The Line of Resistance

Proust, Francoise. Deutscher, Penelope, 1966Hypatia, Volume 15, Number 4, Fall 2000, pp. 23-37 (Article)
Published by Indiana University Press

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The Line of Resistance1

FRANOISE PROUST Translated by Penelope Deutscher

Proust interrogates Gilles Deleuzes notion of resistance in relation to death as that which is turned against death. She questions a concept of resistance which is no more than impassivity and indifference. How, she asks, can we know if the force of resistance is on the side of death or life? Characterizing life as movement, she speaks for a concept of resistance as on the side of life.

Everyone is familiar with the surprising afrmation made by Gilles Deleuze in his Foucault (1988): Resistance comes rst (Deleuze 1988, 89). This statement could be said to summarize the whole work. It is a paradoxical afrmation. Either resistance co-exists with power or it succeeds it, but in no way can it precede it. Only hampered and thwarted forces, diminished and impeded powers, petried or frozen movements resist. Furthermore, their stubborn insistence-tobe can be called resistant only if they convert their having been denied (their negation) into afrmation, only if they derive their negation from afrmation, and not the reverse. Resistance is like a kind of double negation. The fact of it alone marks a negation or a contrariety of being and attests, by the very fact of its action alone, to the negation of this negation: it counters its own contrariety. But this double negation engenders no afrmation. So one needs to invert the derivation. Because its implicit or explicit starting point is an afrmation, an intransitivity, as Michel Foucault remarkably expresses this (Foucault 1983, 223), it is able to counter its own contrariety. In other words, it acts at the same time against the very conditions of its own contrariety. It acts its reaction, and its own share of reactivity, actively. Resistance in this sense is the provocation of a new action. Resistance is this action, this afrmative turning around of the
Hypatia vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 2000) by Penelope Deutscher

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countering (retournement du contrer). Or to speak in a still more Foucauldian fashion, it is the reversion or the destabilization (basculement) of force relations. It is the gesture with which, and the moment at which, the reversibility (the dissymmetry or the instability) of all force relations is denitely established. To afrm that resistance comes rst, as Deleuze does in a singular manner, is to propose that resistance is like a line. It escapes the plane or the surface, opening it onto a wild and unfettered surface, onto an Outside which would always have haunted and inhabited it in its most intimate interior. This line is at once straight and twisted, at once rm and supple. It connects the informal points of force through which a curve bends. It initiates retrogressions, sketches out ights, zigzags and leaps over volcanoes. It is the line of resistance, the line of the outside. Deleuze writes, [R]esistance comes rst, to the extent that power relations operate completely within the diagram, while resistances necessarily operate in a direct relation with the outside from which the diagrams emerge. This means that a social eld offers more resistance than strategies and the thought of the outside is a thought of resistance (Deleuze 1988, 8990). Better yet: resistance is the Outside. What is the Outside? We know that Deleuze borrowed this concept from Maurice Blanchot, just as Foucault did at the same period.2 From his earliest works, and under the inuence of his reading of Emmanuel Lvinas, Blanchot turns around (retourne), and perhaps diverts, Martin Heideggers Being-towards-death. Heideggerian death is the possibility most proper to Dasein, the possibility which it opens onto the impossible, putting an end to the possible.3 It is a deliverance of possibles which opens them up to their force of decision and responsibility. But in Blanchots work death becomes the Impossible of the possible, the Indetermination of every determination, the Incertitude of every certitude. This haunting is as insistent as it is elusive, a chance happening as decisive as it is undecidable, a presence as near as it is far, and so on. Death is the name of the impossible, not of the nothingness of being (for it is archipresent), but of the innite which is never nished and has never begun, the impossible as demanding as it is undemanding (passivant). One might name it Law if the Law passed no judgement. One might name it Presence if Presence were not graspable being (tre sous la main). One might name it the Near if the Near werent the proper, and so on. For all these reasons, it is named the Outside. As such it is the analogue of Levinass exteriority more exterior than all exteriority; in other words, every exteriority is always already comprised in being. The Outside designates this thinking. It tests those frontier zones which drive away foundational categories and certain major concepts. The three main points are as follows: 1The Outside is rst of all, as Foucault explains, the Outside of the Subject of certitude and representation, in other words, of interiority. It is the

