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1 Table of Contents
Introduction
Claire Colebrook...............................................................3
Essays
Stevie Schmiedel
With or Without Lacan? Becoming-Woman between the Language of Organs and the Anorganism of Language...11
Kimberly Lamm
Writing Becoming-Woman: The Movement of Deleuzean Thought in Contemporary American Poet ry.........................................................................................42
Alan Lopez
That Hysterical Discourse in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Locating a Critical Subject within Carroll............................................ ..69
Ilaria Serra
The Female Spectator's Laughter: Anti-Oedipus to Free Female Spectatorship............................................................100
Ada Jaarsma
Encountering Hegel and Deleuze: Towards a Feminist Pedagogy of the Concept......................................................124
Book Review
Alan Nicholson
A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and G uattari...................................................................................145
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3 Introduction
Introduction
Claire Colebrook
Why Deleuze? Why now? One answer to this problem might appear to lie in Gilles Deleuzes affirmation of difference, thus placing him and his work in a far more general resistance to the Western metaphysical traditions commitment to being as self-identical. Perhaps, as the postmodern attention to language and signification has demonstrated, what something is is an effect of a dispersed system of relations and differences, with relativity being that which conditions experience but remains necessarily beyond experience. One should no longer strive to know or determine being, and in this liberation from some ultimate ground one abandons all moralism, prescriptivism and hierarchy. The postmodern world is a world without meta-narratives or authority only because it is also a world without ground. When Deleuze and Guattari insist that relations are external to the terms related (Deleuze and Guattari 3), they challenge the common sense assumption that our experienced world and its order are the direct and immediate outcome of underlying identities or substances. The general appeal of Deleuze for feminism has, for some time now, resulted from the identification of Deleuze as a philosopher of difference: as a critic of ultimately determining substance, as an antidote to the Hegelian interpretation of difference as the mere vehicle for identity and knowledge, and as an antagonist of all that is Platonic, stable or unified. Both the excitement and the alarm generated by Gilles Deleuzes concept of becoming-woman lay in its seemingly post-modern potential. Feminists had long noted that appeals to essence, nature, being or necessity had done them no favours. As long as woman had a nature, patriarchy could be explained and justified. While postmodernism in general appeared to offer a liberating anti-foundationalism, where women were no longer tied to their biology or history, Deleuze and Guattaris emphasis +++ The general appeal of Deleuze for feminism has resulted from the identification of Deleuze as a philosopher of difference +++
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on difference and becoming actually offered woman as the key to all becomings (Deleuze and Guattari 275). In this regard, while reservations were expressed about the appropriation of the feminine for yet one more liberating theory that had not yet considered the concrete embodiment of womens struggles, Deleuze could also be hailed as part of a postmodern pantheon of difference. Here, Deleuzean becoming would free the concept of woman from its humanist and patriarchal dependency on man, remove all thought of a prescriptive, identity-based or essentialist feminism, and enable sexual difference to be thought beyond its usual binary and hierarchical figures. While post-modernism in general is an anti-essentialism, Deleuzes becoming-woman has the added benefit of tying the project of fluidity, non-identity, difference and mobility to that which has always been identified with natural inertia, biology, timelessness and non-transcendence--the feminine. Woman or the feminine would be the key to all becomings, then, not because of any essence, but because man or the human has been constructed as that which establishes the truth of identity and presence. Woman could be affirmed strategically as that which has always been associated with the other of man; becomingwoman signals that space or imagined other necessary to the production of the male subject as the truth and order of female matter. Until relatively recently feminist approaches to Deleuze have therefore been oriented by the problem of differences anti-essentialist force. Early assessments of Deleuze expressed reservations about the affirmation of difference and non-identity just as women were beginning to form their own subject positions (Jardine). Deleuze could be placed within a tradition of male subjectivity that defines itself in opposition to the mere fixity of being. As Rosi Braidotti noted in Patterns of Dissonance, a celebration of postmodern non-identity can function as yet one more maneuver in a tradition of modern Cartesianism that defines the subject as other than any object, as nothing more than the mastery and negation of being-in-itself. While Braidotti has subsequently turned to Deleuze in
5 Introduction
an affirmative spirit, she nevertheless tempers her celebration of becoming and nomadic wandering with the recognition that some minimal concept of identity or subject position is necessary for political action. Braidotti herself desists from giving a fully-fledged theoretical answer to the relation between difference and identity but her recognition of the problem opens the way for those feminists who have been stringently critical of the affirmation of difference per se. In opposition to those who have located Deleuze within an affirmative destruction of essence, identity, being and nature, are those feminists who regard difference as a doxa, as a definite position, value and decided term within a political arena. The clearest expression of the political and necessary problems in any unthinking celebration of difference is given in Rita Felskis landmark essay The Doxa of Difference, where, according to Felski, Deleuzean feminism is yet one more example of an unreflective celebration of difference. Difference is, as Felski points out, never difference in itself. Difference is always articulated, defended, defined and used from socially and politically constituted positions. Felskis criticism, although it includes Braidottis turn to Deleuze in its sights, actually offers one of the best opportunities for realizing the feminist potential in Deleuzes philosophy. If feminists are going to be different--if sexual difference can delimit and point beyond the Western logos-- then difference needs to be thought differently, and not just affirmed as one more revolutionary concept. Deleuzean feminists have, over the past decade, recognized the problem of the social and political meaning of difference and have therefore supplemented Deleuzes project with the analysis of the figures and senses of difference that have inevitably been defined through the image of gender (Lorraine; Olkowski). One should not just affirm woman as the other, as different and beyond the strictures of patriarchy; one should, following Irigaray, look at the way oppositions between identity and difference have been defined on the model of the male subject. Only then can becoming-woman be affirmed as more than the celebration of what is dif-
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ferent from man. Only then can difference be thought not as a value within a field of already defined terms but as what goes beyond the image of man as a thinking being who recognizes, defines and orders difference-- what Deleuze refers to as the image of thought (Difference and Repetition). It is possible to criticize Felski for having missed the unique nature of the Deleuzean project. Yes, the postmodern affirmation of difference is an uncritical celebration of a specific value that always emerges from some specific political and social condition, but Deleuzes difference is not to be conflated with a bland postmodernism. Just as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have pointed out that global capitalism is enabled and sustained by the simple affirmation of difference and that only the production of a common humanity can effect the imagination of a point beyond the exchange, equivalence and ungrounded flow of capital, so one could turn to Deleuzes difference as radically other than any postmodern notion of a free flow of signifiers. But in order to recognize the force of Deleuzes difference in this sense--as critical of postmodern capitalisms flows of signification--one needs to take Felskis criticism of difference seriously. If Deleuzean difference is not a refusal of fixed positions and a retreat from political force just what is it? Here we need to turn to the feminist work on Deleuze that approaches difference as sexual difference (Grosz), and perhaps we also need to flirt with the concept of essence, a concept that Deleuze himself was capable of articulating in ways that were compatible with positive difference. Today, perhaps, the great divide in the thought of sexual difference lies in the Lacan/Deleuze binary, a binary that, like all other simple dualisms, organizes a complex field of relations, differences, distinctions and contraries. On the one hand, following the seductive mobilization of Lacan by Joan Copjec (1994) and Slavoj iek, one could see sexual difference as the figure through which being comes to be. In order to say that anything is at all some difference needs to be marked between self and other, between presence and absence, and thought must both struggle to
7 Introduction
think the all of being and recognize an all that lies beyond thought. This conflict between that which must think all, and that which is not-all is parcelled out into the two logics of male and female subjectivity. Male subjectivity is structured around the abandonment or negation of an outside, and, concomitantly, the lure of transcendence or the idea of an all to be captured by thought (Copjec 2002, 9). Woman stands for that other logic or non-phallic jouissance, for it recognizes that being is not-all; feminine desire is not oriented to totality. On the other hand, Deleuze offers a way of thinking sexual difference beyond the male-female binary, not because of an anti-essentialism, but because of a far more rigorous essentialism. For if one really thinks, if one encounters what is in its radical singularity as possessing a power, force and potential--a capacity to relate--that goes beyond constituted terms, then sexual difference no longer explains the thought (by a subject) of being. Rather, thinking is sexual difference, the desiring response of life to life. And if life is sexually different--becoming through creation, encounter, striving and production--then no single point of creation, such as the difference between male and female bodies, can stand for or explain life or creation as such. Sexual difference is not, thereby, subsumed beneath a general notion of difference. For the concept itself is seen as an event of sexual difference, as one of the ways in which life preserves in its being, enables action and effects relations--relations that are both the effect of an encounter but that also determine what each point of relative stability in any encounter is. Thought can only have a world because something offers itself to be thought, but this neither determines what thinking is, nor does it exhaust the potential of the world to produce other encounters, beyond those of thought or what we have taken thought to be. One might have to think different styles of thinking, different modes of conceptualization, different responses to life on the basis of different bodily forces. If biologism and essentialism have been placed as pejoratives in postmodern feminist discourse this is because biology has been seen as a determin+++ thinking is sexual difference, the desiring response of life to life +++
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ism, where social relations flow from the being of bodies or the essence of individuals. But Deleuzes biological life does not have its basis in a plane of substances that then produce relations. On the contrary, one can--and one should--strive to imagine different worlds where the essences, singularities and differences of life are not reduced to any single logic or set of relations, such as the relation between man and woman. In this regard, one could go beyond the idea that Deleuze offers a future to feminism by giving women a way of thinking essence as a potential to become, and say that feminism offers Deleuzean philosophy a future. If difference is to be more than just a single flow or system of relations then one might need to begin with at least one other sexed subject, one other body whose desire is not that of subject grasping the being of an object.
Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Oxford: Blackwell,2002. ------. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Trans. Elizabeth Guild. New York: Routledge, 1991. Copjec, ------. Joan. Imagine Read my Desire: No Lacan Against Ethics the and Historicists. Sublimation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Theres Woman: Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Felski, Rita. The Doxa of Difference. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
9 Introduction
Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Lorraine, Tamsin. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. iek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso, 1994.
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11 With or Without Lacan?
With or Without Lacan? Becoming-Woman between the Language of Organs and the Anorganism of Language
Stevie Schmiedel
There seem to be two camps, two ways of reading Gilles Deleuzes and Flix Guattaris concept of becoming-woman as described in their Thousand Plateaus. My own reading of Deleuze and Guattaris work confirms an anti-psychoanalytic and anti-dialectical understanding that turns against the psychoanalytic feminism presented by Luce Irigaray, and even against Judith Butlers Foucauldian re-reading of Lacan with which she defines a political practice of parodic performances. Some recent articles by Deleuzean feminists, who wish to deconstruct molar feminism in order to pose a Deleuzean molecular becoming-woman against it, aim to fuse Lacanian feminisms and Deleuzean methodologies. To me, read closely, these fusions are counter-productive. When Jerry Aline Flieger writes, for example, cultural feminists, such as Judith Butler, who see gender as a largely performative effect, will probably welcome the Deleuzean notion of becoming,1 her reading of at least one of the two theorists differs strongly from mine. After introducing my critique of psychoanalytic feminist approaches, which, for the purpose of this paper, I will restrict to the feminist politics of Luce Irigaray and, to some extent, Judith Butler, I will criticize the attempted fusion by concentrating on two examples: Jerry Aline Fliegers synthesis of Lacanian and Deleuzean concepts in her Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification, and Dorothea Olkowskis fusion of Luce Irigaray and Deleuze in Morphologic: Deleuze and Irigaray,2 which closely resembles Rosi Braidottis combination of Deleuze and Irigaray in her Nomadic Subjects and hence will be referred to.
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Let me first elaborate on my critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its offshoots, Irigarayan or even Butlerian feminist political practice, and how they differ from Deleuze and Guattaris schizoanalytic method and notion of becoming-woman. From Psychoanalytic Feminism to Deleuze Both Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler agree with Jacques Lacans description of our subjectification within the symbolic order as determined by language and signification, and hence, as dependent on the socio-cultural environment. But fundamental to his description of the symbolic order are two concepts which, in my opinion, cannot escape a deterministic prescription of gender structures. The real as well as the phallus predetermine a symbolic structure that will inevitably be ruled and determined by The-Name-of-the-Father. In spite of their criticism of these concepts, Irigaray and Butler remain faithful to Lacans description of our subjectification through the language of the symbolic order which is determined by a binary and patriarchal gender structure. Identity within the symbolic, formed through language, is either male or female. Desire is constituted by the lack that occurs through entry into the symbolic order and its necessary repression of the real. This real, I argue, cannot be detached from a physical dependence and felt union with the m/other. Hence, that which has to be repressed, controlled and fetishized is woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject.3 Schizoanalysis, the anti-Oedipal anti-logos drawn by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in their two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, enables a questioning of this Lacanian premise. The Deleuzean pendant to the psychoanalytic subject is the constantly-becoming body without organs. The Deleuzean becoming challenges the Lacanian real, which Deleuzean feminist Rosi Braidotti describes as a tyranny of the past.4

Schizoanalysis can discover a multiplicity underneath our bi-gendered society, and hence re-codes a language that, according to Lacan, divides us into male and female. Deleuzean feminism gives imperatives: we have to follow a Deleuzean ethos and deconstruct our own thinking in binary oppositions, we have to advance our own becoming and describe it. That is, psychoanalysis versus anti-dialectics: a subjectification fuelled by an originary lack that aims to fill itself, is opposed to Deleuzes notion of becoming. Deleuzes becoming-woman, which is the exact opposite of the becoming-woman as described through the Oedipal complex, is not consciously perceived: we have to make things do things. It is an ethics, not a dialectics. According to Donna Haraway, action appears in Deleuze as a simulation, a performance. Resistance against this freedom to act is expressed from a Lacanian feminist point of view5 that, in giving orders, we would be male-identified. Can we oppose the phallus, our patriarchal world, and a theory that affirms it, through phallocratic action? Does not feminist psychoanalysis conceal its own phallus in arguing that we cannot? This is the fundamental question, the answer to which will determine whether we should read Deleuzes becoming-woman through Lacan, or should rather abandon him. Lacans notion of the real is a moment of absolute jouissance and plenitude. We cannot articulate the real; it is a place that exists before the constitution of the paternal law, and that cannot be spoken from inside the symbolic. In Lacans mirror stage, though, this time prior to entering the symbolic is marked by a physical dependency and union with another body (i.e. the imaginary). Although he aims to circumscribe this body gender-neutrally as the Other, his focus on the mother is denoted by refering to nurseling dependency. In his crits6 he presents the symbiosis with the mother as the only time in which real satisfaction is possible, and which simultaneously conditions the design of ones entry into the symbolic order and hence Oedipal subjectification. Because, after being detached from the symbiosis with the mother it is only an Other from +++ Deleuzean becoming challenges the Lacanian real +++
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outside this symbiosis who can affirm the subject as such. The desire to be affirmed evolves through the frustration of needs. When the child realizes that its own body is not melded into the mothers, and the instinctive satisfaction provided by nursing gives way to a prolonged periods of the m/others absence, instinctive need is transformed into demands that are expressed through symbolic and imaginary relations. The desire for the m/other, for a plenitude in which instincts are satisfied, is, through language, transferred onto material objects of desire. While need was directed at an object that could satisfy it, demands are directed at an Other who, even if he fulfills the demand, cannot satisfy the one who demands. Only a dissolution of the self, a melding into the Other, would bring the satisfaction unconsciously yearned for. But there is no way back: through identification with the language in which demands are articulated, a self has evolved. When need is expressed as demand in a language that alienates need from itself, the one who demands is alienated, too, and begins identifying with the language that s/he speaks--that speaks him/her into being. This language dictates forms of love through structures of identification that promise yet suspend affirmation: the Others desire. And, for Lacan, these structures are dictated by the paternal, Oedipal law. Is this language, and hence, these structures of identification, really changeable if the base of desire is a plenitude that can not be detached from the mother? Desire for affirmation--as Lacan would say, for the phallus--is merely misrecognition. Any identification within the symbolic that promises to possess the phallus is a failure, as the desire to own the phallus stands in for a desire that cannot be filled. Judith Butler argues that this structure of tragedy in Lacanian psychoanalysis effectively undermines any strategy of cultural politics to configure an alternative imaginary for the play of desires (Gender Trouble 56). She notes that binary restrictions operate in Lacan to frame and formulate sexuality, delimiting in advance the forms of its resistance to the real. An abstract and static real

articulates forms of desire that, as their real object, suggest an originary w/hole, which cannot be detached from a symbiosis with the mother. This maternal omnipotence creates fear of castration in the boy, and penis envy in the girl, because only a third party can intervene between mother and child: he who brings the law and bars the childs incestuous wishes for its mother. The father believes himself in possession of the phallus, a misrecognition affirmed by the daughter who unconsciously seeks to possess it through him. In identifying with the mother she feels lacking, and this lack can only be filled by love, by being affirmed by the Other. Any alternative conception of a symbolic that is based on this real would have to evaluate the mothers omnipotence positively: daughter would have to upvalue her lack as a positive difference, throw herself on the mothers side, and fight against man. However we turn it, with this real a war of the sexes remains inevitable. Judith Butler describes how every subject painfully experiences the loss that accompanies ones identification with one gender and its structures of desire. How is such loss released, how strong does the real have to be--how tyrannical, as Rosi Braidotti would say--to drill itself so deeply into the psyche?7 According to Butler, Lacans real is a disavowed negativity that threatens with ones dissolution in psychosis. That is why the paternal, Oedipal law has such an easy game at dictating structures of identification: woman has to be feminine, in order to obtain the phallus that will save her from non-existence, and man masculine, in order to shield himself with the phallus from womans threatening lack. And this neurotic masquerade, that will always alienating, makes us melancholic. Luce Irigaray complains that the focus on the phallus as that which presents power is associated with the male genitalia. With such an association, how can a change in gender structures be articulated? Although Lacans theoretical concepts reveal his chauvinism, he is defended by Irigaray: Lacan prefers the phallus as primary signifier because
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more is actually better--at least in our society.8 But, I argue, in relation to a phallus that is associated with man--the binary opposition to woman-she can only remain castrated, less, and lacking. The focus remains on a threatening w/hole woman aims to fill, and she thus has to be controlled and dominated. Even if Lacan says that nobody owns the phallus, it is hard to ignore a symbolism in which man has a phallus in order to ward off the fluid, the irrational, the groundless. Might not the focus on womans fluidity ignore that man is just as oppressed by the binary--or as Deleuze would say molar--oppositions man-woman, hysteria-logic. nature-culture, as well as by a psychoanalytic theory that prefers the phallus, one specific organ, and that assigns this organ a hard, molar imaginary because it happens to belong to those that are currently better situated? To keep the fluid, the polysemic, where it was enunciated encarcerates woman in her definition as birth-machine and supports psychoanalytic theorizations that can be mapped onto the triangle mommy-daddy-me, the nuclear family, and its desiring structures. Psychoanalysis describes our relations as analyzable, calculable, and hence, subject them to a law. In their fight against molar entities Deleuze and Guattari define molecular becoming-woman:
What we term a molar entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject. Becoming-woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it. We are not, however, overlooking the importance of imitation, or moments of imitation, among certain homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a real transformation on the part of certain transvestites. All we are saying is that these indissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be understood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity,

of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman. We do not mean to say that the creation of this kind is the prerogative of the man, but on the contrary that the woman as a molar entity has to become-woman in order that man also becomes--or can become-woman. (TP 275-76)
In my opinion, their notion of becoming-woman voices an indirect criticism of a feminism that, although it might not believe in an essence of woman--which Irigaray certainly does not--takes woman as its subject of enunciation:
It is, of course, indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back their organism, their own history, their own subjectivity: we as women makes its appearance as a subject of enunciation. But it is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function without drying up a spring or stopping a flow. The song of life is often intoned by the driest of women, moved by ressentiment, the will to power and cold mothering. Just as a dessicated child makes a much better child, there being no childhood flow emanating from it any longer. It is no more adequate to say that each sex contains the other and must develop the opposite pole in itself. Bisexuality is not better a concept than the seperateness of the sexes. It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary machine as it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. It is thus necessary to conceive of a molecular womens politics that slips into molar confrontations, and passes under or through them. (TP 276)
Irigaray does not believe in an essence of woman, but she does believe in the existence of two sexes and an ontological sexual difference. Femme nxiste pas, she is merely enunciated as the Other to a monolithic male society and logic. From this position of the Other she has to interrupt this
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monolithic logic: the fluid, the polysemic, the non-concrete has to subvert the hardness of male power. Deleuze, similarly, asks us to challenge the homogenous, the molar, stems and territorialized laws through rhizomes, deterritorializations, haecceities, lines of flight. But contrary to Irigaray, he does not believe in two, but in n molecular sexes:
When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically womens writing, she was appalled at the idea of writing as a woman. Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles--but also hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable. The rise of women in English novel writing has spared no man: even those who pass for the most virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence or Miller, in their turn continually tap into and emit particles that enter the proximity or zone of indiscernability of women. In writing, they become-women. The question is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation that oppose masculine and feminine in the great dualism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the body*--the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms. This body is first stolen from the girl: Stop behaving like that, youre not a little girl anymore, youre not a tomboy, etc. The girls becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, a prehistory, upon her. The boys turn comes next, but it is by using the girl as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire, that an opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too. The girl is the first victim, but she must also serve as an example and a trap. That is why, conversely, the reconstruction of the Body without Organs, the anorganism* of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-woman, or the production of molecular woman. Doubtless, the girl becomes a woman in the molar or organic sense. But conversely, becoming-woman or the molecular woman is the girl itself.

The girl is certainly not defined by virginity;* she is defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a combination of atoms, an emission of particles, a haecceity. She never ceases to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo--that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become. (TP 276-77; * indicates my italics)
That which was enunciated as birth-machine has to become anorganic, so that man does not have to situate and cannot be situated against woman enunciated as a threatening w/hole. Becoming-woman, then, is not to become woman, but to become molecular, polysemic, non-organic, or better, not defined by organs and their functions. Hence, Deleuzes flow is directed against the monolithic, against the historically masculine, especially against the phallus as the primary signifier that translates everything, but not against man, and definitely not against man as defined by his organs and its functions. Any representation of a subject assigned, also the feminine, risks the stopping of flows. Only the deterritorialization of representation, and hence, of any binary opposition, can effect a subversive infiltration of power structures. I believe Irigaray risks stopping flows in her strategy to speak from the position of the Other. This strategy can not evade a reiteration and solidification of patriarchal gender structures, even if her aim is to achieve the opposite. The sexual difference Irigaray describes is historically constructed. Patriarchy enunciated and excluded woman as irrational, fluid, non-logical, hysterical, and, as such, as Other to masculinity and the makers of the law. A politics that acts out of this enunciation, even if this
+++ Becomingwoman, then, is not to become woman, but to become molecular, polysemic, non-organic, or better, not defined by organs and their functions +++
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political identity is only temporary, reiterates this difference: the larger the female phallus that has to be erected in resistance to the male phallus, the fiercer and more unsolvable the war of the sexes. If woman is enunciated by patriarchy as irrational birth-machine, and described by psychoanalysis as such as omnipotent and dangerous, a reference to the irrational as strategy against a monolithic rationale can only reiterate this enunciation. It supports a capitalist structure that depends on the representation of woman as birth-machine, and of man as capital. To start with the genderneutral individual could be more helpful if we would like to inhibit the reiteration of gender determinisms. An example: Irigaray asks why women should be equalized in a working world that has historically been defined by men:
To whom or to what do women want to be equalized? To men? To a salary? To a public office? To what standard? Why not to themselves? (je, tu, nous 12)
The question is, though: who exactly is themselves? Who is accumulated under the heading the Other, the fluid? Perhaps the next quotation articulates this problem more clearly:
Working condition and production techniques are not equally designed nor equally applied with respect to sexual difference. The targets and modes of work are not equally defined by, nor for, women and men.(je, tu, nous 84)
Irigaray seems to appoint man as culprit as much as woman as victim. Turning back again onto the path which radical feminism took to divert from liberalism, we could argue that focusing on the female experience ignores the fact that condition and production techniques, targets and modes of work, are not equally defined by, or for, all men. In psycho-

analytic feminism, womans experience can only be assessed in relation to male domination, and thus, man is made into a molar concept. This representation of man, though, ignores capitalisms dependency on desiring-structures that are based on binary oppositions and non-fillable lack, and hence, supports molar and binary representations of gender. If woman remains, symbolically, a birth-machine, predestined for the reproduction of labour force, and man remains, symbolically, the source of its capital, historical definitions of labour remain untouched. That is why the Deleuzean infiltration of molar orders is more productive. Deleuzes partner Guattari suggests in his Chaosmosis various forms of work and modes of production that could make the capitalist machine stutter. In AntiOedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is the capitalist system that creates molar binaries, a system that has to be fought through making visible the multiplicities behind molar concepts. Subversive action should not be coded through gender, in order to reveal the multiplicities that might exist behind fixed binaries. Within this multiplicity, desiring-forms that do not rest on an originary lack do exist. In Symians, Cyborgs, and Women, Donna Haraway says--and why should we not believe her?
I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. (181)
In feminist psychoanalysis, this expression of desire for a non-gendered identity--or, a non-identity, an in-between--is not thinkable. Desire within our symbolic order is gendered; we constitute ourselves within an Oedipal triangle. Judith Butler would argue that Haraway lacks, that she is mourning her unfulfilled female identity, which she will never reach nor could reach. Is it not phallic to assume that every identity is inevitably bi-gendered? Do not psychoanalytic feminists erect a law in making us conclude that Haraway unconsciously mourns? Deleuze says: It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary machine as it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. Butlers
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parodic performances, hence, are not subversive enough; on the contrary (and as has been argued elsewhere), they might reiterate stereotypical gender structures.9 For Deleuze, the body is constantly becoming, and every moment of becoming creates new repressions: antiproductions. The cards are continuously mixed all over again; no originary real is the motor of desire: the real is constantly changing. And if we want to, if we are ethical in a Deleuzean sense, we make this becoming visible. But how? I believe psychoanalytic feminists hold onto their binary glasses in their view of the world. Donna Haraway says that we all have been +++ psychoanalytic feminists hold onto their binary glasses in their view of the world +++ colonized by origin-myths with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse (Symians 175). Her--in my opinion--Deleuzean cyborg-politics advocates post-colonial resistance: one may, or rather, should, use language in order to fight perfect communication--to fight the code or the signifier that translates all meaning perfectly (Symians 176). Similarly, Deleuze erects an antilaw, an anti-logos, with which an Other, a non-paternal symbolic order should be organized and described. This nomadic law infiltrates the law of reason, and I would argue, this includes a theory that knows what we lack: psychoanalytic feminism. Nomadism describes a way of thinking that deconstructs itself, that postpones its meaning and that lets multiple meanings evolve through the pluralization of time. Deleuze defines this process of molecularization as becoming:
Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becomings is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire. (TP 272)
The duration of time constitutes immanent modes of existence. They evolve inevitably: differentiation flees from molar concepts. They become-

