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ACTUAL VIRTUAL - APRIL 2006
ISSN 1752-5624
The Secret of Theory
This paper examines Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida’s different conceptions of the secret and the ways in which secrecy offers a new formal paradigm for the reading of literature. Following suggestions in A Thousand Plateaus and The Fold, it examines the ways in which the structure of the secret is central to Henry James’ literary practice. Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of the secret in Henry James, and in the novella in general, suggests a modernist aesthetics that would run counter to the vitalist ethic and aesthetics so often attributed to the Deleuze of the cinema books. It concludes by arguing that literary history has always harboured a vitalist aesthetic, which culminates in literary modernism, and that there are ways in which we can read Deleuze beyond vitalism. The question or problem that dominates a minoritarian ethic of literature is not, “How can literature be adequate to life?” but “How much life can literature (or philosophy) bear?
Professor Claire Colebrook, University of Edinburgh
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