Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser

Postcolonial Literatures and
Deleuze
Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures
Edited by
Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser
Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to McGill University - PalgraveConnect - 2012-07-31
10.1057/9781137030801 - Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze, Edited by Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser
Also by Lorna Burns
CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN WRITING AND DELEUZE: Literature between
Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy
Also by Birgit Kaiser

FIGURES OF SIMPLICITY: Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville
Postcolonial Literatures and
Deleuze

Edited by
Lorna Burns
and
Birgit M. Kaiser
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Lorna Burns and
Birgit M. Kaiser 2012
Individual chapters © contributors
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction: Navigating Differential Futures, (Un)making
Colonial Pasts 1
Part I Deterritorializing Deleuze, Rethinking Postcolonialism
1 Forget Deleuze 21
Bruce B. Janz
2 The Bachelor Machine and the Postcolonial Writer 37
Gregg Lambert
3 The World with(out) Others, or How to Unlearn the Desire
for the Other 55
Kathrin Thiele
4 Edward Said between Singular and Specific 76
David Huddart
5 Deleuze, Hallward and the Transcendental Analytic of
Relation 96
Nick Nesbitt
Part II The Singularity of Postcolonial Literatures
6 The Singularities of Postcolonial Literature: Preindividual
(Hi)stories in Mohammed Dib’s ‘Northern Trilogy’ 123
Birgit M. Kaiser
7 Beyond the Colonized and the Colonizer: Caribbean
Writing as Postcolonial ‘Health’ 145
Lorna Burns
8 Becoming-animal, Becoming-political in Rachid Boudjedra’s
L’Escargot Entêté 165
Réda Bensmaïa (translated by Patricia Krus)
vi Contents
9 Revolutionizing Pleasure in Writing: Subversive Desire and

Micropolitical Affects in Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads 181
Milena Marinkova
10 Undercurrents and the Desert(ed): Negarestani, Tournier and
Deleuze Map the Polytics of a ‘New Earth’ 199
Rick Dolphijn

Index 217
Acknowledgements
An edited volume is always a ‘group work’ which could not have come
into existence without the inspiring and generous contributions of

many people. Our heart-felt gratitude goes to all of the contributors
to the volume, whose thoughts and energy really made this a shared
journey into the links between postcolonial literatures and Deleuzian
philosophy, and ultimately, of course, made this volume what it is.
We are also indebted to Patricia Krus for her translation of the chapter
by Réda Bensmaïa. Furthermore, our sincere thanks are due to Maria-
Magdalena Campos-Pons and the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami,
for granting us the rights to use a detail from the work ‘Identity Could
Be a Tragedy’ (1996), which we felt was most fitting to spearhead the
discussions in this book. Thanks are also due to the Worcester Art
Museum for supplying us with a copy of the image. We are grateful for
the financial support we received from Frans Ruiter and the Research
Institute for History and Culture (OGC) at Utrecht University, which made
us hopeful that even in times of financial crisis, the work that this book
does, and others like it, is still valued, something we also strongly felt
in the advice and support given by Paula Kennedy, Benjamin Doyle
and the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan throughout the process.
A Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies
in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh gave Lorna the oppor-
tunity to develop this project and she is grateful to Susan Manning and
Pauline Phemister for creating such a wonderful research environment
at IASH. She would also like to thank the Universities of Glasgow and
Lincoln for their support. And Birgit would especially like to thank
K and J for their love and care in words and deeds, which makes this all
worth fighting for.
vii
Notes on Contributors
Réda Bensmaïa is University Professor of French and Francophone

literature in the French Studies Department and in the Department of

Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of The
Barthes Effect: Introduction to the Reflective Text (University of Minnesota
Press, 1987); The Years of Passages (Minnesota, 1995); and Experimental
Nations or The Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton University Press,
2003). He is also the editor of Gilles Deleuze (Lendemains, 1989) and
Recommending Deleuze (Discourse, 1998).
Lorna Burns is a Lecturer in English in the School of Humanities at

the University of Lincoln. Her work has appeared in Deleuze Studies,
the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Textual Practice. She is the author
of Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature between
Postcolonialism and Post-continental Philosophy (Continuum, 2012).
Rick Dolphijn is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media

and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. His work has appeared in
Inflexions, Krisis, and Angelaki, and he is the author of Foodscapes:
Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (Eburon/University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
David Huddart is Associate Professor of English at the Chinese

University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Postcolonial Theory and
Autobiography (Routledge, 2007) and Homi K. Bhabha (Routledge, 2005).
Bruce B. Janz is Professor of Humanities and Chair of the Department

of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida, and director of the
CAH Centre for Humanities and Digital Research. He is the author of
Philosophy in an African Place (Lexington Books, 2009).
Birgit M. Kaiser is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at

Utrecht University. She is the author of Figures of Simplicity: Sensation
and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (SUNY, 2011).
Gregg Lambert is the Dean’s Professor of Humanities and Founding

Director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center in Central
New York. He is the author of The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
(Continuum, 2002), Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? (Continuum,
2006), On the (New) Baroque (The Davies Group, 2008), and the
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
forthcoming In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and

Philosophical Expressionism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Milena Marinkova is the author of Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics

and Micropolitical Writing (Continuum, 2011) and co-editor of Visions
of Canada: Canadian Studies in Europe. She teaches at the University
of Derby. Her work has also appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth

Literature, Moving Worlds and Third Text.
Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University.

He is the author of Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French
Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2003), Universal
Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment
(University of Virginia Press, 2008). He is also the editor of Toussaint
L’ouverture: The Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2008) and co-editor with Brian
Hulse of Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music
(Ashgate, 2010).
Kathrin Thiele is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the

Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She
is the author of The Thought of Becoming: Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of
Life (diaphanes, 2008), co-editor with Maria Muhle of Biopolitische
Konstellationen (August, 2011), as well as co-editor with Katrin Trüstedt
of Happy Days: Lebenswissen nach Cavell (Fink, 2009). Her work has also
been published in Deleuze Studies.
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Introduction: Navigating
Differential Futures, (Un)making
Colonial Pasts

In the fifteen years that have followed Robert Young’s seminal rereading
of the epistemic and physical violence of colonialism as a desiring-
machine’s production, coding and re/deterritorialization of colonial
desire, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
to ‘think through’ (Young 1995, p. 173) postcoloniality, few have
followed Young’s lead and ventured into the difficult domain of Deleuze
and the postcolonial. Christopher Miller’s application of Deleuze and
Guattari’s nomad and rhizome as conceptual tools for theorizing the
(post)identity politics of postcolonialism has perhaps come closest to
setting the parameters of a Deleuzian postcolonial analysis: today both
nomadology and rhizomatic thought continue to find privileged reso-
nance with the work of postcolonial theorists and critics (cf. Glissant
1997; Huggan 2008, pp. 28–30; Miller 1998). Without denying the
relevance of these terms to postcolonial studies, this volume promotes
a more fundamental alignment of the fields of Deleuzian thought and
postcolonialism. In doing so, it forms part of a growing awareness within
postcolonial studies of the critical potential of this dialogue, as evi-
denced by the recent work of Simone Bignall and Paul Patton – in both
their co-edited volume Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010) and their indi-
vidual works Deleuzian Concepts (Patton 2010), and Postcolonial Agency
(Bignall 2010) – as well as by the work of contemporary literary scholars
including Mrinalini Greedharry (2008), Ronald Bogue (2010), Eva Aldea
(2011), and, of course, as we shall see, Peter Hallward in his Absolutely
Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2001).
Critical interventions such as these together create what Bignall and
Patton refer to as ‘the simultaneous becoming-Deleuzian of postcoloni-
alism and the becoming-postcolonial of Deleuze’ (2010, p. 12). In other
words, as both Bruce Janz and David Huddart point out explicitly in
1
2 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
their respective contributions to this volume, the exercise of bringing

Deleuzian thought into dialogue with postcolonial studies should not
be approached as a corrective to certain theoretical inconsistencies
or failings within the field. Rather, by exploring the shared problems
that both Deleuzian and postcolonial thought seek to address, critical
analysis can uncover the common strategies employed by both in
order to overcome the striations of power and hegemony (colonialist

or otherwise). It is through this task of reconstructing the shared
ground of critical thought that new theoretical concepts (or new assem-
blages, as Deleuze might say) may be created between these two fields:
producing not a hybrid successor to the two, but, as in Deleuze and
Guattari’s well-known example of the wasp and the orchid (2004, p. 11),
initiating a process by which each is variously de- and reconstructed by
the other.
Echoing Young’s analysis of Deleuze and postcolonialism, Bignall and
Patton’s recent collection Deleuze and the Postcolonial seeks to illustrate
the ways in which Deleuzian thought can be made to ‘speak’ to post-
colonial theory, even if Deleuze himself did not directly ‘speak with’ or
for formerly colonized peoples (Bignall and Patton 2010, p. 1). This is
an important point, for it begins to suggest something of the resistance
to Deleuzian philosophy within the field of postcolonialism. As Bignall
and Patton discuss in their introduction, Deleuze’s failure to offer
models of counter-/postcolonial resistance, the absence of sustained
political commentary and anti-colonial critique in his work, and his
appropriation of ostensibly primitive or nativist paradigms such as the
nomad have raised concerns that this might reflect an ultimately self-
interested Eurocentrism to Deleuze’s philosophy (Bignall and Patton
2010, pp. 1–2; cf. Kaplan 1996). Indeed, this suspicion had been raised
earlier by Gayatri Spivak whose Althussarian critique of both Deleuze
and Michel Foucault argued that while both theorists expose complex
networks of power and desire they nevertheless both ‘systematically
and surprisingly ignore the question of ideology and their own implica-
tion in intellectual and economic history’ (Spivak 1999, p. 249). Both
Deleuze and Foucault fail, in other words, to recognize the ideological
biases inherent in their own privileged positioning as Western intel-
lectuals while arguing for the deconstruction of ideologically inflected
subjectivities such as ‘the other’.
In their contribution to Bignall and Patton’s Deleuze and the
Postcolonial, Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey do much to clear a way
beyond Spivak’s critique. They argue that Deleuze and, indeed, Deleuze
and Guattari in works such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, base
Burns and Kaiser: Introduction 3
their analyses on a philosophy of difference and repetition distinct from

Spivak’s Lacanian reading of the subaltern. As Robinson and Tormey
argue, Spivak’s critique turns upon a misreading of the Deleuzo-
Guattarian concepts of desire, subjectivization and representation.
While Spivak does usefully draw attention to the problematic of a post-
colonial discourse that speaks for or about the subaltern within a
register that risks reinscribing the dominance of hegemonic (Western)

structures of thought, her assertion that Deleuze works within a Western
conceptualization of oppression – ‘deploy[ing] an essentialised sub-
ject of oppression’, a ‘universal subject of oppression’ (Robinson
and Tormey 2010, p. 22) – crucially ignores the important distinctions
between a Deleuzian philosophy of difference-in-itself and a Lacanian
understanding of difference based on an ontological lack. As Robinson
and Tormey point out, within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of
difference-in-itself desire is ‘a matter of flows and becomings which
traverse the entire social, and indeed material or ecological field (2010,
p. 22). What Deleuze and Guattari term ‘desiring-production’, therefore,
reaches far beyond the limits of the sovereign subject. Thus, while
certain majoritarian (not a numerical determination, but signifying
a state of standardization, domination, or stratification) flows of desire
can produce determinate subjects or identities, there is very crucially
always also, in opposition, a flow of desire characterized as minoritar-
ian (again, not a marginal subjectivity, but a singularity, a process of
becoming and transformation rather than a fixity). Since the figure
of resistance must be identified as minoritarian, the so-called subject
of desire must be one that follows minor lines of becoming, employs
rhizomatic strategies of thought and operates within ‘smooth’ spaces
that escape the ‘striations’ of power. Hence, Robinson and Tormey
argue, ‘the agency of the oppressed, the voice of the subaltern, is not
characterized by true representation or self-presence. Rather, it contains
original production, an expression of the primacy of desiring-production
over social production’ (2010, p. 24).
Significantly for an understanding of Deleuze, Robinson and Tormey’s
argument highlights the different understandings of difference and
desire in Deleuzian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Neverthe-
less, as Kathrin Thiele’s essay ‘The World with(out) Others, or How
to Unlearn the Desire for the Other’ shows, such an opposition does not
fully ‘capture’ Spivak, and even beyond her own critique of Deleuze,
significant elements of Spivak’s work resonate with crucial dimensions
of Deleuzian philosophy. Thiele demonstrates the particular affinities
between Deleuzian becoming and Spivak’s demand for an unlearning of
one’s privileges. In doing so, her essay produces an assemblage between

the two: an assemblage that can be made fruitful not only for postcolonial
analyses but also for new ways of becoming. From the angle that Thiele
proposes, neither Deleuze nor Spivak are concerned with speaking for or
about the subaltern or the other, but rather direct their labours toward
the deconstruction of dominant (Western) structures of thought. Such a
labour of unlearning one’s privileges is accompanied for Spivak – and has

to be – by an affirmation of the uncharted, of the new. It can, therefore,
be aligned, as Thiele shows, with a Deleuzian movement of becoming,
which is based on a rejection of both representationalist thinking and
attempts to subordinate difference to the same. As Deleuze argues in
Difference and Repetition, the thought of representation subordinates
‘difference to identity or to the Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed’
and has offered merely ‘a conceptual difference, but not a concept of
difference’ (Deleuze 1994, p. xv). Representation – as much as a Lacanian
ontology of lack – submits difference to pre-existing images and privi-
leges stratification and identity over movement and difference. While
the former in their reliance on ‘pre-existing images’, as Robinson and
Tormey argue, are majoritarian, the latter are minoritarian tendencies
and a vehicle for the emergence of unforeseen openings, for the creative
production of newness.
It is precisely this recognition of the centrality of creative produc-
tion in Deleuze’s work that, as Bruce Janz argues in his essay ‘Forget
Deleuze’, forms the basis of a postcolonial mode of analysis that remains
true to Deleuzian thought. While Hallward, Kaplan, and Miller have,
in their different ways, offered important and challenging critiques of
a Deleuzian-inspired approach to postcolonialism, they are united, as
Janz highlights, by a view that holds Deleuze’s work to be incapable of
offering an explanation that could adequately account for the differen-
tial experiences of those lives joined under the umbrella of postcolonial
studies. Janz proposes a route beyond this impasse by arguing that such
an explanatory approach is itself at odds with Deleuze’s own philosophy,
which far from seeking to explain or interpret the phenomena of this
actual world is rather, as Deleuze argued with Félix Guattari in What
Is Philosophy?, concerned with the creation of concepts. Philosophy,
for Deleuze and Guattari, is defined as the creation and recreation of
concepts in response to particular problems: a process which witnesses
the perpetual transformation of those concepts as they encounter new
contexts. As a result, the work of postcolonial criticism today, which is,
in turn, the task undertaken by this collection, is not merely to apply the
Deleuzian concepts of, for example, minor literature, deterritorialization
or nomadology to the study of certain contemporary writers, but to

‘Forget Deleuze’: to de-compose, counter-actualize the very concepts
employed in his philosophy and recreate a new assemblage that responds
to the problematics of different colonial pasts and postcolonial presents.
It is just such a process of ‘forgetting’ that Réda Bensmaïa enacts in this
volume: offering a critical reading of Algerian author Rachid Boudjedra’s
novel L’Escargot Entêté, in which the protagonist’s (a government civil

servant) ‘becoming-rat’ provides a new context for discussing Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal. Rejecting the obvious psy-
choanalytic interpretation of the protagonist’s attempt to rid the city
in which he lives and for which he is responsible of the vermin that
threaten to overrun it, Bensmaïa engages in an experimental act of liter-
ary criticism in which Deleuze is not merely applied to a text or a text
revealed to be in fact ‘Deleuzian’, however we might define that. Beyond
the representationalist framework, the becoming-rat of Boudjedra’s civil
servant, like Kafka’s Gregor, is neither mimetic (imitating vermin) nor
metaphoric (a degraded society), but offers a mode of individuation that
is shared by humans, animals and the city itself. Rather than explicat-
ing minor literature or ‘becoming’, then, Bensmaïa’s essay walks with
Deleuze: creating a new assemblage that cautions us against a careless
celebration of becoming without paying due attention to the always
present danger that what may appear to be liberating can all too easily
be co-opted by hegemonic and majoritarian systems. Between the twin
poles of postcolonial literatures and Deleuze, then, this collection, like
Bensmaïa’s essay, is committed to a creative process by which both
are variously de- and reconstructed by the other. In this way, through
the critical reading of literary texts, we do not merely gain a ‘better’
understanding of certain authors but recreate Deleuzian concepts anew
in relation to the problem of postcoloniality.
Engaging Critiques, or On the Viability of Postcolonial

Literatures and Deleuze
In order to produce, as this volume intends, a fruitful encounter between

these two critical agendas – postcolonialism and Deleuzian philosophy –
we need to unravel the conceptual tools and implications of the processes
of both minoritarian becoming and majoritarian standardization for
a postcolonial mode of analysis freed from questions about the ability
of the (Western) postcolonial critic to speak for or about an ‘authentic’
subaltern. Indeed, it is the potential inherent in minoritarian flows of
desire to affect a creative process by which dominant, standardized
majoritarian identities are challenged that signals the value in opening

up a dialogue between Deleuzian thought and postcolonial literatures.
While some postcolonial writers, most vocally Ngugi wa Thiong’o
have argued that the continuing use of the language of the colonizer
perpetuates an imperial hegemony, a far greater number have defended
their use of the colonizers’ language. From Yeats to Achebe, Walcott
to Djebar it is the creative potential of language, its mutability when

faced with registers of dissent and resistance, hegemony and privilege,
that signals the potential of postcolonial articulations – and very spe-
cifically postcolonial literatures – to disrupt the dominant forms of
colonial discourse. By showcasing a series of essays that draw attention
to postcolonial literatures we highlight something of the potential of
bringing Deleuzian thought into dialogue with a field of critical and
literary analysis. Indeed, what the essays in this collection demonstrate
is that, despite the criticisms that followed the decidedly literary and
poststructuralist postcolonialism of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, it is
through the philosophy of Deleuze that the revisionary force of postco-
lonial literature for society and the imagination, politics and aesthetics
may be reconceived anew.
While recent studies such as that offered by Patton and Bignall return
to the question of the relation between postcolonial studies and Deleuze,
previous works put to question the validity of such an approach. Young,
Miller and Kaplan, as was mentioned, adopted a critical approach
to Deleuzian thought, and problematized the possibility of a shared
approach to (neo-)colonialist hegemony between the two fields. As Miller
argued, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘[p]hilosophy is the very means by
which the virtual is created and the real, the actual, and the referential are
left behind’ (Miller 2003, p. 132). This particular line of argument, which
views the philosophy of Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) as emphati-
cally de-specifying such that the question of situated engagement with
this actual world is ‘left behind’, is derived from one of the most
important works to address the relationship between Deleuze and the
postcolonial: Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the
Singular and the Specific (2001).
This volume offers a critical engagement with Hallward’s Absolutely
Postcolonial, a thought-provoking and influential intervention into
debates about postcolonial theory and literature. As Miller’s comments
highlight, the operative distinction at work in Deleuze’s philosophy
is between the interlinked concepts of the actual and the virtual. It
is this pairing that Hallward focuses on, arguing that ‘what is real’
for Deleuze, ‘is a vitalist, self-differing force of Creativity in its purest
form – an absolute intensity or virtuality in constant metamorphosis’

(Hallward 2001, p. 11). From this argument, Hallward deducts that
‘all existent individuals, then, are simply the immediately produced,
direct actualisations of the one and same Creative force […], the virtual’
(p. 12). And it is this reading of the virtual that grounds his critique of
postcolonial theory and literature. While colonial and counter-colonial
discourse may indeed be criticized for their over-specification of

the subject, in his view, the postcolonial has moved in precisely the
opposite direction, towards a reality Hallward calls ‘singular’ and which
‘will operate without criteria external to its operation’; thus, replacing
‘the interpretation or representation of reality with an immanent
participation in its production or creation: in the end, at the limit of
“absolute postcoloniality”, there will be nothing left, nothing outside
itself, to which it could be specific’ (Hallward 2001, p. xii).
Where Absolutely Postcolonial systematically exposed the so-called sin-
gularity of much postcolonial theory, Hallward’s later study of Deleuze,
Out of this World (2006), which is the focus of Nick Nesbitt’s ‘Deleuze,
Hallward, and the Transcendental Analytic of Relation’, follows suit by
arguing that what remains consistent across Deleuze’s work (including
his co-authored texts with Félix Guattari) is a commitment to a singu-
lar creative force (the virtual). Hallward’s argument is not that virtual
stands apart as the transcendental cause of the actual, since ‘[t]he actual
does not exist separately from the virtual, and the virtual does not tran-
scend the actual in some higher plane. Rather, the two dimensions are
given as facets of one and the same creative process’ (Hallward 2006,
p. 35). Instead, Hallward contends that Deleuze’s favoured concepts of
deterritorialization, counter-actualization and minor lines of becoming
mean that the ‘redemptive task of thought’ (2006, p. 35) is, primarily,
to explore the movement of the virtual and, as such, will lead us away
from the specificity of this actual world. While, for Hallward, this places
the aims of a Deleuzian politics at odds with the properly political task
of universal emancipation, Nesbitt undertakes an immanent critique of
Hallward’s own terms of engagement to demonstrate the ways in which
an ‘event’ such as absolute democracy may be extracted from Deleuze’s
Spinozist-inspired ontology. By offering a radically immanent philoso-
phy, Nesbitt argues, Deleuzian thought remains resolutely in this world,
not in some transcendent elsewhere or ‘outside’. If counter-actualization
can serve as a means to rethink certain majoritarian structures (political
or otherwise), which, as such, set themselves up as a priori, fixed and
transcendent givens (as in the case of judgement, for example, as Lorna
Burns outlines in her essay [cf. Deleuze 1997, p. 135]), such a move
cannot lead to the point of self-destruction or radical abstraction into

some transcendent plane or other-world.
The question of immanence, however, and how we interpret its
use in Deleuze’s work is central to the critique undertaken by this
collection. While Hallward understands singularity as designating
the absolute, the all-encompassing to which there can be no outside,
the essays collected here suggest that not only in literary criticism

(in the wake of poststructuralist thought), but in Deleuze’s philosophy
itself, the term has been used rather differently and in a more complex
fashion than Hallward’s reading allows. Consequentially, this volume
interrogates, alongside questions of the creative production of the new
in light of colonial legacies, the specific potential of the Deleuzian
concept of singularity for postcolonial studies in general, and for the
study of postcolonial literatures in particular. Singularity can, most
obviously perhaps, be seen to designate in the field of postcolonial
literary studies the singularity of each postcolonial writer: in other
words, the individual author’s singular manner of expressing a specific
postcolonial experience or postcolonial way of living. From such an
understanding of singularity, questions indeed arise as to how gene-
ralizable, and hence how politicizable, such expressions are. Only if we
assume the writer to represent or speak for a people could these expres-
sions be directly political. Yet, as Jacques Derrida (1992) and Derek
Attridge (2004) have shown, the singularity of the work of art precisely
resists generalization.
More directly in relation to Deleuze’s work, we find yet another,
very particular glossing of the term which Deleuze derives from
its Leibnizian-mathematical heritage (in The Fold, 1993) and its
Simondonian-biological one (in The Logic of Sense, 1990). Birgit
M. Kaiser’s contribution to this volume, ‘The Singularities of Postcolonial
Literature: Preindividual (Hi)stories in Mohammed Dib’s “Northern
Trilogy”’, pursues these layers of singularity – and especially the impli-
cations of the second – for a reading of postcolonial literatures, and
for several of Dib’s novels specifically. It is important to note that
both Leibnizian ‘singular points’ and Simondon’s ‘singularities’ work
in very different directions than what Hallward suggests as the singu-
lar as absolute. Rather, in both the Leibnizian-mathematical and the
Simondonian-biological lineage of the concept, for Deleuze singularity
is related to processes of individuation. The Logic of Sense distils the term
from the Stoics and from Simondon and presents it in a new coinage as
the swarming potential of ‘anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and
pre-individual singularities’, and ‘far from being individual or personal’
(Deleuze 1990, p. 103). The question that singularity permits Deleuze

to address is that of processes of individuation, in order to depart from
the assumption of fixed, pre-given individual units. Taken from this
perspective, singularity offers ways, as Kaiser argues, to analyse the com-
plex processes of individuation in a globalized, diffracted, postcolonial
world – that is processes of the (unending) formation of individuals
that Dib experiments with in his ‘Northern Trilogy’. While Hallward

describes the singular effectively as a solipsistic ego, detached from the
matters of the world and asserting an ‘absolute self-determining power’
(2000, p. 99), in ‘a mode of individuation that constitutes itself out of
itself, as its very medium of existence, there is nothing more singular
than the Cartesian cogito’ (2000, p. 102), with Simondon’s and Leibniz’s
understanding of singularity in mind we realize that Deleuze’s uses of
the term in fact explicitly question and depart from a Cartesian cogito
(cf. Kaiser 2010). Hence, Deleuze neither equates singularity with indi-
viduality or the single individual, nor with the ‘absolute’ in the sense
of an ‘unlimited ontological Totality’ (Hallward 2001, p. 67), but draws
on singularities as the prerequisites of processes of individuation, of the
individual’s ‘moulding in a continuous and perpetually variable fashion’
(Deleuze 1988, p. 19). On the basis of such a specific use, singularity, tied
to Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming and immanence, allows us to think
difference and processes of individuation – we might say (always a entan-
gled and worldly) ‘identification’ – within the postcolonial present, and
precisely permits us to avoid reducing the complexity of these processes
to a Manichean opposition or a dialectic of self and other.
Such a usage of the concept clearly runs counter to Hallward employ-
ment of singularity as absolute, as a dissolution from context and from
relations with concrete others, as a vanishing in an undifferentiated sphere
of global sameness and flow that, since it knows no boundaries, is also
not political or politicizable. This is in fact the underlying fundamental
concern that drives Hallward’s reading of Deleuzian singularity and
immanence: he fears that the result of Deleuze’s thought of creative
evolution, immanence and difference-in-itself, is the dissolution of lines
of demarcation which he deems necessary for political articulation.
In this sense, Hallward’s study is in some respects typical of the
politically inflected criticism that has been directed against postcolo-
nial theory since the mid-1990s. Where the first wave of postcolonial
studies (associated predominately with the work of Edward Said, Homi
Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak) exposed the reductive and essentializing
discourse of colonialism and cemented literary modes of analysis as the
key tools of postcolonial critique, in recent years a new post-Marxist
critical turn has emerged through the works of Neil Lazarus, Robert
Young and Benita Parry. The latter direct their critique against the focus
of existing postcolonial critique on cultural and literary analysis, and
encourage a move ‘toward a renewed engagement with the “properly
political”’ (Bongie 2008, p. 1). It is in this light that critics such as
Graham Huggan, Chris Bongie and David Huddart have viewed
Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial: they read his dismissal of postco-

lonialism as a deterritorializing, singular discourse as a sign of the
movement’s failure to provide meaningful political resistance or social
commentary. By this view, postcolonial texts emerge as singular rather
than representative: that is they are said to eschew the confrontational
logic of the ‘properly political’ discourse of anti-colonialism (cf. Bongie
2008, p. 12), and tend to associate with a brand of critical theory that
privileges cultural and psychological concerns over collective princi-
ples, politics and justice.
As David Huddart’s contribution to this collection, ‘Edward Said
between Singular and Specific’ argues, addressing this critique represents
a significant challenge to Deleuzian scholars, especially those interested
in developing a Deleuzian politics, since, when viewed from Hallward’s
Badiouian perspective, the political task of critical thought must
be first to situate and then to universalize. In his detailed analysis
of Hallward’s critique, Huddart demonstrates that key postcolonial
theorists such as Bhabha and, crucially, Said have evidenced a similar
wariness towards processes that de-contextualize intellectual analysis.
Said’s work in particular, like that of Achille Mbembe, is well placed
to offer both the politically responsible mode of intellectual analysis
that Hallward argues for, while, at the same time, demonstrating
a corresponding awareness of the value of, what Deleuze would term,
counter-actualization as the open potentiality of a politics yet to come.
In works such as After the Last Sky, for example, Huddart argues, Said
offers a fragmented perspective that not only reflects the dislocated
history, culture and society of the Palestinian people, but which acts
as a strategic stance to balance, on the one hand, those outside forces
that seek the dissolution of Palestinian identity (a singularization,
if we were to follow Hallward’s terminology), against, on the other,
the perpetual task of de- and re-composing that identity. Indeed, Said
suggests that where Palestinian identity has become too fixed a form
it is precisely the creative act of invention, of counter-actualization,
returning to the plane of consistency to connect its component parts
in a new way (creating a new assemblage), that is the precondition of
an evolving politics.
Like Said, Achille Mbembe has sought less to offer a phenomenological

account of experience in the postcolony, than to understand how
individuals can live and act in a meaningful way in that particular
context. Exploring the actuality of a particular place, the postcolonial
philosopher’s task is, as it was for Deleuze, the creation of concepts
adequate to their situation: to uncover the creative eruption of
(‘a’ singular) life within specific regimes of violence and oppression

(cf. Deleuze 2005, p. 28). What both Huddart and Janz reveal in their
analyses of Said and Mbembe, respectively, is the close awareness that
both writers demonstrate of the political task endorsed by Hallward: to
situate and to relate. In other words, to produce a concept or literary
expression that is ‘irreducibly specific to (though not specified by)
the situation of its articulation’ (Hallward 2001, p. 62). Despite his
reservations about the field, Hallward’s distinction between the specific
and the specified is, we suggest, essential if we want to conceive of
a postcolonial literature and thought that is at once a reflection and
commentary on contemporary political, cultural and social issues, and
at the same time a creative, imaginative leap beyond the status quo.
On this basis, the essays collected here engage critically with Hallward’s
distinction between the specific and singular tendencies of postcolonial
theory and literature. In doing so, we mean to employ a clear distinction
between colonial, counter-colonial and postcolonial responses to the
problems faced in the contemporary world.
For Hallward, the distinctions operating between the three terms – specific
to, specified by and singular – go to the heart of his political project and
unite his critique of the key figures (Said, Spivak, Bhabha) and authors
(Glissant, Sarduy, Dib, Johnson) of contemporary postcolonial studies.
If Hallward criticizes the poststructuralist strand of postcolonialism for
chasing empty signifiers, then the resurgent neo-Marxist return to the
political risks falling into the trap of over-determining the creative work
of literature. Drawing a comparison between Deleuze and Guattari’s
minor literature with Sartre’s literature of commitment, Gregg Lambert
suggests in his essay ‘The Bachelor-Machine and the Postcolonial
Writer’ the extent to which ‘politics’ itself can be seen to function as
a pre-set value or set of ready-made significations that determine in
advance the meaning of the text. In the case of the postcolonial writer,
the act of writing is preceded by a set of assumptions about the social
and political value of the work. The work of postcolonial literature is,
as a result, so over-determined (specified by) as to reduce it to mere
representation, which, in turn, implies a refusal of the text’s virtual-
ity. Crucially, as Lambert argues, within this framework both style and
context are rendered irrelevant by the pre-established framework of

values, the latter effectively over-determining the act of writing and
thereby excluding the particular contexts against which an individual
writes from the terms of analysis. Literature must, as indeed Hallward
argues, allow for some degree of de-specification: being merely ‘specific
to’ rather than ‘specified by’. However, as Lambert highlights, this
is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari advocate in their concepts of

minor literature and fabulation.
Never to be confused with minority writing as such, the concept of

minor literature holds great significance for postcolonial literary
studies. As was noted in the work of Mbembe and Said, it is precisely
the open, virtual potential to become in unforeseen ways that marks the
revolutionary potential of postcolonial/minor literatures to overcome
the (pre-)determining legacies of colonial pasts, while escaping
majoritarian visions of specified futures. From early works such as
Difference and Repetition to late essays including ‘Immanence: A Life’, the
twin poles of what Deleuze refers to as the planes of consistency and
organization are essential for the creation of forms and concepts that
challenge majoritarian apparatuses. Deleuzian becoming encapsulates
the movement from one to the other, tracing a line of actualization
that is necessarily a creative expression of difference. These points
are taken up in Lorna Burns’ ‘Beyond the Colonized and the Colonizer:
Caribbean Writing as Postcolonial “Health”’, in which she argues that
while Hallward’s dialectical understanding of differentiation suggests (as
Hegel did of Spinoza) that without the negative presence of an opposed
other or limit ‘all particularity and individuality pass away in the one
substance’ (Hegel 1968, p. 257; cf. Burns 2010), Deleuze’s Nietzsche
offers us a different path. Turning to a philosophy that ‘proceed[s] only
through positive and affirmative force’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. 12),
Burns poses an alternative reading of postcolonialism, one grounded
not on a dialectical progression that proceeds according to a negative
and, as Bignall in Postcolonial Agency (2010) demonstrates, imperialist
opposition, but, rather, through active forces.
By exposing the way in which the opposition of colonized and
colonizer may be reformulated in terms of Nietzsche’s differentiation
between active and reactive forces, Burns offers a way beyond Hallward’s
Hegelian critique in the development of a Deleuzian approach to post-
coloniality. In doing so, she focuses on the specific role that literature as
literature can play in the imagining of differential futures specific to but

not specified by the colonial pasts that engendered them. In her reading,
Sam Selvon’s over-looked novel An Island Is a World offers one such
example of a literary text that vacillates between the specific realities of
this life and a singular sense of, what Deleuze terms, a life. Exploring
Deleuze’s comments on the role of the writer as a physician, diagnosing
the world and creating new symptomatologies that not only identify

‘the generic illness of man’ but, crucially ‘assess the chances of health
[… and] the possible birth of a new man’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 53), Burns
draws on Caribbean texts that foreground a becoming-postcolonial
beyond the oppositional politics of anti-colonial discourse.
The ‘chance of health’ as the focus of literature and literary criticism
is a subject taken up again in the contributions of both Rick Dolphijn
(‘Undercurrents and the Desert(ed): Negarestani, Tournier and Deleuze
Map the Polytics of a ‘New Earth’) and Kathrin Thiele (‘The World
with(out) Others, or How to Unlearn the Desire for the Other’). While
Dolphijn reads Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as a Deleuzian proposi-
tion of a deterritorialization of the colonial and postcolonial striations
of the Middle East, Thiele critically examines the claim that such a
deterritorialization would imply a turning away from real others. Both
Dolphijn and Thiele engage with Deleuze’s sense of a ‘World without
Others’, which he develops in a reading of Michel Tournier’s novel Friday:
a reading with which Hallward, in particular, has taken much issue.
Unlike Hallward, who draws on Deleuze’s reading as exemplary of his
singular, non-relational philosophy, both Dolphijn and Thiele argue, in
their distinct ways, that the chances of health in postcolonial contexts
lie in an unworking of established frames of reference and, as a result, in
the creation of new symptomatologies that delineate the prevailing ills
and ressentiment of the contemporary and postcolonial world.
These new symptomatologies form part of the ongoing political work
of literature and literary criticism. That our task as literary scholars is
one that is, Deleuze tells us, both critical and clinical offers a new way
to understand persistent anxieties within postcolonial studies towards
the relationship between literature and politics as such: a tension that is
likely to remain at the fore of debates in postcolonial studies. However,
far from viewing literature as separate from politics or the development
of strategies of resistance or, as we saw above, societies’ ‘chances of
health’, the essays collected in this volume explore literature’s potential
for imagining ‘new possibilities of thinking’ as key to understanding its
value for postcolonial theory. And, crucially, as Deleuze shows us – even
in early works such as Difference and Repetition – the production of the new
is always a political act, a radical step beyond the limits of our present
conditions. By exposing the micropolitical acts of experimentation,
creation, difference and relationality at the heart of Nalo Hopkinson’s
novel The Salt Roads, Milena Marinkova highlights the revolutionary
potential for postcolonial studies held by the transformative capacity
of literary imaginations. Refusing the over-determined and micropoliti-
cal discourse of an oppositional anti-colonialism, Hopkinson’s novel

demonstrates an awareness of past traumas and present political
responsibilities, but resists over-determination. Recalling the degree of
de-specification that both Hallward and Deleuze insist upon, The
Salt Roads, Marinkova argues, rejects the strictures of pre-set value
systems (such as identity, history and politics) and, instead, traces a
variable range of actual and virtual forms of political engagement. This
tension between actual and virtual extends to the novel’s treatment
of the recalled colonial past of plantation society in Saint-Domingue.
In recreating the historical memory of colonization and slavery,
Hopkinson establishes a new continuum between past, present and
future. Rather than building on a continuous relation between these
three, such a micropolitical history making proceeds by ruptures: retain-
ing the legacies of the colonial past as a disjunctive, virtual presence
(as Deleuze’s Bergson would argue) available for creative actualization
in the present. It is in this sense that, viewed from the perspective of a
Deleuzian philosophy of time, the postcolonial present/future emerges
as an undetermined potentiality, expressive of, but not specified by the
colonial past from which it is drawn.
In a sense, this reanimates a concern for openness toward creations
of unforeseen ways of living, for newness, that had been at the heart
of postcolonial theory, if we think, for example, of Homi Bhabha’s
characterization of the ‘location’ of the postcolonial moment as a tran-
sitory site, ‘neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past’
(1994, p. 1). Without prescribing the new – hence Bhabha’s hesitation
with respect to a ‘new horizon’ – he defines cultural translation as ‘an
encounter with “newness” that is not part of the continuum of past
and present’ (1994, p. 7). What is at the heart of the rejection of such a
continuum between past and present is a view that holds that in order
for the postcolonial to have the fully fledged potential of disrupting
colonial domination, it must withdraw from a logic of determination
that locks the postcolonial present in an uninterrupted line of conti-
nuity between past and present. By such a view, the colonial past is
insistently preserved as the historical memory of colonization within
the present and deals in a future that emerges as always already marked
by the colonial encounter. While remaining mindful of the particular

(colonial) histories, Bhabha as much as Deleuze intends to signal the
potential of (postcolonial) thought and art to produce new assemblages
(to remain within Deleuzian terminology) within the ‘postcolonial’
present and for differential futures, unforeseen within the framework
established by the various forms of colonial domination.
The always renewed potential to become new in relative, context-

specific ways is essential for reconceptualizing postcolonialism as a
transformative practice that transcends the legacies of colonialism and
engenders new forms of aesthetic practice and political engagement.
Being aware of these context-specific articulations, yet thinking of
them as singular expressions of newness, the essays collected here push
Hallward’s use of the specific into unforeseen directions. Deleuzian
thought is at the centre of such a (re)new(ed) postcolonialism, in that
it offers a theory of temporal progression that engenders the new
(Difference and Repetition), establishes historical memory as a virtual,
pure past caught up in a ceaseless creative evolution (Bergsonism), and
reconceptualizes identity, difference, relationality, and locatedness in
ways that hold great significance for postcolonial studies.
With this in mind, Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts,
Differential Futures evaluates the interstices between Deleuze and post-
colonial literature. It is, as Deleuze shows us, precisely the ability of
the future to exceed established patterns of behaviour, its ability to
emerge in unpredictable, singular ways that necessitates an alternative
reading of postcolonialism: a reading that transcends the strictures
of what Walcott designated a literature of ‘recrimination and despair’
(1998, p. 37), repeating the biases and oppositions of colonialism, and
instead moves towards a revisionary postcolonial literature. In turn, the
postcolonial writers explored in this volume are shown to be invested
in the elaboration of a transformative vision of a future that maintains
the ability to become new in divergent and truly different ways. They
can, therefore, be seen to engage or resonate with Deleuzian thought
at a fundamental level. Following their lead, we suggest that through
literature and the work of literary criticism we can begin to reread post-
coloniality as a differential actualization of the (virtual) past, and, in
doing so, uncover a means to conceive of a genuinely original present
in which colonial pasts co-exist as a disjunctive factor. In this way,
the colonial past persists within the postcolonial present not as an
over-determining or specifying legacy, but as the ground from which
differential futures emerge in unpredictable, unforeseeable and ever
new ways.
Works Cited
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Postcolonial Literature. London: Continuum.
Attridge, Derek (2004) The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
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and the Subaltern’, in Deleuze and the Postcolonial. Ed. Simone Bignall and Paul
Patton. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–19.
Bogue, Ronald (2010) Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Bongie, Chris (2008) Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial
Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Burns, Lorna (2010) ‘Becoming-Bertha: Virtual Difference and Repetition in
Postcolonial “Writing Back”, a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso
Sea’. Deleuze Studies 4.1: 16–41.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
—— (1990) The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester with
Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press.
—— (1994) Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
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—— (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco.
—— (2005) Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Trans. Anne Boyman. New York:
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Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum.
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Barbara Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum.
Derrida, Jacques (1992) Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge.
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—— (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London/
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London: Routledge.
Part I
Deterritorializing Deleuze,
Rethinking Postcolonialism
1
Forget Deleuze
Bruce B. Janz

When thinking about the possibility that Deleuze might be relevant
or useful to postcolonialism it is worth asking two questions: what
problems or questions within postcolonialism might potentially be
addressed in a new way (which is to further ask, which questions con-
tinue to be unsatisfactorily addressed), and what does it mean to be true
to Deleuze in a context such as this?
The first question has many possible answers. Postcolonial theory
has had much success in highlighting ways of being and becoming
that were not apparent, or were wilfully ignored, under other types of
theory, but there are always more to be named and critically appraised
as political and economic events spawn new communities and produce
new inequities. While postcolonial praxis has worked toward greater
subjective and community awareness, social equity and opportunity,
and recognition of past oppression, new forms of domination and mar-
ginalization always arise out of the victories of awareness and justice.
The questions that postcolonial theory has taken up are vast. They
include the question of subjectivity (who can be seen and heard, and
in what manner, and who cannot?), the question of recognition (whose
voice counts, and how does it count?), the question of elitism and cul-
tural inequity (how does it emerge, why is it problematic, where does
it reside, and what can be done about it?), the question of discourse
(how do forms of expression and representation succeed or fail in being
adequate to individual and group identity and aspiration, and how
do the subtleties of discourse re-inscribe problematic power relations
or alienated subjectivities?), the question of resistance (what is being
resisted and what constitutes effective resistance?), and the question
of place (who determines the nature of a place, even provisionally,
and whose narratives can become part of political, economic, social
21
and literary life?). These are, of course, not the only questions possible
within postcolonial thought, and each of these questions stands as
shorthand for a host of others as well. But I term these ‘questions’ in
order to make room for an open-endedness about them.
The questions that form the core of postcolonialism have not, of
course, been fully answered – there is always more to say about the nature
of subjectivity, cultural inequity, place, and so forth. But the central nar-

rative is clear. There is a well-worn path which is based not so much in
the questions, but in the answers to the questions, or rather the types of
answers (by which I mean, the types of claims, and the concepts they
draw upon) that are seen as legitimate. There is some irony to this, in that
a centrepiece of postcolonial thought is the recognition and affirmation
of difference. What has sometimes emerged, though, is a fairly unified
sense of a set of central concepts, which are seen as applicable to a wide
range of particularities. Concepts such as tradition, hybridity, violence,
exile, and so on, flow back and forth over the wide world of postcolonial
experience, functioning as universals even as they are presented as linked
to place. And how could they not? How else could there be an area that
generalizes on postcolonial experience enough to have a name, other
than transporting concepts largely intact from one milieu to another?
The response will no doubt be that this overstates things, that in fact
there is a great attention to the specificity of concepts. And, it is true, there
is some attention to this. But the large-scale narrative of dispossession,
immiseration, explication of that immiseration, and resistance/emancipa-
tion is replicated time and again across a wide range of writings from a
variety of disciplinary perspectives. The narrative itself is not something
I am objecting to, but rather the implicit assumption that it continues to be
basically the same narrative everywhere, that differences are aberrations
from the central narrative, rather than potentially productive moments.
Being true to Deleuze in this context is the other issue at stake
here, and is significant because of past critiques. Arguably the single
most important essay in the history of postcolonial theory, Gayatri
Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ is directed against both Deleuze and
Foucault, and maintains that neither can deal with history sufficiently
to imagine a form of representation adequate to the subaltern. ‘[I]n
the Foucault-Deleuze conversation,’ she says, ‘a postrepresentationalist
vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda’ (Spivak 1988, p. 285), which
becomes manifest in the tendency to talk about the ‘masses’ or the
‘workers’ in an over-generalized manner. Julie Wuthnow argues that
a truly Deleuzian approach is incompatible with postcolonial theory, in
that it reasserts a colonial discourse and does little to enable ‘effective
Janz: Forget Deleuze 23
indigenous politics’ (Wuthnow 2002, p. 185). Christopher Miller

points out that several of Deleuze and Guattari’s sources in A Thousand
Plateaus (1987) contradict and undermine their non-representational,
realist philosophy when it comes to colonialism, and also notes the
book’s inability to produce a true concept of difference (Miller 1993).
And, Peter Hallward, in the most ambitious and nuanced critique,
argues that Deleuze like many other thinkers presents a ‘singular’ or

essentially monistic approach to the world, in the sense that there is an
account of existence that subsumes Deleuze’s well-known philosophy
of difference under the seemingly unified concept of ‘creativity’
(Hallward 2001).
So, there are some significant questions about the possibility that
Deleuze might have anything useful to say in a postcolonial context
(see Kermally 2008 for more such questions). These issues cannot be
easily dismissed or waved away as if the critics don’t understand the
‘real’ Deleuze. If difference matters, it must matter here as well. It is
worth noting before we continue, though, that in many cases, Deleuze’s
central task, or motivating question, is taken to be one of explanation.
Can he offer an account that makes sense out of the experience of those
who are elided or missed by theory rooted in the Enlightenment West?
Each of these critics argues that he cannot, that he is either as indebted
to his European place as anyone else is or the concepts he develops are
sufficiently tainted as to render them useless. There is no new account
of the postcolonial experience here, the critiques conclude.
But what if that was not his point in the first place? Neither explain-
ing nor interpreting are the primary goals of Deleuze and Guattari’s
thought. Being true to Deleuze must mean more than just getting
Deleuze correct, or more than Deleuze getting postcolonialism correct,
whatever that means. What seems clear is that it cannot mean that
Deleuzian concepts must neither be ‘applied’ to new situations, nor be
used to ‘interpret’ or ‘explain’ existing phenomena. Deleuze is not an
applied philosopher, nor a hermeneuticist, nor a closet social scientist.
And it seems that many critics of Deleuze want him to be one of these.
It should be said, many enthusiasts want the same thing. My sense
of his work, though, and of the work he did in friendship with Félix
Guattari, is that it should serve as a loose model for the creation of con-
cepts in new areas. Deleuzian philosophy can be distilled briefly:
• Step 1: Learn Deleuze

• Step 2: Forget Deleuze
• Step 3: Begin
Deleuzian thought requires, in a strange way, its own erasure, before it

can be truly creative. One should not ask, does Deleuze speak about X,
or how can we apply Deleuze to Y? If he does that is no guarantee that
what he says will apply; if he does not, he may be more useful than
immediately apparent. The way to reach the point of usefulness of
Deleuze is in the second, often missed step: Forget Deleuze. Not ‘deny
Deleuze’, or ‘reject Deleuze’, but ‘forget Deleuze’.

Forgetting Deleuze means that we will not apply Deleuze. We will
not look to see whether he gives us a new tool to solve an old problem.
He will not do that, although he might help to redefine the problem. He
will not provide another technique for analysis, another concept that
captures a bit of human experience hitherto missed or ignored. Nor are
we necessarily faced with the Scylla and Charybdis of clearly explaining
him in lucid prose, on the one hand (and thus missing or distorting his
work), or embodying his aesthetic, on the other, keeping the sensibil-
ity intact but just slightly out of reach. There is no virtue in the patois
of this tribe, but neither is there any in the plainspoken distillation of
concepts, ready to be wielded as if they were a new set of weapons.
Forgetting Deleuze means walking with him, sometimes running ahead,
sometimes following. And then – striking out on a new path. The well-
known concepts – bodies without organs, planes of immanence, the fold,
and so many others – are not fetishes or idols, they are just concepts, made
to be stretched, changed, re-appropriated. That is how they are honoured.
If we were to not forget Deleuze, if we instead thought we would
use him as a theorist within postcolonial theory, there are some obvi-
ous strategies we might adopt. We could see postcolonial literature as
minoritarian. We could equate the state apparatus with the colonizing
impulse. Colonizers might play chess, taking justification from their
milieu of interiority, while the colonized play Go, engaging in and capi-
talizing on the milieu of exteriority. Colonizers may territorialize while
the colonized deterritorialize, colonizers build cities while the colo-
nized, in some cases literally, are nomadic. The postcolonial situation
might be seen as pure becoming. We could multiply the superficial ways
that Deleuze might be pressed into service as a theorist, to be applied to
a situation which he did not write about directly, or to explain a set of
circumstances in some totalizing manner.
Or we could forget Deleuze, and then begin.
Mbembe and the Postcolony
Achille Mbembe leaves the reader of On the Postcolony with some

tantalizing hints of a creative, hopeful future, even in the wake of the
institutional and existential violence he has chronicled throughout

the book. It is worth asking just what might be creative here, and how
one might hope. Mbembe has a concern for place-making, not in the
phenomenological or Heideggerian sense but in the sense that actual
life moving through and within space creates concepts adequate to
their situation. There are, for instance, intimations of lines (as too with
Tim Ingold [2007] and V.Y. Mudimbe [2008]), which sketch out figures

in cartoons, or form segments, or trace out the workings of power, or,
as with the lines of flight, chart new paths. There is a concern with the
life that emerges, that unfolds within the regime of biopower. And there
are the concepts of becoming and death, used apparently differently by
Deleuze and by Mbembe, but which in both cases raise the question
of how, as Mbembe puts it, ‘the lines between resistance and suicide,
sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred’ (Mbembe
2003, p. 40). Under these conditions, is the only option to be part of
the ‘living dead’, or is there still creation, as he seems to indicate at the
end of On the Postcolony?
In a previous review I did of On the Postcolony ( Janz 2002), I chose
the connecting thread of ‘nothingness’. Mbembe’s book is suffused
with negation (or as he puts it, absence): ‘absences of those presences
that are no longer so and that one remembers (the past), and absence
of those others that are yet to come and are anticipated (the future)’
(Mbembe 2001a, p. 16). This would seem to make him less than ideal,
from a Deleuzian point of view. But I suggested in that review that one
might also tell the story using time or place, and it is this path I want to
take up now. The lines that Mbembe uses to trace life in the postcolony
are, despite appearances in most of the book, lines of hope for the crea-
tion of something out of nothing, or out of negation.
Mbembe deliberately uses the term ‘postcolony’ instead of ‘the post-
colonial’ because he wants to distance himself from ‘modern black
revolutionary possibilities’ and a critique of ‘the political ideologies of
racial sovereignty and black internationalism of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries’ (Mbembe 2006, p. 152). He wants to distance
himself from ‘postcolonial theory per se’, as it has, in his opinion, focused
more on the struggle between ‘Father and Son’ than on the ‘violence of
brother toward brother and the status of the sister and the mother in the
midst of fratricide’ (p. 153). This sense of omission may be overstated,
but more importantly, it paves the way for Mbembe to be less concerned
about explanation at a systemic level, and more concerned about
how individuals can act meaningfully given the situation they find
themselves in. As I suggested in my earlier review of On the Postcolony,
Mbembe explicates a world of authenticity that takes violence as a fact
of existence. ‘This is how it is to live in Africa […] now, is the hope of

existence confined to the struggle to overcome that violence, or can one
find one’s subjectivity in a meaningful manner if overcoming violence
seems remote?’ ( Janz 2002, p. 6).
There is, in fact, a sense of hope for Mbembe, at the end of a recitation
of the ways in which the violence inherent in colonial sovereignty
has become part of both governing structures and social reality in

contemporary Africa. One might not expect hope at the end of the grim
assessment that Mbembe delivers, or perhaps more to the point, one
might wonder as to the basis for hope, given that assessment.
Hope?
Mbembe’s brief concluding chapter offers an interesting opportunity

to think about whether it is possible to acknowledge the analysis he
has done throughout the rest of the book, and at the same time justify
hopefulness in the final two sentences:
What is certain is that, when we are confronted by such a work of

art, Nietzsche’s words regarding Greek tragedy are appropriate: ‘We
must first learn to enjoy as complete men’. Now, what is learning to
enjoy as complete men – and women – unless it is a way of living and
existing in uncertainty, chance, irreality, even absurdity? (Mbembe
2001a, p. 242)
What is interesting here is that the hope implicit in ‘learning to enjoy as

complete men’ almost echoes mid-twentieth century existential answers
to the hopelessness of the human condition. We were all instructed to
believe because it was absurd, or in the face of absurdity. It was the radi-
cally free, supremely difficult choice that we had available to us. While
this isolated ending might suggest such a view, passé and oblivious to
political reality as it is, such an answer is not clearly where the rest of
the book leads us. There is no stoicism here, nor is there quietism, nor
is there vain hope.
What there is, possibly, is an ecology in which both people and con-
cepts take root and develop in response to the situation. Emmanuel Eze,
in On Reason, argues that there are many forms of reason, and these
are not sorted along cultural or racial lines, as many have believed (Eze
2008; see also Janz 2008). They are, rather, forms of reason appropri-
ate to different kinds of objects. Rationality is the ability to creatively
assemble those forms of reason. Rationality is a kind of emergent
property of forms of reason in a particular place. It is an ecology in

which some manoeuvres and strategies have borne fruit, and others
have not. Such ecologies can be invaded, and can be dominated, but
they can also respond to such domination.
Speaking of place at all in a postcolonial context may seem jarring.
Postcolonialism has in many ways been suspicious of place talk. There
is placelessness – people are either taken or forced out of their places (in

the case of slavery and forced migration), or places are taken from their
people (in the case of occupation of land). This sense of placelessness
has its roots in a phenomenological sense of belonging or dwelling.
We might also speak of the non-place, a different concept not based
in phenomenology but in structuralism. Signifiers become unhinged,
meaningless, as they all point to something meaningful which is absent.
And thirdly, the debt that postcolonialism owes to neo-Marxian analysis
manifests itself in the dissolution of place in favour of the homogeniz-
ing effects of the global flows of capital and labour. Globalization leads
to cosmopolitanism. Place, then, seems at least quaint and at most out
of touch with the reality of life in the wake of colonialism.
And yet, Mbembe’s effort throughout On the Postcolony has not been
to deliver a generalized theory of colonialism, or of postcolonialism. He
is more interested in what it means to be on the ground, place-bound,
unable or unwilling to simply leave. Most of those facing the political
and social structures that exist after colonialism cannot leave them. They
are part of the ecology. Throughout On the Postcolony, African subjectiv-
ity struggles to assert and define itself in the face of the negation that
manifests itself at every level of society. Existence in the postcolony is all
violence, some of it overt, but by our point in history mostly woven into
the fabric of society, into the public discourse, even into the humour. This
violence, pervasive as it is, always becomes manifest in the struggle of
subjectivity to find clarity and some sort of direction. It is, in other words,
a struggle to define one’s location in a place shot through with negation,
that is, with the tendency to devalue, ignore, or pathologize place.
Place, then, is a concept both foreign to the postcolonial condition,
and central to it. People are both rooted in material circumstances and
alienated from the places that might allow those circumstances to be
unambiguously and transparently experienced. For Mbembe, there is
the abiding desire to see the end of the violence inherent in everyday
life, but at this point, long after the fall of many overt colonial struc-
tures, there is little sense that that day will come.
It is worth noting that the negation of which Mbembe speaks in con-
nection with life in Africa might not yield a kind of existential or even
Hegelian situation, that is, one in which the negative is the prerequisite
for freedom, or a moment on the road to a higher form of being. His
account of the violence inherent in the postcolony is remarkable for
its specific nature. ‘The’ postcolony is, in fact, many postcolonies, and
the position one holds in that place is multiple, complex, and in some
cases, even contradictory. Mbembe is not the only one to emphasize
this – as Hallward points out, the hallmark of postcolonialism is its

attention to heterogeneity (Hallward 2001, pp. 20–21). And, that hetero-
geneity is not just the diversity of multiple cultures or experiences, but
of multiple places.
Why does this matter? Well, places are more than the Heideggerian
notion of dwelling that suggests belonging and home. Place exists in a
variety of ways, simultaneously. It is assembled at different levels – we
might, for instance, speak of ‘African philosophy’, and we might speak
of ‘Kenyan philosophy’, and further, ‘Luo philosophy’ or ‘Odera Oruka’s
philosophy’. Each of these conceptual ecologies is assembled from
‘topemes’, sub-significant elements that those who engage in a place use
to articulate that place. ‘African philosophy’ is not merely ‘lower-level’
philosophies added up or averaged out. There are different questions at
these different levels, and the process of answering those questions is
the process of living in that place.
It is apparent, using this simplified example, that heterogeneity is not
just a function of diverse experience or cultural codes of meaning. If we
are in place, we are engaged with the questions of that place, the live
issues that must be addressed by a competent person engaging in life in
that place. At the same time, any particular place draws on other topemic
levels of place. While African philosophy is not simply the addition of
more specific philosophies, neither is it an unrelated enterprise.
Postcolonialism’s relationship to place is, as has already been sug-
gested, complex and contradictory. What is clear, though, is that it is
a different kind of relationship that exists in postcolonial situations
than that which obtains in relatively non-postcolonial settings (note,
I do not suggest a binary opposition between postcolonial situations
and non-postcolonial situations – every society, at this point in world
history, is to some extent implicated by some aspects of postcolonial-
ism). Consider: the topemic levels of some social actors move relatively
smoothly between the levels of place. This may be the result of being
close to the imaginary limit of dwelling, pure engagement in a place
that allows a person to be transparent to their place, and the place to
them. But, of course, no one ever exists in that ‘pure’ form. But the
postcolonial situation is closer to the other extreme. While place is
clearly important, in the sense that actors are localized and owe ‘debts
and duties’ to a place (to use Derrida’s term), there is also a disconnect
between the actor and the place. The colony, after all, is no longer the
place that the prior inhabitants recognize, and the slave has been taken
from place into a new place.
Mbembe’s whole book is about the loss of place, or the disconnect
between the actor and the place in which action has meaning. And this

