as the most alien book imaginable from The Phenomenology of Perception.

This is the first in a series of posts, initiated by the suggestions of Evan Duq in his blog ‘Working on concepts‘. I’m in the throes of some intensive writing practice over the summer as I try to get the first draft of my new book into shape and currently am working on a paper for the ‘Strange Encounters: Kant and Deleuze’ conference we’re organising at Greenwich…so throwing LOS into the mix should be good.

I’m using the Athlone 1990 edition and all references are to that unless otherwise stated. Whilst this is a re-reading (in my case) of LOS I am going to approach it to a large extent as though it were a fresh reading…inevitably this will be slightly distorted by the existing annotations in the text but what I want to note is that these are reading notes rather than sustained critical commentary. Certain comments are inevitably going to be extremely tenuous and at times plain wrong…the freedom to be wrong, however, is part of the nature of the internet and why students quoting texts and online commentaries should remember caveat emptor!

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LOS begins with a rather short and sweet preface that takes on a quite traditional role of introducing the text rather than philosophically positioning the reader in regard to the text. The first thing of note is the reference to ‘modern reader’ and a set of elements to be found within Lewis Carroll that would ‘please’ such a modern reader. The elements seem to refer to structuralist type aspects of form, as well as aspects of a psychoanalytic interest (children’s books “or, rather, books for little girls” and an explicit mention of “a profound psychoanalytic content“). Who, then, is the ‘modern reader’? Someone embedded within a psychoanalytic practice of reading? Someone embedded, moreoever, in a specifically structuralist psychoanalytic reading, ie; a Lacanian? Is the suggestion - perhaps - that Deleuze is presenting a text which should be of profound interest to the Lacanian reader and as such a common ground of discussion or theoretical concept creation? It seems likely, at least at the moment, that this is the case. If so this suggests a certain ‘audience’ for LOS - viz, the Lacanian reader, but an audience that needs to attend to something usually forgotten. “Over and above the immediate pleasure” Deleuze says (and I would want to check the French edition here to see whether jouissance is the specific term at work in this sentence) “there is something else” in the work of Carroll, that being the play of sense and nonsense. This “connection between language” (one form of sense) “and the unconscious” is readily present, Deleuze says, but he then indicates again the ’something else’ he wants to bring to attention, “what else is this marriage connected with” (xiii). Read the rest of this entry »