A Question of Style in the Philosophy of Difference: “The Bartleby Formula” (Ca. 1989)

Continuing our question, how does one begin to define the subject of the writer without already assuming the predicates of the individual, the person, the national, ethnic or racial subject? As I have already argued, Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier solution begins with a discovery of the strange consciousness that they found operating in writers like Kafka and Proust: the subject of writing is more like a plant or an animal than a human being. However, this is not quite right either, because here it is a question not of resemblance or homology but instead of becoming, which must be defined through the literary process and in a manner that is immanently machinic. The writer may be described in terms of a process of “becoming animal,” or “becoming flower,” or even as I argued in chapter 4, “a becoming people”; however, these terms themselves do not exist naturally and must be produced as an aspect belonging to the total process specifically produced by the writing machine. For lack of a better term, I will simply call this aspect a style. The question of style in certain kinds of writing cannot be formally reduced to a manner of speaking or to the peculiarity of certain kinds of statements; rather, it is an aspect of becoming expressed by the writing machine—an expression in language that is also a real form of social desire that sometimes threatens to carry along the reader into a state that closely approximates a kind of delirium. (“Identification” is not a good term for naming the cause of this desire, even though the psychoanalytic theory of transference can be partially employed to understand its mechanism.)1 Therefore, let us postulate the following chain of equivalence that will be the basis for discussing this aspect: becoming = delirium = style.

In both modern literature and philosophy, this equivalence has generally circulated around the themes of writing and madness. Concerning the first theme, I must begin by stating a truism: Today, the philosopher is also a writer. In other words, can we today any longer imagine a philosopher who does not entertain an essential relationship to the question of style? Can we imagine a philosopher who did not write? Of course, one can say that Hegel wrote, or that Kant conceived of his system in writing, that both were great composers of written works. But is this the same thing as the philosopher as writer? Hence, the question of writing must be understood to be both more general and more particular (one could say “historical”) than the philosophical problem of representation as such, because the contemporary philosopher (that is, the one who professes to “do philosophy” in its current form and its academic setting, because there are very few “free thinkers” today à la Emerson and Nietzsche) is someone who must reflect on the formal, but also the material and institutional, conditions of his or her philosophical project as also a project of writing. The question of writing has even engaged some philosophers in an anxious reflection that sometimes threatens to reduce the philosopher’s logos to a madness (or delirium) borne only by writing, thus threatening the former subjective determinations of the philosopher (an upright nature of thought and the goodwill of the thinker) by turning its pretension for truth into the effect produced by the “insane game of writing” (Mallarmé). Simply the fact that this anxiety was first expressed by modern writers, or becomes an obsessive concern of certain modern literary works, does not make this peculiar kind of delirium any less a concern for the contemporary philosopher, who, whether or not he or she chooses to acknowledge it, is also implicated in the question of writing.2

The above statements can be readily supported in the opening pages of the early, perhaps most systematic, reflections on the relationship between philosophy and writing, Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) and, of course, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968). In the preface, Deleuze writes: “Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death.”3 A year before, Derrida wrote:

Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still provisionally called writing, far from falling short of a science of writing or of hastily dismissing it by some obscurantist reaction, letting it rather develop its positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge. The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.4

In both passages, written at the very beginning of their respective “philosophies of difference,” each philosopher seems to express a certain foreboding around the question of writing, which appears to one as an “altogether threatening silence” and to the other as an “absolute danger.” For each, the limit (or horizon) of all philosophy will henceforth bear an ineluctable relationship to “the experience of writing,” which is to say, to the particular experience effected in philosophy by modern literary machines.

Concerning the second thematic, recalling the arguments in the Introduction, by taking up the literary machine into its apparatus the philosopher’s discourse has been exposed to the most essential confusion, one that is often addressed under the general themes of madness or schizophrenia. Here I would simply point out that the image of thought presupposed by certain philosophies, particularly those of Deleuze and Derrida, most closely approximates an expression that is brought into proximity with the experience of madness, in such a way that madness poses the situation of an alternative between thinking and the nature of “that which refuses or resists the form of thought” (to again recall Foucault’s diagnosis of the modern cogito).5 Given the importance of this question in both philosophers’ respective works, it is fairly evident that while Derrida has the tendency to draw both themes, writing and madness, into relation to the form of Law (e.g., “plus de littérature, plus de loi”), Deleuze constantly attempts to place them in contact with the nature of Life, for whom writing is defined as “a passage that traverses both the livable and the lived experience.”6 The significance of this difference in tendencies (or inclinations) will be my primary subject in this chapter; to illustrate the sense of this difference, I have chosen two figures, Antonin Artaud and Melville’s Bartleby, who already constitute perhaps the most enigmatic examples in modern literature of these opposing tendencies between life and law. I will suggest that between these two figures there is a more fundamental problem that is shared between Derrida and Deleuze, one that concerns precisely the question of style (i.e., the function of the literary machine) in the production of a philosophy of difference. For me, the question will be as follows: How can one not reduce the concept of difference to the question of style? That is, how is the conceptual image of difference different in each case in each philosophy of difference? Earlier on, I claimed that “difference” (as a presupposition) has become a dogmatic image of thought, in the sense that several postmodern philosophers, following Heidegger, can be united by the common presupposition of “difference” as the problem that determines the nature of their thought. To establish the uniqueness of their own projects, all philosophers must speak differently about difference. Nevertheless, as I said in the beginning, because philosophers do not speak today—having “no mouth, no teeth, no larynx”—the expression of difference can be said to make its mark only in writing, and this opens the fundamental relation between philosophy and writing, or more specifically, between a particular philosopher and a limited number of writing machines. This underlies the importance of only certain writing machines (especially, of a small and overdetermined group of writers and particular literary works) in the creation of a philosophy of difference.

Concerning the “exemplary case of Antonin Artaud” (Derrida), we might expect that the question of writing with regard to both regions of the law and life must be employed in a rigorous way to understand why Artaud becomes exemplary within each philosophy of difference. Of course, it is well known that Artaud is a writer who suffered the questions of style and of madness in the most personal and idiosyncratic way, seeking in all cases to make both the unique expressions of “an enigmatic life named Antonin Artaud.”7 As to what this demand might signify for each philosopher, or more systematically within each philosophy of difference, we must take a few precautions. Again, just as the discussion of difference was not unique to either philosopher, neither was the name of Artaud. For example, we can postulate that perhaps to the milieu and the cultural limitations that conditioned each respective work, the figure of Artaud is not that unusual for French intellectuals of “this generation,” no more than Kafka or Proust, as I argued earlier, and so we must be careful not to essentialize the appearance of the figure of Artaud as a common factor that, in itself or in himself, determines the relationship between the two works. In many ways, as I also argued, this can be reduced to an environmental factor, as they say in scientific case studies, no more important than the fact that Derrida and Deleuze both “shared” the same water in Paris at a particular historical moment.

Part of this environment that Deleuze and Derrida shared in common was the series of writings on the figure of the poet in several psychoanalytic and philosophical works published in the 1950s and early 1960s by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, and Jean Laplanche on the general theme of “madness and the work,” and, in particular, around the poetry of Hölderlin and the writings of Artaud, who appear in the works of several critics, especially in the writings of Maurice Blanchot, who is frequently cited by both Deleuze and Derrida during this period as well.8 In 1965, Derrida publishes in the journal Tel Quel the famous article “La parole soufflée,” which later appears in L’Écriture et différence (1967). In this article, Derrida addresses the problematic conjunction, even confusion, of the two discourses, “the critical and the clinical,” concerning the figures of Hölderlin and Artaud in particular. Derrida writes, “Although they are radically opposed for good reasons, the psychoanalytic reduction [performed by Laplanche] and the Eidetic reduction [exhibited in the writings of Foucault and Blanchot, particularly in Livre à venir, where Artaud’s entire journey becomes exemplary] function in the same way when confronted by the problem of madness or of the work, and unwittingly pursue the same end.”9 That is to say, even by an opposite path, both come to the same result: the creation of an example, in critical discourse, or a case, in the clinical. Derrida initially questions this reduction, however inevitable to both discourses, but especially in the case of Artaud, who would never accept the scandal of “his thought separated from life.”10

As the title of Derrida’s essay indicates, at first glance and in light of Artaud’s own protests, such a reduction would amount to an act of “theft,” the “stealing of property” (and the experience of the body first of all, which was stolen before his birth). Thus, Derrida’s commentary highlights this aspect of appropriation or theft in order to question the manner in which Artaud’s body has been separated from his own experience by being divided between the clinical and the critical discourses. Here, Derrida appears in the guise of an attorney—and thus the question is clearly situated “before the law” (devant la loi)—in order to prosecute the case of “poor Antonin Artaud,” and not as a particular case of “the poet,” but rather Artaud himself, as the self-present, unique or singular.

