Gregg Lambert
Department of English and Textual Studies
Syracuse University
glambert@syr.edu
One day, perhaps, there will no longer be any such thing as Art, only Medicine.
–Le Clézio
Introduction to the Literary Clinic
The title of this essay recalls an earlier question from Nietszche’s famous “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” which I would like to take up in asking what are the uses and abuses of literature for life and, recalling Nietzche’s guiding question, what kind of health it may promote for “an individual, a people, a culture” (Nietzsche 63). In the various essays assembled around the “problem of writing” in his final work, Critique et Clinique, Gilles Deleuze responds to this question by outlining some of the components of a clinical as well as a critical use of literature, which we might summarize along the following lines. First, certain writers have invented concrete semiotic practices that may prove more effective than psychoanalytic discourse in diagnosing the constellation of mute forces that always accompany life and threaten it from within. Second, as a result of this diagnostic and critical function, certain works of modern literature can be understood to produce a kind of “symptomatology” that may prove to be more effective than political critique in discerning the signs that correspond to the new arrangements of “language, labor, and life” (to cite Foucault’s abbreviated formula for the grand institutions of instinct or habit); third, perhaps most importantly, literature offers a manner of diagramming the potential forms of resistance, or “lines of flight,” which may be virtual to these new arrangements.1
Taken together, these tasks must be understood as creative and even “vitalist” in the sense that Bergson had earlier employed this notion; or as Deleuze writes, “there is a ‘use’ of representation, without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless” (LS 146). The realization of this “use,” however, may require that we approach the question of writing from a point outside the critical representation this question receives in the institutions of literary study today. In fact, I would like to suggest that a clinical usage may radically alter the conditions of the practice of literature and emerge as a kind of Deleuzian “war machine” against how the uses of literature have been determined by the dominance of institutional criticism in the modern period. Is it simply a question of “style,” in other words, that Deleuze’s own commentaries on writers seem to pay no attention or even tribute to the field of criticism, but rather approach always from a point external to the historical representation of an author or given body of work? Moreover, could we imagine something like a “Deleuzian school of literary theory,” understood as one approach among others in a pluralism of critical styles and methodologies, preserving the relative stability of the field of literary objects and the integrity of “a set of individuals who are recognized and identify themselves practitioners of the discipline” (Godzich 275) of literature?2
For anyone familiar with Deleuze’s writings, and especially those works written in collaboration with Guattari, the response to the above questions might seem an obvious “no”; however, in the academy today where the principle of “marketing” is fast becoming an efficient cause determining the uses of theory, we must always hold out the possibility that anything can be perverted against its own nature. Yet, rather than speculating on the fortunate and unfortunate actualities that might flow from the proclamation, “one day this century will be known as Deleuzian” (Foucault), in what follows I offer a more preliminary discussion of some of the principles we might draw from Deleuze’s own manner of treating literary expression and, in particular, the questions and problems of writing that have been associated with the works by the modern writers who occupy a central role in his own writings, as well as in the works written with Guattari. This discussion represents my own attempt to come to terms with what might be formulated as the characteristic marks of what Deleuze had early on proposed as a generalized “literary clinic.” I hope to provoke creative dialogue about the very conditions that would make a Deleuzian pragmatics distinct in the belief that such a dialogue should occur at this critical juncture as Deleuze’s writings are being increasingly taken up by institutions of literary and cultural studies today.3
The Critical and The Clinical
Foucault’s famous statement in “What is an Author?” that we have passed through the age of the “great writer” and the “universal intellectual” has too often been understood to mean that we can now simply reject the notion of literature itself. Indeed this statement has been generally understood to vindicate the “specialist” or the academic subject of knowledge, who were the objects of an even more severe attack by Foucault as exemplars of merely “bad literature.” On the contrary, Foucault’s statement concerns a change in the conditions of discourse in which the writer function now appears, designating a new arrangement of statements caused by the entrance of a new subject that succeeds what he calls the “Man-Form.” The appearance of the universal intellectual was conditioned by the alliance between literature and the law, as the relationship between universal or general expression and its species or variables. Moreover, the universal man-of-letters was the double of the jurist (e.g., Zola, Dickens) and often appeared speaking the juridical language of being. He was decisive, a moralist. Extending Foucault’s observation to the contemporary period, we can define the subject of modern criticism as a final avatar of the subject who judges, the subject of the statement “I judge”: that is, the subject of certainty whose historical emergence is closely allied to the juridico-legal function of judgment one finds at the basis of what Foucault has called disciplinary societies (a social arrangement which, according to Deleuze, we are now in the process of “quitting”).4
The appearance of the “critic,” in other words, is the result of a historical process that has bound the reflective character of judgment to the civil and juridical functions of modern institution. Deleuze and Guattari write that “in so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or rational State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject” (TP 376). This is no less true for the subject of literature, for which we have the personages of the critic and his or her double, the “theorist,” both of whom have emerged today as “the only true legislators” of literature and culture. Therefore, the modern critic occupies an intermediary position between, on the one hand, the apparatus of the state and its systems of majority (the school, the press, or modern media) and, on the other, the fragmented (or molecular) body of collective enunciation that circulates at the base of every socius. Because of this relationship, we might discern that the range of issues and problems (pragma) that have frequented literary criticism for the past several decades, and even before, are codeterminous with changes and fluctuations that have taken place in mediums of civil and juridical identity where conflicting moralities and sovereign discursive agents clash over the cultural reproduction of the institutions of “civil morality”: problems of national canon formation, the status of minority expression in a dominant cultural sphere, the conflicts over the ideological mechanisms of “taste” in dominant aesthetic judgments. However, despite their efforts to liberate themselves from this function, modern critics have become so entangled in the disciplinary apparatus that determines their official function in schools and the public press that they find it difficult, if not impossible, to “deterritorialize” their statements from the mechanisms of power and systems of majority they serve.
In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari note the critic’s predisposition, even within minority struggles, “to reterritorialize, to redo the photos, to remake power and law, to also remake a ‘great literature’” (K 86). To illustrate this problematic alliance between modern criticism and the disciplinary organization of social strata, we might briefly refer to the comparison made in A Thousand Plateaus, “Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine” between the games of chess and Go. Following this analogy, criticism can be likened to the game of chess; that is, it can be understood as a “striated space,” or a discursive grid made up of “positions” and “theories” (Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, post-colonial theory, queer theory, cultural studies) whose subjects are coded, each bearing intrinsic properties “from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive” (TP 352). A “marxist” confronts a “deconstructionist”; a “feminist” becomes a “post-colonial critic”; a “third-world post-colonial theorist” check-mates a “white first-world feminist.” As in chess, for an emerging theory or school of criticism “it is a question of arranging a closed space… thus of going from one point to another (TP 353) in a manner that closely resembles passing through territories,” even though these territories are composed of theorems, schools, subjects, and authorities. Those who enter the game of theory are constrained by the axiomatic values that determine the intrinsic properties of the position they have selected; each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation”(TP 352).5 This constitutes a form of interiority that is specific to a theoretical movement, or school of critics. It is only the “Queen” (i.e., the Master Theorist) who lawfully combines within herself all possible moves, and thus has the greatest latitude and mobility–that of a ‘Subject au large’–who can surpass the relative powers of the other players, who seems to fly over the entire discursive plane to magically capture the scepter of the King.
The above analogy between the institutionalization of “criticism” and “theory” in the modern period and what Deleuze calls a “State-form” of knowledge is striking and this is not accidental. The analogy confirms that the relations between different theories and the kind of conflict that ensues between particular subjects are inherently conditioned by a disciplinary model of organization that subordinates thought to a model of Truth (Cogitatio Universalis), revealing the underlying “striated” space that conditions their distribution and even orders the modes of actualization and points of conflict between different subjects. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the only means of subtracting thought from its disciplinary organization is to subtract it from its images, since to offer another “image of thought” only amounts to the magical return of the mythical foundation of “the State-form.” The theorist who believes she can leap outside this magical circle by offering a “true” image only ends up becoming the another cog in the machinery of an infinite revolution of disciplinary order. As an antidote to this situation, we might propose what Deleuze and Guattari call “outside thought” according to the analogy of Go, where rather than arranging a closed space and subordinating thought to a model or theorem, it would be a question of “arraying oneself in an open space” and maintaining a form of exteriority that enters in to confront criticism as “a form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking” (TP 353). Such an “outside thought” must be conceived in terms that are purely strategic:
A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought; a problem-thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem; a thought that appeals to the people instead of taking itself for a government ministry. (TP 378)
For the new subject of knowledge, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the earlier alliance with the Law (“the moral criteria of judgment”) is no longer possible, since the subject of enunciation that underlines juridical language has been “de-ranged” by the entrance of new technologies and bio-physical forces that are taking place on a plane of immanence. In response, according to Deleuze, “the intellectual or writer becomes adept at speaking the language of life, rather than of law” (F 91). Consequently, this new subject attempts to develop the cases of exception and to invent a form of language that allies itself with the forces that arrive from “the outside,” (e.g., madness, sexuality, power, death, etc.), interrupting the notions of good and common sense which belong to the classical language-subject, and exposing the history of violence which founded the Cogitatio Universalis. Contrary to the classical subject of knowledge (savoir), whose conceptual personages are the philosopher (“the Man of the State”), the literary critic (“the prince of the Republic of letters”) and the psychoanalyst (“the model detective of polis”), the new subject corresponds to the personages of the “diagrammatician” (the cartographer or genealogist) and the “symptomatologist” (or diagnostic novelist).
