Deleuze, Marx and Literature
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内容摘要
本文在简要概述德勒兹的作品后，分别探讨了他的独著和他与加塔利合著的文本中与马克思和马克思主义的关联之处。随后，文章讨论了德勒兹的学术生涯中与文学和文学作品的不同相遇，以及这些相遇的不同的时期划分方式。最后一部分聚焦于德勒兹生命主义哲学，及其如何在他后期对英美文学的讨论中得以凸显，最后以弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的《海浪》为例进行了总结。
关键词
资本主义；德勒兹；马克思；次要文学；非个人生活
作者简介
保罗·帕顿，武汉大学弘毅讲席教授，《社会与政治哲学》期刊的主编，新南威尔士大学的荣休教授，澳大利亚人文科学院院士。他著作等身，其中包括《德勒兹与政治》（2000）和《德勒兹的概念：哲学、殖民、政治》（2010），并在当代政治哲学、人-动物关系及文学作品等方面发表了大量文章。
Title
Deleuze, Marx and Literature
Abstract
After a brief outline of Deleuze’s work, this article surveys his relation to Marx and Marxism in his solo writings and in his texts co-authored with Guattari. It then discusses the varied encounters with literature and literary works in the course of his career, along with the different ways in which these can be periodized. The final section focuses on Deleuze’s enduring philosophical vitalism and the manner in which this comes to the fore in his later discussions of Anglo-American literature, concluding with an example from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
Key words
capitalism; Deleuze; Marx; minor literature; impersonal life
Author
Paul Patton is Hongyi Chair Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan University, the editor of the Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, an Emeritus Professor at The University of New South Wales, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has authored many books, including Deleuze and the Political (2000) and Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (2010). He has published widely on contemporary political philosophy, human-animal relations, and literary works. Email: prp@unsw.edu.au
Introduction
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) is best known for his work written with the radical psychoanalyst Felix Guattari during the 1970s. Anti-Oedipus [1972]① brought notoriety for its critique of psychoanalysis and its outline of a materialist theory of desire. It theorized human desire both at the level of the individual unconscious and at the level of social order, producing a typology of the different ways that societies organized the flows of desire that, in some ways, paralleled Marx’s theory of different modes of production. It was followed a decade later by the experimental and challenging A Thousand Plateaus [1980], which consists of an open-ended series of “plateaus” that develop a philosophy of nature through analyses of familiar social phenomena, such as language, desire, signs, literary forms, micro and macro-politics, and unfamiliar phenomena theorized by the authors, such as faciality, various kinds of becoming, refrains, forms of capture and forms of nomadism.
Deleuze’s work is often divided into three periods, which include the work before his collaboration with Guattari and the work after. Before Guattari, he published influential books on Bergson (Deleuze [1966]) and Nietzsche (Deleuze [1962]), short studies of Hume (Deleuze [1953]) and Kant (Deleuze [1963]) and a series of major works at the end of the 1960s that included Spinoza and the Problem of Expression [1968]. Difference and Repetition [1968] and The Logic of Sense [1969]. After Guattari, although before their final collaborative work What Is Philosophy? [1991], he published books on the British painter Francis Bacon (Deleuze [1981]), his contemporary Michel Foucault (Deleuze [1986]), an essay on Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze [1988]), and an influential two volume study of cinema as a distinctive art form, Cinema I: The Movement-Image [1983] and Cinema II: The Time-Image [1985].What Is Philosophy? is in many ways a reflection on the aims as well as the methods of the practice of philosophy Deleuze developed in collaboration with Guattari. As they understand it, philosophy is essentially a critical exercise of thought that produces concepts in terms of which we can understand everyday events and processes. They distinguish philosophy from natural science, which produces functions that enable us to manipulate the material world, and also from art that produces or captures “objective” sensations, which they call perceptions and affections. These are embodied in the particular material of a given art form: paint on canvas, music, the sculptor’s stone or the writer’s use of language. What Is Philosophy? outlines an explicitly political conception of both philosophy and art. It describes philosophy as a form of thought that serves the political vocation of resistance to the present, to everyday servitude, the intolerable, and the shameful. Philosophy is properly utopian, in a sense that Deleuze often explains by quoting a phrase from Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, referring to thought that is “critical of the present time in favour of a time to come” (Nietzsche 60). More poetically, What Is Philosophy? asserts that philosophy calls for a new earth and a new people (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 99, 101). In this formula we can hear an echo of Marx’s famous thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 5).01
Deleuze and Marx
Fredric Jameson suggested a long time ago that Deleuze was “alone among the great thinkers of so-called poststructuralism in having accorded Marx an absolutely fundamental role in his philosophy – in having found in the encounter with Marx the most energizing event for his later work” (Jameson 395). He further explained, in order to take into account the multiple ways in which Deleuze and Guattari depart from or are critical of Marxist ideas, that it was not a question of deciding whether or not Deleuze or Deleuze-Guattari are Marxists but rather a matter of whether or not Deleuze’s thought “moves within and endorses” the Marxian problematic, or “to what degree the problematic of Deleuze includes the Marxian problematic and endorses Marxian problems and questions as urgent ones within its own field of inquiry” (Jameson 402).