If Artaud absolutely resists—we believe, in a manner that was never done before—critical and clinical exegesis, he does so by virtue of that part of his adventure (and with this word we are designating the totality anterior to the separation of the life and the work) which is the very protest against exemplification itself. The critic and the doctor [and to this list we might also add the lawyer as well] are without resources when confronted by an existence that refuses to signify, or by an art without works, a language without trace. That is to say, without difference.11

In other words, Derrida pursues the critical issues posed by the experience of Artaud as a legal question of the “restitution” of stolen property (i.e., Artaud’s body proper, meaning his singular body, which can belong to nobody else), foregrounding the failure of his singularity before the law. By so doing, Derrida reveals an irreducible gap or void in the discourse of knowledge whereby the singular is extinguished in favor of the example, the exemplary, and the case (all of which reduce the singular to a species of the particular). It would seem natural to conclude from the above discussion that if properly represented according to the poet’s own prescription, Artaud would not become an example of the thetic construction of “madness and the work.” In other words, he would not become “a particular case,” spirited or stolen away from his own experience in order to become a signifier for other cases, or as Derrida remarks, “the index of a transcendental structure.”12 I will return to address this below, because this is not at all the real issue that underlies Derrida’s argument. In fact, Derrida’s critique runs in the opposite direction: to attack the very silence of life by analyzing it and decomposing it even further in order, finally, to discover or exhume the historical and common ground in which both the critical and clinical discourses are imbedded.

During the same period that Derrida is making this argument, Deleuze also addresses—not for the last time, of course—the critical and clinical representation of the writer, and also around the figure of Artaud, whom he remarks as being “alone” (i.e., singular, unique). In Logique du sens (1969) Deleuze writes, in terms almost identical with Derrida’s earlier comments, that both “the clinical psychiatric aspect and literary critical aspect are botched simultaneously”: first, “by believing to have discovered identical materials that one can inevitably find everywhere; second, by believing to have discovered analogous forms which create false differences.”13 In this context, we should also recall an earlier example that Deleuze himself uses to interrogate the relationship between critical and clinical: the example of Sacher-Masoch. First addressing the question of the clinical determination of literary work in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967), Deleuze discerns that the extraction of the “clinical entities” of sadism and masochism from the work of Sade and Masoch results in an evacuation of the descriptions offered by these works themselves. There is a reduction of the language that was specific to Sade and Masoch in which symptoms later associated with the psychoanalytic terms that bear their names were first arranged together and displayed upon a critical tableau indistinguishable from the art of Sade and of Masoch. On the other hand, if we are to regard Sade and Masoch following Deleuze’s argument as the “true artists and ‘symptomatologists,’” something curious happens when psychoanalysis appropriates their clinical discoveries: the critical is obscured by the clinical in the same way that Sade and Masoch are separated from their own writing machines. This is why Deleuze writes that, in the case of the psychoanalytic appropriation of Masoch and Sade, because the clinical judgment is too full of prejudices, “it is now necessary to begin again with an approach situated outside the clinic, a literary approach, from which these perversions originally received their names.”14 Deleuze’s early work, therefore, functions as both a critical introduction to and a clinical recovery of Masoch’s own language, because the text is accompanied by a new edition of the novel Venus in Furs (i.e., in Masoch’s own words). In the title under which this work appears in French, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, the term présentation assumes the precise sense of a legal “discovery,” the stage in which evidence is gathered from an opposing party in the initial phase of a trial. Deleuze’s critique of the clinical appropriation of Masoch can be understood precisely as pleading for the defense in a proceeding against psychoanalysis, a proceeding that would finally be brought to trial later in Anti-Oedipus (1972).

Even in light of the above similarities in their approach to the problem of the critical and the clinical, we might nonetheless expect that Derrida does not share Deleuze’s strategy concerning the overturning of the conjunction between work and madness in exactly the same manner. The following passage from Derrida’s argument in “La parole soufflée” may shed some light on the division in their approaches to the theme of madness. This passage concerns the figure of the poet Hölderlin in Laplanche’s reading, but can also be extended to address the issue under discussion with regard to the general notion of schizophrenia, and in some ways can also be applied to Deleuze and Guattari’s “reappropriation” of the psychoanalytic category in Anti-Oedipus. According to a thesis that Derrida ascribes to a certain philosophical treatment that follows the disappearance of both psychological and structuralist styles, the question of schizophrenia that was reopened by Hölderlin and Artaud is “a universal problem.’”

[It is a] universal and not only human problem, not primarily a human problem because a true anthropology could be constituted upon the possibility of schizophrenia—which does not mean that the possibility of schizophrenia can in fact be encountered in beings other than man. . . . Just as “in certain societies, the accession to the Law, to the Symbolic has fallen to other institutions than the Father” [Laplanche] . . . similarly, analogically, schizophrenia is not one among other dimensions or possibilities of the existent called man, but indeed the structure that opens the truth of man.15

What is remarkable in this description is the fact that Derrida is already forecasting, seven years prior to the publication in French of Anti-Oedipus in 1972, the space of a problem that Deleuze and Guattari will baptize as the discourse of “schizoanalysis,” the original and creative conjunction and overturning of the two dominant representatives of the clinical and the critical, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hence, in this passage we find a certain number of assertions that would find implicit support in this later work:

1. That the only “true anthropology” can be constituted on the basis of the actual existence of schizophrenia.
2. That there are other organizations of sexuality, accessions to the symbolic and the law, that have not fallen to the institution of the Father (i.e., to Oedipus).
3. That the external limit of schizophrenia within psychoanalytic discourse opens the possibility of accession to these other dimensions, which are like the future societies that exist either before or beyond the paternal function.

With regard to the third thesis, Deleuze will later take up this possibility again in reference to Bartleby and Ahab, concerning America as precisely the loss of the paternal function as the psychic glue of social institutions. Deleuze describes this possibility earlier in Difference and Repetition:

It is not a question of opposing to a dogmatic image of thought another image borrowed, for example, from schizophrenia, but rather of remembering that schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility of thought—one, moreover, that can only be revealed as such through the abolition of that image.16

Nevertheless, Derrida suggests, at a crucial point of his own argument, that there remains a possibility still of establishing the “unity” of madness and the work of art on the basis of a certain “historicity,” that is, at the moment when “the deciphering of structures has commenced its reign and determined the position of the question,” a moment “even more absent from our memory in that it is not within history.”17 Therefore, Derrida argues, what authorizes the disappearance or the loss of the unique itself is precisely “the conception of the unique or the unicity of the unique—here, the unity of madness and the work—as conjunction, composition, or ‘combination.’ ”18 Here Derrida is explicitly stating that the condition of madness and the work is the historical appearance of a certain notion of structure that demands both phenomena as its internal precondition and extreme limit as two forms of “non-sense”: on one side, the non-sense expressed by madness as the deviation or the absence of the structure, and on the other side, the non-sense of an automatism, or the purely mechanical repetition of the structure in all its contingent parts. In other words, here we have the necessary conjunction between what lies outside “Structure,” in both senses, and the concepts of difference and repetition. These states express the internal and external preconditions and the limitations in the notion of structure itself: its absence (for example, the foreclosure of structure in the experience of schizophrenia) and, at the same time, the emission of non-sense elements and particles that are like the genetic actualization of the structure’s purely formal repetition (for example, esoteric and portmanteau words, or Artaud’s screams).

It is for this reason that Antonin Artaud, or “the universal schizophrenic man,” can become an exemplary case, because his experience expresses the condition of the closure of a metaphysics of presence, or at least represents an extreme limit case. Deleuze, in fact, will find the same condition in Difference and Repetition when he defines a “structure” as two coexistent series (for example, a psychic series and a linguistic series) “and neither of these series can any longer be designated as the original or the derived.”19 Consequently, the relationship between madness and the work, the clinical and the critical, is the result of the “displacement” or of the “disguising” of one series within another. Whatever resemblance or identity is discovered to operate the unity between these two regions of experience, madness and the work, even the appearance of one as the implicit “truth” of the other, is the result, not of their eternal presupposition or the universality of their conjunction, but of the pure effects of a certain “dark precursor,” whose function could perhaps be defined along the same lines as Derrida’s description of the moment that lies outside every structure, that “conjoins the two senses of non-sense in a unicity” (for example, the historical univocity of madness and the work). Given this common intuition, however, it is interesting to note that Derrida does not choose to follow this intuition to its final conclusion, as Deleuze does later on in his work with Guattari. That is to say he does not choose to bestow some revolutionary potential or vitally productive force on the historical closure of schizophrenia, which is thus defined as the “negative” of structure, the secret essence, or the truth of structure—that is, the truth of capitalism, for instance, in the major thesis of Anti-Oedipus that schizophrenia is the negative of the capitalist formation.

Derrida’s decision is to remain willfully naive concerning this potential, and perhaps this is because, as Derrida writes in the conclusion, “this obeys a law too”20—that a life named Antonin Artaud, who desired himself absolutely and lawlessly, must risk becoming, in the act of cruelty that authorizes all transgression, yet another law. In other words, for Derrida the image of closure that Artaud announces already belongs to the history of the Same. Here again, we must recall the convergence between the clinical and critical around the themes of madness and the work; both concern the supposed access to “a place beyond”—symbolic access to another law than the one that falls to the Father, or to another language, “a foreign language within language.”21 Before all these possibilities, Derrida chooses to remain naive. He prefers not to see this difference “in-itself” as productive and critical; rather, he prefers to see this conception of difference as naive and uncritical of its own duplicity—perhaps even complicity—with the metaphysical presuppositions of the text that it inhabits and seeks to demolish. “The duplicity of Artaud’s text,” Derrida writes,

simultaneously more or less than a stratagem, has unceasingly obliged us to pass over to the other side of the limit, and therefore to demonstrate the closure of the presence in which he had to enclose himself [an enclosure that Derrida earlier compares to a tomb or sarcophagus] in order to denounce the naïve implications within difference. At this point, different things ceaselessly and rapidly pass into each other, and the critical experience of difference resembles the naïve and metaphysical implications within difference, such that to an inexpert scrutiny, we could appear to be criticizing Artaud’s metaphysics from the standpoint of metaphysics itself, when we are actually delimiting a fatal complicity.22

By analogy, we could easily apply many of the above criticisms to the early text of Deleuze and Guattari. For example, concerning the desire for abolition or demolition of a certain structure, I recall these lines from Anti-Oedipus: “Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction—a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the super-ego, guilt, the law, castration.”23 In addition, we might take up Derrida’s remarks to reopen any one of the great themes that occur in Anti-Oedipus concerning, for example, schizophrenia as the “internal limit of capitalism,” as “the truth of desiring production,” or the schizo as a “revolutionary alternative to paranoid or fascist desire.” Finally, we might even choose to question other presuppositions in this work, or elsewhere in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, such as how the schizophrenic as a clinical entity is related to the concept of the body without organs, or to the figure of Artaud himself, who is identified with the “universal cry of schizophrenic man.”24 Anyone who has taught these works would immediately agree that one of the primary obstacles one encounters is precisely the objection concerning the univocity of “suffering” and a certain pathos with which there is a need to preserve this madness of “the Other as Other.” The frequency of these moral and ethical objections appear on first glance to confirm Derrida’s argument that “the schizophrenic” has been used to create a contemporary myth from the reality of madness—one that only neurotics really believe in! In his essay “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure,” however, Deleuze himself is careful to distinguish the real language of madness, which is more like an inarticulate block of expression, a void that links directly to itself, or to its own lived experience, and that never refers outside of itself.25 This note of caution concerning the possibility of representing madness “in-itself” seems to agree with a statement made by Derrida (in the same essay, but also repeated in his seminal essay “The Cogito and the History of Madness”) “that there is no such thing as an art without works, a language without trace or difference.”26 Likewise, according to Deleuze, what the language of madness is lacking (that is, if it can truly be called a language at all, rather than simply what Deleuze calls a “linguistic procedure or protocol”) is a “vital process that is capable of producing vision.”27

These potential criticisms might be severe except for that fact that, by his own words repeated several times throughout the essay, Derrida’s own approach to this question remains “overtly naive.” What does this mean? The essay begins with the following declaration: “Naiveté of the discourse we open here, speaking in the direction of Antonin Artaud. To reduce this naiveté, we would have to wait a long time—in truth, until a dialogue between the critical and the clinical was inaugurated.”28 (In response, it could be said that Deleuze inaugurates this dialogue two years later in his preface to Sacher-Masoch, which I will return to below.) However, at this point Derrida already resolves his own position and announces his strategy concerning where he himself is speaking from, because to speak with knowledge or expertise concerning the experience or the work of madness would be to assume the position of either the critic or the doctor, either the critical or the clinical. Unable, or rather unwilling, to choose either discursive position, Derrida’s only alternative is to remain stubbornly naive; therefore, “our initial stipulation of naiveté was not a stipulation of style.”29

For Deleuze, on the other hand, naiveté is not a very good method. A better method would be provided by the image of “stupidity,” as I have already discussed, which Deleuze describes elsewhere as “the highest finality of thought.”30 Thus, Deleuze’s implicit response to Derrida’s strategy might be that it is preferable to be stupid than willfully naive, since naiveté still retains an image of the “beautiful soul” who seeks to protect itself from an encounter with error. To mistake madness for the work, or the work for madness—this is a trap that Derrida attempts to avoid by remaining forcefully naive, and by refusing the risk of “transgression,” which might also become a new form of error, even an error in principle, that is, the repetition of an error that grounds the history of metaphysics itself. He writes: “The transgression of metaphysics through the ‘thought’ which, Artaud tells us, has not yet begun, always risks returning to metaphysics.”31 In some sense Derrida is also guilty of reducing the entire experience of Artaud to the single possibility of error, which is to say he reduces this thought to the circular error of metaphysics. In defending himself against the possibility of error, he circumnavigates Artaud’s thought, “in the sense in which one poses a net, surrounding the limit of an entire textual network,” but ultimately in a manner that seeks to contain this thought “in-itself” and to maintain its position outside this history as singular, self-present, and unique.32 For Deleuze, on the other hand, the possibility of error proves nothing concerning the positivity of this thought, because error can no longer be taken as the sole “negative” of thought.33 Moreover, “as for the true transcendental structures of thought and the ‘negative’ in which these are enveloped [for which ‘schizophrenia’ remains one possible name], perhaps these must be sought elsewhere, and in figures other than those of error.”34 From these observations concerning the case of Artaud, we might conclude that although they share the same criticism of the historically determined discourses of the critic and of psychoanalysis, we might see here why they do not share the same strategy of occupying the interval between life and the law. Derrida, here and at all times, remains cautious and resolutely naive before the law in encountering the singular possibility of a life named Antonin Artaud; Deleuze, on the other hand, runs on ahead somewhat precipitously, even blindly, seeking an encounter with the immanence of “a life” that at all times refuses to be reduced to the event of error. As for Artaud himself, who exists somewhere between Deleuze and Derrida, his experience nonetheless remains inscrutable to each philosopher: as the enigma of “a life that wanted properly to be named Antonin Artaud.”35

Turning now to the specific case of Melville’s character, let’s recall that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is the story of a copyist on Wall Street who one day appears in the office of the narrator, a lawyer, and is hired under a special and secret arrangement to supplement the copying service of the other two clerks, who are almost Kafkaesque in their comic ineptness. I will return to question this arrangement below, because it will become particularly important in Deleuze’s commentary. “Is there a relation of identification between the attorney and Bartleby?” Deleuze asks in his commentary. “But what is this relation?” “In what direction does it move?”36 Whatever direction or sense this identification will take, its movement will be traced through the strange or enigmatic formula that Bartleby enunciates in response to every one of the lawyer’s requests: “I would prefer not to.” In commenting on this formula, Deleuze first of all underlines its essential agrammatical character. Although technically correct, even a common expression of the American spoken idiom, Deleuze underlines its “queer use” of the word “prefer” and abrupt termination, NOT TO, which leaves what it rejects undetermined and, therefore, allows an infinite play of substitutions to complete the infinitive. According to Deleuze’s formulaic reading of the statement, because it stands at the limit of several proper variables, it has this limit function of an expression that falls to an almost degree-zero of a speech event between a stereotypic utterance and highly poetic expression and, at the same time, would be neither one nor the other. In other words, although in the story its enunciation has the character of the former, being “bare, mechanical speech,” it is singular to Bartleby and forebodes, as Deleuze says, a kind of “foreign language introduced into Standard English” that exhibits a poetic character of repetition not typical of clichés.

Concerning what the formula “negates,” or “refuses” (even though the formula neither affirms nor denies anything determinate), Deleuze underlines the fact that every instance of this response is directed at all the activities performed by a subject whose assigned role or job title is indicated in the title next to Bartleby’s name, “scrivener” (collating, copying, running errands, filing, proofreading, etc.). This is why the formula does not seem to refer to this or that particular assignment, or action, but threatens “to subsist once and for all and in all cases.”37 In short, in every case Bartleby’s formula inserts a space or interval between the requested action that is expected of his position (a scrivener, a “legal writer” or “copyist”) and his “response,” even his “respons-ibility.” Thus, the formula strikes against this very identification of Bartleby as subject, as a subject to the duties that arise naturally from the duty of identification with his position in the lawyer’s office, or his position in society, with his vocation (or “calling”). And yet Bartleby never rejects these subjacent identifications; one could easily temporalize the formula by adding the word “now,” I would prefer not to right now, at this moment, at this time, which leaves open the possibility that he will perform these assignments later, at some other moment, perhaps of his own choosing, even though this is not likely. It is precisely because of this that Bartleby becomes uncanny, he remains a copyist, but one who would prefer not to copy.

Reading Deleuze’s commentary on the figure of Bartleby, there is a certain uncanny resemblance to Derrida’s formula of “deconstruction” (which I remind the reader is neither a word, nor a concept, but is presented as a strategy of repetition, that is, of a certain formulaic procedure of the copy itself). Was this Deleuze’s intention? To secretly, as if by some enigmatic joke or sense of irony, place the philosophy of deconstruction under the sign of Bartleby (in America)? At first glance this comparison may seem a little too mechanical and forced, and one could suspect that the effects of Derrida’s constant refusal to define the term have engendered this association. But then, I would argue this would be the first trait that the two formulas share in common, a certain proliferation within a major language, like a void introduced into a standard language that threatens to carry it off, to stutter, to defer its own sense. Thus, the first trait of my comparison is precisely this propagation, which in the case of Derrida is literally that of a foreign language (at least its copy or translation) in a standard or major language. We might ask, concerning this secret affiliation between Bartleby’s formula and the formula of deconstruction: like the effect of Bartleby’s formula on the lawyer, hasn’t Derrida’s formula caused at least some readers to go a little bit mad? Moreover, the resemblance does not stop at the surface of the effects that both of these formulas have engendered in language, or more specifically, the means by which both formulas inhabit and reproduce or propagate themselves in a common language. Rather, I would argue, they share the same sense of responsibility, or the same strategy of the response, not one of “non-response” (refusal or ethical naivete of the beautiful soul), but rather a tactic or strategy of a “deferred response” (an ethics of responsibility that never assumes the power or position to respond to and for the Other). In other words, they enact the same gesture with regard to the social situation of speech, and even say the same thing, according to different formulas and procedures.

Commenting directly on Bartleby’s formula in The Gift of Death (1995), Derrida writes:

Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” takes on the responsibility of a response without response. It evokes a future without either predicting or promising; it utters nothing fixed, determinable, positive, or negative. The modality of this repeated utterance that says nothing, promises nothing, neither refuses nor accepts anything, the tense of this singularly insignificant statement reminds one of non-language or a secret language. . . . But in saying nothing general or determinable, Bartleby doesn’t say absolutely nothing. I would prefer not to looks like an incomplete sentence. Its indeterminacy creates tension: it opens onto a sort of reserve of incompleteness; it announces a temporary or provisional reserve, one involving a provision. . . . We don’t know what he wants or means to say, or what he doesn’t want to do or say, but we are given to understand quite clearly that he would prefer not to. The silhouette of content haunts this response.38

Given the silhouette already outlined in the above passage, it is not without precedent that we might read Derrida’s formula together with Bartleby’s, or to read Derrida under the sign of Bartleby. But why not? Bartleby is a copyist who prefers not to be “a copyist”; Derrida is a philosopher who prefers not to be “a philosopher.” Moreover, we could easily supplement Bartleby’s formula with any number of Derrida’s formulaic utterances:

• I would prefer not to . . . merely copy the text of metaphysics.
• I would prefer not to . . . transgress.
• I would prefer not to . . . answer your question.
• I would prefer not to . . . respond, that is, according to your own terms.
• I would prefer not to . . . speak clearly, that is, according to some social obligation whose origin is unknown, ineffable, and probably dangerous.

There is, of course, an endless almost infinite number of permutations and possible applications of Bartleby’s formula to Derrida’s own remarks in this or that text, interview, or public occasion. Reading any one of his interviews would be evidence enough of the necessary and undeniable link between Bartleby’s strategy and the strategies of “deconstruction.” Moreover, there is a third trait of comparison, which is that of “politeness” (politesse). It is what makes the enunciation of the formula so strange in Melville’s story, because this aspect of politeness in the act of declining, or resisting, provides the mask or simulation of observing the social ritual of response even in the face of absolute resistance to social imperative or command, of “non-response.” This again addresses a certain silence at the basis of the statement, a silence that is more performative gesture than speech. “Because there is an art to non-response, or the deferred response which is a rhetoric of war, a polemical ruse.” Derrida writes,

Polite silence can become the most insolent weapon and the most deadly irony, but then this non-response is still a response, the most polite, the most vigilant, the most respectful—both of the other and the truth. This non-response would again be a respectable form of politeness and respect, a responsible form of the vigilant exercise of responsibility. In any case, this would confirm that one cannot or that one ought not to fail to respond.39

Returning now to Deleuze’s own reading, it is clear that the situation that is being addressed is what Althusser called the “interpellation of the subject.” It is not by accident that Bartleby’s formulaic utterance takes place within the apparatus of the law, in a lawyer’s office, or that the character of Bartleby emerges in Melville’s universe as a kind of limit case of a society of laws, and of the very possibility of a strange being that seems to belong to the same condition as the law itself. Bartleby’s statement announces or hails from a region that must be placed beyond the name of the Father. Moreover, it is because Bartleby prefers not to be . . . a particular subject that he is described as a kind of “void” in the social relationships that govern language as a social institution, creating a vacuum within language (langage). For this reason, according to Deleuze, Bartleby becomes “a zone of indetermination,” a silence that does not respond to or has no correspondence with the implicit and subjective conventions of all speech acts, making him a pure outsider (exclu) to whom no social position can be attributed.40 If Bartleby appears to be enigmatic, moreover, it is not from some hidden principle of his character—Bartleby often exclaims that “there is nothing particular about him”—but from the character of his silence concerning his proper role and from the alterity that this silence announces. It is the silence around the question of “duty” that is most critical and ends up becoming a crisis for the lawyer, who, as the law’s agent, must dispel all secrets in order to reveal the motive behind them, which is why all secrets have a tinge of furtiveness and criminality, or scandal, about them like an aura of an evil or narcissistic, essentially antisocial motive. Derrida observes in another context, “It is precisely in the sense of respect for duty that Kant often evokes the necessity of penetrating behind secret motives to see if there might not be a secret impulse of self-love behind the greatest or most moral sense of duty.”41 This could also be the sense in which Bartleby’s formula could be justified as the strictest observance of the duty to oneself, “be true to oneself.” It is for this reason, as well, that the lawyer’s response to Bartleby’s statement gradually becomes more delirious—as the law’s representative, he is at the same time confronted with the presence of a being such as this, without particularity, and yet who continues to occupy a space very near him, and who even sits at his own desk.

Let us now return to the question of whether Deleuze was in fact commenting on Derrida’s formula in the guise of Bartleby, as if he was secretly signing “Derrida” or “deconstruction” under the sign of Bartleby, who is also defined as the scrivener (the writer). There are many hints in Deleuze’s essay that would seem to support this interpretation. Certainly, Derrida is a philosopher who can also be defined as a “copyist” à la Bartleby. However, the most obvious identification is contained in the oblique reference to the central scene of La Carte postale (1980), in which the figure of the lawyer who assumes Bartleby’s position repeats exactly the portrait of Socrates (the philosopher), sitting at the writing desk taking dictation from Plato (the writer). To give my reading some semblance of credibility, I will turn to one of those rare occasions when Derrida chooses to respond and to address himself directly to Deleuze’s interpretation of Bartleby, in his seminar of “Questions of Responsibility” conducted at the University of California, Irvine, in 1996.42 As if by some secret telepathy, on this occasion Derrida could not help but speak on the figure of Bartleby from his own position, that is, as someone who, like Bartleby, has chosen a certain logic of “non-response” and as a result has experienced a certain madness of the law in response to his own formula. Thus, at a crucial juncture of his lecture on Deleuze’s own commentary, Derrida intervenes to turn the tables on Deleuze, so to speak, in order to appropriate the Bartleby as his own figure or “proper representative” (or what Deleuze will later on call a “conceptual persona”).

Of course, the intervention will take place around a particular passage, even around a certain word translated from Melville’s story. Deleuze writes at a certain point: “Bartleby stops copying altogether and remains on the premises, a fixture [impavide].”43 The statement refers to the point in the story where Bartleby stops copying altogether and thus loses all relation to his supposed function, but rather becomes a dead and external thing, an object or useless fixture. Of course, this scene repeats in an original manner the traumatic scene of the division between speech and writing: the event at the origin where writing diverges from speech, where it prefers not to copy, where its external and arbitrary relation to speech suddenly appears as a point of crisis, but rather inaugurates the dialectic of mastery over the “property” of writing that defines the history of metaphysics, a dialectic that one might define as the primary or original masochistic contract. In short, Derrida reads Bartleby’s silence as already a displaced representative of the silence of nonresponse, noncorrespondence, the concept of différance that “speaks everywhere throughout language” even though “it remains silent, secret and discrete as a tomb.”44 This is the critical point in Derrida’s commentary on Deleuze’s reading of Melville’s story. It seems obvious, so evident and plain to see, that the crucial trait that determines Bartleby’s character is this displaced representative of différance. Thus, as Deleuze writes in the beginning of his commentary, “Bartleby is not a metaphor of the writer.”45 “Yes,” Derrida responds, “he is writing itself, and the possibility of the formula ‘I would prefer not to’ is always already conditioned by the possibility that writing engenders in the contract of speech, the original possibility of its noncopy, of noncorrespondence, where it comes free.”46

To reinforce this appropriation in his lectures, Derrida adds a word that is nowhere in either Melville’s story or Deleuze’s own reading; the word is secretaire and refers to Bartleby’s supposed position in the lawyer’s office, but also means a bureau, a cabinet for filing papers, provided with a surface for writing. Of course, other significations flow from this word as well, all of which seem to unlock the predicates of Melville’s character of Bartleby: secretum (or secret), confidential (or confidant). All of these significations can be understood to refer to the nature of the secret pact between Bartleby and the lawyer, who at one point in the pitch of delirium over Bartleby’s presence declares, “Yes, Bartleby, I never feel so private as when you are here . . . I penetrate to the predestined purpose of my life.”47 Around this proximity Deleuze, in his commentary, again raises the possibility of a strange and secret pact between Bartleby and the lawyer, as if the lawyer’s actions and delirious protests against the figure of Bartleby betray a secret guilt, or sexual responsibility. We might locate the nature of this pact in the unconscious or some ideological contradiction that the lawyer becomes acutely sensitive to; as a representative of the law, the subject of law, Bartleby, would be, according to this interpretation, the law’s own double or underside. In other words, if every subject is a subject of interpellation, then we must consider the difference of the condition of a being who is outside interpellation, who resists identification absolutely. Such a subject could not be a subject in Althusser’s sense, that is, “a subject of ideology,” because ideological interpellation demands that there be a subject who is, in every instance, (a) “particular.” Therefore, it is clear that where there is no interpellation, there will be no subject either.

For both Derrida and Deleuze, such a being goes by the name of literature, which very much appears as the law’s double or simulacrum in “our era.” Derrida says this quite clearly at several points: no law without literature, no literature without law (“plus de littérature, plus de loi”); or “no democracy without literature, no literature without democracy.”48 (Of course, for both phrases we could substitute a positive declaration, which the French allows: “the more democracy, the more literature; the more law, the more literature.”) Derrida’s expansion on the subject of literature will allow us to profile in a more summary manner what he shares in common with Deleuze around the question of literature:

Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in the conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secures in principle the right to say everything. . . . This authorization to say everything (which, moreover, together with democracy, as the apparent “hyper-responsibility” of the subject) also acknowledges a right to absolute non-response, just where there is no question of responding, of being able to or having to respond. This non-response is more original and more secret than the modalities of power and duty because it is fundamentally heterogeneous. We find here the hyperbolic condition of democracy which seems to contradict a certain determined and historically limited concept of democracy, a concept which links it to the concept of a subject that is calculated, accountable, imputable and responsible, one that “must respond” and “must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Of having to confess, to reveal all their secrets, with the exception of certain situations that are determined and regulated by law.49

At this point, several remarks could be drawn from this passage concerning the positive affirmations that Deleuze and Derrida share (partage) concerning the question of literature (or “the literary machine”). Both thinkers identify literature with a certain absolute nonresponse, which could be understood that the subject who “speaks” in literature speaks in an absolutely original manner, which does not copy or reproduce or respond to the subject in social space, inscribed in its rituals and conventions, in its ideological apparatus. This allows us to understand the special nature of literary enunciation, which does not directly represent social enunciation or other kinds of statements, but allows the possibility for new statements and thus new subjects of enunciation (like Bartleby, for example, who is a pure fiction). This very possibility is something that Deleuze has determined as the condition of being “a bachelor,” that is, of a subject who establishes the virtual link of the literary statement to collective enunciation. Second, the “heterogeneity” between the subject in literature and the subjects of moral duty and respect functions as the second meaning of “nonresponse,” because the literary subject exceeds both of these regimes and does not arise from interpellation, but absolutely eludes this ideological mechanism (perhaps even contrary to the function of criticism in the modern period, which can be said to be one of binding literary statements to interpellated subjects and known identities). The figure of Bartleby has prefigured this for us in a striking manner. My third remark concerns what Derrida calls “the hyperbolic condition” of the subject (of enunciation): That the literary subject exceeds or emerges outside the “calculated” identity of the moral or civil subject (and I have used the word “interpellation” to substitute for this calculating regime that belongs to modern disciplinary societies) creates the possible identification of the space of literature as the space of différance (that is, a spacing defined as both displacement and temporal delay) between the closed, relatively determined, or calculated democracy and what Derrida calls the “democracy to come.” This might also address what Deleuze defines as “a place where Bartleby can finally take his walks” and is something that Deleuze would affirm as well, concerning the possibility of certain statements in modern literature as the seeds of collective enunciation of a missing people, or “a people to come.”

Finally, if there is a duplication of Derrida’s logic inscribed in the relation between Bartleby and the lawyer, does this association imply that we may read Derrida’s formula under the sign of “masochism,” particularly as a certain manner of creating contracts that are made in the absence of the Name of the Father or, in Derrida’s words, that do not “fall to the Father” or to the principle of Law (the Symbolic)? We recall Derrida’s statements above concerning the case of Artaud, but also the statements in Deleuze’s commentary on Bartleby concerning the different figures in Melville who all live in the realm devoid of the Father, in an OUTLANDISH or deterritorialized realm, which he calls “America”: confidence men, raving psychotics, monomaniacal demons like Ahab who also bear a kind of “secret and evil pact” with a primary nature that exceeds the secondary order of the Law, and others like Bartleby, whom Deleuze describes as “orphans,” whose relation to the Father occurs by “unnatural alliance.” For both Derrida and Deleuze, the problematic is always the power of these states of exception, perhaps even exemplary cases, in revealing or interrogating the nature of the primary contract, the one that runs prior to and stands at the condition of even the “linguistic contract.”

However, we have to be more precise concerning the event of the contract in question, which also engages at a fundamental level the question of literature. This is the creative possibility that Deleuze finds in the literary process; it is the capacity to “invent” new contracts, the capacity that belongs to what Deleuze calls a “nonorganic life” that can be found in the written line, in the curvature of the sentence, to invent new percepts and affects, new “signs” that imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, new forms of resistance—most of all, to free life from the forms that imprison it. Again, as Deleuze said later: “Creating isn’t communicating but resisting.”50 For Derrida, on the other hand, there is more than a difference of style concerning how to pursue this question. First of all, he has always stressed an absolutely nonoriginal and, let us say, absolutely unimaginative relation to the event of difference. Most of all, he has strenuously objected, on several occasions, to the term “creative” as a way of describing his procedure. “This implies that the subject . . . becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform—even in so-called ‘creation,’ or in so-called ‘transgression’—to a system of the rules of language as a system of differences, or at the very least conforming to the general law of différance.”51 Therefore, if “masochism” is perhaps a good way of characterizing Derrida’s procedure by way of analogy, it is not because it is an exemplary means of “transgression,” in the creation or invention of new contracts, since it already owes this particular trait to the primary contract between speech and writing, which, as Derrida has shown throughout his entire body of work, is already showing signs of being strained, arbitrary, differential. “Arbitrary and differential,” as Saussure says, “are two correlative characteristics.”52 Thus, for Derrida the question of creation in literature would have to be something more akin to a theory of “masochism” without transgression, more akin to the event of something “that ‘produces’—by means of something that is simply not an activity—these differences, these effects of difference.”53 This is why we can describe his procedure as one of “tracing” the movement of an original default, or nonreproductive instance that belongs to this primary contract, or of extending and deploying it throughout every other region it informs, and the procedure itself is only an effect and a “kind of intensification of its play.”54 This would be a particularly compelling way to read both the clinical and the critical dimension of his work concerning a default at the heart of the symbolic order, a default that is nothing more or less than the possibility of a grammatical error. He does so, he says so explicitly, by tracing this movement, by inserting a chain of nonsynonymous substitutions precisely in the place of this simple grammatical substitution, “this silent lapse of spelling,” because différance makes the movement of signification possible.

Do the above statements also imply that writing has replaced death as the absolute border of silence (nonbeing) and finitude? If so, what is its specific threat or danger—a harmless supplement, a secondary appendage to speech, a mere automaton? After Of Grammatology, at least, no one can so easily dismiss the question of writing as that point where its all-too-self-evident meaning dissolves in favor of movement that necessarily exceeds consciousness, thereby dislocating the unity of the work with regard to its former end, goal, or telos. As a consequence of Derrida’s interrogation, no one today can (or rather should) approach the question of writing innocently. Its sign, as Derrida announces very early on, is always presented as a sort of “monstrosity,” as “an absolute danger,” as I quoted earlier. This is a sign not merely of the times, according to Derrida, but of the “inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation, inflation itself.”55 Today, in fact, we can still perceive all the symptoms of this inflation (of language, of writing) in the manner by which the subject—including every aspect of this subject’s “life-world” (Lebenswelt), such as its culture, politics, knowledge, economy—is absolutely comprehended by an order of signs, one might even say precomprehended, in a manner that necessarily exceeds consciousness. Thus, the weight and measure of the subject’s own activity and experience has disappeared under the gravity of another measure that takes the form of a shadowy writing that the subject barely discerns, even though it already animates every perception, action, feeling, or thought.

There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of signifying references that constitute language. The advent of writing is the advent of this play; today such a play is coming into its own, effacing the limit starting from which one had thought to regulate the circulation of signs, drawing along with it all the reassuring signifieds, reducing all strongholds, all the out-of-bounds shelters that watched over the field of language. This, strictly speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of the “sign” and its entire logic.56

If one does not enter lightly into this dangerous and insane game of writing today, this is because the border that separates our knowledge from our naivete or simple ignorance has been eclipsed. Deleuze remarks, “We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write.”57 All the old reference points are gone (or at least strangely dislocated); once we enter the game, there are no more “time-outs,” and what’s worse, we only come to discover that we were always already playing and being played. Given the gravity of this “new” situation, therefore, it would seem plausible that one could (even should) simply choose not to enter into the game, to continue speaking of and from that former limit, to hold onto all the old reassuring signifieds, to cling to a concept of the “sign” as spoken, intentional, ordered, and most of all, “logical.” However, if the future introduced by the advent of writing exposes one to the measure of a certain insanity (one that necessarily exceeds Hegelian “bad infinity”), then the avoidance or reduction (perhaps even the “foreclosure”) of this moment only exposes one to another, potentially more dangerous and violent, form of madness.

My last statement can be readily illustrated by the following observation: if, as suggested above, the boundary- or limit-concept of knowledge has been transmuted from death into “writing,” then the reduction of the question of writing (again) to a former position of “secondariness” would be comparable to reducing the question of finitude (again) to the status of mortality of the “creature” (ens creatum). But I think this reduction has also happened quite recently in philosophy and the “return of religion.” It is not by chance that we see in this response the nostalgic reassertion of a certain theological solution, since, as Derrida has remarked many times, the production of theology (in the West) has always taken place by means of a certain repression of the limit first introduced by writing (although one could also say, in this context, by a certain history of writing, or even the repression of history as such, which can be defined as “the total movement of the trace”). Thus, Derrida writes, “in its origin, to be sure, one can already suspect that an origin whose structure can be exposed as ‘signifier of the signifier’ conceals and erases itself in its own production.”58

In addressing the question of style in the two major philosophies of difference “in our era,” I have attempted only to demonstrate what, upon first glance, might seem all too obvious: Derrida and Deleuze are philosophers who write. It is difficult to judge which activity grounds the other, in the sense of which provides the necessary conditions for the other activity to take place—philosophizing or writing? Does it even make sense any longer to pose this distinction? Certainly one factor would be the evolution in the systems of writing, publication, archiving, or more generally, the dispersion of the public functions of discourse (especially written discourse), including all the civil and legal codes—here one might recall Foucault’s descriptive genealogy of the author as a discursive function—that determine the circulation of written works and their relationship to proper, identifiable individuals. This has certainly become a constant, even obsessive, theme in Derrida’s later writings concerning the signature, the proper name, the enunciating dimension of the speech act or performative statement (such as the promise or oath). One cannot account for this series of themes except to say that they mark the limits and the tertiary borders of a properly philosophical (demonstrative) discourse. They form the outside of philosophical representation, an outside that reappears as the very condition of philosophy in its contemporary mode—the wildly different appropriations of the term “deconstruction” already attest to this—and thus become occasions for Derrida’s own interrogation concerning the various convergences and, more often, the “destinerrance” of his body of work. Therefore, a second factor for understanding the emergence of the question of writing in philosophy is a certain “contamination” that has taken place between the genres of philosophical and literary discourse in the modern period, after Nietzsche in particular. One might argue that this has always been the case (for example, Plato’s dialogues, or Hegel’s “philosophical Bildungsroman”), but there is something distinctly modern in the emergence of “literature,” and in the concept of writing that accompanies it, as distinguished from the earlier forms of rhetoric, poetry, or “belles lettres.” It is around this development that the question of writing is especially marked and around this question, I would argue, that the most dizzying and contracted dialogue between “the philosopher” and “the writer” has ensued in the contemporary period. At a moment of near identification, we can locate many places in both Deleuze’s and Derrida’s work where the philosopher emerges to assert that what he is doing is not “merely literature.” Derrida complains, and not only once, “Those who accuse me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric . . . have visibly and carefully avoided reading me.”59

Yet, it is precisely this confrontation and even struggle around the question of writing that for both Derrida and Deleuze the question of philosophy has recommenced in the postmodern period. In the 1995 interview “Is There a Philosophical Language?,” Derrida addresses this “contamination” of a “properly philosophical language” and a “purely literary discourse”:

The explanation between “philosophy” and “literature” is not only a difficult problem that I try to elaborate as such, it is also that which takes the form of writing in my texts, a writing that, by being neither purely literary nor purely philosophical, attempts to sacrifice the attention to demonstration or to theses nor fictionality or poetics of language. In a word, . . . I don’t believe that there is a “specifically philosophical writing,” a sole philosophical writing whose purity is always the same and out of reach of all sorts of contaminations. And first of all for this overwhelming reason: philosophy is spoken and written in a natural language, not in an absolutely formalizable and universal language. That said, within this natural language and its uses, certain modes have been forcibly imposed (and there is here a relation of force) as philosophical.60

Consequently, by means of the proliferation of many experiments on the level of genre (Disseminations, Glas, The Post Card, and Circumfessions are perhaps the most notable works in this mode), Derrida has constantly called into question the supposed naturalness of a certain mode of philosophical discourse. There is a politics of style, and by means of this experimentation, style becomes a political question, because “each time a philosophy has been opposed, it was also, although not only, by contesting the properly, authentically philosophical character of the other’s discourse.”61 Moreover, there is a certain violence, at least the visibility of “force,” that Derrida’s writing causes to appear, precisely in not obeying the traditional and institutional norms that always command the reproduction of an entire historical apparatus (of authorities, protocols, linguistic and discursive norms, national differences, and so on). “A philosophical debate is also a combat in view of imposing discursive modes, demonstrative procedures, rhetorical and pedagogical techniques.”62 It is precisely this combat between force and signification, which was invisibly present in the tradition of philosophy (constituting its “white mythology”), that Derrida’s style manifests as a phenomenon that must now be incorporated into its total signification.

As for Deleuze, it goes without saying that his work experiments with the normative conventions of a properly philosophical discourse, perhaps even to a hyperbolic degree in the case of the writing machines of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Even his “traditional” philosophical commentaries are extremely deceptive and no less experimental in terms of innovating the discursive form (as in the case of The Fold). Of course, this program or “style” of experimentation is already foreshadowed in the frequently quoted passage from the preface to Difference and Repetition:

The time is coming when it will be hardly possible to write a book of philosophy as it has been done for so long: “Ah, that old style. . . .” . . . It seems to us that the history of philosophy should play a role roughly to that of collage in painting. The history of philosophy is the reproduction of philosophy itself. In the history of philosophy, the commentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximum modification appropriate to a double. (One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa.)63

Given that the question of writing and a certain strategy of experimentation are fundamental traits in both philosophies of difference, I return to my initial question: Can the concept of difference be reduced to the question of “style” in writing? But again, this begs a more preliminary question: “What is style?” In response I will simply say that style is an image. But an image of what, exactly? As we saw in our reading of the final edition of Proust and Signs, Deleuze defines the function of style as the form of the communication of the whole within the work. Its function is to unify a multiplicity of viewpoints, even at the level of the sentence, without thereby submitting this unity to a closed totality. “But just what is this form, and how are the orders of production or truth, the machines organized within each other?” Deleuze asks. “None has the function of totalization.”64 In several places Deleuze even refers to style as an “essence,” despite the inappropriateness some might ascribe to this word, since it allows a viewpoint to open up onto the work as a whole: “an individuating viewpoint superior to the individuals themselves, breaking with their chains of associations.”65 Thus, the essence of essence, of style as the essential viewpoint in the work, is “syntactic” or “conjunctive”: “Essence appears alongside these chains, incarnated in a closed fragment, adjacent to what it overwhelms, contiguous to what it reveals.”66 Alongside, adjacent, and contiguous—style, nevertheless, expresses unity, the unity of this multiplicity of fragments, blocks, and parts. Thus, style must also be defined as the unifying trait that is produced after the work, at its end—one might say as the gesture of a final brushstroke or word—but that nevertheless continues to exist alongside the work. The fact that this unity continues to exist “alongside the work,” contingently related, possibly undergoing further permutations, is what makes the image of a style an object of criticism. Each critic seeks to grasp in an image the unity of a work (of a given author) by discovering the most stylistic element that defines the work’s genetic structure and its essential idea. The fact that most critics fail to discover this element of style, or that it is open to such intense disagreement and even conflict, is what makes the function of style so interesting, because it opens the question of the work’s unity (its genetic or formal history) to a seemingly endless number of appropriations. It is by this trait that “style” actually functions like a foreign language discovered within the language of the work, as a second-level order of signification, or new convention by which the work is determined, even if this determination is only “contingently” fixed and can undergo further translation or repetition—almost infinitely.

Does this mean that style is external to the work? Is the translation of the work’s meaning into another, so-called secondary and descriptive language, like a foreign language borne within the work, but abutting its external representation? Each work, according to Umberto Eco (who is cited by Deleuze in this context), “produces new linguistic conventions to which it submits, and itself becomes the key to its own code.”67 Later Deleuze will rename this “foreign language within language” or this “transversal dimension” (the very element of style) as, simply put, “the Outside.” For example, the following passage from “He Stuttered” concerns this concept of style:

When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or to stammer . . . then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. When language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent. Style—the foreign language in language—is made up of these two operations.68

Finally, according to Deleuze, it is through this “outside” or “transversal dimension” that the work is able to communicate with other works by the same writer, even those that do not yet exist, in addition to the works of other writers or artists.

For if the work of art communicates with a public and even gives rise to that public, if it communicates with the other works of the same artist and gives rise to them, if it communicates with the works of other artists and gives rise to works to come, it is always within a dimension of tranversality, in which unity and totality are established for themselves, without totalizing objects or subjects.69

Taking up the same issue of style (the definition of the work, of its manner of unifying itself, the existence of a unique idiom or style), Derrida also speaks to a certain “unity without totalization,” a unity that exceeds the identity of the signature, or the individuating viewpoint of the writer (i.e., the limited chain of associations):

There is a legal copyright and a civil identity, texts signed by the same name, a law, a responsibility, a property, guarantees. All this interests me very much. But it is only one stratum of the thing or the singular adventure called a work, which I feel is at every moment in the process of undoing itself, expropriating itself, falling to pieces without ever collecting itself together in a signature. I would be tempted to retain from the old concept of work the value of singularity and not that of identity to itself or of collection. If anything repeats itself in me in an obsessive fashion, it is this paradox: there is singularity but it does not collect itself, it “consists” in not collecting itself. Perhaps you will say that there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a “style.”70

Perhaps echoing the passage by Deleuze quoted above, the condition of this singularity, the condition of the “recognition” of style—whether this is attributed to the work or to the writer, it is difficult to say—is repetition from the perspective of an other writing machine. One can never recognize one’s own style, or rather, this occurs only when the writer is already located in the position of the other, which is to say, at a certain distance and according to a measure and technique that is highly determined. Following Derrida’s comment concerning style, any such nomination or viewpoint always comes from the other, whose apprehension provides the very basis of the work’s communication.

This can be perceived only by the other. The idiom, if there is any, that by which one recognizes a signature, does not reappropriate itself, as paradoxical as that may seem. It can only be apprehended by an other, given over to the other. Of course, I may think I recognize myself, identify my signature or my sentence, but on the basis of an experience and of an exercise which I have undertaken in which I will have been trained as other, the possibility of repetition and thus of imitation, simulacrum, being inscribed at the very origin of this singularity.71

It seems that we have located the essence of style in this event of expropriation of a singular and unique idiom, from the moment that this idiom is already handed over to the powers of repetition or imitation, revealing instead a discourse that is strangely divided from itself at its very origin. On the basis of this observation concerning the possibility of a singular or unique instance of “I,” it is interesting to remark that even to speak of the works of “a Deleuze” and “a Derrida,” we are speaking from a pure convention, a fiction that belongs more to the history of the signature, the proper name, the bounded determination of the work as a property that belongs to an attested civil identity. It is even from this viewpoint that Derrida or Deleuze could be said to imitate or repeat themselves from the moment that they begin writing, because they themselves are marked or limited by the same institutional conventions that determine their civil identities and that define the very conditions of written enunciation. One can see why the works written with Guattari, where the status of the signature and the proper name is constantly frustrated by a writing process that refuses to obey the normative conventions of authorial identity, continue to trouble most of Deleuze’s commentators—and perhaps this constitutes Deleuze and Guattari’s most radical experiment, one that transgresses not only philosophical conventions but the underlying conventions of written forms, which is to say the rules that determine the dominant conception of the writing machine.

Returning to the late essay “He Stuttered,” in conclusion, Deleuze often speaks of “a non-style,” which is made up from “the elements of a style to come, which does not yet exist.”72 In a certain sense, modern philosophy (after Nietzsche) has always concerned itself with the question of style as a variable that will “make difference” by means of a new species of repetition, one that assembles together all the elements of the “not yet” and the “to come.” Nonstyle, therefore, can be defined as virtual, suspended between the tensors of the “to come” and the “not yet,” scattered and fragmentary. On the other hand, Deleuze also defines style as essentially economical: “Style is the economy of language.”73 However, this sentence would be misunderstood if “economy” were conceived as an order in equilibrium and balance; instead, economy must now be redefined as the duration perched between boom and bust, as an order of profound disequilibrium.

