1
Literature and Life
'To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-formed or incomplete, as Gombrowicz said as well as practiced. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible. These becomings may be linked to each other by a particular line, or they may coexist at every level, following the doorways, thresholds, and zones that make up the entire universe, as in Lovecraft's powerful oeuvre.
Becoming does not move in the other direction, and one does not become Man, insofar as man presents himself as a dominant form of expression that claims to impose itself on all matter, whereas woman, animal, or molecule always has a component of flight that escapes its own formalization. The shame of being of man—is there any better reason to write? Even when it is a woman who is becoming, she has to become-woman, and this becoming has nothing to do with a state she could claim as her own.
To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule—neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularized out of population rather than determined in a form. One can institute a zone of proximity with anything, on the condition that one creates the literary means for doing so.
...something passes between the sexes, the genera, or the kingdoms. Becoming is always "between" or "among": a woman between women or animal among others. But the power of the indefinite article is effected only if the term in becoming is stripped of the formal characteristics that make it say the ("the animal is in front of you...")... All writing involves an athleticism, but far from reconciling literature with sports or turning writing into an Olympic event, this athleticism is exercised in flight and in the breakdown of the organic body—an athlete in bed, as Michaux put it. One becomes animal all the more when the animal dies; and contrary to the spiritualist prejudice, it is the animal who knows how to die, who has a sense or premonition of death. Literature begins with a porcupine's death, according to Lawrence, or with the death of a mole, in Kafka...
Language must devote itself to reaching these feminine, animal, molecular detours, and every detour is a becoming-mortal. There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of a necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things.
To write is not to recount one's memories and travels, one's loves and griefs, one's dreams and fantasies... In this infantile conception of literature, what we seek at the end of the voyage, or at the heart of a dream, is a father... Even becoming-animal is not safe from an Oedipal reduction of the type "my cat, my dog"... But literature takes the opposite path, and exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal—which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point: a man, a beast, a stomach, a child... It is not the first two persons that function as the condition for literary enunciation; literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say "I" (Blanchot's "neuter").
Of course, literary characters are perfectly individuated, and are neither vague nor general; but all their individual traits elevate them to a vision that carries them off in an indefinite, like a becoming that is too powerful for them: Ahab and the vision of Moby Dick... There is no literature without fabulation, but as Bergson was able to see, fabulation—the fabulating function—does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego. Rather, it attains these visions, it raises itself to these becomings and powers.
We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up. Illness is not a process but a stopping of the process, as in "the Nietzsche case". Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good health (there would be the same ambiguity here as with athleticism),
but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible.
The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums. What health would be sufficient to liberate life whenever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera? It is like Spinoza's delicate health, while it lasted, bearing witness until the end to a new vision whose passage it remained open to.
Health, as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people. We do not write with memories, unless it is to make them the origin and collective destination of a people still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations. American literature has an exceptional power to produce writers who can recount their own memories, but as those of a universal people composed of immigrants from all countries...
This is not exactly a people called upon to dominate the world. It is a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becoming-revolutionary. Perhaps it exists only in the atoms of the writer, a bastard people, inferior, dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete. Bastard no longer designates a familial state but the process or drift of the races... This is the becoming of the writer...Though it always refers to singular agents, literature is a collective assemblage of enunciation. Literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair: there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is world-historical, a "displacement of races and continents."
Literature is delirium, and as such its destiny is played out between the two poles of delirium.Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant. But it is the measure of health when it invokes this oppressed bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting everything that crushes and imprisons, a race that is outlined in relief in literature as process.
Here again, there is always the risk that a diseased state will interrupt the process or becoming; health and athleticism both confront the same ambiguity, the constant risk that a delirium of domination will be mixed with a bastard delirium, pushing literature toward a larval fascism, the disease against which it fights—even if this means diagnosing the fascism within itself and fighting against itself.
The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life. To write for this people who are missing... ("for" means less "in the place of" than "for the benefit of").
We can see more clearly the effect of literature on language. Proust says, it opens up a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch's line that escapes the dominant system...
Syntactic creation or style—this is the becoming of language. The creation of words or neologisms is worth nothing apart from the effects of syntax in which they are developed. So literature already presents two aspects: through the creation of syntax, it brings about not only a decomposition or destruction of the maternal language, but also the invention of a new language within language. "The only way to defend language is to attack it... Every writer is obliged to create his or her own language..."
Language seems to be seized by a delirium, which forces it out of its usual furrows. As for the third aspect, it stems from the fact that a foreign language cannot be hollowed out in one language without language as a whole in turn being toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. These visions are not fantasies, but veritable Ideas that the writer sees and hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals. They are not interruptions of the process but breaks that form part of it, like an eternity that can only be revealed in a becoming, or a landscape that only appears in movement. They are not outside language, but the outside of language. The writer as seer and hearer, the aim of literature: it is passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas.'
'We sometimes congratulate writers, but they know that they are far from having achieved their becoming, far from having attained the limit they set for themselves, which ceaselessly slips away from them.
To write is also to become something other than a writer
...
If we consider these criteria, we can see that, among all those who make books with a literary intent, even among the mad, there are very few who can call themselves writers.' (1-6)
16
Plato, the Greeks
'Platonism appears as a selective doctrine, as a selection among claimants or rivals. Every thing or every being lays claim to certain qualities. It is a question of judging the well-foundedness or legitimacy of these claims. The Idea is posited by Plato as that which possesses a quality firsthand (necessarily and universally); it then allows us to determine, after certain tests, which things possess that quality secondhand, thirdhand, and so forth, depending on the nature of their participation. Such is the doctrine of judgment.
The legitimate claimant is the participant, the one who possesses the quality secondhand and whose claim is thereby validated by the Idea. Platonism is the philosophical Odyssey, which will be continued in Neoplatonism. It confronts sophism as its enemy, but also as its limit and its double: because he lays claim to anything and everything, there is the great risk that the sophist will scramble the selection and pervert the judgment.
This problem finds its source in the City. Because they refuse any imperial or barbarian transcendence, the Greek societies or cities form fields of immanence (even in the case of the tyrannies). These fields are filled and populated by societies of friends, that is, by free rivals whose claims in each case enter into a competitive agon, and are exercised in diverse domains: love, athletics, politics, the magistratures. In such a regime, opinion obviously assumes a decisive importance.
This is particularly clear in the case of Athens and its democracy: autochthony, philia, doxa are its three fundamental traits, and constitute the conditions under which philosophy was born and developed. In spirit, philosophy can criticize these traits, surpass and correct them, but it nonetheless remains indexed to them. As Vernant has shown, the Greek philosopher invokes an order that is immanent to the cosmos. He presents himself as a friend of wisdom (and not as a wise man, as in the East). He sets out to "rectify" or secure the opinion of men. These characteristics survive in Western societies, even if they have taken on a new meaning, which explains the permanence of philosophy in the economy of our democratic world: the field of immanence of "capital"; the society of brothers or comrades, to which every revolution appeals (and the free competition among brothers); and the reign of opinion.
But what Plato criticizes in the Athenian democracy is the fact that anyone can lay claim to anything; whence his enterprise of restoring criteria of selection among rivals. It will be necessary for him to erect a new type of transcendence, one that differs from imperial or mythical transcendence (although Plato makes use of myth by giving it a special function). He will have to invent a transcendence that can be exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself. This is the meaning of the theory of Ideas.
And modern philosophy will continue to follow Plato in this regard, encountering a transcendence at the heart of immanence as such. The poisoned gift of Platonism is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning (the triumph of the judgment of God). This enterprise runs up against numerous paradoxes and aporias, which concern, precisely, the status of the doxa (Theaetetus), the nature of friendship and love (Symposium), and the irreducibility of an immanence of the earth (Timaeus).
Every reaction against Platonism is a restoration of immanence in its full extension and its purity, which forbids the return of any transcendence. The question is whether such a reaction abandons the project of a selection among rivals, or on the contrary, as Spinoza and Nietzsche believed, draws up completely different methods of selection. Such methods would no longer concern claims as acts of transcendence, but the manner in which an existing being is filled with immanence (the Eternal Return as the capacity of something or someone to return eternally). Selection no longer concerns the claim, but power: unlike the claim, power is modest. In truth, only the philosophies of pure immanence escape Platonism—from the Stoics to Spinoza or Nietzsche.' (136-7)
6
Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos
'...the same type of man could not have written [both] the gospel [of John] and the Apocalypse. It matters little that each of the two texts is complex or composite, and includes so many different things. The question does not concern two individuals or two authors, but two types of man, two regions of the soul, two completely different ensembles. The gospel is aristocratic, individual, soft, amorous, decadent, always rather cultivated. The Apocalypse is collective, popular, uncultivated, hateful, and savage.
...John of Patmos does not even assume the mask of the evangelist, nor that of Christ; he invents another mask, he fabricates another mask that unmasks Christ or, if you prefer, that is superimposed on Christ's mask. John of Patmos deals with cosmic terror and death, whereas the gospel and Christ dealt with human and spiritual love. Christ invented a religion of love (a practice, a way of living and not a belief), whereas the Apocalypse brings a religion of Power—a belief, a terrible manner of judging. Instead of the gift of Christ, an infinite debt.
...Nietzsche was not the first. Nor even Spinoza. A certain number of "visionaries" have opposed Christ as an amorous person to Christianity as a mortuary enterprise. Not that they have an overly accommodating attitude toward Christ, but they do feel the need to avoid confusing him with Christianity. In Nietzsche, there is the great opposition between Christ and Saint Paul: Christ, the softest, most amorous of the decadents, and kind of Buddha who frees us from the domination of priests and the ideas of fault, punishment, reward, judgment, death, and what follows death—
This bearer of glad tidings is doubled by Saint Paul, who keeps Christ on the cross, ceaselessly leading him back to it, making him rise from the dead, displacing the center of gravity toward eternal life, and inventing a new type of priest even more terrible than its predecessors. 'Paul's invention, his means to priestly tyranny, to herd formation: the belief in immortality—that is, the doctrine of "judgment."' (36-7).