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Abstract
This article examines the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (especially Cinema) and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in terms of the intersection between corporeality, temporality, and the political. The first part analyzes the deconstruction of lyrical subjectivity in Rimbaud’s verse in relation to the breakdown of the “sensory-motor link” described in the first volume of Deleuze’s Cinema; it discusses these homologous movements as a release of free-floating bodily potentiality. The second part shows how the shift from the first to the second volume of Deleuze’s Cinema and the shift from verse to prose poetry in Rimbaud constitute the formal dimensions of a shared political project based on the transformation of bodily life, or a biopolitical transformation. This project can be understood as communist insofar as it attempts to liberate time from capital for the body and to produce a social form based on sharing the common (or common bodily potentials).
Notes
Many thanks to Cesare Casarino for his generous advice prior to and after the writing of the initial version of this essay and for his continuing intellectual support, to Tom Cannavino and Robert St. Clair for all of their advice during the rewriting and revising of the article, and to the anonymous reviewer for Angelaki for the incisive and helpful comments throughout the revision process.
1. To name only a few of Deleuze's works where this attempt to rethink corporeality is present: Expressionism in Philosophy, Anti-Oedipus, and The Logic of Sense. The Logic of Sense is especially useful in this regard, as it quite explicitly centers on the displacement of a body characterized by depth, centrality, and a dualistic split between mind and matter in favor of a decentered body of nonsense characterized by impersonal singularities which articulate themselves as surfaces. See especially The Logic of Sense 196–234.
2. Hereafter cited parenthetically as C2.
3. See Deleuze and Guattari, “What is a Concept?” in What is Philosophy?
4. See especially Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in The Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 40–63; The Psychoses, 1955–1956 89–102; and “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Écrits.
5. But whether such a proper lyrical poem even exists is questionable. Indeed, I am suggesting that Rimbaud negates less the complexities of lyrical poetry than the simplistic mode of reading which would tie it to fixed forms of the ego. That being said, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin articulate, each in their own way, how the ego-bound quality of lyrical poetry is symptomatic of historical conditions. The lyrical poem responds to the shocks of modern life (the hustle and bustle of the crowd; the overabundance of commodities; etc.) with formal strategies designed to preserve the subject from dissolution. On the other hand, these two thinkers suggest the way in which lyrical poetry intimates a certain beyond of the ego-subject through the objectifying (or language-fetishizing) aspects of modernist poetry. See Adorno, especially 42–46; and Benjamin, especially 316–32.
6. Of course, one would also want to discuss the colonial aspects of this poem, the geographic imaginary which underlies the structuring of its desire. For analysis of this aspect of Rimbaud's work, see especially Jameson, “Rimbaud and the Spatial Text” in Modernist Papers 249–54; and Ross chapter 3: “Spatial History.”
7. See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, especially 58–63; and Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays.
8. In Lacan's words in Seminar: Book III: The Psychoses:
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For want of being able in any way to re-establish his pact with the other, for want of being able to make any symbolic mediation whatsoever between what is new and himself, the subject moves into another mode of mediation, completely different from the former, and substitutes for symbolic mediation a profusion, an imaginary proliferation, into which the central signal of a possible mediation is introduced in a deformed and profoundly asymbolic fashion. (87)
9. Throughout Deleuze's work there are two primary philosophical opponents: Plato and Hegel. Deleuze generates a counterattack on Plato or, more accurately, on the ontological legacy of Plato in “Plato and the Simulacrum” in Logic of Sense, where he argues not that simulacra are more important than essences but that there are nothing but simulations, that the notion of an original is the effect of a coagulation, or a blockage, in the movement from simulation to simulation.
10. A number of critics note the manner in which Rimbaud's poetry is metamorphic, or characterized by a shifting series of incarnation of the lyrical subject. Especially notable is James Lawler's Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self, which analyzes Rimbaud's “project of self-dramatization” in relation to “a poet conditional yet absolute” (5). Lawler's analyses are often quite compelling, especially insofar as they challenge a series of received oppositions (active–passive, reality–dream, etc.), yet I do not feel that he adequately unpacks the implications of Rimbaud's language for subjective form. See especially “The Poet as Transgressor: ‘Le Bateau ivre’” in Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self.
11. In “Rimbaud's Simplicity,” Bersani articulates some of what I aim to show in this essay. Specifically, he argues that Rimbaud imagines an alternative form of lyrical subjectivity, defined by an anonymous, impersonal, and fragmentary form of desire. He also suggests the collective aspects of this subjectivity. Bersani, however, pays little attention to the historical conditions or political implications of this emergent subjectivity, nor does he seem to recognize the importance of temporality in Rimbaud's work. Finally, Bersani states that the language of Rimbaud's poetry, especially his prose poems, is in some sense “superfluous.” I disagree. The language of the prose poems operates in a completely different fashion from verse but is absolutely necessary.
12. Rimbaud is, in many senses, a Spinozist. Identity, or the ego, is the effect, rather than the cause, of sets of multiplicities (forces, images, sounds, colors, etc.). In addition, I would add that desire drives Rimbaud's poetry in much the same way that conatus drives human life in Spinoza's Ethics. The subject is recomposed through encounters with other beings and with events in the world, encounters which either increase the power of the subject (its ability to multiply its capacities to act or to be acted upon) or decrease it. See Spinoza, especially Books II and IV.
13. Hereafter cited parenthetically as C1.
14. Yet as I discuss below, the open set can be as ideological as the closed set, for it is the open set (the set which constantly displaces its own limit) that is the very model of capital, which accumulates and reproduces by displacing its own limit. One needs, then, to distinguish between open sets of equivalents, where each member of the set belongs by virtue of an abstract, formal equality to every other member, and open sets of singularities, where members are wedded through a movement of differentiation and relation that resists formal equality in favor of commonality, or the expression of difference through the differentiation of a common space.
15. Deleuze's discussions of expression are scattered throughout his oeuvre, sometimes appearing under other names such as “folding,” but see especially Expressionism in Philosophy 43–49, 180–86, 321–37; Logic of Sense 12–28, 142–48. The term expression suggests the multiplication of form at every level of content, which is also to say that it suggests that content and form do not exist in terms of a one-to-one correspondence, since form might be said to always suggest at least a bifurcation, the possibility of moving in many directions. The term expression also suggests univocity or monism, which means that it is not thought in terms of a subject–object relationship but in terms of the organization of a plane of immanence in which figures emerge through horizontal relations. Finally, material substance is exhausted in expression so that there is no excess of content hanging over form, yet without losing a surplus of potentiality or the virtual, which enables the possibility of change. Indeed, the expressed is that which inheres in a proposition as surplus to denotation, manifestation, and signification, that which opens on to a sense that is the virtual of the actual.
16. Negri argues for an understanding of time as surplus over space. He explicitly identifies such time with corporeality, a point which I shall turn to in the next section of the essay. Time, then, if it becomes unleashed from the spatializing tendencies of capital, may foment a revolutionary or liberatory movement. The affinities with Deleuze, here, are great. Deleuze argues in the second volume of the cinema books that the time-image arises the moment when time becomes “its own boss” (42). See Negri, especially chapters 7.3 and 9.1.
17. In “Literature and Life,” Deleuze writes, “Health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing” and “The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of health or this invention of a people, that is, the possibility of life” (Essays 4). That this description is fitting not only for Deleuze but also for Rimbaud is indicated by their shared term délire, or delirium, which suggests that the production of life is not a mere regulative function stabilizing a preexisting homeostasis but an immanent utopian and biopolitical affair of producing new forms of life. See especially Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 17–20, 84–88; Deleuze, Cinema 2 150–55, 215–24; and “Literature and Life” in Essays Critical and Clinical; but see also Smith's nuanced synthesis of Deleuze's relationship to literature, “‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze's ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project” in Essays Critical and Clinical.
18. For two useful discussions of these letters, see Whidden 119–31; and Murphy chapter 6: “Le 15 Mai 1871: Politiques du voyant.”
19. On Rimbaud's relationship to Parnassian poetry, see Whidden, especially 119–38. Whidden argues that Parnassian poetry is characterized by a specific relationship to time and space, one which privileges the tightly ordered and enclosed capture of beauty. He argues that Rimbaud's poetry engages in a rebellion against these standards. Whidden, however, does not elaborate the social or political implications of this verse but remains, for the most part, concerned with the formal dimensions abstracted from their material conditions. In addition, Whidden tends to view Rimbaud as escaping time, whereas I would argue that he does not escape but rather reorganizes time in relation to the body/subject.
20. Laforgue 252–54. On Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, see also Fowlie; and Murphy, especially chapters 1–4.
21. Frey argues that the sense of this phrase involves a giving up of discursive authority as a productive act. The other speaks not as a mere reflection of the self but as an overthrow of selfhood as such, an argument which lines up well with my own, though Frey does not analyze the socio-political implications. See Frey, “Rimbaud” in Studies in Poetic Discourse, especially 118–24.
22. Rimbaud's simultaneous identification with workers (“I will be a worker” (CW 370/371)) and refusal of work (“Work now, never, never: I am on strike” (CW 370/371)) in his letter to Georges Izambard, dated 13 May 1871, is a homologous gesture, bespeaking, at one and the same time, a refusal to engage in the classicism which would guarantee him cultural capital, or a literary wage one might say, and a refusal to take up a proper métier in society. That Rimbaud would shortly thereafter take up a proper career and forsake poetry does not annul the significance of these words but rather testifies to the intense difficulty of maintaining a self-chosen exile from the capitalist lifeworld.
23. Froment-Meurice argues that the entirety of Une Saison may be understood in terms of an attempt to harness the break of modernity, an attempt to produce an absolute break, or “radical caesura,” disrupting the fashion cycle of commodification. Froment-Meurice understands this absolute break as a self-deliverance, which is to say a break that is also an opening onto an abyss. I would only add that this opening is not so much onto an abyss as it is to the powers of the body. See Froment-Meurice, especially 33–41, 53–56.
24. Deleuze himself makes this homology (break with capital: break with the action-image) in several places. In the second volume of the cinema books, Deleuze, drawing on Marxist rhetoric, says that the time-image is that moment when time becomes “its own boss” (C2 42). See also Cinema 2 77–78, where Deleuze discusses the relationship between cinematic time and money. One must be careful to note Deleuze's insistence on the “inequivalent” in his discussion of circulation, for it is that word which names the corporeality called communism.
25. In making this connection between material ambivalence and biopolitics, I draw on the work of Paolo Virno. Virno argues that biopolitics is the effect of the emergence of labor-power or potentiality qua potentiality in history. Biopolitics names the struggle over forms of embodying potentiality. Capital produces technologies of control, various forms of discipline which attempt to make potentiality calculable and equivalent. These technologies (which can range from medical apparatus to techniques of education) are the means towards the end of the reproduction and expansion of capital. Of course, Virno also indicates the possibility of a liberation of this potentiality from capital, what he calls “exodus.” But he wants to insist, as do I, on the ambivalence of the biopolitics, for there is no necessity of liberation, no teleological guarantee of an emergence of a non- or post-capitalist social form. See Virno, especially 81–84. See also Casarino, “Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the Corporeal” in Casarino and Negri.
26. The communist form of corporeal time is also Deleuze's crystal-image. The crystal-image is an organization of time defined by a splitting into the virtual and the actual. This splitting doubles itself in Deleuze's writing as a number of other oppositions, creating the following chain of homologies: virtual and actual; past and present; preservation and passing; subjective and objective. These oppositions are not, however, as rigid as they would appear. Each pairing involves elements that are “distinct and yet indiscernible.” They form circuits that indiscernibly exchange one element for another. It is important, I would argue, to assert the priority of the virtual over the actual, as the matrix from which the actual emerges. Indeed, Deleuze says as much in “The Virtual and the Actual” (in Deleuze and Parnet), where he states: “Actualization belongs to the virtual. Actualization of the virtual is singularity, whereas the actual itself is constituted individuality” (181; translation mine). The actual emerges from the actualization of the virtual. There is, then, a surplus of virtuality, or potentiality, over actuality at the ontological level. This surplus is precisely what the action-image attempts to repress – but it can only repress it, not eliminate it.
27. What I am calling communist corporeality may be understood as an extension – but also a presupposition and implication – of the concept of the common. Communist corporeality is the embodiment of the productivity of the common, which I understand to be, at once, the ontological substratum of life and condition of possibility for a specific form of struggle. As ontological substratum, the common consists of relating to and through others. It is composed of singularities which are inseparable from their relating and exposing themselves to others. Commonality, rather than the individual or the organic community, is being. As a condition of political struggle, commonality implies its opponent – by whatever name it goes under – which seeks to capture and limit potentialities, or the relations that compose commonality, to privatize and enclose the common. The common names the antagonistic attempt to multiply the potentialities for production without the subordination of either capitalist exchange (equivalency) or any other form of political heteronomy (whether it be that of representation or dictatorship). It is a concept of collective political creativity. On the common, see Hardt and Negri 196–219; Casarino, “Surplus Common” in Casarino and Negri; Virno 35–45; and the special issue of Rethinking Marxism entitled The Common and the Forms of the Commune.
28. For an excellent analysis of this ambivalence – in terms very different from my own – see Ranciere's “Rimbaud: Voices and Bodies” in The Flesh of Words. Rancière argues that the primary tension driving Rimbaud's work is one between the commonality of exchange and socialization more generally (Rancière is especially interested in working-class culture and the commodities of the entertainment industry) and the messianic dimension of a people to come or a body of salvation.
29. See especially Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chapter 1, section 4, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret.” But see also Marx's reflection on the sensuousness of labor in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, especially 69–84. On the spectrality of the commodity, see especially Derrida's incisive analysis of commodity fetishism in Specters of Marx 186–209.
30. Deleuze performs this cartography of the flesh in a number of places with regards to a number of aesthetic forms, but see especially the repeatedly discussed emergence of language from the body in The Logic of Sense 181–86, 210–51, 280–335; the interference between body and painterly material in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 19–25, 124–30; and Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, plateaus/sections 3–6. The entirety of Essays Literary and Clinical is also, arguably, devoted to this mapping, but see especially in this work “Literature and Life,” “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure,” and “Bartleby; or, The Formula.” I would also add that corporeal poetics is already being pursued by others, especially in relation to the discourse of biopolitics. See, for example, Casarino, “The Southern Answer,” as well as the special issue of Polygraph entitled Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality.