Deleuze and The Schizoanalysis of Literature

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis
of Literature
Schizoanalytic Applications
Our goal with this series is to broaden the base of scholars interested in Deleuze
and Guattari’s work. But beyond that we want to change how their work is
read. While their work is already widely known and used, its use tends not
to be systematic, and this is both its strength and its weakness. It is a strength
because it has enabled people to pick up their work from a wide variety of
perspectives, but it is also a weakness because it makes it difficult to say with
any clarity what exactly a ‘Deleuzian-and-Guattarian’ approach is. This has
inhibited the uptake of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking in the more ‘hard-
headed’ disciplines such as history, politics and even philosophy. Without
this methodological core, Deleuze and Guattari studies risks being simply
another intellectual fashion that will soon be superseded by newer figures. Our
goal here is to create that methodological core and build a sustainable model
of schizoanalysis that will attract new scholars to the field. In saying this,
we also aim to be at the forefront of the field by starting a discussion
about the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s methodology.
Editors: Ian Buchanan, David Savat and Marcelo Svirsky
Titles in the series:
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema,

edited by Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature,

edited by Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art,

edited by Ian Buchanan and Lorna Collins
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis
of Literature
Edited by Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts

and Aidan Tynan
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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First published 2015
© Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts, Aidan Tynan and contributors 2015
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-47252-963-3

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Contents
List of Contributors vii
Introduction: Towards a Schizoanalytic Criticism Ian Buchanan,

Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan 1
Part 1 Towards a Schizoanalysis of Literature
1 The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body without Organs

Ian Buchanan 25
2 The Drama of Schizoanalysis: On Deleuze and Guattari’s

Method Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter 43
Part 2 The Ethics of Style
3 The Schizoanalysis of Literature: Austen, Behn and

the Scene of Desire Joe Hughes 63
4 What Is Nonstyle in What Is Philosophy? Donald Cross 82
5 Deleuze on Genre: Modernity between the Tragic and

the Novel Ruben Borg 99
Part 3 Schizoanalytic Interventions
6 Is Critique et Clinique Schizoanalytic?: Schizoanalysis

and Deleuze’s Critical and Clinical Project Garin Dowd 119
7 The Analyst and the Nomad: Lacan, Deleuze and Coetzee’s

Life and Times of Michael K Alan Bourassa 137
8 Razing the Wall: Deleuze, Rancière and the Politics of

New World Literatures Lorna Burns 154
vi Contents
Part 4 Literature and Life After Deleuze
9 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’: Schizoanalysis, Acceleration

and Contemporary American Literature Benjamin Noys 175
10 Negarestani in R’lyeh Ben Woodard 191
Index 211
List of Contributors
Ian Buchanan Joe Hughes

Institute for Social Transformation School of Culture and Communication
Research University of Melbourne
University of Wollongong Parkville
New South Wales Australia
Australia
Donald Cross
Tim Matts Comparative Literature
Research Associate University at Buffalo
Department of Decay New York
Bartlett School of Architecture USA
University College London
Ruben Borg
UK
Department of Culture and Literature
Aidan Tynan University of Tromso
School of English, Communication Norway
and Philosophy Garin Dowd
Cardiff University Ealing School of Art, Design and Media
Cardiff University of West London
UK London
Robert Porter UK
Media Studies Research Institute Alan Bourassa
University of Ulster Department of English
Co. Londonderry Concordia University
N. Ireland Montreal, Quebec
Canada
Iain Mackenzie
Department of Politics and Lorna Burns
International Relations School of English
University of Kent University of St Andrews
Canterbury Fife
UK UK
viii List of Contributors
Benjamin Noys Ben Woodard

Department of English and Centre for the Study of Theory
Creative Writing and Criticism
University of Chichester Western University
West Sussex London, Ontario
UK Canada
Introduction: Towards a
Schizoanalytic Criticism
Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan
This book is an attempt to put schizoanalysis to work in the field of literary

studies and map out new ways of thinking the theory and practice of literature
inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s work. In their final collaboration, What
Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari argue that the specific job of
philosophy is to create concepts – which they rigorously distinguish from
scientific ‘functions’ – while the job of artists is to create ‘blocs of sensation’
made up of ‘affects and percepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164). These are
not the same as affections and perceptions, which always belong to a particular
person, but are the impersonal rendering of these in the materiality of the art
works themselves. This is a radically autonomous conception of art that compels
us to think the radical heteronomy of sensations. The scream of Bacon’s popes
is a scream of line and colour, the tumult of Turner’s skies the tumult of oil and
watercolour. As Sartre writes, ‘Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the
sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow
sky at the same time. . . . it is an anguish become thing’ (2001: 3). The affect
achieves autonomy – thingness – in the material, while the distance between
the perceiver and the perceived disappears in this moment of autonomy that is
also a moment of heteronomy. Deleuze and Guattari wish to avoid the impasses
of representation and signification in their approach to aesthetics but this is a
necessary corollary to their vision of the universe as a monistic multiplicity, a
single infinitely modified substance in continuous variation.
Deleuze’s article on Melville’s famous story Bartleby, the Scrivener demonstrates
the stakes of what we might call a schizoanalytic reading. Bartleby’s formulation
‘I would prefer not to’ – which he gives in answer to his employer’s increasingly
reasonable requests – is a bloc of words that fascinates with its impenetrability, its
inscrutability, its implacable deflection of meaning. The formula, as Deleuze calls
it, seems a perfect embodiment of Bartleby himself or of the white wall that faces
2 Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature
his window: without particularities, without references, a sheer blank where the
powers of interpretation break down (Buchanan 2000: 94–5). Through his very
serenity, Bartleby can inspire riots and Melville’s story is nothing if not a story of
the limits of legal rationality (embodied in the narrative voice of the attorney).
Bartleby himself is less a character than a ‘man without qualities’, a ‘Figure that
exceeds any explicable form: it projects flamboyant traits of expression that mark
the stubbornness of a thought without image, a question without response, an
extreme and nonrational logic’ (Deleuze 1997: 82–3). The affect captured in the
formula is the solemnity of a desire that has detached itself from normal laws of
preference and particularity to discover a ‘negativism beyond negation’ (Deleuze
1997: 71).
Rancière observes that the focus on the materiality of the linguistic formula
situates Deleuze’s reading in opposition to the traditional literary categories of
story and symbol: ‘Bartleby is not the story of the quirks and misfortunes of a poor
clerk. Nor is it a symbol for the human condition. It is a formula, a performance’
(2004: 146). But the nature of this materiality is difficult to pin down (which is
what leads Rancière to suspect a contradiction in Deleuze’s method). Deleuze
identifies the formula as a ‘limit-function’, since it marks a point where articulate
speech merges with the agrammatical (Deleuze 1997: 68). ‘I would prefer not
to,’ though grammatical, tells us apparently nothing since the ‘not to’ defines
no particular preference while the ‘I would prefer’ suggests one. Does Bartleby
prefer or does he not? The undecidability of the object of the formula’s ‘to’ carries
us to a place where we can no longer distinguish thought and action, statement
and intention. The formula attains a pure performativity or ‘practicality’ in the
schizoanalytic sense, and immunizes itself against interpretation. This is the
source of the story’s strange comedy, suggesting that the contradiction of a
preference that wants not to prefer can only be resolved through laughter or can
only laugh at its irresolution. The problem is the same as a symbol that does not
symbolize, a meaning that does not mean. This is the fulcrum of schizoanalytic
poetics, which dispenses with the empire of signs and the idea of the text as
a tissue of signifiers in favour of a vision of the literary work as a machine or
practical object composed of asignifying or non-representational particles
discernible in blocs, traits and figures.
Language for Deleuze, as for his post-Saussurian colleagues, is a system of
signs referring to other signs. For this reason, within linguistic representation
‘we can never formulate simultaneously both a proposition and its sense; we
can never say what is the sense of what we say’ (Deleuze 1994: 155). Language
Introduction 3
for this reason traps within itself an unsayable and an unreadable. Words refer
to other words, not to the referent, as Saussure pointed out. Language cannot
get outside of itself to speak about itself, to say its sense. What Deleuze calls
sense, then, is precisely what language cannot say but which language alone can
bring about as its very own outside. The outside of language is reachable only
via language, even if by a nonsense of the kind Bartleby or one of Lewis Carroll’s
creatures might produce:
There is only one kind of word which expresses both itself and its sense –
precisely the nonsense word: abraxas, snark or blituri. If sense is necessarily
a nonsense for the empirical function of the faculties, then conversely, the
nonsenses so frequent in the empirical operation are like the secret of sense for
the conscientious observer, all of whose faculties point towards a transcendent
limit. (Deleuze 1994: 155)
Nonsense and esoteric words are part of what Deleuze calls ‘refrains’ (1994: 123).
These are linguistic blocs stripped of meaning as such and whose importance
lies entirely in their performative element – this being the ‘secret’ of sense.
Throughout Deleuze’s writings on literature, he comes back again and again
to blocs such as these, which he calls by different names: the procedure, the
formula, the combinatorial, the refrain, the ritornello. In each case, the goal is to
identify how a literary text breaks with the ‘empirical’ deployment of language,
that is, language as representation, which consists in identifying predicates
attributed to subjects. Sense is indifferent to predication in this way. When
Alice grows larger and smaller in Wonderland, she is involved in becomings
that ‘elude the present’ (Deleuze 1990: 1). Alice is neither large nor small; she
becomes larger and smaller. These ‘events’ are ‘sense-events’ precisely because
they also evade the ‘good sense’ of saying whether someone is large or small.
The realm of sense, which Deleuze explores meticulously in The Logic of Sense –
an important precursor of the schizoanalysis books – is one in which language
and event, word and world, are no longer distinguishable. Sense is identifiable
via nonsense or similarly ‘anomalous’ points in language where meaning is
stripped away. Deleuze could be accused of a kind of linguistic idealism here
perhaps, but it would be very different from the one demonstrated by Derrida,
for example, or by the linguistic turn generally imputed to poststructuralism.
Even as we respect Deleuze’s insistence on the specificity of the philosophical
practice, we cannot avoid the fact that literature, of all the arts, comes closest
to philosophy. When asked in an interview if A Thousand Plateaus could be
described as ‘a work of literature’, Deleuze peremptorily replied that it is

‘philosophy, plain old philosophy’ (Deleuze 2007: 176). And yet, he suggests a
special kinship between literary and philosophical discourse; for example, when
he writes that ‘a book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of
detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction’ (Deleuze 1994: xx). In this respect,
Deleuze’s work in general, and his schizoanalytic interventions in particular, can
be read as incorporating what he calls a ‘literary-speculative’ mode (Deleuze
1990: 273). If schizoanalysis can be considered philosophy and nothing more,
it nevertheless presupposes a crucial shift in the relation between literature and
forms of writing normally called theoretical. Deleuze’s pre-schizoanalytic work
on Carroll had already intimated such a transformation: in The Logic of Sense,
Alice’s adventures are treated as insights into language, logic and sexuality which,
in turn, give philosophy access to the domains of linguistics, mathematics and
psychoanalysis. This approach reaches its peak in the two volumes of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, where the ‘aesthetic figures’ of fiction – from Büchner’s
Lenz and Beckett’s Molloy to Melville’s Ahab and Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter –
appear as so many attractors, carriers and repellers of thought, which Deleuze
and Guattari call ‘conceptual personae’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 2).
Schizoanalysis disturbs the division of labour separating author, critic and
theorist, insisting on their differences in regime but not on their difference in
nature. Schizoanalytic criticism – if we can speak of such a thing – exhorts us
towards a traversal of these generic and disciplinary classifications, making
possible perhaps new kinds of hybrid discourse. It would thus be inappropriate
to describe the pieces collected in this volume as schizoanalysis applied to
literature. Schizoanalysis is itself a practice, but one that operates alongside other
practices in order to help us better understand – and in some cases to challenge
and transform – the relations between theory and practice in any given field.
When Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘meaning is use’, they are saying that
whenever we find ourselves pondering the meaning of something we are in fact
‘using’ it in some way. In this sense, there can be no theory that is not already
a practice. In Anti-Oedipus, they suggest that the hermeneutic question – what
does it mean? – is in general a poor one, not because meanings are not important
but because they arise from uses or practices:
The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The

question posed by desire is not ‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it
work?’ How do these machines, these desiring-machines, work – yours and
mine? . . . Desire makes its entry with the general collapse of the question ‘What
Introduction 5
does it mean?’ No one has been able to pose the problem of language except
to the extent that linguists and logicians have first eliminated meaning; and
the greatest force of language was only discovered once a work was viewed as a
machine, producing certain effects, amenable to a certain use. Malcolm Lowry
says of his work: it’s anything you want it to be, so long as it works – ‘It works too,
believe me, as I have found out’ – a machinery. But on condition that meaning
be nothing other than use. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 109)
This is an important passage for two key reasons. First, it suggests that a
schizoanalytic reading of a text should be oriented around those ‘pragmatic’
moments – embodied in linguistic blocs, refrains, formulae and so on – when
meaning swings over to use, where something ‘occurs’ in the text rather than
being signified or narrated. The Consul’s drinking in Under the Volcano does not
‘mean’ anything, but it functions to maintain the novel’s alchemical consistency,
catalysing Lowry’s complex of references whose meanings only function in
relation to the figure of Geoffrey Firmin drinking himself to death. The scene in
Beckett’s Molloy, in which Molloy arranges stones in the pockets of his coat in
order to suck them in a particular fashion, would be another example of such a
moment.
Second, the passage helps us to situate schizoanalytic criticism more broadly.
Jonathan Culler insists on a ‘basic distinction’ in literary studies between two
different kinds of projects: one based on a linguistic model ‘takes meanings
as what have to be accounted for and tries to work out how they are possible.
The other, by contrast, starts with forms and seeks to interpret them, to tell us
what they really mean. In literary studies, this is a contrast between poetics and
hermeneutics’ (Culler 1997: 61). Poetics aligns with linguistics and theories of
literary competence – it asks, for example, how readers take certain sentences
in certain contexts to mean certain things, how we recognize the conventions of
different styles and genres via an implicit cultural knowledge, how meanings are
constructed from codes.
Beyond oedipal form
The key premise of schizoanalysis is that desire is productive, that the world
as it exists is literally a product of desire, that desire composes the material
infrastructure and not just the ideologico-cultural superstructure of society,
even if ideology tends to work by trying to convince us that this is not so,
that our desires are only ‘representations’. Given the role of desire in the material
composition of society, schizoanalysis thus wants to know why we tolerate things
as they are, especially when one considers how disadvantageous things tend to
be for the majority of people. Tolerate is too polite a word. Most of us do not
merely tolerate ‘things’ as they are, we actively contrive to ensure that things
remain exactly as they are. And the more ‘well-off ’ we are, the more likely this is
to be true, either because it fits in our perceived interest to do so, or else we fear
that to change the status quo would mean losing the few privileges we already
have or somehow expect to gain.
This is despite the fact that income distribution is becoming increasingly
unequal – not just on a global level, which has been manifestly obvious since
the earliest days of colonization, but also on a country by country basis. In the
United States, for example, the net wealth of the richest few (the top 0.1 per cent)
continues to grow apace even as the net wealth and, more importantly, the net
income of the majority of the people (i.e., the other 99.99 per cent) either stagnates
or shrinks. The escalating costs of the middle-class ‘lifestyle’ once enjoyed by a
solid proportion of Americans in the post-World War II boom years can now
only barely be met by resorting to extensive and, in many instances, crippling
borrowing that begins with student loans and ends with funeral plans (Celine’s
nightmare vision of death on credit is already upon us). Many of us would, of
course, like things to be different, but the trouble is we do not know how to make
that fantasy a reality. There is no button we can click that will instantly change
things for us. And for many of us that is as much as we are prepared to do. So the
situation persists, the downward slide continues, the rich get richer and the poor
get poorer, and still we do nothing. We might share the odd angry meme on
Facebook to register our discontent, but we do not march on parliament and
demand change. That thought does not even occur to us.
To the extent that we do nothing to change our situation then it must be said
that we desire it. This is not an exercise in victim-blaming. It is rather the first step
in staking out a complex problematic. In view of the fact that we do not demand
change, despite the many provocations our situation puts before us, Deleuze and
Guattari are prompted to say that the fundamental problem of political philosophy
is ‘still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich
rediscovered: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it
were their salvation?” ’ And they continue (drawing directly on Reich):
the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go
out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular
Introduction 7
practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after
centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and
enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery
not only for others but for themselves?
They then single Reich out for praise (only to chastise him immediately afterwards
for remaining all too Freudian) for refusing to
accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of

fascism, and demand[ing] an explanation that will take their desires into account,
an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no the masses were not innocent
dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism,
and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted
for. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 29)
It is the last part of this statement that is crucial – in phrasing it like this, ‘it is this
perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for’, Deleuze and
Guattari are saying something slightly different from both Spinoza and Reich.
The key question is not ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly
as though it were their salvation?’ This question is imprecise because it does
not take into account the degree to which ‘man’ is the product of desire before he
is the agent of desire. The more precise question is, ‘What is the nature of desire
such that it is possible that we could have a situation in which men fight for
their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ Schizoanalysis
is, in effect, a complex attempt to ‘answer’ this question – if Deleuze and Guattari
find both psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) and Marxism (particularly Althusser)
wanting it is because neither provides a satisfactory answer to this question.
Like the Frankfurt School before it, which was initiated in the early years of
the rise of fascism in Germany, with the explicit purpose of trying to understand
why things were going the way they were (whence the murderous hatred of Jews
and the sudden love of authority?) and which used all the resources of history,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology to do it, schizoanalysis
arose in a period of history which, in spite of the preceding so-called glorious
30 years, seemed altogether bleak, and which therefore similarly makes use of all
the resources of history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology,
but also adds evolutionary biology, ethology, genetics, information theory, and
mathematics into the mix. For Deleuze and Guattari, the problem faced in the
early 1970s was essentially the same as the problem faced by the Frankfurt
School in the early 1930s: in their view, fascism did not disappear, even if the gas
chambers did, it simply migrated to a deeper, and more recessed quarter of the
psychosocial matrix of Western society. The flashpoint that brought this into
focus for Deleuze and Guattari was May 1968 because it marked the dawning of
a new era (Buchanan 2008a: 7–12).
Over the course of that long hot summer, with the garbage piling up in the
streets and in the stairwells of inner city Paris, the events of May 1968 made
clear to France and ultimately the whole of the Western world that a twofold
transformation of the political landscape had taken place during the prosperous
years following the end of World War II. First, it signalled the end of the era in
which organized labour could use its power to determine the outcome of political
disputes of any type – 10 million workers went on strike, but the government
called their bluff and won. More particularly it signalled the end of the idea that
change could be achieved via a reformist agenda. Second, it sounded the death
knell for the idea of revolution – it was made clear that the vast majority of
people were unwilling to take up arms to compel change. Little wonder French
Marxism looked to the Far East in this period, albeit through melancholy eyes,
knowing full well that the Cultural Revolution in China and the war in Vietnam,
as inspirational as they were for many, were both forms of popular struggle long
since outmoded in their own country and could not be construed as examples
of what was possible at that time in Paris, or elsewhere in the West. Deleuze
and Guattari positioned schizoanalysis in this complex ‘third’ space (before
that became a dirty word following the abuses of Tony Blair), between the now
blunted claws of reform and revolution. If neither reform nor revolution is
possible at this juncture in history, then what is possible? That is the essential
political question asked by schizoanalysis. To their credit, Deleuze and Guattari
do not pretend that they have or that there could be a single straightforward
answer to this question. If they refuse to outline a political programme at the
conclusion to the first call to arms, Anti-Oedipus, it is because in their view
politics is both more complex and more fluid than fixed ideas about planning
and change can accommodate.
It is complicated because there is no guarantee that the people – including the
theorists themselves – who want and advocate change are able to separate their
political ideals and ideas from their own personal prejudices and predilections
(Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 174). As Fredric Jameson has noted, all utopias
are suspicious because we can never be sure that they are truly original – if
we can think them up, then surely at some level they are simply an extension
of the present world, albeit with some crucial modifications – and worse still
Introduction 9
not simply the projection of one person’s fantasy writ large (Jameson 1994:
52–60). The same has to be said for all political programmes, even those of an
avowedly ‘pragmatic’ and ‘non-utopian’ variety. They all carry within them the
hidden baggage of past prejudices, past misprisions, past misapprehensions
and worst of all past presuppositions. As Deleuze famously said in Difference
and Repetition, knowing where to start in philosophy ‘has always – rightly –
been regarded as a very delicate problem, for beginning means eliminating all
presuppositions’ (Deleuze 1994: 129). Deleuze and Guattari’s solution, which
has become one of the slogans for which their work is known, is to say start
in the middle. Not because this is the ‘best’ place to start, as though we had a
choice, but because it is the only place to start. When they say we are always in
the middle of things, this is not some throwaway line, the kind of thing someone
says when they are too busy to stop and make a proper start to things. Rather
it is an acknowledgement of a simple fact. At whatever moment we choose to
start thinking about something in a critical, philosophical or, indeed, historical
way we are unable to either retrieve time that has been lost to us and try to
discern within it the crystals that have given rise to this moment or freeze time
and map out all its potential futures. We simply have to go with the flow. Our
political thinking must be similarly fluid, able to adapt to new information, new
knowledge (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 178).
Contemporary capitalism is the middle of things for Deleuze and Guattari.
It is the background against which their work must be understood, but more
than that it is in many ways the primary object of their work. For schizoanalysis,
however, capitalism is not merely one social formation among others, but part
of a global history which they describe in unabashedly universalist terms.
Capitalism corresponds to a universal and world-historical form of ‘decoding’,
which means quite simply the diminishing capacity of socially determined
meanings to contain or transmit the desires of subjects. Social codes correspond
to beliefs, myths, body modifications, rituals, taboos, kinship structures and so
on. Codes work economically – not merely symbolically – by distributing debts
and obligations across the social body. An absolutist monarchy has a single,
infinitely powerful point of sovereign authority with a direct link to God, and
all debts are related to this transcendent point (such a society is ‘overcoded’, as
Deleuze and Guattari put it).
Capitalism is the social form that transpires when a society passes a certain
threshold of stability secured by coding and overcoding on the social body. The
formal equivalences necessary for capitalist exchange (so much of commodity A,
for commodity B) are indifferent to the contents of these exchanges. At a

certain level of economic abstraction, commodities A and B can be quite
literally anything; it has no impact on the process of exchange, on its ‘meaning’.
These ‘axiomatic’ quantifications are what replace codes in capitalist society.
The enigma of capitalist subjectivity that Deleuze and Guattari focus on is the
fact that our desires and acts can be analysed formally in this way, at the level of
abstract quantities, while we nevertheless tend to insist on the unquantifiable
or ineffable ‘meanings’ by which our subjective interiors are to be understood
(even when these meanings do not consistently match up with our behaviours).
As capitalist subjects, we seem to be ‘doubly articulated’ as believers and
unbelievers: ‘capitalism is like the Christian religion, it lives precisely from
a lack of belief, it does not need it – a motley painting of all that has been
believed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 375). Axiomatization brings about, at
the same time, a great increase in freedom (you can have anything you want)
and a great loss of freedom (as long as it is buyable, as long as it is available
in the form of a commodity). This is capitalism’s ‘double-pincer’ movement,
the ‘double-bind’ with which Deleuze and Guattari identify the psychoanalytic
theory of Oedipus.
There is a radical break in capitalist society between form and content.
The meanings organizing social life become arbitrary, artificial and mutable.
There is a profound loss of belief since axiomatization means there can be
no codes as such. The only social body to which anything sticks is the body
of capital itself, but this instigates a tendency within the social body towards a
complete ‘deterritorialisation’, a tremendous sundering of the connections that
embed consciousness in a meaningful world. This is what decoding is, and a
society defined by decoding is – as Marx and Engels pointed out – subject to
unprecedented volatility and revolutionary change. And yet capitalism persists,
just as we still believe in things we do not strictly speaking believe.
Capitalism is thus not one social form among others but is the only social
form in which the economic determination of society becomes manifest as such
and in which the economic, in its formal emptiness, becomes the direct object
of investment of desire. Desire becomes theorizable as an ‘abstraction’, a pure
quantity – as libido, as Freud called it, or as labour power for Marx. All other
social forms can be read in terms of capitalist decoding since all other societies
presuppose the efficacy of codes in a way capitalism no longer needs to, or in a
way it can only hark back to, nostalgically and cynically (‘In the old days, things
were better …’). Capitalism, in short, makes universal history possible:
Introduction 11
If capitalism is the universal truth, it is so in the sense that makes capitalism the
negative of all social formations. It is the thing, the unnamable, the generalized
decoding of flows that reveals a contrario the secret of all these formations,
coding the flows, and even overcoding them, rather than letting anything escape
coding. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 153)
Deleuze and Guattari are resolutely anti-relativist and anti-culturalist here in

a way that puts schizoanalysis at odds with much contemporary left-liberal
discourse. Given the universality of capitalism as decoding, in a capitalist world
all relativism will necessarily be false relativism and a piecemeal reform of the
capitalist system will simply be a means to include more and more peoples and
struggles under its axiomatic nets.
Anti-Oedipus’s critique of capitalist libido raises the question of how a
genuinely anti-capitalist desire could be recognized. The psychoanalytic account
of the family as the matrix in which desire is formed is no use, Deleuze and
Guattari maintain, and can only distort matters. Freud’s view of the infant is of
a kind of homo natura, a natural individual whose subjection to the Oedipus
complex resolves the conflict between an anti-social (i.e. incestuous) desire
and desire in its socialized form (identification with the father). By giving
desire an anti-social essence, it can only ever said to become a social force
through an unavoidable relinquishment that forever haunts it and that comes
to be expressed through symptoms and dreams mediating this loss. Lacan’s
structuralism translates this relinquishment into the ‘lack’ that propels desire
and which is built into language conceived as a system of self-referring signifiers.
But schizoanalysis insists that desire is social from the very beginning, even –
and perhaps especially – if it is also in conflict with the family. If desire is fully
social in this way then Oedipus is, from a practical point of view, entirely useless
as a means to read and interpret it. Psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic repeats the
double movement of capitalism, allowing for the naturalism of libido only in
terms of a cultural and symbolic mediation (hence the role of art and literature
in Freud’s ostensibly scientific enterprise). Psychoanalysis essentially reinscribes
capitalism’s double-pincer movement by insisting upon a naturalism – we are
beings of instinct, essentially the same – and a relativism – we are beings of
culture, essentially different – that are both equally false.
The famous opening passages of Anti-Oedipus paint a picture of the world
as a series of machines coupling with other machines. Deleuze and Guattari
draw on several literary texts in these opening pages. Büchner’s Lenz on his
promenade across the Vosges is depicted as encountering ‘alpine machines’ and
‘photosynthesis machines’. Beckett’s Molloy ponders the relationship between

a ‘bicycle horn machine’ and a ‘mother-anus machine’. These literary madmen
provide Deleuze and Guattari with the philosophical dramatis personae by
which to begin the schizoanalysis project. Deleuze and Guattari use ‘delirium’
as a kind of ‘royal road’ for rendering desire visible, but not necessarily legible
(Buchanan 2008b: 8–9).
Write like a rat!
Such a position is not entirely new, of course. Plato’s Ion defines poetry as a
delirious discourse. Coleridge and Keats both spoke of poetry as a kind of
delirium. Joyce famously said of Ulysses – that a transparent sheet separates
it from madness. But for schizoanalysis, literary delirium has the distinctly
political capacity to give consistency to new and unheard of agencies by affecting
language as a whole: literature allows us to discern desire (as a constituting-
constituted force) without the conditions of readability by which we normally
grant the efficacy of statements.
If Oedipus is a means of reading desire according to the requirements of an
‘expressive unconscious’ – a desire that exists primarily in terms of it meanings –
then schizoanalysis seeks a way of inscribing and recognizing desire according to
the requirements of a productive or pragmatic unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari
do not aim to provide us with a better hermeneutic but to draw the conclusions
of their hypothesis that the unconscious only exists to the extent that we produce
it. The replacement of the problem of meaning by the problem of function is
motivated by Deleuze’s own philosophical critique of representation, worked out
in his monumental Difference and Repetition. Schizoanalytic pragmatism aims
to apply these ideas to the spheres not only of politics but of behaviour and
volition. Anti-Oedipus is an attempt to lay bare the activities of an unconscious
convinced that it is nothing but meaning. That book argues that when we define
the unconscious in terms of its meanings, we end up with a puzzling divergence
of belief and production: it is possible for us to believe one thing, but to act in
another way and thus to produce a world that may be in striking contrast to our
beliefs and to the meanings we hold dear.
This divergence is contradictory, however, only when we approach things
from the side of meaning. When we approach things from the side of production,
we can see that desire has two ‘poles’, two ‘regimes’, or two fundamental ways of
Introduction 13
organizing or distributing itself and, as subjects, we are constantly oscillating

between the two organizations. Deleuze and Guattari, in deliberately provocative
fashion, describe these poles as ‘paranoiac fascisizing’ and ‘schizorevolutionary’
(1983: 277). Desire, often the desire of the same person, will attempt to invest
in two divergent ways at once. Indeed, the capitalist economy has come to rely
on this. There is in reality no contradiction here that will cause the capitalist
machine to pass over into something else. Rather, the contradiction is central to
capitalism’s reproduction and essential bipolarity. Even the meagerest desire will
want to become a part of some ‘megamachine’, to keep the system going at all
costs (even the great mutant flow of international finance would be impossible
without the mortgage repayments of the poorest homeowners, as the 2008 crisis
showed). Just as the masses were sexually aroused by fascism, we are likewise
aroused by the signs of money: ‘It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking
or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people
who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows,
money that produces more money?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 104).
These libidinal investments of politics and the economy make sense only if
we insist on the productive nature of desire over its hermeneutic nature: what
desire could resist the flow of finance, even in one who knows nothing about
banking, and even when the flow is leading us in lethal directions, even when the
machine is crushing us? Or again: what desire could resist the line of flight that
causes the machine to come crashing down? Jack Kerouac’s writing is as equally
in thrall to the road that leads him further and further into desolate beatitude
as to the nostalgia for a disappearing American heartland that leads him back
to Catholicism and conservative politics. Literary authors are singled out by
Deleuze and Guattari for their propensity to manifest both regimes at once, and
thus to provide us with a kind of ‘map’ or ‘diagram’ of desire:
Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D. H. Lawrence

to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac,
men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate,
to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they
shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the
process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes –
the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land – or
else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol – or worse
still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two
poles. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 132–3)
The schizoanalytic view of language is that by giving it a symbolic or

representative role (as Saussurian theory does) we get things backwards. We
think that there is a material world in which change occurs, and an immaterial
representational domain (language, culture, ideology) which registers those
changes. In order to insist on the material reality of desire, we need a supporting
discourse to recognize it. Perhaps, though, the contrary is the case: change is
always immaterial (an ‘incorporeal transformation’ as Deleuze and Guattari call
it) and thus only language in its most deterritorialized form as an imperative
medium (for passing orders, for declaring marriage, war, strike, bankruptcy, etc.)
is capable of accounting for these changes. It is thus the immaterial that gives rise
to the material through the very means by which the latter finds expression in
the former. Deleuze and Guattari see this as preferable to a theory (for example,
Lacan’s) which asserts that we are more or less trapped within chains of signifiers
whose relation to the material real is arbitrary and socially determined.
The consequence of this, from a political point of view, is that the articulation
of desire does not require a pre-existing discourse. From a literary point of
view, it means that literature should not be regarded as a product of ideology
or culture, but rather as the attempt to articulate the passion of that which
has no language, no culture, no discourse, perhaps even no thought. Deleuze
and Guattari pick out two examples here: a scene from Karl Philipp Moritz’s
autobiographical novel Anton Reiser in which calves are slaughtered, and Hugo
von Hofmannsthal’s bizarre fictional epistle The Letter of Lord Chandos which
depicts the extermination of a colony of rats in a cellar:
Hofmannsthal, or rather Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with a ‘people’ of

dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the interstices of his disrupted
self that the ‘soul of the animal bares its teeth at monstrous fate’: not pity, but
unnatural participation. Then a strange imperative wells up in him: either stop
writing, or write like a rat. . . . Writers are sorcerers because they experience the
animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle. . . .
Moritz feels responsible not for the calves that die but before the calves that die
and give him the incredible feeling of an unknown Nature – affect? (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 240)
The writer on this account has a very different responsibility than the one
stipulated by the oedipal super-ego. There is here a duty to a passion that escapes
language as such. But this is not an individual passion; it is distributed in a pack-
like fashion and oscillates between different types of groups or multiplicities.
The act of writing is correlated with the passion of the group (in both its fascistic
Introduction 15
and nomadic polarities), the struggles of peoples, even when the writer is the
most solitary being.
Overview of chapters
The pieces gathered here and presented over the course of four sections are
diverse in their concerns and avowals; they are, properly speaking, a multiplicity
that extends and develops many of the concepts broached in this introduction.
What draws them together is a fascination with the possibilities of schizoanalytic
literary study not so much as a nascent ‘school’ of criticism but as an unknown
territory. Deleuze and Guattari knew well, of course, that the mapping of
a territory does not leave it or the cartographers untouched, that the map is
ultimately indivisible from the mapped. The explorations initiated by these
pieces call for a transformation of both the theory and practice of literary culture
as we know it. Nothing less could satisfy the demands of a schizoanalysis of
literature.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the ‘body without
organs’ (BwO) as ‘the only practical object of schizoanalysis’ (1987: 202). While
indispensable to their project, the term nevertheless appears both inconstant
and inconsistent throughout the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
even disappearing altogether from What Is Philosophy?. It is for this reason that
Ian Buchanan offers a genealogy of the BwO, arguing that if we are to claim
schizoanalysis as a methodology, then we must duly acknowledge the centrality
of this term to Deleuze and Guattari’s work and thus, the motivating problem
to which it is a response. Marking the BwO’s first appearance in Deleuze’s
preceding, eminently literary study, The Logic of Sense, where it is shaped as
much by Melanie Klein’s thesis on ‘partial objects’ as by the schizophrenic affect
of Antonin Artaud’s ‘To Have Done With The Judgement of God’, Buchanan
gainfully acknowledges Deleuze’s prior concerns with incorporeal sense and
ideal events, clarifying the BwO as a quasi-concept which gives expression to
the organization of desire, and which supplants the logical basis of Freud’s ‘death
instinct’, offering a superior model for understanding the clinical relationship
between the drives and the compulsion to repeat.
Tracing the reformulation of the BwO through the Marxism of Anti-Oedipus,
where it emerges as a ‘structural necessity’, Buchanan elucidates this ‘virtual’
locus of ‘anti-production’, enabling us to effectively address Deleuze and
Guattari’s central concern with ‘desiring-production’, a Marxian reconception

not only of Freud’s drives as primary processes, but one that describes a
universal, ‘machinic’ process of synthesis. Direct contact with the BwO is,
however, necessarily pathological; the irruption of immanence threatens the
transcendent, socially approved organization of the actual body. Deleuze and
Guattari themselves supply the example of Büchner’s Lenz, who experiences
himself as a cog within nature experienced as a colossal machine, productive of
all manner of material flows into which his socially conditioned, molar being is
dispersed. In closing, Buchanan supplies the example of ‘love’ with which to help
us better recognize the operation of the BwO in everyday life, a phenomenon
which, by giving consistency to the disparate elements of our amorous affair,
a consistency that Deleuze and Guattari themselves insist is an ‘affirmation
irreducible to unity’, supplies a non-totalizing model for the schizoanalysis of
our health, hopes and neuroses, enabling us to at once understand why it so
preoccupied Marcel Proust.
Robert Porter and Iain Mackenzie work to establish the ‘use-value’ of Deleuze
and Guattari as political philosophers. Describing a broader methodology that
spans the two volumes of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, Porter
and Mackenzie look as much to A Thousand Plateaus as to Anti-Oedipus,
specifically to their pragmatic approach to language. If the role of slogans for
schizoanalysis is significant (‘Destroy, destroy’), then in A Thousand Plateaus,
language is comprised of ‘order-words’ that compel obedience. By bridging the
two volumes in this way, Porter and Mackenzie reckon with the degree to which
political concepts are ‘dramatised all around us on an ongoing basis’. By reading
them as dramatists, and specifically as writers of great style who deploy ‘a form
of dramatic language-use’ as a performative experiment, they propose that
Deleuze and Guattari’s passages be ‘re-played, or re-enacted by their readers’ as
part of a humorous provocation. Extending their previously defined notion of
a ‘modulating vocalism’ (2011), their contribution to this volume demonstrates
how, despite appearing to call for the destruction of ‘theatrical scenes’ (the
Oedipal psychodrama), the drama of schizoanalysis turns upon its highly
literary character, and thus, how it necessarily equals a vector of sociotechnical
transformation.
It is in this way that the relationship between literary style and schizoanalysis
should be acknowledged. Joe Hughes extracts what he describes as a ‘castrated
formalism’ from Anti-Oedipus which, he maintains, depends upon two
generalizations. First, schizoanalysis is fundamentally an analysis of our
Introduction 17
constitutive passivity, which is to say that it ‘explores the most basic processes of
passive synthesis’. Second, we should acknowledge that by attending to desiring-
production, schizoanalysis is concerned with the basic forms this passivity takes.
Hughes thereby pursues two theses, both of which observe that a Deleuzian
aesthetics necessarily equals a pragmatism, grounded as it must be ‘in the principle
that works of art momentarily reconfigure our passive syntheses’. Accordingly,
Hughes aims to emphasize that a disarticulation of the very concept of form
is basic to a schizoanalytic formalism. Drawing on a paradigmatic example
from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, he then proceeds to demonstrate how,
as the basic structural unit of the novel, the scene functions to establish ‘a kind
of coercive framing whereby the reader’s passive syntheses yield to a structure
given to them from the outside’. It is precisely by way of such coercion that lines
of flight, or other modes of engagement with the text, may emerge, thereby
drawing our attention to the ‘delirium of connection’. The scene can therefore
be construed along the political lines schizoanalysis implies, namely as an
organizing form integral to a historically specific regime of representation.
Donald Cross makes recourse to Deleuze’s reading of Marcel Proust’s essay
Contra Sainte-Beuve, specifically as it informs his and Guattari’s suggestion of
‘nonstyle’ in What Is Philosophy?. In forging a link between Deleuze’s Proust
and Signs, schizoanalysis, and the account of concepts in What Is Philosophy?,
Cross acknowledges how for Deleuze, Proust is at once a symptomatologist and
a critic of rationalist philosophy and Platonic Ideas, particularly as these pertain
to notions of organic totality vis-à-vis creative composition. If, in Contra Sainte-
Beuve, Proust himself discerned nonstyle in the writing of Balzac, a ‘vulgarity’,
and a ‘literalness that makes no attempt to transform the “reality” it recounts’,
then Cross proposes to extract from it a concept of nonstyle that ‘proceeds
without a predetermined principle of unification’. Such a reading extends the
schizoanalytic understanding of literature while demonstrating the relationship
between philosophy proper (as the creation of concepts) and nonstyle,
specifically where the concept is a ‘fragmentary whole’, a mobile, heterogeneous
multiplicity that nevertheless retains consistency. We thus discern that ‘nonstyle
is intimately involved in the endoconsistency of the concept’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 17).
If, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari denounce tragedy as an ‘ideological
form’, then this is because it remains tied to the order of representation.
Ruben Borg shows how generic conventions and formal categories might
be reconsidered, chiefly after Deleuze’s career-long assertion that ‘modern
philosophy shares with the novel the task of honing a new type of empiricism’.
Engaging Alistair Fowler’s work, Borg takes up the notion of ‘genres as fields of
association’, thus sustaining a Deleuzian conception of how such fields serve as pre-
codifying compositional principles. By viewing schizoanalysis as a development
of Freud’s theories of association, the post-psychoanalytic approach necessarily
‘begins by interrogating the power of a certain type of event to orient thought’.
Borg then shows how philosophy draws on the powers particular to a novelistic
inquiry, which gives us ‘tools for an experimental empiricism by which reality
is seen to unfold in excess of individual experience, subjective determination or
judgement’.
Borg’s reappraisal of the tragic follows Deleuze’s reading of Hamlet in his book
on Kant, which can be seen to inform the schizoanalytic orientation, chiefly by
enabling a departure from a dialectical, domesticating and moral conception
of the tragic, as per the classical Greek view. Hamlet’s infamous perception of
a ‘time out of joint’ acknowledges a form of time wholly different to that ‘on its
hinges’, or one which, as per the Aristotelian model, accords moral force to heroic
agency measured in relation to eternity in a world of extension. The prince’s
passivity draws our attention to a time out of joint, which for Deleuze, puts ‘time
itself on stage’. Emerging as the ground of action, for Borg it is a time not only
‘unmoored from character’ but ‘endowed with an original and constitutive force’
that can therefore be linked to the sign of a ‘schizo-laughter’. Borg then turns to
Joyce, in whose writing a form of love is the font of all passions.
Garin Dowd considers the relationship between schizoanalysis and the final
collection of essays published late in Deleuze’s career as Critique et clinique (or
Essays Critical and Clinical). In addressing the clinical domain associated more
with Guattari, Dowd means to establish whether or not Critique et clinique
is compatible with the earlier outlines of a potential schizoanalysis in Anti-
Oedipus. Where Buchanan’s chapter emphasizes the need for a genealogy of the
BwO, Dowd’s emphasis on establishing the link between this material also calls
into question the relationship between the pre-Guattari Logic of Sense (with its
appendices on literary authors) and the post-Guattari Critique et clinique. Since
no clear indication of when many of the essays that comprise the late collection
were written has yet emerged, Dowd’s approach serves to raise a number of
interesting avenues for further research.
Alan Bourassa proposes that we reconsider J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Life and
Times of Michael K (1983) as a staging ground for a confrontation between
Lacan’s theory of subject-formation and Deleuze’s theories of nomadism and
Introduction 19
the Double. While we might discern the stages of Lacanian subjectivity in

Michael K’s plight – confrontation with the Other’s desire, the assimilation
of the Nom-du-pere, the birth of neurotic ressentiment – Bourassa argues
that there is in fact a means of reckoning with these stages as part of a larger
nomadic movement within which Michael K is given to transform the neurotic
subject position into a nomadic one in which he finds the proper plan, space
and affect to reengage with his world and transform his desire from lack to
a force of movement, concealment and enjoyment. By functioning both as
the figure of the law (from a Lacanian perspective) and the Double (from a
Deleuzian perspective), the doctor at the Kenilworth hospital in Section 2 of
Coetzee’s novel is positioned at the turning point from neurotic subjectivity to
nomadic mapping.
Attending to New World writing, Lorna Burns extracts a political sensibility
from Deleuze’s essays on Whitman and Melville’s Bartleby, one that contributes
towards our understanding of the consequence of ‘creolization’ for literary
analysis. This she tempers with Jacques Rancière’s interrogation of Deleuze’s
position in The Flesh of Words and Dissensus. If Deleuze begins with a view of
literature as non-representational, emphasizing instead its fabulating function
after Bergson, then Burns draws on Rancière to explore and verify its political
worth. She moreover looks to Ėdouard Glissant’s conception of creolization
as a creative process that is itself a model of becoming that dispenses with a
paternal, arborescent logic in favour of a non-filiative, rhizomatic one open
to perpetual variation and experimentation. Again, the extent to which these
‘critical and clinical’ essays of Deleuze’s remain contributory yet tangential
to the schizoanalytic project lets us acknowledge the necessity of further
genealogical spadework.
Benjamin Noys airs concern over a highly contentious mobilization of
schizoanalysis. Extending his identification of Deleuze and Guattari’s role in what
he has elsewhere termed ‘accelerationism’, he explores the extent to which this
recent theoretical, aesthetic and political trend remains largely predicated upon
the suggestion in Anti-Oedipus that the post-May’68 ‘revolutionary path’ might
in fact be to accelerate the capitalist process, rather than to seek a traditional
anti-capitalist, or other counter-cultural position. Acknowledging Deleuze’s own
preference for Anglo-American literature in his writings independent of Guattari,
specifically the degree to which such ostensibly ‘experimental’ writing enacts a
deterritorialized line of flight, Noys turns to the work of Thomas Pynchon to
explore accelerationism. In Pynchon’s writing, Noys finds a ‘signature example
of convergence’ of accelerationist readings of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory and its

relationship to Anglo-American literary production.
Published decades before Pynchon began explicitly referencing Deleuze
and Guattari, most notably in Vineland (1990) but also in the cartographic
and territorial concerns of Mason & Dixon (1997), Noys discerns in Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973) an exploration of the problem of acceleration, particularly as it
relates to the sociotechnical situation of World War II and subsequently to post-
war counter-cultural concerns with control. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Pynchon
suggests that if we are to explode the constraints of control societies, then we
require a superior acceleration to the one that effects and sustains them via
processes of reterritorialization. This obstinate force of social reterritorialization
can be explored through the peregrinations of Pynchon’s protagonist, Tyrone
Slothrop, whose schizoid quest in the ‘zone’, or the occupied Germany of
World War II, appears to dramatize Deleuze and Guattari’s concern with the
schizophrenicizing process, enabling Noys to consider if the dispersion of
Oedipal individuality upon the BwO can effectively underwrite an accelerationist
strategy without amounting to descent into apoliticality, one that observes the
clinically schizophrenic ‘black hole’ of ‘absolute deterritorialization’, and which
Deleuze and Guattari themselves warn against.
What makes Gravity’s Rainbow so exemplary in this regard, Noys suggests, is
the degree to which Slothrop’s peregrinations in the depolarized space of the zone
is enabled by the conflict itself. Noys wants us to acknowledge World War II as a
capitalist hecatomb, yet one that appeared to prompt a certain nostalgic longing
in Pynchon for a perversely utopian mediator relative to the Cold War cultural
location from within which he was writing. Not only does the schizoanalysis of
literature as a methodological approach raise concerns over the political utility
of Deleuze and Guattari’s work in this connection, but it further ties their legacy
to a libidinal-materialism that would effectively absorb schizoanalysis as an
implicit component of accelerationism, as one of its revolutionary toolkits.
It is with methodology in mind that Benjamin Woodard means to ask if
schizoanalysis falls short of being a species of geophilosophy, specifically with
regard to the proper ground or territory of thought, which he articulates via
a distinction between cognitive-philosophical models of land and ocean. As a
method of navigation, philosophy might be said to be lacking when compared
with contemporary neuroscientific observations. Woodard begins by contrasting
the role of affectivity in schizoanalysis with the neuroscientific concerns of Alain
Berthoz. After linking this to his geophilosophical concerns, he moves to consider
Introduction 21
the literary-philosophical ‘hyperstitions’ of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani,

writers whose work was initially aided and abetted by the revolutionary call for
deterritorialization described by schizoanalysis. If the power of fiction is one
of fabulation, then the largely aquatic orientation of many of H. P. Lovecraft’s
stories lends Land and Negarestani a geophilosophical milieu from within which
to harness and propagate hyperstition as exemplary of processes of decoding
and deterritorialization. Conceived in terms of ‘ungrounding’, Woodard shows
how despite its ostensibly ‘literary’ provenance, hyperstition equally harnesses
science for its efficacy. Dramatizing his concerns by way of an encounter with
Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’Lyeh, a terrible tomb lost to countless aeons, and
within which the dread spectre of Cthulhu slumbers, Woodard there exhumes
a subaquatic Negarestani, sustaining a ‘daemonic’, post-schizoanalytic current
that would continually dissolve the figure by raising the ground.
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Part One
Towards a Schizoanalysis
of Literature
1
The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body

without Organs
Ian Buchanan
The body without organs is the only ‘practical object of schizoanalysis’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 203). From the perspective of what I want to call ‘Practical
Deleuzism’, there could be no more important concept in the entire Deleuze
and Guattari arsenal. Yet one struggles to answer the basic question: ‘what is the
body without organs?’
There is no single answer to this question. Not only does the concept of the
body without organs have several dimensions, not all of them entirely consistent
with each other, it is also inconstant. The body without organs evolved
continuously as a concept (and I am aware that Deleuze and Guattari insisted
that it was not a concept – I will deal with this issue below). Its first iteration in
The Logic of Sense is different in crucial ways from the versions that appear in
Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. It is strangely absent from both Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature and What Is Philosophy? Yet one does not have to
search very hard to find its avatars in these works as well – I take this as but
one of many signs of its indispensability to Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. The
way the body without organs changes from its first iteration to the next raises
in turn a fresh set of questions about whether we should periodize it and speak
of an early and late body without organs, or assume that the last permutation
was meant to supersede all others as the final form. To add complexity to an
already confusing enough situation, Deleuze and Guattari even admit that they
were not sure themselves if they each meant the same thing when they used the
concept. They also pursued a deliberate policy of using new words for old or
existing concepts to prevent them from becoming ‘fixed’ (or perhaps ‘fixated’
is the better way of putting it). The body without organs thus has a number of
synonyms in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the plane of immanence, the plane
of consistency, the earth and the plateau being the most obvious and well known,
but there are others as well as I’ll show, such as strata, and life, which also need to
be taken into account. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the secondary literature on the
body without organs is extremely inconsistent in its handling of the term.
There is little to no agreement among Deleuze and Guattari scholars as to what
exactly this concept refers to, a fact that – as I have argued elsewhere – cannot
but hold the field back (Buchanan 2013). How can schizoanalysis take root as a
methodology in the human and social sciences if its basic terms are subject to
guesswork and surmise? If we cannot locate, describe and define a set of common
points of reference for the body without organs then it has no philosophical
value; it is simply an adjective. That is what is at stake every time we open up
the debate about what Deleuze and Guattari ‘really meant’, regardless of how
much of an anathema to their work that type of question might seem. Deleuze
and Guattari are often presented by their commentators as being uninterested
in precision and unconcerned whether people grasp their ideas and concepts
correctly or not. On one level this is true enough because they do encourage
their readers to be creative in their application and development of concepts.
But that does not mean their work lacks all rigour or that they were sloppy in
the construction of their concepts and would be willing to accept conceptual
sloppiness in others. Being given the freedom to modify concepts, to keep them
alive by making them evolve, is not the same thing as being told concepts can
be made to mean whatever we as readers choose. More to the point, if ideas
and concepts do not have some kind of cutting edge, some line of thinking or
reasoning that circumscribes them, defining what is included within their ambit
and what is not, then quite simply they cannot be concepts. At best they are
adjectives, as I said above; at worst, they are empty assertions, or opinions. Either
way, attentive readers of Deleuze and Guattari would know that is not how they
thought ideas or concepts function.
Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit in saying both that they regard
concepts to be rigorously distinct from opinion and adjective (the fate of ‘fallen’
concepts) and that concepts have sharp edges. I want to suggest that the reason
we – and I very much mean to include myself in this ‘we’ – have struggled to
understand the concept of the body without organs is that we have failed to heed
one of Deleuze and Guattari most basic interpretive principles. Instead of asking
what something means, we should ask how it works (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
109). Put simply, if we want to know what the body without organs is, then we
should first of all ask how it works. The body without organs is what it does.
The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body without Organs 27
To which I will add the following crucial caveat: to understand how the body
without organs works we have to take a systemic view of it and recognize that it
does not work in isolation. It is just one element, albeit a highly crucial element,
in a larger analytic apparatus, which Deleuze and Guattari very loosely refer to
as schizoanalysis. We must, as Laplanche and Pontalis say of the ‘death instinct’
(another of the body without organs’ cognates), discover the body without
organs’ ‘structural necessity’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 97). Why, in other
words, was it necessary for Deleuze to invent it? Why was it necessary for
Deleuze and Guattari to modify it as they did over the course of their two decades
long collaboration? This approach to the issue follows Deleuze’s edict, set down
very early in his career and insisted upon countless times throughout his work,
that we should always start with the problem. Putting these two methodological
principles together, I want to suggest that the first question, asking how the body
without organs works, is isometric with the second, asking what problem it
answers to.
How does the body without organs work?
This question is less clear-cut than it first appears because neither of the basic
points of reference – neither the ‘body’ nor the ‘organs’ – are deployed in anything
like a straightforward manner. The body it refers to is not the physical body,
and the organs it refers to are not necessarily bodily. Both may be ‘material’, as
Deleuze and Guattari often maintain, but that does not mean they are physical,
or actual empirical entities, because for Deleuze and Guattari almost anything,
including words, thoughts, ideas and so on can constitute ‘matter’. If we were to
locate the body without organs at all, in a spatial or topographical sense, we’d
have to say it was in the unconscious, but this is not quite right either because
for Deleuze and Guattari (in contrast to Freud), the unconscious is not a pre-
existing entity or agency of the mind (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 149). Deleuze
and Guattari reject the idea that the unconscious is only revealed in the slips
of the tongue, errors of memory and assorted other tics and faux pas that have
come to be known as ‘Freudian slips’. As they rightly point out, this is a highly
degraded conception of the unconscious that says nothing at all about its true
function as a behind the scenes organizer of our conscious lives. In Deleuze
and Guattari’s terms, as I will try to clarify in what follows, the unconscious is
not simply a dark force constantly threatening to undermine and betray our
performance of our self or indeed selves; it is, rather, a capacity or capability of