occurs at a variety of topemic levels, ranging from personal relations,
to social relations, to the narrative of a country, to international rela-
tions and diasporic communities. It is, then, the discontinuity of places
and those who exist in them that describes the vast array of conditions
imperfectly collected under the heading ‘postcolonial’.
And it is important to recognize this. There is not ‘postcolonialism’,
there are ‘postcolonialities’. They do not have a single defining charac-
teristic. There were different kinds of colonies that people exist in the
wake of. There are different kinds of organization that have emerged
from those colonial structures. These places are not the same places.
What is striking about Mbembe’s narrative is the hope that he has at
the end of it all. Can someone really be a ‘whole man’, in the face of
this? Not if we suppose that the point of the exercise of postcolonialism
is to construct an infrastructure that returns power, self-determination
and agency from the perpetrators, heirs and beneficiaries of colonialism
to those affected by it. This is the often-assumed hope of postcolonial-
ism, and most regard the first step toward this as being a clear and
thorough analysis and explanation of the colonial situation.
Notably, though, no matter how nuanced the explanatory account,
and no matter how much of a voice the marginalized achieve, little
seems to change. Democratic structures emerge even as neo-liberal
and capitalist assumptions about the nature of those structures remain
widespread. People are given agency, but quickly become little more
than emerging markets. Self-determination finds its place, and then it
is immediately lost as it is incorporated into globalized flows of capital
and labour. To the extent that postcolonialism has an emancipatory
dream, it seems to be a dream always deferred, always open to being
co-opted. Mbembe’s dream, as well, seems to remain at that place,
having sketched out the place of concrete life in Africa, but with a new
place only hinted at.
But place may not be so simple, and that may be the way out of this
problem. Much of postcolonial thought has been directed at describ-
ing and explaining the mechanisms of oppression and domination,
along with finding ways out of such oppression. The central concepts
at stake are freedom and self/group determination, but these exist in

an ecology with other concepts, and relate to other formations of such
concepts elsewhere in the world. There is no single sense to any of these
concepts – they all have a provenance, and despite the illusion of simi-
larity brought on by the use of similar or identical words in different
contexts, careful attention to place usually shows that these concepts
have subtle but significantly different shadings and meanings. ‘Freedom’

does not mean the same thing in all situations, or in all postcolonial
situations, or even among different subgroups, all of which have been
subjected to similar colonial political, economic or social structures.
Despite the oft-heard value of diversity and difference in postcolonial-
ism, Peter Hallward’s critique has been that, in fact, postcolonialism itself
has been such a vague term that it has presented only the illusion and not
the reality of meaningful difference. Perhaps, though, as I have already
argued, explanation or understanding is not the point, or not the only
point, that postcolonialism might pursue. Perhaps it should be genera-
tive. Of what? Of concepts. What kind of concepts? Concepts adequate
to a place. How do we know when a concept is adequate? When those
who are fluent in the place can adapt it to the existing ecology. That
does not mean making the concept transparent, in some Heideggerian
manner, such that there is a continuity between intention and means. It
means that the concept is engendering, rather than obfuscating.
A Thousand Tiny … Concepts
Ultimately, Peter Hallward’s critique must be overturned, in the case

of postcolonialism, by actually providing the grounds for differences
which lead to new places. Ultimately, the goal of the postcolonial theo-
rist is to work him/herself out of a job. The means and subtleties of
colonialism had to be made clear, and we had to learn how to listen to
voices that were rendered unavailable by the structures of colonialism.
We have not fully completed those tasks, but we have come to the point
of recognizing that there is no easy solution to neo-colonial structures,
no magic infrastructural change or programme or artistic endeavour or
literature that cannot be co-opted, commodified, and shifted so that
those who speak are merely re-packaged as actors in a neo-liberal nar-
rative. Since the Marxist dream of emancipation in this clear and direct
sense is not an option, Mbembe’s quotation from Nietzsche takes on all
the more urgency. How do we enjoy as ‘complete men and women’?
The answer is in this creation of adequate concepts. That does not
mean that material needs are unimportant – exactly the opposite. Those
concepts are only adequate inasmuch as they bring those who hold
them into life. Obviously, this cannot simply be wished into existence,
and a host of thinkers from Fanon on demonstrates the massive odds
against social and political equality. What can be done is to find ways of
making material and conceptual difference and struggle into a creative
moment. Some examples will help to illustrate this.
Arun Saldanha (2006) re-theorizes race, turning it from being a prob-

lem to being an opportunity. Following Elizabeth Grosz’s use of
Deleuze’s ‘thousand tiny sexes’ idea, he argues that we should not
de-ontologize race, but rather turn back to the materiality of race. This
move is not meant to recover some lost notion of race as biological in
some determinist sense, but rather to move it from being solely a matter
of social convention (which could not be brought into creative tension)
to being contingently biological. He thinks that what is needed ‘is an
affirmation of race’s creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need
not be about order and oppression, it can be wild, far-from-equilibrium,
liberatory’ (Saldanha 2006, p. 21). This is not a denial of racism, but the
recognition that racism does not define and exhaust all the ‘creative’
potential of race, and that throwing out the material sense of race
because of its potential racism is an overreaction.
Saldanha’s proposal, put in the terms I have been using here, is to use
race as a creative concept in an ecology. It means something different
in different places, but that does not mean that it loses its materiality
in favour of being solely socially constructed. What might be creative
about race? The creativity exists not in the contingent reality itself, but
in the development over time that has occurred in the presence of race,
and in the tension between some of those thousand tiny races. Without
question some of those reactions have formed the basis of colonialism,
domination and genocide. At the same time, race has also served as
one of several milieus in which people have worked out viable and rich
forms of life. Jews, Muslims and Christians during the Middle Ages, for
example, found ways to work together on intellectual problems, often
appealing to the same thinkers in different ways, and their work served
to define their faiths, their groups and their identities.
It is important to note that I am not suggesting that the historical
problems will just vanish in some new era of cooperation grounded on
nothing at all. There is tension at various levels. But not for everyone,
and not at all times, and not for every issue. And where there is tension,
it does not always take the form of hostility. Most importantly, even
when there is deep suspicion and a history of exploitation, the call here
is to find the moment of creativity within that space. Mbembe, recall,
spends over two hundred pages sketching out the violence inherent in
the postcolony, and yet at the end, life still exists, and finds a way. It is
that moment I am interested in.
Another example: in my recent Philosophy in an African Place ( Janz
2009), I argued that one of the common features of African philosophy
over the past several decades has been its tendency to try to answer
a question that was not rooted in its own place. The question is ‘Is

there an African philosophy?’, and it is a question that comes largely
from a sceptical West. It assumes that there is no philosophy in Africa,
and puts the onus on Africans to prove that there is, or that it is not
simply derivative. The field has largely been an extended answer to
this challenge, an answer which has tried to claim a territory in the
name of African philosophy, by identifying concepts that can be truly
philosophical and truly African. So, concepts such as tradition, reason,
wisdom, culture, language, and practicality have all been pressed into
service. I argued that African philosophy must become ‘philosophy-
in-place’, that is, philosophy that recognizes the concepts that exist in
an ecology. All the concepts just mentioned can be seen in that manner,
but they have to be reconfigured so that they are not simply addressing
a foreign question. Only then will they be able to become creative in the
place where they matter, to the people to whom they matter.
So, to take an example, tradition must recognize its provenance as
a concept in a Western setting as developing through the medieval
church, being questioned in the Enlightenment, being recovered in
often-problematic ways in Germany in the nineteenth century, and
existing today in relation to discourses on modernity. Is that the prov-
enance of a viable concept of tradition in Africa, or in some specific
place within Africa? I think not. I think that there will be different
questions that inform a concept of tradition, questions that will be
related to but not identical to the Western concept. Perhaps it will end
up being so different that another term gets used, but more likely it
will continue to bear a family resemblance. But it is the difference in
provenance that matters, that only becomes apparent as someone who
requires a concept to express life in a place puts these other concepts
in tension with what is available in the culture itself, and creates some-
thing new.
Learning to Enjoy as Complete Men (and Women)
These examples should help to orient us toward the kind of thing we

need to look for in Mbembe. The explicit theoretical language he uses
tends to be Heideggerian (his use of concepts such as negation, death

and place all have their roots there), but in fact, his development of
concepts gives every evidence of working toward a philosophy-in-place.
Some examples follow.
Mbembe recognizes the ways in which concepts are being created
that are adequate to another version of an ecology, one based not in the
justification of the past among former colonizers or oppressors but in the

reconfiguration of that past into a new age. Mbembe details this within
the South African context by showing how terms like ‘transformation’,
‘rights’, ‘equality’, and so forth become a kind of code that is used to
maintain white supremacist ideology (Mbembe 2008). His critique fol-
lows a familiar postcolonial path by showing the ways in which colonial
power reinscribes itself in postcolonial discourse. What is interesting,
though, is what happens next. Mbembe sketches out a useful histori-
cal analysis that shows how concepts can be co-opted to a particular
ideology. But at the same time, he recognizes that concepts with a
dubious history, such as the Afrikaner model of ‘empowerment’ (Mbembe
2008, p. 16), might also have something to say about equal opportunity
within South Africa. It was a concept that implied particular kinds of
political, social and economic structures, and even though it had been
used for the privilege of one group at the expense of others, Mbembe
recognizes that there are some aspects which could still be useful, in a
new context. What is interesting is that, by the end of the article, his
conclusion is that ‘Real freedom means “freedom from race”’ (Mbembe
2008, p. 18), which, if we take Saldanha seriously, is not necessarily free-
dom at all as it would undermine the possibility of using race as a driver
of difference that might make a philosophy-in-place possible. Mbembe
shows how a concept that had been implicated in the defence of social
inequality could in fact have elements that lead in a very different
direction, but from that he concludes that we need to move past race.
Elsewhere, though, he draws a different conclusion.
In an earlier article, Mbembe actually makes race into a creative
concept by looking at Jewish and Black experiences in a manner that
superficially looks like it conflates the two, but which actually uses
them to illuminate each other (Mbembe 2005). From Judaism, Mbembe
locates a particular kind of homelessness and rootlessness (articulated
by Hannah Arendt) which ‘came to symbolize a life and a death outside
the pale of the law’ (Mbembe 2005, p. 295). Because of this particu-
lar experience, a conceptual ecology emerged which ‘more than any
other, has unveiled the profound connection that ties any ethical
practice of freedom to a moral concern with vulnerability – especially
as manifested in the figure of the stranger and, to a lesser extent, of the

enemy’ (Mbembe 2005, p. 295).
The same history does not exist in the Black experience, but a different
trajectory exists with its own insight. The issue is again a platial one – it
is not homelessness and rootlessness, but ‘captivity, bondage, colonial
subjugation, and racism’ (Mbembe 2005, p. 296). Mbembe goes further,
to localize the conceptual ecology to Francophone Africa. And, in that

place, he finds that, as with the Jews, there is a concern about death in
relation to freedom, but the narratives are not the same. Instead, there is
rhetoric about the right to self-determination as central to freedom, and
the idea of self-ownership. Because of this, the discourse on freedom
ends up being about transcending oneself in death, which means that
violence is connected to freedom.
Mbembe concludes by telling the reader that the difference between
these two experiences of freedom explains the difference between South
Africa and Israel. If we push him out of the mode of explanation, though,
we see a model for the creation of concepts which are adequate to a
place. What happens when a concept of freedom that walks the path of
Jewish experience encounters the freedom-path of African experience?
Difference, certainly, but perhaps also something new. This is because
concepts are a distillation of the narratives that their provenance makes
possible, but that provenance could be otherwise. The clear narrative
sketched by Fanon and others about the implications of conquest and
slavery and its trajectory into violence might be met by another narra-
tive, a ‘what if’ provenance which takes homelessness and rootlessness
as possibly meaningful experiences despite never having left one’s land.
Exile could happen at home just as easily.
These are not the only two possible lines of provenance in relation
to the concept of freedom (or, by this point, the cluster of related
yet distinct concepts, all of which are summarized by the word
‘freedom’). Even within Africa, freedom has not, and cannot, mean the
same thing everywhere, since its provenance varies. Mbembe traces a
racial provenance in this article, but that is not the only possible trajec-
tory for understanding freedom. If the concept could travel, it could
bring the traces of its place to a new place.
The introduction to the issue that Mbembe edited of African Studies
Review is another example of the ways in which he lays the ground-
work for the production of new concepts (Mbembe 2001b). The stated
purpose of the issue is to ‘highlight a significant body of social science
research conducted in Africa by African researchers living and working
there – as “insiders”’ (Mbembe 2001b, p. 2). The point in doing this is

to both avoid the two common analytic tendencies, which he identifies
as the ‘expert/consultant and the activist/militant’, and also avoid the
most common alternative, which he calls ‘nativism’, or the tendency
to celebrate difference through ideologically loaded binary categories
(native versus settler, victim versus killer). The analytic tendencies ‘are
more concerned with stating what African should be rather than with

describing what Africa actually is’, while nativism ‘claims to explain,
almost always in a mechanical and literal fashion, events or processes as
complex as colonialism and its aftermath, the nature of the postcolonial
state, and even genocide’ (Mbembe 2001b, p. 3).
And it is this recognition of Mbembe’s which opens the door to
something new, something other than neo-liberal positivism, Marxist
dogmatism, or nativism. The paths of thought and practice can be
traced, and with them, the kinds of meaningful interaction which
actually exist within Africa can begin to be understood. Mbembe’s
introduction to the papers in the special issue lead him to see at
least two new forms of cosmopolitanism that have emerged in recent
years – a ‘practical cosmopolitanism’ which occurs when migrants
are integrated into new and different networks, and another form of
cosmopolitanism which ‘seeks to reconstruct African identity and the
public sphere according to the universal principle of reason’ (Mbembe
2001b, p. 11). This second one is concerned with the ‘emergence of a
deterritorialized self’ (p. 11). In other words, Mbembe presents us with
a new option, true to the spirit of postcolonialism but with an attention
to the details of experience, a sympathy for the new intellectual possi-
bilities that that experience offers, and the potential for a politics based
somewhere other than in neo-liberal abstractions or identity politics.
We could continue with the examples from Mbembe’s recent work,
but in all of them we would see the connecting thread to a hopeful
production of concepts and experiences. This is the hope Mbembe
alludes to at the end of On the Postcolony. The path that he travels is
a regular one. He keeps coming back to the same central questions,
ones rooted in the place from which he comes and constitutive of
that place. The value here is that, in refusing to tackle the traditional
questions of postcoloniality in their universalist form, he is able to
tease out some new conceptual directions that in the end will certainly
prove more useful. They are concepts that are adequate to their places.
And their adequacy can be the prelude to turning them into ‘travel-
ling concepts’, to quote Mieke Bal (2002), which then makes them
into generative concepts in new places, rather than new examples of

intellectual colonization.
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi.
Eze, Emmanuel (2008) On Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hallward, Peter (2001) Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the
Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ingold, Tim (2007) Lines: A Brief History. New York: Routledge.
Janz, Bruce (2002) ‘Review of Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony’, H-Africa. Available
at: http://www.hnet.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=122821016818245
—— (2008) ‘Reason and Rationality in Eze’s On Reason’, South African Journal of
Philosophy, 27.4: 296–309.
—— (2009) Philosophy in an African Place. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Kermally, Jenny (2008) Towards a Deleuzian Postcolonialism. Unpublished PhD
dissertation, University of Dundee. Supervisor: James Williams.
Mbembe, Achille (2001a) On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
—— (2001b) ‘Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism. Introduction’, Special
Issue of African Studies Review, 44.2 (September): 1–14.
—— (2003) ‘Necropolitics’. Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture, 15.1: 11–40.
—— (2005) ‘Faces of Freedom: Jewish and Black Experiences’, Interventions, 7.3
(November): 293–298.
—— (2006) ‘On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics’, African Identities, 4.2:
143–178.
—— (2008) ‘ “Passages to Freedom”: The Politics of Racial Reconciliation in South
Africa’, Public Culture, 20.1: 5–18.
Miller, Christopher L. (1993), ‘The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes
of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority’, Diacritics,
23.3, Histoires Coloniales (Autumn): 6–35.
Mudimbe, V.Y. (2008) ‘What Is a Line?’, Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy,
21: 23–62.
Saldanha, Arun (2006) ‘Reontologizing Race: The Machinic Geography of
Phenotype’, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 24: 9–24.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and
Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press), pp. 271–313.
Wuthnow, Julie (2002) ‘Deleuze in the Postcolonial: On Nomads and Indigenous
Politics’, Feminist Theory, 3.2: 183–200.
2
The Bachelor Machine and
the Postcolonial Writer
Gregg Lambert

The question ‘what is a minor literature?’ concerns the distinctly
modern relationship between a writer and a people; that is, either a
particular people, or as Deleuze and Guattari often say, of a people who
are ‘missing’. However, Deleuze and Guattari state from the very begin-
ning that this relationship should not – must not! – be understood in
representational terms: the writer neither represents a people according
to a dominant modernist representation of the writer as the authentic
creator of national consciousness in exile, nor in the quasi-elective and
public social function assigned to certain writers who are assumed to
represent minority or subaltern experience (even though this experi-
ence is almost always addressed to a majority viewpoint). As Deleuze
argues concerning the relationship between literature and life, ‘[t]o
write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of
lived experience’ (1997, p. 1). This is because literature (apart from other
kinds of written expression) always involves a becoming that surpasses
the lived experience of the writer determined as a subject or an indi-
vidual. Therefore, in order to further clarify the often misunderstood
refrain the vocation of a writer is to create a language for a people who are
missing, Deleuze will return to this phrase in Essays Critical and Clinical
and add that it means ‘not in place of’ but rather ‘to the attention of’
(1997, p. 4. Translation modified). Following this sense, I would suggest
that there is a closer relationship between Deleuze–Guattari’s concep-
tion of the writer and Sartre’s earlier response to the question ‘for whom
does one write?’ Although the method of arriving at this question will
no doubt be different, the goals of what Deleuze and Guattari call minor
literature, on the one hand, and what Sartre defines as ‘a literature of
commitment’, on the other, are similar in determining the conditions
37
of collective enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 84; Sartre 1988,

pp. 137–138).
For example, the tenuous status of the relationship between the indi-
vidual act of writing and what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘collective
enunciation’ bears a certain resemblance to the problem Sartre invoked
in his famous example of the black airman in World War II: a mechanic
who works on planes because he is ineligible to become a pilot (no

doubt, due to the combination of his race and educational background),
who steals a plane and flies into France only to end up dying in a plane
crash. The meaning of this act, of course, has only an indirect relation
to the general situation of the colonized: ‘The general revolt on the part
of all coloured men against colonists is expressed in him by this particu-
lar refusal of this prohibition’ (Sartre 1988, p. 98). However, the means
of expressing his revolt is not immediately given in the act of stealing
an airplane without knowing how to fly, in order to die in a nationalist
war for the same colonialists he is supposedly rebelling against. His act
is not intended to represent a general revolt on the part of all the colo-
nized, only a specific and individual refusal of his status as a subject that
informs his ‘desire to fly’ (and in some ways, this choice even seems
perfectly Kafkaesque, much like the desire to become an Indian in one
of Kafka’s fables). As Sartre writes, ‘this political position, of which he
doubtless has no clear awareness, he lives as a personal obsession: avia-
tion becomes his possibility as a clandestine future’ (1988, p. 96).
As a second point of comparison with Deleuze and Guattari’s choice
of Kafka as the author who will provide them with the blueprint for the
becoming-revolutionary of literature, let us also recall Sartre’s manner
of posing the same problem by championing, through what he defined
as a ‘progressive and regressive method’, the most unlikely figure of
Flaubert, the petty Bourgeois, who chose as his response a style of
becoming-woman (in the famous example of ‘I am Madame Bovary’).
As Sartre writes concerning Flaubert’s project,
This project has a meaning, it is not the simple negativity of flight; by

it a man aims at the production of himself in the world as a certain
objective totality. It is not the pure and abstract decision to write
which makes up the peculiar quality of Flaubert, but the decision to
write in a certain manner in order to manifest himself in the world in
a particular way; in a word, it is the particular signification – within
the framework of the contemporary ideology – which he gives to lit-
erature as the negation of his original condition and as the objective
solution to his contradictions. (1988, p. 147)
Lambert: The Bachelor Machine and the Postcolonial Writer 39
In this regard, Fredric Jameson was absolutely correct in his observation

that the cases of Proust and Kafka (as well as other early modernist
writers like Joyce and Durrell) are absolutely singular because there
was no pre-given model or archetype for connecting the political and
social situation of the subject to the means of writing as a response to
this situation.

[T]he first modernists had to operate in a world in which no
acknowledged or codified social role existed for them and in which
the very form and concept of their own specific ‘works of art’
were lacking […]. Such imitation was unavailable to the classical
modernists, whose works designate their process of production as an
analogical level of allegory, in order to make a place for themselves
in a world which does not contain their ‘idea’; this formal auto-
referentiality is then utterly different from the poems about poetry
and novels about artists in which the late-modernists designate
themselves in their content. ( Jameson 2002, pp. 199–200)
For Jameson, this singularity accounts for the originality of these writers,
in particular, as opposed to the late-modernist writers (like Beckett and
Nabokov) he seems to discount where the vocation of the modernist
writer in exile was already a cliché.
Of course, today, the situation of ‘becoming a writer’ is somewhat
more complicated than it was for Flaubert, since its meaning is already
given in advance as one possible objective solution to one’s contradic-
tions, which in some ways already limits this activity’s significance
because it is already too ‘meaningful’. In other words, the project of
becoming a writer has a meaning even before it is actually a project
of writing, or before the question of whether the particular work has
merit is even raised. That is, the younger generation of minority and
postcolonial writers, where the vocation of the writer is already invested
with a social and political value, determines the meaning of this activity
in advance. Where the model is already too determining of the specific
activity, the whole meaning of writing is often reduced to becoming a
one-dimensional and clichéd matter of representation (allegory). And,
thus, the question of style (what Sartre defines as signification within
the contemporary framework of ideology), as well as the question con-
cerning the specific circumstance of a text’s production (what most
cultural critics today call either ‘context’ or ‘history’) are completely
lost in a presupposition that never explains the real reason a subject
chooses to write as a particular means of both taking flight from and, at
the same time, specifically engaging with his or her particular situation
(whether or not this situation is defined in sexual terms, ethnic terms,
or in some other manner yet to be identified by criticism as worthy of
being nominated as ‘political’ today).
As a criterion by which many works of literature are selected to be
brought before an already specialized public and the court of profes-
sional and academic opinion, the ‘political’ names a value that already

infuses the work with a ready-made signification, even when these sig-
nifications are yet to be released from the work’s blank volume. These
significations are usually released by the critic whose official role in the
process is to identify what is worthy of being expressed and valued,
worthy enough to be repeated and extrapolated within the critic’s own
text. But this process usually obscures the criterion by which the writers
first choose to select certain themes (even when the theme is the act of
writing itself!), or choose to construct particular characters in a fiction
(when we are speaking of fiction and not of poetry), or, as Deleuze and
Guattari often describe, produce certain particle-signs and expressions
that refer to purely intensive states of being – ‘to make the sequences
vibrate, to open the word unto unexpected internal intensities – in
short, to create an a-signifying and intensive utilization of language’
(1986, p. 22). Of course, not all writers achieve this style, and certainly
some writers manage it better than others.
In the case of so-called ‘minority’ and postcolonial writers, we must
come back to the objective determination of the act of writing in the
first place, which precedes the subjective determination itself in every
particular case (or the writer’s own ‘idea’, as Jameson defined it in the
passage above). If the meaning of this specific activity has become too
abstract, it is because the answers to the questions ‘what is writing?’,
‘why write?’, and ‘for whom does one write?’ are already given in
advance by the framework in which the literature is read. The content,
thus, is always-already abstracted and immediately subject to criticism
for not being specific enough, which is to say that the meaning and
value of the work are given before the actual work itself. Of course,
Sartre is right to point out that it is not the more or less abstract deci-
sion to write, but rather the decision to write in a certain manner that
constitutes the primary criteria for discerning the question of style (in
Flaubert’s case, the style of becoming-woman, which is not simply a
matter of ‘writing like a woman’) as one of how the subject of writing
constitutes a movement that is both away from and toward the given
situation of being a subject in other respects. Consequently, according
to Deleuze and Guattari’s major thesis concerning minor literature,
the more singular the writer’s expression becomes, the more the
relationship between the writer and a people (in this case always mean-
ing a specific people) becomes an ‘intensive zone’ of mutual becoming.
As I will return to discuss in the conclusion, such a becoming is not of
the writer and a people as subjects, but rather of the creative relation
between so-called individual enunciation and collective enunciation –
as in the case, for example, where the writer’s description of his or her

own situation (which is intentionally falsified) functions like a ‘child-
hood block’ of the actual past or becomes what Sartre calls a clandestine
future that is shared, albeit in a manner that is difficult to predict, with
a people.
What Is Writing?
An argument that Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial (2001) shares

in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
(1986) is the following: modern writers must invent their own process,
which is sometimes related to the specific situation of a people. Simply
put, the manner in which a writer describes his or her own situation
can sometimes provide the conditions for a collective enunciation, even
when the objective determinations of the conditions are lacking (except
in the specialized case of literary enunciation). What Jameson refers to
as analogical actually refers only to the ‘idea’ that does not belong to
the framework of an existing language, or to a given world, and thus
the means of expressing the idea must actually be invented. For exam-
ple, a writer who is determined by what today is called a ‘postcolonial
situation’ must invent the means by a number of creative and purely
‘artificial’ procedures to escape that situation via literature (which
I would qualify as a writing process that is not specified in advance
in the same way as the given situation itself is). As Hallward writes,
‘any literary work, however mimetic its intent, involves some degree
of de-specification, some degree of imaginative transcendence, some
distance taken from convention-bound routine’ (2001, p. 333). The fact
that the writing process is not completely specified beforehand – thus,
it is not determined by the situation in the same way that the living
subject is determined – means that there exists some degree of freedom
in the process, even though this relative degree of literary freedom may
be quite remote from the real situation experienced by the individual
subject.
What would be the literary critic’s role in all this? Hallward responds:
pay attention to the process! And, most importantly, pay ‘attention to
how it works’ (Hallward 2001, p. 333). Deleuze and Guattari formulate

this axiom much more succinctly: ‘Only expression gives us the method’
(1986, p. 16). It is only around this point that there seems to be
complete agreement between the two positions, or between the specific
and the singular, and this could become a creative occasion for staging
a confrontation with the theories of literature and writing employed
by much postcolonial criticism to date. Simply put, most postcolonial

critics can be charged with losing sight of the process itself by not
understanding how it works; either by making it too complex and
over-determined (thus denying any degree of virtuality in the expres-
sion itself), or by simplifying it too much as a direct representation of
the situation (thus denying any degree of de-specification, as Hallward
puts it, that is inherent in the formal determination of any ‘fiction’).
Deleuze and Guattari call this procedure ‘falsifying narration’, since all
writers fundamentally lie about their situations, especially when they are
telling the truth, and so a kind of free and non-moral determination of
the false underlies the technical determination of creation or invention
in fiction. In this technical sense, falsifying a situation would essentially
correspond to what Hallward calls de-specification and what Deleuze
would later on define, following Bergson, as the creative conditions of
‘fabulation’ (1997, p. 3). However, in those rare cases today where post-
colonial critics choose to direct their attention to the writing process
itself, they don’t understand how it works because they reduce its func-
tion to purely formalist concerns, or restrict the value of enunciation to
the individual writer and his or her ‘private-political concerns’ (as the
representative member of an oppressed minority or marginalized class).
In both cases above, as Hallward rightly observes, the creative process
of de-specification itself is rejected and thus it no longer matters how it
works (2001, p. 333). For most critics, on the other hand, it is only the
situation that really matters. In the end, what matters is only the situation
minus the expression.
Beginning from this state of affairs, we need to place the question of
the writing process and how it works again at the centre of the discussion.
Of course, this question is not so simple. If the true task of the critic
is to describe the writing process, first by understanding how it works
according to its own terms and procedures, and second by avoiding
the trap of reducing the process itself to a purely formalist description
of literary terms and procedures, then the writing process cannot be
understood simply as a set of superficial features or mere ‘effects’. This is
not what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that expression will
provide its own unique method, one which we might assume would be
particular to every case. If the latter is true, however, and the writing
process also functions by means of a subjective determination that
belongs to a particular writing machine, then how can we pretend to
abstract from this larger determination of expression a ‘method’ that
could be applied to other writing processes, to other writers? Again,
let us take Kafka as a case perfectly suited to illustrate this problem.
If, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, Kafka’s own process was specific to

what they describe as a particular writing machine, and later on as ‘an
assemblage’ (agencement), then how do we get from this statement to
the claim that the case of Kafka is exemplary for the situation of minor
literature in general? What seems to be missing is something that Sartre
had defined as the object of his own search, a ‘progressive-regressive
method’ for moving between the subjective determination of a par-
ticular writer (for example, the style of Flaubert) and the progressive
determination of the writer as a ‘free alterity’ who represents a ‘virtual
people’ (according to Sartre’s own terms; Sartre 1988, p. 140).
Another way of understanding this reciprocal relationship, referring
back to Sartre’s example of the black airman, is the relation between the
‘desire to fly’ and his situation as a colonized subject. For example, what
Deleuze and Guattari will define as Kafka’s bachelor desire may indeed
be comparable to the desire to fly an airplane, but how would flying
specifically apply to other modern writers? As Deleuze and Guattari
write, ‘as long as the form and the deformation or expression are not
considered in themselves, there can be no real way out, even at the level
of contents’ (1986, p. 16). Here we encounter the same problem that has
determined Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature when
applied to other literatures, especially those written by minorities. And
yet, we also find here the problem of expression indicated above, one in
which the ‘method’ is not given beforehand, as is the case of a ‘theory’
for interpreting different contents. In other words, this reverses the
priority of understanding that operates in most theories of interpreta-
tion, for only when we understand how it works can expression give us
a method.
Most of the critical responses to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka book to
date have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the third chapter
and the definition of a minor literature, a term that has been picked up
and applied to any number of works by minority writers by a method of
‘tracing’ (as Deleuze and Guattari describe it at several points). In reject-
ing this overtly hermeneutic and allegorical application of the concept
to works by other minority writers, or to postcolonial literature in gen-
eral, am I suggesting that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept is completely
useless, or that it is a theory (if, indeed, it is a theory) that can only be

applied to Kafka’s writings and no other author? In some sense, Deleuze
and Guattari’s first axiom of interpretation – ‘only expression gives us
the method’ (1986, p. 16) – would seem to lead us to that conclusion; it
reverses the usual production of signification in hermeneutic criticism
in which the method (or the theory of interpretation) gives the expres-
sion (in this case, the meaning). Here, on the other hand, what Deleuze

and Guattari are trying to devise is a critical procedure according to
which the method is completely derived from the expression, and only
refers back to the expression. In other words, they are almost exclu-
sively concerned with the question of how Kafka’s literary machine
works: in defining its component parts, its connections, its relays, its
series and blocks, and, finally, with describing the entire process of
how it was assembled, beginning with the letters and ending with the
novels (which is to say with the posthumous writings that continued
to be assembled by other hands after Kafka’s own death). Deleuze and
Guattari provide an ‘interpretation’ of Kafka’s literary machine that is
so ‘specific’ (to evoke Hallward) as to make it inapplicable to another
work of literature. Only in this sense, I would argue, can their theoreti-
cal project be understood as ‘anti-interpretation’.
Contrary to the first tendency toward extreme specificity, however, we
also find in the concept of minor literature an opposing trend toward
‘singularization’ (to again employ Hallward’s terminology), one that
would even define a universal trait or condition of modern literature,
or at least, the production of new literary statements. It is only in the
last chapter, ‘What Is an Assemblage?’, which in many ways replaces the
earlier chapter ‘What Is a Minor Literature?’, that we hear them speak of
a general and non-specific use of the concept. Moreover, here we should
note that they often resort to the phrase ‘so-called minor literature’, as
in the following passage: ‘Let’s return to the problem of the produc-
tion of new statements and to so-called minor literature, since this
literature, as we have seen, is in an exemplary situation for producing
new statements’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 83). Of course, it is a
pity that most critics, including most readers of Deleuze and Guattari
as well, have never really gotten beyond the third chapter, ‘What Is a
Minor Literature?’, to reach the point of the book where the question
of a minor literature is redefined in new terms and according to a new
emphasis: as an exemplary situation for producing new (so-called ‘literary’)
statements.
What is the methodological status of the theoretical statement at
this point? In fact, the method being employed is simply inductive.
According to an inductive method, one begins with a certain hypothesis

that is then tested in a process of experimentation. This produces an
analysis of the results, and concludes with a judgment concerning
whether the initial hypothesis was valid, leading to a new set of thetic
principles that can serve as the basis for certain general conclusions,
but which must themselves be tested in a number of new experiments.
In this case, the initial hypothesis was that Kafka’s work was a rhizome,

a burrow (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 3), and was composed by
certain identifiable contents and forms of expression (the bent-heads,
the portrait-photos, the musical sounds, the animal-becomings, and so
on). The concluding hypothesis concerns what Deleuze and Guattari
define as an assemblage (agencement), which is the particular object of
the novels and seems to confirm the validity of the initial hypothesis. It
is at this point, moreover, that we arrive at two primary characteristics
of a minor literature in general, which they define as ‘an exemplary
situation for producing new statements’ (1986, p. 83).
In the final chapter, the two characteristics of a minor literature are
as follows: the first characteristic is that of a clock that runs too fast
(cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 59) referring back to its prognosticat-
ing potential concerning ‘the diabolical powers […] knocking at the
door’ (p. 83) (for example, fascism or totalitarianism); the second is
that it produces statements that are for the benefit of a people who are
missing. Moreover, this second characteristic now assumes the primary
role in the identification of a minor literature, which is described in the
following manner: ‘When a statement is produced by a bachelor or an
artistic singularity, it occurs necessarily as a function of a national, politi-
cal, and social community, even if the objective conditions are not given
to the moment except in literary enunciation’ (p. 84). This is stated even
more directly in the following sentence: ‘a statement is literary when it
is “taken up” by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of
enunciation’ (p. 84). It is at this point, however, that we should immedi-
ately note that the definition has changed: it no longer responds to the
question ‘what is a minor literature?’ but extends to address the more
general question ‘what are literary statements?’ As such, it now bears on
defining the subjective conditions of new literary statements – perhaps
even the subjective conditions of all literature as such.
In some ways, this progression again recalls Sartre’s search for a
manner of determining the relationship of the subjective form of the
artwork to the objective or historical conditions, which he defines as a
movement of ‘free alterity’. Thus, the subjective conditions for literary
statements that define a minor literature do not necessarily correspond
to the subjective conditions of being a minority, or the member of a

minority. Why? There are two reasons. First, because the term ‘minority’
actually refers to the objective conditions of the individual or subject
who is identified as belonging to a social, national or ethnic identity
(even when this objective determination is divided or reflected by the
subject of enunciation itself). Second, even these objective conditions
are already too abstract and function formally as the subject of the state-

ment according to juridical or statutory requirements. In other words,
it is already at a position that is in some way twice removed from the
subjective conditions of enunciation, especially literary enunciation
(even though literary enunciation can and often does take these abstrac-
tions and fill them with new contents and forms of expression). On a
very technical level, however, this actually illustrates the second defini-
tion of a minor literature as the production of new statements when
the objective conditions are not given to the moment except in literary
enunciation.
Recalling Sartre’s own observations, however, even before we consider
the particular social identity in question, there is already the objec-
tive determination of the writer qua writer, which is to say, the objective
and historical conditions of literary enunciation determined by tradi-
tion (national, linguistic, popular, ethnic or cultural), which the writer
cannot choose to ignore entirely without losing precisely the objective
determination of being ‘a writer’. Even ‘minority writing’ today is such
a tradition, and minorities themselves must choose (or not) to write
like particular minorities. Native American writers, for example, must
always decide whether or not ‘to write like Native Americans’, which
also presupposes the act of choosing certain group memories, common
experiences, family relationships, and so on. It is in this sense that the
subjective conditions of enunciation are, in part, bound up with the
formal and linguistic possibilities that define historically the particu-
lar tradition that the writer inherits. Such inheritances, however, are
not reducible to individual conditions of experience and memory, but
already appear in an essentially fictionalized and impersonal form of
collective enunciation.
The situation just described was no different for Kafka, and Deleuze
and Guattari are very careful to provide an accurate account of the
objective determinations of literary enunciation that define the various
possibilities available to both Kafka, the writer and the Jewish minority
living in Prague at the end of the Hapsburg monarchy. To offer a few
examples, in the immediate period there was the tradition formed by
the members of the Prague School (Leppen, Meyrenk, Kisch, Werfel,
Brod, Hasvek and the younger Rilke), but also the German of Goethe
and Kleist; there were the emergent Czech popular and nationalist lit-
eratures, the Yiddish folk literature, and the popular Yiddish theatre of
Lowy. And, as in the case of every writer, there is also the presence of
other writers, who might serve as models or influences and who do not
immediately belong to his context and situation in Prague. For exam-
ple, he admired Dickens and used his work as a model for his first novel

Amerika, although Deleuze and Guattari will argue that only Kleist can
be regarded as the master who deeply influenced Kafka. As they write:
He doesn’t want to create a genealogy, even if it is a social one, à la

Balzac; he doesn’t want to erect an ivory tower, à la Flaubert; he
doesn’t want ‘blocks’, à la Dickens […]. The only one he will take as
his master is Kleist, and Kleist also detested masters; but Kleist is a
different matter even in the deep influence that he had on Kafka. We
have to speak differently about this influence. (1986, p. 55)
In this regard, Jameson’s argument that Kafka’s exceptionalism as a

classical modernist writer was the lack of any previous model is certainly
not true; in fact, the specific problem that Kafka faced was the existence
of too many models, all of which Kafka rejects in favour of construct-
ing what Deleuze and Guattari call a bachelor machine. However, this
concept is – in line with Jameson’s remark – also intended to highlight
the unusual and singular character of literary enunciation, as well as the
objective determination of the writer in Kafka’s case, for which there
was no clearly defined predecessor or model.
‘What Is a Bachelor Machine?’ – or ‘Why Write?’
I will return to the objective or social determination of the writer

in the final section, but first we need to define the concept of the bach-
elor in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature, especially in
relation to the general proposition that, in a certain sense, all literary
statements are produced by bachelors! But what or who is a bachelor? In
the case of Kafka, the desire to remain a bachelor certainly provides the
subjective determination of enunciation, particularly in the letters, in
the sense that it is the strictly machinic definition of a writing machine:
it is the social desire of the bachelor that is directly linked to the process of
writing, even serving as its motor. Here, if only in the case of the letters,
the writing machine is a bachelor machine. This is not a metaphor,
but a literal equivalence in Kafka’s singular case. Nevertheless, despite
this singularity, Deleuze and Guattari also seek to give it a larger social
meaning, one that will not be restricted to Kafka’s private and individu-
alistic concern but will serve to provide an objectively determined and
social meaning as well, which both Sartre and Jameson were attempting
to postulate for the modernist writer: namely, a unique model.
The problem today is that both the objective determination of
literature and the subjective determination of the writer are already

over-determined, bloated by too much interpretation, exaggerated to
an extreme degree, and even Oedipalized in a way that is very different
from the problem of the petty bourgeois writer that Sartre addressed in
his time. It is here that we must connect the concept of the bachelor
to the modernist myth of the writer in a very particular way, keeping
in mind all the while that Kafka is exemplary because he has been
employed historically to establish the myth of the modernist writer in
the first place, both as a form of enunciation and as a social form of
desire. In other words, as a function of the modernist myth (as a signi-
fication within the framework of an ideology), the proper name Kafka
belongs to a collective assemblage of enunciation that has produced
both the objective and subjective conditions of the modern writers that
follow. This collective assemblage of enunciation is called, for the lack
of a better term, ‘modern literature’. It is perhaps for this very reason
that Deleuze and Guattari select Kafka as the writer they will employ to
counter this same myth, even by creating another Kafka, an ‘anti-Kafka’,
the Kafka of a bastard tradition of minor literature. Certainly, Deleuze
and Guattari can be accused of participating in the modernist myth of
the writer as a stranger or foreigner, and of a people who are missing
or still to come, but as they also say, the thoroughly modernist myths
of the writer and of a people ‘must be understood in a completely different
way’ (1986, p. 70).
Therefore, if there is going to be any political value attached to the
situation of the writer today, regardless of his or her social identity, we
must first do away with many of the major clichés that have obscured
the nature of the desire that first responds to the question ‘why write?’
To echo Sartre, the decision to write must actually be possible as an
elective form of freedom, among other freedoms that are socially and
politically defined, before the question of its specific value is even
raised. Moreover, it is precisely because of the lack of an external com-
mand as the cause of the activity that there is a peculiar subjective form
of demand that is erected in place of objective social desire. After all, no
one is forced to write, or to become a writer! The decision to write may very
well be in the form of an elected freedom, but the writer is often a being
who turns this freedom into a form of bondage; to become chained to

one’s own desk like a dog and eschew the desire to go for walks outside
(as Kafka often complains of his own particular habits), to forgo the
proximity of others (even if for periodic intervals), to build a vast and
intricate burrow, to withdraw into the burrow and to live part of one’s
life there, alone, always alone! In fact, there is a strangely obsessive and
impersonal force that binds the subject of writing to his or her daily

routines and particular habits, as if the writer is someone who, in the
absence of an external law, must invent a law that can only be applied
to his or her case. Kafka’s particular obsession was to construct a writ-
ing machine that would serve as a compliment to the writing machine
that existed in the office, which had its own bureaucrats and bosses
who would enforce its laws and its daily routines. In this sense, I would
interpret Kafka’s bachelor desire by the measure of its severity and by
the sacrifices it demanded in enforcing commitment to writing. In
other words, the nature of the desire that informs an artistic singularity
must first be understood positively as a ‘unique idea’ that is formed to
express a real social desire and not simply as a fantasy or merely as an
aesthetic and dreamy escapism. Only when viewed in this way, first of
all, as a specific desire that also informs a social form of individuation,
can the myth of the modernist writer again be justified as describing
both the subjective and objective determinations of real process, ‘or, as
Kleist would say, a life-plan, a discipline, a method, not at all a phan-
tasm’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 70).
As with any real social desire, the writer engages in a process that
‘produces this production of intensive quantities directly on the social
body’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 71) and, moreover, is ‘plugged
all the more into a social field with multiple connections’ (p. 70). The
desire of ‘becoming a writer’ exists alongside or ‘mixed up with’ other
social desires: it is collective before becoming an individual form of
expression. But this is because there is no such thing as individual desire.
All desire qua desire is already collective, which is to say, fundamen-
tally social. Therefore, the argument that Deleuze and Guattari employ
for determining the social nature of desire that informs becoming
a writer is contained in the following statement: ‘A machine that is all
the more social and collective insofar as it is solitary, a bachelor, and
that, tracing the line of escape, is equivalent in itself to a community
whose conditions haven’t yet been established (1986, p. 71). In other
words, even the most solitary and solipsistic of desires are at their core
already collective assemblages of enunciation of which the desire of
the solitary writer is only one possibility. Therefore, one does not
‘become a writer’ by inventing a singular form of desire, any more than

one becomes a homosexual or a political activist in this way. Rather,
according to Deleuze and Guattari, one enters into a becoming that is
already subjectively determined by a collective assemblage of enuncia-
tion and objectively determined by other social assemblages of desire.
The only condition of uniqueness or novelty occurs when a new
statement is invented to be inserted into these collective assemblages

of enunciation, designating new possibilities for becoming, which are
defined as new intensive quantities. As Deleuze and Guattari write:
‘Production of intensive quantities in the social body, proliferation and
precipitation of series, polyvalent and collective connections brought
about by the bachelor agent – there is no other definition possible for
a minor literature’ (1986, p. 71). Therefore, even in its most private or
subjective determination, fantasy still remains part of a collective assem-
blage of enunciation; likewise, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘[t]he most
individual enunciation is a particular case of collective enunciation’
(1986, p. 84). The process of becoming a writer only exists in relation
to other kinds of becoming within the social field itself, becoming that
the writer often takes up to fill with new contents and new statements.
Likewise, the becoming-bachelor of the writer only exists in relation to
other kinds of bachelor desires, and to other real social bachelors, and we
here might imagine other sexual bachelors, political bachelors, and
minority bachelors as well (and even, as Deleuze and Guattari argue
later in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), that becoming-woman is the first
of all bachelor desires). Therefore, we might further extend the notion
of the bachelor to occupy a point of collective enunciation that, at its
farthest limit, also necessarily addresses the situation of a people.
Nevertheless, at this point I must immediately qualify the last state-
ment concerning the concept of the bachelor, which is still in danger of
remaining too abstract, or of falling back into the most commonplace of
myths concerning the solitary writer as purely impersonal and creative
being, and writing (or literature) as the only privileged medium for the
creation of a people. As Deleuze and Guattari often remark, this would
be a science fiction! In fact, these are the two abstractions that we must
chase away, just as K. in The Castle often chases away his assistants,
even if only to have them return back through the window. The first
myth I have already addressed is that of the bachelor desire in its mod-
ernist formulation: the writer as an a-specific, non-relational, and too
singular form of individuation that includes all other singularities and
is immediately capable of expressing them out of its own substance. The
second myth concerns the social position of the writer often defined as
a leading or cutting edge of deterritorialization, as if the bachelor and the
writer are beings that always appear on the edge of any family or group,
always at the margins, as if only to exist in ‘a world without others’ (to
refer to Deleuze’s reading of Tournier’s novel Friday at the end of Logic
of Sense). Here the writer is defined as being the very embodiment of an
absolute boundary into the social field itself, either approaching from

the outside or seeking to become a completely different nature. In the
end, a pure being of writing and the specific silence borne of a writing
that actively silences all other voices in a singular expression of one sub-
stance – again, this would really be nothing more than a science fiction! Yet, as
result of its most general and mythic signification within the framework
of a modernist ideology, this second myth has especially distorted the
position of the writer in the postcolonial field of literature (the writer
as stranger, or foreigner, even in relation to his or her own people or
race). In many cases, this has led to pre-determination of the position
of the minority and postcolonial writer, and of any minority expression
for that matter, as having an immanent relation to the politics of the
group without any prior determination of its content, a prejudice that
sooner or later leads to the discovery of contradictions, either implicit
or explicit betrayals, and an entire range of ‘unfortunate complications’.
In some ways, it is because of this prejudice that in the short history of
postcolonial writing it is already marked by a degree of controversy and
schism that surpasses even the intensity of the debates surrounding the
French socialist or leftist writer in ‘Situation of the Writer in 1947’ that
Sartre was addressing, and thus far, it seems, there has been no postcolo-
nial writer who has not also been put on trial by later generations for in
some way betraying his or her fidelity to the people.
For Whom Does One Write?
I will conclude by returning to Peter Hallward’s critique of what he calls

the logic of singularization in modern literature, basically the definition
of the framework of modernist ideology, which is specifically applied in
Hallward’s study to the postcolonial field. Hallward’s arguments against
the singularizing movement of writing amount to two objections, both
of which circle around the hallucinatory presence of the subject and
the object in writing. First, writing destroys every existing object in
order to produce in place of this object an image that is given more
consistency and reality than objects belonging to the external world
(in other words, writing produces its own objects in the manner of a
hallucination). The production of literary objects is conditioned by the
destruction of all real objects and any natural relation the object has
with things. As Blanchot writes, ‘the word only has meaning if it gets
rid of the object it names’ (quoted in Hallward 2001, p. 17).
Second, and more importantly for Hallward’s critique of the singu-
larizing tendency of the celebrated postcolonial writers he takes up,

through the medium of writing the writer destroys any specific relations
that belong to the world of subjects, including relations that would
define his own subject and particularly his or her dependent relations
upon others. In place of this specific subjectivity, the postcolonial writer
creates a singularity that only exists within the curvature of writing
itself, and the Deleuzian philosopher, for his part, in turn invests this
singular subject of the writer with a higher reality and finality of desire.
It is here that we can find the critique of the writer and philosopher
as bachelors who are detached from all other social relations and thus
absolutely singular, thus both impersonal and collective, a multiplicity
in themselves. Here, the form of hallucinatory presence would be the
purely impersonal voice of an ‘I’ that appears as a condition of writing
and would be, for this reason, both the neutralization of all specific
subjects and the crystallization of all the possibilities of enunciation in
one being, equated with the singular and hallucinatory presence of the
third person singular (Blanchot’s ‘neuter’).
In response, I will restrict my comments to the material determina-
tion of writing in the second of the above claims. Concerning Hallward’s
second claim that, in its absolute or singular mode, writing produces
the quasi-hallucinatory presence of a collective subject as the direct
actualization of its expression, almost in the sense of creating a people
who exist in the virtual and purely non-relational space of writing as
the true subjects of enunciation. Of course, we can say that there are no
‘literary people’, no people who exist somewhere in literature, hiding
somewhere in the text, lurking around the next phrase or passage, ready
to leap out and materialize on the next page. Nevertheless, Hallward
seems to describe the situation of singular writing in this manner, par-
ticularly in extending his critique to the field of postcolonial literature
where we find a direct equivalence between the writer and a people as
two parts of the same univocal expression, one in which the writer as a
specific subject foregoes the power to say I and immediately dissolves into
an impersonal and anonymous subject of collective enunciation.
Here I come back to Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier point that this
would turn the collective conditions of enunciation in literature
into a kind of science fiction. In order to avoid this trap already laid out
by the overtly modernist determination of the relationship, Deleuze
and Guattari argue that the actual bachelor and the virtual community
are, indeed, effectively real, but both must be understood as expressing
different aspects of collective enunciation. Therefore, the process of
becoming a writer always refers to singular agents (agents), but what
is called literature refers to a collective assemblage (agencement) of

enunciation, and it is only in relation to a specific collective assem-
blage (agencement) that a statement is literary when it is taken up or
expressed by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of
enunciation. These conditions, however, must not be understood to
actualize the political conditions of the group, but refer only to the
enunciations that are found to be missing an objective determination,
a real political existence.
In other words, perhaps this is a way of reading Hallward’s own argu-
ment against him. Yes, we might say, certain writers have been found to
hallucinate a direct relation to a people, especially in those cases where
a specific people are found to be missing and thus their only means of
appearing must be compared to quasi-hallucinatory states or certain
special kinds of deliria (visual apparitions, auditory hallucination or
paracusia). And yet, in perceiving this presence, that is, in feeling the
intensity of a desire that provides it with an object or an image, the
reader participates in the writer’s hallucination as well, and the quasi-
hallucinatory status of the perceived object in each case does not deny
the reality of both experiences. Hallucinations constitute intensive
moments of real experience also, and this is what Deleuze and Guattari
mean when they say that writers produce real intensities directly on
the social body, intensities that are communicable with other social
subjectivities, inasmuch as readers can perceive the intensity in their
own experience, and can share in some sense the same hallucinatory
reality. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari might have a bet-
ter understanding of writers, since they allow certain expressions of
delirium to exist in literature, whereas critics often want to reduce the
literary process to a rational form of communication between profes-
sionals, in which there is not the least hint of intensity or desire.
Literature may be a delirium, or may include certain kinds of deliria
that are shared between the writer and his or her audience, but then,
‘all delirium is world historical’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 4). In fact, a people
might be the name of a specific delirium that has obsessed many modern
writers, and the hallucinatory presence of a people in many modern
works can attest to this fact. In other words, like the positive status of
bachelor desire we spoke of earlier, we would need to define the people

as a specific form of delirium that thus have a hallucinatory quality of
collective enunciation. The writer, by the means of writing, produces
visions and auditions, which might be best defined as specific kinds of
hallucinations that have lost their pathologically determined character,
much like the writer discussed earlier produces a falsification of his or
her particular situation as subject in a manner that cannot be morally

or juridically determined as lying. As Deleuze writes, in the introduction
to Essays Critical and Clinical, ‘there is no literature without fabulation,
but as Bergson was able to see, fabulation – the fabulating function
– does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego’ (1997, p. 3). This is
because, finally, ‘to write is always to engage in a movement to become
something other than a writer. The writer does not speak about it, but is
always concerned with something else’ (p. 6). In other words, it is often
from a critical perspective that the following questions are issued: ‘what
is writing?’ ‘Why write?’ ‘For whom does one write?’ And finally, ‘What
is literature?’ Even in moments of quiet reflection, writers can be heard
to pose these questions concerning the process as well. But that is not
important. What is important is that in engaging the process of writing,
the writer has always sought to become something other than merely
a writer. Who is to say, in the end, that becoming a people is also not
a secret concern of the so-called postcolonial writer as well? Moreover,
who would forbid it today?
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans.
Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
—— (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Jameson, Fredric (2002) A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.
New York: Verso.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1988) What Is Literature and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
3
The World with(out) Others, or
How to Unlearn the Desire
for the Other