fluid, become-woman, then child, then animal, plant and mineral, until they withdraw from normal perception entirely. Their successive becoming-indiscernible is bound to a becoming-asignificant of language, which is why becoming is preferably found in literary texts. The artist has the potential to erect the new codes that Haraway dreams of; s/he can create affects that interrupt the Lacanian signifying chain and might erect new signifiers, if not a-signifiers. Deleuzes ethos is realized when the order of language is interrupted:
If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc. (TP 240)
To show what a word, a text, a body, a language can do instead of what it means according to a molar concept is Deleuzean ethical practice. From Deleuze to Psychoanalytic Feminism A fusion with the stem from which to deterritorialize is suggested by Deleuze and Guattari themselves: The tonal must be protected at any cost! (TP 162). This respect for the stem in order to avoid a brutal emptying of ones Body without Organs is different, though, from the integration of the stem into Deleuzean feminism as proposed by Dorothea Olkowski and Jerry Aline Flieger. It is as if they say: if we read Freud/Lacan/Butler/ Irigaray carefully, what they are really saying is very Deleuzean. This, on the other hand, Deleuzeans should probably welcome: is not their reading one that aims to analyse what psychoanalytic feminisms can do instead of what they mean, to reveal how they have been (mis)read--coded--by Deleuze? In what follows, I will articulate my problems with Deleuzean feminists harmonic treatment of my Others, the psychoanalytic feminists I criticize and whom I accuse of contradicting Deleuzes anti-dialecti-
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cal thinking. In the debate about Deleuzes notion of becoming-woman, Flieger notes that Deleuze and feminism have often been cast in adversarial positions. Especially skeptical of the postmodernist realities of techno-bodies, critics such as Anne Balsamo also warn against a Deleuzean approach. In her Technologies of the Gendered Body, Balsamo echoes the sentiment of many feminists, even those sympathetic to postmodernism, who question the erasure of the body in millenial culture (Flieger 41) If Deleuze and Guattari criticise a molar feminism as constitutive of the notion of woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject (TP 275), it is obvious how they could be linked to Donna Haraway who lacks the dystopian tenor of other feminists when talking about cybernetics: she welcomes this permeability of animalmachine-human, as an opportunity for feminism, or for living beyond the boundaries imposed by a too-strictly constructed and observed gender. . . . Flieger argues that Freud could join the club: like Haraways human-machine, Freuds paraphrenic man-woman belies a single identity: in his becoming, man-woman is no longer a binary opposition but a binary apposition, whereby majoritarian man is de-positioned (Flieger 60). How does Flieger deduct such a notion from Freud? Looking at the Schreber case, a subject of study for both Freud and Deleuze, Flieger argues that Freud is more Deleuzean than Deleuze acknowledges. For Flieger, Deleuzes critique of Freuds limited analysis of Schrebers schizophrenia focuses too heavily on the familial situation, ignoring its economic and political influences. Flieger counters that Freud did actually make references to Schrebers situation as member of a discriminated minority (Jews) in Germany, and linked this feeling of discrimination to his identification with women. Was Deleuze being too oppositional? A reading organized around what Freuds analysis can do, namely affecting a socio-political critique of anti-Semitic Germany, was more Deleuzean than

Deleuzes anti-Freudian reading himself. Deleuzes analysis of Schreber, which aims to study intensities non-politically, with focus merely on the schizzes and flows, the molecular transformation, leaves us with the troubling dismissal of ideology in Schrebers case (Flieger 51). As argued above, I defend Deleuzes focus on intensities as his own micropolitical approach, since intensities have their own material difference that can be employed to account for an active becoming-woman. Schrebers analysis of a plane of intensity of schizzes and flows expresses a rejection of an identification with masculine power, and thereby presents resistance to identification within a system of molar concepts--the basis for discriminations. Just as Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism will never be effectively challenged by union power, they perceive a description of power structures to be certainly important, but less effective than actual schizoanalytic practice as a subversion and critique of a fascist system.10 Resistance against masculine identity, resistance against the phallus, is also resistance against being subjectified into the signifying chain: it is the resistance against a discriminating system of codes. Flieger is surely right that Freuds paraphrenic man-woman belies a single identity, and, Deleuze would argue, materially so. But, in Freudian psychoanalysis, this non-identity is seen as pathological, and has to be reversed through therapy, whereas Deleuzean schizoanalyses conceives the material becoming-Other of Schreber as a political act. It is exactly this difference between pathology and becoming-Other that is the difference between Freud and Deleuze, and I wonder why we should embrace Freud if Deleuze not only has his own language to articulate Schrebers politicality, but also does so in a more productive manner for a feminist rewriting of difference. Flieger suggests another link between Deleuzean schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis by comparing Deleuzes description of becoming to Lacanian desire. The Deleuzean becoming-Other of two beings are actual
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evolutions: no organism remains in itself but is always drawn out of its isolation and individuation, in an act of commingling (Flieger 55). The desire of the Other is an intrication of one being in another, an act of commingling. And this fusion is productive of the signifying chain, each partner signifying the Other but not actually being the Other. The signifying chain is proof of the constitutive lack of meaning in language, and of the constitutive lack of the subject, of his desire of the Other. Deleuzes schizoanalysis, though, aims to refute the idea of signification at the base of desire; for him, there is a sexual relation, and this is real becoming.
It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.) . . . [but] something else entirely is going on*: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp . . . There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on a line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated to anything signifying*. (TP 10; * indicates my italics)
But Flieger counters with the statement that Deleuzes notion of becoming does not really escape the signifying chain, and that this signifying chain could lead from Lacan back to Freud: For the signifying chain is . . . an elaboration of the drive that Freud calls the compulsion to repeat, associated with the death drive, which were intensities that, in a sense, do not satisfy or annul desire, but feed desiring production, perpetuating actions that are meaningful only by dint of their repetition, in response to a compulsion to repeat. This nexus spun from the association of Deleuzean becoming with the Freudian pleasure principle is based on a severe misreading; it distorts Deleuzes notion of becoming and forfeits its liberating potential. Deleuzes

theorization of antiproduction certainly owes a great deal to Freuds pleasure principle, but its difference from Lacanian desire is crucial. Lacans rewriting of the Freudian relation between the pleasure and reality principle11 sought to prove their incommensurability, which he theorized through the real. The trauma--the real--can never be abreacted, as it is inaccessible. Similarly, in Deleuze, antiproduction represses a constitutive outside, but what is repressed is--contrary to Lacan--not predetermined. The Lacanian real as constitutive for the desire of the Other, a desire that can never be filled, opposes the liberating potential of Deleuzean feminism. Becoming is not an imitation or tracing, but a mapping and connection. The wasp-orchid effects a disorientation and reorientation of each organism, a dislocating identification which forgets the past of the organism, opening it to becoming-other (TP 10), which is exactly the opposite of Lacanian desire: the past of the organism is never forgotten, it remains the tyranny of the past that frames and formulates sexuality. The pleasure principle, although it can be associated with Deleuzean repetition, implies a fixed corporeal memory that in Deleuze is opened up to the material changes of duration, that are contingent on the environment. The spark that ignites Deleuzean repetition is arbitrary whereas, in a Lacanian Freud, repetition is based on a real that cannot be dissociated from a union with the m/other. Although the eternally recurring law, that the orchid and the wasp will be attracted to each other, might seem like an analogy of Lacanian desire, what Deleuze wants to prove in relation to their fusion is a becoming that is something other than the Lacanian there is no sexual relation: a becoming that does fill a desire, that is desire in itself. He is not asking why they come together, he is talking about their product, which, to him, is not the reproduction of a signifying chain, or proof of a constitutive lack, but a becoming that is affirmative. Ignoring and misreading Deleuze in this way is thwarting his potential to propel feminism into a new and
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unpredictable future. Flieger argues that Deleuze and Freud are themselves engaged in a mutual becoming-Other, and I completely agree with her that a Deleuzean-feminist rhizome deterritorializes from Freudian thought as conductor. Her very witty application of Deleuzean terminology does hide the fact, though, that Deleuze and Guattaris schizophrenic methodology did evolve out of a quest to combat the psychoanalytic dogma that, especially in the clinical practice in relation to schizophrenic/paranoid patients such as Schreber, still follows a very discriminating ontology. In this light, then, also worrying is Fliegers desire to compare Deleuze and Butler, with the suggestion that Butler would welcome the Deleuzean notion of becoming, and this is especially true of cross-dressing as a kind of performance or masking, which characterises the mutual lure of the orchid and the wasp (Flieger 59), and later:
But the joke is on no one, for in becoming-other, every one loses face and identity, and finds creative solutions, ways to gain pleasure. Paradoxically, one finds survival at the expense of identity, by becoming-other . . . the surviving of the fittest becomes the conniving of the wittiest--as when the orchid dresses to fool the wasp. In this molecular play of intensities, the orchid is a transvestite, luring the wasp with a material wit. (Flieger 61)
In Butler, though, cross-dressing is a parodic performance and expression of mourning that is lost or could never be obtained, which, as has been argued, emphasizes the original and unresolvable desire based on gender binarism. It is very far from a cross-dressing, a becoming-Other, that forgets the past of the organism, that is de-individuated: on the contrary, the mourning, expressed in the parodic performance, re-individuates the performer as essentially bi-sexual. Butler is far from agreeing with Deleuze, as his idea of desire as affirmation, not lack, is opposed to her theoretical

methodology that refers to psychoanalysis. Cross-dressing, as the word implies, is exactly the mimesis and mimicry Deleuzes becoming-Other opposes. Similarly, fusing Deleuze with Kristeva seems just as risky. Flieger argues that becoming-Other could actually be exemplified in lcriture feminine, as its subversive practice (that does not have to be limited to women writers), notably in Irigarays sensual lyric in This Sex which is not One, or in Kristevas Stabat Mater, is written . . . with the same molecular atomised material sense of becoming as, say, Deleuzes chapters on faciality and rhizome (Flieger 59). Stabat Mater is an essay in which Kristeva does present graphic and lurid passages on becoming-mother that are imbued with the transformative experience of becoming-other. But, I argue, Kristevas essay tightly defines the becoming a woman has traditionally been limited to: virgin, mother, or whore,12 and her approach does not achieve to open a space for alternative becomings: criture feminine certainly aims to be subversive as it tries to create another language, presenting a fluidity that is normally absent in our way of thinking and speaking. But, as Butler argues in Gender Trouble, to base this fluidity in womens cyclical natures and fertility reiterates the gender war.
Insofar as Kristeva conceptualizes [the] maternal instinct as having an ontological status prior to the paternal law, she fails to consider the way in which that very law might well be the cause of the very desire it is said to repress. (90)
ing, as the word implies, is exactly the mimesis and mimicry Deleuzes becomingOther opposes +++
Cross-dress-
+++
One could extend this point to argue that to conceptualize woman as multiple, and to link this multiplicity to her organs, to a placental economy, fails to consider the way in which the monolithic law might well produce this very economy it is said to repress. This links us to Olkowskis attempt to fuse Deleuze with Irigaray, and her defence of Irigaray against exactly this accusation. Not only do some of Irigarays concepts correspond to
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Deleuzes, but Irigaray, contrary to some opinion, actually challenges dichotomies. Namely, by folding the two theoretical strands together, a creative and original point of view on certain feminist problems or issues might be contructed. Olkowski acknowledges that although both Irigaray and Deleuze seek a logic that could pass through the dualisms constructed by language and by social and legal institutions, Irigaray--even while insisting on fluidity--retains an essentialist and totalizing framework in respect to relations, whereas Deleuzes conception of relations leaves them inbetween terms and independent of them: the world is an open whole that guaranteed transformation (Olkowski 103). For Irigaray, the multiple is still subordinate to the unity of being, while in Deleuze, multiplicity inhabits each thing. Whereas Irigaray supposes a value-system, which makes the fluid still relate to being valueable, Deleuzes ethics dictates an in-between that cannot be valued according to good or bad. Their most prominent difference being here, and in reference to the concept of becoming-woman, that for Irigaray, the girl has a body that is stolen from her, and this pre-Oedipal girl, to Irigaray, could have been organised by a placental economy. And it is exactly this description of woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs that, to me, makes her reading of Deleuze molar. In Olkowskis view, though, to make these organs speak would be to insert molecular woman into language. Let us follow her argument: The becoming-woman of any molar male or female, is, as its limit, what Deleuze and Guattari call the Body Without Organs, that is, the body not organized by castration or its threat. Problematically, Olkowski then proceeds to compare the molecules of the female body to the notion of the molecular, having a very organic vision of what makes her molecular:
The somewhat dizzying result of this kind of thinking is the multiple and multi-dimensional body, the assemblage of a multiplicity of sexual

forces, a multiplicity of behaviours for all the becomings that pass between the powerful, fixed bodies constituted by analogy. Woman as becoming is thus anomic, against and outside the rule, the principle, the structure. Her molecules are a powerful contagion, spread by symbiosis and mucosity. And if we succeed in a logic and language of fluidity, all those words that are so distasteful because they express the body of woman--the uteral, the vulvar, the clitoral, the vaginal, the placental, or womans luminous body itself--may then enter, for the first time ever, into our knowledge. (Olkowski 107; italics mine)
Olkowski codes womans molecules through a language of fluidity; it would thus be more fitting to call them atoms than to associate womans organs with the open multiplicity Deleuze envisages through the symbolism of molecules. Atoms, to Deleuzes Nietzsche, are always already coded. What makes a womans body more symbiotic? Who defines the quantity of mucus? How then, does this predetermined conception of the female body fit into a becoming multiple and molecular, when it is exactly this limited notion of woman (as defined by her form and endowed with organs that are coded as fluid) that presents a molar term? In Olkowskis reading of Irigaray, the womb has no consciousness, memory or language and is defined as the opposite to the male logos; there is no access to the Platonic cave and its wisdom; the logos does not set up a space in which the babbling and stuttering of that which remains below the level of the type can be heard (Olkowski 107). A language that wants to account for real difference must be able to express multiplicity. In patriarchy, no single word can ever be uttered without muting the babbling and stuttering of that which remains below the level of the type. And representation is associated with the phallus, the unitary, the monolithic, the primary signifier. Womans multiple sexuality, This Sex which is not One, can thus bring a new logic into language, one ruled by a placental economy, where a word is associated with the multiple.
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Here, multiplicity will no longer remain outside of language, but rather mythologized as the Other, the mad: the myth of woman as hysteric. The goal, for Irigaray, Deleuze, and Olkowski, is for us all to be able to speak non-pathological multiplicity, fluidity, and it is here where they definitely all coincide. But why can only female sexuality bring this Deleuzean schizophrenia into language? If a single word can never be uttered without muting the babbling and stuttering of that which remains below the level of the type, why is Platos cave necessarily the womb? Why is phallocratic language shaped by the male sexual organ, when, in naming the penis, by definition, one suppresses its own fluidity? Why is Platos cave not also the Other of the psychoanalytic association of the penis with the phallus: the fluid within the hard? And could the cave not be associated with any other organ that might determine a bodys subjectivity? To associate monolithism--molar representation--with the penis because psychoanalytic language does so is to agree to a theory that will forever determine what will be excluded from the light. If to articulate the male sexual organ is to mute the fluid below the level of the type, and the type is represented by the phallus, then--by nature--the sexes will always be opposed, as will their languages. Irigaray very clearly appeals to a Lacanian real that, as argued-and as Irigaray herself seems to argue--is directly related to womans organs and her functions. The real as that which cannot be thought must consist of a fluidity that words--beings--by nature cannot represent. In Lacan, the real is associated with the womb as the time when needs were satisfied. As such, the real is always already coded. Irigaray wants to see this real, the placental, multiple female sexuality which presents a disavowed negativity to man, inserted into language in order to make the real speak:
[I]f we examine the properties of fluids, we note that this real may well

include, an in a large measure, a physical reality that continues to resist adequate symbolisation and/or that signifies the powerlessness of logic to incorporate in its writings all the characterisitc features of nature. (This Sex which is not One 106)
In contrast to Irigarays placental sexuality, the Deleuzean girl is marked through an underlying anorganism, meaning she is not defined by her organs: focusing on sexual difference and, as such, on two sets of organs and their functions, delimits our becomings. What if organs other than our wombs determine our economies, our desiring-machines? If we read Haraways cyborg as a symbol for Deleuzes girl, Haraway summarises it perfectly: bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity. . . . One is too few, and two is just one possibility (Symians 180). Deleuze does not propose a non-organism, an eradication of a feminine subject that defines herself through certain organs and a certain perception of their functions, described in opposition to the phallus. He merely says that she is just one possibility. The female body has historically been coded as embodied hysteria and multiplicity, and, as I have aimed to establish, this cultural coding is based on a binary that locks feminism in its oppressed position. A focus on woman as Other once more inscribes a binary into the sexes. Olkowski follows Irigaray in arguing that our language is phallocratic:
[W]e erect material superstructures . . . we penetrate foreign arenas; we engineer projectiles for defensive and offensive purposes . . . we encourage each other to be hard on the issues; we size up situations; we admire a cocky attitude as well as a comer. (Olkowski 92)
Claire Colebrook says about Deleuze and Guattari:
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Rather than attacking a philosophy of identity and being in terms of some pure outside, they have read philosophy perversely: showing the ways in which the tradition already articulates modalities of becoming. . . . The contamination of tradition, its non-identity and infidelity to itself, is affirmed when writers are read in terms of what they do, and not in terms of some pre-given model of reason or authorial intention. (Colebrook 4-5)
What would happen if we contaminated the patriarchal, and even the psychoanalytic feminist tradition? If we looked for the fluid in male genitalia, and hence, dissociated them from a language that is said to be shaped by the male sexual organ? If we talked about their softness and vulnerable exposure, the multiple shapes of testicles, the changing form and texture--never homo, the same--of the penis? And compared it to the sharpness of the clitoris, like a blade in its sheath, protected and cunningly hidden behind a triangular shield, much more geometric than mans multiple shapes? What about comparing the madness of mans pubic hair with the slight growth of the feminine, concentrated on this triangle, focused, exact? What about those women who hardly notice their monthly cycle, shedding a few drops of blood--right on time, like clockwork, calculable, every twenty-eight days? What about premature ejaculations, embarrassing erections? Who sizes up whom? Who feels penetrated, and who rides? Who comes? What about the numbing, irregular pains of prostatitis--are they not as improper to talk about as premenstrual tension, in fact, much more improper? It is correct that we have traditionally focused on being instead of becoming, on the hard instead of the fluid. And just as the fluid has been excluded from the symbolic, so has woman. But the logical conclusion cannot be to associate woman with this exclusion, with the fluid, as it agrees with the oppressors argument for excluding her. The fluid has

always already existed within the hard, it is not just woman who is fluid, and, following Deleuzes ethics, we should reveal the fluid within the monolithic. In focusing on womans fluidity, and associating this fluidity with her organs--which, I argue, is a cultural association and could just as much be recoded--the Lacanian notion of the real and a theorization is supported that will continue to associate the penis with the phallus: man will have to continue to protect himself against the reproductive monstermother. Irigaray counters:
But without a female homosexual economy, a female narcissistic ego, a way to represent herself, a woman in a heterosexual encounter will always be engulfed by the male homosexual economy, will not be able to represent her difference. Woman must demand the same, the homo and then not settle for it, not fall into the trap of thinking a female homo is necessarily any closer to a representation of otherness, an opening for the other. (This Sex which is not One 74)
If the fear of being engulfed by a male homosexual economy is that large, if the male phallus appears as dangerous, how could one be self-critical towards ones own phallus erected in resistance to it? Would one not fear, in deconstructing it, that male power would take over again? How can the male phallus be diminished by bringing fluidity into language through a feminine, organic, placental economy? If though, woman can be anything, if she is not determined by her organs and holds the potential of a multitude of identities or rather, becomings, she is not mans Other anymore. Without fear of her difference, he can follow into becoming-Other: he will be affected if her becoming-Other endures. I believe it is then that the uteral, the vulvar, the clitoral, the vaginal, the placental will have entered into our knowledge as something other than monstrous. Rosi Braidotti follows a line of argumentation similar to Olkowskis.
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Her work remains more closely tied to criture feminine than my non-sexed notion of becoming-woman. Braidotti argues that Irigaray supports the ontological basis of sexual difference. Supporting Irigaray in this conviction, Braidotti seems to enforce the notion of a nomadic nomos and a becoming-woman through criture feminine instead of deconstructing the molar notion of woman as endowed by her organs. Interestingly, in a comparison of feminism and postcolonialism, she acknowledges that, if looked at closely, the oppressor--Europe as well as man--bursts into a thousand tiny races and sexes. But instead of concluding that the articulation of these molecules might take the power out of their oppressive force, she insists on constructing a feminine symbolic. Although, following Irigaray, she considers this femininity to be still blank, it is and remains an Other to masculinity. In her Nomadic Subjects, a whole chapter is devoted to the feminisation of culture she envisages through Irigaray. She warns the reader that she is about to engage in some severe man-bashing, knowing that this is not going to help feminism in the long run:
Perfectly aware of the fact that I am lapsing into a polemic that may not advance the feminist cause very far in the long run, I shall nevertheless gleefully enjoy the whole performance. (Braidotti 136)
But already a few pages earlier she writes:

Women can see the light where men just stare into empty space, watching the downfall of the phallic monuments and documents they have erected by and for themselves. (Braidotti 131)
If the oppressor is not homogenous, was it only men who erected these monuments? And did they erect them for themselves? Is it only women who can see the light? Certainly, what could be wished for is a becoming-

Other of a gyno-centric notion of woman as well as a monolithic view of man, a notion of both woman and man that opens up to the in-between, the hermaphrodite, the cyborg. A Harawayan notion of feminism that embraces change is such a becoming-Other of feminism that psychoanalytic feminisms are far from, but have served as a stem for, a stem that has to be kept at any cost. It is a stem that serves as a base for a molecular politics representing exactly those women who wish to define themselves as ontologically different to man, who define themselves as mucotic-symbiotic. From this stem, rhizomes can be webbed, that might lead some towards a different future. Just as psychoanalytic accounts, which are the stem from which Deleuze/Guattari have spun their rhizomes into a schizoanalytic methodology, have to be kept in order to have a safety net to fall back on. They present something that is known and has grown deep roots, but that is at least not empty. Deleuze and Guattari, always aiming to stay in the middle between the two modes of being, advise not to eradicate it, and to always come back to it.
If it is true that it is of the essence of a map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausible that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assuming the necessary precautions are taken. . . . For example, one will often be forced to take dead ends, to work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a foothold in formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse, rigid territorialities that open the way for other transformational operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in spite of itself. (TP 14-15)
and reassuring us:

Eventually, the weed gets the upper hand. (TP 19)
This return to the stem is different, though, to a mutual becoming-Other.
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And this difference is important to highlight in order to remind us that deterritorialization begins somewhere where there is drought, not life: a notion of man and woman created and exploited by a system we are hoping to bring to a stumble.
Notes
1. Buchanan and Colebrook: Deleuze and Feminist Theory, 59. I would personally not describe Judith Butler as a cultural feminist, if we follow a definition of cultural feminism as derived from Linda Alcoffs renowned confrontation of cultural feminism with post-structuralism in Signs 13:3, 105-36, 1988. 2. Both in Deleuze and Feminist Theory. 3. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix A Thousand Plateaus, 275; hereafter TP. 4. Deleuze and Feminist Theory, 161. 5. See Teresa de Lauretis Daughters Seduction. 6. See 255 for the direction of treatment and principles of its power and 287 for the signification of the phallus. 7. In her Bodies That Matter, Butler aims to redefine Lacans real through Ernesto Laclaus psychoanalysis of democracy. Politics, according to Laclau, is a speakable psychosis. Hence, Butler aims to argue that the real is not a disavowed negativity but defined by differential relations that can be negotiated. If the real is not disavowed and accessible, why has it got such predetermined and structuring power that leaves each subject mourning its unfulfilled gender identities? To me, this ambiguity renders Butlers use of Laclau unconvincing. 8. Irigaray, Luce: Speculum de lautre femme. 9. Tyler, Carole Ann: Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Alice Doesnt or Jane Gallops The

