Chapitre IV. Writing through the walls of the political : Deleuze, Rancière and Virginia Woolf
p. 63-71
Texte intégral
1In two recent critical texts on Deleuze, Jacques Rancière offers an interesting and highly original perspective on Deleuzian thought by exploring it through his own understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics.1 Aesthetics for Rancière is not a discipline or a theory of art or even a division of philosophy. Rather, it is a specific mode of thought that is also a mode of perception of thought, an idea of thought that is imbricated within a field of the sensible. It refers to the manner in which a space given as common is divided or distributed among the entities identified as forming part of it. Aesthetics defines and delimits a field of the perceptible by determining what is visible or invisible within it. It is thus a configuration of ways of being, doing and speaking that operate as forms of exclusion and inclusion within a common sphere. Politics occurs when a given field of the sensible is redistributed, when ways of being, saying and doing are reconfigured to make for the emergence of new modes of subjectivation and inscription within a common world. Politics disrupts determined allocations of parts, roles and functions through an act of democratic dissensus, whereby previously unheard and unseen subjects open up a space and time in which they affirm their capacity to participate equally in a given sphere of experience.2 Politics is aesthetical in principle, while aesthetics is implicitly political. Aesthetics and politics are tightly bound up with each other, but not synonymous or even equivalent. There is no correlation between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, no convenient correspondence between aesthetic virtue and political virtue.3
2Deleuzian thought, or what essentially amounts to the same thing for Rancière, Deleuzian aesthetics, displays all the tensions and contradictions of what Rancière terms the aesthetic regime of art. A radical departure from Aristotelian poetics, the aesthetic regime of art breaks with the hierarchies that subtend the former’s partition of the perceptible to ground itself in a metaphysics that affirms the immanence of thought within the sensible. With specific reference to literature, the literary work of art declares its autonomy by identifying itself with a particular kind of heteronomy, with a specific mode of being in which matter and thought are co-present to one another. In this shift to a different ontological ground, an entire metaphysics of representation and signification comes to be abandoned, along with its modes of individuation and relations of causality and inference between them :
La puissance propre de la littérature s’origine dans cette zone d’indétermination où les individuations anciennes se défont, où la danse éternelle des atomes compose à chaque instant des figures et des intensités inédites […] La puissance nouvelle de la littérature se prend […] là où l’esprit se désorganise, où son monde craque, où la pensée éclate en atomes qui éprouvent leur unité avec des atomes de matière.4
3But this metaphysics that grounds literature also suspends it in an interminable movement between autonomy and heteronomy, logos and pathos, between the immanence of thought within that which does not think and the immanence of that which does not think within thought. Deleuze’s readings of literary texts are caught within the paradoxes of the metaphysics of literature, by the groundless ground of undifferentiated, non-individual life, by “le pathique sous le logique; le pathique à son point de repos, d’a-pathie.”5 Deleuze is constantly led to betray the metaphysics of literature that also constitutes the ground for his thought : the world of a-signifying atoms and molecules freed from the organizational hierarchies of representation, or in other words, the world of impersonal, non-representative and imperceptible becomings. This indeterminate universe constituted by the free dance of particles is a world of pure ontological equality, in which the identity of difference becomes an indifference. However, such an aesthetics of indifference proves to be untenable in Deleuze’s reading of literature, where he inevitably returns to that from which he seeks a rupture : the mimetic world of representation and signification :
L’analyse de Deleuze s’inscrit alors dans le destin de l’esthétique comme mode de pensée, dans le destin de l’oeuvre moderne liée à ce sensible pur, en excès par rapport aux schèmes de la doxa representative. Elle s’établit dans les zones où la pitié – c’est- à-dire la sympathie avec la vie in-individuelle voisine avec la folie, avec la perte de tout monde. Deleuze a affaire avec l’œuvre moderne comme œuvre contradictoire où l’élément pathique, la pensée-caillou, vient défaire l’ordre de la doxa mais où cet élément pathique est lui-même inclus, racheté dans une organicité et un logos de type nouveau6.
4Summoning what he regards as one of the greatest and strangest legacies of Deleuzian thought, the image of a wall of loose, uncemented stones that Deleuze assigns to the political community to be created, Rancière points to the aporia at the heart of Deleuzism, and explains why Deleuze consistently betrays the metaphysics of literature and why Deleuzism hurtles itself into the wall : both stem from the impossibility of actualizing impersonal, imperceptible and indiscernible modes of being into a political community grounded on the equality of every subject who forms part of it. Deleuze, who seeks to chart out a passage from ontology to politics, stops short before the wall of uncemented stones, wherein the undifferentiated dance of atoms, molecules and becomings cannot translate into the creation and operation of a fraternal community. Ontological equality (or indifference) is unable to make a difference with respect to political equality. A fraternal political people cannot be invented from a Deleuzian ontology. “Rien d’autre ne se conclut que l’identité du pouvoir infini de la différence et de l’indifférence de l’infini.”7 Rancière concludes : “On ne passe, de l’incantation multitudinaire de l’Être, vers aucune justice politique. La littérature n’ouvre aucun passage vers une politique deleuzienne.”8
5The challenge that Rancière’s powerful and compelling reading of Deleuze poses to a Deleuzian is unique, in that the encounter between two philosophers embarked upon a similar project, the articulation of the relationship between the aesthetic and the political risks running into the very wall mentioned by Rancière, where differences become indifferent, incapable of producing a way out of the impasses of thought. The purpose of this paper then, is to try and follow a line of flight from between the loose stones of Deleuze’s aporeitic wall, by reconfiguring the meeting between Deleuze and Rancière in terms of the following question : Can the plane of impersonal and invisible hacceities, affects and percepts give rise to a new partitioning of the perceptible, and how? What planes of consistency, what becomings allow for the emergence of a political sphere where none existed before, for a new visibility of those who are of no account?
6By reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, a writer who constitutes a point of convergence for both Deleuze and Rancière, I will argue (as Rancière himself suggests) that Woolf defines new (impersonal) modes of individuation that constitute a reconfiguration of the perceptible, an egalitarian redistribution of the relations between the visible, the sayable and the thinkable. A Room of One’s Own attempts to inscribe women and their writing within the sphere of a common reality or space of the community. However, I will attempt to show that this reworking of the sensible can and must be grounded on the very metaphysics of literature that Rancière refuses for (a Deleuzian) politics, that Woolf succeeds in charting out the passage between an ontology and a politics that Deleuze sought to extend in his own philosophical writings. The impersonal in Woolf, I submit, is a political mode of subjectivation that fleetingly sutures the gap between the (feminine) personal and the political.
7In order to proceed, I would like to first examine why Rancière refuses an easy equivalence between aesthetic and political equality, and why the democracy of the written word cannot equal democracy as a political form. In the interview he gave for the English edition of Le partage du sensible, he states categorically : “[L] iterary equality is not simply the equality of the written word; it is a certain way in which equality can function that can tend to distance it from any form of political equality.” The equality established by literature is a passive immanence, in contrast to the equality of political subjectivation. And in his Politique de la littérature, a work that appeared in 2007, Rancière consecrates an essay entitled “Le malentendu littéraire” to the difference he sees between political dissensus and literary misunderstanding. For Rancière, political dissensus works on the level of the collective, in a process of subjectivation that links a group of anonymities constituted as a “we” with the reconfiguration of a field of political subjects and agents. Literature seeks to undo and unmake the perceptible field organized around a subject of enunciation towards anonymous percepts and affects. Political dissensus is the construction of a sensible, literary misunderstanding a deconstruction or even an invalidation of its coordinates. Literary equality lays out a scene that is opposed to the scene constituted by democratic equality, “[…] la scène des choses muettes qui sont là sans raison, sans signification, et entraînent les consciences dans leur aphasie et leur apathie, le monde des micro-individualités moins qu’humains qui imposent une autre échelle de grandeur que celle des sujets politiques.”9 For Rancière, the politics of literature tends towards an indifferent muteness, an apathy that cannot constitute a sufficient ground for the testing out of democratic equality in an act of political subjectivation. And yet, a Deleuzian will no doubt recognize in this difference established between political disagreement and literary misunderstanding the persistence of a very familiar ontological field, a plane of consistency that moves between the two poles of the molar and the molecular. Furthermore, in the interview alluded to earlier, Rancière proposes a way of conceptualizing the knot between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics in a more permeable rather than a dichotomous manner by allowing for the entry of aesthetic modes of individuation into the field of the aesthetic possibilities of politics :
There is a limit at which the forms of novelistic micrology establish a mode of individuation that comes to challenge political subjectivation. There is also, however, an entire field of play where their modes of individuation and their means of linking sequences contribute to liberating political possibilities by undoing the formatting of reality produced by state-controlled media, by undoing the relations between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable.10
8And interestingly enough, it is in the novels of Virginia Woolf, one of Deleuze’s preferred writers, that Rancière identifies this field of aesthetic possibilities that may be appropriated by politics. In other words, Woolf’s molecular politics, Rancière seems to concede, can make for more effective forms of political dissensus.
9A Room of One’s Own is a complex questioning of women’s exclusion from a sphere not given as a common, and the claiming of a visible, a sayable and a doable that are denied to women within a particular temporal and spatial configuration of a sensible. “[W] hen a subject is highly controversial,” notes Woolf, “– and any question about sex is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.”11 Terms such as “woman” and/or a female “I” have no existence, they are but inventions for somebody “who has no real being.” But the text also begins with a trespassing, with the emergence of a woman who dares to walk and think within a masculine space that cannot accommodate this difference. And thereby begins a very materialist feminist inquiry into the reasons for the marked absence of women writers from the great works of literature. Why is it, asks Woolf, that women are everywhere represented in literature, but do not themselves write? The answer lies in a division of space, time and labour that assigns certain functions to women’s bodies, but deprives them of others, an hierarchical spatial and temporal distribution of bodies that determines in advance their capacity to perform some activities but not others. If only the Mrs Setons of the world had “learnt the great art of making money,” women might have had the fellowships, the endowments, the time and the room to write poetry. But the time to make money is precisely what is denied to women in an imposed state of motherhood : “Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children – no human being could stand it,” remarks Woolf wryly.12 Challenging the forms of (literary) representation that sustain a particular mode of visibility for women, a visible that in fact relegates women to the invisible, Woolf questions the divisions that perpetuate the inequalities between men and women : “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other poor? […] What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?”13 Why were women deprived of the possibility of writing? These are questions that call for an undoing of a given configuration of the perceptible, for a redistribution of parts, roles and identities attributed to subjects. What is worth noting however, is that the political subjectivation that Woolf seeks for women is one that flees the rigid categorization and despotism of a self and an ‘I’towards the anonymous and a-subjective intensities of the lived, in a writing freed from personal and identitarian politics, in a writing that is an art, rather than a “method of self-expression”.
10Woolf is thus led to ask what is perhaps the most important question of A Room of One’s Own, one that bears upon men and women alike : “But what is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation, I asked.”14 And her response is clear : it is the liberation from a self, from its self-consciousness, self- reflexivity and self-absorption, it is the move away from its grievances and grudges that makes literature possible. Shakespeare’s genius and merit lay in his ability to free himself from the politics of a self and subjecthood, in a mode of being that is impersonal, incandescent and unimpeded. Woolf admires Jane Austen for the same reason she admires Shakespeare – there is no anger, no despotic “I” or self to make its presence felt; only the humble anonymity of an incandescent mind. It is by becoming imperceptible and indiscernible that they suffuse their writing with the greatest force. Writing can only come about when the category of sex is renounced or forgotten to make room for a sensibility that responds to the imperceptible, the small, the unknown and the unrecorded. To write as a woman, for Woolf, is to write “as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman.”15 One writes through a becoming-woman in which writing is filled with a “curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.” Writing is a matter of affirming the difference and multiplicity of the real. And reality for Woolf is whatever leads us out of the drama of the human and personal “I”, it is that which is in touch with the common life, rather than the neatly separated lives of individuals. A Room of One’s Own does not seek to box women further into their individual cells, it encourages them to connect with the impersonal multiplicity and intensity of life, with a reality “[…] now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun […] in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly.”16 To live in the presence of reality is to leave the narrow framework of human sexual relations, it is to create and make entire worlds communicate. Writing is a matter of recording the obscure, the forgotten and the invisible, a forging of links to anodyne objects that compose a field of experience : “Above all, you must […] say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists’bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble.”17 It is the expression of a receptivity to the molecular equality of the perceptible and the imperceptible, the visible and the invisible, the human and the non-human, the personal and the impersonal :
[Mary Carmichael] had a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free. It responded to an almost imperceptible touch on it. It feasted like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight and sound that came its way. It ranged too, very subtly and curiously, among almost unknown or unrecorded things; it lighted on small things and showed that perhaps they were not small after all. It brought buried things to light and made one wonder what need there had been to bury them.18
11A Room of One’s Own thus maps out modes of individuation that distend narrow forms of personal subjectivity towards an immanence of mind and matter, in a profoundly democratic and egalitarian union characterized by a non-preferential sympathy with multiple states of being :
Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant perhaps that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotions without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided.19 (98)
12The fullness and unity of which Woolf speaks here is not an all-encompassing whole that would subsume the totality of life under its law and principle, it is in itself a small fragment of a teeming, impersonal and multiple flow of the real : “And I saw again the current which took the boat and the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and the woman, I thought, seeing them come together across the street, and the current swept them away, I thought, hearing far off the roar of London’s traffic, into that tremendous stream.”20
13The room that Woolf seeks for women wields the power to open up a disjunctive space and time within the neatly partitioned sphere of the political, a space-time sensorium of an a-subjective collective, a common “we”, or forcesof femininity tied to the multiple and the impersonal, capable of saturating, stretching and rearranging the parameters of the aesthetical and the political :
One goes into the room – but the resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman could say what happens when she goes into a room. The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers – one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of femininity to fly in one’s face. How should it be otherwise? For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.21
14The common life that Woolf claims for women is forged through myriad connections with the a-subjective intensities of the real. And it is through becomings and hacceities constructed in a relation of unity and sympathy (rather than the a-pathetic, passive, indifferent equality of all things molecular or atomic) that a new form of political subjectivation can break through the walls that divide, oppose and separate, that the woman writer will emerge from an obscure and anonymous collectivity :
Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners […] she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part […] that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that to so work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.22 (114)
15To conclude, what I have tried to show in the course of this article is that A Room of One’s Own problematizes the partition that Rancière establishes between the molar subjectivation of political dissensus and the molecular de-individuations of literary misunderstanding. The very existence of the space and time of a common sphere of writing is contingent upon the mapping of modes of being in touch with the common life, in a micropolitics of affects and percepts constructed through the saturation of atoms and molecules. In the continuity she establishes between an ontology and a politics, Woolf, as Deleuze notes, reminds us that to write is to also become something other than a writer23, it is to reach the point where words no longer clutter the mind with chaotic indistinction, but bear the possibility of pointing towards the gestures of (an) other.
Notes de bas de page
1 See Rancière J., “Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?” in Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique, Alliez E. ed., Le Pleissis-Robinson, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998, p. 525-536. See also Rancière J., “Deleuze, Bartleby et la formule littéraire” in La chair des mots : politiques de lécriture, Paris, Galilée, 1998.
2 For a detailed consideration of the above, see Rancière J., La mésentente : politique et philosophie, Paris, Galilée, 1995. See also Rancière J., Le Partage du sensible : esthétique et politique, Paris, La Fabrique, 2000.
3 See Rancière J., “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art : Jacques Rancière in Interview with Gabriel Rockhill”, The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution of the Sensible, Rockhill, Gabriel trans., London, Continuum, 2004, p. 49-66.
4 Rancière, J., La chair des mots, op. cit., p. 183.
5 Rancière, J., “Existe-t-il une esthéthique deleuzienne?”, op. cit., p. 534.
6 Ibid., p. 535-536.
7 Rancière, J., La chair des mots, p. 200.
8 Ibid., p. 202.
9 Rancière J., Politique de la littérature, Paris, Galilée, 2007, p. 54.
10 Rancière J., “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art”, op. cit., p. 65.
11 Woolf V., A Room of One’s Own, London, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929, p. 4. All future references will be to this edition.
12 Ibid., p. 22.
13 Ibid., p. 25.
14 Ibid., p. 51.
15 Ibid., p. 93.
16 Ibid., p. 110.
17 Ibid., p. 90.
18 Ibid., p. 92.
19 Ibid., p. 98.
20 Ibid., p. 104-105.
21 Ibid., p. 87.
22 Ibid., p. 114.
23 Deleuze G., Critique et Clinique, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1993, p. 17.
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