Kathrin Thiele
What are we to do with Gilles Deleuze’s most fascinating yet troubling

text ‘Michel Tournier or the World without Others’ which can be
found in the appendix of The Logic of Sense (1990) and which devotes
itself to the reworking of the Crusoe-myth in Michel Tournier’s Friday
from 1967? Does this text, as Peter Hallward once argued, ultimately
show that ‘Deleuze works very literally toward a world without others;
that he denies the philosophical reality of all relations – with and
between others’ (1997, p. 530)? Does Deleuze’s utterly non-moralizing
philosophy – and that it is non-moralizing is probably both the best
known and the most significant feature of his thought – does it, in its
striving for a thought of ‘difference in itself’, lead us into the dead end
of an absolute solipsism; into ‘the singular as absolute, beyond relation,
as sovereign or self-constituent’ (Hallward 1997, p. 530)? And, thus,
do we have to read Deleuze’s article as his most explicit and radical
statement of a move ‘out of this world’ – philosophically challenging
but ethico-politically inefficient, a claim Hallward makes in view of
Deleuze’s œuvre as a whole.
Deleuze writes a philosophy of (virtual) difference without (actual)

others. He intuits a purely internal or self-differing difference, a
difference that excludes any constitutive mediation between the
differed. Such a philosophy precludes a distinctively relational con-
ception of politics as a matter of course. (Hallward 2006, p. 162)
All of these are serious charges, and much more than a mere theoreti-
cal disagreement regarding the notion of the singular is at stake here.1
Such claims question nothing less than the ethico-political potential of
Deleuze’s philosophy as such, a charge that becomes especially relevant
55
if we examine the importance of this thought for non-phallogocentric

and postcolonial perspectives.
So, what to do? In what follows I will argue that while the stated
critique is to be taken into account, drawing conclusions too quickly
would be both too easy and miss the very singular transformative
potential of difference philosophy such as it is exemplified by Deleuze.
I do not wish to downplay the challenges that the question of other-

ness addressed to Deleuze raises – a challenge that seems plausible at
first sight, given Deleuze’s rejection of all forms of recognition and
representation, that is, all mediated forms of relating to others that
seem to be ‘of this world’. Nevertheless, in this article I will develop
a different understanding of Deleuze’s thought of becoming, its sin-
gular mode of becoming-other, than an all too literal reading of ‘The
World without Others’ might suggest. At the same time, we must, of
course, also avoid moving towards the other extreme and retreating
to a straightforwardly analogical or metaphorical reading that Deleuze
himself so strongly worked against. What will be claimed here is that
instead of leading us to the blunt elimination or rejection of ques-
tions of otherness or relationality, something very different is at stake
in Deleuze, both in his thought of ‘difference in itself’ in general
terms and in his article on Tournier’s novel Friday in particular. What
we witness in Deleuze is a transformation of the question of other-
ness and relationality itself; and what I will show is that rather than
disregarding the ethico-political issue of otherness as a most urgent
and fundamental question for a ‘different’ philosophy (such as a phil-
osophy of difference worth its name claims), Deleuze’s article makes an
effort to exemplify the task ahead of us: to rethink relation – rethink it
differently instead of reproducing the same, but rethink it in order to
relate anew.2
Before I will be able to unfold the specificity of Deleuze’s thought of
becoming as the (dis-)continuous movement of becoming-other that
implicates and addresses the question of otherness and the relating to
others, it is necessary to engage in a first step with the criticisms issued
against Deleuze’s thought. It is important to situate the questions of
otherness and relationality proper, which (and here I fully agree with
Hallward) truly are at the most fundamental level of engaging with
the postcolonial condition. After the assessment of the situation, in
a next step I will then discuss Deleuze’s text ‘Michel Tournier or the
World without Others’.3 What I hope to bring to the fore in my read-
ing is that, unlike the conclusion drawn by his critics, with Deleuze the
question of otherness itself – supposedly (politically) so clear – finds a
Thiele: The World with(out) Others 57
different ‘line of flight’ and twists away from the (structurally violent)
dialectics of self versus other (cf. also Derrida 1999; Levinas 2000;
Ettinger 2006). In affirming Deleuze’s thought of tout-autres, ‘[n]ot
an Other, but something wholly other (un tout-autre) than the Other’
(Deleuze 1990, p. 317), one specific aspect in the thought of differ-
ence must be emphasized that Deleuze himself did not make explicit
enough, but that – as I propose here – is at the heart of all movements

of becoming such as we find them throughout his (and Guattari’s)
philosophy: the practice of becoming is, as we can say with Gayatri
Spivak, most centrally a practice of unlearning (Spivak 1990). Thinking
with Deleuze (in the best sense of the term, as Isabelle Stengers has
shown us), the goal of this article is both to counter-balance persist-
ent misunderstandings of Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming, and to
develop further the difficult yet most essential issue of relationality and
relatedness in contemporary thought.4
Difference in Itself: Elimination or Transformation

of the Concern for the Other?
The criticism that Hallward’s (1997) text on Deleuze’s Tournier-reading

in ‘Deleuze and the “World without Others”’ articulates (and that he
continues in his 2006 book-length study on Deleuze entitled Out of
this World: Deleuze and the Philoshopy of Creation) goes to the heart of
Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. In his reworking of the Western
ontological tradition of Being into one of becoming, Deleuze himself
never tires to stress the ethico-political entanglements implied by such
reformulation into a philosophy of radical immanence.5 This is his
Spinozian and Nietzschean heritage of an ontology that is an Ethics
and of his thinking Beyond Good and Evil. Regarding the position of
and the relation to the o/Other,6 however, the question is whether this
thought of ‘difference in itself’ – a difference neither starting from nor
aiming at identity, but a difference that is only ever different/ciation
and to be shown differing (cf. Deleuze 1994, p. 56) – is still worthwhile
pursuing, which is precisely what Hallward contests in view of both the
world’s distribution of powers and the production of inequalities in a
fully globalized world: ‘[Deleuze’s] work shares with global capitalism
a certain faith in limitless expansion along an infinitely extendible
“frontier”, on the all too familiar American model’ (Hallward 1997,
p. 537). In such a world, the question is whether the post-identitarian
nomadology that Deleuze (and Guattari) suggest does not rather
work in favour of the appropriative (capitalist) power structures
(cf. Miller 1993) than countering them. What is questioned is therefore

nothing less than whether a thought that concerns itself with differ-
ence in a purely affirmative way – and consequently rids itself of all
forms of ‘representation’, ‘recognition’, ‘identity’, and ‘Subjectivity’
(with a capital S) – does not fall prey to both a continued essentializa-
tion of ‘passivity’ (as for example in the case of the so-called ‘feminine’)
and of ‘subalternity’ (as for example with post/colonial subjects) and

gives up on any effective political strategy; a Politics (also with a capital
P) that is able to bring to a halt the more and more rigid stratifications
of this world (cf. Hallward 2006). What we encounter here is, therefore
(and again), the very fundamental concern with the general direction
of Deleuze’s thought, which many critics – feminist, anthropologist,
and philosophical – have addressed to Deleuze and Guattari’s work
from early on;7 this time, however, concentrating its powers on the
urgent question of otherness – the question of how to approach our
‘others’ and how to relate in this further and further differentiated and
globalized world.
From a strictly Deleuzian perspective one could now easily ask: Why
bother in the first place? These fundamentally critical readings of
Deleuze’s work have been successfully countered by voices of a grow-
ing Deleuzian canon, especially in regard to the Deleuzian potential
for political and ethical thinking that once more seems to be in doubt
here.8 Yet, it is the very specificity of the question of otherness and the
cosmo-political urgency of this question that for me demands once
more a more direct engagement.
One way of responding to such criticisms in view of this specific
question could be to claim that in a strict Deleuzian sense and ‘proper’
Deleuzian terms the question of otherness should no longer be of
concern, given that in his philosophy of difference one no longer
thinks in terms of a pre-given distinction of self/selves and other(s)
but, as Hallward rightly states, in ‘singular’, that is ‘intra- rather
than inter-individual’ terms: in terms of a ‘“becoming-other”, under-
taken along a “line of flight” which exceeds all specific containment’
(Hallward 1997, p. 534). Thus, the argument could proceed, a thought
of becoming in the Deleuzian sense is structurally immune against
critiques from theorists of recognition who continue to problematize
the dialectical (specific) relation of self and other as constitutive of both
subjectivity and collectivities. We could say that they not only confuse
cause and effect in regard to this division (assuming first a given subject
which then encounters difference instead of seeing the subject as an
effect of a process of difference), but they also mistake where difference
exactly starts (not merely between ‘given’ entities but always already
with-in-between them, constituting and different/ciating every-thing in
the first place [Deleuze 1994, p. 209]).
While this is surely sufficient in its (Deleuzian) argumentation, there
still remains the question of whether such a complete displacement of
the question of otherness does not turn away from and maybe even
forget (the notion of) the o/Other as such, and if such a move can truly

serve as an argument to strengthen the ethico-political dimension of the
thought of difference. Is it really convincing to override the concern for
‘otherness’ by the mere claim of an (un)becoming-subject that always
already becomes-other and thus overcomes any opposition between
self and other?9 And even more so, would the claim of a turn away
from otherness even be a valid reading, given Deleuze’s engagement
with the question of the o/Other that we find in his reading of Michel
Tournier’s Friday?10 In this sense, Hallward, who in many respects mis-
reads the Deleuzian thought of singular becomings, does scholars who
work from a difference philosophical perspective a favour. Not only
does he provide us with a chance to re-read one of the most fascinating
essays on literature by Deleuze, but also to work through the pressing
question that arises if we are to relate Deleuze and postcolonial issues:
what, actually, does happen to the ethico-political issue of otherness in
Deleuze? The debt of this difficult question we cannot not inherit – so
we finally have to learn how to inherit it. And yet, the task ahead is
that we will have to inherit it under the premises of a subjectivity that
is a becoming-other, situated within an ontology of becoming that is
no longer secured by the binary and oppositional discourses of subject
versus object, of nature versus culture, or of a truthful macro- versus an
inefficient micro-politics.11
The question to be answered is therefore: how are we to argue
for the singular mode of relatedness in the movements of becoming
that Deleuze aims to substitute for the relation of self/selves and o/
Other(s), without at the same time ending up in a world completely
without others, without perhaps even a concern for them? How ‘to
think’ the Deleuzian turn away from our given situation (a world
structured by very particular identities that exclude and live off all
kinds of others (human and non-human) and in which becoming-
imperceptible cannot look like a political strategy worthwhile trying)
towards more molecular dimensions, without seemingly taking flight
from the here and now? How to produce a true line of flight for this
world by giving these ‘other’ dimensions a most ‘real’, a most worldly
significance?
Thinking through Fiction: From ‘The World without

Others’ towards An-other World
What Deleuze finds most fascinating about his friend’s literary rework-
ing of the Crusoe-myth is nothing less than that Tournier’s novel Friday
achieves in literary form what he himself seeks in his philosophical
project: a rewriting of an ontology of Being – static, normative and

ahistorical – into an ontology characterized by necessary change, that is
an ontology of becoming, movement, and transformation.12 To a certain
extent Tournier’s 1967 novel still gives an account of a Robinsonade,
the type of self-constitutive journey to which Daniel Defoe’s novel gave
the name. However, Tournier’s Robinsonade is very different from the
one that became the modern myth of enlightened subjectivity. In a
moment we will engage with this difference in more detail, but what
I would like to emphasize at this point is that in Tournier’s Friday it is
a process of transformation – a Robinson necessarily becoming-other
in a situation that is utterly other to him – that substitutes his pred-
ecessor’s will for restoration at all cost. We will explore in detail where
precisely this transformation with Tournier takes us, but we can already
say that what Friday shares with Deleuze’s philosophical project is a
mode of (literary) thinking – thinking in the strong sense – that rather
than reproducing the ever-same (identity) affirms (the event of) differ-
ence, and that in a most literal sense pushes this experience to such a
degree that thereby the world itself becomes unhinged. In that sense
the novel is an experiment, and in this experiment we not only witness
how Robinson learns to live on his island, but we ourselves witness a
transformation of the way we all live in, with, and of this world.13
Comparable then to Deleuze’s conceptual worlds, Tournier invents
and creates fictitious worlds.14 And much like Deleuze, Tournier does
this by first of all beginning from somewhere else, by starting from a
different angle than the one taken for granted, which ‘[e]verybody knows
and no one can deny’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 130). His Friday shatters the most
fundamental structure of our being in this world, and it does so by
‘telling a different story’ and ‘asking a different question’. Robinson is
no longer the exemplary self-centred subject that wills only what he has
lost. Rather, he becomes a Robinson who learns to encounter difference
in a different manner, and thereby learns to live-with-others.
In Friday, all of this is already announced at the opening when, still
safely placed in the novel’s preface and warmly seated in the captain’s
cabin of the Virginia (the vessel which Robinson has chartered), a con-
ventionally ‘modern’ Robinson listens to captain Van Deyssel – ‘this
bulky Dutch Silenus, lapped in a luxuriating materialism’ (Tournier

1997, p. 9) – who reads Robinson’s future in tarot cards. At this point,
Robinson, the young man who, as we also learn, has left behind
‘a young wife and two children, to seek [his] fortune in the New World’
(p. 8) encounters his entire ‘fate’ by means of these cards. However,
rather than a teleological development, his is a fate of crooked transfor-
mation, with diverse and contradictory states of becoming. Robinson’s

fate, which, as the Dutch captain wisely says, is not foretold in ‘precise
terms’ (p. 13), is populated by a multiplicity of ambivalences: leading
from the cards of the Demiurge (‘an acrobat: his work is an illusion and
his order illusory’) to Mars (‘Robinson the king…’), then the Hermit (‘the
warrior has become conscious of his solitude’), and Venus (‘well, here’s
something to bring the Hermit out of his hole’), makes him encounter
the mysteries of Sagittarius (‘Chaos’), Saturn (‘a hanged man’), but also
the Twins (‘the bisexual angel […] attained to a solar sexuality’), and
leads him to the Capricorn (‘the door, which is the soul’s way out – that
is to say, death’), but also to Jupiter (‘Jove! Robinson, you are saved, but
at the very last moment!’) (Tournier 1997, pp. 7–14).
In this soothsayer’s account of Robinson’s adventures, a whole cartog-
raphy of subject-forces can be found and Tournier imagines from the
very start an-other world: not only a world that starts by truth-telling
via tarot cards, but also one which later, once Tournier’s Robinson has
been stranded on the island, does not concentrate all its powers on a
restoration of ‘what is’ (respectively ‘what was’ in Robinson’s specific
case) but becomes a transformative process of worlding without any
pre-given telos. In Friday, one could argue, we see unravel before us
as much a ‘possible’ world (understood in the Leibnizian sense) as our
supposedly ‘real’ one, but it is one that is marked by a fundamental
difference. And it is this difference that leads to a completely different
Robinsonade, one in which encountering the other does not necessar-
ily imply imperialist domination of that other, but instead can lead to a
process of learning an-other world. Tournier himself says as much when
he reflects on what interested him first in writing this novel:
[For Defoe] Crusoe alone was in possession of the only civilization

that existed […]. I was interested […] in the elimination of every
last vestige of civilization in a man subjected to the corrosive effects
of inhuman solitude: the very roots of his life and being are laid
bare, and he must then create from nothing a new world, groping
in the dark, feeling his way toward discovery, clarity, and ecstasy.
Friday – still more virginal, more bereft of civilization than Robinson
even after his bath of solitude – serves the new man as both guide
and midwife. Thus my novel was intended as both inventive and
forward-looking, whereas Defoe’s was purely retrospective, confined
to describing the restoration of a lost civilization with the means at
hand. (Tournier 1989, pp. 190–191)
Of course, also in Tournier’s novel the figure of Robinson is at first des-

perate to return at any cost to the world he has lost. Realizing his utter
solitude ‘brought on a mood of heavy melancholy’ (p. 21), and with dis-
tracted fervour Robinson, like his Defoeian counterpart, tries everything
to escape his lot. Thus, he builds Escape, his very personal ‘Ark’, which,
however, as the story quickly shows is built on very ‘sandy grounds’:
The growing panic which at first he had managed to control over-

whelmed him when he found that he was unable to slide rollers
under the keel […]. The hull was immovable, and in his effort to
lever it he succeeded only in loosening one of the side members.
After three days of desperate, fruitless effort, fatigue and frustrated
fury nearly drove him out of his senses. (pp. 38–39)
And equally, after he has to give up his plan of returning to civilization,

this Robinson, like Defoe’s, cannot stop busying himself with organizing
his life in the manner he thinks of as ‘natural’. He starts salvaging
anything from the shipwrecked Virginia that still might have relevance
for a so-called civilized life, from alcohol, the captain’s tobacco, half-
broken furniture to, of course, the Bible. Furthermore in Tournier’s
account, Robinson is also led towards the measurement and cultivation
of the land, as well as the subsequent codification of rules that he himself
establishes for his new ‘civilized’ life on the island. Thus Robinson’s
‘kingdom’ is born: ‘In performing the sacred act of writing it seemed to
him that he had half-retrieved himself from the abyss of animalism into
which he had sunk, and returned to the world of the spirit’ (p. 46).
And yet, after having achieved all of this, after having ‘returned to the
world of the spirit’, we as readers have not yet made it very far into the
novel. We realize that we are in no way at any end of this Robinsonade,
as was the case in Defoe who at precisely this moment, when Robinson
has again reached control over his life on the island, introduces
Friday – the necessary ‘subject’ to this new kingdom, the one for whom
all of this is built and the one who must be initiated into a humanist
and ‘enlightened’ world. In Friday, however, this first stage – the stage of
Mars and the Hermit, if you will – is only the beginning of the journey,
the stage at which Robinson still remembers – far too vividly – his life
with others, before his solitude on the island. Unlike his heroic pred-
ecessor15 who stands as the ultimate triumph of the Enlightenment
belief of civilization defending order, rationality, progress at whatever
cost, and thereby silencing the imperialisms underlying this civilization,
this (postcolonial) Robinson will have to move on.16 In this narrative,
gaining control over one’s life and the land one is living off is only one

side, only the beginning of the story. This Robinson cannot help it but
he also experiences another force, a force that unmistakably leads him
away to other, stranger, experiences, some of which are more productive
than others. And with these experiences of unbecoming – Robinson for
a while withdraws literally within the earth, and he also begins to see,
encounter, and live on-with the island in a mode of (in-)human sexual
relation – this Robinson, in however slow a manner, moves towards
‘a different island’; one that is perceivable for both himself and the
reader from the start but one that cannot be faced before Robinson’s
whole structure of being is unhinged.
For if on the surface of the island I pursue the work of civilization –

tillage, stockbreeding, building, administering, lawgiving – which
follows the pattern of human society and is therefore in a sense
retrospective, I feel that in myself I am the scene of a more radical
process of creation, one which is engaged in finding new and origi-
nal substitutes for the ruins that solitude has left with me, all more
or less tentative and so to speak experimental, but bearing less and
less resemblance to the human model from which they sprang. […]
Inevitably a time will come when an increasingly dehumanized
Robinson will be incapable of being the governor and architect of an
increasingly humanized estate. (Tournier 1997, pp. 111–112)
Lurking in the shadows and in the many dark moments of this account
of Robinson’s life on the island, the process that he undergoes, even
after having encountered Friday, is the painful but ‘necessary’ expe-
rience of doubting the foundations of what it is to be human. And
instead of producing a reasonable, enlightened kingdom for which he
ultimately would be rewarded by being saved from the island (together
with Friday), it is the task of this Robinson to find another way out. But,
how does this happen? What is it that makes Robinson become-other in
the way that Tournier has in stock for him?
It is helpful to incorporate Deleuze’s discussion of Tournier’s novel
at this point because the very question of ‘What happens?’ or ‘What
has to happen?’ is key to ‘Michel Tournier and the World without

Others’. Tournier, it has been argued, presents the reader with an ‘other’
Robinsonade, one that starts from somewhere else, as Deleuze confirms,
and which marks ‘the first important difference with Defoe’s Robinson’:
a different starting point that subsequently structures the whole narra-
tive. For Deleuze, Friday is a narrative which does not merely replicate
the world such as the European Enlightenment myth has pictured it,

but effectuates a different Robinson, a ‘Robinson becoming elemental
on his isle, with the isle itself rendered to the elements’ (Deleuze 1990,
p. 302). The different starting point, or the difference that Deleuze sees
at work and that sets his discussion in motion, turns upon the fact that
Friday does not repeat the supposedly single motor of the modern (capi-
talist) world – economy, as Defoe’s text famously does. Rather, Tournier’s
other Robinson experiences another force as his strongest drive in life:
sexuality. The difference that the fictitious world of Tournier creates is
a libidinal, sexual subject substituted for the purely rationalizing homo
economicus of the 18th century. Against the myth of a ‘humanized’ yet
completely de-sexualized Robinson in Defoe, Tournier sets up a highly
sexual Robinson who undergoes a process that will also have to be
understood as a ‘de-humanization’ or (in terms of psychoanalysis) a
‘perversion’. According to Deleuze,
instead of bringing an asexual Robinson to an origin which repro-

duces an economic world similar to our own, or to an archetype of
our own […] [Tournier’s] Robinson’s final goal, is ‘dehumanization,’
the coming together of the libido and of the free elements, the
discovery of a cosmic energy or of a great elemental Health which
can surge only on the isle – and only to the extent that the isle has
become aerial or solar (1990, p. 303).17
The elaboration of both the ‘great elemental Health’ and the becoming-
‘aerial or solar’ of the island – something that from a perspective
indebted to radical immanence might at first generate irritation – will
need to be postponed for the moment. For now, it is important to stay
a little longer with the significance of Tournier’s ‘philosophical venture’
to start from and imagine an-other Robinson, another subjectivity – one
that instead of rationalizing knows a more experimental, a more open
structure, and that is hinted at by ‘sexuality’.18
As was already elaborated in view of the novel itself, this other – more
sexual – Robinson is no longer a Subject-Being, who by merit of being
alone on an island unknown to humankind can think of nothing but
rebuilding what he knew, and who therefore ‘naturally’ ends up

subjectifying everything/-one he encounters to this new world-order,
which is in turn nothing but the replication of the old order he represents.
To the contrary, Robinson becomes someone who slowly – yet necessarily –
experiences a process of fundamental transformation (perversion).
Stressing necessity is in this context essential for Deleuze since, as
he states, ‘[t]he perverse world is a world in which the category of

the necessary has completely replaced that of the possible’ (Deleuze
1990, p. 320). In view of the close links between Deleuze and Tournier
mentioned earlier it is not surprising that Tournier also emphasizes
this aspect of ‘necessity’, and in his account of writing this novel states
that in rereading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe he was simply struck by the
question: ‘If you must live on an island in the Pacific, hadn’t you better
learn from a native well versed in methods adapted to local conditions
rather than attempt to impose an English way of life on an alien envi-
ronment?’ (1989, p. 189).
If we take the Crusoe-myth as one of the exemplary philosophical
experiments engaging with the issue of ‘who we (Westerners) are’, then
Tournier returns us to this fundamental question, in all its simplicity,
which truly unhinges the world such as we know it (and inherit it from
Defoe’s Robinson). And yet, posed in this way, the question at the same
time brings to the fore the idea that it might not be unreasonable after
all to see cooperative behaviour as maybe a much more realistic human
trait than the seemingly natural picture of a subject so self-occupied and
self-involved that it imposes, no matter what, ‘an English way of life’,
upon all that it encounters.
Beginning from a different point, Tournier triggers a philosophical
revolution: he questions who we are on the most fundamental level,
and it is not exaggerated to call this level ontological, even if we speak
of literature here. For it concerns the question if not precisely the image
of thought that seems still so natural – a subjectivity threatened by
everything/-one other, a subjectivity most concerned with remaining ‘the
same’ – is instead of realistic rather utterly ‘idealized’. It is the question
if this is not an image of thought that we might call, following feminist
critique and postcolonial deconstruction, phallogocentric, and therefore
one that we can learn, also with Deleuze and Tournier, to put into per-
spective: not as natural, but as representing simply one subject-formation
in and of this world – the ‘phallic’, ‘modern’ or ‘colonial’ one.19
This creative act to begin from somewhere else (and beginning
differently must not be confused with setting a new beginning as
another origin) has to be acknowledged as an important philosophical
achievement, an achievement that leads to the central question: ‘what

is going to happen in the insular world without Others?’ (Deleuze 1990,
p. 304). What is going to happen, when all others are gone and when,
because of the forced absence of all recognizable others, this world will
disintegrate – a world that was structured by the figure of the Other
(and up to Lacanianism this was the only possibility of what ‘world’
could imply)? What happens, when, ultimately, the ‘logic of the Other’

itself has disappeared, the existence of all o/Others who, as Deleuze
says, always ‘assure[…] the margins and transitions in this world’ (1990,
p. 305)? This question of both Tournier and Deleuze gnaws at our most
fundamental convictions and beliefs, for it is also the question ‘what is
actually allowed to happen?’
Before turning back to the novel once more, a significant misun-
derstanding regarding Deleuze’s argument on otherness in ‘The World
without Others’ can now already be corrected. Contrary to what
Hallward assumes, Deleuze’s interest in otherness is not to ultimately
‘work towards’ a world without others as a world beyond all specific rela-
tions. Rather, both Deleuze’s and Tournier’s engagements exemplify that
what is important is to start again the experimental exploration, to begin
anew by imagining a situation in which the structure of the Other (the
dialectic of self/other and the Lacanian law of the Other) is no longer
simply taken for granted. Thus, instead of once more merely reflecting
on a situation in which nobody recognizable is left as the other, what is
taken up in Friday and Deleuze’s discussion of it, is the task to imagine,
differently than Defoe, what is or better what becomes thinkable in such
a situation if we do not already assume and start from the ever-same
narrative – in both literary and philosophical terms. Tournier stated that
he was not convinced by the solution that Defoe finds for his Robinson,
a subject that structurally always already relies on the presupposition
that all relating implies clearly separated subjects and objects, that it is
first of all against the other that we act. And Deleuze, in turn, starts his
theorization of the other from a world without others in which not so
much the comfort of ‘my’ other is gone, but most of all the comfort of
structural assurance of this world itself is gone, in order to imagine – that
is to think – differently. They both explore what could happen – and this
means also to question what has been allowed to happen so far – when
the world as we know it, the world distributed by the structural Other,
who in return ‘prevents assaults from behind […] fills the world with a
benevolent murmuring […] makes things incline toward one another
and find their natural complement in one another’ (Deleuze 1990,
pp. 305–306), has ultimately disappeared. Can – that is, is it allowed
that – something else happens, something different from what we

assume to be truthful to subjectivity since Defoe?
Worlding-with-others: Becoming as Unlearning
It is important to again turn our attention to Tournier’s novel and to

stress that it does not jump to the mere opposite – to a scenario in

which the shipwrecked Robinson and his new environment harmonize
in a seemingly natural way with one another – but chooses a different
line of flight. Instead of directly counteracting the implicit prejudice of
modernity in Defoe’s text by confronting it with a merely oppositional
alternative, Tournier’s novel attempts to ‘un-make’ or deconstruct the
very dialectic itself at work in such a world-view:
Nevertheless, my novel Friday is not really an anthropological novel.

The genuine anthropological novel remains to be written. Its true
subject – and an exciting and rewarding subject it is – would be the
confrontation and fusion of two civilizations personified by two rep-
resentative narrators, and it would take place as if under laboratory
conditions on a desert island. (Tournier 1989, p. 190)
If we analyse Tournier’s objective, it is in a paradoxical sense both

more modest and much bolder than any counterposition that would
concentrate its powers alone on giving voice to ‘the other’. Tournier
does not focus his attention on the (very real) possibility of a speak-
ing Friday – the subaltern who can speak – and thereby avoids forcing
hierarchies to crumble by choosing finally the (politically correct)
right side. And yet, Tournier’s intention in this novel does at the same
time nothing less than to question the whole system that poses the
opposition of self and other in the first place. This move, we can say,
is on the one hand modest, because it does not overthrow the inherited
structure in one blow and ‘the white, western man’ (Robinson, but also
Tournier) is careful not to fall into the trap of repeating the gesture of
‘speaking for’ and ‘representing’ subaltern other(s). In Friday the focus
is kept on the one speaking subject that this narrative of the constitu-
tion of subjectivity – so far – has produced: Robinson. Also in Tournier’s
novel Friday doesn’t speak. However, what the novel dares – and this
move is, on the other hand, so much bolder even if not conclusive –
is to imagine differently how encountering differences might take place
as such. By presenting a Robinsonade in which Robinson undergoes a
radical transformation (the ‘becoming elemental’ in Deleuze’s sense),
Friday dares to imagine a different difference-regime: one no longer

bound to the pre-given ‘law of the Other’, but one capable to learn
from and world-with-others differently. By following the journey of
Robinson step by step and avoiding the presentation of this process as
one that moves towards a pre-established telos, the implicitly reigning
presupposition that encountering difference means opposing self and
other is itself undone. Slowly, yet necessarily, unbecoming himself,

Robinson becomes a figure capable of learning with and from the many
painful and exhilarating experiences he undergoes in his life on the
island – with and without others. And in the end a world is produced
that ‘represents a fantastic deviation from our world, under the influ-
ence of a transformed sexuality, rather than an economic reproduction
of our world, under the impact of a continuous effort’ (Deleuze 1990,
p. 303). In such a world, the following reflections of Robinson, nearing
the end of his journey, become central:
As I think of it, there is nothing very astonishing in the almost

crazed intensity with which I [now] watch Friday. What is unbeliev-
able is that I should have lived so long in his presence without, so
to speak, seeing him at all. How can I account for that blind indif-
ference, when for me he is the whole of humanity assembled in
one person, my son and my father, my brother and my neighbor?
(Tournier 1997, p. 208)
‘[I]nnocently and superficially’ (Deleuze 1990, p. 316), like the figure

of Friday himself in the narrative, Friday experiments with an-other,
a more different/ciated journey of (un)becoming, in which Robinson
is not the one who ultimately gains back what he has lost, but who by
looking at Friday himself regains a new space for movement, a space
for negotiation and learning as a constitutive dimension of his becom-
ing. Thus, rather than being the acknowledged subject to Robinson,
Tournier’s Friday presents to us a wholly other (tout-autre) form of
subjectivity. With Deleuze we can call this subject one that finally
has learned to follow the movement of becoming: instead of taking
‘an origin as a starting point’, Friday knows ‘how to get taken up in the
motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to “get into something”
instead of being the origin of an effort’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 121).
Starting with the wish of ‘mastery’, in long and painful steps Robinson
unlearns his desire for everything other and with the help of Friday – by
merely looking at him – he learns the very simple (or should we say
singular?) capacity to move with and to be transformed by his encounters
(human and non-human) on the island. This alone is meant with the
becoming-‘aerial and solar’ of which the quote from Deleuze earlier
spoke. Thus also is Robinson’s ‘elemental Health’, such that after the
arrival of the Whitebird – his supposed rescue – Robinson cannot help
but feel a deep repulsion towards his so-called civilized human others:
What principally repelled him was not so much the coarse brutality,

the greed and animosity that emerged so clearly from the discourses
of these […] civilized and perfectly honorable men. It was easy to
imagine encountering men of a different stamp, mild-mannered,
benevolent, and generous. For Robinson the evil went deeper, and he
defined it to himself as the incurable pettiness of the ends to which
all men feverishly devoted their lives. Each was in search of some-
thing, some special acquisition, wealth or personal satisfaction; but
why that thing more than another? (Tournier 1997, p. 224)
After his transformation, the difficulty for Tournier’s Robinson is, there-
fore, not relating-with-others. Rather, he can no longer endure civilization
and its mode of oppositional relation to the other: a mode that he regards
as one of ‘acquisition’ that always borders on greed. Here lies the crux of
this Robinsonade. Different to a world-without-others in which a sup-
posedly ‘sovereign’ and completely ‘self-sufficient’ Robinson becomes
‘absolutist’ (Hallward 1997, pp. 538ff), the transformation in Tournier’s
Robinson entails a de-humanizing and de-subjectivizing process in which
only the modus of relating, but by no means the relating itself, becomes
undone. To the very contrary, worlding-with and living-together-with
both Friday and the island become intensified in Friday, so much so
that the economically driven logic of reciprocity and exchange, whereby
everybody can ultimately keep himself and the other at a distance, where
recognition means measuring against what one has achieved and how
much oneself and everything else is worth, is shaken up, and a different
praxis of relating is envisioned. It is one in which Robinson and Friday for
a short while are allowed to become-other together-on-with the island,
and in which, to use an expression by Bracha L. Ettinger, we witness the
‘co-emerging I and Non-I prior to the I versus other’ (2006, p. 64). Instead
of a world distributed and structured by subject, predicate and object,
a multi-species becoming – as we can also say with Donna Haraway
(2008) – dawns onto this new world.20
Both the Deleuzian formula of a ‘World without Others’ and Tournier’s
becoming-elemental Robinsonade now appear to us in new light. Rather
than metaphors for a new ‘heroic’ achievement that would once again
separate Robinson from his environment, clearly distinguishing subject

from object, nature from culture, and making Friday speak, the world
without others and the becoming-elemental are conceptual-fictitious
expressions of the difficult processes of unlearning. In doing so they
reveal a strong affinity with what Spivak has asked from intellectuals of
‘the West’ in order to finally leave behind the Enlightenment-rationalist
project with its objectifying dialectics of self versus other. In one of her

most famous interviews from 1984, ‘The Post-Modern Condition: The
End of Politics?’ collected in The Postcolonial Critic, her point resonates
well with this discussion:
I think first of all that the Western theoretical establishment should

take a moratorium on producing a global solution […] – and this
is why the critique of Western metaphysics is so important, as a
critique of Western metaphysics in the post-structuralists. I think
in the language of commercials, one would say: Try it, you might
like it. Try to behave as if you are part of the margin, try to unlearn
your privilege. This, I think, would be a lesson that one could draw,
in a very crude way, from the post-structuralist enterprise. (Spivak
1990, p. 30)
Tournier’s Robinson in as much as Deleuze’s striving for a tout-autre

can be read as in this way ‘trying’. What is significant in Tournier and
Deleuze is that both put all their efforts into un-working the logic of
the same – the striving for a mere restoration of the same old world
in Robinson – by pushing difference to such a degree that every-
thing – every-thing and -other – becomes unhinged. Yet, the un-doing
or un-working involved in this process, the dimension that truly makes
this becoming a movement towards others, cannot become explicit
enough if we articulate it only via the Deleuzian formula of ‘the World
without Others’ (although we are now able to read it differently than
literally as a world that has no others) or via Tournier’s Robinson, who
at the end of his solitude would answer the men of the Whitebird, if they
were to ask him what he is living for, ‘by pointing one hand the shores
of Speranza and with the other to the sun’ (Tournier 1997, p. 224). In
order to make explicit what Deleuze’s and Tournier’s account does, we
need to bring them in contact precisely with Spivak’s postcolonial and
feminist perspective. With her, we can learn to read Tournier’s Friday
as well as Deleuze’s thought on otherness and primary relatedness as
processes of becoming that first of all mean unbecoming oneself by
unlearning what ‘privilege’ in Spivak’s sense means, and that is ‘not to
recover a lost consciousness, but to see […] the itinerary of the silencing’
(Spivak 1990, p. 31).
Becoming in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense never starts by opposition.
Becoming, which is always only a becoming-minoritarian, means noth-
ing less but ‘unlearning’ one’s own habits and, thus, opening up new
spaces for both experimentation and negotiation, which then might
lead to macropolitical changes. ‘Becoming-minoritarian is a political

affair and necessitates a labor of power (puissance), an active micropoli-
tics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 292). While this might sound like
a too slow process for a new ‘Politics of Truths’ such as Hallward in a
Badiouian sense strives for (cf. Badiou 2009), it is Tournier’s Robinson
who exemplifies that everything less laborious and intense leads not to a
new world but only to the restoration of the very same old one. The task
ahead of us – to open up new spaces for negotiation and transformation
in this world – starts from nowhere else but with and from ourselves,
especially here and now in the ‘West’. It demands that we unlearn our
privilege, which, to say it with Foucault, might be less a process consist-
ing ‘in showing the invisible, but in showing the extent to which the
invisibility of the visible is invisible’ (Foucault 1998, p. 153).
The expression of a ‘World without Others’ by Deleuze dares to
reformulate the question of otherness itself. Instead of presenting a (final)
solution to the question how to save the other from the consumptive
desire of the Western self, it explores new modes of how to learn
differences differently: a different difference that starts with libidinal
energies and sexuality (not economy) and thus opens our imagination
to a very ‘real’ deconstruction of the naturalized phallogocentric order
we are still living in.
Notes
1. If we take Hallward’s article ‘Deleuze and the “World without Others”’
together with Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the
Specific, arguing against the singular and delimiting it from the specific as
‘the form of mediation’ (Hallward 1997, p. 532), is Hallward’s claim against
Deleuze’s philosophy.
2. For the emphasis in Deleuze’s philosophy on the question of ‘thinking differ-
ently’ and re-thinking what is given, cf. Colebrook (2000), Grosz (2005b), and
Thiele (2008).
3. This seems to happen in nearly all of the existing critical references to this
text (and especially in Hallward 1997). However, only when reading this text
within the context of the novel, is it possible to also understand Deleuze’s
radical formula of a ‘world without others’, beyond the mere rejection of
otherness and relationality.
4. Cf. Isabelle Stengers’ (2011) unique exposition of the inventive method of

‘thinking with’ in her Thinking with Whitehead.
5. As Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘immanence can be said to be the burning
issue of all philosophy because it takes on all the dangers that philosophy
must confront, all the condemnations, persecutions and repudiations that it
undergoes. This at least persuades us that the problem of immanence is not
abstract or merely theoretical. It is not immediately clear why immanence is
so dangerous, but it is’ (1994, p. 45).

6. In this text, the question of otherness is mainly addressed on a structural
and/or ontological level, due to Deleuze’s specific intervention into the
discussion in ‘Michel Tournier and the World without Others’ and given
his philosophy of difference as structurally un-working Hegelian dialectics.
However, significant in poststructuralist thinking is that the structural and
the specific dimensions, that is, the Other (as law) and the other (as concrete
other), are no longer categorically separated. This is why Deleuze uses both
‘other’ and ‘Other’, depending on which dimension (structural or specific)
he emphasizes. In this text I choose ‘o/Other’ whenever this double conno-
tation of the question of otherness/difference is addressed, and move in gen-
eral from a concern of ‘the Other’ (l’Autrui) as structure towards a thought
of ‘other others’ or ‘wholly others’ (tout-autres), a ‘different difference’ so to
speak, which in radical immanence always only comes in the small case as
‘an-other’.
7. For an overview of early feminist critical receptions, cf. Grosz 1994,
pp. 161–183. For an explicitly postcolonial critique, cf. Spivak 1999,
pp. 248–279. From the anthropological point of view, Miller (1993, 2003)
has harshly criticized Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, and from
the politico-philosophical point of view, cf. Hallward 2006, and most
prominently Badiou (2000, 2009) and Žižek (2004).
8. For further analyses of this question cf. Braidotti (2002, 2006), Colebrook
(2002), Grosz (2004, 2005a), Patton (2000), Smith (1998) and Thiele (2008).
9. For Deleuzian ‘becoming’ as a movement of unbecoming, cf. Grosz (2005b).
10. ‘Michel Tournier and the World without Others’ is not Deleuze’s only text
in which we find a discussion of the o/Other. It is complemented by pas-
sages directly devoted to the question in Difference and Repetition (cf. Deleuze
1994, pp. 254–261) and by the general direction of Deleuze’s philosophy of
difference. For an account of Deleuze’s engagement with the question of
otherness, cf. also Bryant 2008.
11. The phrasing of otherness as a debt that we must learn to inherit is itself
indebted to the most recent work of Donna Haraway, who pays tribute
to otherness in bringing into view other others (even non-human or fact-
fictional others). In recent lectures and articles, she argues (with Derrida) for
the task to finally start learning to inherit this world structured by so many
violent forms of ‘othering’. This task does in no way only concern the past.
It has to be seen as a thought of non-linear engagement with past, present
and future: ‘To inherit the past thickly in the present so as to age the future’
(Haraway, Lecture at Utrecht University, April 2011).
12. Deleuze and Tournier shared a close friendship in their adolescence, on
which Tournier reflects in his autobiography The Wind Spirit (cf. pp. 127ff).
In this context it is interesting to speculate in what sense their friendship
might have inspired in both the interest in (an ontology of) desert islands
in general and in Robinson Crusoe in particular. Cf. also Deleuze’s early essay
on ‘Desert Islands’ in which he distinguishes ‘continental’ from ‘oceanic’
islands, only counting the latter as ‘originary, essential islands’ (2004, p. 9).
13. That Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence affects thought not only in its
abstract sense as ‘thinking differently’, but also effectuates a different ethico-
political practice in this world, cf. my discussion of Deleuze and political
activism in Thiele (2010).

14. Deleuze uses ‘fictitious’ in a strong sense, different from the ‘factual’ but in
no way as its simple opposite: ‘Everything here is fictitious (romanesque),
including theory, which merges with a necessary fiction – namely a certain
theory of the Other (Deleuze 1990, p. 318). For ground-breaking work on
the interrelatedness of fact and fiction in knowledge- and truth-productions,
cf. also again Haraway (1989).
15. Tournier calls this heroic Robinson ‘the patron saint of the outdoor-do-it-
yourselfer’ (1989, p. 188).
16. ‘For I had wanted to dedicate my book to all of France’s immigrant work-
ers, to those silent masses of Fridays shipped to Europe from the third
world – some three millions Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese,
and Portuguese on whom our society depends and whom we never see or
hear, who have no right to vote, no trade union, and no spokesperson […]
Our affluent society relies on these people; it has set its fat white buttocks
down on their brown bodies and reduced them to absolute silence’ (Tournier
1989, p. 197).
17. Sexuality here is not to be read in a too narrow sense, merely addressing
the discourse of sexuality that our modern economies, as Foucault has
shown, have produced. I read this emphasis on ‘sexuality’ that Deleuze
sees as the first significant difference between Defoe and Tournier instead
in a much broader – cosmological – sense in which the economical desire
for and fixation on the other is opened up again and slowly un-worked by
a multiplicity of desires, going far beyond specific sexual identities and/or
sexual acts.
18. It is interesting to refer here to what must be one of Deleuze’s earliest texts:
‘Description of Woman: For a Philosophy of the Sexed Other’ (Deleuze
2002). Here, he claims ‘a-sexualization’ within philosophies of the Other as
responsible for the so far missing philosophical status of ‘Woman’. Given
that this article was originally published in 1945, one might be tempted to
read Deleuze as a philosopher of sexual difference avant la lettre. The text,
however, shows too many problematic arguments to be counted as an
up-to-date feminist engagement, but it already refers to a by then still
‘unpublished manuscript’ of Michel Tournier, from which Deleuze quotes
the famous ‘the Other is: “the expression of a possible world”’, which we
again find in ‘Michel Tournier and the World without Others’ (1990).
19. Also in Friday, the transformative power of sexuality/desire passes through
the masculine image of sexuality as ‘the little death’, but ultimately it
arrives at what Robinson himself – at the preliminary end of his process of
becoming – describes in the following way: ‘There is no longer that loss of
substance which leaves the animal, post coitum, sad. My sky-love floods me
with a vital energy which endows me with strength during an entire day and
night. If this is to be translated into human language, I must consider myself

feminine and the bride of the sky’ (Tournier 1997, p. 212).
20. Though not as explicit as in my chapter here, the most recent discussions
of Deleuze’s ‘Michel Tournier and the World without Others’ by Eleanor
Kaufman (2011) and Levi R. Bryant (2008) seem in agreement with the
argument put forward here. While both argue against a moralistic image of
thought or an easy ethics in Deleuze, the ethico-political intention driving
Deleuze’s deconstruction of the ‘Other-structure’ is in both of their interpre-

tations not at all in doubt.
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Minnesota Press.
—— (2009) The Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. London and New York:
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and the Ontology of Immanence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
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—— (2002) Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.
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IN: Indiana University Press.
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Ethics. Ed. Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
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and New York: Routledge.
4
Edward Said between Singular
and Specific
David Huddart

Postcolonialism is a notoriously problematic term, but throughout
debates on its utility there runs the assumption that, whatever it is,
it must be political. Postcolonial theory, distinguished from postcolo-
nialism, appears to have left behind the Marxist categories of much
anti-colonial thought in favour of various kinds of post-structuralism,
usually associated with Derrida and Foucault. That move now appears
problematic to many in the field because it apparently leads to
de-politicization, and so there is a need to draw upon other modes
of thought. One possibility would be to return to histories of politi-
cally engaged thought, to renew postcolonialism’s energies through
a more clear-sighted sense of what political criticism might be. Many
critics have taken an alternative route, engaging more fully with
some of the philosophical names associated with French philosophy,
principally Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, it is clear that postcolonial stud-
ies has entered a new stage in its reception of Deleuze’s work, with
increasingly systematic attention being given to its implications for
postcolonial practices. Increasingly, critics have brought Deleuze and
postcolonial studies together in an explicit and sustained manner, as
can be seen in the recent collection Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010).
Bignall and Patton summarize the aim of that volume when they
write that, ‘[p]roperly mutual negotiations witness the simultaneous
becoming-Deleuzian of postcolonialism and the becoming-postcolonial
of Deleuze’ (2010, p. 12). Accordingly, it is not that Deleuze is mobilized
to correct the philosophical inconsistencies of postcolonial studies, or
indeed that Deleuze provides a single all-encompassing perspective
that trumps all others, including those articulated in the postcolonial
field. Instead, Deleuze ‘himself’ is necessarily open to postcolonial
transformation, and that transformation is underway. Rather than
76
Huddart: Edward Said between Singular and Specific 77
discussing this potentially bilateral transformation in the abstract, this

article will consider the ways in which Deleuze’s work can be made to
communicate with a specific example of postcolonial thought.
That example is Edward W. Said, owing to a number of connections.
First, their respective notions of affiliation have at least superficial
similarities, and seem to be motivated by similar problems. Second,
they share an emphasis on the decisiveness of location and geography,

which is connected to the idea of affiliation. Third, Deleuze himself
took an interest in Palestinian issues, as noted by Bignall and Patton
(2010). Indeed, Said himself mentioned this interest: ‘in the late 1980s,
I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of
friends, had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault express-
ing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians’ (quoted in Marrouchi
2004, p. 92). Finally, Deleuzian concepts offer possibilities for the close
reading of Said’s less critical and more literary work, work that may
also appear less political. However, although these connections are very
real, making too strong a connection between Deleuze and Said could
appear strange. If nothing else, Deleuze never discusses Said’s work, and
it would of course be extremely surprising if he did. Moreover, despite
his serious (and increasingly critical) interest in so-called French theory,
and particularly Foucault, Said very rarely discusses Deleuze’s work, and
then only in passing. In Beginnings (1975), for example, Said discusses
at great length Foucault’s ‘impersonality’ and its connection to the idea
of discourse. However, although this is his most sustained engagement
with French philosophy, Said only makes the briefest of references to
Deleuze, arguing that singularity is made equivalent but not reducible
in his work (Said 1975, p. 311). That reference may well prove very
important in understanding connections between the two thinkers,
but it is undeniably brief. Much later, in Culture and Imperialism (1993),
Said refers to A Thousand Plateaus without going into detail. Indeed,
it appears that Said has not fully understood Deleuze, when he writes
that: ‘A great deal of this immensely rich book is not easily accessible,
but I have found it mysteriously suggestive. [...] This quite original
treatise contains a metaphor about a disciplined kind of intellectual
mobility in an age of institutionalization, regimentation, co-optation’
(Said 1993, p. 402). Nonetheless, this reference opens a series of
questions about the connections between Said and Deleuze, and this
article presumes that the connections are real and potentially impor-
tant. As I hope to show, such connections will provide a systematic
understanding of certain aspects of Said’s work, but will also assist in
defending one version of Deleuze against some recent and powerful
objections to his philosophy. To explore these connections, this article

will first reconstruct challenges both to Deleuze and the postcolonial,
before looking more specifically at work by Said to see how it makes
(or even does not make) the move signalled in my title: the move
between singular and specific. In using these terms, I am already of
course alluding to arguably the most coherent objection towards both
Deleuze and the postcolonial.

Challenging Deleuze
That objection is found in systematic form in Peter Hallward’s work

on Deleuze, which post-dates his analysis of postcolonial theory but
shares many of its presumptions as well as plausibility. It may have
seemed that objections to Deleuze’s work, for example around the
concept of the nomad, had already been expressed and rebutted (for
example, see Miller 1998, 2003; Holland 2003; Bogue 2004). However,
Hallward’s intervention (2006) has renewed the controversy about the
politics of Deleuze’s philosophy and its influence. Near the beginning
he clearly states his position: ‘More than a hundred and fifty years after
Marx urged us to change rather than contemplate the world, Deleuze,
like so many of his philosophical contemporaries, effectively recom-
mends instead that we settle for the alternative choice’ (Hallward 2006,
p. 7). He works from a single presumption to find a consistent path
through Deleuze, and does not deny that this is to ‘simplify aspects of
his thought’ (p. 7). However, while some of the earlier attacks on an
over-enthusiastic nomadology really may have been overly simple, it is
clear that Hallward’s cannot be dismissed so readily, and defenders of
Deleuze are required to sharpen their responses (see for example Alliez
et al. 2010). If we assume that the postcolonial is political, then it is well
to understand the attack on Deleuzian politics as clearly as possible if
we are set on making connections between Deleuze and postcolonial
studies. This is because Hallward is concerned about the ability of any
philosophy to contribute to the transformation of actual situations. This
is a particular concern when we think about philosophies of difference,
which seem to maintain these actual situations as opposed to immedi-
ately universalizing them. Hallward wonders if such philosophies are
really as attuned to these real situations as they seem, and questions if
respect for difference and otherness enables any form of transformative
politics. Following Badiou, he wants to contest Deleuzian philosophy
in particular, and by implication readings of Deleuze that find in his
work transformative political potential. There are indeed many such
readings, most visibly the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
who write that, ‘[e]vents of resistance have the power not only to escape
control but also to create a new world’ (2009, p. 61). Despite the doubts
of people like Žižek (2004), those who follow Hardt and Negri clearly
find great political potential in Deleuze’s work. Further, at least in some
guises, what emerges from recent responses to Deleuze is a form of
cultural politics, as we would expect in, for example, a Deleuzian post-

colonial literary criticism.
From Hallward’s perspective, for such cultural politics to transform
actual situations it will be necessary for it to stop thinking about the
virtual and the singular, and to start thinking about the actual and the
specific. Even though forms of cultural politics might well intervene in
actual situations, their constitutively non-universal nature precludes
them from becoming a responsible politics, or from producing volun-
tary political organization (see also Hallward 2009). Deleuze certainly
appears to be attuned to Hallward’s way of thinking, as Dialogues reminds
us: ‘The question has always been organizational, not at all ideological:
is an organization possible which is not modelled on the apparatus of
the State, even to prefigure the State to come?’ (Deleuze and Parnet
2002, p. 145). Asking such questions, Deleuze appears to be operating
in ways that license Hardt and Negri et al. to adapt him for ‘organiza-
tional’ purposes. However, Hallward doubts that Deleuze adds anything
useful to the thinking of political organization. A Thousand Plateaus
reminds us that, ‘everything is political, but every politics is simultane-
ously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004,
p. 213). However, if we follow Hallward’s argument then it appears
that the macropolitical is lost: whatever it stipulates about the virtual
and the actual, in fact the virtual is privileged and so, as also seems the
case with postcolonial theory, Deleuzian philosophy forgets the specifi-
city of things as they are. The actuality of situation, agency, relation
and politics is therefore of at most secondary importance to Deleuze.
Anyone that follows him on this path also demotes these categories.
It may be the case, then, that minorities are ‘objectively definable
states’ as well as ‘crystals of becoming’ or deterritorialization (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004, p. 106), but this understanding of Deleuze insists
that the latter always in fact takes precedence, even obscuring the real
as we more usually understand it. For some critics, this would mean
that the metaphorical obscures the literal, although Hallward of course
does not interpret Deleuze in that way. Another way to understand the
problem is to say that the postcolonial obscures the anti-colonial: or
university ‘postcolonialism’ takes over from real life postcolonialism.
Returning to Deleuze, we can say that although Deleuze writes of both

planes of movement and planes of rest (planes of consistency and
planes of organization) it is always the former that draw his interest.
According to this reading, it is the single meaning that matters more
than the difference, and this has significant political implications that
Hallward pursues from the beginning of his account to the end:

Deleuze writes a philosophy of (virtual) difference without (actual)
others. He intuits a purely internal or self-differing difference,
a difference that excludes any constitutive mediation between the
differed. Such a philosophy precludes a distinctively relational con-
ception of politics as a matter of course. The politics of the future
are likely to depend less on virtual mobility than on more resilient
forms of cohesion, on more principled forms of commitment, on
more integrated forms of coordination, on more resistant forms of
defence. Rather than align ourselves with the nomadic war machine,
our first task should be to develop appropriate ways of responding
to the newly aggressive techniques of invasion, penetration and
occupation which serve to police the embattled margins of empire.
(Hallward 2006, pp. 162–163)
This virtual level of creating coincides with the singular postcolonial

plane of immanence, and as we will see, the critique of Deleuze repeats
the critique of postcolonial theory, which argues that postcolonial criti-
cism is definitively a singular criticism. The presumption guiding this
reading of Deleuze is not that the virtual is an unreal otherworld, and
therefore politically valueless. Indeed, Hallward accepts that the virtual
and actual are tied together in Deleuze:
The actual does not exist separately from the virtual, and the virtual
does not transcend the actual in some higher plane. Rather, the two
dimensions are given as facets of one and the same creative process,
two aspects of one and the same ‘expression’ (and it will be the
redemptive task of thought to explore the possible means of extract-
ing or subtracting the one from the other). (Hallward 2006, p. 35)
The bracketed comment here is Hallward’s key point, and it is this

task that he argues undermines any commentator desiring to extract
a politics from Deleuze. Despite apparent disagreements, postcolonial
thinkers are all singular, and in the same way Deleuze’s work champions a
singular creating. Whatever qualifications are in place, it seems that there
is a temptation at work in both the terminology and the presumptions of

Deleuze’s thought. Accordingly, Hallward does not suggest that it is only
inferior thinkers that mistakenly try to politicize Deleuzian terminology
(see Žižek 2004, p. 20; also During 2001, p. 171, and Bogue 2004, p. 173),
but instead suggests that the problems are located squarely within
Deleuze’s own work. This understanding of Deleuze, in its challenge
to the assumptions of a philosophy of difference, is radical. Of course,

postcolonial theory is itself based on a philosophy of difference, and
increasingly is inspired by Deleuze’s work. Clearly, postcolonial theory
needs to reconsider its basis, as is clear from Hallward’s discussion of its
own presumptions, to which I will now turn.
Challenging Postcolonialism
We can now move on to postcolonial studies, which Hallward analysed

in an earlier book. Despite the various positive connections made
between Deleuze and postcolonial studies, it might be more important
that Hallward connects the two to the extent that they are politically
irresponsible. His challenge to postcolonial studies appears familiar and
can be compared to the position of Neil Lazarus, who articulates the
understanding of many critics: postcolonial studies jettisoned Marxism
and found an alternative conceptual drive in post-structuralism, thereby
losing political responsibility (2005, p. 114). To critics of this persuasion,
Deleuze would just be a late addition to the list of thinkers that have
waylaid the field (for example, San Juan 2004, p. 23). But Hallward’s
position is philosophically more specific than this, and his claim about
irresponsibility is rather different. This irresponsibility derives from the
shared emphasis in Deleuze and postcolonial studies on the singular
rather than specific: instead of de-specifying and being specific to
a given situation, Hallward argues that postcolonial theory and Deleuze
both operate through singular logics which remove them from relation
as such, political or otherwise. While it is possible to accept this charac-
terization in the case of Deleuze, as in Badiou and Žižek, seeing him as a
strictly aristocratic philosopher, the characterization would certainly be
more damaging to postcolonial studies. It is important then to under-
stand the potential significance of Hallward’s argument.
One way of thinking about this question is through his analysis of
the postcolonial insistence on the located-ness of critical subjectivity:
‘Nothing is more orthodox in the domain of postcolonial studies
than an insistence on the multiple, specific, heterogeneous nature of
contexts and subject positions’ (Hallward 2001, p. 21). But even here,
how exactly this theoretical insistence is to be turned into critical

practice remains a matter of vigorous debate. As Hallward suggests, how
to convert a principled insistence on such multiple locations is a matter
of debate, but as I have argued elsewhere (Huddart 2008), in very
broad terms postcolonial critical practice has become autobiographical,
and this is a key way it translates its theory of multiple location into
writing about those locations. Hallward is not alone in questioning

whether such moves are any longer appropriate or adequate. Despite
its claimed introduction of anti- and post-colonial politics into literary
and cultural discourse, if we follow the challenges to the philosophy of
difference there is serious doubt as to whether postcolonial theory is still
appropriate, and this doubt has been focused around the convergence of
alterity and theory. Such challenges suggest that for an intellectual inter-
vention to be truly worthwhile, it cannot be merely tied to one situation,
despite the fact that it necessarily arises in a time and a place.
Such a position is particularly clear in Hallward’s own work, for
example his damning indictment of international intervention in Haiti,
Damming the Flood. There, he writes the following:
This is not a book motivated by any personal association with

Haiti, its government or its people, and nor has it emerged from
a long familiarity with its history or culture. [...] Instead this is
purely and simply a political book. In what follows I will assume
that politics doesn’t concern things that make people different but
things that they hold in common. I will assume that true political
action is animated by collective principles that concern everyone
by definition – principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, justice.
(Hallward 2008, p. xxiv)
Indeed, he is briefly scathing about the urge to include one’s own expe-
riences in such a work, and this is something directly connected to what
the book is – a political book, based on the common, the collective,
and the universal. For Hallward the great task is to situate in order to
relate: to de-specify and be specific, in the name of universal principles.
An intervention (theoretical or otherwise) comes from a time and place,
which means it can be specified. Nonetheless, this does not mean that
it is only in relation to a time and place, or that the time and place can
only be explained through reference to them. Interventions do not have
singular and privileged explanatory power, nor do they create their own
terms of evaluation. Theories must be made universal through coordi-
nation rather than laissez-faire respect for difference.
In Absolutely Postcolonial, Hallward argues that postcolonial theory

operates through a singularizing logic, creating its own terms of eval-
uation and becoming non-relational. It seems to him mired in
singularity, and therefore unable to contribute to contemporary political
questioning: ‘Postcolonial critics generally prefer “malleable situational
lessons” to hard matters of general principle’ (Hallward 2001, p. 176).
Instead of theory being always responsive (‘strategically essentialist’ and

so on), the argument is that situation must be subtracted from theory,
and this path is one that postcolonial theory is unwilling to follow.
Accordingly, he makes the following claim: ‘postcolonial theory in
general can only obstruct what is arguably the great political task of our
time: the articulation of fully inclusive, fully egalitarian political princi-
ples which, while specific to the particular situation of their declaration,
are nevertheless subtracted from their cultural environment’ (p. 126).
The conclusion is clear: a theory cannot create its own terms of evalua-
tion, for it will then be exclusive and accordingly ineffective in the face
of a genuinely global hegemony. When counter-hegemony is required,
utter fragmentation is inadequate. The specified locales of thought are
what lead to this fragmentation, and they are what must be overcome.
Hallward argues thereby against significant tendencies in contempo-
rary cultural and literary studies, and to that extent postcolonial theory
would only be one possible target. Hallward’s position additionally
challenges the idea of cultural politics, something central to postcolonial
theory (in, for example, Gilroy 2002). For Hallward, there can be no
cultural politics: at least, every instance of a cultural politics that is
tied to a singular culture is depoliticized. This idea can be illustrated
by discussion of Homi Bhabha’s work, particularly on the agency
of the postcolonial subject. From Hallward’s perspective, the category of
difference in Bhabha licenses a de-contextualized theory. It produces
the conditions of judgment as a singular plane, within which it is
impossible to make sense of what actually happens in a specific colonial
or postcolonial context. This singularized critical perspective produces
only the illusion of agency, making the categories of the colonial and
postcolonial self-confirming. If colonialism is simply a question of
denying the splitting of agency at the origin then postcolonialism is
inevitable salvation. The prior agency necessarily undoes the author-
ity of colonial power, and yet this tells us absolutely nothing about
the actuality of colonial power, as it takes place in a virtual realm. The
agency is of course very real, but not the kind of reality that it needs to
be if it is to be agency as traditionally understood. If postcolonial theory
really does operate in this manner, then it is emphatically virtual rather
than actual, and accordingly can be judged politically ineffective. It

may of course be argued that postcolonial criticism is full of varied and
conflicting critical perspectives. However, whether or not postcolonial
critics believe in the prior deconstruction of the subject, or a general-
ized nomadology, there clearly is a general tendency to think in terms
of cultural politics, and these politics must seem irresponsible from
Hallward’s perspective. These forms of cultural politics are relative (or

even disembodied), which of course they are, but they must also follow
a path back to organization as such (which they do not).
Other Postcolonialisms
Of course, many critics have responded to Hallward’s version of Deleuze

(in the context of postcolonialism, see for example Nesbitt 2010). Shifting
attention to the postcolonial, the situation might again be more complex.
It can be argued that postcolonial theory is alive to the questions that
Hallward raises, and it is certainly possible to find alternative resources at
work in Hallward’s examples. For example, although Hallward criticizes
Bhabha, it is clear that Bhabha shares some of Hallward’s concerns. In
particular, he has for some time been critical of generalized theories of the
nomad or exile, particularly to the extent that they assume a flat, undiffer-
entiated and privileged cosmopolitanism. Writing on Edward Said, Bhabha
suggests that, ‘[t]he slow pace of critical reflection resists processes of totali-
sation – analytic, aesthetic, or political – because they are prone to making
“transitionless leaps” into realms of transcendental value, and such claims
must be severely scrutinized’ (Bhabha 2005, pp. 12–13). Slowness may not
be what Hallward has in mind, but clearly Bhabha is also concerned about
the danger of the singular. Meanwhile, Bhabha elsewhere writes dismissively
of ‘a doctrinal espousal of global nomadism or transnationalism’ (2006,
p. 34). He has evidently been taking note of debates about the politics of
Deleuze’s work and its application to neo-colonial or globalized times: per-
haps this indicates that postcolonial theory has begun to reassess some of its
assumptions, and to re-think its terminology.
However far that reassessment has progressed, it is unsurprising that
Bhabha is prompted to these warnings in writing on Said, as Said’s
work is clearly alive to the dangers diagnosed by Hallward. There are
numerous passages which speak of the responsibility of the intellectual
in comparable ways, for example the following:
the public realm in which intellectuals make their representations

is extremely complex, and contains uncomfortable features, but the
meaning of an effective intervention in that realm has to rest on

the intellectual’s unbudgeable conviction in a concept of justice and
fairness that allows for differences between nations and individu-
als, without at the same time assigning them to hidden hierarchies,
preferences, evaluations. Everyone today professes a liberal language
of equality and harmony for all. The problem for the intellectual is
to bring these notions to bear on actual situations where the gap

between the profession of equality and justice, on the one hand,
and the rather less edifying reality, on the other, is great. (Said 1994,
pp. 69–70)
Hidden hierarchies, preferences, and so on: these are the ties of race,
community or anything else that produce a singularizing vision that
precludes universalizable principles. On one level this is exactly what
we should expect from Said’s humanistic perspective, a perspective
that critics of many persuasions have defended as distinct from the
postcolonial project (for example, Lazarus 2005). However, despite such
declarations, and the precisely elaborated ideas of the specific inherent
in the concept of worldliness, there is doubt here too. It could be argued
that Said elevates the category of exile as a prime enabling principle, and
I earlier referred to a conceptual meeting between Deleuze and Said that
would no doubt trouble Hallward. However, I suspect that Said there
discusses nomadology in terms of metaphor (rather than virtuality)
precisely to resist the idea that something like his own life experience
is truly postcolonial, minoritarian or exilic. In any case, within postco-
lonial theory, Hallward has most time for Said, writing that his sense
of the singular and specific is ‘much the most productive in the field’
(Hallward 2001, p. 51). Of course, Said in turn has some use for Deleuze,
and this indicates that Said’s work could be a privileged example for
understanding this challenge to both Deleuze and postcolonial theory.
To explore this possibility requires a sense of Hallward’s concerns about
Said: fundamentally, as in the case of Glissant, Hallward believes there
is a falling-away from a relational criticism to a more singular vision in
Said’s work (2001, p. 57). Criticism becomes something that is empow-
ered by ‘its own autonomy, its own self-constituent authority’ (Hallward
2001, p. 60). It is perhaps unsurprising that Hallward has time for Said,
given how much Said’s critical influence owes to Foucault: Foucault, of
course, is someone that Hallward finds a more relational thinker, and
also someone misrepresented by Deleuze (Hallward 2000). Given the
familiar assumption that Said moves away from Foucault’s influence, it
is quite logical, following Hallward, to see a falling-away in Said’s work
(however, some have argued that his last work on Foucault corrects his
misreading: see Racevskis 2005). As I understand it, Hallward sees an
increasing aestheticization of politics in Said’s later works. For example,
he interprets the use of the contrapuntal as evidence of a more singu-
larized approach. Most relevantly for this article, Hallward specifically
sees the nomad and migrant as assuming centrality after Deleuze and
Guattari, detached however from any actual nomadic or migrant lives.

