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. (1)

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
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
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)

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

When asked in an interview if A Thousand Plateaus could be

4
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
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
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.

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

12
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 constitutingconstituted force)
without the conditions of readability by which we normally grant the efficacy of statements

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
13
organizing or distributing itself and, as subjects, we are constantly oscillating between the two
organizations.

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)

14
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:

15
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the ‘body without organs’ (BwO) as ‘the
only practical object of schizoanalysis’ (1987: 202).
The ‘Structural Necessity’ of the Body without Organs
Ian Buchanan

25
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
26
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.

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.
36
(habla de Lógica del sentido) 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
37
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.
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).
38
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.
39
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.
41
. 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.
43
The Drama of Schizoanalysis: On Deleuze and Guattari’s Method
Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter
64
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.

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, 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.

65
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
66
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.
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 desiringproduction: 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.
67
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.
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
69
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).

84
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.
85
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:
86
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
87
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.

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)
90

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.
91
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).
92
‘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.
93
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
94
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,
95
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.
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.
Deleuze on Genre: Modernity between the Tragic and the Novel
Ruben Borg
99
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)
100
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.
101
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.
102
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’
Insofar as it draws on generic categories, then, schizoanalysis begins by interrogating 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
Deleuze on Genre 103
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, quasisynonymous terms, precisely because
seeing is itself understood as a nonrepresentational 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
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature104
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 selfsufficient, 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
Deleuze on Genre 105
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 commonsense 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
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature106
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.
Deleuze on Genre 107
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 antiHegelian 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.
108
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
Deleuze on Genre 109
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.
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature110
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
Deleuze on Genre 111
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
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature112
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
Deleuze on Genre 113
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.
6 Is Critique et Clinique Schizoanalytic?: Schizoanalysis and Deleuze’s Critical and Clinical
Project
Garin Dowd
119
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 AntiOedipus and consolidated in A Thousand Plateaus. This
chapter will suggest, however, that Deleuze’s final volume of essays, Critique et clinique, represents
120
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 productions 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).
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
120 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).
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
122
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.
123
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)
124
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 postGuattari 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
Is Critique et Clinique Schizoanalytic? 125
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).
126
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.

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
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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.
Este capítulo es fundamental
127
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.
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
128
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).
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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).
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.
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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)
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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).

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
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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).
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).

Birman, Joel (1998), ‘Les signes et leur excès: La clinique chez Deleuze’, in Eric Alliez (ed.), Gilles
Deleuze: La vie philosophique. Le Plessis Robinson: Institut Synthélabo, 477–94.

Bourassa, Alan (2002), ‘Literature, language and the non-human’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), A Shock
to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge, 60–76.

Colombat, André Pierre (1997), ‘Deleuze and the Three Powers of Literature and Philosophy: to
Demystify, to Experiment, to Create’. The South Atlantic Quarterly, A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Ian
Buchanan
Lambert, Gregg (2000), ‘On the Use and Abuses of Literature for Life’, in Ian Buchanan and John
Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 135–166. Lecercle,
Jean-Jacques (2002), Deleuze and Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Léclaire, Serge ([1971] 1999),
‘The Real in the Text’, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (eds),
Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts, Postwar French Thought Vol II. New York: The New Press,
320–3.
Zourabichvili, François (1996), ‘Six Notes on the Percept (on the Relation between the Critical and
the Clinical)’, trans. Ian Hamilton Grant, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, 188–216.

Artículo The analist and the nomad

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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
145