Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  Coldness and Cruelty provides one of the clearest examples of what might be termed Deleuze's “symptomatological” approach to literature. At a conceptual level, the book is an incisive critique of the clinical notion of “sadomasochism,” which presumes that sadism and masochism are complementary forces that belong to one and the same pathological entity. Psychiatrists were led to posit such a “crude syndrome,” Deleuze argues, partly because they relied on hasty etiological assumptions (the reversals and transformations of the so-called sexual instinct), and partly because they were “content with a symptomatology much less precise and much more confused than that which is found in Masoch himself.”16 Because the judgments of clinicians are often prejudiced, Deleuze adopts a literary approach in Coldness and Cruelty, offering a differential diagnosis of sadism and masochism based on the works from which their original definitions were derived. Three results of Deleuze's analysis are important for our purposes. On the clinical side, Deleuze shows that sadism and masochism are two incommensurable modes of existence whose symptomatologies are completely different. Each chapter of Coldness and Cruelty analyzes a particular aspect of the sadomasochistic “syndrome” (the nature of the fetish, the function of fantasy, the forms of desexualization and resexualization, the status of the father and mother, the role of the ego and superego, and so on), and in each case shows how it can be broken down into “symptoms” that are specific to the worlds of sadism and masochism. On the critical side, he shows that these clinical symptoms are inseparable from the literary styles and techniques of Sade and Masoch, both of whom, he argues, submit language to a “higher function”: in Sade, an Idea of pure reason (absolute negation) is projected into the real, producing a speculative-demonstrative use of language that operates through quantitative repetition; in Masoch, by contrast, the real is suspended in a supra-sensual Ideal, producing a dialectical-imaginative use of language that operates through qualitative suspense. Finally, Deleuze shows how these new modes of existence and new uses of language were linked to political acts of resistance: in Sade's case, these acts were linked to the French revolution, which he thought would remain sterile unless it stopped making laws and set up institutions of perpetual motion (the sects of libertines); in Masoch's case, masochistic practices were linked to the place of minorities in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and to the role of women within these minorities.17

  Deleuze initially saw Coldness and Cruelty as the first installment of a series of literary-clinical studies: “What I would like to study (this book would merely be a first example) is an articulable relationship between literature and clinical psychiatry.”18 The idea was not to apply psychiatric concepts to literature, but on the contrary to extract non-preexistent clinical concepts from the works themselves. As is often the fate with such proposals, Deleuze did not exactly realize the project in its envisioned form. Yet when Deleuze asked, ten years later, “Why is there not a ‘Nietzscheism,’ ‘Proustism,’ ‘Kafkaism,’ ‘Spinozism’ along the lines of a generalized clinic?,” he implied that his monographs on each of these thinkers fell, to a greater or lesser degree, within the scope of the “critique et clinique” project (D 120). Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, shows how Nietzsche set out to diagnose a disease (nihilism) by isolating its symptoms (ressentiment, the bad conscience, the ascetic ideal), by tracing its etiology to a certain relation of active and reactive forces (the genealogical method), and by setting forth both a prognosis (nihilism defeated by itself) and a treatment (the revaluation of values). Deleuze thought that the most original contribution of his doctoral thesis, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, was its analysis of the composition of finite “modes” in Spinoza, which includes both a clinical diagnostic of their passive state (human bondage) and a treatment for their becoming-active (the “ethical” task) (EPS 11). In the first edition of Proust and Signs (1964), Deleuze interprets In Search of Lost Time as a symptomatology of various worlds of signs that mobilize the involuntary and the unconscious (the world of love, the social world, the material world, and the world of art, which comes to transform all the others).19 Even in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari show how Kafka's work provided a symptomatological diagnosis of the “diabolical powers” of the future (capitalism, bureaucracy, fascism, Stalinism) that were knocking at the door. Certain essays collected in Essays Critical and Clinical could similarly be read as literary-clinical studies of specific writers. In all these works, what Foucault called the “author function” has all but disappeared; the proper name does not refer to a particular person as an author but to a regime of signs or concepts, a determinate multiplicity or assemblage. Deleuze speaks of Nietzsche's philosophy or Proust's novel in much the same way one speaks of Alzheimer's disease in medicine, the Doppler effect or the Kelvin effect in science, the Hamiltonian number or the Mandelbrot set in mathematics: that is, as a non-personal mode of individuation. If we were to characterize the symptomatological method used by Deleuze, we could do so in terms of these two fundamental components: the function of the proper name, and the assemblage or multiplicity designated by the name.20

  With the publication of Anti-Oedipus in 1972, however, the “critique et clinique” project took a new turn, or at least brought to the fore a tendency that would become ever more pronounced as Deleuze's own work progressed. Anti-Oedipus offers a now-famous critique of psychoanalysis that is primarily symptomatological: psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari contend, fundamentally misunderstands signs and symptoms. Given the book's subtitle, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one might expect Deleuze and Guattari to provide a symptomatological analysis of schizophrenia that would correct the errors and abuses of psychoanalysis. But in fact this is not quite the case. Schizophrenia is an acute phenomenon that poses numerous problems to the clinical method: not only is there no agreement as to the etiology of schizophrenia, but even its symptomatology remains uncertain. In early psychiatric accounts of schizophrenia (Kraepelin, Bleuler), the diagnostic criteria are given in purely negative terms: that is, in terms of the destruction the disorder engenders in the subject—dissociation, autism, detachment from reality. Psychoanalysis retains this negative viewpoint, in so far as it relates the syntheses of the unconscious to the father–mother–child triangle of the Oedipus complex (the ego): in neurosis, the ego obeys the requirements of reality and represses the drives of the id, whereas in psychosis the ego remains under the sway of the id, leading to a break with reality (AO 122). The problem with both psychiatry and psychoanalysis is that these negative symptoms are dispersed and scattered, and are difficult to totalize or unify in a coherent clinical entity, or even a localizable “mode of existence”: “schizophrenia is a discordant syndrome, always in flight from itself.”21

  Anti-Oedipus therefore takes the “critique et clinique” project to a properly transcendental level. From the clinical viewpoint, one of its aims is to describe schizophrenia in its positivity, no longer as actualized in a mode of life but as the process of life itself. Deleuze and Guattari draw a sharp distinction between schizophrenia as a process and schizophrenia as a clinical entity (which results from an interruption of the process, as in the case of Nietzsche), although their use of the same term to describe both phenomena has led to numerous misunderstandings.22 For what Anti-Oedipus terms “schizophrenia as a process” is nothing other than what A Thousand Plateaus terms “the process of Life” as a nonorganic and impersonal power.

  The problem of schizophrenization as a cure consists in this: how can schizophrenia be disengaged as a power of humanity and of Nature without a schizophrenic hereby being produced? A problem analogous to that of Burroughs (How to incarnate the power of drugs without being an addict?) or Miller (How to get drunk on pure water?).23

  From the critical side, Deleuze and Guattari once again appeal to the work of literary figures, especially a number of Anglo-American writers, whose work here assumes an importance it did not have in Deleuze's earlier work. “We have been criticized for over-quoting literar
y authors,” they would later comment, “but is it our fault that Lawrence, Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs, Artaud, and Beckett know more about schizophrenia than psychiatrists and psychoanalysts?”24 If literature here takes on a schizophrenic vocation, it is because the works of these writers no longer simply present the symptomatology of a mode of life, but rather attempt to trace the virtual power of non-organic Life itself.

  How are we to conceive of this “schizophrenic vocation” of literature? In 1970 Deleuze wrote a new essay on Proust entitled “The Literary Machine,” which was added to the second edition of Proust and Signs. Whereas the first edition of Proust and Signs considered the Search from the viewpoint of its interpretation of signs, “The Literary Machine” considers the work from the viewpoint of its creation, its production of signs.25 Art, Deleuze argues, is essentially productive; the work of art is a machine for producing or generating certain effects, certain signs, by determinable procedures. Proust suggested that his readers use his book as an optical instrument, “a kind of magnifying glass” that would provide them with “the means of reading within themselves,” in much the same way that Joyce described his works as machines for producing “epiphanies.”26 There is thus a “literary effect” produced by literature, much as we speak of an optical effect or an electromagnetic effect; and the “literary machine” is an apparatus capable of creating these effects, producing signs of different orders, and thus capable of functioning effectively. The question Deleuze here poses to the literary work is not “What does it mean?” (interpretation), but rather “How does it function?” (experimentation). “The modern work of art has no problem of meaning, it has only a problem of use.”27 But the claim that “meaning is use” requires a transcendental analysis:

  No one has been able to pose the problem of language except to the extent that linguists and logicians have eliminated meaning; and the highest power of language was discovered only when the work was viewed as a machine, producing certain effects, amenable to a certain use … The idea that meaning is nothing other than use becomes a principle only if we have at our disposal immanent criteria capable of determining legitimate uses, as opposed to illegitimate uses that would refer use to a supposed meaning and restore a kind of transcendence. Analysis termed transcendental is precisely the determination of these immanent criteria. (AO 109)

  For Deleuze, these immanent criteria can be summarized in two principles.

  First, the claim that meaning is use is valid only if one begins with elements that in themselves, apart from their use, are devoid of any signification. Modern literature has tended to pose this question in terms of the problem of a world in fragments, a world deprived of its unity, reduced to crumbs and chaos. We live in an age that no longer thinks in terms of a primordial Unity or Logos that we have lost (Platonism), or some future Totality that awaits us as the result of a dialectic or evolution (Hegelianism), or even a Subjectivity, whether universal or not, that could bestow a cohesion or unity upon the world (Kantianism). It is only when objective contents and subjective forms have collapsed and given way to a world of fragments, to a chaotic and multiple impersonal reality, that the work of art assumes its full meaning—“that is, exactly all the meanings one wants it to have according to its functioning; the essential point being that it functions, that the machine works.”28 The elements or parts of the literary machine, in short, must be recognized by their mutual independence, pure singularities, “a pure and dispersed anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, whose elements are welded and pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link.”29 This is the principle of difference, which constitutes the first criterion: fragments or parts whose sole relationship is sheer difference, which are related to each other only in that each of them is different. “Dissociation” here ceases to be a negative trait of the schizophrenic and becomes a positive and productive principle of both Life and Literature.

  Second, the problem of the work of art is to establish a system of communication among these parts or elements that are in themselves non-communicating. The literary work, Deleuze argues, must be seen as the unity of its parts, even though it does not unify them; the whole produced by the work is rather a “peripheral” totality that is added alongside its parts as a new singularity fabricated separately. Proust describes the Search as a literary apparatus that brings together heterogeneous elements and makes them function together; the work thus constitutes a whole, but this whole is itself a part that merely exists alongside the other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes. Yet it none the less has an effect on these parts, since it is able to create non-preexistent relations between elements that in themselves remain disconnected, and are left intact.30 This is the empiricist principle that pervades Deleuze's philosophy, which constitutes the second criterion: relations are always external to their terms, and the Whole is never a principle, but rather an effect that is derived from these external relations, and that constantly varies with them. Russell demonstrated the insoluble contradictions set theory falls into when it treats the set of all sets as a Whole. This is not because the notion of the Whole is devoid of sense, but it is not a set and does not have parts; it is rather what prevents each set from closing in on itself, forcing it to extend itself into a larger set, to infinity. The Whole, in other words, is the Open, because it is its nature constantly to produce or create the new.

  Deleuze thus describes his philosophy as a “logic of multiplicities,” but he also insists that “the multiple must be made,” that it is never given in itself (N 147; TP 6). This production of the multiple entails two tasks: obtain pure singularities, and establish relations or syntheses between them so as to produce a variable Whole that would be the “effect” of its disconnected parts. These are precisely the two paradoxical features of Life as a non-organic and impersonal power: it is a power of abstraction capable of extracting or producing singularities and placing them in continuous variation, and a power of creation capable of inventing ever-new relations and conjugations between these singularities. The former defines the vitality of life, the latter its power of innovation. Deleuze is here appealing, at least in part, to a model borrowed from biology, which defines Life (in the evolutionary sense) as a process consisting of the molecular production of variation and the a posteriori selection of these variants.31 To be sure, Deleuze is aware of the dangers of invoking scientific propositions outside of their own domain: it is the danger of an arbitrary metaphor or a forced application. “But perhaps these dangers are averted,” he writes in another context, “if we restrict ourselves to extracting from scientific operators a particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to non-scientific domains, and converges with science without applying it or making it a metaphor.”32 This is the “vitalism” to which Deleuze lays claim: not a mystical life force, but the abstract power of Life as a principle of creation.

  From this point of view, the relation between the critical and the clinical becomes more complex. On the one hand, the term “critical” refers not only to criticism in the literary sense, but also to critique in the Kantian sense of the word. The philosophical question now concerns the determination of the genetic elements that condition the production of the literary work. (Deleuze, one should note, describes the “transcendental field” in a completely different manner than does Kant. Much like the genetic “code,” it constitutes the conditions of real experience and not merely possible experience; and it is never larger than what it conditions, but is itself determined at the same time as it determines what it conditions.) On the other hand, the term “clinical” does not simply imply a diagnosis of a particular mode of existence, but concerns the criteria according to which one assesses the potentialities of “life” in a given work. It is no longer simply a question of ascertaining the symptomatology of a particular mode of life, but of attaining the genetic level of the double power of Life as a process.

  Now in fulfilling these two vitalistic powers, modern literature can be
said to have had five interrelated effects—effects that, as Deleuze suggests in his essay on Klossowski, are the inevitable consequences that follow from the death of God: the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the subject, the dis-integration of the body, the “minorization” of politics, and the “stuttering” of language.33 Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that these are five themes of Deleuze's own philosophy that, in the context of his own work, enter into a certain resonance or affinity with the work of specific writers and artists. Deleuze has undertaken a formidable conceptual creation in each of these domains, and in what follows I would simply like to show, in a rather summary fashion, the role each of these themes plays in the context of Deleuze's “critique et clinique” project.

  1. The Destruction of the World (Singularities and Events). Ontologically and logically, Deleuze locates the philosophical basis for modern literature in Leibniz. Leibniz conceives of the world as a “pure emission of singularities,” and individuals (monads) are constituted by the convergence and actualization of a certain number of these singularities, which become its “primary predicates.” Here, for instance, are four singularities of the life of Adam: to be the first man, to live in a garden of paradise, to have a woman emerge from one's rib, to sin. These singularities cannot yet be defined as predicates, but constitute what Deleuze calls pure “events.” Linguistically, they are like indeterminate infinitives that are not yet actualized in determinate modes, tenses, persons, and voices. The great originality of Deleuze's reading of Leibniz in both The Fold and The Logic of Sense lies in his insistence on the anteriority of this domain of singularities (the virtual) in relation to predicates (the actual).34 “Being a sinner” is an analytic predicate of a constituted individual or subject, but the infinitive “to sin” is a virtual singularity-event in the neighborhood of which the monad “Adam” will be actualized. Such singularities constitute the genetic elements not only of an individual life, but also of the world in which they are actualized. For one can add to these four singularities a fifth one: to resist temptation. This singularity is not impossible in itself, but it is, as Leibniz put it, incompossible with the world in which Adam sinned. There is here a divergence or bifurcation in the series that passes through the first three singularities; the vectors that extend from this fifth singularity to the three others do not converge, they do not pass through common values, and this bifurcation marks a border between two incompossible worlds: Adam the non-sinner belongs to a possible world that is incompossible with our own. For Leibniz, the only thing that prevents these incompossible worlds from coexisting is the theological hypothesis of a God who calculates and chooses among them in a kind of divine game: from this infinity of possible worlds, God selects the “Best,” the one richest with reality, which is defined by the set of convergent series that constitute it, and the set of monads that express it with varying degrees of clarity. Each monad, though it has neither door nor window, none the less expresses the same world in the infinite series of its predicates (“the pre-established harmony”), each of them being a different point of view on the single compossible world that God causes them to envelop (“perspectivism”).