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I which is irremediably ssured4: haunted by its doubts or the specters of madness or sickness. This ssure aims to ll in the striated spaces of closed mediums (the great connement, on the claustral model). As if we didnt know that the more the outside is drawn and enclosed by a within which constitutes itself as such by enclosing itself, the more it is constituted like an interior monad, an empty pocket (an invagination, if you like), an interior stronghold. It is all the more resistant as it goes unnoticed and unconceived. It is all the more contaminating as it is enclosed upon itself. Thus the madman becomes this gure of transgression, this gure of a thought which is all the more alive insofar as it must have elaborated its apparatus at the interior. As Blanchot writes, to shut up the outside, that is, to constitute it in an interiority of anticipation or exception, is the exigency that leads societyor momentary reasonto make madness exist, that is, to make it possible (1993, 196).5 For when the brute power of the naked level of sex and language moves through (passe ) the interior, a gurehere madnessis rendered possible. It is an exceptional gure, because it bears the promise of new subjectivities or subjectivations. For the outside is not the redoubling of the inside. It is not the exteriorization of a pre-constituted interiority. The interior is not a primary fact. It is a folding-over, an invagination of the outside. It is the Outside which is primary. This is why lines striate representation in every direction. They are lines of ssure, lines of life-death which, when they fold over and redivide, form at the interior an outside with the power of an entwisted resistance. 2The Outside is therefore an open exteriority. But if the Outside is not Heideggerian openness, it is because, as Deleuze insists, the Outside is battle, and not serenity. It is war, not peace. It might well be specied, as it is by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that the Open is the Fold, or the Interlacing of two series (the to Speak and the to See, the Light and the Saying [MerleauPonty 1968]). Even so, the phenomenological Openness is always a great openness onto a peaceful world. But s/he who says Outside says wind, breath, tempest, says coldness, desert, vertigo, says savagery, barbarism, violence. Topology encounters dynamics. Forms are named as forces. So the Outside is an unfettered, unformed, and wild multiplicity of forces. It is a space of aleatory dispersion of points of singularity. They are points where a force is affected by and affects another. They are pure intensities. These points vibrate and oscillate. They are themselves knots, packets, centers, threads. They never cease to collide and clash. They stabilize, in a provisory fashion only, into gures or forms. Then they disperse anew according to a network or rhizome. Then they recongure, in a manner at once regulated and aleatory. If it is true that a gure is no more than a composition of lines, then one might well say that every point is the inection point of a curve. Far from the curve being a series of points, it is the point which is the crossing-point of

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two curves. But there exists, at the same time, a oating line (Deleuze 1988, 113). This is a brief line, of incessant variations. It can never splice the other lines to make a contour. It makes the two forms in battle communicate (Deleuze 1988, 113). It is a kind of punctual aggregate of free electrons. They never constitute a series. If they do, it is a provisional one, divergent or convergent, which always remains at the margins of a zone. It imprints this instability, or this disequilibrium which makes for a battle, on the whole diagram. This oating line is the transversal line. It is non-integrated. It is the line of the pure outside which is always escaping and always returns. 3This line of the outside is pure because it is not reappropriable by a negation or a contradiction. The Outside is not opposition, nor even exteriority. It is, as Blanchot says, the neutral.6 The neutral is not that which is neither the one thing nor the other. If so, one would have to understand it as a kind of mystical One, like that of negative theology. It is more like Stoic indifference. It is the undifferentiated afrmation of all that which is, where everything is, in a certain fashion, undifferentiated. (Presence is absent and absence is omnipresent. Death never survives and is always there.) It is where everything un-decides itself on the borders of the sea of sand. It is where, at the same time, every element distinguishes itself, because it is at an innite distance from the neighboring element. It is a sort of network in which each point is distinct, distant from even its closest neighbors, and has a position in relation to every other point in a space that simultaneously holds and separates them all (Foucault 1994, vol. I, 520). This is a kind of Deleuzian Stoicism of the multiple, as Alain Badiou himself writes of the Platonic multiple. For one needs to be able to afrm, indifferently, all enveloping worlds in divergent series. The work is a kind of inactivity. Either death never comes, or it has always come. It is indenitely repeated (ressasse) and indenitely recommences. This is how the Stoicians justify suicide, incidentally. He who lacks nothing, the wise man, is in a state of beatitude. Empirical death removes something from this. Once one lacks nothing, one should give oneself to death. Nevertheless, as Blanchot and Deleuze will add, there is still an illusion due to insufciency of indifference. It is the illusion of mastery over death, or of the covering over by an active empirical death of the mortal inactivity that which is more passive than all passivity. So the outside is indifference. For Indifference is never indistinction, nor the absence of difference. To the contrary, it is the brute, naked, informal element: pure exteriority. It is the transcendental condition of all forms of exterioritythose forms which are differentiated because they are exterior to each other in a free (smooth) space or surface. They are forms which border each other in a concrete and variable manner. They become, and metamorphose,