Deleuze and Guattari’s debts to Marx and Marxism are readily apparent in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In Anti-Oedipus, they outline a “universal history” that resembles Marx’s materialist theory of history. The important difference is that, whereas for Marx it is the mode of production of essential goods and services that explains the nature of society in each epoch, for Deleuze and Guattari it is the abstract machines of desire and power that are definitive. They distinguish three kinds of social machine: territorial, despotic, and capitalist. The so-called primitive territorial machine organizes material production through the mechanism of kinship systems, the despotic machine overcodes the territorial systems of alliance and filiation to make these converge on the figure of the despot or sovereign, while the “civilized” capitalist machine coordinates the decoded flows of material production through an impersonal system of the exchange of value in pursuit of surplus value. Unlike Marx, they do not consider these different mechanisms for the coordination and control of social production to be successive stages in a single process of evolution. Rather, they understand them as virtual machines that may be operative in varying degrees within a given social field. Concrete social formations are then specified by the extent to which the different abstract social machines are actualised within them in different combinations. In this respect, they propose a philosophical knowledge of history that remains indebted to the structuralist Marxism of Althusser.A Thousand Plateaus broadens and generalizes Deleuze and Guattari’s social ontology so that it becomes a general theory of assemblages and the manner in which these are expressed throughout human history. The last traces of Marxist teleology are removed from their universal history when they say that social formations are defined by processes or becomings that are associated with particular abstract machines or assemblages and “all history does is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 430). The successive plateaus provide a series of new concepts and associated terminology with which to describe different kinds of assemblages. These include concepts designed to express social, linguistic, and affective assemblages, such as strata, content and expression, territories, lines of flight, or deterritorialization; the terminology employed to outline a micro- as opposed to macro-politics, along with concepts such as body without organs, intensities, molar and molecular segmentarities, and the different kinds of line of which we are composed; the terminology employed to describe capitalism as a non-territorially based axiomatic of flows of materials, labor, and information as opposed to a territorial system of overcoding; and finally, they include a concept of the state as an apparatus of capture that, in the forms of its present actualization, is increasingly subordinated to the requirements of the capitalist axiomatic, along with a concept of abstract machines of metamorphosis, or nomadic war machines, that are the agents of social and political transformation.There is an extensive literature, in English and in French, on Deleuze’s relation to Marx and the ways in which his and Guattari’s thought aligned with or departed from Marxist ideas.② To give just one example of the way in which, to use Jameson’s phrase, Deleuze’s problematic “includes the Marxian problematic and endorses Marxian problems and questions as urgent ones within its own field of inquiry,” consider the novel conception of capitalism as an axiomatic outlined in Anti-Oedipus and further developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari contrast pre-capitalist economies, in which various kinds of social code extrinsic to the economy regulate the flows of labour and materials, with capitalist economies in which only the formal equality of monetary value regulates the flows of units of production and consumption. They argue that, whereas previous social machines operate by means of the codification of social processes, capitalism is unique in that it functions by means of a formal, axiomatic connection of decoded flows. The description of capitalism as an axiomatic system in the strict sense in which this term is used in mathematical logic is a distinctive contribution that provides a privileged point of entry into Deleuze and Guattari’s political thought.Deleuze and Guattari speak of the capitalist axiomatic in both a primarily economic sense and also in a broader sense where this refers to a social machine which includes a juridical and social or political apparatus. In the narrow sense, capitalism as an axiomatic refers to the way in which factors of production appear in the balance-sheet of an enterprise simply as units of monetary value. Objects produced under the most diverse regimes of code, such as artefacts of indigenous handicraft, can be exchanged alongside products of fully automated production systems. In these terms, they describe capital as “a general axiomatic of decoded flows” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 453). In the broad sense of the term, the capitalist axiomatic refers to the mechanism or set of mechanisms required for the maintenance of a relatively stable assemblage of the social factors required to sustain the extraction of surplus value: “The true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which takes the place of the old codings and organises all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 233). In explicit contrast to pre-capitalist societies that relied on systems of codification, implying the existence of forms of collective belief, judgment, and evaluation on the part of agents that are extrinsic to the processes of production and circulation of goods, capitalism has no need to mark bodies or to constitute a memory for its agents. In this sense, capitalism is a profoundly cynical machine that functions by means of an axiomatic intrinsic to the social processes of production, circulation, and consumption.Another distinctive feature of axiomatic systems that justifies Deleuze and Guattari’s adaptation of the concept is that, subject to certain overriding constraints, such as consistency, there is considerable scope for variation in the axioms that define a given model. The history of capitalism continues to experiment with regard to axioms. Each successive crisis provokes a response that takes the form of adding new axioms or subtracting older ones: the incorporation or the elimination of trade unions, centralised wage fixing or decentralized wage bargaining, the regulation or deregulation of banking and finance markets, and so on. None of these axioms is essential to the continued functioning of capital as such, any more than are the axioms of bourgeois social life. Homosexual unions can meet the expectations of family life as well as heterosexual ones. Economic activity is increased when family members dine individually at McDonalds. As Marx and Engels point out in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism threatens to replace all the values of “civilised” social existence with the “cash nexus.” Capitalism constantly approaches this limit only to displace it by reconstituting its own immanent relative limits. The capitalist axiomatic generates schizo-flows which are the basis of its restless and cosmopolitan energy while at the same time setting new limits on the socius. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the capitalist axiomatic is a machine that represses the very social forces and flows of matter and energy that it produces: “it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius [social body] that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 246).For the most part, the concepts developed in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus do not imply a political program and do not directly address the macropolitical public domain. Deleuze and Guattari affirm the importance of changes to regimes of public right that come about through struggles for civil and political rights, for equality of economic condition and opportunity as well as for regional and national autonomy. However, they offer no normative theory of the basis of such rights, nor of the kinds and degrees of equality or regional autonomy that should prevail (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 470-471). They offer no justification for the establishment of basic civil and political rights, for the kinds of differential rights that might apply to cultural or national minorities, or for particular ways of distributing wealth and other goods produced by social cooperation. Instead, they focus on the micropolitical sources of political change such as the minoritarian becomings that provide the affective impetus for political movements. In A Thousand Plateaus, it is above all such “minority” social movements or social processes of “becoming-minor” that carry the potential to transform existing social relations. For Deleuze and Guattari, the sources of political creativity must always be traced back to shifts in the formations of individual and group desire that in turn lead to changes in sensibility, allegiance and belief. To the extent that such micropolitical movements bring about changes in the majoritarian standards themselves, along with new forms of right or different status for particular groups, they effectively bring about a “new earth, a new people” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 99, 101). At the same time, the significance of such minoritarian becomings for public political right depends on their being translated into new forms of right and different statuses for individuals and groups: “Molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes and parties” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 216-217). In this manner, even though they offer neither descriptive nor normative accounts of macropolitical institutions and procedures, Deleuze and Guattari provide a supplement to liberal as well as Marxian conceptions of political order. They invent a language in which to describe micropolitical movements and infrapolitical processes that give rise to new forms of constitutional, political, and legal order. They outline a social ontology of assemblages and processes that bears indirectly on the forms of public right. They invent concepts such as becoming-minor, nomadism, smooth space, and lines of flight or deterritorialization that are not meant as substitutes for existing concepts of freedom, equality, or justice but that are intended to assist the emergence of another justice, new kinds of equality and freedom, as well as new kinds of political differentiation and constraint.Some critics attribute the engagement with Marx and Marxian problems in the work of Deleuze and Guattari primarily to Guattari, while presenting Deleuze as a conservative or even an a-political thinker (Žižek, Hallward, and Badiou). Against this tendency, others such as Simon Choat point to the presence of Marx in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition in order to show that “even before he began collaborating with Guattari, Deleuze’s work was both deeply politicised and engaged with Marx” (Choat, “Deleuze” 9). Deleuze’s early engagement with Marx and Nietzsche is reflected in the way in which Anti-Oedipus proposes what they call “universal history”, not as a Hegelian process in which capitalism is the inevitable outcome of historical development but as a Nietzschean genealogy according to which “universal history is the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity. Ruptures and limits, and not continuity” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 140, cited Choat, “Deleuze” 15). Similarly, Deleuze’s concept of the pure Idea of society in Difference and Repetition, where this is understood in terms of a virtual structure of reciprocally defined differential relations, is reflected in the concepts of abstract machines and concrete machinic assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of societies in terms of machinic processes can be understood as an attempt to develop a more dynamic and fluid conception of society than the structuralist conception of modes of production endorsed in Difference and Repetition. Choat describes this as not so much “a repudiation of Marx’s concept of the mode of production but rather a development of it: an attempt to push Marx in an even more materialist direction” (Choat, “Deleuze” 21).While the presence of Marx in Deleuze’s earlier work is undeniable, it is also true that the relationship with Marx became more pronounced in his later work. In a 1990 interview with the Italian Marxist philosopher, Antoni Negri, Deleuze famously declared that he and Guattari had remained Marxists “each in their own way” (Deleuze, Negotiations 171). He explained further the sense in which he and Guattari remained Marxist by suggesting thatwe think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself. (Deleuze, Negotiations 171)
I drew attention earlier to Deleuze and Guattari’s novel conception of capitalism as an axiomatic system that continues to come up against its limits only to overcome and reformulate those limits. In another interview shortly before his death in 1995, Deleuze reaffirmed his sense of himself as “completely Marxist” and announced that his next, and last, book would be entitled The Greatness of Marx [Deleuze 1995b]. Much is often made of this supposed last and unfinished book by Deleuze, although it is difficult to know how seriously one should take his announcement of this project. ③ The title repeats the title of an essay on Yassar Arafat that Deleuze published in 1984.④ There is little evidence that much of the book was ever written and, if anything was, none of it has ever been published.
02
Engagements with literature
Deleuze engaged with literature throughout his career, writing several versions of a study of Marcel Proust, Proust and Signs [1964, 1970, 1976], long essays on Pierre Klossowski [1965], Sacher-Masoch [1967a], Michel Tournier [1967b], and Emile Zola [1967c], a study of Kafka [1975] co-authored with Guattari, and a series of essays on authors, such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, T. E. Lawrence, and Samuel Beckett, many of which are published in Essays Critical and Clinical [1993]. In addition, Deleuze’s philosophical works, especially the work with Guattari, make frequent use of literary texts. For this reason, Ronald Bogue suggests that much of his work is “a thinking alongside literary works, an engagement of philosophical issues generated from and developed through encounters with literary texts” (Bogue, Deleuze on Literature 2).
Since Deleuze did not develop a systematic theory of literature, in the way that he did for cinema, we are left wondering how to understand these episodic engagements with literature. With the exception of the brief discussion in A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 8, of the differences between the literary genres of the novel, the novella and the tale, all of them deal with particular authors or particular literary texts rather than literature as such. All of them were tailored to Deleuze’s philosophical concerns at the time, which evolved over the course of his career. As a result, commentators propose different ways of periodizing Deleuze’s literary essays. Bogue suggests that they fall into two distinct groups, pre- and post-Guattari, “the first focusing on psychoanalytic themes and the interpretation of signs, the second on socio-political dynamics and the deterritorialization of language” (Bogue, “Deleuze and Literature” 287).Bogue’s two-phase periodization of Deleuze’s literary essays accords with one major rupture in the continuity of his work, namely the rejection of a psychoanalytic approach and associated concepts that followed his encounter with Guattari. However, a recent study by Catarina Pombo Nabais, Deleuze’s Literary Theory ([2013] 2020), takes a more fine-grained approach to the discontinuities in Deleuze’s work, outlining the successive philosophical projects that informed his engagements with literature. These began with his elaboration of a transcendental empiricism that involved a fundamental reworking of Kant’s theory of the faculties, from his studies of Hume, Nietzsche and Proust up until his major works at the end of the 1960s, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense. The books co-authored with Guattari during the 1970s, from Anti-Oedipus and Kafka to A Thousand Plateaus, developed a philosophy of nature organized around the concept of assemblage. Finally, the work undertaken during the 1980s, including his two volumes on cinema and the studies of Foucault, Leibniz and Francis Bacon, sought to elaborate a philosophy of life that increasingly took the form of a philosophy of “spirit.” Pombo Nabais focuses on the concept of the event, which Deleuze suggested in a 1988 interview was an enduring element of all his work,⑤ in order to propose four periods in his literary essays defined by their relationship to the concept of the event: “the period before the theory of the event [Proust and Signs, Masochism]; the period organized by the event [Logic of Sense]; the period centered on the assemblage [Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus]; and, finally, the period marked by the return of the event” [What Is Philosophy? and Essays Critical and Clinical] (Pombo Nabais 19, translation modified). Space does not allow here a more detailed discussion of Pombo Nabais’ careful reading of the successive phases of Deleuze’s engagements with literature. I mention it by way of contrast with Bogue and in order to point out that the interpretation of his literary texts is intimately bound up with the successive but overlapping “layers” of his philosophy.The principal elements of Deleuze’s early studies of literary work are Proust and Signs [1964, 1970, 1976], which treats Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as an account of the narrator’s apprenticeship in the interpretation of signs – worldly signs, signs of love, signs of involuntary memory and of art – and Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty [1967] which develops a psychoanalytic reading of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. Deleuze argues that Sacher-Masoch deals with psychic phenomena quite unrelated to those discussed by the Marquis de Sade, hence the misleading character of the diagnostic term Sado-Masochism.The key text of the Guattari period is the jointly authored Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [1975], which proposes a resolutely anti-psychoanalytic reading of Kafka’s oeuvre that questions the very idea of “interpretation” that had provided the foundation of Deleuze’s earlier work on Proust. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari outline a pragmatic conception of language according to which language is not a matter of representation or communication but the actualization of “collective assemblages of enunciation” or “statement,” drawing on Deleuze’s reconstruction of Foucault’s theory of statements and discursive assemblages in The Archaeology of Knowledge. In these terms, a book is not an object of interpretation but rather a certain kind of machine or assemblage that functions in connection with other social, institutional or interpersonal assemblages. As they comment in “Introduction: Rhizome”:We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed ... when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 4)According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s The Trial is not so much a critique of the law as a fantastical representation of the law as a rhizome of connections, in which everyone is related to or familiar with K’s case but the law or the determination of that case is always deferred or somewhere else. Bogue comments that the law machine in Kafka’s The Trial is “at once a transcription and dismantling of the world around him, and hence an experimentation on the real institutions, practices, and discourse of the law in Prague and the Austro-Hungarian Empire” (Bogue, “Deleuze and Literature” 299).
It is in Kafka, too, that Deleuze and Guattari develop the concept of minor literature, which they define as the literature of an oppressed or excluded people. Such a people forms a minority where this term must be understood in a qualitative rather than a quantitative sense. What is important is not that they constitute a numerical minority but that they are defined by the ways in which they depart from the standard, “normal” or majoritarian identity. Minor literature typically involves a “minorization” or “becoming-minor” of the majority language, which Deleuze and Guattari define by reference to the ways in which a text written in the language of the majority may also destabilize that language by subjecting it to syntactic and stylistic deformations, producing a kind of foreign language within the majority language. Kafka’s Czech German or Joyce’s Irish English provide examples of this linguistic “becoming minor.” Pombo Nabais writes that Kafka “dismantles society, not only via a question of language, but in language, by the numerous images that words create around them … Kafka does nothing more than exploit this ambiguity of words, playing with what they make visible, with their logical, historical, or cultural dependencies. He plays with these dependencies and, thus, plays with the values of the entirety of the major, German society of Prague” (Pombo Nabais 176-177).In minor literatures, as Bogue notes, everything is political and the writer assumes the function of giving voice to or summoning forth a ‘people to come’. The concept of minor literature provides a concrete example of the way in which Deleuze and Guattari’s utopian conception of philosophy carries over into their conception of literature. In the terminology of What Is Philosophy?, art shares the same revolutionary vocation as philosophy but employs different means. Whereas philosophy breaks with everyday opinions through the invention of concepts, literature breaks with everyday ways of seeing and thinking by capturing new, previously unrecognized percepts and affects. In this sense, the novelist is a “seer” who experiences and gives expression to new possibilities for life.03
Literature and Life: Deleuze’s Vitalism
In the chapter of Dialogues (co-authored with Claire Parnet, [1977]) entitled “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” Deleuze outlines his preference for the English and American literature of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, R. L. Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and others. He justifies this preference by reference to the manner in which these writers portray life as a process of self-transformation or escape from established identities in favour of flight toward another world. For these authors, writing is a matter of tracing lines of flight or processes of becoming that have the potential to lead to the creation of new forms of life: “In them everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside” (Deleuze and Parnet 36). Individual characters realize this potential when they manage to break out of existing forms of life and gain access to the primary and transformative power of pure, impersonal life. Deleuze shows how this idea of a pure, impersonal life that is implicit in although distinct from the lives of individual characters is present in the work of several of his preferred Anglo-American authors, including Melville’s Moby Dick and Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 novella, The Crack-Up. Since he provides an extended analysis of the latter in Logic of Sense and again in A Thousand Plateaus, it is a helpful example to illustrate this conception of life.
Fitzgerald’s novella describes the experience of a severe break-down involving the loss of faith in his former values and the dissipation of all his convictions. As he writes: “I have spoken in these pages of how an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crackup of all values” (Fitzgerald 62). He distinguishes three different kinds of transition from one state or stage in a life to another: first, “the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside” (Fitzgerald 52). These are the large breaks such those between youth and adulthood, between poverty and wealth, between illness and good health, or between success or failure in a chosen profession. Second, there is “another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it is too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again” (Ibid). These are the almost imperceptible cracks or subtle shifts of feeling or attitude that involve molecular changes in the affective constitution of a person. They involve the kind of incremental but irreversible change through which the individual becomes a different person and eventually, as Fitzgerald suggests, “the new person finds new things to care about” (Fitzgerald 58). Cracks of this kind amount to a redistribution of the attitudes, desires and attachments that make one a certain kind of person. Third, the author realizes that “the ones who had survived [the second kind of break] had made some sort of clean break” and resolves to effect a break of this kind with his past self (Fitzgerald 63). This involves more than becoming a different kind of person, reconciled to the “qualified unhappiness” that he considers the natural state of the sentient adult (Fitzgerald 65). It is a matter of ceasing to become a person at all: “I have now at last become a writer only” (Fitzgerald 64).Deleuze’s discussions of the novella redescribe Fitzgerald’s three kinds of crack as three kinds of line on which individuals or societies may be composed, along with the kinds of event or “becoming” associated with each. First, there is a molar, rigid line that corresponds to the social and institutional identities within which our public, private, and professional lives are lived: family, school, work, etc. It is on this line that we find the significant events that make up the biography of a given person or the history of a particular society. Second, there is a line of molecular, supple segmentation that involves different kinds and degrees of rupture with who or what the person is – in Deleuze and Guattari’s language, these are different kinds of deterritorialization. On this line, we encounter a different kind of event; “becomings, micro-becomings, which don’t even have the same rhythm as our ‘history’ … another politics, another time, another individuation” (Deleuze and Parnet 124-125). In The Crack-Up, these are the imperceptible cracks in a person’s make-up that occur independently of the