From Deleuze and Guattaris Words To A de PDF

Daniel Haines
From Deleuze and Guattaris words to a Deleuzian theory of reading
What were after certainly isnt any theory of reading. (Deleuze 1995: 22)
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known.1
Nonetheless, as Aidan Tynan notes in Deleuze's Literary Clinic, comparatively few
literary critics have engaged with their work and the nature of a properly Deleuzian
literary criticism still remains an open question (Tynan 2012: 12-14). Claire
Colebrook made a similar observation a decade earlier (Colebrook 2001: 150) and
Tynan is right to let it stand.2 Despite a small but steady stream of publications over
the last 15 years there is nothing one can call a movement.3 What exactly a
Deleuzian reading is and how his own readings work remain matters for further
discussion, even if that discussion has intensified. There is no question that recent
works by authors such as Ronald Bogue, Mary Bryden, Alan Bourassa, Gregg
Lambert, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, and Beatrice Monaco have provided new insights
about Deleuze and Guattaris relationship with literature and what this means for
1. This is evident throughout their solo and joint work but the key texts with a specific focus include
those on Sacher-Masoch (Deleuze 1991), Proust (Deleuze 2000), Carroll (Deleuze 1990), Kafka
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986), as well as a range of authors in Deleuze 1998.
2. For some critics, such a movement would be undesirable in any case. In his essay On the Uses and
Abuses of Literature for Life: Gilles Deleuze and the Literary Clinic, Greg Lambert asks: could we
imagine something like a "Deleuzian school of literary theory"? For any student of Deleuze's
writings, and especially those works written in collaboration with Guattari, Lambert suggests, the
response to the above questions might seem all to obvious; however, in the academy today we must
always hold out the possibility that anything can be perverted against its own nature (Lambert 2000:
136). Lambert picks up this argument in Whos Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? (2006). There are
some similarities between Lamberts position and the one articulated in this paper; a key difference is
the way the importance of textuality is understood.
3. Monographs and articles of note include those by Baugh (1997, 2000), Bogue (1996, 2003, 2010),
Boundas (2000), Bourassa (2009), Bryden (2007, 2009), Colebrook (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002),
Colombat (1997, 2000), Crawford (1997, 2000), Hughes (1997), Hicks (2001), Holland (1993, 1996,
2000), Lambert (2000, 2002, 2003, 2006), Lecercle (2002, 2010), Nealon (2003), Marks (1997, 2000),
Monaco (2008), Smith (1996, 1998, 2003), Stivale (1981, 1984, 1998), Tynan (2012), and Uhlmann
(1996).
This is an authors copy. This article was published in Deleuze Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp 529-557, 1
ISSN 1750-2241, November 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/dls.2015.0203
literary criticism. Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical has, in particular, received a
great deal of attention and Tynan's work spells out the importance of concepts of 'the
clinical' and health in a compelling way. Or, at least, in a way that is compelling for
philosophers and critics whose interest is in what might be called the ontological
Deleuze.4 As Tynans own comments suggest, it is likely to be less compelling for
those literary critics whose interest is less ontological and more textual. Like most
critics, Tynan appears to accept the view of Deleuze and Guattari, best summed-up by
Daniel W. Smith in his introduction to Essay Critical and Clinical, as rejecting modes
of reading that focus on textuality (Smith 1998: xv-xvi). This paper argues that this
widely held view of Deleuze and Guattari as offering an ontological alternative to the
textual focus of deconstruction is only one possible reading of their texts. The
possibility of a different reading of Deleuze and Guattaris admittedly discouraging
comments on reading, interpretation, and meaning is made apparent by interrogating
the difficult style of their own texts. This paper reads Deleuze and Guattaris work in
a different way and offers literary critics with an interest in textuality exactly what
Deleuze claims not to: a theory of reading. Is this theory of reading truly Deleuzian?
Perhaps not from the perspective of an ontological reading that sets itself against
textuality. Nevertheless, it produces new possibilities for one kind of Deleuzian
movement in literary criticism.5
4. Alain Badious Deleuze: The Clamor of Being is the most prominent example of this way of reading
Deleuze (Badiou 2000).
5. It will be interesting to see how the approach discussed here relates to the work collected in the
collection Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature, edited by Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts, and Aidan
Tynan, which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2015.
Deleuze and Guattaris words
The source for the widespread reading of Deleuze and Guattaris work as anti-
textual is clear. In Letter To A Harsh Critic, Deleuze summarises the position of
Anti-Oedipus on reading and interpretation as follows:
There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with
something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if youre even
more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next
book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and
interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on. Or theres
the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the
only question is Does it work, and how does it work? How does it work for
you? If it doesnt work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This
second way of readings intensive: something comes through or it doesnt.
Theres nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret.
(Deleuze 1995: 7-8)
For most commentators, these kinds of statements, which are frequent throughout
Deleuze and Guattaris work, appear to write-off the whole enterprise of
contemporary literary criticism. It is hardly surprising that their ideas have remained
relatively unexplored within literary criticism compared to many other fields such as,
for example, film and architecture.6
Ian Buchanan and John Marks edited collection Deleuze and Literature
provides a useful reference point for gauging critical responses. When Deleuze and
Guattari actively reject terms like signifier, meaning, and interpretation, Andr-
Pierre Colombat sees them as rejecting a focus on language and representation
(Colombat 2000: 22). Kenneth Surin frames this apparent move away from a focus on
language and textuality as a restoration of the privileges of various ontological
problems (Surin 2000: 172-174). Surin and Eugene Holland offer the widespread
view of Deleuze and Guattari as an alternative to Derrida (Holland 2000: 260-261),
6. Gregg Lamberts work is useful for understanding the Anglo-American critical reception of Deleuze
and Guattari. See Whos Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? (Lambert 2006).
while Bruce Baugh passes by deconstruction without comment (Baugh 2000: 34-56).7
Similarly, when John Rajchman notes in his book The Deleuze Connections that
Deleuzes work is not at all textualist and makes no attempt to abandon philosophy
in favor of art or text, or to undo all the distinctions between the two (2000: 116) at
one level his message appears to be that Deleuze is not the same as Derrida thank
goodness!. In short, one hope of a Deleuzian century appears to be that in it
philosophy will flex its ontological muscles once again, and the textual tangles of
deconstructive literary criticism will wither away. And, in Anti-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus, many passages similar to the one from Letter To A Harsh Critic
cited above seem to support this hope clearly and directly.
At the same time, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia both have
what seems best described as a highly literary style. Anti-Oedipus begins:
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits

and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to
have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines real ones, not figurative
ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other
machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1984: 1)8
Even by the standards of post-World War II French philosophy, which requires a
considerable adjustment for the Anglophone reader, these books also overflow with
allusions to and citations of literary texts. The first twenty-five pages of Anti-Oedipus,
for example, quote or allude directly to literary texts by Georg Buchner, Samuel
Beckett, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Franz
Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, Villiers, and Friedrich
7. Baugh does however engage with Derridas work in Making the difference: Deleuzes Difference
and Derridas Diffrance (Baugh 1997).
8. See Jean-Jacques Lecercles Deleuze and Language for a detailed discussion of this opening
paragraph in terms of literature (Lecercle 2002: 8-19).
Hlderlin.9 The density of such explicit references is entirely typical and there is also
a great deal of more indirect allusion, such as, for example, the solar anus mentioned
in the first paragraph, which is the name of a text by Georges Bataille (1985: 5-9). In
A Thousand Plateaus, things are taken even further: the third plateau, entitled
10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?), is framed
as the narrative of a lecture given by the same Professor Challenger who made the
Earth scream with his pain machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle (Deleuze
and Guattari 1988: 40).10 In a move beyond citation or allusion, a literary character is
given new life as a conceptual persona within the text.11 Similarly, the title of this
plateau, with its unexplained date, its inspired pun on Nietzsches The Genealogy of
Morals,12 and the strange question it poses in parenthesis, indicates the working of a
remarkably literary sensibility.
For readers of Derrida, this unusual mode of address actively draws attention
to questions of style and textuality when reading Deleuze and Guattari. Next to their
statements that reject meaning, interpretation, and textual theories of reading we must
place another set of statements, which indicate that Deleuze and Guattari pay a very
particular sort of attention to words, both their own and those of others. Deleuze hints
at this necessity in a number of marginal texts. In the same interview that he rejects
9. These quotations and allusions can be found in Deleuze and Guattari 1984 as follows: Georg
Buchner (2); Samuel Beckett (2-3, 12, 14, 20, 23); D. H. Lawrence (5, 24); Henry Miller (5); Henri
Michaux (6-7); Antonin Artaud (8-9, 14-15); Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel, Alfred
Jarry and Villiers (18); Friedrich Hlderlin (21). The name Villiers refers to French writer Jean Marie
Mathias Philippe August Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1840-89), author of The Future Eve.
10. Professor Challenger first appeared in The Lost World (1912). He also appears in the novel The
Land of Mists and the short stories The Disintegration Machine and The Poison Belt. The story that
Deleuze and Guattari refer to in A Thousand Plateaus is When the World Screamed, in which
Professor Challenger drills down to the core of the Earth in order to prove his hypothesis that the planet
is itself a living being. All these stories are collected in Doyle 1995, sadly without the original
illustrations.
11. The idea of conceptual persona is discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy?
(1994: 2-3, 61-83).
12. Nietzsches Zur Genealogie der Moral, first published in 1887, is commonly known in English as
The Genealogy of Morals, from the 1956 Francis Goffling translation (Nietzsche 1956) or as On The
Genealogy of Morals, from the 1967 Walter Kauffman and R. J. Hollingdale translation (Nietzsche
1967).
the idea of a theory of reading, for example, Deleuze also suggests that A Thousand
Plateaus introduces 'elementary novelistic methods into philosophy (1995: 25) and
appeals to literature: what we find in great English and American novelists, he
immediately suggests, is a gift, rare among the French, for intensities, flows,
machine-books, tool-books, schizo-books (1995: 23).13 Likewise, his prefaces to
Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense both invoke literary models: the
former describes itself as part detective novel, part science fiction (Deleuze 1994:
xx), while the latter claims to be a psychoanalytical novel (Deleuze 1990: xiv).14
Less marginal are the concepts of a minor literature elaborated in Kafka: Towards a
Minor Literature and of philosophical style, which is most developed in Essays
Critical and Clinical. In both cases, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise deterritorialising
uses of language, which they argue becomes revolutionary through a certain kind of
nonsense or stuttering. While these ideas have been widely discussed, it is not often
asked what these concepts mean for Deleuze and Guattaris own texts.15 It is hard to
reconcile their suggestion that becoming stranger to oneself, to ones language and
nation is the peculiarity of the philosopher and philosophy, their style, or what is
called a philosophical gobbledygook (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110) with a view
that treats their rejection of textuality, interpretation, and meaning as the whole story.
Where they have considered Deleuze and Guattaris own style, Anglo-
American critics and philosophers have usually seen it as an obstacle to understanding
13. These kinds of statements are no doubt what led Julia Kristeva to note, in Revolution in Poetic
Language, that while Deleuze and Guattari: are right to stress the destructuring and a-signifying
machine of the unconscious their examples of schizophrenic flow are usually drawn from modern
literature, in which the flow itself exists only through language, appropriating and displacing the
signifier to practice within it the heterogeneous generating of the desiring machine (1984: 17).
14. Amended translation. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle has pointed out, Lester and Stivale choose, rather
strangely, to translate psychanalytique as psychological rather than psychoanalytical (personal
communication).
15. But see Joe Hughes Philosophy After Deleuze: Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation II for an
interesting discussion of Deleuze and Guattaris style in relation to the idea of the philosopher as
friend (Hughes 2012: 1-26). Unusually, Hughes offers a positive explanation of their style, but his
account remains focused on style as a detour to ontology rather than a consideration of textuality.
what they are really talking about. Richard Barbrook sums up the general view
admirably when he suggests that Deleuze and Guattaris style is nothing more than
hermetic language and tortured syntax (Barbrook 2001: 161). The most prominent
example of this perspective is provided by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmonts best-
selling book Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers Abuse of Science,
which attacks Deleuze and Guattaris What is Philosophy? for its lack of clarity
(1999: 145). Intellectual Impostures suggests that Deleuze and Guattaris allusions to
science are so brief and superficial that a reader who is not already an expert in these
subjects will be unable to learn anything concrete while a specialist reader will find
their statements most often meaningless, or sometimes acceptable but banal and
confused (1999: 146). It is not only the alleged misuse of science that draws fire. In
Sokal and Bricmonts view, this is an abuse of philosophy too:
We are well aware that Deleuze and Guattaris subject is philosophy, not the
popularization of science. But what philosophical function can be fulfilled by
this avalanche of ill-digested scientific (and pseudo-scientific) jargon? In our
opinion, the most plausible explanation is that these authors possess a vast but
very superficial erudition, which they put on display in their writings. (Sokal
and Bricmont 1999: 146)
Intellectual Impostures response is to quote lengthy passages from What is
Philosophy? and then declare them to be nonsense (148), absurd (149), or totally
devoid of meaning (150).
No doubt many objections can and have been raised concerning Sokal and
Bricmonts approach; what is interesting is that Deleuze and Guattaris words have
appeared just as problematic to their supposed defenders. In Intensive Science and
Virtual Philosophy, for example, Manuel Delanda, in defence of Deleuze and Guattari
(although he adopts the common practice of only referring to Deleuze), declares that:
I will not be concerned in this reconstruction with the textual source of

Deleuzes ideas, nor with his style of argumentation or his use of language. In
short, I will not be concerned with Deleuzes words only with Deleuzes
world. (Delanda 2002: 3)
Delanda says he wants to dispel any negative impression created by Deleuze and
Guattaris experimental style, since he is addressing an audience of analytical
philosophers of science and scientists interested in philosophical questions, and:
When confronted with Deleuzes original texts this audience is bound to be

puzzled, and may even be repelled by the superficial similarity of these texts
with books belonging to what has come to be known as the post-modern
tradition. Although as I argue in these pages Deleuze has absolutely nothing in
common with that tradition, his experimental style is bound to create that
impression. (Delanda 2002: 1)
In defending Deleuze and Guattari, Delanda concedes the terrain of Sokal and
Bricmonts critique. Unlike Jean-Franois Lyotard, who expressed outrage at French
critics who responded to the publication of Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand
Plateaus by asking for a bit of sense (Lyotard 1992: 11), Delanda shifts the
argument to other grounds: ontology (2). Although Deleuze and Guattari were just
as scornful of the postmodern as Delanda would like, this approach does not address
the question of how this experimental style should be understood if not as a sign of
postmodernism.16,17
When it comes to Deleuze and Guattaris words, the tendency on both sides is
towards effacing the textual dimension of their work as far as possible.18 Writers like
16
Guattari called postmodernism the paradigm of all submission and every sort of compromise with
the existing status quo (Guattari 1996: 110).
17. Delanda acknowledges this to a degree, noting that: There is a certain violence which Deleuzes
texts must endure in order to be reconstructed for an audience they were not intended for, and that this
includes the violence done to Deleuzes fluid style, to the way he fights the premature solidification of
a terminology by always keeping it in a state of flux. Fixing his terminology will seem to some akin to
pinning down a live butterfly. As an antidote I offer an appendix where I relate the terms used in my
reconstruction to all the different terminologies he uses in his own texts and in his collaborative work,
setting his words free once again after they have served their purpose of giving us his world (2002: 6-
7).
18. Brian Massumis Translators Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy occupies an ambiguous position
that deserves further discussion in this context. It begins by posing the books style as a problemIt is
difficult to know how to approach it (Massumi 1988: ix)but, while Massumi certainly does not
disapprove of it on this account, his response seems to be to reassure. The message of his foreword
seems to be: if you find the style of this book difficult, then just dont read it. Using the analogy of
listening to a record, he suggests that there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them (xiii).
Delanda have used Deleuze and Guattari to produce a new philosophy of science,
while, simultaneously, Sokal and Bricmont fume over their abuse of science; both
are equally eager to dispense with any analysis of textuality and style. But can we
really forget about Deleuze and Guattaris words? One of the few critics to suggest we
cannot is Michel Foucault. In his 1977 preface to the English translation of Anti-
Oedipus, Foucault writes that:
It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference

(you know, that much-heralded theory that finally encompasses everything,
that finally totalises and reassures, the one we are told we need so badly in
our age of dispersion and specialization where hope is lacking). One must
not look for a philosophy amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions
and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel. I think that Anti-
Oedipus can best be read as an art, in the sense that is conveyed by the term
erotic art, for example. (Foucault 1984: xii)
If, as Foucault suggests, Deleuze and Guattaris texts are to be approached more like
art than philosophy, then consideration of their difficult style is key to any
interpretation of their work. The next three sections develop a reading of the meaning
of Deleuze and Guattaris style, through texts by Plato and Nietzsche, and using the
concepts of major and minor use. As this interpretation of their writing style is
developed, it becomes clear that, contrary to the widespread idea that they are anti-
textualists, and despite Deleuzes remarks to Clment, his work, with and without
Thus, although the style is recognised as a positive aspect of the book, Massumi falls into a highly
subjectivist interpretation: The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge The
question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think?
What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open
in the body? The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be none. If that happens, its not
your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off buying a record (xv). Invoking the tool
box metaphor, Massumi thus seems to reduce the idea of use to an anything goes version of
postmodernity that rests on an idea of individual choice. On the other hand, some justification for this
position might be taken from Deleuzes own Letter to a Harsh Critic, which makes some similar
points (Deleuze 1995: 7-8).
Mark Seems introduction to Anti-Oedipus does not touch upon style except even more
indirectly through references to Deleuze and Guattaris joyously unorthodox use of many writers and
thinkers (Seem 1984: xvii), which he calls more poetic but more fun (xix), likening it to stoned
thinking (xxi). Like Massumi, Seem thus appears to celebrate the style of the text only insofar as it
represents an anything goes eclecticism.
Guattari, offers a well-developed and intriguing theory of reading that opens up new
possibilities for textual and literary criticism.
Style in Philosophy
Right from the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition, born precisely as it
distinguished itself from the less scrupulous discourses of the Sophists and
rhetoricians, the assignment of style to poetry and literature, and their exclusion
from any part in a discourse that aims at truth, is a constant. Not only should
languages affective, sonorous, and metaphorical qualities be confined to literature,
but also, if at all possible, they should remain under the jurisdiction of reason even
within literature. In Book X of The Republic, for example, Socrates suggests that
poetry is acceptable only insofar it serves the State and reason:
the only poetry that should be allowed in a state is hymns to the gods and
paeans in praise of good men; once you go beyond that and admit the sweet
lyric or epic muse, pleasure and pain become your rulers instead of law and
the rational principles commonly accepted as best. (Plato 1987: 437; 607a)
Differentiating between a philosophical and poetic use of language is not enough:
even within poetry, Socrates distinguishes a proper use of language under the power
of rational principles and an improper use of language that rules the body through
pleasure and pain.
Today, the consensus in Western philosophical discourse remains that style
should be characterised by qualities like clarity, simplicity, and economy. Both
analytic and continental philosophers generally view the kind of blurring between
literary and philosophical uses of language that occurs in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia with deep suspicion. As Habermas puts it, philosophy deals with the
validity claims raised within the text and does not refer to the text (1992: 224). On
this view of language, style is what defines literature and the literary but it is both
supplementary to and threatens to corrupt philosophical discourse it may lead to
people mistaking a representation for the thing represented or a copy for the Idea. In
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze, in agreement with Derrida, argues that precisely
this separation is essential to the philosophical tradition:
It is correct to define metaphysics by reference to Platonism, but insufficient

