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One day, perhaps, there will no longer be any such
thing as Art, only Medicine.
--Le Clézio
Introduction to the Literary Clinic
1.
The title of this essay recalls an earlier question from Nietszche's famous "On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life," which I would like to take up in asking what are the uses and abuses of literature for life and, recalling Nietzche's guiding question, what kind of health it may promote for "an individual, a people, a culture" (Nietzsche 63). In the various essays assembled around the "problem of writing" in his final work, Critique et Clinique, Gilles Deleuze responds to this question by outlining some of the components of a clinical as well as a critical use of literature, which we might summarize along the following lines. First, certain writers have invented concrete semiotic practices that may prove more effective than psychoanalytic discourse in diagnosing the constellation of mute forces that always accompany life and threaten it from within. Second, as a result of this diagnostic and critical function, certain works of modern literature can be understood to produce a kind of "symptomatology" that may prove to be more effective than political critique in discerning the signs that correspond to the new arrangements of "language, labor, and life" (to cite Foucault's abbreviated formula for the grand institutions of instinct or habit); third, perhaps most importantly, literature offers a manner of diagramming the potential forms of resistance, or "lines of flight," which may be virtual to these new arrangements.1
2.
Taken together, these tasks must be understood as creative and even "vitalist" in the sense that Bergson had earlier employed this notion; or as Deleuze writes, "there is a 'use' of representation, without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless" (LS 146). The realization of this "use," however, may require that we approach the question of writing from a point outside the critical representation this question receives in the institutions of literary study today. In fact, I would like to suggest that a clinical usage may radically alter the conditions of the practice of literature and emerge as a kind of Deleuzian "war machine" against how the uses of literature have been determined by the dominance of institutional criticism...