Deleuze with Carroll

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Notes

Alan Lopez

Department of English

306 Samuel Clemens Hall

SUNY Buffalo

Buffalo, NY 14260

USA

E‐mail: [email protected]

I would like to thank Linda Shires, Pelagia Goulimari, and an anonymous Angelaki reviewer for their very helpful and careful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. My thanks also to Gregg Lambert and David Johnson, both for their encouragement of my work and for the many hours of invigorating discussion on the writings of Deleuze and Descartes.

I mean only to highlight a division in Carroll scholarship over the subject of nonsense, an object traditionally taken up less under the protocols of what we might call Continental philosophy and postmodernism, than that of linguistics and mathematics and certain analytical strains of philosophy. On the latter, see Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice and subsequently revised in two separate editions, More Annotated Alice and The Annotated Alice .

I'm referring to Alice's exchange with Humpty Dumpty, where, in response to Alice's question over whether Dumpty can explicate the poem Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty replies “I can explain all the poems that were ever invented – and a good many that haven't been invented just yet” (187).

See, for instance, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), as well as Bishop Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).

Here I am thinking of works by Jean‐Jacques Lecercle, Peter Heath, and James R. Kincaid in particular.

The following discussion over the division of nonsense between Antonin Artaud and Lewis Carroll is indebted to Gregg Lambert's discussion over Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida and the question of literature divided (shared) between them (see “The Subject of Literature between Derrida and Deleuze”).

Deleuze's references to Carroll and Artaud occur in a number of his works, but perhaps the most well known occur in his works with collaborator Félix Guattari, namely Anti‐Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus .

See Jean‐François Lyotard's critique of the normativity of metadiscourses in The Differend , in particular Lyotard's characterization of the “crisis of legitimacy” as an epistemic rupture in modern society over the basic question of consensus and of whether any discourse (or discourses) may legitimately (be said to) organize and adjudicate various truth‐claims or claims‐to‐truth (3–32, 128–30, 123–50).

Cf. Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman.”

I thus disagree with interpretations which have occluded discussion of the philosophical dimensions of this confluence, especially as this appears around the question of Alice's dream, in favor of a less radical approach – such that what is reinstalled, rather than subverted, are those rhetorical protocols ostensibly subverted by nonsense.

For instance, Alice's discussion with the Mad Hatter over the subject of time. Whereas the Hatter's is a personified “Time” Alice's is a conventional definition of “time.” As Cohan and Shires suggest, “Alice and the Hatter each use the word ‘time’ to refer to something different because the words they use keep pointing to other signifiers of time within two mutually exclusive syntagms, each producing a different meaning for time” (16).

See Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical over the question of the (im)proper division of literature between the two discourses, a division most striking within what Deleuze calls psychoanalysis's “botching” of the clinical discourse (LS 92) – a problem itself taken up much earlier by Deleuze around the figures of de Sade and Masoch in his Coldness and Cruelty , originally published in 1967.

Cf. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry 3–29. The phrase is borrowed from Frye's characterization of romantic poet William Blake's “The Tiger.” The expression refers to the juxtaposition between fear and awe incarnated in the observer in the face of his reciprocal gaze with the contained animal. The phrase's use of “symmetry” underscores the potential of the encounter: the sense of an irreducible other that, while contained, and even while fearful, nonetheless (or precisely therefore) remains a source of wonder and captivation.

Cf. Beverly Lyon Clark, Reflections of Fantasy.

In Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference 176.

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alan lopez

Alan Lopez Department of English 306 Samuel Clemens Hall SUNY Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260 USA E‐mail: [email protected]