The question cannot be answered according to a syntactic or even a
semantic logic. Language refers also to its context, to the body, to the
before and after, to the imaginary and expectations, to desire. The pro-
duction of sense depends on everything that serves as a context to the
enunciation and to the intentionally produced signs; it depends on the
fact that language crosses into and connects with other planes, pro-
liferating in this encounter. We can attempt to describe the various
planes separately, but they only function in an instantaneous manner.
When I start running while screaming ‘run away!’ people run with me
not only because of the words I have said but from the way in which I
said them, from the fact that I am terrorized and that I am fleeing
myself.
In communication there is a dimension at once pragmatic, affective
and emotional that shares several traits with contagion. The produc-
tion of sense has much to do with contagion, not only with syntactic
orthodoxy and semantic pertinence. What the production of sense
puts into motion are ‘lines of flight’ toward other planes of expression.
When two people argue, the problem is not that one is right and the
other is wrong, but that they inhabit two unequal planes: the one
walks the length of a labyrinth different from the other’s, because the
two labyrinths intersect along a line that allows flight onto the other
plane, but otherwise they do not coincide. This is why Deleuze said he
did not like the method of disputation. To dispute someone’s thought
is not very interesting, nor even very useful, because there is nothing
to dispute. Rather, it is a matter of understanding on what plane a cer-
tain speaking subject is moving, and what assemblages set his process
of enunciation in motion.
In fact, there was a curious aspect of Félix’s and Gilles’s mode of
arguing that seemed particularly remarkable in situations of collective
discussion. There was a kind of lightness, an excess of freedom that
could be viewed as superficiality
I remember one spring day in the early 1980s, when I had to prepare a
document to launch a day of struggle against the ongoing repression in
Italy. There was me, Félix, and Franco Piperno seated in a garden reading
texts that each of us had written separately so that we could then fuse
them into a single text. I had recently seen a movie, The Man Who Fell to
Earth, with David Bowie coming from a distant planet and remaining
trapped on this world. I liked the film immensely and what particularly
moved me was the idea of belonging to a race of visitors that happened
to come here by chance and then were caught on planet Earth. I wrote
something on this theme, about David Bowie and extraterrestrial visitors.
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