On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life:
Gilles Deleuze and the Literary Clinic (9)
34. 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.
35. 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?
36. 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).
37. 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.... "
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