Michael Goddard (Lodz)

Michael Goddard (Lodz)

The Series, Chaosmosis and Virtual Resonance: Deleuze’s Encounter with Gombrowicz

The relations between the thought of Gilles Deleuze and literature can usefully be approached through examining his productive encounters with a series of writers including Artaud, Beckett, Borges, Proust, Kafka and Sacher-Masoch. These encounters are never instances of applying readymade philosophical concepts to literature but rather of opening philosophy to literature, or more precisely to the philosophical concepts developed implicitly in works of literature in the form of percepts and affects. One particularly productive but less discussed encounter is with the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who Deleuze refers to on numerous occasions but especially in relation to the concepts of repetition, the series and chaosmosis as these concepts are developed in Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition.

This paper will examine this encounter, focusing on the role two of Gombrowicz’s most important works, Pornografia and Cosmos, play in the development of Deleuze’s thought in the late 1960’s. It will show how in these works there is already a kind of ‘post-structuralism,’ in that the deployment of repetition and the proliferation of series is an implicit critique of the then prevalent structuralist and quasi-structuralist accounts of both psychic and social organization. On the actual level of citation, what Deleuze picks up from these novels seems limited to one enigmatic scene of simulacral repetition from Pornografia and the deployment of divergent series as the compositional principle of Cosmos. However, I will argue that in the passages surrounding these citations, traces of a virtual encounter with Gombrowicz can be found in the way Deleuze elaborates the concepts of repetition, the series and the cosmos as chaosmosis. I will argue that this encounter itself takes the form of a crossing point between the divergent series of Deleuze’s philosophy and Gombrowicz’s writing that at a certain point crystallised around these common notions or shared concepts. In conclusion, I will argue that Deleuze’s later and even briefer citations of Gombrowicz add further confirmation of a shared project of subversion of prevailing forms in their respective fields and the development of a productive relation to chaos, through the construction of resonant abstract planes. Utilising the scheme laid out in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy, I will argue that this virtual intersection between the plane of immanence of philosophy and the plane of literary composition in the encounter between Deleuze and Gombrowicz, is highly revelatory of the relations between philosophy and literature and other aesthetic practices more generally.