The Pleasure of Writing: Escape from the Dominant System

It may be – I’m not really sure yet – that I am committing a certain kind of error in employing Deleuze to write about the pleasure of writing, given that Deleuze, in his own words, could “hardly bear the word ‘pleasure’” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 189).Whether this is the case remains to be seen, but for now, at least, it is the elaboration of the possibility of this mistake that forms of the basis of this chapter:in other words, writing about (the possibility of the mistake of writing about) the pleasure of writing with Deleuze. Here is my declaration of intent: it is my argument that the pleasure (though, as we shall see, pleasure may be the wrong idea here) of writing can be read inter alia as the creative and productive aspects of desire as the production of new forms of subjectivity through the process of writing itself. And that this production may, at least, be found in the processes of wha tDeleuze and Guattari (1986) term a ‘minor literature’ and Ronald Bogue (1997, p.111) describes as ‘minor writing’: writing that produces escape from dominant modes of being. As such, this chapter is written around the problem of reading writing as the work of how writing writes the self – synthesising a self – rather than a self producing writing. I use the work of Deleuze and Guattari here to suggest that a minor literature might offer possibilities for desiring-production in academic writing. This is writing that, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, that “is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (1986, p. 16), that is, writing that produces movement and change, forming new connections and producing new and innovative forms of subjectivity that diverge from the dominant (major) modes of being writerly.