Throughout his work, Deleuze not only draws on literature in order to address philosophical problems but he seeks to map out the ‘mobile relations’ between philosophy and literature. After an initial overview, I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus (1980), a book co-authored with Guattari, and in particular, on plateaus “1874: Three Novellas or ‘What happened?’” and “1730: Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible…” In doing so, I aim to explore: (a) how the relation between literature and philosophy is refracted in Novellas Plateau (...) and (b) the way in which Deleuze and Guattari articulate their key philosophical notion of becoming-imperceptible via Kierkegaard’s knight of faith. The novella as a literary genre by essentially relating to secrecy also advances a distinctive way of relation between the three dimensions of time (the past, present and future). I argue that novella-time could be extended beyond the limits of the literary genre ‘novella.’ To this end, I propose a reading of Kierkegaard’s Repetition (1843) and selected entries from his Journals in order to identify his contribution as a religious writer to the discussion of philosophy as literature. I conclude that time, change and faith stand out as a common problematic of philosophy, literature, and life. (shrink)

A quotation from the early Platonic dialogue Hippias Major is used as an epigraph to Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Apart from this paratextual (and liminal) presence of the Platonic text, “the Hippias as an introduction to the beautiful” could serve, according to Climacus’ words, “as a kind of analogy to an introduction such as that” his own book aims to be; that is, an introduction which will throw light “on what Christianity is” but make “it difficult to become a Christian”. The (...) aim of the present paper is to investigate whether the above claim of Climacus could be attested in the Postscript and how the Platonic dialogue helps him reiterate a “new approach” to the problem of the Crumbs and orient his reader to the particularity of the Crumbs’ crumb philosophy. (shrink)