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Angelaki
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Writing life and love

Santiago Cols a a Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures, 4108 Modern Languages Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275, USA Online Publication Date: 01 April 2006

To cite this Article Cols, Santiago(2006)'Writing life and love',Angelaki,11:1,199 207 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09697250600798110 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250600798110

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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities volume 11 number 1 april 2006

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Whats the hurry, in the end? You cant walk first and later enjoy the landscapes, or the versere . . . I seek things, I remember others, I return to the poems, and in addition I go and I come, I love, I play, I work, I wait, I hope, I despair, I consider. And it all forms part of Keats, because I am not going to write about him, but rather walk by his side and make of this, in the end, a diary [. . .] I simply enjoy walking through my memory, arm in arm with John Keats, favoring every type of encounter, presentation, and citation. zar, Imagen de John Keats 19 Julio Corta

he late Argentine expatriate author Julio zar was still a young man when he Corta wrote this, around my age and not yet a famous writer. Hed only publish his first collection of short stories later that year, 1951. And hed move to Paris to begin the second half, the famous half, of his life. No Hopscotch yet, no Blow Up, no Cronopios y Famas, none of these have yet been written, maybe not even conceived. The manuscript from which this comes would run to some six hundred pages and would sit in a desk drawer, unseen, until after his death. a) is the chapter Methodology (metodolog heading under which the words appear in his book on Keats. In the pages that follow I want to show you zar on this walk what I found as I followed Corta that he began as a young reader of a young John Keats. I want to share the perspective this methodology, this walk, offers on how Julio and so you and I might think about being, knowing, making, living, and loving. I know its customary for me to tell you in advance what I found, and part of me would really like to. I know in a way wed both feel better if I did. But on the other hand Im afraid that might spoil the walk for you. I think it might

santiago cola s WRITING LIFE AND LOVE zar and julio corta gilles deleuze
be more enjoyable and more in the spirit of things to have you just join along and find what you find.

1
Petrone is a Buenos Aires businessman who comes to spend a week in Montevideo closing a deal. On a tip from a friend he takes a room in the peaceful, almost deserted Hotel Cervantes. Everything about his stay is routine: the room is clean and ordinary, his business progresses smoothly, and he even has leisure time for the newspaper and a cabaret, though neither is remarkable enough to arouse his interest. Everything is normal and satisfactory, except that he cant sleep because of the soft cry of a

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/010199^9 2006 Taylor & Francis Group DOI: 10.1080/09697250600798110

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baby in the room next to his. Something has disturbed his sleep. Something has awakened him. This happens four times in the story. The first time occurs in those first minutes in which persist the remains of night and of dream and he thinks that at some moment hed been zar disturbed by the cry of some creature (Corta 1994b, 311). Petrones sleep is disturbed by the cry of a baby who (he is told later) doesnt exist. But the cry exists because it keeps him up at night. So it is real, even if theres no baby there because it produces undeniably real effects. Petrones responses to being awakened to dismiss the cry as a dream; to dismiss as a deception the managers assurance that there is no baby; to dismiss the baby as a hallucination of the hysterical solitary woman who occupies the adjacent room all involve rationally explaining away the phenomenon in order to get back to sleep. Finally, when each of these explanations melts away before the heat of the persisting phenomenon, he flees in terror. Petrone hears the baby crying from the other side of the door, but he never tries to open it, to pass through it. The condemned door behind the wardrobe in his room, the ghostly door that carries the memory of the building that the hotel now occupies, the door: at one time people had entered and exited through it, banging it shut, leaving it ajar, giving it a life that was still present in its wood that was zar 1994b, so different from the walls (Corta 312). Even though, or maybe because, he glimpses the presence of that past life embedded in the grain of the wood; even though, or because, that door demands he assume some kind of responsibility, Petrone still treats it like an ordinary non-functioning condemned door. This door isnt so much a symbol of or a metaphor for something as it is a metonym, a piece, a tip of the iceberg of an entire way of perceiving and experiencing being in the world that Petrone an ordinary businessman who just wants to sleep does not want to accept. In reflections also first inspired by his reading of Keats, Julio offers Petrone some advice, in the form of his description of something he calls participation. Participation for Julio refers to a way of relating and relating with the things of the world. To know, Julio quotes Levy-Bruhl,
in general, is to objectify, to objectify is to project outside of oneself, as if the thing were strange, what one would know. [. . .] The essence of the participation lies, precisely, in erasing all duality; in spite of the principle of contradiction, the subject is at the same time him or herself and the being in zar 1994a, which he or she participates. (Corta 272; 1996, 519)

