So I'll move onto your other more cruel and hurtful criticism, when
you say I'm someone who's always just tagged along behind, taking it
easy, capitalizing upon other people's experiments, on gays, drug-
users, alcoholics, masochists, lunatics, and so on, vaguely savouring
their transports and poisons without ever taking any risks. You turn
against me a piece I wrote where I ask how we can avoid becoming
professional lecturers on Artaud or fashionable admirers of
Fitzgerald. But what do you know about me, given that I believe in
secrecy, that is, in the power of falsity, rather than in representing
things in a way that manifests a lamentable faith in accuracy and
truth? If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone
else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions,
and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. And what
do my relations with gays, alcoholics, and drug-users matter, if I can
obtain similar effects by different means? What's interesting isn't
whether I'm capitalizing on anything, but whether there are people
doing something or other in their little corner, and me in mine, and
whether there might be any points of contact, chance encounters and
coincidences rather than alignments and rallying-points (all that crap
where everyone's supposed to be everyone else's guilty conscience and
judge). I owe you lot nothing, nothing more than you owe me. I don't
need to join you in your ghettos, because I've got my own. The
question's nothing to do with the character of this or that exclusive
group, it's to do with the transversal relations that ensure that any
effects produced in some particular way (through homosexuality, drugs,
and so on) can always be produced by other means. We have to counter
people who think "I'm this, I'm that," and who do so, moreover, in
psychoanalytic terms (relating every-thing to their childhood or
fate), by thinking in strange, fluid, unusual terms: I don't know what
I am--I'd have to investigate and experiment with so many things in a
non-narcissistic, non-oedipal way--no gay can ever definitively say
"I'm gay." It's not a question of being this or that sort of human,
but of becoming inhuman, of a universal animal becoming--not seeing
yourself as some dumb animal, but unraveling your body's human
organization, exploring this or that zone of bodily intensity, with
everyone discovering their own particular zones, and the groups,
populations, species that inhabit them. Who's to say I can't talk
about medicine unless I'm a doctor, if I talk about it like a dog?
What's to stop me talking about drugs without being an addict, if I
talk about them like a little bird? And why shouldn't I invent some
way, however fantastic and contrived, of talking about something,
without someone having to ask whether I'm qualified to talk like that?
Drugs can produce delire, so why can't I get into a delire about
drugs? Why does your particular version of "reality" have to come into
it? You're a pretty unimaginative realist. And why do you bother
reading me, if that's how you feel? Arguments from one's own
privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. My favorite
sentence in Anti-Oedipus is: "No, we've never seen a schizophrenic."
What, in sum, does your letter contain? Nothing about you, except the
one bit I like. Lots of gossip, "things people say," where you deftly
confuse what they're saying and what you're saying. And maybe that's
what you set out to produce, a sort of self-contained jumble of
echoes. It's a mannered letter, rather disdainful. You ask me for
something you can publish, then say nasty things about me. My letter,
given yours, seems like a self-justification. Wonderful. You're not an
Arab, you're a jackal. You're doing all you can to turn me into what
you complain I'm becoming, a little celebrity, ra ra ra. I can do
without your help, but I do like you--to put an end to the gossip.
Gilles Deleuze
"No, we've never seen a schizophrenic" 
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