Although the institution of psychoanalysis in the modern period constitutes the dominant representation of the conditions whereby the critical function of knowledge is given a clinical or diagnostic usage, the critique Deleuze and Guattari launch against this representation in Anti-Oedipus (1972) is well known. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), they write that “[e]ven today, psychoanalysis lays claim to the role of Cogitatio Universalis as the thought of the Law, in a magical return” (TP 376). In Deleuze’s later writings, Foucault himself becomes the “conceptual persona” of the figure who stands for a new arrangement of critical and clinical. Much has already been said of Deleuze’s praise and recognition of Foucault’s later work as nothing less than “diagnostic” novels of the micro-disciplinary regimes of power that have replaced the State-form, regimes whose operations no longer “correspond” to the classical concepts of “truth,” “freedom,” “the good,” etc., that occur in the wake of philosophy and explain the decline of the philosopher’s discourse as the natural expression of the State-form. For Deleuze, the name Foucault designates less the author, or the body of work, than a mode of discourse whose subject no longer corresponds to that of the classical philosopher, but rather to a clinical practitioner who invents a new form of knowledge that corresponds to the problem of how to live a non-fascist life.6
This may help clarify why the relationship between critical and clinical is somewhat complex and not always clear, since the clinical can always be too much of a dominant “method” and may threaten to obscure the critical, and, as I will argue in the case of literature today, the opposite may also be true as well. Here, we might recall an earlier example that Deleuze himself uses to interrogate this relationship between critical and clinical: the example of Sacher-Masoch. First addressing the question of the clinical determination of literary work in his introductory essay to Masoch, Coldness and Cruelty (1967), Deleuze writes that, like the physician, the works of Sade and Masoch can be seen to have constituted a profoundly original clinical tableau by disassociating symptoms that were previously confused and grouping together symptoms that were previously disassociated and unperceived. Sade links the order of reason with the sadistic arrangement of the drives from the position of Law, or absolute right; Masoch links together the status of minorities and women and the position of law arranged through the privileged instrument of the contract–the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys them” (M 13). In the psychoanalytic treatment of both writers, however, Deleuze discerns that the extraction of the “clinical entities” of sadism and masochism from the work of Sade and Masoch results in an evacuation of the descriptions offered by these works themselves. There is a reduction of the language that was specific to Sade and Masoch in which symptoms later associated with the psychoanalytic terms that bear their names were first arranged together and displayed upon a critical tableau indistinguishable from the art of Sade and of Masoch. As Deleuze writes, “symptomatology is always an affair of art…” and, moreover, “the specificities of sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary values proper to the works of Sade and Masoch” (M 10).
In other words, it was the “critical” creation of Sade and Masoch to have first raised these obscure affections, passions, and perceptions to the status of what Deleuze and Guattari will later call affects and percepts. Through this process of creation, their literary works caused what was formerly unperceived, imperceptible, and “outside of language” to pass into language where these percepts and affects become “signs” that will henceforth bear a certain visibility, and, as Deleuze writes, “a tendency toward greater specificity [which] indicates a refinement of symptomatology” (M 13). If we are to regard Sade and Masoch as “true artists and ‘symptomatogologists,’” something curious happens when psychoanalysis appropriates their clinical discoveries: their own proper names are employed to designate the “syndromes” they themselves first brought to light. The critical is obscured by the clinical even as Sade and Masoch are separated from their own language. Sade and Masoch are reduced to “a clinical state” of illness, rather than the critical diagnosis of health. At this point, Deleuze’s accusation of the “Oedipal” function of psychoanalysis, after Krafft-Ebing, becomes clear: First, psychoanalysis was not specifically attentive enough to the works of Sade and Masoch, and consequently, it botched the accuracy of its own clinical conception of sadism and masochism in misinterpreting the symptomatology they had originally created. Second, when the symptoms were separated from their original contexts, they lost the critical force that was specific to their literary production. This led to the subsequent confusion of sado-masochism as a set of complementary and reversible structures, which Deleuze’s essay goes on to separate and clarify as distinct and irreversible. Therefore, Deleuze’s early work functions as both an introduction and a critical recovery of Masoch’s own language in the edition of Venus in Furs. In the title under which this work appears in French, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, the term “présentation” assumes the juridico-technical meaning of a legal process of “discovery,” the stage in which evidence is gathered from an opposing party in the initial phase of a juridicial proceeding. Therefore, Deleuze’s critique of the clinical appropriation of Masoch can be understood precisely as pleading for the defense in a proceeding against psychoanalysis, a proceeding that would finally come to trial in Anti-Oedipus (1972).
This is why Deleuze writes that, in the case of the psychoanalytic appropriation of Masoch and Sade, because the clinical judgment is too full of prejudices, “it is now necessary to begin again with an approach situated outside the clinic, a literary approach, from which these perversions originally received their names” (M 10). In an interview that took place about the same time he wrote the preface to Masoch’s novel, Deleuze described this point outside as the place where “the problem of symptomatology” must also be situated: “at a neutral point, almost zero-degree, where artists and philosophers and doctors and patients can encounter one another” (CC 177, n.25). Both these remarks correspond to a strategy one can find throughout Deleuze’s writings, from Difference and Repetition, where this point is “difference” (i.e., the repetition of the variable, the “new”) that must be located outside the Western philosophical tradition; to the Foucault, where Deleuze even formulates this strategy in the chapter of “Strategies and the Non-Stratified”; and finally, to the writings with Guattari where this point of “the outside” (le dehors) is expressed in several different ways and itself becomes multiple points each inserted or discovered to be emerging within their own assemblage or plateau (e.g., “the war-machine,” “the nomad,” “smooth space,” “the line of flight,” “deterritorialization,” etc.).
Of course, this strategy no doubt receives its most forceful articulation in the following passage from Anti-Oedipus, where it is applied to the re-configuration of the relationship of critical and clinical, which necessarily entails the destruction of the previous relationship operated by psychoanalysis, as one of the primary tasks of what they call “schizoanalysis”:
[T]he problem [of Oedipus] is not resolved until we do away with both the problem and the solution. It is not the purpose of schizoanalysis to resolve Oedipus, it does not intend to resolve it better than Oedipal psychoanalysis does. Its aim is to de-oedipalize the unconscious in order to reach [from a point almost outside] the real problems. Schizoanalysis proposes to reach those regions of the orphan unconscious--indeed "beyond all law"--where the problem of Oedipus can no longer be raised. (81-82)
As Deleuze and Guattari explain in the next statement, this point outside is not necessarily outside psychoanalysis itself (for example, another discourse or branch of knowledge such as philosophy or political science) as it is the “outside of” psychoanalysis–“the schizo,” a figure which must be sharply distinguished from the clinical entity of the schizophrenic, since many of its representatives are drawn primarily from literature (Artaud, Beckett, Nijiinsky, Rimbaud, etc.)–and which can only be revealed through an internal reversal of the analytical apparatus. Consequently, this strategy is one of reversing the institutional priority between the two functions, critical and clinical, either by investing the clinical object with a critical function, or the critical with a clinical determination, and thereby folding one operation onto the other.
Applying this example to our situation today, the critical institution of literature in the university, we might suggest that certain literary works bear a critical activity that is proper to their own creation, which occurs before or even without its representation by “criticism” or “theory.” We might ask how this activity has often become obscured by the institutional consolidation of criticism in the university so that, today, the problems of literature are separated from their own expressions. In response, we could suggest an analogy with the situation of the schizophrenic within psychoanalytic discourse, who becomes subject to the analytic and clinical form of interpretation which strips this subject of his or her own language and, in turn, makes him or her the “object” of another system of classification and knowledge. Like the clinical subject, literature today is often stripped of any enunciatory power of its own, and lately, often appears so helpless that its very representation predisposes it to the critic’s ideological rectification or discourse of truth. As in the description of Sade and Masoch above, perhaps, like psychoanalysis and its regime of “interpretation,” the critical representation of literature may also be full of too many prejudices to be of use any longer, and it is now necessary to begin all over again, as if to begin once more from a point “outside.” Therefore, we must ask in response to our own situation, how we might begin “as if” from a point outside, that is, to recommence on a plane that is immanent to the expression of “the critical” invented by writers themselves.7
The Four Criteria
In the introductory essay of his last work, Critique et Clinique (1993), the plane of immanence upon which the question of literature is unfolded is “Life.” More specifically, Deleuze defines literature as “the passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas (CC 5), somewhat in the same manner that Whitehead had earlier spoken of Ideas themselves as the “passage of Nature” into a place (Fold 73). Recalling the above strategy announced in the preface to Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, it is only on the plane of immanence, that is “Life,” where we can discover a point that is situated outside the (critical) representation of literature, and we can begin to pose again the question(s) proper to literature itself. Yet this statement must be understood precisely and without leaving “Life” as a pure abstraction or metaphysical expression of vitalism. Keeping in mind the strategic necessity of situating the question the critical from a point “outside” its historical representation (or representative discourse), I would like to turn to this introductory essay in order to interrogate the above passage, since it is from this point that Deleuze describes what happens when the questions of living are bound up with “the problems of writing.” In this essay, Deleuze outlines what could be called four criteria for defining the relationship of literature to life. Because these criteria may give a good approximation of the re-configuration of critical and clinical–that is, on the “uses of literature for life”–in the sections that follow I will comment on each one.
