A Deleuzean Approach to Literature

Portrait of Deleuze by Nicolas Cours-Barracq
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According to Deleuze, literature is not as an attempt to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience. 

Rather, to write in a literary manner - be it poetry or prose - is to move in the direction of the ill-formed or incomplete; to learn how to unexpress the expressible and to problematize everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar usage.  

Above all, Deleuze wishes to stress that literature should not become a form of personal overcoding; it is not an opportunity for an author to give the world a white face that somehow resembles their own. This is why any form of writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing - but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality.

Literature, at its best - which is to say most inhuman - transports us from Oedipal structures and instigates a process of becoming; helping us locate zones of indiscernibility wherein we can lose ourselves and become-Other (think of Ahab's becoming-whale in Melville's Moby Dick, for example; or Gregor's becoming-insect in Kafka's Metamorphosis). 

And just as crucially, as I have indicated above, literature carries language away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign language within the writer's native tongue. It does this not by simply inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant and well-known language out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it  stutter or scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not outside language, but are the outside of language).

And when a language is so unsettled and pushed to its limit, then ultimately it is obliged to confront a profound silence that doesn't signify there is nothing left to say, but, on the contrary, that there is still everything left to say.