Drag. 10. See their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 11. Lacan, Jacques: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 12. See Toril Moi: The Kristeva Reader.
Works Cited
Alcoff, Linda. Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory. Signs 13:3 (1988): 405-36. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia Press, 1994. Buchanan, Ian and Colebrook, Claire eds. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. ------. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesnt: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press, 1984. ------. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987. Flieger, Jerry Aline. Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber, and Molecular Identification. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 38-63. Gallop, Jane. The Daughters Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
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Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Irigaray, Luce. je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1993. ------. This Sex which is not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. ------. Speculum de lautre femme. Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1974. Lacan, Jacques. crits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 1977. ------. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959-1960. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992. Moi, Toril. The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Olkowski, Dorothea. Body, Knowledge and Becoming-Woman: Morphologic in Deleuze and Irigaray. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 86-109. Tyler, Carole Ann. Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag. Ed. Diana Fuss. inside/out. Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 1991.
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Writing Becoming-Woman: The Movement of Deleuzean Thought in Contemporary American Poetry

Kimberly Lamm
Delirious and heterogenous, collective and multiple, dense with +++ AngloAmerican literature is the rhizomatic hero in the work of Gilles Deleuze +++ minor languages deterritorializing the major, Anglo-American literature is the rhizomatic hero in the work of Gilles Deleuze. In their dialogue On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature (1977), Deleuze and Claire Parnet cite a litany of Anglo-American writers and declare: In them, everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside (36). Anglo-American literature strikes out beyond itself, always becoming in the heterogeneous landscape of the actual. In the sweeping gestures of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987),1 Deleuze and Flix Guattari exclaim: American literature, and already English literature, manifest th[e] rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent: they know how to move between things, establish the logic of AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings (25). Part of the literatures supremacy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, derives from the map of entryways and exits within the language itself (TP, 13). Feminist engagements with Deleuzean thought are not quite so smooth or celebratory. Questions hinge on Deleuzes formulation, becoming-woman.2 Becoming-woman is the act of embodying the feminines instability and multiplicity, its resistance to masculinitys fixed and representative status. Becoming-woman is a necessary plateau in the act of becoming. Brian Massumi delightfully describes becoming as the great dissipative outside stretching uncertainly on the wild side of the welcome mat (95). Becoming-woman is a necessary plateau, a lift-off space for
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this movement into uncertainty, the affect yet to be seen. Acknowledging that becoming-woman is indeed sexist, Massumi explains that because the feminine and women have traditionally embodied the instability repressed in patriarchal culture and the rigid components of masculine identity formation, Deleuze privileges becoming-woman as a better place from which to begin an innovative departure: The feminine gender stereotype involves greater indeterminacy (fickle) and movement (flighty) and has been burdened by the patriarchal tradition with a disproportionate load of paradox (virgin/whore, mother/lover) (86). Since women do not have an immediate or necessary access to becoming-woman, many feminists contend that becoming-woman is another manifestation of a complicated but familiar process of excluding women from representation while simultaneously formulating their exclusion as an image of representations undoing. Luce Irigaray and Alice Jardine argue that for all the innovation in Deleuzean thought, becomingwoman is a repetition of Western philosophys simultaneous construction and disavowal of the feminine: the same girl in a conceptually different dress. One might paraphrase both Irigarays and Jardines arguments with the following question: does becoming-woman risk repeating womens historical invisibility in the name of literary and philosophical experiment, evacuating the category of woman, and celebrating her disappearance? Adopted and transformed into a lived materiality, becoming-woman, according to Jardine, renders women one simulacrum: a female figure caught in a whirling sea of male configurations (217). Rosi Braidotti argues, however, that Deleuzes emphasis on the activity of thinking differently, combined with his emphasis on deessentializ[ing] the body, sexuality, and sexual identity can expand feminisms construction of new desiring subjects (163). This essay utilizes the logic of AND to find the connections among Deleuzean thought, feminism, and contemporary American poetry. Contemporary American poetry by women offers a compelling textual
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field in which literary practices negotiate between the Deleuzean ideas prevalent in American literature and feminisms work disassembling the pervasive logics of patriarchy and reconfiguring gendered and sexed subjectivities. Rosmarie Waldrops A Key into the Language of America (1993), Susan Howes Pierce-Arrow (1999), Thalia Fields Point and Line (2000), and Juliana Spahrs Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You (2001), innovate within the entryways and exits of American English, but are also cautious of making feminized subjectivity the conceptual ground that makes subversion possible (TP 13).3 Pushing the genre of poetry into other literary forms,
Poetrys plasticity, its shifting play with form and line . . . becomes a means to both test and examine Deleuzean collectivities +++
+++
moving thought and construction of personhood into unexpected realms, these texts work within the logic of and, but they do not rush to overthrow ontology or do away with foundations--a reluctance I attribute to the feminist thought internal to their work. While their work innovates toward a becoming that links American literature and feminism, these poets are far more likely to write women as well as an active, vital feminist critique that resists making women images and figures for others becoming. The title of Fields text is indicative. Deleuze and Guattari state that [b]ecoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point (294) and that the girl is an abstract line, or a line of flight (277). These contemporary texts by women consist of both lines and points, both flight and concentrated scrutiny, and suggest a model of writing that both becomes in lines of flight but can also critique the formulations of the feminine that sustain the movement of these lines. Poetrys plasticity, its shifting play with form and line, its attention to the appearance of thought and speech, its capacity to interrupt itself, pause, fragment, and trail off, as well as its capacity to render speedy accelerations and the viscosity of slowness, becomes a means to both test and examine Deleuzean collectivities. Though their stylistic executions are radically distinct, for all of these writers, poetry is a form of thinking within the materiality of language and form, writing a new language within language (Deleuze, Literature and Life 5) while still inscribing
critical pauses that will resist inadvertently reinscribing patriarchys representations of femininity within Deleuzean lines of flight. The formal and conceptual differences in these projects are partially generational. Waldrop and Howe were both born in the 1930s, and represent a generation of women whose careers were underway as second-wave feminism emerged. Waldrop and Howes work moves into the textual layers of history to exhume and represent desiring utterances buried within layers of American literature and history. Field and Spahr, who were born in the late 1960s, seek a poetry beyond gender identifications, and construct texts that investigate and build collective forms. While Waldrops and Howes books expand from within a textually and historically specific field, and focus on individual figures who represent the unfulfilled possibilities of American literatures rhizomatic strains, Field and Spahr throw their analytical nets wider and into the future, attempting to reconfigure forms of personhood that will move into novel forms of collectivity. In Point and Line (2000), the collection that most explicitly grapples with the Deleuzean lexicon and themes, Field investigates various appearances of becoming and its relations as she reconfigures the shape of the book, language, and consciousness. Jardines description of Deleuze and Guattaris work is equally applicable to Point and Line: the book as corpus is imploded and infolded through an analysis of its signifying registers (211). No aspect of the book, reading, or language is left untouched by Fields defamiliarizing formal invention, a deterritorialization she thematizes in the following passage from the opening of The Compass Room.
Each book has a title and all chapters have numbers and each page has a number and each paragraph begins with a clear indentation, a pause or a clearing of a throat, and each sentence ends with a period and each word ends with a sound and each time we meet has the allure of
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progress away from something medieval such as violent unpaved roads and bawdy unplucked fowl running amok in the uncleared fields at the outer regions of fiefdoms. (16)
At the center of this swift, unpunctuated passage, hinged to a time between the orders of language and untamed medieval fields, is a we. The phrase each time we meet slyly announces an important preoccupation for Point and Line: the imaginative formations and actual effects of collectivities. Field doesnt simply represent images of rhizomatic collectivities, but enacts the difficulty of becoming part of a rhizomatic collectivity in thought and on the page. In Walking, a long poem in which Field negotiates between becoming a collective utterance and remaining within the recognizable and individualized form necessary for encountering the quotidian world, Field stages encounters between rhizomes and individual forms, and interrupts them with critical halts of caution:
an individual a perfect stranger in a gray parka with fur in passing some abstraction possibly a crowd but for now take two steps in place to keep the stranger always ahead (54) is replaced with
I lie in a field of anxiety and sense perceptions someone asks me
armies step in unison is there danger in every theory? (67-68)
Perhaps this field of anxiety arises from a desire to recognize the political purpose of the collectivity the protagonist walks with and within. Played against enjambed lines that zigzag and break across the page, the rhythmically built and steady density of the following lines enacts the galvanized collectivity of striking factory workers:
pause at a landmark where one thousand women shoebinders and stitchers and five thousand men shoeworkers marched through the streets of Lynn in a blizzard-the shoe business came to a halt on Washingtons Birthday 1860 and through the snow through February through March into April they walked on striking terrain where how and why one crossed the lines of stepping and connecting people into and out of stores all became a web of tangled empty stomachs pockets of emotion--an entire generation walked without blurring their manifest intention (63)
This rhizomatic marching, which extended into and included spaces and people beyond its primary goal, is a model for the collectivity of the protagonist who figuratively walks within the formations she composes. But it is a landmark now, cemented into the past. Fields Walking grapples with the question of how to write collectivities of the present with the knowledge that
in walking there are limits to road recollections of personal and national and racial pasts acute moral apprehension, higher powers of expression or there oughtta be (62)
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By transcribing into writing the way the phrase ought to be appears in spoken form--oughtta be--Field links languages spoken, lived texture with the imperative to acknowledge historys role in determining ones access to becoming. Field ends the poem with three lines that represent thoughtful walking steps that inscribe accountability and attest to the importance of individual points within rhizomatic lines of flight:
what this one did (76)
Without relinquishing movement and permeability, these texts stress writing as an investigative form that can halt and call attention to the formulation of the feminine within rhizomatic collectivities. In Deleuzes thought, writing is an important means to and a figure for becoming. In Literature and Life, Deleuze writes, Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes animal or vegetable, becomes molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible (1). In becoming-imperceptible, the egos relation to language unhinges, making it open and permeable to collective utterances; the territory of identity dissolves into we. Virginia Woolf is one of two or three women writers cited in Deleuzes work who bridge the distance between writing and becoming-woman: When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically womens writing, she was appalled at the idea of writing as a woman. Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field (TP 276). Deleuze refers to Woolfs attention to the places and states where the borders between persons blur to non-existence. Deleuze and Parnet cite the following line from Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway (1925), though they attribute Dalloways voice to Woolf herself: I spread myself out like a fog BETWEEN the people that I know best says Virginia Woolf in her
walk among the taxis (30). Deleuze emphasizes Woolfs opposition to writing like a woman, and yet, Deleuze and Guattari claim, as they do not for other writers, that Woolf made all her life and work a passage, a becoming (TP 225). In the work of these contemporary poets, we see writers drawing upon qualities that Deleuze associates with the feminized other--permeability and instability--but instead of reinscribing the feminization of these qualities, these writers draw upon these states as a means toward constructing new collectivities that do not simultaneously exalt the feminine into an imaginary and muse-like state and then deny the actuality of womens subjective internalization. Waldrops A Key into the Language of America (1994) highlights writing as tool in the feminist project of exhuming womens voices from the confines of historical documents. A Key into the Language of America is a critical revision of Roger Williams 1643 text of the same name: a missionary guidebook to the language and customs of the Narragansetts, and the first study of a Native-American language printed in English. Waldrop critically re-stages Williams A Key into the Language of America, but brings to the foreground what was essential to the conceptualization of the world Puritans encountered and conquered: the feminization of Native-American culture and the American landscape. Waldrop exposes the simultaneous disavowal and recognition of the feminine, and the paradox that women are only granted limited forms of recognition within the cultural syntax of their disavowal. By transcribing a fictionalized voice of a Native American woman, Waldrop foregrounds the feminized minor as well as the gendered strictures and banishments within American becomings. She restages the cultural clash between the Narragansett Indians and the Puritans, but allows the openings that emerge from the clash to expose what and who operated as the sign of passivity. This young womans voice represents but resists a gendered passivity; she is a subject denied a subject position, a subject denied its own relation to the imaginary, and continually displaced. +++ By transcribing a fictionalized voice of a Native American woman, Waldrop foregrounds the feminized minor as well as the gendered strictures and banishments within American becomings +++
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She employs a language dense with ironies and metaphors to describe the experience of being forced to signify the receding edge of language, culture, and landscape while being simultaneously bereft of personhoods visible signs. On the periphery of more private weather, I tried to adjust to Dutch trumpets and fire instead of bedclothes. This was inevitable if I wanted to imitate consciousness (8).4 Waldrop suggests that consciousness--crucial to a definition and experience of personhood--must be imitated within spaces flanked by signs of triumph and destruction. Waldrop strategically places her fictional transcription of this voice to inscribe an interruption of Williams text as well as its reception. In her preface to A Key into the Language of America, Waldrop explains that Williams wrote for his Puritan compatriots; he wanted his book to facilitate communication and teach the Puritans a lesson about the Narragansetts humanity. It was misread, and became of great practical use to traders, missionaries, and settlers (xv). Waldrop unravels the concatenation of assumptions that informed Puritan misreadings of Williams text. The first chapter, entitled Salutations, is an imitation of Williams delineation of the Narragansetts sign system for greeting, which turns into the introduction of the language, and then turns into an assessment of the natural resources available to the Puritans--the pumice found in great quantities. The Narragansett Salutations, Waldrop writes, Are of two sorts and come immediately before the body. The pronunciation varies according to the point where the tongue makes contact with pumice found in great quantity (3). The voice of the young woman emerges from this description, announcing her continual displacement within the receding space of Native American marginalization:
I was born in a town on the other side which didnt want me in so many. All the streets were long and led. In the center, a single person had no house or friends to allay excessive sorrowe. I, like other girls, forgot my name in the noise of traffic, opening my arms more to measure their extension than to offer
embrace. (4)
Rendered anonymous but part of a paradoxically atomized collective--I, like other girls, forgot my name--this voice offers an ironic imitation of a salutation to measure womens dissipation within the fast traffic of American colonialization. Moreover, the passage suggests that the feminine becomes the means through which incursion is supposedly welcomed and measured. The woman embodies and displaces this measurement simultaneously, as she open[s] [her] arms more to measure their extension than to offer embrace. Waldrop follows this declaration with a poem that elucidates the ideas informing and the consequences that emerge from the Puritan assumption that learning the Narragansett language will help facilitate economic expansion and the eradication of Native Americans. Notice how woman is imagined as a facilitating passageway, shedding critical light on Deleuze and Guattaris feminization of becoming and their claim that the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities (249):
the Courteous Pagan barefoot and yes his name laid down as dead one openness one woman door so slow in otherwise so close
A Key into the Language of America provides an important counterpoint to Deleuzes celebration of Americas geographical becomings.
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Deleuze and Claire Parnet write that American literature operates according to geographical lines: the flight toward the West, the discovery that the true East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond. The becoming is geographical (37). This compelling portrayal ignores the fact that American literature can also be defined by subjects who struggled to sustain nominal forms of personhood, forms continually threatened by American colonialisms geographical becomings. Spahrs Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You (2001) also critiques Americas geographical becomings. The title of her collection makes the angry ambivalence within Hawaiis emblematic gesture of welcome and farewell quite clear. In Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You, Spahr attempts to forge forms of relation that do not replicate the assumptions of dominance that characterize Americas geographical becomings. Thematically and stylistically, Spahrs text is composed under the sign of AND. The AND, Deleuze and Parnet write, has a fundamental sobriety, a poverty, and ascesis (Superiority 57 ). The austerity of Spahrs poetry is part of her project of building the poem into a collectivity that doesnt repress minor utterances. Discussing the characteristics of minor literature, and Kafkas choice to invent a way other than artificially enrich[ing] German, Deleuze and Guattari write: Go always farther in the direction of deterritorialization, to the point of sobriety. Since the language is arid, make it vibrate with a new intensity (Kafka 19). Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You unhinges pronouns from actual people so they vibrate with a bare and open intensity. The I in Spahrs text represents [i]ndividuation without a subject (Superiority 40) and an impersonal materiality. This spare and unspecified I is part of the speakers attempts to articulate the complexity of we.
What I mean to say here is that I am confused.
I am part of a we and then not part of a we. (47)
With a minimalist beauty, Spahrs text searches for words and spaces common, supple, and specific enough to link people to each other and the rest of the world. In things, a poem that experiments with the elasticity and collectivity of the phrase da kine, she writes:
Da kine for me is the moment when things extend beyond you and me and into the rest of the world. It is the thing. (8)
Not only does Spahr insist on languages materiality when she aligns da kine with the thing, language becomes the means toward a possible and unforeseen collectivity. Furthermore, da kine is both a synecdoche for pidgin and Hawaiis colonial history. As the historically specific and simultaneously empty center of Spahrs poem, da kine also demonstrates Deleuze and Parnets claim that American English has an extraordinary capacity for being twisted and shattered and for secretly putting itself in the service of minorities who work at it from the inside, involuntarily, unofficially, nibbling away at that hegemony as it extends itself: the reverse of power (Superiority 58). In the following passage, which is extraordinary for its combination of simplicity and metaphorical density, Spahr literalizes the space of collectivity da kine makes possible by aligning it with a mosh pit:
Da kine is the mosh pit at the fuck-you-aloha-Ilove-you show.
The mosh pit is thrashing about in masking tape.
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Everyone is connected in the thrash, everyone taped together in the fuck-you-aloha-I-love-you. So the thrash in anger is the thrash of connection, of of joining.
The more thrashing, the more sticking.
It is the thrash of reaching out for others in the most isolated land mass.
It is da kine. (things 9)
[T]he most isolated land mass is a Hawaiian island, but Spahrs primary focus is the phrase da kine because as language it points toward a reconceptualization of the landscape and the collectivities that inhabit and define it. In things, there is a mapping that extends beyond you and me via da-kine. Words have an impersonal and conceptual materiality in Spahrs text; they fill and empty with history, politics, and ethical consequences as well as innovative possibility. One could say that each line in Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You negotiates between what is present and what is possible in language. Relations between people--sexual, intersubjective, political--are not only negotiated through language but they assume its spare and pliable forms. In switching, bodies are not represented through gendered demarcations, but instead resemble sentences that are placed together awkwardly but equally to imagine forms of desire that are not based on uneven power relations:
This desire takes the form of one person having one leg on one persons shoulder and the other leg stretched out and twined
around the other person, moving back and forth. (40)
This representation of sex between persons rather than genders becomes a model for negotiated speaking:
How to speak around a table as if one leg is on one shoulder and then the other is stretched out or twined around the other person. (49)
Spahrs Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You highlights writing as a means to building forms of subjectivity and collectivity that are not explicitly or implicitly patriarchal. To that end, Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You enacts and connects two aspects of Deleuzean thought: the bodys potential for action instead of a container for recognizable ontology. For Deleuze, the body isnt regarded as an already discernible form, but a potential for movement and action. We know nothing about a body until we can know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body (TP 257). In Spahrs poem a younger man,/ an older man,/ and a woman, the writing enacts the becoming of a tumbling teams physical configuration, and the verb of ontology--are--appears as an effect of what the we does and builds.
We stand and we hold out our arms at the side. We are a support. We put our hands in our hands and we raise our body up until our body is inverted yet parallel to our body. Our legs at our head, our head at our knees. Our hands
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in our hands. And we raise our hands to raise us up. And we are balanced by our hands on our hands and our legs are in the air, slowly spreading. We are in motion. We are raising up into a line. (74)
The last line represents the we raising itself into the moving +++ Howe writes to investigate, document, and imagine a man whose life and work embodied Americas rhizomatic strains, but rather than celebrated, was repressed to the margins: Charles Sanders Peirce. +++ line of its future. As this passage enacts the careful building-block formation of a pyramid composed of human forms, it calls attention to relations between writing and the becoming of a physical collectivity. The enjambed lines of this deliberately built poem enact the sense of risk at each step of the building, and the pronoun we is deliberately repeated until it becomes the focus of the passage, achieving a level of abstraction that emerges from the materiality of the language and the physicality of the form to which it refers. As Spahr writes the tumblers building a pyramid, we empties and fills with new forms, attesting to what both language and the body can do. While Spahrs Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You writes a spare and physical language that will shape future becomings, Howes Pierce-Arrow unearths the becomings made opaque by the dense textures of the past. Like Waldrop, Howe writes to investigate, document, and imagine a man whose life and work embodied Americas rhizomatic strains, but rather than celebrated, was repressed to the margins: Charles Sanders Peirce. Pierce-Arrow is a textual portrait of this American philosopher whose work and person was, in the words of Howe, first feminized and then restricted or banished (The Birth-mark 1). Explaining that Peirce was never offered a teaching appointment after he was dismissed from Johns Hopkins University, Howe lists the various representations of Americas great logician: a decadent aesthete, a lecher, a liar, a libertine, a queer,
a wife beater, an alcoholic, a drug-addict, a plagiarist, a wannabe robber baron; an unpractical pragmatist with suspect metaphysics (Pierce-Arrow 8). Howe writes Peirce becoming-woman and becoming imperceptible, but these becomings were spurred on by punishment. To call attention to this enforcement, Howe also writes his mournful alienation from the culture and history to which he brilliantly contributed. For Howe, history is the enforcement of safe grammar, a synecdoche for the ideological impositions of order upon language and perception as well as the repression of its excesses, and Peirce brilliantly exceeded these orders. Of Peirces academic banishment, Howe writes:
C.S. Peirce is not the only example other masterminds knocked at academic portals and were refused entry but they are the obituaries a penalty paid for safety for grammar (51)
Pierce-Arrow exhumes the possibility and potential obscured by the canonizing orders of American literature and history--its safe grammar. Though Pierce-Arrow by no means approaches the excessive abundance of the work that has for the most part been left unseen in libraries, Howe begins to document the strange and lyrical becomings indexed on the surface of Peirces manuscript pages into visibility by placing a few of these elaborate designs in her book. One is a hand-written draft of Peirces epic narrative The First Chapter of Logic, which begins: O creator out of blank nothing of this universe whose immense reality, sublimity, and beauty so little thrills me as it should (4). Another reproduces Peirces cartoonish drawings of a group of people; he extends the drawn lines of their noses into faucets, long pins, and tubes that elongate into shapes that surround them. In another place, Howe cites Peirces experimentation with
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the logic of a sentence that betrays his need for praise. These are the first few lines: Figure 99 Somebody praises somebody to his face/ Figure 100 Somebody does not praise everybody to his face/ Figure 101 Somebody is not praised to his face by anybody (xiii). Peirce, Howe explains, drew and wrote (according to his own calculations) over 2,000 words, diagrams, algebraic formulas and/or existential graphs a day. His unpublished writings (including correspondence) come to more than 100,000 pages (19). Howe describes Peirces pursuit of logic becoming other in a delirious line of flight. Putting thought in motion to define art in a way that includes science, these graphs, charts, prayers, and tables are free to be drawings, even poems (ix). It is not only the work that becomes in the space of his manuscript pages. Pierce-Arrow portrays Peirces self-representations as continually shifting within the textual acts of his philosophical pursuits. Peirce himself acknowledged the fictionalizing involved in his self-representations, and Howe cites his written meditation on his name: (I am variously listed in print as Charles Santiago Peirce, Charles Saunders Peirce, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Under the circumstances a noncommittal S. suits me best) (7). Howe deliberately plays on Peirces name in the title of her book, and uses Pierce--a mistaken identification or a misspelling. This portrait of Peirce, which sensitively attends to his poetic self-stagings, represents him as an elusive figure, who, like the one explicit knowledge he restlessly sought, cannot be adequately or thoroughly represented. In the following passage, Howe sketches a possible image for Peirce becoming delirious and imperceptible. Notice its connection to the material ground with its rich possibility for imaginative anonymity:
He dreamed of flying or floating in air owl-like above the ground terra incognita its voluptuousness (68)
This dream is a fantasmatic counterpart to the images of Peirce isolated and desperately poor. He contrived a hideout from/ creditors in the attic, Howe writes, to which he would flee/ drawing up the ladder/ leading to it (107). Though he was isolated, in Howes mind, Peirces singular pursuit of the logical structure of reality, combined with his capacity to transform, connects him to the literary and philosophical war machine of the Homeric epics. In the following passage, Peirce becomes a war god who attests, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, the power of metamorphosis (TP 352) as well as the dangers of insisting on ideas relation to material actuality:
Phemomenology of war in the Iliad how men appear to each other when gods change the appearance of things Send him down unwilling Captain of the Scorned he is singularly doomed (3)
Howe makes it clear that despite the fact that Peirce was first feminized and then restricted or banished (The Birth-mark 1) it is his masculinity that allows her to transform him into a philosopher warrior of Homeric proportions, which redeems him, at least momentarily, in the space of her work. It is Peirces notoriously mysterious French wife, Juliette Peirce (ne Pourtalai) who truly represents the becoming-woman of Pierce-Arrow. Biographers have discovered only hints, rumors, embellishments, contradictions, erasures, fictions about Juliette (9). The following lines of poetry, which allude to her fluency in multiple languages, interrupt Howes citation of all rumors documenting Juliettes life: Babel wants a scourge for its wild/ green grassblades not seeing me (10). Juliette is a mystery Howe doesnt attempt to solve. Instead, Howe represents her ablaze with an inconsistency that almost moves her
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into the realm of the unperceived. After Howes description of Peirces 100,000 page tome of unpublished writings, and after she speculates that [p]erhaps Peirce banished himself for logics sake, Howe writes, Juliette remains exactly who she never says she is she already burned her boats (19). Notice how is floats in the middle of this unpunctuated sentence, a precarious link between saying and burning. Her proficiency in multiple languages emphasizes her swift movement through multiple grammars of being such that she represents the relinquishment of a stable being. Both Charles and Juilette Peirces lives enacted becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible, but her imperceptibility enacted the severity of cultural rules about womens lives instead of demonstrating, as Peirces life does, that she was a rebellious exception to Americas insistence on safe grammar. Juliettes almost invisible becoming haunts the pages of PierceArrow. An equally evasive female figure--a girl--threads her way through the opening poem of Fields Point and Line. She enacts becoming, but also contributes to a critique of the role a feminized passivity plays in the formation of collectivities. In A:I, a girl emerges as an image of possibility outside the stifling and repressive space locked between a therapist and the speaker. When the girl first appears, the speaker represents her movement as well as her pragmatic ability to make obstacles part of her path: A girl strolls through a bustling market, walking alone from fence to fence, around the backs of benches, wandering without stalling (4). A page later, the speaker imagines the girls desire as a clear shape of moving water. Her thoughts surveying the texture of the actual and available are an illustration of form becoming formless. In her pocket, there is change: A girl searches an open-air market for something to buy with the change in her pocket. Her slow consideration of everything takes on the rhythm of water spilling across a table, growing as vastly clear as sunlight on a blank wall (5). The speaker detests and resists the therapists inclination to reduce the girl to a representation of the speaker herself: A girl, in
your book, is never alone. So I must be the third person here. The girl in an open-air market speaks to no one, as she was taught to do by a protective parent, or by experience. And so she is silent, and so youd say she and I are identical (4). The speaker resists making the girl a mimetic representation of herself. The girl in A:I is a representation of transformative possibility and shares qualities with the girl of Deleuzean thought. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write, The girl is like the block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term, man, woman, child, adult. It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becoming-woman that produces the universal girl (277). Perhaps because the girl is crucial to the speakers image of the possibilities and freedoms outside, Fields text expresses a skepticism of the girls formlessness. Does her formlessness mean she will be forced to adopt anothers form? In A:I, Field writes A sounds like I when spoken (6). In Literature and Life, Deleuze emphasizes the prepositions a and an to stress becomings impersonality and universality: [t]o become is not to attain a form . . . but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule (1). In the following passage, the speaker describes the imaginary image of a groups representation of themselves, and links it to a stereotypical scenarios of a girl in danger, as well as assumptions about her place, movement, and agency:
I wont emerge. The Polaroid wasnt loaded so all that develops is the feeling of panic as we discover that the candids are lost: We would have lived differently had we known the dumb thing was empty! A girl is approached by a stranger at the market. He will ask her if shes lost, not where shes going. (5)
In The Compass Room, a poem that appears later in the book,
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Field develops this imaginary image of photography to expose the undetected role the feminine plays in the becoming of collectivities. As the title of the poem might suggest, at the corner of every right hand page, the words for the points on the compass appear, illustrating the idea that the page, like the Deleuzean Body without Organs, does not possess or close off an interiority, but is defined only by the longitudinal and latitudinal lines passing through it. And in the center of each page, in dense prose, Field narrates the dissolving and congealing story of a group of friends and their various sexual and psychological formations. Field gives them one initial instead of names, and the initials are the chemical units of DNA: A, T, G, C. This group mutates into various sexual configurations; they transform individual points on the map--gender and sexual identity-into lines of flight, intense states of becoming: their bodies do not finally believe their individual identities and go to water (33). Their dissolution is most dramatically realized in sexual encounters centered around As tied up body: The silk scarves bind As ankles and press her eyes (32). Across this page and As body [t]hey see each other in flashes, like lightning in a doorway; blazing white and impenetrable grays (32). A becomes pregnant, forcing the groups shifting and permeable collectivity into a more definable form. In the following lines, Field clearly alludes to Virginia Woolfs novel The Waves (1931) to describe the fluidity of their movement and its interruption: The waves plunged into the blue-night beach until A announced her pregnancy. Silence broke across the table as though we could each take credit (36). It is not only sexual difference that shifts form into definition; it is a womans subjective embodiment of her role reproducing and maintaining a collectivitys representation of themselves. Near the end of The Compass Room, the speaker realizes her role as the ground of the groups representation of themselves, though it remains unclear which initial(s) was hers. (I am describing the speaker as her because the assumed passivity and generosity she unwittingly offered marks her as feminine.) At
the end of their vacation, someone whispers to her: You were the perfect host (48). The speaker reflects on this angrily, and adds the feminizing suffix to host: I am still upset; perfect host stuck in my ear like salt water after a dive. The hotel was not my home. I didnt buy a round of drinks. I was no ones hostess and the implications rob me of my pleasures, the choices of my trip (49). In the last paragraph of this long prose poem, the speaker sees her connective role in the photographs,5 imperceptible at the time:
I reach the bottom of the stack and tap them on the table, realizing that I am in every single picture: in their smiles, in the space between arms and bodies. I am in the foreground of every portrait, reflected in their faces, implicated in the angle of every shot. There is not a single photo of me, the one who remembered the camera. (49)
Whether this speaker is A or not doesnt matter; what matters is this I has, without her awareness, become the becoming-woman for the group; she is crucial for the imaginary and material ground of representational possibility; she is the connective space sustaining forms delineation. Fields text suggests that the feminine is the becoming upon which the representation of reality is strung, and posits the following question: how can women write becoming-woman when, without their knowledge, they are feminized as the representational ground congealing experience? Point and Line seems to answer: a multiply-pronged idea of writing that can move along lines of becoming and retreat to scrutinize the seemingly endless figuration of the feminines protean multiplicity as the ground of representation. Becoming-woman holds enormous potential for feminist thought and practice if it can be attached to an image of writing that writes against womens implicit passivity. At the beginning of her poem, Hours, Field constructs an image of a woman writer delirious with pos-
+++ Becomingwoman holds enormous potential for feminist thought and practice if it can be attached to an image of writing that writes against womens implicit passivity +++
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sibility, posed at the edge of creation. Note that at the end of this passage, Field makes it clear this is a temporary spell, not an image fixed into isolation or identity:
The species divides, one great part going That Way, the other surrendering to a desk; she has an urge to do something perverse upon the world, becoming a strange and drunken genie playing ukulele, saying hello forever; a temporary spell. (77)
This perverse and delirious image of writing must be paired with a writing practice that is conscious and pragmatic, carefully attuned to the real possibility that femininity will be posited as a fixed precondition for subversive possibility. The last passage in Fields text creates spaces of possibility--entryways and exits--within the already made forms of language and perception. It also offers the idea that what is left unseen in the male figures vision--our mother--becomes an impediment to creating new possibilities for america.
With his gaze that reveals nothing he escapes--first our mother, then conceding journeys cant be made, we cant form a bridge across [1 small thing] or [1 clear idea]: [3 names for america]. So in the meantime consider [10 kinds of change] which makes all change visible, or [1 definition, anything]; [the difference between returning and arriving] (139).
Waldrop, Howe, Spahr, and Field negotiate between given forms of language and the possibilities of the new. Without this negotiation, becoming is feminized and essentialized, thrown far away from the lived contours of womens lives, returning as the central absence of the patriarchal imagination. These poets engage in multiple conceptions of writing and becoming so as to better mark the difference between patriarchal representations of
woman returning and the arrival of the new.
Notes
1. Hereafter I will refer to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia as TP. 2. In her recently published essay Becoming Woman: Deleuze, Schreber, and Molecular Identification (2000), Jerry Aline Flieger asks: Is Deleuzean feminism an oxymoron? (39). Rosi Braidotti opens her essay Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzean Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism (1994), by stating, Feminists relationship to Deleuzean thought is ambivalent (159). In one of her earliest written engagements with Deleuze, entitled A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics, Elizabeth Grosz cites an even earlier essay to elucidate and critique Deleuze and Guattaris unquestioned decontextualization of women: they exhibit a certain blindness to feminine subjectivity, a feminist point of view and the role of women in their characterizations of the world. . . . They fail to notice that the process of becoming-marginal or becoming-woman means nothing as a strategy if one is already marginal or a woman (188). 3. In Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy (1991), Rosi Braidotti distinguishes the Deleuzean formulation of becoming-woman from Jacques Lacans and Jacques Derridas: Deleuze recognizes that the feminine is one of the constant elements in the system, not as a necessary symbolic absence (Lacan) or as an alternative strategy (Derrida); rather, it acts as one of the preconditions for conceptuality (109). 4. In Waldrops text, words in bold indicate that they are taken directly from Williams A Key into the Language of America. 5. In Creative Evolution (1911) Henri Bergson writes, We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic
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of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform, and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus (306).
Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1998. Braidotti, Rosi. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1991. ------.Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzean Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism. Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy. Eds. Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski. New York: Routledge, 1994. 159-185. Deleuze, Gilles. Literature and Life. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 1-7. Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ------. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomilson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. 36-76. Field, Thalia. Point and Line. New York: New Directions, 2000. Flieger, Jerry Aline. Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber, and Molecular Identification. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 38-63. Grosz, Elizabeth. A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics. Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy. Eds. Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski. New York: Routledge, 1994. 187-210. Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary
history. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. ------. Pierce-Arrow. New York: New Directions, 1999. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which is not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Massumi, Brian. A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Spahr, Juliana. Fuck You--Aloha--I Love You. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Waldrop, Rosmarie. A Key into the Language of America. New York: New Directions, 1994.
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69 That Hysterical Discourse
That Hysterical Discourse in Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Locating a Critical Subject within Carroll.
Alan Lopez
With the notable exception of Gilles Deleuzes famous prolegomenon on Lewis Carrolls Alice books, Logique du sens (1969), in which Deleuze explores the intersections between sense and nonsense around the axes of theory and philosophy, theory has played a relatively minor role within conventional readings of Carroll, particularly around the subject of nonsense. Indeed, there are arguably only two other works that could be said to offer a sustained theoretical and philosophical treatment of Alice and nonsense, in particular, Peter Heaths The Philosophers Alice and Jean-Jacques Lecercles The Philosophy of Nonsense. At the same time, it is perhaps because of the pivotal space nonsense has occupied within conventional and theoretical readings of Alice that it has found itself interrogated within literary studies as a representative of that common ground in which literature and theory meet. Structuring this exemplarity is what Jean-Jacques Lecercle refers to as anachrony, an obvious play on the word anachronism. Here, anachrony refers to the uncanny [unheimlich] way in which nineteenth-century Victorian nonsense could be said to anticipate (and thus have within itself) the still inchoate seeds of theory and postmodernism (here we can imagine deconstruction and psychoanalysis, as well as the theories of Foucault and Deleuze). Such is indeed the project of Lecercles book. As Lecercle writes, the declared object of this book [Philosophy of Nonsense] is the intuitions of Victorian nonsense writers--how literary practice anticipates theory (166). Here we
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may read Lecercle as in some ways picking up on Gabrielle Schwabs suggestion that Carrolls works participate within, if not mark, the beginning of those far-reaching challenges to our cultural notions of mimesis and representation which culminate in what we have come to call . . . postmodernism (Nonsense and Metacommunication 7). A question posed to (or by) readers of Alice might thus be whether we can indeed find within the Alice books what Peter Heath identifies as an indigenous philosophy attributable to Carroll himself (The Philosophers Alice 8). Though answering the above question in the negative, Heath nevertheless underscores (if +++ underlying the linguistic and philosophical contours of Carrolls nonsense is in fact an hysterical subject +++ not exaggerates) Lecercles anachrony when he wryly suggests that the Alice books can explain all the philosophies that ever were invented, and a good many that hadnt been invented when it was written (8). What I believe is symptomatic about this type of reading is that it foregrounds the anticipatory character of nonsense but forecloses an examination of any particular theory within the Alice books, say, the search (or location) of a critical discourse within the Alice books. We might read this omission as a symptom of an ironic reluctance to question the character of the indigenous philosophy attributed to Carroll. Or, in more emphatic terms, as a reluctance to identify a critical discourse within the texts, perhaps out of fear of a vulgar anachronism. Over these readings, I would like to suggest that a more productive examination of the status of a critical subject within Alice would occur in the context of the complex negotiations between the madness of nonsense and the epistemic and ontic doubt grounded in simulacrum. As I alluded to above, I wish to argue that underlying the linguistic and philosophical contours of Carrolls nonsense is in fact an hysterical subject (Lacan), one whose principle discourse as the hysteric is anticipated within nineteenth-century Victorian literature and culture, but whose destination and thus whose understanding and explication, may be located within postmodern theory, continental philosophy. It is this notion of nonsense as unconsciously psychic and phantasmatic that, in my opinion, deserves attention. I suggest this for three

reasons. First, if we conceive of nonsense as unconsciously phantasmatic, that is, as more linguistic and literary than philosophical and theoretical, we may at least understand why traditional and ostensibly theoretical readings of Alice have missed, and thereby sought, the philosophical or theoretical character of nonsense within its more conventional modes of expression, such as those within analytic philosophy, philology, and linguistics--and thus not within theory and philosophy. (Here Im thinking of works by Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Peter Heath, and James R. Kincaid in particular). Second, we may better understand why these traditional approaches have failed to discern what I will argue are those theoretical and philosophical contours conditioning Wonderlands rituals and games. In other words, we may understand the continual failure to discern the philosophical problems evoked and posed by the Alice books, problems which invariably put into question ontological and epistemological concerns over knowledge and subjectivity conditioned by Wonderlands fantastic and magical structure. Third, we may discern a critical subject within Alice, one whose positivity as hysterical could be said to be produced through the above-mentioned axes of madness, doubt, and simulacrum. To pursue this question, I will juxtapose literary readings of Alice (including Lecercles and Heaths) with Deleuzes and Derridas theoretical readings of simulacrum, concluding with a comparative reading of Deleuzes schizo and Antonin Artauds madness, and the affinities therein with the nonsense of Carroll. Specifically, I will address the ways in which we might take up Alice as a figure who at once reconfigures as well as complicates conventional or even post-structural narratives of sexual difference, in particular, those narratives in subscription to the notion that assertions of difference have an origin within--or find their determinations within--material rather than linguistic and/or psychic structurations of subjectivity (here, Im thinking of Monique Wittig and Judith Butler). Such configurations, namely the former, could be read as problematic in so far as they ultimate-
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ly turn on--if not privilege--a uniquely deterministic or even constitutive conception of the division of sexual division, a conception which, in addition to fashioning an alienated subject, necessarily forecloses the possibility that questions of subjectivity could be organized or conceived in ways other than or outside of traditional framings of that question (i.e, the question as such is overdetermined from the beginning). Such an alternative undertaking is carried out precisely through Alices occupation--or perhaps performance of--the discourse of the hysteric, a discourse which I suggest--vis--vis--engagements with Lecercle and Deleuze--constitutes a particular and pronounced response and even resistance to processes of interpellation, and thus a response that effectively occasions for us a re-evaluation of the space of the feminine/sexual difference within various theoretical considerations of the subject, particularly within for example the writings of nineteenth-century Victorian literature, but also--and perhaps more importantly--within our current cultural-theoretical milieu--and thus around a particular interpretation of difference that belongs to what Deleuze identifies as the plane of the virtual, that is, the rhizomatic. Indeed, as I see it, to take up Deleuze around this question of theory and sexual difference is to gesture towards ways in which we may more usefully re-imagine various psychoanalytic and theoretical registers of signification, reconceive the ostensibly ontological fixity of subjectivity itself. To read the question of the status of sexual difference under the sign of a Deleuzean register, a register whose usefulness is found precisely within the character of its rhizomatic plane, those lines of flight whose modes of resistance are found in the ways in which they offer the possibility of a fluid, dynamic, open, vitalistic relation to the world, one open to and predicated upon the continual emergence of new subjectivities (for example, the war machine, the nomad, smooth space . . . deterroritorization) (Deleuze and Literature, On the Uses and Abuses of Literature 139), points of resistance (resistance to processes of interpella-

tion), is to reconfigure--and even dismantle--the binary between being and becoming, self and other, categories which for Deleuze are conceived as one and the same. Before I turn to an examination of the status of the critical subject within the Alice books, however, I must pause here to explicate the proposition that there exists within literary studies a certain hesitancy to identify a critical discourse within Alice. More precisely, I would like to address the condition of this reluctance, in particular, why a critical subject has yet to be discerned within Alice and nonsense. It seems to me that structuring this question of why is a certain and profound misrecognition [meconnaisance] of nonsense, one that always puts at stake the very character of nonsense: its ostensible lightness, its intangible, impalpable, ethereal, form. To frame this all a little differently, reluctance to locate a critical subject within Alice may be understood as symptomatic of the very lightness of nonsense, its non-theoretical and benign character. (Here benign refers to the linguistic and philological games and constructions often enacted under the aegis of nonsense.) Understandably, and perhaps arguably, it is this lightness, which conceals or covers over the psychic and philosophical lines along which an hysterical subject may be discerned. This meconnaisance is easily highlighted through a return to Lecercles reading of Carroll. Lecercle, as Ive suggested above, argues for a close propinquity between Alice and philosophy (or philosophy and nonsense). Or, in different terms, Lecercle discerns no clear ideological boundary or point of termination between linguistics and philosophy. As Lecercle writes, the attitudes of philosophers towards nonsense does not differ from that of linguists . . . philosophers, both analytic and continental, seem to find reading nonsense texts rewarding (162). There is, in other words, a sharing of tendencies or interests between linguists and philosophers over the status of nonsense, such that nonsense texts raise questions that fascinate [analytic and continental] philosophers (162). That Lecercle does suggest such a close, almost liminal, relationship
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between nonsense and philosophy should not surprise us, for it is that very liminality which Lecercle suggests conditions the importation of the Alice books within a philosophical idiom and context. As Lecercle writes, reflecting on that liminality, the Alice books are plastic enough to be inserted in the philosophical tradition . . . intuitive enough to enable us to raise questions about the present state of the art--even perhaps to go over to the other side (163). The other side, of course, is Lecercles taciturn reference to continental philosophy, in particular, deconstruction. Here, again, I believe we may identify Lecercles anachronic reading of Alice, a reading which posits the Alice books as if in anticipation of some un-yet post-modern conception of subject and object, a certain eschatological point at which the Alice texts and theory coincide with each other. If we then take Lecercle at his word, that is, if we take at face value his suggestion that nonsense evokes (or anticipates) questions for both analytic and continental philosophy (here Im thinking of Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan), I believe we would expect to discern within Lecercles intervention an attempt to elevate or bring to relief what have heretofore been understood as the marginal or peripheral dimensions of Alice and nonsense (i.e., the dimensions of theory and continental philosophy). I wish to suggest, however, that it is precisely the opposite which we find at work in Lecercles reading. Though I grant Lecercles profound and quite illuminating reading of the affinity between nonsense and philosophy, I would critique Lecercle for his failure to carry out his initial proposition: an identification of both the analytic and philosophical questions raised by nonsense. (Here we might also read this division as existing along the lines of linguistics and philology on the one hand and postmodernism or theory on the other, with the suggestion that it is the latter half of the equation that is neglected by Lecercle.) I would argue that Lecercle ironically marginalizes the very dimensions he was to highlight: the philosophical and theoretical dimensions of nonsense, those in keeping with the continental tradition. This marginalization, I wish to suggest, is

an unconscious one, carried out precisely because of Lecercles failure to discern any substantive difference between linguistics and philosophy (particularly around the subject Alice and nonsense), and no substantive distinction between the questions raised by linguistics and the questions raised by philosophy. In other words, absent from Lecercles reading is any imperative to bring to relief the questions of one dimension of nonsense over another (for example the questions of philosophy over that of linguistics), since, indeed, for Lecercle, there is no substantive difference between the two. Both fit within the genre of nonsense. With this in mind, we might read Lecercles philosophical treatment of Alice as indeed symptomatic of several other, non-theoretical (or conventional) readings, at least in character, if not in scope and breadth. In other words, both kinds of readings could be said to extinguish the marginal or peripheral in favor of the traditional, such that what remains unexplored within such readings are precisely those radical and theoretical dimensions of nonsense, dimensions which have been jettisoned in favor of the more traditional, surface-level, counterparts of nonsense, specifically, linguistic and philological language games, paradoxes and portmanteau words. Again, I would suggest that here Lecercle dramatizes one of my earlier three points in response to the lightness of nonsense: on the one hand he identifies the philosophical within the linguistic; on the other hand, he conflates the two fields, destroying any possibility of finding within Carroll that which Carroll ostensibly anticipates: unique or particular philosophical, theoretical problems of subject-object relations (post-modernism). Because I could be accused here of offering a reductive or even selective reading of Lecercles text, I wish to acknowledge Lecercles identification (if not outright examination) of the marginal structures of nonsense, here understood as madness, doubt, and simulacrum (psychic and theoretical structures which historically and conventionally have been subordinate to the more conventional and thereby linguistic dimensions of Victorian nonsense). Lecercle writes: [t]he most striking
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feature of Victorian nonsense [is] the quality of its intuitions, this mixture of diachrony (the genre reflects, refracts and arranges the elements of a historical conjecture) and anachrony: it anticipates, and it criticizes in advance, the developments of philosophy and linguistics (224, emphasis mine). If developed within a Lacanian analysis, nonsense here performs the discourse of the critical hysteric, deeply suspicious of all critical theory, and, in fact, intent on revealing it as pure simulacrum, merely a grand narrative (Lyotards term) posturing as so many discourses and counterdiscourses. I suggest a comparison between Lacan and nonsense precisely because of the metonymic relation Lecercle himself could be said to have to the discourse of the hysteric. The discourse of the hysteric occupies an integral role within critical theory, with striking appearances within (for example) race theory, queer theory, and gender theory. I emphasize the word critical (as in critical hysteric) to highlight a certain ethical imperative within the hysterics otherwise suspicious and doubting discourse, specifically, an imperative to locate difference where previously there were only vulgarly consolidated categories of identity (here we can refer to arbitrary markers like race, gender, sexuality), categories which homogenize what is invariably heterogeneous: the fractured, split subject. This formulation led Lacan to famously announce that Woman does not exist (for Woman as a marker of identity reduces to the level of the imaginary what precisely is not merely imaginary: women). I would argue that we find a similar undertaking (and suspicion) within Lecercles reading of Carroll, in which Lecercle attempts to reveal the philosophical character, the philosophical tenor, of the various discourses and knowledges throughout which nonsense has culturally and historically been enunciated (linguistic, social, philological, logical). In other words, we might read Lecercle as desiring to show that nonsense is ultimately mediated only ever through the discourse of philosophy; it is the discourse of philosophy which makes possible, conditions the appearance of, a concept of nonsense. As Lecercle writes, I have used philosophical concepts and theories in order to cast

light upon the workings of nonsense texts . . . I have also attempted to use Victorian literary texts to read philosophical texts, so that the interpretation of philosophical texts in and through nonsense is given anachronically, in advance . . . I have in short, attempted a reading of, by and with the texts of Victorian nonsense (223). What Lecercle hopes to draw out in Carroll is the proposition that nonsense is philosophy, philosophy is nonsense. However, it is only within the last section of Lecercles work, a section entitled The Polyphony of Nonsense, that Lecercle may be said to allude to an hysterical subject within Alice, one enunciated through the discourse of madness, one discourse among other discourses Lecercle identities as structuring nonsense: fiction, logic, and the natural sciences (196). These discourses do not so much condition the appearance or visibility of any one discourse as they remind us of the various social, historical, and literary discourses through which nonsense has enunciated itself, madness being one of the discourses. Indeed, I wish to argue that it is within Lecercles discussion of the discourse of madness that we get a glimpse of the hysterical subject qua hysteric within the Alice books, one identified through its perpetual alienation from Wonderland, a subject who we might say is always looking into Wonderland, questioning her own relation to its sense and rationality (i.e., what am I? What am I becoming now? What do you want from me?). As Lecercle writes, The nonsense character is isolated and pointed at, subjected to the wondering gaze of an audience of readers who laugh and gape at [her] eccentricities, as if [she] were a freak in a fair . . . or who prod and interpret . . . (206). While I agree with Lecercles reading of the nonsense subject, I would like to tease out and examine further the epistemic and ontic questions of self-doubt raised by nonsense, questions which acknowledge yet go beyond, a reading of Alice as mere spectacle, as an object of difference. In more emphatic terms, I would like to put at stake Alices own skepticism and self-doubt as regards the phenomenality of her being. Which is to say, I would like to address the ways in which such doubt (epistemic and ontic) could be
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said to reveal those axes around which a radical erasure of the self occurs: namely, madness, doubt, and simulacrum. It is in fact through such an examination that I believe we may discern within Lecercles reading a certain division of type or kind between Carrolls madness and Antonin Artauds madness, a division reflecting the structure (or lack thereof) immanent within Carrolls and Artauds madness (or treatment thereof). Here I cite Artaud as that paradigmatic (and idiosyncratic) figure for whom language was of the most personal and painful experiences, something lived rather than thematized or simulated. Though later I will elaborate on the relationship between Carroll and Artaud, here I merely wish to draw attention to a certain philosophical elision on Lecercles part, an elision concerning his treatment of the subject of madness within Carroll. As I indicated above, the madness discerned in Carroll by Lecercle is a madness organized around rhetoric and visuality, whose elements of fantasy, ritual, and simulacrum, may be said to perform a response to the vulgar pragmatism of reason and rationality. In other words, the borders (or realms) of reason and rationality are revealed to be just as vulgar and artificial (arbitrarily ordered) as those within Wonderland and the Looking-Glass. It is in this sense that we can say that the madness Lecercle discerns in Carroll is not the Artaudian madness of pain and feeling, sensation and depth. It is not the madness that resists boundaries and literary codifications, a madness of radical self-doubt and hatred. I would even argue that within Lecercles reading is a certain reluctance to approach the schizo qua schizo, a reluctance to approach madness qua madness. (Unlike, say, Artaud, or the existentialist poets Beckett and Hlderlin. Or even Genet, and his decadent love and appreciation (intoxication) of all sensory (sexual) experiences, including the experience or state of madness). To use Gabrielle Schwabs terms, we might say that Lecercle spares himself (and us) the torture of a schizophrenic experience (178). In other words, we might accuse Lecercle of committing what Schwab identifies as a critical error, understood

