Deleuze's Dick

Author(s): Russell Ford

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric , 2005, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2005), pp. 41-71
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40238200

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Philosophy & Rhetoric

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Deleuze's Dick

Russell Ford

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bom-

barded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people
using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their
motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an aston-
ishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I
ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the
basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way
that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my
editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build uni-
verses that do fall apart.
-Philip K. Dick (1995, 262)

Introduction: Another diction

The hack. The salesman. The fired cop. The drifter. The betrayed criminal.
Each of these constitutes a novel literary invention; each gives a new sense
to the investigative character. They are not modifications of the classical
model, stamped with the rational imprimatur of Sherlock Holmes, C.
Auguste Dupin, or Joseph Rouletabille - there is no line of filiation from
these to Vachss's Burke, Pelecanos's Nick Stefanos, or Himes's Coffin Ed
Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.1 Even Lacan's powerful psychoanalytic
reading of Poe's "The Purloined Letter" reveals Dupin to be a genius only
in a game whose dialectical structure is given in advance. Although the
subjects that come to occupy this structure only acquire determination
through the assumption of their places, the dynamic form of the dialectic is
itself "foreclosed" by the phallus whose circulation organizes the system.2
Dupin understands the circulation of the signifier only because this circu-
lation is the figure of the law. Rejecting the phallocentric rationality of the
mastermind, the new figurations of Vachss, Pelecanos, Himes, and others
parody the grand orchestration of reason - -their language is slang not de-
duction. They are not detectives but "dicks": a name3 that incorporates
within its reduction an empirical transformation of the transcendental. In

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2005.

Copyright © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

41

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
42 R. FORD

fact, it is a transformat
new type of conceptual
The philosophical pro
izes as a "transcendental
from its determination
history. Such a freeing
of present events that
by that history. The dis
his insistence on the disc
new formulations that i
losopher is the one wh
thereby places herself in
historically conditioned,
ited number of possibl
the other hand, this con
repeated, perpetually, so
solving the question of
the question of the deter
of parody is the limit o
to the vicissitudes of his
In the assumption of t
limit where thinking en
thinking into new and u
new, of what puzzles an
leads Deleuze to write th
particular species of d
tainly not claiming tha
narrative, he is also not
resemble a detective n
maintain their mutual d
style of thinking comm
following Pierre Klossow
not only links the sensi
but does so precisely b
crete dimension.6 Deleuz
ferential philosophy is
particular relevance of a
ence but also the fundam

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 43

The centrality of language to D

indicated as early as his 1954 rev
The central claim of Hyppolite's bo
of language, which in turn is th
exists as the natural Dasein in wh
appears. Man is the trace of this
trace without which self-conscious
reading, Hegel's Phenomenology o
of the coincidence of logic and exis
the narration of the education of f
in determining the problem for co
determination of the mode of know
no 'beyond' means that there is no
only sense), and that in the world
being thinks itself in thought). Fin
is nothing beyond language" (199
finite knowing to sense occurs th
flow of time renders a once-true st
continues to flow, and sense arises,
finite expression reflects the absol
constitutes the ever-renewed effort to articulate sense. Deleuze breaks with

Hyppolite on the issue of what determines the movement of knowing to-

ward sense and argues that this movement is not reducible to mere contra-
diction. For Deleuze, the force of time is not adequately thought as negation,
consciousness is not reducible to a series of distinct states, and therefore
philosophical knowledge must undergo a radical transformation. Where
Hyppolite conceived of philosophy as the discovery of expressions adequate
to the movement of time, Deleuze, by conceiving of the work of time as
difference rather than contradiction, develops a conception of philosophy
as the invention or creation of concepts.
Of central importance to Deleuze's critique of Hyppolite's reading
of Hegel is Nietzsche. It is in Nietzsche that Deleuze finds a thought that
articulates the flow of time as a differential force that is irreducible to con-
tradiction or negation: eternal return. More specifically, it is Pierre
Klossowski's work on Nietzsche that allows Deleuze to use Nietzsche to
work out the possibility of a consistent, non-transcendental philosophy.
For Klossowski, Nietzsche dramatized a style of thinking that moved ac-
cording to a time ordered by difference rather than contradiction. The doc-
trine of eternal return (a "simulation of a doctrine" [1963, 21 1 ; translation

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 44 R. FORD

mine]) was dramatized in

the one willing the affi
cratic revaluation of all values. In his own work on Nietzsche, Nietzsche
and Philosophy, Deleuze (1983) provides an account of this doubling by
describing will to power as belonging properly to active forces even as it
wills reactive forces.7 This fracture does not express an incomplete synthe-
sis of negative moments, but constitutes in its positivity a book that thinks
the force of time as immanent to finite expression but not grounding it.
The doctrine of eternal return is parody because it thinks the constitutive
difference of finite thinking and an adequate expression of being precisely
by expressing the latter in the former. If for Hegel and Hyppolite the secret
was that there was no secret, for Klossowski and Deleuze, the secret is that
there is only the secret, only difference.

Bergson and the secret of empiricism

It is again a matter of the secret in Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze

clarifies the relation between detective fiction and philosophical works by
linking detective fiction to empiricism.

By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should
intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the
problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate
in relation to 'dramas' and by means of a certain 'cruelty.' They must have a
coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from them-
selves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere. This is the secret
of empiricism. Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a
simple appeal to lived experience. (Deleuze 1994, xx)

The secret of empiricism is what it conceals in and through its ap-

parent lack of methodology. This lack is in fact not a lack at all but
empiricism's positive character as a style of thinking, a style of working
with concepts, that operates to render thinking commensurate with a par-
ticular experience. Concepts are dramatized insofar as they are ordered
and set in relation with each other neither by an independent subject nor
according to the transcendental necessities of the situation, but by the in-
human force of time, the imageless force that impels thinking. At the edge
of knowing, empiricism negotiates the limit between experience and the