In this detachment, Said’s work becomes much closer to that of the
other prominent theorists in the ‘Holy Trinity’ of postcolonialism.
However, as we can already see, Bhabha (writing about Said) at least
recognizes the problem so trenchantly diagnosed by Hallward. It might
further be argued that Said is alive to the temptations of a ‘vulgar’
Deleuzianism, even if he does not engage with Deleuze at any length.
Finally, as Hallward himself implicitly recognizes, those temptations
seem to be acknowledged by Deleuze ‘himself’ (as Žižek might put it).
A closer reading of Said’s autobiographical works, which really might
appear singular and de-politicized, will help us measure the extent to
which postcolonialism can be rescued as a form of cultural political
engagement, even if we can hardly resolve the question of cultural poli-
tics as such. Clearly, Said himself shares a concern about the potential
shift from actuality in postcolonial theory, and his many discussions
of the category and experience of exile indicate wariness. In fact, Said
frequently considers the category of exile alongside the question of
intellectual responsibility, but I will discuss one of particular relevance.
In Culture and Imperialism, immediately following his reference to
Deleuze and Guattari, Said makes the following observation:
while it would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that

the bravura performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries
of the displaced person or refugee are the same, it is possible,
I think, to regard the intellectual as first distilling then articulating
the predicaments that disfigure modernity – mass deportation,
imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession, and
forced immigrations. (Said 1993, p. 403)
It is important to note that the intellectual exile is involved in perform-

ances rather than simply a repository of being. Said was particularly
wary about the ways in which exile might slip into becoming a form of
fixed identity, with identity politics (often assumed to be definitive of
cultural politics) being a specific target. Of course, identity is something
both assumed and thrust upon us, and Said’s reflections on this dual
quality help sharpen our understanding of how he imagined the

postcolonial, which is so often assigned to subjects as well as assumed
by them.
This is most obviously the case with Said’s own identity, which became
a topic of such controversy. In Reflections on Exile, he writes that,
Identity as such is about as boring a subject as one can imagine.

Nothing seems less interesting than the narcissistic self-study that
today passes in many places for identity politics, or ethnic studies, or
affirmations of roots, cultural pride, drum-beating nationalism, and
so on. (Said 2002, p. 567)
However boring Said may have found the question of identity, his own
was given ferociously motivated scrutiny by Justus Reid Weiner. In brief
Weiner argues that Said defines himself as ‘an archetypal exile’, and that
this self-definition depends upon ‘a tissue of falsehoods’ (Weiner 1999).
Weiner’s conclusion is that aspects of Said’s life-narrative constitute a
‘parable’, one that ignores the truth, and one that has allowed Palestinian
nationalists to ignore the truth as well. Whatever its motivation,
Weiner’s approach raises questions about tensions between conceptions
of identity in Said’s work, principally because the discussion of abso-
lutized identity presupposed as authority in Weiner’s work is all about
the extent to which work can be politically mobilized. Said’s memoir,
Out of Place (1999), in certain ways actually appears to de-compose his
identity and make it most unpolitical: it is close to being negatively
capable in its treatment of his childhood, which is remarkable given that
some of the context is so self-evidently what structures his later political
engagement. However, as Moore-Gilbert (2009) notes, Said himself
points to the surreptitious re-emergence of his ‘political life’ at the heart
of the memoir, even if it is not offered as deriving simply from the
experience that surrounds it. We can find many political implications in
the ways in which Said’s de- and re-composition, or de-definition and
re-definition, are held together.
Out of Place is profitably considered alongside After the Last Sky (1986),
although in doing this we are already assuming a number of things
about the political elements in the memoir. The first thing to say is that
in some ways Said’s sense of intellectual responsibility is very much
Hallward’s: his political work does derive from his experience, but
this is not a precondition of the work, and Said does not represent his
politics as arising necessarily out of his history or his situation. Further
than that, although it is not possible to think of Said as what Weiner
would call an ‘archetypal exile’, clearly he did not present himself in

that way. Nonetheless, it is easy to understand anxieties about the use
of the category generally and about its appearance in Said: exile remains
a powerful category that is semi-detached from actual exiles, just as
nomad appears semi-detached from actual nomads (see Bogue 2004,
p. 177). There appears to be an oscillation between empirically precise
and poetically just uses of such terms, but perhaps the Hallward-Deleuze

meeting offers us a better way to describe this oscillation. Weiner desired
an authoritative means of distinguishing the true exile, and accordingly
argued that the only way Said was an exile was in a singular sense, as we
might now call it. However, Said’s non-theoretical writings demonstrate
the kinds of complex oscillations between singular and specific that
postcolonial cultural politics seems to demand. After the Last Sky and Out
of Place are examples of a kind of invention of personal and communal
beginnings: this invention is constantly being denied and is therefore
constantly re-starting, repeating itself with variation.
This invention is political in both texts, of course, but is more direct
in Said’s collaboration with photographer Jean Mohr. If there is a dif-
ference between the two texts, this might offer some confirmation of
Hallward’s concern that Said becomes more and more singular. It will
be necessary to see if there is a real break between the two, and the
theme of invention is a promising locus for investigation. At one point
in After the Last Sky, Said diagnoses an attitude toward the present that
combines both a lack of presence and persistent nobility:
The closeness and clutter of the present force us to attend to the

details of everyday life. Whenever I look at what goes on in the
interior I am always surprised at how things seem to be managed
normally, as if I had been expecting signs of how different ‘they’, the
people of the interior, are, and then find that they still do familiar
things. We Palestinians conduct ourselves, I think, with an energetic
consciousness that there are still chores to be done, children to be
raised, houses to be lived in, despite our anomalous circumstances.
(Said and Mohr 1986, p. 67)
Here we see a shift from different ‘interior’ being viewed by the spectator
to being spoken-of by one of the same. It may seem hopelessly idealized
or indeed singular, but much of the text implies almost a privilege to the
perspective of the Palestinian people. It is a fragmented perspective, and
might appear already to romanticize and de-contextualize. Obviously
enough, this perspective ultimately aims at self-dissolution, and this is
true in terms both of the Palestinian people (not yet to achieve it) and
Said personally. Politics of one kind is the goal, if not something that is
immediately available, and so there has to be a dwelling in the process
of preparing for that politics. Accordingly, the perspective is driven by
a de- and re-composing process: it does not delude itself with dreams
of return and redemption, but understandably maintains a dream of
wholeness.

The ways in which Said expresses such a balance are as important as
the basic themes outlined. In After the Last Sky, Said’s text attempts to be
adequate to the photographs it accompanies, and the lives they record
and produce; early in the text Said gives the following justification for
its forms:
Since the main features of our present existence are dispossession,

dispersion, and yet also a kind of power incommensurate with our
stateless exile, I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid,
and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to represent
us. What I have quite consciously designed, then, is an alternative
mode of expression to the one usually encountered in the media,
in works of social science, in popular fiction. It is a personal render-
ing of the Palestinians as a dispersed national community – acting,
acted upon, proud, tender, miserable, funny, indomitable, ironic,
paranoid, defensive, assertive, attractive, compelling. (Said and Mohr
1986, p. 6)
This fragmentary mode of expression matches not only the fragmen-

tary experience of the Palestinians, but is a suitable mode for capturing
a personal vision as opposed to an encyclopaedic history. Indeed,
through his fragmentary commentary Said foregrounds the specificity
of his perspective. One example of this fragmentary invention is given
later on the same page, when Said details his use of pronominal shifts
to convey the Palestinian sense of foreignness within: this text is one
which actually aims at confusing the ‘we’ with the ‘I’, and even with
the ‘you’. So, although not an ‘objective’ book, as Said’s point stresses,
After the Last Sky attempts to be adequate to its object, which is also its
subject. Said conveys the exemplariness of the ‘insider’ Palestinian per-
spective as both disabling and enabling:
The structure of your situation is such that being inside is a privilege

that is an affliction, like feeling hemmed in by the house you own.
Yes, an open door is necessary for passing between inside and
outside, but it is also an avenue used by others to enter. Even though

we are inside our world, there is no preventing others from getting
in, overhearing us, decoding our private messages, violating our
privacy. (Said and Mohr 1986, pp. 52–53)
No one is likely to miss the fact that the ‘privilege’ of this fragmentary
perspective is also an affliction. Indeed, of course the Palestinians do

not exist as fragmented in a void, and Said juxtaposes the fragmented
nature of the Palestinian culture, history and ultimately social organiza-
tion with the absolute order of Israeli equivalents. Said even writes of
the Palestinians as discursive effects of Israel: ‘Whenever we try to narrate
ourselves, we appear as dislocations in their discourse’ (Said and Mohr
1986, p. 140). Becoming more than a lack in someone else’s discourse
again requires a balancing act: both maintaining the fragmented iden-
tity against its dissolution by others, and also getting organized and
re-composing identity, given that the de-composed cannot be an end in
itself. The fragmented Palestinian identity will remain an anxious form
of identity and organization from Said’s perspective:
A part of something is for the foreseeable future going to be better

than all of it. Fragments over wholes. Restless nomadic activity over
the settlements of held territory. Criticism over resignation. The
Palestinian as self-consciousness in a barren plain of investments and
consumer appetites. The heroism of anger over the begging-bowl,
limited independence over the status of clients. Attention, alertness,
focus. To do as others do, but somehow to stand apart. To tell your
story in pieces, as it is. (Said and Mohr 1986, p. 150)
Nomads perform – it is not an absolute identity. Claiming nomad iden-

tity is not desirable, but sometimes living and expressing nomadically
is what there is. A similar position is found in Out of Place, written after
Said’s diagnosis with leukaemia. In such a situation, the postponed
metaphysics of return can no longer be postponed: ‘So many returns,
attempts to go back to bits of life, or people who were no longer there:
these constituted a steady response to the increasing rigors of my illness’
(Said 1999, p. 222). This series of returns is later made the motivation for
the memoir’s writing: ‘This memoir is on some level a re-enactment of
the experience of departure and separation as I feel the pressure of time
hastening and running out’ (p. 222). In some ways the re-enactments
and revisitings are another way of de-composing the thoroughly stable
and comprehensively understood identity: they are in fact a way of
eluding expectation. Both Palestinian identity and its single example

in Said have become, through various projections and processes, all too
stable, even if that stability is tempered by inherent flaw or fragmen-
tation. Before a politics can be re-imagined, these identities must be
de-defined.
While I earlier suggested that the political life is surreptitiously making
itself felt in his memoir, Said is not always indirect in making the connections

between personal and political. Indeed, Out of Place refers back to After the
Last Sky in order to capture the rhythm of de- and re-composition common
to both texts:
To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after charac-

terizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities,
abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all
these years. Thirteen years ago I wrote in After the Last Sky that
when I travel I always take too much with me, and that even a
trip downtown requires the packing of a briefcase stocked with
items disproportionately larger in size and number than the actual
period of the trip. Analyzing this, I concluded that I had a secret but
ineradicable fear of not returning. What I’ve since discovered is that
despite this fear I fabricate occasions for departure, thus giving rise to
the fear voluntarily. The two seem absolutely necessary to my rhythm
of life and have intensified dramatically during the period I’ve been
ill. I say to myself: if you don’t take this trip, don’t prove your mobil-
ity and indulge your fear of being lost, don’t override the normal
rhythms of domestic life now, you certainly will not be able to do it
in the near future. (Said 1999, pp. 217–218)
As elsewhere in Out of Place, Said’s personal reflection can be generalized

as broad political insight, and here we see an urge to keep moving that
is also an urge to escape the dynastic, to grasp affiliation rather than
filiation. The connection between his personal reflection and the reality
of the Palestinian people is clearly made through the reference to After
the Last Sky. There, Said discusses his luggage habits as an example of
repetition compulsion: ‘It is as if the activity of repeating prevents us,
and others, from skipping us or overlooking us entirely’ (Said and Mohr
1986, p. 56). There is both movement and stasis, both innovation and
recourse to the time-honoured and relatively stable.
Finally, this co-existence of route and root is often elaborated in Said’s
reference to musical form. Most famously, he imagines the reading
process as being contrapuntal. Hallward, it will be recalled, is concerned
that the contrapuntal exemplifies Said’s increasing singularization.

His concern is understandable given that the contrapuntal is so often
analysed as the key to understanding Said’s interpretive practice.
Nonetheless, the category is not made into a self-evidently desirable
state or practice. Not every use of the metaphor follows the same logic
as the one guiding his interpretation of literature, for example. At the
close of Out of Place, indeed, we can see his own identity re-imagined in

terms of the contrapuntal, but again this is finely balanced:
I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents.

I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many
attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s
life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they
require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are ‘off’ and may be
out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place,
in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not
necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally
yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think,
even I am far from being totally convinced that it is. (Said 1999,
p. 295)
The final sentence could hardly be clearer in holding off any postcolonial
singularized identity, or any idealization of the postcolonial nomad or
exile. I would argue that these reflections on identity can be general-
ized as much to other postcolonial critics as to the Palestinian people
more directly referenced. The ‘atonal’ identity here imagined is hardly
recommended, whatever that would mean, and here and elsewhere it
is difficult to see Said’s work as idealizing the exile. It is more the case
that Palestinian identity simply is what it is, both a leap and fall. His
work hardly ignores the privilege of his own position, and does not
assume an authority to produce its own categories of judgement. Said
does not romanticize the communality of Palestinian identity, and does
not bemoan his distance from the Palestinian community. Here, again
as elsewhere, Said sets out an individual experience of identity, thema-
tizing and demonstrating the act of invention that tentatively grounds
any identity whatsoever. The relationship between his own experience of
being Palestinian and a projected general Palestinian identity is one that
requires situation and specification, and although these are not necessary
consequences of postcolonial analysis, nor are they precluded by it.
Everything that I have argued about Said here can be turned back to
help us understand the temptations found in Deleuze’s terminology. The
category of nomad remains as clear an example of these temptations as

any, its idea of mobility evidently ripe for mis-use in postcolonial stud-
ies as much as any other field. However, as commentators like Bogue
(2004) have pointed out, there is no necessity in the transformation
of nomad to an idealized and generalized type. At most, the mobil-
ity it puts forward is not necessarily any one thing, as John K. Noyes
suggests: ‘Mobility casts subjectivity between the ideal freedom of the

disembodied wanderer and the brute reality of the refugee’ (2004,
p. 160). It is hardly necessarily the case that the latter will be forgotten,
however idealized and singular postcolonial studies can appear. The
same caution should be exercised in terms of affiliation: as I mentioned
at the beginning of this article, it is certainly the case that Said agrees
with Deleuze’s understanding of filiation and affiliation, but in the case
of both thinkers their tendency to affiliate and ally is more complex
than it immediately appears. Deleuze (with Guattari) may well consider
all filiation to be imagined: ‘Becoming produces nothing by filiation;
all filiation is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than
filiation. It concerns alliance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, p. 238). Said
would agree, but affiliation only appears to stress appearance, as it were.
Rather, it is does not guarantee the freedom from the dynastic that it
seems to desire, and there is always the possibility that the categories of
affiliation will begin to look like those of filiation – ends in themselves,
lazy shorthand for philosophical or political thought. As he writes in
‘Secular Criticism’, ‘affiliation can easily become a system of thought no
less orthodox and dominant than culture itself’ (Said 1983, p. 20). This
danger or temptation is something Said clearly wished to keep foremost
in mind, and postcolonial studies at least some of the time follows his
lead. Of course, there is much in postcolonial theory that does not keep
this temptation in mind, as Hallward’s analysis suggests. In the end,
however, Said’s work guards against this temptation: although he imag-
ines himself disembodied, and indeed imagines this as a kind of ideal,
even in his most self-focused writings he recognizes the need to recom-
pose and re-embody, a political need deriving from the fact that any
subjectivity cannot in fact singularize itself, but instead always relates.
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—— (1983) The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
—— (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
—— (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London:
Vintage.
—— (1999) Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta.
—— (2002) Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

Said, Edward with Jean Mohr (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London:
Faber & Faber.
San Juan Jr, E. (2004) Working through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to
Critical Practice. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Weiner, Justus Reid (1999) ‘“My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by
Edward Said’, Commentary Magazine, 108.2: 23.
Žižek, Slavoj (2004) Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York:
Routledge.
5
Deleuze, Hallward and the
Transcendental Analytic
of Relation

Nick Nesbitt
The concept of Relation is among the most central to all postcolonial

critique. Best known through its influential formulation in the work
of Édouard Glissant, the relationality of human subjectivity and its
implications for the critique of the exploitative power relations of the
plantation and empire more generally are a fundamental category for
conceptualizing Caribbean and, indeed, anticolonial critique more
generally. This relational, dialectical understanding of experience origi-
nated with the French recuperation of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic in
the wake of Alexandre Kojève’s influential interpretation. Though this
influence was particularly powerful for Césaire and Fanon, Édouard
Glissant’s early work, culminating in his 1969 study L’Intention poétique,
can be read as a quite original adaptation of postwar neo-Hegelianism.1
Though such an analysis exceeds the scope of this study, Glissant
constructs a model of relation in terms perfectly congruent with the
Hegelian model of the specification of beings through their dialectical,
negative, mediated relation to others. As the title of Glissant’s earli-
est theoretical work Soleil de la conscience (1956) implies, the author’s
concern at this stage of his work was to develop, through the three
modes of fiction, poetry and theory, a phenomenology of Caribbean
consciousness and, indeed, self-consciousness, in which ‘all truth lies
in dialectical consummation’ (1997a, p. 16). Glissant’s work in the
following decade, collected in Le discours antillais (1981), reflects in its
turn the contemporary Metropolitan abandonment of post-Sartrean
situational phenomenology, critique and anti-colonial engagement,
and the celebration of Foucauldian discourse critique. This shift of
Glissant’s concern from Antillean consciousness to discourse is not,
however, a fundamental one, for it remains steadfastly situated within
a post-Kantian, correlationist horizon of subject-object relativity and
96
Nesbitt: Deleuze and the Transcendental Analytic of Relation 97
expressive totality, in abstraction from a speculative assertion of a

subject’s relation to truth.2
Glissant’s Hegelian framework gradually moves into the background
of his work after 1981 as he develops and articulates his own original
conceptual arsenal, famously drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Glissant’s central concept of Relation, in turn, becomes in this later
period less a dialectical one, and increasingly a model of a neo-Deleuzian

becoming-singular. In this later concept of Relation, most thoroughly
articulated in Poétique de la Relation (1990), Glissant describes a single
world, a world without transcendence, in which all differentiation occurs
on a Deleuzian register of infinitesimal variation and ‘infinite change’
(1997b, p. 84). All beings, rather than gradually distinguishing themselves
in negative relation to others, are understood by the mature Glissant in
neo-Spinozist fashion to be self-differentiating, engaged in a cosmic proc-
ess of infinite becoming.
Peter Hallward describes this shift in his ‘Edouard Glissant: From
Nation to Relation’, in this author’s view the single most important
critique (rather than interpretation or analysis) of Glissant to date. ‘Like
Deleuze’, Hallward writes, ‘Glissant arrives at a theory of la Relation
defined primarily by its transcendence of relations with or between
specific individuals (2001, p. 67). If Hallward’s critique is in fact, as
Paul Gilroy has written on the cover blurb of the book, a ‘monumental
study [that] transforms the terms within which critical understanding
of postcolonial culture has been conducted’, it would seem essential
for an immanent critique of postcolonial relation to engage the three
primary theoretical references of this philosophy: Glissant, Deleuze and
Hallward.
What Is Absolute Democracy? Deleuze, Hallward and the

Problem of Immanence
Peter Hallward’s Out of this World ends with the provocative claim that
‘the political aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy amounts to little more than
utopian distraction. […] Those of us who still seek to change our world
and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration
elsewhere’ (2006, pp. 163–164). If one believes, as this reader emphati-
cally does, that Deleuze’s thought does hold important resources for
contemporary political thought and the construction of radical (in
other words, egalitarian) democracy, and if one also believes, as I do
as well, that Hallward’s book is in fact one of the finest in the swarm-
ing jungle of Deleuze studies, explicit and clear (even to a fault) in its
theoretical claims, limpid in structure and argumentation, thoroughly

and rigorously researched, then some critical effort must be made to
square these two claims.
One way to undertake such a critique of Out of this World would
undoubtedly be to dismantle its tendentious presentation of Spinozist
thought, to the point that a reader of Out of this World might be forgiven
for supposing that Spinoza was an otherworldly thinker of subtraction

and counter-actualization avant la lettre, one who had precious little
to say about the practical political organization of society. It would
of course be a relatively simple thing to show that the author of the
Political and Theological-Political Treatises (TP and TTP), unlike Deleuze,
was intensely concerned with the possible and adequately true modes of
organization of society and the forms of relation (precisely as Hallward
understands the term) that would allow for the unlimited expression
of the powers of the body politic. Since Out of this World is, however,
a book about Deleuze that makes no claim whatsoever to offer a true
image of Spinozist political thought, such a critique would itself be
inconsequentially tendentious, negative, ungrounded, even resentment-
based (in the Nietzschean sense).
Instead, one should undertake an immanent critique of Out of this
World on its own terms, using its own resources, to show that in its
extraordinary precision and articulation of a singular philosophical
personae (Hallward’s ‘Deleuze’), the book contains within itself the
negation of Hallward’s abstract, dismissive conclusion of irrelevancy.
One should take at its word this Deleuzian truism that Hallward him-
self cites: ‘You have to work your way back to those problems which an
author of genius has posed, all the way back to that which he does not
say in what he says, in order to extract something that still belongs to
him, though you also turn it against him’ (Deleuze, cited in Hallward
2006, p. 159). We must, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, ‘extract
an event [such as absolute democracy] from things and beings [such
as Out of this World]’ (1994, p. 33). ‘The work of philosophy’, Hallward
writes, ‘is precisely to extract a concept from the circumstances of its
[indistinct] actualization’ (2006, p. 140). In other words, although
Out of this World claims to prove the total insignificance of Deleuzian
thought for egalitarian politics, it is in fact a relatively simple matter (as
Hallward likes to say) to show that with only the very slightest recod-
ing and terminological substitution (‘General Will’ for ‘God’, ‘Absolute
Democracy’ for ‘philosophy’ or ‘art’, etc.), Out of this World itself shows
us with utter precision, clarity and simplicity how to extract the con-
cept of absolute democracy from its merely virtual encoding in Deleuze.
To do so for all of Deleuze’s thought would demand a whole book on its

own, but nor is there any need to do so, since, I am claiming, Hallward’s
reading has already done that work for us. Instead, one need only
attend to a relatively few sections in this dense study to unfold from it
and begin to actualize the concept of absolute democracy. These pas-
sages only amount to about a dozen pages in what is an extraordinarily
precise study: Sections II and III of Chapter 4 (‘Creative Subtraction’),

and Section V, Chapter 6 (on ‘Relation’).
Key to such a critique is to remain faithful to Hallward’s repeated
emphasis on the necessary intrication of the virtual-actual doublet.
Though Out of this World claims in its conclusion to have shown that
‘there is no place in Deleuze’s philosophy for any notion of change,
time, or history that is mediated by actuality [and] thinking the
consequences of what actually happens within the actually existing
world as such’ (2006, p. 162), Out of this World in fact demonstrates
precisely the opposite. If Deleuzian philosophy is tendentially an eth-
ics of subtraction and counter-actualization, ‘the production of actual
creatures is a fundamental aspect of what creation is’ (2006, p. 56). As
such, Deleuze’s philosophy remains steadfastly and purely immanent,
it never ‘flees or despises ordinary life for the sake of something better
outside or higher than it’ (p. 57). If it calls for the counter-actualization
of any given world or sedimented state of being, this purification and
construction of a plane of immanence should never go to the point of
suicidal self-destruction, nor indeed can it, insofar as human nature (or
a given body’s ‘essence’, understood as its expressive power) is itself
only manifest in its actualizations. The absolute is always the aim of
any counter-actualization; ‘since it is not transcendent, however, this
absolute process must always proceed from and through particular
territories’ (p. 90). This is explicitly the ‘guiding principle’ of Out of
this World, that ‘only an absolute, virtual, or non-actual force creates,
but it only creates through the relative, the actual, or the creatural’
(p. 96). The ‘dissipation’ of the actual may approach death, and it may
even bear a sacrificial logic (p. 92), but this dissolution is (and this is
Deleuze’s principal point), always productive of new and above all better
(in other words, more adequately expressive) actualizations (in various
forms including novels, musical compositions or concepts). The cru-
cial point to address here is simply that in discussing these superior
forms of actualization, Out of this World gives the impression of hav-
ing a priori dismissed the possibility that one of these superior forms
might be political, and instead simply jumps (symptomatically above
all in the passage from Chapter 4 to Chapter 5 [‘Art and Literature’])
to the conclusion that only art, literature and, above all, philosophy
(Chapter 6) offer Deleuze such models.
Of course, Hallward is absolutely right that it would be absurd to look
to Deleuze for a discussion of a politics of ‘conflict or solidarity, […]
commitment, […] coordination, [or] more resistant forms of defence’
(2006, p. 162). Nor does Deleuze ever adequately draw out the philo-
sophical concept of an absolute politics, as he emphatically does for

fields such as literature, painting, music and philosophy itself. In fact,
one should indeed conclude from Out of this World that Deleuze, like
Adorno on at least this one count, abandons the promise of politics to
the exploration of aesthetics and philosophy. Nonetheless, and this is
the virtual truth Out of this World reveals so clearly, a concept of absolute
democracy remains to be extracted from Deleuzian thought.
I believe that the fundamental reason Out of this World overlooks
this virtual encoding of absolute democracy in Deleuze, though it lies
presented right before us in the four brief pages of its Chapter 4 Part II
(pp. 89–92), is that Hallward often proceeds, implicitly if never explic-
itly, as if the ethical end or norm guiding his investigations (here as well
as in Absolutely Postcolonial) is mere relation as such and not a universal
axiom such as justice as equality. Hallward often proceeds as though
the end of politics was not equality but what one might call militant
sociability en soi, those ‘more resilient forms of cohesion [and] more
principled forms of commitment’ (p. 162), a sort of non-hierarchical
General Assembly of the engaged. I would argue (and, if pressed,
Hallward would doubtless agree) that such non-hierarchical forms of
social relation are instead only a particular (if necessary and enjoyable)
mode of the struggle for justice as equality.
What model of politics does exist in Deleuze, if only virtually, doubt-
less comes from the determinant influence of Spinoza upon his thought.
None of the other thinkers he admired, from Leibniz and Hume to
Nietzsche and Bergson had anything remotely approaching a concrete
political philosophy in the sense we find so strongly drawn in every level
of Spinoza’s thought. Owing to Spinoza’s premature death at the very
moment he set out to articulate a precise model of ‘democracy’, it has
been left to scholars to speculate as to its form. My own feeling is that
there is an important division to be drawn between the situated, practical
nature of the TTP and the more abstract and rigorous schematicism of the
TP, a distinction made palpable in the abandonment of social contract
theory in the TP, and its replacement by a formal logic of absolute popu-
lar sovereignty, defined by Spinoza as ‘the sovereignty held by the entire
multitude’ (quoted in Negri 1997, p. 227) without division or alienation
of human powers of expression. This emphasis on absolute popular

sovereignty points to the precise moment in the argument of Out of this
World at which a symptomatic void or gap remains to be filled by the
Spinozist-Deleuzian concept of absolute democracy: the ‘political impli-
cation’ of Deleuze’s Spinozist understanding of freedom, Hallward claims,
is that ‘the more absolute the sovereign’s power, the more “free” are those
subject to it’ (2006, p. 139). This is quite literally true for Spinoza, as it

would be for Rousseau, but Out of this World never discusses this point,
immediately moving to its next section on philosophy (Ch. 6 Pt. III). As
such, the reader is left to suppose that Hallward sees sovereignty as the
inevitable alienation of the power of the multitude, which it certainly
is in any Hobbesian political model. Spinoza, Rousseau and Robespierre
all argue, however, that under conditions of absolute undivided popular
sovereignty (expressed as Rousseau’s volonté générale) this alienation can
be overcome or at least minimized through structural safeguards.
Undivided, universal popular sovereignty is the prescription Spinoza
(as the abstract, unarticulated concept of absolute democracy) and
Rousseau and Robespierre (as popular sovereignty and volonté générale)
address to the plague of political alienation. Against the conclusion of
Out of this World itself, this ethic of popular sovereignty proceeds as an
experimental politics of relation that only requires that we recode the
book’s literal argumentation in a political modality. As Hallward writes
in virtually Spinozist terms:
As we gradually find out what a body [politic] can do, as we dis-

cover what we are capable of, we cultivate more fruitful encounters
with other individuals. Such encounters enhance our powers of
understanding. […] Likewise, the more we come to understand the
nature of other singular individuals the more we are able to develop
‘common notions’ that express something of the essence of these
individuals. (2006, p. 89)
In the realm of democratic politics in the Radical Enlightenment,

Rousseau’s General Will was precisely such a concept. The ‘third and
highest stage’ in the development of our powers of reason ‘is reached
via the direct expression of this idea’ (p. 89), in other words, as what
Spinoza and Deleuze after him called an ‘adequate’ truth. Not merely
clear and distinct, as for the Cartesian idea, but such that we are ‘par-
ticipants in their production’ (p. 89), that is, in their actualization in
the world. The common name for this politics of an actual, absolute
democracy in the Age of Revolution was, of course, Jacobinism.
Though Out of this World celebrates the end of militant sociability,

Hallward’s Deleuze tells us (virtually) that we require the pure concept
of absolute democracy as the idea that would orient all such political
struggle: ‘How do we arrive at such ultimate knowledge [not of ‘God’,
but of democracy]? We reach it via nothing other than the idea of
[democracy] itself’ (p. 89).3 Under the mode of political practice, the
experimental politics of Jacobinism is quite literally the construction of

an actual plane of pure immanence, as immediate, non-representational
democracy as undivided popular sovereignty. Under the mode of
thought, this concept should rightfully be called a ‘politics of prin-
ciple’, in which fidelity to the pure principle of universal popular
sovereignty, from Spinoza to Rousseau and Robespierre and beyond,
orients all political practice in any given situation.4 Jacobinism (and
Louverture’s Black Jacobinism after it) ‘grounds a sequence of adequate
ideas [of absolute democracy as popular sovereignty] that is identical to
the construction of reality’ (Deleuze, quoted in Hallward 2006, p. 90).
Hallward rightly points out that the struggle for any adequate idea
involves the ‘removal of those constraints that hamper’ (2006, p. 90)
the instantiation of this idea. For Jacobinism and Black Jacobinism, this
struggle to destroy the Ancien Régime and plantation slavery respectively
went under the name of Terreur. To be undertaken ‘in actuality’, in
‘experimenting with what a body can do’, Jacobinism necessarily ‘must
overcome whatever actually hinders this creating’ (p. 90). If Spinoza and
Rousseau each finished their philosophical lives in a proto-Deleuzian
withdrawal from the world, Jacobinism and Black Jacobinism in con-
trast name the struggle to dissipate the worlds of the Ancien Régime and
slavery via practical experiments in popular sovereignty. Each proceeded
from the egalitarian maxim that, as Adorno famously wrote, there is no
true equality amid general inequality. Only in a free society in which all
can express their full human essence can freedom exist such that any
individual actualizes their essential nature.
For both Spinoza and Rousseau, General Will is the active expression
of human desire in the form or mode of Reason. Spinoza’s concept of
Absolute democracy, insofar as it can be derived from the Ethics and
what was completed of the TP, is by definition a direct rather than rep-
resentative democracy, in which ‘absolutely everyone [in quo omnes
absolute] who is bound only by the laws of his country and otherwise
independent’ participates directly.5 Spinoza’s ‘absolute’ democracy
leads directly not to the divided powers and representational conceits
of Condorcet and other figures of the Progressive Enlightenment, but
to the radical democratic experimentation of Robespierre, because
‘absolute sovereignty’, in Spinoza’s words, ‘is strictly equivalent to

sovereignty held by the entire multitude’, in which there is no alienation
of power, but in which right, as sovereign power, is maintained in so far
as possible with the individual (cited in Negri 1997, p. 232). The neces-
sary forms of a complex state structure in absolute democracy would
of course exist, but these would necessarily be structured to multiply,
rather than alienate, the powers of expression of the multitude. Since

Spinoza never even began to explore the form those structures might
take, he passed on to the Radical Enlightenment the task of imagining
and articulating undivided popular sovereignty as absolute democracy,
a process of experimental politics taken up to the fullest by the Jacobins
during their short period of sovereignty. In this view, then, the French
Revolution should be understood as the great modern experiment in
radical democracy, and Robespierre as the great experimenter of its pure
Spinozist form as undivided popular sovereignty.
Jacobinism, then, is the political name for, or mode of, deterri-
torialization as Out of this World literally understands it, in which
deterritorialization tends to become ‘positive and absolute, […] imme-
diately expressive of the single energy’ (Hallward 2006, p. 96). The
absolute, then, ‘relates to one or “a” body, considered as a multiple’
(p. 96), precisely what, in the mode of the political, Rousseau called the
volonté générale. Absolute democracy, democracy without the alienation
of our expressive powers as the various forms of representation that
Spinoza, Rousseau, Robespierre and Deleuze all critiqued, is precisely
‘not mediated’. In absolute democracy without representation, the will
of popular sovereignty moves at an ‘infinite speed’ and, as universal
prescription, demands to be ‘carried to infinity’ (p. 142) as universal
emancipation. ‘Rather than work through the actual world’ (p. 142) of
an existing world and its hierarchical regime of sovereignty, gradually
negotiating infinitesimal ameliorations of general exploitation, the
politics of absolute democracy are resolutely conflictual and decision-
istic (as Hallward would explicitly wish them to be).6 Such a politics
avoids the neo-Habermasian politics of negotiation and rational dis-
cussion that accepts the basic (unequal) terms of political subjectivity
(who counts as a political subject able to undertake such negotiation),
and moves instead to ‘dissipate’ this unjust state of affairs. It leaves no
place for what Out of this World claims to celebrate in its conclusion as
the ‘constitutive mediation between the differed’ (p. 162). It asserts in
its place, as General Will, that a single political body (the popular sov-
ereign or multitude) renders irrelevant or indiscernible the relations and
differences between the multiple elements (humans) of that set (p. 154).
Such an understanding of absolute democracy, then, allows one to look

back to Hallward’s earlier Absolutely Postcolonial in a new light, as a
critical philosophy of (postcolonial) relation.
From the Poetics of Relation to the Politics of Truth:

Absolutely Postcolonial

Much ink has been spilled in recent years regarding the overall unity,
or lack thereof, of the theoretical writings of Édouard Glissant. Peter
Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial (2001) sets the stage with what is
still today the most philosophically insightful and original critique
of Glissant’s project. In the book’s second chapter, ‘Edouard Glissant:
From Nation to Relation’, Hallward argues that Glissant’s work should
properly be divided into two phases: an earlier, more militant phase that
retains elements of Fanon and Sartre’s politics of anticolonial prescrip-
tion, in which Glissant follows a critique of Antillean alienation with
a call for autonomous nationhood. A second phase, beginning after
the publication of Le discours antillais in 1981, finds its most developed
articulation in Poétique de la Relation, and gradually devolves into a
depoliticized affirmation of unmediated universality that Glissant bap-
tizes the Tout-monde.
We must distinguish, then, between early and late moments in

Glissant’s engagement with the mechanics of individuation and
specification. In a first moment, Glissant asserts a specificity
defined only by its power to move beyond itself in its mediation of
others. […] This moment is organized around the pursuit of a national
specificity. […] In a second moment, Glissant mostly abandons
the nation in favour of a kind of self-asserting, self-constituting
singular immediacy on the Deleuzian or Spinozist model – an
‘already immediate’ immediacy, so to speak. This is what he calls
‘la Relation’. (Hallward 2001, p. 67)
Hallward goes on to show how, beneath the surface consistency of a

properly Caribbean model of expressive totality running through the
entirety of Glissant’s work (pp. 68–69), the periodization of Glissant’s
production turns around the problem of mediation.
While a general critique of postcolonial theory, followed by a series
of specific critiques of postcolonial writers makes up the greater part
of Absolutely Postcolonial, I want to focus here on the two very brief,
yet absolutely central theoretical ‘excurses’ at the heart of the volume.
The book in general has yet to garner the full attention it deserves,
and the discrepancy between the rapturous praise for the book in
cover blurbs by Žižek (‘the key theoretico-political intervention of the
last decade’) and Paul Gilroy (‘This monumental study transforms the
terms within which critical understanding of postcolonial culture has
been conducted’) and the relative silence of its reception is telling.
What is less apparent is that the book goes far beyond a mere critique

of postcolonial theory and literature, and constitutes in fact a general
(if minimal) political and practical ontology that structures Hallward’s
work in the last decade.
The primary operative distinction of Hallward’s study is drawn
between what he calls ‘singular’ and ‘specific’ modes of relation. In
what is in fact a quite singular (not to say tendential) understanding of
the singular, Hallward defines the term as ‘what creat[es] the medium
of its own universe’ (2001, p. 177). Speaking of Deleuze in particular,
he specifies that ‘all existent individuals […] are immediately produced,
direct actualizations of one and the same Creative force’ in which all
differences, which in this Deleuzian ontology are infinite, are ‘singular’
in so far as they remain ‘free from the limits of constituent relations
between the differed’ (p. 12). This absolute absence of mediation, of
what Hallward calls (and will repeatedly call for) ‘constituent relations’
are emphatically not what key theorists of the singular such as Spinoza
or Hegel, both grand thinkers of mediation if ever they existed, under-
stand by the singular.7
Hallward, in his two essential theoretical excurses to Absolutely
Postcolonial, wishes to ground the two central concepts of his
philosophico-political project. The first of these, which he circum-
scribes in Excursus III, is the universal, while the second (the particular)
he addresses in Excursus IV. A strong understanding of the universal is
crucial to Hallward’s project (as it is for Badiou), in order to avoid not
only the relativist politics of might is right, but also the language-based
equivalent of this amoral order, the world of Habermasian dialogue, in
which (one might argue with some exaggeration) any political end is
acceptable so long as it follows the proper, rational procedures (which
procedures are themselves supposed to guarantee a priori the illegiti-
macy of various fascistic political scenarios). Only universal principles
that would transcend any merely empirical conflict (might is right and
its liberal philosophical window dressing, Rortian pragmatism) as well
as any empirical dialogue (Habermas) or language game (Wittgenstein)
can hope to offer a grounded orientation for communal political action
(which is ultimately, I think, what is always at stake for Hallward).
Nor can capitalism, in the Marxist model, or patriarchy, in the feminist,

count in Hallward’s estimation as universals in this strong sense, given
their empirical status. Instead, they are to be understood more as
‘tendencies’, to which exist many exceptions to their predominance
both in time and place (cf. Hallward 2001, p. 179).
Following this series of refutational delimitations of what would
count as a true philosophical universal, Hallward moves to make the

key positive distinction of his ontology. On the one hand, he tells us,
human beings find themselves a priori determined, as a species and
in every case, to be ‘relational beings’ (2001, p. 179). This ahistorical,
ontological ground of human being-in-the-world Hallward proposes to
call the ‘transcendental of the specific’ (p. 179), in the sense that it is a
transcendental predetermination that itself allows any specific, empirical
determinations of individuals of the human species. This ‘transcendental
of the specific’, then, is a strong universal in the sense not only that it
is said to hold universally, in all cases, for all human beings (no human
being is not relational), but even more in so far as it itself transcends
all empirical cases; it is not itself a case, but is of an entirely different
order; it is, one might say, a purely and unrelatedly singular concept. The
transcendental of the specific is what enables any human existence to take
place. One thinks for example of the animalistic ‘human beings’ raised in
the wild that so fascinated Enlightenment thinkers such as Itard’s Enfant
Sauvage, and Truffaut’s own fascinating contemplation of the ultimately
dehumanizing effects of pure arelationality.
In contrast, the universal is for Hallward to be understood in a very
precise sense, as the unfolding of this relationality through the articula-
tion of ‘universalisable principles valid for all relations’ (p. 179). Here
Hallward explicitly mentions only the two principles that we can safely
presume ground the entirety of his work (as well as that of this writer):
justice and equality. In what can perhaps be taken for the theoretical
condensation of an entire theoretico-political project that he has called
a ‘politics of prescription’, Hallward summarizes: ‘Given that we are
relational creatures, “universal” here will apply to the prescription of cer-
tain unconditional principles (as opposed to empirical regularities) that
circumscribe how we are relational. Principles of justice and equality, for
instance’ (p. 179). In other words, justice as equality serves as a strong
universal, and not merely a relative claim in the marketplace of ethical
imperatives, because it is a ‘universalisable principle’.
Hallward does not explain or defend this neo-Kantian ‘universalisabil-
ity’ of the principles of justice and equality, and we are left to ponder
why justice would be any more relational than injustice, or inequality
than equality. If relationality itself is unavoidably and a priori a human

category, and if it seems undebatable that humans can express their
relationality as much through injustice and inequality as their oppo-
sites, then Hallward has not in any sense provided an a priori ground to
a politics of prescriptive equality. One might argue in a Kantian mode,
however, that to fully universalize injustice and/or inequality would
imply the destruction of humanity (whether in a situation of pure

arelation as inequality or simply via the ultimate and fully universal
injustice of planetary mass destruction), and is thus self-contradictory.
But of course, Hallward is explicitly not claiming that justice and equal-
ity are transcendental, but just the opposite, that they are potentially
universalisable modes of instantiation (and thus empirical cases) of a
universal category (the ‘transcendental of the specific’). Justice as equality
simply offers a, perhaps the only, non-contradictory universal mode
of instantiation of human relationality. In other words, the universal
fulfillment and unfolding determination of human being-in-the-world
as justice and equality would witness precisely the infinite deployment
and richness of what Hallward has already claimed to be the very defin-
ing characteristic of that humanity: relationality.
One of the many ways that Hallward’s argument goes against recent
theoretical doxa is thus in its explicit assertion of a fundamental and
universal human nature. Though relationality is the transcendental
category of particular interest to Hallward, he also mentions language
and even subjectivity itself, as well as ‘certain properly basic degrees of
agency, subjectivity, relationality, sexuality, identification, and so on’,
based on the putative authority of ‘cognitive science’ (p. 180). These
basic categories are transcendental in the strict Kantian sense, Hallward
claims, that all empirical human experience is inconceivable without
them. Hallward’s question is formally, if not in its content, perfectly
Kantian: he asks, not ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’
but ‘How is relation a priori possible?’
The transcendental conditions that Hallward claims allow for human
relation are said to be purely formal, devoid of all content. Though
many quite powerful critiques of this type of Kantian formalism have
been offered, from Hegel to Adorno, Hallward avoids having to mount
any strong defence of this absolute distinction between pure, empty
transcendental forms and empirical content by simply assuming this
division to be true, and then proceeding to assert that the description
of these transcendental conditions ‘is not properly a philosophical so
much as a scientific problem’ (p. 180).8 In this view, the transcendental,
which a few lines before was said to be devoid of all empirical content,
is suddenly instead claimed to be understandable only by the empirical

sciences, and is to be located in ‘our peculiar biological history’ (p. 180).
Aside from a certain scepticism regarding the irrelevancy of philosophi-
cal thought and the sole validity of empirical science to further our
understanding of such pure, content-free categories of experience,
Hallward’s argument suffers from a more basic logical contradiction. As
Nathan Brown convincingly argues in what is the most far-reaching

and considered critique of Hallward’s thought to date, the author of
Absolutely Postcolonial describes the universal, ahistorical structures of
human experience as having developed in various historical and situ-
ational contexts that contributed to the development of the species.
‘The contradictory nature’ of Hallward’s argument, Brown writes,
is of a piece with the vicious circularity of the sociobiological account

upon which Hallward relies – a circularity that is symptomatic of
the idealist, teleological concept of ‘man’ upon which that account
relies. […] Man implicitly precedes his own production, in [this]
account, because ‘he was selected’ to reproduce his own production.
Rather than critically confronting the teleological circularity of this
account, Hallward attempts to evade it by subtracting species require-
ments absolutely from any process of development. If Hallward’s
account of the specific can in fact be deconstructed, it is because
the unconditional status of relationality upon which it relies […] is
grounded upon the ahistorical extraction of the transcendental from
the empirical: that is, quite precisely, upon the non-relationality of
relation as a transcendental condition. But since the development of
human animals is indeed specific – conditional and historical – the
critical point is that the evolutionary processes through which this
development occurs are incompatible with […] the exemption of
transcendental structures from history and from context upon which
Hallward relies. (2011, p. 152)
The contradiction here is that transcendental species conditions are said

to be at once purely formal, timeless and without empirical content (‘it
is impossible to become transcendental’ [Hallward 2001, p. 330]), yet to
have evolved in time and place; in other words, they presuppose their own
existence, such that any empirical scientific description of their evolution
would presuppose their timeless transcendental functioning. While Kant
and Husserl sought to escape this contradiction by arguing that purely
formal categories were indeed timeless, and while Badiou, in Logics of
Worlds perhaps offers a more promising account of the appearance of
what he in turn calls ‘transcendentals’ in any world, Hallward simply

evades the whole problem by shunting it off as a problem for the empiri-
cal sciences to resolve, such that the evolutionary appearance of human
transcendentals becomes in Hallward’s account a sort of miraculous
apparition rather than the labour of a subject of truth.
Unlike Hallward’s humanism, Badiou’s conception of transcendentals
is purely formal, pertaining to individuals of any kind that count as one

in any world. As it stands in Logics of Worlds, the concept nonetheless
suffers from an identical contradiction regarding its simultaneous time-
lessness and unaccounted for, yet necessary, genesis. Indeed, Badiou
offers no account of the genesis of transcendentals, and claims that
they are ‘anterior to every subjective constitution’, and are an ‘imma-
nent given of any situation whatever’ (2009, p. 101). If so, then this
would imply that all worlds simultaneously and eternally exist, if only
virtually.
Instead of such an idealist account, I think that Badiou’s materialist
conception of truths should be folded back upon the eternal status of
the transcendental itself: like truths, like the subject itself, a new, true
transcendental (say the human capacity for symbolic logic or to know
mathematical truth) can appear in an atonal world but only as the nega-
tion of that previous world. A truth is ‘intransitive to knowledge’ as it
stands in the ‘encyclopedia’ of that world, in Badiou’s parlance, such
that a fidelity to that new, yet eternal transcendental (fully developing
the human faculty for logical reason or mathematical truth) takes the
species from one world (say, of Homo Erectus) to another (Homo Sapiens).
Unlike Hallward’s account of the universal, for Badiou any universal is
‘in no way the result of a transcendental constitution, which would
presuppose a constituting subject. On the contrary’, Badiou writes, ‘the
opening up of the possibility of a universal is the precondition for there
being a subject-thought at the local level’ (p. 145).
Against Hallward’s neo-Cartesian account, for Badiou, the subject is
not presupposed, but a ‘late and problematic construction’ (p. 101), and
the same should be affirmed of transcendentals themselves. Elsewhere,
in his earlier ‘Eight Theses on the Universals’, Badiou even asserts that
the transcendental coordinates of a world can come into being through
the implicative fidelity of a subject to the truth they make manifest: ‘The
univocal act [of a subject of a truth] that modifies the valence of one of
the components of the situation must gradually begin to transform the
logic of the situation in its entirety. Although the being-multiple of the
situation remains unaltered, the logic of its appearance […] can undergo
a profound transformation’ (2005, p. 153).
This points to the primary challenge in reading Badiou’s second

instalment of his magnum opus: like Hegel’s Phenomenology, like Proust’s
Recherche, Logics of Worlds can only truly begin to be read in its second
iteration, when the truth of its concluding sections is folded back upon
its initial ‘logic’. In other words, to remain true to its own innermost
logic, the initial description of the logic of any world under the reign of
its transcendentals in the first section of Logics must become historico-

materialist, and one must develop, as Hallward himself has noted in a
review of Logics, a phenomenology of relation, which remains mystified
in Badiou’s account (Hallward 2008, p. 119). How, precisely are the con-
sequences of a truth to be unfolded by the novel subjects of that truth
such that a new world – with its eternally true, yet newly functional
transcendental coordinates for what counts as one – takes the place of
another world?
To return to Absolutely Postcolonial then, the second moment of
Hallward’s excursus on the universal moves from an account of human
transcendentals to a sort of transcendental deduction of categories of the
properly universal, the principles such as justice and equality that are
‘criteria prescribed as valid for all relations in the situation concerned’
(2001, p. 183), such that their legitimacy depends not on the particular
instance or context of their application but ‘on normative criteria applied
to relationality in general’ (p. 183). Universal principles such as justice
and equality are thus external to any situation, and are not derived from
that situation but axiomatically imposed from an elsewhere. ‘Universality
persists as a fragile assertion’, Hallward writes, ‘a projection from the
specific: it holds only insofar as its proponents are able to make it stick’
(p. 183). In other words, though universals ‘transcend’ a situation, they
are not in Hallward’s formulation transcendental because they require
both a decision in favour of their assertion and the empirical fidelity
of a subject to uphold them and struggle for their implementation.
Universals such as justice and equality, thus, have a merely prescriptive
and subjective, rather than a priori validity, while only transcendentals
like relation are for Hallward a priori ‘valid’. The universal is in the end
the site of a decision and the ensuing struggle to make that universal
‘stick’ in any world. ‘Enabled by its transcendental conditions, grounded
in the evolution of social and political institutions’, Hallward concludes
his transcendental analytic of relation in a decidedly Sartrian tone, ‘the
prescription of universalizable criteria is always a project in the most
concrete – and most subjective – sense’ (p. 187).
Following on this transcendental deduction of the categories of
relation (specifically, justice and equality), the problem for Hallward then
becomes one of conjoining the universality of a politics of prescription and

its militant subject(s) with this strong (i.e., transcendental) model of rela-
tion. Hallward wants to retain the ethical prescriptivity of Kant and the
activist subjectivity of Badiou while conjoining this with the dialectical
relationality of Hegel and Sartre. Unlike both Hegel and Sartre, however,
Hallward denies that relationality is itself necessarily dialectical, while
admitting that many specific forms of relations are clearly dialectical in

form (cf. Hallward 2001, p. 252). Moreover, it is precisely at this point
in his argument that Hallward returns to reformulate his critique of
Glissantian Relation in light of the preceding theoretical articulation.
His argument with Glissantian Relation is not that there does not exist
many instances of relation that follow Glissant’s model, as is obviously
the case. Rather, it is the illegitimate move to deduce the exemplarity
and even ethical legitimacy of Glissantian Relation and creolization on
the basis of their ubiquity – rather than as subjective decision – that
Hallward denies. If relationality is simply one of the universally
transcendental categories of human being-in-the-world, it can have no
particular ethical or political orientation per se. Such an orientation can
only come, as he has already argued, through the choice or decision
of subjects in any particular world or situation. ‘Identities are banally
relational’, as Hallward observes:
Simply, there is nothing in this condition that orients the expres-

sion of these differences toward an anarchic dissemination any more
than toward a disciplined coordination. There can be no automatic
derivation of a politics of creolisation and hybridity. The question of
whether to organize our differences in terms that privilege heteroge-
neity or homogeneity is in every case to be answered by a political
decision. It is not something to be deduced from a more primitive
meditation on Being, difference, community or humanity. (Hallward
2001, p. 252)
In consequence, Hallward concludes that subjectivation is both always

a consequence of despecification and subtraction from the various
constituted (specified) identities that have formed us as individuals,
while at the same time the various modes of relation must always be
subjectively chosen, never derived from a transcendental teleology,
‘be it consensus, hybridity, responsibility, or dissemination’ (p. 253).
In short, Hallward concludes, such an understanding of the transcen-
dental, unsurpassable nature of relation and its irrelevance to political
and existential decisions (we cannot opt out of our status as relational
beings) leave us as subjects of relation two principal tasks: always to

despecify our identities, to subtract ourselves from the prefabricated
roles we are called upon to play and freely to choose, again in a Sartrian
fashion, our ‘essence’, and, second, ‘to demystify the pretensions of
a singular disinterest’ (p. 253); in other words, to pursue the ruth-
less critique of the existing world that Marx first called for. We must
continue to criticize the mystified naturalness of our institutions and

elites in order to reveal the manifold legitimized forms of violence and
domination that assure their predominance. In any situation, we are
always already obliged to choose, as Sartre never tired of reminding us,
‘deciding a relation in one way or another’ (p. 253), as Hallward puts
it. In this fundamental, unsurpassable situation of human freedom,
there are no authorities or big others to make such decisions for us, no
incontrovertible or undeconstructable moral or ethical guidelines. At
the same time, in making such choices, Hallward reminds us that the
criteria we rely on, such as justice and equality or profit and utility, are
always external to the particular situation itself, and thus, he concludes,
‘a matter of conflict, deliberation, and decision’ (p. 253).
Seen in the light of Hallward’s critique of singular reason, the full
extent to which his transfixing and stunning critique of Haitian
antipolitics, Damming the Flood (2010), is the direct manifestation and
fulfilment of the author’s ontology of relation becomes clear. For what
first appears merely as a compelling archival reconstruction of a moment
of contemporary history reveals itself in light of the formal schema of
Absolutely Postcolonial to be a sort of anthropology (to continue the
Kantian metaphor) of Haitian antipolitics, tracing its manifold forms
and degenerations, from Port-au-Prince to Washington and Paris and
back, articulating a neo-Sartrian totalization of Haitian specification,
an unparalleled phenomenology of the destruction of Haitian popular
sovereignty from the rise of Aristide to the 2004 coup and celebration of
political subjectivation following the universal prescription of the egali-
tarian truth statement tout moun se moun (every person is a person).
If Absolutely Postcolonial stands as the only true critique of postcolo-
nial reason to date, the monumental theoretical reference of the field
it surveys, the critical project it sets forward compels its readers to
question and perhaps to ‘demystify’ the book’s point of unquestioned
faith and even dogma: that relation itself is an unsurpassable, ‘unde-
constructable’ limit to critical thought. I would argue that Hallward’s
dogmatic hypostatization of relation as a content-free, transcendental
condition of human being-in-the-world is a particular form of the
contemporary turn to what has been called ‘political ontology’.
It is precisely this properly ontological assertion that enables the

claim that all politics must be a matter of decision and choice, and that
any attempt to orient a specific politics from reference to an absolute
is disqualified. In other words, if relation is to serve as the absolute,
ontological ground of all politics (as well as all being-in-the-world in
general), it must be preserved by Hallward as pure form, free of all
empirical content, for politics to take shape as the free reign of the

manifold decisions of its various subjects. Bruno Bosteels, in his recent
volume The Actuality of Communism, convincingly critiques the various
contemporary negative ontologies of the contemporary turn of political
theology, from Derrida and Nancy to the ‘infrapolitics’ and ‘impolitical’
of Esposito and Alberto Moreiras, to propose instead a ‘generic’ ontol-
ogy that postulates, following Badiou, the ‘existence of an indiscernible
with which to interpret the impasse of being as the effect of an event
within the situation at hand’ (Bosteels 2011, p. 52).
This theoretical orientation has the distinct advantage, as Bosteels
points out, of avoiding the twin threats of collapsing the event into
a situation of total predetermination by the situation out of which
it arises (a position one might trace to Bourdieu and, to some extent,
Hallward’s nominalist fascination with relation) nor elevating the event
to the status of the miraculous (as one finds in Lacan and Žižek). Indeed,
among the most powerful claims of Bosteels’ intervention is to urge us
to move beyond discussion of political ontology, and to focus instead
on a ‘leftist (or communist – which is not necessarily the same) theory
of the subject’, as well as the attendant assertion that, against Lacan,
Žižek and antiphilosophy in general, any militant theory of the subject
must assert that the subject always comes after any process of subjectiva-
tion (cf. Bosteels 2011, p. 53, p. 214). It is only by refusing the impasses
of these various contemporary negative political ontologies that a path
forward can be discerned in the contemporary eclipse of all the various
historical forms of political militancy.
Bosteels is at his most compelling in calling for the investigation of
the various modes (historical as well as formal) of political subjectivation
that have yet to be discovered in the wake of Badiou’s work. Bosteels is
particularly concerned to avoid the lure of what he, following Rancière
and Badiou, calls ‘speculative leftism’, the leftist version of Hegel’s
beautiful soul, the radical, Manichean position of political purity that
refuses to dirty its hands with any compromises with the actually exist-
ing political situation, and thus remains destined to change nothing
at all. Instead, Bosteels asserts that politics must be ‘reinscribed’ in its
present situation (p. 69). Alberto Moreiras rejects as sacrificial all logic
of evental truth, as, precisely, sacrificing ‘what is not tied to the event’.
In contrast, a politics of the subject worthy of that name must in fact
necessarily affirm what Moreiras rejects as positive philosophies of
the subject that tend to suppress all difference and non-identity: ‘The
nonsubject’, Moreiras writes, ‘is that which the subject must constantly
subtract in a kind of self-foundation that extends into virtue’ (quoted
in Bosteels 2011, p. 113). One should emphatically reject such a line

of argument as inviting quietist depoliticization. Such ‘nonsubjects’
were, for example, Louis XVI after Varennes, or the slaveholders of
Saint Domingue after the uprising of August 1791. These ‘nonsubjects’
of their respective revolutions were, precisely, ‘sacrificed’ to the Terror
insofar as they actively sought to undermine and destroy the struggle
to articulate a new, more egalitarian world beyond all forms of enslave-
ment. Robespierre and Louverture were precisely such militant subjects
of an event whom Moreiras rejects, subjects whose ‘self-foundation’
(‘I am Toussaint Louverture. I want liberty and equality to reign in
St. Domingue’) was predicated on a political ‘virtue’ and dedication to the
common good that refused the various comprises of all Thermidorian,
reactionary politics of interest (profit and utility). It is around such a
point of dispute with Moreiras that one can begin to address the prob-
lem of the ‘historicity of politics and thought’ (p. 278) that Bosteels
so compellingly underscores: ‘Not only: What does it mean to think
in the present of our actuality? But also and above all: What does it
mean to think in the present under the condition of certain events
from the past, […] delving into the archives of popular insurrection and
plebian revolt without sinking them even deeper into the dustbins of
history’ (p. 278).
Yet it remains perhaps the primary task of contemporary political
thought to critique the specific limits of such a positive political ontol-
ogy of the subject as we find, in various forms, in Badiou, Hallward
and Bosteels, without regressing behind the antipolitics of late
Heideggerianism. The ontologies of these three thinkers can all be called
positive in the superficial sense that they affirm that a true practice of
politics (under the shared name of ‘communism’) has in the past, and
can in the future, in fact be practised. Each considers, in varying degrees
of detail, the specific historical and contemporary manifestations of
such ‘truth politics’, from the French and Haitian revolutions, the Paris
Commune and Russian Revolution in the past, to Haiti and Garcia
Linera’s Bolivia today. Each of them, moreover, attempts to describe the
formal parameters of such a positive political ontology without regress-
ing behind the post-Heideggerian critique of metaphysics that has
forced the post-68 generation of thinkers that Bosteels describes into

a general retreat from all political militancy. Each considers a crucial
dimension of his work – with the elder Badiou having gone furthest
in this path – to be the articulation of the formal, philosophical con-
ceptuality and contradictions of any such post-Heideggarian, positive
political ontology.
To pursue this task, the ‘speculative turn’ of Badiou’s student Quentin