the mind whose limits are constantly tested without ever being reached.
We will need to qualify this statement further in what follows, but for now
it serves to at least locate the territory that interests us. If we return to the very
source of the phrase itself, namely the work of French poet and dramatist Antonin
Artaud, it is obvious that insofar as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, it does
not refer to a state of being. It is neither physiological nor ontological.
‘No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No oesophagus. No belly. No anus.’
The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served
to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the
unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day,
finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was
at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a
model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor,
just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. (Deleuze
There are several points to note in this analysis of Artaud that can help us to
answer more concretely the twofold question of what the body without organs
does and what the body without organs therefore is: first, and most importantly,
Deleuze and Guattari say the body without organs is synonymous with Freud’s
death instinct – the implications of this have not been sufficiently investigated
in the secondary literature. At a minimum, it means the body without organs
is what desire desires (state of being); secondly, the body without organs is not
an object, it is not something desire lacks; thirdly, the body without organs is
how desire desires (mode of being); lastly, the body without organs is the degree
zero of desire, it is what desire desires when it no longer wishes to desire (‘It is
nondesire as well as desire’ [Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 149]). In effect, this is
what desire desires the most, not to desire; or, more accurately, to be in a state
in which desire is unable to exert any pressure. What Artaud longs for, what he
desires, and what he finds in the body without organs, is a blessed moment of
relief from desire’s incessant demands.
From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if
nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth
and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 7)
For Artaud, the organs – the mouth, the tongue, the anus, and so on – are
importunate parasites, or interlopers, or invaders, constantly seeking his
attention, demanding action of him, and ultimately driving him ‘crazy’ (in the
vernacular rather than clinical sense). Obviously, if Artaud had been literally
without his mouth, tongue, teeth, larynx, oesophagus, belly and anus, he would
be dead. So these organs Artaud names, and the body that rejects them, cannot
be taken literally.1 Nor should we assume Artaud meant it literally, any more
than we assume when someone says ‘my mother will kill me for staying out
late’ it is meant literally. And just as ‘my mother will kill me for staying out late’
is not a metaphor, so Artaud’s statements are not metaphors either. The simple
point I want to make here is that language cannot be construed as a binary
system with literal meaning on the one hand and metaphorical meanings on the
other – this has long been understood in language philosophy, but many of
Deleuze and Guattari’s readers seem not to have grasped that language is vastly
more complicated than this and that there is a wide range of ways in which
meaning can be made. Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, which is where the concept of the
body without organs first appeared, is an extended argument for the existence
of precisely the kind of sense in which Deleuze thinks Artaud’s work ought
to be understood as yielding. It is a mode of sense that falls outside of the
literal/metaphor binary.
Sense, as Deleuze defines it, is ‘the expressed of the proposition, . . . an
incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event
which inheres or subsists in the proposition’ (Deleuze 1990: 19). It is therefore
‘irreducible to individual states of affairs, particular images, personal beliefs,
and universal or general concepts’ (Deleuze 1990: 19). It is supplementary (in
Derrida’s sense) to words, things, images and ideas: ‘For we may not even say that
sense exists either in things or in the mind; it has neither physical nor mental
existence’ (Deleuze 1990: 20). Sense inheres or subsists inside the proposition
and has no existence outside or beyond the proposition. It is nevertheless quite
distinct from the proposition. It does not dissolve into or otherwise disappear
into the proposition. Deleuze equates sense with Husserl’s concept of the noema
(the perceived as such, or better, the perceived for itself independent of either
the perceiver or the object perceived) and even goes so far as to ask whether
phenomenology could be the science of surface effects (Deleuze 1990: 21). ‘The
noema is not given in a perception (nor in a recollection or an image). It has
an entirely different status which consists in not existing outside the propo
sition which expresses it – whether the proposition is perceptual, or whether
it is imaginative, recollective, or representative’ (Deleuze 1990: 21). We must
distinguish between green as a sensible colour or quality and green the attribute
(i.e., noematic colour). The proposition ‘the tree is green’ contains a dimension,
which Deleuze calls sense, which amounts to saying the ‘tree greens’, or to put
it another way ‘the tree is in a constant state of becoming green’. Deleuze thus
proposes that the noema be grasped as a ‘pure event’:
‘Green’ designates a quality, a mixture of things, a mixture of tree and air where
chlorophyll coexists with all the parts of the leaf. ‘To green’, on the contrary,
is not a quality in the thing, but an attribute which is said of the thing. This
attribute does not exist outside of the proposition which expresses it in denoting
the thing. (Deleuze 1990: 21)
Sense is at once the event and the boundary line or membrane separating
propositions and things (Deleuze 1990: 28). The event is ideal in both of its forms,
Deleuze insists, and therefore ontologically distinct from its realization in a state
of affairs. He reserves the term ‘accident’ for the actualized event, for the event that
takes place between bodies in the living present. The ideal event is composed of
‘singularities’, the ‘singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical
state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points
and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centres; points of fusion,
condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and
anxiety, “sensitive” points [points dits sensibles]’ (Deleuze 1990: 52). In A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the term haecceity, borrowed from Duns
Scotus, and use it in place of singularity, though they continue to use that term as
well. They define the haecceity as ‘a mode of individuation very different from that
of a person, subject, thing, or substance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261).2
The body without organs must belong exclusively to the psychical apparatus
rather than the physical world because plainly its attributes are impossible
anywhere else. It is the realm of pure intensities, which is to say a realm like
that of sense and is therefore incapable of extension. This does not mean the
body cannot be a source of stimulus for the productions that take place on and
through the body without organs, but it does mean that the body is not a useful
reference point for trying to understand the body without organs. Deleuze and
Guattari are explicit about this. They say it ‘has nothing whatsoever to do with
the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8). They perhaps confuse matters when they go on
to speak about the anorexic building herself a body without organs via starvation,
as though to say her emaciated body is the literal embodiment of the organ-less
body. But this is not what they mean. Anorexia is not a refusal of the body, it is
a refusal of the organism, or more specifically, a refusal of what the organism
imposes upon the body (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 110). The theme of refusal is
central to the notion of the body without organs. What it is refusing in this case,
namely the organism, is coextensive with the body but not identical to the body.
Deleuze and Guattari never actually define the organism. However, it seems clear
that they mean some kind of ‘organ system’ in which organ is the code for any
kind of internal psychic stimulus, stimulus originating from within the psychic
apparatus itself, and not a response to stimuli from the external environment.
When the alcoholic says they need a drink, to refer to an example Deleuze
and Guattari use, it is the body without organs speaking. It may be that external
circumstances – marriage break-up, job loss, too much or too little success, and
so on – drove the alcoholic to look for a solution in a bottle in the first place,
but that does not explain why the particular effect of alcohol is desirable. It is
easy to assume that the alcoholic’s purpose in drinking is to render themselves
insensible to these external shocks to their conscious selves. But in saying that
we are also saying there is an agency or power greater than the sensate self that is
willing and able to drive the self to sacrifice itself for the sake of its own comfort.
Deleuze and Guattari call this agency, this power, the body without organs. It is
an immanent power, however, not an overarching figure, like the superego, that
the poor benighted self, the ego, feels it must answer to and whose edicts it must
obey. Suicide, for example, is theorized by Žižek as the subject’s attempt ‘to send
a message to the Other, i.e., it is an act that functions as an acknowledgement
of guilt’ (Žižek 2001: 44). But this is not how Deleuze and Guattari view things.
Indeed, in A Thousand Plateaus they treat the Other or superego, which they
refer to as ‘the face’, as a pathological symptom of psychic disturbance.3
Instead of an authority figure like the superego riding roughshod over the ego
and determining its actions by coercion and injunction, Deleuze and Guattari
imagine a synthesizing figure, the body without organs, which operates by
coaxing and conviction, by giving consistency to things in a way that ‘makes
sense’. It does not elicit guilt from the subject; on the contrary, it empowers it.
This is the key point to Artaud’s cry – being without organs ‘made sense’ to him;
it is a solution he can live with.
As Deleuze and Guattari emphasize throughout their work, the body
without organs does not pre-exist desire. It is not an ultimate or primordial
gatekeeper. It comes into being as an effect of the desiring-production process.
For example, when schizophrenic desire goes into a kind of productive hyper-
drive, firing off thoughts and associations faster than the subject can process
and put into perspective, the body without organs arises as a counterweight, as
a force of anti-production, slowing things down, and eventually bringing them
to a halt. Deleuze and Guattari find an instructive example of this process in
the ‘schizophrenic table’ observed by Henri Michaux in The Major Ordeals of

the Mind, which is rendered functionally useless as a table by years of ‘useless
additions, supplements to supplements – the sign of an irresistible tendency
to elaborate without ever being able to stop’ (Michaux 1974: 126; Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 6). The subject of endless production, the table is paradoxically
incapable of producing anything itself; it cannot even perform its basic function
as a table. It is unproductive in and of itself, it cannot produce anything, but
more importantly it sets a natural limit to production, eventually becoming
so overly elaborate it cannot be augmented any further. Just as importantly,
it achieves this unproductive state without anyone intending for it to happen
(passive synthesis).
Death instinct
The death instinct, as Freud conceives it, has two dimensions, both of which are
crucial to our understanding of the body without organs. First, the death instinct
manifests itself as an apparently irrational or obsessive compulsion to repeat a
particular set of ideas, behaviours or rituals in apparent defiance of the pleasure
principle. The ideas, behaviours or rituals it obsessively repeats are not obviously
in and of themselves pleasurable, the masochist’s desire to be struck being the
most obvious and well-known example of this. But, Freud reasons, this behaviour
is in fact consistent with the demands of the pleasure principle, providing we
grasp that it is the repetition process itself that gives rise to pleasure and not
the specifics of ideas, behaviours or rituals. As Freud argued with respect to
his grandson’s ‘fort-da’ game, repetition is the unconscious’s means of obtaining
mastery over discomforting stimuli; as such, it is both a mechanism of defence
and an attempt at self-cure. The masochist turns the uncontrolled violence of
the disciplining parent into a source of pleasure and control. Deleuze’s critique
of Freud’s position is well known, so I will not extend my discussion of it here
(Deleuze 1991).
The crucial point to note here is that the compulsion to repeat occurs at a
level below conscious or even preconscious thought – it belongs to the order
of the drives and is therefore experienced by the subject as an inexorable
pressure, something they are helpless to avoid. It is machinic inasmuch as, like
all machines, it operates regardless of how we feel about it. Just as our car engine
continues to turn over irrespective of how we feel, so the drives spur us from
within irrespective of how we feel about them. For instance, at a certain point in
our lives (typically pre-pubescence) we may feel a set of affects that we will later
learn to identify with being sexually aroused without being emotionally ready
for or even interested in sex as an idea, much less a set of behaviours, in any of
its possible permutations. We experience these affects, these unfamiliar feelings,
because like the car’s engine, our sexual instincts know nothing of the emotional
readiness of the self in the driver’s seat, as it were, and would not be affected by it
even if they did. We feel sexual urgings even if we are not able to interpret them as
such. This is precisely why the drives can be a source of emotional conflict for us:
they push us in a direction we do not necessarily want to go, but nevertheless feel
unable to refuse. Psychoanalysis as a therapeutic discourse is largely devoted to
understanding the various and often highly creative psychological compromises
we reach with our drives.
‘But’ Freud asks, ‘what is the nature of the connection between the realm of
the drives and the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot help thinking
that we have managed to identify a universal attribute of drives – and perhaps of
all organic life – that has not hitherto been clearly recognized . . . . A drive might
accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism
to restore a prior state’, that of their inorganic origin (Freud 2003: 76). This
brings us to the second, and from the point of view of the body without organs
ultimately more important, dimension of the death instinct. Freud’s hypothesis
is that this drive to repeat is historical rather than mechanical in nature. It
archives evolutionary change in the organism, but seems not to have any specific
biological purpose. His examples are the spawning patterns of certain fish and
the migration of some birds, which appear to have no other purpose than to
return the creatures to a previous domain. What intrigues him is the ‘pull’ this
previous domain continues to exert on the creature, long after it has evolved away
from and in a completely different direction from its origins. Why must salmon
spawn in fresh water even though they live most of their life in salt water? There
does not seem to be any good reason for this. When Freud speaks of death, then,
it is this ‘other domain’ that he is referring to, the domain before life, rather than
the domain after life. His conclusion that the goal of life is death does not mean
death is something we long for. Freud’s point is not that deep down we want to
die. He’s not saying that in the midst of life all we want is death. Rather, what we
as species want – and this explains the purpose of the life drives – is to die in our
‘own particular way’ (Freud 2003: 79).
The death instinct ‘is charged with the task of safeguarding the organism’s own
particular path to death and barring all possible means of return to the inorganic
other than those already immanent’ (Freud 2003: 79). The death it seeks is not
the end of life, as such, but a return to the inanimate state that preceded life. The
so-called life drives, by contrast, aim to preserve and extend life to enable us to
realize our ultimate goal of dying in our own way, which is not to say by our own
hand. What we seek in effect is the peace and quiet of the inanimate state ‘we’ (as
a species) were in before we took our first breath. Insofar as the death instinct
is concerned, what we want is to never have lived at all. Freud’s death instinct
clarifies our understanding of the body without organs in two ways: first, as we
have just seen, the whole impetus of the death instinct is to prolong a prior state,
an inorganic ‘before’ the body and mind sense without being able to know – it
is not imagined so much as felt, at some level well beneath both the conscious
and the unconscious; second, the death instinct manifests as a compulsion to
act, often, indeed usually, without any sense of why we should or must act in
a particular way, and frequently in the face of common sense and reason. This
is precisely the point of Artaud’s demand for a body without organs. Besieged
by demands from within, demands which are like so many extra and as it were
unneeded organs, Artaud longs for the peace of an organ-less body.
The degree zero of desire
In most instances, then, at least in its earliest materialization in Deleuze and

Guattari’s thinking, the body without organs manifests itself as a refusal, or even
more strongly as a repulsion (not to be confused with repression). Not in the
conscious sense of an ‘I’ being put off or disgusted by something external to it.
But in the deeper and, dare I say, more visceral sense of an unconscious and
essentially defensive response to stimuli produced by the unconscious system
taken as a whole, which is by no means limited to the stimuli produced within
the confines of the skull, but includes the entire sensory apparatus. Deleuze and
Guattari initially referred to these internal stimuli as ‘desiring machines’, but
would later term them ‘affects’ and ‘becomings’ (having grown uncomfortable
with the narrowly sexual reading many of their commentators made of ‘desiring
machines’). I will say more about desiring-machines in a moment, but first I want
to emphasize that the body without organs belongs to the order of what Freud
referred to as the primary processes (i.e., desiring-production or the passive
syntheses), the realm of the drives, which he contrasts to secondary processes,
the realm of waking life. There, as Freud explains in his essay ‘Beyond the
Pleasure Principle’, an essential touchstone for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘cathexes
can easily be transferred, displaced, [and] compressed’ in a way that would be

impossible in either the preconscious or conscious (Freud 2003: 74). Desire is
both infinitely mutable and utterly mercurial, subject to constant change and
ceaseless transformation. Freud goes on to suggest that the primary process is
the equivalent of Breuer’s ‘free-flowing’ cathexis. More importantly, though, for
our purposes, in Freud’s view the psyche has very little, if any, defence against
primary processes: ‘the excitations that come from the deeper layers carry over
into the system directly and without diminution, whereby certain features of
their mode of progression generate successive sensations of pleasure and/or
unpleasure’ (Freud 2003: 68).
The body without organs arises as an indirect response to stimuli generated
from within the unconscious system and not in response to external events and
circumstances, no matter how troubling or perplexing they may be. Internal
stimuli do not directly cause the body without organs to come into being but
their existence, or rather their insistence, requires its presence. The body without
organs is, in this precise sense, structurally necessary. The practical operation of
the body without organs is selective, even though that is not its true function: it
erects a membrane where Freud thought no barrier was possible and determines
which psychic material may pass through. In effect, then, the body without organs
acts as a kind of censor (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term). It operates in
the midst of desire, alongside it or beneath it, recoding it and passing judgement
on it. The body without organs determines when a particular mode of desire, or
particular way of desiring, is undesirable. In contrast to Freud’s censor, though,
the body without organs is not a near-sighted gatekeeper easily duped by the
cunning disguises desire is apt to wear. Its function is not merely to protect
the conscious from the blushing feeling of self-reproach we experience when we
are confronted by our desires in their naked form. It is more powerful than that.
Not only that, its operations tend to be all or nothing campaigns. It is a force of
anti-production, where production refers to the processes of the unconscious
as it formulates the objects (the intuitions, ideas, thoughts, fantasies, and so on)
central to the subject’s sense of self and well-being.
In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth,
slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected,
and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated
fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it
utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. (Deleuze
The body without organs does not regulate the flow of good and bad unconscious
thoughts, as the censor does in Freud’s work. It actively – and aggressively –
seeks to drown out and bring a halt to the production of thought. The imagery
Deleuze and Guattari use here of counterflows of amorphous undifferentiated
fluid and so on to describe how the body without organs functions is drawn from
Deleuze’s discussion of Melanie Klein’s theory of partial objects in The Logic of
Sense. Artaud is brought into this discussion as an example of what Klein means.
It is worth reminding ourselves of this fact for two reasons.
First, because it reminds us that Deleuze was already working on the concept
of the body without organs before he met Guattari (Guattari has said that it was
this concept, particularly, that drew him to want to meet Deleuze), which is to
say he was already thinking about schizophrenia and its particular affects and
effects before his collaboration with Guattari would make that the focus of his
work for more than a decade. This is important because it means we have to
reject the tired and utterly clichéd image of Deleuze as the ‘pure’ philosopher
only interested in ‘purely’ philosophical ideas who was ‘corrupted’ by his contact
with Guattari touted by both Badiou and Žižek, both of whom ought to know
better. Second, because it reminds us that the origins of the term body without
organs and the thinking behind it is heterogeneous, meaning that we cannot
simply look to Artaud as the defining authority capable of providing the first or
last ‘word’ on the subject.
There is perhaps a third reason, too, which is that as one charts the movement
from Deleuze’s first use of the term body without organs in The Logic of Sense
through to its later iterations in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, it
becomes clear that the concept of the body without organs evolved constantly
and considerably. This underscores my previous point, namely that Artaud
cannot be used as the final arbiter of what the body without organs means.
At best, he opens a window onto its existence. One can also say that Melanie
Klein sensed its existence independently of Artaud, though perhaps she did not
quite grasp its clinical significance, as evidenced by her reluctance to develop
the term, as did several other artists and theorists important to Deleuze and
Guattari. What particularly interested Deleuze about Klein is her ‘geography
and geometry of living dimensions’, that is, her distinction between the so-called
paranoid-schizoid position of the infant and the depressive position which is
supposed to succeed it (Deleuze 1990: 188).
One can see in this the precursor to Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in maps
and diagrams. The paranoid-schizoid position Klein speaks of is the product
of the splitting of the object, that which the child first attaches itself to both
as a matter of practical necessity and out of love, namely the maternal breast.
For Klein, all subsequent attachments, meaning all subsequent investments of
the libido, follow this path of latching onto and in the process separating off
an object. The ‘invested’ breast is dissociated from the maternal body as is the
child’s mouth from its own body; in the process, both take on a life of their own,
or in Deleuze and Guattari’s language they become machinic.
This process is highly fraught, however, because the object/machine is
ambivalent, prone to being both good and bad. The maternal breast is good
when it delivers milk to the hungry child, but becomes bad in the child’s eyes
when it is withdrawn or its milk withheld. On top of that, the objects are not
merely ambivalent; they are also highly mobile and completely unstable. ‘Not
only are the breast and the entire body of the mother split apart into a good
and bad object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces, broken into
crumbs and alimentary morsels’ (Deleuze 1990: 187). The good partial objects
are adopted by the child as central to its sense of self (introjection), while the
bad objects are expelled (projection), but the good objects do not stay good, as it
were, and continue to split apart, thus creating new good and bad objects to be
absorbed/expelled (re-introjection/re-projection) (Deleuze 1990: 187).
Klein’s object relations theory is subsumed in Deleuze and Guattari’s work
by the concept of desiring-machines. They retain, and indeed refine, the
ambivalence central to Klein’s theory. The body without organs is in a certain
sense a mechanism of defence against this ambivalence. At the micro level, the
breast and the mouth, for example, are machines because they constitute an
effective relationship. The breast supplies the child with the nutrition it requires
to live and the child’s suckling stimulates the production of milk in the breast,
while the nursing process is said to facilitate the formation of the child-mother
bond. At the macro level, the breast and the mouth are machines because they
begin the process of forming the child as a subject by organizing his or her
body in a particular way. The mouth of the infant is for eating and breathing,
but it is also used for crying and vomiting, and so on, but over time it is also
used for speaking, and eventually this function becomes dominant, with even
breathing consigned to the nose. At that point the mouth ceases to be machinic;
what matters now are the words and sounds that issue from it; its machinic
quality is displaced onto language. Pathology makes its appearance when this
ordering of the machines is undone, or becomes somehow intolerable, as in the
example of the anorexic.4 This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they
say desiring-machines ‘only work by breaking down [Les machines désirantes

ne marchent que détraquées]’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8).5 Their effect is
always (potentially) as disordering as it is ordering, particularly when, as in this
example, the machinic possibilities appear endless.
Desiring-machines are not in and of themselves pathological, but they do
nevertheless have a pathological modality, which is characterized by what I will
term the irruption of immanence. ‘Desiring-machines make us an organism;
but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this
production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not
having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 8). As Deleuze and Guattari clarify in the following paragraphs,
the body they are referring to here is the body without organs. When this body
rebels, it overturns all the existing hierarchies, all the established benchmarks,
and to a greater or lesser degree induces chaos. If the mouth acquires the
status of speaking-machine, its purpose becomes transcendent inasmuch
as it lays outside of itself, the production of words, a function that can be
subsumed by other machines (we can write, make films, music and so on). To
put it another way, when the mouth starts to speak it must give up its other
functions – eating, vomiting, and crying, and so on – and enter a realm in which
it is relatively unimportant. Now what matters are the words that flow from it,
not the mouth itself. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe
this process as deterritorialization. When immanence is restored, however,
the mouth regains its vital, machinic ability to form new connections, but at
the cost of its ordered place in the world. It becomes machinic in itself when
it ceases to speak and instead utters gasps and cries and other unarticulated
sounds; it enhances this power by reasserting its bodily ability to bite and chew
and spew and so on. These are not regressions, in Freud’s sense, because they
do not constitute a return to childhood as such; rather, what is at stake is an
irruption of immanence and a corresponding loss of transcendence (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983: 5). Chaos and disorder reign when the desiring-machines
become autonomous, when they break free from the necessary constraints of
the organism as a whole.
This irruption of immanence is, I want to stress, pathological – it is a
schizophrenic effect signalling the onset of psychosis. I stress this because the
material Deleuze and Guattari cite as examples of the irruption of immanence
is often quite charming, bucolic even. As, for instance, the seemingly beautiful
scene they extract from Büchner’s account of Lenz’s mountain strolls.
Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky,

alpine machines – of them connected to those of his body. The continual whir of
machines. ‘He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact
with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and
plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers
that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: 2)
As conditioned as we are by more than two centuries of nature-driven

Romanticism, it is difficult for us to see this passage as anything but beautiful.
It seems to betoken everything we strive for in this hyper-cultural age that
constantly bemoans its disconnection from the natural environment. Here is
someone who is fully in touch with and connected at the deepest levels to the
one thing we post-postmodernists no longer know how to know, namely nature
itself. For precisely this reason, we should be cautious. It is true, Deleuze and
Guattari do, at times, and this is clearly one of those times, make it seem as
though the irruption of immanence is liberating, but one has to read them very
carefully because what they are saying is that it is liberating for the schizophrenic,
who finds the pressure of staying within the confines of the transcendentally
organized body and universe impossible to sustain. Lenz enjoys his mountain
stroll precisely because it enables him to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere
of his home and his church, his father and his pastor. This does not mean it is
in and of itself liberating, that it should treated as an image of freedom. In fact
it should be understood as a falling into illness. Schizoanalysis is the attempt to
understand this illness for itself.
What problem does the body without organs answer to?
In the foregoing, we have only seen the body without organs in its ‘negative’
light as an agency of repulsion and anti-production. Although this was how the
‘concept’ began life, it is not the whole story. The decade between Anti-Oedipus
and A Thousand Plateaus saw Deleuze and Guattari rethink the body without
organs as a multidimensional concept with both ‘negative’ and ‘affirmative’
capabilities. As part of this shift in their thinking, they also came around to
proposing that the formation of the body without organs could be influenced by
the subject’s actions. While they still maintained that the body without organs
was unengendered, they now allowed that it was also possible to act in such as
a way as to give rise to ‘affirmative’, or what they now termed ‘healthy’ bodies
without organs as opposed to ‘negative’ or ‘cancerous’ bodies without organs. As
an unengendered ‘state’, one can only achieve either of these outcomes – healthy
or cancerous – through a process of experimentation, the difficulty being that
at first glance the two look very much the same. To the alcoholic, the perfect
state of drunkenness, in which their consciousness has been dulled significantly,
but has not yet been extinguished altogether, is ‘healthy’ inasmuch as it enables
them ‘to be’ in the world in a way they find ‘peaceful’ (in Artaud’s sense of being
free from the persecution of the organs). The trouble is, this state of being is not
sustainable.
This discussion of the drugged state, which Deleuze and Guattari associate
with the body without organs, is important because at the bottom it is animated
by the singular problem, which we’ve barely touched on, namely the problem that
the very concept of the body without organs is conceived as an answer to. And
that problem, quite simply, is what makes a drugged state, but by extension, any
state of being, desirable for itself. Deleuze and Guattari’s answer is that it is the
body without organs that makes a particular state desirable. In so doing, they are
identifying a hitherto overlooked agency of the mind. The key to what I’m trying
to say here is to be found in a short passage in Anti-Oedipus whose profound
implications I want to explore briefly in closing. Referring to schizophrenia,
which is just one manifestation of the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari
say it ‘is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity;
schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines
as “the essential reality of man and nature” ’ (1983: 5). If we wanted to grasp the
proper texture or character of the body without organs then we could do no
better than to think of it as a psychic phenomenon of the same order as love: one
does not decide to fall in love, nor does one decide how one will love, one just
loves and thrives or suffers as fate dictates. And when one is in love, that feeling,
if we can call something so profoundly altering as love a mere feeling, colours
everything we do. This is why Proust can fill so many pages trying without ever
fully managing to capture all of its effects and affects.
This is not to say the body without organs is synonymous with love because
clearly it has a great many other modalities. Rather what I want to say is that
love is one of the possible forms the body without organs can take. But it can
just as easily take the form of rage or depression or any other feeling that arises
without our willing it to do so and thereafter influences everything else that we
think and do until a new feeling takes its place. To call this type of feeling a body
without organs is a way of constructing a new topography of the psyche and that
is its core purpose conceptually speaking. It is, however, a topography of the
transversal line, that is to say, the line that brings together disparate elements
without actually joining them. The sparkle in the eye, the hint of a smile, the
soft notes of the perfume and the gentle music are joined by love but not in the
manner of putting pieces of a puzzle together and either discovering a lost unity
or what might be termed a prospective unity. No, love itself is the ‘whole’ that
sits alongside these elements, uniting them yet leaving them separate too. The
body without organs works in this way – it is a semiotic force, if you will, pulling
together the disparate elements of our experiences, and giving them consistency.
The manifold ways this process occurs requires a work at least as long as Proust’s,
which is why both Deleuze and Guattari, in separate works, and together, have
no hesitation in describing Proust as a master clinician.
Notes
1 Deleuze and Guattari cite a similar remark from Freud’s analysis of Schreber:
‘Judge Schreber “lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines,
almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with
shattered ribs; he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx with his
food, etc.” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8). Again, this is obviously not meant to
be taken literally or referentially, but neither can it be read metaphorically: the
missing body parts do not stand for anything other than themselves.
2 The haecceity is a mode of individuation suited to the individuation of events,
which are eternal, not bodies, which are transient, operating in the segmented
time of Chronos. It separates discrete ‘moments’ on the infinite plane of
Aion, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology corresponds to both ‘Life’
(understood existentially) and the body without organs. The individuation of a
life, they argue, is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads that
life because the subject ‘lives’ in the living present, but their life belongs to the
time of Aion.
3 Guattari makes this connection between the superego and the face explicit in
The Machinic Unconscious (Guattari 2011: 98).
4 ‘The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is
uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-
machine, or a breathing-machine (asthma attacks)’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: 1).
5 It is worth observing here that ‘détraquées’ could also be translated as ‘going off
the rails’, which would be its more literal meaning. In my view this would be a
better translation because it signals a going off course of desire, rather than a
breakdown.
References
Buchanan, Ian (2013), ‘Schizoanalysis: An Incomplete Project’, in Dillet, B., Porter, R.

and McKenzie, I. (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Post-structuralism. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 163–88.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester. London: Athlone.
—(1991), Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. J. McNeil. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987), Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and
B. Habberjam. London: Athlone.
Freud, Sigmund (2003), Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans.
J. Reddick. London: Penguin.
Guattari, Félix (2011), The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans.
T. Adkins. L.A.: Semiotext(e).
Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand (1973), The Language of Psycho-analysis,
trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: W.W. Norton.
Michaux, Henri (1974), The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones,
trans. R. Howard. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Žižek, Slavoj (2001), Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out.
London: Routledge.
2
The Drama of Schizoanalysis: On Deleuze

and Guattari’s Method
Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter
Time and again Deleuze and Guattari insisted on the political significance of the
schizoanalytical project announced in Anti-Oedipus. In one interview, Deleuze
provocatively described Anti-Oedipus as ‘from beginning to end a book of political
philosophy’ (1995: 170). Indeed, this is one of the key phrases or slogans that we
have adopted when trying to emphasize Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to
political philosophy (MacKenzie 2004: 84; MacKenzie and Porter 2011a: 13).
In many respects, it makes obvious sense to talk about Deleuze and Guattari’s
schizoanalytical project, and their work more generally, as political philosophy.
This is clearly demonstrated by the way scholars working in and around the field
have drawn on the rich resources Deleuze and Guattari provide (among others,
see Hardt 1993; Goodchild 1996; Patton 2000, 2005, 2007, 2010; Braidotti 2002;
Genosko 2002; Thoburn 2003; Read 2003; Buchanan and Thoburn 2008; Widder
2012). As is clear from this literature, Deleuze and Guattari not only engage with
the core concepts of political thought (say, ideology, the state, capitalism, to name
but a few) but also develop a new lexicon of concepts for political theorists to
analyse and employ (smooth/striated, de- and re-territorialization, nomadology
and war machine, for instance). Securing their place in the contemporary canon
of social and political theory, or more broadly in the history of political thought,
might seem a relatively straightforward task in this context. The truth, however,
is that within the narrow confines and well-policed borders of English-speaking
political theory, within political studies, and even across the social sciences more
generally, this has not happened to any significant degree. In these disciplinary
contexts, Deleuze and Guattari’s place is best thought of as marginal, perhaps
even increasingly precarious to the extent that their work is being seen as part
of a ‘poststructuralist event’ long since recuperated and sold back to us by those

very marketing men they expended so much energy castigating in their final
collaborative work together, What Is Philosophy? (Dillet et al. 2013: 507–26).
Those who are increasingly buying into the idea that Deleuze and Guattari
are passé, or are at least of limited use in the contemporary conjuncture, are
not completely wrong-headed, nor can they be easily dismissed as mere
creatures of ressentiment. As Ian Buchanan points out in his recent essay on
the schizoanalytic method, the ‘truth’ of what such critics are saying is worth
confronting (Buchanan in Dillet et al. 2013: 165). Buchanan mentions explicitly
Peter Osborne’s (2011) remarks about the culture industry and the authorial
branding that has grown up around Deleuze scholarship, remarks that connect
and find interesting resonance with concerns expressed by McKenzie Wark over
10 years ago in A Hacker Manifesto, when he asserted that ‘there is an industry
in the making, within the education business, around the name of Deleuze, from
which he must be rescued’ (Wark 2004: 391). If such comments are taken the
right way, caustic though they may be (witness also Osborne’s remarks about the
‘secondary exposition’ of Deleuze and Guattari in the ‘mid tier of an academic
publishing industry that is tending towards its real subsumption’), then this
means understanding and being worthy of their provocation. For behind the
caustic tone an important and serious issue is being raised: namely, that the
reception and exposition of Deleuze and Guattari’s work has tended to remain
just that – merely reception and exposition. Osborne does not pull his punches,
saying that Deleuze and Guattari ‘have yet to become the enabling conditions
of theoretically significant new productions’ (Osborne 2011: 151). Interestingly,
and rightly, Osborne draws an important distinction between Deleuze and
Guattari and Foucault in this context. Where there are ‘thriving fields of post-
Focauldian study’ (for instance, in political sociology or in a certain kind of
institutionalization of ‘discourse theory’) Deleuze scholars tend towards
‘fetishistic terminological repetition’ (Osborne 2011: 151). If these remarks ‘cut
to the quick’, or express a ‘truth’ for Buchanan, it is simply because he accepts in
broad terms the point that the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari has
been overwhelmingly focused on the basic task of trying to explain their key
concepts. Indeed, this is a point he himself made a few years before in his book
on Anti-Oedipus. As he says:
The reception of Anti-Oedipus has largely been decided by how well particular
commentators have been able to cope with its infamously playful language.
This is equally true of both the affirmative and negative responses. Deleuze
The Drama of Schizoanalysis 45
and Guattari enthusiasts can be just as muddled in their apprehension of

Anti-Oedipus as the detractors. The difficulty of the rhetoric of Anti-Oedipus is
such that it is an achievement in itself just to understand what they are trying to
say. But this means figuring out what they are saying has taken priority over whether
what they are saying is valid, cogent or even worth saying. There is in this respect
little that has been written about Deleuze and Guattari that is genuinely critical,
where that would mean evaluating their project from a position of understanding
and determining its relative strengths and weakness. (Buchanan 2008: 133)
In an important sense, Buchanan points to a problem of language that Osborne

also is keen to foreground. Where Osborne is certainly more caustic in his remarks
(it is the obscurity and impenetrability of Deleuze and Guattari’s language that
accounts for the limited scope of the secondary literature) Buchanan remains
a critic, sympathetic, to be sure, but a critic nonetheless, concerned, as he is, to
evaluate the uses to which the schizoanalytical method can be put (Buchanan
2008; also see Buchanan and MacCormack 2008). This broader debate or question
about the continuing use and merit of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in
contemporary social, political and intellectual culture provides us with a useful
backcloth against which to discuss their work here. Without trying to spuriously
wish away a number of related and persistent problems that swirl around any
analysis of the place Deleuze and Guattari may have in a contemporary culture
industry of academic publishing, we will take as our point of departure two issues
implied by the above. The first issue or problem is method. We have dealt with
this problem at length elsewhere and will only make passing reference below to
the claim that we can and should view dramatization as a critical method; that
is, as one of a group of methodological positions that insist that one can only
come to know the world through changing it (MacKenzie and Porter 2011a;
MacKenzie and Porter 2011b). The second issue or problem is language. It is this
that we shall focus on below. As political theorists, first and foremost, our concern
with these problems is broadly motivated by the following question. How can we
insist on the claim that Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be productively read as
a method for doing political philosophy, and in a way that captures the imagination
of those who may, at present, remain unconvinced of its utility?
Deleuze and Guattari’s language
One of the most obvious, perhaps the most tempting, ways to understand and
engage with what Buchanan calls the ‘playful language’ of Deleuze-Guattarian
works such as Anti-Oedipus is to be less than amused, to be humourless. There is

no doubt that a text like Anti-Oedipus can be read with a wilful obstinacy, with
scepticism, with a determination to be unimpressed. No doubt such obstinacy
and scepticism can harden and become more wilful as we move through such
a text, page by painful page. There is no doubt in our mind that Deleuze and
Guattari have to bear some responsibility for bringing to life this wilful obstinacy
in some of their readers. What is all this shitting and fucking? What do these
diatribes and slogans actually amount to? What, pragmatically speaking, are we
supposed to do with the forms of language-use we find in Anti-Oedipus? Here
are three examples:
Destroy, Destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction – a

whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete cutterage. (Deleuze and Guattari
1977: 371)
Schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions.
Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in
this task no activity will be too malevolent. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 314)
That is what the completion of the project is: not a promised land and a pre-
existing land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming
undone, its deterritorialisation. The movement of the theatre of cruelty: for it
is the only theatre of production, there where the flows cross the threshold of
deterritorialisation and produce a new land – not at all a hope, but a simple
‘finding’, a ‘finished design’, where the person who escapes causes other escapes,
and marks out a land while deterritorialising himself. An active point of
escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific
machine and (schizo) analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 322)
Read in the right way, we can clearly garner a rather wilful and critical spirit
in these passages. This presupposes, however, that we move beyond simply
decoding or working out Deleuze and Guattari’s line of attack (‘Down with
Oedipus, the ego, castration, guilt, lack’. . .!). For we also need to think a bit more
about the possibility of a critical evaluation of the pragmatic use to which such
a critique can be put. How can we do this? Well, our key intuition here is that
there is some critical potential in reading Deleuze and Guattari as dramatists,
and that reading them in this way will allow us to evaluate their work within
an appropriate methodological framework. By appropriate methodological
framework we simply mean a useful context within which to understand how
they did political philosophy and, perhaps more importantly, how we can do
political philosophy in their wake. So in beginning to broach the question posed
above; Deleuze and Guattari’s method of doing political philosophy can be
productively read as a method of dramatization. The method of dramatization
is a critical method employed by Deleuze and Guattari, and it can also provide
a methodological framework within with to evaluate critically their use-value as
political philosophers.
At first sight, this might seem a rather odd and problematic interpretive strategy,
particularly in the context of an edited collection focusing on the ‘schizoanalysis
of literature’. To this we would say that Deleuze and Guattari’s development of
a schizoanalytical method really comes alive in a form of dramatic language-
use that is self-consciously performed in order to be replayed or re-enacted by
their readers. As dramatists or artists, Deleuze and Guattari practice ‘philosophy
as a kind of writing, with a vengeance’ (Lecercle 2010: 128). In an important
respect, this is what we mean when we speak of the drama of schizoanalysis:
it is a dramatic performance in which the medium (in this case a particular
form of language-use) becomes not just the message but also the method.
We can unpack this claim a little more by coming back to the passages from
Anti-Oedipus quoted above. When Deleuze and Guattari urge us to ‘Destroy,
Destroy’, when they speak in one breath of schizoanalysis destroying ‘represen
tations and theatrical scenes’ and in the next about schizoanalytical movements
in a ‘theatre of production’, when they talk about schizoanalysis more generally
proceeding ‘by way of destruction’, we can understand these statements as very
particular, and always potentially dramatic, forms of language-use. They are,
at least in part, linguistic and dramatic performances, they are part of what we
would call the modulating vocalism that is so intrinsic to Deleuze and Guattari’s
use of language (MacKenzie and Porter 2011a: 82). The key here is the context
of language-use, the moment in which Deleuze and Guattari sing their song
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988, ‘On the Refrain’). Perhaps another example will help
us develop this point. The following passage is taken from a conversation Deleuze
had with Christian Deschamps, Didier Eribon and Robert Maggiori shortly
after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus. At one point, Maggiori tentatively
suggests to Deleuze that his and Guattari’s reflections on language and linguistics
in A Thousand Plateaus seem to have a conceptual or philosophical prominence
comparable to that of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus. Consider Deleuze’s response:
I don’t think that linguistics is fundamental. Maybe Felix, if he were here,

would disagree. But then Felix has traced a development that points towards a
transformation of linguistics: initially it was phonological, then it was semantic

and syntactic, but it’s turning more and more into pragmatics. Pragmatics
(dealing with the circumstances of language-use, with events and acts) was long
considered the ‘rubbish dump’ of linguistics, but it’s now becoming more and
more important: language is coming to be seen as an activity, so the abstract
units and constants of language-use are becoming less and less important. It’s a
good thing, this current direction of research, precisely because it makes possible
convergences and collaborations between novelists, linguists, philosophers,
‘vocalists’ . . . (‘vocalists’ are what I call anyone doing research into sound or the
voice in fields as varied as theatre, song, cinema, audio-visual media. . . ). The
potential here is enormous . . . . I don’t think we, for our part, are particularly
competent to pronounce on linguistics. But then competence is itself a rather
unclear notion in linguistics. (Deleuze 1995: 28–9)
What a fascinating passage of talk (and that it is talk or speech action is, of course,
important). Deleuze immediately says ‘I don’t think linguistics is important’ and
at the end of the passage he declares that he and Guattari are not ‘particularly
competent to pronounce on linguistics’. Read humourlessly and all too literally,
we could suggest that Deleuze is engaged in a performative contradiction. He is
making a claim, implicitly grounded in reason (‘linguistics is unimportant’), only
to then subsequently deny its validity (‘I’m not competent to make judgements
about the value of linguistics’). We could further apply this humourless and
literalist logic to Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks about ‘theatre’ in the passages
quoted from Anti-Oedipus above (where the theatre of the unconscious makes
way for the theatre of cruelty). But such an excessively literal reading is possible,
we would say, only if a reader is wilfully determined to designate a contradiction
rather than trying to immerse herself or himself in the language-use and
participate in the drama. Indeed, when such readings become excessively wilful
(‘how can you praise and bury the concept of theatre at the same time?’) they
can quite quickly assume a discernibly comic form: a thing-like repetition and
mechanical obstinacy, a humourlessness that can become very funny.
Coming back to Deleuze’s explicit response to Maggiori, we can say that his
sense of humour is clearly in evidence, particularly if we recall the context in
which he is talking. If it makes very little sense to read Deleuze’s remarks solely
in terms of their designative function, this is clearly because they are operating
in a different register, a humorous and dramatic register that is meant to provoke
us. As James Williams rightly points out, it is important and productive to
read Deleuze in a way that seeks to do justice to his ‘rich and chaotic style’ of
argumentation, a style or form of writing that aims not at a ‘single meaning or
content’ but allows for a ‘multiple mixture of modes, meanings, physical hooks
and emotional connections’ (Williams 2008: 20). Indeed, Deleuze’s statements,
says Williams, often come in the form of ‘smiling provocations’ (Williams 2008:
21). So why might we be provoked and why might a wry smile spread across our
faces as we read Deleuze’s words in this context? If we think about the context of
Deleuze’s remarks, the fact that they refer back to his and Guattari’s discussion
of ‘the postulates of linguistics’ in the fourth plateau in A Thousand Plateaus,
then we can immediately see that Deleuze’s declaration of ignorance (‘we are not
competent to pronounce on linguistics’) is itself a humorous provocation. At once
we are prompted to read this fragment of speech action against the background
of some of the key claims Deleuze and Guattari make in the fourth plateau.
When Deleuze says ‘I don’t think that linguistics is fundamental,’ he is not
making a particular value judgement about the importance of the study of
language, but a broader political point about how the disciplinary borders of
linguistics are policed. These disciplinary boundaries are precisely the ‘postulates
of linguistics’ that Deleuze and Guattari seek to challenge in plateau four (see
Lecercle 1999, 2002, 2006). This can explain why Deleuze immediately qualifies
his first sentence with the suggestion that ‘Maybe Felix, if he were here, would
disagree,’ pointing generously to Guattari’s influence and work in the field and in
their developing conception of ‘pragmatics’ (Lecercle 2002: 51). For the concept
of ‘pragmatics’, as Deleuze says, should not be seen as the ‘rubbish dump’ of
linguistics, but rather as fundamentally important to all aspects of language study.
Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari insist in plateau four that the student of language
should (indeed needs to) practice a form of pragmatics, where ‘pragmatics’ traces
the internal or intrinsic relations between speech and action: for example, when
a promise of love is at once the action of making a promise (Deleuze and Guattari
1988: 77). Or, put more strongly still, Deleuze and Guattari rather provocatively
assert that pragmatics is not only fundamental to the study of language-use in
speech action, but also crucial to understanding the other branches or fields of
what is sometimes called ‘linguistic science’: for instance, semantics, syntactics,
phonematics and so on. In this respect, pragmatics, for Deleuze and Guattari,
‘becomes the presupposition behind all other dimensions and insinuates itself
into everything’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 77).
This brings us back again neatly to Deleuze’s remark about how the concept
of ‘competence’ functions in linguistics. In making this remark, he has Chomsky,
and the various research programmes influenced by Chomskyian linguistics,
in mind. For declaring his and Guattari’s lack of competence in linguistics
is a humorous provocation as soon as we realize that it is a well thought out
implication of the pragmatic turn that Deleuze and Guattari think is necessary
for the student of language. The final sentence in the passage above is the obvious
clincher, should we be in any doubt about the penultimate one. To repeat: ‘I don’t
think we, for our part, are particularly competent to pronounce on linguistics.
But then competence is itself a rather unclear notion in linguistics.’ The reason
that competence is a ‘rather unclear notion’ is precisely because it functions
as part of a dualism that is endlessly complicated by the variations that are set
in motion by speech action. As is well known, Chomsky draws an important
distinction between competence and what he calls ‘performance’. Where
‘performance’ may be thought of as the extrinsic, individual and context-specific
use of pre-given deep syntactic structure or language system, ‘competence’ is
best seen more as an ‘innate’ faculty that the language-user has for creatively
generating new forms of syntax in accordance with this deep or pre-given
systematicity or structure. Against Chomsky, Deleuze and Guattari argue that
it is impossible to maintain a distinction between competence and performance
as the systematicity or constancy of the former (as reflective of a deep syntactic
structure) can no longer be assumed independently of the latter. Put simply,
speech action should not be seen as the extrinsic, individual or context-specific
use of the resources always-already available in a deep syntactic structure, but
syntax itself needs to be accounted for by the way it is actualized and continually
renewed in and through speech action. The ‘meaning and syntax of language can
no longer be defined independently of the speech acts they presuppose’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1988: 77).
Speech action sets language in motion, a ‘continuous variation’, that renders
problematic what Deleuze describes in passing in the passage above as ‘abstract
units and constants of language-use’ (read: constants like Chomsky’s ‘competence’
or, say, Saussure’s notion of ‘langue’ as a structure or system independent
of ‘parole’). The stress on constancy or pre-given structures in language, for
Deleuze, is ‘becoming less and less important’ the more and more pragmatics
inspires us to view language as an open system of continual variation and, in
this respect, it can converge with research work undertaken by ‘vocalists’ in
other fields of enquiry; that is ‘anyone doing research into sound or the voice in
fields as varied as theatre, song, cinema, audio-visual media’. For us, and as we
have already implied, this is an extremely suggestive remark as it reinforces the
importance of the performative aspect of language-use, giving readers a licence
to think of Deleuze and Guattari’s language-use as a dramatizing, varying,
modulating, vocalism. Deleuze and Guattari can indeed be viewed as vocalists,
or their writing can be thought to imply a vocalism, where ‘vocalism’ connects to

the idea that the variations, modulations and movements in language issue from
the medium itself, and not just simply from the extrinsic or particular context of
their enunciation. In this way, Deleuze and Guattari offer a form of ‘pragmatics’
that is rather interesting and provocative. It is a pragmatics that insists, inevitably,
on the importance of performance in language, or the use of language in speech
action, while simultaneously retaining the idea that language is characterized by
a kind of intrinsic or immanent movement that issues from the medium itself.
In this sense, we are content to refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatics in
A Thousand Plateaus as a form of modernist pragmatics (MacKenzie and Porter
2011a: 83).
Dramatization and normativism
If we think of the dominant forms of methodological self-consciousness in

contemporary political theory as a thing appropriated, populated or masked
by forces in Deleuze’s Nietzschean sense, then one of the most prevalent of
these is normativism. Speaking broadly, the political philosophy of the late
twentieth century in the West, particular in its dominant, if slightly varying,
‘liberal’ guises, exemplified what one of its most influential proponents would
call a ‘linguistification of the sacred’ (Habermas 1984). Part of the more general
linguistic turn that pervaded late twentieth-century philosophy, the various
communicative turns that define moral and political philosophy in this period,
and continue to define it to the present day, are premised on the idea, or the
promises, of normative critique. From this perspective, it makes no sense
whatsoever to engage in a critique of actually existing political configurations
without some assumed normative impulse guiding us, without some notion
that critique is motivated by the promise of change for the better. As Habermas
famously put it in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, critique suffers from
a serious motivational deficit for as long as it unknowingly or unthinkingly
trades on a ‘crypto-normativism’ that cannot sufficiently account for its own
moral impulses (Habermas 1987).
Coming back to Deleuze and Guattari, we would say that they cut rather
singular, or even odd, figures in this context. The normativism that dominates
and masks contemporary political theory becomes problematic, and remains
persistently problematic, when Deleuze and Guattari enter or populate the scene.
If we paint Deleuze and Guattari against the pink or grey wall of normative
political theory, if we try to blend them into this wall, then we have to recognize
how, and in what sense, the wall itself ‘comes alive’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:
127). Deleuze and Guattari are partly the heirs to a critical, materialist and
Marxist tradition that would insist that the normative implications of any form of
critique always need to be held in suspense. In this way, Deleuze and Guattarian
critique, and the method of dramatization, sits in a stubbornly and resolutely
critical relationship to one of the most dominant modes of doing contemporary
political philosophy. From a Deleuze-Guattarian perspective, Marx’s eleventh
thesis does not contain the phrase ‘for the better’ for good reason. As early as
their German Ideology, Marx and Engels refer to communism as a movement
that will only come to know capitalism in the process of dismantling it (Marx
and Engels 1974). If we can only know the world through its transformation,
then we can expect that this transformation will bring with it new norms, values
or even a new ethics that is more consistent with the change that is experienced
as such.
The grey wall of contemporary political theory can come alive, or
get dramatically re-enlivened, to the extent that it becomes increasingly
motivated by a whole series of new research questions that have less to do
with the normative or moral conditions of critique and more to do with
understanding how the political world gets transformed through the practice
of dramatization. There are any number of ways we could follow this impulse
or line of thinking, any number of ways to put the method of dramatization to
work in critically re-evaluating contemporary political thought or the history
of political thought. So, for instance, we could look at canonical texts and
figures in contemporary normative political theory (say, Habermas’s Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the
Self or John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice) in order to interrogate critically the
dramatizing strategies they use in order to make their key concepts resonate,
come alive and function (See MacKenzie and Porter 2011a; MacKenzie and
Porter 2011b). Further, we could think about and foreground the extent to
which political thought gets dramatized in relation to various emerging
and changing cultural, media or technological forms. In the context of this
chapter, we have emphasized one medium (i.e., language) but we know that
Deleuze and Guattari hardly stop there. Whether we think of language,
painting, cinema, architecture and built form (or whatever else) we know that
Deleuze and Guattari have been motivated, in various ways, by the idea that
such forms embody a style of thinking that is intrinsic or immanent to them.

