Deleuze & Guattari

“Minor Literature”
• Who was Deleuze (and Guattari)?

• Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995); Félix Guattari

(1930-1992).
• Deleuze wrote many important books on:
Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Proust, Foucault,
Cinema, etc.
• Together, they wrote a 2-volume “Capitalism and
Schizophrenia”; What is Philosophy?; and this
book on Kafka.
• The book on Kafka was written between
the two volumes of Capitalism &
Schizophrenia, and uses many of the
concepts from those books.
• Who was Kafka?
• Franz Kafka (1883-1924) – a Jewish-
German writer born in Prague, then part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Czech
Republic).
• Most of his publications were posthumous
(after his death). The most significant:
“Metamorphosis”, The Castle, The Trial.
• As we will see, this position of Kafka (in
terms of national/religious community and
language) is a central part of D&G’s
analysis of his writings.

• What is that analysis?

• The subtitle to their book – Toward a
Minor Literature.
• What is that? Ch.3 tells us – in outline.
• First point to note is that a lot of D&G’s
thought seems to proceed by contrasting
very abstract terms/tendencies –
sometimes these come in pairs,
sometimes in threes.
• The first, which structures the book, is this
idea of a ‘minor’ literature – which is
contrasted with a ‘major’ literature.
• And, following this, a ‘minor’ use of
language is contrasted with a ‘major’ use
of language.
• How to deal with this high level of
abstraction?
• For example: the language (style, forms,
vocabulary) used by government
administrations is markedly different from,
for example, the language used by poor,
uneducated city-dwellers. One is ‘major’,
the other is ‘minor’.
• But, after all, the govt admin are in a
minority – so, why is that a ‘major’
language?
• Because it’s tendency, and its effect, is one of
control, uniformity and power.
• Whereas, the ‘minor’ language is (potentially) a
language of subversion, splintering, opposition.
• At this initial stage we can already say that a
‘minor literature’ is a literature which is in some
way oppositional in relation to large-scale
structures of power – and forms of language-
use.
• Another set of abstract oppositions
(related to the first):
• Territorialization – Deterritorialization –
Reterritorialization.
• At a certain level of abstraction, these are
three processes, three forces which are
continuously in play in the social field.
• For example?
• D&G speak about the position of Kafka, as a Jew in 19th
century Prague.
• The primitive, original territoriality of the Jews in the
empire was in the rural communities – in which the
languages spoken were Czech and Yiddish.
• There then occurred a deterritorialisation when rural
workers migrated to the cities, losing their original
communities and languages.
• There then follows (potentially) a reterritorialisation in
which, for example, Jews become part of the urban
bourgeoisie, speak ‘correct’ German, engage in
professional employment, etc.
• We can map the ‘major’ vs ‘minor’
distinction onto this de- and re-
territorialisation distinction.

• A minor literature would be one which

disrupts processes of re-territorialisation
(in language, community identity, etc).
Final Essay: Due December 17th (50%)
Submit hard copy to Philosophy Department Main Office by 5:00pm
Word Limit: 2,000-2,500 words
NB:
• The primary philosophical and fictional references in this essay MUST be
chosen from the topics covered since Essay 1 (Lecture 9 – 22).
• All essays MUST incorporate the discussion of at least one literary work.
• It is highly recommended that in your essay you refer to more than just the
readings listed in the Course Outline.

1. “The range of possible meanings and effects of a work of literature are in no

way limited by any knowledge we may have about the author of the work.”
Discuss this claim with reference to more than one philosopher and any
fictional narrative included in the course.

2. “Narratives, in other words, provide us with opportunities to, among other

things, exercise our moral powers”. Discuss this claim with reference to
more than one philosopher and any fictional narrative included in the
course.

3. “It would be more fruitful to approach works of literature as potential

transformers of individuals, rather than as clarifiers or extenders of current
moral beliefs”. Discuss with reference to Foucault and/or Deleuze &
Guattari, and any fictional narrative included in the course.
• So, what is a minor literature?

“A minor literature doesn’t come from a

minor language; it is rather that which a
minority constructs within a major
language” (16).
• It has 3 characteristics:

1. Deterritorialised language;
2. Centrality of politics;
3. Collective enunciation
1. Deterritorialized language

“…in it language is affected with a high coefficient

of deterritorialization”
“In short, Prague German is a deterritorialized
language, appropriate for strange and minor
uses. (This can be compared in another
context to what Blacks in America today are
able to do with the English language.)” (16)
Note: how widely applicable is this idea?
2. Centrality of politics

“Minor literature…its cramped space forces

each individual intrigue to connect
immediately to politics…In this way the
family triangle connects to other triangles
– commercial, economic, bureaucratic,
juridical – that determine its values.” (17)
3. Collective enunciation