Can we make progress if we do not enter into regions far from equilibrium? Physics attests to this. Keynes made advances in political economy because he related it to a situation of a “boom,” and no longer equilibrium. This is the only way to introduce desire into the corresponding field. Must language then be put into a state of boom, close to a crash?74

Likewise, we might think of Derrida’s program along the same lines: to introduce the question of language into a region far from equilibrium. In this manner, Derrida poses as his fundamental gesture the question of writing as an essential disequilibrium within what he names as the logocentric tradition. He summarizes this strategy in the interview “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch Over Our Thinking”: “The act of writing or rather, since it is perhaps not altogether an act, the experience of writing . . . gives one a way that is better than ever for thinking the present and the origin, death, life, or survival.”75 Finally, in this context, allow me to recall a very early passage by Derrida, almost nearly at the very beginning of his work. He speaks about a certain boom that will inevitably lead to the bust of language. He writes:

The devaluation of the word “language” itself, and how, in the very hold it has upon us, it betrays a loose vocabulary, the temptation of a cheap seduction, the passive yielding to fashion, the consciousness of the avant-garde, in other words—ignorance—are evidences of this effect.76

My emphasis on these passages from the works of both philosophers is not merely to produce an analogy of themes based upon the repetition of the economic metaphors of “boom” and “crash” (or “bust”), but rather underscores the redefinition of an economy of difference and repetition that no longer is related to the equilibrium of a certain return or recovery of the same (of metaphysics, identity, self-presence, and so on). Thus, the economy of disequilibrium either is defined as the point where the being of language cracks and shudders, and when language itself is pushed to a state of boom, close to a crash, or is revealed as expressing all the inflationary signs of a crash—perhaps even one that is “immemorial.” In turn, this raises the question of silence in the region of language. There are actually two silences: one that is peaceful, marking a pause, a breath, which is already made possible by the order of speech. In fact, this is not silence at all, since it is already “impregnated” by the signifier that speaks through it and replenishes its significance. The other silence, one might say, can never be heard. Instead of peaceful, it is essentially brutal; it marks, not a pause between two words, but the rupture of language with itself. In this second silence, no breath is possible, because it is not made for the breath, but for the eye. It is this other silence that is announced earlier on by Deleuze as “altogether more threatening” and by Derrida as a “dangerous future,” a silence that is introduced by a philosophy of difference and repetition.

Finally, there is also a divergence present here between the two manners of reaching this point, and it is on this ridgeline or border that we can sharply distinguish the philosophical projects of Derrida and Deleuze. Whereas Derrida will trace the effects of this profound disequilibrium of a difference “that speaks everywhere throughout language,” Deleuze will understand it as an act or activity of creation: to place language in a situation of a boom, close to a crash. For the latter, difference is essentially, and perhaps “supremely,” created difference and not the effect of some flaw or crack, some essential lapse, in the orders of being and language. Here we might locate a difference in style between these two philosophers, or rather, between the style of these two major philosophies of difference today. To put it succinctly, I would simply say that Deleuze is a philosopher of the boom, whereas Derrida is the philosopher of the crash.

The “boom” can be demonstrated in several different senses: in language, to push syntax to its limit, to the point of stuttering; in desire, to crack desire itself up to the point of causing it to multiply its objects and states of becoming, beyond Oedipal familiarity; in politics, to break from the individual and the fascist collective organization alike, in order to cause the very phenomenon of collective assemblages to become more supple, molecular, and even experimental. All these mark the characteristic traits of a Deleuzian style of the critical (as the moment of turning, krinein, or crisis). Of course, the crisis of every boom is the risk of a crash. Thus, as Deleuze often warns, desire risks becoming trapped, or blocked; a schizoid process risks becoming schizophrenic; the body without organs risks becoming petrified, the vitriolic body of a junkie filled with refrigerator waves. As for language, there is the risk of it falling silent, and nonstyle can easily come to resemble all the trademarks of an all-too-familiar style. The point, it seems, is to keep on moving, that is, creating. The moment one stops, difference risks becoming uncreative, static, (non) Being.

For Derrida, on the other hand, one could say that the crash is itself the creative moment par excellence, and one does not approach it by dint of force, much less by exceptional or creative effort. One can find this axiom supported early on in “Force and Signification” (from Writing and Difference), where Derrida already announces the critical forces of this crash: “The force of our weakness,” he writes, “is that impotence separates, disengages, and emancipates. Henceforth, the totality is more perceived, the panorama and the panoramagram are possible.”77 Moreover, the crash—of a certain metaphysical epoch, a logocentric tradition, a certain subject of representation, of a certain idea of science and writing—has already happened. This is already evident in a passage from the same essay where this approach or strategy is methodologically announced (what would later be baptized as a “deconstructive operation”) in terms of a certain solicitude or solicitation of the Whole:

Structure can be methodically threatened, in order to comprehend more clearly not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but labiality [one might say at its fringe, margin, or border—terms that Derrida will make much use of from this point onward, but already in Of Grammatology]. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin, “the whole,” and from citare, “to put in motion”). The Structuralist solicitude and solicitation give themselves only the illusion of technical liberty when they become methodological. In truth, they reproduce, in the register of method, a solicitude and solicitation of Being, a historical-metaphysical threatening of foundations. It is during the epochs of historical dislocation, when we are expelled from the site, that this structuralist passion, which is simultaneously a frenzy of experimentation and a proliferation of schematizations, develops for itself.78

In this passage one can already detect in the italicized terms all the earmarks of a Derridean style that would be methodologically deployed in subsequent works. More importantly, we might note the transformation midpassage where Derrida ascribes the structuralist moments, their “method” as well as their “passion” for form, to a more original cause. Thus, the structuralist gesture is not original, but already a reproduction or response to an ontological becoming that has resulted in the shaking of foundations of science and knowledge. In truth, “the structuralist activity,” as Barthes once defined it, is here described as a supreme passivity, an openness and a vibration with a more original event having to do with “our historical dislocation.” Today one is left only to demonstrate its “taking place,” to allow its event to unfold throughout all its ramifications, a task of demonstration that requires an infinite patience of a Derridean style of radical critique.79 Here, the character of the krinein, the crisis demonstrated by means of the critique, bears a negativity that speaks to a secret affiliation between the Derridean style of critique and Heideggerian Lassenheit (as a “letting be” or “opening to” the eventuality of the event of difference), but that also opens to the dimension of the “not yet” or the “to come,” a patently noncreative dimension of a nonstyle.

Stepping back from this extremely shorthand sketch of a major distinction in these two philosophies of difference, one can now glimpse the reason behind Derrida’s hesitation over the definition of philosophy as “the creation of concepts.”80 For Derrida, the task of philosophy is largely demonstrative, and although the creation of a new concept can serve to demonstrate a shift in or transformation of the old ground (or closure), it cannot become the highest definition of philosophical activity. In fact, this supreme act of creativity, “this frenzy of experimentation and proliferation of schematization” as Derrida would say, is only the effect of a more primordial dislocation, which becomes the condition of any subsequent “play” and “creation.” Although the force of creativity is often characterized as a power (for example, as a power of imagination and affection), in fact it is the power of a fundamental passivity, weakness, impotence, disengagement—critique and emancipation. Consequently, deconstruction is not an act of creation, but rather the demonstration (monstration, or the bringing to manifestation) of a silent lapsus that insists in any order of signification, marking the very opening of this order to what exceeds it. In this way, différance can be better likened to the manifestation of the silent lapsus calumi that Freud discovered in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. When a slip of the tongue or pen occurs, the literal meaning of the text is opened to another text, another production or logic of signification. The slip, the error, or lapse—all interrogate this order, which can never close upon itself finally to assign identity, or meaning. In a certain sense, one can say on the basis of the above that Derrida also believes with Deleuze that the nature of the unconscious is productive, although this production is not for that reason located in an “unconscious” as an agent of production and creativity. Rather, the unconscious is the name for the silent lapse that strikes against the being of language. What is the other name for this silence but writing? Thus, I return to my initial question. Can we imagine a philosopher today who did not write? In response, I would pose another question: Is there anything more pitiful than a writer? Anything more deluded, more helpless, more in error? The one who writes is not to be admired. He (or she, but what difference does this make, except the trait of a final anthropomorphism of the writing machine?) only suffers from a delirium, that is, from a lack of style. Style, then, can only represent a partial solution to the “altogether threatening silence” that strikes against the being of one who writes, “Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving.”81