Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  49.

  MI 98. This text contains Deleuze's analysis of Firstness and Secondness in Peirce and makes the comparison with Biran.

  50.

  Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (New York: Norton, 1990), Chapter 9, 62–4.

  51.

  François Zourabichvili, “Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation between the Critical and the Clinical),” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 190. Zourabichvili's article provides a profound analysis of the clinical status of the percept in Deleuze's work.

  52.

  Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1925), 11, as cited in TP 263. For Deleuze's analysis of the role of affects and percepts in T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, see his essay “The Shame and the Glory: T. E. Lawrence” (ECC 115–25).

  53.

  See Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 160: “man absent from but entirely within the landscape.” Cézanne's phrase captures exactly the paradox of the percept.

  54.

  Claude Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen, trans. Félix Aprahamian (London: Stainer & Bell, 1976), 61–3.

  55.

  Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1980), Vol. 3, 209, as cited in TP 280 and WP 172.

  56.

  WP 170. It is precisely in this context that Deleuze considers the effects of drugs and alcohol on literary creation. Though drugs can indeed open the “doors of perception,” drug-induced works rarely, if ever, attain the level of the percept; the effects of such perceptive experimentations, Deleuze argues, must be brought about “by quite different means—that is, in art. For Deleuze's discussions of drugs, see TP 282–6, which is an elaboration of an earlier article, “Deux questions” (Two questions), which appeared in Recherches, 39 bis (Dec 1979), 231–4. The first question concerns the “specific causality” of drugs, which Deleuze locates in a “line of flight” that invests the system of perception directly. Drugs “stop the world” and release pure auditory and optical percepts; they create microintervals and molecular holes in matter, forms, colors, sounds; and they make lines of speed pass through these intervals (see MI 85). The second question, however, concerns the inevitable “turning point”: in themselves, drugs are unable to draw the plane necessary for the action of this “line of flight,” and instead result in “erroneous perceptions” (Artaud), “bad feelings” (Michaux), dependency, addiction, and so on. This is why Burroughs formulates the aesthetic problem posed by drugs in the following manner: How can one incarnate the power of drugs without becoming an addict?” Imagine that everything that can be attained by chemical means is accessible by other paths” (LS 161).

  57.

  See Deleuze and Guattari's comments in A Thousand Plateaus: “Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms or functions, a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages?” (270).

  You don't reach the plane of consistency by wildly destratifying … Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. (160–1)

  58.

  TP 356. For the comparison between Goethe and Kleist, see TP 268–9.

  59.

  WP 88–9. This is how Deleuze defines Proust's project: to render visible the invisible force of time. “‘Time, which is usually not visible, in order to become so seeks bodies and, wherever it finds them, seizes upon them in order to project its magic lantern upon them,’ quartering the fragments and features of an aging face, according to its ‘inconceivable dimension’” (PS 160).

  60.

  On Deleuze's use of embryology and the model of the egg, see DR 214–17, 249–52.

  61.

  William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1966), 8, 131, as cited in TP 153, 150.

  62.

  George Büchner, “Lenz,” in Complete Plays and Prose, trans. Carl Richard Mueller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1963), 141, as cited in AO 2:

  He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.

  63.

  D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Viking, 1960).

  64.

  Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 177, 179, 189, 193.

  65.

  See Pierre Klossowski, “The Euphoria at Turin,” in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Klossowski cites one of Nietzsche's final fragments, in which the two poles of delirium are mixed:

  I touch here the question of race. I am a Polish gentleman, pure blood, in whom not a drop of impure blood is mixed, not the slightest. If I seek my most profound opposite … —I always find my mother and my sister: to see myself allied with such German riff-raff was a blasphemy against my divinity. The ancestry on the side of my mother and sister to this very day (—) was a monstrosity. (250)

  66.

  D 36–51. The Anglo-American writers that appear most frequently in Deleuze's writings include Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, H. P. Lovecraft, Malcolm Lowry, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, R. L. Stevenson, and Virginia Woolf.

  67.

  On the geography of American literature, see TP 19, 520 n18; on the process of demolition, see AO 133, 277–8, and D 38–9, 140–1.

  68.

  See, for example, Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay (London: Faber, 1966), 55: “We have found parts, but not the whole. We still lack the ultimate power, for the people are not with us. But we seek a people.”

  69.

  On all these points, see the short section in The Time-Image (TI 215–24) that analyzes the conditions of a modern political cinema. In a parallel section of the book that would deserve a separate discussion (TI 262–70), Deleuze analyzes the conditions under which the cinema is capable of fighting an internal battle against informatics and communication (a “creation beyond information”).

  70.

  See N 171–2. For Deleuze and Guattari's critique of the concept of class, see AO 252–62.

  71.

  In TP 469–70, Deleuze and Guattari provide a set theoretical interpretation of the major / minor distinction. What defines a minority is not its number but rather relations internal to the number: a majority is constituted by a set that is denumerable, whereas a minority is defined as a non-denumerable set, no matter how many elements it has. The capitalist axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, whereas minorities constitute fuzzy, non-denumerable, and non-axiomizable sets, which implies a calculus of problematics rather than an axiomatic.

  72.

  “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” in TP 351–423, which could be read as an attempt to set forth the type of political formation that would correspond with the “active” mode of existence outlined in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Revealingly, in The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stéphane Nadaud, trans. Kélina Gotman (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), Guattari indicates that, in September 1972, a mere six months aft
er the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was already hard at work on the “Nomadology” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. “Gilles is working like a madman on his nomads” (397), Guattari writes, almost as if Deleuze had realized, even before finishing Anti-Oedipus, that its tripartite typology of social formations (primitives, States, capitalism) was inadequate, and would have to be complemented with a fourth type—the nomadic war-machine.

  73.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini develops this notion of free indirect discourse in L'Expérience hérétique (Paris: Payot, 1976), 39–65 (in literature), and 139–55 (in cinema). For Deleuze's analyses, see MI 72–6.

  74.

  See Herman Melville's essay on American literature, “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” in The Portable Melville, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Viking, 1952), 411–14; and Franz Kafka's diary entry (25 Dec 1911) on “the literature of small peoples,” in The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910–1913, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, 1948), 191–8.

  75.

  N 174. Bergson develops the notion of fabulation in Chapter 2 of Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. T. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton with W. Horsfall Carter (New York: Henry Holt, 1935).

  76.

  D 43. For the concept of “minority,” see TP 105–6, 469–71. On the conditions for a political cinema in relation to minorities, and Bergson's notion of “fabulation,” see TI 215–24.

  77.

  Marcel Proust, By Way of Sainte-Beuve, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), 194–5: “Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty.”

  78.

  See Gilles Deleuze, “Avenir de linguistique,” preface to Henri Gobard, L'Aliénation lingistique (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 9–14, translated as “The Future of Linguistics” in TRM 67–71. See also K 23–7: “The spatiotemporal categories of these languages differ sharply: vernacular language is ‘here,’ vehicular language is ‘everywhere,’ referential language is ‘over there,’ mythic language is ‘beyond’” (K 27).

  79.

  On all these points, see K 15–16, 23. Pierre Perrault encountered a similar situation in Quebec: the impossibility of not speaking, the impossibility of speaking other than in English, the impossibility of speaking in English, the impossibility of settling in France in order to speak French (see TI 217).

  80.

  TP 101. See also TP 76: “A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker.”

  81.

  In addition to the essays collected in Essays Critical and Clinical, see Deleuze's essay “Of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl” in LS 82–93, which compares the procedures of Carroll and Artaud. See especially LS 83, where Deleuze notes that the comparison must take place at both a “clinical” and a “critical” level.

  82.

  See Gilles Deleuze, “One Manifesto Less,” in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

  83.

  N 140–1. With regard to this “outside” of language in philosophy, Deleuze writes that “style in philosophy tends toward these three poles: concepts, or new ways of thinking; percepts, or new ways of seeing and hearing; and affects, or new ways of feeling” (N 164–5).