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 45

thoughtful determination of that

my concepts along a moving hori
from an always displaced periphery
passivity nor an active determinati
cism marks the irruption of conce
consistent, as they negotiate the sp
particular style of thinking, a diff
piricism is what it makes apparent
through the repetition of the mom
mediately differentiated.
It was Bergson who thought t
"Bergson's Conception of Differenc
time as the review of Logic and Ex
Bergson's method of intuition is ca
without recourse to finality or to
tradiction. The key to Bergson's fo
the faculty of "fabulation."8 Thinki
beginning, between a thought of
and a thought of duration, or of th
lation is the faculty of thinking th
determining their end or usefulne
tive space of the world and, in th
cance of worldly things. However
finality and does not stop with the
and the corresponding end are in f
the one hand as the mixture it for
difference and simplicity of its
apparent dualism of thinking eli is
stitutes thinking is not between
purpose of a thing and its present
tween the actual and the virtual, be
fictional significance of that thing
the virtual is the real difference b
difference cannot be reduced to con
The virtual, for both Bergson
For Bergson, it is the concept that
relationship of thinking and the w
concept of the possible - a concept
virtual - on the contrary, the virt

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 46 R. FORD

Objects are possibilities

there is neither subject
comes to expression in t
possibility of the possib
simultaneous condition that it be actual and not actualized. The virtual is a

concept that answers the question of the determination of possibilities that

the concept of the possible merely begs. Deleuze pushes the concept of the
virtual even further in his work on the cinema (1989, 78-83). There, Deleuze
shows that the distinction between the actual and the virtual is a temporal
distinction between the present and the differential force of time (what
Bergson calls "Life")9 The actual determination of things and events in
the world is thus transformed from the transcendental selection of possi-
bilities to the generation of actualities coupled with their inner, temporal
differentiation. Such an empiricism reworks transcendentalism without dis-
carding it.
Empiricism appears different from conceptual determination, but
empiricism's secret is that this difference is only apparent, and that real or
concrete difference is the difference between thinking and the appearance
or expression of thinking. The apparent difference is mistaken for the real
difference not as the result of an error, but because thinking is developed,
according to Bergson, in areas quite different from speculation, or the think-
ing of thinking itself. What is commonly called "thinking" emerges as a
power of finite creatures to determinately apprehend things in the world.
In Creative Evolution, Bergson (1998) refers to this aspect of the power of
thinking as the intellect, whose particular power is the inventive determi-
nation of systems of analytically discontinuous bodies.10 The intellect de-
velops in addition to, but also alongside, the instinct that is another power
of thought. Where the power of intellect is to construct systems of signifi-
cance applicable to a number of different situations, the power of instinct
is to think the specificity of a thing or situation as a whole. "Instinct is
sympathy" (176), and, as examples of instinctive behavior, Bergson de-
scribes the behavior of wasps that sting each species that they prey on ac-
cording to the location of nerve junctions particular to that species; the
wasps cannot be acting based on intellect because their behavior cannot be
extended to new species of prey.11
The intellect inevitably leads thought to a consideration of thinking
itself but it does so through language. Language is the intellect rendered
communal, the sharing of systems of significance that permits the coordi-
nation and often cooperation between different finite creatures. With Ian-

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 47

guage, the intellect obtains its ade

not a representation12 - insofar as
extended and so can be brought
With language, thinking itself can
tellect, and one might imagine thi
tic community think about the c
intellect, however, apprehends t
faculty or tool of analysis and sys
termine thinking analytically, by
determination of thinking as a suc
fails to adequately think thinking
instinct that is equally constitutive
lation, in order to think thinking
ition. Intuition is the method that t
the difference of thinking, the di
cance, without thinking of this di
cance of a thought, what organizes
of a lack but rather the insistent c
Intuition is the method that takes account of this difference in think-

ing. It is therefore a key concept for Deleuze's reading of Bergson because

of not only its epistemological importance but also its metaphysical impor-
tance. Like Hegel, Bergson's thinking is organized by the problem of con-
sciousness. However, Hegel proposes a dialectic that recollects and
recuperates a determinate ground for thinking (this is the dialectic of con-
sciousness). In doing so, Hegel resorts to a Newtonian conception of time
that thinks of it as composed of a succession of mutually exclusive mo-
ments, and of space as a set of mutually exclusive points. Only in such a
conceptualization can difference be organized into a determinate force that
both resolves and preserves the difference between the Part and the Whole,
between a determinate thought and thinking, between the finite existent
and Spirit. By affirming the difference that is the secret of empiricism rather
than attempting to eliminate it through recourse to a dialectic of negation,
Bergson opens the way to a thinking that accords priority to difference.
Most importantly, because intuition is primarily metaphysical, because
Bergson's problem is consciousness as the field of experience, difference
is developed not as a determining concept but as the determinability of
every experience. The secret of empiricism is the difference that calls forth
determination. For Bergson, the invention of the power of determination is
a decisive moment in the evolution of thinking and consciousness because

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 48 R. FORD

it is the moment determ

force of life found in
force because its determ
cisely as determining.
The secret of empirici
or "life" as Deleuze calls this force in his later works. This force of life has

less in common with the naturalist's or biologist's conception of the vast

manifold of living things than with concepts such as Hegel's Spirit,
Heidegger's Dasein (and later Ereignis), and Nietzsche's eternal return.
Life is not the essence of living things but the principle of difference that
enables the emergence of the living as such. It is thus identified with the
disclosive power of thinking that is dramatized in consciousness. Conscious-
ness does not dispose of life; life is a force whose dramatization engenders
consciousness as the trace of its differing determination. The "cruelty" of
life is precisely this differential determination of forces, the fact that there
is something determinable, and this givenness is expressed in the creative
determination of forces by concepts. The force of life expresses itself as
differing or, in other words, as the remembrance of determination and the
production of the unforeseeable. What is new is what differs not from a
whole that it negates but from itself in its development. This is the lesson
of Creative Evolution. The sympathetic but indeterminate apprehension of
the instinct always outstrips the reflective and determinate apprehension
of the intellect. Consciousness is the dramatic expression of the new inso-
far as the differing that is consciousness preserves the particularity of the
created in memory even as it repeats the force of life in the trajectory of
duration. Consciousness is not life's reflection; it is the trace of life's dif-
ferential expression.

