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Frida Beckman
Abstract
Exploring the evolution of the conceptual persona of the idiot from
the philosophical idiot in Deleuze to the Russian idiot in Deleuze and
Guattari, this article suggests that their use of the figure of Antonin
Artaud as a model for an idiocy that is freed from the image of thought
is problematic since Artaud in fact evinces a nostalgia for the capacity
for thought. The article invites the writings of Kathy Acker and argues
that Acker makes possible a more successful way of thinking of the event
of thought beyond the Image and thereby a new conceptual persona of
the post-Russian idiot.
Keywords: idiocy, image of thought, conceptual persona, Antonin
Artaud, Kathy Acker, Gilles Deleuze
There is thus something that is destroying my thinking,
a something which does not prevent me from being
what I might be, but which leaves me, if I may say so,
in abeyance.
(Antonin Artaud)
the idiot serves as a basis rather than an escape from the dogmatic image
of thought. In the overarching movement of Cartesian subjectivity,
whereby thought returns to confirm the I as the basis of its own
trajectory, the idiot steps in and allows thinking itself to remain an
unthought category.
This paper seeks to address the figure of the idiot, not only as a
neglected theme in Deleuze studies, but also in terms of the ways in
which it could be reconfigured and used as a means to move beyond
rather than predetermine the Image of thought. To enable this, it revisits
one of the most established figures in the history of the writing of idiocy
and madness, Antonin Artaud, and invites the work of a less obvious
writer in such a context, American experimental novelist Kathy Acker.
Moving from Deleuze’s early conception of the idiot to the later one
developed with Félix Guattari and from Artaud to Acker, this paper will
suggest firstly that Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the figure of Artaud is
problematic and secondly that Acker renders possible a more appro-
priate and successful way of thinking of the event of thought beyond the
Image.
are masters of their own language, all those for whom words mean
something, all those for whom there are currents of thought [ . . . ] and who
have named these currents of thought I am thinking of their specific task
and the mechanical creaking their minds give out at every gust of wind.
(Artaud 1968: 75)
Unlike this ‘trash’ of ‘those who still believe in orientation of the mind’,
Artaud celebrates and affirms his confusions. ‘I truly lose myself in
thought like in dreams’, he writes, ‘the way one returns to thought,
suddenly. I am he who knows the inmost recesses of loss’ (Artaud 1968:
74–5). This loss is the loss of the self-evidence of thought and Artaud
thereby rejects the idiocy of philosophy and its presumption about the
self-evident capacity to think. Returning to thought ‘suddenly’ means
a production of thought that does not begin nor return to the innately
capable thinker but that is produced in thought itself.
Despite his uncertainties and failures, Artaud’s is an ambitious project
that somehow continues to strive toward new possibilities for being
and for thought; it is, as he states himself, a confrontation with ‘the
metaphysics I created for myself, in accordance with the void I carry
within me’ (Artaud 1968: 81). This means that although Artaud rejects
the self-evidence of the thinking ‘I’, he nonetheless believes in the
creativity of thought. But to reach this creativity, there must be an
originality that only the idiot could provide because to reach real
thinking one must slough off the ‘masters of language’ who ‘orient
thought’.
If we take a look at Artaud’s private letters, however, we will see
how Artaud struggles to find a way of justifying a thinking that seems
to lack the will to truth that would justify it as subjective thought. ‘[I]s
the substance of my thought so tangled’, he writes in the first of his
many letters to Jacques Rivière, ‘and is its general beauty rendered so
inactive by the impurities and uncertainties with which it is marred that
it does not manage to exist literally? The entire problem of my thinking
is involved. For me, it is no less than a matter of knowing whether or
not I have the right to continue thinking, in verse or prose’ (Artaud
1965: 8–9). Artaud’s uncertainty about his own ‘right’ to continue
thinking suggests a frustration, a sense of a capacity lost to him. Thought
continually ‘abandons’ him, leaves him on the border of non-being. The
poems he so insistently offers to Rivière are crucial to him because an
existing uncertainty is still so much more reassuring than non-existence.