here as a certain failure to address the pathological or phantasmatic dimensions of madness and schizophrenia on their own terms (178). To put this all a little differently, we might say that Lecercles critical error is conditioned by his attempt to reinscribe within literary conventions what is fundamentally of a philosophical and theoretical importation: those marginal dimensions of nonsense, such as epistemic and ontic selfdoubt. In effect, enacted by Lecercle is precisely what Deleuze identifies as a reading of the surfaces, that is, a reading which mediates the violence and schizophrenia of nonsense through a reliance on tropological and linguistic devices. Lecercle suggests as much when he argues, as Schwab does, that nonsense is contained or framed within a larger meta-narrative, a narrative in and through which nonsense is both inscribed and delimited. Lecercle writes: the text of nonsense is a verbal asylum, in which madmen speak, but within the limits and constraints of the text, which phrases both the discourse of madness and the discourse on madness (208). For Lecercle, nonsense is principally rhetorical and linguistic, but also narratological, in mimetic relation to discourses which oppose or attempt to subvert it (discourse of rationality, logic, scholasticism, etc.). Or, as defined by Schwab, nonsense is a collision of systems of meaning--a collision that invites a new relationship between the involved systems or even causes them to collapse (159). For Lecercle, then, nonsense refers less to a lack of order, and more to a collision between different systems of order within a larger system (159). In other words, inherent within Lecercles reading of madness is a certain willfulness to treat madness as a literary genre, as something not in fearful symmetry (Frye) with literature or the literary. The price paid for such a formulation, though, argues Deleuze, a formulation which mediates the schizophrenic through the literary, is that both both life and death lose their cutting edge. And what is this cutting edge? For Deleuze, it is the schizophrenic experience of nonsense, the loss of self and subjectivity, what I will argue is the instantiation of the hysterical subject within the Alice books, Alice herself. +++ inherent within Lecercles reading of madness is a certain willfulness to treat madness as a literary genre, as something not in fearful symmetry with literature or the literary +++
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The question thus posed to us by Carroll, I wish to suggest, one picked up James Kincaid, Peter Heath, Linda Shires, and of course Deleuze, is thus the question of how Alice answers the ineluctable void or gap lurking and hiding behind Carrolls surfaces. For Deleuze, the void of nonsense (or the obverse of nonsense) is precisely the world of depths, the world of the schizo. It is in fact around this question of the status or place of nonsense within Alice that Carroll and Deleuze may be said to encounter one another. In contradistinction with Lecercle, for Deleuze, the schizos world is precisely not the world of nonsense, not the world of surfaces, images, and metaphor. Over and against the tropologically-structured world of nonsense, the schizos world is a world of depth, a world of the literal. In the schizos world, writes Deleuze, [t]hings and propositions have no longer any frontier between them, precisely because bodies have no surface . . . the entire body is no longer anything but depth . . . [e]verything is body and corporeal. Everything is a mixture of bodies . . . (Logic of Sense 87). The world of schizo, argues Deleuze, rumble[s] under the surface, and [always] threaten[s] to break through it. Even unfolded and laid out flat, the monsters still haunt us (Essays Critical and Clinical 22). Particularly striking, here, is Deleuzes reliance on haunting geometrical monsters (laid flat) as descriptors of that realm beneath the surface. For it seems to me that these descriptors put at stake precisely that thing which could be said to haunt Wonderland: a nervousness (Alices) that there is actually something rather than nothing lurking beneath Wonderland, beneath its realm of surfaces. What Deleuze identifies as a haunting, as a radical contingency, may in fact be understood here as the possibility of the appearance (or the penetration) of the world of depths onto and into the world of surfaces. That is to say, from the perspective of the inhabitants on the surface, that is, Wonderlands inhabitants, the world of depths exists only as a possibility, one which threatens (but does not penetrate) Wonderland. What is between the two realms, what establishes (but does not guarantee) difference between them, is nothing but the

very possibility of the presence of the other, of that which threatens to arrive. In other words, there is nothing between the two realms (surface and depth) save for the impossible possibility of the arrival of the Other (the unfolded and laid flat . . . monsters [which] still haunt us). Deleuzes haunting images could thus be said to address the already-present contamination of the realm of sense by schizophrenia, a contamination which strikes out against the very positivity of nonsense as nonsense, as something defined by itself. That is to say, Alices world is precisely that which is counter and antithetical to the world of the depths. Its positivity is derived only-ever from its negation and concealment of that which does not make sense, that which is Other. It is in this sense that we may thus understand the relationship between madness and nonsense as analogous to the relationship between philosophy and nonsense: one establishes the conditions of possibility for the other--at least to the degree that both fields of knowledge implicitly or explicitly raise questions concerning the limits of knowledge (or the possibility thereof), particularly as such limits could be said to address the (in)finitude of the subject. Though Kincaids piece raises this question of finitude, its nevertheless an issue whose treatment is reserved until the end of his essay, in a provocative section on Alices unresolved dream. I would like to take up, then, a re-examination of that question of finitude, a question that Kincaid identifies in terms of an an impossible choice . . . [whose] final point is not so much aggressive as deeply and profoundly sad (99). Over and against readings by Beverly Lyn Clark, James Kincaid, and Peter Heath, I would like to suggest that Alice and Through the Looking-Glass inaugurate an epistemological and ontological break with reality, a break which ultimately forces Alice to encounter what Peter Heath identifies as the Kantian terror of the Real: the very notion that she does not (or may not) exist (Philosophers Alice 6). While Heath acknowledges, in his own words, that Carroll is no Kant, particularly in the formers treatment of reason and consciousness, he at the same time locates within Carroll the
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phenomenological character of Kants project: a concern with Critical Philosophy itself, with the bounds and of sense and the limitations of reason (6). Indeed, the entirety of Descartes Meditations may be said to be dramatized within Carrolls texts. Recall that although Descartes Meditations does initially reflect a radical self-consciousness, such radicalism is ultimately attenuated by Descartes conclusion that there is something certain and unshakeable: consciousness, the cogito; namely, doubt. Yet I would like to suggest that the epistemological and ontological certainty granted to the cogito by Descartes is exactly what Through the Looking-Glass and to a lesser extent Alices Adventures in Wonderland seek to put at stake and finally undermine. To put this all into different terms, I want to suggest that the gap reveled by Carroll is nothing other than the fictiveness and simulacrum of consciousness itself. Offered by Carroll is the revelation that reason and rational discourse are just as fictive and artificial, vulgarly determined, transparent, as the apparent discourse of nonsense. Such would at least seem clear to the readers, if not quite Alice, although Carrolls final refusal to answer whose dream? hints at Alices own unresolved question over her ontological finitude and fact, and thus further reifies her position as an hysteric subject. We might understand Alices status as an hysterical subject as the condition of an implicit and obscene alterity between Alice and the two realms, an alterity forever inassimilable to Alice, and thus always out of her reach (interpreted as unheimlich). That is to say, it is Alices inability to discern the fundamental play and fantasy (or narratological structure, determined by repetition and iteration) structuring the two realms (Wonderland and Looking-Glass) that conditions her estrangement from both Wonderland and herself. Or, rather, it is because of her profound misreading of the world and people around her (a desire to find substance where there is only surface and play, or an equivocation between substance and artifice), that Alice is obliged to read as real what is fundamentally of a performative and iterative dimension, namely, the

theatricality and fantasy of Wonderland: the games, the cake, the Queens proclamations, the white rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Hare, the Cheshire Cat. Nothing is what it seems, and Alices interventions into the realms of fantasy serve only to reveal this point, that is, reveal the simulacrum of Wonderland and Looking-Glass, its pure repetition as fantasy and ritual. One can imagine, for instance, an infinite number of encounters with Alice and Humpty Dumpty, in which Alice tries, but ultimately fails, to prevent Humptys fall. In other words, there is a profound narratological and theoretical overdetermination to the Wonderland and Looking-Glass world, one whose theoretical unfolding (for the reader and Alice) finds Alice as both the story-teller and the listener. Or, in Lacanian terms, Alice is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, equivocating between positions passive and active, but never (even in the coda) free of the fantasy and authorship of Wonderland: Is it all a dream? What am I (Alice) to the Other? Am I, I? With a slight pun on Kincaids title, Alice never fully or really invades Wonderland, but always maintains a heterogeneous relation to it. I would like to pursue this notion of the decentered subject partly through the analysis provided by Linda Shires, in her essay, Fantasy, Nonsense, Parody, and the Status of the Real: The Example of Carroll. Though not privy to Lecercles discussion of nonsense and literature (which would appear about eight years later), Shires provides a useful framework through which to examine the relationship between Carroll and nonsense, in particular, the ways in which such a decentering of the subject may harbor within itself the elusive critical subject yet to be located within Alice. Of particular interest to Shires are the ways in which nonsense and fantasy question the basis of a known reality, unsettle fixed positions for the reader and for characters of speakers, put our mastery and control into question . . . (272). As Shires writes, what is at stake-whether in the unreal of fantasy, the more real of parody, or the non-real of nonsense--is ourselves (268). In other words, each inaugurates a specular
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trauma in which even ones self or I disappears and can no longer be guaranteed (e.g., I am I). Shires ultimately treats nonsense in dialectical terms. Like a trip to the fun house, nonsense offers and presents us with a similar kind of risk, pleasure, loss, and reassurance (268). I would like to extend further Shires deployment of Lacan and psychoanalysis, in particular Shires position that nonsense aim[s] toward a breakdown of linguistic coherence, of a reassuring sense of identity, of known meaning (272). We need only refer to Alices encounter with Tweedledum to highlight this point, a point which Tweedledum manages to encapsulate within a single sentence. Regarding the possibility that Alice may simply be a manifestation of the Red Knights dream (a possibility Id argue is never put to rest) Tweedledum says to Alice, If that there King was to wake... youd go out--bang!--just like a candle! (Alice 224). To which Alice responds, in words amplified in comparison to those earlier offered to the Caterpillar: I am real! (225). Here we might discern within Alices response to Tweedledum a delayed though categorical response to the diffident one earlier offered to the laconic Caterpillar: I cant explain myself, Im afraid, sir . . . because Im not myself, you see (Alice 55). As Alice continues, we arrive at a disturbing parallel between the slumbering Red Knight and Descartes Evil Genie, a parallel Kincaid alludes to in his essay. As Alice says to Tweedledum: Besides, if Im only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know? Descartes poses the same question thusly: I will suppose therefore that . . . some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all things external are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this mediation (Meditations 15). Alices comments, in other words, beg the

question of some true self. Alice literalizes precisely the very terror and monstrosity that Kant and Descartes could theorize and philosophize about. Within theological terms, Alice is not before [vor] the Caterpillar, nor is she really before the Red Knight. In theological terms, she is before Descartes Evil Genius. Keeping in mind this radical theology underpinning Carrolls nonsense, we might pause here to explore the ways in which such questions underlie an antagonism between Alice and the Other, such that Alice must always ask, what am I? who am I? Carrolls books strike out at the very limits or extremes of reason and rationality, of faith and belief. I would even go so far as to suggest that at stake in these works is no less than the erasure of the Cartesian subject itself, an erasure carried out precisely around the unresolved nature of the dream, and thus Alices lingering questions and doubts about the reality of her reality. Indeed, we locate the antagonism between Descartes and Carroll precisely around this question of the certainty or perhaps uncertainty of the cogito. Relying on Sewells reading of nonsense, Kincaid concludes that nonsense, in its pure form, is not frightening but deeply reassuring, since it actually only appears to be disorderly and actually establishes so many structures and limits that it functions to keep disorder in check (Alices Invasion of Wonderland 93). Let us now place the above discussion next to Kincaids examination of nonsense and identity in Carroll, if only to examine further a certain (mis)reading of Kincaids around what I believe is Kincaids problematic reading of Wonderland. Like Shires, Kincaid observes a cryptic parallel between death and nonsense (or the absurd). Unlike Shires, though, his treatment of death is finally narratological or figurative in character. Kincaid in fact only glosses the theological or more ontological dimensions of nonsense, treating such dimensions as merely exemplary of Carrolls nonsense. By several measures we can read Kincaids argument as in anticipation of (and paralleling) several (mis)readings of nonsense and
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skepticism within conventional readings of Alice, readings which to me reduce Alices confrontation with death to a narrative device employed by Carroll. Though Kincaid addresses the question posed by Carroll in Alices denouement, the one over which is ostensibly divided Alices existence or extinction, Kincaid nevertheless repeats the same Derridean move by Carroll, preferring not to answer or respond to the two possibilities: Which do you think it was? (Looking Glass 327). Instead, Kincaid, like Alice, retreats into what Derrida identifies as a willful navet, which evokes that Hegelian beautiful soul that seeks to protect itself from an encounter with Error (Lambert, The Subject of Literature 183). Or here we might say the Real. Rather than confront the two possibilities offered by Carroll (existence or extinction), which would force him (Kincaid) to address head on the question (and implications) of Alices being or not being imaginary, Kincaid defers to Carroll, just as Carroll defers to the reader. As Kincaid writes, commenting on the chiasm conditioned by the question, [w]e are back where we started, and the closing question . . . significantly returns to the issue of whether or not Alice is only part of the Red Kings dream (99). For Kincaid, the complexity of the image of Alice makes the choice impossible, perhaps because Carrolls final point is not so much aggressive as deeply profound and sad . . . (99). Kincaid fundamentally foregrounds the question itself as meaningful. In other words, Kincaids mournful response turns on the presence of the question, the fact that it is even posed by Carroll, a move which allows him to sidestep the ontological and epistemological implications of the question altogether. By way of analogy, we might thus say that Alices waking or real world dramatizes the performative--and thus purely syntactic--status of her Cartesian subjectivity and Derridean difference. Such reflects the self-reflective relation she has to herself. As Alice continually asserts in Through the Looking Glass, consciousness is materialized only and precisely through the very act (or the possibility) of thought or self doubt (qua the hysteric).

We might now turn our attention to the case of the I within Carrolls texts, the disappearance of which is conditioned by the specular trauma inaugurated by nonsense. My intent here, though, I want to be clear, is not to rehearse the critical dialogues surrounding this disappearance within Carroll. Such enterprises have fruitfully and productively been performed by individuals elsewhere, notably, by Linda Shires, Gabriele Schwab, JeanJacques Lecercle, and of course Gilles Deleuze. I wish to argue, however, that in each intervention (with the exception of Deleuzes) a certain kind of (mis)reading has been performed, often at the price of obscuring Carrolls quite significant and even scandalous ideas on subjectivity and consciousness. Such interventions have in fact dramatized Deleuzes greatest criticism of Carroll: a hesitancy to probe beneath the surface level of language, beneath its rudimentary syntagmatic transparency. In other words, the critical genealogy informing Alices relation to nonsense has been a genealogy complicit in the reduction of what is invariably terrifying and frightening to what is essentially innocuous and even superficial, merely a dream or excursion on Alices behalf: Alices confrontation with her own finitude, or lack-in-being. While I am in sympathy with Lecercles claim that Carrolls texts may not explicitly address the erasure of consciousness or the vanishing cogito, I must again take heed of Deleuzes claim that there is an implicit epistemological and ontological terror lying beneath Wonderlands surface, one which threatens to destroy (reveal as artifice) Alices Cartesian subjectivity. Over and against Beverly Lyn Clarks reading, we see this threat of erasure only partly through Alices problems with growth. Rather, such problems are fully undertaken through Wonderlands perversion of that which is most cherished by Alice: the specular relationship between herself and the other. Within Wonderland, this relationship is inverted and perverted, twisted around, such that it is Alice who is strange, other, without sense, full of nonsense. Carrolls Wonderland does not so much topple the linguistic and rational hegemony of Alices waking world as it inserts an infinite number of linguistic
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and rhetorical possibilities into that world, inverting and bending rather than dismissing or negating its logic and rationality. In other words, Wonderland and nonsense strike out at the very rationality and sensibility cherished and signified by Alice, a rationality that refuses to acknowledge (and itself strikes out at) the arbitrariness and linguistic play that sutures her both to Wonderland and the real world. Nonsense, in other words, evokes the notion of a violent and disruptive response; such inserts into Alices rationalistic social dialectic, a counter, or antithetical discourse, a discourse that appears from +++ Wonderland turns inside out Alices symbolic order, rendering it uncanny +++ the perspective of Alices rationalistic discourse as a kind of nonsense (Lambert, The Subject of Literature; emphasis mine). Such a discourse can indeed only call into question Alices rationalistic conception of herself as fixed or stable self. Whereas in the real world Alices relation to herself could be said to be organized around resemblances and types of sameness, within Wonderland that relationship between self and consciousness is made unheimlich. In other words, Wonderland turns inside out Alices symbolic order, rendering it uncanny. And it is uncanny precisely because Alice recognizes herself, perceives herself, as that which is the sole province of someone or something other than itself. For Alice, I no longer equals I, a scene dramatized quite well through Alices encounter with the Caterpillar. Alices self is projected onto the other, made legible through the other. To slightly modify Shires argument, uncanny is not so much Alices recognition of herself as multiple or spatially represented. Rather, uncanny is her apprehension of herself as not unique, not special, not singular, not owned, not possessed--by herself. Alices relation to herself is one of exteriority and estrangement-rather than, say, of knowledge and semblance. Which is to say, for Alice, the Other is herself. As the Alice books demonstrate, particularly Alice in Wonderland, there is continual slippage between the signifier and the signified, such that Alice (the subject) becomes merely another signifier within the social dialectic. Wonderland, in other words, robs Alice of the

possibility of saying, of identifying herself as Alice. As Derrida puts it, as soon as I speak, the words I have found . . . no longer belong to me . . . [but are] merely repeated (Writing and Difference 177). In other words, Wonderland is the effective dramatization of the theft, the appropriation, of Alices agency. This theft of the name and the discursive crisis it enacts is highlighted in Alices encounter with the Caterpillar. The Caterpillar demonstrates the very secondarity or exteriority of Alices relation to language. We witness such theft in the Caterpillars terse, That is not said right comment to Alice:
Not quite right, Im afraid, said Alice timidly; some of the words have got altered. It is wrong from beginning to end, said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes. (Alice 61)
To the Caterpillar, Alice is empty, hollow, simply a thing, on or around which so many signifiers and markers may be inscribed--and which may speak for Alice. Like the letter whose destination is at once always and never reached or received, Alices speech never says where it is going, nor where it is coming from, primarily because it does not know where it is coming from or going to (Writing and Difference 178). As Lecercle puts it, such an encounter merely reinforces Alices status as a supplement to Wonderland, or, in his terms, an exponent. For the Caterpillars critique of Alice, as prolonged as it is, denies any agency to Alice, rendering her moot as a tape recorder. Conceived of as a kind of tape recorder, Alices speech, her subjectivity is always missing, always stolen. As Derrida explains, it is always stolen because it--as a sign--is always open (Writing and Difference 178). In other words, unfixed from its referent, its is merely a floating signified. Framed within the above discussion, my allusion to Deleuzes warning or caution may now be clear: whether inhabiting the parodic or the carnivalesque, the fantastic or the affective, nonsense derives its potency
+++ Wonderland is the effective dramatization of the theft, the appropriation, of Alices agency +++
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(and terror) precisely by calling into question fundamental arrangements of knowledge and discourse, whether this knowledge be linguistic, rhetorical, social, personal, visual, or otherwise. The violence of nonsense is violence enacted on language, to be sure, but also violence enacted on the subject, on Alices senses of space and time. It is a violence that facilely twists the known into the unknown, that wrenches the readable into the unreadable, the sensible into nonsensical. In the remaining part of my essay Id like to turn to an examination of Carrolls affinity with Deleuze. While it may seem natural to conclude from the following discussions what Derrida identifies in la parole souffl as a kind of critical helplessness, especially in our attempts to determine just what discourse or genre can fully appreciate or accommodate the nonsense and skepticism within Carroll, it seems as though Carrolls skepticism and ontological uncertainty belie a certain affinity with philosophy (and psychoanalysis), one that may allow us to accommodate (though not quite frame) the discursivity and hyperlogic of what Deleuze identifies as Carrolls logical nonsense. At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that it is only philosophy that can appreciate Carrolls nonsense, or that it is only psychoanalysis that can appreciate it. Indeed, on their own, both discourses are as helpless as literature in the attempt to render sensible Carrolls ontological games and escapades. As an alternative, I suggest that such may be appreciated through the intersections of all three, through a discourse of metaphysics, one principally put forward by Gilles Deleuze, both in Essays Critical and Clinical and Logic of Sense. In more precise terms, the multitudinous contours of this dissolution and erasure of the self may be figured within Deleuzean schizo (Antonin Artaud), a subject who at best literalizes the trauma only dramatized by Carroll and experienced by Alice; and at worst rejects Carroll for himself not feeling the depth of nonsense, the real of nonsense. I acknowledge, of course, the striking incommensurability between Carrolls Wonderland and the Deleuzean schizo, an incommensurability

most sharply pronounced when examined through each others treatment of language. Indeed, whereas the characters and inhabitants of Wonderland conceive of language as a capricious play between sign and signified, in/out, word and thing, the Deleuzean schizo discerns no play between sign and signified. The schizo discerns no difference between what Freud identifies as Wortvorstellung and Dingvorstellung, or, the representation of a word and the representation of a thing. Carrollean devices like metonymy and metaphor are completely useless and meaningless to the schizo. And they are meaningless because their boundaries have collapsed. In other words, for the schizo, the sign is the signified. As Gabriele Schwab helpfully explains, for the schizo, [l]anguage no longer mediates between interior and exterior spaces of self and other; it becomes the other and turns into an object that invades the self and effaces its boundaries (168). In other words, the Deleuzean schizo feels the interiority and literality of language. He discerns the very structure of language: its immanence and being, its depth and objectivity. In this sense, the schizo experiences what for Carrolls Wonderland is merely transparent and arbitrary: language. I have highlighted these differences between Carrolls Wonderland and the Deleuzean schizophrenic, since such will play a role in my argument that there is in fact a tacit affinity between two. Indeed, as I will argue below, Carroll anticipates and actually mirrors Deleuze in several important and provocative ways, ways which may or may not have been prescient to Carroll himself. Deleuzes initial approach to Carroll is innocuous enough: Alice in Wonderland was originally to have been titled Alices Adventures Underground. . . . But why didnt Carroll keep this title? (Essays Critical and Clinical 21). The answer, suggests Deleuze, lies in Carrolls own treatment of Alice. As Deleuze explains, Alice progressively conquers surfaces. She rises or returns to the surface . . . Movements of penetration and burying give way to light lateral movements of sliding; the animals of the depths [lions, tigers] become figures on cards without thickness . . .We
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no longer penetrate in depth, but through an act of sliding pass through the looking glass, turning everything the other way around . . . (Essays Critical and Clinical 21). While here we can immediately recognize Deleuzes dramatization of the disappearance of the I within Carrolls text, less obvious seems to be the ways in which Deleuze puts at stake the way in which Carroll anticipates the Deleuzean disappearance of the self. Though I acknowledge, of course, that the latter half of this proposition (disappearance of self) could be said to be performed within Lecercles reading, I would suggest such only establishes the conditions for what I believe is truly at stake in Wonderland: the death of the rational and bourgeois Cartesian subject, a subject predicated on the condition that it can self reflexively know itself, that it can know itself vis--vis its ostensibly known and empirically fixed position as a subject outside of language (I am I). If anything, Alices hyper-logic and rationality, her adherence to an extralinguistic conception of consciousness, conditions its very erasure least within Wonderland. For within Wonderland, rationality and rational discourse are just as fictive as the discourse of nonsense. Whether figured as a response (nonsense), or as an extended conceit, nonsense figures within Carroll as the revelation of the polysemy and onomatopoeia conventionally suppressed by rational or sensible modes of discourse, which, we may speculate, gain their positivity as rational or sensible only through the renunciation and othering of that which is illogical, that which doesnt make sense. It is not the case that Carrolls Wonderland is bereft of any logic or rationality, but, rather, that it employs an interior or minoritized logic and rationality, one whose character is antithetical to but not without a kind of logic and rationality, even a logic pushed to its absurd and comic limits. Indeed, it is this radical nonsense that forces Alice to call into question the very conditions constitutive of her identity as a self, as Alice. In other words, the trauma enacted upon Alice is one that obliges her to address the linguistic and visual contingency of her identity as Alice. This

trauma is easily highlighted through a brief turn to Alices acrimonious encounter with Humpty Dumpty:
Dont stand chattering to yourself like that, Humpty Dumpty said . . . but tell me your name and your business-My name is Alice, but-Its a stupid name enough! Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. What does it mean?-Must a name mean something?-Of course it must . . . my name means the shape I am--and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost. (AA 248)
As Humpty Dumpty cantankerously demonstrates, Alice is merely another signifier within the social dialectic of Wonderland. Alice is that proverbial X, the empty subject who exists precisely where she does not. Like the linguistic games enacted by Wonderlands inhabitants, the play and punning on linguistic and semantic difference, Alice herself is continually being emptied out, always becoming something other--or, more correctly, always in fear of becoming something other: the Deleuzean Body without Organs. This revelation is doubtless in striking contrast with Alices waking peregrinations within the real world. Indeed, in all of her peregrinations, it is quite likely that Alice never gave serious attention to the degree to which her very identity and self were dependent upon (or complicated by) linguistic and specular modalities of meaning. And yet Alice is that floating and antinomian signifier, her world narrative continually in transformation, unstable, its meaning always provisional and contingent, slippery accrued or determined through its circulation and trafficking within the social dialectic (or within the nonsensical of Wonderland). Conceived
+++ Alice herself is continually being emptied out, always becoming something other--or, more correctly, always in fear of becoming something other: the Deleuzean Body without Organs +++
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of as that floating signifier, Alices antinomian status within Wonderland is made clear. Though Alices early narrative in Alice is organized around a fundamental displacement or decentering (she feels lost), a displacement highlighting the degree to which Alice does not quite belong in Wonderland, we might say that the majority of the Alice and Through the Looking-Glass narratives are content to treat Alices adventures as episodic series of excursions or detours, whose telos becomes just as illogical as its arche. If only to Alice. I want to be clear about what I am suggesting here: I do not wish to attenuate the physical or somatic difference operating within Carroll. At the same time, I believe that the somatic and the physical changes experienced by Alice (her shrinkage, her growth) can only be understood through their discursive effects rather than through their immediate materialization as changes. In other words, I do not believe the changes alone can account for what we identify as nonsense within Carroll, nor, really, within Alices own subjectivity. Here we might recall Schwabs earlier definition of nonsense, namely, that nonsense is not a lack of sense, but, rather, a collision of systems of meaning--a collision that invites a new relationship between the involved systems or even causes them to collapse Illustrative of this point of countervailing discourses is of course Alices discussion with the Mad Hatter over the subject of time. Recall that such a discussion is incoherent because neither subject has the same referent for time. Whereas the Hatters referent is a personified Time, Alices referent is a conventional definition of time. As Cohan and Shires suggest, Alice and the Hatter each use the word time to refer to something different because the words they use keep pointing to other signifiers of time within two mutually exclusive syntagams, each producing a different meaning for time (Telling Stories 16). If viewed through these lights, Beverly Lyn Clarks distinctions between Wonderland and the real world, a distinction between sense and nonsense, become problematic, if only because such distinctions are

enunciated purely on the level of the physical: Alices somatic changes. As Clark writes, Carroll keeps the fantasy under control in part by sharply segregating it from the real world--we know when we are in Alices real world and when we are in Wonderland, partly because of the clear physical processes she . . . undergo[es] to enter Wonderland, the process of falling down the rabbit hole or of changing size to enter a door (VII). Here we might take Clark to mean that Carroll controls or mediates the differences between the two worlds (real and fantasy, for instance) through the insertion of various physical crises, contradictions, into the latter. For Clark, Carroll enlists these irrational contradictions and idiosyncratic occurrences to serve as frequent reminders of real world standards: Alices comments, specifications of her height, allusions to improving verse. These reminders anchor the imaginary worlds even more firmly, continually alerting us that the fantasy world differs from the real world and that the imaginary worlds are only diversions (20). What I find particularly striking, here, is Clarks somewhat easy demarcation between the two worlds, that of the real and that of the imaginary, or Wonderland and the real world. Clarks setup is problematic in that it could be said to suggest that the social and linguistic norms of the real world are somehow less imaginary, less fantastic, than those in Wonderland. In other words, it seems as though Clark can only distinguish the realms by reifying one realm at the expense of the other, by reifying the real world over the whimsical Wonderland and lookingglass worlds. Clarks position seems to imply that Alice is in possession of a type of rationality, a kind of logic, which somehow escapes the provisionality and contingency haunting the Wonderland and looking-glass worlds. In actuality, such rationality is continuously dissolving, always in a precarious position, much in the way as Alices ontological identity as Alice. It is within the above sense that Alice has an almost exclusively heterogeneous relation to Wonderland and its inhabitants. Alice can only
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misunderstand the triple entendres and logical word-plays hurled at her by individuals like the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare. In each instance, Alice fails to see or properly read the transparent text of nonsense (performed) before her. Instead, hers is merely a series of attempts to discern a certain structure of meaning and signification within the protean and arbitrary text of Wonderland, within its subtext. Admittedly, there is a kind of logic and rationality haunting Wonderlands nonsense. We must keep in mind, though, that it is a logic whose rules or sense are derived from within. In other words, Wonderlands logic is derived entirely from within Wonderland itself, and is thus antithetical to Alices rationality and sense. Alices failed invasion of Wonderland is conditioned on her misreading of that specular relationship between herself and Wonderlands inhabitant. Alice misreads the rhetorical position from which she speaks, never fully acknowledging the degree that it is her who is without sense. From the perspective of Wonderlands inhabitants it is Alice who dramatizes the nonsensical and absurd. Alice is the nonsensical within Wonderland. And to the degree that Alice actively interrogates the possibility that she is not she, her own subjectivity is brought into question, andn thus reconfigured not as something spatialized or even multiple, but, rather, as something without foundation, without center, completely autonomous of Alice--pure simulacrum. Wonderland is always before the law [devant la loi], always obedient to a set of laws or logic, no matter how abstract or arbitrary. We can in fact understand Alices hysterical discourse as conditioned precisely on her misreading [meconnaisance] of the simulacrum of Wonderland, her desire to find laws, substance, literality, where there is only the representation or illusion of such. In short, where there is only surface and image.
97 That Hysterical Discourse Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass. Illus. John Tenniel. n.p: Everymans Library, 1992. Cohan, Steven, and Linda Shires. Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Clark, Beverly Lyn. Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror Worlds of Carroll, Nabakov, and Pynchon. Ed. Peter Lang. American University Studies. Series IV, English Language and Literature; vol. 32. New York, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Micael A. Greco. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ------. The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester and and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philpsophy, Ed. and Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Heath, Peter. The Philosophers Alice: Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. New York: St. Martins Press, 1974. Kincaid, James R. Alices Invasion of Wonderland. PMLA 88 (1973): 9299. Lambert, Gregg. The Subject of Literature Between Derrida and Deleuze: Law or Life? Angelaki, vol. 5, no. 2. August 2000. ------. On the Uses and Abuses of Literature for Life. Deleuze and Literature. Ed. Ian Buchanan and John Marks. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. The Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. New York: Routledge, 1994. Schwab, Gabrielle. Nonsense and Metacommunications. The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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Shires, Linda. Fantasy, Nonsense, Parody, and the Status of the Real: The Example of Carroll. Victorian Poetry. 26 (1988): 267-83.
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The Female Spectators Laughter: AntiOedipus to Free Female Spectatorship

Ilaria Serra
The starting point for this project is a deep disappointment with the theories that deal with female spectatorship. While Laura Mulveys classical articles and her theories about the male gaze are still engaging, they are unsatisfying in their positioning of the female viewer: is it possible that the only way a woman can identify with a movie character (in classical Hollywood movies) is through identification with the victim/object-- masochistically--or by transvestitism with the male character? There must be another way.1 The fact is that all analyses that start from a Freudian basis are destined to remain trapped in the binary gender distinction man/woman which is limited in that it conceives narrative from a purely male point of view. Women cannot help feeling uneasy with Freudian psychoanalytic readings: Psychoanalysis came into existence because of the ills of women, writes Elizabeth Cowie, explaining her own attractionrepulsion to psychoanalysis, in Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (9). The ills of women are not only those of Freuds hysteric patients, but also the characteristics of his prototypical woman, the lacking woman, seen inescapably in negative terms (against the positive male terms). Cowie sees the way out, but prefers not to pursue it because it is too radical: At its most radical, this implies the abolition of the function of the phallus as privileged signifier in the construction of the subject and hence also the overthrow of the unconscious of our time--which is difficult to imagine (8). With this paper I would like to try that radical path by substituting Freudian psychoanalysis with a Deleuzean one, by substituting
101 The Female Spectators Laughter

Freuds Oedipal phallocentrism with concepts in Deleuze and Guattaris Anti Oedipus. A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic on the analysts couch (3) they write.2 The French antirationalist philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and the leader of the antipsychiatric movement Flix Guattari, found the courage to dismantle the whole Oedipal and Freudian unconscious of our time. Seeing the relationship between personal unconscious and societal unconscious, they attacked both Capitalism and Freudianism in their pivotal book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977). I will apply the theories of Anti-Oedipus to the issue of female spectatorship. My point is that, after all, cinema is dream making, and it invites our complete identification with the story, with the action everywhere it goes, with all the protagonists (not only men), with the camera as the means of our gaze. This can be seen as the triumph of fantasia, a triumph of a thousand new identities, in a joyful, schizophrenic breaking of all schemes: it is perfectly possible for a man to identify with the female protagonist; likewise, it is possible for a woman to identify with a cowboy without necessarily feeling betrayed in her essence as a woman. We are all schizos, write Deleuze and Guattari, because as schizophrenics, we refuse one established identity and authority. The attempt to rebel against Freudian straitjackets unites in the same battle Deleuzean schizoanalysis and feminist film criticism. The common purpose is to fight the male point of view to which all must conform, to establish a schizophrenic freedom from the Oedipal/masculine power. I will therefore follow a Deleuzean path in three steps. First, by denying the existence of one masculine sex established in the unconscious (which for Freud is the phallic phase of both boys and girls). Second, by denying desire as lack3 and pleasure as the masculine pleasure (scopophilia that enacts patriarchal fantasies). Third, by constructing a new kind of identification: not as male/female binarism but as production of a +++ The attempt to rebel against Freudian straitjackets unites in the same battle Deleuzean schizoanalysis and feminist film criticism +++
thousand possibilities. I will then apply Deleuzes theory of the schizo to attempt a new theory of female spectatorship and feminist filmmaking. Female Spectatorship and Freudian Psychoanalysis The most important link between Freudian psychoanalysis and classic cinema is given by Laura Mulvey in 1975 with her ground-breaking article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In sum, she explains the internal mechanism of the man-woman relationship in the narrative: the mans primal fear of castration is exorcised either by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (the woman) or by the disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object. Mulvey theorizes the male gaze as the product of three looks: that of the camera, the characters, and the audience. Through the male gaze, the woman becomes only an icon displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look. In Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema inspired by King Vidors Duel in the Sun (1946) (1981), Mulvey theorizes that the male gaze must belong also to the women in the audience as spectators constructed by the film text. The woman spectator has only one choice in front of the screen image: to regress in the pre-Oedipal phase of her development when she was not restrained as a female, and to operate a trans-sex identification by transvestitism. Mulvey writes that for women (from childhood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes second nature. Following Mulvey, Teresa De Lauretis reinforces the idea of transvestitism when she adds another kind of identification available to women: the identification with the story, with the movement of the narrative which is always a Freudian Oedipal journey. In this journey, the man travels towards the possession of the woman, and woman accepts her role as the passive object of his desire. Movies therefore work as tools by which women are seduced into femininity and are remade again and again as woman. The consequences of

this theory go very far, and they lead Deidre Pribram to assert an extreme argument: an authentic female spectator cannot exist: Following the psychoanalytic-semiotic argument, then, classic realist cinema--by addressing woman as non-subject--eliminates the possibility of an authentic female spectator (3). These theories have been followed both by dissatisfaction and admiration. Feminist criticism has tried to give different answers to the question of female spectatorship. Very often, though, they cannot step away from Freudian psychoanalysis. Mary Ann Doane, for example, tries to fight Freud with his own weapon when she remarks that women usually wear femininity as a mask or as a masquerade. It has become so natural for women that it is their special game, and thanks to it they manipulate the identification for their pleasure or their special purposes. For Doane, the masquerade is a resistance to patriarchal positioning and the transvestite adopts the sexuality of the other--woman becomes a man in order to attain the necessary distance from the image. Recent publications ask in a loud voice for an alternative reading of the desire/identification relationship. In Camera Obscura (20-21, 1989), Margaret Morse writes, I often feel that our feminist discourse has been far too eager to accept (while condemning) as gospel the limitations of psychoanalytic rules for women subjects. In Fire with Fire, Naomi Wolf calls this tendency victim feminism: when a woman seeks power through an identity of powerlessness (135). Elizabeth Cowies interesting Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (1997) treats identification and spectatorship in a way that is very close to Deleuzean psychoanalysis, but still refers to the Freudian staples. First, Cowie asserts that the gender of the character does not necessarily determine the viewers identification. Rather, she argues that there is no single or dominant view or look in the cinema (either the male gaze or Christian Metzs identification with oneself seeing4), but a continual construction of looks, with a constant production of the spectator-position and thus subject (137,
my italics). We will arrive to the same conclusion through a Deleuzean reading. Freudian Psychoanalysis and Oppression Oedipus is first the idea of an adult paranoiac, before it is the childhood feeling of a neurotic (274): this is how Deleuze and Guattari define Oedipus: this myth is a production of Power. They pick up Claude Lvi-Strausss intuition that sees the Oedipus myth as produced by Laius, +++ The invention of Oedipus is seen by Deleuze and Guattari as an attempt to control and rule a society, through negation of the disruptive force of multiple desires +++ the father who invents his sons guilt: the idea that he is guilty seems to exist mainly in the mind of the father who desires his sons death and schemes to bring it about (274). For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism and Freudian psychoanalysis are two faces of the same oppression. Through the notion of absence/presence and lack/possession, Freudian theory has been a tool of capitalism: in fact, lack is created, planned and organized in and through social production. . . . The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class (28). The invention of Oedipus is seen by Deleuze and Guattari as an attempt to control and rule a society, through negation of the disruptive force of multiple desires. It is as if Freud had drawn back from this world of wild production and explosive desire, wanting at all costs to restore a little order there, an order made classical owing to the ancient Greek theater (54), Deleuze writes. Women are victims of such an order, and they are even asked to comply with it. Linda Nochlin sees this constraint to collaborate as deeply rooted in womens minds: the need to comply, to be inwardly at one with the patriarchal order and its discourses is compellingly inscribing itself in the deepest level of the unconscious, marking the very definitions of the self-as-a-woman in our society--and almost all others that we know of (33). In cinematic terms, it is Raymond Bellour who asks women to comply and even to cherish a Freudian interpretation of Hitchcocks movies. His words cannot be irritating for a woman: I think

that a woman can love, accept and give a more positive value to these films only from her own masochism, and from a certain sadism that she can exercise in return on the masculine subject, within a system of loaded traps. All of which is far from negligible! (Bergstrom, 186). Asking women to accept this order submissively--because it is not that bad after all, and we can always fight back with our traps !--is like asking Alice Walker to love, accept and give a more positive value to her patriarchal wound. Walker speaks of the wound that a man produced on her eye in Pratibha Parmars Warrior Marks (1993). We can use it as a striking metaphor for the violence done by Freudian psychoanalysis on womens capacity to see with a different eyesight. As woman spectators, our eyeballs have been cut by the established Freudian system of criticism: we have to see a patriarchal journey, and we have to identify with it happily, in a submissive role. Within such a Freudian framework, even movies that are expressively produced for women, such as the typical Hollywood womans movie, Rebecca by Alfred Hitchcock (1941), are symbolical acts of violence for the woman-spectator. The film should be addressed to women (according to the production) and should provide an identification with the young wife who sees the story and retells it (according to the text). Instead, in the very apex of the movie--the revelation of the truth about Rebecca-the second wife is not even present. The scene belongs completely to the men, especially the husband, who sees the story for us in the empty house on the beach. The woman and the woman-spectator are therefore expelled from the movie. This is an act of maximum violence if we read it through the lens of Freudian theory. How is it that women still love it? Is it really for their own ingrained masochism? I would argue that the reason is that they do not identify with the character of the second wife--no matter what Hollywood and the movie painstakingly want us to believe. They identify with the action, wherever it goes, whoever plays it, however it is shown.
An Alternative Reading The loudest scream of protest against Freudian based theories comes from a group of students. In a recent Web article, Feminist and Other (?) Pleasures, Alayne Sullivan tells the enraged answers her female students gave to Mulveys theories in her class at Columbia University, while confessing her own incapacity to deal outside Mulveys framework (I hurry to remind myself that I may be buying into the trap of victim feminism. But I cannot quite--not yet anyway--rid myself of the visceral and gendered nature of my responses to the omnipresent and often dangerous alignment of male gender with action and power and female gender with relative lack of action and power). Sullivan reports her students reactions in these terms:
Why could they not identify with the power and action and freedom of the male role? They loved these stories and lived happily in the worlds constructed through their identity with the (primarily male) action. . . . Just who was I, or Laura Mulvey for that matter, to characterize their identification as restless in transvestite clothes, or as sadness, or worse yet, as a regressive boy/girl mixture or rivalry and play?!
These students give an explanation of their own identification by refusing the Freudian structure:
The pleasured identification, experienced and vehemently defended by certain women in the Popular Literature course, was with action, freedom, and power. The identification was not with the males themselves, not with the male gender and male sexuality, but with the centrality of the power, freedom and adventure of the protagonists experience. . . . Insistently, the women referred to herein maintained their interpretive

strategies not as androcentric, but as essentially feminist. According to them, they were, indeed, taking control of the reading experience. They were desexualizing the text connecting to the existence behind it, affiliating themselves with and appropriating as theirs the power and the freedom of the story.
I underline the words desexualizing and freedom because they are the locus of the fight for a new reading of women spectatorship. And they connect us directly to Deleuze and Guattaris theories. De-Sexualizing as Freeing It is extremely important to de-sexualize the narrative if we want to free ourselves from Freudian constraints. We cannot keep thinking in strict binary terms of woman/man, because our readings will otherwise remain rigid. Let us take, for example, some recent liberating movies: while providing alternative roles for women, they retain the old sexualized narrative. As soon as a woman shows the signs of freedom and the power of action, she is immediately masculinized, and we are back in the old cage. We all remember the heroine of Ridley Scotts Alien: she has to sacrifice her hair, the better-known feminine fetish la Gilda, in order to gain the leading role of an action movie. Thelma and Louise by Ridley Scott (1991), Fried Green Tomatoes by Jon Avnet (1992) or Bound (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1996) are satisfying movies for women: finally, power, action (even violence), and sex are guided by a woman. Furthermore, the audience undoubtedly identifies with these characters, men and women alike. As we look closely at these movies, though, we have to admit that they all strangely internalize the old distinction between man and woman. Not only do they seem to say that Laura Mulvey was right, they even re-enact and visualize her concept of transvestitism. In fact, all the powerful heroines of these movies, in
a way, become men. Thelma and Louise both start wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a skull. Idgie Threadgood in Fried Green Tomatoes is a tomboy from the beginning, refusing to wear girls clothes and then wearing vest and tie. This hints to her lesbianism (that is clear in the novel by Fannie Flagg) in a very indirect--but present--way. The openly lesbian Corky in Bound is also portrayed as a manly girl: her clothes, her almost acrobatic deeds, and her fights are those of the male hero of action movies. Her desiring looks toward the definitely more (even caricatured) feminine Violet, passing through such a man-like woman, become a way to compromise the male gaze. The caressing of Violets body through the camera revolutionizes Mulveys assertions, since the looker is clearly a woman-but such a manly woman! Isnt this perhaps a way to mediate between revolution and establishment, a way to provide a compromise for the male viewer? In sum, it seems that we cannot escape from the Freudian cage: either women are passive and victims, or they have to give up their femininity. It is the Mermaid damnation: in order to obtain legs to lead the action she has to sacrifice her melodic voice. So, we are falling in the Freudian trap again. But now we possess one more element: we have noticed that--often--when a woman gains narrative power, she physically becomes a man. This is the truth we held by now and also our escape route: it shows very clearly that there is something too strict, too poor in the duality power=man/weakness=woman, looker=man/looked-at=woman. Enough with it. The only way to reject Laura Mulveys theorization is to refuse its strict binary male-female terms, and thus refuse her Freudian sources. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris Anti-Oedipus provide us with the foundation to do so.
A Deleuzean Path First Step: Ode to Sex Multiplicity Deleuze and Guattari legitimate our wish to de-sexualize identification. They negate the Freudian bizarre notion that there is finally only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which the woman, the feminine, is defined as lack, an absence (294). On the contrary, according to them, the molecular unconscious . . . knows nothing of castration because partial objects lack nothing and form free multiplicities as such (295). The unconscious is partial because it is always forming itself in a multiplicity of shapes by effect of desire; this is what Deleuze and Guattari call the desiring-machine that is at the center of our being. The result of desire cannot be established once and forever (what a difference from the Freudian two-fold possibility!). Rather it is
everywhere a microscopic transexuality, resulting in the woman containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering--men with women, women with men--into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of n sexes in a subject, and with which it represents its own sexuality. The schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes. (295-296)
Deleuze and Guattari thus criticize the tendencies in Freudian psychoanalysis to cage human beings into specific roles and gendered fantasies, such as Oedipal sexuality, heterosexuality, homosexuality, cas-
tration: We deny that these are productions of the unconscious, they argue (74). They thus come very close to Constance Penleys assertion that sexual difference, ones unconscious sexual position, is constructed through the unconscious, but the unconscious is not itself sexually differentiated (Camera Obscura, 21-22: 256). They directly touch some feminist issues when they pickaxe other staples of Freudian criticism:
We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The Womens Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked. . . . It should be recognized that Womens Liberation movements contain, in a more or less ambiguous state, what belongs to all requirements of liberation: the force of the unconscious itself, the investment by desire of the social field, the disinvestment of repressive structures. Nor are we going to say that the question is not that of knowing if women are castrated, but only if the unconscious believes it, since all ambiguities lie there. (61)
Second Step: a New Desire, and a New Pleasure For Deleuze, the schizophrenic unconscious is the desiringmachines or the nonhuman sex, that in the case of cinematic spectatorship, is formed by n sexes, it is formed by the production of desire and it rejoices in the pleasure of this production. Desire and pleasure have new meanings for Deleuze and Guattari. For them, desire is not desire for something we lack. We cannot be forced to choose between production and acquisition. From the moment we place desire on the side of the acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of a real object (25). Instead, desire is the cause of production, and is

itself production. This is the turning point in Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy, though it is difficult to grasp because it upsets the state of things and our common (Freudian) thinking. Desire is not a production of the subject who lacks something and it is not the search to establish the primary feeling of satisfaction (Laplanche 121). It is instead an autonomous force. Desire is the productive force itself. For Deleuze, the entire universe can be thought as being the result of a desire. Desire is the center of creation. It is the drive for creation. We do not create desire, since desire creates us. This creative/desiring drive is the desire machine, and the autonomous productive and reproductive desire machines (5) are at the center of our personality. Our volatile subjectivity turns around it. Desire produces what we are. Desire makes us everything.5 This being everything is the main challenge to the binary Freudian identities of male and female. Being everything makes us-all of us--schizos in our hearts. We are producing-desiring schizophrenic machines, and while watching a movie, the process of production of identities is at its apex. This desire is a disruptive force in so far as it produces new realities and thus questions the established order. Desire is the password that enables both feminists and schizoanalysts to ask for more and to ask for freedom. Desire is what the established power fears; that is why the leadership has a tendency rather to reply: when I hear the word desire, I pull out my gun (257). Pleasure, therefore, does not derive from the fulfillment of desire, from the possession of the fetish or the destruction of the threatening feminine element, as a Freudian reading would suggest. Deleuzean pleasure lies in the very production of identities. Production is itself a pleasure: Even suffering, as Marx says, is a form of self-enjoyment. Doubtless all desiring-production is, in and of itself, immediately consumption and consummation, and therefore sensual pleasure (16). This pleasure derives from freedom, and it recalls the personal definition of pleasure
that Sullivans students gave: The pleasure they [the students] derived depended on identification with, again, freedom and power. It was irrelevant to them that the characters who had such freedom and power in the many popular texts they read were male. Third Step: A New Identification There is no fixed subject unless there is repression (26), writes Deleuze. Therefore, outside repression, in the free space of fantasy (or in the movie theater) our subject is free to desire and to produce thousands of new identities. Identification means becoming thousands of new identities. Deleuze and Guattari speak of identification in a Nietzschean sense, as the subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: every name in history is I . . . . The subjects spread itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the center of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the center there is the desiring-machine (21).6 The authors in fact establish that they do not believe in the ego, but in the subject, and that this subject is never the center of our being, but rather an ever-changing creation of the desiring-machine that is at our center. In the act of watching a movie (always for Guattari and Deleuze) there is no ego. The ego is like daddy-mummy: the schizo has long since ceased to believe in it (23). So, dont ask the female viewer to identify with the woman on the screen. And dont ask the man to identify with the man on the screen. Dont ask them to identify with the Freudian journey of the story. Why try to bring him [and her] back to what he [and she] has escaped from, why set him [her] back amid problems that are no longer problems to him [and her]? (23). Here lies the opposition between Freud--with his narrow and limited conception of the ego imprisoned in his own tripartite formula--the Oedipal, neurotic one: daddy-mummyme (23)--and the spectator/schizo. We--as spectators/schizos--resist. We

dont want to be reduced to one impoverishing ego (that is why Freud doesnt like us: Freud doesnt like schizophrenics. He doesnt like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals [23]). For a Deleuzean Theory of Spectatorship: Spectators as Schizos Revolutionaries, artists and seers: Deleuze and Guattari reunite together the three categories of people who know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace (27). Interestingly for us, spectators are ultimately seers! Artists and seers-spectators are the archetypal schizophrenics: they are everything, they lucidly experience the productive process of desire. Watching a movie is a state of hallucination or delirium--the complete withdrawal from the outside world (23)--where the subject produces itself through new identities. Deleuze asserts that delirium (I think) and hallucination (I see, I hear) presuppose an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucination its object and thought delirium its content--an I feel I am becoming a woman, that I am becoming a god, and so on (18). Certainly, with Deleuze and Guattari, we can say we are all schizos! (67) when we watch a movie, because we are ready to be sucked in, or to desire, or to become n people, n characters, n lives; we are ready to become the man or the woman or the flying elephant Dumbo. Deleuze and Guattari comment on the multiple possibilities of this game of identification with an important passage: A child never confines himself to playing house, to playing at being daddy-and-mommy. He also plays at being a magician, a cowboy, a cop or a robber, a train, a little car. The train is not necessarily daddy, nor is the train station necessarily mommy (46). We can thus conclude that there is no female spectator: this revolutionary assertion comes from a feminist critic, Constance Penley. She writes: although I have learned a great deal from work that has been done on the +++ We--as spectators/ schizos--resist. We dont want to be reduced to one impoverishing ego +++
female spectator . . . I have been drawn more toward work demonstrating that there is no female spectator, at least at the level of unconscious identification (Camera Obscura, 21-22: 256). If there is not a woman in the audience, as there is not a man, Anti-Oedipus proposes a new entity: the desiring machine or the Body without Organs. For Deleuze and Guattari, the life flow oscillates from two extremes, from the wish to be nothing, to the wish to be everything: on a scale of intensity that goes from 0 (I never asked to be born leave me in peace), the Body without Organs, to the nth power (I am all that exists, all the names in history), the schizophrenic process of desire (8). The spectator experience is exactly a constant flow from being nothing to being everything in a seemingly contradictory process: The genesis of the machine lies precisely here; in the opposition of the process of production of the desiring-machines and the nonproductive stasis of the body without organs (9). When we watch a movie, we go back to an origin, we become what we are in the core, a Body without Organs; we lose every constriction, every organization. We are no longer feminine or masculine as our body has become one with the screen, with its creative power. There is one short moment when we can conceive this: think to that brief moment, magical and still, of complete darkness between the trailers, the commercials and the beginning of the movie. In that moment our eyes dont see, our ears dont hear, our mouths dont suck. In that moment we are like the old woman Biji in Deepa Methas movie Fire: we dont speak, we dont move, we are ready to become all perceiving and still we are paralyzed in a Body without Organs. The Body without Organs is comparable to the perception without a body imagined by Christian Metz, when the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as a pure act of perception (as wakefulness, alertness) . . . I take no part in the perceived, on the contrary, I am all-perceiving (48). American Beauty provides a pivotal scene illustrative of this allperceiving spectator and his/her schizophrenic jouissance. The two young protagonists, Rick and Jane, are in Ricks room and Rick is filming Jane.

We see her through his camera. Male gaze and the male discovery of the womans truth go together, as Kaja Silverman points out in The Acoustic Mirror: she is confessing to him her inner desires and revealing herself to him. Suddenly something happens. Rick gives his camera to Jane and it is her turn, for the first time, to possess the gaze and to see him through her point of view, while he confesses his past. As viewers, we experience the movement of the gaze from the man to the woman as a liberating moment. But I dont think that everything should here be reduced to sex or gender, to the transformation of the male gaze into the female gaze. What we experience is a pleasure, jouissance in Roland Barthes terms. The joy--or the orgasm--of the unexpected, the breaking of the rules. The schizophrenic joy. The jouissance that is even a discomforting joy, because it makes the reader shake: the text of jouissance, Barthes explains, is the one that provokes a state of loss, that discomforts (perhaps even to a certain annoyance), that makes the historical, cultural, psychological axes of the reader shake, the consistence of his tastes, of his values, of his memories, that problematizes his relationship with language (26).7 Judith Mayne stresses the importance of talking about jouissance: feminist analysis of spectatorship had much to say about pleasure and practically nothing to say about jouissance, much to say about woman-as-victim and practically nothing to say about female subjects (230). In the moment of the swapping of the camera, our two channels of identification--camera8 and character--are destabilized. The passing of the camera/look visualizes the production of identities that we usually do without noticing. In that moment the schizophrenic ubiquity is played out. We feel freedom (like the students) and omnipotence. As Christian Metz writes, we are
all-perceiving as one says all-powerful (this is the famous gift of ubiquity the film makes his spectator); all-perceiving, too, because I am entirely on the side of the perceiving instance: absent from the screen, but certainly present in the auditorium, a great eye and a great ear with-
out which the perceived would have no one to perceive it . . . (it is I who make the film). (48)
Filmmakers as Schizos: Sheherazade against Oedipus The comparison between the schizo and the filmmaker is drawn out by Gilles Deleuze in his more sober book, Cinema 2, where he defines the filmmaker who becomes another, in so far as he takes real characters as intercessors and replaces his fiction by their own story-telling (152). Deleuze here quotes the poet Rimbaud: I is another (Je est un autre); the film-maker . . . white just like Rimbaud, himself exclaims that I is another, that is me a black. When Rimbaud exclaims, I am of inferior race for all eternity . . . I am a beast, a Negro . . . it is in the course of passing through a whole series of forgers (152-153). The true schizos are the artists for Deleuze and Guattari, because they are able to produce a thousand new identities around them. Their models are Friedric Nietzsche, who says Every name of history is I; Antonin Artaud, who asserts I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and myself (Here Lies, quoted in Anti-Oedipus: 15); and Vaslav Nijinsky, who is able to state, I am God I was not God I am a clown of God; I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am a red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinaman. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner, a stranger. . . . I am husband and wife in one. I love my wife. I love my husband (Diary, qtd. Anti-Oedipus 77). The feminist filmmaker is conscious of her own schizoid dimension, as Julie Dash demonstrates by opening her Daughters of the Dust with this proud admission of schizophrenia. The voice over exclaims in fact: I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the barren one and many are my daughters. I am the silence that you can not understand. I am the utterance of my name (75-76). Dash, as a woman filmmaker, is involved in a schizophrenic production because she is making an act of

rebellion, she is counter-narrating, she is--as Deleuze puts it--speaking in her own name. B. Ruby Rich clarifies the connection between feminism and schizophrenia: Speaking in ones own name versus speaking in the name of history is a familiar problem to anyone who has pursued a course of study, become involved in an established discipline, and then tried to speak out of personal experience or nonprofessional/nonacademic knowledge without suddenly feeling quite schizophrenic. Obviously it is a schizophrenia especially familiar to feminists (41). This meaning of schizophrenia is well depicted in feminist experimental films (such as Sink or Swim by Sue Friedrich, 1990) and documentary films (such as The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveteer, by Connie Field, 1980). Both provide an example of a very particular need for the viewers identification, to the extent that they give a counter-narrative. Since they use a marginal womans voice rather than the voice of history, they strongly need to involve the spectator in a schizophrenic production. Sink or Swim chooses to deconstruct the alphabet (which is the alpha and omega, the world explained by the authority, the mainstream knowledge) to make it tell a personal feminine story. Rosie the Riveteer counterpoises marginal womens stories to history written with a male-pen: historical inserts like the ads of smiling women in the kitchen and the male voice over black and white documentary film. Feminist documentary films have a common element that testifies the strong will to tell a new story, to invite the viewers identification: the constant presence of the talking heads. When a character talks to the spectator, we have one of the most effective examples of soliciting identification, as the French director Francois Truffaut maintains: The cinema becomes subjective when the actors gaze meets that of the audience. Performance rather than POV is the central device of identification (Smith 158). In wishing to tell a secret or alternative history, women directors need to make themselves heard by the audience in the most effective way. It is a replay of the story of the mythical woman storyteller, Sheherazade,
the teller of 1001 tales, the young wife who saved her life by looking at her husband in the eyes and keeping him involved in her narration. Like women filmmakers who try to tell and save a forgotten story, she played on a strong identification with the viewer. Sheherazade can therefore replace the traditional storyteller, Oedipus: If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesnt all storytelling lead back to Oedipus? Isnt telling a story always a way of searching ones origin, speaking ones conflicts with the Law, entering the dialectic of tenderness and hatred? . . . As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for something: to make good novels, to +++ This becoming the character, not only identifying with him, is a production of the desiringmachine that is the spectator +++ tell good stories (75-76). Telling stories is not a male prerogative. Again, it is a matter of rebuffing Oedipal restrictions and replacing Oedipus with Sheherazade. Conclusion Schizophrenia and Feminism: The Laughter The final chapter of Anti-Oedipus is a triumphant list of the positive tasks of schizoanalysis, which we can apply to a liberated cinema. Interestingly, to illustrate such positive tasks, Guattari and Deleuze choose a cinematic example, Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin. Even more interesting is their comment on spectatorship, which seems to justify our reading of their book. Quoting a film review by Michel Cournot, they maintain that throughout the movie the spectator was no longer on his seat, was no longer in a position to observe things. A kind of perceptive gymnastics has lead him, progressively, not to identify with the character of Modern Times, but to experience so directly the resistance of the events that he accompanies this character, has the same surprises, the same premonitions, the same habits as he (317). This becoming the character, not only identifying with him, is a production of the desiring-machine that is the spectator. The result is the laughter when Chaplin makes the board fall a second time on his head. Since the spectator is no longer on his seat, but

is the character, Deleuze and Guattari call this a schizophrenic laughter: it is not only the effect of the board falling on Chaplins head, but the very effect of the production of the desiring-machine, of the new state of the subject. It is the effect of freedom. Laughter is the sign of schizophrenic freedom, what Deleuze and Guattari define as escape, breakthrough or deterritorialization. In fact, the first positive task of schizoanalysis is to free our unconscious from the strait-jackets imposed by Freudian divisions and by consciousness-Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction--a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, law, castration (311). The second positive task is the escape from the prison: The schizophrenic escape [is] convertible into a revolutionary statement (341). Feminist movies, counter-cinema and feminist documentaries share this revolutionary nature, both in the cinematic and in the social field. By permitting the subject to experience a production of a thousand new identities, cinema provides a tool of changing society.9 It is a social investment, a nomadic and polyvocal that takes place in the dark narrow space of a movie-theater: Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movement in extension; it becomes immobile, in a room and on a Body without Organs--an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is creating (341). Only in this free, deterritorialized land, we will have the liberating laughter. The laughter, among others, of a freed woman-spectator.
Notes
1. Naturally, it is possible to engage in a whole theory of spectatorship that constructs the spectator starting from the text, without even referring once to gender and psychoanalysis, as in the book by Francesco Casetti, Dentro lo sguardo: il film e il suo spettatore (published in English by
Indiana University Press). It is also possible to engage in an ethnographic analysis of spectatorship, as Jackie Stacey does in Star-gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female. What I am trying to do here is to find another psychoanalytic answer to the problem, without negating psychoanalysis as a whole. 2. All quotations are from Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus, unless otherwise noted. 3. Desire and need are very close in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis according to Laplance and Pontalis: Freud doesnt identify desire with need . . . this difference anyway is not always clearly attested in Freudian terminology (121-122). 4. Metz writes: In other words the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as a pure act of perception (as wakefulness, alertness): as the condition of possibility of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject, which come before every there is (49). 5. For Deleuze and Guattari, everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions . . . productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasure, of anxieties, and of pain (4). 6. The quotation from Nietzsche is from the letter to Jackob Burckhardt, January 5, 1889, in Selected letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. 7. Barthes counterpoises the text of jouissance to the text of pleasure: the one that makes you content, full, gives you euphoria; the one that comes from culture, that doesnt break with it, it is tied to a comfortable practice of reading (25). 8. Christian Metz asserts,As he identifies with himself as look, the spectator can do no other than identify with the camera too, which has looked before him at what he is now looking and whose stationing (=framing) determines the vanishing point (49). 9. As for the social need of claiming multiple identities, see the recent book by the Lebanese Amin Maalouf in Lidentit (Milano: Bompiani, 2000); in it Maalouf defends the right to have multiform identi-

ties in the modern world where whoever claims a more complex identity is marginalized.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du Text, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973. Bergstrom, Janet. Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour. An Excerpt. Feminist Film Theory. A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 186195. Camera Obscura. 20-21, 1989. Casetti, Francesco. Dentro lo sguardo: il film e il suo spettatore, Milano: Bompiani, 1989. Cowie, Elizabeth. The Popular Film as Progressive Text--A Discussion of Coma. Feminist Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. ------. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Dash, Julie, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African-American Womans Film. New York: The New Press, 1992. de Lauretis, Teresa. Oedipus Interruptus, Feminist Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 83-96.
Deleuze Gilles. Cinema 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Doane, Mary Ann. Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator. Feminism and Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 131-145.
Laplance J. and Pontalis J.-B. Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Quadrige, 1967. Mayne, Judith. Camera Obscura. 21-22: 230-234. Metz, Christian. Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Morse, Margaret. Camera Obscura, 21-22: 246-248. Mulvey, Laura, Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema inspired by King Vidors Duel in the Sun (1946). Feminist Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 122-130. ------. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Feminist Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 59-69. Nochlin, Linda. Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Penley, Constance. Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Pribram, Deidre (ed.). Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. New York: Verso, 1988. Rich, Ruby B. The Crisis in Naming in Feminist Film Criticism. Feminist Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 4147. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: the Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Stacey, Jackie. Star-Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sullivan, Alayne. Feminist and other (?) Pleasures. WILLA 3 (1994): 14-18. Wolf, Naomi. Fire with Fire: the New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. New York: Random House, 1993.
123
Encountering Hegel and Deleuze: Towards a Feminist Pedagogy of the Concept

Ada Jaarsma
By exploring the pedagogy of the concept that both Hegel and Deleuze invoke in their philosophical projects, I seek to elaborate a certain awareness of the risk that we take when we read. What we open ourselves up to when we engage with a philosopher might change not only our knowledge but our very ability of relating to the world. By mobilizing a certain pedagogy of the concept, both Hegel and Deleuze make explicit the very relationship to learning that is enacted when we read philosophical texts. This paper will try to develop an understanding of this pedagogical relationship by examining the possibilities of the encounter between Hegel and Deleuze, while at the same time striving towards an awareness of the feminist stakes of such an encounter. In order to stage an encounter between the Hegelian and Deleuzian pedagogies, I will first explore the affective role that pedagogy plays within the operations of philosophy. Anne Carson, a contemporary poet and classics scholar, points to the inevitable force of transformation with which both learning and desire affect us. For example, in her work on ancient Greek texts, Carson argues that the newly emerging plastic contours of the alphabet and the edges of words changed the very experience of love itself for the early Greeks (Eros the Bittersweet 58; hereafter Eros). She claims, Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive, or fall in love in the same way (Eros 42). Carson allows us a glimpse of the intimate relations between love and learning, relations that are essentially affective. She states, There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker. . . . I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, fall-
125 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

ing in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other. How? (Eros 70). Similarly, I would like to understand how the encounters that occur when we engage with a system of thought or when we enter into a relationship with a thinker open up and move our own boundaries. Carson, while reading Plato, points to the lesson taught to us by Eros: When he inhales Eros, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved. Touched to life by erotic accident, this enlargement of self is a complex and unnerving occurrence (Eros 35). When Eros teaches us, we are essentially changed: Desire changes the lover . . . he feels the change happen but has no ready categories to assess it. The change gives him a glimpse of the self he never knew before (Eros 37). Carsons understanding of the act of learning, then, echoes the experience of falling in love, with all of the bittersweetness and potential heartbreak that this implies. The relations between loving and learning depend upon the work performed by pedagogy as such. Pedagogical experiences hold great potential for erotically charged relations. Paul Patton, analysing Jane Gallops experience in the classroom, writes: Her exercise of pedagogic power over the student produced a feeling of power that was for her indistinguishable from erotic desire. We can now see that this event involved a process of becoming in the strict Deleuzean sense: a becoming-student on the part of the teacher, to the extent that she was forced to come to terms with his version of what he had wanted to say in the paper, and a becoming-teacher on the part of the student to the extent that he was forced to see his own text through the eyes of a more experienced reader (Eros 79). Jane Gallop herself says: Teachers and writers might better serve the claims of knowledge if we were to resist not sex but the impulse to split off sex from knowledge (Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment 100). Gallop embraces the erotic nature of learning, but also points out that
the unexpected is always at risk within the operations of pedagogy. As Penelope Deutscher argues, A purity of transmission could only occur if we were indeed all parrots. The element of transmission, appropriation, incorporation, perversion, novelty--an admixture of otherness--is necessary to the economy of pedagogy, and destabilises that other key element of the pedagogical model--the notion of the baton which can be transmitted between subjects (Eating the Words of the Other 35). Teaching philosophy implies employing a certain force of destabilization that allows for unexpected transformations within the student, the teacher, and the +++ Both Hegel and Deleuze point to a certain pedagogy at work not merely in the teaching of philosophy but within the very operations of philosophy itself +++ dynamics between them. Both Hegel and Deleuze point to a certain pedagogy at work not merely in the teaching of philosophy but within the very operations of philosophy itself. Can and should we resist these pedagogies, and if so, at what points? What would an encounter between Deleuze and Hegel teach us, not only about their own projects but also about the force at work within their pedagogical concepts? Deleuze writes that a problem does not mark an insufficiency in knowledge, but rather, the problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing them to be grasped as signs, just as the questioning or problematizing instance is a part of knowledge allowing its positivity and its specificity to be grasped in the act of learning (Difference and Repetition 63). Learning involves or implies an encounter with a problem as a signifying and specific positivity. This paper will attempt to think through the ramifications not only of conceptualizing philosophy according to this positivity of a problem, but of engaging with such a philosophy as a radically pedagogical and feminist enterprise. In What is Philosophy, together with Flix Guattari, Deleuze introduces a modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, a task which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments (12). The task focuses on the emergence of the concept, an emergence which is both singular and creative. Deleuze and Guattari describe the creative emergence of the concept as idiosyncratic, personal

and innovative. Every concept is singular, and the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always a singularity. The first principle of philosophy is that universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained (What is Philosophy 7; hereafter WP). Their descriptions of the productive work performed by the concept sound shockingly Hegelian: The concept posits itself to the same extent that it is created (WP 11). Several sentences later, Deleuze and Guattari reflect explicitly on Hegels contributions to philosophy, stating that Hegel powerfully defined the concept by the figures of its creation and the moments of its self-positing (WP 11). Indeed, Hegels own reflections on the concept emphasize the intimacy between the content and the form of philosophical knowing (Philosophy of Right 2; hereafter Right). According to Hegel, the concept is the unity of epistemology and ontology, the unity which fulfils the task of philosophy: to comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason (Right 11). Hegel states that true thought is not an opinion about the thing but the concept of the thing itself (Right 225). Learning the concept, according to Hegel, involves moving beyond the shallow thinking of a particular individual to a participation in the substantive knowledge of philosophy in which form and content cohere perfectly (Right 6). Through reason, or speculative knowing, form unites with content, which is embodied in the substantial essence of actuality (Right 12). In Hegels pedagogy of the concept, what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational (Right 10). This pedagogical operation works immanently from within history: The teaching of the concept, which is also historys inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm (Right 13). Arriving too late to provide answers as to what the world ought to be, the pedagogy of the concept opens up to the synthetic relations between the empirically
embodied and the rational ideal. How this pedagogy relates to Deleuzes philosophy of radical empiricism will be a crucial question for understanding the relations between Hegel and Deleuze. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Hegel extends philosophy too far, thinking through each moment as a reconstitution of the universal. Hegel himself writes, Philosophy is a sequence which does not hang in the air; it is not something which begins from nothing at all; on the contrary, it circles back into itself (Right 225). Rather than attending to the singular moments of creation, Hegel invokes a logic of creation in which the participation of an entire system of consciousness, or the entire realm of the truth of Spirit is always at work when we experience the unity of form and content through philosophy (Phenomenology of Spirit 57). Contrary to this indeterminate extension of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari propose an approach to philosophy that is more modest, attending to the singular moments that make creation possible. As the disparity between a singular and a universal creation suggests, the prevailing scholarship on Deleuze insists on the necessity of keeping Hegel theoretically separate from Deleuze. Rosi Braidotti writes, Deleuzes notion of becoming is adapted from Nietzsche; it therefore is deeply anti-Hegelian (Nomadic Subjects 111). Indeed, Deleuze himself writes that there is no difficulty in identifying Nietzsches enemy: it is the dialectic which confuses affirmation with the truthfulness of truth or the positivity of the real; and this truthfulness, this positivity, are primarily manufactured by the dialectic itself with the products of the negative (Nietzsche and Philosophy 183). Alain Badiou identifies Hegel as a designated enemy of Deleuze, one of those who inject the transcendence of the concept into a fake immanence (Deleuze 99). Vincent Descombes states that Deleuzes philosophy of desire is a critical response to the dialectic (Modern French Philosophy 26). Kojves reading of Hegel characterizes dialectical philosophy as the thinking which identifies desire with

pure negativity, and sees in it not only a negation, but a negation of the negation (Modern French Philosophy 26). In contrast to Hegelian thought, Deleuzes philosophy is forcefully affirmative, invested in an elaboration of desire as positive. The problematic role of the subject within Deleuzes thought also prompts scholars to emphasize a firm philosophical divide between Hegel and Deleuze. Since Deleuzes project seeks to evade any reduction of the transcendental to the synthesizing activity of a subject, the Hegelian subject is clearly an object of sharp Deleuzian critique. Keith Ansell Pearson explains, The error of attempts to define the transcendental with consciousness for Deleuze is that they get constructed in the image of that which they are supposed to ground, running the risk of simply reduplicating the empirical. Metaphysics and transcendental philosophy are only able to think singularities by imprisoning them within the confines of a supreme self or a superior I (Germinal Life 87). Deleuze then, according to Pearson, moves us as readers beyond the boundaries of phenomenology, beyond the condition of the human, affirming a world of haecceities and individuations beyond the embodied subject, a world beyond good and evil, the expression of the repeated singularity of the One (Germinal Life 137). In this world, we can be attuned to the becoming at work within events, evading the static logic of subjectivity. Not only are we as readers of Deleuze beyond the phenomenological subject but we are fully implicated in a world of empiricism, a world incompatible with the Hegelian dialectic. According to Descombes, Philosophy, for Deleuze, is either dialectical or empiricist, according to whether the difference between concept and intuition (in the Kantian sense of a relation to the particular entity) is taken to be a conceptual or a non-conceptual difference (Modern French Philosophy 155). We are moving, therefore, outside of a purely conceptual philosophy. The status of the concept, then, necessarily differs between Hegel and Deleuzes philosophies. Deleuzes debate with Hegel, as characterized by Baugh, concerns
the epistemological model that underlies Hegels argument. Contrary to Kantianism or Hegelian Idealism, it is the empirical which explains the conceptual and the abstract conditions of all possible experience, not the reverse (Deleuze and Empiricism 17). Baugh concludes then, I would argue that insofar as Deleuzes empiricism is meant to meet the challenge of Hegels critique of empiricism, it is above all post-Hegelian (Deleuze and Empiricism 27). Deleuzes empiricism operates according to a philosophy that is embodied, concrete, and contingent, rather than idealistic, abstract, and universal. Hegels great mistake, according to Baugh, is the abstract explanation of the abstract (Deleuze and Empiricism 22). As Deleuze writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy, The taste for replacing real relations between forces by an abstract relation which is supposed to express them all, as a measure, seems to be an integral part of science and also of philosophy (74). Deleuze goes on to explain that this abstract relation allows a third partys perspective on activities that replaces the real activities themselves. Rather than arriving too late, with a backwards look at historical development, as Hegel posits, Deleuzes empiricism seeks to explore the conditions under which the new is produced. Conditions themselves are actual rather than possible, particular rather than universal, embodied rather than eternal or a priori. The real causes of experience are not universal; causes operate through chance, rather than dialectical necessity. Baugh explains Deleuzes transcendental empiricism as the search for real conditions of actual experience: It is meant to be an empiricism that would be immune to Hegels critique of empiricism as the poorest and most empty kind of knowledge, or a post Hegelian empiricist metaphysics (Deleuze and Empiricism 15). For Deleuze, the empirical engages with non-conceptual differences between instances, the basis of multiplicity, of an external and non-conceptual relation between instances (Deleuze and Empiricism 17). As Pearson explains, the transcendental empiricism that

