In order to talk about and develop Deleuze's Alice, the left-hand side of this text makes use of an adolescent relic. This is a short story I wrote when I was about nineteen years old and came across recently. This was written before I discovered Deleuze but contains some interesting resonances with his thought, and perhaps opens things up in a different way by proposing another Alice, an abject Alice, perched within the liminal space of puberty and struggling with a literalised bad object which is nothing but her own corporeal and permeable surface.

Facehole

Introverted and of average intelligence, Kim reached the age of fourteen having trawled through all the predictable emotions during her adolescence with a deliberately sullen and slowmoving gracelessness.

She spent her after-school hours sitting in the bedroom of her mother's house in the evenings and staring closely into the mirror, admiring small creases and wrinkles, procuring contortion after grotesque contortion, half horrified and half delighted by the series of faces leering back at her. If Kim looked for long enough she noticed that her face seemed to move of its own accord in rhythm to the shapes of her thoughts. The muscle fibres presented a kind of zombie dance, simultaneously chained to and liberated from the constraints of her peculiar will. She discovered the facehole, however, not during one of these exploratory mirror sessions but sitting alone on the bus.

Multiplying the Surface

This quotation is from Deleuze's very short essay on Lewis Carroll in Essays Critical and Clinical: Deleuze presents Alice as an adolescent ‘becoming’ subject, climbing to the surface of sense and operating from this surface position armoured by the logics of Wittgensteinian language games, Victorian etiquette and Euclidean geometry, adapting quickly each time these logics are challenged but just about retaining her sense of propriety throughout. In his extended treatment of Carroll in The Logic of Sense, however, Deleuze creates Alice herself as a conceptual persona for his own surface of language or sense. This chapter will look more closely at Alice herself as surface: the materiality of her body and the way she problematises, amongst other things, the oppositions of internality and externality, and more broadly the Cartesian mind-body dualism.