signifying breaks that otherwise define the progress of a life. They are changes in the molecular structure of a personality or “redistributions of desire such that when something occurs, the self that awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 198-199). The “something that occurs” here can only be the kind of historical event that takes place on the first kind of line.The different kinds of events that take place on this second line still only amount to a relative rupture, a form of relative deterritorialization, in relation to the character, person or historical entity found on the first line. Deleuze points to a third line, one that represents an even greater distance from the historical entities and identities of the first line, that he calls the line of flight or absolute (as opposed to relative) deterritorialization. On third line, “not only has the matter of the past volatilized but the form of what happened, of an imperceptible something that happened in a volatile matter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible …” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 199). It is on this line that individuals or groups escape history and enter the realm of abstract life or becoming. They become imperceptible in the sense that they are identifiable only as pure events, indistinguishable from one other but “each in their own way.” This phrase roughly translates Deleuze and Guattari’s deliberately paradoxical formula in relation to “becoming-imperceptible”: “One has become like everybody else but in a way that nobody else can become like everybody else” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 200). The person is reduced to an abstract line capable of actualization in a multiplicity of traits.The idea of an abstract, impersonal life in all things is one of the enduring philosophical layers of Deleuze’s thought. In some formulations, it relies on a Bergsonian conception of the virtual or inner realm of being that is actualized in real events and states of affairs.⑥ There is an implicit vitalism in the philosophy of nature outlined in A Thousand Plateaus, which includes the idea of an abstract, non-biological life that is expressed in metals, music or in works of visual art: “A powerful nonorganic life that escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 507; see also 411). In a letter-preface to the published version of a thesis on the aesthetic dimension of his work, Deleuze wrote to the author: “I believe that you have seen, in your own way, what is essential for me, this ‘vitalism’ or a conception of life as non-organic power [puissance] ([...] it is ‘life’ that seems essential to me)” (Buydens 7). One of the most explicit presentations of this vitalism occurs in a short text called “Immanence: A Life’,” published in 1995 (Deleuze 2007). Here, he illustrates this conception of life with reference to an incident from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend in which an unpleasant character almost drowns, and in doing so becomes an object of sympathy for a number of onlookers. On Deleuze’s account, they do not feel for the person, who was disliked by all who knew him, but for the indefinite, impersonal and singular life that is expressed in this man:The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life. (Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness 390)This conception of life as an impersonal force or energy that is manifest in singular moments can also be found in the work of Virginia Woolf, about whom there are numerous comments in A Thousand Plateaus and Dialogues. Lu Chunhui’s wonderful PhD dissertation on Woolf draws attention to a number of ways in which key novels – Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves – can be usefully read in the light of Deleuze.⑦ To take just one example: in the concluding passage of The Waves Woolf presents a conception of life remarkably similar to the one Deleuze describes in relation to the passage from Dickens. One of the central characters of this novel is Bernard, an aspiring writer who tries to capture the meaning of his own life and that of his friends in the stories he tells, even though as the novel unfolds he comes to despair of his own ability, or the ability of language in general, to capture the life that is expressed in this small group of friends. The title alludes to the way that the novel is punctuated by passages that describe waves in the sea, as a kind of visual metaphor for the life of nature of which they are a part. In the final paragraph of the novel, Bernard describes his awareness of life by reference to the waves of desire that pulse through him:
Here, there is an image of the fluid, undifferentiated life that is at once the sea, the waves that punctuate the book, the energy of a horse underneath a rider and Bernard’s awareness of an impersonal life that is both distinct from himself and at the same time who or what he is. This is a variation on another image that appeared earlier in the novel in a passage attributed to another character, Rhoda: “With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses…” (Woolf 370). In both passages, Woolf presents life as an impersonal force to which individual characters are attached, not so much an individual wave but the energy that produces the wave, and the next one, and so on until this particular wave dies but the impersonal life of the sea continues.
Deleuze’s later engagements with literature are driven by his interest in the kind of writing that gives expression to this abstract, impersonal life rather than by an interest in the social function, the nature, or the aim of literature as such. In the Introduion to Essays Critical and Clinical entitled “Literature and Life,” he makes it clear that he is not proposing a general theory of literature but rather an idiosyncratic definition of “writing” that applies to his canon of favoured authors. What he offers in these essays is not so much a philosophical theory of literature as an encounter between a particular form of philosophical vitalism and a particular kind of modernist literature in which, as suggested in Dialogues, the aim of writing is “to carry life to the state of a non-personal power” (Deleuze and Parnet 50). As we have seen, access to this non-personal power is a condition of transformation in both individuals and social relations. For this reason, literature as Deleuze defines it in his later essays is also a pathway to the production of new earths and new peoples.责任编辑：张爱平
此文原载于《外国文学研究》2023年第5期
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