ABSTRACT
When asked in a 1988 interview about plans to write a work devoted to literature, Deleuze said that he “dreamed of a group of studies under the general title, ‘Critique et Clinique’” (PP 195; 142).1 In 1993 such a work finally appeared-Deleuze’s last book, Critique et Clinique (Essays Critical and Clinical), a collection of eighteen essays-eight published between 1970 and 1993 and ten new studies-many focused on literature, with a few concentrating on topics in philosophy, psychoanalysis and film. Yet throughout most of his writings, Deleuze had dealt frequently with literature, and the theme of the “critical” and the “clinical” was one he had enunciated as early as 1967 in the Présentation de SacherMasoch: le froid et le cruel (translated as Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty). There Deleuze expressed the hope that in his examination of Sade and Masoch “perhaps la critique (in the literary sense) and la clinique (in the medical sense) might be made to enter into new relations, in which the one teaches the other, and vice versa” (SM 11; 14). This link between literature and medicine was itself one Deleuze had already touched on in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), where interpretation was treated as a form of symptomatology and semeiology. In this chapter, we will consider briefly first the notion of critique and its relation to medicine in Deleuze’s Nietzsche, then the
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mutual reinforcement of critique and clinique in his book on Masoch, and finally the connection between signs, symptoms and sense in The Logic of Sense.2 Throughout, our concern will be to ask how Deleuze differentiates literature from other forms of writing and to determine the specific functions Deleuze ascribes to literary works of art.
