Deleuze, Affect Theory, and the Future of Realism

Rethinking realism after Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” (1967) requires a special kind of labor: allegedly, an anachronistic task of recuperating representation as a concept that is meaningful and even “possible.” Noticing the new literary practices of modernist masters such as Mallarmé, Valéry, and Proust, Barthes made a declarative argument in his essay that a text “could have no other origin than language itself,” turning the autonomy of the art object into the autonomy of the text, thus extending aesthetic autonomy to all of language.1 His claim that searching for an ultimate, single meaning in a text entails…