Deviant Masculinity and Deleuzian Difference in Proust and Beckett

  • Jennifer M. Jeffers
Chapter

Abstract

In Proust and Signs, Gilles Deleuze maintains that, in In Search of Lost Time, Proust is a philosopher of difference because he goes beyond the ‘abstract truths of “philosophy” that compromise no one and do not disturb’.1 Of course, this version of philosophy is the Deleuzian rendering of ‘state philosophy’ which is aligned with western philosophy’s obsession with identity. Deleuze’s campaign against ‘state philosophy’ and identity-thinking began in the 1960s and continued throughout his entire career. In Deleuze and the Political, Paul Patton argues that:

[f]rom his essay on Proust (1972) through to What is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze has pursued the question of the nature of thought. What is at stake in this question is the effort to describe an exercise of thought which is ‘opposed to the traditional image which philosophy has projected or erected in thought in order to subjugate it and prevent it from functioning’.2

Keywords

State Philosophy 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, tr. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 16.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. 3.
    Gilles Deleuze, ‘On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought’, in Desert Islands and other Texts, 1953–1974, tr. Michael Taormina (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), [pp. 135–42]Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Gilles Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, tr. Constantine Boundas, in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, eds Constantine Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994), [pp. 23–33].Google Scholar
  5. J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar
  6. Oswald Ducrot as ‘Quand dire c’est faire’ (Paris: Hermann, 1972).Google Scholar
  7. 5.
    George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 4.Google Scholar
  8. 6.
    In their discussion of major and minor languages in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari define the major language tradition in the following terms: ‘Majority implies a constant, of expression and content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-whit e-het erosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language [...]’: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 105.Google Scholar
  9. 8.
    Lynne Segal, ‘Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties’, in Gender, ed. Anna Tripp (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 72–86Google Scholar
  10. 9.
    Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 6 vols (New York: Vintage, 1982), IV, p. 355.Google Scholar
  11. 10.
    Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, lames Joyce, andMarcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. 11.
    Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1995).Google Scholar
  13. 12.
    Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1997), p. 29a.Google Scholar
  14. 13.
    Berthold Schoene, ‘The Union and Jack: British Masculinities, Pomophobia, and the Post-nation’, in Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago, eds Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 86.Google Scholar
  15. 14.
    Peter Boxall, ‘Beckett and Homoeroticism’, in Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 111.Google Scholar
  16. 15.
    Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, in tr. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Essays Critical and Clinical, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 156.Google Scholar

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© Jennifer M. Jeffers 2009

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  • Jennifer M. Jeffers

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