3 - The Fleshly and the Angelic

Summary

There is in Miller a strange attraction on the side of the religious, compensated by an aversion no less significant to that which tends toward perfection.

— Georges Bataille, “Miller's Moral”

WHILE RESERVING AN INTEREST in the ideal of which it is a part in order to violate it, minor literature causes the major language to lose its power as an inhibiting force for expression. The major language is a body from which to flee, from which to forge a new language that resists its structural forms, rules and even grammar. In the words of Kafka, Miller's parallel act of concession and defiance in his writing is his “ape-nature” fleeing out of him “head over heels and away” (“A Report to the Academy,” 258). Like Kafka, in Deleuze and Guatarri's analysis, Miller bores the way out by fleeing to the extent of becoming peripheral, becoming childlike, and, like Kafka, by becoming-animal — ultimately, by becoming that which is marginal, always simultaneously provoking, in Miller's words, “the fleshly and the angelic” (Sexus, 227).

Miller uses this expression “the fleshly and the angelic” to refer to the dual nature of the human figure in the text, specifically alluding to a figure in Sexus called Melanie. She sends Miller into a reverie on this division in mankind itself but also, more importantly, on this division in writing which, Miller states, is “[h]uman gestures. All borrowed from the animal and insect worlds” (Nexus, 242).