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at the heart of a milieu of exteriority. And this is a milieu which, let us reiterate, always includes relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance (Deleuze 1988, 44). They are faithful to or betray their ordinary zone of adherence. They cross or are confused with lines which pass through their vicinity. In the time of their de-liaison, the informality discussed above is no less the case, the points in which a force encounters and affects another becoming home to a battle. From the moment there is battle, there are agglomerations, bindings, groups, compositions of lines and thus of forms or gures. But at the same time there are, necessarilyand because of this battles are not confused with war, nor with peacezones and unexpected forms of irregular, sniper-like confrontation. The battle renders them innite. Each diagram,7 writes Deleuze, testies to the twisting line of the outside spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic line that passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another, and operates always as the most recent. And what a strange twist of the line was 1968, the line with a thousand aberrations (Deleuze 1988, 44). So we can better understand the gures of resistance selected by Deleuze, as much as (sometimes) by Foucault. They are not gures of revolt (heroic or otherwise) against injustice or gures of combat against oppression. They are gures of originary and anonymous existence, which are brought, despite themselves, to a visible or non-visible confrontation with power. They are restored or dissolved by the impersonal and innite writing of life. Wanting to recount the Life of Infamous Men and then the Parallel Lives,8 Foucault aimed to give infamous gestures their component of resistance and eternity. Minor, lowly, and obscure gestures (lacking glory) are illuminated as immense and brilliant by a visible, glorious power. It might be that the fama changes its aspect, or that power is no longer repressive but inciting, that it doesnt condemn to silence but incites to confession. It might be that Pierre Rivire or Herculine Barbin would today be named Roger Knobelspiess. But this doesnt change the meaning of resistance. This does not refer to an individual or collective act, or combat. It refers to an infamous life which, through its aleatory encounter with writing, has rejoined the immanent and non-dened line of a simultaneously dull and brilliant life, which once became legendary and today will be qualied as literary. In fact, what could be closer to the Foucauldian narratives9 than the narratives of Herman Melville and Samuel Beckett that Deleuze enjoys so much? Bartleby, with his frail, gray silhouette and his modest I would prefer not to, undermines the lawyers work organization and life (Melville 1987, 25). In the end he drives him mad, and as such is a brother in resistance to Herculine Barbin. He is the companion of Lawrence, mad in the desert, or of Molloy, man of indifference, innite chatter, and perpetual going over and over (re-

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ssassement). He is the neighbor of Carroll (or of Brisset) who disorders language and drives it away just as much by accelerating pronunciation (innite speed) as by breaking down its forms (innite slowness). We know that, in Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze distinguishes three temporal syntheses, or three repetitions. The rst repetition is that of habit (Humeian habit, Bergsonian memory-habit, Husserlian passive synthesis), which constitutes the living present. This present is indeed living because it organizes life and the lived. It is at the same time at work in organic life (muscles, heartbeats, alternations of need and fatigue) and in psychic life (different rhythms and tempos of thought, different degrees of mental vivacity). Gathered up together or contracted with the present of life, past and future only exist as relationships to that present of which they are a dimension: One of the great strengths of Stoicism lies in having shown that every sign is a sign of the present, from the point of view of the passive synthesis in which past and future are precisely only dimensions of the present itself. A scar is the sign not of a past wound but of the present fact of having been wounded (Deleuze 1994, 77). For as long as the scar is still present, that of which it is the scar (the wound) is still present. At this level of psychic and organic life, we can see that the game of repetition (of death, in other words) is hidden under habits, whose vulgar mechanisms only permit minimal variation and mediocre modication. Beckett demonstrates his modern Stoic grandeur when he nonetheless draws out small differences from a massive repetition: Molloys series of stones, Murphys biscuits, Malons possessions (Deleuze 1994, 79). There is a second repetition covered up by the rst. It is not sufcient to constitute time as the present. The present passes, but it passes in time. So, as Immanuel Kant would have said, a synthesis is necessary which is no longer empirical (Hume) but transcendental. For what is that time which makes time pass, but which does not itself pass? What is it, if not the being past of time, that past in itself which Bergson calls virtual and which Proust calls pure? One does not see how the present will pass, if it has not already passed at that moment where it takes place. No more does one see how a past can return if it is no more than a former present become past, if it wasnt already past at the moment when it was present. Past (but this pure past is neither present nor past; it is time, itself) and present are superimposed. They are not juxtaposed and it is not that they succeed each other. They are simultaneous and not contiguous. When a new present occurs, it awakens its double at the same time. It provokes phenomena of echoes, repetitions (reprises), replies, dja-vus, and ghosts: echoes between organic and inorganic life, echoes between life and death, and so on. Isnt this the line of resistance? This shadow line accompanies every present like a ghost, or a haunting which adheres to its back. It is the double of other temporal series which are at once the same and innitely different. Is

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this a kind of reminder, in the wake of a past which was never actualized and which demands-to-be, that another life is possible? For if the virtual redoubles the actual, not only is just a minuscule element of it actualized, but the other points of the shadow resist repression (refoulement) by pressing against the present, demanding justice. In truth, for Deleuze, this is only an approximate form of resistance: the line is, effectively, that of destiny. Echoes, reminiscences, resonances, referrals, signs: all this designates the univocity of being and time as destiny: This is what we call destiny. Destiny never consists in stepby-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localizable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance, and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals, and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions. We say of successive presents which express a destiny that they always play out the same thing, the same story, but at different levels: here more or less relaxed, there more or less contracted. (Deleuze 1994, 83) But in this case a third (and ultimate) repetition (or temporal synthesis) is necessary. It afrms this same story and this same play. A last repetition is necessary, one which takes up all these chances and non-localizable liaisons, all these trajectories of a nomadic and chaotic distribution, all these aleatory releases (lancers). It afrms them as fragments of a unique release (lancer) (chance or chaos). In repeating them it afrms their extra-temporal unicity, in other words, time itself. Certainly this time is neither originary nor creative. It is at once distinct from and indiscernible from that which is effected in and with it. It only appears as such if it is afrmedin other words, enveloped and implicatedby the events which occur. Similarly, the virtual is no more than the expression of the actual. This third repetition takes up the preceding ones anew. But it diverts and betrays them, drawing from them a superior power. It is something like the eternal return, which only gleans its power as eternity under the condition of being repeated, in other words, being at once afrmed and selected.10 Eternity is not the immemorial (the second repetition), which would again suppose the present since it doubles and accompanies it at a deep level. It is pure, innite emptiness, the pure innitive of time, the pure and empty form of time, according to the expressions of Difference and Repetition. This is empty and desert-like time, time which slips towards the innite where the present (rst repetition), the past (second repetition), and the future (third repetition) are themselves, all of them, innite. It is time which is out of joint, time which, in some way, broaches and opens, at once and for always, the door of

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memory (the two Bergsonian times). It slips like a stroke or an arrow towards the diagonal. It is an immobile time because of the mad mobility. (Or to the contrary, it is a mobile, Bartlebian time through the force of its mad immobility.) It is an eternal time, not because it is xed and congealed, but because it has neither beginning nor end. It is a neutral, anonymous, impassive, and indifferent time. Furthermore, it is, as such, cruel, terrible, merciless, the time of one lives, one dies, the innitive of death. There life bursts into multiple chaotic and aleatory fragments and simultaneously coincides with the one of impersonality, anonymity, and the absence of a proper domain. This is the time of the infamous life, of a Bartleby or a Molloy: the time of a pure state. In The Logic of Sense (1990), contemporaneous in 1969 to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze does not distinguish three temporal syntheses or three repetitions, but two times: Chronos and Aion. These two times are at once foreign to each other and strangely close, at once distinct and indiscernible. They envelope each other and mutually express each other, as with the virtual and the actual. The greatness of Stoic thought, writes Deleuze in Logic of Sense, is to show at once the necessity of these two readings and their reciprocal exclusion (Deleuze 1990, 61). So there are two times: Chronos, or the eternal present, at once limited because it is present and future, and because it contracts within one single present the past and the future. This is, in fact, the only Stoic time which authorized commentaries have transmitted to us (and here Deleuze collapses the two repetitions, the two Bergsonian times). And there is another time which excludes the other: Aion. Deleuze makes this coincide with the Stoic incorporeal. It is, he says, an extra-Being (Deleuze 1990, 57). According to the Stoics it is of the place, of the vide, of the unexpressable . . . and of time. Here, Deleuze follows and repeats (in other words, redirects) Emile Brhier, whose La thorie des incorporels dans lancien stocisme concludes as follows: Beings themselves, substances, . . . have an internal life, which is to say, concentrated in itself, far from being objects of contemplation by nature. But this life, without losing anything of itself, spreads over the surface of multiple events. These events suppress none of the internal force of being. They are pure effects without being in turn causes. These events, with their relations, form the theme of dialectics. In logic, thought does not enter into contact with being, because being rebels against thought; it never attains substance. (1962, 6061) Deleuze re-routes Brhier. Events spread over the surface of multiple events because they dont enter into contact with the being of thingsin

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other words, with bodiesand arent modied by them (and dont modify them), and are therefore impassive and indifferent to the body. They become, for Deleuze, being itself, what he calls extra-being. As such, they are the very object of thought. So if the event is indeed what occurs, and comes, it is the unlimited becoming which constantly separates things from themselves. It puts them, in the strict sense, out of order. The event is not that which happens. It is the becoming, or the straight line which will always have carried off or driven away things, their acts, or their states from the moment they take place and occur: The event . . . has no present . . . being the perpetual object of a double question: what is going to happen? What has just happened? The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen, never something which is happening (Deleuze 1990, 63). So the event is unlimited becoming, as such, from the moment the singular is justied. There is only one sole event, as Deleuze continually repeats: the throw of the dice (chance) which distributes multiple becomings in aleatory fashion. One can equally name the event destiny or the eternal return, if one understands this as afrmation, and not the simple disillusioned fact (second repetition) of a unique aleatory distribution of nomad trajectories in an all the more terrible and merciless drawn-out becoming. Now one must maintain stoic exactingness. On the one hand, one must distinguish two times. There is successive time, on the one hand, the time of the present, or of presents, where the future and the past are only distinguished in their more or less great contraction. On the other hand, there is empty time. Aion is impassive, indifferent, impenetrable (the always, according to the common translation). It is eternal time, the straight line of the diagonal. These times are absolutely distinct, the only way to afrm eternity: This is the secret of the event. . . . It exists on the line of the Aion, and yet it does not ll it. How could an incorporeal ll up the incorporeal or the impenetrable ll up the impenetrable? Only bodies penetrate each other, only Chronos is lled up with states of affairs and the movements of the objects that it measures. But being an empty and unfolded form of time, the Aion subdivides ad innitum that which haunts it without ever inhabiting itthe Event for all events. This is why the unity of events or effects among themselves is very different from the unity of corporeal causes among themselves. (Deleuze 1990, 64) So there are two types of causality, two types of time, two types of death. There is empirical death, which modies the state of the body, which concerns the I and which the I can either confront (affronter) or endeavor to

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rejoinin suicide, for example, which is always in a present which makes everything happen. And there is impersonal death, the death of one (on) or the death of nobody, above all not my death. This is what Blanchot sought in works, and Deleuze in the limit-experiences discussed above. It is the dying of the living, as the greening (verdoyer) is to the tree. For there is no distinction between the living and the dying. [N]o one ever dies, but has always just died or is always going to die in the empty present of the Aion, that is, in eternity (Deleuze 1990, 63). In this way, death and the wound are not events among others. Each event is like death. It is double, and impersonal in its double: It is the abyss of the present, time without a present, with which I have no relationships; it is that toward which I cannot go forth, for in it I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die. In it they die; they do not cease, and they do not nish dying (Blanchot 1982, 160).11 All of a sudden, we see that these two times are one. Aion is no more than the part of eternity which one can extract from the pure event, its power of eternal return. Furthermore, sometimes the two deaths, the empirical death and the wound, or the fracture of time, are rejoined, as when the fracture rises to the surface of the Open and makes everything explode in the tempest, whirlwind, volcano, etc. Then the event illuminates, in misfortune but also splendor, its part in the eternal explosion. This event is at once a birth, or a future, and in any case a transmutation. (In 1967, Deleuze saw the proletariat [which] already makes its way [Deleuze 1990, 332] in Emile Zolas alcoholic proletariat of Rougon-Macquart heredity, or in his machine, rather, in La Bte humain [Deleuze 1990, 32133].) A war, in any case, a battle in which, as Deleuze writes: death turns against death; where dying is the negation of death, and the impersonality of dying no longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment when death loses itself in itself, and also the gure which the most singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me. (Deleuze 1990, 153)12 This is, however, the point which should give us pause. For how, in Deleuzes work, can death be turned against death? (Deleuze 1990, 153; italics added). How can the encounter of two deaths, where one is without relationship with the other, result in battle? It is certainly the case that death is not my own death, the individual, ipseic death proper to me. The terror of death which can seize someone with a fatal disease is not narcissistic, nor egocentric. It is the panicked fear of not knowing exactly what to do with this death, this terrible and irresistible power (puissance) which is coming, so near, and yet so ungraspable. Does it follow, for all this, that it is not destruction, as Deleuze reiterates?13 In any case, it is clear that Deleuzian war is no more than a hovering over.

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The battle, so much smokescreen, embeds us in fog, and, paradoxically, we are never there: The battle hovers over its own eld being neutral in relation to all of its temporal actualizations, neutral and impassive in relation to the victor and the vanquished, the coward and the brave; because of this it is all the more terrible. Never present but always yet to come and already past, the battle is graspable only by the will of anonymity which it itself inspires. This will, which we must call will of indifference is present in the mortally wounded soldier who is no longer brave or cowardly, no longer victor or vanquished, but rather so much beyond, at the place where the Event is present, participating therefore in its terrible impassability. (Deleuze 1990, 100101) Truly a terrible reversal! It is the wounded soldier, whoever that is, victor or vanquished, always already wounded, indifferent both to the wound and to the result of the battle, who represents the battle of being! But how could it be otherwise, given that the battle is just another name for Chaos, or the Throw of the Dice? In Deleuzes work there is neither contrariety, confrontation, nor rebellion. There are only more or less rapid, mad, traitorous becomings, those of a unique dispersion. And certainly the battle is always on the prowl between those lines which never cease to nomadize. They zigzag and volcanize. The battle is all the more cruel and terrible for this. But in this case resistance designates no more than impassivity and indifference. It is the indifference of neutral death, without any relation to empirical death. It is the impenetrability of the eternal wound that has no relation to this actual wound. So it is not a matter of engaging in war with war, or even of turning death back against death. Neutral and impassive dying is death turned on itself [which] would be willed against all deaths. We are faced with a volitional intuition and a transmutation (Deleuze 1990, 149). By means of a Stoic and Nietzschean leap, it is a matter of becoming the offspring of ones own events (Deleuze 1990, 149), of being invited to embody the wound which existed before me (Deleuze often borrows this formula from Jo Bousquet). It is a matter of demonstrating ones own crack at the surface, and of rejoining it in a straight, impregnable line. Death loses itself in me. My impassivity renders it destitute of its own heights (the source of ressentiment and oppression). Freedom (or will) would, then, consist of not rendering oneself unworthy of that which, in the exemplary event which is death (war or wound), has its component of eternity and impassivity. Thus resistance takes on its true face, a Stoic face: to afrm, to conrm, and to rejoin ones destiny: Amor fati is one with the struggle of free men (Deleuze 1990, 149).

