by Daniel Smith
ESSAY 12
Life
“A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze's “Critique et Clinique” Project
The critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) may be destined to enter into a new relationship of mutual learning. (M 14)
A
lthough Essays Critical and Clinical is the only book written by Deleuze that is devoted primarily to literature, literary references are present everywhere in his work, running almost parallel to the philosophical references. Deleuze first linked together the “critical” and the “clinical” in the study of Sacher-Masoch that he published in 1967.1 The 1969 Logic of Sense is in part a reading of Lewis Carroll's work and includes supplementary material and chapters on Klossowski, Tournier, Zola, Fitzgerald, Lowry, and Artaud. Literary references occupy considerable portions of the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which Deleuze wrote in the 1970s with Félix Guattari. He has written books on both Proust (1964) and Kafka (1975, with Guattari), as well as two long essays on Carmelo Bene (1979) and Samuel Beckett (1992). His 1977 Dialogues with Claire Parnet includes an important chapter entitled “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.” Essays Critical and Clinical includes eight newly revised articles that were originally published by Deleuze between 1970 and 1993, along with ten essays that appear here for the first time. Once again, names of philosophers (Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger) appear side by side with names of literary figures (Melville, Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Beckett, Artaud, Masoch, Jarry, Carroll). Although he first announced the idea for this book during a 1988 interview, it is clear that Deleuze had conceived of the “critique et clinique” project early on in his career and pursued it in various forms throughout his published work.2
What role do these literary analyses play in Deleuze's philosophical œuvre? In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as a practice of concepts, an activity that consists in the formation, invention, or creation of concepts, and indeed their work is marked throughout by an extraordinary conceptual inventiveness. But philosophy, Deleuze adds, necessarily enters into variable relations with other domains such as science, medicine, and art. Art, for instance, is an equally creative enterprise of thought, but one whose object is to create sensible aggregates rather than concepts. Great artists and authors, in other words, are also great thinkers, but they think in terms of percepts and affects rather than concepts; painters, one might say, think in the medium of lines and colors, just musicians think in sounds, filmmakers think in images, writers think in words, and so on. Neither activity has any privilege over the other. Creating a concept is neither more difficult nor more abstract than creating new visual, sonorous, or verbal combinations; conversely, it is no easier to read an image, painting, or novel than it is to comprehend a concept. Philosophy, Deleuze insists, cannot be undertaken independently of science and art; it always enters into relations of mutual resonance and exchange with these other domains, though for reasons that are always internal to philosophy itself.3
Deleuze therefore writes on the arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and his books and essays on the various arts, and on various artists and authors, must be read, as he himself insists, as “works of philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word.”4 The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in time, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze analyzes in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image: “What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that the other arts don't show?” (N 58). Deleuze thus describes his two-volume Cinema as “a book of logic, a logic of the cinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographic concepts,” concepts that are specific to the cinema … but that can only be formed philosophically (MI ix; N 47). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation likewise creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon's paintings, but also finds a place in “a general logic of sensation” (FB 3). Essays Critical and Clinical must be evaluated in the same manner: that is, in terms of the concepts Deleuze extracts from the literary works he examines and the links he establishes between philosophy, literature, and the other arts.5 The book is not a mere collection of articles; though most of the essays are devoted to individual authors, the book develops a series of concepts like so many motifs that appear and reappear in different essays, which enter into increasingly complex contrapuntal relationships with each other, and which could likewise be said to find a place in a logic of literature—or rather, a logic of “Life.” For if the Cinema volumes deal primarily with space and time, and Francis Bacon with the nature of sensation, Deleuze's writings on literature are primarily linked with the problematic of Life. “You have seen what is essential for me,” he once wrote to a commentator; “this ‘vitalism’ or a conception of life as a non-organic power”; in a later interview, he added, “Everything I've written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is.”6
The idea that literature has something to do with life is certainly not a novel one. In Deleuze's work, however, the notion of Life, as a philosophical concept, has a complex ontological and ethical status. In one of the last essays he published before his death in November 1995—a short, dense, abstract, yet strangely moving piece—Deleuze wrote of a scene from Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. A rogue despised by everyone is brought in on the verge of death, and the people tending to him suddenly manifest a kind of respect and love for the slightest sign of life in the dying man.
No one has the least regard for the man [writes Dickens]. With them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separate from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it is life, and they are living and must die.7
As the man revives, his saviors become colder, and he recovers all his crudeness and maliciousness. Yet “between his life and his death,” comments Deleuze,
there is a moment that is no longer anything but a life playing with death. The life of an individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life that disengages a pure event freed from the accidents of the inner and outer life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. A homo tantum with whom everyone sympathizes, and who attains a kind of beatitude. This is a haecceity, which is no longer an individuation but a singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil.
