Europe: Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière

Abstract

At the end of his book, La Chair des Mots, politiques de l'écriture (1998), Jacques Rancière evokes a wall, a frontier, in the nomad and plastic thinking of Gilles Deleuze. The approach is twofold: on the one hand, literary, summoning affections and concepts but, above all perceptions, these conceptual characters that Deleuze inaugurates in a between-two of philosophy and literature, «philosophiture», he would say, or «literasophy»; on the other hand, it is political, evoking the horizontality and verticality, equality and difference of a people to come. In both cases, Rancière envisions the possibility of a Deleuzian wall, which would be something of the order of the frontier. We know how Deleuze abhorred frontiers and, at least, among it, he would agenciate cracks and lines of passages, lines of escape, lines of flight. To retake the idea that Jacques Rancière explores in his text entitled Deleuze, Bartleby, and the literary formula, there would be a wall in Deleuze's thought, a limiting barrier of his own thinking. The end or the cut of the flow, according to Rancière, is stated as it: «The strength of any strong thought is also the ability of disposing itself its aporia, the point where it no longer passes». Now, Deleuze avoid the point, «to make the point» repulses him, always prefering the line. So this wall-end-point could not be a strong aporia in the bosom of a strong thought without also being a line of escape, a passage, an opening or a pause before gaining speed again. A wall of slowness to better accelerate. Here is what this article proposes to enunciate: from the characters that Deleuze extracts from the novels of the authors and the literature he appreciates to reach the haecceities, these a-subjective singularities that are not identities but are perfectly individuated, to assure them a territory and a voice, the possibility of the univocity of an European people to come. ; This work was funded by national funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UIDB/04041/2020 (Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion