A Note on Deleuze and Language

Abstract

Nothing is more fragile than the This is how Gilles Deleuze begins the thirteenth series of his Logic of Sense dedicated to the comparison of Antonin with Lewis He goes on to ask: not this secondary organization threatened by monster even more awesome than the - by formless, fathomless nonsense?1 What are in confrontation here are a surface and a language in depth,2 with the latter having the possibility of apprehending and at the same time creating what Deleuze calls subsense or a-sense or infra-sense, which must be distinguished from the nonsense of the surface.3 What he has in mind is primary order in the constitution of signification as opposed to any artificial (secondary) production.4 It is Artaud's language that offers this insight to Deleuze who in the previous twelve series of The Logic of Sense had built on Carroll's works, namely on Alice' s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass, but also on The Hunting of the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno. The poem Jabberwocky is used by for An Antigrammatical Effort Against Lewis Carroll. Here is the first verse of the original: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves. And the mome raths outgrabe. Artaud's translation, which can only be quoted in the original French, runs as follows: Il etait Roparant, et les vliqueux tarands Allaient en gilroyant et en brimbulkdriquant Jusque-la ou la rourghe est rouarghe rangmbde et rangmbde rouarghambde: Tous les falomitards etaient les chats-huants Et les Ghore Uk'hatis dans le GRABUG EUMENT.6 What does this mean? As in the original Jabberwocky, we do find some that belong to the dictionary and we can still detect grammar. But towards the end we are not only left with meaningless signs but also grammar seems to vanish. Is there something here that Deleuze can extract for logic of sense? He writes: As we read the first stanza of Jabberwocky such as renders it, we have the impression that the two opening verses still correspond to Carroll's criteria and conform to the rules of translation generally held by Carroll's other French translators.... But beginning with the last word of the second line, from the third line onward, sliding is produced, and even creative, central collapse, causing us to be in another world and in an entirely different language.7 Artaud's version of Jabberwocky indeed produces by means of his breath- words and howl-words de-construction or de-formation of (natural) language establishing new grammar and, consequently, new lexicon, new syntax, new phonetics. This is not to say new dialect or new orthography and still less the creation of neologisms, but new alphabet of thought.10 In reality, morphology and syntax evaporate in because the grammar of our way of being is modified. Moreover, the study carried out by Deleuze in the thirteenth series of The Logic of Sense shows that Artaud's conceptuality is not arbitrary. It corresponds to specific systematization, having much in common with Louis Wolfson's, schizophrenic student of foreign languages, but containing aspects that can only be considered from the perspective of Artaud's genius. The problem cannot truly be posed only from the clinical point of view, as if there could not be philosophical sense in the language of schizophrenic - as if this were but simple aphasia.12 Artaud's work is quite the opposite being decisive and pioneering from the critical point of view. For Deleuze, Artaud is alone in having been an absolute depth in literature, and in having discovered vital body and the prodigious language of this body.13 It is the corporal dimension that is really at the centre of the distinction between Artaud' s depth and Carroll's surface. …