[3] His father was a factory manager and he was engaged in Trotskyist political activism as a teenager, before studying and training under (and being analyzed by) the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s.

It led Guattari into a broader philosophical exploration of, and political engagement with, a vast array of intellectual and cultural domains (philosophy, ethnology, linguistics, architecture, etc.).

came to represent aspects of the multiple political and cultural engagements of Guattari: the Group for Young Hispanics, the Franco-Chinese Friendships (in the times of the people's communes), the opposition activities with the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, the participation in the M.N.E.F., with the U.N.E.F., the policy of the offices of psychological academic aid (B.A.P.U.

[8]: 254 In his last book, Chaosmosis (1992), Guattari returned to the question of subjectivity: "How to produce it, collect it, enrich it, reinvent it permanently in order to make it compatible with mutant Universes of value?"

This concern runs through all of his works, from Psychoanalysis and Transversality (a collection of articles from 1957 to 1972), through Years of Winter (1980–1986) and Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989), to his collaboration with Deleuze, What is Philosophy?

In Chaosmosis, Guattari proposes an analysis of subjectivity in terms of four functors: (1) material, energetic, and semiotic fluxes; (2) concrete and abstract machinic phyla; (3) virtual universes of value; and (4) finite existential territories.

[10] On 29 August 1992, two weeks after an interview for the Greek television curated by Yiorgos Veltsos,[11] Guattari died in La Borde from a heart attack.

The collection includes essays such as "Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines," cosigned by Deleuze (with whom he had coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus), and "Everybody Wants To Be a Fascist."

In 1996, another collection of Guattari's essays, lectures, and interviews, Soft Subversions, was published, which traces the development of his thought and activity throughout the 1980s ("the winter years").