Situating Deleuze on Literature and Philosophy: Territories Distinct but Uncannily Analogous

Abstract

How does one situate the thought of Gilles Deleuze (his own thought, as well as his collaborative writings with Felix Guattari)? On the one hand, the reader of his works is struck by the breadth of the topics they survey (philosophy, literature, political theory, cultural critique, psychoanalysis, film) as well as by wide variations in tone (sober, declarative unpacking of difficult philosophical concepts, but elsewhere inventive flights of fancy which have been much admired and hotly contested). On the other hand, if, as Michel Foucault suggested, our century is ＂Deleuzian,＂ this is possibly the case because of the multifaceted usefulness and rhetorical persuasiveness of terms such as ＂assemblage (agencement),＂ ＂deterritorialization,＂ ＂line of flight,＂ ＂plane of immanence,＂ ＂rhizome,＂ etc.—terms which have served multiple ideological purposes and which have migrated far from their Parisian or European points of origin. In my article, I attempt to situate the relationship between literature and philosophy in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. My thesis is that the writers' own explicit attempts to separate the domains into separate territories (developed with the greatest explicitness and rigor in What Is Philosophy?) mask the fact that, for Deleuze the acute reader of literary texts by Proust and Kafka, these two supposedly distinct fields stand in a relation of mutual resonance. Rather than being separate but equal, literature and philosophy are strangely analogous. Philosophy, the domain in which concepts are created, resembles uncannily, in the mode of Freudian Unheimlichkeit, the spider's web of literature.