Theory Matters (review)

THE COMPAKATIST historical, political, erotic, etc., is disrupted by the refusal ofany diegetic stability. What matters in Bene's Richard IIIis the replacement ofnarrative coherence (as we know it from Shakespeare) with a fluctuating series of"events." Bene's theatre belongs to a minor literature through this movement of reinventing the classical structure ofthe play. He engages in writing and acting in a "foreign" language, a "different" Italian that, while keeping the basic references to a central meaning (what Deleuze calls "lines offlight"), becomes like a dialectal version ofthe unified norm. It is through this "confusion ofsound and the representation ofsound" that expression becomes "new": reshaping (de-territorializing) the familiar and "becoming " literature through the creation ofnew relations oftextual solidarity within the community ofreaders. Resisting Platonism, Deleuze sees everything as contained by the event-movement fueled by affective intensities. Nature as such does not exist, since it would lead us to the Platonic stasis ofthe eternal Idea. Instead, what exists is the verbal dimension, which alone is capable oftransformation. Even when he uses the word "Ideas," Deleuze sees them as physical attributes, as Bogue usefully points out: "Ideas are like Goethe's light, phenomena ofinstantaneous movement and speed, forces that have real, material existence . . ." (167). Becomingother through writing is the condition ofcreation in general, ofthe aesthetic viewed as event-phenomenon. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts concludes Bogue's survey ofDeleuze 's philosophy ofthe aesthetic. The relation between philosophy and the arts is defined at the outset, according to the "biological model ofthe embryo." Philosophy "extracts" the creative force while the arts "embody" it. In other words, the relation is one of symbiosis. The connection between the arts and philosophy in Deleuze's thinking is expressed, according to Bogue, through a summoning of powers "that are at once inside and outside ofphilosophy" (192). A concrete example illustrating this correspondence between arts and philosophy is the painting ofFrancis Bacon. Deleuze observes that the canvas is not blank at all—like Mallarmé's blank page—before the painter draws the first contours and lines. Quite the opposite, it already contains images and fragments of a broad cultural discourse scattered through the artist's brain. Such images combine visual forces (physical energy) and psychic residues that clash and outline the process of becoming-art as expressive function. The unconscious is thus "impersonal" in that it signifies the collective memory the artist has to reckon with, while the conscious is the projected energy towards an aesthetic goal. Tracing all of these intricate threads that engage philosophy and arts, Bogue's study ofDeleuzian thought accomplishes a formidable task: it proves in all its nuances that both thinking and aesthetic expression belong to the wide flow that we simply call life. Florin BerindeanuCase Western Reserve University VINCENT B. LEITCH. TheoryMatters. New York/London: Routledge, 2003. xi + 195 pp. When some "theory people" started all that talk about the "end oftheory" and the "post-theory" age about ten years ago, they got a lot offolks confused. Were theorists already theorizing their own obsolescence? After all, back in the nineties, theory was still the youngest discipline ofour profession, barely in its mid-twenties and, for all its glamour, a bone ofcontention in many departments. This is one of the paradoxes that Vincent Leitch unravels in his new book by pointing out that Vole 28 (2004): 153 KEVTEM) ESSAYS what has disappeared or diminished is not theoryper se but its insularity, theoretical discourse in its "high" or "grand" form set apart from other discourses. Meanwhile, the old controversies have not died down. But amidst these debates and fueled by them, linguistics- and then philosophy-based theory has expanded so widely, has encroached upon, and subsequently combined with, other fields, methodologies, and vocabularies so intimately that it has permeated almost every academic nook and cranny. Like Pascal's God, its center is now everywhere, whereas back in the seventies, afterthe structuralist earthquake and its poststructuralist aftershocks, one could pinpoint a center around which theory was more or less organized. Afterwards, Leitch argues, theory—theory in North America, I hasten to specify —went through profound "disorganization" and became "postmodernized." Its hard core "softened" and spread out across academic domains, where...