Resingularization
résingularisation (fr., terme original de Guattari) — de re- + singularisation
At Félix Guattari’s, *resingularization* is the process by which a subjectivity escapes the mass production imposed by what he calls *Integrated World Capitalism*: instead of churning out interchangeable individuals, it reactivates what, in each person, resists media homogenization. This process cuts across the book’s three ecologies—environmental, social, mental—without distinction, giving them a style of their own rather than a shared doctrine. Guattari links it to *heterogenesis*: producing diversity, not sameness.
Their different styles are produced by what I call heterogenesis, in other words, processes of continuous resingularization.
The word ferme [“The Three Ecologies”]—the quoted phrase literally opens the book’s conclusion. Guattari has just asserted that the three ecologies—environmental, social, and mental—stem from a single ethico-aesthetic discipline while remaining distinct in their practices. What binds them is not shared content but an operation: heterogenesis, “producing the diverse.” Resingularization is its effect on subjectivity—not stabilizing an identity, but relaunching it, individual by individual, school by school, municipal council by municipal council.
This gesture responds to a diagnosis. Guattari sees in what he calls Integrated World Capitalism a machine for producing serial subjectivity—lives calibrated to the same media refrains, “desingularized” before they even occur. Against this mass production, resingularization does not restore some buried authentic self; it opens existential territories where difference becomes possible again, through practice—artistic, clinical, militant—rather than mere observation.
To be distinguished from assemblage and deterritorialization, concepts forged by the same Guattari but with Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus: those terms describe the structure and movement of any heterogeneous ensemble, whether human, machine, or institution. Resingularization, by contrast, targets specifically what happens to a subjectivity when it escapes standardization—an ethico-political gesture situated in the moment, not a general grammar of assemblage.