to define Platonism by reference to the distinction between essence and
appearance. The primary distinction which Plato rigorously establishes is the
one between the model and the copy. The copy, however, is far from a simple
appearance, since it stands in an internal, spiritual, noological and ontological
relation with the Idea or model. The second and more profound distinction is
the one between the copy itself and the phantasm. It is clear that Plato
distinguishes, and even opposes, models and copies only in order to obtain a
selective criterion with which to separate copies and simulacra, the former
founded upon their relation to the model while the latter are disqualified
because they fail both the test of the copy and the requirements of the model.
(Deleuze 1994: 264-5)
For Deleuze, a simulacrum is a kind of dangerous supplement to the Idea, rather
than its faithful copy, since it challenges both the notion of the model and that
of the copy, just as, for Derrida in Of Grammatology, the supplement of writing
challenges the primacy of speech.19 In writing, the danger of the copy becoming a
simulacrum, i.e. a copy that exceeds and threatens rather than reproducing the Idea or
model, begins with style (Deleuze 1994: 68-9, 126-8). What could be worse for the
integrity of philosophical discourse than a beautiful utterance being mistaken for a
true one, or a signifier for a signified?
Book X of The Republic makes this point by assigning literature a role in
contradistinction to philosophy. Socrates declares that realistic representations
definitely harm the minds of their audiences, unless theyre inoculated against them
by knowing their real nature (Plato 1987: 422; 595b). The subtext seems to be that
when art convincingly represents appearances it threatens not just the distinction
19. In an analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Essay on the Origin of Languages, Derrida describes
the way writing has been thought about as a dangerous supplement to speech (1997: 141-64). At the
close of Of Grammatology, in The Supplement of (at) the Origin, he develops a logic of the originary
supplement (1997: 313).
between the true and the false, or between the original and the copy, but also between
philosophical and literary language, only the former of which is meant to be able to
provide real knowledge. Socrates later adds that:
We must ask ourselves whether those who have met the poets have, when they
see or hear their works, failed to perceive that they are representations at the
third remove from reality, and easy to produce without any knowledge of the
truth, because they are appearances and not realities; or are they right, and do
good poets really know about the subjects on which the public thinks they
speak so well? (426-7; 598e-599)
His answer is that the poets do not know anything but illusion: all the poets from
Homer downwards have no grasp of truth but merely produce a superficial likeness of
any subject they treat (429; 600e-601). Just how dearly poetry is expected to pay for
presuming to represent the real nature of thingsfor usurping the role of
philosophycan be seen in Socrates conclusion that when you strip it of its poetic
colouring, reduce it to plain prose I think you know how little it amounts to (429;
601b).
This whole progression is important in respect of at least three things it fails to
acknowledge. First, Socrates argument cannot account for philosophy itself always
being either spoken or written, or for the fact that it too relies on a representation of an
appearance that is, on language, on signifiers. The plainness of prose is a fallacy:
take away the language philosophy shares with poetry, and it too amounts to very
little. Second, Socrates own method of argument frequently relies on hypothetical
situations and analogies that do not refer to anything real, not even to appearances,
and which are frequently based on simile and metaphor. Indeed, Socrates very next
utterance (after I think you know how little it amounts to) provides a fine example
of this. Like a face which relied on the bloom of youth for its charm, he says, and
whose lack of beauty is plain to see when youth deserts it (429; 601b). This utterance
involves a poetic simile (like a face), and it uses two metaphors relating to age: the
bloom of youth, and the idea of being deserted by ones youth. Particularly notable
is how much this poetic flourish does lose when reduced to plain prose, as it does
not yield up much sense, and only creates a striking image. How can poetry reduced
to prose be like an aged face? It seems to imply that prose is the old age of poetry
a very puzzling formulation that does not seem to be ruled by rational principles but
by another metaphor.
Third, not only does Socrates argument seem to deny the philosopher
recourse to signifiers and language, but, at a meta-textual level, Socrates own
position as a character in a written text which itself employs at least some of the
conventions of realistic representation becomes problematic. Although the text is not
presented as if it really happened, it is based upon a historical person, known to the
author, and implicitly claims to be giving an accurate picture of Socrates
philosophical position and method. This being the case, that it does not present itself
as a historical account but explicitly as a fiction, a dramatic dialogue, is the most
striking thing of all: the text is itself an example of precisely what is being criticised.
It is not an original instance of Socrates philosophy, but only Platos copy or
simulacra. Socrates conclusion that the artist knows little or nothing about the
subjects he represents and that the art of representation is something that has no
serious value; and that this applies above all to tragic poetry, epic or dramatic (431;
602b) also applies to the philosophical text that proposes it.20
20. These points are not new. A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance describes very similar
arguments in the writings of Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553), who: answers Platos charge that,
since poetry is three removes from ideal truth, poets are fundamentally ignorant of the realities they
attempt to imitate, by pointing out that the poet is indeed ignorant of what he is speaking of, in so far as
he is a versifier and skilled in language, just as the philosopher or historian is ignorant of natural or
historical facts in so far as he, too, is merely skilled in language, but knows these facts in so far as he is
learned, and has thought out the problems of nature and history. The poet, as well as the philosopher
and the historian, must possess knowledge, if he is to teach anything; he, too, must learn the things he
is going to write about, and must solve the problems of life and thought; he, too, must have a
philosophical and a historical training. Platos objection, indeed, applies to the philosopher, to the
This passage from The Republic illustrates both the way philosophy attempts
to constitute itself in a relation of difference with literature and style, and the
impossibility of really drawing this distinction without at the same moment
reintroducing the literary (if it was ever absent). In this sense the philosophical text is
forced not only to remain at the level of signifiers but also to use literary language in
order to deny that it is a text. Since it remains discursive, philosophical language is
always already supplemented literary language; a text that claims its object is the
truth or the good does not, merely by virtue of saying so, refer to anything outside
itself. As Derrida writes: if a text always gives itself a certain representation of its
own roots, those roots live only by that representation, by never touching the soil
(1997: 101). In The Republic this cleavage of literature and philosophy hinges on a
rational subject (understood in relation to empirical objects and to Ideas) and the most
important source of knowledge is said to be that based on use (as the mastery of an
object). During the course of the argument discussed above Socrates asks, isnt the
quality, beauty and fitness of any implement or creature or action judged by reference
to the use for which man or nature produced it? (Plato 1987: 430; 601d). This
rhetorical question encapsulates the sense in which philosophical discourse both
constitutes itself as what can be termed, following Deleuze and Guattaris concepts of
major and minor literature in Kafka, a major use of language that re-inscribes a
sovereign and rational subject. But considered as an utterance, as a textual example of
how Socrates is represented as speaking, it also shows how contradictory the self-
image of this philosophical major use of language is, how strange this elision of
textuality is in assigning style, the poetic, and the literary a role as antithetical to
truth and reason. In the very act of claiming the status of a major use of language,
orator, to the historian, quite as much as to the poet (Spingarn 1963: 22). See also The Simulacrum
and Ancient Philosophy (Deleuze 1990: 253-79) and Platos Pharmacy (Derrida 1981: 63-171).
philosophy also makes a poetic, literary, and consequently a minor use of language
that moves away from simple reference.
To make Platos text stand in for all Western philosophy would be too
simplistic. Every philosophical text negotiates the relationship between the literal and
the metaphorical use of language in its own way. Nonetheless, the extent to which
Platos view of representation has persisted cannot be underestimated. The success of
Sokal and Bricmonts book is only one of the latest indications that the demand for
language to be used clearly and according to rational principles, especially when it
comes to philosophy or science, remains dominant in Western culture. In both
analytic and continental philosophy, a clear division between the philosophical and
the literary is still demanded. Where this has been challenged, for example in texts
produced by Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, it has been under the
influence of Friedrich Nietzsches work.
Truth and dancing
In advancing a radical perspectivism that acknowledges only relative knowledge and
dismisses the idea of unchanging or ideal truths, Nietzsche recast philosophy as a
discourse of competing styles. As early as 1873, in On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense, the venerable idea of truth was dismissed as follows:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,

anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been
subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration,
and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as
firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we
have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by
frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their
stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins. (Nietzsche 1999:
146)
In this passage, truth is not the object of a philosophical or major use of language
that can be defined in opposition to the falsity of literature, but the worn-out product
of social relations, intensified by literary use itself. Inasmuch as this literary, poetic
origin has been forgotten, the coins have lost their stamp and all sensuous vigour,
all power to affect the senses (as the poetic did in The Republic). However, that truth
is a matter of metaphors, metonymies, [and] anthropomorphisms has been
forgotten by a particular kind of use: a philosophical use that ignores textuality. The
concept of abstract or universal truth, of a truth that can be expressed by, or
extracted from, a text without loss is thus contested in this passage. Truths are instead
presented as simulacra, signifiers without signifieds, copies without a model or
original: the very thing philosophy attempts to exclude from truth.
In Deleuzes reading of Nietzsche, this contestation of truth and philosophy
rests on Kants previous critique of the metaphysical use of reason. He sees
Nietzsche as extending and ultimately undercutting Kants critique by attempting a
true critique that works in terms of values (Deleuze 1983: 1); what Nietzsche
called the transvaluation of values. Where Kant was content to establish the proper
use of reason, the rules and limits of its use (Kant 1993: 7; Axv) as a means to
establish truth,21 Nietzsche tries to establish the value of truth as a concept, and of
what is claimed to be true on the basis of reason. The passage quoted above from
Nietzsches On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense continues:
Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we
have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in
order to exist, i.e. the obligation to use the customary metaphors, or, to put it
in moral terms, the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established
convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all. (Nietzsche
1999: 146)
21. An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? is also greatly concerned with the proper
uses of reason (Kant 1983).
For Nietzsche, it is a set of unquestioned, unconscious moral assumptions, the very
belief in morality itself, which have bestowed value on what are held to be truths
and on the very idea of truth. Philosophers have been building under the seduction
of morality apparently aiming at certainty, at truth, but in reality aiming at
majestic moral structures (Nietzsche 1982: 3).22 This is the point where Nietzsche
steps beyond Kantian critique, since, as Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition:
Kantian Critique is ultimately respectful: knowledge, morality, reflection and

faith are supposed to correspond to natural interests of reason, and are never
themselves called into question; only the use of the faculties is declared
legitimate or not in relation to one or other of these interests. Throughout, the
variable model of recognition fixes good usage in the form of a harmony
between the faculties determined by a dominant faculty under a given
common sense Critique has everythinga tribunal of justices of the peace,
a registration room, a registerexcept the power of a new politics which
would overturn the image of thought. (Deleuze 1994: 137)
However, when the image of thought conserved in Kants philosophy is overturned, in
Nietzsches texts, the point is reached where, as in such works as Mallarms Book
or Joyces Finnegans Wake everything has become simulacrum (Deleuze 1994:
69).23
Nietzsches work constructs an image of a Dionysian philosopher-artist who
affirms a singular vision as the most life-enhancing, strengthening style of positing
truths. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze argues that:
Nietzsche creates his own method: dramatic, typological and differential. He

turns philosophy into an art, the art of interpreting and evaluating. In every
case he asks the question Which one? The one that is Dionysus. That
which is the will to power as plastic and genealogical principle. The will to
power is not force but the differential element which simultaneously
determines the relation of forces (quantity) and the respective qualities of
related forces. It is in this element of difference that affirmation manifests
itself and develops itself as creative. (Deleuze 1983: 197)
22. Nietzsche is quoting Kant when he uses this phrase.

23. Deleuze makes the same argument about the limits of Kants critique in Nietzsche and Philosophy
(1983: 89-90).
Truth is not discovered beyond sensible appearances, but affirmed, as a style, within
or of appearances considered as simulacra, appearances no longer opposed to a
solely intelligible, determining logos. Truth becomes a matter of differences of forces,
not of correspondence or description; at which point, it is no longer truth in any
conventional sense.24
Rather than leading to an anti-textualist position, this perspective, by locating
truth in the simulacra of metaphors and metonymies, poetically and rhetorically
intensified, gives writing and style a central place in Nietzsches philosophical
project. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes philosophical thinking as a
style that his contemporaries no longer understand:
Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means
Read German books: no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a
plan of instruction, a will to mastery is required for thinking that thinking
has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned, as a form of dancing
(Nietzsche 1990: 76-7)
The argument here is that his contemporaries have no sense that style is required in
thinking, or that it might be a style. Rather, they think it is a natural faculty; that
common sense is the beginning and end of thinking, its basis and ultimate
destination. It is of course debatable whether or not German philosophy at the end of
the nineteenth century (or philosophy in any age) is quite so heavy-footed. But that
Nietzsche should critique philosophy on the basis of its style indicates a radical shift
has taken place: philosophical discourse has been re-constituted on the basis of the
very element it attempts to exclude. Twilight of the Idols reinvents philosophy as a
style, a play, a dance:
For dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being
able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say
24. In Differance, Derrida cites Deleuzes suggestion in Nietzsche and Philosophy that difference in
quantity is the essence of force, the relation of force with force (Derrida 1973: 148). In Difference and
Repetition, Deleuzes follows his claim that the sole origin is difference (1994: 125) with a note
referring to Derridas essay Differance.
that one has to be able to dance with the pen that writing has to be learned?
But at this point I should become a complete enigma to my German readers
(Nietzsche 1990: 77)
In privileging style and writing in this way, Nietzsche challenges the dominant
discourse, breaking with the epistemological frame that excludes precisely these
things (and with them difference, variability, and singularity) from philosophy. And
his emphasis on style, on the textual as an order of signifiers without a final signified,
renders him, to this day, largely incomprehensible within the philosophical discourse
he is challenging, one in which reading and writing are still organised in relation to an
idea of transcendent truth positioned somewhere outside language.25
Major and Minor Styles
Considered from the perspective of Platos Republic and Nietzsches deployment of
style, criticisms of Deleuze and Guattaris tortured syntax begin to take on a
clearer significance. To write philosophy in a way that draws attention, deliberately
and playfully, to style, is to challenge the very foundation of philosophy, to
problematize the division of philosophical and literary uses of language, and to
disrupt the possibility of treating language as transparently referential. Style, in
philosophical discourse, reveals the irreducible materiality and opacity of language
that always frustrate the possibility of using language to discover a truth outside
representation; a truth which, nonetheless, language itself seems to offer the subject.
These ideas are familiar within deconstructive criticism; the point here is not,
however, to suggest that the same textual strategies are at work in Derrida and in
Deleuze and Guattari. Rather, like Foucaults remarks in his preface to Anti-Oedipus,
25. In Force and Signification, however, Derrida argues that Nietzsche recommends a dance of the
pen in vain since writing cannot be thoroughly Dionysiac (Derrida 1990: 29). And it will always be
possible to read Nietzsche, or any text, as if style were not important. As Lyotard asks on the final page
of his profoundly Nietzschean text, Libidinal Economy, is the dance true? One will always be able to
say so. But thats not where its force [puissance] lies (Lyotard 1993: 262)).
Derridas work should alert critics to stylistic, textual, and interpretative questions
within Deleuze and Guattaris texts. Daniel Smith, John Rajchman, and many others
are quite right when they stress that Deleuze and Guattari are not attempting to
deconstruct the opposition between literary and philosophical discourse (Smith 1998:
xv; Rajchman 2000: 116). Rather, they attempt to construct or constitute a different
image of thought (Deleuze 1994: 129-67), a minor philosophy that is a matter of
conceptual creation rather than validation or reference, and which is no longer
opposed to the literary, nor literary itself in the conventional sense (of being false or
a fiction). The experimental style of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is neither
literary nor philosophical in the ordinary senses of these words (it cannot be
understood either as metaphorical or as propositional). Rather, this style attempts to
put language to a minor, revolutionary use, one that challenges the position of the
subject as using language like a tool, and detaches discourse from a referential
function. In this sense, and with this aim, Deleuze and Guattari extend Nietzsches
thought by inventing a new style of philosophising, a Nomadic Thought that
involves conceptual creation and the deterritorialisation of language that moves it
away from a referential use.26
The kind of criticisms of Deleuze and Guattaris style of writing discussed
earlier continue to judge their texts against a more traditional philosophical use of
language that assumes it is a discourse governed by truth. If both critics and
advocates largely ignore the question of style in Deleuze and Guattaris texts, this
seems to stem from a shared investment in the philosophical ideal of knowledge as a
transparent discourse, operated by a rational and sovereign subject, whose object is
truth. In other words, from a wish to preserve the major use of language intact, and to
26. The strand of Deleuze and Guattaris work related to the idea of Nomadic Thought offers the
strongest challenge to readings that privilege ontology at the expense of textuality. See Nomadic
Thought (Deleuze 2004).
continue viewing style as a distorting factor, best exorcised, rather than as
constitutive of language. It is a rejection of this view of language, knowledge, and
thought, rather than an anti-textual position, which leads Deleuze and Guattari to
make the statements they do about meaning and interpretation. What they reject is the
idea that language is a form of transparent or mimetic representation. That is, they
reject the major use of language that has dominated Western philosophical discourse,
based as it is on the idea of a unified subject who dutifully interprets and masters
well-ordered meanings at the level of representation in relation to the truth it always
already lacks. The question of style is thus in essence a political one, since the
effacement of style within philosophical discourse is not a matter of error but
presupposes and re-inscribes a set of values. Philosophys attempted effacement of
style underwrites the sovereignty of the subject by treating language as a tool, always
already subordinate to a rational subjects aims, and so simultaneously shoring up the
possibility of truth. Privileging style, however, as Deleuze and Guattari do, is a way
of asserting the independence of language and texts from the use for a subject, truth,
or reference. It gives texts, and therefore reading and criticism, a different value.
A theory of reading
Writing about Foucault, in Letter to Reda Bensmaia, Deleuze says:
I think great philosophers are also great stylists. And while a philosophical
vocabulary is one element in a style, involving as it does the introduction of
new words on the one hand, or giving an unusual sense to ordinary words on
the other, style is always a matter of syntax. But syntax is a sort of straining
toward something that isnt syntactic nor even linguistic (something outside
language). (Deleuze 1995: 164)
Despite Deleuzes gesture towards something extra-linguistic, this something outside
language is not an ontological referent, but the movement of concepts (164). In
other words, that syntax strains towards something extra-linguistic does not mean
that language is just in the way or a means to an end, since, as Deleuze and Guattari
argue in What is Philosophy?, the concept is real without being actual, ideal without
being abstract it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object
at the same time as it is created (1994: 22). On the other hand, the concept is not
discursive and philosophy is not a discursive formation, because it does not link
propositions together (22). What is Philosophy? argues that philosophy concerns
neither external referents nor the content of propositions, but non-discursive concepts.
That concepts are non-discursive does not mean that philosophy is not a kind of
writing, however, since philosophy still proceeds by sentences, but it is not always
propositions that are extracted from sentences (24). Instead:
from sentences or their equivalent, philosophy extracts concepts (which must

not be confused with general or abstract ideas), whereas science extracts
prospects (propositions that must not be confused with judgments), and art
extracts percepts and affects (which must not be confused with perceptions or
feelings). In each case language is tested and used in incomparable waysbut
in ways that do not define the difference between disciplines without also
constituting their perpetual interbreeding. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 24)
In rejecting propositions Deleuze and Guattari reject unified, totalised meanings.
And in distinguishing concepts from ideas, prospects from judgements, and percepts
and affects from perceptions and feelings, they reject the indexing of philosophy,
science, and art to the mastery of a subject who merely uses language to its own
ends.27 What remains a key part of the picture, however, are texts and reading.
In 1914: One or Several Wolves?, Deleuze and Guattari chide Freud for filling
the void with associations and using the word to reestablish a unity no longer found
in things in his interpretation of the Wolf-Man (1988: 26, 28). Freuds procedure in
27. While Deleuze and Guattari appear to assign literature, and therefore literary criticism, to the
domain of percepts and affects, distinct from philosophys concern with concepts, the reality is that
they themselves do not respect these divisions. In their own texts, the perpetual interbreeding Deleuze
and Guattari allude to allows philosophy to extract affects and literature to extract concepts at every
turn. Even in the essay that has become a touchstone for ontological readings of Deleuze, Immanence:
A Life, we find that the philosophical concept of immanence is best described in literature (Deleuze
2001: 28).
interpreting one of the Wolf-Mans dreams, concerning six or seven wolves in a
tree, is read as follows:
He has decided that this is neurosis, so it is always a question of bringing back

the unity or identity of the person or allegedly lost object. The wolves will have
to be purged of their multiplicity. This operation is accomplished by associating
the dream with the tale, The Wolf and the Seven Kid-Goats (only six of which
get eaten). We witness Freuds reductive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave
the wolves to take the shape of goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the
story. Seven wolves that are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the
Wolf-Man himself) is hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen his
parents make love at five oclock, and the roman numeral V is associated with
the erotic spreading of a womans legs. Three wolves: the parents may have
made love three times. Two wolves: the first coupling the child may have seen
was the two parents more ferarum, or perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf
is the father, as we all knew from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not
just a castrator but also castrated. Who is Freud trying to fool? (Deleuze and
Guattari 1988: 28)
In passages like this one, Deleuze and Guattari seek to demonstrate that
psychoanalysis does a poor job of reading of the unconscious by offering an
alternative, counter-method of reading. The plateau re-reads the Wolf-Man in terms of
desire as multiplicity that invests wolves at the level of intensity rather than as
representations of something else (i.e. coitus between parents, castration) that relates
desire to a unified subject. Deleuze and Guattari argue that:
The wolf, as the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is

not a representative, a substitute, but an I feel. I feel myself becoming a wolf, one
wolf among others, on the edge of the pack It is not a question of
representation: dont think for a minute that it has to do with believing oneself a
wolf, representing oneself as a wolf. The wolf, wolves, are intensities, speeds,
temperatures, nondecomposable variable distances. A swarming, a wolfing. Who
could ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine, or
that the two are linked only by an Oedipal apparatus, by the all-too-human figure
of the Father? (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 32)
While desire is not textual for Deleuze and Guattari, they continue to read desire in
texts, and the misreadings of psychoanalysis are not presented simply as errors. 28
28. Partly in response to Anti-Oedipus, Jean Baudrillard suggests, in Symbolic Exchange and Death,
that the concept of the unconscious should be abandoned altogether (Baudrillard 1993).
For them, just as much as for psychoanalysis, reading of texts is a matter of reading
desire. 1914: One or Several Wolves? acknowledges that:
Of course, there are Oedipal statements. For example, Kafkas story, Jackals and
Arabs, is easy to read in that way: you can always do it, you cant lose, it works
every time, even if you understand nothing. The Arabs are clearly associated with
the father and the jackals with the mother; between the two, there is a whole story
of castration represented by the rusty scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs
are an extensive, armed, organized mass stretching across the entire desert; and
the jackals are an intense pack forever launching into the desert following lines
of flight or deterritorialization (they are madmen, veritable madmen); between
the two, at the edge, the Man of the North, the jackal-man. (Deleuze and Guattari
1988: 37)
It is the phrase but it so happens that which signals the critical point of divergence
from Freuds method of reading. The key difference is whether texts are read in terms
of immanent or transcendent selections that is, what kind of unconscious is
constructed and affirmed in or through the text. By assuming Oedipus as a universal
abstract principle, psychoanalysis makes exclusively Oedipal, transcendent selections
and misreads the unconscious.
A very different approach to reading desire in texts based on immanent principles
of selection is at the heart of what Deleuze and Guattari can offer literary criticism.29
It is both original in approach, and potentially far-reaching in its consequences, since
it is a way of reading that aims to contest fundamental ideas within Western thought
and culture. Unlike psychoanalytic readings, Deleuze and Guattaris approach to
reading attempts to affirm the immanence of desire by rejecting the use of such
abstract universals (unity, totality, the subject) as criteria of selection, arguing that
they are illegitimate, transcendent principles. As Deleuze describes it in On
Philosophy:
29. Colebrook (2002: especially 51-71) and Tynan (2012: especially 10-12, 15-16) note the importance
of immanent criticism to Deleuze and Guattari and, like many authors, identify the Niezschean
genealogy of this approach. However, in these texts the concept of immanence is understood in relation
to ontology, rather than in relation to textuality.
Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there are no
such things as universals, theres nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or
object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying,
rationalizing, but just processes all the same. These processes are at work in
concrete multiplicities, multiplicity is the real element in which things happen.
(Deleuze 1995: 145-6)
In his preface to the English translation of Dialogues II, Deleuze characterises this
approach as an empiricism, or pluralism concerned with multiplicities (Deleuze
and Parnet 2002: vii). Unlike so-called rationalist philosophies, where the abstract
is given the task of explaining, Deleuze says he approaches things with a completely
different evaluation: analysing the states of things, in such a way that non-pre-existent
concepts can be extracted from them (vii). By states of things, he means neither
unities nor totalities, but multiplicities (vii). Elaborating the differences between
these two approachesa rationalism that moves from the abstract to things, and an
empiricism that moves from things to the abstractDeleuze writes that:
To extract the concepts which correspond to a multiplicity is to trace the lines of

which it is made up, to determine the nature of these lines, to see how they
become entangled, connect, bifurcate, avoid or fail to avoid foci. These lines are
true becomings, which are distinct not only from unities, but from the history in
which they are developed. Multiplicities are made up of becomings without
history, of individuation without subject (the way in which a river, a climate, an
event, a day, an hour of the day, is individualized). That is, the concept exists just
as much in empiricism as in rationalism, but it has a completely different use and
a completely different nature: it is a being-multiple, instead of a being-one, a
being-whole or being as subject. (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: viii)
Although he does not use the terms here, this distinction can be related to a major
(rationalist) use and a minor (empiricist or pluralist) use. Similarly, in Essays Critical
and Clinical, Deleuzes essay Plato, the Greeks suggests that philosophy is
essentially selective, and the difference between rationalist and empiricist
philosophies depends upon the criteria used to make that selection (1998: 136-7).
What Plato invented, he argues, was a way of making selections that is based on
transcendent determinations such as the one, the totality, and the subject, and so the
poisoned gift of Platonism is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to
have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning (137).30
In Plato, the Greeks, Deleuze argues that:
Every reaction against Platonism is a restoration of immanence in its full

extension and in its purity, which forbids the return of any transcendence. The
question is whether such a reaction abandons the project of a selection among
rivals, or on the contrary, as Spinoza and Nietzsche believed, draws up
completely different methods of selection. Such methods would no longer
concern claims as acts of transcendence, but the manner in which an existing
being is filled with immanence (the Eternal Return as the capacity of something
or someone to return eternally). Selection no longer concerns the claim, but
power: unlike the claim, power [puissance] is modest. (Deleuze 1998: 137)
Deleuze and Guattaris theory of reading rests upon the refusal of transcendent criteria
of selection (Ideas), and proceeds by constructing completely different methods of
selection based on immanent criteria. A minor reading of this kind has a completely
different use, since it is no longer motivated by claims to the truth or the need to
affirm the sovereignty of a unified subject. The hostility towards meaning,
interpretation, and the subject that are found in Deleuze and Guattaris texts are all
part of this project of reversing Platonism, by refusing the epistemological or
ontological primacy of the representational categories of the negative, unity, the
subject, and totality. These categories govern the major use of language and turn
reading into an effacement of textuality, since when you invoke something
transcendent you arrest movement, introducing interpretations instead of
experimenting (Deleuze 1995: 146).31 They govern the philosophical language-game
that ignores style, or assigns it to literary, metaphorical language, while attempting
30. This is an argument that Deleuze also makes in a 1966 essay, The Simulacrum and Ancient
Philosophy, which proposed that philosophy must reverse Platonism (Deleuze 1990); in Difference
and Repetition (Deleuze 1994: 60-1), and with Guattari in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 9-10).
31. As discussed earlier in relation to What is Philosophy?, the movement referred to here is that of
concepts (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22).
to treat non-literary, philosophical language as if it were a matter only of
propositions that related to transcendent truths.32
For Deleuze and Guattari, a minor reading is also affirmation of the immanence
of desire. The term affirmation is used in the sense described by Nietzsche in
Twilight of the Idols:
To divide the world into a real and an apparent world, whether in the manner
of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning
Christian ) is only a suggestion of dcadence a symptom of declining life.
That the artist places a higher value on appearance than on reality constitutes no
objection to this proposition. For appearance here signifies reality once more,
only selected, strengthened, corrected. The tragic artist is not a pessimist it is
precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is
Dionysian (Nietzsche 1990: 49)
Against a division of the world into the intelligible and the sensible, where the
sensible (including representation) is merely an appearance, and the intelligible is
the true, transcendent reality it refers to, Nietzsche proposes the affirmation of
appearances, of multiplicity, becoming, and difference, which, in being affirmed, are
no longer opposed to reality. Affirmation thus gives the simulacra their full power
of the false, and overturns the logic of representation as such (of the hierarchical
difference between representing sign and represented thing). In Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze argues that overturning Platonism, then, means denying the
primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorifying the reign of simulacra
and reflections (Deleuze 1994: 66). When multiplicity and becoming are affirmed in
their immanence every thing, animal or being assumes the status of simulacrum in a
universal ungrounding (67). Nietzsches Dionysian affirmation, the essence of the
tragic, is precisely this empowering of the simulacra, in that it is no longer concerned
with affirming the unified subject in relation to the objects of knowledge, or with
32. While it could be argued that this argument concerns philosophy rather than literature, it also
breaks down that precisely distinction. It must also be noted not only that Deleuze chose to place
Plato, the Greeks within Essays Critical and Clinical, but also that his examples of overturning
Platonism are as likely to be drawn from literature as from philosophy.
stabilising meaning in relation to the subject. Instead, as a minor reading, it is the
affirmation of desire and difference.
Conclusion
Arguing against an anti-textualist reading of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper has
developed ideas about their style of writing and approach to reading in relation to the
concepts of a major use of language, dominant within the philosophical tradition, and
a minor use. Although the term style has been associated with a minor use of
language (in writing and reading) because of its potential to draw attention to the very
textuality a major use effaces, both major and minor uses of language are styles. As
a language-game, philosophical discourse constitutes itself as a major language by
attempting to exclude style, metaphor, and poetry from the realm of knowledge and
attributing them to literature; but this major use of language itself remains a style, and
the literary is always already at work in philosophical discourse. The work of reading
as affirmation is to trace the way texts immanently constitute these major and minor
styles, and reveal the way that the minor, when affirmed, undoes the major.
Within this major style, language is understood as a kind of tool used by a
rational subject for specific purposes: the transparent representation of external
referents (objects) and internal referents (states of mind, thoughts), or the formulation
of propositions that refer to an outside world. The model is the same whether one is
writing or reading, inscribing unified meanings or decoding them in a symmetrical
way. While no philosopher has ever believed that this ideal of a perfectly transparent
language could be fully attainedmeaning can never be fully decoded because
language, in its materiality and opacity, gets in the wayit has nonetheless remained
a guiding principle for thinking about the use of language, at least since Plato, right up
to the present day. It is from the perspective of this ideal transparency that problems
concerning language are posed: how to reduce confusion and increase clarity, how to
represent or interpret accurately, or how an accurate representation is possible, have
been the dominant kind of questions. In fact, this model of language-use is so
dominant that it is completely naturalized: that language is a tool for a subject and that
the work of reading is to decode, as accurately as possible, the meanings put there by
the authors of texts is common sense. On the other hand, a minor style or way of
reading shows that no use of language can avoid the metaphorical or non- literal;
referential and mimetic transparency or interpretation is impossible because textuality
always gets in the way: every language-game is a style. The stubborn materiality
and opacity of language thus challenges the sovereignty of a rational subject, whether
a writer or a reader, in relation to both external and internal objects of knowledge. In
troubling this investment in a unified subject, the minor use of language or minor
approach to reading, as a form of deterritorialisation of the major use that treats
language in terms of sense and reference, is therefore very much a matter of politics.
Where critics and defenders of Deleuze and Guattari read them as if their style
was a mere inconvenience, they reveal a shared political investment in a philosophical
language-game that Deleuze and Guattari themselves attempt to disrupt. They also
overlook the passages where Deleuze and Guattari articulate despite their claims to
the contrary a theory of reading based on the principle of immanent selections and
motivated by the philosophical project of overturning Platonism. Applying this
theory of reading, as a way to explore and interpret this conservative investment in
maintaining the separation of the literal and the metaphorical, is one of the essential
tasks of a Deleuzian literary criticism. It also has implications for the philosophical
trajectory that, over the last two decades, has used Deleuze and Guattaris texts to
restore the privileges of ontology.
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From Deleuze and Guattaris words to a Deleuzian theory of reading

Nonetheless, as Aidan Tynan notes in Deleuze's Literary Clinic, comparatively few

Deleuze.4 As Tynans own comments suggest, it is likely to be less compelling for

possibility of a different reading of Deleuze and Guattaris admittedly discouraging

comments on reading, interpretation, and meaning is made apparent by interrogating

textuality. Nevertheless, it produces new possibilities for one kind of Deleuzian

movement in literary criticism.5

textual is clear. In Letter To A Harsh Critic, Deleuze summarises the position of

Anti-Oedipus on reading and interpretation as follows:

Deleuze and Guattaris work, appear to write-off the whole enterprise of

for example, film and architecture.6

Pierre Colombat sees them as rejecting a focus on language and representation

language and textuality as a restoration of the privileges of various ontological

view of Deleuze and Guattari as an alternative to Derrida (Holland 2000: 260-261),

goodness!. In short, one hope of a Deleuzian century appears to be that in it

deconstructive literary criticism will wither away. And, in Anti-Oedipus and A

cited above seem to support this hope clearly and directly.

what seems best described as a highly literary style. Anti-Oedipus begins:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits

Even by the standards of post-World War II French philosophy, which requires a

Beckett, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Franz

remarkably literary sensibility.

appeals to literature: what we find in great English and American novelists, he

machine-books, tool-books, schizo-books (1995: 23).13 Likewise, his prefaces to

Minor Literature and of philosophical style, which is most developed in Essays

American critics and philosophers have usually seen it as an obstacle to understanding

selling book Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers Abuse of Science,

Sokal and Bricmonts view, this is an abuse of philosophy too:

Intellectual Impostures response is to quote lengthy passages from What is

devoid of meaning (150).

appeared just as problematic to their supposed defenders. In Intensive Science and

I will not be concerned in this reconstruction with the textual source of

Guattaris experimental style, since he is addressing an audience of analytical

philosophers of science and scientists interested in philosophical questions, and:

When confronted with Deleuzes original texts this audience is bound to be

Bricmonts critique. Unlike Jean-Franois Lyotard, who expressed outrage at French

critics who responded to the publication of Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand

Oedipus, Foucault writes that:

It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference

possibilities for textual and literary criticism.

languages affective, sonorous, and metaphorical qualities be confined to literature,

poetry is acceptable only insofar it serves the State and reason:

Differentiating between a philosophical and poetic use of language is not enough:

pleasure and pain.

Today, the consensus in Western philosophical discourse remains that style

should be characterised by qualities like clarity, simplicity, and economy. Both

literary and philosophical uses of language that occurs in Capitalism and

this separation is essential to the philosophical tradition:

It is correct to define metaphysics by reference to Platonism, but insufficient

For Deleuze, a simulacrum is a kind of dangerous supplement to the Idea, rather

integrity of philosophical discourse than a beautiful utterance being mistaken for a

true one, or a signifier for a signified?

Book X of The Republic makes this point by assigning literature a role in

contradistinction to philosophy. Socrates declares that realistic representations

provide real knowledge. Socrates later adds that:

presuming to represent the real nature of thingsfor usurping the role of

This whole progression is important in respect of at least three things it fails to

appearance that is, on language, on signifiers. The plainness of prose is a fallacy:

little. Second, Socrates own method of argument frequently relies on hypothetical

recourse to signifiers and language, but, at a meta-textual level, Socrates own

conventions of realistic representation becomes problematic. Although the text is not