Meillassoux offers the resources to think the necessary contingency not
only of the empirical constitution of any world, but of the very tran-
scendental parameters that determine, for Badiou, who or what ‘counts
as one’ in a world, or, for Hallward, the purely formal species categories
such as relation that are actualized in any given situation. As mentioned
above, the Badiou of Logics of Worlds seems to view ‘transcendentals’ as
timeless invariants of any world, and Hallward claims that the ‘tran-
scendental of the specific’ (2001, p. 183) are beyond all genesis. I want
to argue instead that Meillassoux’s speculative meta-critique, despite
superficial appearances to the contrary, offers the (logical) means to
grasp Bosteel’s concern for the ‘consequences’ of any event, itself a
development of Badiou’s earlier and apparently abandoned suggestion
in ‘Eight Theses of the Universal’ that the ‘logic of appearance’ in any
world can ‘undergo a profound transformation’ (2005, p. 153).
This assertion of the relevancy of Meillassoux’s speculative realism for
a contemporary materialism can indeed seem counter-sensical; given the
probing critiques that Alberto Toscano and Peter Hallward have offered
of After Finitude, Meillassoux’s apparent disinterest in the political per
se, to say nothing of the latter’s puzzling celebration of the possibility
of a ‘Dieux à venir’, to cite the title of a recent article, that is, that a
god identical to that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as yet inexistent,
could nonetheless come to exist at any moment.9 It is undoubtedly true,
in light of these critiques, that a merely logical critique of correlation-
ism cannot itself stand as a consequential materialism, to say nothing
of an actual politics. And yet, as Nathan Brown points out in his
rebuttal to Hallward, Meillassoux is explicitly not making an argument
about relation, politics, or even empirical change per se. These are the
concerns of Toscano, Hallward and others, but should not be imported
to condemn Meillassoux for what he has never claimed as the subject of
his critique. Any critique of After Finitude must remain immanent to its
(logical) domain of argument; a politico-materialist critique should only
then ask whether a speculative materialism has anything to bring to the
critique and transformation of actually existing worlds (as I believe it
does). In fact, as Brown argues,
A speculative demonstration that whatever-situation is contingent

rather than necessary (despite its manifest stability) does not under-
mine the political urgency of working toward the contingent stability
of another situation – toward just and equitable ways of structuring
or distributing relations among the given. An insistence upon – or
rational demonstration of – the contingency of any stable situation
that we might imagine or construct, and which we might care to

preserve, would seem to encourage rather than disable the active
task of such preservation, however fragile that task may be. (Brown
2011, p. 146)
In fact, as Brown goes on to point out, the absolute contingency of

a world’s transcendental structures in fact would support Hallward’s
abiding concern for a politics of principle: ‘Precisely because any given
or constructed situation is absolutely contingent rather than necessary,
it has to be upheld by conviction and by force, even if we cannot assure
its protection against the perpetual threat of disintegration’ (p. 146).10
The implications of Meillassoux’s defence of the logical necessity of
absolute contingency, extending even to apply to the transcendental
categories that structure the count of any world, are clear. Meillassoux’s
strictly logical argument must be extended beyond its severely limited
scope, as Toscano, Hallward and Brown all agree, to address the actual
modes of transformation of any world to constitute a materialism
worthy of the name. After Finitude invites readers to think the transcen-
dentals of any world, including Hallward’s relation, ‘as a fact rather than
an absolute’ (Brown 2011, p. 149). In fact, Brown shows that in order
to be thought at all, the correlational structures Hallward describes
as absolute must instead be posited as absolutely contingent, capable
of becoming and perishing. ‘The very possibility of [what Hallward
calls] the specific, then – the factical non-necessity of that which is the
case – requires us to think the necessary contingency of the structural
invariants of our experience’ (p. 155). In other words, relation cannot
be hypostatized as singular, timeless and quasi-miraculous absolute any
more than the manifold ontic situations in a world.
While we cannot regress behind the legacy of post-Kantian critique
to affirm any absolute truth dogmatically, wouldn’t the claims of the
various post-Spinozist truth politics, from Jacobinism and the Black
Jacobinism of Toussaint Louverture, Delgrès and Dessalines, to figures
such as Schoelcher, Césaire and Aristide, compel us to investigate
whether it is possible to affirm a truth such as justice as equality pre-
cisely as a non-dogmatic absolute? Such a project implies not an abstract
confrontation of theory and practice, but the exploration of a recurrent

problem: how can we pass from the essential process of critique to a
politics of the universal? This is a true problem for the various ideal-
ist politicians of Atlantic modernity, from Robespierre and Toussaint
Louverture to Schoelcher, Marx, Césaire, Fanon and Aristide. What
possible relations can be constructed between the articulations of truths
and the laborious, uncertain historical actualization of their implica-

tions and consequences? Perhaps we have to assert, and to take seriously
as a philosophical proposition, that it is absolutely possible to think a
politics of the absolute non-dogmatically, as well as the corresponding
assertion, that we can affirm, at least as an absolute contingency, that
there can be a non-dogmatic politics of the universal.
What if the givenness of all singular forms of universality only appears
as a correlation between world and incipient subject following any
Event? The stakes here are double: first, to assert (non-dogmatically, as
absolute contingency) the absolute possibility of a politico-historical
truth outside of its presentation to a subject (the truth of justice as
equality). Second, to assert the absolute contingency of any regime of
(political) presentation: from within any world whose regime of hier-
archical presentation or countability appears unsurpassable, a subject
asserts not only the possible mutation/singularization of individuals
(in an eternal cycle of mere cyclical, ontic change), but that the very
regime of presentation, the rules of the game, are themselves abso-
lutely contingent (an assertion of structural anarchism analogous
to Meillassoux’s articulation of ‘Hume’s Problem’ [2010, Ch. 4]). If
Meillassoux himself goes on to speculate in subsequent work on the
possibility of a ‘Dieu à venir’, this is a speculative turn completely
unmotivated by the author’s logic of absolute contingency. One
might just as well speculate on the sudden appearance of floating Blue
Meanies or a true communist community. Such decisions are a matter
of ethics, not logic.
There would then be (at least) two questions to ask that might
further determine any meaningful distinction between the empirical
and transcendental non-existence of the subject of universal emancipa-
tion prior to 1791. (1) Can we actually distinguish the empirical and
transcendental conditions allowing for the emergence of the universal?
I think we can, quite easily. We know, for example, the empirical facts
that allowed for the appearance of universal emancipation and the
destruction of plantation slavery as a system or world in the Haitian
Revolutionary sequence, 1791–1804. These include: the vast numerical
disproportion between whites and blacks, a disproportion unmatched
elsewhere in Atlantic slavery, the role of Vodun, the power vacuum in

St Domingue after 1789, the white planter class’s bid for independence
in 1790–91, the circulation of truth statements such as ‘les hommes
naissent et demeure égaux en droits’ throughout the Atlantic world and
St Domingue specifically immediately, from November 1789 onward,
the African declarations of universal human rights such as the Charte
du Mandingue, etc.

But, (2), what are the transcendental conditions of the appearance of
the subject of universal emancipation in a site such as St Domingue
in 1791–1805? Might these include some sort of universal reason
or reasonability including illiterate African slaves (such as we find
in Rancière), or a postulate of universal becoming/singularization
(Spinoza, the late Kant, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri)? In other words, can
we step back from the assertion of unsurpassability that grounds such
a condition as universal reason to understand the very emergence of
the conditions for the taking place of the transcendentality of univer-
sal emancipation?
Or finally, taken another way, insofar as a transcendental subject of
universal emancipation implies the taking place of that subject (i.e. its
minimal condition being that there is such a subject), is it possible to
meaningfully posit (speculatively) the existence of an ideal universal
(justice as equality) independent of its relation to a bodily support,
without relapsing into metaphysical dogmatism? In other words, posed
as a politico-historical rather than purely ontological problem (and
hence to undertake a politicization of the ethically agnostic specula-
tive realist position of Meillassoux), can any other order take place than
what the transcendental regime of presentation (as slavery or Ancien Régime)
decrees? Can there appear an entirely new order of presentation and
counting (such as that of the universal, ethnically, racially despecified
universal ‘blacks’ of Dessalines’ 1805 constitution)?
The radical singularity and absolute contingency – at an ontological
level of the order of presentation – of any universal sequence would
seem to depend on this distinction, to avoid collapsing what Sartre
called historical intelligibility into Glissant’s neo-Hegelian totality of
univocal becoming within Relation. To think singular universality
emphatically, to think beyond Relation, would imply the circumscription
of a transcendental viewpoint such as that of Poétique de la Relation or
even Absolutely Postcolonial, to posit the pure void/non-existence not
only of the subject of universal emancipation, but of the very regime
of presentability/giveness allowing for the appearance of any subject in
the wake of an incompossible event.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the influence of Hegel, and the master-slave dialectic
in particular, on French Caribbean thought, see Nesbitt (2003). For a
Hegelian reading of Fanon, see Sekyi-Otu (1997). Peter Hallward has ana-
lysed in incontrovertible detail the specifically Hegelian dimensions of
Glissant’s early work (2001: 72–73).
2. On the limits of the contemporary turn to political ontology, see Bosteels

(2011).
3. Again, I remind the reader that I am explicitly recoding Hallward, reading
him against the grain as it were, substituting ‘democracy’ everywhere he
writes ‘God’.
4. Such a ‘politics of principle’, need it be said, bears a fundamental relation
with Hallward’s own ‘politics of prescription’.
5. ‘All the evidence’, concludes McShea ‘points to Spinoza’s democracy as a
direct democracy’ (1968, p. 128).
6. Cf. Hallward (2006, p. 185 n. 14).
7. Hegel’s meditation on the spontaneous Aufhebung of the universal out of
the particularity of sense-certainty explicitly (and, of course, dialectically) is
only the most famous refutation of such a non-relational notion of singular-
ity. Of course, Hallward is not making an argument about Hegel or Hegelian
dialectics, but rather about Deleuze’s idiosyncratic notion of the singular, and
through Deleuze, to less philosophical, postcolonial, Deleuze-inspired thought
such as that of Glissant. My point is simply that Hallward’s concept of the sin-
gular ignores its fundamentally relational status for thinkers such as Spinoza
and Hegel, a fact that only becomes important if one accepts the proximity of
Hallward’s own thought to a more Hegelian or Sartrian dialectical understand-
ing of the term. In other words, Hallward’s singularity, philosophically, if not
genealogically via Glissant and Deleuze, is the perennial straw man whose
main purpose seems to be to demonstrate that the later Glissant is theoreti-
cally simplistic (which, as I argued above, seems to be quite true).
8. See in particular Adorno’s critique of Kantian formalism in Negative Dialectics
(1973, pp. 135, 140).
9. Toscano accuses Meillassoux of offering a merely logical (that is to say,
speculative) refutation of post-Kantian correlationism, and plays Meillassoux
off against Coletti’s ‘critical materialism’. Toscano asserts that Meillassoux’s
argument must be extended beyond any mere critique of logic to account
for what Marx termed ‘real abstraction’ (2011, p. 91; cf. Johnson 2011).
Hallward, as one might expect, remains untroubled by correlationism per
se, and focuses instead on what he sees in Meillassoux as a ‘deficit of genu-
inely relational thought’ (2011, p. 137, my emphasis). Hallward notes that
Meillassoux’s logical defence of absolute contingency offers no account of
the modes, mechanisms and forces of actual change (such as power, spirit
or labour, for Spinoza, Hegel and Marx respectively). As such, the actual
transformation of any world following the logical assertion of absolute
contingency, even including its transcendental rules of presentation, tends
to take on the character of miracle (cf. Hallward 2011, p. 139).
10. It should be noted that Brown conflates the contingency of any situation
with that of its transcendental categories or rules of presentation, the latter
being the true novelty of Meillassoux’s argument (one hardly needs a densely
philosophical argument to convince that change occurs in a world).
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor (1973) Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge.
Badiou, Alain (2005) Infinite Thought. London: Continuum.
—— (2009) Logics of Worlds. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum.

Bosteels, Bruno (2011) The Actuality of Communism. London: Verso.
Brown, Nathan (2011) ‘The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and
Meillassoux’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism.
Ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press,
pp. 142–163.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Glissant, Édouard (1990) Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard.
—— (1997a) Soleil de la conscience. Paris: Gallimard.
—— (1997b) Traité du Tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard.
—— (2010) Le discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard.
—— (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London:
Verso.
—— (2008) ‘Order and Event: On Badiou’s Logics of Worlds’. New Left Review, 53:
97–122.
—— (2010) Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment. London:
Verso.
—— (2011) ‘Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’ After
Finitude’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Ed. Levi
Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, pp. 130–141.
Johnson, Adrian (2011) ‘Hume’s Revenge: Adieu, Meillassoux?’ in The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and
Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, pp. 92–113.
McShea, Robert (1968) The Political Philosophy of Spinoza. New York: Columbia.
Meillassoux, Quentin (2010) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.
London: Continuum.
Negri, Antonio (1997) ‘Reliquia Desiderantur: A Conjecture for a Definition of
the Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza’, in The New Spinoza. Ed.
Warren Montag and Ted Stolze. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 219–248.
Nesbitt, Nick (2003) Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean
Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Sekyi-Otu, Ato (1997) Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Toscano, Alberto (2011) ‘Against Speculation, or, A Critique of the Critique of
Critique: A Remark on Quentin Meillassoux’ After Finitude (After Colletti)’, in
The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Ed. Levi Bryant, Nick
Srnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, pp. 84–91.
Part II
The Singularity of Postcolonial
Literatures
6
The Singularities of Postcolonial
Literature: Preindividual
(Hi)stories in Mohammed Dib’s

‘Northern Trilogy’
Birgit Mara Kaiser
In his analysis of the relations between Deleuzian philosophy and

postcolonial literature in Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the
Singular and the Specific (2001), one of Peter Hallward’s main points
of contention is singularity. Hallward unravels his intervention into
postcolonial studies and his critique of Deleuzian philosophy along
the distinction between singularity and specificity, something he had
argued already in ‘The Limits of Individuation, or How to Distinguish
Deleuze and Foucault’ precisely by way of attributing singularity
to Deleuze and specificity to Foucault. As the article holds, Deleuzian
philosophy ‘pursues a fully singular conception of the individual’ (2000,
p. 93), while Foucault’s historical analyses are investigations of specific
constellations of power and work with the notion of a ‘specific subject
[that] is inevitably partial, interested: “he is necessarily for one side or
the other […]”’ (2000, p. 99). Foucault himself indeed uses the term
‘specific’ when, in ‘Truth and Power’, he speaks of the ‘specific intel-
lectual’ (Foucault 2000, p. 129) as no longer an ‘“absolute savant” […]
who bears the values of all’ (p. 129), but as a ‘person occupying a spe-
cific position – but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to
the general functioning of an apparatus of truth’ (p. 131). The biolo-
gist or the nuclear physicist are the examples he gives. What Foucault
phrases quite specifically as a new type of intellectual, namely one
entangled in structures of power, yet able to throw his or her exper-
tise in to ‘either benefit or irrevocably destroy life’ (p. 129), Hallward
expands to a wider conception of subjectivity. Leaving aside the diffi-
culties that such a transposition of an understanding of the intellectual
onto a wider theory of subjectivity might entail, what is at stake for
Hallward in this terminological distinction and in his siding with
123
Foucault against Deleuze are different conceptions of subjectivity. Their

difference hinges for Hallward on the question of whether subjectivity
is thought of as the effect of a social and intersubjective relationality
to an environment, or as dissolved from these. Hallward clearly argues
for such relationality, since it allows for a subject’s ‘engagement’ with
a situation – hence the stress on interestedness and the taking of sides
(cf. 2001, pp. 329–335) – and thereby also opens the possibility for

an active reworking of determining (what Hallward calls ‘specifying’)
structures into specific alliances and positions that can alter concrete
social and historical realities.
The field of critical study to which such a striving for despecifica-
tion has been constitutive is postcolonial theory. Albert Memmi’s The
Colonizer and the Colonized set this in motion – if I limit myself only
to the North African context, to which my later examples will also
correspond – with an analysis of the specifying effects of colonial
power on both colonized and colonizer, and his analysis lays the
grounds for the unworking of these (in Hallward’s terms) specified posi-
tions and the subsequent formulation of specific (national) projects.
It is this strategy that Hallward sees eroded in the developments of
postcolonial theory in the past decades, mainly in Homi Bhabha’s and
Gayatri Spivak’s writings, and he finds the reasons for such a loss of
concrete and contextualized engagement in the prominent influence
Deleuzian philosophy has had on postcolonial theory. Due to this,
Hallward perceives ‘the singular postcolonial mode’ (2001, p. 19) as a
prevailing trend in both postcolonial literature and theory. Deleuze’s
predominant influence on the field is a surprising assertion in itself,
since Hallward’s main examples, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak,
drew inspiration more prominently from Lacan and Fanon (Bhabha)
or Derrida and Marx (Spivak) than from Deleuze. But even if we leave
the theoretical legacies of postcolonial theory aside – which would
distract us from the central question that this volume examines: the
relation between postcolonial literatures and Deleuzian philosophy –
it is striking that Hallward bases his intervention on a presentation
of Deleuze’s concept of singularity (and its resonances in postcolonial
literature) in the way he does. As I would like to argue here, with
recourse to Mohammed Dib, one of Hallward’s examples of a ‘singular’
writer influenced by Deleuze, his presentation of singularity is
neither adequate to Deleuze’s use of the concept, nor to the works of
Mohammed Dib, an inadequacy that, furthermore, prevents us from
seeing the productive links that exist between postcolonial literatures
and Deleuzian philosophy.
Kaiser: Preindividual (Hi)stories in Dib’s ‘Northern Trilogy’ 125
The Singular as the Non-Relational and the Absolute

(Hallward)
Absolutely Postcolonial develops a critique of singularity largely along

the lines of Hallward’s wider criticism of Deleuzian philosophy,
which he perceives as one that moves out of this world. In Out
of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, Hallward cor-

respondingly criticizes Deleuzian philosophy as one ‘of (virtual)
difference without (actual) others’ (2006, p. 162), and as advancing
the dissolution from concrete others and contexts. Reading Deleuze
as ‘a spiritual, redemptive or subtractive thinker, a thinker preoccu-
pied with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialization’
(Hallward 2006, p. 3) his philosophy is for Hallward ‘oriented by
lines of flight that lead out of the world; though not other-worldly,
it is extra-worldly’ (2006, p. 3). The Deleuzian concepts that epito-
mize such a move are deterritorialization, which is understood as
a movement of disembodiment and dissolution, and singularity,
which is read as a self-sufficient single, creative medium without
external criteria. In this vein, the singular is equated with what
Deleuze calls, following Spinoza, the single substance, for Hallward
an all-encompassing dynamic to which there is no outside, as it is
self-sufficient, self-creative and an ‘absolute and exclusive point of
reference’ (Hallward 2001, p. 23).
This last point was already central to Absolutely Postcolonial: here,
the tendencies of moving beyond concrete and localized struggles with
real others are seen as predominant trends in postcolonial theory and
writing, which celebrates ‘a purely fluid difference beyond relations-
with-others’ (Hallward 2001, p. 23) forfeiting localized and specific
struggles. While the Deleuzian concept of deterritorialization stands
for the transcendence of locales of such a ‘hybridising trend [as …] the
recent revival of créolité and mestizaje identity’ (Hallward 2001, p. 23),
the singular comes to stand for global sameness, for the drive toward
‘singular placelessness’ (p. 60) and ‘the dissolution of relationality,
as the expression of a non-relational, self-creative or self-constituent
force’ (p. 329).
Without a doubt, one of Deleuze’s main thrusts in the concept of
deterritorialization is to conceive of processes of unworking rigidi-
fied structures and of unmaking doxa in order to produce different,
unforeseen lines of flight and ways of living. These unworkings are, as
Deleuze and Guattari carefully elaborate in A Thousand Plateaus, only
and always only one side of the dynamic: the unmaking of old lines
of segmentation (deterritorialization) are always bound up with the

creation of new lines (reterritorialization).
Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power

that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has
reterritorialization as its flipside and complement. An organism that
is deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorial-

izes on its interior milieus. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 54)
Hallward dissociates these two complementary tendencies of the

dynamic of becoming and concentrates on only one of its dimensions:
deterritorialization. By purely stressing this unworking tendency and
losing sight of simultaneous reterritorialization, it becomes possible to
treat deterritorialization as the naive celebration of global flows and
a pseudo-liberating transcendence of localities, as ‘escaping […] the
territorial, the relative’ (Hallward 2001, p. 13) and as working toward a
singular mode that ‘undermines the whole dimension of relations-with-
others’ (Hallward 2001, p. 2).
In view of such an analysis, Hallward calls for critical thinking in
general and postcolonial studies in particular to return to the specific.
In addition to the inspiration it takes from Foucault’s notion of the spe-
cific intellectual, the term also draws on Sartre’s concept of situation as
‘a theory of subjectivation undertaken as a project specific to a particular
situation’ (Hallward 2001, p. 247). What is conceptually at stake in the
specific is, thus, one’s relationality to concrete and limited historical
situations (Foucault), and the affirmation of one’s active commitment
to shaping and ameliorating these, based on a Sartrean idea of freedom
as the very moment of asserting oneself in a situation (cf. Sartre 2003,
pp. 503–573). The singular, on the contrary, is seen to affirm the tran-
scendence of all relations, and in ‘The Limits of Individuation, or How
to Distinguish Deleuze and Foucault’, the opposition between specifi-
city and singularity is condensed to that of ‘a specific individual […]
which exists as part of a relationship to a context, to other individuals
and to itself’ and ‘a singular individual […] which like a Creator-god
transcends all such relations’ (Hallward 2000, p. 93). What is effectively
described here as singular is a self reminiscent of a Fichtean ego, which
out of itself can create the world and assert an ‘absolute self-determining
power’ (Hallward 2000, p. 99), and it is the self-determination without
others that Hallward is most worried about, ‘a mode of individuation
that constitutes itself out of itself’ – and he adds that ‘there is nothing
more singular than the Cartesian cogito’ (Hallward 2000, p. 102).
The other pivotal example Hallward gives of such an absolute self-

determining power, next to the Cartesian subject, is global capitalism.
Global capitalism is no doubt the most aggressively singularising

force the world has ever seen. But like any singularity, its operation
is hierarchical through and through: it proceeds through the exploita-
tion of differences and gaps and its impact has proved every bit as

polarising as Marx predicted. (Hallward 2000, p. 62)
One cannot but agree with the critique of global capitalism’s celebration
of players that operate beyond locales, especially in view of the current
increasing disengagement of the financial market from the localized,
material concerns of the world. It is, however, a misunderstanding – and
this is the important point here – to call either the Cartesian subject
or the levelling, uprooting, exploitative processes of global capitalism
‘singularizing’ in a Deleuzian sense. Singularity is a crucial concept for
Deleuzian philosophy, but one not equatable with either of these, nor
with the non-relational or absolute. In Deleuze, singularity amalga-
mates different philosophical, mathematical and scientific implications
of the term and serves the main purpose of addressing the genetic and
always relational processes of individuation and identity, of place-making
and relational becoming. Once we understand singularity in this light,
the concept can then also help us to see the productive links between
postcolonial literatures and Deleuzian philosophy, especially if we wish
to reanimate postcolonial studies as the study of complex processes of
identification and (what Hallward calls) ‘despecification’, which have
always been at the core of postcolonial writing.
The Singular as the Non-substitutable and

Intensive (Deleuze)
The concept of singularity is central to Deleuze’s work and already

appears crucially in Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of
Sense (1969), only to return prominently twenty years later in The
Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The introduction to Difference and
Repetition states right away that ‘repetition as a conduct and as a point
of view concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities’
(Deleuze 1994, p. 1), and that ‘[t]o repeat is to behave in a certain
manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has
no equal or equivalent’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 1). Thus, from the outset the
singular is stressed as part and parcel of the possibility, and necessity, of
repetition, and – since the singular here addresses the non-exchangeable,

the unique – its repetition is also bound to produce difference: to repeat
the singular is to repeat this singular differently. Thus, to begin with,
we must confirm that it is a concept tied to Deleuze’s most fundamental
philosophical concerns: repetition, the difference it presupposes, and
the differentiation it actualizes, and that Hallward is right to highlight
it as crucial to Deleuzian thought.

As a synonym for the ‘non-substitutable’, singularity has of course
also become prominent in continental philosophy and poststructu-
ralism (for example Derrida 1992; Nancy 2000) and has become here
especially relevant in relation to the arts and literature, since it stresses
the work of art as unique – precisely as ‘non-substitutable’ – and thus as
forestalling the abstracting and generalizing tendencies of philosophy.
With reference to Derrida, Rodolphe Gasché notes the singularity of
a text in this vein as its ‘irreplacable corpus, […] this very text’ (1995,
p. 120; cf. also Derrida 1992, pp. 181–220) – addressing both its non-
substitutable materiality, and, on the level of plot, ‘the course of a
unique drama’ (Gasché 1995, p. 120) whose narrative quality prevents
us from generalizing it to ‘a universally articulable truth’ (1995, p. 121).
Likewise from a Derridean angle, Derek Attridge has used singularity in
this sense under the very heading of a ‘singularity of literature’ (Attridge
2004), and went beyond the focus on the unique materiality of the text
toward singularity as the inventive process of reading, as the event of
newness that is not pre-programmable by any specific arrangement
of the text, but is brought about in the singular encounter with this
very text.
The singularity of the literary work […] does not lie in any essence of
the work, any inalterable and ineffable core or kernel. […] Singularity
arises from the work’s constitution as a set of active relations, put
in play in the reading, that never settle into a fixed configuration.
(Attridge 2004, pp. 67–68)
As an event effected by the active relations that are invited by, yet not
predetermined by the literary text, singularity for Attridge is the name
for the ongoing negotiations between the reader and the literary work,
ongoing due to the reader’s unresolvable alterity vis-à-vis the text and
the text’s inventive intervention into the cultural norms it responds
to and challenges at the same time. This particular play that literary
or artistic works enable has become one of the predominant uses of
singularity in recent literary theory. Without in the least disputing the
significance of these approaches, it is important for the context of this

chapter to pay attention to the precise dimensions of singularity in
Deleuze, not only if we wish to understand the Deleuzian concept, but
also if we wish to see its potential relevance for postcolonial literatures.
As François Zourabichvili notes, singularity for Deleuze has, beyond its
more general implication of the ‘non-substitutable’, an ‘original and
precise’ (2004, p. 94, all translations are mine) sense. For Deleuze,

[t]he concept of singularity is based on the notion of a ‘differential
relation’ or ‘disparate’ that avoids the reduction of the simple to
the atomic and consequentially the confusion of the singular and
the individual. [… T]he concept has simultaneously a mathematical
and a physical origin. It is built from the theory of differential equa-
tions (and of the role of ‘singular points’ in the finding of solutions)
and the study of ‘metastabilized’ systems. […] Singularity according
to Deleuze attests to the paradox of difference, that it is one and
multiple at the same time, a ‘point-fold’ (Le Pli, 20). Singularity
is simultaneously preindividual and individuating (DR, 317–327).
(Zourabichvili 2004, pp. 94–95; references given in the quote are to
French texts)
Next to the wider sense of the singular as non-substitutable – as this

very body, or this very event – Zourabichvili points here to the term’s
additional double origin in Deleuze: the mathematical ‘singular
points’ on a curve of a differential equation developed by Leibniz
(pursued in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, as well as in the ninth series
of The Logic of Sense), and ‘singularities’ as used in Gilbert Simondon’s
theory of individuation (discussed in the fifteenth series of The Logic of
Sense and in ‘On Gilbert Simondon’).1 Within the limited scope of this
chapter, it is impossible to attend to these dimensions with the required
depth. But in view of Hallward’s reading of the singular as the non-
relational, as well as in regard to Dib’s novels to which the chapter turns
in its second half, it is precisely this second dimension – Simondon’s use
of singularities as preindividual and individuating – that is most relevant
and I will limit myself to this in what follows.
Deleuze had first engaged with Simondon in ‘On Gilbert Simondon’,
where he notes that Simondon’s study of the physico-biological genesis
of the individual stresses two things: first, that ‘the individual can only be
contemporaneous with its individuation’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 86), in other
words, that we need to be aware of an individual as the (momentary)
result of its (ongoing) process of relational formation; and secondly, that
Simondon, ‘[b]y discovering the prior condition of the individual, [...]

rigorously distinguishes between singularity and individuality’ (Deleuze
2004, p. 87). This latter distinction is crucial, because it means that
Deleuze poses the question quite differently, or inserts a level of inquiry
that is missing if we conflate these two. Rather than presuppose the
existence and unity of the individual, Deleuze is interested in its
processes of formation, in the becomings of an entity – and by impli-

cation its re-formation in future becomings. With Simondon, Deleuze
understands the ‘multiple, mobile and communicating character of
individuality, its implicated character’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 254) and writes
that ‘[w]e are made of all these depths and distances, of these intensive
souls which develop and are re-enveloped’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 254). On
these grounds, he is able to reject the alternative between either already
given individuals as different and separate entities or an undifferenti-
ated mass of sameness.
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze then refuses, also here with explicit
reference to Simondon, to ‘accept the alternative which thoroughly
compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities
already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated
abyss’ (1990, p. 118). Instead, he affirms the world as teeming ‘with
anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singulari-
ties’ (1990, p. 119; a second source on which Deleuze draws for this is
Stoic philosophy, cf. 1990, pp. 4–12; pp. 127–147). But it is especially
with Simondon that we can start our analysis from a subterranean or
preindividual level and see how these still impersonal singularities are
actualized and organized during the concrete ontogeneses of individu-
als or ‘selves’. Simondon’s L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme
et d’information contested the hylomorphic presupposition of exterior
and anterior principles of individuation which abstractly (and literally)
inform the form an individual assumes, that is the presupposition that
matter is simply moulded into an abstractly pre-existing form. Such an
approach disregards the heterogeneous force-field, the milieu, in which
individuation takes place, and Simondon accordingly replaces the idea
of the (abstract and anterior) mould by that of modulation (cf. Simondon
2005, pp. 45–48): modulation stresses the processual and open-ended
formation of entities, since, as Anne Sauvagnargues explains, ‘individu-
ation implies a constitutive, and hence multiple, rapport to a milieu of
individuation […]; for identity, Simondon substitutes primary and
multiple relation, solely capable of accounting for becoming’ (2004,
p. 134, all translations are mine, emphases added). To the traditional
(Aristotelian) binary of form and matter, he adds the milieu in which
the relational formation of living beings occur, and argues that these
formations are realized as a differentiation of and alongside the milieu
(cf. Simondon 2005, pp. 67–77). Therefore, as Sauvagnargues notes, we
‘cannot separate the individual from its milieu, both of them are gener-
ated in this operation of individuation, which produces them together’
(2004, p. 136).
In addition to this, Simondon himself insists that we must not

understand the milieu merely as an added third term compensating for
the shortcomings of the too vague hylomorphic connection between
matter and form.
The third reality which we call milieu, or constitutive energetic

system, must not be understood as a new term that is added to
form and matter: it is the very activity of the relation, the reality
of the relation between two orders that communicate by way of a
singularity. (Simondon 2005, p. 62, all translations are mine)
Thus, under the ontological precondition of relationality Simondon

considers the prior conditions of individuation, the fact that ‘the
individual is not, properly speaking, in relation, neither with itself
nor with other realities; it is a being of relation, not a being in rela-
tion’ (Simondon 2005, p. 63). From this point of view, the processes
of making and unmaking that is individuation are per se a relational
becoming within a force-field. The very possibility of such becoming is
given because Simondon attends to a zone prior to that which is already
formed. In L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information
he asserts the ‘existence, between form and matter, of a zone of medial
and intermediary dimension – that of singularities which are the
ignitor of the individual in its operation of individuation’ (p. 60). We
have arrived here again at the term under scrutiny – singularities – and
must first of all note that Simondon uses it in the plural. Instead of a
reference to the single or the absolute – in Hallward’s sense of ‘a single
and unlimited ontological Totality’ (2001, p. 67) – singularities for
Simondon are the swarming stuff of a preindividual zone, the prerequi-
site of any process of individuation and becoming. Accordingly, Deleuze
notes that singularities ‘correspond to the existence and distribution of
potentials’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 87) which are organized during processes
of individuation – or said otherwise, individuation resolves the prob-
lem that the mobile, overlapping, incompatible, disparate impersonal
singularities pose ‘by organizing a new dimension in which they form
a unique whole at a higher level’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 87). In addition
to the constitutive role of the milieu during operations of becoming

(and hence their fundamentally relational nature) that we saw earlier,
we also find here the introduction of a dimension of life that precedes
or exceeds the closed-off individual and subsists alongside it once
an individuated person or entity has emerged. The living, Simondon
holds, ‘preserves in itself a permanent activity of individuation’ (2005,
p. 27), an activity that modulates the beings that we ‘are’ in definitive

ways by actualizing a set of singularities, but also a permanent activity
in the sense that it opens and extends these beings onto a virtual plane
of becoming. The preindividual dimension thus not only implicates
all becomings in and with a milieu (and in that sense necessarily with
others), but is also actualized differently in unique constellations. In The
Fold, Deleuze stresses in this sense ‘the real definition of the individual:
concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging
preindividual singularities’ (p. 63); and he holds that ‘the individual is the
actualization of preindividual singularities, and implies no previous deter-
mination’ (Deleuze 1993, p. 64).
Such an understanding of the individual allows us to see it as a dif-
ferential effect of and alongside a milieu, and at the same time as a
certain stabilization of an otherwise dynamic, ongoing, pliable and
relational process, a perpetual becoming that derives its force from this
preindividual dimension. In a similar vein, and in close affiliation with
and direct attribution to Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural
has proposed to call this dimension ‘infraindividual’ (cf. Nancy 2000,
p. 8; p. 198 for reference to Deleuze). For both Nancy and Deleuze, in
their different ways, such a dimension allows for the breaking up of the
hypothesis of the individual as a stable, closed-off, atomistic unit that
is in-divisible, and reinserts into our conception of it a dynamism that
permits focusing on processes of generation and becoming. Seen under
these premises and with the conceptual legacies it carries, becoming
(permitted by singularities as the virtual [or inconspicuous, minute,
swarming] prerequisites of any individuation) can be and must be
affirmed as a process ‘of this world’ – always differentiated from and
within the milieu, alongside which it occurs.
We have, thus, arrived at a quite different understanding of singular-
ity to the one Hallward puts forth. In a second step, our question will
be how Deleuze’s precise understanding of singularity is relevant to
the postcolonial in general and to postcolonial literatures in particu-
lar. Certainly, the levels of relationality and becoming discussed so far
address dimensions that do not immediately translate into political
articulations and struggles against (neo)colonial domination, one key
concern of Hallward’s critique. However, as Simone Bignall has pointed

out, one crucial facet of the postcolonial – not only in the past, but
also for its future – is the examination of ‘a qualitative difference, yet
to come, in practices defining social construction, self-concept and
attitudes of being, relating and belonging’ (2010, p. 2). Emerging as a
critique of Western colonial power and its related onto-epistemologi-
cal2 practices – such as logocentric narratives of a rational subject and

binary oppositions of essentialized difference – postcolonial analyses,
in theory and literature, have offered fundamental critiques of Western
conceptions of self. The deconstruction of the binary oppositions upon
which these rested have been one major achievement of postcolonial
analyses, along with the emancipatory articulation of identities that
had formerly been discarded by colonial discourse. However, under the
current complex, global conditions – of a heritage of colonial exploita-
tion and oppression that exerts continuous influence, but also of global
cultural, political and ethical entanglements, always shot through with
power – the task seems to be to once again re-examine and reimagine
qualitatively different self-conceptions and ‘attitudes of being, relating
and belonging’, as Bignall calls it. The task of postcolonial analyses,
specifically, would then lie in the examination of processes of iden-
tification and individuation as they occur under the condition of
entanglements on a global scale, by paying privileged attention to the
challenges that result for these from postcolonial/neocolonial power
relations, and by envisioning alternative – that is non-appropriative and
non-colonizing – ways of becoming under such conditions.
As I would like to argue with the help of Dib’s ‘Northern Trilogy’,
it is such different practices of becoming, of individuation as well
as of relating, that literary analyses of our postcolonial present are
especially equipped to examine. And it is here that singularity in a
Deleuzian sense can be helpful, as it puts stress on processes of forma-
tion that draw on the swarming field of preindividual singularities,
connecting us on subtler levels than merely as one individual unit to
another. Dib’s novels pay attention to this level and experiment with
a becoming otherwise under the conditions of cross-cultural entangle-
ments: questioning and undermining clear-cut binaries, we witness
becomings in which new zones of cultural contact constitute milieus of
unforeseen individuations. And importantly, Dib remains at the same
time attentive to the difficulties – the joys and pains – these new milieus
and cultural complexities inflict on those evolving in and with them.
Such qualitatively different perspectives on postcolonial becoming
neither celebrate the pseudo-liberation from locales, nor the dissolving
of differences in a global village. Rather, they affirm the complexities of

our entanglements, specific to the unique constellations in which they
actualize, yet in close relation and co-becoming with others.
Mohammed Dib’s Writing of Relation
The French-Algerian writer Mohammed Dib is one of the four literary

cases that Absolutely Postcolonial considers to be exemplary of the
singular postcolonial mode. Hallward is particularly critical of Dib’s late
writings as becoming increasingly detached from worldly concerns and
moving toward ‘a space beyond rapport’ (2001, p. 234). Contrary to
the ‘principle of a territorial enracinement’ (2001, p. 223) Hallward sees
at work in the early Dib, his late writings perform a ‘shift toward the
mystical’ (2001, p. 223) and a flight from the world. It is true that Dib
situated his early narratives in his native Algerian context. In particular,
his so-called ‘Algerian trilogy’ (La Grande Maison, 1952; L’incendie, 1954;
and Le métier à tisser, 1957) highlighted the poverty and harshness of
rural life in Algeria under French colonial rule, which only ended in
1962. After having the protagonist of Un Été Africain (1959) demand
national independence for Algeria, Dib was forced to leave Algeria
and moved to France. With the relatively late ‘Northern Trilogy’ (Les
Terrasses d’Orsol, 1985; Le Sommeil d’Ève, 1989; and Neiges de marbre,
1990) he begins to vary his narrative settings, drawing inspiration
from, among other things, his frequent travels to Finland from 1975
onwards and his translations of Finnish folktales. Although all three
novels – with independent plots and different protagonists – are set
more or less explicitly between a (usually unspecified) North, France,
and a South that is sketched only by allusions to Islamic traditions
and moments in Algerian history, Dib continues to examine North
African–European relations in these novels. In each work, the protago-
nists (whose reveries and first-person narratives the texts present) are
struggling with the difficulty of living in the wake of a geographical
displacement and forced distance from a loved one. Migration and
exile are predominant issues in postcolonial Algeria and a major trait
of French-Algerian postcolonial relations, which were first marked
by the exodus of one million pieds noirs from the settler colony to
France in the immediate aftermath of independence, and since the
1980s by a steady stream of migration from Algeria to (mainly) France,
continuing to the present day, as the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal
pointed out in a recent interview (cf. Sansal 2011). As I would like to
argue, Dib’s novels dissect the incessant labour of those who left to
fabricate – as Borhan, first-person narrator of Neiges de marbre, says –

a ‘ground on which to place my two feet together’ (Dib 2003b, p. 172,
all translations of Dib are mine).
The first of the three novels in the trilogy, Les Terrasses d’Orsol, pursues
the growing derangement of the narrator Aëd, who has been sent – or
imagines that he has been, we are not sure as the narrative voice remains
closely tied to his perspective and he is not entirely reliable – as envoy

of an unspecified country to Jabher, a city in the fictional northern land
of Orsol. Somewhat alienated from life in the city, he discovers – or
hallucinates, we are likewise never sure – a giant abyss in the middle
of it, populated by reptile-like creatures. In his confusion, Aëd refers to
them as ‘hideous creatures’ (Dib 2002, p. 42) and ‘monstrous tarantulas’
(p. 43), but has to admit to his horror that ‘the monsters that I saw
crawling down there were, I knew, human beings’ (p. 52). The nature of
the chasm or its role in the city is not revealed and the novel pursues
Aëd’s growing despair at the indifference with which Jabher’s inhabit-
ants respond to his attempts to alert them to the fact that there are
human beings living ‘là-bas’ (p. 93).3 The lives of the Jabherians on the
‘white and quiet terraces of Orsol’ (p. 87) continue undisturbed, but for
Aëd a process of transformation begins, as he had already feared early
on in the novel.
Everyone of them, without wanting it, forced me to drop the man

that I was, abandon him and the habits, the principles, the illusions
which he hung on to, which he believed in. No doubt, I was already
ripe for a mutation and I had given my consent to it without my
knowledge. (p. 23)
It is this mutation, Aëd’s increasing withdrawal from reality, that, for

Hallward, is exemplary of a progressive dissolution of an individual
that would otherwise be called to intervene and rectify this abysmal
scenario (cf. Hallward 2001, pp. 231–233). Unable to do this, Aëd grows
more and more detached from life in Jabher and increasingly depend-
ent on Aëlle, his lover in Jabher. Although progressively alienated from
his immediate surroundings, it is the relation to her that keeps him
alive, and, as Hallward grants, offers ‘a partial redemption-by-relation’
(2001, p. 233).
Relation, thus, remains one of the most crucial elements of Aëd’s
transformation in/with Jabher: he comes undone in relation to the
distressing chasm and indifference of his surroundings, he becomes
in relation to his milieu, we could say – one that proves resistant to
emerging and changing with him. It is only in the relation with his
lover Aëlle that he finds a new footing again. She provides what he
had hoped to find in Jabher early on in the novel: ‘All of a sudden,
I thought I was treading with a safer foot on firmer ground’ (p. 38).
We must grant that the ground she provides is not firm in the conven-
tional sense, since he does become increasingly withdrawn from daily
routines, and what Les Terrasses d’Orsol closely pursues is indeed Aëd’s

despair over life in Jabher. Nevertheless, we do not witness the blissful
withdrawal into the mystical depths of his own self that Bachir Adjil
suggested in his reading of the novel. Adjil sees in Aëd’s withdrawal
resonances of Sufi mysticism and Ishraqui traditions (cf. Adjil 1995,
pp. 156–184), and affirms this as an inner, spiritual journey moving
beyond the worldly (and does so with references to the Deleuzian
concept of becoming [cf. Adjil 1995, pp. 144–155]). Hallward largely
follows Adjil’s reading (cf. 2001, pp. 215–224), but, unlike Adjil, rejects
this move as ‘singularizing’. Also in view of the other novels of the
trilogy, where relations to lovers and the transformations of the self
brought about through the entanglements with loved ones hold a
central position, a mystic inner journey of Sufi inspiration seems to be
less important here, whether we were to praise it like Adjil, or reject
it like Hallward. Rather than an inner journey, it is Aëd’s constant
exchange with Aëlle, his constant relatedness and address(ability) to
this lover that the novel pursues. Dib marks this address(ability) even
in her name, which plays on the French à elle meaning ‘towards her’
or ‘hers’, and stresses Aëd’s relationality to his milieu, made up mainly
of his Jabherian acquaintances, the city, the chasm ‘là-bas’, and Aëlle.
In relation to these, Aëd becomes undone and transformed. However
happy the result may be, the focus lies on the character’s manoeu-
vring in a new land and on the relations which (trans)form him there.
Neither in Les Terrasses d’Orsol, nor in either of the other two novels of
the trilogy, do we find the narrators able or interested in transcending
these relations in order to flee the world, as Hallward suggests.4 Much
like Aëd’s expressed wish to tread the ground with firmer steps, Borhan
notes towards the end of Neiges de marbre, despite his sadness over the
failure of his marriage, that ‘I still search for a ground on which to place
my two feet together’ (p. 172). Neither Aëd’s nor Borhan’s sadness and
grief prompts a withdrawal into mystical realms. Much rather, they are
figures of a continuous struggle with this world, made up of the ground
one lives on and the people one loves; figures who despite their despair
continue to live and affirm relationality and continue to be moulded
under its predicament.
Le Sommeil d’Ève – the Preindividual (Hi)stories of

Faïna and Solh
Keeping in mind the specific question of preindividual singularities that

we saw in Simondon and Deleuze, I would like to turn, in a last step,
to Le Sommeil d’Ève. Again, for Hallward, the novel depicts the lack of
rapport and dialogue between the two main characters, Faïna and Solh

(cf. Hallward 2001, p. 234), and epitomizes the fact that ‘the link between
situation and reaction is broken beyond repair’ (p. 205), forestalling
any active intervention into the situation or sense of agency. At first
sight, the narrative structure of Le Sommeil d’Ève might motivate such a
reading: while the first half of the novel consists of Faïna’s first person
narrative, the second is narrated from Solh’s perspective. The two lovers’
accounts are, therefore, formally separated as they move back and forth
between Finland and France caught up in a constellation that makes
a relationship difficult for them: Faïna is three years into her marriage
with Oleg, living in Finland, and pregnant with their son Alexis, while
Solh, an unspecified ‘Jew or Arab’ (p. 67), as Faïna’s father derogatively
calls him, lives in France. By means of his troubled memories of the
Algerian war of independence we can assume Solh to be Algerian.
After her return from France (and Solh) to Finland (and Oleg) for the
birth of her son, Faïna muses in her part – suitably entitled Moi qui ai
nom Faïna (‘Me who is called Faïna’) – about her love for Solh and her
intense longing for him: ‘He is inside of me, too close for me to look at
him – and at the same time I see him. I am filled up, I am covered by
Solh’ (p. 12). In her reverie she ‘inwardly chat[s] with Solh’ (p. 30), an
internal heart-to-heart of which she says it is ‘not a real thought, less
than that. It was a voice without voice, a vibration’ (p. 30). In her inte-
rior monologue she dreams of Solh and talks of her longing for him, as
well as her increasing fatigue: ‘I have a terrible desire to sleep, a craving
for night where I so much long to hold Solh’ (p. 12). This fatigue grows
stronger and stronger until Faïna can barely continue her maternal and
daily tasks, increasingly refusing to take care of them. At this point, the
narrative shifts to Solh’s perspective – a reversal underlined by the part’s
title Moi qui ai nom Solh (Me who is called Solh), perfectly mirroring
Faïna’s narration. We learn from his interior monologue that Faïna had
spent time with him in France after the birth of her son, but returned
to Finland. And just as we had heard Faïna before ‘embracing your
memory, Solh’ (p. 109), he now embraces hers by dwelling in turn on
his love for her, recalling how he cared for her in her state of increasing
immobility and silence.
Rather than suggesting the absence of dialogue, or a movement

beyond rapport, the reversal of perspective allows Dib to precisely por-
tray intense relation that goes beyond what any dialogue could reveal.
In fact, the only direct conversation between the two characters that
appears in the novel by means of telephone conversation, ironically
rings hollow with a painful lack of communication. The bond which
is otherwise so present in their reveries, must be explicitly stated by

Faïna during their telephone call: ‘I want you to know that if there
was anyone who touched the wound of my soul, it is you’ (p. 100).
They have each other under their skin, as she says that Solh ‘invaded
me with his love like a beast of prey. He has occupied me and I have
to live with the predator until I die from it’ (p. 103). Indeed, this is
the story of an intense affective tie that transforms both characters
(although to different degrees) – and we witness the transformation
in the interior ‘dialogues’ of both perspectives. The intense affect of
love, actualized with and for each other, becomes a new milieu in
which the two co-emerge, at times actually together, at others across
long distances.
In this sense, Le Sommeil d’Ève is also the story of such intense affec-
tive ties under the predicament of spatial distance and unfortunate
circumstances. Early on in the novel, Faïna laments ‘[w]e are together,
but where? – nowhere’ (p. 13). And yet, despite the intensity of their
love, they do not negotiate a future together:
To live with you, I dream of nothing but that. But you are three
to demand the same thing: you, Oleg and Lex. We might as well
end our relations, Solh, why not, but I will never stop speaking
to you in my thoughts. That will be my share and my lot – not a
dream: but the truth without which I would not exist. (Dib 2003a,
pp. 35–36)
We might read the fact that they never dream of an escape toward
a liveable, practicable relationship as a sign of their lack of (will to)
rapport. However, this would be to disregard the intense rapport that
permeates their interior conversation, even if not an actual lived rela-
tionship. As Solh remarks, it is ‘the same forces that beat her, beat me’
(p. 169), regardless of whether circumstances permit a viable relation-
ship. By means of this set-up, Dib does not treat Faïna and Solh as two
separate and pre-existing individuals who interact (in a second step)
through dialogue, but rather depicts their relational individuation with
and alongside each other, a relatedness as lovers that is affirmed by the
characters and exposed by the novel even in the absence of a sustainable

(institutionalizable) relationship. In this process, they emerge along
certain vectors of a shared milieu, as, for example, ‘taking a trip to the
country’ (Dib 2003a, p. 182) or ‘having sex in Hotel Academica’ (p. 68,
p. 159). At the same time, they diverge along others vectors, such as
‘loving trees’ and ‘having Alexis’ (Faïna) or ‘doing mathematics’ (Solh).
At the points where they converge – not only when meeting at different

hotels, but also when Solh starts recalling Faïna’s childhood memories
as his own – they do so with an intensity that undercuts the assumed
unity and separated existence of the individual: ‘You passed from you to
me, Faïna, and I have passed from me to you […] twins, one being the
mirror of the other, the image in the mirror’ (p. 191). In Deleuzian
terms, what we witness is a block (or a line) of becoming, much as
Deleuze and Guattari explain for one of their privileged examples, the
wasp and the orchid: ‘A coexistence of two assymetrical movements
that combine to form a block, down a line of flight that sweeps away
selective pressures’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 293–294). Such a
line of becoming does not ‘link the wasp to the orchid, any more than it
conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying them away
in a shared proximity’ (p. 294). It is such a shared proximity that Dib
alludes to when Solh remembers the likeness that people noticed about
him and Faïna – thinking they were brother and sister, surprisingly so,
because ‘nothing lent itself to likeness in our case’ (Dib 2003a, p. 190).
Solh claims that it must have been because of the many ‘moments […]
that stayed between us’ (p. 190) and due to which ‘one must emigrate
toward each other’ (p. 191).
From this angle, after their trip to the countryside in France, during
which Faïna remains for the most part silent, Solh tells himself that
despite her muteness, she responds to him by offering ‘herself as a
response’ and that she thereby ‘takes up a dialogue with you, a dialogue
without words, phrases what the heart attempts and always fears to
admit. A dialogue, it will never cease, you are certain of that’ (p. 203).
What he phrases here toward the end of the novel, echoes what Faïna
herself had asserted at its beginning:
I am bound to Solh with my whole being, flesh and thoughts […]

Solh is more than the man I love: he is the mirror that sends the
reflection of the world back to me. Close or far, alive or dead, he
remains the one who gave me breath and life back. Therefore, there is
no interruption for me. Our days together are fused in an irresolvable
continuity and I advance calmly on that basis. (p. 37)
In regard to the Deleuzian use of singularity, upon which this chapter

hinges, we can thus note that in Le Sommeil d’Ève Faïna and Solh are pre-
sented not only – as is perhaps common in a love relation – as unique
for each other, but at the same time, via the narrative structure of two
intertwined yet distinct reveries, as non-exchangeable relata of their
relation. They live and suffer their love together, but do so differently
from each other. During the telephone conversation Faïna remarks: ‘We

both suffered. In different ways, sure. In any case, nothing is compa-
rable. But I feel you’ (p. 98). Although they respond to their distance
and closeness in singular ways and are in that sense not comparable,
they live an intense connection – I feel you. But even more importantly,
Dib sketches their relational becoming as one that rests on a level of
preindividual intensity, a level that exceeds individual unity or sepa-
rable entities: an unworking of what they were before their encounter
(Algerian mathematician in France, language teacher in Kivinlinna),
precisely due to an intense relationality, not the result of two separate
beings and their fleeting relations with others. We are not shown who
they were before; all we get to see is a portrait of their entanglement
as a block of intensity: Solh-and-Faïna, in their co-becoming as lovers
between France and Finland.
Postcolonial Becoming of the Present
Dib’s ‘Northern Trilogy’ scrutinizes the becomings of figures in milieus

that are more complex than (bi)national settings. Traditionally, the
cultural contact zones that inform much Algerian literature and in
which belonging and becoming is negotiated are most often those
between France and Algeria. Dib explodes this binary by bringing a
third term into the equation, thus multiplying cultural references and
exceeding the binary of French–Algerian relations by going to the far
North. On the basis of this expanded setting, he then shows his figures
in the (re)making, involved in incessant and precarious processes of indi-
viduation and becoming in response to the milieus they are in. They
respond to the ones they come to love and are driven by the one prob-
lem that haunts them all: how to live in this world? In this sense, Dib
writes against the particular background of an Algerian predicament –
a long and close entanglement with France, faced with the lot of
forced migration and displacement. But what his ‘Northern Trilogy’
proposes in the light of this is by no means a disentanglement of these
two cultural or national realms – the difficulty of such attempts have
masterfully been highlighted by Balibar (1999) and Rosello (2003). Nor
is Dib concerned with an exploration of Algerianness. He much rather

experiments with what Bignall has called a (Deleuzian) alternative view
of relational selfhood. As we have seen in Dib, he affirms what Bignall
had asserted for Deleuze, namely that
we are complex bodies that have been creatively produced through

the positive generative forces of desiring-production and the con-

structive process of different/ciation. […] In recognizing that my
relations with others are always partial, that we combine in selec-
tive ways and can sensibly avoid imposing upon each other at the
sites where our bodily compositions disagree, my recognition of the
complex composition embodied in the form of the other is the basis
for a politics of joyful assemblage and an ethics of care. (Bignall
2010, p. 217)
What we saw in Le Sommeil d’Ève is that ‘complex composition’ of Solh-

and-Faïna, something equally echoed by the ‘complex compositions’ of
Borhan-Lyyl-Roussia and Aëd-Aëlle. Each of these exceeds a single indi-
vidual and rests on intensities that subsist underneath the individual
components, even if somewhat indifferent to (or complicating) liveable
relationships in a mundane sense. And yet, despite their often painful
struggles – a predicament shared by many nomads and migrants – Dib
shows his characters not as escaping toward a space beyond rapport.
The novels instead dissect processes of formation, which are partly
also deformations. Such processes imply a preindividual level that para-
doxically needs to merge with and be (however ephemerally) integrated
into a definitive, modulated individual, which can then narrate and
have a (hi)story. In view of the ‘Northern Trilogy’, but also in light of a
Deleuzian employment of singularity, we might say that there are no
singular individuals, but only definitive ones, integrating preindividual
singularities. As I have argued, Dib’s ‘Northern Trilogy’ dissects precisely
these dimensions in relating and belonging, and examines the milieus
of individuations and processes of becoming beyond binaries, while
remaining at the same time attentive to the joys and pains this always
also implies.
For Deleuze, singularity articulates one avenue into the complex
processes of individuation and relationality, and this is – on the one
hand – what ‘Deleuze’ can bring to postcolonial literatures. At the same
time, it is especially postcolonial writing like Dib’s that registers and thinks
through these processes of becoming for our postcolonial present, dis-
secting them in historically, socially, linguistically complex yet concrete
settings; in scenarios that are informed by colonial pasts and that ask for
complex accounts of our positioning (territorialization) and becoming
(deterritorialization) in this world in view of differential futures. This is,
on the other hand, what postcolonial literatures offer to ‘Deleuze’: the
careful, narrative and complex accounts of such becoming, giving food
for thought and for further conceptual precision to Deleuzian analyses.