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Participation, then, for Julio is more than just a way of relating. It also by its contrast with to know in the passage above suggests a way of relating that facilitates a form of understanding. Participation so understood takes as its point of departure the assumption that there is an essential inter-being of the things that make up that world. Participation suggests that we might get ourselves into better relations with that world if we stopped thinking of ourselves as outside of it. Or to put it another way, if we stopped trying to get ourselves outside of it. Julio wouldnt be alone in adopting this perspective. I think Gilles Deleuze was after something similar when he developed the idea of becoming. To become, he asserts,
is never to imitate, or to do like, nor to conform to a model, whether its of justice or of truth . . . One and the same becoming, a single bloc of becoming, or, . . . an a-parallel evolution of two beings who have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. (Deleuze and Parnet 23)1

Becoming could be among other things a way to talk about knowing as participation without splitting things up into subjects and objects. This view of becoming, Im sure, guided Deleuze when he wrote about other authors. So when he tells me to Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him (Deleuze and Parnet 119). I take him to be encouraging me into a becoming with the author, an understanding without or beyond subjects and objects.

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Something like Julios walk with John Keats perhaps.2
fact in this building, was left here by the previous tenants. So you wont find much that pertains to me, yet I prefer these random appurtenances. Their diversity keeps me from being limited to a single mode of reflection; and in this laboratory, whose resources I have systematically inventoried (with the opposite of the conventional valuation, of course), my imagination is less inclined to measure its steps. Which is something I know it would zar have taken me more words to say. (Corta 1986c, 7)

2
In Julios work this basic way of seeing our being and knowing in this world that I have been calling participation derives from something that struck him repeatedly in his studies of Keats: the sense or awareness of the porosity of the membranes separating him from the people and things around him, and those things and people from each other. Over the course of his correspondence, Keats lets drop time and again a certain notion that returns and is formulated in relation to concrete cases that worry him: the notion of being invaded by the personality of those who zar 1996, 490). This idea is surround him (Corta everywhere in this book: Keats as a kind of ecstatic chameleon, broken-up in his encounters with the world. Keats poems are just the diary of the trip. This sense of permeability, this compassion (feeling with), lies at the bottom of that attitude toward citation that Julio expresses here in the Keats book for the first time in writing: if I quote because I want to (Si cito porque me da la gana) and not to impress or dominate its because the wanting gives me the quotes (es que la gana me da las citas). When the little-stickthat-speaks begins to do so for another, I respect that habitation of a spirit that uses me to repeat itself, to return from its tomb. Voracity of the poet that overflows his own books, invading alien zar 1996, 19). Some time later, hell ones (Corta say this again, at the beginning of Around the Day in Eighty Worlds:
You may have noticed the quotes raining down, and thats nothing compared to what will follow (that is, almost everything). In the eighty worlds of my trip around the day there are harbors, hotels, and beds for Cronopios, and besides, in quoting others we cite ourselves, its been said and done more than a few times, only pedants quote to be correct, whereas Cronopios quote because they are terrible egotists and they want to gather their friends together . . . Robert Lebel, for example, who described this book perfectly when he said: Everything you see in this room, or in

