Life Drawing: A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence

Quite A Crowd

vii The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, that was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I did not write this book alone. I couldn’t have. True enough, my fingers wrote or typed its various chapters in various drafts, but I didn’t write or type alone. I couldn’t have. Nothing is written alone. Writing is folding heterogeneous materials together, egg whites into pancake batter. True enough, it may be your fingers around the wooden spoon, but your fingers are not alone; with them always there is the family recipe and the irreplaceable Sunday breakfasts still alive in your affections. Nothing is written alone. Writing is writing together. Often the roman-numeraled pages of a book are the only place we can feel the heterogeneity of the materials folded into its pages. I still remember when my student hands anxiously opened a very large and heavy book on q u i t e a c r o w d viii Quite a Crowd Frege to find myself suddenly put at ease by the opening words of Dummett ’s preface. I am always disappointed when a book lacks a preface: it is like arriving at someone’s house for dinner, and being conducted straight into the dining-room. A preface is personal, the body of the book is impersonal: the preface tells you the author’s feelings about his book, or some of them. A reader who wishes to remain aloof can skip the preface without loss; but one who wants to be personally introduced has, I feel, the right to be. (Dummett [1973] 1981, ix) In prefaces we learn of the heterogeneous materials buffeting the author’s writing. In Dummett’s case, among other buffetings, we learn of the importance of his working against racism, of his gratitude to his favorite conversational partners, and of his shock at discovering Frege’s anti-Semitism. My skepticism about the category of the personal, the concept of the person, also moves me to be skeptical of the distinction between the personal preface and the impersonal body of the book. The body of the book is traversed by many material energies. Some of these will be connected to everything; some will be as nearly discrete as the gift of a quotation from Ecce Homo. But only nearly. The most discrete of gifts harbors connections in all directions , and it is no indiscretion to enjoy them. I do not, therefore, think it unusual that I wrote this book in the exciting winds of places, friends, and conversations enjoyed. But I have not tried to hide that fact, and that may take some readers by surprise. Even if every author writes with the voices of others echoing on the accumulating pages, still one mostly conceals this fact from one’s readers, thus maintaining the pretense of organized personal authorship. But part of the joy of writing this book has been the space it provided for enjoying, once again, so much of the past almost ten years. The joys of continuing conversations otherwise . As I have not tried to hide this fact from my readers, you will find irregular references to persons and places the winds of whose philosophical energies drew my writing on. I think of this as a way of making manifest the dispersed origins of thinking which are disguised by the usual practice of pretending the author’s voice and the voices of others can be kept separate . Separated by the convention of numbering the voices of others in roman numerals and of the author’s own in arabic. But the separation is only pretense. Writing is writing...