“A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze’s “Critique et Clinique” Project

The critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) may be destined to enter into a new relationship of mutual learning. (M 14)

Although Essays Critical and Clinical is the only book written by Deleuze that is devoted primarily to literature, literary references are present everywhere in his work, running almost parallel to the philosophical references. Deleuze first linked together the “critical” and the “clinical” in the study of Sacher-Masoch that he published in 1967.The 1969 Logic of Sense is in part a reading of Lewis Carroll’s work and includes supplementary material and chapters on Klossowski, Tournier, Zola, Fitzgerald, Lowry, and Artaud. Literary references occupy considerable portions of the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which Deleuze wrote in the 1970s with Félix Guattari. He has written books on both Proust (1964) and Kafka (1975, with Guattari), as well as two long essays on Carmelo Bene (1979) and Samuel Beckett (1992). His 1977 Dialogues with Claire Parnet includes an important chapter entitled “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.” Essays Critical and Clinical includes eight newly revised articles that were originally published by Deleuze between 1970 and 1993, along with ten essays that appear here for the first time. Once again, names of philosophers (Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger) appear side by side with names of literary figures (Melville, Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Beckett, Artaud, Masoch, Jarry, Carroll). Although he first announced the idea for this book during a 1988 interview, it is clear that Deleuze had conceived of the “critique et clinique” project early on in his career and pursued it in various forms throughout his published work.