Against the “Natural” Order of the World

Abstract

Along the many conceptualizations and definitions of the sign offered by the history of semiotics this article selects as its point of departure the Proustian definition, whereby the sign is what forces us into thinking. However, this thinking no longer makes an effort to find the truth, but creates the circumstances where thinking may seek the truth or, in other words, establishes the relationship with the still-unsought and reveals the truth in incommensurability. This is because – as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari assert in their work What Is Philosophy? – the true criterion of thinking is novelty; namely, to think means to think differently; moreover, it is only possible to think differently. This recognition places us precisely at the crux of their late philosophical thought through the prism that we will use to read the genre novel (a kind of “moral and metaphysical thriller” as the author herself defined it) Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive your Plough over the Bones of Dead, 2009; the title is a paraphrase of the verse from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”), written by Olga Tokarczuk – who, among other things, won the Vilenica Prize in 2013. However, this reading will not take place as an application of Deleuze’s reading of Proust, known from the work Proust and Signs, even though this will be taken into account. The article first of all seeks to determine which of Deleuze and Guattari’s basic concepts, above all becoming (becoming-animal, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-imperceptible) are key for reflecting on the thematization of animals in literature, and on this basis to show that it is precisely the issue of thematizing animals that is fatefully connected with contesting the orientation that subordinates heterogeneity to a single homogenizing concept and makes it possible for generally known accepted ideas to continually succeed in becoming rooted in consciousness. Yet such an orientation requires attentiveness, particularly to the part of the sign that is more accessible to perception than to reason. In this context, distinguishing between reason and perception is vitally important for the reading of Tokarczuk’s novel. It is precisely in this sense that it is possible to understand the fact why the poetical “composite” art of William Blake is the most important intertextual element in the novel.