Razing the wall: Deleuze, Rancière and the politics of New World literatures

Focusing on two essays drawn from Essays Critical and Clinical – ‘Whitman’ and ‘Bartleby; or, The Scrivener’, this essay seeks to widen the Deleuzian lens on New World writing. America in the broadest sense – North and South connected by the broken bridge of the Caribbean archipelago – is a collection of diverse peoples and political bodies, ‘federated states and various immigrant peoples (minorities) – everywhere a collection of fragments’ (Deleuze). This claim ties the fragmentary character of New World writing, Deleuze argues, to the experience of the collective: in short, the political function of literature. However, in exploring the politics of New World writing this essay also draws from Jacques Rancière’s critical reading of ‘Bartleby; or, The Scrivener’. Rancière questions Deleuze’s approach to literature and the fraternal politics that he finds in Melville, interrogating his identification of processes of de/reterritorialisation. Rancière argues that there is no true metamorphosis associated with the literary text because Deleuzian becoming stresses the movement towards a space of pre-individual indeterminacy. While this suggests a significant distinction between a Deleuzian and a Rancièrean aesthetics, I suggest that Rancière’s critique might help us to clarify the processes of de/reterritorialisation in Deleuzian literary analysis.