Deleuze: The Philosophy of Crime Novels

Going back through these older essays one is struck by Deleuze’s curious mind. He didn’t have some ultimate plan, instead he had that empowering curiosity that allowed him to wander the highways and byways of life and thought and thereby shed light on both the sublime and the most mundane objects. In his short essay on The Philosophy of Crime Novels, gathered together in Desert Islands, we see his fascination with two aspects of the detective mind. Literature has for the most part always lagged behind the cultural matrix within which it finds itself. Crime novels have been a staple in French society since their inception and one of the editors and promoters of this captivating art form Deleuze honors in this essay was Marcel Duhamel of the famed La Série noire (Éditions Gallimard).

In 1945, under the editorship of Marcel Duhamel , Gallimard  started publishing its translations of British and American crime novels in the La Serie Noire .  In 1946, echoing the Gallimard label, the French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote the two earliest essays to identify a departure in film-making, the American ‘film noir ‘.  Although they were not thought of in the United States as films noirs  (the French label did not become widely known there until the 1970s), numerous postwar Hollywood movies seemed to confirm the French judgment that a new type of  American film had emerged, very different from the usual studio product and  capable of conveying an impression ‘of certain disagreeable realities that do in truth exist’. 

Deleuze acknowledges the power of both deductive and inductive reasoning and attributes it too earlier forms of detective fiction, as well as to the dialectical interplay between the French and English approaches to the art of both philosophy and crime detection. From the beginnings in the 19th Century the detective novel devoted itself to the ‘power of the Mind’ and the genius of the Detective to elucidate the activities of the criminal world. At the center of this Deleuze tells us was the deep seated need know the truth about such things:

“The idea of truth in the classic detective novel was totally philosophical, that is, it was the product of the effort and the operations of the mind. So it is that police investigation modeled itself on philosophical inquiry, and conversely, gave to philosophy an unusual object to elucidate: crime” (Desert Islands, 2004. 81).

What’s fascinating to me about Deleuze is much the same I find in Slovoj Zizek, his ability to take even the most mundane aspect of culture and turn his curiosity as a philosopher into something that sheds light on both the cultural artifact and the philosophical world upon which it is based into something that enlightens as it instructs. He had a light touch, he was neither pedantic, nor a full blown pedagoge, he was able to see with a double eye or vision the dual aspects of our cultural life. In the crime novel he discovered the art of detection, the uncovering of truth as method and quest, and what he discovered was two schools of truth: the dialectical interplay between two cultures – the French and the English.

On the one had he discovered the French school, with Descartes as its masters, who taught us that truth is a “question of some fundamental intellectual intuition, from which the rest is rigorously deduced. On the other hand was the English school of Hobbes, for whom truth is always “induced from something else, interpreted from sensory indices” (81). These were the schools of inductive and deductive reasoning. These two schools of truth produces within the detective novel of these respective cultures a duality from its early inception to now.

Out of the English school came Sherlock Holmes, the master of semiotics, the interpreter of signs, the deductive genius. The inspired creation of Conan Doyle offered us a complex yet idiosyncratic detective whose abilities border on the fantastic, and who is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to adopt almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve difficult cases. Holmes’s primary intellectual detection method is abductive reasoning. “From a drop of water”, he writes, “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other”. Holmes stories often begin with a bravura display of his talent for “deduction”. It is of some interest to logicians and those interested in logic to try to analyse just what Holmes is doing when he performs his “deductions.” “Holmesian deduction” appears to consist primarily of drawing inferences based on either straightforward practical principles—which are the result of careful observation, such as Holmes’s study of different kinds of cigar ashes—or inference to the best explanation. One quote often heard from Holmes is “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

From the French school Deleuze cites two authors, Gaboriau who created Taberet and Lecoq: Lecoq first appears in L’Affaire Lerouge, published in 1866, in which he is described as “formerly an habitual criminal, now at one with the law, skilful at his job”. Lecoq plays only a minor role in this story, much of which is taken up by Mister Tabaret, an amateur sleuth nicknamed “Tirauclair” (French for “clarifier”), whom Lecoq recommends to help solve a murder; and, second, Gaston Leroux whose creation of the detective Rouletabille is described by Deleuze as always “invoking the right track of reason” and explicitly opposing his theory of certainty to the inductive method, the Anglo-Saxon theory of signs (82).