Notes
1. The mathematical origins of the concept lie in Leibniz’s theory of singular
points and the differential calculus. In order to determine the behaviour of
curves, Leibniz developed mathematical integration and differentiation, per-
mitting him to determine the shape of a curve by determining the distribution
of its singular points or singularities, points at which the curve changes its
direction or behaviour. Via Leibniz, the singular for Deleuze is what is remark-
able in relation to the ordinary, mathematically speaking to the ordinary points
of a curve (where the curve does not change direction). The Fold notes accord-
ingly that ‘a singularity is surrounded by a cloud of ordinaries of regulars’
(p. 60) and that ‘whatever is remarkable or singular is so to the degree that an
inflection that erects a singular point can be made to move anywhere’ (p. 60).
2. I take the term ‘onto-epistemology’ from Karen Barad’s reading of Niels
Bohr’s quantum physics (Barad 2007, pp. 97–131). According to Barad,
Bohr contested ‘the Cartesian (inherent, fixed, unambiguous) subject-object
distinction in a way that undermines the very foundation of classical epis-
temology and ontology’ (p. 125) leading her to speak of ‘onto-epistemology’
(p. 185) instead in order to stress the fact that ‘practices of knowing and being
are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. […that w]e are part of the
world in its differential becoming’ (p. 185).
3. Dib wrote the ‘Northern Trilogy’ during a period of stagnation and mounting
frustration in Algeria over what was seen as the betrayal of the revolutionary
aims of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) to establish a socialist post-
colonial nation. The laconic là-bas, which returns in all three novels as the
insinuation of a geographical distance, could be read as Dib’s marker of a
reality from which his figures (and he himself) are geographically removed.
In Les Terrasses d’Orsol, also the additional layer of the growing social
chasm between the ruling FLN party and the Algerian people echoes from
là-bas. The dejected humans in the chasm and the disturbing indifference of
the Jabherians are an uncanny parallel to the indifference of the FLN to the
increasing alienation and impoverishment of the Algerian people. Frustration
over this found expression in nationwide protests in 1988, only a few years
after the novel’s publication, demanding the country’s political opening and
democratic elections. These were granted and held in 1990, only, however, to
reconfirm the continuous iron rule of the FLN and the army: they cancelled
the elections when the Islamist FIS (Front Islamique du Salut) won with a land-
slide, leading to a decade of civil war from which Algeria only slowly emerged
in the early 2000s, but under continued FLN rule – a situation which still today
leaves many with no other hopes than to leave the country (cf. Sansal 2011).
4. The last novel of the trilogy, Neiges de marbre, also focuses on the precariousness
of relation, and likewise does not end happily. It pursues the end of Borhan’s
marriage with Roussia. They live in Finland, with Borhan being originally
from an unspecified country in the South, sketched loosely by allusions to
‘an Islamic sky’ (Dib 2003b, p. 166) and a place alluded to as là-bas (down
there) where his mother lies dying. Neiges de marbre recounts the pain of
‘the death of love’ (p. 103), and depicts Borhan’s and Roussia’s increasing
estrangement from each other at the end of their joint life in Finland. Despite

his intense closeness to their daughter Lyyl, Borhan returns to France, and
we witness his double displacement and the entanglements with people in
places that one has moved to; that is, places in which one needs to readjust
to and alongside a new milieu. Like in Les Terrasses d’Orsol, the focus lies on
the Borhan’s manoeuvring of his (distant, yet intensive) relations to Roussia
and Lyyl.
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1954–1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, pp. 111–133.
Gasché, Rodolphe (1995) ‘Possibilizations, in the Singular’, in Deconstruction
is/in America: A New Sense of the Political. Ed. Anselm Haverkamp. New York:
New York University Press, pp. 115–124.
Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.
London and New York: Verso.
—— (2000) ‘The Limits of Individuation, or How to Distinguish Deleuze and
Foucault’, Angelaki, 5.2: 93–111.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2000) Being Singular Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
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tentes fructueuses’, MLN, 118.4: 787–806.

Sansal, Boualem (2011) ‘Hoping for Democracy: When Will the Arab Spring
Reach Algeria? Interview with Author and Winner of the German Book Trade’s
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youtube.com/watch?v=rDwqnoD5mw8 (accessed 23 October 2011).
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2003) Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological
Ontology. London: Routledge.
Sauvagnargues, Anne (2004) ‘Deleuze: De l’animal à l’art’, in François
Zourabichvili, Anne Sauvagnargues and Paola Marrati, La Philosophie de
Deleuze. Paris: PUF, pp. 117–228.
Simondon, Gilbert (2005) L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et
d’information. Grenoble: Millon.
Zourabichvili, François (2004) ‘Deleuze: Une Philosophie de l’Evènement’, in
François Zourabichvili, Anne Sauvagnargues and Paola Marrati, La Philosophie
de Deleuze. Paris: PUF, pp. 1–116.
7
Beyond the Colonized and the
Colonizer: Caribbean Writing as
Postcolonial ‘Health’

Lorna Burns
The critical block generated by Peter Hallward’s appraisal of the state

of contemporary postcolonial studies, Absolutely Postcolonial, had, until
recently, foreclosed on the potential of a productive dialogue between
postcolonial and Deleuze studies. On the one hand, postcolonial critics
found in Hallward’s valorization of specificity a further confirmation
of the increasingly dominant neo-Marxist strand of postcolonial
analysis. On the other hand, Deleuze scholars were (and continue to
be) unable to accept the Hallwardian, or more precisely Badiouian,
account of Deleuzian thought, specifically in relation to his glossing
of the ‘singular’ or virtual (cf. Bignall 2010; Claire Colebrook in Alliez
et al. 2010). As a result, certain key lessons of Absolutely Postcolonial
have failed to impact on the study of postcolonial literatures, while the
interrogation of postcolonial concepts from a Deleuzian perspective
has been a long time coming. While I believe that there are strong
grounds for challenging Hallward’s characterization of the ‘singular’
as a monistic, substance-like ‘mode of individuation [that] proceeds
internally, through a process that creates its own medium of existence
or expansion’ (Hallward 2001, p. xii), to move wholly in the opposite
direction, towards an increased specificity, and thus to insist on
reducing the work of literature to that of political discourse, is to miss
the point of Hallward’s reading.
Absolutely Postcolonial departs quickly from the neo-Marxist and materi-
alist critiques of postcolonial studies: the field, such as it is, has generated
a critical environment so emphatically singularizing that no degree of
close attention to historical and socio-political inequalities (specificity)
could overcome the essential impulse towards the non-relational, pre-
individual and deterritorialized in much postcolonial theory. However,
this is allied with a word of caution directed against those who would
145
too easily conflate the cultural and the political. Revealing his own key
philosophical influence, Alain Badiou, Hallward strictly delineates the
properly political task of realizing universal principles of justice and
equality – a recognition not of equal difference or respect for otherness, but
that of sameness (cf. Hallward 2001, p. xx) – from the role of literature:
What is distinctive about literature is its capacity to invent new ways

of using words [...], at a disruptive distance from inherited norms
and expectations – in other words, its capacity to provoke people to
think, rather than merely recognise, represent or consume. To be sure,
these new ways of using words may have an indirect political effect,
but there is no theoretical justification for claiming that they should
always have such an effect. Literature and politics can both be revo-
lutionary, but only within the limits of their own field. (p. xx)
There is something particularly Deleuzian in Hallward’s insistence that

we take a serious interest in what literature as literature, not as represen-
tation of the real, political commentary or social critique, can do. This
is not to undermine the fact that Absolutely Postcolonial remains deter-
minately anti-Deleuzian throughout. However, it nevertheless points to
a way beyond the stalemate and hints at the contours of an argument
spanning the twin poles of singularity and the specific that, I argue,
remains vital for postcolonial literary studies. Indeed, far from rejecting
the critique, the Deleuzian response to Hallward’s presentation of the
specific and the singular as philosophical concepts would, rather, be to
ask what problems do they address and how can they be reformulated
to better address those problems?
In terms of Hallward’s observations on literature above, something
of the problematic relationship between literature and politics
remains in his formulation. Even if one accepts without reservation
Hallward’s account of the Deleuzian singular, the objections that follow
against ‘what can quite precisely be called postcolonial literature’
(p. xxi) (in other words, a non-relational, deterritorializing, singular-
izing literature) remain strongly orientated by political values. What is
problematic in postcolonial literature, claims Hallward, are the conceits
of difference-without-others, fragmentation, hybridity, creoleness, and
so on. And yet such tendencies are only problematic if they lead
readers to think and then to act in singular, deterritorializing ways.
It is clear from this, therefore, that while Hallward invites us to first
consider the specific role of literature as a provocation to think in new,
creative and critical ways, he also maintains that this must be allied
Burns: Beyond the Colonized and the Colonizer 147
with a consideration of the ways in which these new modes of thinking

impact on other fields such as politics and philosophy. Literature,
then, becomes one plane of immanence or consistency among others:
intersecting and overlapping with different planes, decomposing and
recreating concepts and sensations in relation to diverse parts, produc-
ing new assemblages.
This is of course to adopt a distinctly Deleuzian approach to the

problem of postcoloniality set out by Hallward, but it is the aim of
this essay to attempt to bridge these two critical perspectives by show-
ing how we can move on from Hallward’s critique of Deleuze and of
postcoloniality, but also by highlighting the ways in which Deleuzian
philosophy can provoke new ways of thinking about postcolonialism
and about literature. I do this through reference to a range of Caribbean
sources, some of which form the basis of Hallward’s critique, such as
the Martinician writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant. However, my
main points of (literary) reference will be two works that shed a great
deal of light on the interlinked concepts of the specific and the singular:
Sam Selvon’s An Island Is a World (1955) and Derek Walcott’s Omeros
(1990). One, a neglected work, often overlooked in favour of The Lonely
Londoners (1956) that followed it; a novel concerned with Trinidad’s
middle-class and a protagonist, Foster, whose unresolved existential crisis
makes him ‘more a Prufrock than a Roquentin’ (Salick 2001, p. 83). The
other, a Nobel Prize-winning epic in the shadow of Homer and Virgil;
a celebrated example of ‘writing-back’ as the poet reimagines Achilles,
Hector and Philoctete as St Lucian fishermen. Both texts, however,
evoke the tension between the singular and the specific, and in doing
so reveal the value of both for postcolonial literature. Indeed, this is the
unobserved potential of Hallward’s subtitle: Writing between the Singular
and the Specific. To be sure, the formulation of a specific configuration as
‘irreducibly specific to (though not specified by) the situation of its
articulation’ (Hallward 2001, p. 62) is an important one, as I shall argue.
However in his desire to read Deleuze and writers such as Édouard
Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib and Severo Sarduy in a
certain way, Hallward rejects the revolutionary potential of the singular
as an affirmative force that takes us beyond the kind of prescriptive deter-
mination that is characteristic of the ‘specified’. Might not postcolonial
literature be best understood as precisely that? As the creation of new
ways of thinking (new affects, new percepts) from the relation between
the specific and the singular? Such an approach would invite us to view
postcolonial literature itself as a plane of consistency, the limits of which
would be the singular, on the one hand, and the specific, on the other.
Affects of Postcolonial Literature
Deleuze’s approach to literature is clear: there is nothing to interpret or

understand when reading a text, ‘the only question is “Does it work,
and how does it work? How does it work for you?”’ (Deleuze 1995,
p. 8). Literature, specifically literature, creates affects (which are not
feelings, but becomings) and percepts (not perceptions but ‘packets

of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever
experiences them’ [Deleuze 1995, p. 137]). The pre-individual logic
of Deleuze’s work can be seen in this brief description. Rejecting the
Cartesian cogito, Deleuzian philosophy displaces the transcendent
subject as the primary ground of differentiation or being: it is not a ques-
tion of the perceptions of some pre-existing individual or the affections
they experience, rather the subject comes into being (becomes) with the
expressions or sensations it actualizes. Crucially, the pre-individual
basis of Deleuzian philosophy is directed against a dominant strand of
European thought that has cemented negativity at the core of ontology.
For Deleuze, it is the unfortunate legacy of Platonism that transcend-
ence supervened on immanence: where Plato introduced ‘a new type
of transcendence’, ‘a transcendence that can be exercised and situated
within the field of immanence itself’, modern philosophy has simply
followed suit and erected ‘a transcendence at the heart of immanence as
such’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 137). The Platonic Idea, for example, assumes a
transcendent function since it stands as a pre-existing determination of
the thing. In other words, the quality of the thing is differentiated not
internally or immediately, but by its relative lack in relation to the Idea
that it realizes in varying degrees of accuracy.
The extent to which a negative determination and lack has character-
ized individuation in European philosophy has recently been explored
by Simone Bignall. While such a reading is not in itself new, what Bignall
further argues in Postcolonial Agency (2010) is that it is precisely this focus
on the ‘generative forces of negativity’ (p. 30) that also characterizes the
field of postcolonial criticism. Dividing the field of postcolonial stud-
ies into the two major schools that have increasingly come to polarize
critics – Marxist and poststructuralist – Bignall demonstrates how both
sides remain grounded in negativity and dialectical difference:
united in their common emphasis on the critical power of the

negative. In Marxist postcolonialism, this negativity is rendered
in the dialectical play of opposition; in poststructuralist, decon-
structivist and psychoanalytical postcolonialism, critical negativity
inheres in the crucial lack or absence at the ontological heart of the

subject. (Bignall 2010, p. 76)
More problematically, by continuing to construct difference negatively

either by opposition or by ontological lack postcolonial theory does
not merely preserve Hegelian dialectics as the dominant mode of con-
temporary thought, but remains bound to an emphatically imperialist

worldview. Since the end game of dialectical transformation is the
assimilation of difference, Bignall argues, postcolonial theory ‘proposes
solutions to colonialism that are unable to break free from a fundamen-
tally imperial outlook and attitude, because it assumes an underlying
concept of agency that remains grounded in negativity’, and as such, is
‘aimed at the management of difference’ (Bignall 2010, p. 20; p. 18).
Without pre-existing abstractions such as the One or the Truth as the
transcendent categories that determine in advance the form that being
assumes, Deleuzian philosophy suggests a very different concept of dif-
ference than that offered by the oppositional logic of dialectics. While
Hegelian philosophy stresses becoming over being, it is nevertheless a
becoming that represents an evolution towards a final synthesis and
realization of the One or Unity. As a result, what drives this becoming
is lack judged from the position of the ideal. Moreover, the projected
movement of becoming by this account offers a concept of being and
transformation fixed in a relation with that to which it is opposed (thesis
meets antithesis): ‘reality is not “created” but “realised” in this process,
in the sense that everything that comes to be always already exists, or
is pre-given, and is simply “made real” (Bignall 2010, p. 34). Deleuze’s
comments on the distinction between his actual and virtual, on the one
hand, and the real and the possible, on the other, stress the incompat-
ibility of this account with his own philosophy: ‘actualisation […] is
always a genuine creation. It does not result from any limitation of a
pre-existing possibility’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 264); ‘the rules of actualiza-
tion are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference
or divergence and of creation’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 97). While we might
reflect on the way in which Hegel privileges a form of becoming that is
driven by an immanent force and rejects the Cartesian Cogito as first
cause of being, he nevertheless falls into the trap of Platonism insofar
as he places transcendence at the heart of immanence: a final unity.
In turn, the dialectical production of difference is always a negative
moment, determined (judged even) by its difference from the ideal.
In place of an ontological lack or dialectical opposition, Deleuze pos-
its the actual and the virtual. Such a move resists the dualisms offered
by Cartesian thought since the actual and the virtual are presented as
two sides of a single reality. Starting from the pre-individual field of the
virtual, Deleuze describes the movement from unity to difference in
two stages: first, a process of differentiation, which designates a primary
form of organization that emerges from the chaotic milieu and which
determines the plane of consistency or composition from which the
second process, that of differenciation, proceeds as the actualization of

the thing or state of affairs: the determination of the form, content and
expression of a particular thing as an assemblage.1 Such a process of
different/ciation ‘cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must
create its own lines of actualization in positive acts […], to create its
lines of differentiation in order to be actualized’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 97),
since there is neither a final unity that exists as the endgame of becom-
ing (the elimination of difference), nor a transcendent limitation on
becoming and being (virtual and actual) insofar as both are fully real.
In terms of postcolonialism, as Bignall argues, dialectical philosophy
fails on two accounts: first, by maintaining the oppositional structure
of conflict upon which imperial ideologies operate; and secondly, by
conceiving of difference as an object to be overcome. Deleuze, on the
other hand, offers a positive conception of difference as the immanent
different/ciation of the virtual: a concept of difference-in-itself and not
just specific differences between actual things. Understanding the ways in
which actual things come to be differenciated from the virtual plane of
composition provides us with ‘a true difference in kind as a body changes
qualitatively from one kind of assemblage to another when its constitu-
tive elements shift and combine in alternative ways’ (Bignall 2010, p. 110).
Both Bergson and Nietzsche can be read behind the account of different/
ciation offered here: the Nietzschean relation of forces that either stratify
as actual bodies or retain their infinite speed within the smooth space
of the virtual; and the Bergsonian elaboration of difference-in-kind as a
qualitative, not quantitative difference. Such is an affirmation of the pro-
ductive forces of life: the endlessly creative becoming-actual of the virtual
plane of immanence. In turn, where we seek to understand the different/
ciation of actual things, exploring how they came to be what they actually
are, counter-actualizing being by retracing its becoming, we return to the
virtual or ‘singular’ plane of immanence in such a way as to pose alterna-
tive lines of actualization (differenciation) or to construct a new plane
of composition (differentiation). Rejecting the colonialist logic of binary
opposition, lack and final cause, the central task of postcolonial critique,
then, becomes ‘the disruption and “counter-actualisation” of the prob-
lematic post-colonial present that remains tied to the virtual conditions
of the emergences of colonisation, and the subsequent reconstruction of

an alternative postcolonial present’ (Bignall 2010, p. 114). Postcolonialism,
according to this Deleuzian model, becomes a question of the new and the
eternal return of (not recuperation of) difference understood as an affirma-
tion of life’s productive forces.
Hallward’s account of the singular and the postcolonial, as I have
argued elsewhere, must be read in terms of the negative movement of

Hegelian dialectics (Burns 2010, pp. 18–20). The postcolonial, we will
recall, has moved towards a reality Hallward calls singular and which ‘will
operate without criteria external to its operation’; thus, replacing ‘the
interpretation or representation of reality with an immanent participation
in its production or creation: in the end, at the limit of “absolute post-
coloniality”, there will be nothing left, nothing outside itself, to which
it could be specific’ (Hallward 2001, p. xii). In this, however, Hallward
echoes precisely Hegel’s objections to the affirmative forces of Spinoza’s
philosophy: ‘the cause of his [Spinoza’s] death was consumption, from
which he had long been a sufferer; this was in harmony with his system
of philosophy, according to which all particularity and individuality
pass away in the one substance’ (Hegel 1968, p. 257). For Hegel, as for
Hallward, the Spinozist conception of substance and positive (or imma-
nent) differentiation cannot provide an adequate basis for particularity or
the specific since it involves no other or limitation (dialectical synthesis)
(see Hardt 1993, p. 67). This negative conception of difference is carried
through into Hallward’s definition of the specific, notably in Hallward’s
brief discussion of the fiction of V.S. Naipaul, in which difference emerges
when ‘Naipaul puts himself and his characters in a position of judgement,
as alternatively judge and judged’ (Hallward 2001, p. 332). As a result,
Naipaul’s work ‘is simply specific rather than singular, inflected through
the experience of a positioned narrator or character and maintained as a
network of […] relationships’ (2001, p. 332). In other words, for Hallward,
as for Hegel, difference and specificity are produced negatively through
one’s situated opposition to an other.
By confirming negativity as the generative force of difference and
individuation, Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial, like much current post-
colonial critique, remains trapped within an imperialist framework.2 For
Deleuze, Spinoza joins Bergson and Nietzsche within a minor tradition
in the history of philosophy that escapes the cogito and the negative
dialectic, offering a philosophy that ‘proceed[s] only through positive and
affirmative force’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. 12). But the return to imma-
nence and affirmative forces offered by Deleuze should not be taken as a
rejection of the specific and the actual. Rather, the actual is always created
through positive forces: from the plane of immanence assemblages emerge

through the processes of actualization. Further, what is actualized is never
fixed and reified; rather each assemblage may be counter-actualized and
reconfigured anew. This is why Deleuze’s philosophy consistently evokes
creation in its characterization of being and becoming. And far from being
non-relational, it is the potential for new connections between parts, the
construction of new assemblages that characterizes the potential of this

actual world to become in unforeseen ways.
Island Philosophy
The ability to become-new is a recurrent trope in postcolonial writing.

Cuban theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo draws on Deleuze and Guattari
in The Repeating Island (1992) by viewing the Caribbean as a machine
assemblage that ultimately resists coding, producing syncretic objects
that are open to a continual transformation. For Benítez-Rojo this
ongoing, transformative condition is one that ultimately resists even
the notion of process where that term is taken to signal a progressive
evolution: creolization, he argues, ‘is not a process – a word that implies
forward movement – but a broken series of recurrences, of happenings,
whose only law is change’ (Benítez-Rojo 2002, p. 202). This disjunctive
transformation could not generate ‘a predictable state of creolization’
(Benítez-Rojo 2002, p. 202) but rather an unstable state, and it is this
association of creolization with the unpredictable or unforeseeable that
marks the common ground Benítez-Rojo shares with key Caribbean
theorists such as Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant. As Glissant argues,
‘[c]reolization opens on a radically new dimension of reality [… it] does
not produce direct synthesis, but “résultantes”, results: something else,
another way’ (1995, p. 270). In this, as in other statements, Glissant estab-
lishes clear links between his philosophy and that of Deleuze: dialectical
progress, ‘direct synthesis’, is rejected and in its place Glissant promotes
an affirmative poetics of newness, creativity, becoming and relationality.
Literature, according to the Deleuzian model, may be deterritorializ-
ing or reterritorializing, but what is important in a text for Deleuze and
Guattari ‘is the way it transmits something that resists coding: flows,
revolutionary active lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding’ (Deleuze
1995, p. 22). In other words, it is the creative, minoritarian effects of
literature, its ability to disrupt normative standards that is of interest to
the Deleuzian reader. In turn, if, following Hallward, we acknowledge that
what is crucial in evaluating the literariness of literature is its ability to
cause readers to think, then we see that the role of the (postcolonial)
literary text is to affect the production of a minoritarian line of thought

in the reader. Deleuze, however, would go further. The role of litera-
ture is not merely to encourage the reader to think in a certain way,
even if this represents a new or minoritarian way of thinking for that
reader. Such an approach takes us too close to the cogito. The effect (or,
better, affect) of literature is, rather, the becoming-minoritarian of the
reader. Thus the role of postcolonial literature, however we define it, is

not to produce a reader who thinks and then acts in a postcolonial way,
but rather, to create the becoming-postcolonial of the reader herself.3
Selvon’s An Island Is a World leads us towards a greater understanding
of the role that both the specific and the singular play in developing
(or creating) the concept of becoming-postcolonial, although, as we
shall see, it is a task that remains unfulfilled at the novel’s close: a task
that is indirectly taken up later by Derek Walcott. Crucially, An Island
Is a World is a novel that vacillates between modes of thinking that are
variously specific and singular. The epilogue to the novel, for example,
opens on the protagonist, Foster’s, ‘present’ and we are immediately
aware that he is ill at ease with his place in the world:
Foster imagined Trinidad as it was, a mere dot on the globe. But he

saw himself in the dot.
He saw himself in the dot, and he transmitted thoughts into the
universe. He was lying down on the dot and thoughts radiated from
him like how RKO introduce their films with a radio station broad-
casting into space. (Selvon 1993, p. 1)
This relationality, however, is immediately inverted and we are told

that at other times ‘Foster was big and the globe was small, spinning
off there in space’ (p. 1). In many respects, Foster could be seen to
represent the position of Trinidad, a small island trying to find its place
in the emerging world order. There is an overwhelming sense, as with
Selvon’s first novel A Brighter Sun, of limitation: a parochialism that is
endemic within the Caribbean and which prevents the novels’ charac-
ters from fulfilling their ambitions and potential. For Foster, however,
this is characteristic of a general condition that he meets throughout
his travels: ‘No one thinks of the world. I am an Englishman. I am an
American. I am a white man. I am a black man, No one thinks: “I am a
human being, and you are another”’ (p. 155).
In moments such as these, Selvon appears to be anticipating a kind
of cosmopolitanism: a universalistic vision that encourages every one of
us to look beyond our own closed world and to acknowledged a shared
human existence (Appiah 2006, p. xv). Yet this exemplary postcolonial

move is thwarted in other respects. For example, during his time
in London Foster’s first-hand experience of prejudice, isolation and
loneliness (foreshadowing that of Moses and the ‘fellars’ in The Lonely
Londoners) leads him to question the sufficiency of cosmopolitanism. In
his letters to his friend Andrews back home in Trinidad he writes,

sometimes a man feels as if he hasn’t got a country, and it’s a lonely
feeling, as if you don’t really belong nowhere. I used to think that this
had merit, that we’d be able to fit in anywhere, with anybody […].
I used to think we belonged to the world, that a Trinidadian could
go to Alaska and fit in, or eat with chopsticks in Hong Kong […].
I used to think of this philosophy as being the broadest, the most
universal […], that we’d be able to see the way clearer, unbounded by
any ties to a country or even a race or a creed. (p. 106)
But, he continues, ‘You can’t belong to the world, because the world
won’t have you. The world is made up of different nations, and you’ve
got to belong to one of them’ (p. 107). In presenting these two opposing
readings of the Caribbean’s global cosmopolitanism, Selvon suggests the
importance of both the specific and located, and the relational and uni-
versal. As in the opening image of the RKO transmitter, one’s thoughts
may be broadcast far into the universe but they always emanate from a
particular ground or dot.
Thus there is recognition in Selvon of the need for both the particular
and the universal, but it is a sense of the particular wholly freed from
what Glissant would term atavistic modes of belonging. Where the
complete absence of ‘any ties to a country’ or race, is revealed to be
insufficient to live in this actual world (characterized as it is by a global
world order founded on nation states), the novel resists essentializing
belonging. The immigration of Indo-Trinidadians to India in the wake
of Indian independence is a prominent example of this:
men who had forgotten their nationality in the cosmopolitan popu-

lation became aware of themselves as Indian. A flame of nostalgia
began to spread. Men who had forgotten who they were dusted their
memories and began to talk about going back home. (p. 161)
Expedience and nostalgia are suggested as the driving forces behind this
return, but that the Indian population feels so little attachment to ‘the
country in which they had worked their lives away, to go to distant India
purely for sentimental reasons’ (p. 210), is presented more as a reflection

on the failure of Trinidadian society to be truly cosmopolitan in Appiah’s
sense of the term (2007, p. xv). It is this struggle that Foster’s closest
friend Andrews clearly highlights: ‘this is their country, and they should
help to build it, and suffer with it, and go through all the struggles that
we have to undergo before we find a place on the map’ (p. 181).
So far Selvon’s novel has spoken to what Hallward characterizes as

both the demand for genuinely universal principles such as equality
and the mutual recognition of sameness, and the recognition of specific
ways of being. We can read behind Selvon’s comments on the failure of
certain universalistic concepts and recognize specific historical events
of Trinidad’s history, such as the migration of Indo-Trinidadians in the
wake of Indian independence and the political failure of Federation to
foster inter-Island conviviality and cooperation. However, this, Deleuze
reminds us, is only one way of reading literature. An interpretative
approach such as this treats literature as mimesis, as a reflection or rep-
resentation of reality rather than as itself the creation of possible worlds.
By subjecting literature’s becoming to pre-existing states of affairs,
interpreting the text as a reflection of something else, we take a majori-
tarian approach to literature and miss the ‘flows, revolutionary active
lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 22) that a
minoritarian reading adopts. Following Bignall, we might extend this
further to argue that the former follows an imperialist logic by impos-
ing a predetermined image of thought onto a text’s becoming. In order
for there to be a real distinction between colonial, counter-colonial and
postcolonial thinking, by contrast, the postcolonial is best understood
as a move away from what Walcott terms a literature of ‘recrimination
and despair’ (1998, p. 37) which endlessly repeats the oppositional
politics of counter-/colonialism. Postcolonialism viewed in this light is
always minoritarian, a becoming-new that represents a flight from, not
opposition to, the dominant forces of colonialism.
Hallward’s definition of a creative expression specific to but not
specified by the situation of its articulation strongly resonates with this
description of the postcolonial. However, the Deleuzian logic behind
minoritarian becoming is rejected as singularizing. Yet given the case set
out against negative determination in this essay, we are now in a posi-
tion to better understand the value of the singular or what Deleuze terms
the virtual for postcolonialism and, importantly, for literature. Selvon’s
novel again provides further context for this argument as in another
letter home Foster makes the following observation: ‘Too many people
forget the actuality of life, the exact moments of existence. Each action
is mechanical, habit charting a beaten, circular course’ (Selvon 1993,

p. 128). This realization brings Foster to an impasse and he is unable to
reconcile his everyday existence in Trinidad with his intellectual life:
To escape from this, dream dreams, write books, compose music,

paint pictures, is not the way out. There is something false and hol-
low about each creation of the artist, something lifeless and useless,

inapplicable to the common-place, everyday actions […].
Life as it intrinsically is cannot be depicted. The artist steps over
life to get at the person […]. Any attempt to present life as it is either
recounts events which have already happened, or speculates on
what is to come. The present, in truth, is a farce. It does not exist.
(pp. 128–129)
Foster’s comments on art and literature here are striking in their pes-
simism, and seem at odds with other sections of the novel in which the
narrative is used to defend different art forms such as popular music and
modernist painting, for example. However, it hints at an approach to
life and to literature that brings us close to Deleuze’s own.
Consider the way in which Deleuze reads Charles Dickens’s Our
Mutual Friend in his final essay ‘Immanence: A Life’:
A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found

as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an
eagerness, respect, even love, for the slightest sign of life. Everybody
bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma,
this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrat-
ing him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviours
turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between
his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life
playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an imper-
sonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the
accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity
and objectivity of what happens. (Deleuze 2005, p. 28)
It is this distinction between this particular life and a Life that is of

greatest interest. A Life that is beyond any particular instance of being.
And it is in this sense that Foster’s claim that ‘Life as it intrinsically is
cannot be depicted’ gains new sense. A Life cannot be depicted, we can
only ever experience this particular life and, therefore, the artist must
‘step over life to get at the person’ (Selvon 1993, p. 129). In representing
the specific traits and trials of a character’s particular life the artist may
find that they are simply recounting events past or speculating on
futures to come: in other words imagining a particular way of being.
However, Deleuze’s point is that literature is at its most powerful when
it hints at the presence of a life behind the particular, as in Dickens’ tale.
A life means the potential for life (and for different ways of life) in any
context: life as becoming, not being.

Deleuze’s reading of literature exposes the coexistence of the singu-
lar and the specific, while maintaining that it is the singular power to
become in unforeseen ways that represents literature’s, and life’s, poten-
tial to break free from the strictures of daily routine and mechanical
existence. Foster’s problem is that rather than recognizing the singular
sense of ‘Life as it intrinsically is’ as a potential to become, to escape
essentialized ways of being, he too often falls into the trap of nihilism.
For example, while surveying his fellow passengers on a bus ride into
town he thinks, ‘[e]veryone in this bus is more or less happy, thinking
about small pasts and presents and futures. It is the way of life (as if
I didn’t know). Alternatively, oblivion’ (Selvon 1993, p. 4). While dia-
lectical thought may offer a sense of becoming over being, unless like
Foster’s counterpoint in the novel, the priest Father Hope, one is able to
accept the fundamental premise that the ultimate aim of the dialectic is
the realization of the Ideal (God), then one is in the position of nihilism.
Foster’s fear of life therefore vacillates between nihilistic despair and an
over-determined existence wherein he tries to ‘live in a state of acute con-
sciousness of being’ (p. 129): a consciousness of everything at the same
time. And in the meantime he forgets to actually live his particular life.
If there is something false in the representation of the artist, it is a
necessary deception (indeed Deleuze characterizes literature as working
through the power of the false). It is not possible for a particular life
to be conscious of all things, but it is Foster’s flaw to fall into nihilism.
In the end, Naipaul’s claim that Selvon’s protagonist could be read as
‘a symptom of the intellectual malaise that is eating away at Trinidad
and the rest of the West Indies’ (quoted in Ramchand 1993, p. vi), gets
close to the heart of the matter. Foster is indeed a symptom of malaise,
or more accurately the diagnosis of one: ‘On the journey, he diagnoses
this sorrow: the result of too much aimlessness and hopelessness’
(Selvon 1993, p. 4). But once again this is precisely the role of literature
as Deleuze presents it:
More a physician than a patient, the writer makes a diagnosis, but what
he diagnoses is the world; he follows the illness step by step, but it
is the generic illness of man; he assesses the chances of health, but

it is the possible birth of a new man. (Deleuze 1997, p. 53)
Following Nietzsche in Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze argues that

literature is ‘an enterprise in health’ (1997, p. 3) precisely because writers
diagnose, create new symptomatologies. But in showing us how particu-
lar symptoms or forms of malaise come to be what they actually are,

the affects and percepts of literature suggests alternative ways of becom-
ing. Thus, even while in Foster’s ‘present’ (the epilogue to the novel)
he is unable to escape his malaise, a nihilistic sense of aimlessness in
life, Selvon’s novel offers the reader a range of conflicting perspectives,
playing characters and ideas off of one another, showing us how things
came to be what they are and therefore hinting at the possibilities of a
future that might become very different. This is never utopian, but as
Andrews recognizes, a struggle: always a tension between the particular
hardships of this specific life and the deeper singular sense of being
(becoming) that unites us all. Political positions, literary diagnoses
are produced not by rejecting the singular and focusing purely on the
specific, but emerge from a relation between both.
Diagnosis and Cure
Selvon’s work offers its readers a ‘symptomatology’ of ‘Caribbeanness’:

diagnosing the ills of neo-colonial dependency, parochialism and
integration. But, in doing so, it creates the potential for the ‘birth’ of
a new, postcolonial subjectivity. What is diagnosed in this process is
more than just a reflection of specific contexts, but more generally a
colonialist mindset: in other words, a reactive relation of forces. As
Deleuze outlines in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), it is the affirmative
philosophy of Nietzsche that best illustrates the reactive negativity of
the dialectic and offers an account of bodies defined by the relative
forces acting upon them. Opposed to the dialectic of self and other
in which ‘everything depends on the role of the negative’, Nietzsche
shows us that ‘it is important to see that forces enter into relations
with other forces. Life struggles with another kind of life’ (Deleuze 2006,
p. 8). Far from the non-relational account of singular substances offered
by Hallward, through Nietzsche the Deleuzian plane of immanence is
both constructivist and relational: a relation conceived not as that to
a transcendental subject or predetermined absolute, but simply that of
life relating to another life of the same kind. Difference, in this model,
is the difference of reactive and active forces, the extent to which one or
the other determines the body. The role of the philosopher as physician
is to evaluate and interpret these different forces. Therefore, although
Deleuze via Nietzsche critiques judgement and oppositional thinking,
this is not to say that there is no place for an evaluation of the forces
acting upon this world, for an ethics, in his work.
On the side of dialectical thinking, Deleuze argues, are the reactive
forces as the lowest power of life: it is ‘an exhausted force which does

not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer
acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it’; ‘the speculation
of the pleb, [...] the way of thinking of the slave’ (Deleuze 2006, p. 9).
In his reinterpretation of the master–slave relationship, Nietzsche turns
Hegel on his head to argue that, for Hegel, ‘power is conceived not as the
will to power but as the representation of power [...]. What the wills in
Hegel want is to have their power recognised’ (Deleuze 2006, p. 9). Thus, in
Hegel, both the master and the slave fall under the sway of the reaction-
ary forces that characterize ressentiment and bad conscience; both occupy
the position of the ‘slave’. The operative distinction here turns on the
difference between forces that simply are in themselves (active forces) and
those which depend on external recognition (reactive forces). Hence, ‘the
Nietzschean notion of the slave does not necessarily stand for someone
dominated, by fate or social condition, but also characterises the domi-
nators as much as the dominated once the regime of domination comes
under the sway of forces which are reactive’ (Deleuze 2006, p. ix).
Albert Memmi comes close to this distinction in his characterization
of the colonizer and the colonized as both equally trapped and defined
by their relation to one another. As such, Memmi argues, even if the
colonizer should desire the destruction of the colonized, ‘it would be
impossible for him to do so without eliminating himself [...]. With all
his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indis-
pensable to his own’ (Memmi 1974, p. 54). Since both the colonizer
and the colonized depend for their very existence on the presence of
the other, both are driven by reactive forces, since only a dominated
force reacts to other forces. What The Colonizer and the Colonized diag-
noses in the colonial condition, therefore, is the increase of reactive
forces: the will to dominate rather than the will to power. Viewed
from this perspective, the will to power is never the desire to have
power over someone else (to dominate), but rather the power of trans-
formation. The distinction between an affirmative and a negative
philosophy discussed earlier in this essay is once again of critical issue,
since we are now in the position to understand that the highest power
of life is the immanent different/ciation of Life. Creation, the eternal
return of difference, transmutation: these are the active forces which

do not depend on a dialectical relation, moment of recognition, lack
or negative difference to simply be.
The key actor in postcolonial literature according to this diagnosis is,
therefore, neither the colonizer nor the colonized, but the Overman,
a figure or body in which the active forces dominate. Further, since
true creation, becoming and newness are the production of the eternal

return or actualization of the virtual, only where active forces dominate
can the demand for newness articulated by Glissant and Harris be met.
But this does not mean that we are left in a world without difference
and conflict. As Deleuze argues in ‘To Have Done with Judgement’, the
Nietzschean model gives grounds for a different form of conflict or com-
bat. Judgement is reactive precisely because it takes recourse to higher
values, seeking recognition from a pre-existing ideal, and concerns itself
with the diminishment of opposed forces. Such is to be on the side of
‘combat-against’ or war:
combat-against tries to destroy or repel a force [...], but the combat-

between, by contrast, tries to take hold of a force in order to make it
one’s own. The combat-between is the process through which a force
enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to
them in a new ensemble: a becoming. (Deleuze 1997, p. 132)
The forces of combat-between are linked to a counter-actualization,

since it is a question of creating a new assemblage: returning to the
plane of composition to connect with other forces and become anew.
Judgement, on the other hand, precisely because it is dependent on
higher values as the pre-existing criteria from which judgements can
be formed, ‘prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence’
(Deleuze 1997, p. 135). To have done with judgement, Deleuze stresses,
does not mean that there are no means of distinguishing between
individuals or that all things are of equal value. Rather it poses the
alternative of a relationality that does not posit self against other, colo-
nizer against colonized, but envisions a fraternal relationship in which
forces ‘pass between parties, which provoke a change of state and create
something new in them: an affect’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 127).
We return in this last moment to the affect, one of the two creations
of literature itself, and much of this discussion concerning forces and
judgement finds resonance in contemporary Caribbean literature. Derek
Walcott’s often-cited critique of ‘the pastoralists of the African revival’ who
offer a ‘literature of recrimination and despair’ produced by the ancestors
of slaves or descendants of masters (Walcott 1998, p. 9, p. 37) highlights

the extent to which the prevailing reactive forces of colonization continue
to characterize the malaise of the New World. By contrast, his work is a
move beyond comparison and even representation: as the poetic voice
of Omeros claims, ‘when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?’
(Walcott 1990, p. 271). It seems a curious claim for a poet to make;
however, it comes as the poet’s self-reflexive account of his relationship

between himself and those lives that are the subject of his work weighs
heavily on his mind: ‘I had read and rewritten till literature/ was as guilty
as History. When would the sails drop/ from my eyes, when would I not
hear the Trojan War/ in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop?’
(p. 271). In this moment he is like the ageing Major Plunkett who
obsessively searches for the ‘webbed connection’ (p. 95) between his
housemaid, Helen, and the Homeric heroine: both seek to make Helen
‘the object of a recognition, the content of a representation’ (Deleuze 2006,
p. 9). Such is the ill that Omeros diagnoses: prevailing reactive forces
aligned with the colonialist will to dominate. And the cure?
[…] There, in her head of ebony,

there was no real need for the historian’s
remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen
as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,

swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone,
as fresh as the sea wind? (Walcott 1990, p. 271)
Indeed the search for a cure for ressentiment is one that characterizes the
actions of many of the poem’s figures. Philoctete’s festering wound is,
for him, a sign of his grandfathers’ chained ankles, a ‘rage festering for
centuries’ (p. 244), but it is healed only at the point at which his combat-
against is replaced by combat-between: the obeah knowledge of Ma
Kilman, the plants of the new land, and the cauldron from the old sugar-
mill (all markers of colonization) are brought together not in dialectical
opposition but in the creation of a new assemblage, a new subjectivity:
‘So she threw Adam a towel/ And the yard was Eden’ (p. 248). For the
poet who looks upon Helen as she walks across the beach, his own quest
ends too in the affirmation of active forces: his decision to see Helen as
she simply is. To see only her becoming, not her becoming-Helen.
Literature, Walcott writes in ‘The Muse of History’, represented for him
neither mimesis nor colonialist oppression, but ‘another life’. Unlike
Jamaica Kincaid, whose eponymous protagonist, Lucy, reacts violently
against her colonial education – she recalls reciting Wordsworth’s

‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ in perfect English as ‘the height of
my two-facedness’ (Kincaid 1991, p. 18) – for Walcott literature is not
primarily a site of imperialist domination or alienation. As he argues:
like any colonial child I was taught English literature as my natural

inheritance. Forget the snow and the daffodils. They were real, more

real than the heat and the oleander, perhaps, because they lived
on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory. There is a
memory of imagination in literature which has nothing to do with
actual experience, which is, in fact, another life, and that experience
of the imagination will continue to make actual the quest of a
medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale, because of the power
of a shared imagination. (Walcott 1998, p. 62; emphases mine)
Here Walcott acknowledges what Selvon’s Foster could not: that

literature moves beyond this particular life and enables us to intuit the
singular (a) Life, which is the condition of its existence. No oppositional
positioning of being and nothingness, Deleuze’s Nietzsche affirms that
‘Life struggles with another kind of life’ (2006, p. 8), just as Walcott
recognizes that literature’s role is to create possible worlds (affects
and percepts) and not merely to reflect a particular political reality or
specific social circumstance in the first instance.
Taking seriously Hallward’s claim that we approach literature prima-
rily as literature, this essay has explored how postcolonial literatures
‘work’ as specific and singular expressions: resisting the Hegelian
critique Hallward projects onto Deleuze and highlighting the value
of an affirmative approach to the forces that define literature and
postcolonial critique. Ultimately, if we are to fully acknowledge the
value of the formula ‘specific to but not specified by’ it must be regarded
as a rejection of reactive forces. Viewing the specific as relational but
not over-determined (dominated) is to understand it as the expression
of active forces. As a result, far from providing the grounds for its
critique, Deleuzian thought is well placed to account for the affirmative
actualization of the specific. This much Caribbean symptomatologists
diagnose as they reveal the ‘aimlessness and hopelessness’ (Selvon 1993,
p. 4) of a world trapped in the oppositional logic of imperialism and the
colonialist desire to ultimately overcome difference. In doing so, how-
ever, they also point towards its cure: the affirmation of Life, becoming
and the production of the new as the specific work of postcolonial
literatures.
Notes
1. See Bignall (2010, pp. 103–104); Deleuze (2004, p. 261).
2. Indeed, Bignall presents her book as a major challenge to Hallward’s reading.
3. Since becoming is a minoritarian movement, one does not become-man. It
is rather, only the becoming-woman of the man or woman that captures the
sense of the concept.

Works Cited
Alliez, Éric, Claire Colebrook, Peter Hallward, Nicholas Thoburn and Jeremy
Gilbert (2010) ‘A Roundtable Discussion’. New Formations, 68: 143–187.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2007) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.
New York: Norton.
Benítez-Rojo, Antonio (1996 [1992]) The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and
the Postmodern Perspective. 2nd edn. Trans. James Maraniss. Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press.
—— (2002) ‘Creolization and Nation Building in the Hispanic Caribbean’, in
Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature. Trans.
James Maraniss. Ed. Timothy Reiss. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 201–210.
Bignall, Simone (2010) Postcolonial Agency. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Burns, Lorna (2010) ‘Becoming-Bertha: Virtual Difference and Repetition in
Postcolonial “Writing Back”, a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso
Sea’, Deleuze Studies, 4.1: 16–41.
Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
New York: Zone Books.
—— (1995) Negotiations: 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia
University Press.
—— (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco.
—— (2004) Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum.
—— (2005) Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Trans. Anne Boyman. New York:
Zone Books.
—— (2006) Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London:
Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2006) Dialogues II. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum.
Glissant, Édouard (1995) ‘Creolization and the Making of the Americas’, in
Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. Ed. Vera
Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press,
pp. 268–275.
Hardt, Michael (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. London:
UCL Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1968) Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Trans. E.S. Haldane and
Frances Simson. London: Routledge.
Kincaid, Jamaica (1991) Lucy. London: Jonathan Cape.

Memmi, Albert (1974) The Colonizer and the Colonized. Trans Howard Greenfield.
London: Souvenire Press.
Ramchand, Kenneth (1993) ‘Introduction’, in Sam Selvon, An Island Is a World.
Toronto: TSAR Publication, pp. v–xxv.
Salick, Roydon (2001) The Novels of Samuel Selvon: A Critical Study. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press.
Selvon, Sam (1985) The Lonely Londoners. Harlow: Longman.