Artaud, it seems, clearly mourns his professed inability to think, and he is
also pursued by nostalgia; he is in search for a capacity lost, in ‘constant
pursuit of [his own] intellectual being’ (Artaud 1965: 7). While Artaud
The Idiocy of the Event 61
relation of friendship. The friend, they argue, reveals ‘the Greek origin
of philo-sophy’ and the way in which philosophical communication and
reflection ‘violently force the friend into a relationship that is no longer
a relationship with an other but one with an Entity, and Objectality
[Objectité], an Essence – Plato’s friend’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 3).
Such friendship relies on common knowledge and on the self-evidence
of thought and thereby blocks the possibility of creating new concepts,
that is the possibility of thinking. Furthermore, it points to the inevitable
ethics of the event. A philosophical thinking based on intersubjective
idealism, or, rather, a stupefying dialectics, disables thinking through
appropriation and domination of the Other that could unsettle the
presuppositions that make up the Image of thought. The true event of
thought relies on an ethics of true difference, ‘to will the difference’ of
the friend that disrupts rather than negotiates your ability to think.
While the conceptual persona of the friend is not a person in the
material, phenomenal sense in Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, I will
nonetheless stop for a moment to compare cursorily Artaud’s exchanges
with Rivière to an exchange between Acker and Avital Ronell.8 At
first glance, the exchange between Artaud and Rivière reveals the lack
of common knowledge that philosophy presumes and thereby affirms
Artaud’s position as the Deleuzian Russian idiot who rejects the natural
capacity for thought. Artaud anticipates Rivière’s rejection of his work
and even justifies it. ‘You will say to me’, he writes in a postscript, that
‘in order to give an opinion on matters of this kind, another mental
cohesion and another perceptiveness are required’ (Artaud 1965: 12).
Recognising his own failure he realises that ‘it may be necessary to think
further than I do, and perhaps otherwise. I am waiting only for my brain
to change’ (Artaud 1965: 12). But can the lack of ‘proper’ thinking really
be a liberatory thought-event as long as it is measured exactly against
the ‘proper’? Is a thinking that is not only nostalgic, as I have already
suggested, but also painfully aware of its submission as an ‘Entity’ to the
domination of the old philosophical friendship really affirmative of its
own difference?
This exchange suggests a very different ethical relation. In an article
on Acker, Ronell characterises her exchanges with Acker by emphasising
the ‘co’ in conversation. This is a politics of friendship that Ronell
theorises in a discussion whose implications lie well beyond the scope
of the present essay, but that indicate an ethics of ‘being with’
that complicates the origins of thought through the work of Martin
Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. Arguably even more
complex, however, is the ethics of the production of thought in Acker’s
The Idiocy of the Event 63
writing. Acker’s texts, I would suggest, do not rely on the ‘co’ so much as
the ‘con’ in conversation.9 Acker strips philosophy and literature of their
meaning by removing philosophical statements and narrative pieces from
a meaningful context. She uses, or mis-uses or (ab)uses, thought, thereby
undermining it as a meaning-making process. These conversations, then,
imply a very different friendship than that which relies on common
sense.
This con, it is important to note, is not a dishonesty within a moral
system. Rather, it is a dishonesty that displaces this moral system. Or,
more radically, it is a con that displaces the system of self-evident
thought. ‘The only way you can get the real self’, Acker writes in
Great Expectations, ‘is to rip someone off [. . . ]. You’re a con man’
(Acker 1982: 98). What is the nature of a friendship that steals rather
than communicates? What are the ethical implications of such thought?
Stealing, Deleuze has argued, is the very reverse of plagiarism or copying.
Rather than the deadweight of imitation, stealing involves a becoming, a
‘double-capture’ or ‘double-theft’ that is always ‘outside’ or in between
(Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 7). Stealing is a more radical move than
plagiarism in that it produces something new out of the old. Indeed,
Deleuze describes his collaborations with Guattari in these terms of
the productivity of a ‘theft of thoughts’, of being ‘between the twos’.
‘I stole Félix, and I hope he did the same for me’ (Deleuze and Parnet
2002: 17).10
In Acker’s literary production, the act of stealing involves a radical
mode of thought because thinking has become an act of immanent
creation rather than one of nostalgic reproduction. Acker steals
shamelessly from philosophical as well as literary discourse. She
‘borrows’ characters, fragments of stories and historical personages from
the history of literature and philosophy. For example, she includes
the writings of classical Roman poet Propertius and Pauline Réage’s
infamous The Story of O as well as quasi-fictionalised versions of real
life critics such as Sylvère Lotringer and Susan Sontag. Furthermore, she
transcribes lines from other novels and even ‘steals’ entire book titles,
one novel being entitled Great Expectations, another Don Quixote. In
the former, Pip from Charles Dickens’ novel becomes a woman and a
woman (possibly the same, who knows) is taken to Roissy to become O,
Pauline Réage’s masochistic protagonist.