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But is this really resistance? For resistance is not that traitor line which zigzags incessantly and escapes every grip on it. It is the power of the countering (contrer), not of nomadization. It is a contrariety still in act and not a variation. It is a game of actions and reactions between being and its double. This is not extra-being as Deleuze would have it. It is counter-being (contretre). Resistance is born from the abutting encounter, in a precarious point of the crestline between two types of being, being and non-being, which interrupt each other. Resistance is indeed a line. But this line needs to be traced out and maintained so that, in it and through it, being and counter-being are simultaneously connected and kept at distance. To conclude, then, lets sketch out what a line of resistance is. Of course Deleuze is right. Resistance is another name for the death drive within the distinction between Eros (desire, sexuality) and Thanatos (destruction). For living, as Xavier Bichat (rediscovered by Foucault) and Sigmund Freud (rediscovered by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida) both say in their own way, is no more than thrusting-towards-death (nest que pousse--mort). The living are wrought by the drives. The drives produce the living, making them produce and expend energy, leading them blindly, and without appeal. Every drive pushes the living to death. Every drive is drive to or of death. In this regard, every drive is destiny. But what, precisely, if death manifests itself less in destruction than in conservation (inertia, regression, de-eroticization), if death is an indestructible and irresistible force? What if the living runs up against this rock or this remainder because it is itself a buttress of force (une force bute)? Then a certain question remains undecidable. This is the question of knowing if the force of resistance is death or life. It remains undecidable what, in that battle which is disease (a philosophical question in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche and Deleuze), makes for resistance. Is it the disease which refuses the cure? Is it health which leads a continuous combat against the seductions of disease? It matters little, in the end, what the nature (undecidable in itself) of resistance is. The combat undertaken is the only thing that counts. And death undertakes no combat. It is content to follow its path, to dig its trenches, to undermine and mine those lands it crosses. It is a glacial ow, a steady river, a sleeping water. It is terrible and terrifying in its inertia. Life, itself, does engage in combat. It is combat itself. According to the circumstances, it unravels or weaves, it disconnects or connects, it unmakes or it makes, it associates or it disassociates. It alone is sensitive to circumstances, to congurations, combinations, variations, metamorphoses. In one sense, then, there is only one drive, and it is the drive of resistance: death. But, it is also the case that there is not one, but two powers (puissances) which continually redouble. Life is death, and life is resistance to that irresistible power which is death. Life gleans its energy from death, by turning it against death.14

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It is life, not amor fati, which is the point at which death turns against death (Deleuze 1990, 153). It is life which is this power of turning and deviating, this game which thwarts death by tracing and displacing thousands of lines, each of them more variable and aberrant. For life is movement, setting in motion: folds of mountains, eddies of rivers, deserts or oases of planes, etc. Life draws out lines. In the company of Deleuze and Guattari one can distinguish two kinds of lines: break lines (lignes de coupure) (hard or molar segmentations) and crack lines (lignes de flure) (simple or molecular segmentations) (Deleuze 1987, 200). But the fact of the matter is that this life-death duality is itself traversed by other lines. These are diagonal or transversal lines. They are lines of ight (abstract, non-segmented), as living as they are mortal. For these lines are not discernable from those with which they are associated or which they cross. They make all lines move, including those which appear to be pure movement (Deleuze 1987, 192252).15 They come from everywhere, from the outside as from within, from the farthest and nearest, from everything and from nothing, from chance or misfortune. They blur all lines, and, at the same time, they pass between lines. They are themselves bundles, ends, knots of lines. They are lineaments, always interwoven, coupled, doubled, indiscernable, and impossible to disentangle. They are the and which is just as much the or. They are as much disjunctive as conjunctive. For the line is neither the traced nor the trace. It is the tracing, the passing and making pass where the line goes, and whence it comes. Now one can understand why resisting is maintaining the line (tenir la ligne). Resistance is at once a mobile and immobile line. It is so mobile that it is rendered immobile and so immobile that it goes at a crazy speed. On the one hand, it is entirely mobile. It leaps, bounds, pulls back, hides, then reappears by surprise, in haste. It is clandestine, disguised, ubiquitous, traitorous. On the other hand it is entirely immobile. It is pugnacious, obstinate, stubborn, stuck in its place, rmly keeping to its positions. In the same way it simultaneously cultivates slowness and speed, prudence and imprudence, patience and impatience, calculation and the mad wager. It effects these simultaneously and out of time ( contretemps). It falters and limps. It practices at once the absolute and the relative, the whole, immediately and the compromise, the nonnegotiable and the negotiable, the outside and the within. One must keep to its line all the more because it is oblique and skewed. Resistance is not equivocal, it is duplicitous. It practices a double politics. It is the contemporary and double of the power it resists, neither primary nor secondary in relation to it. Resistance constantly accompanies power. At the same time as it resists from within the hard lines of history, it causes an outside to surge up. This contaminates, grafts onto, and displaces the inside. Neither in the middle nor at the margins, resistance redoubles, does an aboutface, and, ironically, nds itself confronting its adversary.

