June 4, 1973
Jean-Pierre Faye (1925-) initially came to prominence as a poet and novelist, participating in the Nouveau Roman movement alongside figures such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. He published his first poems in 1945, and from 1958 onwards authored a series of novels beginning with Entre les rues [Between the Roads] and La Cassure [The Break] (1961), going on to receive a literary award for L’Ecluse [The Lock] in 1964. During the 1960s, Faye became involved with the literary journal Tel Quel, but his relationship with the journal’s presiding figure Philippe Sollers became increasingly fractious, and in 1967, he split from the journal for political reasons to form a new journal, Change, which began to appear in 1968 (Guattari’s text ‘Machine and Structure’ was published in Volume 12 in 1969).
In 1972-73, Faye published three major theoretical works, Théorie du Récit [Theory of Narrative], the immense Langages Totalitaires [Totalitarian Languages], and a collection of articles, La Critique du langage et son économie [The Critique of Language and its Economy]. Deleuze enthusiastically embraced these works in the Anti-Oedipus II seminars of 1973. Faye went on to publish La Raison narrative [Narrative Reason] (1990) among numerous other works, and remained prolific as a theoretician, novelist, playwright and controversialist right into the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
Theory of Narrative is subtitled as an ‘Introduction to Totalitarian Languages’ and starts from the premise that sequences of actions or events, sequences of discourse, and movements in the relations of production and exchange should not be understood as parallel series (as is suggested by certain contemporary Marxist accounts of the relation of economy and ideology), but as mutually influencing each other. On the one hand, Faye refers back to the eighteenth-century French historian Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, whose narration of the history of France in Observations sur l’histoire de France (1765, 2nd edition, 1788) introduced terms like ‘patrie’ and ‘citoyen’ into the French language in such a way as to actually “change the face of nations”. On the other hand, Faye begins to set forth his study of the intricate details of the history of Nazism, giving the example of a particular sequence of political events, discourses and economic events in 1934: the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s speech of 13 July retroactively justifying it, and the initiation of the German ‘financial miracle’ engineered by the Chancellor, Hjalmar Schacht. Political and economic events cannot be understood here, he contends, without taking into account the discursive narratives that are woven into them in real time.
Faye’s major work, Totalitarian Languages, despite appearances, is not a work of theory strictly speaking, and contains no systematic attempts to define or classify types of totalitarianism. Instead, it is a microscopic account of events in the history of Nazism, again focussing on the interweaving of real-time discursive narratives with political and economic events. Faye distinguishes a whole array of political actors and groups from the far right and far left, charting their decisive maneuvers and sometimes overlapping positions at crucial historical junctures. Basing himself on an account of a speech given in 1932 to the ‘Society for German Literature’ where the speaker called upon the audience to “renounce the democratic and bourgeois schema of the distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’” and instead to “represent German parties and currents in the form of a horseshoe (Hufeingestalt)” (p. 401), Faye elaborates a complex account of the shifting forces that made Hitler’s political success possible. In the latter part of the book, Faye analyses the system of ‘Mefo bills’ created by Schacht to support German rearmament in the 1930s.
In Anti-Oedipus II, session 4 and session 5, Deleuze sees Faye as giving a novel and successful account of the “production of statements” at particular junctures of history which supersedes classical Marxist accounts of the relation of economy and ideology. He refers to Faye’s account of Mably but focuses primarily on Faye’s account of the history of Nazism. He does not refer to the ‘horseshoe theory’ but talks at length about the role of ‘Mefo bills’ in the Nazi economy. A small portion of Deleuze’s material on Faye’s work found its way into A Thousand Plateaus.
Deleuze and Faye had personal relations going back a long way: they knew each other in their youth, were related through marriage, and attended university in Paris at the same time. [Edited: C Kerslake, 2024]