This kind of tactic does not only challenge representation and
meaning in literature; Acker’s unabashed pilfering also challenges the
nature of philosophy as a reflective mode of thinking. Acker’s writing
seemingly mirrors the thematisation of the thinking subject and the
64 Frida Beckman
and at the same time existed in the same body – mine: I was not possible’
(Acker 1988: 33).
Acker’s characters do not only lack the capacity for self-reflexivity,
they also lack the immediate recognition through which thinking could
proceed along the path of common sense. The common sense of
the philosophical idiot functions as such because to him, thinking is
obvious and does not therefore lead to the questioning of thought itself.
Acker’s writing violently opposes such self-evidence of thought. When
Acker’s characters are temporarily and defectively constituted through
philosophical claims, they are constituted, not through thinking, nor
through thinking about thinking, but through someone else’s thinking
about thinking. By extension, there is no possibility for thought to
be truly self-reflexive – thought cannot return to prove the subjective
capacity of the character to think, there are no such circles to be made.
Instead, thought comes to be outside itself, beside itself. When Acker’s
characters are caught in a repetition of thoughts that cannot be identified
as their own, they lose the possibility for coherent self-reflection.
Thus far, Acker’s writing fits well as a thematisation of the Russian
idiot that no longer takes for granted his own pre-existent capacity for
thought. In its forceful mixture of challenging and frequently repulsive
narrative fragments and its unforeseeable textual spaces Acker’s work
is distinctly similar to Artaud’s. Like Artaud, Acker seems to resist
representation in favour of a stuttering text in which characters ebb
and flow without a delineable subjectivity. Acker too questions the
self-evident nature of thought. Acker’s writing, however, does not
only reject reminiscence, it also rejects the nostalgia for the capacity
to think that haunts both Artaud and the conceptual persona of
Deleuze and Guattari’s Russian idiot. In fact, Acker plays with and
ridicules the Cartesian agent capable of improving himself through
thinking. In her text, seemingly philosophical ponderings concerning
the nature of being and thinking are mixed with incoherent writings
on sadistic and masochistic relations. In this way, the ‘instrumental
stance’ to one’s desires, inclinations, tendencies, habits of thought and
feeling is overtly ridiculed. Instead of producing coherent self-reflection,
these philosophical scraps are juxtaposed to the most extreme forms
of physical and unconstrained desires, inclinations and habits. We
read: ‘Stylistically: simultaneous contrasts, extravagancies, incoherences,
half-formed misshapen thoughts, lousy spelling, what signifies what?
What is the secret of this chaos? (Since there’s no possibility, there’s
play. Elegance and completely filthy sex together)’ (Acker 1982: 107).
Thought, here, is exchanged for ‘play’. Thinking, in Acker’s writing, is
66 Frida Beckman
body that it has feared and the potential incapacity that it has ignored.
Is O the possibility for a thinking that is ‘neither given by innateness nor
presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality’ as Deleuze
desires? Beginning with O means beginning from nothing, from a genital
plane of immanence that disables the reminiscence at the basis of the
image of thought from Socrates to Descartes.
Does this mean that we can consider Acker’s fiction as an alternative
configuration of idiocy, one that may be more active than the idiocies
Deleuze and Guattari proffer? Considering Acker’s writing in terms of
idiocy may be perceived as provocative, not in the least because many
feminist critics have pointed to Acker’s writing as offering an important
contribution to the possibility of thinking female subjectivity. As the
many feminist readings of her work suggest, Acker can indeed be said
to challenge the mastery of discourse through pastiche and mimicry
and in this particular respect, her literary project can be discussed in
relation to Luce Irigaray’s philosophical one. Like Irigaray, she follows
the critical approach(es) evinced both in postcolonial and feminist
quarters that see mimesis as introducing a powerful disruptive force
into the dominant discourse that it mimics. However, if this strategy
opens for ‘another articulation’ as Brennan suggests, then this is an
articulation that does not playfully repeat a masculine framework of
thought but that violates it with its repetition. Acker constructs her
characters through statements about the impossibility of identity, about
moving so fast you become ‘a perfect image: closed’, about not being
a name but a movement (Acker 1982: 44, 49 and 63 respectively),
and many others that clearly echo the terminology and thought of
what in her contemporary America was called poststructuralism. By
tying philosophy and its presumptions regarding thinking closely to her
characters while simultaneously subverting its morals, Acker creates a
space that resists any transcendent logic that could determine the nature
of thinking. Unlike Irigaray’s repetition that works to bring out the
feminine potential in the history of metaphysics, Acker’s repetition,
as Naomi Jacobs suggests, ‘is original only in its omissions and
inaccuracies, the absences surrounding its inclusions, the forgetfulness
around its remembering’ (Jacobs 1989: 53). In this sense, Acker’s literary
production invests Irigarayan mimicry with the problem of thinking, not
just beyond a phallogocentric frame of thought, but thinking in itself.
It seems clear, then, that if thinking in Acker’s work is idiotic, it is
not so in the philosophical sense described in Difference and Repetition.
Both her characters and the text itself lack the common sense that
allows presuppositions regarding the nature of thinking. In other words,
The Idiocy of the Event 69
Notes
1. I would like to express my thanks to Dr Charlie Blake for crucial response to an
early draft of this paper, to an anonymous reader for crucial response to a later
draft and to Professor James Williams for helping me make sure that I got my
Images and images right.
The Idiocy of the Event 71
2. Descartes, as Deleuze and Guattari show, works with thought according to three
personae, Eudoxus – the idiot, Polyander – the technician, and Epistemon – the
public expert (What is Philosophy?, 2003: 221).
3. Nicholas de Cusa’s wrote on the figure of the idiot in the fifteenth century and
Deleuze and Guattari point toward him as the first to make the idiot into a
conceptual persona (What is Philosophy?, 2003: 62).
4. ‘The conceptual persona’, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘is the becoming or the
subject of philosophy, on a par with the philosopher, so that Nicholas of Cusa,
or even Descartes, should have signed themselves “the idiot”, just as Nietzsche
signed himself “the Antichrist” or “Dionysus crucified” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari
2003: 64).
5. Cited in Hayman (1977: 85).
6. This nostalgia and recognition of his lost capacity for thought also differentiates
this Russian idiot from yet another idiot that appears in Deleuze’s essay ‘Plato
and the Simulacrum’. This idiot, as Lambert notes, is more likely to be found in
Shakespeare than in Dostoevsky and is characterised less by the naive innocence
of the common man than by a ‘will to stupidity’ or even ‘malicious cunning’ that
allows him to ignore his effect on the world (2002: 5).
7. The notion of friendship has been extensively theorised by philosophers from
Aristotle to Derrida, the contemporary interest peaking, arguably, with the
seminars called ‘Politics of Friendship’ in 1988–89 in France. My aim here,
however, is not to make a (belated) contribution to these debates but rather
to use the notion of friendship as a stepping stone toward a discussion of the
ethics that qualify the event of thought in Artaud and Acker.
8. Ronell, incidentally, has spent quite a bit of time theorising the notion of
stupidity. Her book Stupidity was published in 2002. She also writes about
stupidity in relation to Acker in the essay ‘Kathy goes to hell: on the irresolvable
stupidity of Acker’s death’.
9. Obviously, the prefix ‘con’ has its etymological base in ‘com’, that is ‘with’, an
interesting point in itself in relation to Acker’s strategy of incorporating others’
work and the implications of such strategy on how we think about friendship.
10. For this more personal-philosophical aspect of Deleuze and friendship, see, for
example, Charles Stivale’s work on these relations including Gilles Deleuze’s
ABC: The Folds of Friendship (2007) and ‘The folds of friendship: Derrida-
Deleuze-Foucault’ (2000).
11. This exchange between Artaud and O also appears in a slightly modified version
as the essay ‘The end of the world of white men’ (Acker 1995).
12. Acker presents O as a prostitute – in Réage’s novel she is not.
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DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000488