"We Shouldn't Judge Deleuze and Guattari": A Response to Eugene Holland

I am writing in response to an essay published in the Spring 2003 issue of Research in African Literatures, "Representation and Misrepresentation in Postcolonial Literature and Theory," by Eugene Holland. His article was ostensibly a "review essay" of two books, Celia Britton's Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance and my volume entitled Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. As the designated representative of "misrepresentation" in Mr. Holland's opus, I am invited to respond to charges that seem to stem from a range of causes: from simple if profound philosophical disagreement to questions of minute textual interpretation. Holland, who makes his entry into the criticism of (the criticism of) postcolonial literature in this essay (with "insights and feedback" from the editors of this journal), dispenses quickly with any semblance of professional courtesy, denouncing one chapter of my book as a "maniacal attack," "obsessive," a "diatribe," and "infuriating." ¹ What so disturbed Mr. Holland? We must attempt to find out. At stake in this debate are a number of important issues, including the uses of theory in postcolonial contexts, questions about the rules by which a text may and may not be read, and the relation of the virtual to the real. My language in this response will of necessity be strong, but at no point will I allow myself to cross outside the bounds of professionalism as Mr. Holland did.

I will move directly to the part of Holland's article that is concerned with my essay on Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, because the rest of his essay is so clearly dispensable. Without the "infuriating" provocation of my critique of Deleuze and Guattari, Holland would have had no reason or qualification to write about the two books in question; the rest of his essay is consequently almost entirely anodyne and paraphrastic.

My essay "Beyond Identity: The Postidentitarian Predicament in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus" was first published in Diacritics in 1993, then reprinted in Nationalists and Nomads in 1998. It is concerned with the question of what lies beyond the supposedly stable forms of identity that used to rule the world; more particularly, it examines closely the form of "postidentitarian" thought that is offered by A Thousand Plateaus. By scrutinizing the sources of Deleuze and Guattari's knowledge, and their use of those sources, particularly in their footnotes, I raised questions about their and their disciples' claims to operate on a plane that is somehow free from the burdens and the ethics of representation. My stated goal was "to read the referential within a universe that is supposed to be purely virtual" (M 173). My conclusion was that the nomadology of A Thousand Plateaus was seriously compromised by its own gestures of reference, its "points of contact" with the world. I suggested that we would have to do better, that we needed "a more convincing ethic of flow" than that which Deleuze and Guattari described. ²

Overall, it is clear that Holland is offended, curiously, by my "close attention to detail," which he finds "obsessive." ³ The six pages that I wrote comparing an important but mostly unacknowledged precursor text, Pierre Hubac's Les nomades, to A Thousand Plateaus are a case in point: Holland sees no virtue in this comparison and learns nothing from it; he would rather that I interpret Deleuze and Guattari only through the lens of works by Deleuze and Guattari. I will return to that issue below. Why does Holland not want Deleuze and Guattari's magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus and its sources to be studied so closely? Is it not a normal and valued purpose of scholarship to test and to question the foundations of highly influential works? To test ideas against other ideas in some sort of intellectual context? Have we not learned that...