?We Shouldn' Judge Deleuze and Guattari?: A Response to Eugene Holland

Abstract

Iam writing in response an published in the Spring 2003 issue of Research in African Literatures, Representation and Misrepresentation in Postcolonial Literature and Theory, by Eugene Holland. His article was ostensibly a review essay of two books, Celia Britton's Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance and my volume entitled Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. As the designated representative of misrepresentation in Mr. Holland's opus, I am invited respond charges that seem stem from a range of causes: from simple if profound philosophical disagreement questions of minute textual interpretation. Holland, who makes his entry into the criticism of (the criticism of) postcolonial literature in this (with insights and feedback from the editors of this journal), dispenses quickly with any semblance of professional courtesy, denouncing one chapter of my book as a maniacal attack, obsessive, a diatribe, and infuriating.1 What so disturbed Mr. Holland? We must attempt find out. At stake in this debate are a number of important issues, including the uses of theory in postcolonial contexts, questions about the rules by which a text may and may not be read, and the relation of the the real. My language in this response will of necessity be strong, but at no point will I allow myself cross outside the bounds of professionalism as Mr. Holland did. I will move directly the part of Holland's article that is concerned with my on Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, because the rest of his is so clearly dispensable. Without the infuriating provocation of my critique of Deleuze and Guattari, Holland would have had no reason or qualification write about the two books in question; the rest of his is consequently almost entirely anodyne and paraphrastic. My Beyond Identity: The Postidentitarian Predicament in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand was first published in Diacritics in 1993, then reprinted in Nationalists and Nomads in 1998. It is concerned with the question of what lies beyond the supposedly stable forms of identity that used rule the world; more particularly, it examines closely the form of postidentitarian thought that is offered by A Thousand Plateaus. By scrutinizing the sources of Deleuze and Guattari's knowledge, and their use of those sources, particularly in their footnotes, I raised questions about their and their disciples' claims operate on a plane that is somehow free from the burdens and the ethics of representation. My stated goal was to read the referential within a universe that is supposed be purely virtual (M 173). My conclusion was that the nomadology of A Thousand Plateaus