Apprenticeship and fabulation

According to Bergson, language maintains a particular relation to this force

of life. Hegel also privileges the relation between language and the force
of time, and it is on this basis that Hyppolite carries out his ontological
reading of Hegel's philosophical project. In the Phenomenology of Spirit it
is language, and writing in particular, that enables the first movement of
the dialectic from sense-certainty to perception: "To the question: What is
Now?, Let us answer, e.g. 'Now is Night.' In order to test the truth of this

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 49

sense-certainty a simple experimen

a truth cannot lose anything by be
lose anything through our preservi
the written truth we shall have to sa
For Hegel, the truth of the parti
guage reveals that the truth of the
everything else. According to this
the affirmative taking up of lang
sciousness. In language, consciousne
the particular. Thus truth is found
the finite; truth is found only in t
rejects this account that reduces th
thing else, and so reduces the fin
Bergson, the immediate certainty o
of a particular, is not differentiate
For Bergson, a particular thing first
that it is not, because consciousnes
ferent dimensions of thinking and
or language, would then be the ex
truth of the particular, but rather th
consciousness.

Deleuze develops such a Bergsonian conception of language in his

essay "Literature and Life." For Deleuze, the function or goal of the lan-
guage of literature is to allow the force of life to pass through it. However,
the determination of the goal of something differs that thing into its virtual
and actual aspects. The Idea that passes through language in literature, and
that endows particular determinations with consistency, is nothing other
than the force that is expressed in the invention of those same determina-
tions. "Idea" is a term that Deleuze adopts from Kant, for whom there were
three Ideas - God, freedom or the immortality of the soul, and the world -
that were determined and given by the temporal structure of the synthetic
operation of rational judgment, but could never be made determinate for
the understanding.14 These Ideas marked the limits of the determinative
power of thought. Deleuze, however, follows Bergson in thinking determi-
native consciousness as the actualization of an indeterminate and differen-
tial form of time. Ideas multiply without ultimate bound and become the
actualization of the limits of temporal forms of existence. At the same time,
these forms undergo qualitative transformation. Literature is defined by
Deleuze in terms of this transformation: "the aim of literature: it is the
passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas" (1997, 5).

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 50 R. FORD

The language of literat

to think a created world
creativity that ground
it grounds its own mean
first movement of the P
determining language, a
of its own production, lo
language or a false det
argues, only by pursui
priate expression of Be
of desire that is the dyn
the Phenomenology is a
think, and so to speak, t
ing that understands the
as a lack or deficiency. H
the way for a narration
education.

By challenging the work of contradiction in the opening moments of

the Phenomenology, Deleuze's reading of Bergson and Hyppolite challenges
Hegel's account of the dynamics of thoughtful language. In emphasizing
the primary and affirmative differential character of consciousness, not only
is the power of thinking to ground itself stripped away, but the very voca-
tion of consciousness is profoundly altered. Consciousness can no longer
be thought of as an activity of self-grounding because it is now posited as
primarily groundless. Consciousness retains a particular dynamism, but this
is now a dynamism of consciousness where the genitive is subjective rather
than objective. Consciousness is differed in its ground, and, to use Bergson's
terminology, it succeeds in thinking this ground, it succeeds in expressing
itself meaningfully, when it thinks this ground sympathetically, when think-
ing thinks differentially. The narrative of such a thinking would constitute
an "apprenticeship" rather than an education. Thinking submits its deter-
minations to the differential force that creates but does not ground these
very determinations and, in so doing, thinks the particular difference of
these determinations that enables another determination to be created. An
apprenticeship of finite, determinative thinking to the imageless force of
thinking, an apprenticeship of language to this force, creates concepts whose
consistency is ill-suited for application to a wide variety of events. This is
not to say that concepts sufficient to think new events negate existing con-
cepts, but rather that new events come to be thought according to a sympa-

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 51

thetic thinking that "makes, rem

moving horizon" (Deleuze 1994, xxi
ticularity of their creation. The la
opposed to what it is not because
such a questioning.
The language of differential thi
sion and new styles in order to acc
ing. Deleuze, both in his own work
singles out two linguistic elements
of every determination: the indefi
these two grammatical function
through an implicit reconceptualiza
tion is both distinct and indissociable from the other. An indefinite article

distinguishes something without making it possible to oppose this thing to

everything else. The significance of the term marked with the indefinite
article is highlighted by the article insofar as it occludes the particularity
of the object endowed with the significance in favor of the significance
itself. "A jaguar" expresses the complex of meanings (solitary, fierce, quiet,
etc.) carried by the term, rather than the stable identity that emerges from
this complex. Similarly, the infinitive predicates something of a thing but
does so in a way that preserves a degree of autonomy for the predicate
itself. The infinitive "stalking" in "a jaguar stalking" foregrounds the mean-
ings implicated by the predicate (at night, through a forest, in a storm) and
so facilitates multiple, different conjoinings of the subject and predicate.
Both the indefinite article and the infinitive, precisely by foregrounding
the different meanings implicated in their terms, draw thinking into a sym-
pathetic complicity with what the intellect alone would merely represent.
Linguistic expressions constructed in this way or similar ways form
the distinctive aspects of literary styles. A style is a way of holding on to
the particularity of an expression precisely by allowing that expression to
develop in unknown ways according to the differences implicated within
it. An expression is singular not when it can be opposed to other expres-
sions, not when can be negated, but when it is broken or fractured accord-
ing to the different trajectories of the forces that constitute it. The unique
beauty of a literary style is the way that it draws together a new and un-
known assemblage of forces from out of the everyday, and the way that
this style vanishes in its expression as these forces enter into new assem-
blages. Deleuze writes: "We sometimes congratulate writers, but they know
that they are far from having achieved their becoming, far from having

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
52 R. FORD

attained the limit the

from them" (1997b, 6)
This process by which
then leads thinking in
the power of "fabulat
guage and, in so doing,
use the language empl
phy?, literature creates
difference from philos
material the aim of art
and the state of a perce
the transition from on
pure being of sensation
ods such as the use of t
creates fictional percep
sentation or self-consc
multiple styles of fabu
where determination em
image that joins thinki
unable to be determin
tion as the inventive co
thinking develops as co
This is why literature i
ture creates proximities
tification, not because t
synthesis, but because t
tive, and constitute thin
The imageless force of t
the world in the imag
doubled force of creativ