This non-organic vitality is made manifest most clearly, perhaps, in a newborn baby:
Small infants all resemble each other and have hardly any individuality; but they have singularities—a smile, a gesture, a grimace—which are not subjective characteristics. Infants are traversed by an immanent life that is pure power, and even a beatitude, through their sufferings and weaknesses … With a young child, one already has an organic, personal relationship, but not with a baby, which concentrates in its smallness the same energy that shatters paving stones. With a baby, one has nothing but an affective, athletic, impersonal, vital relation. It is clear that the will to power appears in an infinitely more exact manner in a baby than in a man of war. (PI 30; ECC 133)
For Deleuze, Life is an impersonal and non-organic power that goes beyond any lived experience—an ontological concept of Life that draws on sources as diverse as Nietzsche (life as “will to power”), Bergson (the élan vital), and modern evolutionary biology (life as variation and selection). And if Life has a direct relation to literature, it is because writing itself is “a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived” (ECC 1).
But the concept of Life also functions as an ethical principle in Deleuze's thought. Throughout his works, Deleuze has drawn a sharp distinction between morality and ethics. He uses the term “morality” to define, in general terms, any set of “constraining” rules, such as a moral code, that consists in judging actions and intentions by relating them to transcendent or universal values (“this is good, that is evil”). Wha
t he calls “ethics” is, on the contrary, a set of “facilitative” (facultative) rules that evaluates what we do, say, think, and feel according to the immanent mode of existence it implies. One says or does this, thinks or feels that: what mode of existence does it imply?8 This is the link that Deleuze sees between Spinoza and Nietzsche, whom he has always identified as his philosophical precursors. Each of them argued, in his own manner, that there are things one cannot do or think except on the condition of being weak, base, or enslaved, unless one harbors a resentment against life (Nietzsche), unless one remains the slave of passive affections (Spinoza); and there are other things one cannot do or say except on the condition of being strong, noble, or free, unless one affirms life, unless one attains active affections. An immanent ethical difference (good / bad) is in this way substituted for the transcendent moral opposition (Good / Evil). “Beyond Good and Evil,” wrote Nietzsche, “at least that does not mean ‘Beyond Good and Bad.’”9 The “Bad” or sickly life is an exhausted and degenerating mode of existence, one that judges life from the perspective of its sickness, that devaluates life in the name of “higher” values. The “Good” or healthy life, by contrast, is an overflowing and ascending form of existence, a mode of life that is able to transform itself depending on the forces it encounters, always increasing the power to live, always opening up new possibilities of life. For Deleuze, every literary work implies a way of living, a form of life, and must be evaluated not only critically but also clinically. “Style, in a great writer, is always a style of life as well, not at all something personal, but the invention of a possibility of life, a way of existing” (N 100).
Put differently, the question that links literature and life, in both its ontological and its ethical aspects, is the question of health. This does not mean that an author necessarily enjoys robust health; on the contrary, artists, like philosophers, often have frail health, a weak constitution, a fragile personal life (Spinoza's frailty, D. H. Lawrence's hemoptysis, Nietzsche's migraines, Deleuze's own respiratory ailments). This frailty, however, does not simply stem from their illnesses or neuroses, says Deleuze, but from having seen or felt something in life that is too great for them, something unbearable “that has put on them the quiet mark of death” (WP 172). But this something is also what Nietzsche called the “great health,” the vitality that supports them through the illnesses of lived experience. This is why, for Deleuze, writing is never a personal matter; it is never simply a matter of our lived experiences. “You don't get very far in literature with the system ‘I've seen a lot and been lots of places’” (N 134). Novels are not created with our dreams and fantasies, nor our sufferings and griefs, our opinions and ideas, our memories and travels, nor “with the interesting characters we have met or the interesting character who is inevitably oneself (who isn't interesting?)” (WP 170). It is true that the writer is “inspired” by lived experience; but even in writers like Thomas Wolfe or Henry Miller, who seem to do nothing but recount their own lives, “there's an attempt to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it.”10 Nor does Deleuze read works of literature primarily as texts, or treat writing in terms of its “textuality,” though he by no means ignores the effect literature has on language. His approach to literature must thus be distinguished from Jacques Derrida's deconstructive approach.
