Deleuze And Literature

Deleuze and Literature Edited by Ian Buchanan and John Marks Edinburgh University Press Deleuze and Literature Thanks to Trevor Pull for technical assistance, and to Alex Edwards for her help and support. For Courtney Anne Buchanan and David Dennis Marks. Deleuze and Literature Edited by Ian Buchanan and John Marks Edinburgh University Press # The contributors, 2000 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 10.5 on 13 Sabon by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1207 6 (paperback) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents Introduction: Deleuze and Literature 1 Ian Buchanan and John Marks 1 Deleuze and Signs 14 Andre  Pierre Colombat 2 How Deleuze can help us make Literature work 34 Bruce Baugh 3 The Paterson Plateau: Deleuze, Guattari and William Carlos Williams 57 T. Hugh Crawford 4 Underworld: The People are Missing 80 John Marks 5 Inhuman Irony: The Event of the Postmodern 100 Claire Colebrook 6 On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life 135 Gregg Lambert 7 `A Question of an Axiomatic of Desires': The Deleuzian Imagination of Geoliterature 167 Kenneth Surin 8 Transvestism, Drag and Becomings: A Deleuzian Analysis of the Fictions of Timothy Findley 194 Marlene Goldman 9 Only Intensities Subsist: Samuel Beckett's Nohow On Timothy S. Murphy 229 vi Contents 10 Nizan's Diagnosis of Existentialism and the Perversion of Death 251 Eugene W. Holland 11 I and My Deleuze 263 Tom Conley Notes on Contributors 283 Index 286 Introduction Deleuze and Literature Ian Buchanan and John Marks It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of literature to Gilles Deleuze. In 1964 he published the first French edition of Proust and Signs (1972), and in 1967 a study of the work of Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: An Introduction to Coldness and Cruelty (1989). The Logic of Sense (1990), published in French in 1969, was a philosophical work which included material on Artaud, Lewis Carroll, Fitzgerald, Klossowski, Lowry, Tournier and Zola. Together with Fe  lix Guattari he published Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986) in 1975, and the two volumes of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, Anti-Oedipus (1984) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), contain important material on literature, including a long section on the concept of `becoming' in A Thousand Plateaus, which offers a reading of Melville's Moby Dick. It was not, however, until Deleuze's last published book, Essays Critical and Clinical (1997), that he produced a series of essays on the subject of literature and writing in general. There, Deleuze argues that while it is true that the essential problem of writing is indeed a matter of language, it is not a textual problem. Rather it is a matter of creating what he likes to call (borrowing from Proust) a `foreign language' with