Captain Deleuze and the white whale: Melville,moby‐dick,and the cartographic inclination

“Captain Deleuze and the White Whale: Melville, Moby‐Dick, and the Cartographic Inclination”; Herman Melville is usually viewed as one of the United States's darker, more brooding authors, but Deleuze, in his many scattered comments on him, finds a strikingly different figure. Clearly Deleuze feels a strong kinship with this 19th‐century writer, and he seems to find in Melville a perspective that is at some distance from the Melville currently configured by the American academy. This essay reads parts of The Fold and A Thousand Plateaus through a lens provided by Melville, specifically the Melville of Moby‐Dick, arguing that a complex notion of the fold provides a central feature of both authors, concept of human agency.