  84.

  AO 133, 370–1, 106. For this use of the term experimentation, see John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 13: “The word experimental is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown.”

  85.

  N 146–7. See also TP 100: “Only continuous variation brings forth this virtual line, this continuum of life, ‘the essential element of the real beneath the everyday.’”

  86.

  ECC 126–35. On the distinction between “transcendent judgment” and “immanent evaluation,” see TI 141:

  It is not a matter of judging life in the name of a higher authority which would be the good, the true; it is a matter, on the contrary, of evaluating every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the Life which they involve. Affect as immanent evaluation, instead of judgment as transcendent value.

  87.

  On the notion of immanent criteria, see K 87–8 and TP 70. “Although there is no preformed logical order to becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of events” (TP 251).

  88.

  See D 141:

  Critique et Clinique: life and work are the same thing, when they have adapted the line of flight that makes them the components of the same war-machine. In these conditions, life has for a long time ceased to be personal, and the work has ceased to be literary or textual.

  Essay 13: Sensation

  Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in “The Logic of Sensation”

  1.

  Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981), in the series La vue le texte, edited by Harry Jancovici, now out of print. A revised version appeared from Éditions de la Différence in 1983, incorporating fifteen new paintings by Bacon and one minor emendation to the text (on 25). The French book is currently available in a paperback edition published in 2002 by Éditions de Seuil, in the series L'Ordre philosophique, edited by Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin. Deleuze also gave an important series of seminars on art from 31 Mar 1981 through 2 Jun 1981, apparently after the book had been written, which were no longer focused on Bacon's work in particular.

  2.

  See, for instance, Patrick Vauday's early review in Critique 426 (1982), as well as Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Le Plissé baroque de la peinture,” Magazine littéraire 257 (Sep 1988).

  3.

  Ronald Bogue's three-volume work on Deleuze and the arts, which includes Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, Deleuze on Cinema, and Deleuze on Literature (New York: Routledge, 2005), is a definitive study of Deleuze's “philosophy of art.” My comments here are indebted to Bogue's wide-ranging work.

  4.

  Gilles Deleuze, “8 ans après: Entretien 1980” (interview with Catherine Clément), L'Arc (rev. edn., 1980), special issue on Deleuze, 99.

  5.

  John Russell, Francis Bacon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; rev. edn., 1979).

  6.

  See Jean-François Lyotard, Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1987), and Michel Butor, Comment écrire pour Jasper Johns (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1992).

  7.

  See Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, trans. John Weightman (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), and Francis Bacon, trans. John Weightman (New York: Rizzoli, 1998).

  8.

  See Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), 276.

  9.

  See ABC C: Deleuze

  doesn't believe in culture, rather he believes in encounters (rencontres), but these encounters don't occur with people. People think that it's with other people that encounters take place, like among intellectuals at colloquia. Encounters occur, rather, with things, with a painting, a piece of music. With people, however, these meetings are not at all encounters; these kinds of encounters are usually so disappointing, catastrophic.

  10.

  Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, 305–6.

  11.

  “La Peinture enflammé,” interview with Hervé Guibert, in Le Monde, 3 Dec 1981, 15, in TRM 181–7: 185, 187.

  12.

  David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962–1979, 3rd edn. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1987).

  13.

  From Francis Bacon's introductory
text to the “The Artist's Eye” exhibition at the National Gallery, London, as cited in Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, 310; whence the famous phrase, variously attributed, “talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”

  14.

  “La Peinture enflammé,” 15, in TRM 181–7: 185.

  15.

  Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne (1935), translated as The Primary World of the Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman, 2nd edn. (New York: Free Press, 1963).

  16.

  Marius von Senden, Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation, trans. Peter Heath (London and Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960).

  17.

  See Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic, 1985) and Diary of a Baby (New York: Basic, 1992).

  18.

  Straus, The Primary World of the Senses, 351.

  19.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 102–6. Oliver Sacks's famous case of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) explores the opposite condition (visual agnosia): a patient who had retained the abstract and categorical, but lost the concrete (7–22).