I. “Literature is a passage of life that traverses outside the lived and the livable” (CC 1).
This is what Deleuze means by the first sentence that begins the leading essay of Critique et Clinique, “Literature and Life”: “To write is certainly not to impose a form of expression on the matter of lived experience” (1). This statement recalls a question first posed by Proust: “If art was indeed but a prolongation of life, was it worth while to sacrifice anything to it? Was it not as unreal as life itself?” (The Captive 339). Before Deleuze, Proust is probably the greatest apologist for the “duty” of literature. How many have turned aside from its task, he asked, lacking the instinct for it, which is nothing less than the instinct for life itself. “Real life,” on the other hand, “life at last laid bare and illuminated–the only life in consequence to which can be said to be really lived–is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist” (Time Regained 298). For Proust, therefore, literature is the most “real” of all things, since the ideas formed by pure intelligence may be logical, but are not necessary; moreover, perception or knowledge which is common or general is likewise not necessary, because it has not been deciphered, developed, worked-over, that is, created. (In a famous description, Proust writes that for most people memory is a darkroom containing many negatives that have not been “developed.”) Therefore, literature is life:
remote from our daily preoccupations, [the life] we separate from ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life. (Time Regained 298-299)
According to this principle, certain literary works often take the opposite path: to discern beneath the merely personal the power of the impersonal. Thus, literature sometimes concerns the question of living in the sense that the writer struggles with the problem of life in order to extract movements and becomings that are inseparable from the question of “style.” However, “style,” in this sense, does not reflect the individuated expression or personality of the artist or writer; as Proust wrote:
[A]rt, if it means awareness of our own life, means also the awareness of the lives of other people--style for the writer, no less than color for the painter, is not a question of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, were it not for art, would remain the secret of every individual. (Time Regained 299)
In the passage that traverses both the lived and the livable, the identities of the terms do not remain the same, but enter into a process of mutual becoming; Deleuze calls this process a “capture,” a kind of repetition that causes both to become unequal to their former definitions, and enter into a relation of becoming. Such a becoming, however, concerns the immanence of a life, and only in certain cases does it emerge to touch upon the immanence of a life that is lived and livable by others. We might ask then, what makes the life posed by literature exemplary; in other words, what causes its critical expression to pass over to the side of the clinical? It is upon this question that the value of the literary enterprise is posed, whether it receives justification and a “use” or falls into a miserable state of its own univocity. This is where the question of “passage” receives a definite qualification: literature concerns the passage of a life into language. It is only through this passage that Life itself can achieve the repetition of a higher power, and the personal can be raised to the condition of a language.
Deleuze often remarks that the plane of life surpasses both the lived and the livable; the writer’s encounter often proceeds from an encounter when life, defined in terms of the lived and the livable, becomes impossible, or, when this encounter concerns something that is “too powerful, or too painful, too beautiful” (N 51) when defined in terms to of experience. Accordingly, the writer often returns from the land of the dead and is himself or herself “a stranger to life” (TI 208). In other words, the writer does not simply write from experience or memory, but also from something too painful for memory or too light for experience, perhaps even “an unbearable lightness” as in Kundera. It is for this reason, second, that the act of writing and the figure of the writer always entertain a relationship with a fundamental stupidity (betisse), which is not simply a lack of experience as the fictionalizing factor, as well as with a fundamental amnesia or “forgetting,” which is not simply a weak memory as the factor of an overly active imagination. (The récits of Marguerite Duras are exemplary in this regard). Both stupidity and forgetting are the forces that define the writer’s strangeness and estrangement from the “lived and the livable.” For example, is there not a stupidity proper to Kafka’s relationship with women that initiated the desire of the bachelor (hence, his famous statement, “Prometheus was a bachelor”), or a forgetting that one finds in Artaud, Beckett, and Joyce? As in the famous case of the “jeune homme schizophrene” (an earlier essay of which is included in Critique et Clinique), the relationship to a maternal language has undergone a fundamental trauma and dispossession and must either be invented anew (as in the case of Joyce and Proust) or pushed to its extreme limit to the point where Language itself confronts its impossibility (impouvoir, using Blanchot’s term) and comes into contact with its own outside. The latter can find its various strategies in Artaud (where the outside is the cry beyond words), or in Beckett, who pushed the language of the novel to an extreme repetition that unravels into tortured fragments at the same time that his characters devolve into partial objects (e.g., a mouth, a head, an eye, a torso, a stomach, an anus).
Perhaps we can illustrate the immanence of a life with the following statement which implicitly points to the example of Kafka: “The shame of being a man–is there any better reason to write?” (CC 1). Here, “shame” defines the fundamental trait of a life that is not simply the life of Kafka, but of a “situation” particular to his case. For Kafka, therefore, the problem of writing is posed within an immanent relation to the escape from a “situation” of shame. Benjamin had earlier perceived this shame as an “elemental purity of feeling” that is fundamental to Kafka’s writings and, consequently, “Kafka’s strongest gesture [gestus]” (Benjamin 25). What is the “shame of being human?” For Benjamin, shame is primarily a social feeling: it is something one feels in the presence of others, something one feels for others. Because of this origin, the individual is innocent and cannot be found to be its cause. Consequently, in Benjamin’s reading, the situation of shame always returns to the character of the Law and its officers (the judge, the father, the mother, even the son and the daughter, or sister); the character of law is that of an incredible filth that covers everything and everyone–a defilement of being. The father in “The Judgment” wears a dirty nightshirt; in “The Metamorphosis,” the father’s uniform is covered in filth; in the Trial, the Examining Magistrate pages through a dusty volume of the Law which, when K. discovers its contents, is filled with dirty pictures. One might think this is a characteristic particular to the fathers and the officials only; however, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the son has become the embodiment of filth, he is vermin. Neither does woman escape, since as many have noticed, she is touched with the filth of the Law that defiles her own sex, and appears as a slut, a court prostitute, or a hunchback among the assembly of harpies who assemble on the stairs outside the painter Titorelli’s studio. Shame–i.e., the shame of being human–is nothing “personal,” but rather belongs to an unknown “family” which includes both humans and animals alike. And Kafka writes concerning his indefinite relationship to this family: “He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family…. Because of this family… he cannot be released” (qtd. in Benjamin 25).
II. “To write is not to recount one’s memories and travels, one’s loves and griefs, one’s dreams and fantasies; neither do we write with our neuroses, which do not constitute ‘passages,’ but rather those states into which we fall when our desire is blocked or plugged-up”–consequently, “literature then appears as an enterprise of health.” (CC 2-3)
We might ask why Deleuze seems to love children and writers so much. Or rather, why are writers so often described in the process of “becoming-child?” Kafka’s letters often demonstrate this directly, particularly those to Felice where he takes a child’s point-of-view in talking about her “teeth” or in day-dreaming over the idea of curling up in her dresser drawer next to her “private articles,” or, finally, in the passages where he describes a thousand agitated hands fluttering and out of reach, which can be understood as prefiguring of Gregor Samsa’s thousand tiny legs waving helplessly in front of him. In addition to Kafka, we might think of Beckett as well, particularly the trilogy, where the transformation of the characters–Molloy, Malone, Jacques, Mahood, the Unnameable–all undergoing incredible and hilarious journeys and transmigrations, are haunted by endoscopic perceptions. The answer, it seems, would be simple enough: because the child knows how to play (to experiment), and the writer in the process of “becoming-child” does not imitate children but repeats a block of childhood and allows it to pass through language. However, to avoid allowing the notion of “play” to remain too simplistic (since most will say they know what “playing” is), we should turn back to Freud who entertained an original intuition of the child-at-play in his “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.”