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NOTES
We thank the Rue Descartes editors, the Collge Internationale de France, and Presses Universitaires de France for permission to print a translation of this article. Ed. 1. First published as Franoise Proust. 1998. La Ligne de la rsistance. Rue Descartes 20 (Gilles Deleuze Immanence et vie): 3548. Ed. 2. In 1966 Foucault devotes an article in Critique titled The Thought of the Outside to Blanchot, who already in that period had made an impression with The Space of Literature (1982), so frequently cited by Deleuze. See Foucault (1987). 3. See, for example, Blanchot (1982, 150). Trans. 4. Flure is usually translated as ssure in this chapter, but is translated in terms of the crack in Deleuzes The Logic of Sense (1990). Trans. 5. Partly cited in Deleuze (1988, 97). 6. One of Badious crucial arguments is that Deleuzian being is neutral. See Badiou (1996) and Badiou (1998). 7. Proust cites Deleuze as stating that each point testies, but Hand correctly translates Deleuze as stating that each diagram testies. Trans. 8. See the 1977 essay La Vie des hommes infmes in Foucault (1994, 3:241 53). As the editors explain, the essay was originally written as the introduction for an anticipated publication of the archives of the Bastille (see note 6). This project converted into a series edited for the publishing house Gallimard, called Les Vies paralleles (Parallel Lives), in which Foucault published the memoires of Herculine Barbin. Trans. 9. It is well known that Foucault wanted, in the rst place, to constitute an anthology of Lives of Infamous Men drawing on the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury archives of general hospital imprisonment at the Bastille. After this project aborted, he devoted a series to narratives of Parallel Lives. These were drawn from pathetic or pathological reminiscences with which medical literature in the second half of the nineteenth century was infatuated. Again, the project was aborted. See Foucault (1994, 3:241). 10. Selected, or perhaps self-selected, so much is it the case that Deleuzian and/ or Nietzschean afrmation goes beyond the dialectical opposition between position and negation, afrmation and destruction. This is what the idea of superior power signies. There is neither negation nor contradiction. There are superior points of view which dissolve, or dry up, without the desire for or will to destruction. The reader will note, furthermore, that all the limit experiences cited by Deleuzeamnesia, acephalia, apathy, catatonia or masochism, perversion, theatre of cruelty, black humor; or drunkenness, travel, desert, oceanare not experiences of the desire for destruction (they are desexualized). They are dissolution and ssure of the self, of the subject of certitude and representation. 11. Deleuze often cites Blanchot. For example, see Deleuze (1994, 11114) and Deleuze (1990, 15253, 22223). 12. Note the exact similarity of this 1969 text to Deleuzes ultimate text of 1995, LImmanence, une vie (Deleuze 1995), which Deleuze wrote, stoically, just before suiciding. 13. For example, in Deleuze (1994, 11113) and Deleuze (1990, 196201).

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14. This point is fully developed in Proust (1997). See in particular 14851. 15. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, Plateau 8, 192231): 1874: Three Novellas, or What Happened?

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Badiou, Alain. 1996. Deleuze. Paris: Hachette. . 1998. De la vie comme nom de ltre. Rue Descartes 20: 2734. Blanchot, Maurice. 1982. The space of literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. . 1993. The innite conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brhier, Emile. 1962. La thorie des incorporeals dans lancien stocisme. Paris: Vrin. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. London: Athlone Press. . 1990. The logic of sense. Trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. C. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. . 1994. Difference and repetition. Trans. P. Patton. London: Athlone Press. . 1995. Limmanence: une vie. Critique 47: 37. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. 1989. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1983. Afterword: The subject and power. In Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1987. Maurice Blanchot: The thought from outside. In Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Zone Books. . 1994. Dits et ecrits. In 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Melville, Herman. 1987. Bartleby, the scrivener. In The writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, ed. Harrison Hayford. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Proust, Franoise. 1997. De la rsistance. Paris: Cerf.