As for the method of deconstruction of texts [Deleuze once remarked], I see clearly what it is, I admire it a lot, but it has nothing to do with my own method. I do not present myself as a commentator on texts. For me, a text is merely a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It is not a question of commentating on the text by a method of deconstruction, or by a method of textual practice, or by other methods; it is a question of seeing what use it has in the extra-textual practice that prolongs the text.11
For Deleuze, the question of literature is linked not to the question of its textuality, or even to its historicity, but to its “vitality”: that is, its “tenor” of Life.
How, then, are we to conceive of this link between literature and life, between the critical and the clinical? Deleuze first raised this question in his 1967 book Coldness and Cruelty in the context of a concrete problem: Why were the names of two literary figures, Sade and Masoch, used as labels in the nineteenth century to denote two basic “perversions” in clinical psychiatry? This encounter between literature and medicine was made possible, Deleuze argues, by the peculiar nature of the symptomatological method. Medicine is made up of at least three different activities: symptomatology, or the study of signs; etiology, or the search for causes; and therapy, or the development and application of a treatment. While etiology and therapeutics are integral parts of medicine, symptomatology appeals to a kind of limit-point, pre-medical or sub-medical, that belongs as much to art as to medicine (DI 134). In symptomatology, illnesses are sometimes named after typical patients (Lou Gehrig's disease), but more often it is the doctor's name that is given to the disease (Parkinson's disease, Roger's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease). The principles behind this labeling process, Deleuze suggests, deserve careful analysis. The doctor certainly does not “invent” the disease, but rather is said to “isolate” it; he or she distinguishes cases that had hitherto been confused by dissociating symptoms that were previously grouped together and by juxtaposing them with others that were previously dissociated. In this way, the doctor constructs an original clinical concept for the disease: the components of the concept are the symptoms, the signs of the illness, and the concept becomes the name of a syndrome, which marks the meeting place of these symptoms, their point of coincidence or convergence. When a doctor gives his or her name to an illness, it constitutes an important advance in medicine, in so far as a proper name is linked to a given group of symptoms or signs. Moreover, if diseases are named after their symptoms rather than after their causes, it is because, even in medicine, a correct etiology depends first of all on a rigorous symptomatology: “Etiology, which is the scientific or experimental side of medicine, must be subordinated to symptomatology, which is its literary, artistic aspect.”12
The fundamental idea behind Deleuze's “critique et clinique” project is that authors and artists, like doctors and clinicians, can themselves be seen as profound symptomatologists. Sadism and masochism are clearly not diseases on a par with Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease. Yet if Krafft-Ebing, in 1869, was able to use Masoch's name to designate a fundamental perversion (much to Masoch's own consternation), it was not because Masoch “suffered” from it as a patient, but rather because his literary works isolated a particular way of existing and set forth a novel symptomatology of it, making the contract its primary sign. Freud made use of Sophocles in much the same way when he created the concept of the Oedipus complex.13 “Authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients,” writes Deleuze:
We mean that they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists. There is always a great deal of art involved in the grouping of symptoms, in the organization of a table [tableau] where a particular symptom is dissociated from another, juxtaposed to a third, and forms the new figure of a disorder or illness. Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological picture produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, nor even with respect to a case in general; rather, they are clinicians of civilization … Symptomatology is always a question of art. (LS 237; M 14)
It was Nietzsche who first put forward the idea that artists and philosophers are physiologists, “physicians of culture,” for whom phenomena are signs or symptoms that reflect a certain state of forces.14 Indeed, Deleuze strongly suggests that artists and authors can go further in symptomatology than doctors and clinicians, precisely “because the work of art gives them new means, perhaps also because they are less concerned about causes” (DI 133).
This point of view is very different from many psychoanalytic interpretations of writers and artists, which tend to see
authors, through their work, as possible or real patients, even if they are accorded the benefit of “sublimation.” Artists are treated as clinical cases, as if they were ill, however sublimely, and the critic seeks a sign of neurosis like a secret in their work, its hidden code. The work of art then seems to be inscribed between two poles: a regressive pole, where the work hashes out the unresolved conflicts of childhood, and a progressive pole, by which the work invents paths leading to a new solution concerning the future of humanity, converting itself into a “cultural object.” From both these points of view, there is no need to “apply” psychoanalysis to the work of art, since the work itself is seen to constitute a successful psychoanalysis, either as a resolution or a sublimation. This infantile or “egoistic” conception of literature, this imposition of the “Oedipal form” on the work of art, Deleuze suggests, has been an important factor in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption subject to the demands of the literary market.15