—— (1993) An Island Is a World. Toronto: TSAR Publication.
Walcott, Derek (1990) Omeros. London: Faber and Faber.
—— (1998) What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
8
Becoming-animal,
Becoming-political in Rachid
Boudjedra’s L’Escargot Entêté

Réda Bensmaïa
Translated by Patricia Krus
Portrait of an illusion: one of the most striking phenomena for

critics – and perhaps for literary critics in particular – is indeed the critical
fecundity and pertinence of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts pertaining to
literary texts and, more generally, of their artistic concepts (painting,
cinema, music). We marvel at the fact that a certain text by Kafka,
Döblin, Blanchot, Proust or Mozart seems to have been written in the
wake of what we find in conceptual form in the work of the two philoso-
phers. But even more interesting and disturbing in certain respects is the
existence of the reverse phenomenon in another ‘species’ of critics. For
these latter, it was not the philosophical and critical work of Deleuze and
Guattari that unearthed an analytic or critical gem (on the quality of a
musician’s pulsed timing, intuition relating to an event, a line of flight
or the capture of a haecceity, the singularity of an author’s becoming-
animal, etc.), but, on the contrary, the perspicacity and poetic genius of
the authors and creators ‘elected’ by the two philosophers that led them
to develop their theoretical problems and refine their concepts. If critics
base their arguments on such premises, what is, perhaps sadly, missed
in both cases is the specificity of the philosopher’s work in relation to
that of the creator of a work of art. Both are, in my opinion, empirical
approaches, which remove from the ‘encounter’ (cf. Bensmaïa 2010)
between philosopher and artists everything that makes such encounter
a crucial moment in the creative process – in the process of the creation
of concepts on the part of the philosopher, and in the process of the
creation of percepts and affects on the part of artists. But let us not be
mistaken: sending the former back to his concepts and the latter back
to their percepts or affects does not imply in the least that both do not
ride the same tide. A ‘real’ concept carries as much affect as a literary
text. And reciprocally, what Deleuze and Guattari define as ‘percepts’
165
are never without critical or theoretical implications. The poetic force

of a verse by Celan or Hölderlin does compel one to think.
It seemed important to signal some of these problems raised by the
relation between Deleuze’s critical texts and the works he interprets, in
order to lay bare a number of risks or pitfalls: the ‘empirical’ pitfall, as it
was called earlier, of reducing the unknown and the new to the known;
but most importantly the risk of missing the real nature of the ‘encounter’

between a philosopher’s thought and that of a writer, painter or
musician. What deceives us here and leads to this paradoxical situation
is the fact that the Deleuzian approach itself seems very often to go in
the direction of the illusion I am describing: the illusion that it would
be from the reading of an admired author or a particular work that a
certain concept is ‘born’. We can even find a reason for such a misun-
derstanding, for example, in the first chapter of The Logic of Sense, which
invites us to believe that Deleuze merely extracted his logic of sense
from the works of Lewis Carroll and the paradoxes the latter created
in Alice in Wonderland. Indeed, the preface of The Logic of Sense, enti-
tled ‘From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics’, argues that ‘the privileged place
assigned to Lewis Carroll is due to his having provided the first great
account, the first great mise en scène of the paradoxes of sense’ (Deleuze
1990, p. xiii, emphases in bold added). If in this text Lewis Carroll is
hailed as the first in the initial discovery of paradoxes of meaning, and
more precisely of their ‘staging’, then it seems necessary to highlight the
conceptual terrain of this – which is precisely what Deleuze sets out to
do in The Logic of Sense in what he calls an ‘attempt to develop a logical
and psychological novel’ (Deleuze 1990, p. xiv).
Thus, when reading Deleuze too hastily and with too little care,
we risk overlooking the fact that, despite appearances, the Deleuzian
concepts and the properly Deleuzian philosophical problematic are not
induced from the works he admires, but above all deduced by means of
prior theoretical labour, which at the start owes nothing to the works
that are elected. Moreover, Deleuze himself declared that this ‘new
image’ of sense found in Lewis Carroll or in the Stoics ‘is already closely
linked to the paradoxical constitution of the theory of sense’ (Deleuze
1990, pp. xiii–xiv) and that it took this ‘logical and psychological
novel’ to draw this out. As Anne Sauvagnargues has shown in her fine
study of the Deleuzian conception of art, for Deleuze ‘art cannot be the
subject of hermeneutic interpretation’ since ‘with Spinoza, [he] under-
takes to critique all attempts that reduce art to the expression of a meaning
which needs to be derived from the material of the piece’ (2004, p. 219).1
This implies that in his analyses, Deleuze never simply formalizes in
Bensmaïa: Becoming-animal, Becoming-political 167
retrospect what he ‘discovers’ (by chance, or by accident?) in the writers

he examines, but that he rather proceeds by way of inference according
to his own method. It is as an experimenter in new theories, which he
‘draws’ from his critical reading of the history of philosophy, psychoa-
nalysis and linguistics, that Deleuze shortlists, so to speak, the writers
who will become part of his universe. We, thus, have to overthrow our
traditional assumptions of the relation of art and philosophy: literature

and art (cinema, painting, music) never function as an ‘illustration’ or
a confirmation of the validity of a Deleuzian concept. On the contrary,
it is the newness of the concepts Deleuze creates (on the subject, on
language, time, becoming, etc.) which allow us to ‘discover’ the play of
intensities in the works of art, as well as the ideas and the virtual images
they contain. In this way, we can avoid saying that a novel, a film, or
a musical piece is ‘Deleuzian’, unless it has been directly inspired by
Deleuze’s work. To say that a work is ‘Deleuzian’ would mean falling
prey to what Bergson called the ‘retrospective illusion of the truth’:
I attribute an intuition or an idea to the author I am reading, which
I have only been able to identify because I already held the concept that
allowed me to decipher that intuition or idea. When under the spell of
such an ‘illusion’ one fails to see the true nature and effective critique
of a philosophical concept worthy of its name.
By not acknowledging this situation, we run the risk of reducing the
analysis of a text or œuvre to the mechanical ‘application’ of the con-
cepts at hand, instead of experimenting, instead of opening up new
fields of investigation and exploration. Ultimately, we risk missing that
which makes the encounter between a work of art and a philosophical
analysis an experimental process, and not only (or not at all) a process
of interpretation.2 And indeed, when we move from the simple ‘appli-
cation’ of concepts to an experimental mode which, for example, in
Deleuze implies a becoming-animal, a becoming-imperceptible, or a
becoming-woman ‘everything changes’ because, without warning, one
finds oneself
on the plane of consistency or immanence, which is necessarily

perceived in its own right in the course of its construction: experi-
mentation replaces interpretation, now molecular, nonfigurative,
and nonsymbolic, the unconscious as such is given in microper-
ceptions […]. The unconscious no longer designates the hidden
principle of the transcendent plane of organization, but the process
of the immanent plane of consistency as it appears on itself in the
course of its construction. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 284)
As can be seen very well in this passage, Deleuze always insists on

the moment of construction: the construction of adequate concepts,
the construction of one (or more) planes of consistency on which one
begins an analysis, and which in turn always goes back to determining
the conditions of a problem. I have permitted myself this small theoreti-
cal detour for one rather simple reason: if one wants to put Deleuzian
concepts to work in the analysis of texts, one should be less concerned

with emphasizing what Deleuze has done in this or that ‘case’ or with
trying to find more texts which support still ‘better’ the legitimacy
and/or productivity of the concepts he created; one should rather ask
oneself what newness these concepts allow us to discover in the texts
under analysis.3
Let us take for example a text like L’escargot entêté (The Stubborn Snail,
1985 [1977]) by the Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra. What, for exam-
ple, would a classic psychoanalytic reading of the text yield? It would
quite quickly become the banal story of a civil servant, a professional
ratter, who dreams of ridding the city for which he is responsible of the
five million rats that infest it and endanger the health and security of
its inhabitants. In addition, the character (who happens to be also the
story’s intradiegetic narrator) is slightly perturbed – he notes down all
the thoughts that cross his mind on small bits of paper which he hides
in the twenty-two pockets of a jacket he never takes off, he still lives
with his mother despite being in his fifties, and he is obsessed with the
presence of a snail that he comes across in his garden every day. We
have all the ingredients to seal the text off in a psychoanalytic line of
interpretation.
Rachid Boudjedra does not exclude such a ‘line’ by making his nar-
rator an obsessive character who lives with a timer in his hand and a
calendar in his pocket, a sexually repressed individual who moans con-
stantly about his indulgence for onanism, an unrepentant misogynist,
who notes that:
The civil service has difficulty recruiting people. Young people have
prejudices. Not to mention women! They don’t stay in their job. They
get jaundice and, after a few weeks, go and work elsewhere or get
married. They like to be wed. Even if it’s just the one time. Why this
obsession? Reproduction! The only thing of real interest to them. Like rats
and mice. (Boudjedra 1985, p. 13, emphasis added).
A character who, to top it all, has an infamous authoritarian personality,

telling anyone who will listen that ‘blind obedience is the essential
quality of a civil servant’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 12), someone who does

not hesitate to loudly proclaim his ‘infallible devotion to the state’
(p. 46) and that he fears he might ‘transfer his affection’ (pp. 48–49)
onto the rats for whose extermination he is responsible.4 Other elements
reinforce the pertinence, to a certain extent, of a psychoanalytic reading
of Boudjedra’s text: beyond (or in addition to?) the fascination with rats,
there is, of course, the ubiquitous presence of the mother, as obsessive

and disquieting as the presence of the snail that haunts and taunts the
narrator. Furthermore, there is also the memory of the castrated father
upon which a hysterical mother – who has become ‘phosphorescent’
by repeatedly pushing aside the father, and who is ‘daubed coarsely on
the inside’ (p. 19), as the narrator suggests – has imposed her will; and,
last but not least, we have the handicapped sister whose only dream is
to marry a brother steeped in frustration and in repressed feelings of all
kinds, misogynist, asocial and a misanthrope who would never consider
the idea of marriage.
As we can see, nothing is missing from this nosographic portrait in
order for us to read the story’s protagonist as a very banal neurotic, and
to complement such a reading by recourse to intertextual references,
which would allow us to better situate Boudjedra’s text in the liter-
ary field. In this case, we would summon the debt that the text owes,
for example, to Gregor Samsa’s ‘becoming-cockroach’ in Kafka’s The
Metamorphosis, or to Beckett’s Molloy whom Boudjedra’s narrator calls
to mind. While Molloy never ceases to pass the stones he sucks on from
one pocket to another, the protagonist of Boudjedra’s novel multiplies
the number of pockets that absorb the innumerable notes he endlessly
takes – on the mood of the day, on the poisons he feeds to the rats, on
onanism, snails, labyrinths, on his subordinates at the office, on the
morals of his fellow citizens and, finally, on his psychological ‘emotions’.
Even his proximity to and interest in the rats and his obsession with
this ‘perverse’ stylommatophora that the snail represents can be
interpreted in analytic terms. Also in this regard, Boudjedra makes it
easy for us by constantly establishing the link between the relationship
the narrator sees between rats, faith, the State, history, war, and migra-
tions on the one hand, and the links that connect the snail to sexuality,
desire, sexual difference, and generally to everything that relates to
the morals of a so-called ‘modern’ society on the other hand. While for
the narrator the rat ‘is a seismograph’ (p. 47), for the reader the nar-
rator is, despite his denials and reactionary conservatism, in his own
way, a philosopher as well as a well-informed political analyst and a
sociologist. For is he not constantly mindful of the ills of the society in
which he lives? And is it not also true that through his observations we
discover the damaging effects of ‘nepotism’, urban sprawl, the abuse of
power, state censorship, and of the intolerance of anticommunism and
religious dogma?
It is interesting to note at this point that, from a Deleuzian–Guattarian
point of view, nothing is missing from this portrait because ‘it is all
there’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 233): ‘a becoming-animal not

content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance, on the
contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage’ (p. 233).5 Indeed,
the narrator never ‘takes’ himself to be a rat, nor does he take on any
of their traits. He does not imitate them and he never gives up on his
desire to exterminate them. He declares that he knows them well, which
shows that he never leaves the firm ground of his human identity.
The thought of acting the rat or of abandoning his ambition to be the
greatest ratter never crosses his mind. In his own way, he is a Doctor
Frankenstein:
At dawn, I mix my poisons, while the rats I keep in my cellar are

sound asleep, gorged with treats. I know them well. There is always
one of them that keeps guard to alert the others, whenever I come
close. I know what to do. I know their psychology. My dosages are
renowned among specialists […]. The tranquillity of the city is at
stake, if not its economic prosperity. But I do not want my words
to be interpreted as an attempt to politicize a merely zoological
phenomenon. (Boudjedra 1985, p. 24)
We can see that the line separating human beings from animals is
clearly marked. That is to say, if there is a becoming-animal, and par-
ticularly a becoming-rat, it will have to occur by way of a very different
process than imitation or resemblance. No analogy or representative
series could lead from human to rat. Rats, we are told, have ‘their
psychology’ and many other characteristics which give the narrator’s
becoming-animal its own specificity.
At the same time, what this short novel also shows is a becoming-
molecular: ‘the proliferation of rats, the pack’ – there are over five
million in the city, the narrator claims – ‘that undermines the
great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, p. 233). Here too, ‘it is all there’, everything that Deleuze
and Guattari tell us about becoming-animal seems to apply word for
word to this novel. As shown above, the protagonist may be presented
as a profoundly perturbed human being, and yet it is through him,
through what he experiences on a daily basis that it becomes clear that

something is rotten in the city – is it Algiers, or Oran or Constantine?
He is our intercessor, our negotiator, our night watch: his phobias, his
fears, his anxieties, his repulsions as well as his most personal tastes
serve to reveal what is dysfunctional in the family, disorganized in the
work sphere, broken in so-called romantic relationships. As the narrator
says, ‘large networks of multiple interferences. Another labyrinth under

crystal’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 28). Although he claims to have no interest
in politics, every gesture, every judgement he passes on the society in
which he lives, has political implications.
It appears as if his incapacity to live like everyone else, so to say his
neurosis, and the ignoble character of his profession – he lives more
among rats than humans – become the conditions for the appearance
of certain haecceities which give the city that he lives in its tonality
and substance: the revolting squalor covering the streets, the din of the
mosques’ loudspeakers calling to prayer, the inhabitants’ ignorance of
the dangers posed by hordes of rats that engulf the city, their inability
to hear what is being said and done in their name by the State, by the
muezzin, by civil servants, and also their lack of sensitivity to what pro-
liferates around them, mirroring what goes through the confused mind
of the narrator, and risks destroying the population in the most terrible
ecological catastrophe:
murmurs of mute syllables which fall back on my skull like soft snow.
Shimmering itch. Hatchings. Stripes. Cracks. Partial sentences tainted
with safran. Residues of crushed dreams. Nauseous gulps. Salivated burps.
Alkaline rigidities. Purplish caking. Vinous macerations. (Boudjedra
1985, p. 94)
But having arrived at this point, we have to ask if all the dimensions
which play a role in a becoming (still in a Deleuzian–Guattarian sense
of the term) have been accounted for. It seems that at least four other
stages are still missing in the truly initiatory journey of a becoming.
(1) The stage of the ‘evil’ or ‘baleful choice’. As we know already,
Boudjedra’s narrator lives among rats, but he cannot disregard the
snail that stubbornly crosses his path every day and seems to question
everything he believes in. It seems as if at a certain point he does not
know any more to which saint he should devote himself: the rat or the
snail. Everything in his head becomes confused, everything in his body
becomes muddled, and he finds himself gradually caught up in a meta-
bolic metamorphosis which erases all human ‘borders’.
(2) We also cannot but attend to the particular assemblage that is

formed, ‘a war machine or criminal machine’, which can also here ‘reach
the point of self-destruction’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 233). (As is
apparent, I am simply following step by step Deleuze and Guattari’s
determinations of what plays a part in a becoming-animal in general).
The narrator in L’escargot entêté notes that ‘[a]ll my poisons and all my
mixtures will be useless. Sexual hormones are the future in this deadly

fight. Only they can strike at the root of evil. That is to say, diminish
reproduction until the species has entirely disappeared’ (Boudjedra 1985,
p. 97). If we know of the narrator’s deep disdain for what he calls ‘the
masses’ and that he tends to assimilate them with rats – saying that
‘[t]he masses like to be taken care of. So do rats’ (p. 108) – we can bet-
ter take measure of the type of genocidal or eugenic assemblage he
may have entered.6 Clearly, another parameter of what characterizes
the becoming-animal according to Deleuze and Guattari has full hold
here. We have something of the order of a destructive and criminal
war machine here, which leads to the narrator’s self-destruction. This
significantly means that becoming-animal does not necessarily imply
a liberation or an enrichment for the ‘subject’ who undergoes it, but
rather an experimentation that one must know how to manage. Hence
also the numerous warnings by Deleuze and Guattari against hazardous
experiments and improvisation with drug use.7
But how can we explain such a play of correspondences between
what originates in theory and what is found in a work of art? Is this
purely accidental or something entirely different? The demonstration
undertaken in the previous sections of this essay shows that what is at
stake is not an empirical description of this strange thing that Deleuze
and Guattari call becoming-animal, but rather a haecceity, that is to
say ‘a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, sub-
ject, thing, or substance. […] A season, a winter, a summer, an hour,
a date’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 261). In this sense, L’escargot
entêté is a text that lends itself well to a Deleuzian–Guattarian analysis of
becoming-animal, not because the main character is obsessed with the
reproductive capacities of rats, snails or pigs, but because the author has
managed to find the mode of individuation that displays the relation
of movement and rest between humans and animals – but also among
humans themselves – of which life in the unnamed city of ... is made.8
The city no longer reaches me […]. She comes to me, unreal, blurry,
almost obliterated. Nevertheless she does not cease to flourish with
constructions and convulsions. Her excess fat will kill her. Urban
sprawl! I had noted down somewhere: she is a splattering sprung from

the materials that made her, accumulated in an incredible bric-à-brac.
A miracle of balance and the sea that gnaws at her! But, I confess, she
carries her leprosy like a blue lace. (Boudjedra 1985, p. 79)
What a magnificent, dark description of a city which one can barely

discern. It will take the madness and passion of a ratter to uncover the

haecceities that shape it.
Our impression that we are dealing here indeed with a becoming-
animal as a means to capture a haecceity is further reinforced by the
correspondences we can see with the two other determinations at
stake in a becoming-animal, as Deleuze and Guattari define it. Indeed,
as mentioned above, in Boudjedra’s novel, the narrator is also the
subject of (3) a ‘circulation of impersonal affects, an alternative current
that disrupts signifying projects as well as subjective feelings, and
constitutes a nonhuman sexuality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 233,
emphasis added). He says and writes that he ‘no longer has contours,
or borders’, and his relation to genital sexuality is rather problematic.
After all, he worships Onan and his practices.9 We also know that he
has no intention to marry, nor to have a romantic or sexual relation-
ship with a person of the opposite sex. It is this, among other things,
that pushes him to enter into ‘an irresistible deterritorialization that
forestalls attempts at professional, conjugal, or Oedipal reterritorializa-
tion’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 233). The omnipresent relation
to his mother plays out in the proverbs he inherited from her and the
disgust for sexual relations and sexual reproduction that she impressed
upon him, and it is interesting to note that the proverb that comes back
most often in the narrator’s notes and memories alludes – surely neither
innocently nor accidently – to a becoming-rat: ‘My mother used to say:
the rat’s son is a rodent’.10
Like Deleuze and Guattari’s little Hans in A Thousand Plateaus, Rachid
Boudjedra’s narrator is caught up in an assemblage that constantly
makes him drift from one dimension of a becoming-subject to another,
a becoming-subject that cannot be reduced to a totalizing transcenden-
tal signifier – the proverbs and moral sayings of the mother, the father’s
absence, the sister’s expectations, the little schemes of the bus driver
who drives him to work, the behaviour of the employees at the minis-
try, as well as the narrator’s sexual disorders, all of these constantly
restart the attempts to identify with a unified self. But it seems as if the
narrator is faced with two opposing metaphysics: one, as we saw, which
his becoming-rat pulls in the direction of a (State) control of affects and
the most rigid interiorization of the law, social rules, cleanliness, work,
profitability, and sexual and moral taboos, all of which makes him see
himself (a little more every day) as an ‘agent of the state’; and another
(metaphysics) that is a result of his becoming-snail and incessantly
shatters the politico-moral edifice he struggles to put in place as an obe-
dient and untiring civil servant. Contrary to the rat, the snail, as a good
stylommatophora, spurs him toward a very different political economy

and toward a morality that is opposed to the first one in every regard.
The snail’s hermaphrodism ensnarls the narrator in a becoming –
perhaps a spiral becoming if we consider what he says on myths relating
to snails: ‘So the snail’s spiral appears like the order at the heart of
change, and like a balance in imbalance’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 135). Or
one might as well say that his becoming-snail enables him to discover
dialectics, marking a becoming-Hegelian of the narrator. A becoming,
which radically puts into question the clean conscience he has in regard
to the neat separation of genders: being both male and female, the snail
invokes a non-human sexuality that greatly perturbs the narrator and
causes him to experience emotions that overthrow his normal routine
and tear his habitual value system to shreds. A moment comes, when
the narrator no longer knows whether he has a rat, mouse or snail in his
head: ‘Accumulated superimpositions. Conoidal series. But essentially:
sticky threads that get tangled around my head and made of the mucus
used by the snail to close off the holes it lives in at a slow pace, winter and
summer. There are also strange noises in my skull that sound like mice
gnawing’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 94, emphases added).
Thus, even if the narrator appeared ambivalent towards rats at the start
of the narrative, it quickly becomes clear that the attention he pays to
them exceeds his professional duties: the rats become an object of fasci-
nation and, at the same time, an opportunity to discover and to acquire
some of his (aesthetic, political, sexual) preferences. Indeed, he spends
much time – despite being so frugal with it – studying rats meticulously, at
first scientifically, then rapidly in historical, literary and aesthetic terms:
But I like the mist and rain drops on top. They draw labyrinths in zigzags
similar to the rats’ itineraries described by Amr Ibn Bahr (166–252 of the
Hegira) in his Book of Animals [Traité des Animaux]. Because the rat does
not run, it zigzags. It ignores the straight line! It meanders. (Boudjedra
1985, p. 13)
One of the first instances of a convergence between the narrator and

these animals he claims to abhor is the labyrinth. It occurs as the lifting
of a repression: the narrator thought that only the straight line was the
right choice, but he discovers affinities with the rhizomatic trajectory
of the rat. This is in any case the first form that his becoming-rat takes:
a taste for ‘routes of escape’, for the ‘capacity to take side roads’ and the
art of ‘beating dead ends’ (Boudjedra 1985, pp. 16–17). In one of his
secret notes, he writes:

I have noted down everything […]. Know thy enemy. It’s a common
principle in strategy and tactics. Otherwise imprisonment beckons.
Rats have their own way of circling objects. The labyrinth is a gradual
imprisonment. It points to extremely rich symbolism and its history
is fascinating. (Boudjedra 1985, p. 17)
As stated earlier, becoming-rat does not work by resembling a rat but

rather by an a-parallel encounter of certain points that provoke a system
of resonances sui generis in the subject that experiences it: here, a hith-
erto unknown interest in labyrinths and a taste for meandering paths.
Before, the narrator ran, but now he meanders, he walks, acts and
thinks in zigzags. While he used to concentrate solely on the science
of poison, he now spends his time reading veritable Traités on war and
becomes passionate about history. This means that his becoming-rat now
also occurs by way of a becoming-historian and becoming-researcher
which paves the way for a multiplicity of other ‘interests’, such as, for
example, the study of the nature of space, of strategic and tactic spatial
assemblages of the human habitat, of labyrinths, and more generally
of what he calls ‘the combinatorics’ of different conceptions of space
and time:
Transcription wears me out and combinatorics fascinate me. A dream

of lace. I fell asleep reading the Book of Animals by Abou Othman
Amr Ibn Bahr (166–252 of the Hegira). I was just relishing in the
description of the way in which a rat builds its labyrinths […]. I could
no longer go to the office. Strange dream, with lines zigzagging along
the meanders of my brain, worn out by transcription and combinatorics.
(Boudjedra 1985, p. 77, emphases added)
Later in the narrative we discover that the narrator’s fascination with

combinatorics does not stop at his interest in the rats’ art of managing
their habitat, but that it extends also to a fascination he has for another
‘combinatorics’, namely that linked to myths relating to snails – or does
it double, oppose, or complete his fascination for rats?
If the Romans told fortune by reading animal entrails, ancient

Mexicans read in the patterns on snail shells. Undoubtedly, Aztecs
disappoint me. They worshipped said animal to the point of seeing,
in the variation of its growth marks, a complex and fascinating com-
binatorics [...]. Indeed, myself, as worn out and fascinated as I am by
transcription and combinatorics, I would have been the first to become
passionate about the shells of gastropoda! (Boudjedra 1985, p. 136)

From one secret annotation to another, the reader discovers that, while
the becoming-rat gives the narrator his sense of superiority vis-à-vis
his employees and the ‘masses’, this is always accompanied – or even
doubled – by this border phenomenon of the snail. As soon as he has
become an erudite and fine connoisseur of the complex architecture
of labyrinths, he shows only contempt for those who ignore the laby-
rinth’s importance in their lives: ‘Silas Haslam, a 19th century surveyor,
dedicated a thick volume [to labyrinths]: A General History of Labyrinths.
I tell this to my subordinates. They do not understand. They snigger’
(Boudjedra 1985, p. 17).
Once more, the ratter, the ‘exterminating angel’ for rats, is trans-
formed, gradually, into a historian fascinated with human civilizations
and migrations in an a-parallel becoming to that of the rats. Although
the narrator denies any interest in politics, by way of his movement
through the intersecting history of humans and rats he comes to take a
position and discovers that his becoming-rat throws him continually in
the arena of political stakes and struggles and that he passes judgement
on everything, including the politics of his country’s leaders. The rats’
zigzagging itinerary and their ‘combinatory’ art lead him little by
little to discover that he has always taken part and has always been a
participant in political matters.
One only needs to take a map of invasions to precisely trace the itin-
erary they [the rats] have taken. No matter how often I repeat this
to my employees, they don’t listen to me. They say it’s politics and
that they don’t understand it. As if I was fascinated by politics. Not
at all! (Boudjedra 1985, p. 21)
A handsome denegation or denial which shows that, to some extent,

the narrator knows very well that what he does and says is political,
and that the rat is a political matter in as much as it relates to the
hygiene and health of a people, as well as to the responsibility of politi-
cians and civil servants. And undoubtedly, this is also what enables an
understanding of the other ‘game’ which he is passionate about, and

which he shares with the rats: the art of camouflage. The rats’ art of
escaping and of covering the tracks is all the more fascinating for the
narrator as it corresponds perfectly to his own compulsion to cover his
tracks, to hide his most intimate thoughts – his ‘emotions’ as he likes
to say – by multiplying the number of pockets where he hides what he
calls his ‘little writings’. Soon, this becomes an art of writing, an art of

writing as camouflage or as Deleuze would say, a ‘power of the false’
which slowly takes shape:
Where did I read that a large city consummates five hundred tons of
food every day? I must have noted it down on a piece of paper and
transcribed it on an index card marked: economic misdeeds. Easy to
check. My files are up to date. My little writings never stay more than
twenty four hours in my pockets. I sometimes get muddled but I quickly
redress the situation. (Boudjedra 1985, p. 22, emphasis added)
Rapidly, we realize that the narrator has (at least) two ‘writings’ in stock:
one is the writing of his daily notes which consists, he says, of ‘inde-
scribable hieroglyphics’ and castrations, and the other is the ‘assiduous’
and ‘legible’ writing, which even his secretary can easily decipher.11
What seemed at first merely a question of orthography and diligence
for the narrator turns out to be the execution of a true poetics. And we
come to a moment, when the art of camouflage and combinatorics that
we perceived in the narrator must be to a certain extent transferred, so to
speak, to the author himself. Does the author himself not proceed like
our ratter? Does he not constantly displace his notes and hoard his index
cards? What do we know of these cards of his? How many of them have
been disclosed? Which pocket is still hidden from us? How many pock-
ets are there in total? What are the links between the pockets?
As we can see, it is once more a – labyrinthine – question of combina-
torics – that is to say of an assemblage of elements that first need to enter
into a plane of composition, and then, if ‘all goes well’, into a plane of
consistency, which will allow the writer to transmit some of his ideas (on
politics, morality, on the social administration of a population’s health,
on art, or on religion) without being stopped by state censorship or
self-censorship. We are, thus, not surprised to realize that the narrator’s
becoming-rat corresponds to the author’s becoming-imperceptible, who
will have needed to mobilize all the resources of the power of the false
and of camouflage (the multiplication of pockets, the main character’s
neurosis, a pack of rats, a stubborn snail) to achieve this, precisely by
way of erasing (raturant) everything that may give him away to the
authorities and to his superiors, and by avoiding political blunders as
much as possible. ‘A life. A void. A useless word. To cross off. Or to hide
in the twenty-first pocket so that no one comes to know what I really feel.
Only my social role must emerge from my personality: chief officer of the
city’s pest control’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 27, emphasis added).
Indeed, of Rachid Boudjedra’s personality only his social role

transpires: the writer! The reason for this being that as a writer, he proceeds
in disguise behind his ‘sinister’ doubles: a civil servant who is obsessed
with his work as a ratter, and a snail that stubbornly puts into question
all of his preconceived opinions. We then understand all the more clearly
why Deleuze and Guattari have intimately linked every becoming-
animal worthy of its name to a becoming-imperceptible. By slipping
into the skin of a ratter who is fascinated by rats and obsessed with a
snail, Boudjedra has been able to suppress everything ‘that prevents
us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004, p. 280), in the midst of human – all too
human – affairs by mobilizing the labyrinthine resources of a becoming-
rat and by playing off the dialectical richness of the spiral that inspires
him to the slow progression of a snail towards new shores.
These are a few lines of thought that one can draw from a Deleuz-
ian–Guattarian reading of a text like Boudjedra’s. The analysis hopes
to have shown that L’escargot entêté – Boudjedra’s novel – ‘is’ not
Deleuzian but that we have submitted it to a becoming-Deleuzian by
choosing to abandon a psychoanalytic line of reading, and to move
instead into the direction of a quest shared by both: that of the mini-
mal conditions for the capture of a haecceity. In Deleuze and Guattari,
this appears in the form of the concept of becoming, and in Boudjedra
as the shadow that engulfs a city and soon after an entire country, like
a lead weight.
Notes
1. In the same text she makes more precise observations that are useful to
this analysis, saying that ‘nevertheless, this thinking [...] is not the result of
a private conscience, but the ideal singularity of a differentiated virtuality. By
choosing Spinozist ethics over judgement by analogy, Deleuze replaces the
signifying forms of analogy with the exposition of the real forces of ethology’
(1990, p. 219).
2. I am thinking here, for example, of the way in which a Deleuzian scholar
like Arnaud Villani tackles the question of the encounter in his own study of
Deleuze. In the chapter analysing ‘the phenomenology of the encounter’ in
Deleuze, after citing a long passage from Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,
Villani writes straight out: ‘Everything in this text is Deleuzian. What else can be
said except that a fluid flows back and forth at the right moment between this
page and the philosopher, so that, later, the latter can eventually make good use
of it’ (Villani 1999, p. 16, emphasis added). This is a very good example of the
‘illusion’ that consists of taking real questions in reverse: Villani ‘forgets’ that
he was able to discover this ‘Deleuzian’ gem only because he placed it there
in the first place! This is all the more regrettable since Villani disposed of the
arguments which would have helped him avoid this ‘mistake’, namely the

answer Deleuze gives to the question on his capacity to find real problems: ‘If
it is true [that I have this capacity], it is because I believe in the necessity to con-
struct a concept of the problem. I have tried to do so in Difference and Repetition
and would want to take this question up again. But this practically forces me
to ask, in each and every case, how a problem can be posed. In this way, it seems
that philosophy can be considered a science: in that it determines the condi-
tions of a problem’ (Villani 1999, p. 130, emphases added).
3. Villani does this once more in his book when he, for example, endeavours
to clarify (we are not sure if for himself, or for his readers?) the notion of
haecceity as reinvented by Deleuze through Duns Scotus: ‘Haecceity. It origi-
nates in Duns Scotus. I would first like to propose an entirely personal list
of haecceities (which brings to mind the Chinese encyclopaedia mentioned
by Foucault): the blue beast bleeding in the thicket (Trakl), the whale’s
bone in Ahab’s leg, Queequeg’s coffin, the yellow in the view of Delft, etc.’
(1999, p. 86).
4. Elsewhere, there are similar, rather unpalatable statements: ‘I am too faithful
to the State to believe in God’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 31) or: ‘my faithfulness to
the State is legendary, to such an extent that I am losing interest in God’
(p. 84). Later, he adds: ‘In any case, personally, I am too faithful to the State
to believe in all these religions, but I can’t stand fornicators’ (p. 118).
5. For reasons that will quickly become apparent, in this paragraph I am merely
transposing almost literally what Deleuze and Guattari write about Daniel
Mann’s film Willard (cf. 1987, pp. 233–234).
6. Elsewhere, another note says: ‘When I’m fifty, no one will be able to blame
me for a descendent. Nothing! I have no offspring. I am like the people of
Uqbar, I am weary of copulation and mirrors. They multiply the number of
people’ (p. 108).
7. For example: ‘Instead of making a body without organs sufficiently rich or full
of the passage of intensities, drug addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or
a cancerous one: the causal line, creative line, or line of flight immediately
turns into a line of death and abolition. The abominable vitrification of the
veins, or the purulence of the nose – the glassy body of the addict’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, p. 285). Many of these ‘traits’ can be found in the descrip-
tion that the narrator gives of his state of mind or his body: ‘The feeling, each
time the day comes to a close, that I have no contours, nor margins. Veins eroded
by the chaffing of words at the border of conscience...’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 98,
emphasis added). What better ‘illustration’ could there be of the experience of
what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘Body without organs’?
8. As Boudjedra in his novel, I leave out the name of the city. But everything
points to Algiers, known in its mythical history as ‘Algiers, the White’, of
which Boudjedra seems to be thinking.
9. ‘I think Onan deserved his punishment. He was killed and he deserved it.
But I still have some sympathy for him. He avoided getting his brother’s wife
pregnant. He could have fathered twins. He refrained from doing so. He con-
sequently did not encourage reproduction. He has nothing in common with
rats, snails and pigs whose fertility is legendary. He is worthy of my respect’
(Boudjedra 1985, p. 117). The narrator’s loathing for reproductive sexuality
in general is already established, but his attitude towards the sexuality of gas-
tropoda shows that he has definitely left the world of humans. This appears

in one of his notes on the customs of snails: ‘What a strange animal! Walking
on its tongue! As if its perverse hermaphrodism was no longer enough. It must
undulate, contract and use its tongue to go at an even slower pace than a
tortoise’ (Boudjedra 1985, p. 92, emphasis added).
10. Hastily, but rather symptomatically, Boudjedra translates an Arab proverb
here: ‘Oulid El Far, yakhreuj haffar!’ which does not translate as ‘the son of the
rat is a rodent’ but more precisely in my opinion as ‘Son of a rat, posterity of
a borer (of tunnels, holes etc.)’. What Boudjedra’s translation erases (misses?)
is the displacement which transforms a rodent into a borer of tunnels and
labyrinths. What is missing from his translation is the becoming: from rodent
the rat becomes a borer! Quantum leap! Deterritorialization! Line of flight!
11. Boudjedra’s text plays with the idea of erasure or crossing out (rature). I do
not think we take the interpretation of the text too far if we say that he
consciously uses this expression on several occasions. The narrator spends
his time crossing out the words he writes. As I will show momentarily, this
behaviour also relates primarily to writing and literary writing.
Works Cited
Bensmaïa, Réda (2010) ‘Deleuzian Haecceities’, in Deleuze and the Postcolonial.
Ed. Paul Patton and Simone Bignall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 119–162.
Boudjedra, Rachid (1985 [1977]) L’escargot entêté. Paris: Folio.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sauvagnargues, Anne (2004) ‘Deleuze. De l’animal à l’art’, in François Zourabichvili,
Anne Sauvagnargues and Paola Marrati, La Philosophie de Deleuze. Paris: PUF,
pp. 117–228.
Villani, Arnaud (1999) La guêpe et l’Orchidée, Essai sur Gilles Deleuze. Paris:
Editions Belin.
9
Revolutionizing Pleasure in
Writing: Subversive Desire and
Micropolitical Affects in Nalo

Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads
Milena Marinkova
In a conversation with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald in 1988,

Gilles Deleuze voices his impatience with the exhausted political project
of ‘the revolution’:
We’re told revolutions go wrong, or produce monsters in their wake:

it’s an old idea, no need to wait for Stalin, it was already true of
Napoleon, of Cromwell. To say revolutions turn out badly is to say
nothing about people’s revolutionary becoming. (Deleuze 1990,
pp. 152–153)
Keen on investigating that which escapes the predetermining effects

of socio-political structures and normative identities, Deleuze is inter-
ested in revolutionaries that ‘aren’t part of history’, in revolutions
that ‘transmute and reappear in different, unexpected forms’ (Deleuze
1990, p. 153). If the unpredictability of becoming, of constant trans-
formation, is one of the exit strategies that the French philosopher
brings to the 1980s gridlocked field of political theory, the subtle
potential of desire and affect to reinvigorate contemporary political
activism is another. With their declaration that all ‘politics is simul-
taneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2004, p. 235), Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge both the significance
of traditional political structures and the world of ‘micropercepts,
unconscious affects, fine segmentations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004,
p. 235). And this alternative world, I would argue, is a possible way
of mobilizing a different kind of political awareness – a micropolitical
awareness – in the current climate of post-ideological cynicism and
political disaffection.
181
Deleuze’s insistence on acknowledging the ways in which the political

field is traversed by vectors of creativity and difference, affects and
desires, constitutes his own contribution to ongoing debates among
(postcolonial) political philosophers and literary theorists about the
autonomy of the aesthetic and the political domains. Isobel Armstrong,
for example, has commented on the current paradoxical ‘fear of
aesthetics’, dictated either by an anxiety about the aesthetic as expressive

of the unitary self or by an anxiety about the aesthetic as ‘the collapse and
elision of categories, as a permeable, dissolving meltdown of difference
in the law of the same’ (Armstrong 2000, p. 36). Thus, on the one hand,
there is the necessity for boundary transgression and loss of demarca-
tion invoked by advocates of postmodernist pastiche, postcolonial
in-betweenness and deconstructionist revision of binaries. On the other
hand, the post-Marxist and postcolonialist camps of critical theory insist
on the stringent demarcation between reality and representation, on
the necessity for transparent language and clear-cut political allegiance.
Deleuzian micropolitics, contesting binary models, social fragmentation
and normative identitarianism, tends towards the former rather than
the latter critical position. With his emphatic investment in the idea
of becoming revolutionary – an unpredictable, creative becoming that
signals a fervour that does not dissipate into bitterness – Deleuze renews
the belief in ‘the democratic and radical potential of aesthetic discourse’
(Armstrong 2000, p. 2), while problematizing the institutionalization of
oppositional discourses (for the purposes of this essay one such strand
could be anti-colonial discourse) that have become as exclusionary and
inflexible as the hegemonic structures they aim to dismantle.
The potential of Deleuze’s micropolitics for postcolonial writing
will be exemplified in my reading of The Salt Roads (2003) by the
Caribbean-Canadian speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. With
its transhistorical and transnational scope, including colonial Saint-
Domingue, nineteenth-century Paris and fourth-century Alexandria,
The Salt Roads stages a number of micropolitical interventions into
hegemonic historical, religious and artistic discourses by three hitherto
marginalized women (the plantation slave and healer Mer, Baudelaire’s
‘mulatto’ mistress Jeanne Duval and the Nubian prostitute Thaïs).
These women not only author their own histories in a predictably
postcolonial fashion, but also bear affectionate witness to the lives
and stories of others with whom they share their disenfranchisement
if not identitarian belonging. Hopkinson’s novel, therefore, does not
simply perform another postcolonial/postmodern rewriting of History’s
master narrative. The protagonists respond to their disempowerment
Marinkova: Revolutionizing Pleasure in Writing 183
in a Deleuzian fashion: with their intimate and creative gestures,

they resist the pressures of dogmatic and exclusionary macropolitical
discourses (colonial as well as anti-colonial). While the novel’s micro-
political agenda might lack the impact of mass political movements or
the unbending principles of political platforms, Hopkinson’s is a voice
that engages in a trenchant albeit imaginative postcolonial critique
of marginalization that avoids narrow identitarian loyalties. The Salt

Roads invokes very real events and people refracted through the micro-
prism of those not palatable or heroic enough to merit inclusion into
memorialized History or monumentalized anti-colonial struggle. This
strand of postcolonial fiction does not figure, therefore, as a platform
for the articulation of yet another postcolonial (non)revolution (an
escape into an alternative reality or a dour dystopia). Instead, it maps
the possibilities of Deleuzian revolutionary becomings (of actual and
virtual forms of political engagement) and points towards the way in
which postcolonial literature can emerge as a medium for micropolitical
interventions that matter.
Forging the Micropolitical: Restoring Affect and Creativity

to the Postcolonial
In his study of the French artist Gérard Fromanger, Gilles Deleuze

concludes that ‘there are no revolutionaries but the joyful, and no
politically or aesthetically pleasing revolutionary painting without
delight’ (Deleuze and Foucault 1999, pp. 76–77). Deleuze’s belief in
the possibility of political and artistic praxes that fly in the face of
avant-garde laments about ‘the eternal impossibility of the revolution’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 113) has crystallized into his notion
of micropolitics: a creative and affect-driven intervention into power
relations that resists containment within conventional (macro)political
structures. The latter he defines as an ossified and institutionalized
version of politics on a macro level, whereas the micropolitical is
processual, affective and non-identitarian (Deleuze and Guattari 2004,
pp. 229–255). While monolithic macropolitics, coinciding more often
than not with the hierarchical and disciplinarian state apparatus, are
premised on analogy and rigid binaries, the micropolitical rejoices in
difference and liminality. Originating from the quarters of the disaf-
fected without being bitter, responding to specific material realities
while remaining inclusive, micropolitics is no longer ‘a process of
facilitating or bolstering identity [...] but [...] a process of innovation,
experimentation, and of the complication of life’ (Thoburn 2003, p. 8).
Deleuze’s insistence on the creative impulses of the micropolitical

calls for the re-imagining of what it means to be political and how one
can be political in a climate of disillusionment with available ideolo-
gemes (Deleuze 1990; Garo 2008). Reminiscent of his critique of the
dogmatic idea of thought in Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze’s
micropolitics is relational rather than representational: it engages with
the multiple forces traversing the spaces occupied by those defined as

minorities, it responds to as well as transforms realities.
As an enabling ‘politics of invention’ (Thoburn 2003, p. 6), Deleuze’s
‘micropolitics of borders’ (Deleuze 1990, p. 45) challenges received
binary oppositions and master narratives, discarding notions of The
Law, The Master and The Rebel as unproductive ‘hollow teeth’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983, pp. 108–109). Cutting across and between group-
ings and subjectivities, the micropolitical impulse is not just a demand
for political legitimization or institutionalization, for example, through
representation or sovereignty, but a quest for constant engagement
with the immediate problems at hand (cf. Rolfe 2007). Thus, even
though Deleuze recognizes the validity of macropolitical structures for
the empowerment of disenfranchised groups, he also insists that real
power is micropolitical, differential and creative. Merely reversing the
binary would be equivalent to perpetuating the fundamental premise
of the existing power structure, the result being an analogous macro-
political (if minority-constituted) entity:
When a minority creates models for itself, it’s because it wants

to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper
(to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But
its power comes from what it’s managed to create, which to some
extent goes into the model, but doesn’t depend on it. A people is
always a creative minority, and remains one even when it requires
a majority […]. It’s the greatest artists (rather than popular artists)
who invoke a people and find they ‘lack a people’ […]. Artists can
only invoke a people, their need for one goes to the very heart of
what they’re doing, it’s not their job to create one, and they can’t.
Art is resistance. (Deleuze 1990, pp. 173–174)
The macropolitical model of political representation of ‘the people’

(or the nation, for that matter) imposes a restrictive identitarian frame-
work on the political. What Deleuze suggests is that by mobilizing
the creative impulses from within this highly regulated domain, the
micropolitical empowers while acknowledging the inevitability of (or
perhaps, the need for) the macropolitical; it produces difference in a

culture of overwhelming apathy and compliance. In this sense, the artis-
tic ‘invocation of a people’ both engenders and dissipates the political
(actual) ‘creation of a people’; implicated in the macropolitical demand
to write in the name of ‘a people’, creative micropolitics continually
undoes the idea of ‘the people’ by assuming a position where ‘the people’
is missing. Paul Patton, therefore, concludes that one can read Deleuze’s

(and Guattari’s) micropolitics as a philosophy working towards the rein-
vigoration of the desire for transformation, rather than as a teleological
political platform, a fact which others, such as Slavoj Žižek, deplore:
Deleuze and Guattari are not theorists of liberation but theorists of

becoming-revolutionary. The latter implies the possibility of trans-
formation in the forms of social organisation of work and desire,
and the possibility of redistribution of the molar assignment of
differential power and affects to the sexes, but not the abolition of
molarisation as such. Becoming-revolutionary is a process open to all
at any time. (Patton 2000, pp. 82–83)
The micropolitical coupling of creativity and politics may be cognizant

of analogy (the representation of a reality, wherein difference is defined
negatively by means of an oppositional logic) but it is ultimately driven
by ethology (the ability of a body to affect others and be affected
by others). Deleuze’s contestation of political and representational
hierarchies, according to Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins (2007),
results in the affirmation of the affective potential of the body, its ability
to relate to other bodies and contexts, and thus in the articulation of
an ethics of non-appropriative openness to the unknown. Deleuze’s
comments on ‘the reading of art’ are symptomatic of his ethological
understanding of creativity and map out the political significance of
affect- and body-driven aesthetics:
There are […] two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box
with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and
then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signi-
fiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first
or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and
write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other
way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the
only question is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it
work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try
another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something

comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing
to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like the plugging into an
electric circuit [...]. Writing is one flow among others, with no
special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of
current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows – flows of shit,
sperm, words, action, eroticism, money, politics, and so on. (Deleuze

1990, pp. 7–8)
Stripping art of its aura of abstract intellectual superiority, Deleuze situ-

ates it on a par with other material and affective flows; he removes art
from the safe ensconcement of subjective interiority and denounces
its perverse fetishization of external reality. Artistic creation depends,
according to the philosopher, on its experiential values – on the way
de-subjectified affects (unlike the highly subjective emotions) enact
assemblages of desire and enunciation (Deleuze and Foucault 1999,
pp. 74–77). His critique of a purely textualist engagement with literature
(the book as a metaphor, ‘a box within a box’) and of excessively realist
or psychological readings (literature as mimetic of an external reality or
expressive of individual consciousness) does not so much call for the
re-inscription of the boundaries between ‘real’ versus ‘imagined’ life (or,
politics versus culture), but invites us to consider literature as part of
an economy of desire which criss-crosses bodies, individuals and com-
munities, politics, economies and literatures alike. Experiencing art as a
‘plugging into’ the affective world of the imagination, but also into the
material circuit of cultural production, therefore, challenges received
ideas about the autonomy of the aesthetic and political domains (which
could be seen as another ‘box within the box’). Moreover, resisting
the appropriative pull of subjectivity and identitarianism, whereby the
potential multiplicity of the text is limited by the cultural capital of the
reader or the personality of the author, the reading and writing practices
described by Deleuze are singular in their affective intensity, equalizing
in their obliteration of hierarchy, as well as global in their potential to
reach across (semantic and cultural) differences.
Deleuze’s trust in the transformative potential of non-identitarian,
creative and affect-driven micropolitics opens up the possibility of a
different and, I would argue, more productive engagement with the
‘realities’ that have fallen within the disciplinary purview of postcolo-
nial studies. Ongoing debates in the field dwell on the rift between the
postmodernist-textualist turn in postcolonial critique, on the one hand,
and the historico-materialist approach, on the other. The proponents
of the latter insist on the unequivocal distinction between matters

of political urgency and literary/cultural practices, on the radical
disentanglement of political activism from the sophisticated analysis of
textual ambivalence, and on the redefinition of politics in strictly oppo-
sitional terms as demand, contestation and irreconcilability (Lazarus
1999; Young 2001; Hallward 2001; Parry 2004). Careful to establish the
familiar failings of Marxist interpretations of the (post)colonial, Peter

Hallward has concluded that the conflation of literature with politics
and context would render the postcolonial project of actual emancipa-
tion contradictory at least, or impossible at worst:
what happens or is created in literature must be considered as a

creative process in its own right, without immediate, specifying refer-
ence to the context of its production, or political affiliation. However
complimentary their effects may be in certain situations, as a matter
of principle political commitment and literary production should be
treated as thoroughly distinct processes. (2001, pp. 44–45)
His insistence on the separation of the creative from the political reso-
nates with laments about the marginalization of confrontational voices
and the ‘death of politics’ in postcolonial criticism (Ahmad 1992, p. 65).
These accounts thus justify the need for the strategic re-inscription of
identitarian thought and political doxa in the field, with Chris Bongie
calling for the ‘“repoliticizing” of postcolonial studies, the (re)creation
of a space for anti-colonial discourses within the field’ (Bongie 2008,
p. 16). Postcolonial literature, at the same time, appears to have retained
its politically suspect position as an aesthetic practice that is not only
complicit in the relentless onslaught of global market forces, but also
overrated in its relevance to the articulation of and engagement with
postcolonial matters (cf. Huggan 2001; Harrison 2003).
Such understanding of politics as an uncompromisingly antagonistic
narrative that bears no qualifications and demands exclusion for its
successful implementation, however, seems to me to resonate with
Deleuze’s definition of the macropolitical as rigid, oppositional and
territorial in its identitarianism. Ironically, it is the implication of post-
colonial literature in global market forces and its institutionalization,
to use Deleuze’s terminology, in dominant macropolitical structures
that has led the same cohort of scholars to construe the imaginative
domain as politically suspect and to assume a more interventionist, as
well as territorial, stance on politics and cultural production. However,
the institutionalization of these same critics in academia, coupled with
their regular appearances on the global book market, somewhat blunts

the radicalism of their self-proclaimed politicization. And while their
divisive approach to politics and culture may be used to challenge the
dubious (non)politics of many a literary analyst, it fails to account
for their own co-optation by hegemonic discourses or address the
impasse created by their methodological rigidity. Arguments for the
absolute autonomy of art and its relative ‘revolutionary’ potential

may have validity on a global, macro, political level. But if books and
films cannot trigger revolutions or legislate equality, their imaginative
scope and affective impact can reinvigorate political thought in times
of ideological stalemate and political cynicism (cf. Appadurai 1996;
Quayson 2003; Huggan 2008). The fusion of an affective aesthetic
with a non-identitarian and anti-oppositional micropolitics that the
Deleuzian framework enables can bring about global alliances which
exceed the identitarian categories (for example, nation, class, race) that
have tended to define (and at times weaken) political discourse and
activism. It can also map out alternative affective – call it literary, imagi-
native or textual – ways of becoming-political when traditional avenues
of being-political are unavailable, inaccessible or unsafe.
Even though Deleuze has been criticized for the alleged ahistoricity
of his philosophy and its disempowering effect on already marginalized
voices (cf. Miller 1993; Kaplan 1996; Wuthnow 2002), it is exactly this
micropolitical resistance to the determining impact of identitarianism
that can offer an adequate response to the diffuse ‘soft’ control admin-
istered by the liberal-democratic mechanism of the nation-state and
the neo-colonial expansion of global capitalism today (cf. Hardt and
Negri 2001; Watson 2008). The traversals of the political with the imagi-
native and affective that Deleuze advocates do not necessarily promote
social escapism. Mindful of social realities (past and present) and yet
inspiring future transformations, the micropolitical forges critical
awareness through ‘myth-making, as a way to step out of the political
and intellectual stasis of these postmodern times’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 4).
Regarding ‘reality’ as one of the many possible ‘actualizations’ of a past
and scrutinizing it against its historical emergence can facilitate the
imagining of alternative futures without perpetuating existing inequali-
ties or becoming incapacitated by traumatic histories. At the same time,
the micropolitical resistance to dialectical subsumption and teleology
means that no solution that accommodates confrontational positions
is imposed. Instead, as Simone Bignall illustrates, the focus is on the
different experiences of a fraught situation, on the different relations to
a problematic actuality (cf. Bignall 2007). The micropolitical emphasis
on process, experience and difference (rather than on a solution), on

alternative yet historicized pasts and futures (rather than on a harmoni-
ous present and future predetermined by the past), enables a negotiable
but nonetheless situated understanding of history and agency that is
adequate to our contemporary realities.
Speculative writing, especially the variety produced by the Caribbean-
Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson, is an apt candidate to be read through

a Deleuzian micropolitical lens given its characteristic form of generic
and linguistic multiplicity, subtle political awareness, and imaginative
reclamation of lost histories and voices. By fusing different speculative
genres – science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism – with traditional
African and Caribbean folk tales, historical narratives, ancient Greco-
Roman myths and Christian fables, Hopkinson’s writing relates to a
multiplicity that cannot be circumscribed within a coherent generic
paradigm. Responding to the ‘multiple, overlapping identities’ that
diasporic people occupy (Nelson 2002, p. 103; Glave 2003, p. 150) she
refuses to impose a monologic linguistic or generic framework (her
novels mix Queen’s with Canadian English, Trinidadian with Jamaican
creole, and even Romany). At the same time, Hopkinson demonstrates
an almost Deleuzian distrust towards any realist readings of her work:
It’s as though people believe that fiction doesn’t exist, that it’s all real
people’s experiences with the serial numbers filed off, a kind of mask.
But it’s more like a quilt; there are bits and scraps of real people in
there, but they are recombined to suit the story, and there’s at least
as much whole cloth there, in the backing and the stuffing and the
binding. (quoted in Rutledge 1999, p. 594)
Refusing to be constructed as representative of some kind of essential

blackness, Hopkinson sees the mimetic function of realism as restrictive
and catering to the interests of a publishing industry that ‘eroticizes’
black experience (Nelson 2002, pp. 100–102). Her objective, instead, is
to impel readers to rethink and reassess their assumptions ‘by creating
a world in which standards are different’ (Nelson 2002, p. 101). This
world is still reminiscent of a recognizable historical experience, that of
the black diaspora in the Americas. Its fictional rendition by Hopkinson,
however, weaves alternative and empowering visions of the future that
retain the frictions if not the tethers of the past. In her work, there-
fore, we see an example of an aesthetic practice that is conscious of its
historical imbrications and political responsibilities, while nonetheless
resistant to their determining impulses. The micropolitical aspects of
Hopkinson’s oeuvre ultimately convey her understanding of identity as

traversed by numerous identitarian allegiances (racial, linguistic, politi-
cal, gender, class, religious and sexual), and of the mutual imbrications
of the political and the aesthetic as communal practices of transforma-
tion and empowerment.
Reading the Postcolonial ‘Salt Roads’ Micropolitically

The Salt Roads opens with the birth of a boy on a plantation in colonial
Saint-Domingue. With allusions to the legend of Sister Rose – an African
slave who after being raped gave birth to the nation of Haiti – and the
birth of Jesus, this episode evokes the syncretism that characterizes both
Hopkinson’s works and Caribbean cultural practices (cf. Baker 2001;
Reid 2005).1 The child, however, is stillborn and is buried beside a river
by three slave women, each of them chanting to her god of preference –
Christian or voodoo. Instead of perpetuating the established narratives
of Christianity and Haitian nationalism, Hopkinson conveys in detail
the less heroic experience of Georgine, the mixed-race mother of the
newborn, of Mer, the plantation healer, and of Tipingee, Mer’s lover
and helper. In this way, the author addresses the question that critics
such as Joan Dayan have raised regarding the gender politics of both
colonialism and nationalist movements:
What happened to actual black women during Haiti’s repeated

revolutions, as they were mythologized by men, metaphorized out
of life into legend? It is unsettling to recognize that the hyperboliza-
tion necessary for myths to be mutually reinforcing not only erases
these women but forestalls our turning to these real lives. (Dayan
1998, p. 48)
The silencing of black female voices in colonial and anti-colonial

national narratives is thus questioned at the very start of the novel.
By rewriting the mythologized genesis of Haiti and Christianity as the
birth of a stillborn boy, which in turn gives birth to the multifaceted
goddess Ezili, Hopkinson’s fabulation rewrites histories lost in the vio-
lence of slavery and revolution without imposing a similarly monologic
narrative. In a Deleuzian fashion she challenges the identitarianism
of colonial discourse and the exclusivity of the anti-colonial project.
Thus, the familiar goddess Ezili of the Petro and Rada pantheons is
represented not as uniform but as multiple: ‘Born from hope vibrant
and hope destroyed. Born of bitter experience. Born of wishing for
better’ (Hopkinson 2003, p. 40; original formatting). Her language is

assertive and typeset in bold; however, its non-standard ring approxi-
mates the idioms of the marginalized women who birth her and the
bodies she will come to inhabit.
Ezili encompasses three different aspects: the flirtatious Frèda, the
angry Hathor and the sorrowful Lasirén. And as a deity of becoming,
she constantly changes her fictional and historical embodiments:

the healing slave woman Mer, Charles Baudelaire’s ‘mulatto mistress’
Jeanne Duval, the Alexandrian prostitute Thaïs, Queen Nzingha of
Matambe, a plantation owner’s wife, the maroon Patrice, Rosa Parks
and the Stonewall rioters. Slipping in and out of different bodies and
struggling to take control over their minds, Ezili does not become
an omnipotent deity; she is constantly ‘fragmenting, dissipating’
(p. 303) in a fractal manner so that each of her different aspects is
echoed in a different body, and ‘each echo has its own echoes, and each
echo’s echo its own, branching and dividing endlessly’ (p. 304). This
pattern is one of constant transformation, of a Deleuzian becoming,
which enables multiple variations, contaminations and reverberations
even if amidst the suffocating contexts of slavery and exploitation.
Replicated in the jazz-like formal arrangement of the book in which
‘[t]he pattern is patter is pat is tern is torn is broken-ken-ken’
(p. 232), each section is narrated from a different point of view with the
heteroglossia enacting the malleability of the self and accounting for the
multiplicity of identities in the Haitian setting. This fractal instability
of Ezili, her multiplicity and vulnerability, reiterate in the fictional text
the Deleuzian micropolitical resistance to rigid identitarian categories
(of race and gender, for example), which are seen as integral to the
structural inequalities of oppressive macropolitical regimes such as
slavery and patriarchy. At the same time, the emancipatory potential
of creativity – the constant fragmentation and differing of the self
as enacted by Ezili inhabiting bodies in diverse contexts – enables
alliances among the disenfranchised across time and space, race,
gender or sexuality. For the deity reaches, converses and empowers the
bodies she inhabits not through violence and opposition, but through
the transformative powers of artistic creation; born out of the slave
women’s chants, Ezili will embark on her journeys to the Ginen story-
space during Jeanne Duval’s serpentine dances.
Hopkinson takes care to show that the vulnerability of the goddess is
not incapacitating; she might be ‘dumbfounded’ (2003, p. 304) by all
the echoes she encounters, but Ezili is adamant that she does not want
to ‘stumble’ (p. 232). Born out of the salt of tears and of the Middle
Passage, trapped in Jeanne Duval’s syphilitic body and miscarried by

the prostitute Thaïs, familiarized with the meaning of ‘dirt’, ‘money’
and ‘food’ but then violently silenced by the warrior god Ogu, Ezili is
far from being victimized. Her embodiment in hitherto disempowered
figures lends them agency to imagine and respond to their entrapment
in alternative ways. If Ogu’s silencing of Ezili on the eve of the slave
rebellion on the plantation stands for the violence with which particu-

lar brands of anti-colonial practices aim to ‘right wrongs’, the deity’s
preoccupation with the power of ‘Ginen story’ and ‘hopes, lives, loves’
gestures at Deleuze’s micropolitics of creativity, desire and inclusion:
They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to
see; I taught me to see. They, we, are the ones healing the Ginen
story, fighting to destroy that cancerous trade in shiploads of African
bodies that ever demands to be fed more sugar, more rum, more
Nubian gold […] I am Ezili Red-eye, the termagant enraged, with
the power of millennia of Ginen hopes, lives, loves. (Hopkinson
2003, p. 305)
Refusing to give in to the ‘the same foul, stagnant swamp’ (p. 65) of
‘the salt sea of the Middle Passage’ (p. 89), Ezili is looking for the ‘sea
in the minds of [the] Ginen’ and ‘the sweet ones too’ (p. 65) – rivers
of desire and joy. The gruesome meaning of ‘salt’ as labour and death
is redefined by her as the ‘sea salt beneath the skin’ (p. 119), the sweat
of pleasure in Mer’s love for Tipingee and the drops of self-abandon in
Jeanne’s erotic dance for Baudelaire.
It is such moments of sensual abandon during which Jeanne loses
her sense of the world and forgets a past of brutalization that free Ezili
from her ‘rat-trapped’ existence (p. 122) and enable her to ‘ride’ other
bodies. It is also in Jeanne’s dreams that the roads and rivers of the
Ginen minds are unblocked, and Ezili is able to float along the streams
of Ginen story-space:
Every time your dreaming mind sets me free, I float into the spirit
place, into that aether that birthed me. There I can perceive a little bit
more clearly. There are currents there. There is movement. Helpless,
I tumble and splash from one to the next. Each eddy into which I fall
immerses me into another story, another person’s head. The streams
are stories of people; I can/will/did see them, taste them, smell them,
hear and touch them. I can perceive where one man’s telling tongue
will take him if he follows that branch of the river, or this. Where
another woman will find the tributary that leads her finally to love,
or to ruin. (Hopkinson 2003, p. 208)
The cancerous sea of the Middle Passage, even when mediated in what
Marianne Hirsch has called ‘postmemory’ (2002, p. 76), can result in
debilitating and suffocating nightmares.2 It is this pattern Ezili wants
to break – the ‘withering’, ‘drowning’, ‘dragging’ and ‘spitting sputum’

(p. 232). What she cherishes, instead, is the aether of the story-stream,
the temporal and spatial uprootedness of that ‘betweenplace’ (p. 288)
where stories are intertwined with one another, temporal linearity and
progress suspended, fact and fiction blended. Rather than drowning in
the ‘foul swamp’ (p. 154) of the Middle Passage, the deity yearns for the
love stories of Africa (p. 208); rather than the ‘salt-pucker of bitterness’
(p. 265), she covets the rhythm of the pattern. If Ezili wants to ‘speak.
Tell fortunes. Give advice’ (p. 208), these shall not be limited to the senti-
mentalization of the brutalized black body, but rejoice in its sensuality,
beauty and vitality. The realism or pathos of ‘bitter’ narratives, even
if politically motivated, is represented as debilitating and disabling;
the only outcome of investment in the mimetic and the sentimental
would be ‘a revolution gone wrong’ in Deleuze’s words (1990, p. 152).
In contrast, the anti-identitarian collective impetus behind Ezili’s strug-
gle against oppression, ‘[t]hey, we, are the ones healing the Ginen
story’ (p. 305) and the sensually suggestive potentiality of her vision
of the future, ‘I can/will/did see them, taste them, smell them, hear
and touch them’ (p. 208), lend her liberatory project micropolitical
resonances. For she speaks for, inhabits, and rejoices in the multiple
selves and stories she encounters; becoming them (or as Deleuze’s puts
it ‘plugging [herself] into an electric circuit’ [1990, p. 8]), the deity does
not represent the disenfranchised ones in a unilateral macropolitical
fashion but rather allows various different experiences of oppression
and exploitation to resonate within her.
These different experiences, narrated in a dialogic fashion by switch-
ing between the first-person narrative of Ezili and the free indirect
discourse of one of the three main characters, act as micropolitical
correctives of historical silences and excisions. One of the erasures
revisited by the novel is that of Jeanne Duval, the mixed-race compan-
ion of French modernist poet Charles Baudelaire. Hopkinson dislodges
Orientalist/Africanist depictions of Baudelaire’s ‘mulatto mistress’ and
fleshes out Jeanne’s presence obliterated from the works of contempo-
raries Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet by giving Jeanne a voice and
a context of her own, not defined by her relationship with the poet.3
Her writing back to History is contrasted with Baudelaire’s predatory

(if socially scandalous) writing practices; if for the flâneur ‘[i]t was all
sport […]. We were all just food for his eyes, for his pen. Fodder for
making stories with’ (p. 182), for Jeanne writing is an intimate and
communal act, invoked by the chamber pot full of urine and men-
strual blood in which she and her lover Lisette ‘write’ and ‘read’ their
future. The use of a liminal product, such as female waste, to predict

the future of marginalized figures – a mixed-race entertainer and her
female lover – reminds the reader of the constricting impact of the
identitarian categories of race, gender, sexuality and class, but also of
the possibilities for reclaiming, albeit in an abject manner, authorship
of one’s life stories.
It falls to Mer as the healer on a Saint-Domingue plantation to per-
form a different form of micropolitical history-writing. A witness to
the exploitation and brutalization of the Ginen, Mer regards it as her
duty to console and abide, to wait and endure. On the eve of the slave
revolt organized by the semi-mythical Makandal, she refuses to join
the revolutionary violence as it risks perpetuating the inhumanity of
the hegemonic macropolitical structure: ‘when the killing starts, the
same stick will beat the black dog and the white’ (p. 377). It is through
healing, patience and bearing witness that Mer resists the exploita-
tive regime of slavery but also the equally exclusive revolutionary
stance. Her micropolitical response speaks for those who are not brave
enough to rebel against oppression, and are therefore victimized by
both slave-holders and revolutionaries. She speaks too for those whose
ambiguous racial identity undermines the identitarian categories upon
which slavery is premised and which are reinforced by Makandal’s fol-
lowers. While Hopkinson can be seen here as correcting the erasure of
women’s contribution to the History of anti-colonial struggle, through
the violent encounter between Mer/Ezili and Makandal/Ogu, she also
dramatizes the bifurcated nature of colonial resistance tackled by other
Caribbean writers before her.4 Mer/Ezili’s desire ‘to save, to save’ (p. 327)
and her subsequent mutilation by the warrior god are a reminder of the
unpalatable aspects of the History-making on which Makandal/Ogu has
embarked; rigidly identitarian and narrowly dogmatic, his oppositional
political approach literally blocks Mer’s story-stream and thus taints the
transformative potential of his revolution. Mer’s acquisition of the gift
of writing, in contrast, shows the potential of her micropolitical stance
to rewrite her/story in the deprived circumstances of a plantation slave
and a silenced woman in a patriarchal society. She embroiders the gods
cherished by the Ginen – Lasirén, Ezili, Ogu, Kouzin Aka and Mother
Mary – sartorially bringing together differences and creating alliances

through syncretic creative practices (p. 387).
This resonates with the subversive rewriting of the Christian legend
of Mary of Egypt that the story of the Alexandrian prostitute Thaïs
performs. Hopkinson deconstructs, with a clear degree of humour, the
legend of the ascetic martyr Mary of Egypt (gypsy Mary), who repents
her past dissolute ways by living for eighteen years the life of a hermit

in the desert on an austere diet. This mainstream version, not surpris-
ingly, is exposed in the novel as the construct of the zealous monk
Zosimus. As Jane Stevenson points out, the characterization of Mary in
the legend – initially as a nymphomaniac sinner and subsequently as a
female ascetic – reflects ‘male paranoia about women’, their bodies and
sanctity (1996, p. 26, p. 38). Hopkinson, however, adds another twist by
having the monk record and disseminate the story that a very unrepent-
ant Thaïs/Ezili feeds him thanks to her newly acquired mindreading
skills. This cheeky reclamation of Thaïs’s narrative authority challenges
micropolitically the Christian doctrine, equally implicated in the
brutal exploitation of slaves as in the sexual and political oppression
of women. The Salt Roads, therefore, attributes Thaïs’s past as a prosti-
tute to the economic inequalities and patriarchal order in Alexandria
rather than to some innate proclivity of hers: not only has she been
sold into slavery by her parents, but her inability to enter the temple
at Capitolina is due to her miscarriage of a child conceived during a
boat trip for which she has to pay in kind. This strand of the novel,
therefore, captures the dispersed character of oppression by focusing
on the intersection of economic and sexual exploitation in pre-colonial
Africa and the Middle East. And, even if Ezili’s incarnation in Thaïs takes
place only in the last third of the novel, her story is not contained in
a patriarchal framework. Thaïs’s alliance with Mer and Jeanne, across
continents and eras, reclaims her/their narrative control and builds the
roads of emancipation that Ezili is seeking.
While all these women are affected adversely by macropolitical struc-
tures premised on identitarian divisions along the lines of race, gender,
class and sexuality, they refuse to get drowned in the ‘foul swamp’
(p. 154) of oppression; neither do their transgressions simply ‘write
back’ to a hegemonic discourse. Instead of embracing an oppositional
political stance, Jeanne’s abject waste-readings of the future, Mer’s
syncretic embroidery of the Ginen’s gods of revolution, and Thaïs’s
cheeky dictation of a Christian legend act as affectionate and joyous
creative responses that forge cross-border alliances capable of countering
the dispersed nature of their oppression. The characters, then, have the
potential not only to ‘correct’ existing historical and literary ‘truths’,

but also to imagine and articulate differently the ‘burden’ of a past that
has all too often limited the possibilities of the future. Reading this, as
well as other postcolonial texts, through the Deleuzian micropolitical
lens will, therefore, map alternative ways of participating in the process
of ‘revolutionary becoming’ for those that do not possess the cultural
or other capital to reform or perform on the macropolitical scene.

