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The "economy" of literature sometimes seems to me more powerful than that of other types of discourse: such as, for example, historical or philosophical discourse. Sometimes: it depends on singularities and contexts. Literature would be potentially more potent.
-Jacques Derrida, "This Strange Institution Called Literature"
Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.1The first sentence of Under the Volcano could be used as a metaphor to introduce Gilles Deleuze's thought in general and the relationship of his work to literature in particular. Deleuze's analyses of numerous works by philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists always lead to the distinction between heterogeneous and parallel series, with two or more "mountain chains" traversing all his critiques from beginning to end. If the main task of the philosopher is to characterize precisely these series and to establish how they communicate with each other, for Deleuze they invariably originate in the Spinozist parallelism between "substance thinking" and "substance extended" as well as in Bergson's matter/memory parallelism. Every one of Deleuze's books entails comparable parallelisms, which were ultimately and explicitly systematized in The Logic of Sense.2
By analogy to the pair of mountain chains in Under the Volcano, Deleuze's philosophy relative to literature can be characterized as a complex relationship between two heterogeneous series, with Deleuze's own pair of "mountain chains" correspondingly expressing the unity of the same forces of Life, of the same unformed, "preindividual" magma pushing through the same fault. Deleuze's entire oeuvre largely revolves around the question of the link between the Multiple and the One that it produces "beside its parts." Here again, Spinoza serves as his main inspiration.
The most important event, in Deleuze's philosophy as in Lowry's novel, is what happens in between the parallel series, or two mountain chains, along the faultlines. Life and forms of life, including thought,...