Another Philosophy of Language: Style and Stuttering

Abstract

The theory of assemblages ought, at first sight, to be the climax and the end of Deleuze’s philosophy of language: it is the most original of his various views on the workings of language, the one that makes the most decisive break with mainstream linguistics. But ‘assemblage’ is not the last word in Deleuze’s philosophy of language — the last word, which is also the first, is style. And we reach not so much the acme of his thought about language as its point of highest tension, something, to use a term Deleuze never uses himself, of a contradiction.