This study explores the intertextuality between literature and philosophy. Deleuze has utilized Bergson's discovery of the pure past to arrive at his own very creative concept of the virtual. Beckett has also been greatly influenced by Bergson's th ...
This study explores the intertextuality between literature and philosophy. Deleuze has utilized Bergson's discovery of the pure past to arrive at his own very creative concept of the virtual. Beckett has also been greatly influenced by Bergson's theory of memory in formulating his own idea of the relationship between memory and subjectivity. Deleuze, in turn, interprets and explores the literary world of Beckett in his now influential essay "The Exhausted," in which he defines Beckett's oeuvre as a process of exhausting the possible.
First, I examine and try to make sense of Bergsonian and Deleuzian concept of the virtual. The concept of the virtual is based upon and developed from the fundamental concept of duration and memory. In Bergosonism Deleuze summarizes the relationship between them as follows: "It seems to us that Duration essentially defines a virtual multiplicity (what differs in nature). Memory then appears as the coexistence of all the degrees of difference in this multiplicity, in this virtuality. The Elan Vital, finally, designates the actualization of this virtual according to the lines of differentiation that correspond to the degrees - up to this precise line of man where the Elan Vital gains self-consciousness." This statement includes all of the constitutive notions of the virtual. I discuss the profound implications, such as the "I is an other" formula, of this idea that recognizes the existence of pure past and an actualization of the virtual on our subjectivity. Although he draws upon many other sources such as Leibniz and Kant, Nietzsche might be the second great influence in formulating the concept. I try to clarify the secret intimacy between the second(the pure past) and the third synthesis of time(the eternal recurrence) to resolve the question concerning "the time out of joint."
Next, I try to provide a literary theory of the virtual in terms of the narrative device (predicate), the character(subject), and time. Deleuze suggests that literature acceded to its modernity when it freed the virtual from its actualizations and allowed it to assume a validity of its own. The virtual world that freed from the actualization is no longer a world but becomes a 'chaosmos', a pure process that passes through all the virtual possibilities. As is clear from his example of Borges, narration becomes fundamentally falsifying. The character, likewise, is no more of a fixed identity. It becomes rather an aesthetic figure which corresponds to the conceptual figure of philosophy. The aesthetic figure inhabits in a different time and place. Since the possible has already been exhausted before anything happens, the time of the virtual singularities and the event is always the 'in between', the meanwhile of time to which Deleuze gives the name Aion.
Deleuze finds the literary expression of a virtual past in Proust. Combray surges forth within the present taste of the madelaine. But that combray is itself a difference, not the Combray as experienced in the past, but an essence of Combray. In "The Exhausted," included in his Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze discusses Beckett's oeuvre in terms of exhausting the possible. The article argues that the Beckettian ‘pure image’ in ...but the clouds... is a virtual image which is an expression of the difference itself. It is a pure intensity, a difference, a ‘light’, a life above, which "appears in all its singularity, retaining nothing of the personal, nor of the rational, and ascending into the indefinite as into a celestial state." We can only understand the character making this image as an aesthetic figure, the amnesic witness around which the other turns.