Abstract
Oppo examines the border between philosophy and literature, framing his reading of Lewis Carroll using Deleuze’s analysis in The Logic of Sense, arguing that the border between philosophy and literature must be explored in the context of language, meaning, and reference. The contrasting perspectives of objectivity and subjectivity, where meaning is relational, is one way of conceptualizing this borderland; Deleuze conceives of this border as the contrast between surface and depth. Oppo argues that sense has a dynamic structure where inside and outside are entangled, as in a Mobius strip, and that this structure reveals that all sense is rooted in nonsense. Oppo suggests the fragility of sense, as it constantly ‘stutters’ and threatens to fall into the abyss of nonsense.
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Notes
- 1.
The birth of an autonomous system of arts originates at the end of the seventeenth century and culminates in the eighteenth century with the concept of beaux arts, as opposed to the useful arts, as specified in particular by Charles Batteux in his book Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746). Unlike other kinds of arts, the beaux arts have their own objective in pure pleasure: eloquence and architecture are, in fact, excluded by Batteux, whereas poetry remains the most important art as it embraces the possibility of grasping not only ‘our world’ but also ‘other worlds’: ‘Si ce monde ne lui suffit pas, elle crée des mondes nouveaux, qu’elle embellit de demeures enchantées…’ (Batteux, Les beaux arts, 3).
- 2.
However debated and articulated, not to mention ambiguous, this issue may be, the idea of a correspondence between a structure of beliefs and a structure of facts permeates the whole history of philosophy, from Plato (Sophist 262E-263D) and Aristotle (Metaphysics Γ 7: 1011b 26–27) to Frege, Russell, and Tarski, and is indeed to be considered ‘the most venerable of all kinds of theories of truth’ (Kirkham, Theories of Truth, 119). On this, cf. Kirkham, Theories of Truth, Lynch, The Nature of Truth, and Künne, Conceptions of Truth.
- 3.
For a definition of naturalism in Quine , see Quine , Theories and Things, 67–72. For a recent survey on this question in relation to the legitimacy of a subjective point of view on the world, see L. Rudder Baker, Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective. In its stronger construal, philosophical naturalism maintains that it is only through science, that is, an objective point of view on things, that we can achieve knowledge and understanding of reality. The existence of a tension in Quine himself between this kind of physicalism and the idea of ‘inscrutability of reference’ in his theory of meaning is well known, however.
- 4.
Cf. these two arguments especially in Plato , Republic , X, 596c–597a and 601a. Much more directly, and with a particular focus on poetry , Plato examines the same problem in the Ion. In this dialogue, through Socrates’ questioning of Ion the rhapsode, he explores the origin and impetus of poetry , the poet’s relationship to the things he discusses, and that of the critic to the poet and his work. On the deceptive effect of arts, see also Plato , Sophist 235 E 5–236 A 2.
- 5.
The claim (‘as if’) for universal validity of the judgement of taste is a crucial juncture of the entire first part of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (cf. in particular I. Kant , Critique of Judgment , Book I, Second Moment, §§ 8–9). What is claimed by this purely subjective (aesthetic ) judgement is an exemplary validity. Humankind itself demonstrates this exemplarity and thereby justifies the unity and universality of such judgement, so that taste may be designated a sensus communis aestheticus. Apart from this, however, for Kant such a judgement is not objective and does not improve our knowledge: it is merely a free activity of the faculties of cognition with the unique certitude of giving us pleasure and displeasure.
- 6.
This is, roughly, the appearance of philosophical aesthetics as a modern discipline, which starts with Alexander G. Baumgarten (1750). For Baumgarten, aesthetics is the science of sensitive knowledge. For the first time—thereby marking the birth of modern aesthetics—an aesthetic view beyond logic is recognized that is neither moral, nor mystic nor practical, but fully cognitive and theoretical.
- 7.
See Jürgen Habermas, “Philosophy and Science as Literature ?,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), 207–208.
- 8.
Willard Van Orman Quine , From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 44.
- 9.
Bill Martin, “Analytic Philosophy’s Narrative Turn: Quine, Rorty, Davidson,” in Literary Theory After Davidson, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 124–143.
- 10.
According to Habermas, this is what nearly happens with philosophers like Blumenberg, Simmel, Derrida, and sometimes Nietzsche and Adorno . Nonetheless, for Habermas, a certain level of criticism and a validity claim on the objective and external world is what should define philosophy as opposed to literature . See Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 205–228.
- 11.
Hilary Putnam , Realism With a Human Face, edited by James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 209.
- 12.
Ibid., 209–210. Putnam’s emphasis.
- 13.
Ibid., 211.
- 14.
Ibid., 137.
- 15.
Ibid., 138.
- 16.
Thomas Nagel , The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3.
- 17.
Michael Dummett, “Frege and Husserl on Reference,” in The Seas of Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 224–229.
- 18.
Gilles Deleuze, La logica del senso (1st ed. in Italian 1975), trans. M. de Stefanis (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006), 293. My translation.
- 19.
Deleuze, Logica del senso, 293–294.
- 20.
Ibid., 294.
- 21.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1st ed. in French 1969), trans. M. Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 22.
- 22.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, xiv.
- 23.
Ibid., 6.
- 24.
Ibid., 7. Deleuze’s emphasis.
- 25.
Ibid., 6–7.
- 26.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 8.
- 27.
Ibid., 11.
- 28.
Cf. the sixteenth and seventeenth series.
- 29.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 125.
- 30.
Ibid. Deleuze’s emphasis.
- 31.
Cf. in particular the fifth, eleventh, and twelfth series, in Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 28–35 and 66–81.
- 32.
Cf. ‘Sixth Series on Serialization,’ in Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 36–41.
- 33.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 19. In this list, Deleuze sums up some classic conceptions of meaning, namely, ‘denotation,’ ‘manifestation,’ and ‘signification.’ The ‘sense’ is in fact extraneous to all of them, he says, just as it is irreducible to any ‘individual state of affairs, particular images, personal beliefs, and universal or general concepts’ (19). Indifferent to both particular and general, personal and impersonal, sense would be, therefore, ‘of an entirely different nature’ (19).
- 34.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 19–20.
- 35.
Ibid., 19.
- 36.
Ibid., 66.
- 37.
Cf. ‘Fourteenth Series of Double Causality,’ in Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 94–96.
- 38.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 1.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Ibid., 42.
- 41.
Deleuze gives an example, which he takes from Sylvie and Bruno , of such a ‘strange object,’ that is, ‘an eight-handed watch with reversing pin which never follows time. On the contrary, time follows it. It makes events return in two ways, either in a becoming-mad which reverses the sequential order, or with slight variations according to the Stoic fatum. The young cyclist, who falls over a box in the first series of events, now proceeds uninjured. But when the hands of the watch return to their original position, the cyclist lies once again wounded on the wagon which takes him to the hospital. It is as if the watch knew how to conjure up the accident, that is, the temporal occurrence of the event, but not the Event itself, the result, the wound as an eternal truth’ (Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 42).
- 42.
See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 44–47.
- 43.
Cf. ‘Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl,’ in Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 82–93.
- 44.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 83–84.
- 45.
Ibid., 84. ‘Summing this up,’ Deleuze concludes, ‘we could say that Artaud considers Lewis Carroll a pervert, a little pervert, who holds onto the establishment of a surface language , and who has not felt the real problem of a language in depth – namely, the schizophrenic problem of suffering, of death, and of life’ (84).
- 46.
See Martin Heidegger , On the Way to Language, trans. P.D. Hertz (San Francisco, Ca.: Harper and Row, 1982).
- 47.
In Anti-Oedipus (1972) Deleuze and Guattari introduce the ‘body -without-organs’ concept to represent the experience of schizophrenics who feel organs as ‘pure intensities’ that can be linked together in an infinite number of directions. In this regard, what is called ‘delirium’ is no other than a wider and more complex matrix by which all the intensities are not reducible to personal and familiar coordinates, but are directed to the world-historical reality.
- 48.
Deleuze, La logica del senso, 294.
- 49.
Deleuze, La logica del senso, 294–295.
- 50.
Gilles Deleuze, “Lewis Carroll,” in Essays Critical and Clinical (1st ed. in French 1993), trans. W. Smith and M.A. Greco (Minneapolis, Mn.: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 21.
- 51.
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 21.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 9.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 4–8.
- 56.
Ibid., 9–10.
- 57.
Ibid., 10.
- 58.
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 22.
- 59.
Ibid., 21.
- 60.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 11.
- 61.
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 22.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 55.
- 64.
Ibid., 54.
- 65.
Jacques Derrida , Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1.
- 66.
Ibid., 42.
- 67.
See Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
- 68.
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4.
- 69.
Ibid., 6.
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Oppo, A. (2017). Alice’s Parallel Series: Carroll, Deleuze, and the ‘Stuttering Sense’ of the World. In: Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (eds) Borderlands and Liminal Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_11
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