Deleuze mobilizes has no reference to an object or a subject: Indeed, it is the very lack of reference that makes this empiricism wild and powerful (Germinal Life 135). In contrast to Hegelian philosophy, which operates according to a necessarily historical dialectic, Deleuze radically reconfigures the workings of history in philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari state, Becoming does not belong to history. . . . Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical (WP 96). As Pearson explains, It is clear that for Deleuze history does not exist apart from a thinking of the event and independent of our producing cartographies of it free of both points of origin and ends or goals given in advance, and free of the glorification of an imperial Subject. History on this model is produced and invented through the pursuit of different series and different levels, and the crossing of thresholds (Germinal Life 223). In Deleuzes thought, each empirical actuality is a singularity, each with its own differing causal histories (Deleuze and Empiricism 24). Baugh points here to a closeness to Hegel, who also wants to account for concrete actuality in terms of its historical genesis (Deleuze and Empiricism 24). However, he emphasizes their differing conceptions of history. Hegel requires intrinsic, logical relations between factors within historical development. As well, the historical process has an overall telos. Deleuzes logic of causation is necessarily non-teleological. In a dialectic, particular events are subordinate to an overarching teleological process. According to Baugh, this conception of history is rejected by Deleuze as a view that would allow one to grasp the particular in terms of the universal, a view that effectively annuls time and duration by substituting logical relations for temporal ones (Deleuze and Empiricism 25). As this brief survey of Deleuzian scholarship indicates, the differences between Hegel and Deleuze are generally held to be obvious, irrefutable, and significant for a serious engagement with Deleuzes philosophy. However, the work of Catherine Malabou opens up the pos-
sibility of an actual encounter between Hegel and Deleuze. Rather than pointing to Hegel merely as an object of critique, Malabou points to the active presence of Hegel within Deleuzes thought. Such a methodology seems to be invoked by Deleuze himself when he makes explicit the work of conceptual personae that live within philosophy and carry out its movements. Catherine Malabou takes up this task of reconstituting the conceptual personae, indicting Deleuze for his inattention to a conceptual persona living within his own philosophy--that of Hegel. Malabou writes, Never does Deleuze seek to determine what the Hegelian equivalent of conceptual personae would be (Whos Afraid of Hegelian Wolves? 116). According to Malabous analysis, Deleuze repeats a gesture that he rejects in the work of other thinkers, namely that of reducing the multiplicities of Hegelian philosophy to a unity. Deleuzes Hegel is a thinker of identity, and the dialectic is thus an infinite circulation of the identical. Within Deleuzes philosophy then, Hegels proper name acts as an unalterable and univocal signifier of a signified (Hegelian philosophy) that is itself unalterable and univocal (Hegelian Wolves 116). Malabou suggests that the nomadic thought of difference and the rhizome is perhaps developed at the expense of a certain Hegelian multiplicity (Hegelian Wolves 117). Malabou, therefore, calls forth the conceptual persona of Hegel within Deleuzes philosophy. Deleuzes Hegel is a dog, a detested domestic animal, the bow-wow of contemporary philosophers because of his designated status as the enemy of Nietzschean thought (Hegelian Wolves 117). Deleuze claims that there can be no compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche (Nietzsche and Philosophy 195). Malabous task, however, is not to search for a compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche or Hegel and Deleuze. Such a task would fall within Deleuze and Guattaris category of communication, rather than philosophy, communication which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create consensus and not concepts (WP 6). A compromise would

seek to restore the universal, in contrast to the work of philosophy, which seeks to create concepts with their own autonomous existence (WP 7). The pedagogy of the concept, invoked by Deleuze and Guattari, emerges out of philosophy, rather than communication, attending to the conditions of creation as always singular moments (WP 12). Malabous analysis seems to take up this pedagogical methodology. The central question posed by Malabou focuses not on a compromise between Deleuze and Hegel but rather on a possible encounter between Deleuze and Hegel. Rather than simply outlining Deleuzes reduction of Hegelian multiplicity, Malabou seeks to expose a certain difficulty that emerges from the problem of relations between Deleuze and Hegel (Hegelian Wolves 118). The question is not one of resolving this relation, of making sense of the differences between Deleuze and Hegel, either in terms of a dialectical relation or a differential force. Rather, Malabou occasions an encounter between the two thinkers. She writes, In complicating the relation between Deleuze and Hegel one manages to show how the two thinkers form one against the other, or one with the other, something like a block of becoming, one of those heterogeneous and unnatural combinations that Deleuze is wont to speak of (Hegelian Wolves 120). As well as elaborating on the openng of an encounter between Hegel and Deleuze, Malabous approach continually poses a methodological question to us as readers, a question which the pedagogy of the concept also seems to invoke: what do we ourselves become when we read? Malabous analysis allows us to glimpse the semantic tension at work within the phrase the pedagogy of the concept. The concepts own pedagogical force constitutes a creative site at which philosophy emerges and operates. This site, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari, is singular and unique to each philosophy, self-constituting and radically affective in its work. According to Malabou, Deleuze fails to engage productively with this pedagogical force in Hegels thinking. The event of a concepts pedagogy remains a potentially productive question in terms of reading
Hegels own philosophy. The pedagogy of the concept also denotes another event, namely, pedagogy itself as a performative methodology through which one can understand and engage in philosophy. In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari point to THE plane of immanence. As well elaborating a plane of immanence at work within each philosophers thought, they describe THE plane of immanence as the nonthought within thought. . . . the most intimate within thought and yet the absolute outside (WP 59). This invocation of THE plane of immanence makes explicit the very project at work within their discussions of philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari state, Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought (WP 59). They are able to evaluate planes of immanence according to THE plane; they ultimately identify Spinoza as the thinker of the best plane of immanence (WP 60). In attending to both of these aspects of the pedagogy of the concept, Malabou brings into focus Deleuze himself as a reader, as a thinker and evaluator of the pedagogical force within philosophy. She brings to the surface the methodology at work within Deleuzes approach to Hegel and his lack of engagement with the Hegelian pedagogy of the concept. We are thus able to glimpse the encounter between Deleuze and ourselves as readers. Malabou highlights the stakes of a Hegel/Deleuze encounter, pointing to the essentially different understandings of becoming at work within the two philosophers thinking. She suggests that Hegel represents the philosophical tradition of teleological becoming, which Deleuze undermines in favour of adestinal, that is, ateleological becoming. Hegels teleological becoming emerges out of a lack, as an individual realizes its separation from the genus and paradoxically experiences union. In contrast, Deleuzian becoming removes the concept from the Hegelian definition of an intermediate state between being and nothing-

ness. Becoming is not a hesitation between the abyssal vertigo of absence of form and the security of a particular incarnation (Hegelian Wolves 125). For Deleuze, becoming achieves a momentary assemblage that cannot and will not give its reason for being (Hegelian Wolves 125). Deleuze and Guattari write, The relativity and absoluteness of the concept are like its pedagogy and its ontology (WP 22). They go on to state that the relative and the absolute are united by constructivism--the concept is self-referential, positing itself and its object while it itself is created. However, Deleuze seems to miss the pedagogy at work within the Hegelian concept, emphasizing its absolute ontology without a concomitant pedagogical force. The tension that Deleuze and Guattari invoke between relative and absolute spaces within the concept, united by the singular moment of creation, points to a non-teleological pedagogy that resists a determinate analysis. Movement without destiny, operating according to fortuity rather than filiation, conditions the Deleuzian becoming-animal, in fundamental contrast with the Hegelian becoming of the animal. Becoming-animal is what is unexpected in a genus (Hegelian Wolves 126). In a philosophical sense, Deleuzean becoming necessarily evades subsumption into an over-arching analysis: The logic of relations between the individual and generic essence are completely incapable of explaining it (Hegelian Wolves 126). This logic of becoming, then, points to unexpected encounters, always individual, unable to be generalized (Hegelian Wolves 126). Becoming is non-teleological and therefore subverts knowledge and calculation, belonging to the order of the secret (Hegelian Wolves 129). Malabou takes up this sense of becoming in order to glimpse an encounter between Hegel and Deleuze. Hegels own becoming, she argues, performs a pedagogical act that brings about the economy of multiplicity endorsed, though not recognized, by Deleuze (Hegelian Wolves 130). She writes, In limiting his thought concerning becoming to generic becoming, one loses sight of this most important fact, namely that for him
the latter is always lacking, always a failure. In Hegel, the animal experiences the fundamental failure of the becoming of the animal (Hegelian Wolves 134). She concludes, In his work multiplicity is not systematically and violently reduced to a unity, it abbreviates itself, and abbreviation is the necessary wearing out that restrains the pack, holds it in check, suspends its infinite becoming (Hegelian Wolves 134). Abbreviation, then, becomes the site at which the dialectic itself works out a logic of singularities: The formalizing reduction of speculative content, its logical writing, paradoxically confer on the being that is deprived of its singularities a type of singularity par excellence that is its characteristic (Hegelian Wolves 135). By pointing to this singularity, Malabou opens up the possibility for exploring the pedagogy of the concept at work within Hegelian thought, and thus the potential for a Deleuze-Hegel relationship emerges. Malabou describes Hegels own understanding of reading as performative in a pedagogical sense: The philosophic reader or interlocutor is of course receptive to the form, but they in their turn are led to give form to that which they hear or read (The Future of Hegel 206). The reader both engages with the universal notion and also incarnates or embodies the universal by bestowing upon it a particular form of the universal: Reading Hegel amounts to finding oneself in two times at once: the process that unfolds is both retrospective and prospective. In the present time in which reading takes place, the reader is drawn to a double expectation: waiting for what is to come (according to a thought which is linear), while presupposing that the outcome has already arrived (according to the teleological ruse) (The Future of Hegel 212). Malabou concludes her analysis of Hegel by pointing to the unique perspective of a philosophy of the event, suggesting that Hegels own philosophy might register itself as an event (The Future of Hegel 216). Malabous Hegel, then, invokes a pedagogical relationship between philosophy and the act of reading: In his own way, Hegel already says that every philosophical reader must always undergo the experience of a task of reading (Deconstructive

and/or Plastic Readings of Hegel 138). Ultimately, Malabou affirms Hegels role in Deleuzes thinking (Hegelian Wolves 136). She identifies Deleuzes Hegel as a Hegel who is both excluded and uniquely anomalous within Deleuzes thought, a Hegel who plays the double role of the accursed exceptional one (Hegelian Wolves 136). Malabous methodology enables an explicit reflection on the act of reading itself. She suggests that Deleuzes misrecognition of Hegel may be symptomatic, suggesting: This non-recognition might also take on the value of a symptom that readers, as ad hoc psychoanalysts, would take it upon themselves to interpret (Hegelian Wolves 121). Deleuzes engagement with Hegel, then, allows for a symptomatic reading of his own methodology. To read symptomatically is to open up the pedagogy of the concept as a question of methodology. Deleuze and Guattari state, So the question of philosophy is the singular point where concept and creation are related to each other (WP 11). If we engage with this singular point and reflect on the event of reading, reading emerges as a transformative event with potentially traumatic force. Tim Dean, a Lacanian theorist, makes explicit the trauma at work within Lacans discourse, reflecting on Lacans style, a style which produces an effect of the real within the very act of reading. Of this trauma which occurs through reading, Dean states: Perhaps this amounts to recommending that we treat Lacan psychoanalytically, reading the analyst in the way that he listens to his patients, prepared to encounter paradoxes and nonlinear forms of argumentation, without flattening his work under ready-made skepticism or unquestioning belief (Beyond Sexuality 15). This attention to the work performed by the texts own methodology allows us the possibility of grasping the pedagogical operations of a philosophical text. As Dean and Malabou suggest, reading symptomatically demands intimacy with the text, openness to any unexpected encounter at work within the very act
of reading. The concept itself is a potentiality for such an event. According to Malabou, Hegels theory has traditionally been understood as incompatible with the notion of the event: Spirit, whose task is to grasp itself, to anticipate the finding of itself in everything that is now and is to come, can never encounter anything wholly other, can never come face to face, in a sense, with the event (The Future of Hegel 199). The conventional interpretation of Hegel both asserts an absence of a conception of the future in Hegelian thought and an absence of a future of Hegels philosophy (The +++ reading symptomatically demands intimacy with the text, openness to any unexpected encounter at work within the very act of reading +++ Future of Hegel 200). When reflected on explicitly, the event begins to resemble the living status of philosophy. Deleuze declares that we must count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself (DR 139). Pearson, referring to Deleuzes approach to philosophy, states that there is something in the world that forces us to think. For Deleuze this something is not to become an object of recognition but rather assume the form of a fundamental encounter (Germinal Life 89). What Deleuze and Guattari call the pedagogical status of the concept opens up a positive relationship to the history of philosophy that promises transformation. Philosophy creates concepts, and concepts can be evaluated not only according to their novelty but also through the power of their becoming when they pass into one another (WP 32). This power of becoming, which results in an event, defines philosophy itself. Claire Colebrook states, As the creation of new concepts, philosophy is the challenge of immanence, the task of thinking a concept as event, and not as a representation of some predetermined transcendence (2000, 118). This thinking the concept as event, as suggested by Colebrook, points to the concept as essentially evental rather

than referential, propositional or discursive (WP 22). Deleuze and Guattari write, The concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing--pure Event, a haecceity, an entity (WP 21). This event must be understood as singular and particular: Every concept shapes and reshapes the event in its own way (WP 34). Pearson states that in Deleuzes philosophy events enjoy an independence of expression in relation to their actual incarnation in bodies and states of affairs (Germinal Life 122). The staging of a Deleuze-Hegel encounter allows us to see the event itself as a problem. Deleuze states, Problems are always dialectical. This is why, whenever the dialectic forgets its intimate relation with Ideas in the form of problems, whenever it is content to trace problems from propositions, it loses its true power and falls under the sway of the power of the negative, necessarily substituting for the ideal objecticity of the problematic a simple confrontation between opposing, contrary or contradictory, propositions. This long perversion begins with the dialectic itself, and attains its extreme form in Hegelianism (DR 164). Deleuzes reading of Hegel, which limits the problematic that is possible within Hegelian thought, contrasts sharply with Malabous analysis. Malabous methodology, as we can see, enables the very problematic of relations between Deleuze and Hegel. How do we recognize and engage with the pedagogy of the concept, then, performed by the philosophical text? One characteristic of early feminist receptions of Deleuzian texts questions the possibility of becoming for women that Deleuzes philosophy enacts. Alice Jardine points to the need invoked by Deleuze for women to become women, which consequently calls also for their subsequent disappearance: Is it not possible that the process of becoming-woman is but a new variation of an old allegory for the process of women becoming obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum: a female figure caught in a whirling sea of male configurations (This Sex which is not One 217). Irigaray, interrogating Deleuzes concept of the Body without Organs, identifies the need to
assert and respond to the historical realities of women: For [women], isnt the organless body a historical condition? And dont we run the risk once more of taking back from women those as yet unterritorialized spaces where her desire might come into being? Since women have long been assigned to the task of preserving body-matter and the organless, doesnt the organless body come to occupy the place of their own schism? Of the evacuation of womans desire in womans body? to turn the organless body into a cause of sexual pleasure, isnt it necessary to have had a relation to language and to sex--to the organs--that women have never had? (This Sex which is not One 141). Echoing Irigarays analysis, Rosi Braidotti asserts the feminist critique of the potentially ahistorical tendencies of Deleuzian thinking: Deleuzes becoming-woman amalgamates men and women into a new, supposedly beyond gender, sexuality; this is problematic, because it clashes with womens sense of their own historical struggles (Nomadic Subjects 120). These feminist responses to Deleuze make use of a method of reading that attends to the pedagogy of the concept at work within Deleuzes own singular concepts, concepts such as becoming and the Body without Organs. If we go back to Anne Carsons reflections on the nature of an erotic encounter, we can begin to think through the stakes of engaging with Deleuzes concepts in this way. Carson writes, A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. . . . In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space (Eros 171). Reading Deleuze as a feminist, risking an encounter with the concepts at work within Deleuzes thought, means participation in such an erotic space. The lover, the beloved, and the space between them make up a triangulation of a specific and singular love affair. The possibility of critique necessary for feminist philosophy depends upon the ability to identify this relationship and develop strategic responses to

Deleuzian concepts. The other semantic dimension of the pedagogy of the concept provides another method of engaging Deleuze. This approach involves taking up the very pedagogical nature of philosophy itself, that is, participating as thinkers in the creation of philosophy. A feminist thinker hereby risks an encounter with the nature of philosophy itself. The parameters that emerge from this encounter with philosophy are critical for feminist thought. As Claire Colebrook explains, How we understand sexual difference is a question of how we understand philosophy (Is Sexual Difference a Problem? 122). According to Colebrook, Deleuze suggests two possibilities for philosophy: transcendental philosophy, asking the question of how the subject relates to the given, and empiricism, locating the constitution of the subject within the given (Sexual Difference 112). As Colebrook asserts, sexual difference has often been understood within transcendental philosophy. In contrast, Deleuzes texts operate within transcendental empiricism, in which the question for philosophy is not to account for the condition of the given but to respond to the given (Sexual Difference 113). If philosophy is understood as a transcendental empiricism, thinking within immanence, then sexual difference will be the task of thinking differently (Sexual Difference 125). Colebrook takes up the nature of philosophy elaborated by Deleuze and suggests, Sexual difference might enable us to think the body not as an explanandum, anteriority or condition but as a form of positive difference (Sexual Difference 125). Similarly, we might be able to think of pedagogy, not as a condition for learning that we must account for and be subject to, but as a given to which we must respond. Carson states, Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact (Eros 169), and her use of the word story is intentional. Fictions in the mind of the lover enact the encounter of loving and learning. Unfolding our own stories, then, as we engage with philosophy, provides a creative response to the +++ The possibility of critique necessary for feminist philosophy depends upon the ability to identify this relationship and develop strategic responses to Deleuzian concepts +++
event of reading Deleuzes work.
Works Cited
Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamour of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Baugh, Bruce. Deleuze and Empiricism. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24.1 (1993): 15-33. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Dalkey Archive Press, 2000. Colebrook, Claire. Is Sexual Difference a Problem? Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 110-127. Dean, Tim. Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ------.. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Deutscher, Penelope. Eating the Words of the Other--Ethics, Erotics and Cannibalism in Pedagogy. Jane Gallop Seminar Papers. Ed. Jill Julius Matthews. Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, 1994 Gallop, Jane. Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Hegel, G. W. F. Philosophy of Right. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1967. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which is not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Malabou, Catherine. Whos Afraid of Hegelian Wolves? Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Trans. David Wills. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 114-138. ------. ------. Deconstructive The Future and/or of Plastic Hegel: Readings Plasticity, of Hegel. The Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 41.2 (2000): 132-41. Temporality, Dialectic. Hypatia 15.4 (2000): 196-219. Patton, Paul. Deleuze and the Political. Nw York: Routledge, 2000. Pearson, Keith Ansell. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. London: Routledge, 1999.
Book Review:
145 A Shock to Thought
A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. Edited by Brian Massumi. New York: Routledge, 2002. xxxix + 256 pp. Alan Nicholson
Curiously, the first shock of A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari is not cognitive but optical. Revamped from a special issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (Vol.24, No.3, September 1997) but now housed in a bright, almost luminous red cover, Brian Massumis collection displays color like an animal intent on action. Coming after Deleuze and Guattari, however, I assume that this is primarily a territorial expression and not an aggressive one; the question being what territory is defined? Certainly nothing as prosaic as the theorists themselves, and those new to their work can indeed take the red cover as a warning if they wish: there is little exegesis here. Any search to locate yet another account of what becoming-x means will be in vain, the preposition of the subtitle making sure that a distance of some kind (a head start?) is acknowledged before the opening page. Unsurprisingly, the editor considers the fifteen articles collected here to be extensions . . . more than reflections (xxxiv) of Deleuze and Guattari. Similarly, I doubt there is an expectation that the subtitles temporality will be read classically for this is also a book in search of Deleuze and Guattari. Articles emphasize their individual and joint works as ways of doing things, potentialities for actualising new thought now. This has always been Massumis strength. Cued from Deleuzes insistence on phi-
losophy as a tool-box and his own emphasis on their use--A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1992)--Massumi continues to engage Deleuze and Guattari as a power in thought and not as fossils in need of excavation. After all, this is the Deleuze-Guattarian thing to do, and subsequently the lack of exegesis should not really put the newcomer off. Although certainly a difficult book, there is much here to recommend it to those with enough savvy to be drawn to the oeuvres of Deleuze, Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari because of their pragmatism (rather than their rhetoric). Indeed, amongst these is a willingness to at least begin the task of dealing with Pierre-Flix without that order-word conjunction. Readers familiar with the present state of Deleuze Studies will realise the sad uniqueness of this. Not only does the collection close with a short interview of Guattari by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (240-245), but throughout A Shock to Thought works that carry his signature alone are referred to and used. We can only hope that more translations of his texts are forthcoming. Expression itself is, of course, the territory marked here, which from the mid-to-late 60s came to play a defining role in Deleuzes thought, crucially in Marcel Proust et les signes (1964) and his first book on Benedict de Spinoza (1968). For most, however, the term no doubt recalls the third plateau of Mille Plateaux where Professor Challenger lectures by crossing Hjelmslevian linguistics with geology, all the while mediated by the underside of a lobster. Subtitled Double Articulation, the lobster articulates twice (the claws) whilst each of the articulations is twice in itself (the pincers) as it images the form and substance folds of the content and expression of Hjelmslev the geologist. And although the plateau is rarely cited, the illustration is as helpful for grasping the force of A Shock to Thought as A Shock to Thought is for grasping it. By strategically

shifting attention toward expression, Massumi reinvigorates the content of Deleuze-Guattari thought at the very moment he turns away from it. Widening the past emphasis on use allows for a territorial expansion that continues to illuminate the thought itself while illustrating that a creative reading of Deleuze and Guattari is a central component of that thought. That such seemingly disparate topics as high fidelity sound (Aden Evens, 171-187), Heian calligraphy (Thomas Lamarre, 149-170), and the art of Merce Cunninghmam (Jos Gil, 117-127) are traversed in the collection indicates the nature(s) of the expansion. Expression is territory, and A Shock to Thought does more that acknowledge double articulation; it continuously invents and reinvents itself from it. Instead of explaining becoming, it just becomes. Make no mistake: this is a lobster of a book. As Gary Genoskos A Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression (47-59) reminds us, however, it is the movement of the lobster that counts, and reducing the editors Introduction: Like a Thought (xii-xxxix) by exclaiming it a fine essay in its own right misses that point. Better to say that it sets the migratory pace, mapping a transversal line through the collection rather than providing the traditional, hierarchical and representational overview. It is left to the footnotes to reference the relations and parallels with the books other authors as differences between DeleuzeGuattarian expressionism and communicative, ideological, and post-modern theories of language are explored. Similarly, the exemplary index is designed for creative use, allowing the reader to also cut back and forth across essays, following concepts and lines of flight. Just one more look at the expressions form: each of the books sections--That Thinking Feeling (1-44), The Superior Empiricism of the Human (45-128), and Forces of Expression (129-245)--carry segments of a citation from Artaud found in
Catherine Dales essay Cruel: Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze (85100). It is a thought-provoking fold that rightly suggests the worthiness of her work; the only danger with both it and the collection as a whole is that it all appears rather too cosy at times, a feeling heightened by authors continuously thanking others in the volume for their comments and suggestions. Shall we say a minor grumble against habit and leave it at that? Well, yes and no. This resurgence of ego in the testifying to a co-operative multiple is important because the book is so keen to extend its territory by demonstrating Deleuze-Guattari ethics in the writing practice. There is a larger difficulty here, one locatable in the impossibility of escaping the mimicry of an expressionism conceptualized through the affirmation of difference. Difference itself establishes identification on the plane of expression. Comparing the methodology of Introduction: Like a Thought with Introduction: Rhizome is a deceptively simple example. The difference extending the rhizome is itself short-circuited by identification, and despite their warnings, we could still risk a little more in our de-stratification(s) of Deleuze and Guattari. Talking like everyone else has its uses but to do so whilst talking like Deleuze and Guattari is dangerous, not because of an all-too-wild deterritorialization but because the migration itself threatens to leave us stationary. I suspect just a hint of a false voyage here, but only because the book itself is composed of a staggering series of lines of flight. Melissa McMahon and Steven Shaviro begin the volume with two essays that deal with the analysis of the beautiful in the Critique of Judgement (3-8, 9-19). Stephan Zagala explores the work of the Australian contemporary artist Mathew Jones (20-43), while Michael Hardt passes by to contribute a brief study of the theology of exposure in a poem by

Pasolini with all his characteristic verve (77-84). To my mind, however, the collections tenth essay deserves singular praise. In Neo-archaism Mani Haghighi, the Persian translator of Ceci nest pas une pipe, gives a probing account of the 1989 fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, but this is not just an essay of interest to Post-colonialists and other migratory mammals. Discussing the failure of Western politicians and liberal intellectuals to understand the radical novelty (143) of Islamic Fundamentalism in the event, Haghighi forwards the possibility of thinking it through its own power for creation and its organization of a post-Nieztschean Deity. The untimely forces lurking here will be obvious to all. The Absolute State has no citizens, only axioms (142), recalls Haghigi, as one is left wondering how Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair like their lobsters. Shocking. Positively Shocking.
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1 Table of Contents

11 With or Without Lacan?

13 With or Without Lacan?

15 With or Without Lacan?

17 With or Without Lacan?

19 With or Without Lacan?

21 With or Without Lacan?

23 With or Without Lacan?

25 With or Without Lacan?

27 With or Without Lacan?

29 With or Without Lacan?

31 With or Without Lacan?

33 With or Without Lacan?

Claire Colebrook says about Deleuze and Guattari:

35 With or Without Lacan?

But already a few pages earlier she writes:

37 With or Without Lacan?

and reassuring us:

This return to the stem is different, though, to a mutual becoming-Other.

39 With or Without Lacan?

Writing Becoming-Woman: The Movement of Deleuzean Thought in Contemporary American Poetry

I lie in a field of anxiety and sense perceptions someone asks me

The mosh pit is thrashing about in masking tape.

The more thrashing, the more sticking.

In The Compass Room, a poem that appears later in the book,

69 That Hysterical Discourse

71 That Hysterical Discourse

73 That Hysterical Discourse

75 That Hysterical Discourse

77 That Hysterical Discourse

79 That Hysterical Discourse

81 That Hysterical Discourse

83 That Hysterical Discourse

85 That Hysterical Discourse

87 That Hysterical Discourse

89 That Hysterical Discourse

91 That Hysterical Discourse

93 That Hysterical Discourse

95 That Hysterical Discourse

97 That Hysterical Discourse Works Cited

The Female Spectators Laughter: AntiOedipus to Free Female Spectatorship

101 The Female Spectators Laughter

103 The Female Spectators Laughter

105 The Female Spectators Laughter

107 The Female Spectators Laughter

109 The Female Spectators Laughter

111 The Female Spectators Laughter

113 The Female Spectators Laughter

115 The Female Spectators Laughter

117 The Female Spectators Laughter

119 The Female Spectators Laughter

121 The Female Spectators Laughter

Encountering Hegel and Deleuze: Towards a Feminist Pedagogy of the Concept

125 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

127 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

129 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

131 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

133 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

135 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

137 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

139 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

141 Encountering Hegel and Deleuze

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