From Method to Style, from the Person to the Mask. What Deleuze Does to Semiotics

Abstract

In this work, we will focus on what we consider to be the two most fundamental contributions of Deleuze’s thought to semiotics: a certain notion of “style” as a practice of analysis, and – following Deleuze’s reversal of Benveniste’s linguistic personology – an impersonal and evenemential theory of enunciation. In particular, on the one hand, the paper focuses on the shifting from semiotics as a methodology to semiotics as style, connected with a certain image the authors share of the discipline. On the other hand, the paper focuses on the concept of collective assemblage of enunciation and on the notion of free indirect discourse, in order to show that enunciation never involves solely “the subject,” but rather a multiplicity of vibrant “enunciative instances”. We will emphasize that enunciation is not an act of egoic appropriation, but a scene of capture, where our voice is assembled with multiple signifying forces drawn from the encyclopedia. We will then employ Deleuze’s notion of dramatization to define the perimeter of the enunciative scene as an evenemential field that assigns us subject-positions. To speak in our own name, something must speak on our own behalf – that is, we must assume these subject-positions by wearing semiotic masks that come from what Deleuze calls the Outside.