Becoming Fiction: Sarraute, Stein, Hemingway

Abstract

In her work on Deleuze and film theory, Patricia Pisters posits a significant distinction between a Deleuzian and a Lacanian approach to the question of how we engage with filmic images. While the latter model inevitably situates the viewer as possessor/victim of the Gaze, for Deleuze,

There is only an attempt to reason and to establish adequate relations that could improve life and increase the power to act. The subject’s desire is not based on negativity and lack (and hence not based on sexual difference and castration), but it is a positive desire to make connections. The image is not seen as a representation, an umbilical cord, but as a thought-provoking encounter. (The Matrix 21)

This observation is made in the context of discussing Hitchcock’s great corpus of film that lends itself to making such “connections,” though I would suggest that Deleuze’s notion of positive desire is relevant to any engagement with art, particularly certain examples of minimalist art, be they visual or otherwise. For Deleuze and Guattari, like Spinoza, desire does not originate in lack, but from an impulse toward joy and becoming, a trajectory that “constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernability, a no-man’s land, a non-localizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 179). In other words, the desiring subject constitutes a process in this view, but one that is not always already delimited by a “localizable” and definitive relation to the other. Rather, one is capable of moving in the direction of a new feeling, seeing and experiencing of oneself alongside, or in provisional conjunction with, that which is other.¹