This paper is to show how properly the contagious concepts stemmed from Deleuze can be applied to literary text, even if Deleuzean reading that has flooded as yet home or abroad is hard to practice. However, we always feel it troublesome that the challenge is so hard and even fatuous in the sense that Deleuze’s texts are inclined to decline to be grasped by readers. Moreover, even the poem of T. S. Eliot’s also would get out of reader’ obsessional desire to ‘territorialize’ the poem. In the dilemma, we find a aphorism of Lacan’s as a western high monk: we can’t read all texts of an author and can’t grasp all of his/her identity even if he/she has scoured all of his/her texts thoroughly. Thus what we know is no less than broken knowledge, so someone who argues that he/she is a know-all must be totalitarian or paranoiac. Deleuzean reading can be practiced in view of not ‘systematic reading’ but ‘affective reading.’ The former chases after comprehensive ideas as if readers would be gods in the Olympus mount, but the latter enjoys ‘intensity’ or velocity of each part composing of text as asserted by Spinoza. After passing through this poem, the trend of ‘deterritorialization’ is perceived just like a form of melody, ‘rondo,’ in which main melody is recurring with marginal variations intervened every movement and at last reduced to ultimate themes which can be summarized such as state of thought without image, enlightenment and revision. To reach the poetic truth, Eliot mobilizes a collage of intertextual images such as a gruesome world of Dante’s hell to which ‘line of flight’ or ‘singularity’ as death takes human in which confession makes possible atonement or salvation. “a patient etherized” means lethargic being castrated by the norm or value of community and paralyzed by the conventional images in ‘socius’ such as primitive, despotic and capitalistic state. “yellow fog” seems to veil falsehood of reality, but indicates difficulty of rational judgement and “time” as ‘abstract machine’ of self-contradiction frees oneself from oneself with the same identity made up of present(‘chronos’), past and future(‘aion’) articulated only by human as subject of thought. Ego riding on timetable is determined to be confined in routine of life, which means that we must take off each conventional mask. Thus “ragged claws” cut causation as ‘rigid line’ of world and Apostle John and “Lazarus” as saints undergo metamorphosis of death or rebirth in that the one was martyred and the other returned from across Lethe of oblivion as Zarathustra would face against his fate. “the eternal Footman” functions as self-disciplined subject succeeding to regime or prisoner contained in ‘panopticon.’ “Hamlet” and “the Fool” mean that the former as ‘war machine’ tries to subvert ‘the State apparatus’ or ‘molar aggregates,’ and the latter denies despotic ‘normalization’ or generalization. Contrary to the mundane situation, “mermaids” and “sea-girls” stand for becoming-imperceptible through ‘decoded flow’ happening when the poetic narrator fed up with stuffed images drowns himself as moving ‘phenotext’(the signifying system) to ‘genotext’(not reducible to the language system), and awakes himself in the revision of Things. At last Eliot completes “the love song” with the esoteric tree diagram erasing image by image, and shows us the terrible road to enlightenment.

• 이규명(부산외국어대학교) | Kyu-Myoung Lee