https://www.academia.edu/1255122/On_Guattaris_Planetary_Psychopathology

Planetary psychopathology is a term used by Guattari in an Italian-published text from the early80s (Guatari 1984). Psychopathology is the science that studies the mental disorders of human beings. Here, “planetary” denotes a world-wide spread of those disorders, the bulk of which Guattari identites in globalization. The term connotes determinism, one outside the planet’s reach, but also outside of human activity in the dispersed state of collective responsibility. Planetary psychopathology is the overall mental disorders of the planet’s streams of desires and planes of organization in the suspicious term “globalization” (or, the post-fordist economic developmentalism). What are the disorders, then, that haunt this planet? Which disorders seize life on it and make it utterly unliveable and intolerable? Are we looking for the abodes, for the specifc instances and the perpetrators of such psychopathology? And is it not similar to Foucault’s claim that madness is a fact of civilization? Here, we should look for the recession of organized consistency in collective acting. As Franco Berardi writes:

“The disturbance into which the planet entered at the start of the 1990s after the brief hope for peace following 1989 was of a new sort, having little or nothing in common with past economic crises. First of all because this exploded in conjunction with the rapid and apparently uncontainable spread of planetary civil war, of a tribal war waged with ultramodern weapons by everyone against everybody else.” (Berardi 2007: 23)