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For Rancire, Deleuzes readings tear the work of art from the world of
representation only to transport it into the symbolic and the allegorical:
To challenge all reintegration of molecular revolution into the schemes of
representation . . . he [Deleuze] asserts a performative conception of litera-
ture, but by so doing, he returns it to the logic Hegel designated as symbol-
ism. . . . Deleuze chooses an exemplary literature and an exemplary discourse
on literature: a discourse in which literature shows its power, at the risk of
showing only fable or allegory, a discourse where one can show it in the
process of performing its work. But showing that operation most often
signies, in Deleuze, focusing the analysis on the gure of an operator. . . .
He descants on the virtue of molecular multiplicities and haecceities, of non-
personal forms of individuation. He goes on about the individuality of an
hour that dreams, or a landscape that sees. But his analyses always come to
center on the hero of the story.
In the above passage, any distinction between the image and the object,
between ction and reality, is undone in favor of the real, understood in
the Deleuzian sense of assemblages and becomings, or creative produc-
tions of desire. Writing, reading, building, and inventing constitute such
planes of composition: Since he had discovered books and especially
since he had seen Aliouate and Khaled handle traps, slingshots, and
other devices (he also had been watching his grandmother weave en-
chanting patterns and decorate ceramics), the fever to make things had
been gnawing at his head and hands (83).
During one of their expeditions into the country elds, Lemdjad and
his childhood friends chance upon a garbage dump (to which they refer
as a construction site) and decide to use some of its contents, such as
broken tools, bits and pieces of building material, and the remains of
what was once a scooter, to build a boat. It is not dicult to see the boat
that the children recreate from a number of disparate, discarded objects
and fragments as a metaphor for an alternative conception of the Al-
gerian nation, an Algeria that is once more capable of reaching out to
wider horizons, an Algeria that can and must be (re)constructed with
patience and determination: The wind of the open sea, laden with the
unknown, pulled at him like a magnet. Still, something chained him to
the land. What was it? Oh yes, he had to work at the construction site if
he wanted the boat to take to the open sea one day (84).
Similarly, Lemdjads loom is at one and the same time a literal object
and a highly charged symbol. It is a machine that must literally nd
its way out of a convoluted administrative machinery, one that opposes
its elegance and ecacy to a system that is singularly devoid of these
qualities: The essential thing is to nd the most aesthetic, the least
cluttered, and the most functional model (26). And at its most aesthetic
and metaphoric, the machine performs the operation that Rancire