Carrying this broad-based intuition with us, we could certainly cast an eye
back over the history of Western thought (political and otherwise) with a view
to questioning how new, or emerging, technological, cultural or media forms
impact on it and bring it to life. Perhaps we could go back to try to relive how
the Cartesian method is anchored in a concept of perception that brings into
play the developing optics- and lens-based media of his time. For instance,
when Descartes seems to suggest the possibility that perceived objects can and
‘do imprint very perfect images on the back of our eyes’, he does so by making
the following explicit connection:
Some people have very ingeniously explained this . . . by comparison with the
images that appear in a chamber, when having it completely closed except
for a single hole, and having put in front of this hole a glass in the form of a
lens, we stretch behind, at a specific distance, a white cloth on which the light
that comes from the objects outside forms these images. For they say that
this chamber represents the eye; this hole, the pupil; this lens, . . . all those
parts of the parts of the eye that cause refraction; and this cloth, the interior
membrane. . . . (Descartes 2001: 100)
So by foregrounding the relation between developing thought and developing

technological, cultural or media forms in the way that it does, Deleuze and
Guattari’s method of dramatization can broadly orient us to a series of research
questions and problems that tend not to be at the forefront of the minds of scholars
working in contemporary political theory, let alone in the history of political
thought. As we have shown in detail elsewhere, one of the key intuitions to be
taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s method of dramatization is that we must take
very seriously the idea that the very formulation of concepts (their resonance, their
affect, their purchase, their capacity to move us and makes us think differently) are
conditioned and dramatized in and through a wide variety of forms and genres;
that concepts (political and otherwise) come to us from a range of places, and
that a critical sensitivity to this is a crucial acknowledgement of the openness and
pluralism of political thought itself (See MacKenzie and Porter 2011a; MacKenzie
and Porter 2011b). For us, one of the most obvious and immediate ways of thinking
about the openness and pluralism of political thought is to begin to reflect on how
political concepts get dramatized all around us on an ongoing basis. As we will
imply in our concluding remarks below, the dramatization of political concepts is
densely woven into the fabric of everyday life.
The pink panther strikes again . . .
We have suggested that the method of dramatization can provide an appropriate

framework within which to evaluate critically Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy
as political philosophy. A key gesture in this context is to emphasize the idea
that practices of dramatization tend towards, or find some kind of resolution in,
action, or in everyday life. The suggestion being, and it remains a problematic
suggestion to be sure, that it is potentially useful to evaluate Deleuze and
Guattari’s political philosophy in light of the action, or political activism,
it might inspire. In saying this we are, of course, reminded of the dangers in
implying that philosophy (political or otherwise) is to be judged and resolved in
action or activism. As Max Horkheimer was fond of saying, there is a tyranny
and stupidity of action as surely as there is a tyranny and stupidity in concepts
and concept formation. In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer frames the problem as
follows:
Is activism, then, especially political activism, the sole means of fulfillment . . .? I

hesitate to say so. This age needs no stimulus to action. Philosophy must not be
turned into propaganda, even for the best possible purpose. The world has more
than enough propaganda. Language is assumed to suggest and intend nothing
beyond propaganda. Some readers of this book may think that it represents
propaganda against propaganda, and conceive of each word as a suggestion,
slogan, or prescription. Philosophy is not interested in issuing commands.
(Horkheimer 2013: 130)
There is a really interesting dramatic tension in this passage, and in all of

Horkheimer’s writings, if truth be told. On the one hand, and taking Horkheimer
literally at his word here, it would seem that he would have no truck whatsoever
with the Deleuze-Guattarian idea of language working as a form of sloganeering.
We hear echoes of Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity in which language has given
itself over the propaganda of the market, of language being conceptually shot
through with the logic of the commodity form (Adorno 2002). Yet, on the
other hand, we know that Horkheimer’s remarks and writings come against
the backcloth of the key and pivotal organizational role he played in the everyday
life of the Institute for Social Research he developed and, in many ways, held
together. Part of his role in this context, and part of what he excelled at as a director
and chief administrator in the Institute, was the carefully crafted diplomacy
and political–institutional activism needed to ensure its survival (including, of
course, the use of a commanding and sloganeering language which was clearly
motivated by a desire to convince various powerful institutional and political

actors of the merits of funding the research of the Institute). As Ned Rossiter
points out, Horkheimer, through his diplomatic efforts and because of his acute
awareness of the everyday material conditions of intellectual labour at this time,
considered it imperative that he, and the other members of the Institute, fully
exploite their association with ‘advanced’ American empirical research methods
across a range of institutional settings: ‘Government, university, industry and
US occupational forces perceived such methods as worthy of financial support
for the reconstruction of cities, the reform of university disciplines, and the
diagnosis of fascist, anti-democratic tendencies in emerging consumer society’
(Rossiter 2006: 20).
Our point here is not to gesture an accusing finger at Horkheimer, to
paint him as some sort of hypocrite, nor even to hastily dismiss his desire to
retain a role for philosophy beyond its crude recuperation as a form of blunt
action-oriented propaganda. Indeed, what is interesting about Horkheimer’s
work (in its broadest sense from the eminent philosopher and critical theorist
through to the smart and savvy diplomat who, for example, convinces a US
high commissioner, John McCloy, in 1950 to put 435,000 DM at the Institute’s
disposal) is that the recuperation always potentially works two ways. To be sure,
the Institute operated as a proto US client organization in the post-war German
reconstruction. But, equally, Horkheimer not only understood the recuperative
dangers and forces of the politics of his time, but he used this understanding
to carve out a space for himself and his comrades in a political, institutional
and intellectual climate that, in many respects, was hostile, even perilous. As
Rossiter puts it:
Without the scalar purchase offered by the Institute for Social Research, its
individual members could hope for little traction with funding authorities. The
tragic conclusion of Walter Benjamin’s life is not only a story of exodus from
Nazi Europe. It is also a consequence of an individual whose personal resources,
while a catalyst for an inventive life, were insufficiently and all too irregularly
connected to the supportive framework offered by the form of the Institute. . . .
Benjamin’s was a life that carried the intense burden of existence external to
anything but the most minimal infrastructures. The Institute . . . conducted
immanent critique by inculcating the general intellect of members who held
a more proximate relation to an institutional persona. This accumulation of
knowledge and know-how enabled the Institute to readily adapt to changing
geo-political circumstances, taking its members along for the ride. (Rossiter
2006: 21–2)
From the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s method of dramatization, the

practices and activities of the Institute are suggestive of a political activism that
is concerned to get close to, populate, or even assume, the forces masking the
conjuncture in which it is operating. Horkheimer, from a Deleuze-Guattarian
perspective, should be commended as a consummate dramatist as the grey wall
of US clientism and post-war foreign policy comes alive, or gets re-recuperated
or at least gets leant on, in and through a body of funded intellectual and
political work that emerges and sits in a stubbornly critical relation to it. The
pink panther strikes again. And the pink panther continues to strike in everyday
life, in varying forms of institutional and political persona, in forms of political
activism that sometimes and somehow have the capacity to radiate out, to move
us in singular ways. The Zapatistas are a well-worn example, but for good reason.
Understanding not simply the power of masks and masking, playing with the
performative contradiction of being seen in a way that draws attention to their
political exclusion or invisibility (Evans 2010), they also dramatize the mask as a
mark of their anonymity, the fact of their becoming no-one in order to become
everyone (Caygill 2013). This, no doubt, is one of the reasons their activism is
continually spoken of as it resonates precisely because we see it as a drama we
too can participate in. It is a form of political activism performed precisely in
order to be replayed or re-enacted by ‘everyone’ as such. Think of their statements,
order-words, formula and how well practised they are in sloganeering. Here are
some examples:
Everything for everyone and nothing for us

Behind us, you are us
Behind our masks is the face of all excluded women
Of all the forgotten indigenous
Of all persecuted homosexuals
Of all despised youth
(Quoted in Caygill 2013: 184)
As Caygill rightly points out, this form of political activism, this particular
‘Nietzschean’ (we would add Deleuze-Nietzschean and Deleuze-Guattarian)
strategy of becoming like no-one and everyone interestingly connects to
a particular body of Situationist thought and political activism such that we
would find in Raoul Vaneigem (Caygill 2013: 184). Indeed, the provocation
of Vaneigem’s work is briefly worth engaging with here by way of conclusion.
From the perspective of a critical theory in Horkheimer’s sense, or from the
point of view of a critical and dramatic method in the Deleuze-Guattarian
sense, Vaneigem’s work is, and remains, a clear provocation to the extent that
it privileges everyday life over critical political philosophy. Or, better still,
Vaneigem continually asserts that the problems of critical political philosophy
(and the key problem here is the constitution or expression of a desire capable
of transforming the world) get resolved in a form of everyday life that, properly
understood, actually conditions it in the first instance (see, for instance,
Vaneigem 1998: 60–1). The question then becomes; how do we have a revolution
of desire in everyday life? Everyday life is there for the taking, for Vaniegem,
there is always the possibility of recuperation from the recuperative powers
that be. In fact, it is not really an abstract possibility, it is simply a series of
practices of resistance that our desires make happen all the time. Everyday life
is there for the taking precisely because desire is never totally spent, accounted
for or recuperated in advance (whether by critical philosophy, the marketing
men, philosopher-marketing men, or whoever else). As Vaniegem says in the
conclusion of The Revolution of Everyday Life:
Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Turin, Mieres, the Dominican

Republic, Amsterdam: wherever passionate acts of refusal and a passionate
consciousness of the necessity of resistance trigger stoppages in the factories of
collective illusion, there is a revolution of everyday life under way. (Vaneigem
2006: 271)
Coming back to Deleuze and Guattari, we would say that this notional sense of
significant happenings and political transformations at the level of desire and
in the context of everyday life is ultimately what the method of dramatization
aims at. As we have tried to argue elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari’s method
of dramatization resolves itself in and through particular kinds of happenings,
events, or what we call ‘dramatic events’ (MacKenzie and Porter 2011a). While
there is much that could be said here, our basic point in conclusion is that it is
important, for us at least, to keep the Vaneigemian provocation very much at the
forefront of our minds when trying to evaluate critically Deleuze and Guattari’s
political philosophy (and their work more generally). Indeed, it would be fair to
say that we have articulated some reservations and concerns in the past about
the extent to which Deleuze and Guattari’s very notion of the ‘event’ remains
trapped in, what we would call, a ‘philosophism’ that, willingly or not, underplays
the importance of actually participating in the ‘dramatic events’ that unfold,
and continue to unfold, in everyday life (See MacKenzie and Porter 2011a:
113–34). The method of dramatization that we find in Deleuze and Guattari
provides us with the critical means to evaluate and push further their project
and work as political philosophers. It pushes us towards everyday life, or at least,

to a recognition that the rough and tumble of everyday life is the terrain on
which the work of Deleuze and Guattari can be productively situated. Is the ‘pop
philosophy’ that they so warmly talked about also a ‘situationist’ one? We think
there is merit in posing this question.
Reading Deleuze and Guattari as political philosophers is not simply a matter
of trawling through their work for political concepts that can be more or less
situated within the canon of political ideas. It is to engage seriously with the
idea of reading their work in order to foreground the linguistic and literary
devices that animate their political interventions. This requires sensitivity to the
ways in which they bring language to life, to their deployment of a pragmatics
that function as a critique of the dominant designative and representational
assumptions that guide political theory. Bringing the political nature of their
linguistic and literary devices into the open in this way establishes the importance
of their performative use of language but also, as we have argued, the centrality
of dramatization as a critical method they invoke. The upshot is that treating
their work as, in part, works of literature – constructed, as they are, as works
that require dramatization rather than interpretation – enables a productive
understanding of the ways in which schizoanalysis can be read as a practice of
resistance within the politics of everyday life.
References
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Part Two
The Ethics of Style

3
The Schizoanalysis of Literature:

Austen, Behn and the Scene of Desire
Joe Hughes
The opening sentences of Anti-Oedipus are probably the most famous: ‘It is at
work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.
It breaths, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 1). It
is arguably the last sentence, though, which refuses to leave us alone. It raises
a question to which Deleuze studies has returned again and again, in various
forms, from its beginnings. ‘It remains,’ Deleuze and Guattari write there, ‘to see
how, the various tasks of schizoanalysis will proceed’ (1983: 382). In a way, this
is the perfect ending for the book. After arguing that the unconscious has no
pre-given form or essential structure and that there is no state to which it might
return in pursuit of health or perfection, this last sentence, a proleptic address to
future schizoanalysts, suggests that schizoanalysis has no well-defined path nor
any obvious clinical protocols. Schizoanalysis must move with the fits and starts
of desiring machines. Its projects will have to be invented in response to the
ways in which these fits and starts unfold within the cultural, institutional and
political contexts in which desiring-machines perform their couplings.
Because of the institutional context in which Deleuze’s work was received in
the English-speaking world, one of the dominant ways the project of schizoa
nalysis has unfolded here has been around the question of how schizoanalysis
might inflect various forms of cultural production and critique. In fact, it has
only been in the past 7 or 8 years that Deleuze studies have begun to focus on
the specifically philosophical problems raised by Deleuze’s work.1 The early
works of Deleuze studies, while not neglecting philosophical problems, tended
to focus on Deleuzian approaches to music, painting, architecture, film, digital
media, and so on.2 The question of this volume – whether a schizoanalysis of
literature is possible – is thus a variation on what was perhaps the first and most
persistent question of Deleuze studies, and the fact that it is being asked yet
again suggests that there still isn’t a satisfactory answer.
The question of how Deleuze’s texts might orient a literary critical practice
is one which structured the early reception of his work. The second volume
of Edinburgh’s Deleuze Connections series, for example, was Deleuze and
Literature (2000) (the first was Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000)). Seven years
before that collection was published, however, Eugene Holland had published
his landmark Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis – a text which was quickly followed
by Jean-Jacques Lecercle still-underappreciated The Philosophy of Nonsense:
The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (1994). John Hughes’ early
Deleuzian reading of the Victorian novel, Lines of Flight (1997), was followed
in 1999 by Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Interpretation as Pragmatics (1999) and,
in 2002, Deleuze and Language. Ronald Bogue’s Deleuze on Literature was
published in 2003.
This list, of course, is not comprehensive – not even of the relatively quiet first
decade of Deleuze’s reception in English (it notably omits, for example, those
introductory volumes which foreground questions of cultural criticism (e.g.,
Claire Colebrook’s Gilles Deleuze (2002)). But it already betrays a fundamental
characteristic of the project of schizoanalysing literature. Each of these early
books develops a critical practice which is different – and sometimes radically
different – from the next. John Hughes used Deleuze as occasion to study the play
of affect in the Victorian novel; Jean-Jacques Lecercles used Deleuze to develop a
novel pragmatics of language and meaning; and Ronald Bogue provided careful
explications of Deleuze’s texts on literature, rigorously detailing the nature of
the relation of Deleuze’s statements to Deleuze’s sources. If one returns to that
early collection, Deleuze and Literature, one immediately notices that each essay
performs the conjunctive synthesis of Deleuze and Literature differently. In the
past 3 years, still new approaches to this question have emerged, from Aidan
Tynan’s Deleuze’s Literary Clinic (2012) to Claire Colebrook’s Blake, Deleuzian
Aesthetics, and the Digital (2012) to Ronald Bogue’s Deleuzian Fabulation (2012).
I have no intention of slowing down this proliferation or trying to insist on one
particular way in which the various tasks of schizoanalysis should proceed. On
the contrary, in what follows I want to argue for yet another approach to the
question of what Deleuzian literary criticism could look like by pursuing what
one could call a castrated formalism.
In a way, this proliferation might seem surprising. Across his career, Deleuze
wrote an enormous amount on literature. One his first publications, in 1947,
The Schizoanalysis of Literature 65
was an introduction to Diderot’s The Nun. In 1964, he published the first version
of Proust & Signs; in 1967, he published Coldness and Cruelty. The Logic of Sense
(1969) was structured around a reading of Lewis Carroll. In 1975, with Guattari,
Deleuze published Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature – a text which anticipates
the important chapters on literature in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Late in his
career, after a series of minor but important engagements with literature and
theatre, he published Essays Critical and Clinical with its essays on Beckett,
Melville, Lawrence and Artaud, among others. In other words, Deleuze has
written about literature more than he has written about any other form of art,
and one might expect that this substantial corpus would have established some
kind of precedent which would have narrowed the set of possibilities for how we
approach the question of Deleuze and literature.
For whatever reason, Deleuze’s texts have not established an authoritative
precedent. I would argue that they shouldn’t. Deleuze’s engagement with literature
tends to take one of two basic approaches. One of the most recognizable is also
one of the most uninteresting kinds of philosophical criticism – the formulaic
kind in which Deleuzian concept X is exemplified by text Y. Thus, we rediscover
the aleatory point of Difference and Repetition in Pasolini (Deleuze 1989: 175),
or Beckett (Deleuze 1998: 158), or we discover that what we thought might
be a specifically Proustian semiotics in Proust and Signs (1964) is not, in fact,
extracted from Proust’s work but rather deduced from a genetic theory of the
faculties – a theory which would receive its fullest development in Difference
and Repetition (1968) but which had already been outlined in Deleuze’s 1956
lecture Qu’est-ce que fonder?3 Despite Deleuze’s frequent claims that art needs
to be understood as capable of thinking by itself and in its own mode, or that
the role of philosophy is to express art’s concepts, most of the time the concepts
Deleuze pulls out of texts turn out to be Deleuzian concepts.
This kind of allegorical criticism whereby the text replays the philosophy
is arguably not a problem when practised by Deleuze himself. But if one is
interested in the specificity of literature and the different modes of thinking
it generates, then it represents one of the major difficulties of developing
something like a Deleuzian literary criticism. How are we to proceed if we
are not content to rediscover, again and again, Deleuzian concepts in this or
that text? One strategy would be to follow the other main form of Deleuze’s
criticism in which the object of critical attention no longer repeats the basic
concepts of Deleuze’s system in a kind of philosophical allegory, but reveals –
from the viewpoint opened up by the theoretical principles of Deleuze’s
thought – its specificity. Thus, Deleuze’s readings of Welles (1989: 107) or

of Louis Wolfson (1998: 7–21) or of the Fosbury flop (1995: 131) attempt to
articulate the specific constellation of functional relations constituting each
object. The former approach, you could say, puts the ‘transcendental’ in
transcendental empiricism. This latter approach emphasizes the empirical. It
remains attuned to the particular texture of the object and its particular mode
of making connections.
One of the virtues of asking about the schizoanalysis of literature is that
Deleuze never tried to move from the project of schizoanalysis to that of practical
criticism. The very task of inventing a schizoanalysis of literature prevents us
from following the path of criticism by conceptual allegory and prompts us to
attend, instead, to the basic principles of schizoanalysis in general and to the
ways in which those principles might guide a critical practice.
Schizoanalysis . . .
There are two questions the very idea of a schizoanalysis of literature raises:
what is schizoanalysis? How might it relate to literature? The answer to this latter
question follows directly from the answer to the first.
Deleuze and Guattari give a bewildering number of definitions of
schizoanalysis throughout Anti-Oedipus. Late in the book, for example, they
write, ‘To overturn the theatre of representation into the order of desiring-
production: this is the whole task of schizoanalysis’ (1983: 271). Elsewhere,
they claim that schizoanalysis, ‘consists of discovering in a subject the nature,
formation or the functioning of his desiring-machines, what do you put
into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your
nonhuman sexes?’ (1983: 322). Still elsewhere they write, ‘Schizoanalysis attains
a nonfigurative and nonsymbolic unconscious . . . apprehended below the
minimum conditions of identity’ (1983: 351). These definitions can be further
multiplied. Almost all of the definitions given throughout the book, however,
are arguably variations on one definition which they give early on and which I
want to focus on here. ‘Schizoanalysis,’ they write, ‘is at once a transcendental
and a materialist analysis. . . . It sets out to explore a transcendental unconscious’
(1983: 109). The question of what we mean by schizoanalysis is a question of
what it means to explore a transcendental unconscious.
Most of Anti-Oedipus is dedicated to describing the structure of this
transcendental unconscious. What we discover across the text is that although
the unconscious can take on any number of different forms, ultimately, it is a

process which consists of four main moments:
1. an initial dispersion of the unconscious in the given of partial objects

2. a connective synthesis – in which the unconscious makes connections
between the partial objects which assault it
3. a disjunctive synthesis – in which the unconscious records the action of its
previous synthesis
4. a conjunctive synthesis – in which the unconscious negotiates and
consumes the conjunction of its connections and its recordings.
At its most general level, then, we might say that the transcendental unconscious
is it is a genetic or productive process in which a passive ego – the body without
organs – gathers together and redistributes partial objects over the course of
three passive syntheses.
The basic task of schizoanalysis, then, is coming to terms with the particular
make up of this or that unconscious, this or that desiring-machine. As Deleuze
and Guattari put it: the ‘task of schizoanalysis is that of learning what a subject’s
desiring-machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of
energy in the machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains
and what becomings in each case’ (1983: 338).
. . . of literature: Castrated formalism
How, though, might we move from an exploration of the unconscious to an

exploration of literature? I want to argue that it is possible to develop two theses
on the basis of two generalizations.
Two generalizations:
(1) Schizoanalysis is the study of our constitutive passivity – it explores

the most basic processes of passive synthesis.
(2) It is concerned with the different forms this passivity takes.
One of the basic positions of Anti-Oedipus is that the system of passive synthesis
is capable of taking a plurality of different forms or entering into different
assemblages. This is, for example, the principle behind Deleuze and Guattari’s
account of universal history. The territorial, the despotic and the capitalist age
all entail new ways of organizing the process of passive synthesis. But it is also
implied in those various descriptions of the tasks of schizoanalysis quoted
above which focus on the ways in which this or that singular subject has its
own particular way of synthesizing (1983: 322, 338). The two theses I want to
pursue here are both built on of the assumption that literature – or, indeed, art in
general – plays out at a mid-level between these two extremes of universal history
and the individual. Or, put differently, my basic position is that a Deleuzian
aesthetics must be grounded on the principle that works of art momentarily
reconfigure our passive syntheses.
From this perspective, one can convert these two generalizations into two
theses.
First thesis:
(1) Literature works on our desiring-machines. It shapes ways of

connecting, recording and consuming.
There is already evidence for this position in Anti-Oedipus itself, if we admit an

aesthetic form other than literature to the line of argument. Towards the end
of the book, Deleuze and Guattari quote at length from an interview with the
filmmaker and writer Michel Cournot in Le Nouvel Observateur. Cournot briefly
describes a scene from Chaplin’s Gold Rush in which Chaplin walks through a
door and a board falls on his head. This scene, Cournot observes, ‘provokes the
spectator’s laughter’. But he immediately asks ‘what laughter is this? And what
spectator?’ I’ll quote his answer at length.
It is as though the spectator, at that very moment, were no longer in his seat, were
no longer in a position to observe things. A kind of perceptive gymnastics has
lead him, progressively, not to identify with the character . . . but to experience
so directly the resistance of the events that he accompanies this character, has
the same surprises, the same premonitions, the same habits as he. . . . If laughter
is a reaction that takes certain circuits, it can be said that Charlie Chaplin, as
the film’s sequences unfold, progressively displaces the reactions, causes them to
recede, level by level, until the moment when the spectator is no longer master
of his own circuits, and tends to spontaneously take either a shorter path . . . or
a path that is very explicitly posted as leading nowhere. After having suppressed
the spectator as such, Chaplin perverts the laughter, which comes to be like some
short-circuits of a disconnected piece of machinery. (1983: 317; original emphases)
While Deleuze and Guattari emphasize various words in this passage they never
comment on it, despite the fact that, unedited, it takes up over a full page of their
text. The point it is making is relatively clear, though, within the context of their
broader argument. As the spectator makes his or her way through the world,
their desiring-machines establish various circuits: habitual ways of connecting,

recording and consuming. The experience of watching a film, however, puts
these habitual circuits back into play. Chaplin, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize,
‘displaces’ the usual circuits of laughter and replaces them in new circuits – short
circuits of a disconnected piece of machinery.
My second thesis follows from this situation.
Second thesis:
(2) The task of the critic is not to return again and again to an

excavation of the unconscious as such, but rather to account
for the ways in which texts extend, interrupt or displace our
circuits.
In a discussion of Cournot’s argument, Ian Buchanan observes that it repre

sents a kind of formalism: ‘we have moved from a discussion of the content of
the film to its constitution.’4 But it is worth emphasizing that this is an entirely
different kind of formalism than the one developed in literary studies of the last
century – the kind which is making a comeback now. It is different in several
important ways.
Most immediately, it conceives of form – the specific organization of the film’s
sequences – only in relation to the circuits of the transcendental unconscious. Form
is something which is plugged into the spectator’s circuits. It is not something the
spectator needs to learn through an apprenticeship in the aesthetics of appreciation,
but something which immediately plugs into habitual expectations and memories.
In addition, this conception of form abandons any pretension to totality. There is
no reason to assume that all of the various parts of a machine are going to relate
to one another in a functional whole, or that form and meaning will run through
one another in an exquisitely closed circuit. The part of one machine, Deleuze and
Guattari argue, can refer to the part of a radically different machine, ‘like the red
clover and the bumblebee, the bicycle horn and the dead rat’s ass.’ They continue:
‘Let’s not rush to introduce a term that would be like a phallus structuring the
whole and personifying the parts, unifying and totalizing everything’ (1983:
323). A machine’s constitution need not be referred back to a theme, meaning
or be governed by some other principle of auto-immunity and closure. This is a
formalism which resists one of the most basic and persistent characteristics of
form: its totalizing closure. One of the basic consequences of this, Aidan Tynan has
persuasively argued, is that we need to begin to think an open formalism in which
form is separated from the totalizing phallus and returned to life (2012: 13).
There is another important break with the tradition which follows from this.
Traditionally – but particularly in last century – form has been conceived of
as a principle of management. Form is what guides and controls the reader’s
attention and desire. The Jamesian critic R. P. Blackmur, for example, returns
again and again to the ways in which various devices ‘command’ attention, the
way in which they ‘direct, limit and frame the reader’s attention’ (1983: 24, 121).
One might say, then, that the rigorously formal protocols of reading of the past
century – whose institutionalization, Mark McGurl has persuasively shown,
was contemporaneous with the rise of management culture5 – were attempts to
control this form of control, either by naming and coordinating forms within
a quasi-scientific system or by subordinating them to a static set of themes.
In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize again and again that this desire
to control desire may succeed here and there, but no matter which way desire
is ‘captured’, it retains, by definition, a base-line delirium. Thus they write, in
a passage which could be generalized to ground a new conception of literary
form, that in the search for desiring-machines, ‘it is not the lines of pressure
that matter, but on the contrary the lines of escape’ (1983: 338). Form does not
constrain connection, but facilitates it. It is a generative principle rather than a
regulative principle.
We can reformulate this thesis from another point of view: passive syntheses
are not passive in the sense that they sit quietly waiting for guidance. The
paradox of the concept – which Husserl emphasized when he invented it – is
that passivity is a peculiar form of activity. The fits and starts of these syntheses
always exceed their form. It is worth noting, in this regard, that although the
Cournot quotation employs the language of management and mastery, Deleuze
and Guattari do not emphasize those words. Rather, the verb they emphasize
is ‘displace’ in a gesture towards (what we might call in a Bergsonian context) a
positive conception of form. To think form positively is to think it as a catalyst
of becoming rather than as a restraint of becoming. As Claire Colebrook argues,
the artist must ‘de-from desire’, by taking the ‘the tendency of desire to direct
itself towards an impossible object, and then extend[ing] that distance to the
point where we open up worlds that are not of this world’ (2007: 36).
If a disarticulated and generative concept of form distinguishes a schizoanalytic
approach from other formalisms, it does so in a particular way in relation to the
contemporary theory of the novel. From Percy Lubbock to Norman Friedman
to Wayne Booth to J. Paul Hunter, the formal theory of the novel has focused
on global and totalizing forms (focusing predominantly plotting, narration
and characterization). But if we no longer have this prejudice for the global,
we can ask different kinds of questions. What about, for example, those local
and messier forms of the novel like chapter division, narrative paragraphing, the
varieties of detail and so on? Aren’t these precisely the aspects of novel form that
set our desiring-machines wandering in other directions without pretending to
totalize them? In the last part of this essay I want to turn to one of those messier
and neglected forms – the scene – and try to say how it works.
The scene
Scenes are the basic structural units of the novel. From the mid-eighteenth
century to the late nineteenth, novels were structured as a series of linked
scenes – sometimes one scene per chapter, sometimes three or four or five. One
can try to think scene in purely static terms – for example, as a particular unity
of space, time and action. But such a characterization risks missing one of their
most important characteristics: whatever fragmentary unity a scene possesses
is grounded in the capacity of the scene to displace the reader’s attention and
desires. It is this capacity of scenes to re-circuit our desire that makes them a
relatively clear object for the schizoanalysis of literature.
Below is a paradigmatic example of the standard scenic form. It is from
chapter two of Pride and Prejudice. The action of the scene is banal. In it,
Mr Bennet surprises his wife and daughters with the news that he has paid a visit
to their new neighbour, Mr Bingley.
Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley.
He had always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his
wife that he should not go; and till the evening after the visit was paid she had
no knowledge of it. It was then disclosed in the following manner.
Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly
addressed her with,
‘I hope Mr. Bingley will like it, Lizzy.’
‘We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes,’ said her mother
resentfully, ‘since we are not to visit.’
‘But you forget, mamma,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that we shall meet him at the
assemblies, and that Mrs. Long promised to introduce him.’
‘I do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces of her
own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her.’
‘No more have I,’ said Mr. Bennet; ‘and I am glad to find that you do not
depend on her serving you.’
Mrs. Bennet deigned not to make any reply, but, unable to contain herself,
began scolding one of her daughters.
‘Don’t keep coughing so, Kitty, for Heaven’s sake! Have a little compassion on
my nerves. You tear them to pieces.’
‘Kitty has no discretion in her coughs,’ said her father; ‘she times them ill.’
‘I do not cough for my own amusement,’ replied Kitty fretfully.
‘When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?’
‘To-morrow fortnight.’
‘Aye, so it is,’ cried her mother, ‘and Mrs. Long does not come back till the day
before; so it will be impossible for her to introduce him, for she will not know
him herself.’
‘Then, my dear, you may have the advantage of your friend, and introduce
Mr. Bingley to her.’
‘Impossible, Mr. Bennet, impossible, when I am not acquainted with him
myself; how can you be so teasing?’
‘I honour your circumspection. A fortnight’s acquaintance is certainly very
little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight. But if we
do not venture somebody else will; and after all, Mrs. Long and her daughters
must stand their chance; and, therefore, as she will think it an act of kindness, if
you decline the office, I will take it on myself.’
The girls stared at their father. Mrs. Bennet said only, ‘Nonsense, nonsense!’
‘What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?’ cried he. ‘Do
you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on them, as
nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there. What say you, Mary? For you
are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make
extracts.’
Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how.
‘While Mary is adjusting her ideas,’ he continued, ‘let us return to Mr. Bingley.’
‘I am sick of Mr. Bingley,’ cried his wife.
‘I am sorry to hear that; but why did not you tell me that before? If I had
known as much this morning I certainly would not have called on him. It
is very unlucky; but as I have actually paid the visit, we cannot escape the
acquaintance now.’
The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished; that of
Mrs. Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest; though, when the first tumult of joy
was over, she began to declare that it was what she had expected all the while.
‘How good it was in you, my dear Mr. Bennet! But I knew I should persuade
you at last. I was sure you loved your girls too well to neglect such an acquain
tance. Well, how pleased I am! and it is such a good joke, too, that you should
have gone this morning and never said a word about it till now.’
‘Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as you choose,’ said Mr. Bennet; and, as
he spoke, he left the room, fatigued with the raptures of his wife.
‘What an excellent father you have, girls!’ said she, when the door was shut.
‘I do not know how you will ever make him amends for his kindness; or me,
either, for that matter. At our time of life it is not so pleasant, I can tell you, to be
making new acquaintances every day; but for your sakes, we would do anything.
Lydia, my love, though you are the youngest, I dare say Mr. Bingley will dance
with you at the next ball.’
‘Oh!’ said Lydia stoutly, ‘I am not afraid; for though I am the youngest,
I’m the tallest.’
The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he would
return Mr. Bennet’s visit, and determining when they should ask him to
dinner.
(Austen 1993, my emphases)
If this is a paradigmatic example, it is because it exemplifies in a distilled form

the four parts of the typical scene. The typical scene has four parts:
1. an opening paragraph which functions as a kind of narrative exordium;

2. a climactic incident or ‘hinge’ which functions as a point of inflection in the
curve of our desire;
3. a closing paragraph which functions as a kind of narrative peroration; and
4. the dramatic action – presented the ‘scenic’ mode of showing rather than
telling6 – which links these three across the time and space of the scene.
The first three are bolded above. In what follows I would like to discuss the first
three elements – the incipit, the hinge and the closing paragraph – focusing, in
particular, on the way in which they momentarily code our desire and structure
our passivity.
Exordium and Peroration

The opening and closing paragraphs of the scene perform inversely parallel
functions. The exordium orients the reader; the peroration de-orients the reader.
For this reason I will discuss them together.
The opening paragraph is relatively short, but the work it performs structures
everything which follows.
Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He had
always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his wife that he
should not go; and till the evening after the visit was paid she had no knowledge
of it. It was then disclosed in the following manner.
Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly
addressed her with . . .
The function of this paragraph is to bring us into the scene, much in the way an
establishing shot works in film. In the space of two sentences, it establishes the
time (the evening after the visit); it establishes the place (the Bennet’s house);
it establishes the actors (Mr Bennet, his wife and daughter); it establishes in
abstract the central action of the scene (the disclosure of the visit to Bingley).
Each of these techniques of orientation situates a variable reader in the vague
time and place of the scene. None of these gestures mean anything, in the phallic
sense of the word; and there is no way to gather these indicators together under
a global theme as the old and some of the new formalists would like. Rather, the
text orients the reader by delimiting the set of possible futures for a relatively
stable set of actors in a relatively well-defined time and place.
The fact that the space, time and actors are given only indeterminately is
important. The paucity of detail prevents one from conceiving these orientational
clauses as a kind of coercive framing whereby the reader’s passive syntheses yield
to a structure given to it from the outside. In a general sense, our attention is
structured, framed or commanded by these orientational clauses. At a micro-level,
however, the minimum of detail opens up lines of flight for other connections
which the text fails to control. The proper name, ‘Mr. Bennet’, for example, is
neither a blank canvas (as William Gass has argued),7 nor a substantial reality
(as writing manuals sometimes pretend), but is, rather, a stimulus to connect (as
Irving Howe has argued).8 Form, we could say, adopting the language of Gilbert
Simondon, is information that modulates our perception without totalizing it or
giving it thematic meaning.9
The kind of work this paragraph does is perhaps made clearer in relation to
the closing paragraph. Austen adds this short sentence to close the scene:
The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he would return
Mr. Bennet’s visit, and determining when they should ask him to dinner.
If the function of the exordium is to orient the reader and carry them into the
space and time of the scene, the function of this closing paragraph is to pull the
reader out of the scene, back into a space of variability. It does so by opening
up a new kind of temporality. Rather than the quasi-concrete time announced
in the exordium and realized in the dramatic action (or dialogue) – which is to
say a perfectible time in which actions can be completed – we move here into an
imperfect time of a past future (‘the rest of the evening’) opened up by the past
continuous tense. This movement back to an unspecified and determinable time
carries the reader back into a space of variability which the next scene, by virtue
of its exordium, will determine in its own way.
From the perspective of the novel as a whole, then, these opening and
closing paragraphs shuttle the reader between a relatively well-determined
space of action and a space of variability in which our attentions and desires are
temporarily unmoored from the fictional world. This is arguably why scene is
best understood from a schizoanalytic point of view. One of its basic conditions is
the radical fluidity of desire; one of its basic functions is to temporarily modulate
desire as it pursues yet another line of flight.
Between these two orientational paragraphs, though, lies the main body of
the scene. When the exordium orients the reader, it opens them up to a new set
of techniques, the most interesting of which is exemplified by the second bolded
paragraph.
The hinge
The second bolded passage constitutes what Henry James called the hinge. It
is the focal point of the scene.10 In this case, Mr Bennet surprises his family by
revealing that he has already paid Bingley a visit.
‘I am sorry to hear that [you are sick of Bingley]; but why did not you tell me that
before? If I had known as much this morning I certainly would not have called
on him. It is very unlucky; but as I have actually paid the visit, we cannot escape
the acquaintance now.’
The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished; that of Mrs. Bennet
perhaps surpassing the rest; though, when the first tumult of joy was over, she
began to declare that it was what she had expected all the while.
This is the moment we have been anticipating since the exordium announced
it would happen. But what constitutes this moment as a hinge in the Jamesian
sense is less its capacity to satisfy our expectations, but that once the information
is revealed there is no possible return to the state of affairs which preceded the
event. The hinge, as James emphasizes, is a one-way door through which the
drama carries our desire.
There is another important aspect of the hinge, though, and it’s related to
what Austen does in its second paragraph. By explicitly drawing our attention
to Mrs Bennet’s astonishment, and by assuring us that Mr Bennet was deeply

satisfied by the event, Austen temporarily prolongs the climax. This prolongation
or dilation of the event is perhaps the central technique of the hinge. It is what
allows the scene to focuses our desire in a moment of dramatic intensity – in this
case a specular flash in which we simultaneously feel Mrs Bennet’s astonishment
and Mr Bennet’s pleasure.
Techniques of delay, however, remain singularly undeveloped in the early
novel. Even in texts where you might expect to find them there is, in fact, no
slowing down of narrative time. Take, for example, the following episode from
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). It puts the techniques functioning in Austen’s
hinge into sharp relief. The episode narrates one of the central events of the
work – the moment at which the prince Oroonoko and his army, thinking
they are merely visiting for dinner, are captured by the Captain of a slave ship.
Given the dramatic intensity of the event as well as its centrality to the plot, one
might expect it to be presented scenically. Instead the action unfolds in a hasty
summary:
The Prince, having drunk hard of Punch and several sorts of Wine, as did all
the rest (for great care was taken they should want nothing of that part of the
Entertainment), was very merry, and in great admiration of the Ship, for he
had never been in one before; so that he was curious of beholding every place
where he decently might descend. The rest, no less curious, who were not quite
overcome with Drinking, rambled at their pleasure Fore and Aft, as their Fancies
guided ’em: so that the Captain, who had well laid his Design before, gave the
Word, and seized on all his Guests; they clapping great Irons suddenly on the
Prince, when he was leaped down into the Hold to view that part of the Vessel;
and locking him fast down, secured him. The same Treachery was used to all
the rest; and all in one instant, in several places of the Ship, were lashed fast in
Irons, and betrayed to Slavery. That great Design over, they set all Hands to work
to hoist Sail; and with as treacherous as fair a Wind they made from the Shore
with this innocent and glorious Prize, who thought of nothing less than such an
Entertainment. (Behn 1997: 33)
Whereas Austen gives space and time to the event and clearly sets it off from
the surrounding actions through her paragraphing and syntax, the event here is
almost indistinguishable from the actions preceding and following it. The sudden
clapping of irons on the prince occupies only one short clause of a long sentence.
The first half of the sentence relates the events leading up to the act, and it is set off
only by a colon. What’s more, the coordination of clauses in the sentence wavers
between hypotaxis and parataxis, further muddying the sequence of events and
their relation to setting. Finally, the details of how Oroonoko reacts to the event,
how the captain reacts to the event, what steps were taken to actually ‘secure’
Oroonoko, the nature of the struggle with Oroonoko and his army on other
parts of the ship, are all left to the reader’s imagination. But because of the way
in which Behn’s syntax quickens the pace, the reader’s imagination doesn’t have
time to dwell in the event or fill these blanks. It thus feels as though the action
happens off stage or that it is being related from a great distance.
By contrast, Austen employs a series of techniques which significantly slow
the pace. This is already accomplished simply by presenting the scene in direct
discourse, a technique which requires that the scene unfold according to the
measured time of conversation in which each utterance awaits and receives
its response. At the climactic moment, however, Austen employs a different
technique which slows the text down to a speed slower than that of utterance
and response. The technique is simple; she merely reports Mr Bennet’s reaction
to the events: ‘The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished; that of
Mrs Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest.’ But by reporting Mr Bennet’s response
and the particular satisfaction he derived from it (a satisfaction which is also the
reader’s), Austen momentarily moves us outside of the time of dialogue into a
temporality opened up by the affective repetition of the succession of events. This
allows the hinge to resonate, if only for a moment, and this resonance operates
a transformation through which the event is further intensified and becomes a
sharper point of dramatic focus.
These techniques of delay and orientation which make up the disarticulated
totality of scene are not things we notice. They operate below the radar of
consciousness, at the level of our constitutive passivity, but they play funda
mental roles in orienting our passivity, redistributing time and intensifying our
desires. They are basic ways of displacing our circuitry. From this perspective
they constitute one of the plurality of ways the project of schizoanalysis of
literature can manifest itself.
New worlds
Schizoanalysis is the exploration of the unconscious. But its task is not merely
descriptive. There is a normative dimension to schizoanalysis. While Deleuze
and Guattari do not broadcast these ends, they are clearly articulated in the final
pages of the text, and they give clear expression to the basic values embodied
in the first half of the text. One end is ethical; the other is cultural-political.
‘[T]he product of analysis,’ they write in a discussion of Reich, ‘should be a free

and joyous person, a carrier of the life flows, capable of carrying them all the
way into the desert and decoding them’ (1983: 331). According to their picture
of universal history as the constant capture of desire, such a free and joyous
person would require another world. Hence the cultural-political project
announced on the last page of the book: the production of a new earth or of a
world to come.
[T]he new earth (‘In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing’) is
not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the
process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the
completion of the process of desiring-production, the process that is always and
already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. (1983: 382)
To ask how the analysis of scenes might make us free or whether it would create
the conditions for another world in which free and joyous existence would be
possible are arguably bad questions with obvious answers. But these normative
claims require that schizoanalysis orient its critique in their direction. From this
perspective we might note that at the same time that the scenic structure of the
novel opens up the mobile space of desire and its temporalities, it also constitutes
a unique partitioning of the world. The scene as a structural and dramatic unit
organizes the world according the potentialities of practical rationality. What is
visible is what is doable. This isn’t at all to say that there is something natural about
scene, as though it were the mode of representation that the body in its activity
organically produced. On the contrary, as its relatively short history as a form
suggests, it is the other way around: the scene, and its particular distribution of
world, constitutes a specific displacement of the body, through which the body
participates in what Milton called, in the Areopagitica, ‘a life beyond life’.11
Notes
1 Cf., for example, Todd May’s surprising but accurate claim in 2001 that Difference
and Repetition was a ‘neglected’ text. There are, of course, exceptions to this claim,
most notably, Ronald Bogue (1989) Deleuze and Guattari, Michael Hardt (1993)
Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, and John Marks (1998) Gilles
Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity.
2 See, e.g., Ian Buchanan, Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (2000); Elizabeth Grosz,
Architecture from the Outside (2001). Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine
(1997), to name only three.
3 See Proust and Signs, pp. 99–100.

4 ‘Is a Schizoanalysis of Cinema Possible?’, p. 140.
5 See Mark McGurl, The Novel Art, pp. 30–56.
6 The question of narrative modality is too complex to address fully here. For the
Jamesians and early narratologists, scenes were defined in terms of narrative
modality: scenes began where ‘summary’ ended (or, if you prefer, showing began
where telling ended; mimesis began where diegesis ended). There are a number of
difficulties with this definition by narrative modality (not considering the fraught
nature of the theory of narrative modality itself). Not only do scenes often include
summary, but one of Henry James’s major technical discoveries was that one could
accomplish the ends of summary in a much more engaging manner through a
succession of short vignettes in the scenic mode. Thus summary can be scenic and
scene can include summary.
7 Gass, ‘The Concept of Character in Fiction’, p. 45.
8 Howe, ‘Characters: Are They Like People?’, pp. 40–1.
9 See ‘Perception et modulation’ in Communication et information. Deleuze drew
on Simondon’s conception of form as modulation (as it was developed in the first
chapter of L’Individu (p. 41)) in Chapters 13 and 15 of Francis Bacon.
10 See Henry James, Notebooks, pp. 156 and 162.
11 See Claire Colebrook’s discussion of this passage in Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics,
and the Digital, p. 86.
References
Austen, Jane (1993), Pride and Prejudice. New York: Norton.

Behn, Aphra (1997), Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave. New York: Norton.
Blackmur, R. P. (1983), Studies in Henry James. New York: New Directions.
Bogue, Ronald (1989), Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Routledge.
—(2003), Deleuze on Literature. New York: Routledge.
—(2010), Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Buchanan, Ian (2000), Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
—(2010), ‘Is a Schizoanalysis of Cinema Possible?’, in Rodowick, D. N. (ed.),
Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Buchanan, Ian and Claire Colebrook (eds) (2000), Deleuze and Feminist Theory.
Buchanan, Ian and John Marks (eds) (2000), Deleuze and Literature. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Colebrook, Claire (2002), Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge.

—(2007), ‘The Work of Art that Stands Alone’. Deleuze Studies 1(1): 22–40.
—(2012), Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital. New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and
R. Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
—(1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. Minneapolis:
—(1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, ed. C. Boundas. New York:
Columbia University Press.
—(1991), Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books.
—(1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University
Press.
—(1995), Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University
Press.
London: Verso.
—(2000), Proust and Signs, trans. R. Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
—(2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Dan Smith. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
—(1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Gass, William (1971), Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston: Non Pareil Books.
Grosz, Elizabeth (2001), Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hardt, Michael (1993), Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis:
Holland, Eugene (1993), Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Socio-Poetics of Modernism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howe, Irving (1994), A Critic’s Notebook. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Hughes, John (1997), Lines of Flight: Reading Deleuze with Hardy, Gissing, Conrad and
Woolf. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
James, Henry (1987), The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (1994), The Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian
Nonsense Literature. New York: Routledge.
—(1999), Interpretation as Pragmatics. New York: St. Martin’s.
—(2002), Deleuze and Language. Basingstroke: Palgrave.
Marks, John (1998), Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity. London: Pluto Press.
May, Todd (2001), ‘The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze’. Theory & Event 5(3).
McGurl, Mark (2001), The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rodowick, D. N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham: Duke University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert (1964), L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: PUF.
—(2010), Communication et information. Chatou: Editions de la Transparence.
Tynan, Aidan (2012), Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms.
4
What Is Nonstyle in What Is Philosophy?