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It turns out that Lebel, whom Julio cites here, is himself citing Marcel Duchamp, and the whole thread of borrowed words leads Julio to affirm the relation between such joyful, friendly citation and that sense of substantiality, the being alive that lacks in so many of our books, that writing and breathing (in the Indian sense of breathing as the ebb and flow of the universal being) not be zar 1986c, 7). And two different rhythms (Corta it is worth remembering that the Spanish word cita, that Julio uses here for quotation, also means encounter or meeting, as in the concrete actualization of a relation. So this attitude toward citation echoes Julios method of chronicling his walk with Keats, that is to say his record of the moving relations that is their walk together. Gilles Deleuze explained in an interview why he wrote about David Hume and the empiricist philosophers. They made, he said, a vital discovery, the certainty of life which, if one really adheres to it, changes ones way of life. It is that relations are external to their terms (Deleuze and Parnet 55; original emphasis).3 Its the idea that relations between things are not subordinate to those things. Relations are just as much things as things. Peter is smaller than Paul, The glass is on the table: relation is neither internal to one of the terms which would consequently be subject, nor to two together (Deleuze and Parnet 55). They have a life of their own, relations do, and so do Julio and Keats, each made up of relations, and so does the relation that is recorded in that book. In this insight Deleuze finds a vital protest against principles. Indeed, if one sees in it something which runs through life, but which is repugnant to thought, then thought must be

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forced to think it, one must make relations the hallucination point of thought, an experimentation which does violence to thought. Empiricists are not theoreticians, they are experimenters (Deleuze and Parnet 55). This is because the history of philosophy is encumbered with the problem of being, IS (Deleuze and Parnet 56). But the empiricists think with AND. For Deleuze, to think with AND makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole (Deleuze and Parnet 57). This all sounds too technical and serious perhaps. Consider Deleuzes thoughts as a way of describing what happens when you step into the forest of Julios citational encounters. Its really quite simple. Deleuzes AND simply connects things, like us with the world around us.4 Dewey made connection the foundation of his theory of experience and of art, and cited John Keats attitude as a prime example. As Deleuze says, with a tremendous, earned simplicity: Try it, it is a quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life (Deleuze and Parnet 57). adding nothing from beyond (no transcendentalism), taking nothing away (no repression); merely experimentally rearranging the relations among s). Here it is important the given elements (Cola to recall that the etymological roots of invention lead us to the Greek heuresis and so evoke the image of stumbling upon something, encountering in short, a cita. Its versatile applicability to generative processes ranging from physics to biology to philosophy to literature partly explains the vital urgency with which Horacio Oliveira, at the beginning of Julios most famous novel Hopscotch, announces that in an age in which we run toward deception through infallible equations and conformity machines, our possible truth must be invention (nuestra n) verdad posible tiene que ser invencio zar 1966, 38384). (Corta When I read these words, Julio springs to life and begins to give me advice, like a mentor or a friend. He first suggests I create the conditions in my life and my self: suspend routine and open yourself to permeability. In another moment, Julio will combine these in the simple counsel, borrowed from Fred Astaire, to let yourself go. Suspend routine, break habits. Like Henry Miller staying up all night, forcing the body to lead the way into the crack the always closing elevator door through the sticky brick of habit (sticky brick is what Julio called it in the Preface to Cronopios and Famas; or the Great Habit in chapter 73 of Hopscotch). I look through dog-eared pages, souvenirs from an earlier transformative journey through Henry Millers Rosy Crucifixion, but the passage Im looking for has slipped back, hiding in the shadows of the hundreds of thousands of other words. Instead perhaps they are in league with each other and this is a diversionary tactic another passage leaps out in front of me, waving its arms, ears wiggling, laughing off the walls. Speaking of the creative artist, Miller gives me another way to think of the conditions essential for the poetic act par excellence:
Acceptance is the solution: it is an art, not an egotistical performance on the part of the intellect. Through art, then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the

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This all smacks of the tom-tom and mumbo jumbo, and also sounds a little technical, but not when you suspend routine and open yourself to that permeability in which Antonin Artaud saw the poetic act par excellence, the recognition of the dynamic and internal destiny of thought zar 1986b, 33). Indeed, in Julios world, (Corta this basic way of seeing being and knowing that I have been calling participation is constitutive of creative power and what is life if not the ceaseless manifestation of creative power, the ceaseless production of the new? I love the corridor for which this passage is the opening: an extraordinary description that is also an example of the poetic act par excellence, the process he n. would elsewhere call invencio Invention is the name that Julio gives to the process of creating something new by an immanent rearrangement of the relations comprising something old: precisely the way that an anagram makes a new word from an old word,

