The Long and the Short of it… Moving Images in Proust and Beckett

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze’s career as a philosopher and critical theorist held important implications for literary and cinematographic analysis. In particular, Deleuze’s notion of heccéites [haecceities], ¹ or the ‘thisness’ at the heart of singularities, offers a tantalizing approach to understanding the unique rhythms and affective intensities in the writings of Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett. The Duns Scotian concept of haecceity recurs throughout Deleuze’s work, notably in his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, but also in Mille Plateaux, written with Félix Guattari.² For Deleuze, the term designates sites of ‘intensities’ and dynamic connections in texts that precede, or limn, any notion of an individual or personal subject. They point instead to relational movements seen as the impersonal event of writing, of writing’s drive towards making meanings. If you will, sens (meaning) is conflated with sens (movement, direction, as in sens de la visite) in Deleuze’s use of this term. Such kinetic force fields in the text carry or bear its affective elements through their cinematic-like assemblages: ‘Les heccéités sont seulement des degrés de puissance qui se composent, auxquels correspondent un pouvoir d’affecter et d’être affecté, des affects actifs ou passifs, des intensités […] des rapports cinématiques qui constituent des agencements collectifs [faits] de compositions de vitesse’ (D, pp.111-13; my emphasis) [Haecceities are merely degrees of force that gather together and to which a power to affect or to be affected corresponds: active or passive affects, intensities, cinematic relationships which constitute collective arrangements made up of formations of speed].