The Deleuzian Critique of Pure Fiction

Author(s): Gregg Lambert

Source: SubStance, Vol. 26, No. 3, Issue 84 (1997), pp. 128-152
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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The Deleuzian Critique of Pure Fiction

Gregg Lambert

Conceptual Actors and the Image of Thought

DELEUZESAYS, "CONCEPTSHAVE A HISTORY"(QP23).1

"OBVIOUSLY,"
That is, each concept has a story to tell, although it may be the kind of story
told by idiots, full of sound and fury. It perhaps follows that philosophy
presents its own history as a narrative of concepts, a fable of thought that
must recommence each time from the beginning, in response to the child-
like question, "what is x?" For example: '"Whatis philosophy?"-a person?
an animal? a hero, a god? a day or hour of the week? "What is death?" Or
simply, "What is an event?" Faced with these questions, the aged classical
philosopher-storyteller might assume a look of an inscrutable mystery,
prefacing his response with "Here begins a long and inexhaustible story."
This introduces the listener to a duration that has nothing to do with the
"Age of Philosophy." (Since Kant, philosophy has been divorced from
wisdom and gains nothing from the accumulation of experience). The
problem of the story's duration is that its episodes are not simply divided
between several epochs (the Greeks, the Schools, the Enlightenment), or
between several distinct characters or conceptual actors (Plato, Aristotle,
Descartes, Heidegger).2 After Leibniz, it is also divided between several
possible worlds. Therefore, in recounting each event in the concept's his-
tory ("Adam eats the forbidden fruit," "Jesus is betrayed by Judas,"
"Caesar crosses the Rubicon and Rome falls to tyranny"), the classical
narrator must calculate all possible versions and variations in order to
concede or renderto reasonthe existence of "the best one," which is given
the pseudo-factuality of the past as well as the quasi-insistence of necessity.

I have characterized our classical narratoras aged only to highlight the

sense of fatigue and resignation that inevitably accompanies the evidence
of History, which motivates him to render only an account of the reasons
that belong to what Deleuze calls the economic or legal connections that
come together to form a dominant system of judgment (LS 318-320). It was
because of an ancient (mythic) accord between the image of reason and the

128 SubStance#84, 1997

 Critique of Pure Fiction
Deleuzean Critique 129

epic representation of the law that the classical philosophical narrative

took on a juridical function, and the philosopher himself often appeared as
a jurist. (For example, the Platonic figure of the philosopher-jurist is
derived from the mythic court depicted in the Gorgias, where the dead
judges appear "without eyes and ears," and no longer inhibited by the
senses, can peer directly into the souls of the accused). Consequently, the
language associated with this function often produced the ethical
tautologies and imperative modes of description with which we are most
familiar, as well as a kind of patriarchal and summary conclusion: "It
happened thus, and therefore was necessary." The meaning of an event
would be deduced from a system of calculation (or jurisprudence) that
hands the real over to the possibleby making it a pure expression of what
Nietzsche called "the past and its 'It was."'
"Then the sleight of hand becomes obvious," Deleuze writes in
Bergsonismconcerning this moment: "If the real is said to resemble the
possible, is this not in fact because the real was expected to come about by
its own means, to 'project backward' a fictitious image of it, and to claim
that it was possible at any time, before it happened?" (B 98). Therefore, for
each case there could be only one possible ending: an Adam eating the
forbidden fruit and expelled from the garden, a Sextus dethroned and in
exile, a Caesar passing the Rubicon and betrayed by Brutus, a Christ
crucified. Finally, after everything is said and done, we find that the classi-
cal philosopher was a narrator of legal fictions, whose only problem was
phrasing a proposition in such a way that one could discern the principles
that would rule the disposition of each case.
But, says Deleuze, there's a new narrator in the village. He can be
identified, in one sense, with the new idiot who appears in What is
Philosophy?In another sense, he can be recognized in the description of the
new archivist announced in the opening pages of Foucault,"who proclaims
that henceforth he will deal only with statements and no longer with
propositions" and even, perhaps, with only the most absurd of statements:
"I am a bug or an earthquake," "I have an unconscious toothache," or, "It
is raining. It is not raining" (F 1).
The ancient idiot [Descartes, for example] wanted the kind of evidence he
could arriveat on his own;in the meantime,he would doubteverything,
including 3 + 2 = 5; in this way he would place all the truths of Nature in
doubt. The new idiot is not concerned with all the evidence, will never
"resign"himself to believe that 3 + 2 = 5; he only wants the absurd-its not
even the sameimageof thought!(QP61/62)

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Gregg

While our classical narrator was only concerned with rendering each ac-
count to reason, our new narrator seeks to multiply each version-that is,
to open each "past" to an infinite number of possible variations-in order
to invent new cases previously unaccounted for in the history of
philosophy. "Theancient idiot wanted the truth, but the new idiot wants to
make the absurd the highest power of thought, that is, to create" (QP 61).
Because he is still essentially concerned with "the problem of judgment,"
the new idiot often appears in the role of a lawyer for the defense, who
pleads his case by narrating the story of each victim of History. (Here we
might recall the style of Foucault, who fashioned his philosophy by narrat-
ing the stories of lunatics, criminals, children, animals and poets.) One
might argue that this role was prefigured in the philosopher-arbiter of The
Republic,although Deleuze-Guattari reject this association outright: "As-
suredly, its not the same character, there has been a mutation" (QP 61).
Consequently, in the various conceptual narratives Deleuze invents to il-
lustrate this new image of thought (for example, that of the Leibnizian
Baroque, or the progression and crisis of the movement-image in modern
cinema), what is called an "event" now corresponds to a central problem
on the plane of narration;a "concept," to the differential calculus of partial
solutions; and "thought," to a jurisprudence in which the cases proceed
without reflective criteria of judgment. There has been a mutation, because
the concept now belongs to an order of events formerly belonging to the
logic of propositional identity and truth; this becomes a major axiom in the
philosophy of Deleuze, which he often refers to as the paradoxof concepts:
"the true object of a concept is an idea whose reality cannot be unfolded
empirically; an object, consequently, that is both outside experience and
can only be represented under a problematic form" (DR 219). Therefore,
each concept unfolds a "tangled tale"-a story with several episodes.