There Freud noticed that the child, contrary to the adult, plays in the full light of day, plays openly, and even causes his or her creations to transform the external world of perception. By way of contrast, the adult can only play in secret, and often actively hides his or her creative activities (perhaps even from himself). Adults are, first and foremost, guilty; consequently, they have lost the innocence of play, have repressed it, meaning that they aggressively prohibit all “public displays” of such an activity, transforming the nature of play itself into an unconscious source of pleasure. Freud used this distinction primarily to distinguish the play of child from the fantasy life of the adult; to show the origin of the phantasm itself has this sense of “hiding,” a guilty source of satisfaction for the adult who can only play in secret (and alone). At the same time, even Freud noticed that the artist constitutes the exceptional case to this internalization and continues to play out in the open. What’s more, Freud exclaims with a certain amount of surprise, that society allows it! Even if the artist must usually pay the price in terms of a suffering that compensates for the artist’s enjoyment and seems to satisfy the cruelty of society itself toward the artist for enjoying too much and in a manner that civilization first of all demands to be sacrificed, cut-off. This economic arrangement of cruelty and pleasure, according to Freud, is the guarantee that the creative writer and artist have to exist.
Returning now to emphasize that the writer, like the child, plays openly and in the full light of day, this would seem to imply that the nature of of the activity cannot find its source in the secret, internalized, and guilty affects of the adult. As Deleuze writes, “we do not write with our neuroses” (CC 3). Wouldn’t this imply that we should look for the sense of the process on the surface of the writer’s activity, for a process that seeks to hide nothing? It seems odd, then, that often the function of interpretation is to reveal or to expose a “secret” behind the appearance of the literary effect, underneath the more overt and all-too-evident transformations: to locate the “figure in the carpet” or the figure of ideology. Is there any difference? Moreover, couldn’t this activity be seen as an extension of the earlier repression: to transform what is out in the open, on the surface, to what is hidden and secret? Wouldn’t this transform the very intentionality of the writer, so that the figure itself would appear to have been ferreted away, and desire become the desire of the phantasm? This is why interpretations of ideology begin with a false premise: that the writer was hiding anything to begin with. Perhaps this is why Deleuze-Guattari choose to highlight the most problematic of writers from the perspective of an adult-morality (Carroll and his love for little girls, Faulkner and Melville’s racism, or that of Celine, the misogyny of Miller and Burroughs, Proust’s “closeted” homosexuality, Artaud’s mania and crypto-fascism, Kafka’s bachelor-desire, Woolf’s frigidity, etc.), as if to say, “Well now, there’s nothing hidden here!” “All perverts–everyone of them!” Or perhaps, “If we are to judge, if we must arrive at a judgment, then we must find a better evidence; but at least, we must find something more interesting to say.” But then “perversion” may not be the right word. Again, this evokes the sense of symptomatology, since the writer “plays”–openly, without shame, or guilt–with what the adult chooses to keep “secret,” even though secrecy makes these symptoms no less determining of a life and perhaps even more so. How many times lately have we had to suffer the moralism of perverts, racists, misogynists, and pederasts who choose to persecute others for their own most secretive desires? Thus, the publicity with which the writer plays with his or her desires is not perverse in the least; rather, the function of “perversion” describes the position of a normative morality under the condition that enjoyment either remains “a dirty little secret” of the individual, or undergoes a strange reversal into sadism and cruelty.
III. “Health as literature,” as writing, consists in fabulation, which Deleuze defines as “the invention of a people who is missing”; thus, “the ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, in this creation of a health, in this invention of a people, the possibility of a life.”
Under this criterion, we should recall the three characteristics that belong to the concept of “minor literature”: first, a certain situation occurs when a major language is affected with a high co-efficient of deterritorialization; second, everything is political and the “individual concern” or “private interest” disappears or serves as a mere environment or background; third, everything takes on a collective value. From these three criteria, we can locate the specific conditions that give rise to what Deleuze calls “fabulation.” The concept of “fabulation” first appears in Bergsonism (1966) and then disappears almost entirely until it is highlighted in the later writings, particularly in The Time Image (1985) and again in the interviews conducted between 1972-1990 that appear in Negotiations (1990), where Deleuze makes the following pronouncement: “Utopia is not a good concept, but rather a “fabulation” common to people and to art. We should return to the Bergsonian notion of fabulation to provide it with a political sense” (N 174). In light of our effort to understand this concept in view of a generalized literary clinic, we might understand the concept of fabulation as having two sides: creation and prognosis. Fabulation is the art of invention as well as a conceptual avatar of a “problem solving” instinct that remedies an unbearable situation–particularly with regard to the situation of “the people who are missing” (CC 4). The goal of fabulation, understood as a process, is where the writer and the people go toward one another (see TI 153ff); in this sense they share a common function. Deleuze writes, “To write for this people who are missing… (‘for’ means less ‘in place of’ than ‘for the benefit of’)” (CC 4). That is, they share a process, a vision beyond words, a language beyond sounds. In this sense, fabulation could be said to resemble the function of dream work and, by extension, the moments of selective rearrangement that mark historical discontinuities. What is power unleashed in revolution but the ideal game deployed within what is essentially a fiction; that is, the power to select and re-order the objects, artifacts, and meanings that belong to a previous world? Utopia, then, rather than designating a static representation of the ideal place, or topos, is rather the power of the “ideal” itself which can bifurcate time and create possible worlds. This is why Deleuze calls “fabulation” a better concept than “utopia,” since it designates a power or a vital process rather than representing a static genre–an ideal form of repetition rather than the repetition of an ideal form.
Fabulation entails a “becoming” that happens from both directions–it is both the becoming-popular of the creator or intellectual, and the becoming-creative of a people. In many ways, this movement echoes the description of the cultural process of nationalist or post-colonialist art first examined by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), which can be used to illustrate the concept of fabulation.8 First, in Fanon’s analysis, the function of fabulation that determines the writer’s cultural presence in colonial culture and the forms of “socialization” and identification that underlie the perspective of the modern “creator” are both explicitly developed:
At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He contents himself with stamping these instruments with a hallmark he wishes to be national, but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism. The native intellectual who comes back to his people [as Fanon previously qualifies, "whatever they were or whatever they were or whatever they are" (222)] by way of culture behaves in fact like the foreigner. Sometimes he shows no hesitation in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the people; but the ideas he expresses and the preoccupations he is taken up with have no common yardstick to measure the real situation which the men and women of his country know. (223)
The incommensurability that underlines the initial appearance of the colonized intellectual also belongs to a preliminary phase in the creation of national conscience of culture in Fanon’s reading. It must be followed by other phases which re-configure the attributes (or “property”) of culture between its contingent and exterior genres and its interior collective expression of “inner truth” (Fanon 225). (Fanon articulates the latter as culture’s muscularity, in relation to political action, and rhythm, in relation to ethnic and regional identities). In a post-colonial culture’s incipient phase, however, these attributes are uncoordinated and this non-coordination can be seen to inform the very appearance of hybridity in the image of the cultural producer and his or her creative work. From the perspective of the post-colonial “people”–who, at this stage, “are still missing”– the initial schizoid image of culture which is also manifested in the appearance of the colonized intellectual is the result of the mutilating psychological effects and de-humanization of the colonizing situation. This addresses the problem of becoming from the perspective of the native intellectual and writer, where “going back to your own people means to become a dirty wog, to go native as much as possible, to become unrecognizeable, and to cut off those wings that before you had allowed to grow (Fanon 221). Part native and part stranger, near and distant at the same time, the creator only “appears” to manifest a characteristic of proximity by imitating native dialects and speech patterns; however, this creator’s “ideas” are at first both unfamiliar and strangely distant from a people’s perception of their own image.
Fanon himself accounts for this hybridity by assigning it two causes. First, hybridity results from an appearance of “culture” itself that is uncoordinated with political and national conscience (i.e., a direct consequence of the colonial process that “alienated” and even “negated” any relationship between these two sites of mentality). Second, this appearance of the indigenous cultural producer and national conscience of culture precedes the actualization of political revolt. This peremptory and premature appearance gives the creator and the cultural work the characteristics of “a-temporality” and “affective remoteness” in the minds of the people themselves:
The artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns paradoxically toward the past and away from actual events. What he ultimately intends to embrace are in fact the castoffs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized once and for all. But the native intellectual who wishes to create the authentic work of art must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must go on until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge. (Fanon 225)
This diagnostic and therapeutic narrative structures the dialectical stages that the creator (and the “people”) must pass through in order to arrive at the synthesis of collective political and cultural expression. Fanon traces these stages from alienation of an interiorized cultural identification with the colonizer; to the spark of an original memory (which Fanon compares to the return of infantile and maternal associations); to a period of malaise, nausea, and convulsion (expressions of “vomiting out” the poison of the earlier cultural identification); and at last to the final stage of combat in the martyrological expression of a true popular culture, where the writer becomes “the mouth-piece of a new reality in action” (Fanon 223). Thus there is a deep analogy between the ethnography of a “people” and the story of the coming-to-conscience of the creator’s voice, the manifestation of a culture’s essential “property” and authentic expression of its innermost nature. At the end of the dialectic of culture outlined by Fanon, the “mental space of a people” that had been distorted by the instruments of colonization gradually draws close to itself in the image of the creator and remembers in the voice of the poet the sound of its own voice. The final image of proximity occurs when the creator and the people become one mentality in which culture thinks itself in–and as–the substance of its own ideational life. The “organic coordination” between the poet’s plastic expression and the people’s inner thought achieves such a synthesis of muscularity and natural rhythm that those who before would never thought to compose a literary work “find themselves in exceptional circumstances… [and]… feel the need to speak to their nation, to compose a sentence which expresses the heart of the people, and to become the mouth-piece of a new reality in action” (Fanon 223).
We could see here in Fanon’s description of the process between the marginalized writer and “a people who are missing,” an echo of a lesson from Kafka that Deleuze often emphasizes in the context of his discussion of fabulation:
The author can be marginalized or separate from his more or less illiterate community as much as you like; this condition puts him all the more in a position to express potential forces and, in his very solitude, to be a true collective agent, a collective leaven, a catalyst. (TI 221-222)
This is the solitude that Kafka addressed in terms of impossibility, where the “problem of writing” is fundamentally related to a collective impossibility: the situation of a people who either live in a language that is not their own, or who no longer even know their own and know poorly the major language they are forced to serve (K 19). To use an expression that is invoked throughout Deleuze’s work, and is principally inspired from Blanchot’s writings, the writer’s solitude cannot be reduced to a normal situation of solitude in the world, to an experience of being-alone and apart from others; this is because the figures above do not experience their aloneness from the perspective of this world, or of this society, or from the presence of others who exist, but rather from the perspective of another possible world or another community that these figures anticipate even though the conditions for this community are still lacking. Often this desire or longing which brings about the condition of solitude is expressed in the discourse of love as in the case of Kierkegaard with Regina, or of Proust with Albertine. In the latter case, Marcel is haunted by the fact that no matter how close he comes to Albertine, or no matter how he draws her near him even to the point of holding her hostage, he is always haunted by the fact that behind the face of Albertine, there always lies another Albertine, a thousand other Albertines each breaking upon one another like waves of an infinite ocean. Thus, it is this experience of solitude that burns into his mind the impossible and delirious desire of capturing each one, of “knowing” all the possible Albertines, as the highest goal of Love.
Returning to the case of Kafka, according to Deleuze, the solitude of the writer is related most profoundly to the situation of the people who are missing. This is why the solitude of certain writers is in no way a private affair for Deleuze, and why the concept of “solitude” must be qualified to evoke the uncanny experience of inhabiting a strange language, a language that is not and may never be one’s own, where the very act of speaking brings with it the feeling of self-betrayal, or of “falsifying oneself,” and where the alternative of remaining silent bears the threat of extinction. It is in this sense that the position of the writer is virtual to that of the collective, and, therefore, the so-called “private” is immediately collective as well, that is, “less a concern of literary history than of a people” (Diaries 149). Deleuze writes concerning this situation which was specific to Kafka’s predicament, but which can describe the situation of other writers as well (such as Melville or Woolf), that “the most individual enunciation is a particular case of the collective enunciation” (K 84). Moreover, “this is even a definition: a statement is literary when it is ‘taken up’ by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of enunciation” (K 84). This last definition appears to re-classify the entire sense of the literary as emerging from “a bachelor-machine,” a concept that Deleuze draws from the figure of Kafka but that also can be found to refer to the figure of Proust; however, the condition of a “bachelor” can be redefined, outside its gendered determination, to describe or refer to a situation in which one prefers the state of being alone (i.e., exceptional, singular, anonymous) than to “take on” the identity of a subject one is assigned by the majority. The situation of preferring to remain a bachelor can find affinities, for example, with the situation of a Jew in 18th century Europe, with that of a woman in 19th and 20th century societies, or with the situation of minorities in America today.
IV. Finally, literature opens up a kind of foreign language within language.” (CC 5)
This invention has three aspects: a) through syntax, the destruction of the maternal language; b) through delirium, the invention of a new language which carries the first outside its usual furrows (habitus), and which, in turn, entails a second destruction: the clichés of visibilities and statements which, although not completely reducible to language, are nevertheless inseparable from it, being the “ideas” and “habits” that determine the forms of seeing and saying; c) in the third aspect, as a result of the destruction of the maternal language and of the clichéd statements and stock visibilities (which are like its ghosts), the literary process bears the former language to its limit, turning it toward its own “outside,” which Deleuze describes as its inverse or reverse side made up of visions and auditions, which “are not outside language, but the outside of language” (CC 5). The final aim of these three aspects, according to Deleuze, is the concept of literature defined “the passage of life within language that constitutes ideas” (CC 5).
Taking up the first aspect, through the destruction of the maternal language, literature functions as a war machine. “The only way to defend language is to attack it” (Proust, qtd. in CC 4). This could be the principle of much of modern literature and capture the sense of process that aims beyond the limit of language. As noted above, however, this limit beyond which the outside of language appears is not outside language, but appears in its points of rupture, in the gaps, or tears, in the interstices between words, or between one word and the next. The examples of writers who define their relationship to language under the heading of this principle are too numerous to recount, although I will provide a few significant examples for the purposes of illustration. First, we might point to the poet Paul Celan, for example, whose poetry is precisely defined as the systematic destruction of the language of Goethe and Rilke in the sense that the poem itself expresses a word that no German mouth can speak (the deterritorialization of language from the teeth and the lips). In Celan, the poem itself is nothing less than a materialization of the mother’s corpse that is gradually interned within the German language and given a specific place of mourning; thus, the image of the mother is a shadow of the lost object by which Celan draws the entire German language into a process of mourning. This is Celan’s process: the “passage” of the Mother’s death into the German language; the passage of the living German language into an encounter with his Mother’s death and, by extension, with the murder of his maternal race. The use of color in Celan’s poetry gives us a vivid illustration of the Deleuzian and Proustean notion of vision. The poet is a true colorist who causes colors to appear as nearly hallucinatory visions in the language of the poem; however, in Celan’s poems, the descriptive and neutral function of color is poetically transformed into the attributes of his mother’s body–her hair, or her skin, her eyes; the green of a decaying corpse. It is as if each enunciation of each color will henceforth bear a reference to his mother’s body, that the German language is modified to incorporate this cryptic reference into its poetic and descriptive functions. Thus, the green is the color of summer grass, but it is also the color of my mother’s decaying shadow; blue is the color of the sky, but it is also the color of the sky the day it wore my mother’s hair; red is the color of the tulip, but it is also the color of the one who that day “when the silent one comes to behead the tulips” (Poems 53); finally, yellow is the hair of Marguerite, but it is also the color of my mother’s star, the star that marked her for extinction.
Kafka also approaches the German language with the statement of his swimming champion, “I speak the same language as you, but don’t understand a single word you’re saying” (qtd. in CC 5), and at the same time draws on the resources of the all too vernacular and deterritorialized Czech-German and the all too symbolic and allegorical Yiddish (“a language of the heart” [Diaries 151]) in order to purify the German language and the syntax of Goethe from its own cultural signification. In other words, as Deleuze often recounts, Kafka “creates a kind of foreign language within language” (CC 5) that, although it bears an uncanny and perfect resemblance to the major language, no longer bears the significance for German culture and emerges as a kind of war machine within its majoritarian sense. As Deleuze and Guattari write, by a kind of schizo-politeness hidden beneath an almost too-perfect German syntax, “he will make the German take flight on a line of escape… he will tear out Prague German all the qualities of underdevelopment it has tried to hide; he will make it cry with an extremely sober and rigorous cry… to bring language slowly and progressively to the desert… to give syntax to the cry” (K 26). This marks the importance of animals in Kafka’s shorter works–the musical dogs that appear in “Investigations of a Dog,” the singing mouse-folk in “Josephine, the Mouse-Singer,” the song of the Ape in “Report to the Academy,” the low-cry of the Jackals in “The Jackals and Arabs”–but also the musical auditions of the other fabulous creatures that Kafka creates, such as Odradek in “Cares of a Family Man” whose laughter bears the airy sound of dried leaves, or the silence of the Sirens in the tale of the same name. In all these cases, we have examples of pure sonorous auditions that are introduced into the German language. It is through the deterritorialization of the human that the German language passes through a becoming-animal, that animals introduce the notes of a strange music that has never been heard before in German literature, that Kafka introduces new possibilities into German tongue, “a music made up of deterritorialized sounds” (K 26). In themselves, as pure sonorous material, these sounds may have already been possible: the melody of a dog’s howl, the shrill silence of a mouse, the low moan of the jackal. However, in the form they take in Kafka’s language–for example, the first song that the Ape learns from a drunken sailor, which becomes his primitive language lesson–becomes an “idea” in its passage through language, an “audition” of a cry of humiliation and oppression that Kafka first introduces as such into the German ear. It is in this manner that he both escapes the oppressive, classical harmonies of the German language and, at the same time, institutes a pedagogy of syntax in which he teaches the German language to cry.
