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Brinsmead, What can a novel do?.pdf (85.28 kB)

What can a novel do? Deleuze, Spinoza, and the Practice of Literary Analysis

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posted on 2017-05-17, 11:21 authored by Faye Brinsmead
How does one do philosophy? What does it involve? Let us consider the most famous image of philosophising in the Western canon. It is a self-image, offered to us by Descartes. For Descartes, doing philosophy involves a high degree of both solitude and introspection. He writes in 1637 that, since emigrating from his native France to Holland, “I have been able to lead a life as solitary and withdrawn as if I were in the most remote desert …” After withdrawing from society, Descartes attempts to distance himself from his own younger self, the credulous child who had, he tells us, accepted a “large number of falsehoods” as true. Sitting alone by the fire in his dressing-gown, he asks himself: Of what can I be certain? The reality of fire, dressing-gown and embodiment itself disappear down the plughole of his reductivist cogitations, and at last he replies: “[T]hat absolutely nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing.” After which he reluctantly consents to put his body and dressing-gown back on, insisting all the while that they are completely detachable from “this puzzling ‘I’.” Cartesian philosophising, then, is an extreme form of doing battle with illusion; it is about subtracting everything that’s even the least bit suspect in order to get to the truth, that evasive little kernel of certainty around which we can (perhaps) build a life, if and when we are brave enough to engage with the world again.

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Publication date

2004

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8

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Article

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    Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique

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