Furthermore, by attuning our reading practices to the role of affects
and desires, Deleuze’s framework alerts us to the significance of these
imperceptible channels for the workings and dismantling of hegemonic
power that doctrinal oppositional discourses are all too quick to ignore
or dismiss.
Notes
1. For another revision of the Haitian legend of Sor Rose, cf. Edwidge Danticat
‘Between the Pool and the Gardenias’ (1995).
2. Hirsch defines ‘postmemory’ as a memory that works through multiple
mediation, a memory which has been communicated through representation
rather than ‘re-enactment’ of the event, and which is more consciously organ-
ized as a narrative. Jeanne’s nightmares convey the horrors of the Middle
Passage as recounted by a sailor who was entertained by her grandmother,
even though none of her immediate family has been transported to the New
World (cf. Hopkinson 2003, pp. 153–154). Unlike Hirsch’s definition, based
on her analysis of Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, Hopkinson, through Ezili,
seems to question the potential of ‘retrospective witnessing by adoption’
(Hirsch 2002, p. 76).
3. For an extended discussion of these visual renditions of Jeanne (cf. Pollock
1999, pp. 247–315).
4. See, for example, Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984), where the legend of the two
sisters, Nanny and Sekesu, presents the former as an emblem of resistance
(she became a maroon) and the latter as a symbol of victimhood and comp-
licity (she remained a slave).
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10
Undercurrents and the Desert(ed):
Negarestani, Tournier and Deleuze
Map the Polytics of a ‘New Earth’

Rick Dolphijn
In their Geophilosophy (in What Is Philosophy?), Deleuze and Guattari

offer us an important connection between the movements of thought
and the connections to the soil in which thought grows. They state that
‘thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth’ (1992,
p. 85). Thought happens in a double movement: ‘territory and earth are
two components with two zones of indiscernibility – deterritorialization
(from territory to the earth) and reterritorialization (from earth to
territory)’ (p. 86). As territory and the earth are inseparable from the
moment that thinking (as a mode) began, it is impossible (for us) to
take them apart; all thought removes itself from a territory, towards the
earth, while it is at the same time installing a territory, removing itself
from the earth. Thought itself, moving parallel to the matters from
which it breaks free, necessarily involves both the earth and territory,
while it is being deterritorialized and reterritorialized ad infinitum. Or,
to use the concepts that Deleuze and Guattari introduced in A Thousand
Plateaus (1987, p. 480), thought moves both by means of a directionality
and a dimensionality.
In A Thousand Plateaus, a politics of space is immediately enforced
in this opposition, as Deleuze and Guattari claim that dimensionality
entrenches (s’instaurer) directionality, thus organizing the latter accord-
ing to the dimensionalities enforced upon the earth. Alfred North
Whitehead referred to this process as ‘grooving’, claiming that ‘[t]he
groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts
from something to which no further attention is paid’ (Whitehead
1967, p. 197). Grooves are the worldly ‘ribs and the rhythms’ that we so
easily slip into, that distort directionality and superimpose their dimen-
sional organization upon it.
199
Whitehead was convinced that because of technology, this grooving

more and more removed us from the face of the earth. Deleuze and
Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, similarly announce that directional-
ity, though inventive and always capable of opening up new routes of
navigation, is more and more bothered by these dimensional processes
of territorialization. They talk in this regard of money, work and hous-
ing, examples that in today’s capitalist system more than ever prove

to give form to the way we live our lives. Contrary to how (financial,
blackboard) economists reduce these issues to set theoretical equations,
Deleuze and Guattari insist that money, work and housing are as real
as they can be: these are the dimensions that dramatically entrench the
urban landscapes in our age, but just as well give form to the sea, the
stratosphere and the desert (cf. 1987, p. 481).
An ecosophical or geophilosophical search for a ‘new earth’, as
Deleuze and Guattari emphasized it later in their careers (Guattari 2000;
Deleuze and Guattari 1992) but which was already present in Deleuze’s
The Logic of Sense (1990) and other earlier texts such as Desert Islands,
seems to be of the greatest importance to contemporary thought (now
more than ever). Their cry for a permanent revolution in thought is a
general cry to break free from the entrenchments in which we live and
should be taken very seriously, especially in combination with the plea
to actually think the earth and to map its ethical, social and political
involvements.
Contrary to how the ecological movement envisions this, a ‘new
earth’ cannot be established through preserving or conserving, or by
considering the earth as equal to ‘nature’, an idea that has received
remarkably little attention in philosophy since Kant, or better, that has,
after Kant, rarely been thought independent of his heritage. In his later
writings, Guattari puts it as follows:
Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-
loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in my sense
questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power forma-
tions, whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue as
it has for the past decade. (2000, p. 35)
In recent years, ecologists like Timothy Morton have gone even further
claiming that ‘Environmentalism is a work of mourning for a mother
we never had. To have ecology, we must give up nature. But since we
have been addicted to Nature for so long, giving up will be painful.
Giving up a fantasy is harder than giving up a reality’ (2010, p. 95).
Dolphijn: Undercurrents and the Desert(ed) 201
But the ecologies suggested by Deleuze and Guattari are not ‘without
nature’ as Morton proposes them. Guattari said it most convincingly:
‘Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture;
in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the
mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference,
we must learn to think “transversally”’ (2000, p. 29). A critical and
clinical Deleuzian (Deleuzo–Guattarian) perspective means that we

have to rethink nature, reconceptualize the earth in order to ungroove
it (ungrooving in the sense of getting rid of the grooves and of finding
the ungrooved earth).
In an attempt to free thought from the ‘finitude’, from the grooves in
which thought has become stranded, Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative
materialism is continuing this Deleuzian line of thinking, especially
where Meillassoux stresses that nature can very well be known
(absolutely) – contrary to how Kant and his followers have always
considered nature to be thinkable but unknowable: in other words,
‘doomed’ to be stuck in anthropocentrism. In his much-discussed debut
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Meillassoux starts
his anti-metaphysics (as he calls it) with an interest in ‘ancestrality’
(a phrase that he uses to refer to all realities before they appeared to
humanity or actually any form of life on earth) or ‘diachronicity’
(a term he introduces later in the book and which concerns the events
after human life or life on earth) and in the ‘arche-fossil’ (those materials
that index the existence of an ancestral reality).
Meillassoux searches for ‘the great outdoors’ (as he calls it); the absolute
outside which is anterior or posterior to life (or thought) and which thus
wards off the possibility of grooving. Moving away from Kantian ideas of
consciousness which are only interested in how objects appear for and
to us (as in, fully embedded in the grooves we have created), Meillassoux
wants to free thinking through the earth, or as he puts it:
And if contemporary philosophers insist so adamantly that thought

is entirely oriented towards the outside, this could be because of their
failure to come to terms with a bereavement – the denial of a loss
concomitant with the abandonment of dogmatism. The great out-
doors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which
was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own
givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we
are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore
with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory – of being
entirely elsewhere. (2008, p. 7)
The idea of being ‘on foreign territory’, as stated above, of being

confronted with grooves that are not familiar to us or perhaps even
with an elsewhere which has not been grooved at all (because it has
not been grooved, or because it cannot be), is a major challenge to
philosophy because it means that philosophy must sacrifice its great-
est possession: consciousness and its language as the essential point of
departure for thinking about the world. Meillassoux is here more radi-

cal than Nietzsche when he considers the necessity of forgetting to be
only the first (superficial) step to take in order to come to a philosophy
that is not limited by human (Kantian) finitude, by the grooves we
created, to a philosophy that, in the end, is indeed more earthly. Only
when philosophy accepts that ‘the same cause may actually bring about
“a hundred different events”’ (2008, p. 90), it can begin to fulfil its task,
which is to take into account all of those consequences that refuse to
be understood, that refuse to act according to our terms (since the laws
of nature, Meillassoux claims, are our inventions).
Tournier’s Speranza
A direct answer to Meillassoux’s ancestrality and diachronicity, his

search for the great outdoors and his interest in foreign territories or
ungrooved ‘entirely elsewheres’, can be found in Deleuze’s earliest
published text called Desert Islands that was first published in 1953.
Anticipating Meillassoux, Deleuze starts by telling us that ‘islands are
either from before or for after humankind’ (2004, p. 9). Interested in
what we may refer to as ‘the unterritorialized’ (which could be that
space not yet inhabited but just as well the space being smoothened)
Deleuze starts his career by searching for the kind of thought that
‘happens’ at the unterritorialized. In A Thousand Plateaus, this kind of
thinking is famously referred to as ‘nomad thought’, where Deleuze and
Guattari conclude that ‘the nomads make the desert no less than they
are made by it’ (p. 382). But it is in his first text Desert Islands, which has
been paid scant scholarly attention, that Deleuze, rudimentarily, offers
us an ecological alternative to the way that thought grows from the
earth. Far removed from money, work and housing, far removed from
the Others, as will be discussed shortly, the deserted island might offer
us new ways to think the earth, the unterritorialized.
Of all possible islands it is, above all, the deserted island which
necessarily provokes a most radical dehumanization, as Deleuze calls
it throughout this text. The deserted island, even more so than the
ancestral and diachronical statement Meillassoux introduced us to,
demands a full surrender (as we will soon see) in order to be thought,

or rather, in order to find out in what way thought could be possible
here in the first place. Lacking territory, the deserted island cannot be
thought, it insists on remaining unthought. This means that it is impos-
sible to continue one’s life when arriving at the shore of a deserted
island. A ‘new life’ has to be invented with the ‘new earth’ time and
again. In a new life ‘there is an extraordinary fine topology that relies

not on points or objects, but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations
(winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creak-
ing of the ice, the tactile qualities of both)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
p. 382). Thus, the truly deserted island, as Deleuze already concluded
in Desert Islands, has to be that place from which thought itself is cre-
ated anew; as a necessarily unfixed, unfixing perhaps, variation on the
ungrooved, uninhabited earth.
Ideally then, and this is what makes the deserted island such a
wonderful and unique place on earth, new lives and thoughts, radically
different from existing lives and thoughts, can be recovered from the
deserted and the unpeopled. It requires a radical reducing of oneself, of
the Human Being, before one is able to reach this ‘consciousness of the
movement which produced the island’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 10). Yet it is
only there, that one can find
an Idea of humanity, a prototype, a man who would almost be a

god, a woman who would be a goddess, a great Amneseiac, a pure
Artist, a consciousness of Earth and Ocean, an enormous hurricane,
a beautiful witch, a statue from the Easter Islands. There you have a
human being who precedes itself. (2004, p. 11)
As far away from anthropocentrism as one can be, way after finitude, it
is at the deserted island that life can be recreated, that a true alternative
can erupt.
A very good example of how to think the deserted island and all that
it can do is to be found in Michel Tournier’s novel Friday. Contrary to
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which Deleuze refers to as a very boring
novel, Tournier’s revitalization of the story offers us a fine example of
how the deserted island happens and how it refuses grooving. As in
Defoe, Robinson intrudes upon the deserted island (one that, as we
soon find out, has always-already been inhabited) and searches for
ways to be included in the island’s existence. And, again, as in Defoe’s
novel, this turns out to be extremely difficult. Robinson tries to estab-
lish two of the fiercest systems that he took from the modern world
(monotheistic religion and capitalism) and – in turn – tries to adapt

them to Speranza, the island.
Speranza does not resist Robinson’s colonization. On the contrary,
both strategies actually work very well. Yet, as he installed these alien
regimes, the island did not re/veil itself (it did not reveille/reveal/unveil
itself). Despite Robinson’s efforts (which included actual penetration)
no openness was realized, there was no awakening, which explains

Robinson’s alienation in this part of the book. Christianity, to start with
the first of the two regimes, seems to be simply ignored by the island. In
the beginning of the novel, the Bible plays an important role, but gradu-
ally it disappears. It is true, as Petit (1991, p. 10) suggests, that there
are interesting parallels between the Bible and this novel as a whole
(for example, that the explosion central to the book marks the switch
between the Old and the New Testament). But in the end Robinson
himself seems to have lost interest in Christianizing the island (and
Friday). Perhaps it is through Friday that Christianity no longer makes
any sense. Friday is not simply a name Robinson gives to personify an
alleged unhumanity that always already lives on (with) the island. But
it necessarily also signals the day of Christ’s death, the day of Venus’s
birth, as Robinson notes (Tournier 1969, p. 228), and the day of fasting
(p. 70). Friday, then, is the vector of deterritorialization.
Capitalism, despite its relatively short existence, proves to be an even
stronger force than Christianity. Note how Robinson, after a short period
of desolation at the beginning of the book, quickly believes in accumula-
tion again. As he notes in his journals: ‘Henceforth I shall abide by the
following rule: all production is creation, therefore good; all consump-
tion is destruction therefore bad [...]. To accumulate!’ (Tournier 1969,
p. 61). But, although rather successful (Robinson collects a huge surplus),
even capitalism is eventually abandoned. It takes about half the book
before he is capable of resisting it, but quite early in the text, the island
itself (later repeated through Friday) shows Robinson once and for all that
these imported strategies (capitalism, Christianity) will not work here:
There was a radiance in the air; and in a moment of inexpressible

happiness Robinson seemed to discern another island behind the one
he had labored so long in solitude, a place more alive, warmer and
more fraternal, which his mundane preoccupations had concealed
from him. (Tournier 1969, p. 90)
The key term in the above quote is ‘another island’. Another island is
concealed from Tournier’s Robinson: it is impossible. But why is another
island impossible for Robinson? Because of Robinson’s mundane

preoccupations. In his reading of Tournier in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
defines the limits of the possible in his conceptualization of ‘otherness’
(which is opposed to ‘anotherness’, as we will find out later). The Other
explains what these ‘mundane preoccupations’ may be. Deleuze claims
that this is what happens:

I desire nothing that cannot be seen, thought, or possessed by a
possible Other. That is the basis of my desire. It is always Others who
relate my desire to an object [...]. The Other is initially a structure
of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not
function as it does. (1990, pp. 306–307)
In other words, it is through Others that my desires are directed, thus

continuing (for instance) Christianity and capitalism. Others are the
mundane preoccupations that keep Robinson from catching up with
the movement of the island prior to humankind, from finding a new
form of life.
Deleuze claims that Tournier’s novel Friday presents ‘Robinson: the
man without Others on his island’ (1969, p. 304). In the end, Robinson
rids himself of the Others that have haunted him, and that, although
not actually present, directed his desires, until the island revealed
to him ‘another island’: a place more alive, warmer and fraternal.
Tournier’s novel tells us how deserted islands reveal their deserted-
ness, their impossible colonization, their ability to wash away all the
grooves made in the sand. Speranza shows its islandness, surrounded
by the sea that immediately erases all of its inscriptions, that always
already ungrooves. Anotherness comes into being through these earthly
dynamics so essential for the deserted island. It can only come into
being when the Others have vanished.
Negarestani’s Xerodrome
There are many different deserted islands. And they can be found eve-
rywhere, but, of course, only where you least expect them. Deserted
islands are impossible, or necessarily unforeseen. They reveal their
desertedness, their entirely elsewheres, when you least expect it. Reza
Negarestani, in his debut Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous
Materials, states that the Middle East springs from the Dead Sea. Its
deserts refuse to be inhabited and, after being grooved by colonial
and postcolonial forces – among them Christianity and (even more
so) capitalism – the earthly dynamics are now surfacing from beneath
and starting to reveal another island underneath. Contrary to Tournier,
whose Robinsonade is a novel which ‘gives rise’ (as Deleuze would say)
to a rich complex of philosophical concepts, Negarestani’s work has
little to do with the novel form anymore. It is H.P. Lovecraft and early
Greek Chthonic mysticism. It talks of Pazuzu and Ugallu-demons and of
Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine. It combines astrophysics with the

fictional diary of a Hamid Parsani.
Cyclonopedia, in every way, practises the ‘radical paranoia – as a specu-
lative line of schizophrenia’ (Negarestani 2008, p. 220). Yet it is in this
sheer madness, which is impossible to summarize, that the Middle East
reveals an anotherness: a world more alive, warmer and more fraternal.
It is a world that suffers, that has been ridden by extreme violence
in many ways, but that slowly and gently finds a way of undying. It
has already started to wash away the alien (Occidental, post-Kantian)
grooves that had been overcoding its space for so long. Such is the
world after 9/11, the explosion in the middle that marks capitalism’s
final stage (which might nevertheless last for eternity) and that has
shaken the earth as a whole, including its deserted islands and the
seas that surround them (for instance, the Arab Spring and the Occupy
movement).
Like Tournier, Negarestani is convinced that the process of dehu-
manization has set in with the ultimate desert(ed). Tournier refers to the
ultimate desert(ed) as Speranza, Negarestani talks of Xerodrome, or the
Tellurian Omega: that which has presented itself as ‘another island’ to
Robinson, and which is at work beneath Speranza, is also at work
underneath the Middle East. Negarestani shows how a politics of space
(Deleuze/Guattari’s ecosophical or geophilosophical search for a new
earth) necessarily comes with an ungrooving of colonial/postcolonial
ribs and rhythms that cover up the Middle East similar to the way in
which Speranza was not awakened by Robinson’s colonizing efforts.
It is this ecosophy which Negarestani’s main character in Cyclonopedia,
Hamid Parsani, develops as his philosophy of oil. Parsani is an Iranian
archaeologist, who, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances
(later he reappears again), convinces us that the philosophy of oil can
re/veil the mighty undercurrents of the Middle East. He notices that the
oil is the speechless and consciousnessless physical spirit that opens up
the body of the island Asia Minor. Oil, he claims, is by now greasing
Integrated World Capitalism (as Guattari would refer to it), recomposing
its flows accordingly. Yet only recently (in the wake of 9/11) oil has
started to realize the entirely ‘new landscape’ we find ourselves in today.
With the accident, with 9/11, its Furies were satisfied and slowly and
kindly a new earth can come into being.
Although discernible only on a hidden level, Cyclonopedia demands
the collapse of the two major systems of grooving that we saw in
Tournier’s Friday: capitalism and religion. Parsani first of all talks of the
gods, who must die. Or rather they ought to take solar voyages to the
earthly ground (to be grounded) to become dead gods. But what do

dead gods do? Parsani explains:
The dead god is not a tired, abolished or doomed god but a god with
its ultimate weapon of catastrophic devastation. A plague coming
to earth to make of the earth’s restrictive ground a direct passage
to openness, the dead god mortifies itself by affirming the earthly
ground within which it is buried. If the act of descent, as associated
with dead gods, is identified as the secularization of the divine’s body
(departing from the divine’s sovereignty), the dead god itself is by no
means a secular entity. In the process of descending, the dead god
rediscovers its supposedly secular corpus as a pestilential but love-
saturated communion with the sacred. Through descent, the god
commits a crime at once secular and sacred: It opens itself by eating
and infecting the human, and opens the human by turning itself
into a corpse. (Negarestani 2008, pp. 204–205)
Could we think of a more radically deterritorializing theology? The dead

gods, the Chthonic deities from beneath the surface of the earth, fertilize
the land, vitalize it again, smoothing the alien grooves that had organ-
ized its surface including the humans that never really inhabited it.
In a similar vein, a new earthly economy has to be reinvented:
‘According to Parsani, the Earth always plays the role of the subversive
Insider against the Empire of the Sun, which has given rise to terres-
trial orders, politics and modes of living based on hegemonic stardom’
(Negarestani 2008, p. 42). And it is this economy, a molecular economy,
that is currently starting to rise from the Middle East, he claims.
In his interview, Parsani suggests that the Middle East has simulated
the mechanisms of dusting to mesh together an economy which
operates through positive degenerating processes, an economy
whose carriers must be extremely nomadic, yet must also bear an
ambivalent tendency towards the established system or the ground.
An economy whose vehicle and systems never cease to degenerate
themselves. For in this way, they ensure their permanent molecular
dynamism, their contagious distribution and diffusion over their

entire economy. (Negarestani 2008, p. 91)
Yet, this religious and economic revolution starts with oil; this heaviest
of the hydrocarbons that flows rapidly, in every direction underneath
its soil, is the essence of the Middle East. Negarestani follows geophysicist
Thomas Gold’s theory of the Deep Hot Biosphere which suggests that

petroleum is not a fossil fuel, and that oil has its origin in natural
gas flows which feed bacteria living in the bowels of the Earth.
Therefore, the demonarchy of oil is not subjected to the laws of the
dead (i.e. the preserved corpses of prehistoric organisms) but rather
is animated by a Plutonic vitalism (abiogenic petroleum generated
by nether biosphere of the Earth) [...] rather than from decomposi-
tion of fossils and organic body-counts. Consequently, oil is far more
substantial and follows a different, autonomous logic of planetary
distribution. (2008, p. 72)
Full of new forms of life, but consisting solely of highly condensed

dead organic compounds, oil, Parsani concludes, is everywhere. Or,
as Negarestani tells us: ‘Books, foods, religions, numbers, specks of
dust – all are linguistically, geologically, politically and mathematically
combined into petroleum. For him, everything is suspiciously oily’
(2008, p. 42). Surfacing at the deserted island called the Middle East, oil
is the undead capable of virtually vitalizing everything.
A Great Health and Death
Negarestani’s search for a new life offered to us by the earth, for the
oily undead, is precisely the search, or rather the flow, that Robinson,
near the end of Tournier’s novel, started to live. The feeling of being
in a place more alive, warmer and more fraternal, or better, to create
one’s life on another island, to rise from its wholly other, ungrooved
soil, is conceptualized by Deleuze as ‘a Great Health’. Commenting
on Tournier, whose Robinson, in searching for a new life with the
island, is constantly concerned with his health, Deleuze only briefly
mentions this idea in the analysis of Friday as published in The Logic
of Sense. There, a Great Health is mainly considered to be the future
state that Robinson is anticipating: the new life he hopes to establish:
the dehumanized Robinson, the ethereal double liberated by the island
(along with the rest of the world).
In What Is Philosophy?, health is conceptually linked to the lives of

the great artists who, like great philosophers, often suffer from serious
illnesses or neuroses, for they ‘have seen something in life that is too
much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them
the quiet mark of death’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1992, p. 172). Of course
this is precisely what happened to Robinson when on Speranza, and
perhaps this also explains Parsani’s unsolved (yet anticipated) disap-

pearance from this side of the Middle East.
Even more so than in The Logic of Sense and What Is Philosophy?, it is in
Nietzsche and Philosophy that Deleuze conceptualizes a Great Health most
convincingly, personifying health with Nietzsche himself.1 Here we once
again see that a Great Health does not equal an ideal physical condition
that we should all strive for, but rather signals the movement from sick-
ness to health and from health to sickness. It is the Great Health that
allows Nietzsche, in his role as pathologist of the earth, to state even
until the very end (in Ecce Homo) that he was actually very healthy. Yet,
it could well be phrased the other way around. For, to evoke Artaud (and,
in doing so, to do justice to Negarestani), we could also claim that we
are searching for ‘a real sickness [...] which touches the essence of being
[... and which] applies to a whole life’ (Artaud 1976, p. 44).
A Great Health has to be acquired over and over again because one is
continuously required to sacrifice it. It is a healthiness of people ‘who
are often shipwrecked and bruised’ (Nietzsche in Deleuze and Guattari
2004, p. 100). They are people who are dangerously healthy and who find
before them
a country still undiscovered, the horizon of which no one has

yet seen, a beyond to every country and every refuge of the idea
that man has ever known, a world so overflowing with beauty,
strangeness, doubt, terror, and divinity, that both our curiosity
and our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness. (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004, p. 100)
In the ecosophical art of moving between health and sickness, of find-

ing joy in both of them at the same time, the Greatest Health, that
dangerously great health, crucial for all creation, for all absolute deter-
ritorialization, reveals itself. Robinson’s striving to catch up with the
movements of the island, the wind, the power of the sun, was a creative
act and gave him his Great Health, and which, in turn, made him
‘live perpetually in a moment of innocence’, as Tournier writes (1969,
p. 205). As if he had witnessed the hidden treasure chambers of the
Mesopotamian necropolises opening up their overwhelmingly different

fields of distribution.
A Great Health is about being reborn by the earth. In Nietzsche,
Deleuze referred to it as sickness, sometimes madness, but Negarestani’s
necropolitics makes an even more radical vitalist claim. It is a celebra-
tion of death, which again rewrites the vitalism of Deleuze and Guattari,
pushing it towards the desert of the real in 21st-century postcolonial

thinking as it surfaces time and again, from the Arab Spring to the
Occupy movement. In Anti-Oedipus, perhaps their most straightforward
political manifesto, Deleuze and Guattari already conceptualize ‘death’
in a similar vein, as they state that ‘every intensity controls within its
own life the experience of death, and envelops it’ (2004, p. 363).
Not only here but in all of Deleuze’s work the experience of death is
neither life’s denial nor its absence (death is not ‘the other’ of life). On
the contrary: it has always already been the essence of every living thing
much more so than life.2 Death is by all means enveloped into every indi-
viduality. It gives birth to its creation. Death is the humus, it resides in the
bowels of the earth from which everything stems, pushing everything
in the direction of the sun. It opens up the individuality carrying life;
it eats and infects the human being, creating life anew. Death eats its
way through everything, creating the strings of matter which life itself
opens up.
To Become a Target: Anotherness and Openness
The plurality of forms demands death (even more so than madness and
sickness) to happen, demands that man let himself be killed. Only then
can new thoughts and new lives happen, lives that are not harassed by
the Others that organized our bodies. Tournier’s another island, from
which Deleuze conceptualized ‘anotherness’ as a radically different
strategy from ‘otherness’, is all about rejecting the existence of man-
and-his-changing-relationships-with-the-earth, prioritizing the event,
or perhaps even prioritizing life itself, to give form to man (amongst
others) as a series of non-essential features. Negarestani, on the other
hand, talks of a complicity with anonymous materials (which is the
subtitle of Cyclonopedia) by which he emphasizes the closedness of
the necrocratic regime.
When Robinson searched to create a new earth, a new style of life,
he was keen on ‘inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing’, as
Deleuze puts it (1995, p. 100). Robinson was ‘the result of circumstances
on the desert isle’ (Deleuze 1990, p. 309), which meant that he, and
everything he embodied, had to emerge into the island’s ecology. He

had to die. He had to be taken over by the island. He had to be eaten
and infected by Speranza – and he had to allow that to happen. He had to
become a target for Speranza.
To become a target is what Negarestani keeps referring to with his
neologism ‘polytics’, his term to replace ‘politics’, which has become
too infected with post 1968 philosophies of Otherness. It is no doubt

the most important argument of the book and definitely demands
much more attention from theory in the near future (if only because
it has become the political agenda of the Arab Spring and the Occupy
movement). Becoming a target comes close to what our main character,
Hamid Parsani, in his numerous publications, has referred to as ‘the
enigma of openness’ which is to lie at the heart of polytics. The enigma
of openness, Parsani tells us, is that true openness involves a radical
closedness, as is made clear in the following example of ‘love’:
The openness associated with love is itself a yet stronger closure

to the outside world. Between two lovers, openness is initially
established to close them upon themselves and from the outside.
Love (philia) in all its forms entangles openness with closure, and
ultimately closure with the radical exteriority of the outside, from
which only impossibility actively emanates: the impossibility of
being closed as well as the impossibility of affording the outside.
(Negarestani 2008, p. 220)
The enigma of openness, this inverse mechanism of complicity,

radicalizes Deleuze’s anotherness, Tournier’s another island, Meillassoux’s
Deleuzianism and, above all, the polytics that Negarestani himself
proposes. It comes down to the idea that true revolution, true change,
is about being opened (by) rather than being open (to) (cf. for instance
Negarestani 2008, p. 242, and 2011a, p. 15). Presented by Negarestani as
a continuation of Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of becoming (cf. 2008,
p. 196), polytics calls for an ecology of clopenness (a term from topol-
ogy combining closed and open), which does not start from language,
conscience or even man (and his Other), but from a need to become a
target, from a need to be opened up (by).
In the following citation, Negarestani summarizes the power of ‘being
opened (by)’:
‘I am open to you’ can be recapitulated as ‘I have the capacity to

bear your investment’ or ‘I afford you’. This conservative voice is
not associated with will or attention but with the inevitability of

affordance as a mesophilic bond, and with the survival economy and
the logic of capacity. If you exceed the capacity by which you can be
afforded, I will be cracked, lacerated and laid open. Despite its dedica-
tion to repression, its blind desire for the monopoly of survival and the
authoritarian logic of the boundary, the plane of ‘being open to’ has
never been openly associated with paranoia and regression. Such is the

irony of liberalism and anthropomorphic desire. (2008, p. 198)
To be ‘opened up by’ is the invention, the moment of creation, the acci-

dent that just has to happen, as the painter Francis Bacon would have it:
it brings forth the possibility of a wholly other life. The idea of ‘being
opened (by), not being open (to)’ suggests the ways in which the politics
of ‘anotherness’ can be understood to replace that of ‘otherness’. For
Negarestani, the politics of Otherness has haunted the postcolonial dis-
course of, in his case, the Middle East (think of Edward Said) for too long.
Deleuze’s rejection of the Other in The Logic of Sense already emphasizes
the ‘being opened (by)’, most notably in the way that he puts so much
emphasis on the moment that Robinson realizes that he has forgotten
the Others: ‘Those lights have vanished from my consciousness. For a
long time, fed by my fantasy, they continued to reach me. Now it is
over, and the darkness has closed in’ (Tournier in Deleuze 1990, p. 309).
Robinson is cracked, lacerated and laid open. Only now can he experi-
ment with the another island that is alive, warmer and more fraternal.
‘Anotherness’ has nothing to do with the Other. Read Derrida’s Of
Hospitality: ‘absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and
that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with
the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown,
anonymous other’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelles 2000, p. 25). Like
Derrida, Said himself, by staging the Orient as Europe’s Other (Said
1979, p. 1), both questions and broadens their correlation. But are both
not talking only about ‘being open to’ and not about ‘being opened
by’? Derrida still talks of the Kantian Subject when he himself opens
his own house, in the same way that Said envisions Europe opening
itself up to the Orient. Isn’t this exactly the kind of anthropocentrism
that Negarestani, Deleuze, but also Tournier are not talking about? And
isn’t this Deleuzian ‘anotherness’, this Negarestanian polytics, or rather,
this Robinsonian ‘another island’, this Parsanian ‘philosophy of oil’ by
all means offering us that very different revolution, very different from
what we have seen before? Negarestani is fierce in his rejection of the
Other: ‘To become open, or to experience the chemistry of openness
is not possible through “opening yourself” [...]. Radical openness can

be evoked by becoming more of a target for the outside [...] one must
seduce the exterior forces of the outside’ (2008, p. 199).
Anotherness does not presume the Self that is or is not sympathetic
to the Other, to an outside. Negarestani’s polytics is the radical outside.
Thus, this New Earth (as Deleuze and Guattari present it in Anti-Oedipus)
can also never be of the earth (it cannot be its property). As Negarestani

puts it: ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s slyly appropriated “New Earth” presents a
model of an earth whose every surface and trellis is an unground, a ter-
minal planetary body tolerating neither solar economies nor its own
terrestriality’ (2008, p. 43). Indeed, the New Earth is being opened (by),
not being open (to). It does not tolerate anything, not even the earth
itself. It resists the present as a whole. It is opened by its undercurrents
as they secretly flow in all directions, creating transversals ad infinitum.
This mythological dream for undercurrents not only holds true for
the body of the island but equally for Robinson himself, who, when
in a state of almost pure joy, is himself opened up by a Great Health
underneath:
He pictured his own lungs growing outside himself like a blossoming

of purple-tinted flesh, living polyparies of coral with pink mem-
branes, sponges of human tissue [...]. He would flaunt that intricate
efflorescence, that bouquet of fleshy flowers, in the wide air, while
a tide of purple ecstasy flowed into his body on a stream of crimson
blood. (Tournier 1969, pp. 193–194)
Negarestani (following authors like Lovecraft and Houellebecq and

perhaps also Artaud [think of his Body without Organs]) in a similar way
celebrates ‘necrocracy’, claiming that ‘necrocracy suggests the strictures
of the conservative economy not in regard to life but in regard to ways
the organism dies; and it is the way of returning to the originary death
that prescribes the course of life for the organism’ (Negarestani 2011b,
p. 192). Getting rid of the organs, of the grooves that order, death is the
only way out: ‘necrocracy suggests that the organism must die or bind
the precursor exteriority only in ways that its conservative conditions or
economic order can afford’ (Negarestani 2011b, p. 193).
Do not Survive!
Negarestani’s polytics, in the end, opts for a new understanding of life,

posing the question ‘if life is the source of living then why do we need
to survive?’ (2008, p. 210). For once we realize that the ethics of life is
external to that of survival, and that survival is a means of resistance
to the epidemic and overpowering presence of life, we must conclude
that to be pro-life is, essentially, to be anti-survival. Or as Negarestani
concludes: ‘when it comes to the exteriority of life to the living being,
survival is intrinsically impossible’ (2008, p. 210).
Negarestani’s ‘radical paranoia’ resists the continuation of life (as sur-

vival): ‘Closed and folded in upon itself, radical paranoia is a speculative
line of schizophrenia that no longer believes in openness to the outside,
since for the living being the outside is merely a vitalistic environment’
(2008, p. 219). The outside then is Otherness, it is a possible world that,
Negarestani insists, reinstalls the regimes that we have always known.
This is then survival as we knew it: it is Defoe’s Robinson who insists on
staying alive (staying true to the capitalist and religious grooves he lived
in). Then, ‘[t]o be part of the environment (viz. the economical outside)
is to survive’ (Negarestani 2008, p. 219).
Negarestani, as expected, is onto something different. We have
already rejected otherness and its ethical need to be ‘open to’ as it
was promoted in work in the writings of Jacques Derrida (and Edward
Said). Now Negarestani also rejects Derrida’s claim that there is nothing
outside context. On the contrary, he seems to urge us to get rid of all
possible contextualization. Unlike deconstruction then, radical para-
noia opts for
a detachment of itself from the economical outside (the environ-

ment) for and by which survival becomes possible [...]. Radical
paranoia reforges survival as that which can sunder the correlation
between the paranoia of the living (survival) and economical
openness and therefore end its own repression in regard to the
unaffordable outside. In radical paranoia, survival is no longer
a parasitic (mutually beneficial) symptom of affordability and
economical openness, but an event which is disobedient to its
vitalistic ambitions. (2008, p. 219)
Or to conclude, as Negarestani says, ‘[t]he separation of survival from

openness offers survival the opportunity to act strategically on behalf of
radical exteriority and its refractory impossibility’ (2008, p. 220).
We could pose this question (Why do you need to survive?) directly
to Robinson, the moment he sets foot on Speranza. It was in this
moment that Robinson immediately understood that ‘this place was
wholly alien and hostile [...] his boat [...] was his only link with life’
(Tournier 1969, pp. 36–37). Robinson knew he had first to die in order
to realize a new type of living, in order to find his Great Health. Death
was his only route towards sustainability, to pick up the movement of
the island prior to humankind, to be released from religion and capital-
ism, to be released from the others, from the mundane preoccupations
that turn us into minds in a groove. The oceans had to devour his
boat, let it sink to the bottom of the sea, without leaving a ripple at

its surface.
Notes
1. In a strange analogy, Robin Mackay recently compared the invention of
geotrauma to the invention of Negarestani, who is indeed a dark and
unknown character himself (Mackay 2011).
2. Spinoza (2000) had already taught us that the experience of death is the first
and foremost reason for any individual (an island, a Robinson, any possible
ecology) to persevere in its being, constantly searching for ways to revitalize
the relations between the individuals of which he is made. His claim that the
free man thinks of death the least of all things (cf. E4P67), does not mean
that his unity is not haunted by death, but rather that the free man equals
the creative man who constantly finds new ways to free himself from grooves
that limited his being.
Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin (1976) Selected Writings. Trans. Helen Weaver. Ed. Susan Sontag.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense. Ed. C.V. Boundas. Trans. M. Lester with
Ch. Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press.
—— (1995) Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University
Press.
—— (2004) Desert Island and Other Texts 1953–1974. Trans. Michael Taormina.
Los Angeles, New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
—— (1992) What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson.
New York: Verso.
—— (2004) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem
and H.R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelles (2000) Of Hospitality. Trans.
R. Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guattari, Félix (2000) The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton.
New York: Continuum.
Mackay, Robin (2011) ‘The Brief History of Geotrauma, or: The Invention of
Negarestani’, paper presented at The Cyclonopedia Symposium, 12 March. New
School, New York.
Meillassoux, Quentin (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.

Trans. R. Brassier. New York: Continuum.
Morton, Tim (2010) The Ecological Thought. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Negarestani, Reza (2008) Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
Melbourne: Re.press.
—— (2011a) ‘Contingency and Complicity’, in The Medium of Contingency. Ed.
Robin Mackay. London: Urbanomic in association with Ridinghouse.
—— (2011b) ‘Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic

Necrocracy’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Ed.
Levi Bryant, Nick Srinicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: Re.press.
Petit, Susan (1991) Michel Tournier’s Metaphysical Fictions. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Spinoza (2000) [1677] Ethics. Trans. W.H. White. Revised by A.H. Stirling. Intro.
Don Garrett. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
Tournier, Michel (1969) Friday. Trans. Norman Denny. Baltimore, MD: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1967) Science and the Modern World. New York: The
Free Press.
Index
Note: ‘n’ after a page reference refers to a note on that page.
active and reactive forces 12, 147, Boudjedra, Rachid 5; L’escargot

151, 158–62; see also negative entêté 168–78
actual/virtual 6–7, 11, 14, 53, 79–80,
83–4, 99, 149–50; actualization 12, capitalism 29, 57, 106, 206;
14, 15, 53, 98–9, 128, 130, 132, and aesthetics 187; global, as
148–50, 152, 160 singularizing force 127
affect 147–8, 158–60, 165, 185; colonialism 7, 12, 30, 83, 161;
and aesthetics 188; affect-driven colonial pasts 14–15, 142;
micropolitics 186; love as affect 138 and gender 190; Robinson’s
affiliation 77, 93 colonization (Tournier) 204
affirmative forces, see active and concept 4, 11, 23–6, 30–5, 100,
reactive forces 146, 165–8; travelling concepts
Africa 26–7, 29, 32, 34–5 (Mieke Bal) 35
analogy 185 contrapuntal 86, 92
Appiah, Antony 155 cosmopolitanism 27, 35, 84, 153–5;
Artaud, Antonin 209 see also Appiah
assemblage 1, 5, 10, 43–5, 48–50, 53, counter-actualization 5, 7, 10, 98–9,
147, 150, 152, 160, 172, 172–3, 177 150, 152, 160
Attridge, Derek 8, 128; see also creation 4, 25, 31–2, 42, 63, 99,
singularity 125–6, 147, 149–52, 155, 158–61,
165; artistic 191
Badiou, Alain 10, 78, 81, 105, creolization 111, 152
108–11, 113, 115, 146
becoming 3, 4, 7, 12, 24–5, 37, 50, Deleuze, Gilles Desert Islands 202;
56–9, 68, 70–1, 127, 130–4, 140–2, Difference and Repetition 4, 12,
149–50, 60, 97, 118, 152–3, 157, 13, 15, 127; Essays Critical and
160, 161, 167, 173, 177; Clinical 54, 158; The Fold 127,
becoming-animal 5, 165, 170–6; 132; The Logic of Sense 8, 51, 127,
becoming-revolutionary 184-5; 130–1, 166, 200, 205; Nietzsche
block of 139 and Philosophy 158, 209; and the
belonging 21, 133; atavistic modes writer 166, 178
of 154 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 42;
Benitez-Rojo, Antonio 152 Anti-Oedipus 2; A Thousand
Bergson, Henri 14, 42, 54, 100, 167 Plateaus 2, 23, 50, 125, 139,
Bhabha, Homi 9, 10, 11, 14–15, 173, 199; Kafka: Towards a
83–4, 86, 124 Minor Literature 41–7; What is
Bignall, Simone 1–2, 12, 76, 133, Philosophy? 4, 199, 209
141, 148–9, 188 democracy 7, 29, 97–103, 142 n 3
black diaspora 189 de/reterritorialization 1, 7, 13, 24, 35,
Body without Organs 24, 179 n 7 51, 79, 103, 125–6, 142, 145, 152, 173
Bosteels, Bruno 113–15 Derrida, Jacques 8, 128, 212
217
218 Index
desire 1, 2–3, 5, 43, 47–50, 52–4 145–7; Damming the Flood 82, 112;
dialectic 12, 28, 57, 59, 66–7, 70, Out of this World 7, 55, 97–103,
96–7, 111, 119 n 7, 152, 157–61 125; see also literature
Dib, Mohammed 8–9, 134–42, 147; Haraway, Donna 69, 72 n 11, 73
Le sommeil d’Eve 137–40; Les n 14
Terrasses d’Orsol 135–6; Neiges de Hardt, Michael and Antonio
Marbre 136, 143 n 4 Negri 188, 79
difference 2–4, 12, 22–3, 30–1, 35, health and literature 158, 159,

57–60, 68, 81, 125, 127–8, 133, 150, 162; Great Health 64, 69, 208–10;
158, 160; and repetition 128 and symptomatology 13, 157–8,
different/ciation 12, 57, 59, 150, 161–3
159 Hegel, G. W. F. 28, 96–7, 105, 107,
directionality/dimensionality 199 111, 113, 118, 119, 159; and
diversity 28 Spinoza 12, 151
Heidegger, Martin 28, 30, 33, 114
earth 199–200; and thought 202–3 Hirsch, Marianne 193
ecology 200; conceptual 32–4 histories 14–15
encounter 167, 178 n 2 Hopkinson, Nalo 190–5; and The
ethology 185 Salt Roads 14
Ettinger, Bracha L. 69 Huggan, Graham 10, 187, 188
event, the 7, 98, 113–15, 117–18, human/animal 63, 174;
156, 165 dehumanization 64, 69, 106,
exile 85–8, 92, 134 202, 206; non-anthropocentric
experimentation 14, 66, 71, 167, idea of human 203; non-human
172, 183 sexuality 174
Eze, Emmanuel 26 hybrid 22, 125, 146
fabulation 12, 42, 54, 190 identity 10, 21, 87, 90–2, 133;
Fanon, Frantz 31, 34, 96, 104, 117, Cartesian cogito 9, 126–7, 142
124 n 2, 148–9
Foucault, Michel 1, 22, 71, 76, 85–6, immanence 7–9, 57, 99, 109, 149–51,
123–4, 126 156; plane of 24, 80, 147, 150,
future (differential) 14–15, 142, 148, 158, 167
188–9 imperialism 155, 162; see also
colonialism
geophilosophy 200 individuation 9, 131–2, 172; and
General Will 101–3 Simondon 129
Glissant, Édouard 1, 85, 96–7, 104, island 63, 73 n 12; another
111, 118, 119 n 7, 147, 152, 154, 160 island 208; island
philosophy 152–8; Speranza 204–5
haecceity 165, 171-3, 178, 179 n 3,
203 Jacobinism 101–3, 116; black
Haiti 82, 112, 118, 190 Jacobinism 102, 116
Hallward, Peter 6–8, 10, 12, 23, 28, Jameson, Fredric 39–41, 47–8
30, 44, 51–2, 55, 57, 59, 66, 78–86, judgement 7, 83, 107, 160
91–3, 97, 107–9, 115–16, 123–7,
129, 131–2, 135–7, 151, 155, 162, Kafka, Franz 38, 43–4, 46–9
187; Absolutely Postcolonial 6, 41, Kant, Immanuel 96, 106–8, 111,
83, 104–6, 110–12, 118, 123, 125–7, 116, 118, 200–1, 216
Index 219
Lazarus, Neil 10, 81, 187 place 26–30, 32, 34–6, 127, 154
life 11, 13, 25–6, 132, 150–1; a life politics 7, 9–11, 13, 21, 26, 35,
156–9, 162; not as survival 214 39–40, 51, 58, 76, 78–80, 83–4,
literature 146–7, 162; and Deleuze 86–7, 89, 91, 97–103, 105–7, 111,
148, 152–3, 155–8, 165–8, 177–8; 113–17, 145–6, 171, 176
and diagnostic function 157, postcolonialism 1–2, 6, 7, 9–12,
159–62; and Hallward 146; minor 14–15, 21–2, 25, 27–30, 35, 42,
literature 11–12, 40, 43–8, 50, 152–3, 76–9, 80–1, 83, 86, 92–3, 104–5,

155; see also health; postcolonial 124, 126–7, 133, 145, 147–51, 155
literature; singularity; writing postcolonial literature 6, 8, 11–13,
15, 24, 39, 39–41, 51–2, 124, 129,
macropolitics 59, 71, 79 141–2, 145, 147, 152–3, 160,
majoritarian 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 12 162
Marxism 9, 11, 27, 30, 35, 76, 81, postcolony 11, 25, 32
106 postmemory (Marianne Hirsch) 193,
Mbembe, Achille 10–11, 12, 31–5; 196 n 2
and On the Postcolony 24–9, 35
Meillassoux, Quentin 115–8, 119 Quayson, Ato 188
n 9, 201
Memmi, Albert 124, 159 race 31, 33
micropolitics 14, 59, 71, 183, 184, reason 26–7, 101–2, 118
186 relation 50, 56, 69, 81, 85, 93, 98,
Middle Passage 191–2 100–1, 103–8, 110–13, 115–17,
Miller, Christopher 1, 4, 6, 23, 188 119 n 7, 127, 130–2, 134–41, 158;
minoritarian 2– 5, 24, 71, 153, 155; Relation (Glissant) 96–7, 104, 111,
see also literature (minor) 118; see also selfhood
representation 4, 5, 10, 11, 21–3, 37,
Nancy, Jean-Luc 113, 132 39, 42, 146, 161
Negarestani, Reza and ressentiment 13, 159, 161
Cyclonopedia 13, 206–8; and rhizome 1, 3, 45
philosophy of oil 206; and
polytics 211 Said, Edward 9–11, n 12, 77, 84–93,
negation 25, 27, 38, 98, 109, 148–9 212; After the Last Sky 10, 87–91;
negative 96–7, 159–60; see also Out of Place 87–8, 90–2; Reflections
negation on Exile 87
newness 10, 13–15, 30, 32, 35–6, 99, Saint-Domingue 114, 117–18, 190,
128, 147, 155, 160, 162, 168 194; see also Haiti
Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 26, 30, 57, Sansal, Boualem 134, 142 n 3
98, 100, 158 Sartre, Jean-Paul 11, 37–41, 43,
nomad 1, 8, 24, 57, 78, 84–5, 88, 90, 45–6, 48, 51, 104, 110–12,
92–3, 202 118, 126
Sauvagnargues, Anne 130–1, 166,
other, the 55–9, 66, 68, 205, 212; 178 n 1
anotherness 205; as law 72 n 6 selfhood 141; see also becoming;
identity
Palestine 10, 77, 88–92 Selvon, Sam 13; An Island is a
Parry, Benita 10, 187 World 13, 147, 153–8, 162; The
people (a people) 8, 26–7, 41, 50, 52, Lonely Londoners 147, 154
54, 184–5; who are missing 45, 48 sexuality 64, 173
220 Index
Simondon, Gilbert and style 11, 39–40

L’individuation 130–1 subjectivity 21, 68, 123–4;
singular 7–9, 10, 11, 23, 39, see also identity
41–2, 44–5, 47–8, 50–2, 55, 77,
79–81, 83, 85, 92–3, 97, 104–6, time 14–15; third synthesis of 15
116–18, 119 n 7, 127–33, 136, 140– Tournier, Michel and Friday 12–13,
1, 142 n 1, 145–7, 151, 153, 155–8, 51, 55, 60–71, 203–4
162, 165; and Leibniz 129, transcendent 7–8, 158

142 n 1l; of literature 128; and
Simondon 8–9, 129–32; and universal 22, 35, 44, 82, 100–1,
substance 145; see also Hallward; 103–11, 117–18, 146, 154–5
Spinoza
slavery 102, 117–18, 190–1 Walcott, Derek 15, 155, 160–1, 162;
sovereignty 100–3 Omeros 147, 161–2
specific 7, 11–12, 22, 39–42, Whitehead, Alfred North 199
44, 52, 54, 66, 79, 81–2, 104–6, world and worldliness (Said) 85;
108, 110–11, 116, 123–4, 126, and worlding-with-others
145–7, 151, 153–5, 157–8, (Haraway) 61, 67–9
162, 165 writing 41–54, 186, 194;
Spinoza 7, 57, 97–8, 100–5, 119 writing-back 147
n 7, 151, 166, 216 n 2; and
substance 125 Young, Robert 1, 6, 10, 187
Spivak, Gayatri 2–4, 9, 11, 22, 57,
70–1, 124 Žižek, Slavoj 79, 86, 105, 113, 185

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Postcolonial Literatures and

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Also by Birgit Kaiser

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9 Revolutionizing Pleasure in Writing: Subversive Desire and

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Réda Bensmaïa is University Professor of French and Francophone

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Lorna Burns is a Lecturer in English in the School of Humanities at

Rick Dolphijn is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media

David Huddart is Associate Professor of English at the Chinese

Bruce B. Janz is Professor of Humanities and Chair of the Department

Birgit M. Kaiser is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at

Gregg Lambert is the Dean’s Professor of Humanities and Founding

forthcoming In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and

Milena Marinkova is the author of Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics

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Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University.

Kathrin Thiele is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the

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their respective contributions to this volume, the exercise of bringing

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their analyses on a philosophy of difference and repetition distinct from

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one’s privileges. In doing so, her essay produces an assemblage between

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or nomadology to the study of certain contemporary writers, but to

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Engaging Critiques, or On the Viability of Postcolonial

In order to produce, as this volume intends, a fruitful encounter between

majoritarian identities are challenged that signals the value in opening

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form – an absolute intensity or virtuality in constant metamorphosis’

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cannot lead to the point of self-destruction or radical abstraction into

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(Deleuze 1990, p. 103). The question that singularity permits Deleuze

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Like Said, Achille Mbembe has sought less to offer a phenomenological

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context are rendered irrelevant by the pre-established framework of

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Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures

Never to be confused with minority writing as such, the concept of

literature can play in the imagining of differential futures specific to but

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by the colonial encounter. While remaining mindful of the particular

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Kaplan, Caren (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement.

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