Deleuze Gilles - Deleuze on Literature

Deleuze on Literature

Deleuze on Literature

RONALD BOGUE

Published in 2003 by
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Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 0415966051 (hb)
ISBN 041596606X (pb)

For my wife, Svea

Contents

Coda: Becketts Television Plays

Abbreviations

All translations from Deleuze, Guattari and Deleuze-Guattari are my own. For works that have appeared in English translation, citations include page numbers of the original French edition followed by the page numbers of the corresponding passages in the English translation.

Introduction

At the time of his death on November 4, 1995, Gilles Deleuze was recognized widely as one of the most important figures in late-twentieth-century French philosophy. Throughout his career, Deleuze showed an abiding interest in several of the arts, but perhaps in none more consistently than literature. Besides writing books on Proust (1964, revised and expanded in 1970 and 1976), the nineteenth-century novelist Leopold Sacher-Masoch, for whom masochism was named (1967), and Kafka (1975), as well as a final collection of essays on literature, titled Essays Critical and Clinical [CC] (1993), Deleuze made constant reference to novels, poems, plays and essays in virtually all of his works. Among the philosophers he most valued was Nietzsche, whom many would characterize as a decidedly literary figure, and other writer-philosophers and philosopher-writers made frequent appearance in his booksKierkegaard, Blanchot, Michaux, Artaud, Klossowski, Beckett, Mallarm, and Borges, among others. Deleuzes 1969 examination of the paradoxes of meaning, The Logic of Sense (LS), was as much a reading of Lewis Carroll as a treatment of Stoic philosophy, and scattered throughout the pages of the massive A Thousand Plateaus (MP) (1980) were references to over seventy-five writers.

Yet despite the ubiquity of literary concerns and citations in his works, nowhere does Deleuze directly offer a systematic theory of literature, nor is one easily extrapolated from his various literary studies. Much of Deleuzes writing on literature is a thinking-alongside literary works, an engagement of philosophical issues generated from and developed through encounters with literary texts. Hence, to a certain extent his thought about literature cannot be fully appreciated apart from a consideration of the works that instigate it. He engages a host of issues related to language, meaning, writing and literature, but in such different contexts and toward such diverse ends that it is sometimes difficult to see how one analysis might be related to another. Nonetheless, a single line of conceptual development traverses all of Deleuzes writings on literature, one generated by the driving concerns of his philosophy. He is no systematic philosopher, in the traditional sense of the term, but there is cohesion in his thought and a wideranging interrelation of motifs across the various disciplines and domains of his speculation. My effort in this book is to examine Deleuzes central texts on literature, language and writing, determine his understanding of the nature and function of the literary within the general domain of social practices and suggest the broad trajectory of his thought that passes through his diverse engagements with literary works over the course of his career.