Donald Cross
At the beginning of What Is Philosophy?, when Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
claim to pose the question of the nature of philosophy (‘ “What is it I have been
doing all my life?” ’) from the ‘point of nonstyle’ (1994: 1), the gesture seems
rather traditional. Has philosophy not often sought some sort of ‘abbreviated
representations’ or transparent signs, as in René Descartes (Descartes 1985: 43),
or some sort of ‘ “ideal” Objectivity’, as in Edmund Husserl (Husserl 1985: 160),
privileging a pure meaning with no interference from the words in which it is
expressed? Indeed, philosophy has long sought the ideal point of nonstyle that
would bypass ‘the weakness of language’, to quote Plato’s Seventh Letter (Plato
1997: 342d), in order to access that ‘knowledge [that] is not something that can
be put into words’ (Plato 1997: 341c). However, Deleuze’s comments on Spinoza’s
Ethics prove instructive here: ‘This book, one of the greatest in the world, is
not what it seems at first glance: it is not . . . a pure language without style’
(Deleuze 1997: 138). Spinoza ‘seems, on the face of it, to have no style at all, as
we confront the very scholastic Latin of the Ethics’, but ‘you have to be careful
with people who supposedly “have no style” ’, Deleuze warns; ‘they’re often
the greatest stylists of all’ (Deleuze 1995: 165). Let us heed Deleuze’s warning,
then, and ask whether the point of nonstyle from which Deleuze and Guattari
inquire into the nature of philosophy is not somehow the greatest style of all.1
What is nonstyle?
After the first page of What Is Philosophy?, the word ‘nonstyle’ does not recur.
While style is thematized in Chapter 7 (‘Percept, Affect, Concept’, which in fact
deals with nonstyle, even if not explicitly named), it is only with reference to
other works that we learn Deleuze’s source for his notion of nonstyle, namely,
What Is Nonstyle in What Is Philosophy? 83
Marcel Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve.2 Proust’s debate with Charles Augustin

Sainte-Beuve centres on a difference in method: While Sainte-Beuve’s ‘special
achievement’ is ‘to have elicited from the biography of the man . . . the sense
of his work and the nature of his genius’ (Proust 1997: 95), Proust holds that
there exists a ‘gulf that separates the writer from the man of the world’ and
that ‘the writer’s true self is manifested in his books alone’ (1997: 106). Yet,
Honoré de Balzac is something of an exception, since, against the ‘very
natural duality’ (Proust 1997: 128) between the literary and the worldly man,
‘life and . . . literature [are] on exactly the same level’ (Proust 1997: 159)
in his work. It is in this connection that Proust speaks of nonstyle: ‘Style is
so largely a record of the transformation imposed on reality by the writer’s
mind that Balzac’s style, properly speaking, does not exist’ (1997: 169–70).
That is to say, Balzac’s vulgarity, his literalness that makes no attempt to
transform the ‘reality’ it recounts, fails to qualify as literary style conceived as
‘a particular medium where things that are topics for conversation, subjects
for study, etc., should not be incorporated in a crude state’ (Proust 1997: 172).
Proust throws Balzac’s vulgar nonstyle into relief against Gustave Flaubert’s
exemplary style in which ‘[e]verything at variance with it has been made over
and absorbed’, polished into a ‘uniform substance’ (Proust 1997: 170). Thus,
the enigma of Balzac: Even though he operates without style with respect
to his commonplace themes and language, he nevertheless reaches ‘images
which are intensely striking but do not fuse with the rest’ (Proust 1997: 170).
And ‘it is by images of this sort – striking, that is, and apt, but discordant,
explaining instead of suggesting, and refractory to any considerations of
beauty or fitness – that he will get his effects’ (Proust 1997: 170).3 In effect, ‘all
the elements of a style . . . exist together’, but, since they remain ‘undigested
and untransformed’, the style ‘is still to come’ (Proust 1997: 170). Broadly
posed, then, style describes the totalization of varying elements into a uniform
whole (Flaubert), while nonstyle proceeds without a predetermined principle
of unification (Balzac).
More generally, this distinction between nonstyle and style amounts to the
debate between Proust and rationalist philosophy as Deleuze sees it. Proust’s
‘whole critique’ of logos, Deleuze says in Proust and Signs, is that ‘the Intelligence
always comes “before”’ (Deleuze 2000: 109). Specifically, ‘the universal logos’
consists in ‘that totalizing impulse’ wherein we encounter a part or a fragment
only to ‘observe [it] . . . as a whole, then . . . [to] discover its law as part of a
whole, which is itself present by its Ideal in each of its parts’ (Deleuze 2000: 105).
The identity of each part is preceded and predetermined by a transcendent
principle, which, as long as it precedes experience itself, always determines

experience in advance and precludes the possibility of a genuine encounter.
This ‘ready-made criteria of organic totality’ (Deleuze 2000: 116) relies upon,
at bottom, a Platonic Idea, and it is perhaps in the Phaedrus that organic unity
receives its strongest formulation: ‘every composition ought to be like a living
creature, having a body of its own and not lacking head and feet; there should be
a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one another and to the whole’ (Plato
2001: 264c). This logical and organic whole, however, cannot preserve fragments
as fragments; it determines them as fragments of a whole, always ‘adapted’ and
thereby sacrificing the partialness of the parts. Even if it is unnamed in Proust
and Signs, this organic totality is synonymous with the Flaubertian style, wherein
every element is polished into a unified substance such that, like the logical unity
in question, ‘the whole is already present’ (Deleuze 2000: 105) from the first
sentence.4
Yet, Deleuze says, ‘there must be a unity that is the unity of this very multiplicity,
a whole that is the whole of just these fragments: a One and a Whole that would
not be the principle but, on the contrary, “the effect” of the multiplicity and
of its disconnected parts’ (Deleuze 2000: 163). And this disconnected unity is,
precisely, Balzac’s nonstyle. In contrast to the logical principle that transcends
the fragments it unifies, ‘unity’ in Balzac, Deleuze explains, appears as one more
fragment, ‘a last localized brushstroke, not like a general varnishing’ (Deleuze
2000: 165). The idea of ‘a general varnishing [vernissage général]’ reinforces
the synonymy between organic unity and the Flaubertian model of style in
which, Proust writes, ‘all the elements of reality are rendered down into . . . a
monotonous shimmering [miroitement monotone]’ (1997: 170, trans. mod.).
By contrast, ‘Balzac has no style’; he has only ‘a fragmentation that the whole
ultimately confirms because it results from it, rather than corrects or transcends
[it]’ (Deleuze 2000: 165). The unity is a result, an a posteriori effect, of the
fragments that it unifies and, therefore, reinforces rather than compromises.
In detail, ‘style’ – that is, nonstyle – ‘begins with two different objects, distant
even if they are contiguous’ (Deleuze 2000: 166).5 From these heterogeneous
objects, what Deleuze calls an Essence (‘what is essential’) becomes accessible:
‘a Viewpoint proper to each of the two objects’ (Deleuze 2000: 166). Since
the essence arises from rather than predetermines the fragments, it is not
foreseeable; the resonance between the two objects creates a ‘world of anarchic
encounters, of violent accidents’ (Deleuze 2000: 174). In sum, nonstyle names an
unpredictable and immanent or rhizomatic unity as opposed to the prearranged
and transcendent or arborescent unity of style.
In ‘He Stuttered’, a short piece from Deleuze’s last work, Essays Critical
and Clinical, nonstyle appears once again in opposition to transcendent unity
(‘a rhizome instead of a tree’ [Deleuze 1997: 111]). The essay is worth considering
briefly not only because it demonstrates that nonstyle is a consistent concern
throughout Deleuze’s corpus but also because it offers a few more terms from
Deleuze’s vocabulary with which to approach the question of nonstyle. While in
its normal, superficial but also official use, language is considered ‘a homogenous
system in equilibrium’, one term meaning one thing and thereby providing the
stability necessary for reference, communication, consensus and command,
great writers find means of making that system stutter via the deeper, ‘proper’
power of language: ‘a system . . . in perpetual disequilibrium or bifurcation’
where ‘each of its terms in turn passes through a zone of continuous variation’
(Deleuze 1997: 108). Continuous variation, in short, describes a multiplicity
that refuses unification via any transcendent principle or Signified, and this
straining that makes language stutter, that pushes it into multiplicity, is nonstyle.
Deleuze writes: ‘When a language is strained in this way, language in its entirety
is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent. Style – the foreign language
within language – is made up of these two operations; or should we instead speak
with Proust of a nonstyle, that is, of “the elements of a style to come which do
not yet exist”?’ (Deleuze 1997: 113). Stuttering, then, sharpens a number of the
senses at work in the non- of nonstyle: non-communicative (‘silent’), non-now
or deferred (‘a style to come’), non-domestic or alienated (‘the foreign language
within language’), and non-major or minor (‘a minor use of the major language’
[Deleuze 1997: 109]).6 All these aspects are no doubt intertwined, but one has
the added advantage of bringing into clearer view the relation between style and
nonstyle: minorization.
As a minor use of the major language, nonstyle is a minor style, but Deleuze’s
sense of ‘major’ is perhaps not what one expects. In contrast to its traditional
sense as ‘common’ or ‘consensus’, ‘[w]hat defines the majority’, says Deleuze, ‘is
a model you have to conform to’ (Deleuze 1995: 173). The definition derives
from the diaries of Franz Kafka, who writes that ‘the literature of small peoples’
(1948: 194) is characterized by ‘[t]he lack of irresistible models’ (1948: 192),
by ‘[l]ess constraint’ due to the ‘[a]bsence of principles’ (1948: 195). Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘that grandiose genius’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 378),
provides the paradigm, which is to say, the predicament:
Goethe probably retards the development of the German language by the force
of his writing. Even though prose style has often traveled away from him in
the interim, still, in the end, as at present, it returns to him with strengthened
yearning . . . in order to rejoice in the completeness of its unlimited dependence.
(Kafka 1948: 197)
And if nonstyle is minor, style itself names the major: ‘How many styles or
genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream:
to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state
language, an official language’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 27). Of course, the
national weight of literature (broadly understood) is nothing new. As early
as Homer, who unifies the sporadic tribes of ancient Greece into a ‘mass of
troops’ against a common Trojan enemy (‘[f]irst came the Boeotian units’, then
‘men who lived in Aspledon’, then ‘the men of Phocis’, and so on [Homer 1998:
II.573–863]), and as modern as James Joyce’s young artist, who goes ‘to forge in
the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race’ (Joyce 1999: 217),
the role of literature has long been national. But even if this national function
is necessary, the very ‘impossibility of not writing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:
16) for Kafka, the problem Deleuze and Guattari note in style’s tendency to
majority is a hegemony that ‘retards . . . development’.
The question of the ‘majority’, however, extends beyond the more obvious
literary traditions such as Goethe, since, as long as one proceeds by means of a
model given in advance, even if one is the only one using that model, one still
qualifies as a majority – of one. Inasmuch as ‘[m]ajority implies a constant . . .
serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it’, one might be ‘the majority,
even if he is less numerous’; inversely, any ‘determination different from that of
the constant will therefore be considered minoritarian, by nature and regardless
of number’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 105). In this sense, Deleuze has not
abandoned the stakes of Proust and Signs: Still in line with the Flaubertian style
that Proust outlines, a model is something pre-given, a transcendent principle
that unifies by predetermining parts (Intelligence comes before). If nonstyle
lacks such a principle, then it is indeed a minorization: Just as a ‘minority . . .
has no model, it’s a becoming, a process’ (Deleuze 1995: 173), so, too, nonstyle
is ‘a syntax in the process of becoming’ (Deleuze 1997: 112). So, if style refers
to the major language, and nonstyle to the minorization of that language, then
nonstyle minorizes nothing other than style itself.
Admittedly, Deleuze most often refers to style even when nonstyle would be
more accurate according to the schema I have been attempting to outline, and
the porousness between nonstyle and style is indicated in the way in which he
recurrently broaches the question of nonstyle by revising a previous statement
on style (‘or should we instead speak with Proust of a nonstyle?’ [Deleuze 1997:
113]). But by insisting on these poles of style as major and nonstyle as minor,
the relation between the two comes into clearer view. Nonstyle minorizes
style, but what prevents it from turning into another major style in turn? As
Deleuze and Guattari recognize, ‘minor language is not immune to the kind
of treatment that draws a homogeneous system from it and extracts constants’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 102). After minorizing a major model, after
style becomes nonstyle, if nonstyle itself turns into a model, nonstyle comes
to be style, that is, the minor comes to be major. The sequence resonates
with the future anterior mode in which Jean-François Lyotard describes the
postmodern: ‘The artist and the writer . . . work without rules and in order to
establish the rules for what will have been made’ (Lyotard 2003: 15). That is to
say, the artist creates without a model (minor), but rules of composition are
extracted from and then retrospectively projected onto the event of the work,
providing a model (major) to be imitated by future artists. Unlike Lyotard’s
postmodern sympathies, however, Deleuze and Guattari call this retrospective
determination ‘the worst’; they lament the way in which, for example, minor
writers like Heinrich von Kleist and Antonin Artaud ‘have ended up becoming
monuments, inspiring a model to be copied . . . for the artificial stammerings
and innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 378). The reduction of nonstylistic stuttering to ‘artificial stammerings’
(an artifice not to be opposed to the organic, since, in this instance, it is nothing
but such organization) makes it clear that, indeed, nonstyle is at stake in the
minor-major negotiation. And this dialectic between the minor and the major
is unending, since the major must always be minorized to escape its oppressive
categories and since, inversely, the minor has a twofold need for the major. First,
the minor needs the major to provide the parameters to be escaped. Although
Deleuze does not stress this necessity, he acknowledges it: ‘In order to write, it
may perhaps be necessary for the maternal language to be odious, but only so
that a syntactic creation can open up a kind of foreign language in it’ (Deleuze
1997: 5–6). Second, aporetically, the minor needs the major as the possibility
of its own survival: ‘When a minority creates models for itself, it’s because it
wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have
a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example)’ (Deleuze 1995: 173).
‘Even politically, especially politically,’ Deleuze and Guattari stress, ‘it is difficult
to see how the upholders of a minor language can operate if not by giving it . . .
a constancy and homogeneity [that make] it a locally major language capable
of forcing official recognition’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 102). With all due
caution (since Deleuze and Guattari distinguish ‘between minor languages . . .

and the becoming-minor of the major language’ [Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
106]), the minor becomes its own impossibility, since its survival (‘to survive’) is
its very destruction (‘to become a majority’, which is to say, to cease to be minor).
Style becomes nonstyle indefinitely, because nonstyle comes to be style.
All these features, then, subtend the first page of What Is Philosophy? where
Deleuze and Guattari speak of reaching ‘[t]hat point of nonstyle where one can
finally say, “What is it I have been doing all my life?” ’ Although they reflect
upon their past, Deleuze makes clear elsewhere that memoires are at most mere
style: ‘Everyone can talk about his memories, invent stories, state opinions in
his language; sometimes he even acquires a beautiful style’ (Deleuze 1997: 113).
By contrast, when it is a question of doing something new, of ‘reaching regions
without memories’, a beautiful style ‘must remain forever inadequate’, and
‘[s]tyle becomes nonstyle’ (Deleuze 1997: 113). So, even if Deleuze and Guattari
pose the question of the nature of philosophy in their ‘old age’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 1), if they reach the point of nonstyle, they reach a region without
memories, alienating themselves in the very act of remembering – a remembering
without memory that recalls Deleuze’s analyses of nonstyle in Proust’s ‘complex
mechanisms of reminiscences’ (Deleuze 2000: 65).7 An explication of the nonstyle
of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical past, however, first requires an explication
of philosophy itself.
What Is Philosophy?
Philosophy begins for Deleuze and Guattari in much the same way as everything
begins for both Hesiod and the Presocratics: chaotically. Just as the Theogony
speaks of ‘the Chasm’ (Hesiod 2008: 6) at the origin, so, too, so many Presocratic
treatises begin what-is in chaos, which is perhaps most apparent in Anaxagoras’
account of a primordial ‘mixture of all objects’ (Graham 2010: F4) that is
eventually ‘separated off ’ (Graham 2010: F6) by the movement of the nous to
result in the beauty and order of the contemporary world. If I invoke Hesiod and
Anaxagoras here, it is, first, because the continuity with Hesiod also indicates a
certain mythic quality in Deleuzian philosophy in contrast to rationalist traditions
and, second, because the difference between Anaxagoras’ and Deleuze’s chaos is
instructive. Deleuze and Guattari write:
Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which
every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but
a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms,
which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference,
without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 118)
Containing ‘all possible particles’ and ‘all possible forms’, chaos is the source of
everything that is but, at the same time, characterized by a lack of characteristics
(‘a void’) since nothing endures: As soon as something comes into being
(‘birth’), it ‘immediately’ passes away (‘disappearance’). So, unlike Anaxagoras’
‘primal soup’ (as Nietzsche calls it in the Birth of Tragedy [Nietzsche 1999: 63])
in which ‘all objects were present’ as ‘seeds’ (Graham 2010: F4) and only await
their separation (a potential), there are no objects in the Deleuzian chaos
properly speaking, since its ‘infinite speeds’ name the immediate disappearance
of anything that appears (‘a virtual’).
If there were only chaos, then, nothing would actually last, and, so, chaos must
be resisted. This resistance is the function of each discipline – philosophy, art,
and science: ‘the Chaoids’, chaos’ ‘three daughters’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
208) – differentiated by the style in which each engages chaos. ‘The problem of
philosophy,’ in particular, ‘is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite
into which thought plunges’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 42). Philosophy addresses
its problem by creating concepts (‘[t]he concept is the beginning of philosophy’),
but it can create concepts only after laying out the plane of immanence on which
it plunges into chaos in order to select “material” for the concepts with which the
plane is populated (‘but the plane is its instauration’ [Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41,
trans. mod.]). Since philosophy is, strictly speaking, ‘defined as the creation of
concepts’, the plane of immanence ‘must be regarded as prephilosophical’ even
if it ‘does not exist outside philosophy’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 40–1). More
specifically, this ‘nonconceptual understanding’ (nonconceptual since it precedes
concepts) is an ‘intuitive understanding’ that posits ‘the power of a One-All’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 40–1). Deleuze and Guattari borrow the notion of
intuition in part from Nietzsche, who, in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,
claims that beginning with Thales every philosophy originates in a ‘mystic intuition’
that ‘ “all things are one” ’ (Nietzsche 1998: 39), but in Deleuze and Guattari the
intuition takes on the particular sense of an immanent unity, a consistency (One)
of a multiplicity (All). Indeed, if philosophy can render consistent the infinite
movements without restricting them, it is precisely because the plane that ‘envelops
infinite movements’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 36) is immanent: ‘When you
invoke something transcendent you arrest movement’ (Deleuze 1995: 146).
Now, the plane ‘envelops’ the infinite movements because it envelops, or is

populated by, concepts that preserve that movement. But what are concepts?
Although they are ‘new ways of thinking’ (Deleuze 1995: 165), and although
philosophy is ‘knowledge through pure concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 7),
neither concepts nor the knowledge they yield function in the traditional sense
for Deleuze and Guattari. Whereas concepts in the Platonic tradition provide a
mediation through which the philosopher can contemplate the Ideas that exist
on the ‘Plain of Truth’ (Plato 2001: 248b) at ‘the upper surface of heaven’ (Plato
2001: 247b), the Deleuzian ‘concept is not discursive’; ‘it has no reference’ and ‘is
not a proposition at all’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22). If the concept yields
knowledge, it yields nothing but ‘knowledge of itself ’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 33): ‘it is self-referential’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22). This follows
from the principle of immanence, since, if the concept were to refer to anything
outside itself, it would then be determined in relation to that exteriority and
thereby forfeit both its immanence and its free movement. So, in contrast to the
scientific enunciation that ‘remains external to the proposition because the latter’s
object is a state of affairs as referent’, the philosophical enunciation ‘is strictly
immanent to the concept because the latter’s sole object is the inseparability of
the components that constitute its consistency and through which it passes back
and forth’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 23). The consistency that is the object
of conceptual knowledge exists on two levels: endoconsistency (consistency
of components within the concept) and exoconsistency (consistency between
different concepts on the plane of immanence). If the specificity of philosophy
consists in the creation of concepts that retain the infinite speeds of chaos while
rendering them consistent, it is in this connection that the nonstyle specific to
philosophical thought must be seen.
What is nonstyle in What Is Philosophy?
‘There are no simple concepts,’ Deleuze and Guattari say at the outset of the
chapter dedicated to concepts, since ‘[e]very concept has components’; it is always
‘a multiplicity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 15). Yet, the number of components
must be limited, since ‘a concept possessing every component’, extracting
every form from the chaos with which it is engaged, ‘would be chaos pure and
simple’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 15). So, the concept is multiple (many
components) and fragmentary (not every component), but, because it ‘totalizes
its components’, it is also ‘a whole’; it is, Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘a fragmentary
whole’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 17). This wholeness or totalization is the
concept’s endoconsistency: ‘Components, or what defines the consistency of the
concept, its endoconsistency, are distinct, heterogeneous, and yet not separable’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 19). Thus, the difficulty of thinking the concept:
completely consistent and totalized (‘not separable’) but composed of ‘distinct’ and
‘heterogeneous’ components that, moreover, have no hierarchy compromising
the concept’s immanence – ‘orderings without hierarchy’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 90). But was a similar thought not expressed in Proust and Signs where
the stake was a non-Logical unity characterized by, precisely, nonstyle? Indeed,
since the syntagm or horizontal relation is the realm of nonstyle (‘[s]tyle is . . . a
syntax’ [Deleuze 1995: 131]), when Deleuze and Guattari describe the concept as
‘not paradigmatic but syntagmatic; not projective but connective; not hierarchical
but linking’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 91, original emphasis), nonstyle’s
implication in the endoconsistency of the concept becomes clear.
More specifically, nonstyle names the state of survey of the concept, which
is to say the concept’s infinite speeds. These speeds describe the way in which
the concept is ‘immediately co-present to all its components or variations, at no
distance from them, passing back and forth through them’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 21); because of this speed or immediacy, the concept is in ‘a state of survey
[survol] in relation to its components, endlessly traversing them’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 20). In other words, by traversing them at infinite speeds, the
concept reaches each of its components in the same movement and at the same
time, unifying them into a point, an instant. The concept’s unity thus comes
all in one stroke, as an encounter, such that ‘[t]he concept speaks the event,
not the essence or the thing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 21). Now, insofar as
this traversal between components unifies them without sacrificing them to a
predetermined idea, insofar as the unity is a unity of the multiplicity rather than
a unity for or before the multiplicity, the survey of the concept recalls the ‘final
brushstroke’ (Proust 1997: 165) of Balzac’s nonstyle. Survey is a Viewpoint, that
is, the ‘Viewpoint proper to each of the two [heterogeneous] objects’ (Deleuze
2000: 166) that is opened by nonstyle operates in the same way as the survey of
the concept’s components. If the ‘[c]oncepts are concrete assemblages’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 36), and if style ‘is an assemblage’ (Deleuze and Parnet
2007: 4), then it is because ‘[s]tyle in philosophy’ – or, once again, should we
instead speak with Proust of a nonstyle? – ‘is the movement of concepts’ (Deleuze
1995: 140). Thus, ‘the point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of
[the concept’s] components’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 20) is the ‘point of
nonstyle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 1).
‘But,’ Deleuze and Guattari add, just as the concept has an internal consistency
with its components, ‘the concept also has an exoconsistency with other
concepts’ (1994: 20). There are ‘bridges’ that form ‘the joints of the concept’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 20) and allow it to connect with other concepts
on the plane of immanence. The concept is therefore ‘absolute’ with respect to
the ‘condensation it carries out’ but ‘relative’ with respect ‘to other concepts, to
the plane on which it is defined’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 21). This relativity
is a consequence of the fact that populating the same plane does not guarantee
any absolute unity of concepts, which ‘are not even the pieces of a puzzle, for
their irregular contours do not correspond to each other’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 23). There is, in other words, no ‘discursive whole’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 23) that would guarantee in advance the identity of and relations between
the concepts comprising it. Indeed, without a transcendent principle stabilizing
them, the bridges themselves are ‘moveable’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 23).
If, in this way, a ‘concept also has a becoming that involves its relationship with
concepts situated on the same plane’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 18), it is also
a certain ‘syntax’ – two or more concepts, in this case, put into variable relations
not determined in advance – ‘in the process of becoming’ (Deleuze 1997: 112),
a formulation Deleuze uses to describe, precisely, nonstyle. So, when Deleuze
and Guattari speak of ‘nondiscursive resonance’ (1994: 23) between concepts,
the statement itself resonates with the unarrested resonance that Proust and
Signs describes as the work of (non)style: ‘style sets up a resonance between any
two objects and from them extracts a “precious image” ’ (Deleuze 2000: 155). In
sum, if philosophy is the creation of concepts, and if these two movements (the
concept’s ‘internal neighborhood or consistency’ and ‘its external neighborhood
or exoconsistency’) are ‘what the creation of concepts means’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 90), and, finally, if those movements are the work of nonstyle,
then nonstyle is philosophy.
Philosophy’s nonstyle is corroborated when Deleuze and Guattari extol
Spinoza and ‘the incredible book 5’ (1994: 36). Since Spinoza is regarded as
‘[p]erhaps . . . the only philosopher never to have compromised with trans
cendence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 48), his relation to the infinite speeds
of thought is not only exemplary; it is the only evidence of the possibility of
philosophy in general. But the elliptical comments in What Is Philosophy?
help little to understand Spinoza’s speeds. An entire essay, however, is devoted
to the issue in Essays Critical and Clinical (‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics” ’),
where Deleuze claims that the Ethics is not one but three: (1) ‘[t]he Ethics
of the definitions, axioms, and postulates, demonstrations and corollaries’
(Deleuze 1997: 151); (2) ‘the Ethics of the scholia’ (Deleuze 1997: 151), which
is ‘inserted into the demonstrative chain’ of the “first” Ethics but with ‘another
style, almost another language’ (Deleuze 1997: 145–6); and, finally, (3) ‘[t]he
Ethics of Book V’ (Deleuze 1997: 151). This ‘third’ Ethics, Spinoza’s fifth part
entitled, ‘Of Human Freedom’, draws upon the preceding four books to a degree
with which it is indeed difficult to keep pace. The demonstration of the first
proposition, for instance, makes recourse to five different propositions from
three of the four preceding parts; it is, in this sense, the Ethics of the Ethics. It
consists in, Deleuze says, ‘bring[ing] together to the maximum degree terms
that are distant as such . . . to assure a speed of absolute survey [survol]’ (Deleuze
1997: 150). The language of What Is Philosophy? (‘speed’, ‘survey’, and so on)
is immediately recognizable, and the survey in this third Ethics, just as I have
argued for the survey in What Is Philosophy?, is to be understood with respect to
‘style’ (Deleuze 1997: 149). Or, rather, nonstyle, which becomes clear in a letter
Deleuze wrote to Reda Bensmaïa that outlines the essay in question:
I think great philosophers are also great stylists. . . . Syntax, in philosophy,

strains toward the movement of concepts. . . . What has this to do with Spinoza?
He seems, on the face of it, to have no style at all, as we confront the very
scholastic Latin of the Ethics. But you have to be careful with people who
supposedly ‘have no style’; as Proust noted, they’re often the greatest stylists of
all. (Deleuze 1995: 165)
The reference to Proust confirms that Spinoza’s style, which provides the infinite
speed of thought that defines philosophy, is in fact nonstyle, which is to say,
nonstyle is philosophy.
But not only philosophy.8 Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘Schizoanalysis rejects
any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it – divine, anagogic,
historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 13). As an analysis of that which is never ‘pretraced’ or outlined
in advance, schizoanalysis criticizes disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, that
remain within the confines of ‘a genetic axis or overcoding structure’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 13). Now, if a genetic axis ‘is like an objective pivotal unity
upon which successive stages are organized’ but also, therefore, determined
from the beginning and hierarchized accordingly, and if overcoding is the
operation of a unity ‘in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system
considered’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8, 12), then it becomes clear that at
stake in schizoanalysis is the eradication of predetermination by a transcendent
principle that would arrest the movement between multiplicities, that is,
between plateaus or, in the case of philosophy, between concepts. The concerns
are consistent, once again, with Proust and Signs. If schizoanalysis analyses
unpredictable multiplicities, and if (non)style consists in the very consistency of
such multiplicities, the immanent coherence without which schizoanalysis would
not be possible, then schizoanalysis is a stylistic analysis, or, more precisely, an
analysis of nonstyle.
To be clear, although they sound familiar, the unity and supplementary
dimension of overcoding must be radically distinguished from the consistency
and ‘necessarily exterior sources of a style’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 98). While
the supplementary dimension of overcoding is posited beyond the structure it
stratifies so as to stabilize it at the cost of arresting lines of flight by determining
acceptable routes in advance, (non)style renders consistent without recourse
to transcendent unity and provides a passage out of stratification or hierarchy.
Precisely by levelling the plane, by rendering consistent and eradicating the
exterior-as-transcendent realm (n – 1), (non)style is able to open onto an outside,
to take flight, to take off, to take place by creating it. In this sense, the consistency
of the multiplicity is the line of flight, the subtraction of arborescent unity as the
possibility of rhizomatic addition (n – 1 =  , ‘creative subtraction’ as ‘creative
stammering’, ‘AND . . . AND . . . AND’ . . . and nonstyle [Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 98–9]). By bringing the outside in (the transcendent made immanent, in
the same plane) and by letting the inside out (creating lines of flight), (non)style
turns the stratified structure inside out: the ins and outs of style. Hence Deleuze’s
claim that A Thousand Plateaus is ‘the nearest [he and Guattari] come to a style’
(Deleuze 1995: 142).
Now, if ‘everything [Deleuze has] written is vitalistic’ (Deleuze 1995: 143),
then nonstyle ultimately works to free life itself; the line of flight is a lifeline,
nonstyle a lifestyle. Indeed, in resisting chaos, the three Chaoids of What Is
Philosophy? are, in fact, resisting death: ‘The philosopher, the scientist, and the
artist seem to return from the land of the dead’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 202).
Even if Deleuze and Guattari attempt to maintain the distinction between chaos’
infinite speeds and nothingness (‘not a nothingness but a virtual’ [Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 118]), in the concluding chapter they admit that, if ‘the appearing
and disappearing’ of the ideas in chaos ‘coincide’, then the ideas ‘blend into the
immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 201). This explains ‘why we want to hang on to fixed opinions
so much’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 201): Opinions offer something stable
and enduring against the threat of chaos. In a desperate attempt to link the
ideas that otherwise immediately disappear, a link that would let them linger,
we attach ourselves to ‘constant’ and ‘protective rules – resemblance, contiguity,

causality – which enable us to put some order into ideas’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 201). By surrendering ourselves to these rules, however, we determine
in advance everything and its relation to anything else; being ‘molded on the
form of recognition’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 145), opinion hypostasizes
precedence and thereby precludes the possibility of an encounter, of becoming,
of life itself. So, the confrontation with the land of the dead takes place only in
order to confront a temptation that is, ultimately, even deadlier: ‘another struggle
develops and takes on more importance – the struggle against opinion’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 203). Life, then, is stretched between two fatal extremes: the
formless death of chaos in which there is no endurance and death in the form or
conformity of opinion in which there is only endurance.
Just as life, so, too, (non)style: ‘Two things work against style: homogeneous
language or, conversely, a heterogeneity so great that it becomes indifferent,
gratuitous, and nothing definite passes between its poles’ (Deleuze 1995: 141).
On one extreme, absolute sameness and fixity (opinion) stifles (non)style, but,
on the other, so does absolute heterogeneity (chaos), a distance too great for
anything to pass, to come to pass, to happen. So, if (non)style, on one hand, gives
consistency to chaos and, on the other hand, minorizes opinion, then ‘[s]tyle,
in a great writer, is always a style of life, too, not anything at all personal, but
inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing’ (and, once again, the reference to
the way in which ‘people sometimes say that philosophers have no style’ [Deleuze
1995: 100] confirms that nonstyle is in question). ‘One’s always writing,’ Deleuze
says, ‘to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace
lines of flight’ (Deleuze 1995: 140–1), and the nonstyle that mobilizes writing
is thus ‘a matter of life and death’ (Deleuze 1995: 99). So, what is nonstyle in
What Is Philosophy? Philosophy is (in) nonstyle, and, as Deleuze’s philosophy is
a ‘vitalism rooted in aesthetics’ (Deleuze 1995: 91), nonstyle is life.
Notes
1 Style has become a frequent question in Deleuze scholarship. In the last chapter
of Deleuze and Language, for instance, Jean-Jacques Lecercle offers valuable
insights when he approaches the ‘concept of style’ (Lecercle 2002: 239) in
accordance with the theory of the concept expounded in What Is Philosophy?,
but, insofar as that theory is itself expounded from the ‘point of nonstyle’, Deleuze
studies also call for an approach to the nonstyle of concepts – not the concept of
style but the (non)style of concepts. In this sense, to speak of a concept of style is
already to presume it, to arrive in style or, one might say, stylishly late. Moreover,
the claim that ‘style is equivalent to nonstyle’ (Lecercle 2002: 245) falls short not
only in Deleuze but also in Proust who, to be seen, posits nonstyle in irreducible
contrast to style.
2 For example, Deleuze 2000: 165ff.; Deleuze 1997: 113; and Deleuze 1995: 165.
Since I trace its significance largely from Deleuze’s monographs, the notion
of nonstyle seems to be primarily his, which is why I speak, for the most part,
of ‘Deleuze’ and not ‘Deleuze and Guattari’, even if they coauthor What Is
Philosophy?.
3 Proust gives an example from Illusions perdues: ‘M. de Bargeton’s laugh which
was like damp squibs going off [des boulets endormis qui se réveillent]’ (Proust
1997: 170).
4 Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs is thus a question of nonstyle
(see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 30).
5 Even though Deleuze speaks of ‘style’ almost throughout the entirety of Proust and
Signs, only broaching the question of nonstyle in the penultimate chapter, it here
becomes apparent that Proust’s style has been nonstyle all along: ‘Can we say that
Proust . . . has no style?’ (Deleuze 2000: 165). The question is controversial; even
Deleuze and Guattari, years later in A Thousand Plateaus, acknowledge that ‘even
Balzac, even Proust, describe their work’s plan(e) of organization or development’
with reference to ‘a transcendent unity or hidden principle’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 266). If Deleuze continues to refer to ‘nonstyle’ as ‘style’ (in Proust and Signs
and in other texts, as well), then there is a certain porousness between these two
poles of logical and non-logical unity for which we must account when the pieces
are in place.
6 Stuttering, the way in which nonstyle subjects homogeneous systems of
language to infinite variation (developed in detail in plateau 4 of A Thousand
Plateaus, ‘Postulates of Linguistics’), pertains more to the terrain of literature
than philosophy according to the divisions drawn in What Is Philosophy? (cf.
170 and 176). Inversely, while nonstyle is developed in an analysis of primarily
literary authors and texts (Proust, Balzac, and Flaubert), its target is nonetheless
philosophical (Platonic organization). A full development of this point is
beyond my scope here, but for more on the style of Deleuze and Guattari’s
interdisciplinarity, see note 8.
7 Apropos of the famous madeleine cake scene in Proust’s Search, for instance,
Deleuze writes: ‘Flavor, . . . the sensation common to the two moments, is here
only to recall something else: Combray. But upon this invocation, Combray
rises up in a form that is absolutely new. Combray does not rise up as it was once
present [. . . but] as it could not be experienced: not in reality, but . . . in its essence’
(Deleuze 2000: 60–1, my italics). This essence, then, is a past that was never
present, a ‘pure past’ (Deleuze 2000: 61), and (non)‘style’, one recalls, ‘is essence
itself ’ (Deleuze 2000: 48). The Is in What Is Philosophy? is therefore not simply
ontological.
8 The letter to Bensmaïa continues: ‘Style in philosophy strains toward three
different poles: concepts, or new ways of thinking; percepts, or new ways of seeing
and hearing; and affects or new ways of feeling’ (Deleuze 1995: 164–5). Deleuze
speaks here of style in philosophy, but, recalling that ‘a compound of percepts and
affects’ defines the specificity of the arts and, further, that ‘style is needed . . . to
raise lived perceptions to the percept and lived affections to the affect’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 164, 170), (non)style exceeds the boundaries of philosophy.
Indeed, ‘style is a literary notion’ (Deleuze 1995: 132), but Deleuze elsewhere
suggests that the ‘procedures or operations in literature’ that constitute style,
‘with a little development, could very well migrate in changed form to other
disciplines’ (Deleuze 2007: 370). Does Deleuze not effect this migration – or, more
precisely, this deterritorialization – by writing What Is Philosophy? from the point
of nonstyle? Moreover, even though science and its functives are conspicuously
absent in the letter cited above, Deleuze and Guattari similarly acknowledge that
there are no doubt ‘ “styles” associated with proper names’ in ‘scientific systems’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 138). Style is thought in each mode of thought
(philosophy, art, and science), as perhaps the very thought of thought.
I thank Prof Rodolphe Gasché for his invaluable reading of What Is Philosophy? pre-
sented in a seminar on Deleuze in the spring of 2012 (lectures collected in Geophilosophy:
On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 2014 and bound to become mandatory reading for Deleuze scholarship),
without which this inquiry would not have been possible.
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5
Deleuze on Genre: Modernity between

the Tragic and the Novel
Ruben Borg
In an entry from his Paris notebook of 1903, James Joyce argued for the primacy
of comedy within a hierarchical ordering of literary genres:
All art which excites in us the feeling of joy is so far comic . . . and even tragic art
may be said to participate in the nature of comic art so far as the possession of
a work of tragic art (a tragedy) excites in us the feeling of joy. From this it may
be seen that tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner in
art. (Joyce 1959: 144)
The statement resonates temptingly with a claim made by Deleuze about the
power of literature at large:
What springs from great books is schizo-laughter or revolutionary joy, not the
anguish of our pathetic narcissism, not the terror of our guilt. . . . There is always
an indescribable joy that springs from great books, even when they speak of
ugly, desperate, or terrifying things. (Deleuze 2004: 258)
And again, with Guattari:
We don’t see any criteria for genius other than the following: the politics that
runs through it and the joy that it communicates. We will term ‘low’ or ‘neurotic’
any reading that turns genius into anguish, into tragedy, into a ‘personal concern’.
For example Nietzsche, Kafka, Beckett, whomever: those who don’t read them
with many involuntary laughs and political tremors are deforming everything.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 95–6)
Read alongside each other, these excerpts set the stage for a conversation between
Deleuze and Joyce on the value of tragic and comedic passions in modern
literature, an encounter from which we might already distil an important
theoretical premise: that a correct distinction between comedy and tragedy is

not a narrow or specialized critical issue, but a matter concerning all great books
and the very determination of their literary excellence.
Though it is not within the scope of this essay to develop such a conversation
in full, I would like to draw on this premise in order to trace the outlines of a
discourse on genre in Deleuze’s philosophy. My first (soft) claim, then, is that a
strong conceptualization of the tragic is key to the project of schizoanalysis. It
underwrites Deleuze’s understanding of desire as a positive, productive force,
his commitment to the affirmation of life’s multiplicity and the politics implied
in that affirmation. But, no less germane to his conversation with Joyce, we must
also take stock of a second, quite separate genre-related operation that features
centrally in Deleuze – namely, Deleuze’s own staging of the encounter between
the work of philosophy and the novel.
Deleuze engages with the ‘novel’ and the concept of ‘tragedy’ often throughout
his career. But more interesting than the frequency at which these terms recur is
the fact that they are often employed to sustain some of his broadest statements
about writing and about modernity. Focusing on these statements, this essay
interrogates the currency of generic markers in schizoanalysis. It asks whether
a concept of genre is at all compatible with Deleuze’s thought and examines
the role of such terms as ‘tragedy’ and ‘novel’ in a Deleuzian reading of literary
texts. How does Deleuze employ these labels, and what does his philosophy tell
us about their potential use in modern critical practice? More ambitiously, how
might we mobilize a Deleuzian discourse on genre to evaluate Deleuze’s own
philosophical project?
Recent debate has done much to disentangle the concept of genre from
its Platonic and Aristotelian roots. If in Plato generic labels (drama, pure
narrative, epic) served a primarily typological function, modern usage often
insists on the hybridization of traditional forms, and on the power of generic
conventions to generate new works. In contemporary critical discourse a genre
may be understood as a formal category to which a work of art belongs, or as
an ongoing conversation in which it participates. Alternatively, genres are
imagined as sets of codified compositional principles which guide and curtail
the artist’s productivity, or even as implicit contexts, affecting the breadth of an
utterance, delimiting its frame of reference. Claudio Guillén suggests that we
think of a genre as ‘a convenient model’ or ‘an invitation to the actual writing
of a work, on the basis of certain principles of composition’ (Guillén 1971: 72).
Alastair Fowler responds by noting that in the 1980s’ and 1990s’ criticism began
to view generic forms as ‘coded structures or matrices for composition and
Deleuze on Genre 101
interpretation. Perhaps now it is time to move on again, and to think of genres

as fields of association like those in actual situations of utterance’ (Fowler 2003:
190). By this last approach genres may be seen to ‘adjust a reader’s mental set and
help in selecting the optimally relevant associations that amount to a meaning of
the literary work’ (Fowler 2003: 190).
Deleuze does not intervene directly in this debate, but his stake in the various
approaches mentioned here is clear. While there exists in his writing a strong
formalist impulse, and even a taste for taxonomies (most evident in the Cinema
books), there can be no danger of mistaking the genres to which he alludes
for pre-codified fields of association. At first blush, the very idea of genre as a
formal category under which sundry works are grouped will be seen to jar with
Deleuze’s widely advertised reputation as a non-axiomatic thinker – and even
to contravene his central ontological stance on the univocal nature of being.
Difference and Repetition famously opens with a disambiguation of the concepts
of repetition and generality, positioning itself squarely against philosophical
grammars that reduce repetition to an analogy between multiple representations
(or, what is the same thing, reduce difference to an interval subtracted from
between pre-established identities). Deleuze will seek instead to mobilize the
power of an originary difference within philosophical practice, staging the
adventure of thought as divergence. In keeping with this project, genres might
indeed be conceived of as matrices for composition and interpretation; but the
idea of a matrix – the relation between a matrix and the work it engenders –
must be cleared of all connotations of resemblance and self-reproduction. It
must embrace divergence as a genetic principle.
In other words, for Deleuze to rely so frequently on generic labels in a reading
of literary texts is to rehearse a productive, generative movement of thought, and
to highlight this movement as an essential component of literary analysis. Generic
labels allow him to make broad generalizations about the power of literature; but
these generalizations do not exhaust their subject. Rather, they place reading
and writing in relation to a limit which is always being redrawn. When Deleuze
writes that ‘a book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of
detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction’ (Deleuze 1994: xx) he may be
placing the reader within an interpretive horizon, certainly setting parameters
for a correct interpretation of his own work (the claim is made in the preface to
Difference and Repetition). But he is also testing the notion that creative thinking
always takes place on the borders of generic definitions, in the crossover of
genres. Crucially, it is the philosophical text that wants to be read, here, as a
particular kind of novel, not the novel itself.
Philosophy is like a novel
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari attempt a quick formal distinction

between the genres of the novella and the tale in the course of which they refer
to the novel (and the detective novel in particular) as a combination of the two
forms:
It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the ‘novella’ as a literary genre:
Everything is organized around the question, ‘What happened? Whatever
could have happened?’ The tale is the opposite of the novella, because it is an
altogether different question that the reader asks with bated breath: ‘What is
going to happen?’. . . . Something always happens in the novel also, but the novel
integrates elements of the novella and the tale into the variation of its perpetual
living present (duration). The detective novel is a particularly hybrid genre in
this respect. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 192)
The idea harks back to the preface of Difference and Repetition and is in turn
taken up and developed elsewhere: ‘Philosophy’s like a novel: you have to
ask “What’s going to happen?” “What happened?” Except the characters are
concepts, and the settings, the scenes, are space-times. One’s always writing to
bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight’
(Deleuze 1995: 140–1).
Deleuze seems to spend a great deal of energy, here, setting up generic
boundaries only to undo them. We begin with the plain observation that the
novel is characterized by the form of a question, or indeed by the combination of
two questions which it borrows from other narrative genres and then passes on
to the philosopher. These questions signal two contrasting dispositions towards
an indeterminate event. It is the peculiar relation of thought to an event that
gives the tale and the novella their distinctiveness, and that marks the novel as a
hybrid form. And this very same relation is what allows the novel first to enter
into dialogue with philosophy, and then to stand, metonymically, for Deleuze’s
most general, most inclusive expression of literary activity: ‘one’s always writing
to bring something to life’1
Insofar as it draws on generic categories, then, schizoanalysis begins by inter
rogating the power of a certain type of event to orient thought. More precisely,
Deleuze argues that philosophical thinking partakes of a peculiar, fabulating
component which puts concepts in creative tension with the conditions from
which they emerge. This is the first thing philosophy learns from novelists – to
move outside the realm of the eternal or the timeless, to grapple with time and
variation not as enemies of serious thought, but as formative elements of the

mise en scene of a concept, its tone and mood, what one might call thought’s
spirit of place.
Such movement, in turn, demands the discovery and exploration of a reality
that is neither that of universal ideas nor simply that of material bodies. Between
matter and idea (and prior to their distinction) is a world of pre-individual
intensities, of patterns of emergence, of virtualities in a constant process of
actualization. For Deleuze, it is always a matter of taking reality as this whole,
of affirming its plenitude in process. Thus, modern philosophy shares with the
novel the task of honing a new type of empiricism. It is the experiment of pitching
reality-as-a-whole in the middleground of idea and matter, a middleground that
takes on multiple names in the course of Deleuze’s career – the image (after
Bergson), the sensation (after Spinoza), the percept:
The novel has often risen to the percept – not perception of the moor in Hardy
but the moor as percept; oceanic percepts in Melville. . . . Characters can only
exist, and the author can only create them, because they do not perceive but
have passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the compound of
sensations. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 168–9)
And again:
We dwell on the art of the novel because it is the source of a misunderstanding. . . .

