In last week’s class, I believe it was made obvious that the potential to understand the writings of Deleuze are directly related to our ability to decode the meanings of the words he uses. A task that, at first glance, may seem simple due to the fact that the majority of words are commonly known and defined already. But, Deleuze does not use words as they have always been defined. He recreates words as he recreates ideas. The inherent limit of language is made apparent when we realize that the meanings of words are based on lived experience and creative constructions and not on official dictionaries.
A definition of a word is not a concrete thing. It is a concept. And whereas things can exist in the world, ideas can only exist in the mind. Nietzcshe states, “A word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases” and follows with, “every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.1” What a word is can be summed up as an analogy or metaphor that attempts to translate a virtual idea into a physical code that allows a thought to be passed from person to person.
Even clearly defined words hold within them the potential to be many things and not specific things. The word “leaf” can create two very different ideas in the minds of two different people, and all the words in existence follow that same mold. By eliminating the details, we create metaphors and analogies that at best convey a general idea of the thought and at worst convey gross distortions of them, if anything at all.
To demonstrate this, we just have to look at Deleuze’s use of the word Image within his writings. Though the dictionary definition is so obvious I have no need to quote it here, when we attempted to clearly define it in class we where faced with a much greater challenge. The best we could do at the time was Stamatia’s great attempt “Though it can’t exactly tell you what it is, I can tell you what it is not ...”
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870’s, Amherst, N.Y: Humanity Books, 1999