L'Histoire d'Autrui:A Brief History of Thought from Leibniz to Borges

We have an example of the Deleuzian conceptual narrative in "The

Story of the Other Person" (L'Histoired'Autrui), in the opening pages of
What is Philosophy?The concept itself is made from several components
that function like the morsels of other concepts, which must suppose
several diverse fields present at each point of the concept's history. It is
said to have three distinct but inseparable components: a possible world, a
face, and actualized language (or speech). "The Other Person is a possible
world, such as this world exists in a face which expresses it, and effectuates

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Deleuzean Critique
Critique of Pure Fiction 131

itself in language which gives it reality" (QP 23). Each of these components,
in turn, are drawn from other concepts, from diverse fields receptive to the
"problem of the Other," or even responsible for its creation as a fundamen-
tal concept of philosophy: the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger,
from which the concept draws its distinction between Weltand Umwelt;the
structuralism of Levi-Strauss and the passage in Sartre's Beingand Nothing-
ness that is the first to apply the discoveries of a structural science to the
appearance of the Other in the famous key-hole scene; the psychoanalysis
of Lacan, with particular attention to the structures of perversion and
psychosis; the literary vortices and cartographies of Tournier, Borges,
Joyce, Gombrowisc; the philosophy of Leibniz where the concept draws its
formula of expression. "In effect, each concept, having a finite number of
components, will bifurcate upon other concepts, differently composed, but
which constitute other regions of the same plane [or world], and which
respond to conjoining problems, participating in a general co-creation"
(QP 24).
Although the concept derives its components of expression from
various encounters within these diverse fields, the cause of this diversity
cannot be reduced to a species of laws. The concept is conditioned by an
object outside experience that can only be represented by a problematic
form; however, this "form" can no longer be found in the Kantian deduc-
tion of the law as a pure (or transcendental) instance of reflection. Modern
philosophy, in particular, has abdicated this use of law as a metaphor of
reason, which had for so long guided its intervention in the field of politics,
and has abandoned any legislative role in the domain of experience, except
in the cases of some analytical philosophies, or in the case of linguistics,
which is not a philosophy. On the contrary, for Deleuze, "to represent in a
problematic form" means to invent, to create. Hence, a concept can no
longer take for its condition a "law" that it seeks to express clearly or to
understand completely; since its creation follows the "contour, the con-
figuration, and the constellation of an ad-vent" (QP 36).3 We might con-
clude at this point that the problem of judgment has also changed
direction, since the event now expands beyond the limits of the time that
conditions it or pretends to contain it, like an episode that multiplies its
versions and divides the conditions of its "story" between several dis-
parate times and just as many worlds.
For Deleuze, the fundamental problem of judgment concerns
decisions that fail to express the conditions of any possible world. But what
does it mean "to decide?" What is a "decision?" "Who decides?" In
response, we should recall that certainty as the dominant characteristic of

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132 Gregg Lambert
Gregg

thinking commences with Descartes, who invented an "image of thought"

that was itself the symbolic equivalent of an action. To decide, to pass
judgment, is to act decisively concerning the matter to be thought. Within
the Cartesian method, this "action-image" represents the decisiveness of
doubt: the power to exclude sensation, belief, understanding, existence, in
order to arrive at a point of absolute certainty. Yet, how did the criteria of
certainty come to resemble the perfection of reason-becoming its aim
(telos)as well as its ideal image? One can assume that this was the result of
a certain decision that bears the proper name of Descartes himself, whose
heroic action was to create an image of thought that was essentially active
(negative, critical) in such a way that, after him, the image of thought itself
was represented by it, as dramatized in the Meditations.Here we have a
good example of a series that becomes the condition of every other series,
since the image of thought can only exist if it bears a resemblance to the
concept of cogito,created to express the relationship between thought (God,
or pure Ego) and perception.
In The Fold, Deleuze lays the essential coordinates for responding to
this problem, in his analysis of the Leibnizian concept of the vinculum
substantia,which can be defined as a kind of dominating fold that functions
as an "ideal causality" and defines a substantial predicate, or category.4 In
the Theodicy,the concept is represented by a God who rules this fold and
possesses the right to decide upon the series that will "ripen" into the best
of possible worlds. This is because at the moment of creation, a decision
will have been necessary, a decision that would allow only one possible
world to be realized; without such a decision, according to Leibniz, there
would only be an infinite number of equally indeterminate points of God's
eternal reflection (218).5A universe not ruled by the principle of incompos-
sibility would be chaos or a labyrinth in which every point or perspective
would be equally indeterminate, and every path lead nowhere, since there
would be no series actualized to give order and direction to all the rest.
Therefore, the law of necessity, expressed here by the requirement that
there be only one actualized world, appears to be the highest principle (or
law), even higher than the Leibnizian God who, in a certain sense, is
compelledto choose.6God must decide at each moment on the inclusion of
one series, and this necessarily excludes all the others, which fall like the
damned into the base of the chosen world, to function as its material,
"releasing an infinite quantity of progress" (Fold74).
In order to justify the statement that "everything real is rational,"
Leibniz had to posit the existence of a God who calculates while the world
unfurls. And because God is not limited by time and space, he would be

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Deleuzean Critique 133
133

able to follow completely the full realization of all possible worlds before
choosing the one that is best. It is only on this condition that the "real
appears rational," since everything that happens will appear against the
image of this total ratiocination that infuses the real with the appearance of
perfect reasoning. The accuracy of God's calculation necessarily presup-
poses the power of a Reasonthat is equal to the whole of time, and such a
presupposition is represented by Leibniz's certainty concerning the criteria
of "the best." Moreover, this criteria must be distinguished from the
criteria of the "Good" [Agathon]of Plato, or "the most perfect of which a
more perfect cannot be conceived" of Aquinas. As Deleuze writes, "the
best of all possibilities only blossoms amid the ruins of the Platonic Good"
(Fold68).
Paradoxically, the series that God finds best is always the one that
leads to death (Sextus Tarquin, Jesus Christ), since a fundamental axiom
that Leibniz discovers in the Theodicyis that "a possible world" can con-
stitute its possibility only from the necessary exclusion or murder of certain
singularities. This is why, for Leibniz, in each and every world there exists
"a vague and indefinite Adam" who is defined only by a few predicates (to
live in the garden, to be the first man); however, there is only one world in
which Adam has sinned (Fold 64). Likewise, there are several possible
worlds containing a Sextus Tarquin, a Judas Iscariot, a Julius Caesar, a
Jesus Christ;however, there is only one where Sextus is dethroned and sent
into exile, or where a Christ is crucified and buried. There are as many
possibilities as there are possible worlds, as Leibniz said of the monad;
however, there is only one that is realized. For Leibniz, therefore, creation
was a terrible decision, which placed God in the position of having to
choose "some Thing over against nothing" (Fold68). In order to justify this
terrible act, Leibniz wrote the Theodicywhere he appears as God's defense
lawyer. "Of course," he pleads,
God is a prioriguilty for the existenceof evil, for the sufferingof the
damned,and for the murderof certainsingularities-but,look,he had his
reasons!WecannotknowwhatGod'sreasonsare,norhow he appliesthem
in each case, but at least we can demonstratethat he possesses some of
them,and whattheirprinciplesmaybe. (Fold59-60)
But why does Leibniz choose the word "ripen"(reifen)to represent the
process whereby a principle is chosen as "the best one" to rule a given
chain of causality that will unfold into a "world"?Does this also imply that
the world is grounded in reason, or that the series that "ripens into an ideal
causality" necessarily expresses the realization of the "best of all possible
worlds"? For example, employing a famous example from the Theodicy,the