Genealogical thinkin

The relation between

Deleuze's work on Niet
digious dramatization o
Zarathustra. Deleuze f

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 53

to attempt to think this coincidence

clearly distinguishes Nietzsche's sty
elements of Nietzsche's work not as
ing but as the necessary form that
capable of expressing something new
ing comes to expression or is dram
its origin elsewhere.
Zarathustra is in some way the
only the satellite. Even better, I
given voice to the triumph of Za
sacrificed in the course of a victor
pay dearly for this creation. Zarathu
that immortality by which one die
179; trans, mine)
In giving expression to Zarathu
stripped of any power of agency as
meaning is both broken and create
of a thought, but the perceptual, l
Zarathustra's encounters is not the
a course of thought, but the exper
the author suffers and is sacrificed
as they carry language and thinkin
thought's grasp but from which se
Deleuze furthers the work of Kl
on language and sense - by worki
thought in an ontological rather th
think thinking ontologically, think
that is inherent to it, a force that
locates such a force in the evaluativ
ing, in its very determination of th
ation that grounds any determinat
synthetic; it establishes relations b
mined properties. At the same tim
determines the thinking that expr
ways inadequate. When thinking as
own self-determination, it seems t
evaluation is evaluated from the sta
ated from another, and so on. As B
think itself, it must abandon the im

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
54 R. FORD

tive.16 Rather than att

genealogical thinking a
ing, and instead develop
the extent to which the
and so admit new expre
Sense and value are
criticaltask is the dif
values themselves, in
not grounded in a par
ungrounded but concer
In asking the question
each significant elemen
particularity of the ele
blage of forces constitu
of other phenomena. "
that seizes it, the valu
expressed in it as a co
logical thinking operat
of thinking, as well as t
cohesiveness, of such a
pretation as the analysi
the forces whose intera
of evaluation that deter
element. Evaluation is a
forces that dominate ea
particular dominations
Genealogy is therefore
liferation of evaluative
ism. On the one hand, t
other than a phenome
certain consistency, th
pable of securing a gro
genealogical thinking
sense that bound partic
ogy is nothing other th
genealogical, thinking
and creation; it is not t
Deleuze writes that
game of concepts and p

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 55

dramatization of thinking in whi

limit by thinking's intuitive self-a
to create percepts, indefinite percep
it and precipitate its developmen
creation of percepts was always sub
However, such a hierarchy does n
"Literature and Life," Deleuze dev
ture whose expressions are not in t
erature may be taken up by conc
defined but developed: it become
that it is not a particular value, bu
of literature is capable of creating
that affect thinking and drive it t
the creation of a new assemblage o
when literature is given a sense th
or aspect of a force other than a
Deleuze, literature is defined by
formulation of a new evaluation.
The genealogical analysis of literature is developed through four in-
terrelated theses: literature is a process of becoming, literature is not the
representation of subjective states, literature constitutes a health, and lit-
erature makes language stutter or break down. Literature is a process of
becoming insofar as it aims not at the communication of a meaning or the
depiction of a state of affairs, but at the creation of linguistic events, per-
cepts, whose sense is determined only at the limit where dominant signifi-
cations collapse. A percept cannot be organized by a dominant signification
because dominant significations are precisely those meanings that do not
interrupt thought. Deleuze uses a figure drawn from Kafka, a swimming
champion who does not know how to swim, as an example of an object that
interrupts thought. "A swimming champion that cannot swim" draws thought
toward the limit of sense through the creation of a new complex of forces
(Deleuze 1997b, 2). To simply create such an expression is not enough,
however. Literature creates fictional spaces of fabulation in which these
new expressions develop new consistencies for thinking.
To think writing as becoming entails thinking of writing as other
than representative. A representation depicts an inner state (whether per-
ceived or imagined) and, even if the state is a dynamic one, this depiction
must first circumscribe its object in order to portray it. If literature is only
as becoming then it cannot consist of the transposition of psychological

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 56 R. FORD

states into language. Wr

tinues through the stru
pression. However, if wr
affective expressions, th
as it pursues it. Consisten
ing never reaches and th
prehended but thinking
cannot be constituted b
because these states ha
perverse. Deleuze emphas
of literature also suffer
tion to this claim, but
facilitates experimentati
disturbance is not trans
tally, in a search for coh
This search for coherence is literature understood as the creation of
a health (Deleuze 1997b, 3). The set of values expressed by a particular
system of thought incorporates objects according to the force that thinking
determines as dominant in each object. With its particular and constitutive
values, thought determines a particular group of symptoms in the world by
constructing a distinctive assemblage out of the unlimited senses of ob-
jects. That thought may be characterized as a group of symptoms does not
mean that thought is essentially diseased or defective. On the contrary,
thinking is precisely the life of symptoms. However, if thinking consti-
tutes the life of symptoms, if the mere representation of thought is not
literature, how can literature be considered a health? In the same way that
thinking emerged as a thought of becoming, as a thought of an indefinite
object broken from its evaluative connections; so a thoughtful expression
that breaks from thought precisely by thinking the creative power of thought
emerges as a health. The life of symptoms is the play of evaluations, the
perpetual creation of new cohesive systems, and so is quite distinct from a
drive toward the creation of a single, prioritized evaluation. The health of
thought is always its image, the form that thought prescribes for the regu-
lar deployment of sense within a given evaluation, but this image is always
a fabulation, always a fiction. The health of thinking is its interruption
because it repeats what is essential to thought but cannot be represented:
the becoming of thought, the limit of sense. Literature is a writing that
constitutes a health through the repeated interruption that experiments with
new senses and new values.

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 57

If writing is becoming, this is be

of things. The sense of something
thinking (Deleuze 1997a, 193). To th
both its dominant, determining fo
forces. Thinking apprehends the o
ing force is thought together with
object. But if these forces are only
sense of the thing and not the thi
multiple. In thinking the sense of
evaluations according to the power
sible coherences. For Deleuze, the e
language and therefore both the in
fected by writing will be linguisti
ing, language changes as evaluati
power of language that Deleuze is i
ductive interruption that marks t
breaks with the senses allocated by
writing comes to speak of object
infinitive.

With the indefinite article, language indicates the multiple senses

corresponding to the multiple powers that constitute an object, but without
reducing this multiplicity. Consider the effect of the transformation of the
term "the crime" into "a crime." With the definite article, the term is im-
mediately linked to a series of other determinate concepts (other crimes,
motives, criminals, detectives, etc.). With the indefinite article these deter-
minations may become actual, but the term itself eludes complete determi-
nation. "The crime" is solved within an existing conceptual framework
that gives the crime determination even before it is actualized. "A crime"
is not solved but resolved insofar as its occurrence is an event that permits
a redistribution of actual determinations; a redistribution whose determi-
nation is a solution and whose difference from the meaningful order of the
previous distribution is a resolution of virtual trajectories of that order.19
The indefinite article allows the play of multiple senses and thus the play
of the object through multiple valuations.
The expression of this play is achieved through a fracturing of deter-
minate language, a process Deleuze calls "making language stutter." Lan-
guage stutters when it expresses the passage of thinking across multiple
forces that are still only on the way to coherence. From the indefinite ob-
ject develops an entirely multiple grammar, a broken grammar that is not a

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 58 R. FORD

new evaluation but the

the vehicle of multiplici
The indefinite article
sion that may be actual
of such a resolution. T
reiterates the limit of m
crime is solved" denotes
tem: justice prevails. M
ingful discourse (solvin
has been caught or kille
tion of the crime is it
other hand, denotes the
ized expression would a
itself. The direction of
preservation. Literature
its greatest power is in
disclosive submission of
erature is a new sympt
the creative act of writ
The writing that is lit
achieves expression, tha
the writer undergoes a
The endurance of this in
comes to be literature.
customary paths, litera
The work of writing is
and consistent system
points of interruption
Just as Nietzsche the p
acter of Zarathustra, w
evaluation of eternal re
thought, and a narration
discern the writer behind these words.

Literature is irreducibly empirical, constantly displaced from the

horizon that constitutes its sense and toward which it strives. Yet it is the

repetition of this striving that gives literature its value. Literature is the
fabulation of new values, the fictional creation of new objects and new
evaluations that would orient new styles of life. As fabulation, the horizon
of literature is "a people to come," a phantasm whose constitution would

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 59

be a health that could endure the i

writing works toward the horizon
lessly reworks the constitution of
the repetition of the politically di
tion of the work of justice. Nowhe
the political more apparent tha
Série Noire."11 From the play of d
ticular sort of detective fiction,
that not only radically contests di
but also works out the political im
mation.

The case of La Série Noire

Deleuze published his short essay on detective fiction in 1966, on the oc-
casion of the publication of the thousandth title in Gallimard's La Série
Noire.11 The first volume in La Série Noire appeared in 1945 and volumes
are still appearing, with over 2700 published so far.23 The content of La
Série Noire may be loosely categorized as hard-boiled detective fiction
where "hard-boiled" serves to distinguish this sort of detective fiction from
what Deleuze refers to as "English" detective fiction. In English detective
fiction, exemplified by the works of such authors as Agatha Christie, John
le Carré, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as the contemporary genre of
police procédurals, the narrative is generally composed of the work of a
detective (either by profession or behavior) who gathers evidence in order
to compose a solution to a crime that has occurred. The reader is placed in
the position of knowing all of the evidence that the detective knows, but
without being privy to the internal reasoning of the character. In hard-boiled
detective fiction, however, the narrative is still in some sense organized by
a crime or series of crimes, but the narrative is no longer governed by an
effort to elucidate these occurrences rationally or from a disinterested stand-
point. Instead, this sort of detective fiction, which often reveals the crimi-
nal, the motive, and the mechanism of the crimes in the opening pages, is
the narration of the consequences of these crimes. The situation is not ex-
plained but resolved. La Série Noire amplified this distinction according to
the editorial policies of Maurice Duhamel. Many of the early titles in La
Série Noire were translations of books that had originally appeared in En-

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
60 R. FORD

glish. In these translat

books of La Série Noir
works so that the psych
tended to develop the c
eliminated entirely.24 T
lived up to their name:
or bad events. Under
literature toward an a
would be constituted b
implicated within but w
If a contemporary wo
novel of the type exem
course of such a work
problem is the crime, a
cepts deployed in such
problem that necessitat
tual apparatus that coul
problems. Concepts oc
Série Noire, a place stri
plex that envelops the n
lematic events - they
consistency. A dick end
grasps or determines th
fabulation. The hack, th
in transition. A dick i
arises from their serie
consistent of events. Fi
gence of a new sense. A
events, and, in so doing
rather the becoming-s
toward consistency. Th
nothing but a series of
insofar as it develops fr
In what Deleuze refe
novel" the action of the
Such narratives exhibi
proper to the tradition
prioritization of the m
thisparallelism, Deleuze

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 61

according to whether they proceed

these two modes both the criminal events and the actions of the detective

are organized by the same metaphysical order. That is, the criminal events
are also organized by the element of truth. It is the identity of this ground
that insures the mutual reflection of the events corresponding to the crimi-
nal and the detective. While it is the ground as identity that permits the
coexistence of the two series of events, their coexistence is a tragic one
and Deleuze emphasizes the affinity of this sort of detective fiction with
Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. The Oedipal structure belongs to both de-
ductive and inductive sorts of detective fiction insofar as it is the search

for truth that organizes Oedipus's actions in his double role as both crimi-
nal and detective. The element of tragedy results from the necessary col-
lapse of the parallel series in an event that recoups the criminal series as an
error, a perversion of the lawful series. This reflection is resolved, is re-
duced to its ground, by "the surprising designation of the guilty party at
the end of the book, all of the characters having reunited for a final expli-
cation" (Deleuze 1988, 44-45; all trans, mine). The action and culmination
of the narrative of the old detective novel is a tragedy whose structure
parallels the metaphysics of platonism.
La Série Noire creates a different sort of structure where "the prob-
lem is not posed in terms of truth. Rather, it is a question of a surprising
compensation of errors" (Deleuze 1988, 45). In this new structure there are
two sorts of cases: those in which the criminal is known, and so only needs
to be apprehended and punished, and those where the criminal is utterly
unknown. In the former case, exemplified in "the American schema of the
gangster" (45) where criminal acts are carried out at the behest of an un-
touchable mastermind, the master criminal's crimes are never brought to
light and proven but he is nonetheless punished: Al Capone was eventually
imprisoned, but for tax evasion. In the other kind of structure, where a
crime or series of crimes is seemingly committed at random, the criminal
is not apprehended by solving these crimes, but by creating the occasion
for a new crime, supplying another term for the series, and catching the
criminal in the act. In either case, the crime is never resolved or explained,
but it is paid for: Lou Ford, the protagonist of Jim Thompson's classic The
Killer Inside Me, is never brought to justice but is killed in the explosive
confrontation with one of his victims - an encounter orchestrated by the
police. Whatever other crimes may have been committed, a new term in
the series will be created, either in the courts or on the streets, that is suffi-
cient to ensure the criminal's punishment.

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
62 R. FORD

The problem that con

fiction is pursued not w
pensation of errors" (
longer one that pursues
sort of non-investigat
Noire is evidence that i
action, by error. The ac
and on the side of the c
ondarily; they are prim
develops neither induc
fonce a tout hasard" (45
and indeed must do so
ways already been fore
identified as responsib
ness of the crime leave
the dick is left to end
hopes not of overcomin
other avenues. This lack
structure and, in fact,
by disclosing the limits
expression, a new dict
In the new sort of det
ture of errors, or rathe
grounded, is constitute
opment of particular ev
tion of the resolution o
of thought, it constitut
problem - yet the stru
detective novel is fashio
emerges from an irredu
oped when particular fo
new configuration, a ne
The narrative of this
logic of contracts. It h
own self-sufficiency, it
ideals, the novel now b
tural configuration ha
then develops this prob
lishment of the previ

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 63

experiment with new forms of cult

calls "the entire society in its hig
emphasis placed upon error rather
dick and the criminal are no longer
stitutive identity, but that the nov
as a simple reflection or representa
derstandings are profound and co
away from truth, but the fracture
system of values at the same time
of other values. The new detectiv
would remain subordinate to identi
Citing the Kef au ver Report, Tu
Inc., as well as Asturias's novel Th
"crime is organized into strict affa
of directors or managers" (1988,
interpreted, a clue to the criminal'
system, an element in a structure;
tacit contract. The criminal activit
objects of investigation when the
violation of certain understood, tac
not attract much notice when it is
for then the activity lies almost en
world. But when this same murder
of other people, or if the slain crim
so occupies a place in the law-abid
rupted and the crime is an express
stituted by the law. Deleuze uses th
when the spectacular violation of a
ity of the legal and the criminal.
Noire is to have explicitly thematiz
tion" (46) characteristic of contemp
crimes themselves and therefore h
their transformations, their deviat
society "in its highest power of
people to come." A crime is alway
that marks the limit between the la
characterizes a particular culture o
but becomes a perceptual trajectory
ing toward new configurations of

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 64 R. FORD

Crime itself is the mov

or prevailing movement
equilibrium in time. Thi
the world that each hon
criminals": crime is not
it is the disruption of an
like writing "a bad che
is reshaped by the very
tion" of detective ficti
relentlessly pursues rog
recuperation. Police and
tiplicity of forces whose
tures. The force of La Sé
heart of the law, but in
equilibrium, which it is
senting it; by thinking w
concrete.

The sort of detective fiction characteristic of La Série Noire deals

with a dick's endurance of the transgressive interruption of a structured

equilibrium, not by explaining the interruption and making it determin-
able, or by producing a resumption of the interrupted equilibrium, but by
forming new concepts that form new contractual relations and may de-
velop into new structures. This mode of exposition reveals a society in its
highest power of the false insofar as crime - the interruption of a necessar-
ily temporary equilibrium - reveals any legal structure as a heterodox at-
tempt to manage the passage of time, to submit change to identity. Any
structural interruption is criminal insofar as it directly challenges the claimed
authority of the structure. La Série Noire contests the very conception of
the law that regards it as the opposite of crime, as the ever- vigilant power
that corrects any perverse swerve away from orthodoxy. La Série Noire
replaces such a fable of the law with the fabulation of a dick, the creative
expression of particular contracts that are constituted from the stitching
together of divergent forces. Crime is the irruption of unstructured time,
falsity, that is not the converse but the very condition of the law. What is
extraordinary in these novels is not their solution but the ramifying series
of errors that constitute their body and permit the discernment of "the real
directions that we would never find alone" (Deleuze 1988, 47). It is as
though a crystal was held before the body of culture and each splintered
image revealed one more of its embodied impulses.29

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 65

Conclusion: Political conse

"The writer as seer and hearer, the

language that constitutes Ideas" (D
force of fate, a formless interrupti
endure an adventure that comes to it
outof a murmuring nonsense. The w
knew and showed with regard to N
expression abandoned at the limit of
itself. This propulsion is the express
and repetition, the expression of cr
the finite. In Deleuze's essay, liter
comes to link ontology and politics
ticular sense of a language is shaken
wanders outside of constituted evalu
new senses gain consistency. An Id
these new structures. Ontology take
mation is accompanied by real con
transformations are evaluative trans
sion not only of the perpetual resist
but also the perpetual resistance of
The importance of literature to
indicated in his assumption of H
Hyppolite followed Hegel in begin
the past of self-consciousness that e
ness, which is determined precisel
following Bergson, thinks the work
the passage of the virtual force of
the efficacy of the concept of the s
tivity amidst the field of consciousn
tivity, which Deleuze calls "the imag
negating activity of desire that mob
with this image by taking up subjec
ing, a stable form that is neverthel
cism is then that, in thinking of su
than a grounded entity, thinking is
creation. Empiricism, as an expressi
ative power of this expressive force

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 66 R. FORD

of its created forms. Em

ence that calls forth det
This consequence of a
fiction as the desire for
creative endurance. If l
sort of detective fictio
assumes a prominent pl
work of truth. A dick
sire. Andrew Vachss's d
the criminal without dis
being imprisoned by a s
verse freedom. Steve A
collapse of information
dick is seduced by a forc
and even the narrative
the police procedural
Johnson and Grave Dig
K. Dick's masterpiece i
point of endurance an
infinity" (1991, 212) wh
Literature creates percep
seeable events and lead
This new style of detec
very space for the crea
desire breaks down an
inventive.

That such a style of literature should be organized by the problem of

the law indicates that this new expression has political consequences as
well. La Série Noire and its inheritors have given expression to the persis-
tence of jurisprudence as a system of justice. In a system of jurisprudence,
concepts are not created for a particular situation and then discarded; con-
cepts of jurisprudence become precedents that are extended to other events.
This application is never a mechanical one but always calls for a renewed
interpretation, a new determination of the sense of the prior event. This
interpretation repeats the prior event and gives it a new value according to
the evaluation that comes to link the present event to the prior one. A pre-
cedent is determining but also determinately different from another event.
Jurisprudence does not fall apart into simple relativism any more than it
consists of the unwitting deployment of general concepts. It is the exprès-

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 67

sion and development of empirical

an event rather than from a consc
a problem, and its resolution is alw
sistency to the world and so to th
cause it finds its origin in a par
permanent.
In an interview with Antonio Negri, Deleuze remarked that "we ought
to take up Bergson's notion of fabulation and give it a political meaning"
(1995, 174). For Bergson, fabulation is the power of thinking to produce
images that "are defensive reactions of nature against the representation,
by the intelligence, of a depressing margin of the unexpected between the
initiative taken and the effect desired" (Bergson 1963, 140). Literature is a
force of resistance, a fabulous power to create affects that drive thought to
undertake the creation of new values. Literature is the vigilance of think-
ing. Fabulation is an expression that draws thinking beyond its own limits,
that creates fictions in order for thinking to fashion new forms of truth. To
extend this notion of fabulation to the point that it becomes a political con-
cept means to use language to develop styles of thinking that resist en-
trenched value systems through the inventive exploration of new values.
Such political fables eliminate or lessen the impotence that threatens to
dissolve any dissident activity from the inside. Literature breaks from es-
tablished values and creates an entirely fictional world with its own false
senses and, in doing so, literature creates for thought an experience of lan-
guage that carries thought away from established evaluations. Literature
does not propose a Utopian dissolution that would be only a new restriction
on thought, but propels thinking into an affective dissolution that marks its
own power of creativity.

Department of Philosophy
DePaul University, Chicago

Notes
1 . Sherlock Holmes is Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective who made his debut in the
novel A Study in Scarlet. C. Auguste Dupin is Edgar Allen Poe's detective whose first ap-
pearance is in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Rouletabille is a reporter and a detective
who first appears in Gaston Leroux's Le Mystère de la chambre jaune {The Mystery of the
Yellow Room). Burke is the main character of a series of novels by Andrew Vachss, begin-
ning with Flood. Pelecanos is a former electronics salesman who becomes a private dick in
a series of novels by Nick Pelecanos, beginning with A Firing Offense. Grave Digger Jones
and Coffin Ed Johnson are a pair of Harlem police officers who appear in a series of novels
by Chester Himes, beginning with For Love of Imabelle (later republished as A Rage in
Harlem).

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 68 R. FORD

2. In his "Seminar on The

covered and rediscovers wi
that the displacement of the
their refusals, in their blind
acquisitions notwithstanding
everything that might be c
the path of the signifier. . . .
diversion which governs th
mechanism, distinct from r
treated extensively in Lapl
sought to work out the poli
through speech act theory,
See Butler (1997; esp. chap.
3. The Compact Oxford En
Dictionary has six separate l
indicates that the word was a familiar form of the name "Richard" and hence came to be
understood as a generic name for everyman. As slang, it can also be used to mean "an inves-
tigator," "penis," "dictionary," as well as "declaration." These other uses date from the 19th
and 20th centuries.
4. "Conceptual persona" is Deleuze and Guattari's term for the emergent actuality of a
philosophical concept. Socrates would be an example of a conceptual persona because, rather
than merely being the mouthpiece for a doctrine (as we could characterize the interlocutors
in works such as Augustine's On The Free Choice of the Will or Berkeley's Three Dialogues
Between Hylas and Philonous), it is the adventure of Socrates through the various dialogues
that constitutes the Platonic search for a concept of the virtuous person. See Deleuze and
Guattari (1994; esp. part 1, section 3, "Conceptual Personae").
5. It is this concern with the limit of thinking that marks the closeness of Deleuze 's philo-
sophical project with that of Kant's. Whereas Kant's Critical Philosophy sought to defini-
tively establish the limits of finite knowledge through a resolution of the chief problem of
modern philosophy from Descartes through Leibniz: the situation of reason within nature,
Deleuze uses Nietzsche's evaluative critique of Kant in order to situate such a determinative
limitation within the movement of history. Hegel had also recognized the productive force
of history, but had subordinated it to the determinate evaluation of Kantian morality. Deleuze
can therefore be understood as a rival claimant to the tradition of post-critical thinking inso-
far as he, following Nietzsche and Bergson, subordinates evaluation to the movement of
time.
6. Deleuze cites Klossowski's essay "Nietzsche, le polythéisme et la parodie" as making
possible a rethinking of the consistency of the world from a non-transcendental standpoint.
Within this rethinking, "parody" denotes a thinking that establishes conceptual consistency
only through the dissolution of the agency of the thinker; it is a thought developed through
what Deleuze calls "A Cogito for a dissolved Self." See Deleuze (1994, 58, 312nl9).
7. This is the lesson of one of the most important chapters in the book, in which Deleuze
argues that Nietzsche writes of the triumph of active forces not through a transcendental
willing, but through the necessary processes of the triumphant reactive forces (see Deleuze
1983; esp. chap. 2, "Active and Reactive").
8. This is a term coined by Bergson (1963, 107-9) to denote the instinctual power that
works to preserve the work of the intelligence in the face of the essential finitude of exist-
ence. In this translation, "fabulation" is translated as "mvth-making function."
9. "Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out or unrolls itself: it splits in two
dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all
the past. Time consists of this split. . . . This is the powerful, non-organic Life which grips
the world" (Deleuze 1989, 81).
10. "Suffice it to say that the intellect is characterized by the unlimited power of decom-
posing according to any law and of recomposing into any system" (Bergson 1998, 157).
11. Bergson claims, on the basis of the extremely precise way in which certain wasps
paralyze their prey without killing it, that such interaction must be rooted in "sympathy"

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 69

rather than the analytic and synthetic o

interrelation may be decomposed by the
particular task of philosophy to attend
1 2. An example of nonrepresentational th
that Descartes uses at the beginning of th
understanding and imagining. The chilia
not be represented by the subject (cf. D
13. Slavoj 2i2ek makes the mistake of e
ity of the virtual1 (2004, 3). Such an equ
actualization, and a lack that inheres wit
however, that the virtual is actual as vi
actual and the virtual. Rather, the diffe
determining: the difference between an
14. The Ideas are the subject of division
Pure Reason. See Kant (1996; esp. introd
of Pure Reason").
15. See note 5 above.
16. "The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life (Bergson
1963, 165).
17. "Percept" is a term used by Deleuze and Guattari to denote the expression that is de-
tached from sensation and incarnated in an artistic medium. The percept thus becomes a
monument of an sensational affect with which the artistic spectator is caught up, rather than
being left to observe it from a distance, as a "personal" perception. See Deleuze and Guattari
(1994, 163-99).
18. Following his lecture Nomad Thought Deleuze responds to a question trom André
Flécheux as to how he [Deleuze] "can pass over deconstruction" by saying, in part, the
following: "As for the method of textual deconstruction, I know what it is, and I admire it,
but it has nothing to do with my own method. I don't really do textual commentary. For me,
a text is nothing but a cog in a larger extra-textual practice" (2004a, 260).
19. For an extended discussion of the indefinite article, as well as the infinite, see Deleuze
and Guattari (1987, 260-65).
20. The French infinitive is not equivalent to the English infinitive. Specifically, in French,
the infinitive is a way of expressing the uncompleted aspect of an action. See L'Huillier
(1999; esp. section 2.15).
21 . Deleuze, "Philosophie de la Série Noire," Arts & Loisirs 18 (janvier 26-février 1 1966):
12-13, was reprinted in Roman 24 (1988): 43-47; it was also translated by Michael Taormina
under the title "The Philosophy of Crime Novels" in Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other
Texts, 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina, ed. David Lapoujade (Cambridge: MIT P, 2004)
81-85. Translations from this article in the text are my own. Page references are to the
reprinted article in Roman.
22. Jim Thompson's novel Pop. 1280, translated by Maurice Duhamel.
23. In 2001, La Série Noire changed to a new format (Série Noire: Nouvelle Présentation)
emphasizing an editorial commitment to detective fiction from around the world. The most
striking change is that the traditional black covers have been replaced with black-and-white
photographs.
24. For an in-depth account of the particularities of Duhamel s editing, see Robyns (1990,
23-42).
25. Klossowski emphasizes the link between fiction and fate in his etymological discus-
sion of "fable": "Fable" (fabula) comes from the Latin verb fari, both "to predict" and "to
rave," to predict the fate and to rave. Fatum, "fate," is also the past participle of fari. Thus
when one says that the world has become fable, one also says that it is fatum; one raves but
in raving one foretells and predicts fate. All of these senses are retained here because of the
role of fatality, the role of Nietzsche's capital notion of fatum" (1963, 181; trans, mine).
26. When Deleuze refers to platonism he is referring not to a philosophical doctrine that
was held by Plato and expressed in the dialogues, but rather the tradition of philosophical

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 70 R. FORD

thinking that arose from a

"platonismi" uncapitalized to
27. On the concept of fore
28. The Kefauver Report is
crime headed by Senator Est
Burton Turkus and Sid Fede
the investigation into a gro
and 1940s. Turkus was assis
investigation into this group
Série Noire) as Société Ano
1963). Monsieur le présiden
Pillement (Paris: Bellenand,
El Senor Presidente, origina
tral American dictator to el
living in Paris.
29. The crystal is the term
tual doubling of time (see n
passing of the present and t
we see in the crystal. The cr
in the crystal the perpetua
Chronos" (1989, 81).

Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. 1963. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Trans. R. Ashley Audra
and Cloudesely Brereton. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P.

Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of t

Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Tr
lumbia UP.

apolis: U of Minnesota P.

Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, 94-95. Ne

169-76. New York: Columbia UP.

95.

and Michael A. Greco, 1-6. Minneapolis: U of Minneso

trans. Melissa McMahon, 42-65. Manchester: Manchester UP

Michael Taormina, ed. David Lapouiade, 252-61. Cambridge: MIT P.

1974, trans. Michael Taormina, ed. David Lapoujade, 8

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

Columbia UP.
Descartes, René. 1984. Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, Vol. II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 1-
62. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Dick, Philip K. 1991. Λ Scanner Darkly. New York: Vintage.

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 DELEUZE'S DICK 71

Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sut

Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.
Hyppolite, Jean. 1997. Logic and Existence. Trans. Leona
SUNY P.
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis:
Hacke«.
Klossowski, Pierre. 1963. "Nietzsche, le polythéisme et la parody." In Un si funeste désir,
173-212. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
L'Huillier, Monique. 1999. Advanced French Grammar. New York: Cambridge UP.
Lacan, Jacques. 1988. "Seminar on The Purloined Letter.1* In The Purloined Poe: Lacan,
Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Müller and William J. Richardson,
trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, 28-54. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Laplanche, J., and J-B Pontalis. 1973. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald
Nicholson Smith. New York: Norton.
Robyns, Clem. 1990. "The Normative Model of Twentieth Century belles infidèles: Detec-
tive Novels in French Translation." Target: International Journal of Translation Studies
2 (1): 23-42.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 1991. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York:
Routledge.

This content downloaded from

45.77.104.39 on Fri, 31 May 2024 03:04:36 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms