The Literary Machine

Abstract

This article aims at demonstrating how, in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the replacement of the notion of “structure” by the notion of “desiring machine” radically modifies the understanding and practice of literature. A detailed study of the critical consequences of this conceptual shift on the interpretation of the works of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka by Gilles Deleuze opens a new perspective on Deleuze's conception of the specificity of the relation between philosophy and literature. The notion of “desiring machine”—reinterpreted as a “collective assemblage of enunciation” in the Anti-Oedipus—leads to a new conception of language, society, power, and desire.

Keywords:

• Structure
• Desiring Machine
• Affects
• Percepts
• Assemblage
• Blanchot
• Kafka
• Proust
• Anti-Oedipus
• Logic of Sensation.

Notes

1. This text was published in 1972 in Guattari's collection of writings Psychanalyse et transversalité, Paris: Librairie François Maspero. The following citations are taken from the new edition of this work, Paris: La Découverte, 2003. The historian François Dosse has recently underlined the importance of this text by Félix Guattari in his work Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari. Biographie croisée, Paris, La Découverte, 2007, published in English as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, Trans. D. Glassman, Columbia U P, 2010. On the machine, see in particular Part II, Chapter 12, entitled “La machine contre la structure,” 268–287.

2. The reference to Deleuze appears in note 1 of “Machine et structure,” op. cit., 240.

3. On the relations between the machine and subjectivity in Guattari, see René Schérer, Regards sur Deleuze, Paris, Kimé, 1998, in particular the parts of this text dedicated to Félix Guattari (“Usine de l’âme – Gilles-Félix,” 86–98 and “Subjectivités hors sujet – Ad Felicem,” 99–106).

4. On the importance of the notion of the machine in the creation of a new “pragmatics of reading” in Deleuze and Guattari, see Chapter 5 of Anne Sauvagnargues’ excellent text Deleuze et l’art (Paris, P U F, 2005; “La critique de l’interprétation et la machine,” 109–137).

5. Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes, Paris, P U F (1964, 1970, and 1976). The following citations are taken from the 1996 edition, “Quadrige” collection, followed by the corresponding page numbers of the English translation.

6. The image of Proust as a spider appears in the conclusion that Deleuze added to the third edition of Proust et les signes in 1976 (“Presence and Function of Madness. The Spider”).

7. While Guattari's influence is at the origin of this transversalist and machinic approach to the work of literature, Deleuze proposes the problem of a “world in fragments” on the basis of an extremely attentive reading of Maurice Blanchot, above all L’Entretien infini (Paris, Gallimard, 1969). Blanchot's thought had a decisive influence along the entire course of Deleuze's thought, an influence which goes well beyond his philosophy of art and that in particular orients his attention towards difference and multiplicity.

8. Deleuze and Guattari borrow the concept of “creative fabulation” from Bergson, who uses it in Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932, Chapter II) to indicate a faculty from which “fantastical representations” arise and that is quite different from the imagination. For Bergson, the function of fabulation plays an essential role in religion, art, and literature.

9. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation, Paris, Éd. de la Différence, 1981 (rééd. Éd. du Seuil, coll. “L’Ordre philosophique,” Paris, 2002); Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P: 2003.

10. On Deleuze's “logic of sensation,” see Anne Sauvagnargues, Deleuze et l’art, op. cit., in particular Chapter 8 (“La violence de la sensation”).