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Gregg Lambert
Lambert~~~~~~~~

name "Caesar" is of little interest in all possible worlds; only in the one
where he crosses the Rubicon does the possible pass into the real as Rome
falls into tyranny. This is because in the series that develops into the chosen
world, the inscription of "crossing the Rubicon" onto the name "Caesar"is
over-determined, and poses between the event and history (local and
global) such a strong connection that it "ripens" into an ideal causality,
manifestly the result of divine jurisprudence. We can infer God's unreal-
ized speculations from the point where he assigns each event to its place
within a possible world, and relegates those that are incompossible to other
worlds-banishes them as false and spurious versions, bad copies, as il-
legal connections, fakes and forgeries.
It is around the criteria used to make such a terrible judgment that
Deleuze swerves from Leibniz's optimistic assertion that the actualized
world is the "best of all possible worlds." Leibniz assumes that the criteria
for realizing certain worlds and letting others fall into chaos are themselves
reasonable, as well as "necessary" (justifying "what happened"). That is,
the decision that actualizes a world is itself grounded in reason, rather than
simply in the world that exists. It may be important to recall that for
Deleuze, nothing is natural; everything happens either by construction,
convention, or some other artificial means-God or the Other, time, the
world, you and I. This also applies to judgment and decision in the above
image of thought, which also touch upon the fundamental conditions of
fiction; thus "everything here is purely fictitious, including theory, which
here merges with a necessary fiction-namely, a certain theory of the
Other" (LS 318). Deleuze is suggesting that the original "character" of
judgment, illustrated by the pure fiction of a God who calculates while the
world unfurls, is not grounded in reason, and may even "subsist" through
irrational and absurd factors (B 108). In Bergsonism,Deleuze addresses this
problem under the name of "virtual instinct," which he regards as the
origin of myth, or "the story-telling function of society."
Take, for example, obligation: It has no rational ground. Each particular
obligationis conventionalandcanborderon theabsurd;theonly thingthat
is grounded is the obligation to have obligations, "the whole of obligation";
and it is not grounded in reason, but in a requirementof nature, in a kind of
"virtualinstinct,"that is, on a counterpartthat natureproducesin the
reasonable being to compensate for the partiality of his intelligence. (B
108).7
What is said here concerning the nature of obligation could equally be
true for the nature of the Leibnizian God. We could say the same concern-
ing Descartes's requirement that the most perfect expression of thought

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Deleuzean Critique 135

must also bear the attribute of "clearand distinct perception." This require-
ment is not grounded in reason, but rather in the nature of the cogito-the
conceptual actor Descartes invents to represent the image of thought that
belongs to his method of reasoning.
The Leibnizian fable of the God who calculates while the world un-
furls may represent the purest expression of this virtualinstinct "which will
stand up to the representation of the real which will succeed, by the inter-
mediary of intelligence itself, in thwarting intellectual work" (B 108). We
can understand this by the way in which this "conceptual actor" provides
the guardrail that protects this world from sliding into chaos, by prevent-
ing certain singularities and events from becoming realized, and excluding
others as illusions and simulacra that approach from the chaos swarming
at the base of this chosen world. In his essay on Pierre Klossowski, Deleuze
argues that the principle of this God is founded upon the disjunctive syl-
logism, and all thought founded on this principle makes a negative and
exclusive use of the disjunctive (Leibnizian "incompossibility," Cartesian
"doubt"). According to this principle, it is the philosopher's job to adhere
to reason, since everything that happened, is happening now, and will
happen in the future essentially ordained by God's eternal de-cision.We
could understand this as the origin of the maxim "Everything happens for
the best," meaning that everything exists only so long as it has been
selected according to God's criteria. As noted above, this constitutes the
tautological form upon which the classical image of reason is grounded,
which requires all thought to obey the same representation of reason, as
being the only one that is also guaranteed the "quality" of being real.
Even by means of this fiction, of all the classical philosophers, Leibniz
comes closest to the truth when he shows that "what is called thinking"
does not belong to the spontaneity of the ego, but rather becomes "subjec-
tivized"-to use Foucault's word-within the human, in order to compen-
sate for its partial intelligence. "Thinking always come from the outside
(that outside which was already engulfed in the interstice or which con-
stituted the common limit)" (F 117). The capacity to think is always already
"put into" the human as the condition of the mental object's sociability as
well the objectivity of a common "Inside." Within the history of
philosophy, this subjectivization has been expressed in many ways, all of
which constitute the essential fictions of the "eventuation" of thought: the
Platonic doctrine of Ideas and the theory of reminiscence, the Cartesian
idea of infinity that appears in the third and fifth meditations, the Leib-
nizian notion of Pre-established Harmony (by way of the vinculumsubstan-
tia), the Heideggerian concept of an original temporality inaugurated by

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Gregg

the event of "thrownness" (Geworfenheit); finally, the concept of the "Out-

side" (Dehors) as conceived respectively by Blanchot ("the interiority of
expectation"), Foucault ("the point of subjectivization"), and Deleuze ("the
fold"). Whatever form this event takes, whatever concept is invented to
express or represent its eventuation, all these fictions share a common
presentiment: what is called thinking embodies the residue or trace-even
the "signature" perhaps-of a power that causes the world to unfold and
to encompass all beings within a common Inside. And this "Inside" bears
no resemblance to the subjective interiority of the empirical ego; rather, it
is the interior surface of an "Outside" that is folded within the self, and it
is by means of this all-encompassing fold that all individual monads can
include the same world. Hence, the "Outside" is not so much a place as a
force, which in turn is related to the force that causes us to think: "the
thought that comes from the Outside is farther away than any external
world, and hence closer than any internal world" (F 117).
Deleuze often speculates on what would happen if this decision were
no longer possible, or, in the words of a popular dictum, "when time falls
from its hinges." What if the symbol of judgment no longer had the power
to pull everything into its wake, and time no longer rushed for the door,
seeking to resolve itself, to actualize itself, or to become realized in one
duration? To rob possibility of its potentiaactiva (the power to actualize
itself in a subject or a world) is something Leibniz did, but only on condi-
tion that all monads express (or infer from their perceptions) the same
"brand"of possibility, and all include the same world. (What is the relation
of "inference"to its realization, if it is not already determined by the image
of an action that remains suspended and virtual, yet ordered in the folds of
time?) Of course, this might leave the decision of which brand of possibility
up to who knows what God of history. After all, someone must decide, and
each decision eventually leads to a matter of life or death. But something
different occurs (in Borges, not in Leibniz) when the event designated by
the above statement introduces into "brain" of Leibniz's God a small
crack-almost like a stroke-that splinters and bursts on the surface of his
reflection. It would change the nature of decision, or "the image of
thought," recalling the image of the mirror filled with cracks and splinters;
Deleuze often uses this image to represent the mind filled with hesitation,
which multiplies possible worlds like the fractal lines of a crystal-event.
Moreover, this image of the cerebral interval constitutes a positive
inversion of the earlier schema, inasmuch as the powers of the labyrinth
(i.e., the powers of speculation, or "the powers of the false") are no longer

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Critique of Pure Fiction 137

held back, but given a positive expression of "actuality." As Deleuze

writes,
Wenow findourselvesbeforeanotherinter-cerebral intervalbetweenintel-
ligenceitself and society:Is it not this "hesitation"of the intelligencethat
will be able to imitatethe superior"hesitation" of thingsin duration,and
thatwill allowthehuman,witha leap,to breakthecircleof closedsocieties?
(B109).
Of course, the initial response to this question is "no," since man often
leaps in the name of an essential egoism that he seeks to preserve against
social obligation, and human intelligence often liberates itself from one
circle (or closed society) only to find itself the creator of another. Yet
something positive occurs, which is the appearance of "something in this
interval between intelligence and society." In Deleuzian philosophy, this
"something = x" has been said in many ways-"intensity," "becoming,"
"the new," "the variable." In Bergsonism,"what appears in the interval is
emotion"(B 110). However, it is not the emotion of egoism, "always con-
nected to a representation on which it depends," but a new "creative
emotion" that is purely potential,. . . [and] in fact, precedes all repre-
sentation, itself generating new ideas" (B 110). In other words, it is not a
new image of action that finally breaks the vicious circle of judgment
(although this was still a possibility for Deleuze at an earlier stage), but the
appearance of a new "being" who makes use of the play of circles in order
to break into the closed-circuit between the dominant image of judgment
and the passive nature of intelligence.
Let us try to formulate a provisional axiom from these observations:
For Deleuze, it was never a question of "breaking-out" of the world that
exists, but of creating the right conditions for the expression of other pos-
sible worlds to "break-in," in order to introduce new variables into the
world that exists, causing the quality of its reality to undergo modifica-
tions, change, and becoming. This "something = x" engenders the various
concepts that Deleuze has invented, in order to mine the "outside," the
sensible surface from which he will extract new assemblages of visibilities
and statements (optsignes et sonsignes), which combine to create new
"signs" that have never before existed (for example, Proust's madeleine).
Consequently, the domains of literature (with its esoteric words and
paradoxical statements), cinema (with its images of movement, action, and
time), and finally the architectural fragments of the Baroque (with its inte-
rior, monadological spaces and infinite facades) will provide material for
the production of new surfaces and new sensible signs that diagram an
essential "indecision" in the mind of God, a "hesitation" in the nature of

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Gregg

movement, a "stammering" in the proposition. Indecision-hesitation-stam-

mering-these are the forces that combine to introduce a new brand of
repetition into time, a species of repetition that will find its source in the
arbitraryforms of possibleintuitions.A poetics of chaos. We might ask what
form our story will take now? In response to this question, the following
sections will take up a crucial moment in Borges that Deleuze often
employs to illustrate the emergence of modern literature as one source of
these arbitrary forms of intuition in language. For Deleuze, it becomes an
episode that properly belongs to the "story of the Other," one that I will
refer to simply as "the Year of Fang."

"The Year of Fang":Chaos and Play / Difference and Repetition

Fang, let us say, has a secret;a strangercalls at his door;Fang

resolvesto kill him. Naturally,thereare severalpossibleoutcomes:
Fangcan kill the intruder;the intrudercan kill Fang, theybothcan
escape,they bothcan die, and so forth.-Borges, "The Garden of
Paths"
Bifurcating
In "What is the Event?" (The Fold), Deleuze proposes a concept of
modern literature that corresponds to the "chaosmos"of Borges's labyrin-
thine construction, versus the chaos at the base of the Leibnizian world,
which holds all the aborted and destroyed singularities. As a result,
Deleuze writes, "the play of the world has changed in a unique way,
because it has now become the play that diverges":
EvenGoddesistsfrombeinga Beingwho comparesworldsandchoosesthe
richestcompossible.He becomesProcess,a processthat at once affirms
incompossiblesand passesthroughthem... Beingsarepushedapart,kept
open throughdivergentseriesand incompossibletotalitiesthatpull them
outside, instead of being closed upon the compossibleand convergent
worldthattheyexpressfromwithin.(Fold81)

Following Whitehead's conception of the event as a structure of "prehen-

sion," what Deleuze develops in this chapter is also designated by the
name "Fang":the reformulation of modern literature as a field of bifurca-
tions and divergences in what Deleuze has called in many places the "ideal
game." The first rule of this game is that there is divergence, rather than
opposition, between compossible and incompossible worlds; the second is
that there is variation, rather than inclusion, of events. However, unlike the
name Caesar, for Leibniz, Deleuze's "Fang"cannot find an historical year,
since it refers to the recurrent fragment drawn from Borges's tale, which

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Deleuzean Critique 139

has itself become a "conceptual character" in Deleuze's philosophy. As

Deleuze writes,

Borges,one of Leibniz'sdisciples,invoked the Chinesephilosopher-ar-

chitect Ts'ui Pen, the inventor of ... a baroque labyrinth whose infinite
series converge or diverge, forming a webbing of time embracing all pos-
sibilities. (Fold62).

For Deleuze, the name "Fang," no longer simply refers to the fictional
character in Borges's story, but functions as an "intercessor"in the history
of the philosophical concept of the Other, signaling an encounter between
philosophy and non-philosophy.
The Borgesian fable concerns Fang and an intruder, who is unknown
(anonymous), approaching from the outside, from "beyond the turn of
experience" (Bergson). In the story the intruder is both inside and outside,
in the past as well as in the future. Deleuze establishes these two locutions
analogically-signaling an event (a death, a murder) that is already ac-
complished, but also predestined and still to come. Fang hesitates, and
from this hesitation (to kill or be killed) several diverse series prolong and
resonate still other series: Hamlet and Claudius, Caesar and Brutus, Sextus
and Lucretia, Christ and Judas Iscariot, Robinson Crusoe and Friday,
Gregor and his family, or K. and the Inspectors. However,
. .. with its unfurlingof divergentseries in the same world, come the
irruption of incompossibilities on the same stage, where Sextus will rape
and not rape Lucretia,where Caesar will cross and not cross the Rubicon,
whereFangkills,is killed,andneitherkillsnoris killed.(Fold82).
Of course, some might want to localize this fable's "effect"by proclaiming
that it's not much of a problem because it belongs to a simple fiction. As
Deleuze writes, "this reconstitution could only be temporary" (ibid.). And
it is true that fiction offers the occasion for speculation which, in some
manner, can be compared to the interval of the brain which cannot be
mapped and followed in a concrete duration, but rather spins and bifur-
cates, synapse upon synapse, path upon path, producing mirror upon
mirrored effect.
As an illustration of this effect, we could develop this episode of the
Deleuzian concept and read it as if it were a cinemagraphic "shot"; in
particular, the "close-up" of Fang's face filled with pure elements of sound
and light, marking the fulgerative instant of association with flashes of
insight, memory, association, emotion. As in cinema, the longer the dura-
tion of the "shot" the more the face begins to lose its contours, as if the skin
becomes too loose for it, becoming a pure surface of speculation (e.g.,

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140 140 Gregg
Gregg Lambert
Lambert~~~~~~_

"what can he or she be thinking now?") or the expression of a "sign"

marking the production of a new emotion never before possible (which, for
that reason, may not even be human in the strictest sense). In our example,
this shot would depict the moment when Fang realizes that the Intruder is
knocking, and this shot is frozen on a close-up of Fang's face, which cap-
tures the hesitations that immediately occur in the "mind of Fang." Thus,
we have the picture of Fang sitting in his room, on the side of the bed (or
perhaps under the sheets, like Molloy). Fang is gazing in the direction of
the closed door, his attention focused on the stirrings of the stranger on the
other side, or perhaps upon the relationship of the secret he holds to the
intruder's intentions. We could study and analyze the shot in this manner.
It is not just a prosaic description of a room, but also a direct presentation
of the mind of Fang, full of hesitations: If this, then this or this, but also
possibilitythat, or perhapseven that as well. "Nothing happens" except the
hesitations that diagram Fang's thoughts while he speculates, and these
speculations begin to develop, to follow the fractured lines of a crystal
event.
Perhaps the significance of this event can best be explained by refer-
ring back to the poetic formula cited in the preface to the English edition of
Kant's CriticalPhilosophy,"time is off its hinges," which implies that time is
no longer connected and resolved through the organic coordination of the
motor-sensorial schema. According to Kurt Lewen, whom Deleuze cites
often in Cinema2, all schema are "hodological." In other words, the schema
are the "hinges" of time; they develop and coordinate time by inferring
movement from an action that is absent, but which orders and coordinates
all temporal events from the point of its beginning or conclusion. Now, it's
true that the incident of "Fang"can be mapped and developed according
to a schematic arrangement; however, this would depend on something
quite striking, since the narrative would be ordered by an action-image
that is absent from the fable itself. Consequently, it would only be from the
perspective of this "action" (to kill or be killed-in short, to decide) that
several possible outcomes can be inferred. (Of course, this already assumes
that only one outcome will have been possible.) The action, then, functions
as a center of space in the unfolding of the narrative. It pulls and develops
the event immediately into its denouement, like a cause from which all the
different possibilities would crystallize afterward as its unrealized effects.
In this sense, the fable presents an indirect image of time than can be
inferred from the action posited, but not in-being. From this position of
non-being,this action organizes and directs the whole of time. It deploys the
possibilities in the image of a certainty that there is a resolution to this crisis

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Deleuzean Critique
Critique of Pure Fiction 141

and it has been ordained in advance, that somethingwill have takenplace-

the intruder will kill or be killed, and Fang will or will not escape with his
life.
We can see now why this fable is not just a "fiction."Or rather, we can
understand how this indirect image of time is essential to all fiction and
occurs within a very Aristotelian determination of tensions and resolu-
tions, whereby space is inferred from movements that extinguish it, and
time is contracted into one duration that pulls everything under its wing.
Contrary to this determination, the "close-up" of Fang's mind presents us
with the direct image of time as "the garden of bifurcating paths," showing
the duration of a fiction as an interval that deploys more space than it is
possible for one world to contain. This is why its movements are undetec-
table and anomalous, rather than simply being abnormal or perverse-dis-
tortions of a given representation of reality. As Deleuze-Guattari write,
A-normal is an adjectivelackinga nounin French,andrefersto thatwhichis
outsiderulesor goesagainstrules,whereasan-omalie, a Greeknounthathas
lost its adjective,designatesthe unequal,the course,the rough,the cutting
edge of deterritorialization...a positionor a set of positionsin relationto a
multiplicity.(TP244)
This sense of the anomalousalso addresses the "literal link" that Deleuze
has consistently argued between perversion, no longer understood by a
moral or legal code, and fiction, no longer subordinated to the criteria of
true representation, but releasing what Deleuze calls "the powers of the
false."8 As in the Deleuzian examples of Tournier's "Robinson thesis" in
Logicof Sense and of Proust's "apprenticeship of signs" in Proust and Signs,
fiction (though not all of it) is pure speculation, which means it is false in a
very special way. It constitutes a "pointde deterritorialization"that bifurcates
worlds and releases incompossible and indiscernible elements that enter
into new variations around the position of the actual. This does not mean,
however, that fiction can be reterritorialized into expressing a generic
property of literature (although this often happens); rather, the concept of
re-territorialization refers only to the process whereby forces are integrated
back into "signs" and "statements."Moreover, Deleuze characterizes these
statements and their proper names ("signs") as "collective enunciations,"
rather than productions of a private conception of the writer.
It is for this reason that Deleuze privileges the "question of literature"
in its modern problematic, since "by detaching and turning back on itself,
literature marks the end of language as such" (F 132). We might recognize
in this a certain paradigmatic notion of literature: the moment when lan-
guage is made to turn back on itself, or when literature steals from lan-

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Gregg

guage its constitutive power over objects-most of all, its power "to
name." Deleuze locates this aspect of modem literature in an analysis that
owes much to Foucault's stubborn insistence on privileging the literary
effect in a time when it was being subordinated to negative forces (work,
communication, information, politics). Instead of subordinating the con-
cept of modern literature to a function of communication, both Foucault
and Deleuze raise the possibility of new forms of resistance that are poten-
tial in the overt tendency of modern writers (Berryman, Celan, Queneau,
Cummings, Mallarme) to "uncover a strange language within language."
Accordingly, literature creates within language a "non-linguistic" stam-
mering, which inclines towards "a-typical expression" and "a-grammatical
effects." By inventing these forms of expression, modem literature marks
and remarks that place where speech and language are detached and
turned toward a muteness that still designates a beingof languagebeyond its
grammar and signification (perhaps even its phenomenal appearance in
the generic forms of the written), and announces the liberation of a dimen-
sion of "verticality," released by a-typical statements (what, in Cinema2,
Deleuze calls "the crystalline surface of narration").9As I have already
argued, a-typical statements lose their derogatory predicate of "ab-nor-
mal," or "non-sense," and become anomalous-designating an edge, a
variation, a line of inflection or deterritorialization. This grounds the pos-
sibility of a new narrative, whose principle Deleuze calls "the powers of
the false." The first axiom of this narrative is that "the past is not necessari-
ly true;"the second is that indiscernability belongs as equally to the past as
to the future. Consequently, if this is the next "image of thought," then it is
certainly the most strange, and most imperceptible, and for that reason,
possibly the most comic of all since our new narratorno longer takes truth
as his final cause, but introduces modifications and variations of the past
and multiplies versions and descriptions of the event, so that "you arrive at
the house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another,
my friend" (Borges).
To better understand the relationship between this new "question of
literature" and the event it supposedly designates ("the end of language"),
let's rephrase our earlier description of literature as "a field of divergence
and bifurcation," thereby detaching what Deleuze calls "pure optsignesand
sonsignes"from the conditions of a Language-subject. Resemblance, con-
tiguity, and causality are the forces that condition the linguistic sign,
through the laws of association and identity. However, modern literature
is usually found to be working against the "possibility of language," in the
sense that it brings language beyond its limit-conditions (in silence and

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Deleuzean Critique 143

non-sense) and discovers a new "being of language on the other side of

what it designates and signifies, beyond even the sounds." This aspect of
modern literature is certainly not violent, and literature should not be
understood as a form of lingua-cide.(Beckett proved this would be a losing
proposition.) Rather, it marks the folding proper to the positive discoveries
of modern writers, whereby the forces that belong to the "outside"-"that
formless, 'mute,' unsignifying region where language can find its freedom
even from whatever it has to say" (F 131-132)-become incorporated
within conditions of language use, in turn creating new possibilities for
speech, life, perception, feeling and action. Here, Deleuze grasps Foucault's
description of the function of modern literature as the liberation of lan-
guage, whereby literature liberates language from its "Other-Structure,"
represented by the categories of linguistics and the "grand unities of dis-
course," which could be conceived as another example of the le Grand
Rabbateur.
The linguistic problematic that literature introduces into language
limits its condition of possibility and, thus, causes it to "stutter." An ex-
ample of this would be when a statement ("I have an unconscious
toothache") ceases to describe and circumscribe an object, but becomes
strangely "self-descriptive," referring to no previous condition of visibility
from which the statement could be inferred, and breaking with the condi-
tion of movement or perception that would be able to resolve its expres-
sion.10Instead, this statement begins to spin on itself causing a feeling of
"swooning" (l'etourdissement),which is the concrete effect of non-sense
introduced within a subject. This indicates that the conditions of the ut-
terance have arrived from outside the world that would be able to situate
it; the statement finds its conditions directly outside. This type of statement
exceeds the articulation of sense by "legal connections" that have been
established by a dominant system of Judgment. (And here we might want
to provisionally retain the Lacanian notion of the "GrandOther" for desig-
nating this system of judgment, and the "time of decision" that this Other
imposes on human speech.) More important, this type of statement actual-
izes the relations between forces exterior to language, and integrates them
into it. We can readily find examples of this in modem literature, such as
Gregor Samsa's "I am a bug," more expressive than "I am a man," and
possibly responsible for introducing a new predicate-Die Verwandlung,or
"metamorphosis." It is precisely this new being of language, often desig-
nated by Deleuze via the proper name of an author like Borges or Kafka, or
that of a fictional persona like "K." or "Fang"-that enters into a direct
relation with whatever forces the human and inhuman forms are being

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Gregg

coupled with at the moment (technologies, media images, textiles,

ecologies, etc.).
For Deleuze, Tournier's fictional hypothesis of "a world without
others" remains exemplary, inasmuch as it creates the conditions for study-
ing the problems caused by the presence of what Deleuze calls "the Other-
Structure,"by showing the conditions of a world that might be organized
in this structure's absence. Among other things, in the "Friday-concept"
one sees the possible "effects" of a subject's being liberated from a destruc-
tive and colonizing relation to the earth, caused by a patriarchal structure
of desire-which can also be seen as the basis for our current global or-
ganization under Capitalism. The hypothetical absence of this structure
also evokes the potential reorganization of the elements of life without
"consumption" or sadness, and with a desire that does not "return"
through the detour of another body that suffers this desire by consolidat-
ing its form of immanence. (This is equally true of Deleuze-Guattari's
research on Kafka's "K-concept," which produces a diagnosis of "the
diabolical powers that are waiting just outside the door" in the obscene
spectacle the body suffers under a regime that incorporates fantastic im-
ages of power belonging to pornography, on one side, and hermeneutics
and religious hagiography on the other.) Thus, in the same way that Friday
was the emancipatory double of Robinson Crusoe in Tournier's ex-
perimental fiction of "a world without others," literature can be conceived
as the double of linguistics, by releasing new signs and "effects" in the
absence of the categories and predications of a dominant Language-sub-
ject. As a final example of this potential, we might refer to many of the
works by Marguerite Duras, where the grammatical personages "he" and
"she" no longer belong to language, but rather to the significations that are
unfolded by the recit. This is especially true of TheMaladyof Death where
"he" does not return to the possibility of saying "I,"and where her silence
does not form the secret condition of his possibility (i.e. his desire, which
consists in hearing himself speak in the presence of a woman). "She"
approaches from the outside the possibilities of language to define her,
meaning that "he" cannot possess her silence as the womb in which he can
gestate his spiritual "essence." This loss of a place to generate and per-
petuate his meaning is what the text, completely identified with her posi-
tion, announces as his "sickness unto death."

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Deleuzean Critique of Pure Fiction 145

Modern Literature and the "Outside"

From as early as the Presentationde Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze has defined

the practices of modern literature as being inextricably bound up with
what he called "a perverse and speculative usage of the death drives"
(particularly illustrated in the structure of masochism), a usage that is also
responsible for the production of metaphysical surfaces in the mechanism
of thought. In Foucault,Deleuze situates the question of modern literature
within what is essentially a psychology of the fold, whereby language is
dis-articulated from the "grand unities of discourse" that structure the
possibilities of expression and turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity.
Finally, in Critiqueet Clinique,Deleuze recalls the above formulation when
he describes the event of literature as,
... in effect,when anotherlanguageis createdwithinlanguage,an integral
languagewhich approachesan "a-syntactical" and "a-grammatical"limit,
or whichcommunicates with its own outside.(CC,"Avant-propos")

Particularly in this last work, Deleuze outlines a new "use of literature"

and gives it two distinct tasks: (1) to engage concrete signifying practices
that are more effective than psychiatry and psychoanalysis in diagnosing
("naming" or "diagramming") the combination of mute forces that both
accompany life and seem to threaten it from within; and (2), to create the
assemblage of "concrete rules and abstract machines," as defined in A
Thousand Plateaux, which are often more effective than politics in the
production of "signs" corresponding to emerging modes of life and labor
and new possibilities for existence. Following these descriptions of the
relationship between modern literature and the "Outside," we might con-
ceive of the "outside" as the place where "mute forces" enter into the
present, where they combine with other forces, lines, genres and ag-
gregates, institutions and individuals, and where they coalesce into nodes,
rivulets, patterns of complex social and cultural phenomena. In turn, these
patterns express new variables of power (violent subjection as well as
enthused enlightenment), as well as new or potential subjectivities. Con-
sider, for example, how the notion of "sadness" changed gradually along
with the evolution of Capitalism, or "jealousy,"with the decline of patriar-
chal and feudalistic societies. Some of these shifting lines and forces imply
radical changes in the forms that currently underlie concrete arrangements
of territory, state, ethnicity or race, type, and most important, collective
and individual determinations of subject, perception, and agency.