Taking up the second aspect, the invention of “a delirium, which forces it out of its usual furrows” (CC 5), we should recall one of the principle axioms of Anti-Oedipus which is that desire always invests or is immanent to the social field of production, in order to apply this axiom to “the desire to write.” The desire to write, at one level, is a delirium which is immediately social. How could we otherwise explain the institution of criticism that has secreted around the work in the modern societies based upon writing if not as an effort to submit this delirium to the identifiable categories of a “proper delirium” that functions as the basis of the group? At the same time, if we were to attempt to grasp “the desire to write” from its immanent perspective within the socius, we would need to conceive of the function of writing in all its occasions: from the legal or juridical and the legislative, to the hermeneutic and confessional modes of writing. Perhaps, then, the figure of the writer emerges to “represent” this delirium and, thereby, to isolate the “problem of writing” to a rare and exceptional cases we call “writers,” almost in the same manner that Derrida had illustrated around the function of the pharmakon. It is as if society, which itself is constructed by and from writing, must also produce a being who embodies in order to protect itself from the madness that belongs to its own order of possibility. Is there any wonder then why the writer has so often been defined by the attributes of illness or bad health? Again, this may explain Deleuze and Guattari’s selection of the series of problematic writers to combat this definition. To close the work off by applying these symptoms to the ethical or psychological character of an author, and thereby to “psychologize” or to “impeach” the writer, is to alienate the critical function of these writers–that is, the “lens” they offer to perceive what otherwise remains obscure and misapprehended by its individuated or psychological forms. Recalling again the second criteria, the principle distinction is the “openness” these symptoms receive in the writing must be set against the usual secret forms that determine the expression of the unconscious phantasies, or individual symptoms.9
In Anti-Oedipus, it is with the discovery of the production proper to the schizophrenic that Deleuze-Guattari find a degree-zero of the delirium that the schizophrenic shares with society: “he hallucinates and raves universal history, and proliferates the races” (AO 85). Thus, the schizo refers to the function of a delirium as the principle of “desiring-production” that society itself uses to “distribute races, cultures, and gods”–in short, to “make itself obeyed”–on the body without organs (the full body of the earth) (A0 84). In Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the concept of delirium we might detect a certain cosmological theory of madness (i.e., the thesis of madness as oeuvre which they share in some ways with Foucault), which was first presented by Freud in his famous commentary on Daniel Schreber, who created a universe with his delirium and then proceeded to populate it with gods, demi-gods (or demons), as well as with new races and sexes. These were the personages of Schreber’s fabulous delirium; however, the structure of this delirium also describes the origin of the prohibitive mechanisms that society itself produces. In other words, the language of madness simply locates in the “story-telling function” of figures like Schreber the very same mechanisms that society itself uses to engender a world populated with gods, cultures, races, and peoples. Given the conservative function of this “myth-making” faculty, we might ask how, according to the major thesis of Anti-Oedipus, the delirium proper to schizophrenic production and social production can lead to the potential of fabulation as a relay to revolutionary force. This is the point around which many commentaries on Deleuze-Guattari’s use of the schizo fall into error by taking the clinical entity of the schizophrenic as a kind of model creator, a turn to romanticism. However, the equation of the fabulation of the clinical schizophrenic with social fabulation has the subtle effect of rendering social production the truth of the clinical equation, since the clinical personage of the schizophrenic constitutes that point where desiring-production is blocked, falls into an impasse, becomes reactive or sick. If the clinical entity of the schizophrenic is identical with society, then we find the true subject of schizoanalysis, which is social production. Therefore, within the literary process delirium undergoes a positive “transvaluation” (Nietzsche) which differentiates it from its repressive or conservative functions in madness and society. That is, if the world itself “is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man,” it is by means of this process that “literature is a health” (CC iv).
Finally, concerning the third aspect of these criteria, Deleuze writes that “…the final aim of literature… is the passage of life within language that constitutes ideas” (CC 5, emphasis mine). In Foucault (1990), Deleuze situates this aspect that belongs to modern literature in what is essentially a psychology of the fold, whereby language is disarticulated from the “grand unities of discourse” (Foucault) which structure the possibilities of enunciation. In Critique et Clinique, Deleuze recalls the above formulation when he describes the event of literature as, “in effect, when another language is created within language, it is a language in its entirety that tends toward an ‘asyntactic,’ ‘agramatical’ limit, or that communicates with its own outside (CC iv). Deleuze locates this aspect of modern literary practices in an analysis that owes much to Foucault’s stubborn persistence to privilege the question of literature in a time when it was being subordinated to the forces of negative (work, communication, information, identity), particularly to privilege the possibilities of resistance that are potential in the recent and overt tendency of modern writers to uncover a strange language within language. Accordingly, modern literature creates within language a non-linguistic stammering that inclines towards “a-typical expression” and “a-grammatical effects” (e.g., Berryman, Celan, Queneau, Cummings, Mallarmé).
As a result of this process, ideas emerge from the process as what Deleuze calls visions and auditions–these are the forms of seeing and hearing that are specific to the literary process in its passage within Language. As Deleuze further describes, however, these ideas appear only when the literary process achieves its aim and breaks through the limit of language, a limit that is not outside language, but rather the outside of language which language alone makes possible. “These visions are not fantasies, but veritable Ideas that the writer sees or hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals” (CC 5). Although they bear a certain hallucinatory quality specific to the literary effect (e.g., Proust’s “madelaine,” Gombrowizc’s “hanged-sparrow,” Melville’s “white whale,” Silko’s “spider-web”), they cannot be reduced to the psychological fantasies of the author nor to “ideologemes” of a collective unconscious, since they take place, as Kafka said, “in the full light of day” and not “down below in the cellar of structure” (Diaries 1910-13 197). Consequently, it is often through words or between words that is the implicit aim of the literary process; this desire on the part of the writer is accompanied by a certain destruction of the stock forms of visibilities and statements, of linguistic and syntactical habits, clichés of the quotidian and common utterances, stock and made-to-order descriptions and categorical prescriptions that all too often imprison what is seen and heard in a fog of nothingness.
This labor of the artist, this struggle to discern beneath matter, beneath experience, beneath words, something that is different from them, is a process exactly the reverse of that which, in our everyday lives in which we live avoiding our own gaze, is at every moment satisfied by vanity and passion, intellect and habit, extinguishing our true impressions that are entirely concealed from us, buried underneath a junk heap of verbal concepts and practical goals that we falsely call 'life.' (Time Regained 299-300)
In a certain sense, then, we might say that modern literature creates the conditions for “good habits” of language use. “What are we but habits of saying ‘I’?” Deleuze first proposes this question in his study of Hume (ES x). The question of language that both philosophy and literature expound upon in different manners, therefore, is one of developing and promoting “good habits” of language usage and diagnosing “bad or destructive” habits. Philosophy has always concerned itself with the “uses and abuses” of language for the purpose of living (and dying) well; however, this image of good sense is not an object of logic, but of ethics or even etiquette. Nietzsche understood this as the essence of logic, as well as an image of philosophy as “the transvaluation of values” which, first of all include linguistic values, or “signs,” whose proper sense can only be the object of a genealogical study, such as Foucault later described in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Consequently, we find in Foucault’s work an original relationship of language to the “body” (the materiality of the self), a relationship which is given an historical and diagnostic expression. Habits (habitus), understood as the modern form of repetition, stand for those institutions of the statements that interpellate us and which define us by determining the possible attributes that can belong to the “I.” As a certain species of repetition, moreover, habits achieve a degree zero of memory (where the particular equals the universal), producing the condition in which “what we do not remember, we repeat.” (DR 19). Thus, certain uses of language can be defined as the cause of our illness, since they lead to a botched form of life, self, individuality, power, etc. We must recognize the effects of these “habits” upon the process of thinking as well, particularly in the sense that the “interiority of thought” (the grand circuit of associations, signs, concepts, memory, and feeling) is “limited” (contracted or disciplined) by the external forms of discourse and language. It is not a question of thought that is without language, but rather of thinking which appears in its most extended circuit which enters into combinations with the elements of seeing and speaking which are “exterior” to a language defined by formed statements and the visibility of objects. Consequently, we can define this problematic as a part of the Deleuzian critique of repetition since our repetitions, or habits of language use, determine the unconscious of our representations.