Creative fabulation has nothing to do with a memory, however exaggerated,
or with a fantasy. In fact, the artist, including the novelist, goes beyond the
perceptual states and affective transitions of the lived. The artist is a seer, a
becomer. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 170–1)
Above all, this empiricism must avoid the danger of grounding reality in the
activities of an apperceiving subject. Reality-as-a-whole preserves itself in itself,
short-circuiting the distinction between a subject and an object of experience. It
involves the unity of the perceiver and the perceived.
The image, here, is removed from the order of representation. Deleuze and
Guattari are able to set seeing and becoming side by side, as parallel, quasi-
synonymous terms, precisely because seeing is itself understood as a non-
representational activity, a process of emergence and ‘passing into’. The eye has
become pre-subjective, perception pre-individual. It is the landscape that sees.
It is in this sense, too, that Deleuze and Guattari will claim that the novel does
not deal with fantasy or memory; nor is it a genre devoted to the invention of
interesting characters. Its strength is to create new beings of sensation, to design
and test out new articulations of the event, using the potentialities of narrative
fiction. Two recurrent examples allow us to understand the power attributed
to character and landscape in this approach: Ahab, whose relation to the ocean
corresponds to an act of ‘becoming-whale’, and Mrs Dalloway who is able to
perceive the town ‘because she has passed into the town like “a knife through
everything” and becomes imperceptible herself ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 169).
In both cases, characters are viewed as privileged modes of entry into the
text, but also as versions of a peculiar kind of becoming which exceeds such
founding phenomenological distinctions as human/inhuman, mind/matter
organic/inorganic. This is tantamount to saying that characters, for Deleuze, are
figures of a reality that is always emerging, always unfolding at the threshold
between multiplicities. Nothing could be more reductive than to read a literary
character as a study in psychology, or as a representation of human personality.
Great novels create characters as new configurations of seeing-and-becoming
precisely where these two activities are folded into each other. Characters and
landscapes thus provide ways of exploring the liminal, indeterminate space that
is reality-as-a-whole, of inhabiting ‘these thresholds and doors where becoming
itself becomes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 249).
A similar procedure is at issue in a discussion of the novel’s treatment of
point of view. Deleuze traces the origin of modern perspectivism in philosophy
to a Leibnizian ontology, based on the theory of monads. Monads are simple,
indivisible substances of being, spiritual atoms without extension or form,
but, crucially, with a disposition to enter into relation with other monads, and
to encode within their own indivisible unity the traces of everything that can
be predicated of an individual concept. In other words, each monad is a self-
sufficient, internally driven principle of relation and individuation, a unit in
which the entire world is expressed, but in a partial way – another take on the
concept of reality-as-a-whole. It follows that there are as many images of the
world as there are points of view, and, more scandalously, as many realities as are
made possible by the assumption of a perfect, unbounded (that is to say, divine)
perspective. According to Leibniz, it falls to God to choose the best of all possible
worlds, and thus to safeguard reality from the dangers of self-contradiction to
which perspectivism might otherwise expose it. But, Deleuze asks, what if reality
were released from the principle of divine selection – how might we be able
to think the emergence of plural worlds, once perspective is freed of its divine
safeguard? At several junctures in Deleuze’s career (most notably in The Fold, in
Proust and Signs and in his Vincennes lectures on Leibniz), we encounter the
suggestion that the techniques designed by modern thought to grapple with this
problem, and with the notion of event it implies, are quintessentially novelistic.2
Indeed, they are what establishes the novel as the modern genre par excellence.
Deleuze’s favourite example is Proust whose apprenticeship in the signs
of art is described as ‘Leibnizian’ precisely in so far as it reveals a theory of
point of view as pure difference – an originary difference constitutive of being
(Deleuze 2000: 41–3).3 This is a far cry from ‘point of view’ understood as
having an opinion about the world. Where seeing and becoming are discussed
as coextensive processes, point of view must be conceived in turn as a genetic
principle. It is how reality differentiates and individualizes itself.
The same idea is developed in a reading of Henry James whose narrative
experiments will be said to redeem the concept of point of view from a common-
sense relativism – that is to say, from association with the banal sentiment that
all reality is subjective, or that everything is relative to the individual. Point of
view in James becomes not the attribute of a subject, but a relation to reality that
makes subjectivity itself possible.
At the basis of each individual notion, it will indeed be necessary for there to
be a point of view that defines the individual notion. If you prefer, the subject
is second in relation to the point of view. . . . Fully into the nineteenth century,
when Henry James renews the techniques of the novel through a perspectivism,
through a mobilization of points of view, there too in James’s works, it’s not
points of view that are explained by the subjects, it’s the opposite, subjects that
are explained through points of view. (Deleuze 1980)
To affirm the primacy of point of view in this manner is once again to insist on
pre-individual becomings, on reality as emergence. It is to pitch the whole in the
liminal space of the percept and the sheer indeterminacy of the event. This is
precisely what Deleuze means when he speaks of writing as the labour of setting
life free from where it’s trapped.
Here we are able to evaluate both the strengths and the weaknesses of Deleuze’s
concept of ‘novel’. I wish to remark, first of all, the sense in which the term is
used to exemplify the aims of writing in general; and, as a corollary to this point,
to note the novel’s status as a hybrid genre, or as a combination of the distinctive
features of other genres (the novella, the tale). It is difficult to determine what
is unique about the novel by this definition: in a way, it becomes a name for the
generic itself.
At the same time, Deleuze invites us to think of the novel not in terms of
some common denominator of all its members, but in terms of its potential. In
other words, a genre is defined by what it does best. And what the novel does
best is first to charge reality with the power of indeterminate events, and then
to provide thought with a means of access to an ontological space where life
emerges in all its multiplicity. Philosophy is like a novel when it urges thought
along the same path – when it designs tools for an experimental empiricism
by which reality is seen to unfold in excess of individual experience, subjective
determination or judgement.
The limits of the tragic
At this point I would like to return to Deleuze’s claim that the genius of a literary
work has to do with the joy that it communicates. And I would like to situate that
claim in the context of a broader discussion of tragic (and comedic) passions
running through modern thought. Notably, Deleuze’s readings of tragic texts
and tragic themes are among the most formative of his career. A reflection
on Hamlet informs his numerous encounters with Kantian philosophy, from
the early monograph to the treatment of passive synthesis in Difference and
Repetition. And a strong interpretation of the tragic in Nietzsche is germane to
his understanding of reality as a product of joyous, affirmative, desiring forces.
As we trace the vicissitudes of the concept in Deleuze, and review the analysis
of elements of tragic form in relation to laughter, we find that the philosophical
stakes are identical to the ones discussed with respect to James’s perspectivism
and Woolf ’s experiments with character and landscape. Here too, at the extreme
limits of the tragic, writing aspires to affirm reality as unbounded, pre-individual
emergence and to set thought in relation to indeterminate events. Only, the
strategies are different. Where novelistic techniques are designed to explore
a new type of empiricism, schizo-laughter advances a powerful critique of
dialectical thought.
In point of fact, the importance of tragedy in Deleuze’s writing derives
precisely from a long-standing philosophical pairing of tragic form with the
dialectic. As Peter Szondi has argued, the evolution of the tragic, as it takes hold in
modern philosophy, shadows the history of German idealism. Szondi traces the
beginnings of this concept in Schelling, and follows its transformations through
the writings of Hölderlin, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Common to these
writers is an attempt to understand tragedy as an expression, at once ethical and
aesthetic, of the pathos of human finitude. Tragic passions originally take root in
the tension between a finite human nature and the infinite reach of divine justice.
We may recognize this idea, variously reincarnated in the oppositions of sense

and concept, desire and law, individual and universal experience, as a grammar
that regulates the labour of philosophical thought in modernity. To this effect (and
drawing on a close reading of Hegel), Szondi equates the tragic with a process of
self-division and self-sacrifice, whereby an ethical existence (a subject) learns to
internalize its formative contradictions and achieves a coherence in the unity of
the concept. According to this sacrificial logic, tragedy is both the passion and
the redemption of finitude: ‘By interpreting the tragic process as the self-division
and self-reconciliation of the ethical nature, Hegel makes his dialectical structure
immediately apparent for the first time’ (Szondi 2002: 16).
This is precisely the interpretation of tragedy Deleuze rejects when he identifies
joy as the defining emotion of all great books. Casting Nietzsche as the anti-
Hegelian philosopher par excellence, and advocating for the passion of Dionysus
against that of Christ, Deleuze insists on a view of tragedy as ‘the aesthetic form
of joy’ (Deleuze 2006: 17). By contrast, tragedy understood as the sublimation
of terror and pity becomes the prime model of an ‘obtuse’ (Deleuze 2006: 17) or
‘low’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 96) type of reading based on personal concern,
the kind of reading that traduces genius into moralistic sentiment.
Anti-Oedipus extends this critique to the psychoanalytic construction of
tragedy. Theorized in stark opposition to the workings of desiring production,
tragedy is denounced as an ‘ideological form’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 107)
that domesticates the unconscious and reduces its investments to the order of
representation. It does not follow, however, that the aim of schizoanalysis is
simply to eschew tragic representations in favour of comedic ones. Nor is it quite
correct to think of schizo-laughter as an event that occurs outside the realm of
tragedy or independently of it.
Under the sign of schizo-laughter the concept of tragedy undergoes a radical
transformation. As always, Deleuze’s approach is to shift attention away from
a thinking based on fixed generic categories to a thinking of genetic forces.
Specifically, tragedy ceases to be concerned with the representation of character
and its moral trials, or with the conflict between fate and heroic agency. Even
as it dramatizes a certain power of death within life, the pressing of life against
its constitutive limit, it identifies that power with the generative processes,
the events and intensive movements that determine the tragic action. By this
reading, tragedy is indeed a dialectical form; but in ‘the true [Nietzschean] sense
of the tragic’ (Deleuze 2006: 38) the dialectic has passed into a new relation with
its constitutive limit.
A reading of Hamlet develops this idea in relation to concepts culled from the
critical tradition – tragic action, tragic character and time. In particular, Deleuze
focuses on the play’s odd plot structure, and on the anachronism announced in
Act I Scene V, ‘The time is out of joint.’ The analysis turns on three interrelated
insights: a reflection on the metaphor of the hinge and its implications for the
classical Aristotelian definition of time as the number of movement; a discussion
of Hamlet’s sense of being out of sync with his own world, signalling the play’s
peculiar unmooring of tragic time from action and character; and finally, a
philosophical parable that reworks Hamlet’s hesitancy into a figure for the
modern (Kantian) understanding of time as a transcendental form of intuition –
and eventually, as a force that puts categorical thinking itself into crisis.
To elaborate, Deleuze first unpacks Hamlet’s formula by considering the
disjuncture it announces in relation to the ‘properly’ articulated time of Greek
tragedy.4 The latter describes a circular movement, a measure of time that
follows the course of a tragic plot along its preordained stages, from a hero’s
limitation, to his fateful transgression, to atonement. The function of time, in
this model, is precisely to measure the action by marking the three phases. Time
is subordinated to movement, and the completion of the cycle is in accord with
the moral and the natural order: ‘The hinge, Cardo, indicates the subordination
of time to precise cardinal points, through which the periodic movements
it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinated to
extensive movement; it is the measure of movement, its interval or number’
(Deleuze 1998: 27).
The articulation of time according to this model reflects the movement of
the stars and the periodic return of the seasons. This is to say that tragic time
draws its significance and its moral force from its correspondence with eternity.
Provided that it keeps its bearings, it allows us to map out the extent of the hero’s
digression, to calculate the distance covered by the action away from and back
towards an absolute limit. This idea, in turn, sustains the Aristotelian definition
of time as the number of movement – where ‘number’ specifies the function of
time within reality, its meagre power. Time, in this context, is not a name for
change or difference, nor does it bring about change. It measures change and
delimits it within a fixed moral compass.
But in Hamlet’s experience, time comes to be associated with number
in a different sense, one that has to do less with measuring reality than with
ordering it. Not only is this shift announced in Prince Hamlet’s diagnosis of a
time that has lost its bearings, it is also expressed in the peculiar structure of
Shakespeare’s play. As Henry Somers-Hall explains, ‘[r]ather than the movement

of the action determining the time of the drama, Hamlet experiences time itself
as being the ground of action’ (Somers-Hall 2011: 69). Hamlet’s reluctance to
assume his role at the centre of the tragic plot, his trademark passivity through
the first half of the action, puts time itself on stage. Deleuze will affirm, to this
effect, that ‘Hamlet is the first hero who truly needed time in order to act’; and
further, that he ‘displays his eminently Kantian character whenever he appears
as a passive existence, who, like an actor or sleeper, receives the activity of
his own thought as an Other’ (Deleuze 1998: 28, 30). It is not just that time
is unmoored from character. Here time is grasped as the passion of character
properly speaking, a force that determines the hero’s position in the world and
that shapes his relation to himself. Far from fixing a geometric point from which
the multiplicity of experience can be organized and unified, Hamlet’s interiority
is rendered as an extreme limit that hollows him out, an uncoiling of time that
separates ‘I’ from ‘Self ’. Time is thus fully realized, and endowed with an original
and constitutive force.
Furthermore, when time is empowered in this manner, when it passes from a
cardinal to an ordinal articulation, it inscribes reality with the sense of a before
and an after, imposing a linear, serial order upon all things. To say that time
is liberated from movement is above all to invest it with the power to reshape
a finite action into an open series. Here it is the very concept of finitude that
must be rethought. The limit towards which every tragic action tends – and
against which reality is dialectically constituted – ceases to be understood as a
limitation (a proscription, an antithesis, a paternal no) and takes on the sense
of an extremity, a frontier in which life itself is pitched. ‘In the first case, cyclical
time is a time which limits and which thus carries out . . . the act of limitation.
When time becomes a straight line, it no longer limits the world, it traverses it’
(Deleuze 1978).
Hamlet’s experience of a disarticulated time is thus the first inkling of a
momentous discovery with which Deleuze credits Kant. The hero’s dithering,
his hesitations, his unpreparedness to act, open up the structure of tragedy to the
invention of a passive yet originary movement of thought. More accurately, they
refer to a passive moment in the genesis of phenomena, an element of passivity
in the mode of appearance of the phenomenal world. Such a reading of Hamlet
substitutes the power of the passive for the passion of finitude, the passage to
the limit for the act of limitation – figures that give the new sense of the tragic
in modernity.
The tragic, the joyous and the modern novel
We are able, at this point, to recognize an important difference between Joyce’s

and Deleuze’s valorization of joy as a defining feature of great literature. For the
young Joyce, the claim that all joyous art is comic and comedy is ‘the perfect
manner in art’ serves to distribute the dramatic passions according to a moral
and aesthetic hierarchy. It is this hierarchy that needs to be affirmed in as much
as it provides the script to a literary and philosophical apprenticeship. On this
point Joyce’s inspiration is scholastic, drawing on the authority of Aquinas and
Dante.
There is room here for only the briefest of summaries: Joyce adopts the
scholastic idea that all passions emanate from a single emotion (namely, love),
and express that emotion partially or in the privative mode. The superiority of
comedic passions over the tragic ones has to do with the degree to which joy
approximates the plenitude of divine love. According to Aquinas, joy proceeds
from love but ‘regards good [as something] present and possessed’, whereas love
‘regards good universally, whether possessed or not’ (Aquinas 1947: I.20). Pity,
in turn, is a defective emotion in that it expresses love by the sharing of sorrow:
‘a defect is always the reason for taking pity, either because one looks upon
another’s defect as one’s own, through being united to him by love, or on account
of the possibility of suffering in the same way’ (Aquinas 1947: II-II.30.2).
Dante’s example is even more obviously pertinent. The allegorical journey
described in the Comedy famously follows the pilgrim’s progress from fear and
pity – the prevalent emotions depicted in the Inferno – to an experience of ‘the
Love that moves the sun and all the other stars’ in Paradiso XXXIII. A note of fear
is sounded as early as the sixth line of the poem, with the word ‘paura’ occurring
five times in the first Canto. The concept of pietà, in turn, recurs throughout
Dante’s passage in Hell, dominating the emotive landscape of the work, most
memorably in Canto V.
Joyce takes on Dante’s theological framework as a mythic prop. In A Portrait
of the Artist the Dantean-Scholastic inspiration is kneaded into the form of the
Bildungsroman to underscore Stephen Dedalus’s sentimental education. As
the novel unfolds, it rehearses a deliberate sequence of dramatic passions. An
early vignette finds Stephen cowering under the table as he is chastised by his
aunt (nicknamed Dante) for entertaining thoughts of marrying the protestant
neighbour’s daughter. The next chapter continues the boy’s amorous education
by presenting a series of images of desire: Stephen daydreams about romantic
adventure inspired by his reading of The Count of Montecristo,5 experiences the

first stirrings of adolescent love, and is finally accosted by a prostitute. Pity and
terror are the prevailing motifs in Chapter 3, where pity is associated with the
countenance of the Virgin Mary, and terror is of course evoked by Father Arnall’s
hellfire sermons. By this reading, the dramatic passions function as stages –
commonplaces in the classic, Aristotelian sense – through which thought must
necessarily pass on its way to Truth. And the crowning moment of that comedic
trajectory is of course the ‘outburst of profane joy’ (Joyce 2003: 186) that sees
Stephen finally responding to his artistic calling towards the end of Chapter 4.
My point is not simply that images of pity, terror and joy punctuate the
structure of the novel. But that to consider their representation within the
framework of a Bildungsroman, or within the story of an artistic and amorous
apprenticeship, is above all to say that tragic passions are emotions that need to
be outgrown. If the structure of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man elaborates
on the idea that ‘tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner
in art’, it does so by relying on a schematic distribution of the passions under the
terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’.
With Deleuze it is rather a question of thinking through an excessive,
transformative power already at work in the formation of tragedy. Joy inheres
in the tragic itself to the extent that the genre is identified with this excess, with
the moment of metamorphosis understood as a passage at the extreme. It should
be clear that this idea of joy has nothing in common with the joyous outburst
that crowns the story of a young man’s education in A Portrait of the Artist.
But it does warrant a comparison with the comedic inspiration of Joyce’s later
works. In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, joy is divorced from a representation
of the characters’ emotions and tied to an impersonal, ‘prehuman’ affirmation
of the plurality of life. It was famously Joyce himself who characterized Molly’s
monologue, in the final Chapter of Ulysses, as something more primordial than
‘a human apparition’: a figure for the earth, ‘which is prehuman and presumably
posthuman’ (Joyce 1957: 180). The various human passions represented in the
novel – Stephen’s grief, Bloom’s mournful pity, and later his jealousy and desire –
are gathered and subsumed in that final ‘Yes,’ but in such a way as to liberate each
passion from its generic distribution.
Consider, also, the phantasmagoria of ‘Circe’, or the exuberant language of
Finnegans Wake. Everything about these texts speaks of hybridity and an extreme
density of sense. Often represented in a single episode are moments of grief
and glory, mourning and exaltation. For example, the Wake’s mythic opening
conflates ‘Comeday morm’ with ‘tragoady thundersday’ (Joyce 1992: 5), and in

a parody of the Eucharist, ‘thirstay mournin’ (Joyce 1992: 6) with a ‘fadograph
of a yestern [yeast and Easter] scene’ (Joyce 1992: 7). In the final chapter, ALP
remembers nostalgically her husband’s youthful vigour: ‘you were the . . .
invision [envy] of Indelond. And, by Thorror, you looked it! My lips went livid
for from the joy of fear’ (Joyce 1992: 626). There is an obvious sense in which
Bloom’s Nighttown fantasy – mixing feelings of guilt, sorrow, political triumph,
and masochistic pleasure – is intensely funny, even as it deals with the pain of
Molly’s betrayal and dwells on the devastating loss of little Rudy, Bloom’s child.
The numerous vignettes of warring brothers woven throughout the Wake are
clearly played out for comedy, as is the retelling of the Tristan story in Book II.4,
and the play-by-play description of the parents’ love-making later in the novel.
But it is the quality of the images, not merely their content that marks out these
works as comedic, properly speaking. Joyce’s visions, if that is the right word, are
pitched in an ontological space for which modernity has no proper concept.6
Briefly put, for the later Joyce the labour of writing is still a variant of the
Christian path celebrated by Dante and Aquinas – a secular version of the
ascent from the passion of Good Friday to the Sunday of the soul. But now
the passage from tragedy to comedy comes to rest on the affirmation of an
element of indeterminacy in the representation itself. At the root of every image,
guaranteeing its production as distinct from other images is a movement of
thought that remains irreducible to genre – that is in fact ana-generic. Comedy
becomes a name for the kind of writing that seeks the point of indiscernibility
between dramatic passions.
For his part, Deleuze associates this same moment with the third synthesis
of time, the time of the eternal return, ‘after the comic and the tragic . . . when
the tragic becomes joyful and the comic becomes the comedy of the Overman’
(Deleuze 1994: 297). The word after, as it is used here, is the strongest clue yet to
the significance of genre in Deleuze’s thought. It tells us that genres are temporally
determined concepts, that there is an aftermath of genre, a post-generic state
to which generic thought itself aspires. Furthermore, when the tragic becomes
joyful, when it evolves past itself, it does not simply become a dead or redundant
genre, but effects a return to an original state of indeterminacy.
The consequences of claiming that joy inheres in the tragic cannot be
overstated. I have already touched on the significance of this notion for a
modern reshaping of the dialectic. Deleuze’s philosophy retains the structure
of an apprenticeship in the dramatic passions but rather than relating to time/
finitude as a negative element to be overcome in the progress of knowledge, it
renders time/finitude as a force inseparable from reality itself. In this context,

joy becomes synonymous with a movement of thought that embraces the simple
reality, the positive reality of the limit. That is to say, joy does not supplant or
redeem the tragic passions. It expresses all passions indistinctly, and celebrates
the reality of all passion as power.
We have seen that throughout Deleuze’s career ‘novel’ and ‘tragedy’ come
to stand for the power of writing at large. Both terms allow Deleuze to think
through the formal strategies by which writing is able to thematize reality in its
fullness. The novel takes charge of the discovery within modern thought of the
possibility of a new type of empiricism; and it hones or tests the techniques of that
empiricism. The tragic, in turn, responds to the articulation of an originary, but
passive force by which reality gives itself (is given) to experience – the dialectic
pulled off its hinges. The importance of generic thinking for schizoanalysis (and
of these two genres in particular) is explained by the necessity of considering
reality always as a process of emergence and always as a whole. To reckon with
genre, in this respect, is to rehearse a peculiar genetic history. It is to ascribe a new
philosophical power to the thinking of the limit – and ultimately, to recognize
an irreducible passivity at work in the formal procedures that determine the
production of reality as a whole.
Notes
1 The rhetorical weakness of Deleuze’s comparison is also instructive. To say that

philosophy is like a novel is already to assume that there are protocols of reading
and writing best defined in terms of generic categories; and that to read and write
productively is to do so across these categories.
2 On this point see Anthony Uhlmann (2011) especially his excellent reading of
Virginia Woolf in Chapter 5. See also Jason Skeet’s discussion of Woolf ’s The
Waves in light of Deleuze’s Cinema books (Skeet 2008).
3 Erika Fülöp provides an insightful commentary on this connection, even
as she takes issue with Deleuze’s interpretation of Proust and argues for the
incommensurability of Deleuzian difference and Proustian essence. For both
Proust and Deleuze, she observes, ‘we can speak not only of a “différence
qualitative” [qualitative difference] resulting from the uniqueness of the viewpoint
proper to each person, but also of a multiplicity inherent in every individual, a
multiplicity that represents the “réalité profonde” [profound reality], that is, the
essence of each person’ (Fülöp 2009: 40).
4 On this point I refer the reader to Deleuze’s 1978 lecture series on Kant
(Deleuze 1978) and to an excellent commentary by Somers-Hall (2011),
especially pp. 67–71.
5 By a happy coincidence, the name of the count with whom Stephen identifies
also recalls Dante. I am thankful to Philip Podolsky for drawing my attention
to this detail.
6 For a more detailed discussion of the ontology of the image in Joyce and
Deleuze, with particular focus on the power of the simulacrum in Finnegans
Wake, see Borg (2010).
References
Alighieri, Dante (1966–67), La Divina Commedia [La Commedia secondo l’antica

vulgata], ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. Milan: Mondadori, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean
Hollander, New York: Doubleday, 2000–07.
Aquinas (1947), Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.
New York: Benziger Bros.
Borg, Ruben (2010), ‘Mirrored Disjunctions: On a Deleuzo-Joycean Theory of the
Image’. Journal of Modern Literature 33(2 Spring): 131–48.
Deleuze, Gilles (1978), ‘Lecture on Kant.’ Cours Vincenne: 21/03/1978, trans. Melissa
McMahon, Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.
php?cle=67&groupe=Kant&langue=2 (last accessed 16 December 2012).
—(1980), ‘Lecture on Leibniz – Cours Vincenne - 15/04/1980,’ trans. Charles Stivale,
Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=50&gro
upe=Leibniz&langue=2 (last accessed 10 December 2012).
Press.
—(1995), Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.
—(1998), Essays, Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco.
London: Verso.
—(2000), Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
—(2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade. New York:
Semiotexte.
—(2006), Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
—(1987), A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
—(1994), What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.
—(2000), Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Fowler, Alastair (2003), New Literary History 34(2 Spring): 185–200.

Fülöp, Erika (2009), ‘Different Essences and Essential Differences: Proust Versus
Deleuze’, in Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping (eds), Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s
Proust. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 39–46.
Guillén, Claudio (1971), Literature as System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Joyce, James (1957), Letters I, ed. Stuart Gilbert. London: Faber and Faber.
—(1959), The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard
Ellmann. New York: Viking Press.
—(1968), Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—(1992), Finnegans Wake. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—(2003), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Skeet, Jason (2008), ‘Woolf plus Deleuze: Cinema, Literature and Time Travel’. Rhizomes
16 (Summer). Web.
Somers-Hall, Henry (2011), ‘Time Out of Joint: Hamlet and the Pure Form of Time’.
Deleuze Studies 5 (Dec. Supplement): 56–76.
Szondi, Peter (2002), An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Uhlmann, Anthony (2011), Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov. New York:
Continuum.
116
Part Three
Schizoanalytic Interventions
6
Is Critique et Clinique Schizoanalytic?:

Schizoanalysis and Deleuze’s
Critical and Clinical Project
Garin Dowd
As Jean-Claude Polack has pointed out, the specifically therapeutic propositions

in the opening section of Anti-Oedipus derive from ones tested in institutional
psychotherapy as practised by Guattari at La Borde:
The liberation of spaces (the ‘stroll’); self-management and the decom

partmentalization and rotation of tasks (the ‘grid’); the abandoning of the
reference only to speech and language; distrust and reservation with regard to
familialist interpretations; the permanent cartography of collective assemblages
of enunciation. (Polack 2010: 63)
It is also true however that in the opening section of the book such propositions
are often amplified by and – in terms of the sequencing of ideas – apparently
inspired by moments in literature. This mutually informing relationship receives
confirmation in Guattari’s 1979 interview where his interest in Virginia Woolf
and Samuel Beckett is explained (Guattari 1996) in the context of psychotherapy.1
While the relationship between the multiple articulations of ‘schizoanalysis’ –
and the many other names by which it goes – and the discipline of psychoanalysis
is explicitly analysed by Deleuze and Guattari, that between the multifaceted
project and literature does not receive a systematic account. Kafka: Toward a
Minor Literature is, at first glance, the closest Deleuze and/or Guattari come to
writing what could be described as a schizoanalysis of literature. The book, on
one level, represents a consolidated and focused reframing of the often expressed
importance of literature for their schizoanalytic enterprise as outlined in Anti-
Oedipus and consolidated in A Thousand Plateaus. This chapter will suggest,
however, that Deleuze’s final volume of essays, Critique et clinique, represents
a more appropriate volume by way of which to approach the question of the

conjunction of schizoanalysis and literature over the career as a whole, albeit in
a language largely shorn of the idioms of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Setting aside the question of the relationship, schizoanalysis is in the first
instance primarily the name of a set of procedures designed to get around the
impasses, such as they were identified by Deleuze and Guattari, represented by
psychoanalysis, summarized in Dialogues – by Deleuze in the following terms:
‘We’ve only said two things against psychoanalysis: that it breaks up all produc
tions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances. In this way it wrecks both
aspects of the assemblage: the machine assemblage of desire and the collective
assemblage of enunciation’ (Deleuze 1987: 77). These words commence the
section in Dialogues on ‘Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse’ which also includes the
note, signed in the name of Deleuze rather than Deleuze and Parnet, on the
critical and the clinical. Psychoanalysis, contrary to its avowed intentions,
exorcises the unconscious: ‘What psychoanalysis calls production or formation
of the unconscious are failures, conflicts, compromises or puns’ (Deleuze 1987:
77). In the development of psychoanalytic interpretative frameworks, represented
by the work of Lacan, the same thing repeats itself: ‘Something always has to recall
something else – metaphor or metonymy’ (Deleuze 1987: 77–8). What is set out
in the pages of this section of Dialogues is in effect an outline of schizoanalytic
method – if one may use this term – as contrasted with that of psychoanalysis.2
That the section begins with a discussion of how psychoanalysis neutralizes the
utterances of patients is perhaps a fruitful point of entry into the consideration
of literature within the context of schizoanalytic procedures: ‘Psychoanalysis is
entirely designed to prevent people from talking and to remove from them entirely
all conditions of true enunciation’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 80). Psychoanalysis,
despite its interest in the proximity of madness and writing, does not in fact
wish to allow delirium to have its say. The ‘its say’ is important here, given
that a decision regarding the arborescent model of interpretation favoured by
psychoanalysis – even in its Lacanian version – is challenged the schizoanalyst’s
insistence on ‘cartographic’ or rhizomatic readings which seek to refuse the
grounding force of metaphor and metonymy, just as they also challenge the
retention of the impasse of the subject in Lacan.3
In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari highlight those ‘unfortunate psychoanalytic
interpretations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 9) which neutralize the work of
literary authors, who thereby become victims of ‘(t)he mistake of psychoanalysis
[which] was to trap itself and us, since it lives off the market value of neurosis
from which it gains all its surplus value’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 10).
Is Critique et Clinique Schizoanalytic? 121
Psychoanalysis, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, is entirely inadequate when it

comes to understanding affective states. It is content, as they would later note in
What Is Philosophy?, to ‘give forbidden objects to itemised affections or substitute
simple ambivalences for zones of indetermination’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
174). By contrast, and against the grain of such hermeneutic neutralizations (or
effectuations/actualizations), the great writers (and certainly those admired by
Deleuze and Guattari) work at a molecular level against the molar grain of what
they call the ‘major’ language, actively producing such zones of indetermination.4
Minor language makes language itself ‘stammer’ – as the work of Beckett among
others attests (Deleuze 1998: 109–11).
For Deleuze and Guattari, where schizoanalysis discloses lineaments and lines
(via its ‘cartographic’ method) psychoanalysis closes down via its competency.5
The protean non-discipline of schizoanalysis can never be straightforwardly
accommodated by the discipline of literary studies – to set aside the question
of philosophy – since it does not belong to that domain; it is interstitial, or
proclaims itself as such. Schizoanalysis, as it might be translated from the
domains with which the concept was initially associated to the field of literature,
for Deleuze and Guattari would entail, as a condition, the subjection of scholarly
competency to a destabilizing and undermining impediment (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 106). Within this context Roland Barthes’ Lacanian jouissance
(Barthes 1976: 21; 1984:164) – the pleasure that derives from the writerly text
or from the writerly and resistant reading of the readerly text – is founded on a
desire still rooted in the textual exercises of structuralism, and thus belongs to
what Anti-Oedipus locates on the paranoid pole, with a role played by repression,
lack and the family scene.6
Consider this example of a psychoanalytic understanding of writing by Serge
Léclaire, a disciple of Lacan (and cited supportively by Deleuze in Logic of Sense –
Léclaire 1999: 230–3): writing entails the attempt to re-produce or re-present the
unconscious. The unconscious, however, is for Léclaire, by definition an Oedipal,
domestic territory, featuring such recognizable psychoanalytic objects as ‘child,
penis, or breast’ and verbs as ‘to beat, breach, or devour’. In the articulation of the
unconscious in the form of writing:
[T]he letter written on paper insidiously tends to substitute itself for the object
and to reintegrate the absolutely other, or the real (lack, anxiety, jouissance), in a
literary order in which the quasi-fetishized materiality of the text takes the place
and function assumed by the real-object (the object as the unnameable index of
the real) in the reference text constituted by the unconscious corpus. (Léclaire
1999: 322)
Léclaire writes: ‘every text is, in its very structure, the veiling of a defect and
. . . by itself a text can do no more than reveal semblances of lack’ (Léclaire
1999: 323). Léclaire, and of course Lacan, also reserved a special place for
délire or dé-lire (to un-read, that is, in delirium) in writing. The limitations of
such an ‘un-reading’ are similar to those identified by Deleuze and Guattari as
problematic in deconstruction and in the whole textualist turn represented by
the Tel Quel theorists.
Schizoanalysis of/and literature
In describing schizoanalysis as a ‘science des chimères’ in his editorial for the

first issue of the journal, Chimères, Guattari emphasized: its protean nature; its
multiplicity; the fact that it is difficult to locate definitively; that it is a domain
which occasionally, if not systematically, convenes with the simulacra of
Deleuze’s upturned Platonism; that it may have as much to do with art and the
arts as it does with forms and modes of critical utterance (Guattari 1987: 1).
Schizoanalysis as a practice should designate, he asserts, a work in progress, as
well as a way of keeping each of the disciplines from which the journal would
draw in touch with its own folie.
Guattari was himself preoccupied with the prospect of a delirious expression
which writing could facilitate and of which certain authors such as James
Joyce were privileged exponents. As Peter Pál Pelbart has suggested, Guattari’s
interest in Joyce’s writing may have something to do with Lacan’s statement as
to the ‘unreadability’ of Joyce, in his seminar XXIII of 1975–76 (Pélbart 2011:
70). Lacan’s identification of Joyce’s writing with the Sinthome, Pelbart points
out, could not be more different from how Guattari conceives of the way in
which work such as that of Joyce is an opening, going ‘against all structuring
or unifying functions’ (Pélbart 2011: 70). Such writing offers, as Guattari sees
it, a ‘poetico-political opening, prefiguration of the collective assemblage
of enunciation’ (Pélbart 2011: 70). Deleuze’s concept of literary authors as
symptomatologists already contains the germ of such a notion. In this context
Birman states that
this is the cardinal idea of the clinic for Deleuze, because as impersonal, the
singularity is no longer identified with the idea of unity, given that the one of
the unary trait, confronted with the ideas of the multiple and of dispersion,
disappears for ever. (Birman 1998: 487, trans. mine)
If this is a perception which Deleuze already has prior to Guattari, it is nonetheless

still true that Guattari helps him advance this clinical element in Anti-Oedipus.
Literature for Deleuze represents another way to explore the clinical, understood
as the trajectory towards impersonal singularity; it is, as Birman puts it, ‘a
privileged laboratory’ for experimentation in this regard.
If in Critique et clinique the concept of ‘a life’ is the philosophical formation
of a type of literary vitalism specific to literature on an ontological level (Smith
1998: xiii), the concept is an addition to the catalogue of concepts of singularity,
or non-organic vitality, inaugurated in Logic of Sense but reiterated in Deleuze’s
late essay ‘Immanence: a life’:
The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life
that disengages a pure event freed from the accidents of the inner and outer life,
that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. A homo tantum
with whom everyone sympathises, and who attains a kind of beatitude. This is a
haecceity, which is no longer an individuation but a singularisation: a life of pure
immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil. (Deleuze 2003: 171–2)
The end of this quotation points to the other founding moment of the critical
and clinical project – namely the book on Nietzsche. This is where, for Smith
(as for Bogue and Zourabichvili) the ethical dimension comes in: Nietzschean
transvaluation beyond good and evil. As Smith observes:
The ‘Good’ or healthy life . . . is an overflowing and ascending form of existence, a

mode of life that is able to transform itself depending on the forces it encounters,
always increasing the power to live, always opening up new possibilities of life,
and must be evaluated not only critically but also clinically. (Smith 1998: xv)
Pre-schizoanalytic Deleuze
The matter is far from straightforward however. It can be argued that there exists
in Deleuze a schizoanalysis avant la lettre in the shape of the pre-Guattari Deleuze
of Proust et les signes, parts of Logic of Sense including the appendices, and the
essay on Sacher-Masoch. Indeed the Deleuze of Proust et les signes is himself
subjected to a schizoanalytic remodelling in the shape of its two additions, the
first in 1970 and the second in 1975. Even the claim that Deleuze finally makes
his long-planned statement on literature in his ultimate collection is one that has
to be subject to significant and complicating qualification. As some have noted,
this volume owes much to Guattari (notably in the essays devoted to themes
from the psychoanalytic literature and in the sections on the stammer and the
affect which draw on their jointly signed corpus) and thus can be said to be in
part schizoanalytic in disposition. However, the book must also be considered
in part a continuation of the pre-Guattari writings on literature, such as those
on Zola, Tournier and Klossowski collected in the appendices to Logic of Sense.
The chronology and the would-be narrative of evolution in Deleuze’s thinking
about literature is further compromised by the fact that in Critique et clinique
the core statement on schizoanalysis as this might pertain to literature is in fact
a rewriting of a statement in Logic of Sense. A pre-Guattari Deleuze and a post-
Guattari Deleuze are thus equally present in the pages of Critique et clinique.
Deleuze had, for example, already set out the inherent problems of what he and
Guattari would later name the disease of ‘interpretosis’ in Logic of Sense. There, as
an alternative, Deleuze takes up afresh the idea of authors as symptomatologists
which he had recently proposed in relation to Sacher-Masoch, but now reframed
in more general terms as a statement about ‘great’ literary authors. Both this
symptomalogical aspect as well as other parts of the book echo the earlier book
on Nietzsche. In Logic of Sense, however, it is the singular figure of Antonin
Artaud who would become increasingly important to Deleuze in his attempt
to identify the deficiencies of a combination of diverse systems, including
Kantian critique, Husserlian phenomenology, structuralism and psychoanalysis.
The deployment of the concept of the body without organs in Logic may still
be Lacanian, but other elements of Artaud which will later enable Deleuze to
avoid the Lacanian problem are also conspicuously present. These include the
notion of a schizoid remaking of the world, which is the mantra of Artaud’s
‘Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu’. Another of the appendices, the study of
Klossowski, had already gone some way towards the pragmatics which would
later come to characterize schizoanalysis as such. The essay begins by referring
to the ‘astonishing parallelism of the body and language’, and of their mutual
reflection in one another in the fiction of Klossowski. It is in particular when
Deleuze comes to discuss Klossowski’s 1965 novel The Baphomet that aspects
of what would come to be reformulated in Anti-Oedipus can be discerned, and
thus, ultimately, the recasting of schizoanalysis as pragmatics in A Thousand
Plateaus:
These are pre-individual and impersonal singularities – the splendor of the

indefinite pronoun – mobile, communicating, penetrating one another across
an infinity of modifications. Fascinating world where the identity of the self is
lost, not to the benefit of the identity of the One or the unity of the Whole, but to
the advantage of an intense multiplicity and a power of metamorphosis, where
relations of force play within one another. (Deleuze 1991: 297)
In another of the appendices, on Michel Tournier, Deleuze refers to the retreat

of Robinson, in Vendredi, ou les limbes du pacifique (Tournier 1967), into a
kind of larval pouch in the earth as a return to the ‘cosmic genealogy of the
schizophrenic’ and describes his constructions as those of ‘nonconsumable
schizophrenic objects’ made by Robinson in Tournier’s novel (Deleuze 1991:
314). When literature is discussed in Logic of Sense, it is with the sense that we
are encountering the remaking of the world with impersonal singularities, events
and phantasms. Arguably the book presents the rudiments of a schizoanalysis
avant la lettre.
The texts collected in Critique et clinique include many which take up again
the writing of authors of key importance in the first critical and clinical period
of Deleuze’s engagement with literature: Proust, Carroll, Wolfson, Masoch and
Artaud are all present. The text which is perhaps most explicitly influenced by
Guattari included in the collection is ‘What children say.’ This text is notable
for other reasons, in that it is not about literature, but about utterance within
a clinical context (Deleuze 1998: 63). The reference is to the manner in which
psychoanalysis has treated its children, little Richard in the case of Melanie
Klein and little Hans in the case of Freud. In opposition to the archeaological
method of psychoanalysis Deleuze advocates Guattari’s cartographic method.
A crucial underlining of the avoidance of interpretation is made here. In
adherence to the slogan ‘make maps’ as proffered in A Thousand Plateaus,
the schizoanalyst should extend the trajectories of the child’s expression to
see if the line can be consolidated into something which, as Deleuze puts it,
overturns the situation. In the same essay, ‘[t]he unconscious no longer deals
with persons and objects, but with trajectories and becomings; it is no longer an
unconscious of commemoration but one of mobilisation’ (Deleuze 1998: 63). At
this point Deleuze specifically invokes Guattari, citing both Les Années d’hiver
and Cartographies Schizonalytiques (Deleuze 1998: 63). Continuing within the
therapeutic, clinical context, the text most closely allied to the schizoanalytic
project, in particular in terms of chronology and subject matter, is the reprint
of Deleuze’s preface to Wolfson – a key author in the Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze
refers in the chapter to the single error of psychoanalysis (Deleuze 1998: 17).
The lesson from Wolfson for the discipline comes from the schizophrenic who
eschews familial categories in order to wander ‘among world-wide and cosmic
categories – this is why he is always studying something. He is constantly

rewriting De Natura rerum. He evolves in things and in words’ (Deleuze 1998:
17). The short text on Masoch published in 1989 returns to insights of the 1967
text on the author but links it to the vocabulary of the Kafka book (Deleuze
invokes the concepts of minor language and style) – hence also to what will later
be referred to, following Lecercle, as Deleuze’s two poetics: ‘[t]he suspension of
bodies and the stammering of language constitute the bodies-language or the
oeuvre of Masoch’ (Deleuze 1998: 55).
But the legacy in Critique et clinique of a pre-Guattari Deleuze intertwined
with and complicated by Guattari can be seen to be more pervasive. The essay
‘To have done with judgement’ sees Deleuze return both to the concerns of Logic
of Sense, where Artaud is important, and to the more radical version of the Body
without Organs which Deleuze and Guattari develop together, directly inspired
by Artaud, in Anti-Oedipus. Momo – Artaud’s alter-ego, is after all ‘momo
contre la psychanalyse’ and Artaud the author who taught writing how to be
schizophrenic.
Schizo-critique, schizo-clinique?
The critical commentary on Deleuze has responded in a variety of disparate ways
to the question of a schizoanalysis of literature and to the broader question of the
place of schizoanalysis in Deleuze’s work in particular. It is perhaps telling that in
his idiosyncratic reading of Deleuze’s work, Žižek (2004) has nothing to say about
this final ‘collaboration’ which Critique et clinique may be said to be, namely if
one insists that there is a strong influence by Guattari on Deleuze’s final book;
nor for that matter does Badiou (1997) deem the volume worthy of comment in
his book on Deleuze, neither commenting directly on the book nor including
any passages from it in his selection of extracts from Deleuze’s oeuvre. Might one
deduce from this avoidance the fact that the book is in fact schizoanalytic and
therefore more allied to Guattari’s Cartographies Schizanalytiques than it is to the
Logic of Sense and the texts in which Badiou can find his version of Deleuze, or
where Žižek can find a closet Hegelian? Is Critique et clinique avoided by Žižek
and Badiou in part because the book may be said to be wholly schizoanalytic
(and hence Guattarian)?7
Broadening this debate out a little, beyond the specific reception of Critique
et clinique, a far more subtle (albeit still critical) appraisal of what both Žižek
and Badiou argue is the ‘genuine’ Deleuze (pre-Guattari, or in books such as
Le Pli) and the ‘fake’ Deleuze is proposed by Philippe Mengue (Mengue 2009).
Mengue’s analysis of the successive modifications made by Deleuze to his study
of Proust claims to demonstrate a tension between the respective manifestations
of Deleuze’s thought in 1964, 1970 and 1975. The first of these, the Deleuze of
1964, retains the mysticism of the unveiling of a truth in Proust (also noted
by Lecercle 2002); the second, the Proust of the literary machine, sees Deleuze
in part retooling the Recherche in the embryonic conceptual framework being
developed by Guattari; the third Proust is post-Anti-Oedipus and has absorbed a
more fully developed thinking of the machinic.
This return to the pre-Guattari Deleuze of the Logic of Sense shows that
the version of Deleuze which Mengue wishes to salvage still accords a place
for interpretation – pace the slogan: experiment, never interpret – which for
Mengue is a limiting and reductive precept of those he derisively regards as the
sycophants of Deleuze. Moreover in the shape of the 1970 Deleuze, for Mengue,
and to return to a point made above, ‘one recognised the possible affiliation
between Deleuze’s reading and that of the textualists, such as Roland Barthes
and Julia Kristeva, whose central concept is that of the “Signifier” ’ (Mengue
2009: 65). This arises partly because of the still anthropocentric overcoding of
the encounter with literature when it is considered within the framework of
the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis. Hence the insistence on a machinic
unconscious which is able to include inhuman becomings via the machinic
assemblages with forces beyond the human.
Other commentators, this time more receptive to Deleuze, have furthered
this line of enquiry. Predating the commentary by Mengue, Alan Bourassa in
his essay ‘Literature, Language and the non-human’, explores the insistence in
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of language in the context of the orthodox vision
of literature as inherently human to which it represents such a stark challenge.
Bourassa argues that what is entailed in is an opening up of the dimension of
the non-literary in literature as well as of the non-human in the human: ‘But
if we add language into the set-up it becomes altogether a more complicated
matter, since as he argues language opens up the dimension of the non-literary
in literature as well as of the non-human in the human’ (Bourassa 2002: 61).
The most enduringly significant author for whom the resources of Deleuze
and Guattari continue to afford trajectories in the study of language and literature
is Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Lecercle’s vital contribution to our understanding of the
question posed in the subtitle of the present chapter – is Critique et clinique
schizoanalytic? – is to suggest that the emergence of what he regards as Deleuze’s
independent poetics is the indicator of two diverging Deleuzes, or two Deleuzes

in tension; the first is the ‘Guattari Deleuze’ who is focused on assemblages,
whereas the second is a high modernist avant-garde elitist who produces a
poetics centred on work concerned with the reflexivity of language.8 Lecercle
argues that through the concept of style in the final book Deleuze attempts
to overcome the tension between the high modernist in him and the political
poetics which emerges through his collaborations with Guattari.
In adopting the concept of ‘style’, Lecercle (countering to some degree the
claim made by Mengue) claims that Deleuze wished to distance his thought
from Barthes and Derrida (Lecerle 2002: 220). The concept gestures towards
domains other than literature, for example, painting and general behaviour:
Style is a name not for a form of diction (the choice of the proper, or the
metaphorical, word), not for a structure of signifiers, not for a deliberate
organisation of language, not even for the result of spontaneous inspiration, but
for the discord, the disequilibrium, the stuttering that affect language at its most
alive. (Lecercle 2002: 221)
The author as subject in this process must be rethought not as being at the origin
of their style; instead the subject has to considered as the effect of their style
(Lecercle 2002: 223).
Let us consider in this context an example from the work of the French author
Eric Chevillard, which concerns an animal-becoming in the lineage of Kafka.
In his 1993 novel La nébuleuse du crabe, Chevillard presents what one might
describe as a manic inheritor of Samuel Beckett’s Worm (from The Unnameable).
Crab is the name given to what the novel describes as something ‘ungraspable,
not evasive or deceptive but blurry, as if his congenital myopia had little by little
clouded his contours’ (Chevillard 1997: 1). At times Crab takes on qualities that
suggest his crustacean namesakes but mostly he/it operates beyond the realm
of character and exceeds its locations and locutions. He/it is, as the novel’s title
suggests, at once a gargantuan all-encompassing medium and a series of multiple
folds and articulations within his medium. The first large-format mode of Crab
is exemplified in the passage:
How many times will he have to fold the sky to make it fit into his pocket? . . .
And once he has managed to fold it, what pocket is he to put it in? That’s another
problem. In his trouser pocket, like a handkerchief? Then what would he do
with his handkerchief? The other pocket is already full of sand: Crab couldn’t
leave the desert behind either. His inside jacket pocket, which has a hole in it,
contains the precipices and ravines that make up the mountains, which he will
certainly need some day; he knows himself well. Finally he slips the sky into his
breast pocket, over his heart, like a gaily patterned but unobtrusive foulard . . . .
Next Crab rolls up the yards, the lawns, he makes a great pile of the land and
loads it onto a wheelbarrow, he collects the sea in a barrel, he assembles his flock,
the most ferocious ones in front – one last look to make sure he hasn’t forgotten
anything – and off he goes. (Chevillard 1997: 97–8)
In his large-format mode Crab has the world inhabiting him, but in his small-
format mode ‘[H]e has been said to spend two or three days as a parasite in the
intestine of a cow now and then’ (Chevillard 1997: 104). This sentence appears in
the course of what could be described as the compressed micro-bildungrsroman
section of the novel, recounting how, having been abandoned by his mother
at birth, Crab is taken in successively by a she-wolf, a hen, a shrimp, a bee, a
mare, and then ‘one after another, a garter snake, a magpie, a whale, a lioness,
a cat and an ant taught him all he knew. Others followed. Finally a bear took
his education in hand with such firmness that Crab, still under her influence,
continues to hibernate to this day, no matter how giddy he makes himself with
coffee’ (Chevillard 1997: 103–4). The novel ends with Crab performing a play,
then, when the curtain does not fall, performing it again. When the curtain still
does not come down Crab embarks on a programme of entertainment:
Crab sand, danced, tossed off jump-rope rhymes, prayers, listed the major world
capitals, the largest rivers, he spread his knowledge wide and thin, he counted
as high as humanly possible, he explored the great moral and philosophical
questions, he spun many a tale, he told the story of his life beginning with
Darwin’s childhood, he dissected his principal organs. . . . But still the curtain
did not fall. (Chevillard 1997: 126)
Finally reduced to silence, having exhausted all of the possibilities of filling time,
Crab is unceremoniously withdrawn from the stage. A trapdoor opens and he
disappears.
In an earlier novel Palafox, we encounter another polymorphous and
protean character who likewise challenges the viability of the personal pronoun.
Chevillard has since then produced several further novels exploring protean
‘characters’ as well as a series of mordantly comic texts derived from his daily
blog entries.9
On the one hand, La nébuleuse du crabe, Palafox and the work of Chevillard
more generally are creations which the language of literary criticism might
once have described as postmodern metafiction. Literary creations such as
Crab however are also apt to be read as experiments in literary production
owing as much to theorisations of literary production as they do to their

literary forbears; as much then to literary theory or ‘poststructuralist’ (to adopt
an inappropriately Anglophone nomenclature) philosophy as to precursors
such as Kafka, Artaud, Michaux or Beckett. They emerge in a culture and
in particular in a literary critical culture which has in part absorbed the
theory by which one might describe them. Yet, in writing a hypothetical
essay about Chevillard’s creation in terms of schizoanalysis, would one be
doing any different than Deleuze and Guattari do when they invoke Beckett’s
schizophrenic strolls? In other words, the announcement of a schizoanalysis
of literature immediately falls into the trap of description, interpretation, and,
crucially, metaphor.
Does this apparent contradiction mean that a schizoanalysis of literature is
over even as it is announced, tripped up by its own too close proximity, by the
very fact that if it wishes to promote an anti-hermeneutic reading of literature, it
must still somehow negotiate a form of exegesis, exposition and exemplification
that bears the hallmarks of interpretation, illustration, metonymy and metaphor?
Is it even possible for literary criticism to escape behaving towards its object of
scrutiny in the same way that psychoanalysis does towards the clinical subject?
(Lambert 2000: 141).
To explore this question further, it is worth considering a definition of what
schizoanalysis adopts from schizophrenia, this time from Eugene Holland,
for whom:
Schizophrenia . . . designate(s) unlimited semiosis, a radically fluid and

extemporaneous form of meaning, paranoia by contrast would designate an
absolute system of belief where all meaning has permanently fixed and exhaustively
defined by a supreme authority, figure-head, or god. (Holland 1999: 3)
On the face of it, there is nothing here that would find itself countered by a
poststructuralist textualist paradigm of reading. When Deleuze and Deleuze and
Guattari together offer reworkings of psychoanalytical cases – such as the Wolf
Man – they are attempting to liberate these narratives from the fixity imposed on
them by Freud. Of course, the fact that they only have Freud’s account of the
Wolf Man’s narrative means that in a curious manner theirs becomes a notionally
deconstructionist reading against the grain, finding the proxy narrative
embedded in Freud’s discussion to, in fact, undermine the interpretation going
on within that discussion. At this level then schizoanalysis remains at least
to a limited degree textualist.
As Kenneth Surin argues, however, the insistence on the idea of the Outside, in
particular as it appears in the opening section of A Thousand Plateaus, implicitly
has in its sights, the famous pronouncement of Derrida in Of Grammatology
that there is no hors-texte (Surin 2000: 172). Derridean intertextuality, with its
ontology of the signifier and the signified and ‘with the correlative assertion
of a fundamental disruption of the relation between signifier and signified, is
fundamentally incompatible with the “pragmatics” of writing that Deleuze is
advocating’ (Surin 2000: 173). While both Derrida and Deleuze are committed
to a view of the text which sees it capable of having its organizing principles
controverted, the approach of Derrida ultimately requires and in some way
prescribes a semiotic point which is the locus of its aporetic unravelling. This
semiotic point remains reliant on the structure. In place of this ontology Deleuze’s
Nietzschean powers of the false, developed from the book on Nietzsche, through
Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, reprised in Cinema 2 the Time-Image
and threaded throughout the essays collected in Critique et clinique yields an
alternative, described by Surin as ‘a power that functions as the book’s “outside”
in order to overwhelm the text’s aspirations to fixity and hierarchy’ (Surin 2000:
173). For Surin it is in the negotiation of the Outside, from whence the powers
of the false emanate, that sets Deleuze apart from Derrida for whom there is no
hors-texte (but not in a prosaic way). Writing for Deleuze has, Surin argues,
perforce to do with something other than itself, it measures this exteriority by

surveying and mapping it, including domains that are yet to come. Writing,
in other words, has to do with the creation of worlds that are specified by the
assemblages the writer enters into, even as he or she is invented by still other
assemblages. (Surin 2000: 171)
Literature is driven forward in its experimental endeavour – of whom Beckett is

in many ways Deleuze’s core exemplar – by new utterances (in Foucault’s sense)
which demand formal innovations.
For example, Lecercle reads the famous opening sentence of Beckett’s novel
Murphy – ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’ – as a
halting act of fabrication, scene-setting, protagonist-placement, furnishing and
illumination. Beckett’s style as stuttering is for Lecercle an instance of literature
coming into contact with the Outside – a concept whose derivation for both
Deleuze and Foucault lies in the explicitly literary context of Blanchot: ‘[a]s a
result of this tension, of this stuttering, langue reaches out towards the limit of
language, that is, towards the partition where language gives place to its other,
silence’ (Lecercle 2002: 231–2).
Pelbart has commented on the role of the concept of the outside in Foucault
as read by Deleuze that ‘[t]he outside, taken for abolished, keeps reappearing as
strategy’ (Pelbart 2000: 207). Pelbart is referring here to a section of the book on
Foucault where Deleuze discusses the turn in Foucault from epistemology to
strategy (Deleuze 1987: 112). If strata belong to the earth, Deleuze writes, then
strategy belongs to the air or the ocean. The book concludes with references to
Herman Melville and Henri Michaux, each an exemplary figure of the encounter
of literature and madness:
On the limit of the strata, the whole of the inside finds itself actively present
in the outside. The inside condenses the past (a long period of time) in ways
that are not at all continuous but instead confront it with a future that comes
from outside, exchange it and recreate it. To think means to be embedded in the
present-time stratum that serves as a limit: what can I see and what can I say
today? (Deleuze 1988: 119)
This reformulation of Foucault’s ‘audio-visual’ archive finds its echo in many

parts of the critical and clinical project, even setting aside the fact that it is to
Melville and Michaux that Deleuze turns in his closing comments. ‘The ultimate
aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this
invention of a people, that is a possibility of life,’ Deleuze writes in ‘Literature
and Life’ (Deleuze 1998: 5). The see-hearing of the writer is literature’s answer
to the question posed in Foucault: language as a whole is ‘toppled or pushed to a
limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no
longer belong to any language’ (Deleuze 1998: 5). From the writer’s ‘procedures’
at the limit to those of the psychotic: Wolfson’s psychotic procedure ‘pushes
language to its limit, yet for all that it does not cross this limit . . . language
might finally confront, on the other side of this limit, the figures of an unknown
life and an esoteric knowledge’ (Deleuze 1998: 22). Deleuze returns to the idea
of a psychotic procedure (which is a critical-clinical procedure, not a clinical
interpretation) in the essay on Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener in which Bartleby’s
formula functions in such a way as to assist Melville in carving out a ‘foreign
language within language’ (Deleuze 1998: 72). Language is pushed to its limit
and discovers its Outside. This is also what occurs in the work of Beckett. The
figure of the outside returns in the text entitled ‘He stuttered’ where nonstyle
(in the manner of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said) is another name for the procedure
of carving literature’s constitutive outside (Deleuze 1998: 113) – its revocation of
any transcendence therefore. The formula-procedure (in Beckett’s case it is both)
‘ill seen, ill said’ is Beckett’s way of asking the question Deleuze poses through
the mouth of Foucault: what can I see and say today; what are the visibilities
and enoncés of my world-historical moment?10 As Smith observes, delirious
formations ‘are neither familial nor personal but world-historical’ (Smith 1998:
xxxix).
In conclusion then, it should be underlined that the term ‘schizoanalysis’ is
itself is far from stable in its employment by Deleuze and Guattari themselves.
Indeed, in many respects the term can be thought of as naming of such instability.
Deleuze and Guattari confirm as much when they assert: ‘What we call by
different names – schizoanalysis, micro-politics, pragmatics, diagrammatism,
rhizomatics, cartography – has no other object than the study if these lines, in
groups or as individuals’ (Deleuze 1987: 125). Will schizoanalysis be substitutable
for all of these when it comes to literature, or does schizoanalysis have a particular
formulation when it comes to the question of literature?
The title of Deleuze’s final book, as glossed by Colombat, on the one hand
captures Deleuze’s understanding of the parallelism – as developed also in What
Is Philosophy? – of literature, with its blocs of sensation aligned with clinical
observations, and philosophy, with its creation of concepts aligned with critical
thought. But on the other hand, he stresses that the most important part of the
title is the ‘and’ which ‘indicates a zone in between, an outside where “critique”
and “clinic” meet and create an actual literary work. This “and” both links and
separates the critical and the clinical through the characteristic becomings of the
power of creation’ (Colombat 1997: 593–4). The encounter with the outside is the
Blanchot idea that recurs in Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking about
literature. It is always implicitly coupled with the Foucaultian notion of creating
new visibilités and énoncés (or visions and auditions as ‘Literature and Life’ puts it:
Deleuze 1998: 5). Both schizoanalysis and the critical and clinical projects share
an endorsement of ‘the splendour of the on’ (Deleuze 1991: 152) of collective
utterance and an embrace of what Zourabichvili described as a perceiving to the
nth power; the evaluation and perception of the forces that animate, captivate
and bring about the visible and audible (Zourabichvili 1996: 202).
Notes
1 Guattari mentions Woolf, the example of Orlando with its gender metamorphoses
and Beckett’s collective perception which captures intensities. He also notes
Beckett’s interest in psychopathology, commenting: ‘[t]he use he makes of
them is essentially literary, of course, but what he uses them for is not a
translation, it’s a collage, it’s like a dance. He plays with these representations, or
rather, he makes them play’ (Guattari 1996: 210).
2 It is important to note however that schizoanalysis is not for Guattari a matter of
method or doctrine. A schizoanalysis of literature is for him in his 1979 interview
a matter of exploring the becoming induced in the author by way of their
engagement with a literary work or corpus. Texts that work in this way, and those
which Guattari valorizes, turn us into ‘madmen, they make us vibrate’ (Guattari
1996: 207).
3 See also Birman 1998: 487.
4 See Deleuze and Guattari (1986). See also Lecercle’s convincing argument that
what is at stake in the concept of minor literature is entirely compatible with
Deleuze’s theory of sens as developed in Logique du sens, in Lecercle (1995).
5 In a 1979 interview, Deleuze even points out that, ironically, it was Guattari who
helped him (Deleuze) to get out of psychoanalysis (Deleuze 1995: 144).
6 An example among many: ‘The psychoanalyst wants there to be, at all costs, a
definite, a possessive, a personal, hidden behind the indefinite. When Melanie
Klein’s children say “a tummy” or ask “How do people grow up?”, Melanie Klein
hears ‘my mummy’s tummy or “Will I be big like my daddy?” ’ (Deleuze 1987: 79).
7 Žižek prosecutes the idea of a ‘guattarized’ Deleuze. I am suggesting that Critique
et Clinique would challenge Žižek’s argument.
8 The modern work of art has no problem of meaning, it has only a problem of use’
(Deleuze 2000: 146).
9 Chevillard’s blog is at http://l-autofictif.over-blog.com.
10 In Logic of Sense, Deleuze had already written: ‘Thus a style in an oeuvre instead
of a mixture in the body. We see no other way of raising the question of the
relationship between an oeuvre and illness except by means of this double
causality’ (Deleuze 1991: 108).
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7
The Analyst and the Nomad:

Lacan, Deleuze and Coetzee’s
Life and Times of Michael K
Alan Bourassa
Let us imagine for a moment a kind of mythic encounter, the kind Freud
dreamed of in Totem and Taboo. Freud dreamed of the father-of-enjoyment
facing his sons, subjects yet to be subjected to the law. These figures, much
like mathematical abstractions, cannot exist in real time and space, but only
as elements of a problematic encounter. Let us imagine another encounter:
between the mythical analysis and the mythical nomad. To be in the space of
the analyst is to face the process by which desire becomes one’s own desire, the
force by which a fantasy directs desire to its symptomatic incarnations. The
analysand seeks in the analyst his putative knowledge and finds in the very
defiles and mazes of love and language a reconfiguration of his own cause of
desire. The analyst stands in a place; the nomad, by contrast, moves through a
space. To be in the presence of the nomad is not to place oneself in a lack, but
to find a vector, a map. It is to sense the overfullness of a territory, its affective
powers. The nomad asks what the territory is capable of. What are its striations,
its gradations, its forces of speed, growth, expansion, concealment. The nomad
does not seek a reconfiguration of desire because desire is already spread out on
the abstract and perfectly real plane of the Body Without Organs.
What story could contain both the analyst and the nomad? It would have to be
a story with a radical break in it, a story where the consistency of narrative voice
is set aside for the forcing of the encounter between two unlikely interlocutors.
What book could commit itself to such a risky inconsistency, such a dangerous
disruption?
This question is the starting point for the problem of J. M. Coetzee’s Life and
Times of Michael K. Written in three sections, Michael K is a perfect example of
a disrupted narrative. In Section 1, we follow K through his ill-fated journey to

Prince Albert, the death of his mother, his discovery of the Visagie’s abandoned
farmstead, his almost fatal sojourn in the mountains, his incarceration in the
Jakkalsdrif labour camp, his return to the Visagie’s farm where he plants his garden,
and finally his stay at the Kenilworth racetrack hospital. Section 3 sees K back in
Cape Town, but this time with just a small change, a kind of minimal distance from
his earlier experience in Prince Albert, but a minimal distance that is equal to an
ontological explosion (and that moves K from aimlessness to nomadism). And
between these two third-person narratives of wandering, of spaces, differentials
of force, there arises, in Section 2, an encounter that, suddenly spoken in the first
person, is characterized by nothing but desire, desire as a question, as empty
space. The doctor of the Kenilworth clinic – our mythical analyst – pierces the
smoothness of Michael K’s world and, paradoxically makes the encounter with
desire the very condition of a nomadic trajectory through the world.
We will search for the function of this broken causality in two thinkers:
Jacques Lacan, whose theory of subjective eruption is built around the encounter
with the enigmatic Other, and the emergence of the fantasy ($ <> a), and Gilles
Deleuze, who, in his essay ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’,
offers up the notion of a ‘wholly other’ (Deleuze 1990: 317), not a replica, but
a Double, and whose discussion of the virtual in Difference and Repetition is
caught up with the notion of doubling: ‘Every object is double without it being
the case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and
the other an actual image’ (Deleuze 1994: 209). The nomadism to which I allude
is best illustrated by this overfullness of the double and the virtual.
So we must do a double reading of the second section (the Kenilworth section)
as it stands in relation to the third section (the Sea Point section). The Lacanian
reading and the Deleuzian reading stand independently as useful readings of
the text, but each thinker sets before the other his greatest stumbling block: for
Lacan, Deleuze sets the question of the nomadism of the subject, the movement
on the surface of the earth that moves beyond neurosis. For Deleuze, Lacan sets
the seeming necessity of the desire of the Other and the birth of ressentiment
that, counter-intuitively, opens the subject onto his own nomadism.
The Lacanian K
As Lacan argues, the neurotic tries to turn desire into demand. For this reason,
the standard Lacanian formula of fantasy, the divided subject in relation to object
The Analyst and the Nomad 139
a, the object-cause of desire ($ <> a) is transmuted into $ <> D, the split subject
in relation to the Other’s demand. ‘the neurotic’s fundamental fantasy involves
the subject’s stance with respect to the Other’s demand, rather that with respect
to the Other’s desire’ (Fink 1997: 60).
By turning desire into demand the subject tries to create a kind of neurotic
paradise, a state of perfect satisfaction. At the centre of the neurotic’s ideal life
would be a fulfillable demand. The demand would be met, and happiness would
result. It is not the difficulty posed by the Other that disturbs the neurotic, but
the impossibility that arises as decipherable demand gives way to indecipherable
desire. K’s understanding that ‘he had been brought into the world to look after
his mother’ (Coetzee 1983: 7) and to bring her back to the imagined idyll of her
childhood home is the beginning of an encounter with the Other’s demand.
The matheme of the subject in relation to Demand ($ <> D) tells the story of
the awakening of the drive in the subject. This moment of the encounter with
the Other’s demand both activates the drives that take up habitation in the body
and requires that a preliminary fantasy (that the Other is making a demand that
can be met) also take root. Only when the Other from whom the demand comes
can be seen as lacking can the subject begin to bear desire. But what happens if
obeying the Other’s demand (the demand to return his mother to her childhood
home) destroys the Other? Michael K quite literally obeys his mother to death,
and in her passing, he is left trapped, already subject to the fragmenting drives
of the subject exposed to demand ($ <> D), but not yet having encountered the
Other’s desire and the fantasy that will make this desire bearable ($ <> a).
We begin to see why Michael K drifts through the first section of the novel
almost without leaving a mark. (‘A man must live so that he leaves no trace of
his living. That is what it has come to.’ (Coetzee 1983: 99)). Demand has begun
to push towards desire, but nothing has emerged to make desire bearable, to
teach him how to desire (Žižek 1997: 7). K drifts into the realm of desire without
a sustaining fantasy, a subject undone and without recourse. This perilous
subjective condition explains why Michael K, in Section 1, always seems in
danger of drifting into nothingness. After his first departure from the Visagie
farm, he finds himself hiding out in the mountains, where he simply begins to
wind down to a state of torpor:
There was a day when he was too tired to get up from his bed in the cave. . . .
It came home to him that he might die, he or his body, it was the same thing,
that he might lie here till the moss on the roof grew dark before his eyes, that
his story might end with his bones growing white in this faroff place. (Coetzee
1983: 69)
And again later, this pure void of being arises as Michael K’s return to the Visagie
farm winds down to nothing. He sits soaked and passive as a flood washes
through his burrow. Barely alive, he
emerged into daylight shivering with cold. The sky was overcast, he had no way of
making a fire. One cannot live like this, he thought. . . . Everything was familiar,
yet he felt like a stranger or a ghost. . . . The shivering would not stop. He had no
strength in his limbs; when he set one foot in front of the other it was tentatively,
like an old man. Needing to sit all of a sudden, he sat down on the wet earth. The
tasks that awaited him seemed too many and too great. (Coetzee 1983: 120)
This is what the troops discover as they stop on the farm: what seems like a very
old man, still, on the edge of nothing. Questioning him is more seance than
interrogation.
Why should this be, this spinning into emptiness? The answer is in Lacan’s
own formula for the drive, which incorporates demand into a new relationship,
the split subject ($) in relation to demand (D): $ <> D.
For need to be satisfied, a little human being has to deal with the Other’s
demand. To be satisfied it has to take the Other’s demand into account. Hence
the drive is a consequence of the articulation in language of the Other’s demand.
Of course, the Other’s demand does not absolutely correspond to the need.
Something escapes the correlation between need and demand which is central
for understanding the drive. It is desire. (Brousse 1995: 106)
The drive is the impossible image of a nothing circling a void. It is crucial to

come to terms with this nothing; built into the demand is the impossibility of its
own fulfillment, the inevitable difference between demand and the fulfillment of
need. The subject pushes towards some way of bearing this drive, this emptiness,
of learning to keep the proper disposition towards it. This proper disposition
is called desire. And it is the lack of such desire (the lack of a proper lack) that
leaves Michael K hovering without affect between being and non-being at the
end of the first section.
It becomes much clearer why the irruption of a new voice in the second
section (in Kenilworth) is necessary. Without it, Michael K is swallowed up by the
drive. The turning point in Michael K’s relationship to the drive is that moment
when the articulation of his being shifts into a different register. In Section 1, as
Michael K speculates on his willingness to help others, he pictures himself as ‘the
stony ground’ (Coetzee 1983: 48). The same metaphor, for the doctor, begins to
take on the contours of desire, of a ‘che vuoi?’
He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own
business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly
from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings,
enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and
camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. . . . An unbearing,
unborn creature. (Coetzee 1983: 135)
The doctor is utterly uprooted by the enigma of this strange being under his
care. Michael K is himself confronted with this indecipherable desirousness.
Confronted by the doctor’s demand that he eat, K shifts instantly from the
demand to the desire embodied within it. This is the turning point for K’s
subjective position:
‘No one was interested before in what I ate,’ he said. ‘So I ask myself why.’
‘Because I don’t want to see you starve yourself to death. Because I don’t want
anyone here to starve to death,’ I doubt that he heard me. The cracked lips went
on moving as though there were some train of thought he was afraid of losing.
‘I ask myself: What am I to this man? I ask myself: What is it to this man if I live
or die?’. (Coetzee 1983: 148)
What am I to the Other? How do I appear within the Other’s desire? K asks
himself this question for the very first time in his confrontation with the doctor.
And it is appropriate that the object at stake in this confrontation is food. For K,
food is the key to a jouissance that he will not compromise.
Another thing I would like to know is what the food was that you ate in the
wilderness that has made all other food tasteless to you. . . . Was it manna? Did
manna fall from the sky for you. . .? Is that why you will not eat camp food – because
you have been spoiled forever by the taste of manna? (Coetzee 1983: 150–1)
Later, as he daydreams about following K in his escape from the Kenilworth

hospital, the doctor formulates his own answer, an answer, of course, that is no
solution but a way of relating to the cause of K’s desire, his object a:
Then as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth: that
you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for
a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply. Your will remained
pliant but your body was crying to be fed its own food, and only that. (Coetzee
1983: 163–4)
So K leaves the hospital, slips away. In Section 3, we find him back at Sea Point
in Cape Town. Demand has gone all the way to desire, but the question of how
one desires is still to be resolved. In Lacanian terms, what is still waiting to be put
into place is the Master Signifier, the Name of the Father.
The Name-of-the-Father is a signifier with no signified. It is an empty signifier
whose meaning is not just open, but that opens a space, that turns an impossible
jouissance into the jouissance that is inaccessible because of a prohibition,
the ‘no’ of the Father. This prohibition, the greatest act of fiction in human
experience, allows us to trade the utter nihility of impossible jouissance for the
great adventure of circumventing a prohibition. Desire becomes forbidden desire
and is the condition for the putting-into-place of fantasy – the fiction of exactly
what happened to my jouissance, where it went, who took it. The final price
exacted by the Name-of-the-Father is neurotic ressentiment, the conviction that
my jouissance has been taken from me.
The character of December, in Section 3, assumes the role of Name-of-the-
Father. He is, first, the Father-of-Enjoyment, Freud’s figure of the primal father
who has access to unmediated enjoyment and for whom the incest taboo is not
in place. Introducing his women to K, December says, ‘ “That one is my sister”. . . .
“The one in there [sexually servicing a john in a lavatory] . . . is also my sister.
Plenty of sisters I have. A big family” ’ (Coetzee 1983: 173). Or a primal horde.
He is a stealer of jouissance. After becoming a member of December’s group,
K wakes at night to find December – ‘the man whose name he did not yet know’
(Coetzee 1983: 176) – rummaging through his clothes and stealing, of all things,
his seeds. K’s jouissance is always tied up with the products of his garden, and K
is left with only those seeds he can recover. This regathering of the seeds is K’s
first harvesting of the pittance of jouissance remaining to him.
December also introduces K to his first sexual experience, a vertiginous
encounter that leaves K’s head spinning, but also awakens a sexual longing. When
he subsequently sees two girls in bikinis climbing the steps from the beach, ‘He
watched their backsides ascend the steps and surprised in himself an urge to
dig his fingers into that soft flesh’ (Coetzee 1983: 180). Only after this encounter
does K articulate his awareness that he appears within the desires of charitable
Others, an awareness tinged with a share of resentment.
They want me to open my heart and tell them the story of a life lived in
cages. . . . And if I had learned storytelling at Huis Norenius instead of potato-
peeling and sums, if they had made me practise the story of my life every day,
standing over me with a cane till I could perform without stumbling, I might have
known how to please them. I would have told the story of a life passed in prisons
where I stood day after day, year after year with my forehead pressed to the wire,
gazing into the distance, dreaming of experiences I would never have, and where
the guards called me names and kicked my backside and sent me off to scrub the
floor. When my story was finished, people would have shaken their heads and
been sorry and angry and plied me with food and drink; women would have
taken me into their beds and mothered me in the dark. (Coetzee 1983: 181)
What does the Other wish of me? My story, the secret of who I am. The Other,
in short, wants to fathom my desire. And it is at this moment that K sees himself
in the Other’s eyes and we hear the first inklings of neurotic resentment. But,
as compensation, we also have, from the Father’s place, a fantasy formula that
nails down K’s position: ‘ “It is difficult to be kind,” [December] said, “to a person
who wants nothing. You must not be afraid to say what you want, then you will
get it” ’ (Coetzee 1983: 179). K is offered what the neurotic is always offered: the
possibility of substitute satisfaction.
In perceiving this possibility, K steps firmly into the neurotic’s desire and can
lay out a specific object of desire, something towards which his desire tends:
the Visagie’s farm. His daydream of the old man who will accompany him
demonstrates that his desire tends towards the Other, where he will fit in to
another’s desire. He has mapped his desire (and in fact dreams of mapping the
surface of the earth where he will plant his seeds) and he is willing to live on the
pittance of jouissance that is allowed to him. The pump that has been destroyed
can still provide just enough water, just enough jouissance.
[H]e, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and
a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he
would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would
lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there
would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can
live. (Coetzee 1983: 183–4)
It is at this point, when we have found the movement towards desire inherent in
demand, where we have found the nothingness of the drive, the fading away of
the subject, the confrontation with the enigma of the Other’s desire, the Name of
the Father that splits the subject from the Other’s desire, the Master Signifier, the
articulation of neurotic desire, the positioning of subjectivity in relation to the
Other’s desire, the acceptance of substitute satisfactions, the pursuit of the object
of desire, that we must stop and declare everything ruined.
It is ‘ruined’ because at the very moment we expect to end up with a properly
oedipalized subject, the subject who has accepted his pittance of jouissance,
who accepts access to jouissance only on, as Lacan says, ‘the inverted ladder of
desire’ (Lacan 1977: 324), the subject who knows and resents the imperatives of
the master signifier, we see something else emerging: a mapping of the earth,
a nomadic movement, an opening to the virtual resonating within the actual.
More importantly, it is not in spite of the advent of the name-of-the-father but
because of it that this subsistent dimension appears.
The Deleuzian Lacan
The relation between the Lacanian subject and the Deleuzian nomad is the
relation between an actuality (socially and linguistically shaped) and the virtual
force that subsists within that actuality: ‘Indeed, the virtual must be defined as
strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself
in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension’
(Deleuze 1994: 208–9). Actuality is plunged into its virtual dimension. In fact, to
consider virtuality apart from actuality is to mistake its mode of insistence. We
will never isolate the actual from its spectral virtual dimension. This intimacy
of the virtual and the actual – indeed Deleuze coins the term ‘differenciation’
to designate ‘the actualization of . . . virtuality into species and distinguished
parts’ (Deleuze 1994: 207) – explains why literature (Kafka, Masoch, Melville)
plays such an important part in Deleuze’s thinking: literature reveals the virtual
vibrating within the actual.
There are three areas where we will find a Deleuzian understanding that
will not refute Lacanian insight, but will fit itself to that insight like a kind
of spectral dimension, an animating force. The first area is the fading of the
subject, the emptying of the subject in the advent of the drive. To this moment
in Lacan, Deleuze can add the zero limit of the Body without Organs (BwO).
The second area is the encounter with the Other, the confrontation with the
Other’s desire (or ‘the desire of the Other’). In the ‘How to Make Yourself a
Body Without Organs’ plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze allows us
to understand that this encounter, to be productive, must always have at its
disposal a point of stability from which to experiment with destratifications.
The third area is the advent of the Name-of-the-Father, the moment at which
the neurotic subject finds the Master Signifier that bars the Other’s desire. This
is the moment at which the split subject, complete with his proper fantasy,
a phallic signifier and toolbox of symptoms becomes the final achievement
of the Name-of-the-Father. To this condition of being, Deleuze brings the

notion of the Double, what he calls ‘the Absolute Other’, the half of the subject
that is immersed in virtuality and in which ‘the elements are released and
renewed’ (Deleuze 1990: 312). In ‘Michel Tournier and The World Without
Others’, Deleuze contrasts this Double with the ‘Structure-Other’, the other
whose presence sets up a world in which desire in constrained by a field of
possibilities adumbrated by what is possible for others. Whereas the Structure-
Other has as its goal the laying out of the field in which desire can appear, the
Double functions strategically to pull down the structures erected by the Other
in order to free the elemental forces trapped by the Other-Structure.
To put these three Deleuzian contributions in fictional terms, Michael K
approaches the BwO, he finds a plot of ground from which to destratify the
organized world of the war, and he finds a way to keep what Deleuze will call the
‘Structure-Other’ at bay, allowing him to rediscover the surface of the earth on
which he can lay out a nomadic path.
The first section of Michael K, as we have seen, describes a return to states
that border on nothingness. His being always wanders too close to non-being,
as when he escapes to the mountains from the Visagie’s farm. He is close to a
pure zero state in his cave: ‘If I were to die here, sitting in the mouth of my cave
looking out over the plain with my knees under my chin, I would be dried out by
the wind in a day, I would be preserved whole, like someone the desert drowned
in sand’ (Coetzee 1983: 67–8). And later, back at the Visagie’s farm, it is the wet,
not the dry, that engulfs him and pulls him close to nothingness (Coetzee 1983:
119–20).
Deleuze and Guattari are very aware of what the proximity of the zero-
state indicates. It is the approach to the BwO, building the plane of consistency
on which intensities can be made to pass. But, in the zero-state, Deleuze and
Guattari warn us, there is a danger: ‘If you free [the BwO] with too violent an
action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of
drawing the plane, you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged
toward catastrophe’ (1987: 161). Michael K is always approaching this state
of catastrophe, a state that we have previously linked to the exposure to the
impossibility of the desire of the Other, the first advent of the drive, the nothing
circling the void. This exposure to desire in the instant before the armature of
fantasy, the Name-of-the-Father, and the symptom are in place is a state of grave
danger. One can collapse into the drive, into the void opened up by the signifier,
the Other’s demand.
But Michael K does not die, he does not throw himself into a suicidal collapse.
So what is the importance of this approach to zero? We see that in the two
examples above, what K is doing is mapping out an approach to the zero-state,
the plane of consistency, but that this is a map not simply of space, but of affect-
space. In the mountains he feels himself becoming a different kind of creature.
There were whole afternoons he slept through. He wondered if he were living

in what was known as bliss. There was a day of dark cloud and rain, after which
tiny pink flowers sprang up all over the mountainside, flowers without any leaf
that he could see. He ate handfuls of flowers and his stomach hurt. (Coetzee
1983: 68)
And back on the Visagie’s farm, he sees the return to earth as a kind of meaningful
zero-state, full with a power of evasion: ‘Would it not be better to hide day and
night, would it not be better to bury myself in the bowels of the earth than
become a creature of theirs?’ (Coetzee 1983: 106). His approaches to the earth
are always dangerous, always close to dissolution, but they are necessary because
this proximity to earth is not a sentimental approach to ‘nature’ as some kind
of pastoral world free from conflict, but rather a cartography of the BwO. His
moments of greatest power, productivity and enjoyment (the moments when he
tends, protects and eats the pumpkins he has grown with such fervour) are the
moments when K hovers in the region of the zero-state.
For Deleuze, the BwO is not a condition of possibility, but a condition of genesis
by which intensities can be assembled, made to pass. Intensity is precisely Michael
K’s problem: he must discover of what intensities he is composed, what he can
make pass, and the question always comes back not to ‘nature’ but to the surface
of the earth. What are its powers of concealment, of evasion, of perception, of
enjoyment, of movement? There is no prefabricated answer to this question, or
in Lacanian terms, there is no Big Other to provide the structuring fantasy, the
substitute satisfactions. Because, in Section 1, Michael K only confronts demand
and therefore the formula for drive ($ <> D), he must either become a map-
maker or pass away. Deleuze and Guattari tell us:
We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us at the
place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within
which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of
the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what
it is: connections of desires, conjunctions of flows, continuums of intensities.
(1987: 161)
Michael K incarnates Spinoza’s famous observation that we do not know what

a body can do. It can, we know, destratify, find its way, set itself up as the plane
upon which intensities will pass, intensities that do not respect the distinction
between earth, body, word, tool, weather. But in this process of experimentation
one must have some safe ground, otherwise wild destratification and the black
hole cannot be avoided: ‘You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform
each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification,
if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand
it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 160).
This plot of safe ground that Michael K must have is provided for him by a
chance encounter with the doctor at the Kenilworth hospital. As we have seen,
this encounter enacts the diagram of desire, the double meaning of the desire-
of-the-Other. The doctor faces Michael K in all of his enigma, questions him
as if the very meaning of the doctor’s work depends upon the answer. Michael
K confronts the mystery of this question; indeed, of questioning itself. He asks
himself why he is so central to the doctor’s desire. This is the moment at which
the safety offered to every subject is offered to Michael K. The confrontation
with Other-desire, in spite of its difficulty, is in fact a moment of security, the
offer of ground to stand on (it is with the advent of the Name-of-the-Father
that nightmarish psychosis has been successfully evaded). As we have seen, it is
only after the encounter with the doctor that others appear in some stable form
to Michael K; they are those who have been named, placed into a recognizable
fantasy formula. K recognizes that others will offer him their charity in exchange
for his story, so long as that story addresses their desire for meaning and pathos.
We can hear in Michael K’s understanding of this bargain the resentment that
is synonymous with neurotic stability. To be subjectified is to be offered, for a
price, ground to stand on.
However, what if, in the setting-into-place of the Other, there is a kind of
beyond of this very Other, a beyond that subsists like an added dimension
in the well-regulating (and regulating) Other? In ‘Michel Tournier’, Deleuze
distinguishes the ‘Structure-Other’ from the ‘Double’ or the ‘Absolute Other’.
The Structure-Other is the other who regulates the world: ‘The Other is initially
a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not
function as it does’ (Deleuze 1990: 307). It is this very structure that allows for
desire because it introduces into the field of experience a perception that can
only appear by passing through the Other: ‘my desire passes through Others
and through Others it receives an object. I desire nothing that cannot be seen,
thought, or possessed by a possible Other. This is the basis of my desire. It is

always Others who relate my desire to an object’ (Deleuze 1990: 306). The Other
is a structure of possibility within which certain concrete others actualize this
possibility. Any Other who functions as a Structure-Other must belong to this
organization of the perceptual field. A ‘world without others’ is not a world
without other people, other encounters, other relationships, but a world in which
others do not function within the constraints of the Structure-Other. So there is
an Other that is not the Structure-Other, but the Double, the Absolute Other. If
the Structure-Other ‘appears as that which organizes Elements into Earth, and
earth into bodies, bodies into objects, and which regulates and measures objects,
perception and desire all at once’ (Deleuze 1990: 318), then the Double is ‘the
new upright image in which the elements are released and renewed, having
become celestial and forming a thousand capricious elemental figures’ (Deleuze
1990: 312). To encounter the Double is already to have the walls of the Structure-
Other crumble. The Double offers not a new ‘structure’ or ‘organization’ but a
reassembling of a field of being.
The Double must, then, function tactically. The Double must be about the work
of freeing, of redrawing, distraction, displacement, intensification: an infinity of
strategies that will belong to the Double insofar as they all serve the future, the
opening up and recasting of the Structure-Other. The best example we can see
of this functioning of the Double in Michael K is the Kenilworth doctor, who
functions as a tactical double. He takes upon himself the very neurosis that K
must submit to. As if the constraints and obsessions of neurosis were an invading
spirit and the doctor the sacrificial vessel who functions as a decoy to summon
the spirit into him, the doctor takes upon himself the very question that K cannot
avoid. To function with a Double is to allow the Double to take on the full force
of the neurotic subject position. This taking-the-bullet is the first function of
the doctor. By doing so, the doctor transforms the structuring question of the
desiring subject – Che Vuoi? What do you want? – into a rhetorical question,
which can still function as a question but also as an ‘upright image’ that frees a
movement along the surface.
The most compelling evidence that the doctor is a kind of parallel subjectivity
for K is that he goes from the position of authority demanding answers to the
subject caught in the torment of encountering the Other’s desire. We see a tonal
shift in the doctor’s question-demands (Lacan’s original term ‘la demande’ can
be translated both as ‘demand’ and ‘request’). In this case, the doctor functions
as the imaginary figure of authority. He is there to pose demands.
I paused; he stared stonily back. ‘Talk, Michaels,’ I resumed. ‘You see how easy
it is to talk, now talk. Listen to me, listen how easily I fill this room with words.
I know people who can talk all day without getting tired, who can fill up whole
worlds talking. . . . Give yourself some substance, man, otherwise you are going
to slide through life absolutely unnoticed. You will be a digit in the units column
at the end of the war when they do the big subtraction sum to calculate the
difference, nothing more.’ (Coetzee 1983: 140)
He presents a front of unconcerned authority: ‘ “We do for you what we have to

do,” I told him. “There is nothing special about you, you can rest easy about that.
When you are better there are plenty of floors waiting to be scrubbed and plenty
of toilets to clean” ’ (Coetzee 1983: 136). But even at these moments we begin
to see a stirring within this authority of something else. Indeed, the necessity
for this authority figure to take onto itself the very subject position it opens
for another explains why Coetzee must break with his narrative voice, why he
must introduce into a third-person narrative a first-person perspective (that
of the doctor). If K’s encounter with the doctor were told from a third-person
perspective, the doctor would be firmly established in the position of the law. He
would be that-to-be-appeased, the founder of prohibition. Because of the abrupt
shift to the first-person perspective, the doctor’s subject position is not so much
destabilized as intensified, overfull. He does not lose his position of authority.
Rather, that position is overlain by another dimension, the dimension of the
neurosis that the law originates. It is clear from the doctor’s imploring tone that
he is, after his encounter with K, struggling in the face of the Other’s enigmatic
desire. As he imagines chasing K at a dead run, the doctor imagines addressing
him:
Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the
heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are
presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another
name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel
homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only
you know the way. (Coetzee 1983: 166)
Much as actual roads are not ‘merely’ roads for K, but have, in their very actuality,
a supplemental dimension, so the doctor, who does not surrender his position as
the figure of the law, is not ‘merely’ the figure of the law (‘merely’ here indicating
that which functions in a single dimension), but takes upon himself the very
anxiety that characterizes the divided subject. His very last words are a desperate
plea for an answer that will not come: ‘Have I understood you? If I am right, hold
up your right hand; if I am wrong, hold up your left’ (Coetzee 1983: 167).
What is the significance of this Double-figure in the narrative? The doctor
does not function here as the founding point of a structure of possibilities, a
structure in which K’s desire will only be for objects already mediated by others.
Rather, in the Deleuzian sense, he functions as an Absolute Other, a Double
whose function in relation to K is strategic. The voice of the Law will not be
silent. The doctor speaks a truth when he berates K’s assertion that ‘I am not in
the war’: ‘Irritation overflowed in me.’ ‘You are not in the war? Of course you are
in the war, man, whether you like it or not! This is a camp, not a holiday resort,
not a convalescent home: it is a camp where we rehabilitate people like you and
make you work!’ (Coetzee 1983: 138). The Law is in place. But if it is in place,
it must fulfill its function. It must prohibit. It must establish the split subject as
the questioning subject. It must, as Lacan reminds us, allow access to jouissance
only on the inverted ladder of desire, the desire that is an ongoing question. This
Law cannot be broken.
But it can be bent.
The most convincing sign that this Law has been bent is the difference in
the status of the question for the doctor and for K. The doctor’s questions are
all versions of the ‘che vuoi’ of desire: What do you want? What is your desire?
What are you hiding from me? Why won’t you tell me? What treasure are you
keeping me from? K’s question, on the other hand, while keeping the form of
the question, undermines the very power of the question by replacing, for the
supplicating question, the rhetorical question, the question divorced from any
concern with an answer. When K asks his question – ‘I ask myself: What am I
to this man? I ask myself: What is it to this man if I live or die?’ (Coetzee 1983:
148) – he is not asking for an answer from the Other; he is dismissing the Other.
The Law has functioned. Desire-as-lack has been established. But it has been
misdirected by the power of the Double. The doctor has, in effect, stepped in
and taken the bullet for K. K can then ask what looks like a question, but that is
not asked with any supplication, any hope that an answer might be forthcoming
that would satisfy desire.
The force of the rhetorical question is that, being a function of the Double,
it frees the elements of the situation. In the case of Michael K, it frees the
elements of the situation at the very same moment as it establishes the situation.
The wandering displaced K of Section 1 is not nomadic, only undirected.
Nomadic movement is not undirected or aimless movement, but movement in
which the points that movement traverses are subordinated to the movement
itself. K, in Section 1, is not so much impassible as passive, available to the

agendas of Others, the perfect subject of a system that is absolutely prepared
for human passivity and powerlessness. In order to have any substance, in order
to assert force within his own field of action, K must have some place in that
system. The trick of the novel is that it must establish K in the position of the
desiring subject (so that December can say to him ‘It is difficult to be kind to a
person who wants nothing. You must not be afraid to say what you want, then
you will get it’ (Coetzee 1983: 179)) but must immediately free him from that
position. A Lacanian reading of the novel demonstrates how K is established
as a desiring subject. A Deleuzian reading establishes how K supplements (and
essentially transforms) this position by leveraging his subjectivity into a new
movement along the surface of the earth.
K’s final position at Sea Point, his plan to return to the Visagie’s farm and
garden more strategically, using the surface of the earth as his home, his weapon,
his smooth space, his element, is a plan, not a fantasy.
The mistake I made . . . was not to have plenty of seeds, a different packet of
seeds for each pocket: pumpkin seeds, marrow seeds, beans, carrot seeds, beet-
root seeds, onion seeds, tomato seeds, spinach seeds. Seeds in my shoes too and
the lining of my coat in case of robbers along the way. Then my mistake was to
plant all my seeds together in one patch. I should have planted them one at a
time spread out over miles of veld in patches of soil no larger than my hand, and
drawn a map and kept it with me at all times so that every night I could make
a tour of the sites to water them. Because if there was one thing I discovered
out in the country, it was that there is time enough for everything. (Coetzee
1983: 183)
K has now established that he can move according to a diagram of forces. He can
take from the earth the elements and forces that it is ready to free up: nomadic
movement, growth, evasion, invisibility, mapping. This nomadism is not a form
of naivety, not an imagined foreclosure of the Other. K has become very aware
of the conditions imposed by the Structure-Other, the war-culture that has
stratified the world:
Now they have camps for children whose parents run away, camps for people
who kick and foam at the mouth, camps for people with big heads and people
with little heads, camps for people with no visible means of support, camps for
people chased off the land, camps for people they find living in storm-water
drains, camps for street girls, camps for people who can’t add two and two,
camps for people who forget their papers at home, camps for people who live in
the mountains and blow up bridges in the night. Perhaps the truth is that it is
enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. (Coetzee
1983: 182)
There is no doubt that K has absorbed and subjectified all of the bitterness of
the neurotic. He is fully aware of where he fits in to the desires of others. He is
fully aware of his place within this structure, and he is unequivocally resentful at
the constraints imposed by the Other’s Che Vuoi? But here is the great paradox
that Coetzee has managed to make stand and show itself: the ‘surrender’ to the
neurotic subject position (with the recognition of the Other’s desire, resentment,
the taking on of the Nom-du-Pere) only makes sense as a kind of doubling. It
is not enough to say that K’s initiation into the neurotic subjectivity leaves an
avenue for his escape. We must say, rather, that it is, paradoxically, this very
initiation that makes possible the freeing of the elements of K’s world. His
passivity within the structure of war becomes the proximity to the BwO and
the diagram of forces that it provides; his encounter with the doctor provides
enough of a safe space (the space provided by the Master) from which to begin
to destratify the world; and the doubling of the Master as both the source and the
object of the ‘che vuoi’ allows K to undermine the question of desire by making
it into a rhetorical question divorced from any possible answer. And, finally, the
ability to desire, to ask for what he wants, allows K to perceive his world as a
field of forces, a smooth space in which he can learn to move. Deleuze has said
that even the most despotic regimes are still creations of desire. We can make
the same claim about neurotic subjectivity in Life and Times of Michael K: the
neurotic subject position is not abolished; it remains whole but is carried away
whole as well.
References
Brousse, Marie-Helene (1995), ‘The Drive (I)’, in Feldstein, R., Fink, B. and Jaanus, M.
(eds), Reading Seminar XI Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Albany: SUNY, 99–107.
Coetzee, J. M. (1983), Life and Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990), ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’, in Constantin
V. Boundas (ed.), The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fink, Bruce (1997), A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and
Technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lacan, Jacques (1977), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
Žižek, Slavoj (1997), The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso.
8
Razing the Wall: Deleuze, Rancière and

the Politics of New World Literatures
Lorna Burns
In ‘The Muse of History’, St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, outlines a New World
aesthetic premised on the poet’s experience of a landscape that is at once indelibly
marked by the colonial encounter and a source of newness and creativity. If the
New World poet’s inheritance is one tied to a history of colonial exploitation,
they nonetheless ought not to be considered in ‘servitude to the muse of history’
(Walcott 1999: 37). Enslavement to the determining force of the past has, Walcott
argues, ‘produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge
written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the
descendants of masters’ (37). In turn, characterizing the New World poet – ‘from
Whitman to Neruda’ (37) – as an Adamic figure experiencing his surroundings
with ‘enormous wonder’ (38), he argues that ‘[t]he truly tough aesthetic of the
New World neither explains nor forgives history’ (37). At the same time, there
is something more in Walcott’s characterization of the New World poet: from
Whitman to Neruda, ‘[t]hey reject ancestry for faith in elemental man’, offer a
vision that is a ‘democratic vista’, and provide a ‘political philosophy rooted in
elation [. . . and] belief in a second Adam’ (40). Adamic or elemental man, for
Walcott, is endlessly recreative when faced with his New World environment
even while it is marked by the trace of colonial pasts. In other words, while the
recreative potential of the scars and wounds of the colonial past is, for Walcott,
an important factor in defining a New World aesthetic, it is also the case that he
charges the poet – ‘from Whitman to Neruda’ – with a political imperative that
is at once ‘a social necessity’ (40) and a democratic vision.
Walcott widens the political project of the Americas to link Latin America
with North through the archipelagic bridge of the Caribbean, and in doing so
envisions a New World aesthetics that refuses history as an overspecifying force.
Razing the Wall 155
The New World poet as Adam has no need to forgive his ancestors, he rather
rejects the paternal function: ‘I have no father . . . although I understand you,
black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper “history” . . . it is not mine to
forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love’ (64). Freed from paternity,
the Adamic poet takes on a function that is at once political and democratic in
that their imaginative task is the creation of a new vocabulary to name their
world. As such, the democratic and political task that faces Walcott’s New World
poet is also one that might be aligned with Deleuze’s own comments on the
specific work of American literature.
Focusing, in particular, on two essays drawn from Essays Critical and Clinical –
‘Whitman’, in which Deleuze explores Whitman’s claim ‘that writing is fragmentary,
and that the American writer has to devote himself to writing in fragments’
(Deleuze 1997: 56), and ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, in which the political and
deterritorializing processes of Melville’s text are uncovered – this essay seeks to
widen the Deleuzian lens on New World writing. America in the broadest sense –
North and South connected by the broken bridge of the Caribbean archipelago –
is a collection of diverse peoples and political bodies, ‘federated states and various
immigrant peoples (minorities) – everywhere a collection of fragments’ (56).
This ties the fragmentary character of Whitman’s writing, Deleuze argues, to the
experience of the collective: in short, the political function of his work. However,
in exploring the politics of New World while writing this essay also draws from
Jacques Rancière’s critical reading of ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’. In essays collected
in The Flesh of Words and Dissensus, Rancière questions Deleuze’s approach to
literature and the fraternal politics that he finds in Melville, interrogating his
identification of processes of de/reterritorialization. Rancière argues that there
is no true metamorphosis associated with the literary text because Deleuzian
becoming stresses the movement towards a space of pre-individual indeterminacy.
While this suggests a significant distinction between a Deleuzian and a Rancièrean
aesthetics, I argue that Rancière’s critique might nonetheless help clarify the
processes of de/reterritorialization in Deleuzian literary analysis.
Writing the New World
The writer’s task, as Deleuze presents it, is to seek to express possible commu
nities, not to represent existing ones. This is what Deleuze calls, following
Bergson, literature’s ‘fabulating’ function (Deleuze 1995: 174): a term which
aligns the creative work of literature with the processes by which a people
emerge: ‘Artists can only invoke a people. . . . When a people’s created, it’s
through its own resources, but in a way that links up with something in art’
(174). Like Walcott’s New World Adam, this function should not be dismissed
as utopian, in the common-day sense of the term. Fabulation, rather, captures
something of literature’s myth-making function, the constitution of a ground
from which a collective may emerge.
If literature may be identified as fabulation, in a New World context such
‘myth-making’ cannot be tied to an idea of absolute or pure origins, since this
would deny the fragmentary, diasporic American reality. Rather, a revisionary
process of recreation is evoked, as Aimé Césaire argues, in the political task of
nation building:
[T]he problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past,
but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. . . . Nor is it the
present colonial society that we wish to prolong. . . . It is a new society that we
must create. (1972: 31)
As Ronald Bogue has argued, Deleuze’s concept of fabulation with its close links
to the political imperative of the creation of a people yet to come should not be
misunderstood as a utopian project, since ‘[a]s an ideal, utopia functions as a
kind of Platonic Idea, something above this world, static and perfect . . . utopias
are the antithesis of becoming, process and movement toward a future that is
genuinely new’ (2011: 81). The critique of utopian origins that can be found
in the work of Caribbean writers such as Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and
Walcott follows a similar logic in this respect: atavistic cultures form around
a myth of genesis, which functions according to a paternal logic and enforces
claims of legitimacy or order. As such, it must fix ‘the object of scrutiny in
static time, thereby removing the tangled nature of uncontaminated survival’
(Glissant 1989: 14). In other words, an idealized past is established as the fixed
and static Ideal against which the current state of affairs may be judged. Filiation
and utopian myths of pure origin are, for Glissant, antithetical to the endlessly
creative process of becoming that he terms creolization. And, of course, this is
precisely his issue with the negritude movement and a black racial politics that
looks back towards an idealized pre-colonial African past rather than engaging
with the present New World reality.
The political function of fabulation, then, maps on to the concept of minor
literature. Where major literatures are preoccupied with ‘individual concerns’
and ‘the social milieu’ is reduced to ‘mere environment or a background’,
a ‘[m]inor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each
Razing the Wall 157
individual intrigue to connect immediately with politics’: a ‘collective

enunciation’ (17). And it is this common function that, for Deleuze, links
the work of Kafka and Whitman, since both writers formulate a collective
statement that is public not individual, and political not representational.
As for Walcott, Whitman’s value is to be found in his endlessly recreative
poetics – offering a world of relations of counterpoint and connection that
are ‘never given but always new’, ‘constantly renewed and invented’ (Deleuze
1997: 59). His characterization of nature and society does not reassert a
paternalistic function or utopian Ideal, but is approached as a process of
relationality ‘between heterogeneous living beings in such a way that they
create a tissue of shifting relations, in which the melody of one part intervenes
as a motif in the melody of another’ (59). This is precisely the Adamic spirit
that Walcott associates with the New World writer.
Whitman offers a democratic poetics of the Americas in which becoming
is privileged over being – ‘processes of companionship and conviviality’ follow
‘not [from] pre-existent givens’ but emerge from a ‘tissue of shifting relations’
between living beings (Deleuze 1997: 59). In doing so, his work is not limited to
a predetermined ideal of the nation or people, but imagines the process by which
a people may be actualized. In the American context, this virtual potentiality
exists within the diverse collection of peoples, cultures and political systems that
characterize both Whitman’s United States and the pan-American perspective
that this essay explores through the connective bridge of the Caribbean. As
such, Whitman offers a ‘world as a collection of heterogeneous parts: an infinite
patchwork, or an endless wall of dry stones (a cemented wall, or the pieces of a
puzzle, would reconstitute a totality)’ (57). But this raises an important point of
contention for Deleuze:
Whitman sometimes places the Idea of the Whole beforehand, invoking a cosmos
that beckons us to a kind of fusion; in a particularly ‘convulsive’ meditation, he
calls himself a ‘Hegelian’. . . . He is then expressing himself like a European, who
finds in pantheism a reason to inflate his own ego. But when Whitman speaks
in his own manner and his own style, it turns out that a kind of whole must be
constructed, a whole that is all the more paradoxical in that it only comes after
the fragments and leaves them intact, making no attempt to totalize them. (58)
Deleuze’s comments on Whitman draw attention to the problem of an a priori

totality posited as the endgame of fusion (in other words, of dialectics). This
critique of Whitman’s ‘Hegelian’ tendencies is echoed in Caribbean writers’ own
resistance to totalizing and essentialized conceptions of creoleness. Jean Bernabé,
Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, for example, argue in their manifesto
Èloge de la créolité that creole identity and aesthetics are no mere ‘synthesis’,
‘crossing or any other unicity’, but the expression of ‘a kaleidoscopic totality,
that is to say: the nontotalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversity’ (Bernabé
et al. 1993: 89. Emphasis original). While Glissant is ultimately sceptical of the
authors’ claim to have escaped essentializing the notions of identity (cf. Glissant
1997: 89), their association of a creole aesthetics yet to come (‘Caribbean literature
does not yet exist’ [Bernabé et al. 1993: 76]) with a fragmentary, patchwork-like
totality that does not precede its parts recalls Deleuze’s characterization of a
specifically American writing. New World identity, then, is as Walcott imagines
it: a broken vase, whose fragments are gathered, reassembled with a love
‘stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole’
(Walcott 1999: 69). In this case, the reconstituted mosaic or ‘kaleidoscopic
totality’ evokes a fragmentary, relational and creolized conception of identity
that (via Deleuze) is characteristic of the wider American continent.
As with Walcott’s vase, which is both complete and fragmented at the same
time, Deleuze argues that fragments do not dissolve into an undifferentiated
nothingness or final synthesis but remain ‘intact’, and it is precisely this rejection of
predetermined relationality that marks Deleuze’s point of departure from Hegelian
thought. The work of the writer, then, is to ‘invent nonpreexisting relations’
between fragments (Deleuze 1997: 58); relations that ‘are not internal to a Whole;
rather, the Whole is derived from the external relations of a given moment, and
varies with them. Relations of counterpoint must be invented everywhere, and
are the very condition of evolution’ (59). It is the inventive (re)construction of a
non-pre-existing whole from the fragments which constitute it that reflects the
New World poetics envisioned by Walcott and the Eloge authors: a nontotalitarian
‘kaleidoscopic totality’ or mosaic of broken fragments that represent the political
task of the writer who relates the New World experience. Deleuze’s analysis of
the poetics and politics of Whitman offers a means to extend his account of a
fragmentary American aesthetics as the political work of minor literature.
However, it is in the analysis of another writer, Herman Melville, that Deleuze
further develops his argument for the democratic vision of the Americas.
Bartleby’s Formula
‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ encapsulates the work of a minor literature insofar as
the famous response of Melville’s protagonist – ‘I would prefer not to’ (Melville
Razing the Wall 159
2009: 11) – functions as a language block: an agrammatical formula that, as such,

pushes language beyond itself, deterritorializing the major language formation.
We learn in Melville’s text that the formula elicits markedly exaggerated
responses from the attorney, such that, while his initial reaction to Bartleby’s
refusal constitutes a confused disbelief, as the story progresses he is driven to
relocate his entire office and staff. As such, Deleuze argues, ‘[w]ith each instance,
one has the impression that the madness is growing: not Bartleby’s madness in
“particular”, but the madness around him’ (Deleuze 1997: 70). It is the general
nature of Bartleby’s formula that characterizes its function within the story for
Deleuze, but also suggests something more fundamental about the ground of
Deleuzian literary analysis. If, as argued above, the task of the New World writer
is to establish non-pre-existing relations that constitute a whole, then this maps
on to Deleuze’s understanding of literature insofar as there is nothing to uncover,
interpret or understand when reading a text. Rather, the reader must look to
how it works, what assemblages it creates, and the new connections it forges. The
book is ‘a little non-signifying machine’ (Deleuze 1995: 8) of connections and
blockages, lines of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and, as such
has neither object nor subject. . . . To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook
this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a
beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things,
there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also
lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification. . . . All this,
lines and measureable speeds, constitute an assemblage. (Deleuze and Guattari
2004: 4)
Here the language of relation outlined by Deleuze in ‘Whitman’ assumes far-

reaching consequences: literature, not merely American literature, is a whole that
does not precede its parts or refer to an a priori Ideal as the source of meaning.
The relational movement that Deleuze finds in Whitman’s politics is, then,
concerned with the creation of an assemblage akin to the creation of a literary
text itself. What Bartleby underscores, however, is the significance of ‘lines of
flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification’ to the assemblage
that is the American/New World text.
The power of Bartleby’s formula, Deleuze argues, is to eliminate preference
as such:
It not only abolishes the term it refers to, and that it rejects [to proofread –
the attorney’s request], but it also abolishes the other term it seemed to preserve
[to copy – Bartleby’s original task], and that becomes impossible. In fact, it
renders them indistinct: it hollows out an ever expanding zone of indiscernibility
or indetermination between some nonpreferred activities and a preferable
activity. All particularity, all reference is abolished. (Deleuze 1997: 71)
The formula that Bartleby utters with increasing frequency creates a line of
flight that returns the everyday tasks of the scrivener to their virtual plane of
consistency. In other words, here Deleuze’s reading of the literary text draws
on his understanding of the dual process of individuation that, as with the text,
takes as its basis an immanent ground of pre-individual relations. In place of
either a dialectical movement towards a final synthesis and predetermined
whole, or a transcendent, a priori Ideal, Deleuze describes two moments by
which being and determinate forms emerge from the plane of consistency: the
first (differentiation) designates a primary form of organization which emerges
from the chaotic milieu and which determines the ‘plane of composition’ from
which the second process (differenciation) proceeds as the actualization of the
thing. It is this duality by which individuation is both the formation of a virtual
plane of composition and a specific actualization that makes a literary text-
as-assemblage operate on the level of both the actual and the virtual, as lines
of territorialization and deterritorialization. Returning to Melville, we might
say that the concept of being a scrivener contains as its virtual consistency a
range of tasks that might be associated with the role in any context – copying,
proofreading, various errands and so on. Bartleby’s first assignment – copying –
is, therefore, a specific actualization of the concept. According to the Deleuzian
model, change and difference within the actual occurs when the actual form
returns to the virtual plane of composition (counter-actualization), creates a
new assemblage, and return as difference (actualization). However, Bartleby’s
formula operates as the counter-actualization of his identity as a scrivener in
such a way that it offers no possibility of return. His line of flight cannot be
reterritorialized and as such Bartleby can have no place in the actual world.
Reading Bartleby’s formula in terms of the relation between the concept
and the specific form of Bartleby’s identity as a scrivener evokes the language
of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of philosophy more so than their idea of
literature. Philosophy, they argue, responds to an actual event by isolating its
specific consistency or concept (the virtual plane of consistency from which
the thing is actualized); literature, on the other hand, captures the persistent
sensations that embody the event. In other words, literature and philosophy
deal not merely with the moment of actualization or differenciation, but give
Razing the Wall 161
expression to the virtual content or plane of composition that exists as the form’s
differentiation. The singularity of literature, from a Deleuzian perspective, then,
is linked to the virtual content which is given a body or universe by the text (cf.
Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 177). From this moments of counter-actualization
and the return (actualization) of the new signal the revolutionary potential to
disrupt the status quo. Thus, the newness that Walcott and Césaire celebrate as
a feature of New World writing is, with Deleuze, revealed as the revolutionary
potential of all minor literatures. As such, it is through Deleuze that we might
begin to address critics of Caribbean writers and postcolonial studies more
generally who have fixated on the question of the political value of literature.
Moments of rupture, innovation and difference that fly in the face of hegemony
identified in Deleuze’s thought, as I have argued elsewhere (Burns 2012), offer
a means to transcend the entrenchment of postcolonial studies into a division
between a poststructuralist celebration of différance and the Marxist elevation
of political and material economies. Peter Hallward articulates the challenge
inherent in this impasse in an otherwise antagonistic study of Deleuze and
postcolonialism, Absolutely Postcolonial, when he claims:
The more forceful Marxist critics sometimes seem to forget that the postcolonial
criticism they attack is primarily literary criticism. . . . It is not enough, then,
simply to condemn the theory for its inadequate attention to other disciplines
like ‘political economy’. . . . However objectionable it may be, postcolonial theory
merits evaluation as an interpretation of literature as such. (Hallward 2001: 334)
While following the argument of Hallward’s analysis will ultimately lead us

away from Deleuze, the challenge that he sets to literary theorists – that we take
seriously the question of how to approach the gap between a political or ethical
sensitivity and a mode of criticism that values literature as such – raises an
important question about how we conceive of the relationship between literature
and politics. The value of literature, Hallward contends, lies ‘in its capacity to
invent new ways of using words . . . at a disruptive distance from inherited norms
and expectations’ (xx). Such articulations ‘may have an indirect political effect,
but there is no theoretical justification for claiming that they should always have
such an effect. Literature and politics can both be revolutionary, but only within
the limits of their own field’ (xx).
The challenge set for the literary critic in Absolutely Postcolonial, however,
is one that Hallward himself seems not to have met. As Andy Stafford suggests,
while Hallward argues for an evaluation of literature as such, Absolutely
Postcolonial pursues a critique of writers like Glissant that takes as its key
coordinates politically inflected notions of the nationalism and resistance