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(Foucault had referred to these underlying forms by simple and ab-

breviated names: "Man,""God," "We,"etc.)11
The concept of the "outside" has undergone several variations in the
corpus of Deleuze, as well as in the collective works with Guattari. In
Differenceand Repetitionit appears under the analysis of the tragic caesura
(particularly in the discussion of Holderlin's theory of the tragic and
Marx's three repetitions of time [DR 123-125]);in Logicof Sense,it is figured
by "unefelure" (the small crack in the depths of the body that gradually
widens to the size of the Grand Canyon).12It is not until Foucault,however,
that the concept of the "outside" is refined to designate a point that is
folded between what is closer than the nearest interiority of a subject and
more exterior than the further exteriority designated by objects of percep-
tion. Thus, it designates a small crack, or interstice, between sensibility and
thought; and an event that causes this crack to widen and "become" a form
of the future. It is important to see the connection with a pure exteriority
that runs deep into the crevices of the body, which is why researching the
outside always entails the creation of new sensibilities and forms that
might be capable of receiving its impression; this researchengagesa diagnos-
tic and taxonomicactivity of theartistand scientistalikewho discernthefigure of
thefuture through"reading"thesymptomsthatunfoldfrom the interiordepthsof
the body.It is the "future" (one or several) that is first introduced along the
borders of this crack; thus, it marks a real dualism in matter that extends
beyond interior and exterior, subject and object, becoming the condition of
a new subject and the sensible conditions of the arrival of a new objectivity.
'The crack is neither interior nor exterior, it is at the frontier, insensible,
incorporeal, ideal" (LS 181). This reveals the stoic essence of Deleuze's
thought as engaging the "theory of incorporeals"; in fact, Foucaultcan be
read as another edition of Logicof Sense,refined and given the proper name
of the author who developed a genealogical method and an art of depths
and surfaces into a methodological instrument, or mode of discourse.
If the body constitutes an object of research on the affects that emerge
from its deepest interior as a result of contact with outside forces, and the
"pure description" of phenomena emerging from the furthest exteriority
form a new status of the object itself, then we might ask why
psychoanalysis and phenomenology could not be the proper sciences for
this new empiricism. Deleuze gives several reasons. For example, although
its language and concepts are fundamental to this research, psychoanalysis
botched the concept of the unconscious by submitting it to a biological
determination of instincts and an economic and juridico-legal determina-
tion of desire (or quanta of intensity). For its part, the phenomenological

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Deleuzean Critique
Critique of Pure Fiction 147

method reveals pure descriptions of objects, but fails to discard the last
vestiges of the philosophical cogito. Ironically, it is literature that purifies
the languages of the body and offers pure descriptions of surfaces that go
further than the first two. Thus, it does not appear as a science, but rather
as a producer of percepts and affects. At this point we must ask why the
"outside" is necessarily bound up with the nature of chance; more par-
ticularly, how literature combines the effects of forces felt deep within the
body with elements of language to correspond to the chance arrangements
of new technologies and forces? Here, there is an assumption that pure
descriptions or simulacra of these new combinations "appear"in literature
before they appear elsewhere, in other regions of discourse and
knowledge.
Why is this so? In part, because literature appears as the double of life,
and solutions on the plane of sense duplicate solutions and "moves" that
life itself creates on the plane of immanence. It is not a question of "repre-
sentation," but of the power of being "capable"or "equal" to the repetition
of these new elements in a linguistic medium that might give clues to the
nature of the movements made on the plane of immanence. Thus, the
formula of "Fang" is used paradigmatically of this moment of turning, or
decision, in which nothing is guaranteed. That is, "Fang has a secret" and
"there is a stranger at the door." From these initial statements, several
possibilities can develop. In order to illustrate the paradigmatic value of
this formula, we could substitute for the nameless stranger the forces sig-
naled by the emergence of a life based on silicon, the formation of the
capitalist in the final stages of planetary deployment, the de-territorializa-
tion and crisis of disciplinary regimes and their re-territorialization by
mechanisms of the "control society," the emergence of racialized identities
and new fascisms of the flesh. Each of these "strangers" mark turning
points for the human form, as well as a fullness of time, a time pregnant
with possibility, the moment of a "dice-throw." (These are the somber
precursors spoken of in Differenceand Repetition.)In turn, each presents us
with diverse possibilities, with possible futures that bifurcate, tracing the
curve of the present that goes toward the future announced by each new
stranger knocking at our door.
In conclusion, the concept of literature that I have been proposing
from my reading of Deleuze-Guattari presupposes two things: first, that a
modern formation of literature constitutes something like a sensible sur-
face, or membrane, which registers these arrangements into signifying pat-
terns; second, that an analysis of these signifying patterns can be referred
back to the social, political, psychological and phenomenological processes

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Lambert~~~~~~_

that inform them. The "question of literature"becomes "diagnostic" when

literary readings confront the combination of mute forces assembled from
various regions-i.e., cultural, political, economic, biological, material-
creating an assemblage with other signs that can be conceived as a
"symptomatology." We see this in Deleuze's binding of a proper name to
an ensemble of signs in a sense that is diagnostic, since it produces a new
form of visibility and the possibility of treatment. This activity can be
understood to apply equally to the writer as to the reader:

Progress,fromthispointof view,is generallymadein thesenseof a greater

degreeof specification,bearingwitnessto the mostexactsymptomatology
(and it is clearthat the plagueand leprosyexist to a muchlesserdegree
today, not only for social and historicalreasons,but becauseone had
formerlygroupedwhatwereactuallyseparatesymptomsundera common
name).(M14).
Thus, a proper name is invented to connote "still other signs on a plane
made up of forces, movements, events" (M 15). In other words, just as the
sign "Parkinson's"now corresponds to a grouping of physiological effects
and connects them to other signs that were previously obscure and unper-
ceived, Deleuze-Guattari compare the assemblage of certain texts and cer-
tain proper names to a "history of symptomatology," in which symptoms
are named, renamed and regrouped in various ways. A partial list of these
names-without distinction to their real or fictional status-would include
Sacher-Masoch, Sade, Wolf-man, Kleist, Kafka ("K." or "Gregor"),Robin-
son Crusoe (or Friday), Ahab, Woolf, Lovecraft, Fitzgerald, and Fang.13
Finally, this "clinical" definition of literary practice in the work of
Deleuze-Guattari explains why their readings do not belong to criticism,
and why literary critics find it so difficult to classify or canonize their
interpretations within a representational body of works. Rather, their task
is to develop "signs" that bear the proper names of the conceptual actors
who envelop or express them (Wolf-man, Kafka, Robinson, Fang, Ahab or
Bartelby, "Nevers" or "Hiroshima") in the sense that a proper name is
made or invented to connote "still other signs on a plane made up of
forces, movements, and events" in a manner of "Parkinson's."As primari-
ly a clinical determination of literary practice, this usage may also help to
explain and clarify, for instance, the anecdotal use of Fitzgerald's Crack-up
or James's WhatMaisie Knew in A ThousandPlateaux.Fitzgerald's book is
the diagnostic of a "life" that cannot be represented by the genre of
autobiography-it is neither the author's life nor life in general-but the
diagnosis of a "life" whose fundamental trait (or symptom) is that it is
always in the process of breaking down. From this basic diagnosis, there-

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Deleuzean Critique 149

fore, several of its more symptomatic expressions (alcoholism, social climb-

ing, parasitism, misogyny, depression) can be researched and mapped in
relation to the trait designated by the verb "to live"-meaning, in this case,
"to break down or crack-up." Deleuze-Guattari's clinical study of
Fitzgerald also reveals the precariousness of existing solutions to the prob-
lem of "breaking down," and the danger of illusory attempts to circum-
navigate this destiny: the danger of becoming intoxicated, manic (Ahab's
South Sea adventure), depressive (Proust's relationship with women as a
kind of hostage situation). Note that Deleuze privileges English and
American writers who try to extract themselves from the form of their
imposed madness (alcohol, drugs, speed, silence, racism, sexism, social
persecution, resentment, etc.).
I will conclude these observations on the importance of literature as a
potential source for diagnosing the forces of the outside with two questions
concerning modern literary criticism. First, is the stage of literary
knowledge today is still comparable to medical knowledge at the time of
the Plague? Second, if the same criteria of specification and accuracy were
brought to bear in evaluating the practice of literature, could it one day be
proclaimed that the greatest "literary practitioners" of our time were also
our greatest physicians?
Syracuse University

NOTES

1. Because this essay was originally written in 1993, before the publication of the
English language versions of Differenceet repetition,Qu'est-ceque la philosophie?,and
Critiqueet Clinique,the translatedportions from these works are my own. In preparing
this text for publication, I have retained my own translations for reasons of stylistic
and textual continuity of references.
2. Although not entirely accurate,I have sometimes resorted to the word "actor"
for the originalterm personnage and at other times employ "character"
conceptuel,
(Massumi)or "persona"(Tomlinson,Burchell),in orderto highlightthe problematic
aspect of the "double"that is characteristicof dramatic presentation, and to underline
the ambiguitythat occurswhen we identifythe figure of the philosopher-or, by
extension,the imageof thoughtitself-with its quasi-fictional
characterin the narra-
tive of philosophy.This ambiguitycan be illustratedwhen we refer to Aristotle,
Descartes, or Hegel not in the sense of their persons, or even their works, but rather in
the sense their names signify a certain "event" or "quality" that appears to charac-
terize a distinct image of thought or to mark an episodic moment in the history of
philosophy. Thus, the term can be understood to have a relationship with Foucault's
definition of the "Author-function."See "Whatis an Author?"in TheFoucaultReader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 101-120.

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Gregg

3. Deleuze-Guattari situate the concept of the Other (Autrui)in the encounter

between philosophy and non-philosophy in Whatis Philosophy?It signals simply the
variables of each encounter and the conceptual actors that mark a form expressing
relation; whether in the stranger, the lover, the idiot, or in the forms of eros, philia,
polemos,etc.
4. For Deleuze, however, the substance of the vinculum cannot be understood as
being "essential" or "substantial,"but, rather, as "sticky"or "viscous": that is, as a
plane of consistency. It is the adhesive that holds everything together and pulls it
along. It resembles a thin and imperceptible film that covers everything and allows
signs to stick to objects,descriptions to individuals, or persons to statements. See also
Bruno Paradis, "Leibniz: un monde unique et relatif," Magazinelitteraire,no. 257
(September,1988), pp. 26-29.
5. See Christiane Fremont'sremarkableanalysis of necessity and ideal causality
in relation to the problem of evil in "Complicationet singularite,"Revuede Metaphysi-
queet de Morale(No. 1, 1991);pp. 105-120.
6. However, in his analysis, Deleuze seems to lighten this command by turning
the Leibnizian universe into a game of chess in which laws only function as contrac-
tual arrangementsbetween players ratherthan descriptions of force, or natural laws.
7. The "story-telling function" of society originates on the same surface that
conditions the mechanism of thought [B 108]. This surface articulates a small inter-
cerebralinterval between society and intelligence, but also an infinitesimal crack that
occurs when the surface of sexuality (or instinct) folds back upon the "firstsymboliza-
tion of thought," producing a doubling effect: on one side of the mirror's surface, a
passional and affective body or emotional thought;on the other, a "virtualinstinct,"or
a fictive and fabulating reason.
8. On the connection between the psychoanalytic concept of perversion and the
concept of fiction, see especially Presentationde Sacher-Masoch and "the Phantasm and
Modem Literature,"Appendix, Logicof Sense.
9. Deleuze suggests, moreover, that atypical statements may reveal the inherent
problems of other common utterances such as "John will arrive at 5:00 p.m.," or
"Tomorrowthere will be a naval battle,"'This evening there will be a concert"-all of
which are contingent upon the series that actualizes them, and which reveal a moment
when time can place truth in crisis just as effectively as, for example, in the statement
from Beckett'sTheUnnamable:"Itis raining. It is not raining."
10. Deleuze considers the phrase from Wittgenstein's Blue Book,"I have an un-
conscious toothache,"to be an episode of centralimportance,comparable to Leibniz's
monad as the expression of possible worlds. See Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown
Books (New York:Harper, 1958), p. 22ff.
11. The combination of these mute forces that compose the concept of the "out-
side" may indicate a reconsiderationin Deleuze of the earlier formulation of the third
synthesis of time found in Differenceet repetition(DR 123-125).In part, this reconsidera-
tion might be due to the subsequent reflections on Leibniz and Foucault. Most impor-
tant, this would concern an interrogation of the Romantic conception of death as a
formal repetition that transforms its substance into an individual or collective "des-
tiny" (i.e. the central premise of the EternalReturnas "selective").
12. For a discussion of la felure, see Logicof Sense, particularly the 'Twenty-
Second Series-Porcelain and the Volcano,"pp. 154-61.
13. This use of the proper name for Deleuze has two sources. First, as we have
seen in Leibniz, the use of the name is attached to the conceptual actors that mark
"lacunae"and "ruptures."Thus, the names of Adam, Sextus, Christ, Martin Guerre,

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Deleuzean
Deleuzean Critique Pure Fiction
Critique of Pure Fiction 151
151

Caesar have a very determined function, by which God calculates all the possible
worlds and chooses the best one. Second, this usage is drawn from Spinoza's
Treatise,where he describes the various "passions" and affective
Theologico-Political
"modes" expressed by the prophets as being representativeof the modifications in the
mind of God. In a very accurate sense, one could say that Spinoza classified the
"prophetic signs" (e.g., Yahweh's anger, jealousy, or loving-kindness) as God's
"symptoms."

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