In an offhand remark after discussing the duplicity of these authors in creating two forms of literature: the detective and criminal, Deleuze brings us to a Freudian leitmotif – the impingement of the Oedipus myth working itself out in some of these very detectives and criminals, saying: “After philosophy, Greek tragedy.” He goes on to say:

“…we mustn’t be too surprised that the crime novel so faithfully reproduces Greek tragedy, since Oedipus is always called on to indicate any such coincidence. While it is the only Greek tragedy that already has this detective structure, we should marvel that Sophocles’s Oedipus is a detective, and not that the detective novel has remained Oedipal.” (83)

As always Deleuze shows his distaste of Freudian reductionism and a penchant for the dialogical reversal that sparks greater awareness.

At this point Deleuze recenters his essay and begins in earnest to describe why the authors published in La Série noire were so important. This new literary turn toward the criminal element as anti-hero showed us that “police activity has nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for the truth” (82). He continues: “Police work no more resembles scientific inquiry than a telephone call from an informant, inter-police relations, or mechanisms of torture resemble metaphysics” (82). Instead most of these new forms of criminal fiction show us two distinct types of criminal: the professional hit-man, and the sexual or jealous murderer. Both types are framed not by a quest for truth, but rather by an “astonishing compensation of error”. It is usually shown that the criminal is detected not by some methodical inquiry but due to the criminals own accidental movements in some other area of criminal activity than the one for which he was at first wanted; or, he is “arrested and deported for tax fraud”; or, even provoked to show himself, not through some careful detection, but through long and insufferable stakeouts, that provoke him to make a mistake and show himself (83). Instead of the methodical genius of a detective we have the blundering and error prone street cops who due to know great genius of their own stumble upon a solution and capture the criminal by accident rather than by careful deductive or inductive reasoning.

Why? Why this change in the genre from the grand genius of Sherlock Holmes or Lecoq? Deleuze offers us insight:

“This is because the truth is in no way the ambient element of the investigation: not for a moment does one believe that this compensation of errors aims for the discovery of the truth as its final objective. On the contrary, this compensation has its own dimension, its own sufficiency, a kind of equilibrium or the reestablishment of it, a process of restitution that allows society, at the limits of cynicism, to hide what it wants to hide, reveal what it wants to reveal, deny all evidence, and champion the improbable. The killer still at large may be killed for his own errors, and the police may have to sacrifice one of their own for still other errors, and so it is that these compensations have no other object than to perpetuate an equilibrium that represents a society in its entirety at the height of its power of falsehood” (83).

Do we not see that even now? This “power of falsehood” in society to compensate for its own failings by sacrificing and scapegoating? Isn’t this happening across the globalized world? Sacrifice and restitution, as old as Greek Tragedy itself, a power of falsehood at the center of society itself in which the “interpenetration is real, and the complicity deep and compensatory” (83). Do we not see it in the daily news, this law of compensation, this power of falsehood, what Deleuze called the “great trinity of falsehood: informant-corruption-torture” (83). Think of Abu Ghraib! As Deleuze implies: “A society indeed reflects itself to itself in its police and its criminals, even while it protects itself from them by means of a fundamental deep complicity between them” (83). As we contemplate the media, the nightly news or cable comics, we forget our own fraudulent complicity, our deep seated and silent knowledge that we too have caused this horrific world, that we are daily complicit with the global regimes in allowing this horror show to go on.

“We know that a capitalist society more willingly pardons rape, murder, or kidnapping that a bounced check, which is its only theological crime, the crime against spirit. … Have we really made any progress in understanding this hybrid of the grotesque and terrifying which, under the right circumstances, could determine the fate of us all?” (84).

He tells us that the realism of the early days was insufficient to “make good literature”, it brought us illusion instead of reality, it promoted stereotypes, puerile notions, and cheap fantasies, “worse than any imaginative imbecile could dream up” (83). Instead what was needed to bring the real back to us was parody, it was through parody that the real returned with a vengeance, and with it the complicity of humans to revel not in truth but in the power of falsehood. We know that parody is a form of imitation, but an imitation characterized by ironic inversion, a repetition with a critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity. Parody is at once a vehicle of satire and a way to portray society through a critical and malicious and often denigrating actant; in the case of crime novels, as seen through the eyes of the criminal. What Deleuze saw in this form was the power to break through the falsehoods that overlay our social blindness and to confront the truths of our own deep and abiding complicities. Without an ability to expose those complicities for what they are we would be forever doomed to repeat the criminal acts that are in themselves the darkest aspect of parody: the truth of our own illusionary lives.