(Stafford 2003: 169). In other words, if we are to retain the validity of both the
specific function of New World or postcolonial literatures as the disruption
of inherited imperialist hegemonies (destroying the paternal function) and
neocolonialist systems of exploitation and an understanding of the work of
literature as such, then we will need to explore further the question of the
relationship between literature and politics. As suggested above, Deleuzian
thought seeks to address this tension by rereading authors such as Whitman and
Melville in terms of a writing that functions as the non-hierarchical gathering
of fragments and lines of deterritorialization that disrupt majoritarian
processes such as the paternal function. This, I would suggest, is not only
where such writers enact a politics, as Deleuze argues, but is what links the
specific or ‘innately’ (1997: 56) American characteristics of Whitman’s and
Melville’s writing to a broader New World and, even, postcolonial frame.
Whitman’s attempt to ‘dismantle the English language and send it racing
along a line of flight’ (58) not only echoes in Bartleby’s deterritorialization of
language through his infamous formula, but finds resonance with the work of
both New World and postcolonial writers who write out of the language of the
colonizer but in doing so disrupt its form.
Roberto Fernàndez Retamar’s citation of Caliban’s rebuke to Prospero who
has both ‘robbed [him] of his island, and trained [him] to speak’ – ‘You taught
me language, and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse’ – functions as a sign of
the New World writer’s ability to send the language of the colonizer a long a line
of deterritorialization (Retamar 1989: 7; cf. Shakespeare I.ii. 363–4). Caliban,
Retamar argues, is the image of American man – fatherless, subjected to the will
of the imperialist Prospero and yet threatening his order with revolt. At the same
time, Caliban’s resistance ought not necessarily be conceived in oppositional
terms. As Simone Bignall has argued, by preserving the negative or dialectical
framework established by imperialist thought, postcolonialism conceived as
opposition ‘proposes solutions to colonialism that are unable to break free from
a fundamentally imperial outlook and attitude, because it assumes an underlying
concept of agency that remains grounded in negativity’ (Bignall 2012: 20) and
is ‘aimed at the management of difference’ (18). Adopting the language of the
colonizer and opening it up to a line of flight that escapes the dominant order,
Caliban is expressive of the creole or ‘mestizo inhabitants’ of the Americas, ‘of
our cultural situation, of our reality’ (Retamar 1989: 14), rather than, simply,
an opposition to colonial cultures. Citing an extended role-call of figures from
Toussaint-Louverture and Simón Bolívar to Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon,
Razing the Wall 163
Retamar explicitly links the history and culture of the New World to the figure of
Caliban. His list brings together revolutionary agents, political figures, musicians,
artists and writers, and, as such, functions not simply as a sign of oppositional
resistance against the forces of imperialism, but, with Caliban as a model, as a
rejection of the paternal function, embrace of a fragmentary creole or mestizo
reality, and creation of a new minor language within that of the colonizer. In
other words, what Retamar locates in the Calibanic spirit of the New World,
Deleuze identifies as the political function of an American literature written in
fragments, between brothers and in a language that sends English ‘racing along
a line of flight’ (Deleuze 1997: 58). However, it is here with an understanding of
the emancipatory, disruptive and political force of literature that we encounter
Jacques Rancière’s critique of Deleuze, since for Rancière it is precisely the
movement of deterritorialization that throws into question the political work of
literature as Deleuze characterizes it.
Dissensus: Rancière and Deleuze
Rancière’s own philosophy explores the overlapping functions of politics and

literature as two forms of dissensus, each serving to redistribute and reframe
the ‘sensible’ in new, unforeseen ways; as ‘making what was unseen visible; in
making what was audible as mere noise heard as speech’ (Rancière 2010: 38).
Both processes, therefore, consist ‘in re-figuring space, that is in what is to be
done, to be seen and to be named in it’ (37), and the articulation of that which
was previously excluded, invisible or other is characterized as the moment of
dissensus, of politics itself. It is in this respect that Rancière’s thought departs
from the Marxist conception of politics which begins with a preconstituted
subject who will assume its proper place once the current system of exploitation
is overcome. Similarly, he stands in opposition to critics such as Chris Bongie who
are expressly critical of postcolonial writers who eschew the ‘properly political’
(Bongie 2008: 1) articulation of situated opposition and nationalism, since, for
Rancière, the political subject, the people, ‘exists only as a rupture with the logic
of archê’ and ‘can be identified neither with the race of those who recognize each
other as having the same beginning or birth, nor with a part or sum of the parts,
of the population’ (Rancière 2010: 33).
Rancière’s identification of moments of rupture and the transformation of the
status quo by means of the emergence of a hitherto silenced or hidden people,
would seem to map broadly onto the processes of deterritorialization, becoming

and fabulation that Deleuze outlines in his own philosophy. Where Deleuze
links the task of literature to the invention of a people who are missing, Rancière
ascribes to the aesthetic dimension of politics a transformative process of the
demos’ becoming-actual. As Gabriel Rockhill explains, in Rancière, ‘[t]hose who
have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police
order via a mode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates
of the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics:
we are all equal’ (Rockhill 2006: 3). Rancière therefore reframes the possibility
of equality or democracy, and thus of politics as he defines it, in terms of an
aesthetic redistribution of the sensible, ‘the cluster of perceptions and practices
that shape this common world’ (Rancière 2010: 152). In turn, ‘[t]he politics of
literature thus means that literature as literature is involved in this partition of
the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, ways of doing and ways
of speaking’ (152). While the two fields of literature and politics are irreducible,
there is, for Rancière, ‘a specific link between politics as a definite way of doing
and literature as a definite practice of writing’ (Rancière 2004: 10).
Rancière offers a literary genealogy which marks a distinction between a
representative regime grounded in Aristotelian models of genre, plot and the
principle of mimesis, and an aesthetic regime, which abolishes ‘the dichotomous
structure of mimesis in the name of a contradictory identification between logos
and pathos. It thereby provokes a transformation in the distribution of the
sensible established by the representative regime’ (Rockhill 2006: 4). This act of
emancipatory dissensus is in line with Rancière’s general characterization of the
politics of literature as such, however, as Rockhill explains, ‘it simultaneously acts
as the contradictory limit at which the specificity of literature itself disappears due
to the fact that it no longer has any clearly identifiable characteristics that would
distinguish it from any other mode of discourse’ (5). Where the representative
regime of art establishes the ‘primacy of action over character’, a ‘hierarchy of
genres according to the dignity of their subject matter’ and does so on the basis
of ‘an analogy with a fully hierarchical vision of the community’ (Rancière 2006:
22), the aesthetic regime ‘strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from
any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres’ (23).
It is not enough for literature to simply abandon the Aristotelian hierarchy of
representation:
The unique power of literature finds its source in that zone of indeterminacy where
former individuations are undone, where the eternal dance of atoms composes
Razing the Wall 165
new figures and intensities every moment. The old power of representation
stemmed from the capacity of the organized mind to animate formless external
material. The new power of literature takes hold, on the other hand, just where
the mind becomes disorganized, where its world splits, where thought bursts
into atoms that are in unity with atoms of matter. (Rancière 2004: 149)
The aesthetic regime opens up a dissensus within the hierarchical and structured
ordering of the sensible because it witnesses a split which both distinguishes
between and collides organization and disorganization, thought and non-
thought, and art and non-art. This is key to understanding Rancière’s democratic
vision of art, since, as Hallward explains, if democracy is concerned ‘not with the
formulation of agreement or the preservation of order but with the invention
of new and hitherto unauthorized modes of disaggregation, disagreement and
disorder’, then the aesthetic regime continually institutes a democratic movement
insofar as ‘genuine art is what indistinguishes, in newly creative ways and with
the resources peculiar to a specific artistic practice, art and that which figures as
other than art’ (Hallward 2005: 35). Where the regime of representation fixes the
division between art and non-art, Rancière’s aesthetic revolution creates dissensus
within that ordered distribution of the sensible by blurring the boundary.
The singular power of literature, then, is a paradoxical position since ‘[a]rt’s
sole task is then to bear witness to an Otherness it cannot evoke or represent’
(Hallward 2005: 38). Of course, Deleuze too locates the power of literature in
that pre-individual zone of indeterminacy or imperceptibility, and his analysis
of the deterritorializing effect of Bartleby’s formula is one example among many
others. Rancière further evokes the Deleuzian notion of an art linked to the
promise of a people yet to come, and in doing so marks the point at which his
thought diverges from Deleuze’s, suggesting that art ‘bears within it the promise
of a people to come whose liberty and equality are effective and lived and not
simply represented. But this promise is marked by the paradox of “artistic”
resistance’ (Rancière 2010: 177); ‘The “resistance of art” thus appears as a double-
edged paradox. To maintain the promise of a new people, it must either suppress
itself, or defer indefinitely the coming of this people’ (179). Caught between art
and non-art (life), a choice must be made to either ‘suppress itself ’ by becoming
other than itself (life) or defer the political promise of a fraternal politics by
remaining art. Rancière’s solution is to preserve the distinction between and
confusion of art and non-art: ‘Art’s “resistance” is in fact the tension of contraries,
the interminable tension between Apollo and Dionysus’ (175). Dionysus, the
line of flight that escapes the hegemonic Law of the Father, cannot alone fulfil
literature’s promise of ‘health’. Rather, both Dionysus and Apollo, minor and
major, deterritorialization and reterritorialization must be continually evoked as
the distinct and interrelated poles of art.
As both Raji Vallury (2009: 237) and Michael Jonik (2011) have argued,
Deleuzians will no doubt recognize the dualism that serves as the ground of art’s
revolutionary power. However, it is here that Rancière introduces a fundamental
critique of Deleuze’s approach to literature and politics, since his work, argues
Rancière, ultimately fails to maintain the distinction between art and non-art,
the sensible and the insensible, introducing, in a self-consciously Platonic move,
‘a transcendence at the heart of immanence’ (Deleuze 1997: 137). As Rancière
argues:
Deleuze, for his part, refuses to accept that, in the last instance, metaphor can
be the truth of its truth. He wants it to be a real metamorphosis: literature must
produce not a metaphor but a metamorphosis. . . . Achab [sic] must be the
witness of ‘primary nature’ and Bartleby must be a Christ, the mediator between
two radically separate orders. For this, the artist himself must have passed
over to ‘the other side’, must have lived through something that is too strong,
unbreathable, an experience of primary nature, of the inhuman nature from
which he returns with ‘reddened eyes’. . . . But it remains to be seen what the
price is to pay for that excess. The price to pay is literally the reintroduction of a
kind of transcendence in the thought of immanence. (Rancière 2010: 180)
While Deleuze privileges metamorphoses such as Bartleby’s becoming-

imperceptible or Ahab’s becoming-whale, ostensibly leading us into a zone of
indeterminacy or deterritorialization, he ultimately fails to maintain ‘the purity
of distinction that contrasts the formula to the story’ (Rancière 2004: 153).
He celebrates the destructive effects of a minor language, but can do so only
as a transcription of words: Gregor’s squeaking in Metamorphosis or Isabel’s
murmur in Pierre, or, The Ambiguities ‘creates no other language in language’
(154). Similarly, despite his rejection of representation and metaphor, Deleuze
returns us to the classical Aristotelian categories of story, character and action:
‘He descants on the virtue of molecular multiplicities and haecceities, of non-
personal forms of individuation. He goes on about the individuality of an hour
that dream, or a landscape that sees. But his analyses always come to center on
the “hero” of a story’ (154) – Ahab or Bartleby are the exemplary characters or
operators of becoming.
If Deleuze provides us with a way to think about the protagonist, author
or ideology in terms of a process with the potential to open up a line of flight
Razing the Wall 167
that escapes the dominant order, then Rancière’s critique challenges certain
assumptions about the politics of literature. At issue is not so much the appli
cation of Aristotelian categories as much as the assumption made by Deleuze,
according to Rancière, that equality is derived from the ontological primacy of
non-preference, imperceptibility or primary nature. To privilege the virtual is to
reinstate transcendence at the heart of immanence and, ultimately, to resolve the
distinction between art and life upon which Rancière’s philosophy of aesthetics
and politics is grounded. Yet, as Michael Jonik has argued the transcendental
empiricism that Deleuze advocates might offer a way to rethink this impasse
(Jonik 2011: 40). Rather than returning us to transcendence, transcendental
empiricism offers a focus on experience, analysing the various states of being and
exploring how states of affairs come to be what they are (becoming not Being).
In other words, rather than starting with ‘abstractions such as the One, the Whole,
the Subject’ and then searching for ‘the process by which they are embodied in
a world which they make conform to their requirements’, Deleuze explores ‘the
states of things, in such a way that non-preexistent concepts can be extracted
from them’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: vi). Thus, it is within immanence that the
processes of de/reterritorialization may be extracted. Similarly, if Deleuze rejects
mimesis in order to argue that ‘Ahab does not imitate the whale, he becomes
Moby-Dick’, he describes not a metamorphosis as such, but the entrance ‘into
the zone of proximity where he can no longer be distinguished from Moby-Dick’
(1997: 78): a flight towards a shared plane of immanence that is common to
both figures. Deleuze’s analyses of literature give us a line of deterritorialization
within immanence as the potential becoming-minor of actual forms. Crucially
then, as Jonik argues, ‘the original becomes less the hero of the confrontation of
the two orders, as the fading sign of the human where it becomes indiscernible
from the inhuman world’ (2011: 40).
The literary text, then, performs the processes of deterritorialization but
not, Rancière reminds us, in order to resolve the tension or dualism of the
virtual/actual divide. There is no ontological basis to suppose that the fraternal
New World community will take precedence over the Law of the Father
(cf. Rancière 2004: 158). Rather, literature and indeed the politics of literature
mark the potential becoming-minor of a people yet to come. It is precisely, this
sense of deferred becoming that Rancière’s analysis of Deleuze and, specifically,
‘Bartleby; or The Formula’ elides. Deleuze’s return to the hero of the work gives
power to the figure of the eccentric or witness who is ‘strictly identical with
the power of the writer’, for Rancière (156). For Deleuze the writer is aligned
with health and the fabulating function because ‘he possesses an irresistible
and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too
big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him,
while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial
health would render impossible’ (1997: 3). Literature embraces the power of a
singularity – ‘[a] brother, a sister, all the more true for no longer being “his” of
“hers” ’ (84) – which is ‘too big’, ‘too strong’, an event that cannot be fully grasped
by its actuality. Literature is health because it incorporates both the actual event
or form and its virtual potential to become new. And, in the face of legacies of
imperial exploitation and colonial law, New World literatures represent health
insofar as they reject the paternal function and realize a ‘society of brothers’
(84). But crucially ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ reveals that this is a society yet to
come, an attempt to transform the world that is threatened always with failure
and the return of the father. Thus, far from assuming unequivocally the priority
of a fraternal community, Deleuze demonstrates the ongoing tension between
contraries by which the singular power of ‘a brother’ is threatened with the
return of the father (88), and, conversely, the majoritarian forces of nationalism
and paternal function of the Law are subject to deterritorialization:
For even in the midst of its failure, the American Revolution continues to send
out its fragments, always making something take flight on the horizon . . .,
always trying to break through the wall, to take up the experiment once again,
to find a brotherhood in this enterprise, a sister in this becoming, a music in its
stuttering language. (89)
It is this preservation of the tension between the singular and the specific that
continually confronts literature with its other without resolving the two.
The same holds for Deleuze’s discussion of Melville’s character classification,
which Rancière misrepresents by claiming the Ahab and Bartleby may be
identified as both the heroes of the analysis and aligned with the function of the
author. As argued above, the author may be associated with good health only
insofar as their experience of an event that is too big gives them the becomings
that constitute health in this actual world. As such, the author is identified not
as a being of primary nature, akin to Ahab or Bartleby, but more precisely as
a witness; a being of secondary nature, such as Ishmael, Captain Vere and the
attorney, who is able to recognize the devastation wrought by originals:
Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, and the attorney in Bartleby
all have this power to ‘See’: they are capable of grasping and understanding,
as much as is possible, the beings of Primary Nature. . . . Though they are able
to see into the Primary Nature that so fascinates them, they are nonetheless
Razing the Wall 169
representatives of secondary nature and its laws. . . . Torn between the two
Natures, with all their contradictions, these characters . . . are Witnesses,
narrators, interpreters. (80–1)
The distinction that Rancière overlooks is one made between the eccentric
figures of primary nature and the role of the prophet, which is to bear witness
to the effects of originals as well as the light they throw on the world. In other
words, like the author, the prophet’s role is to intuit the play of a singular life (the
originals and the events that exceed the logic of representation, that cannot be
located on the plane of organization), within a milieu of particular lives: to grasp
‘the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason. The
novelist has the eye of a prophet, not the gaze of a psychologist’ (82). This enables
the writer-as-witness to formulate a symptomatology of their milieu, creating a
new understanding of particular forms of life. At the same time, because they
also sense, as much as is possible, something of the singular life that originals
express, theirs is a narrative that contains the virtual potential to become. A life
means the potential for life (and for different ways of life) in any context: life
as becoming, not being. Therefore, at once, the author/character as physician/
prophet both creates new diagnoses from the particular lives that populate their
milieu and intuits something of the virtual potential of a life as the power to
become: literature as ‘health’.
The New World poetics that Deleuze envisions, then, is one that anticipates
the demands for newness, fragmentation and a creolizing concept of identity
that contemporary writers of the ‘other America’ express. In establishing the
grounds for health in a people yet to come, a fraternal society that banishes
the Law of the father, Deleuze explores the role of the writer-as-prophet in which
the text moves from the author’s exemplary case to the singularity which grounds
it. Such a focus on the exemplary case or character is not, as Rancière argues,
the reconstitution of transcendence at the heart of immanence, but, the preser
vation of the tension between the singular and the specific. Melville or Whitman,
Walcott or Césaire, these writers of the New World embody the collective,
political function of minor literature by bearing witness to a singularity that is
beyond them but which throws a light upon the world. Such writers pursue the
imperative for newness via a fragmentary writing and reject the paternal function
in a literature which functions as the sign of the potential for health and a society
yet to come in a pan-American, New World context. As such, the politics of New
World literature is at once collective and particular, centred on a secondary New
World ‘Adam’ seeking to create a new symptomatology of their world.
References
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Praise of Creoleness), trans. M. B. Taleb-Khyar. Paris: Gallimard.
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Bogue, Ronald (2011), ‘Deleuze and Guattari and the Future of Politics: Science Fiction,
Protocols and the People to Come’. Deleuze Studies 5: 77–97.
Bongie, Chris (2008), Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/colonial
Literatures. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Burns, Lorna (2012), Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze. London and New
York: Continuum.
Césaire, Aimé (1972), Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham. New York and
London: Monthly Review Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin. New York:
—(1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2006), Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum.
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and Hugh Tomlinson. London and New York: Verso.
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Glissant, Édouard (1989), Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia.
Hallward, Peter (2001), Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the
Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
—(2005), ‘Jacques Rancière and the Subversion of Mastery’. Paragraph 28: 26–45.
Jonik, Michael (2011), ‘Murmurs, Stutters, Foreign Intonations: Melville’s Unreadables’.
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Shakespeare, William (1996), The Tempest, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
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Francophone Postcolonial Studies. London: Arnold, 166–77.
Vallury, Raji (2009), ‘Politicizing Art in Rancière and Deleuze: The Case of Postcolonial
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172
Part Four
Literature and Life After Deleuze

9
‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’:

Schizoanalysis, Acceleration and
Contemporary American Literature
Benjamin Noys
The English comic writer and dandy Max Beerbohm once felt moved to express
his feelings towards psychoanalysis, or what he preferred to call the ‘new
pyschology’, to his friend S. N. Berhman:
‘What would they do to me?’. . . . ‘I adored my father and mother and I adored
my brothers and sisters. What kind of complex would they find me the victim of?
Oedipus and what else?’ He reflected a moment. ‘They were a tense and peculiar
family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?’ (in Cecil 1964: 480)
This amused insouciance might seem to be fatal to psychoanalysis, which tends

to find difficulty in being treated lightly. The ‘Oedipuses’ are comically reduced
to being one family among others, and a peculiar family at that. In reply the
psychoanalyst could note, no doubt to the extreme ire of Beerbohm, that the
‘tenseness’ and ‘peculiarity’ Beerbohm identifies in the Oedipuses might well be
signs of his own anxiety.
The history of literature since Freud has exemplified a relationship to
psychoanalysis that is at once intimate and antagonistic. Post-Freudian
literary writing is a veritable anti-psychoanalysis. It is no surprise then that in
constructing their project of schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari should turn
constantly to literature. This project, in Guattari’s words, aims to ‘sift . . . through
the remnants of psychoanalysis’ to find ‘new theoretical elaborations which
avoid, . . ., the reductiveness of Freudian and Lacanian formulations’ (1998: 433).
This elaboration is, however, conducted from inside psychoanalysis. Deleuze
and Guattari construct a war-machine that turns the remnants of psychoanalysis
against psychoanalysis. Ian Buchanan has pointed out that schizoanalysis is not
so much a dismissal as an attempt to ‘re-engineer psychoanalysis’ (2013: 9). This

re-engineering, contrary to the puzzlement and lightly worn disdain of Max
Beerbohm, turns on the necessity of ‘tension’.
When Deleuze and Guattari turn to writers they do not choose those writers
who have treated psychoanalysis with amused disdain, but to those who have
been closest to it, in the most agonized and tense forms: Kafka, Beckett, D. H.
Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and others. Gregg Lambert notes that Deleuze and
Guattari tend generally to choose ‘problematic writers’ (1998: 30): those who
are pessimistic, politically dubious, anguished and ‘unhealthy’, to change these
‘symptoms’ to new signs of joy, strength, and political possibility. The same is
true in regards to psychoanalysis. Those who display the most ‘exaggerated
Oedipus’, as Deleuze and Guattari refer to Kafka (1986: 9–15), are not the
most oedipal writers but the writers who offer, paradoxically, the best chance
to explode Oedipus from within. The ‘Oedipuses’ are not one family among
others, but the signature form by which capitalism tries to reterritorialize and
recode insurgent desires. In literature, therefore, re-engineering comes from an
intimacy that turns antagonistic, rupturing the oedipal structure by decoding
desire (Holland 1993).
There is, however, a certain slackening of this tension, as literary writers post-
Deleuze and Guattari turn to their work, or can be read in consonance with it.
This convergence suggests that Deleuze and Guattari’s project of schizoanalysis –
which is to ‘de-oedipalise the unconscious in order to reach the real problems’
(1983: 81) – finds itself enacted in literature. This convergence does not simply
either confirm the superiority of schizoanalysis to psychoanalysis, nor does it
simply dissolve any tensions. Instead we find a new tension. Where once Deleuze
and Guattari turned to writers to force a path out of psychoanalysis, or a traversal
to a ‘de-oedipalised’ unconscious, now writers turn to Deleuze and Guattari in
agreement. We now encounter an explicitly ‘de-oedipalised’ literature that has
learnt the lesson of schizoanalysis.
Accelerate the process
The convergence between the work on literature of Deleuze and Guattari, and
Deleuze, and literary writers has not gone unnoticed. Peter Hallward, in his book
Absolutely Postcolonial (2001), has traced how several postcolonial writers – Édouard
Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib, and Severo Sarduy – elaborate, to
‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’ 177
varying degrees and with varying degrees of awareness, a Deleuzian writing. This is,
according to Hallward, a writing of the singular (2001: 3), which returns everything
to immanence and deterritorialization in order to undo the binaries and boundaries
of colonial and capitalist power. Hallward disputes this convergence, arguing that
the dissolution of territories into a singular space of writing leads to inadvertent
collusion with the colonial project by dissolving antagonism and struggle (Hallward
2001: 1–4; cf. Hallward 2006). In a similar fashion, Jordana Rosenberg (2014; cf.
Noys 2008) has critiqued the turn to ‘molecular sexuality’ in Queer theory, which
she traces to an uncritical embrace of the speculative tendencies of contemporary
capitalism. Rosenberg retains more sympathy for Deleuze and Guattari, with their
emphasis on the social, compared to the ‘naturalisation’ of sexuality embedded
into non-human processes of molecular change celebrated by certain forms of
queer theory. Finally, we could note how Fredric Jameson’s attempts to critique
and engage with the stasis of our epoch of financialization have consistently
turned to Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptuality to probe disruptive and productive
capacities (Noys 2014a). This explicitly includes a critical reengagement of literary
writers – including Wyndham Lewis (Jameson 2008), Bertolt Brecht (Jameson
1998), and Andrei Platonov (Jameson 1994) – with the libidinal economy of
Deleuze and Guattari, to re-energize the present moment.
These critical accounts all draw attention to the problematic fact that while
the work of Deleuze and Guattari, especially their account of deterritorialization,
appears to capture something of the truth of capitalism as an axiomatic
machine, this convergence can also collapse into ideological justification. Many
contemporary criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari turn on the argument that
deterritorialization and lines of flight do not indicate a means of escape, but
reinforce and replicate the tendencies of capitalism (Badiou 2000; Žižek 2004;
Hallward 2006). For these critics the schizoanalytic de-oedipalized body
without organs is not the explosion of capitalist society, but the symptomatic
form of contemporary post-oedipal ‘societies of enjoyment’ (McGowan 2004).1
This problem can be traced along one particular vector of Deleuze and
Guattari’s work: acceleration. Eugene W. Holland (1993) has stressed how
literature can engage in a disruptive decoding that pushes capital’s own decoding
to the point of collapse. He has also recently insisted that the politics of Deleuze
and Guattari can be found in ‘free-market communism’: the freeing-up of the
forces of the market that can, it is claimed, disrupt the reterritorializing forces
of capital (Holland 2011). This modelling of acceleration is found in Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), with the well-known claim that the need
might be to ‘go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding
and deterritorialisation’ and that we need ‘[n]ot to withdraw from the process,
but to go further, to “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche put it’ (1983: 239–40).
Acceleration moves along the lines of capital to develop an explosion point of a
line of flight that can punch through capitalism.
I have characterized and contested this modelling of revolutionary practice as
‘accelerationism’ (Noys 2010: 4–9; cf. Noys 2014b). The obvious difficulty, which
became evident to Deleuze and Guattari, was that encouraging acceleration
along the vectors of deterritorialization could both coincide with capitalism
and become outpaced by capitalism. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze
and Guattari rescind or question the desire for acceleration, arguing that the
dismantling of the ego should not be carried out with a sledgehammer but with
‘a very fine file’ (1988: 160). The drive to acceleration as solution is modulated,
if not ruled completely out of hand. This equivocal modulation is also visible
in What Is Philosophy? (1991). Deleuze and Guattari insist that the plane of
immanence is constituted through a practice that is irreducible to philosophy.
This practice requires speed, however, as ‘as long as consciousness traverses the
transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused, nothing is able
to reveal it’ (1994: 26). Here acceleration turns not so much on the forces of
capitalism, as on the force of thought itself. This infinite speed is self-referential,
a speed that refers to no world, but only to the possibilities of thought (Hallward
2006: 140–6).
This problem of acceleration can be probed in the convergence of schizo
analysis with literature. If literature is in the process of becoming-Deleuzian,
then it confronts the same tension between critical analysis of contemporary
capitalism and reinforcement of the forms of contemporary capitalism. For
Deleuze the most fecund literature for thinking schizoanalysis, and his project
more generally, was Anglo-American writing. What he calls ‘the superiority of
Anglo-American Literature’ is predicated on a ‘line of flight’ that incarnates a
deterritorialization (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 36–76). The Anglo-American
moves at ‘breakneck speed’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 37), which always risks
reterritorialization and so the line of flight must be protected, passed on, to truly
accelerate. Deleuze carefully qualifies what this ‘acceleration’ might mean: we
can stay in place and stay on a line of flight, it must not be mistaken for simply
voyaging, and it does not lead out of this world.
These cautions do not immunize his project from the criticisms that have
been posed. Why turn to the language of acceleration at all if it runs the risk of
collapsing back into capitalism? The persistence of speed, even with provisos
and cautions, indicates a continuing belief in some higher production, whether
that be tracked in capitalist deterritorialization, vital capacities, or the speed of
thought. It is this energizing effect that may account for the influence of Deleuze
and Guattari today. While running the risk of replicating capitalism or, better,
capitalism’s self-image of dynamic auto-production, the drive is to find a superior
force of production. This desire includes, obviously, the productive force of
writing. The literary writer seeks to shape or ride the line of flight through the
world so as to generate a newly productive world.
To write in the lineage of Deleuze and Guattari might even be said to constitute
the form of contemporary realism, especially if we consider the prevalence and
relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal descriptions of capitalism.
While experimental writers have been closest to Deleuze and Guattari, as we will
see, this experimental writing is the writing of the reality of the present moment,
taken in the delirious forms of capitalist abstraction. ‘Realism’, in this context,
has to become experimental to present and analyse these ‘abstract machines’:
the forces of repetition, desire, and flux, which constitute our experience. To
write the present is to write this moment of hypertrophy and, often, to try to
exceed it.
If Anglo-American literature was crucial for Deleuze, it is particularly
American literature that has displayed convergence with Deleuze, and Deleuze
and Guattari. There are a number of contemporary American writers who,
explicitly or implicitly, can be linked to the Deleuzian, or Deleuze and Guattari’s,
project. These include Kathy Acker, with her Empire of the Senseless (1988), David
Foster Wallace, especially Infinite Jest (1996), in which Deleuze is mentioned,
and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). The writing and creative-
writing teaching of Gordon Lish has deployed contemporary theory, including
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), in his development of an avant-garde
formal practice.2 This is the more austere Deleuze, who forges repetition as a
weapon against representation.
There are the more obvious and famous examples of explicit influence. These
include cyberpunk science fiction, most notably the work of Bruce Sterling and
William Gibson (who is Canadian, by adopted citizenship). In Gibson’s Idoru
(1996) the eponymous virtual pop-singer is described as a ‘desiring-machine’
(1997: 178), which are ‘aggregates of subjective desire’ (1997: 178; italics in
original). The virtual ‘persona’ is constituted through the forms of desire that
coagulate to form a ‘character’. Gibson’s novel concerns that attempt by the rock
singer Rez to ‘marry’ this virtual creation. This is achieved by the use of a nano-
assembler to create a physical form of the virtual environment of the Walled
City, which had been an enclave within cyberspace: ‘A thing of random human
accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from
its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy’ (Gibson 1997: 289). This
creation mediates the ‘marriage’, and Gibson’s fiction turns on these possibilities
of the embodiment of ‘subjective desire’ and ‘consensual fantasy’. The result is an
attempt to embody ‘desiring-production’.
The signature example of convergence is Thomas Pynchon. In Vineland (1990)
there is a notorious reference to ‘the indispensable Italian Wedding Fake Book,
by Deleuze & Guattari’ (1991: 97). A fake book is a collection of musical leads
to help a performer learn new songs quickly, and is required here by the punk
band Billy Barf and the Vomitones, who have been hired to play at what may be
a mafia wedding. While this may be a throwaway reference, and contains more
than a hint of sarcasm, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997) offers a more sustained
reflection. The boundary drawing by Mason and Dixon involves cartographic
reflection that explores the constitution of the United States as territorial ‘unity’,
and the need or desire for lines of flight (Mattessich 2002: 231–45). The irony,
however, is that Pynchon’s most schizoanalytic novel is one published before his
encounter with Deleuze and Guattari and, appropriately, only 1 year after Anti-
Oedipus (1972). This is, of course, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). It is this novel that
not only converges, in advance, with Deleuze and Guattari, but also converges
and explores the problem of acceleration.
In the zone
Gravity’s Rainbow, appropriately, defies rational summary, but concerns the

picaresque adventures of Tyrone Slothrop as he makes his way through World
War II. Unknown to Slothrop, the erections he achieves before the German V-2
rocket attacks, which allow these attacks to be tracked, are the result of childhood
Pavlovian conditioning to the plastic sheathing Imipolex G used in the weapon
(see Sharpe 2007). Slothrop pursues a quest to discover this fact, against
the various conspiracies that nest the novel, before ending his quest in the
‘zone’ – the fragmented and terrifying landscape of occupied Germany.
The novel, like the work of Deleuze and Guattari, is boundup with the
‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s (Deleuze 1985: 142). This discourse implies a war
within the war between the forces of ‘control’ (Deleuze 1992) and various forms
of escape and resistance. In Pynchon’s novel the war itself is the conspiratorial
agent par excellence or, to be more precise, the use of the war by various systems
of control to accelerate technological development:
It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to
keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs
of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war. (Pynchon 1975: 521)
In a thesis derived from Max Weber, the war is a driver for rationalization, which
develops ‘abstractions of power’ (Pynchon 1975: 81). This truth is recorded in
various forms in the novel by these systems of control. In a manual on file in the
US War Department, it is stated that the violence of war is a spectacle of distraction
for the masses, while ‘[t]he true war is a celebration of markets’ (Pynchon 1975:
105). The journal ‘Paranoid Systems of History (PSH), a short-lived periodical
of the 1920s whose plates have all mysteriously vanished, natch’, suggested that
German hyper-inflation was a stimulus ‘simply to drive young enthusiasts of the
Cybernetic Tradition into Control work’ (Pynchon 1975: 238).
How do we counter the malignant acceleration of control? The suggestion
in Pynchon’s novel, which is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion to
‘accelerate the process’, is that to counter acceleration at the service of control
we seem to need a superior acceleration. This is not simply the acceleration
of technology, but lies in an equivocal attempt to rupture and explode the
constraints of control. This is incarnated in Slothrop’s attempt to evade the
systems of control. One of his pondered solutions seems to coincide with what
Deleuze and Guattari call an ‘absolute decoding of flows’ (1983: 271):
It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back – maybe that
anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences
are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared,
depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates
from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality
to fuck it up. (Pynchon 1975: 556)
The word ‘preterite’ refers to a tract by Slothrop’s Puritan ancestor, which

distinguishes between the elect and preterite, with Slothrop identifying with the
preterite. Katherine Sharpe argues that the world of the preterite is the counter-
cultural world of resistance to the elect of control (2007: 39). In this moment
Slothrop envisages a utopian end to all divisions, including between resistance
and power (‘without elect, without preterite’), and entrance into an anarchic
space deterritorialized, or depolarized, of all binaries.
In the case of Slothrop this involves a disintegration of what Deleuze call the
‘sensory-motor schema’ (Deleuze 1989a: 40). Deleuze’s Cinema books trace how
this schema, which is organized by selection and coordination, breaks down
to the point that characters ‘find themselves condemned to wander about or
go off on a trip’ (Deleuze 1989a: 41). This is the fate of Slothrop. Deep in the
zone he starts to fragment and shatter under the shearing pressures of control
and resistance: ‘he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell–stripped.
Scattered all over the zone’ (Pynchon 1975: 712; italics in original). If ‘[Deleuze]
ruins any merely creaturely coherence’ (Hallward 2001: 14), then so does
Pynchon. The accelerative forces tear Slothrop apart, to the point that ‘Some
believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their
own. If so there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present population are offshoots
of his original scattering’ (Pynchon 1975: 742). If control operates, as Pynchon
and Deleuze and Guattari suppose, by imposing territorialization and the oedipal
grid, the line of flight involves an accelerated fragmentation to the point of the
‘body without organs’, in which the self is radically deterritorialized.
The difficulty is to imagine how such fragmentation can amount to resistance.
Is Slothrop’s disintegration the gate to an existence beyond control, or a
dispersion that lacks any capacity to make significant resistance? (Sharpe 2007:
40). The line of flight, which leaves Slothrop ‘oscillating in the cleft between this
world and nature’ (Pynchon 1975: 740), is only one brief and fleeting moment.
This ‘oscillation’ can only, it seems, be resolved into acceleration beyond such
binaries. The difficulty is then that the destabilization of Slothrop threatens a
collapse that cannot cohere on a line of flight. This would be a collapse, instead,
into what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a black hole’ (1988: 224). This terminus in
‘absolute decoding’ seems to leave no leverage on the present.
This problem, in which the fleeting moment of absolute decoding appears
only to quickly disappear, is also true of the zone itself. The ‘zone’ can only briefly
prefigure a depolarized space as a vanishing mediator, or even utopian moment,
between the end of the war and the reterritorialization of states in its aftermath.
The fences only went down for a brief moment, before being re-erected.3 This
is especially true of the post-war binary of the Cold War, in which nuclear and
cybernetic forces were channelled into the constitution of two mirrored blocs.
This is the time of Pynchon’s writing of the novel, which inhabits a retrospective
nostalgia for a depolarized moment now past. So, at the level of the individual
and at the level of the collective, even if the individual becomes a collective (as
does Slothrop), acceleration seems to disappear or become exhausted. The result
is the reconstitution of a perpetual war between the forces of control and the
counterculture, which always ends in defeat for the counterculture.
We can pair Slothrop’s dispersive ‘solution’ with that of another character:
Gottfried, who is sealed into the final operational V-2 (numbered 00000), which
is fired at the end of the novel. If Slothrop is the figure of disintegration, then this
is the terminal scene of machinic integration. Gottfried has been the masochist
lover of the Nazi Captain Blicero. This relationship has involved a fantasy of
incestuous and masochistic sex between Gottfried and his pseudo-sister and
‘silent doubleganger’ Katje, orchestrated by Blicero (Pynchon 1975: 102). These
scenes include Gottfried ‘in highest drag’, equipped with a fake vagina lined
with razor blades that Katje has to cut her lips and tongue on to ‘kiss blood-
abstracts across the golden ungesoed back of her “brother” Gottfried’ (Pynchon
1975: 95). Gottfried inhabits a ‘becoming-woman’ that offers a parody of the
vagina detanta – the consuming image of absorption and transformation. This
submission of Gottfried within the masochistic scenario prefigures his ultimate
submission to the V-2 rocket as mode of technological acceleration.
Here Pynchon is in a ‘Jungian frame of mind’ (Pynchon 1975: 276). It was
Jung who suggested that we might escape Freud’s Oedipus complex through
embracing the possibility of a rebirth through incest that would connect us with
a primal symbol of the mother. Jung argued that the myth of rebirth through
incest involved a ‘night sea journey’ in a return to the womb to achieve rebirth
(Kerslake 2004: 147). Gottfried is encased in the rocket and in the womb-like
enclosure of a shroud made from the plastic Imipolex G. The sister-incest fantasy
of his masochist linkage to Katje is doubled and repeated in the machine-incest
fantasy of the night-flight.
Without being aware of Deleuze, we could add that Pynchon is also in
a Deleuzian frame of mind. What Deleuze added to Jung’s analysis was the
suggestion that the fantasy of rebirth through incest was a masochistic fantasy
(Deleuze 2004). Deleuze argued that masochism is ‘a perverse realisation of the
fantasy of incest’ (Kerslake 2004: 135, italics in original). Deleuze provides us
with an explicit way in which to link Gottfried’s submissive sexual masochism to
the de-sexualized submission to machinic integration in his night-flight journey.
Rather than simply collapse into submission to the order of Nazi politics or
technological control, Pynchon poses the disturbing possibility of a traversal of
control through submission. Read alongside Deleuze’s analysis of masochism,
which emphasizes how submission can engender a new politics ‘beyond the
father’ (Deleuze 1989b: 100), this suggests another mode of escape.
Deleuze argues that this rebirth through masochism promises the rebirth of a
world-historical ‘new man’ (Deleuze 1989b: 95; Kerslake 2004: 136). In a parody
of Hegel, the world-historical individual is not the tragic figure of power but
the one who has submitted to a masochistic fusion with the machine. While we
might, as with Slothrop’s dispersion, regard this fusion as fatal or impotent, in a
schizoanalytic reading the surrender or submission generates a new power. The
tension of submission is, however, retained in Pynchon’s novel in the tension
of Gottfried’s ambivalent status. Is he pilot or passenger? While the pilot might
direct a line of flight, the passenger submits to it: ‘Stuff him in. Not a Procrustean
bed, but modified to take him. The two, boy and Rocket, concurrently designed’
(Pynchon 1975: 751). The fusion is, appropriately, a masochistic or quasi-sexual
fusion: ‘They are mated to each other, Schwarzgerät and next higher assembly’
(Pynchon 1975: 751). This ‘assemblage’ is uncomfortably poised in terms of the
myth of the new world-historical figure that a schizoanalytic reading would
desire – between the fused traversal of power and fused submission to power.
In the description of the ascent of the V-2, Pynchon writes: ‘The victim, in
bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape’ (1975: 758). The
‘escape’ is temporary, only the moment of the abolition of gravity, which ‘dips
away briefly’ (Pynchon 1975: 759). At this moment of the highest arc of the V-2
the ‘escape’ is figured as a ‘whitening’: ‘a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite’
(Pynchon 1975: 759). In this moment Nazi racial politics ambiguously implode
as we find sunlight, at the peak of the rocket’s arc, ‘rarefying the Caucasian pallor
to an abolition of pigment’ (Pynchon 1975: 759). This ‘abolition’ suggests the
kind of ambiguous racial delirium that characterizes the breakdown of Daniel
Paul Schreber, poised between revolutionary desire and ‘fascist investments’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 364). In this moment the world-historical figure
emerges as this abolition, suspended at the point of the arc before Brennschluss
(the cessation of fuel burning) and the fall of the rocket to detonate on a cinema.
It is fiction that provides the possibility of suspension, as the rocket never falls.
The difficulty, however, is to imagine what is expressed in this world-historical
figure of rebirth? The line, or arc, of flight presents a fleeting glimpse of the new,
which recedes from the stage of history.
Deleuze’s ‘attempt to harness the pathogenic forces of modernity to other
possible world-historical ends’ (Kerslake 2004: 144) remains at the heart of his
project and of his work with Guattari. From Deleuze’s early Jungian evocations,
to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘schizophrenic’, on to the promise of the Cinema books

of a ‘people to come’ where the people are missing (Deleuze 1989a: 224), the
work clears the stage for the emergence of the new. This inaugural function
makes evident the convergence with Pynchon. In the case of Slothrop and
Gottfried, the moment of acceleration to this new figure is strangely stalled in
different forms of terminal disintegration; in the dispersion of the zone or in
the condensed moment of impact. This is the difficult equivocation that haunts
the rebirth of the world-historical figure. The line of flight leads to a rebirth
or decoding that promises to achieve a state beyond acceleration, into what
Pynchon calls the ‘depolarised’. The difficulty is that this involves a slackening of
tension in terms of an achieved ‘absolute decoding’ where no code remains to be
decoded and no territory remains to be deterritorialized. This is evident in the
difficulty in presenting such a moment, which is only left implied. It seems that
any production of the world-historical would, of necessity, betray acceleration
and decoding. While we might strive towards an ‘absolute decoding’, an ascent,
like the V-2 rocket, this is only a moment before the inevitable descent, and
falling back.
Nodes and flows
In a 1984 essay, Pynchon remarked that ‘since 1959, we have come to live among
flows of data more vast than anything that world has seen before’ (Pynchon
in Burn 2003: 19). It is obvious to read Pynchon’s novels as expressions and
navigations of these vast data flows. This cartographic impulse is visible already
in Gravity’s Rainbow, with the ‘zone’ becoming the space, or non-space, of
accumulated data and its potential mapping. Tyrone Slothrop’s wanderings, and
his own dispersion, are an expression of a cartographic mapping that succeeds,
if that is the right word, by coinciding with the zone itself in an ‘anarchic
distribution’ (Deleuze 1994: 47). If, as in Borges’ parable, the map coincides with
the territory, here this produces a fragmentation and dispersion that starts the
flows moving again.
Pynchon’s mapping, like a schizonanalytic cartography, at once condenses and
explodes, stays in place and stays in flight. The difficulty is how this cartographic
impulse is connected to the demand of acceleration. Neither the acceleration
of disintegration nor the acceleration of integration seems to promise enough
capacity for resistance or for purchase on these flows. Instead, in both cases,
we coincide with the flows better to accelerate with them and, it is claimed,
beyond them. It is this utopian or futural dimension that has come to seem
problematic, as the line of flight loops back in its realization to embody the
present. The utopia of excessive acceleration does not accelerate beyond a world
dominated by the state and capital, but can only embody its contradictions and
forms. In this moment utopia comes to coincide with dystopia, and the looped
line of flight leaves us back where we started. This disorientation marks the
contemporary moment, as trace receding possibilities of resistance in the face
of a global capital stuttering in crisis.
The gambit that the looping line of flight returns us to the present could be
seen as the signature move of Nick Land’s retooling of Deleuze and Guattari’s
accelerationism. In Land’s writings of the 1990s, which also might be included
in this convergence of Deleuze and Guattari with the literary, the embrace of
capitalism as the only embodiment of the line of flight became absolute (Land
2013). Land stripped out the critical elements that remained in the project to
grasp acceleration as the only possible solution to the impasses of his moment.4
Convergence was to be celebrated as the truth in all its consequences. It might
not be a surprise that Pynchon, especially Gravity’s Rainbow, and cyberpunk
fiction were both resources deployed by Land to generate his theoretical fictions.
In this case dystopia was embraced, drawing from the more nihilist elements
of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), to strip out the residual moral and
affirmative moments of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. While this had
the benefit of a certain rigour, the result was an integration into capitalism
without reserve. This integration credited capitalism with powers of production
and innovation that now, post-2008, seems dubious at best.
The literary convergence with schizoanalysis and acceleration is not quite as
smooth as Land’s accelerationism, and more interesting for that. It is the friction
that exists in the literary realization of a schizoanalytic and accelerationist vision
that suggests that schizoanalysis is not simply a solution for the problems of
the present. In a fashion truer to Deleuze, schizoanalysis is better thought of
as the means to pose new problems: ‘True freedom lies in a power to decide, to
constitute problems themselves’ (Deleuze 1991: 15). This shift involves moving
away from the celebration of schizoanalysis as the line of flight that escapes the
problems of the present or its condemnation as mere synchrony with the lines
of flight of contemporary capitalism (Hallward 2006: 162–3). It is neither the
good object to be introjected nor the bad object to be expelled, to use Melanie
Klein’s language. To shift away from the realization of schizoanalysis is to turn
towards it as a problem of the cartography of tendencies and counter-tendencies.

Schizoanalysis and its literary avatars would no longer be treated as sites to
accelerate beyond the present, but as moments that encode that present and its
contradictions. Thinking with and against schizoanalysis becomes a crucial task.
This is true both of our reading of literature and our understanding of politics, if
these two can be separated.
The case of Pynchon suggests this necessity. His writing of Gravity’s Rainbow
lies poised on the re-inception of control: with the fading of the counterculture,
capitalist crisis, and the emergence of neo-liberalism. The work tries to grasp this
moment, between insurgent desire and capitalist reterritorialization by trying
to grasp an earlier moment of the convergence of the forces of production and
destruction. If the end of the war was a fleeting moment of the slackening of control,
then it provides a mirror (through a glass darkly) of the struggles and protests of
the’60s. The general tendency of Pynchon’s fiction to provide diminishing returns
is, perhaps, a sign of the difficulty of the task of continuing in the wake of this loss.
The élan of Gravity’s Rainbow work is moderated or consumed in the difficulty of
operating an oppositional schema of control and counterculture in our present
moment. Hence Pynchon’s turns back further to the past to find the moment of
original sin in the form of coding and control (Mason & Dixon, Against the Day
(2006)) or his attempts at a genealogy of the present in the crises of the counter-
culture (Vineland (1990), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013)). The
tension of an oppositional schema persists but is only complicated as Pynchon’s
grapples with the fluidity and capacity of the forces of control that he had traced.
In this grappling, his work loses some of its utopian energy and the tension of a
dichotomy of control and resistance. Instead a new space of control emerges that
operates through modulation, fluidity, and claims to acceleration.
This is also true of the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. In his
reflection on Foucault, Deleuze noted that a difficulty emerged in dealing with
the problem of how ‘transversal relations of resistance continue to become
restratified’ (1988: 94). The ‘impasse’ is not simply an impasse of Foucault’s
conceptualization of power, but an impasse ‘where power places us’ (Deleuze
1988: 96). It is this impasse which, as we saw, Deleuze and Guattari also tried
to confront in A Thousand Plateaus. In the fading of the protests and global
movements of ’68 (and after), in the resurgence of capitalism unleashed, a new
attention to the complexities of struggle emerged. Similarly to Pynchon, a
decline in utopian energy takes place, with the problem of resistance posed but
not satisfactorily resolved.
To grasp our present moment involves attention to the capacity of the language
of acceleration, flows, and lines of flight, not as the means to escape but as equivocal
sites of the ideological and material assemblages of control. Schizoanalysis would
then have to rethink how it operates within these tensions and forces. Instead
of the great politics of revolutionary desire versus fascism, there are a series of
contradictory moments that require a cartographic attention. The literary forms
convergent with schizoanalysis attest to this cartographic impulse, and the
tensions of trying to maintain the tension necessary for the moment of revolt or
resistance. The accelerative moment may have passed, attested to by the stuttering
lurching of capital in global crisis. Instead of the need to reinvent acceleration, to
re-enchant ourselves with the powers of production and destruction, the mapping
out of the contradictions of these desires offers a different line of flight.
Notes
1 This diagnosis of a ‘post-oedipal’ society has mainly been elaborated by Lacanian

theorists, although it echoes Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979). This
accounts for the proximity of these accounts to Deleuze and Guattari, although for
Lacanians this is a sign of a new pathology, while for Deleuze and Guattari, it is a
possibility of liberation (see Žižek 2004: 80–7).
2 I owe this reference to David Winters and Alec Niedenthal, with thanks.
3 This ‘vanishing’ position is also true of ‘DeepArcher’, the free and anarchic virtual
environment existing in the ‘Undernet’ of Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013). This
space exists between the military origins and corporate future of the Internet, and
the novel ends with it being made freely available before corporate takeover.
4 Contemporary accelerationism, which we could call second-wave (after Land)
or third-wave (if we include Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Baudrillard)
accelerationism, attacks Land for this collapsing. They suggest that Land mistakes
speed for acceleration, and so can only endorse the order of capitalism (Williams
2013; Srnicek and Williams 2013). By splitting acceleration from speed, and from
capitalism, the result is that it is difficult to grasp just what is being accelerated.
This seems to leave contemporary accelerationism without a subject.
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H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Criticism 11(2): 433–39.
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and New York: Routledge.
10
Negarestani in R’lyeh
Ben Woodard
Oceanic panic: The fluid roots of navigation
Where are we when we think? Is the territory for thought that of land, sea, or
something unrecognizable? These questions are poetically invoked by Isaac
Newton’s renowned statement:
I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have
been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
After declaring Newton an incorrigible theist, the mathematician, theoretical

physicist, and philosopher of science, Hermann Weyl extended the oceanic
metaphor, writing with regard to Newton and his ilk:
Their excuse is that of an ocean traveler who distrusts the bottomless sea and
therefore clings to the view of the disappearing coast as long as there is in sight
no other coast toward which he moves. I shall now try to describe the journey
on which the old coast has long since vanished below the horizon. There is no
use in staring in that direction any longer. (1934: 179)
If thought has an altogether different territory, then how does it relate to the image
of the sea in relation to the land? This is not simply to proliferate metaphor, but
rather to ask after the terms by which philosophy might function as a method of
navigation and not merely as a mode of description. It is to ask how much can and
should philosophy ground itself in order to think speculatively, to think outward
towards another horizon? Thought as an ocean stirs up images of placidity and
turbulence equally. The surface of the water might be calm or restless, one upon
which we might idle or struggle without a suitable vessel or nearby shoreline. Or
perhaps we might float in a certain quietude – like Goethe’s Spinoza – or instead
struggle with rogue waves and riptides as we desperately make our way back to
shore. It is easy to relish, in an ostensibly new materialist way, in the affectivity
of the boundless ocean, but this would be to maintain the supremacy of the
navigational surface and not the depths involved.
If there is a project that appears to invoke both models of thought
simultaneously, or to have one foot on land and one ostensibly in the deep
sea, then it would appear to be that of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis.
In what follows, the question will become: what is this oceanic continuum and
what is its relation to schizoanalysis and to the great history of reason as an
intellectual jockeying for stability? On the surface of things, the schizoanalytic
model – a schizo out for a walk is better than a neurotic on the couch – might
be considered with regard to the perilousness of navigating on the open sea of
thought. Removed one degree from the surface, with a vessel to carry us (the
regime of philosophy as organized thought for instance), navigation becomes
of the utmost concern, whether we follow Deleuze and Guattari or, via an act of
experimentation, propose an analysis of our own.
Of course, as a formalization of raw cognitive capacities, philosophy is
constructed upon numerous strata (physical, biological, chemical, and so on)
which determine the trajectory of thought in a number of ways. Navigation
therefore presupposes a strange complicity between physical space, biology and
the organism’s computational powers. The neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz
has investigated the human capacity for ‘dead reckoning’, or the way in which
birds migrate or lost dogs return home, which he argues involves a stratified
combination of these three factors. Berthoz’s research traces the navigational
efficacy of the vestibular system, that which provides balance in many mammals
connected to the inner ear. For Berthoz, it is the human being’s singular ability to
remember how our body has moved through various tilts and jerks that may be at
the root of our species’ impressive capacity for topographical memory (2000).
Philosophical tradition has often appealed to merely ideal representations, or
to the capabilities of reason divorced from the corporeal, in order to navigate.
From the stable shore of representation, the tidal wave of Kant’s Critique of
Judgment warns about appealing to the purported excesses of nature. Terra firma
marks the stable ground of thinking, whereas the oceanic appears as a threat to
such stability, as well as to the potential for discovery. It is along these lines that
British philosopher Nick Land accuses Kant of aquaphobia:
Is not transcendental philosophy a fear of the sea? Something like a dike or a

sea-wall? A longing for the open ocean gnaws at us, as the land is gnawed by
the sea. A dark fluidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of
Negarestani in R’lyeh 193
terra firma, provoking a wave of anxiety in which we are submerged, until we

feel ourselves drowning, with representation draining away. (1990: 107)
As Robin Mackay points out in his essay ‘Philosopher’s Islands’, rationality

operates from within the liminal zone between these solid and liquid fields
(2010). From the earliest philosophical texts of autodidactism, to Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra, the island is a central figure within philosophical thought. Yet the
island, so often skewed as that position from which we can look out on to the
ocean, is often abstracted from its larger terrestrial context. Taken up in cosmology
and astrobiology, the entire Earth is described as an island, an apparently rare
zone of habitability. That is, the capacity of life on planet Earth appears strange,
adding a twist to the subsequent capacity we possess for thinking about life from
this particular locality. As Milan Ćirković puts it in ‘Sailing the Archipelago’:
We live on a small island. We have not yet ventured much beyond our immediate
locale on this small island; even our own inconspicuous location still holds great
mysteries for us. It seems that we find ourselves near the mountain peak of our
island, but even that is uncertain. We have only recently discovered that there
are other islands besides our home scattered in a vast (possibly infinite) ocean.
And the ocean is dead. (2009: 293)
Ćirković points out that habitability is not due simply to geographical location
but to topographical concerns, that is, the ‘height’ of our archipelago may have
much to do with its capacity to host life (at least life as we know it). High points
are most open to life, whereas down, closest to the water, life struggles to survive
and even to come into existence at all (Ćirković 2009: 318).1 This metaphor has
interesting traction when comparing the ocean-dwelling with the land-dwelling.
The constitutive contradiction of the deep sea is that it is a dark and cold space
yet full of life, seismically active, and shuddering with complex thermal current
movements. Large tracts of the ocean floor teem with life despite their often
appalling physical conditions; thermal vents eject super-hot matter which
instantly freezes, while rock flows like liquid in the topographical birth pangs
that circumscribe the entire planet. The constraints of the physical on the
biological are ungrounded, if only conceptually, by the apparent ungroundedness
of the topological movement of the ocean floor.
The productivity of the ocean as a massive mutagenic assemblage favourably
accords with Deleuze’s numerous images of becoming, taking on complex
actualizations which undo the assumed stability of the land. And yet the
geographic and topological in Deleuze and Guattari often appears overcoded
by the concept of life, by appeals to the body without organs, to transcendental
anatomy, and to sense. In ‘Who Does the Earth Think It Is?’, geology and
geochemistry are quickly overruled by the vestiges of transcendental
anatomy (1987). Put differently, the schizoanalytic walk through life appears
as a promenade that dips into the depths only to affirm its pre-existing (vital)
trajectory. In this sense there is no building or progression of forms of life
(which no doubt expand chaotically in their own milieus), but only an origami-
like play of forms inwards and outwards. The geological model is applied to the
biological without the recognition that the geological conditions the biological.
In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari stay on the connective surface of the
assemblage, but in the guise of probing the depths (despite Deleuze’s language
in The Logic of Sense). Horizontality betrays the depth supposedly accessed by
the logic of sense, a sense still overdetermined by receptivity (no matter how
wide that receptivity is broadened by Deleuze and Guattari).2
Surface construction speaks to the purported two-headed nature of
schizoanalysis, which is ‘not only a qualitative analysis of abstract machines in
relation to assemblages, but also a quantitative analysis of the assemblages in
relation to a presently pure abstract machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 513).
The abstract machine appears as a giant ocean with currents of form and content
as intertwined expressions facilitated by, but not reducible to, the ocean’s matter
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 68, 72). In his biography of Deleuze and Guattari,
FranÇois Dosse indicates that in their collaboration, Deleuze was the Earth
while Guattari was the sea (2011: 7, 10). With the former dominating the latter
only in state forms, in the rebirth of absolute space via fleet in being, the sea is
visually captured by the state apparatus for the navigation of ships (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 387). Yet again, this would appear to favour the surface over the
depths.
Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land developed the notion
of ‘hyperstition’, which attempts to make real fictional entities, largely by drawing
on the harsh affectivity of Lovecraftian worlds. Given Deleuze and Guattari’s
insistence that schizoanalysis is a practice or a pragmatism, Land’s hyperstition
is suggested as an active attempt to draw on schizoanalytic insights as part of
a post-critical vector of socio-technical transformation. Where schizoanalysis
dramatizes, in many respects, the relationship between the literary and the
philosophical via a purportedly ‘political’ experimentation, we might then ask:
does the schizoanalytic endeavour remain a hyperstition of sorts, yet one afraid
of going too far in any direction?
Since literary affect is so integral to hyperstition as an extension of schi
zoanalysis, we might pause to consider how literary and scientific apprehensions
of the senses differ, prior to exploring how contemporary hyperstition necessarily

draws on both scientific and literary production for its efficacy. If for Land,
Lovecraft’s narrators hold a powerful appeal, it is precisely because they are often
scientists embroiled in maddening research on ancient oceanic cults, research that
inevitably renders them deranged, yet at once radically open to the outside. That
the oceanic features so prominently in Lovecraft’s work gives us to consider Land’s
extension of schizoanalysis as a schizo stroll become voyage proper: For Deleuze
and Guattari, the schizo out for a walk is a better model than the neurotic on the
couch, for, as with Büchner’s Lenz, he is out and about making connections. But is
Büchner’s literary account as mobilised by Deleuze and Guattari adequate in light
of Berthoz’s navigational research? The passive dispersal of Lenz into his environs
might be conceived of differently after Berthoz, with such considerations as the
predator-prey relation having more to say about perception than the nebulous
variety of affects given in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. As Berthoz writes:
We must completely change the way we study the senses. We must begin by
considering the goal of the organism, so that we may understand how the brain is
informed by the receptors, how it regulates their sensitivity, combines messages
from them, and estimates their value, according to an internal simulation of the
expected consequences of action. (2000: 263)
In order to avoid a simplistic opposition between science and philosophy,

however, I propose that we might instead pursue a non-trivial hybridization –
one offered by the theory and hyperstition of Iranian philosopher and novelist
Reza Negarestani.
Asymptotic depths, or Negarestani in a diving bell
Through the notion of the continuum, Reza Negarestani’s emerging ‘asymptotic

thought of the open’ demonstrates the potential philosophical expansion
of Berthoz’s scientific pursuit of the deep roots of sense. While Negarestani
begins his exploration of the trans-modern continuum in his essay ‘Globe of
Revolution’ (2011a), in which he asserts a call to pursue new forms of realism,
the putrid ovum of this thinking lies in the earlier essay, ‘Undercover softness: An
Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay’ (2010). As Negarestani
puts it, the universe that is sensed or speculated is the calculation of forms, of a
sick and complicit mutation of forms, a grotesque and constant restructuring;
ideas as such emerge from the decay of objects: ‘The infinitesimal persistence
of the object becomes asymptotic to the extinction of the object’ (2010: 388).
Since all production entails a certain closing off of the exterior into an interior,
all things decay, or remain less and less, as a part of the living.
Negarestani’s use of asymptotic reasoning is significant as it focuses on the
non-crossing of two infinite series, which approach one another but never fully
coincide. Robert Batterman defines asymptotic reasoning as a form of abstraction
which is internal to the modes of the scientific method, and which attempts
to determine, from the place of the inter-theoretical, how various theories (in
his case the theories of the specialized sciences) approach one another (2001:
3, 5). Put in general terms, asymptotic thought is that form of thought which
attempts to avoid the pitfalls of both reductionism and rampant emergentism by
recognizing that the special sciences, however imperfectly, encircle real physical
singularities, yet, in the attempt to grasp these singularities, there is room for
connections between theories. Batterman’s account of asymptotic reasoning
demonstrates that when one field of knowledge approaches another it is often the
case that the rules for epistemological explanation may change; something which
reductionism misses, as reduction assumes that all transitions are smooth.
Furthermore, asymptotic thought avoids the often crude caricature of science
(somehow as always secretly and dramatically positivist), where science is the
villain for continental thought and for the humanities more generally. Though
Deleuze excavated a means of relating philosophical thought to scientific
thought in creative ways, it would seem he also falls too far in favour of the
former against the latter (or at least, this has overwhelmingly become the case
with his followers, with only Manuel DeLanda threatening the balance in favour
of science). Before considering literary affectivity further, let us first pursue
the debt asymptotic reasoning owes to scientific research. This will enable us
to consider how schizoanalysis has to some extent enabled an asymptotic line
for post-Deleuzian writers and thinkers, whilst at once threatening to limit it
wheresoever the literary is privileged over the scientific.
In his Philosophy of Simulation (2011), DeLanda briefly addresses asymptotic
thought. Discussing the specific example of convection cells, he writes: ‘If a
convection cell or a chemical clock are disturbed by an outside shock they will
tend to return to their original period and amplitude after a relatively short
time. This tendency is referred to as asymptotic stability’ (13). Furthermore, this
resistance to shocks suggests an ‘objective explanatory irrelevance of the details
of the interactions’ (DeLanda 2011: 14). And yet DeLanda’s emphasis on the
regulative stability of models and simulation as an aid to computational reason
falls short of the speculative capacities of thought that Negarestani is attempting
to formulate following asymptotic reasoning. Furthermore, it means allowing
uncritical seepage between external computational simulations and the internal

simulations Berthoz outlines. These uses of asymptotic thought collide in the
‘middle-ground’ of the chemical paradigm. The inter-theoretical wasteland
occupied by the asymptotic thinker becomes hard to define, particularly if we
wish to engage the apparently visible continuum of the oceanic Earth.
In ‘Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss’, Negarestani chastises the closed
dynamics of the sea. He writes:
Ecologically speaking, in an abyssal cosmos where heliocentric slavery has been

abolished, the aquatic vitality of the Earth is either a detoured expression of
a starless-nature that appears as rotting slime or the earthbound abyss which
erupts in the form of corrosive oil. (2011b: 2)
Furthermore:
However, the complicity between the water of life and cosmic climates or what
we call chemistry is endowed with a chemical slant; it gives the death of life
and water weirdly productive aspects. The irruption of cosmic climates into the
terrestrial biosphere generates a dynamics of death or line of exteriorization
whose expression and dynamism are chemical rather than spectral, ghostly or
hauntological. The dying water is blackened into heaps of slime and the biosphere
feeding on such water respectively dies or chemically loosens into the cosmic
exteriority. As these deaths have chemical slants, they spawn more contingencies
or lines of chemical dynamisms which render the universe climatically weird.
(2011b: 4)
Biological entities haunt physics with their regional negentropy. Yet the depth
of this haunting remains an open question for biology and the philosophy of
biology and chemistry. In an interview with Negarestani and Robin Mackay, Iain
Hamilton Grant outlines the particular strangeness of the chemical paradigm
for thinking, as it gives the empirical ‘an additional visceral dimension’, which
‘enables chemistry as a practice to have a specificity that separates it from the
other natural sciences’, as well as lending it a uniquely ‘synthetic ambition’ in
recreating nature (Grant in Mackay and Negarestani 2011: 41).
To return to Batterman we might suggest that it seems necessary to plunge
into the depths in order to move outwards, to speculate. This means that one
must approach what could be either an irreducible singularity or a gradient which
requires the advent of a theoretical field without knowing the proper bounds
of that newly created horizon. In some regard we cross into the hyperstitional,
making fictions real and running with them while simultaneously feeding them
into abductive reasoning. By drawing on the fiction of HP Lovecraft, particularly
his focus on the strangeness of writing and the sea, Nick Land’s concept of
hyperstition enables precisely such a process.
Well known for his fascination with madness and all things tentacular, Lovecraft
also displayed a career-wide obsession with writings materialized through the
image of the found document. His characters write until the bitter end, impossibly
managing to scrawl their final scream as testament to the truth of the doubly-
formatted fiction one is reading. Lovecraft’s tales swing back and forth, affirming
and complicating the validity of their narrator’s accounts. This is evident as early as
his story ‘Dagon’, which begins with the narrator drug-addled and contemplating
death by defenestration once he has found the strength to complete his account.
Having been sunk and captured by German forces in The Great War, we learn that
the narrator had managed to escape on a small boat, yet that in becoming lost, had
awoken to find his vessel caught in a black mire (Lovecraft 2008: 23). He muses:
I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some
unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been
thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for insurmountable millions of
years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. (Lovecraft 2008: 24)
It is difficult not to hear Deleuze’s musings on the oceanic island in this account,
which he describes as always ready to punch through the surface (2004: 9).
Tortured by wild dreams, the narrator of ‘Dagon’ attempts to navigate the
unending plain. In horror, the sea vanishes and he can see only unending
blackness. Soon he comes across a monolith inscribed with ‘aquatic symbols
such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, mollusks, whales, and the like’ (Lovecraft
2008: 25). Here, the tale accelerates: upon seeing what he assumes is the fish-god
Dagon, the narrator runs to his boat and is eventually picked up and taken to a
hospital in San Francisco. The narrator admits to his impending suicide attempt
as a slippery body is heard making a noise at the door.
That the fishy God possessed the power to write is, for Lovecraft, particularly
terrifying. It is the odd constructions, both lithographic and architectural, that
bother Lovecraft’s narrator so, a theme carried through from ‘Dagon’ to the
stories ‘The Temple’ and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. The oft-quoted opening of ‘The
Call of Cthulhu’ clings to oceanic metaphor:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the
midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
(Lovecraft 2008: 355)
The alternatives Lovecraft names to such correlation are either madness or the self-
imposed ignorance of a new dark age. But rather than endorsing irrationalism,
he notes that scientific rationalism is necessary, albeit self-destructive. In this
sense, we might suggest that Deleuze and Guattari err when they refer to
different epochs of Lovecraft’s work in A Thousand Plateaus, attempting to align
his early tales (inspired by Poe, but even more so by Dunsany) with sorcery
and incantation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 251). It remains fair to suggest that
Lovecraft surpassed and rejected these early tales of sorcery, transforming the
concept into that which describes the rationalized space between Nature and
lawful nature as humanity understands it.3
But is the simultaneous power and insufficiency of writing-as-categorization
(which Deleuze and Guattari fail to acknowledge as the ‘sorcery’ in Lovecraft’s
work), the central weirdness of his writing? Delivered as a found document,
‘The Call of Cthulhu’ purports to be the rattled account of an academic reading
fragments of other manuscripts. It twists deeper still as the much feared yet
fictional Necronomicon is invoked within its passages. While Deleuze and
Guattari may have dismissed him as a paranoid, we might instead follow Land
and Negarestani in embracing him as a paranoiac investigator, one paradoxically
revealing of asymptotic reasoning. Admittedly, this is possible only if we
sufficiently detach Lovecraft’s regional concerns with specific cultures and
traditions. If we do so, we find that his work powerfully attests to an effusive yet
non-vitalistic life, one that informs the notion of the asymptotic as much as it is
enabled by it.4
Tentacular life and asymptotic life
Before considering further how this species of Lovecraftian hyperstition

demonstrates asymptotic reasoning for analysis of the late capitalist epoch, it
serves to acknowledge how a number of other authors have embarked upon
similar voyages. In their bizarre Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (2012), Vilém Flusser
and Louis Bec enter similar territory when they create a scientific fable of a
strange deep dwelling creature, thereby circling around the mythologization
of speculation on life. While the entire text centres on the strangeness of any
relation between human and non-human (however unfortunately couched
in Heideggerian dasein), Flusser and Bec bid us to consider ‘[h]ow we would
conduct ourselves if dragged to its depths, where eternal darkness is punctured
only by its bioluminescence’ (2012: 5).
Flusser and Bec shift between the ontological impact of such difference by
moving from environmental to historical roots.
We feel a connection with life-forms supported by bones, while other forms

of life disgust us. Though existential philosophy has concerned itself with the
idea of disgust, it has never attempted to formulate a category of ‘biological
existentialism’, to advance something like the following hypothesis: ‘Disgust
recapitulates phylogenesis’. This hypothesis is advanced here. (2012: 11)
China Mieville’s essay ‘Skulltopus’ (2008) charts similar waters in his discussion
of the tentacular ovum, or the emergence of the cephalopodic in weird and
proto-weird tales from Hugo, to Verne, to William Hope Hodgson, to Lovecraft.
Mieville highlights Hugo’s striking statement that the cephalopod requires us to
rethink philosophy as well as the common association the tentacled beast has
with the vampire (2008: 109). The connection to the vampiric seems especially
erroneous, however, particularly when filtered back through Lovecraft. The
immortal status of both appears as a weak point of consonance, where the
cephalopodic is considered a companion to deep time, suggesting Cthulhu as
an ‘arche-fossil-as-predator’ (Mieville 2008: 113). The uneasy softness of the
octopus makes its longevity appear strangely more abnormal, as if the notion
of solidity (both mental and physical) would seem to better stand the test of
time – as per the undying, fortified corpse of the vampire.
This strange relation of the skeletal to time is folded inwards by the character
of Dr Bodkin from JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, who entertains this cross-
imbrication of softness/hardness via onto- and phylo-genesis in the following
sense:
I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter

the amniotic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic
time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch,
each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as
recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time
machine. (1962: 44)
Flusser and Bec seem to grant this trauma to the non-boned as well: ‘An organism
is a stratified memory constructed of superimposed suppressions somewhat
like geological formations’ (2012: 27). The writing, tracing, or registering of the
different domains of trauma indexes the varying difficulties of thinking in the
folding or dead zones between traumas or between sciences. Flusser and Bec
make the strange claim that science is only interesting in so far as we can use it
to orient ourselves (2012: 17). Yet what does this mean for speculation, and for
the asymptotic wastelands between theories – the floating out into who-knows-
what and towards who-knows-where?
In Peter Watts’ novel Starfish (2008), a team of biologically and technologically-
modified workers are placed in a monitoring station along the Juan de Fuca
ridge. They each exhibit gross psychological damage (as both victims and
victimizers), as only such psychologies are capable of tolerating the immense
figurative pressure of their proscribed occupation. The vulnerability of the
novel’s protagonist, Lennie Clarke, marks the (re)connection of geo-trauma (or
bio-geo-trauma) to the Earth. Watts illustrates the pressure thusly:
The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding form the chimney at the
north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught
in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed
steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres. (2008: 112)
The traces of Clarke’s physical abuse prepared her for the crushing depths of
the sea floor bottom; by way of her folded psychological character, we see how
Clarke sees herself as an organism used by a geochemical locale:
She’s been deluding herself all this time. She felt herself getting stronger and she
thought she could just walk away with that gift, take it anywhere. She thought
she could pack all of Channer inside of her like some new prosthetic. But now.
Now the mere thought of leaving brings all her old weakness rushing back. The
future opens before her and she feels herself devolving, curling up into some soft
prehuman tadpole. (Watts 2008: 283)
Following a Deleuzo-Guattarian schema, Luciana Parisi (2004) outlines Elaine

Morgan’s adaptation of Alister Hardy’s theory of the aquatic ape, in which a
shore-like existence leads to vaginal migration and the erasure of the visible
and olfactory signs of sexual excitement. These geo-traumatic, geochemical
transplantations are complicated by accidental human constructions, by the
tidal wave of capitalism, which washes away these biological signs in obscurity,
recoding them in cultural practices, practices that all too often result in a
virulent sexism that simultaneously praises and rages against the fluidity of the
feminine. Despite their warning about deterritorializing too much, therefore,
Deleuze and Guattari might be seen to cut through the nested dynamics of
folding, sliding instead into the aquatic jaws of thinkable equilibrium. Pictured
stalking out into the sea, their thinking might appear to be folding cephalopods
as so many starched shirts. As I have suggested above, we might sustain instead
Negarestani’s post-schizoanalytic perspective, from within which trauma

transplants ‘universal contingency into regional fields’ (2011a: 29).
Remaining with the case of Lennie Clarke, however, it would appear that the
forces of capital are unable to control the posthuman workers they have created.
It is important, here, to distinguish the posthuman from the posthumanist and
transhuman. The posthumanist takes a position in which ‘we’ (whatever strange
collective that designates) should move beyond the human by fostering deeper
relations with the components of our wider ecologies (our pets, our plants, the
other various creatures and inanimate powers, texts, and things which appear
vibrant in our presence). Following such thinkers as Ray Kurzweil, transhumans
believe that the human can be technologically or biotechnologically surpassed,
with one popular end goal being the digitization and uploading of all human
consciousness. Watts’ glib tales maintain the problematic stubborness and weird
ness of the biological in this regard, specifically insofar as it is nested inside sex:
Living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual
advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary
afterimages swarming across Clarke’s field of view; something flees under cover
of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the
current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth. (Watts 2008: 34)
In Alien Oceans (2009), Stefan Helmreich evaluates the bottom-slime of the Earth’s
oceans after the Germanic tradition of sublime aesthetics, drawing also on Huxley
and Haeckel in his discussion of the first slime or urschleim (74).5 In a chapter
entitled ‘Abducting the Atlantic’, Helmreich opens with an initially promising
discussion of C. S. Peirce’s theory of abduction, but soon descends into moralistic
finger-wagging at the potential ‘violence’ of speculative research, jumping off
from abductive claims with little argument other than his claim that the violence
of abductions haunts the logical meaning of the term (2009: 173). Helmreich
seems aware, however, of the complex connections and alliance-immersion of
working in a medium such as the ocean, where the entire dynamical space seems
encased in strange forms of life, from solar-gulping Prochlorococcus at the surface,
to deep-sea hyperthermophiles, even likening the oceanic genome to Deleuze
and Guattari’s ‘Body without Organs’ (2009: 176, 200). This appears consonant
with Negarestani’s account of the conservatism of Catherine Malabou’s approach
to neuro-plasticity – her wariness towards the Post-Copernican Open as she
advocates being inflexible as a means of resisting capital (Negarestani 2011a: 49).
But how is any kind of neutrality feasible when swimming in a world of
complicity? What kind of neutrality does Helmreich want given that he also
critiques computational logic? (2009: 85). Even down at the sub-basement of the
biological there is no stalwart inflexibility, no safe-haven for Malabou and other
(weak) posthumanists to inhabit. As Longo, Montevil, and Kauffman point out,
flexibility lies at the heart of the dynamics of the biological:
[T]here are no laws that entail, as in physics, the becoming of the biosphere,
and a fortiori, the econosphere, or culture or history, or life in general. In the
same sense, geodetic principal mathematically forces physical objects never to
go wrong. A falling stone follows exactly the gravitational arrow. A river goes
along the shortest path to the sea, it may adjust it by nonlinear well definable
interactions as mentioned above, but it will never go wrong. These are all
geodetics. Living entities, instead, go wrong most of the time. (2012: 17)
Life in the oceanic is life in a chemical field, one that makes us as organisms
susceptible to invasion. Ecological history then appears as little more than an
‘accelerating litany of invasions’ (Watts 2009: 118). To address Malabou’s concern,
then, is to rework the question around the degree to which the capitalist threat
is capable of harnessing the unending openness of the oceanic continuum or the
radical nature of such dynamics.
Node – The capitalist cloning

of the fluidic continuum
The environmental activist and marine biologist Rachel Carson once said that
when life came ashore millions of years ago it brought a piece of the ocean with it.
One of the most notable outcomes of life on land was the eventual birth of trade
and debt. Broadly construed from the schizoanalytical perspective, capitalist
acceleration threatens to speed us back to the sea through a technological
progress unbound. Under this metaphorical construction, capitalist technologies
become those forces which transport us to a world of pure fluidity.
In Maelstrom (2009), the second novel of Watts’ Rifters trilogy, Lennie Clarke,
‘a woman turned amphibious by some abstract convergence of technology and
economics’, is tracked by a futuristic FEMA, the Complex Systems Instability-
Response Agency (CSIRA), more informally referred to as the ‘entropy patrol’
(Watts 2009: 19, 60). That Clarke’s tracking follows a nuclear detonation and
a tidal wave sufficient to destroy half of the west coast of a mega-country,
proves salient; Watts’ novel repeatedly emphasizes the reality of entropy and
the stumbling attempt of computation to catch up with chaos: ‘what good is a
map when the landscape won’t stop changing?’ (2009: 90). Following Clarke’s
reintroduction to modern society, a strange hybridized menace of biological and
technological pathogen emerges, a nest of n-dimensional correlations: ‘[a] dark
entropic monoculture was growing beneath the wider riot of usual breakdowns’
(Watts 2009: 120, 168).
Despite the gleeful chaos that might be said to follow in the wake of a hyperbolic
Deleuzianism, schizoanalysis cannot abide entropy. Deleuze and Guattari might
appear to call for an approach to theory and experiment that suggests a swimmer
who has forgotten about the resistance of the waters themselves. Liquid capital,
or financial capital, is the castle in the sand at the edge of the flood of matter.
Aware of the threat of the oceanic, Nick Land floods the world in a swamp of
cancerous matter. He redraws the Kantian schema as a rotting oil derrick in the
face of a sublime tidal wave.
Back at the water’s surface, Negarestani heads for a converted oil derrick out
in the middle of nowhere, perhaps one converted so as to quicken high-speed
trade as suggested by Wissner-Gross and Freer (2010). We might conceive of the
oil derrick as the reversion to the material base for capital as presented in the
video game Oil Rush. Following global flooding from glacial melting, warring
parties scramble for numerous oil derricks as the last source of readily obtainable
energy on the planet. For financial capital, shaving milliseconds off of trades also
means the blasting of tunnels for fibre-optic cables linking city to city, a physical
ungrounding of the land itself. The effects of capital have fully saturated not
just the economic conditions, but also the very material conditions of life. It is
not just a threat of precarity that we find ourselves under, but the possibility of
expulsion from life itself. As Negarestani has it:
Capitalism, in a similar manner, sniffs out planetary waters so as to employ its

models of accumulation and consumption through their chemical potencies.
This is not only to use the hydraulic efficiency of terrestrial waters in order to
propagate its markets and carry out its trades, but more importantly to overlap
and associate its indulgences with the very definitions and foundations of life.
(2011b: 3)
The economic attempts to unfold our liquidity back out into the world while
claiming to erase the dangers of contagious paranoia, thereby closing out
‘unproductive’ contingency. Are Deleuze and Guattari to blame? Does the
hyperbole of Nick Land’s accelerationism point to the rotting potato roots of their
project? In ‘Becoming Animal’ they say ‘so experiment’. But as Land’s analysis
indicates, this often leads to an excess of tactics without strategy. The problem
is that this is what capitalism seems to be doing: it embraces all tactics to profit
off of them, but the necessity of applying a cost exposes an underlying strategy
which is as obvious as it is gross. Life itself is reduced to profit over cost. High
speed trade and liquid assets have made an ocean out of capital and populated it
with creatures (algorithms) which behave in fundamentally unpredictable ways
(unleashing one, a firm managed to render themselves insolvent in less than a
second). If it is much less a jungle out there than an ocean, then it is tempting
to pollute. The trick of sustaining capital is that the costs incurred may be equal
to or more expensive than its relatively positive creations. That is, the cost of
experimentation is that of allowing any given capitalist sea monster to expand
its territory without risk of drowning the entire enterprise.
The philosopher-economist Elie Ayache suggests that the attempt to harness
radical contingency in financial markets is akin to a form of writing-as-price.
Ayache’s ‘In the Middle of the Event’ (2011) describes how probability is cut into
by contingency, since in order to think probabilities one must create models,
models which have preset parameters (19). Ayache’s The Blank Swan (2010)
addresses how thinking contingency in the pricing of derivatives goes completely
beyond the probabilistic model, with writing-as-price as part of the changing of
context (20–1). This writing in turn relates to the liquidity of the market as a newly
recognized possibility, which in turn furthers the strangeness of writing-as-price:
‘Liquidity is the opposite of a ground on which one can build the edifice of value.
Liquidity is a moving ground, a flowing continuum’ (Ayache 2010: 48, 56).
Beyond making all that is solid melt into air, technological capitalism gives
an extra layer of self-awareness to the creatures living in it. In this sense, capital
becomes an ocean (or chemical medium) in which we swim: life seems unlivable
without it and the outlying bound of capital (which is the purely ideal impossible
dream of limitless production) appears indistinguishable from the water at
hand, from day-to-day life. Because of this illusion, the cost involved in local
exchanges is measured against not only the local terms but also against the far
horizon of capital, while appearing ideally limitless is considered hyper-fragile in
the intimacy of the exchange. Furthermore, worthlessness can be equated with
pure form or even formlessness, that of the productive yet strangely undivided
ocean.6
For all of these reasons, the endless acceleration of capitalism seems
impossible. The only possible options seem to be either to drown or to embrace
the catastrophe (the catastrophe of the sea is the tidal wave, the tsunami). In
Watts’ narrative, the tidal wave is also spun by the capitalist machine; the
key becomes weaponization, particularly of survivors, and specifically the
character of Lennie Clarke. This might return us to the quiescence of Goethe’s
floating Spinozist cork with which we opened, an image of capitalist life if
there ever was one: ‘Lennie Clarke was a mutant; the same environment that
turned everyone else into bobbing corks had transformed her into barbed wire’
(Watts 2009: 313).
Conclusion: The writing of the aquatic continuum
In 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129 sank in deep water some 1,500 miles
northwest of Hawaii. In order to acquire the vessel without Soviet interference, the
CIA approached Howard Hughes, whom they commissioned with constructing
the Glomar Explorer, a vessel, the cover story went, built to harvest manganese
modules off the ocean floor. The story, which indexes one of Land’s hyperstitional
heroes, Maximillian Crabbe, points again not only to the weirdness of fictions,
but also to the weirdness of the actual structures in the sea, to crystal nodes, like
islands in the ocean, reminiscent of crystals in the vestibular system, like bones
scaffolding the squishy meatsacks of life. We might imagine the ship, retrofitted
for oil drilling and still in use to today, discovering Negarestani in R’lyeh.
Lovecraft placed his fictional city at coordinates close to a point of unreachability,
the point most lost at sea, farthest from all land. Sunken and forgotten, R’lyeh
seems impossibly constructed, housing an impossible creature, the monstrosity
named Cthulhu, and whom it is said may be so long-lived as to outlive death
itself. On the other hand, away from the non-Euclidian dimensions of R’lyeh,
there is the hard and closed loops of the computational regimes exemplified in
the figure of the vicious techno-science of the Nazis, descending to the depths,
yet forever missing their target (Flusser and Bec 2012: 71).7
The lesson, perhaps, is that the rigidity of the computational mode is as
illusory as is the fluidity of the affective mode and that neither of these equals the
rational. Significantly, this does not mean that ‘anything goes’, nor does it mean
that one should entertain a humanist or anti-Copernican conservatism. While
the desert islands of Deleuze and Guattari may suggest one solution, one has to
ask if their conditioning of thought as life and of life as thought does not already
do too much to pre-map the great outdoors of the unbounded continuum.
Beyond schizoanalysis we stray into a world of muck, of manipulative epis
temology, abduction, cunning, and intuition.8 Computability is not knowability
(Watts 2008: 113). Variable excess in the deep leads to a twisted form of intuition
or instinct in heavy space. Again, to quote from Watts’ Maelstrom: ‘Intuition
is not clairvoyance. It’s not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary,
that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously – but no less
rigorously – than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person’
(Watts 2009: 320). Following this, schizoanalysis does not suffice as the historical
and political capture of the conditions of analysis (or its writing), insofar as those
conditions are the unfolding of an unlimited thinkability and not the dangerous
(however fallible) navigation of the continuum. This in turn suggests that textual
bodies are recursive traps and that, contra Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestions via
their discussion of ‘regimes of signs’ in A Thousand Plateaus, one cannot have
a post-signifying regime that is simultaneously thinkable and yet not a part of
nature.
Following Lorenzo Magnani, Gilles Châtelet and Alain Berthoz, we might
instead take writing as an extension of the gesture and particularly as it
relates to predation (Magnani 2001: 14). Furthermore, we might take it as an
extension of the strangeness of the creative synthesis of which human beings
are capable. An adequate exploration of the synthetic, as Magnani shows, is
required in order to demonstrate the experiential status of the synthetic, to
demonstrate the synthetic as an early attempt at abductive thinking (2001:
37–8). This requires, as Magnani outlines via Poincare, a form of non-naive
conventionalism that acknowledges that science is that which translates the
crude facts that the body detects into theories (2001: 105). This, in turn, leads
to a complex overlapping of the interior and the exterior which points back
towards the uncertain emergence of synthesis itself (Magnani 2001: 165–78).
Following from this, and from Kant’s ‘What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in
Thinking?’, we are left with the difficulty of obtaining the limits of our singular
horizons, of determining each thinker as a mobile unit of thought, that draws
out a patchworked horizon of reason.
Finally, to return to our opening rift between Newton and Weyl, asymptotic
thought challenges schizoanalysis not only to think through the pragmatics
of its ‘walk’, or the forms of its navigation through concepts, but also its
dismissal of the negative. This means addressing not only the troubling depths
of synthesis, but the means by which thought moves without view of land
and how one sees thoughts approaching one another, analysing the shores
of difference and not simply marking them as such. It is on this basis that we
might suggest Negarestani’s ‘insider’ out on a voyage is a better model than a
schizo out for a walk.
Notes
1 For a longer discussion of islands in philosophy, see my On An Ungrounded Earth

(2013).
2 One can see a strange type of inversion in Mieville’s later work Railsea, in which a
comical retelling of Moby Dick happens on a nest of railroad tracks with unknown
origin. The Oceanic is given as demonstrating a level of dynamic structure as
opposed to the constructivism of the rail system, even the oceanic rail system, the
mobilization of ungrounded navigation in sailing as a model for thought on the
continuum. Though the rail system can also be taken as the privileged framework
engendered by disaster as in the work of Rene Thom.
3 See also Patricia MacCormack (2010), ‘Lovecraft through Deleuzo-Guattarian
Gates’. Postmodern Culture 20, 2.
4 For a longer discussion of Lovecraft and the philosophy of life, see Eugene
Thacker’s After Life (2010) as well as my Slime Dynamics (2012).
5 Helmreich does not mention earlier theorists of the urschleim, such as Lorenz
Oken. For an interesting philosophical discussion of Oken, see Grant, Iain
Hamilton (2009), ‘Being and Slime’, in Collapse, Vol. IV. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
6 Many of these points I owe to conversations with Karen Dewart McEwen.
7 Given Flusser and Bec’s connection of this with Heideggerian dasein, one might
also mention here Timothy Morton’s repeated invocation of Heidegger’s philosophy
as a Uboat of being which misses the deeper coral reef of objects beneath it.
8 Thought on complicity, on cunning reason (Metis), and other indirect modes of
redirecting the navigation of the continuum. As the work of Benedict Singleton
has pioneered, Metis, as cunning reason, might be imagined as the connecting
of two bear traps by razor wire. Traps bring two lines of navigation together,
connected indirectly and as the results of differing traumas.
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210
Index
Acker, Kathy 179 Caygill, Howard 56

accelerationism 19, 20, 178, 186, 188, 204 Cecil, D. 175
actualization 103, 121, 144, 160–1, 194 Césaire, Aimé 156, 161–2, 169
Adorno, Theodor 54 Chamoiseau, Patrick 158
aesthetics 1, 17, 68–7, 95, 154–5, 158, Chevillard, Eric 128–30, 134
167, 202 Ćirković, Milan 193
Alighieri, Dante 110, 112, 114 Coetzee, J. M. 18–19, 137, 139–43, 145–6,
anomalous 3 149–52
anti-production 15, 31, 35, 39 Cold War 20, 182
Aquinas 110, 112, 114 Colebrook, Claire 64, 70, 79
Artaud, Antonin 15, 28–9, 34, 36, 40, 65, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 12
87, 124–6, 130 Colombat, André Pierre 133
Austen, Jane 17, 63, 73–7 Confiant, Raphaël 158
Ayache, Elie 205 creolization 19, 156
Culler, James 5
Badiou, Alan 36, 126, 177
Ballard, J. G. 200 Danielewski, Mark Z. 179
Balzac, Honoré de 17, 83–4, 91, 96 death instinct 27–8, 32–4
Barthes, Roland 121, 127–8 Delanda, Manuel 196
Batterman, Robert W. 196–7 delirium 12, 13, 17, 70, 120, 122, 132, 184
Beckett, Samuel 4–5, 12, 65, 99, 119, 121, Derrida, Jacques 3, 29, 128, 131
128, 130–3, 176 Descartes, Rene 53, 82
becoming animal 14, 128, 204 desiring machine 34, 63
Bergson, Henri 19, 70, 103, 155 Dib, Mohammed 176
Bernabé, Jean 157 Dosse, François 194
Berthoz, Alain 20, 192, 195, 197, 207
Behn, Aphra 63, 76–7 Engels, Friedrich 10, 52
Blackmur, R. P. 70 Evans, B. 56
body without organs 13, 25–41, 96, 124, events 3, 15, 18, 29–30, 41, 57, 76–7, 91,
137, 144, 182, 194, 202 102, 104–7, 123, 125, 160, 168
Bogue, Ronald 64, 78, 123, 156
Bolívar, Simón 162 Fanon, Frantz 162
Braidotti, Rosi 43 Fink, Bruce 139
Brousse, Marie-Helene 140 Flusser, Vilém and Bec, Louis 199–200,
Buchanan, Ian 2, 8, 12, 15–16, 18, 26, 206, 208
43–5, 69, 175 formalism 16–17, 64, 69–70
Büchner, Georg 11, 195 Foucault, Michel 44, 131–3, 187
Fowler, Alistair 18, 100–1
Carroll, Lewis 3–4, 65, 125 Freud, Sigmund 7, 10–11, 15–16, 18,
cartography 119, 133, 146, 185, 187 27–8, 32–6, 38, 41, 125, 130, 137,
castration 64, 67 see also psychoanalysis 142, 175, 183
212 Index
Gass, William 74 Land, Nick 21, 186, 188, 192, 194–5,

Genosko, Gary 43 198–9, 204, 206
Gibson, William 179–80 Laplanche, Jean 27
Glissant, Edouard 19, 156, 158, 161, 176 laughter 18, 68–9, 99, 106–7
Goethe, J. W. 85–6, 191, 206 Lawrence, D. H. 13, 65, 176
Goodchild, Philip 43 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 49, 64, 95, 126–8,
Graham, Daniel 88–9 131, 134
Guattari, Felix 18, 36, 41, 49, 119, 122–8, Lish, Gordon 179
133, 134, 175 Longo, G. 203
Lyotard, Jean-François 87, 186, 188
Habermas, Jurgen 51–2
Hallward, Peter 161, 165, 176–8, 182, 186 Mackay, Robin 193, 197
Hardt, Michael 43 Magnani, Lorenzo 207
Hegel, G. W. F. 106–7, 184 Marx, Karl 10, 52
Heidegger, Martin 208 McGurl, Mark 70
Helmreich, Stefan 202, 208 Melville, Herman 1–2, 4, 19, 65, 103,
Hesiod 88 132, 144, 155, 158–60, 162,
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 14 168, 169
Holland, Eugene 64, 130, 176–7 Mengue, Philippe 127, 128
Homer 86 Michaux, Henri 32, 130, 132
Horkheimer, Max 54–6 Mieville, China 200, 208
Howe, Irving 74 modulating vocalism 16, 47
Hughes, John 64 Montévil, M. 203
Husserl, Edmund 29, 70, 82 multiplicity 1, 13, 18, 84–5, 89–90,
hyperstition 21, 194–5, 206 91, 94, 100, 106, 109, 113,
122, 125
Immanence 16, 25, 31, 33, 38–9, 51,
53, 55, 84, 89–92, 94, 123, 160, Negarestani, Reza 21, 191, 195–7, 199,
166–7, 177–8 202, 204, 206–7
Neruda, Pablo 154
James, Henry 75, 105–6 Newton, Isaac 191, 207
Jameson, Fredric 8, 9, 177 Nietzsche, Friedrich 89, 99, 106–7,
Johnson, Charles 176 123–4, 131, 178, 193
Jonik, Michael 166–7
Joyce, James 12, 18, 86, 99–100, 110–12, Oedipus 10–12, 46, 175–6, 183, see also
114, 122 psychoanalysis
order-word 16, 56
Kafka, Franz 25, 65, 85–6, 99, 119–20, Osborne, P. 44–5
126, 128, 130, 144, 157, 176
Kant, Immanuel 109, 114, 192, 207 paranoia 13, 130, 199, 204
Keats, John 12 Parnet, Claire 120
Kierkegaard, Søren 106 partial objects 15, 36–7, 67
Klein, Melanie 15, 36–7, 125, 134, 186 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 65
Kleist, Heinrich von 87 passive synthesis 17, 32, 67, 106
Klossowski, Pierre 124 Peirce, C. S. 202
Pelbart, Peter Pál 122–32
Lacan, Jacques 7, 11, 14, 18, 120–2, Plato 12, 82, 100
137–8, 140, 144, 148, 150 Polack, Jean-Claude 119
Lambert, Gregg 176 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 27
Index 213
Proust, Marcel 16–17, 40–1, 65, 83–5, Simondon, Gilbert 74

87–8, 91, 93, 96, 105, 113, Spinoza, Baruch 6–7, 82, 92–3, 103,
125, 127 147, 191
psychoanalysis 7, 10–11, 33–5, 47, symptoms 11, 17, 31, 122, 124, 137,
93, 107, 119–25, 127, 130, 144–5, 169, 176–7
134, 175–6
Pynchon, Thomas 19–20, 180–8 Taylor, Charles 52
Tournier, Michel 124–5, 138, 145, 147
Rancière, Jacques 2, 19, 155, 163–9
Rawls, J. 52 Vaneigem, Raoul 56–7
refrain 3, 5, 47 virtual 15, 89, 94, 103, 138, 144–5, 157,
Reich, Wilhelm 6–7, 78 160–1, 167–9, 179–80, 188
Retamar, Roberto Fernandez 162–3 vitalism 95, 123
Rockhill, Gabriel 164
Rosenberg, Jordana 177 Walcott, Derek 154–8, 161, 169
Rossiter, N. 55 Wallace, David Foster 179
Wark, Mackenzie 44
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von Watts, Peter 201–4, 206–7
123–6, 144 Weyl, Herman 191, 207
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 17, 83 Whitman, Walt 19, 154–5, 157–9,
Sarduy, Severo 176 162, 169
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1 Wolfson, Louis 66, 125, 132
Schreber, Daniel Paul 41, 184 Woolf, Virginia 106, 113, 119, 133, 176
semiotics 41, 65, 131
Shakespeare, William 109, 162 Zola, Emile 124
Sharpe, J. 181 Zourabichvili, François 123, 133
214
215
216

Deleuze and The Schizoanalysis of Literature

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Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis

Editors: Ian Buchanan, David Savat and Marcelo Svirsky

Titles in the series:

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema,

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature,

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art,

Edited by Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2015

© Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts, Aidan Tynan and contributors 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-47252-963-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

List of Contributors  vii

Introduction: Towards a Schizoanalytic Criticism Ian Buchanan,

Part 1 Towards a Schizoanalysis of Literature

1 The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body without Organs

2 The Drama of Schizoanalysis: On Deleuze and Guattari’s

Part 2 The Ethics of Style

3 The Schizoanalysis of Literature: Austen, Behn and

4 What Is Nonstyle in What Is Philosophy? Donald Cross 82

5 Deleuze on Genre: Modernity between the Tragic and

Part 3 Schizoanalytic Interventions

6 Is Critique et Clinique Schizoanalytic?: Schizoanalysis

7 The Analyst and the Nomad: Lacan, Deleuze and Coetzee’s

8 Razing the Wall: Deleuze, Rancière and the Politics of

Part 4 Literature and Life After Deleuze

9 ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’: Schizoanalysis, Acceleration

10 Negarestani in R’lyeh Ben Woodard 191

Ian Buchanan Joe Hughes

Benjamin Noys Ben Woodard

This book is an attempt to put schizoanalysis to work in the field of literary

described as ‘a work of literature’, Deleuze peremptorily replied that it is

The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The

Beyond oedipal form

accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of

for commodity B) are indifferent to the contents of these exchanges. At a

Deleuze and Guattari are resolutely anti-relativist and anti-culturalist here in

‘photosynthesis machines’. Beckett’s Molloy ponders the relationship between

Write like a rat!

organizing or distributing itself and, as subjects, we are constantly oscillating

Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D. H. Lawrence

The schizoanalytic view of language is that by giving it a symbolic or

Hofmannsthal, or rather Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with a ‘people’ of

Guattari’s central concern with ‘desiring-production’, a Marxian reconception

the Double. While we might discern the stages of Lacanian subjectivity in

of convergence’ of accelerationist readings of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory and its

the literary-philosophical ‘hyperstitions’ of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani,

Buchanan, Ian (2000), Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Durham, NC: Duke University

The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body

How does the body without organs work?

performance of our self or indeed selves; it is, rather, a capacity or capability of

the ‘schizophrenic table’ observed by Henri Michaux in The Major Ordeals of

The degree zero of desire

In most instances, then, at least in its earliest materialization in Deleuze and

can easily be transferred, displaced, [and] compressed’ in a way that would be

say desiring-machines ‘only work by breaking down [Les machines désirantes

Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky,

As conditioned as we are by more than two centuries of nature-driven

List of Contributors vii

4 What Is Nonstyle in What Is Philosophy? Donald Cross 82

10 Negarestani in R’lyeh Ben Woodard 191

(1) Schizoanalysis is the study of our constitutive passivity – it explores

(1) Literature works on our desiring-machines. It shapes ways of

(2) The task of the critic is not to return again and again to an

In a discussion of Cournot’s argument, Ian Buchanan observes that it repre