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In a surprisingly general way poetics, from say Aristotle to Riffaterre, has endowed the concept of style with one single function: that of identifying the individuality of texts. There does not seem to be much difference between otherwise conflicting theories of literature when it comes to the question of style. Of course there are differences if style is considered from the point of view of its functionality within the different theoretical systems (a narrative style, a philosophical style, or a sublime style). But when style is conceptualized—whether the stylistic object identified is epic, lyric or philosophical—the generic differences seem to vanish in favor of one common functional trait: that of deviation. In rhetoric and in literary theory, style expresses how a text deviates in an individual way. The concept of style accordingly identifies the specific style and accounts for the fact there is such a thing as deviation, a sort of textual remainder, at first sight not possible to be included functionally in the analysis carried out by the means of poetic, narrative or syntactic concepts. However, this remainder, at the same time both obscure and distinct, cannot acquire any scientific value as long as it remains individual, for as Aristotle said “there is only science about the general.” As pure deviation literary stylistics has always had to explain this epiphenomenon by “something else.” And this “something else” needed to be subsumed under the identification of a concept accounting for what was not identical in the text: its deviation, its style.

When literary stylistics has tried to create a concept for this remainder, the same problem seems to return again and again. Whether the concept of style has been created by subjecting style to a syntactical analysis revealing in what way the specific style belongs to a grammatical typology or has been created with reference to the idiosyncratic genius of the author or of the epoch in question, the same difficulty arises. Style obtains its scientific signification as a [End Page 157] deviation from the identity of an a priori form and obtains its functionality as a function of the space separating the specific style from the a priori form—whether a system of grammatical rules or a psychological model of genius. This is the case for all attempts at conceptualizing style. Whether it is as a deviation from the general use of language (Spitzer ¹ ), from the notion of context (Riffaterre ² ), from linguistic codes (Eco ³) or as a deviating transformation of these codes (Barthes ⁴ ); whether it is as a deviation from a norm or as the choice or preferences of the author within a language-system, style has always been conceptualized according to a systematicity yielding a certain liberty to the specific style yet not allowing it to free itself from the formal identity providing it with the possibility of deviation. All the invariables of modern stylistics seem to pay the price of scientificity: they explain the individuality of a given text as a deviation from something general. The problem thus haunting stylistics right up until the point when the question of style was declared superfluous by linguistics ⁵ could be formulated in the following way: how do we create a concept which can identify the specific individualities of texts without reducing those to deviations from the stable identity of another form? We would need a concept of difference to do so and so it seems natural to consult the work of Deleuze to find a way of thinking style as the specific or immanent difference of a given text. On the face of it, the work of Deleuze seems equipped to satisfy such a need first of all because his work contains a systematic philosophy of difference, that is an effort to create a concept of difference, and secondly because Deleuze seems to pay special attention exactly to the notion of style. The notion of style actually enjoys great prominence in the work of Deleuze in contrast to the notions of rhetoric, metaphor, form or genre, and, taking my starting point in the co-existence and the possible convergence of the notions of...