Reading the Road: Using Deleuze to Explore Kenneth White’s ‘Struggle for Subjectivity’

a doctorat d'État at the Université Paris VII (where he was working as a lecturer) under the supervision of Michel Gresset. 1 Gresset suggested Gilles Deleuze as a member of the thesis's jury.White at this point was familiar with Deleuze's work, while Gresset was certain that Deleuze was aware of White's.What they admired in each other's work, I would suggest, was a shared need to move outside established literary and philosophical terrain, part of a wider problem, as White puts it, of how to escape from the 'Motorway of Western civilization, laid down and directed by Platonic idealism, Aristotelian classifi cation, Christianity, Renaissance humanism, Cartesianism and Hegelian historicism, to mention only a few major stages in its progression'. 2 In White's essay about his contact with Deleuze, Dialogue Avec Deleuze, he describes their fi rst meeting and stresses how Deleuze's apartment gave 'a certain impression of confi nement une certaine impression d'enfermement', 3 an intimation of the criticisms of Deleuze's work White goes on to make.Looking into the differences between White's work and Deleuze's, as well as points of convergence that can be found between the poetry and the philosophy (despite White's criticisms of Deleuze) is the concern for the fi rst section to this essay.The focus will be on their conceptions of the fi gure of the nomad.In his preface to Handbook for the Diamond Country White evokes Heidegger and the idea of the 'road that is most necessary for our thought'; White then states that his poetry can be thought of as a 'few signs arising from one body-mind's attempt to follow that road'. 4 In order to read this road, to follow the lines and movements of a 'struggle for subjectivity', which, as Deleuze explains, 1 White lectured at the University of Paris VII between 1969-1980.In 1983 he took up a newly founded chair of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne.