ABSTRACT
In the preface and opening chapter of Critique et clinique (1993), Deleuze suggests that the theme uniting that collection of essays is the relationship of literature to life and the outside. His initial conception of the critical/clinical project, as we saw in chapter 1, focused on symptomatology as a common ground for literary and psychoanalytic investigation, Sade and Masoch providing semeiologies of contrasting scenes, Carroll and Artaud offering topologies of qualitatively distinct worlds. But in his return to the motifs of critique and clinique, Deleuze extends his concern with specific affinities between literature and medicine to a broad consideration of literature as health, the clinical aspect of his enterprise bearing simply on those instances in which literature fails to make connections that further the activities of life. To write is “to invent a new language within language,” to invent “a process carrying words along from one end of the universe to the other” (CC 9; lv). Writing is a “voyage, a journey” (CC 10; lvi), a trajectory toward an outside when healthy, a blocked path when sick. Yet the invention of a new language connects literature not only to the outside world, but also to the outside of language itself, to “visions and auditions that are nonlinguistic, but that language alone can make possible” (CC 9; lv). When the writer is a “seer and hearer,” an inventor of visions and auditions,
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literature attains its goal of “the passage of life into language” (CC 16; 5). The object of this chapter is to delineate what Deleuze regards as the proper relation between literature and life, that is, between writing and the outside, both as outside world and outside of language. I will look first at Deleuze’s meditations on literature, life and lines of flight in Dialogues and A Thousand Plateaus, in which literature’s connection with the outside world may be discerned, and then at his scattered remarks on visions and auditions in Critique et clinique, in which literature’s relation to the outside of language may be traced. A brief concluding examination of the theme of visions and auditions in “The Exhausted,” Deleuze’s 1992 study of Beckett’s television plays, will bring us to issues midway between those of the pragmatics of theater and the images of cinema.