On the other hand, certain modern literary practices, rather than being founded by their representational function, can be understood as a profound experimentation that reveals the positivity and the limits of our language-habits (our addiction to saying “I”). In the statement “I love you,” for example, why is the “I” meaningless, as well as “love”? Perhaps one might attempt to explain the first by the power of the shifter and the second by the privilege of the performative statement. On the other hand, we can understand this as a particular species of repetition which has become abstract and too general, in the case of the first, and meaningless and too particular in the case of the second. What Deleuze praises as “the curve of the sentence” can be understood as a profound experimentation that reveals the limits of certain expressions, negates their abstractness for a “new” positivity of language. Deleuze writes as early as Difference and Repetition that the event of positivity occurs necessarily in the advent of the “new” that introduces variables into a previous repetition. Statements such as Kafka’s “I am a bug” or Fitzgerald’s “I am a giraffe” lead to the discovery of the non-sense that belongs to the statement “I am a man” (TP 377). Consequently, the first two statements repeat the last one and at the same time introduce a new predicate, causing the statement “I am a man” to be lacking definition and, in a certain sense, in need of rectification. In other words, the statement “I am a man” leads to nothing and can be criticized as a bad use of definition. It defines no one and, thus, makes the “abstract” predicate of man possible as a real relationship. Rather than representing, Kafka’s proposition “selects” and corrects the imperfections of the former definition. It reveals the limits of the statement as well as the visibility of the language-predicate; it introduces new variables into old habits of being, new possibilities, clearer and more definite articulations, new possibilities for the passage of a life into language.
Epilogue: The Question “What is Minor Literature” Today?
In conclusion, we should return again to situate the question of literature as one of the principle themes of the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In order to do so, it would be necessary to pay more specific attention to the status of the literary which occurs in the work of Deleuze-Guattari. When and in what manner is it evoked? For example, in the cries of poor A.A., the stroll of Lenz, the sucking-stones of Molloy, Kleist’s Marionettes or Michael-Kolhaus on his horse. In each case, literature is allied to a “war machine,” which means it draws its force directly from “the outside.” Deleuze and Guattari constantly pit this condition of literary enunciation against any representation that subjugates it to a form of interiority (whether that of the subject-author, the private individual, a culture, or even of a race). It is not by accident that the lines from Nijinsky are always recited like the lyrics of a favorite song: “I am a bastard, a beast, a negro.” The relationship of the concept of literature to a war machine is essential, and we should note that many of the examples of the war machine are drawn from writers (Artaud, Buchner, Kafka, Kleist), as well as philosopher-artists such as Nietzsche and Kiekegaard. In A Thousand Plateaus, the conflict between the literary war machine and the critic as “man of the state” is first attested to by the confrontation between Artaud and Jacques Riviere (although not a man of the state, he was according to Deleuze, not the first or last critic to mistake himself for “a prince in the republic of letters”), who found Artaud incomprehensible and poorly organized and he made no hesitation in giving his advice to “pauvre A.A.”–“Work! work! If you revise, then soon you will arrive at a method (Cogitatio Universalis) to express your thoughts more directly!” (TP 377). Next, the literary war machine is attested to by Kleist’s conflict with Goethe (“truly a man of the State among all literary figures”). In the case of the figures like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, there is the conflict between the “public professor” and the “private thinker,” although Deleuze qualifies the latter notion in order to argue that, in fact, the “private thinker” may not be a good term, since it closes around too reductive a notion of the “private individual,” and too simple of a form of interiority where the so-called spontaneity of thought is said to occur. Instead, Deleuze argues that the “solitude” one approaches in the writings of Nietzsche, or in Kafka, is a solitude that is extremely “populated” (TI 467).
The concept of literature we have been discussing fundamentally invokes a situation of language where the collective subject of enunciation (different from the official enunciation a “people,” or of a “national consciousness”) exists only in a latent or virtual state that cannot be located in the civil and juridical language of statutes and laws, the “paper language” of bureaucracy, the technocratic and vehicular language of administrators, entrepreneurs, and capitalists. It would not be an exaggeration to assert that most technical and administrative language, even in the first world, bears an historical relationship to the early techniques invented by colonial administrations–a language composed purely of “order-words” (les mots d’ordre), or a language of command in which the law finds its purest expression, just as Sade discovered the essence of Enlightenment reason in the categorical imperatives of pornographic speech: “Do this!” “Submit!” “Obey!” Concerning the status of this language, as Fanon asserts, we have every reason to believe the colonizer when he says, “the colonized, I know them!” since he has created the categories that were installed at the deepest point of their interiority by the colonizing process, categories which continue to legislate their own knowledge of themselves as “a subjected people.” Moreover, Fanon writes, “colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns out to be the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (Fanon 210). Deleuze refers to this as the condition by which a “people as Subject” falls to the condition of a “people-subjected” (TI 164ff). As we have witnessed many times, the question of “identity” is always a dizzying and even treacherous problem from the position of the colonized, leading often to the very “impasse” from which this category was created, underscoring an “intolerable situation,” since the identity they assume in speaking, in saying “I (the colonized)” has been essentially fabulated and only serves to subject them further. This intolerable condition of enunciation is a condition that is specific to the concept of “minor literature.” At the same time, we must take inventory of the fact that the history of literature in the West is full of examples of this impossible situation; for example: Hippolytus and Phaedra, Antigone; Kafka’s “metamorphosis,” there is Gregor who cannot speak, but rather emits a shrill note that can barely be discerned; but also in Melville, we have the character of Babo in “Benito Cereno” who refuses to speak “as the accused” and chooses to remain silent (therefore, in full possession of his speech), but also in the figure of Bartleby with his “I would prefer not to…. ”
Why does this situation appear as a fundamental problematic, if not to signal something genetic to the literary enunciation: the problem and the power of “falsehood,” of the fictional status of the enunciation that essentially haunts the situation of writing? Taking up the notion of the “public sphere,” such a concept already refers to the particularly “striated openness” (Offendlichkeit) which is established when the dominant institutions of language and culture reflect the pre-conscious interests of the nation-state or class. In such condition, the literary machine itself has already been “reterritorialized” and now functions to reflect the genius of the national character or the spirit of Culture. Thus, we might refer to this moment, one that has prepared the way for the strictly ideological representation of literature in the academy today, which is reduced to a sub-compartment of the “political unconscious” or to the poetics of the State-form. This representation of literature is necessarily one-dimensional, and must sacrifice the variable relationships that originally belonged to the production of the art-work, and above all, must repress the whole question of art often by reducing it to the category of aesthetics which can, in turn, be prosecuted for its falsifying production. Here we might refer to the process of this reterritorialization, again using the analysis of the relationship between the “war machine” and the “State-form” outlined earlier. When a literary machine is captured by the State-form and provided an end, what is that end except a war directed against “the people” in the form of national memory and an official story-telling function? Recalling the problems of criticism we raised in the beginning of this discussion, the very taxonomy and organization of literature soon repeats the rank-and-file order of major and minor tastes, as well as the striated organization of the story-telling function into a form of Canon. On the contrary, the writer does not often seek to represent the truth since, as Deleuze remarks, the “truth” is often the category invented by the colonizer and the oppressor. Rather, citing another anecdotal phrase that Deleuze often employs, the writer seeks to raise the false to a higher power, that is, beyond the moral-juridical opposition of true-false that is maintained by the model of truth. To raise the false to a higher power is to discover the principle of fabulation that governs even truthful representation, to turn this principle into a critical force which addresses the intolerable situation of “a people who is missing.” Accordingly, literature bears within its fragmented body–scattered, torn to pieces, or ‘dispersed on the four winds”–the seeds of a people to come. These seeds are the germs of a “collective assemblage of enunciation,” which as Deleuze often declares, are real without necessarily being actual and ideal without necessarily being abstract (TI 147ff).
Today, Deleuze and Guattari situate the conditions for the emergence of minor literature in a world where the forms of collective enunciation and national consciousness are breaking down on several fronts, as a result of the immigration patterns and displacement of national labor forces, and the decline of the “State-form” itself.
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is a problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? (K 19)
In understanding the above passage, in order to determine the status of the “literary,” the primary emphasis must fall upon the absence of a particular collective enunciation from official and public institutions of language and national culture. In the absence of a distinct majoritarian formation of the “public sphere,” which gives enunciations weight and reference–which “orders reality,” in so many words–a body of literature assumes the shadowy and non-essential region of a collective enunciation, a “minor public” whose existence is always haunted by the “imaginary” (or fabulous) nature of its agora (its open space). But, as Deleuze and Guattari write,
the literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in the mileau: literature is the people's concern. (K 17-18)
In order to strip this last statement of any romanticism in association with the nationalist or ethnic entity of a people invented during the 19th century, I should stress that without specific attention to the position of enunciation that is evoked here, we lose both the status of what Deleuze-Guattari call the “literary machine” and the specific relationship that is being drawn up between a collective enunciation and the concept of minor literature. Here, the status of a minor literature is the problem of its multiple forms and locations, since it does not have an institution that organizes and disciplines its forms. This does not mean that it is formless, but rather its organization of collective enunciations is dispersed across several registers of the major language it inhabits (legends, private letters, songs, heated conversations, stories, fables, etc.) and has the character of dream-language in the various operations it performs upon the form of visibilities and on the organization of statements. Finally, only when these criteria of minor literature are fulfilled can we begin to understand the statement that “literature is a concern of the people,” perhaps even a vital concern of public health–a concern that may demand both a clinical and a critical approach to the uses (and the abuses) of the question of literature for life.
Notes
1. C.f., “Appendix,” Foucault, p. 131ff. Some of the examples Deleuze gives of these new arrangements are “the foldings proper to the chains of a genetic sequence, a new form of life based on the potential of silicon in third generation machines,” the political and economic stratification of the earth under the final stages of capitalism. The description of a vital logic (or “radical empiricism”) echoes the fabulous “problem-solving” instinct of Life first defined in Bergsonism. (C.f., “Élan Vital as a Movement of Differentiation,” pp. 91-113.) Hereafter, all parenthetical citations will refer to the following works; the most frequently cited references will be indicated parenthetically by the following abbreviations:
- Anti-Oedipus: AO
- Bergsonism: B
- Difference and Repetition: DR
- Empiricism and Subjectivity: H
- Essays Critical and Clinical (Critique et Clinique): CC
- Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: K
- Logic of Sense: LS
- Cinema I: The Movement Image: MI
- Cinema II: The Time Image: TI
- Foucault F
- Negotiations: N
- Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Coldness and Cruelty): M
- A Thousand Plateaus: TP.
- What is Philosophy?: WP
2. Wlad Godzich, “Emergent Literature and Comparative Literature,” in The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), 275.
3. At times the reader may notice a certain unapologetic Nietzschean tone–as Deleuze himself describes, “becoming a bit of a guerrilla” (LS 158)–in my characterization of the current critical approach to the question of literature. This is not accidental. In my view, there is a weakness inherent in those commentators today who want to appropriate Deleuze’s writings without also appropriating what is dangerous in it as well. It is to raise the possibility of something dangerous or inherently risky that I have alluded to Nietzsche�’s essay “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” which itself concerns a similar set of problems and issues that surrounded the dominant epistemological orientation of his age. Although my implicit aim is to cause the current critical image of literature to “explode,” this objective is justified by the belief that only what is worthy of being valued can be submitted to destruction with the faith that this “will promote rather than injure the general propriety” of its uses for life (Nietzsche 86).
4. For a very brief and preliminary discussion of the concept of “disciplinary societies,” see “Postscript on Control Societies,” Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughlin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), pages 177-182. Concerning the present moment, Deleuze comments that “discipline would in its turn begin to break down as new forces slowly moved into place, then made rapid advances after the Second World War: [from that point] we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind” (N 178).
5. This is most evident today in marxist or feminist theories, for example, where each statement must refer back to the subject of enunciation in order retain its representative function. Elizabeth Grosz’s writings, for example, bear all the characteristics of a good chess game, in which she must first lay out the positions between orthodox and radical feminism on one side, and the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the other; surveying which moves are possible and which are not, referring back to the subject of enunciation to discover which statements can be employed to further the game for feminists. Her thinking always moves forward under the condition, even the mandate, that she cannot lose her subject (even if she wanted to) without also losing the representative function of her discourse; consequently, her writing moves constantly “between” feminist subject and the philosophy of Deleuze, proposing an implacable “becoming” which never achieves identification of closure on either end. This constitutes her strategy, since after mapping the board and studying the intrinsic attributes of every piece, Grosz begins the process of redefining the intrinsic characteristics of each concept and thereby injecting new statements into the discourse of feminism that have a potential for collective enuncation.
6. By this statement, I am suggesting a mirror reflection of Foucault’s own commentary on the philosophy of Deleuze-Guattari in the preface to Anti-Oedipus. From as early as Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967), Deleuze has identified a certain “clinical” resemblance of a uses of literature or the taxonomy of the “literary sign” that resembles the construction of the proper name (i.e., Parkinson’s, Roger’s) that is made to diagnose symptoms that were previously grouped together and links them up with others that were dissociated. Here, we see a very different conception to the “uses of literature,” one which corresponds in the Deleuzian oeuvre to two important figures: Nietzsche and Spinoza. The figure of Nietzsche has evolved in Deleuze�s thought from its earlier role as the double of Klossowski’s “Baphomet” (i.e., prince of modifications, doctor of the Eternal Return); more recently, his enthusiasm for the “ideal game” has been replaced by another no less profound Nietzsche who resembles less the Nietzsche of Klossowski (or Mallarmé) than the Nietzsche of Foucault: the psychologist of forces and forms that constitute “modernity,” author of the genealogy and the Will to Power, distant cousin to Zarathustra and the writer of Ecce Homo (who were, after all, literary types). Therefore, Deleuze’s remarks concern less an evaluation of “Foucault,” the man and thinker, than a new figure that completes and synthesizes a Nietzschean psychology with a Spinozist ethics.
7. This is to say that in each case the writer herself begins from “a point outside” the critical determination or representation of literature; she begins always–or, at least, in most cases–with the question “what is literature?” Or rather, she begins with a certain series of problematics: “What is…” A narrative? A story? A character? A language? In each case, her answers are always temporary and take the form of a story or narrative, a certain tale or novella, this or that character. This corresponds to a fundamental axiom in Deleuze’s philosophy, often described as his “radical empiricism” or even “pragmatism.” That is, the condition of a statement on literature is at the same time a condition of literary enunciation itself; the criteria by which literature appears as an object of real experience are at the same time the condition of expression or enunciation. It is for this reason that a critical cannot take on a major form without invoking a transcendental function, or without appealing to certain categories that would each time function as constants whether that of the “author,” “narrator,” the “text,” “genre,” or “narrative mode.” The entry of structuralist categories into the study of language and literature after the 1950s marks a certain scientific function which has dominated the major movements of literary criticism from that period onward; however, the need to guarantee a constancy of the object of knowledge, which is a major trait of structurist and narratological theories (like those of Genette, in particular, but also Prince and even Iser in his earlier writings) may, in fact, share the attributes of what Deleuze-Guattari describe as “Royal Science” in their Treatise on Nomadology, and indirectly serve to inscribe the value of literary expression within an apparatus of specialization that also bears a political function consonant with the institutional determination of its subject (which could be invoked as an aspect of reterritorialization).
8. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
9. Here, the Borgesian formula of “Fang has a secret” often recounted by Deleuze can be used paradigmatically of this moment of turning, or decision, in which nothing is guaranteed. That is, “Fang has a secret” and “there is a stranger at the door.” In order to illustrate the paradigmatic value of this formula, we could substitute for the nameless identity of the stranger the forces signaled by the emergence of a life based on silicon, the formation of the capitalist in the final stages of planetary deployment, the deterritorialization and crisis of disciplinary regimes and their reterritorialization by mechanisms of the “control society,” the emergence of racialized identities and new fascisms of the flesh. In turn, each of these “strangers” marks turning points for the human form, as well as a fullness of time, a time pregnant with possibility, the moment of a “dice-throw.” (These are the somber precursors spoken of in Difference and Repetition.) That is, each arrangement presents us with diverse possibilities, with possible futures that bifurcate, tracing the curve of the present that goes toward the future announced by the new assemblage of Life that appears on the horizon. Borges, for example, discovered a possible means of escaping a colonizing relationship with the past through a comic procedure of overturning the European library and parodying the God of European history in its colonial situation. Kafka discovered through the fictional personage of “K.” a manner to research the diabolical assemblage of law and the institution of the state-form. Burroughs diagnosed the secret filiation of the alien, the homosexual, the junkie as victims the paranoia unleashed by the “bio-power” of modern state which defines its internal enemies in terms of a virus. And there are countless more examples of these “somber precursors” in Deleuze’s work (Buchner’s Lenz, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Well’s Cane, Melville’s Ahab or Benito Cereno, Duras and Resnais’s Hiroshima). For a fuller discussion, see my “Deleuzian Critique of Pure Fiction,” Sub-Stance 84 (Vol. 26, n. 3, 1997), 128-152.
Works Cited
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Forward by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968.
- Celan, Paul. Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1972.
- Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
- —. Cinema II: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
- —. Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
- —. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Trans. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP 1991.
- —. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
- —. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
- —. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
- —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Constantin Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.
- —. Prisentation de Sacher-Masoch: le froid et le cruel. Paris: Minuit, 1967.
- — and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
- —. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
- —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Masumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
- —. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
- Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched fo the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
- Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 117-138.
- Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” S.E. Volume IX: 143-153.
- Godzich, Wlad. The Culture of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.
- Kafka, Franz. Diaries. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Shocken Books, 1948.
- Lambert, Gregg. “The Deleuzean Critique of Pure Fiction.” Sub-Stance 84 Vol. 26, n. 3, 1997: 128-152.
- Nietzsche, Fredrick. “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997: 57-124.
- Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Volume V: The Captive and the Fugitive. Trans. C.K. Scott Montcrieff and Terrance Kilmartin. Revised by D.J. Enright. New York: The Modern Library, 1993.
- —. In Search of Lost Time. Volume VI: Time Regained. Trans. Andreas Mayor and Terrance Kilmartin. New York: The Modern Library, 1993.