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great discovery. Here all is play and invention . . . the world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless. We have first to acquire vision, then discipline and forbearance . . . the humility to acknowledge the existence of a vision beyond our own . . . the great joy of the artist is to become aware of a higher order of things, to recognize by the compulsive and spontaneous manipulation of his own impulses the resemblance between human creation and what is called divine creation. (Miller 213)

The humility of which Miller speaks, toward which he prods me, is what Julio is after when he says let yourself go. It is detention, understood as a reflexive verb, as it is more commonly in Spanish, to hold my self back. I try saying it like this let your self go. Now I try it like this: let your self go. Let it float away, my self, the name given to the desire to order and impose cause and effect. Maybe it works for certain purposes, but is an absolute handicap for the sort of voyages Julio and Henry are evoking here.5 In Cronopios and Famas, Julio gives Instructions on How to Sing. They begin like this: Begin by breaking all the mirrors in the house, let your arms fall to your side, gaze vacantly at the wall, forget zar 1969a, 7). Can we let our yourself (Corta self wither, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree (Nietzsche 244). This humility can only be achieved, as anything else, through practice and repetition. Now, with the essential conditions in place, I can relish the gorgeous vision that comprises the poetic act par excellence. This vision consists in a perceptual or physical and very often non-linear rearrangement of preexisting elements so as to release the secret connections (think with AND!) they have with each other and with us. First Julio describes the intuition of archaic, magical origin that there are phenomena, even physical objects, that are what they are and

the way they are because, in some sense they also are or could be other phenomena and other things. Julio might want to call this archaic, magical, or intuitive, but if it is, something very similar is todays most advanced model of life itself. All members of an ecological community are interconnected in a vast and intricate network of relationships, the web of life. They derive their essential properties and, in fact, their very existence from their relationships to other things (Capra 298). Now, what but dead knowing and lifeless writing could issue from a position staked on denying or fleeing such relationships? Indeed, how can we call ourselves alive if we resist such relationships? Perhaps such a vision seems fantastic. But Henry Miller explains why we might be tempted to give it that name. In works of fantasy the existence of law manifesting itself through order is even more apparent than in other works of art. And how beautiful. Im brimming with joy. How extraordinary that Henry should have leaped to my ear to speak of fantasy when I am walking zar. slowly through the works of Julio Corta Perhaps the fact that Julios vision was completely in tune with what we now see as the nature of life itself isnt life fantastic? explains why someone like Henry Miller could enjoy in such a vision the mysteriously healthful effects of an elixir. Miller again: Such a creation, which is nothing less than pure invention, pervades all levels, creating, like water its level. Now another constellation explodes into view before my eyes. First, theres that word: invention. But Henry also draws a line connecting that word with the action of water which, as the Tao Te Ching observes, touches the ten thousand things and does not strive (Lao Tsu Eight). Pure process. Something, Henry now concludes, is present in works of fantasy, which can only be likened to an elixir. This mysterious element, often referred to as pure nonsense, (tom-tom and mumbojumbo?) brings with it the flavor of that longer and utterly impenetrable world in which we and all the heavenly bodies have their being. Henry has indeed shot me back among the stars, now the stars of other people who have written and thought about inventing secret connections. The world, Julio once wrote,

