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THE SUBJECT OF LITERATURE BETWEEN DERRIDA AND DELEUZE - law or life?

In this essay I would like to address what is arguably the most critical and productive subjects with which to compare and contrast the philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze, the subject of literature. The work of both thinkers privileges their relation to the literary process as well as to certain modern writers that they share in common. It is perhaps due to this affiliation that Derrida comes later to confess in his eulogy that “Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this ‘generation.’”1 (Although anyone familiar with Derrida’s mode of confession should already be aware that such a statement is full of potential contradictions and qualifications, so at the same time one must also allow for the opposite sense – that Deleuze is perhaps the one he feels most remote from in this generation of French philosophers.) At the same time, their own statements on the difference between their treatment of the question of literature have been scant and, particularly in the case of Deleuze, there is little evidence that he has confronted the full weight of Derrida’s writings on literature after Of Grammatology (1967/1976). For the purposes of my comparative investigation concerning the status of the “question of literature” in the work of both philosophers, I will focus my attention on two “exemplary cases” that Derrida and Deleuze could be said to share in common: the cases of Antonin Artaud and Herman Melville’s “Bartelby, the Scrivener.” Before turning to examine these cases, however, I must pause to explicate the middle of this proposition that Derrida and Deleuze share something in common with regard to the question of literature, particularly something so enigmatic as the figures of Artaud and Bartelby. The terms partage and partager already invoke the Derridean construction of “sharing” which primarily means “to divide”; actually, the logic of something shared in common refers more to the particular manner of dividing things up, perhaps even the same thing, than to the sense of having something in common. For example, one can have a “share” (partage) in the public stocks of a company, in contemporary market terminology, and this does not have anything to do with a simple concept of sharing, and does not even require that the shareholders know one another. According to Robert, the word “partager” can also be defined as the manner of dividing a set