Comrades:

FG: Dude, why would I need any other comrade than you? GD: Dude? What, are you a surfer now? FG: Sounds more youthful than comrade, which is such an old Soviet thing to say—and you know how I feel about Soviets. My point is that I didn't care about what many of my more famous colleagues thought, because I had your encouragement and support. GD: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to "Feeling With Félix." FG: I mean it. When I said that I was the diamond miner and you where the stone polisher, I meant it. GD: We were kind of married. FG: Happy and monogamous, as you insisted we not work with anyone else. GD: I did insist on intellectual fidelity. And I never cheated on you. FG: Nor I. GD: Now go do the dishes and draw me a bath.

Michel Foucault

GD: Above most other colleagues, I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Michel Foucault is one of our best buds. FG: You loved him because he thought that generations from now, people would look back and call the 20th century the Deleuzian Century. GD: I did enjoy that. FG: And he got you a job at the University of Paris at Vincennes, where we all hung out and talked about how our key concept, desire, works outside our own selfish heads. GD: With Foucault's encouragement, I think that's when we officially jumped off the good ship Freud. Michel saw desire in the form of power structures within dominant cultures that attempt to control language and social behavior. FG: We agreed with that but extended the idea. We saw desire running in all sorts of directions creating, destroying, and then recreating relationships. GD: It's like all those and entrances in Franz Kafka's "The Castle." It's never about starts and finishes; it's about encounters. FG: Enjoy the confusion. Ride the ride. GD: And if you need to vomit afterward, feel free. FG: Exactly.

The Beats

GD: We both really liked this type of American. FG: We saw them as true revolutionaries. When Allen Ginsberg howled, we howled right back. Did you know that when we came to Columbia University in 1975, they put us up in the Chelsea Hotel? How cool is that? GD: Bit of a dump. FG: But it was still cool, and the Beats came out in force. GD: William Burroughs, John Cage, the experimental musician. FG: The Black Panthers came, a bunch of gay activists came, and even Foucault flew in from Paris to hang out. It got really wild.

GD: We admired the Beats and how they wrote without rules or theoretical hierarchies. FG: Just writing from the desire for change instead of writing from the desire to fix your infantile relationship with Mom and Dad. In fact, Mom and Dad can kiss my… GD: Easy. FG: The Beats wrote from their guts and loved the encounter with the unconscious; they didn't worry about fixing the unconscious.

Jean-François Lyotard

GD: Jean-François was a good friend and colleague of mine at the University of Paris. FG: He was also not a friend of Freud. I have to say, though, that even if he was sympathetic to the cause of the oppressed, he wasn't much of an activist. GD: Activism is for a special kind of intellect. FG: Like me. GD: Yes, like you. Anyway, Lyotard help me co-found the International College of Philosophy, and he helped defend me when I made the communist groups on campus upset. FG: Why didn't Lyotard catch flak when he went after them? GD: He didn't use naughty words or talk about sex much, so people weren't too offended. FG: Oh, brother—academia gives me such a headache.

Rivals:

Slavoj Žižek

FG: Žižek thought I was a bad influence on you. He thought I made you too political, and he thought that I made you become a communist idealist with an actual reason to live. GD: He wanted me to embrace nothingness. FG: Why would anyone want to embrace nothingness when protesting and challenging all the corrupt something-ness of dominant capitalistic society is so much fun? GD: He criticized my defense of Nietzsche and his idea of a primal oneness. He called me a mystic, and he said I believed in some type of universal body. FG: All because you believe that people in their native lands should not be controlled by colonial powers thousands of miles away. GD: I'm a mystic of human rights, I guess. FG: I don't understand what Žižek is talking about half the time, anyway. 

Jacques Lacan

GD: Dr. Lacan did not like our work Anti-Oedipus. FG: No, he did not, but an anti-Freudian revolution was long overdue, and we just happened to light the match. GD: A very big match. FG: After my time within the Lacanian School of Freudian psychoanalysis, I needed some fresh air—and so did a lot of other people. GD: We needed to stop talking about desire between family members. FG: Just get rid of the Mommy and Daddy stuff. Jacques stayed stuck inside the individual unconscious, and I got really bored. Desire runs through everything—people, plants, animals, money, art, toaster ovens, ice cream, chickens, dump trucks, and typewriters. The world is a lot bigger than what goes on between Mommy and baby and a diaper change. GD: Wow. FG: Not too bad, eh? GD: Nicely ranted.

Alain Badiou

GD: Alain sent his radical leftist students into my classroom to disrupt my teaching sessions after you and I published Anti-Oedipus, because at one time Alain and I had been colleagues and had tried to tie Freudian psychoanalysis to Marxist politics. FG: We made a left turn away from the left. GD: We out-lefted the lefties by claiming that even their ideology was getting too set in stone. We thought it was even becoming religiousy. FG: Religiousy? GD: Yes, religiousy. FG: Did you come up with that term while at your desk? GD: It came to me in a dream. FG: How very mystical of you. GD: Shhh, Žižek may be listening.