“It Could Have Been Said!”—On the Dialogical Space Between Machery and Deleuze

Abstract

While I was teaching her the Water-Shedding Swordplay, I embedded four weaknesses in the routines. (Reign of Assassins, 2010) A philosophy...assumes that the notion of the virtual stops being vague and indeterminate. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 1991, p. 96) This paper aims to parallelize the theorizations of Pierre Macherey and Gilles Deleuze. First, the author, according to Macherey, must have left something unsaid in his text. The unsaid or the narrative rupture is responsible for the multiplicity of the voices in the text, enabling the text to exist. Above all, Macherey argues that the unsaid or the narrative rupture emerges from how the author chooses to represent ideology. That is, Macherey's so-called unsaid or narrative rupture is actually what the author could have said; it is in fact a potentiality embedded in the text. On the other hand, when postulating his virtual(ity)/actual(ity) couplet, Deleuze asserts that the virtual(ity) is actually a potentiality that can be tapped. To be more precise, the virtual(ity) has its own reality, and once actualized, it will be transformed into something entirely new and different. Here, the dialogical space between Macherey and Deleuze is plain to see: Macherey's so-called unsaid or narrative rupture is literally Deleuze's so-called virtuality. When the unsaid is said, a virtuality is actualized. And a potentiality is thus tapped. By such a reading strategy, we readers are presented with an enactment of an alternative case scenario of the text, namely, how the text could have been made over. In the end, an example of this reading strategy is provided: Macherey argues that Marquis de Sade's desire-ruled society is more oppressive. What de Sade has left unsaid is the problematic relationship between desire and oppression. And it is exactly the potentiality in his works.