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is a badly resolved problem if it does not contain, in some part of its diversity, the encounter of each thing with all the others. The poet, he continued, if she cannot connect them by intrinsic features, does what everyone does when looking at the stars: she invents the constellation, the lines linking the solitary stars zar 1996, 30102). We make the constella(Corta tion by inventing. Im inventing constellations, making a road by walking around among the solitary stars of words Julios, Millers, Deleuzes. And perhaps a reader will traverse some of these paths and see these patterns. But maybe also, without meaning to, I will expose a previously hidden cloud of stars and the reader will then have the joy of inventing her own turtle or bear. But I cant know or guarantee that. I can only take the leap of faith up among these stars and hope that you will join me. Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. These are the principles of connection and heterogeneity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). A rhizome is what started me on this walk, the rhizome comprised of Julios writing-walking Keats. I dont want to squeeze that rhizome into the framework of a single unifying thesis. Id rather leap from star to star. Its okay if I get upside-down or change falls out of my pockets. Itll wind up somewhere and so will I. neurosis, but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 172). Is it an accident that Julio was unhealthy and, according to most who knew him, had a strangely vital relationship to death? That his wide infant eyes witnessed the beginning of a century marked by incomprehensible levels of deaths? Julio himself understood the intimacy of life and death: precisely because deep down I am a very optimistic and very vital person, that is someone who believes in life as profoundly as possible, the notion of death is also zar 1978, 28). Deleuzes very strong in me (Corta assertion concerning the vital function of art might provide another way of understanding teaching and learning to live better (the only solution that Julio could offer to the overwhelming mark of death in his century):6 to elude the bars of the self and the personal and the organism in order to unleash the flow of life. Why do Julio and his characters like to play at shuffling heterogeneous elements until they discover or invent a secret subterranean homogeneity that links them and lights them up into pleasing neon constellations? Maybe because, in their vision of life, we are ourselves nothing more than just such elements, shuffled into figures and arrays and patterns. Juan exclaims: Oh, to give in to that moving framework of instantaneous nets, to accept ones place in the deck, to consent to whatever shuffles and deals, what a tempta zar 1973, 42). Invention now displays tion (Corta another one of its effects. Now you can see that invention lets us see, and even manipulate in miniature, the dynamic of those inexplicable, barely describable anti-laws that, our habitual attachment to the idea of a sovereign ego notwithstanding, might be governing our lives. Morelli says these anti-laws work beyond reason and description. But he does not mean that words cannot evoke these. Far from it. Indeed, if Morelli is right, then this also helps to explain why Julio so often identifies invention with poetry (in its etymological sense of making). True, language cannot represent those magical forces they move and shift much too quickly and chaotically

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Critical to the kind of creativity that flows from seeing ourselves as participating in being conceived as a multiplicity of relations composed of more relations and so on all the way down is letting go of our usual way of thinking of language as offering us a representation or picture of the world. Instead, we might do better if we were to understand language as one of the tools we have for bringing forth of creating, that is, or inventing a congenial set of relations between the bits of the multiplicity we usually call I and the bits we usually call the world. Paradoxically, the vitalism Deleuze finds in the work of art derives from the artists intimacy with death: What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or

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for language. But language can generate when its symbolic, rhetorical, and expressive dimensions are emphasized or deployed verbal iterations of what that something does with the heterogeneous elements including human beings that make up the universe. Language can, in short, create real relations. Think, Italo Calvino encourages us
what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic . . . Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote about the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified himself with that nature common to each and everything. (Calvino 124) a lever. But nowadays we see movement defined less and less in relation to a point of leverage. All the new sports surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding take the form of entering into an existing wave. Theres no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to get into something instead of being the origin of an effort. (Deleuze 1995, 121)

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Julio gives us such a work, he gives it to us the way you give a friend a cold, or joy: so that they have it too. It comes from that chameleonic quality, something he admired deeply in Keats for whom, as for Basho: to know something is to zar 1986a, participate in it in some way (Corta 147). The little boy in The Poisons knows this:
I liked to throw myself face down on the ground and to smell the earth, feeling it underneath me, warm with its smell of summer so different from other times. I thought of many things, but above all of the ants, now that I had seen what the anthills were I stayed thinking of the tunnels that crisscrossed all over the place and that nobody saw. Like the veins in my legs, that you could barely distinguish below my skin, but full of ants and mysteries that came and went. zar 1994c, 305) (Corta

Maybe this helps explain the difference between Petrone, or someone like him, and La Maga (or the woman in La puerta condenada) and people like them. The apparently exceptional in Julios universe works like the wind or the motion of the waves, even like gravity. When people like Petrone become aware of that force or movement, their thoughts and deeds strive to apply energy and resistance, opposition, to subdue it. But the woman in the story, or La Maga, or the children in Silvia, they are different, they surf, or hang-glide, they seek to enter into that surprising order of things.

