The text traces the development of the notion of catatonia in the work of Gilles Deleuze across three spheres – the individual (subjectivity), social and literary. The need for an analysis is based on (1) the author’s perception that Deleuze (and Guattari’s) thought on catatonia and slowness has been undervalued in many interpretations (particularly those linking the philosophers with accelerationism); (2) the recognition, in works of sociologists such as Hartmut Rosa, of the adverse effects of social acceleration. In the individual sphere, catatonia is the effect of a radical withdrawal into anti-production or the body without organs. In the social sphere, catatonia is also linked to anti-production, but since in capitalism most anti-production (or the socius) is included in the sphere of production (as capital), catatonia represents a special case of resistance to this tendency. Deleuze shows how these two spheres intertwine in his analyses of Herman Melville’s works, especially Billy Budd and Bartleby; the title characters of these two texts are interpreted as embodiments of the catatonic as a political-revolutionary figure.
The article explores Herman Melville’s use of allegory in the critique of American expansionism in his novel Pierre. Allegorical structures encoded in this text are identified through references to Thomas Cole’s cycle of manifestly allegorical paintings entitled The Course of Empire. Melville’s novel and Cole’s pictures reveal meaningful similarities. The writer and the painter both use spatial and temporal constructions as a way of conveying ideological senses. In this respect, of crucial significance is a transition from the pastoral to the urban setting and imagery to be found in the novel and in the paintings. In accordance with the principle of allegory, Melville and Cole employ specific methods of universalizing human experience, although they create markedly different combinations of universality and historicity. Cole dehistoricizes his paintings, at the same time suggesting important historical analogies, whereas Melville evidently puts stress on historical contingency. Ultimately, they both foreground the deterministic dimension of individual and collective existence, thus raising questions about the problematic nature of human agency in an imperial culture.
The article discusses the political (and potentially emancipatory) meaning of refusal. Against the dominating philosophical perspective, praising participation and sense of community, it argues that the acts of refusal may (or even must) play an important role in resistance against power. Some elements of a possible theory of refusal are to be found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, especially in his famous essay on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, but also in Dialogues (with C. Parnet) and Mille Plateaux (with Félix Guattari), where he coins the crucial concept of becoming-imperceptible.
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