deleuze and delirium

Gilles Deleuze, "Literature and Life," Essays Critical and Clinical (1997).

on the minor (c.f. Melville's Pip, Father Mapple):

"This is the becoming of the writer. Kafka (for central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer." (4)

on delirium (c.f. Durkheim, the delirium of collective representation):

"Literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair: there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is world-historical, a 'displacement of races and continents.' Literature is delirium, and as such its destiny is played out between the two poles of delirium. Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant." (4)

on syntax (c.f. William James):

"There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things." (2)

Syntax, experience and revelation; bosh! and "finally, breath-words, the a-syntactical limit toward which all language tends." ..."suspended exclamations as the limit of language, as explosive visions and sonorities." (5)

declensions

“Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Widsom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his god.” (321-322)

"'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again.'
'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.'
'Well, that's funny.'
'And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow, especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket." (335)

Melville, Moby-Dick