5
Which is another way of saying they understand and are capable of love. Love, writes Thomas Merton,
demands a complete inner transformation . . . We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our being, our own self. No matter how hard we try, we resist this death: we fight back with anger, with recriminations, with demands, with ultimatums. We seek any convenient excuse to break off and give up the difficult task. (Merton 1960, 1819)

Deleuze observes that:

the kind of physical movements you find in sports are changing. We got by for a long time with an energetic conception of motion, where theres a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point,

No wonder Petrone went running. This experiment can be scary. I must accept what feels at least at first like total vulnerability (not that my sense of self could ever truly protect me). What if I am rejected? What if I am left alone here? What if through the others eyes I see that I must make changes? But the effect of accepting this vulnerability is the rushing feeling of tremendous growth, far beyond the

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dimensions permitted by a cramped and clinging sense of self. Julio once tried to explain that sexuality becomes invention at the moment that one sees ones own pleasure as inseparable and conditioned upon the pleasure of another zar 1978, 69). I dont know if Julio himself (Corta lived this way, though everyone Ive talked to who knew him well agrees that he did, even when they agree on little else. Certainly, much of his writing exercises this capacity, explores it, experiments with it, using and abusing rules of grammar and syntax as a means of overcoming the condition of the skinny, embarrassed cats. And then invention comes back as the discursive mode appropriate for love. For love, Julio tells me, it would be easier for me to communicate in language in the infectious, moving way that others communicate in music or kisses when I can give up my attachment to language as a device for representing some thing outside of it. I want to communicate that way because communicating that way is the best way to touch others and to be touched, to come together with others in language. Without that kind of communication, whether I am using language or music or kisses, I am alone (even if I dont seem to be) with a whole canefield of words grown up between me and others zar 1966, 95). (Corta But Julio, describing a certain Lucas theory of communication, suggests that there is another way for Bruno and Horacio and myself to communicate with our angels without giving up our beloved words:
as rarefied as the air of his writing might be, as much as some thing can only come and go with great difficulty, Lucas never ceases to verify whether the coming is valid and whether the going takes place without major obstacles. Little he cares about the individual situation of the readers, because he believes in a mysteriously multiform measurement that in the majority of cases fits like a well-cut suit, and thats why it isnt necessary to give ground in either the coming or the going: between him and others there will be a bridge as long as what is written is born of a seed and not a graft. In his most delirious inventions theres something that at the same time is so simple, so little bird, and so gin rummy. Its not a matter of writing for others but for oneself, but oneself must also be the zar 1984, 1617) others . . . (Corta

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If we could see words this way: not as snapshots of things but as things themselves, coming and going, that touch people, that produce effects, the way that kisses and music make you shiver or laugh or dance, then perhaps our words would carry the germ of life, infecting and enriching our angels. Perhaps then, instead of caging ourselves our angels having flown in verbal representation, we might build bridges connecting us with our angels. Perhaps, then, we could really come, change, and stay together.

notes
I would like to thank Charles Stivale for the stimulus and invitation that gave rise to this particular article, and Felicity Colman for her tireless, generous, tender, and effective editorial work on the essay. 1 See also Deleuze (1983, 19^25) and Deleuze (1992,169^ 86). 2 This same point is elaborated from the two apparently very different perspectives of Catholic mysticism and American pragmatism by Thomas Merton (1993, 143^ 44) and John Dewey (1917 , 31). Both encourage that we view knowing more as the event that punctuates a successful process of intelligent mixing with the world. 3 And see also, for a more extended discussion, Deleuze (1991, 21^36, 85^104). 4 See also Dewey (1980,13^34), who makes Keats his prime exemplar of this connective stance. Also, for a view of relation as one of the defining conditions of life, see Capra (36^50, 158 ^59, 298 ^99). 5 For a broader consideration of the cultural inflections of this kind of thinking see Batchelor (37^ 68) and Heidegger. 6 In Unos de tantos d| as en Saignon (Corta zar 1969b, 22^27).

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s Santiago Cola Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures 4108 Modern Languages Building Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275 USA E-mail: scolas@umich.edu