and life and deleuze and literature (Comments to Ukrainian Translation of the Deleuze’s Essay “Literature and Life”)

Gilles Deleuze's “Literature and Life” was published in 1993 in the collection of essays "Critics and Clinique". The essay is translated into Ukrainian for the first time. In the essay, the French philosopher demonstrates his own interpretation of literature and literary process. The text is full of concepts and ideas developed and offered by Deleuze in his previous works: “Proust and Signs”, “Logic of Sense”, “Zola and the Crack-up”, “Anti-Oedipus”, “Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature”, “A Thousand Plateaus”, “and Dialogues”.

Deleuze's texts are filled with concepts and various conceptual games. It is extremely important for the translator to reproduce this accurately because the whole of Deleuze’s philosophy is based on this. Therefore, Ukrainian translation of the essay “Literature and Life” is just as accurate as possible (if possible) reproduction of not only concepts but also conceptual shades and various transformations caused by them.

In the rhizome's body, no singularity has an advantage over other singularities. Both deleuze and life, it does not matter which words, everything is written with a small letter. The main task of literature is opening the singularities under the mask of writers. These singularities are impersonal; therefore they aren’t rooted in the personality of a writer. Literature is some kind of phantasm, which doesn’t have any bearer. This phantasm helps to destroy the limits of oppressive reality and discover new continents, countries, and islands. Literature may become a weapon, which we can use in order to elucidate our sufferings, pains etc. We are searching for a better country, better people around us. Simply, we are looking for happiness. Literature gives us it. We must switch off our television, internet, gadgets, and read good books in order to become free from virtual surfaces, simulacrums. The paradox of literature consists of giving the force of the impersonal, which destroy the limits of an oppressive reality.