“…in it everything takes on a collective value…

literature finds itself positively charged with the
role and function of collective, and even
revolutionary, enunciation…
…this situation allows the writer all the more the
possibility to express another possible
community and to forge the means for another
consciousness and sensibility” (17).
• “The literary machine thus becomes the
relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come,
not at all for ideological reasons but
because the literary machine alone is
determined to fill the conditions of a
collective enunciation that is lacking
elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the
people’s concern” (18).
• “The letter K no longer designates a
narrator or a character but an assemblage
that becomes all the more machine-like,
an agent that becomes all the more
collective because an individual is locked
into it in his or her solitude…” (18).
• With this tripartite account of minor literature
[deterritorialised language; immediacy to politics;
collective utterance], D&G can now say:

“We might as well say that minor no longer

designates specific literatures but the
revolutionary conditions for every literature
within the heart of what is called great (or
established) literature.” (18)
• Note, for example, the epigraph to
Deleuze’s book Essays Critical and
Clinical (1993):

“Great books are written in a kind of foreign

language” [Proust]
• We can also think about this in relation to,
for example, the following (from Ch.1 of
the Kafka book):
While rejecting ‘traditional’ approaches to
Kafka – which would interpret his writings
in terms of symbolism, fantasm, etc – D&G
propose a different approach:
“We believe only in a Kafka politics that is
neither imaginary nor symbolic. We
believe only in one or more Kafka
machines that are neither structure nor
phantasm. We believe only in a Kafka
experimentation that is without
interpretation or significance and rests
only on tests of experience…
…A writer isn’t a writer-man; he is a
machine-man, and an experimental man
(who thereby ceases to be a man in order
to become an ape or a beetle, or a dog, or
mouse, a becoming-animal, a becoming-
inhuman, since it is actually through voice
and through sound and through a style
that one becomes an animal, and certainly
through the force of sobriety)” (p.7).
• The general significance of this
phenomenon of a minor literature &
language is underlined, for example by the
linguistic situation of many people today:
“How many people today live in a language
that is not their own?”
And, how many “know poorly the major
language that they are forced to serve?”
“This is the problem of immigrants, and
especially of their children, the problem of
minorities, the problem of a minor
literature, but also a problem for all of us:
how to tear a minor literature away from its
own language, allowing it to challenge the
language and making it follow a sober
revolutionary path? How to become a
nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in
relation to one’s own language?” (19).
• What is language?

“…each language always implies a

deterritorialisation of the mouth, the
tongue, the teeth” – away from their
prinitive territoriality in food. (p.19)
• However, “ordinarily, in fact, language
compensates for its deterritorialisation by a
reterritorialisation in sense. Ceasing to be the
organ of one of the senses, it becomes an
instrument of Sense.” (20)
• This “ordinary” use of language, Deleuze calls
“extensive” or “representative”. For example
when we use the word “dog” to extend over all
instances of dog, to represent an essence of
‘dog’.
• One of the things Kafka does is to carry out
another deterritorialisation of sense in this
ordinary use.
• For example, through a new deterritorialisation
of sound: “the sound or the word that traverses
this new deterritorialisation no longer belongs to
a language of sense, even though it derives from
it, nor is it an organised music or song, even
though it might appear to be.” (21)
• Examples: Gregor’s warbling; Josephine’s
“piping”, etc…
• “Everywhere, organised music is traversed
by a line of abolition – just as a language
of sense is traversed by a line of escape –
in order to liberate a living expressive
material that speaks for itself and has no
need of being put into a form.” (21)
• Line of escape = ligne de fuite.
• “The big error, the only error, would be to
believe that a line of flight consists of
fleeing life; a flight into the imaginary, or
into art. But to flee [fly] on the contrary, is
to produce the real, to create life, to find a
weapon.” (Deleuze, Dialogues, p.60)
• The line of flight takes us away from an extensive use of
language –

Now, “There is no longer a designation of something by a

proper name, nor an assignation of metaphors by means
of a figurative sense. But like images, the thing no longer
forms anything but a sequence of intensive states, a
ladder or a circuit for intensities…

Note contrast between extensive and intensive use of

language.
• “We are no longer in the situation of an ordinary, rich
language where the word dog, for example, would
directly designate an animal and would apply
metaphorically to other things…” (22)

• Rather, “Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor.

There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense,
but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of
the word. The thing and other things are no longer
anything but intensities overrun by deterritorialised sound
or words that are following their line of escape.” (22)
• Now, it’s not that a man is like a beetle, or
vice versa. Rather, we have a “becoming-
beetle of the man” and a “becoming-man
of the beetle”.

“…there is a circuit of states that forms a

mutual becoming, in the heart of a
necessarily multiple or collective
assemblage” (p.22).
• What D&G appeal for, through Kafka, is:

“Even when major, a language is open to an

intensive utilisation that makes it take flight
along creative lines of escape which, no
matter how slowly, no matter how
cautiously, can now form an absolute
deterritiorialisation.” (26)
• Their slogan: “Know how to create a
becoming-minor” (27)

Even philosophy, which “for a long time has

been an official, referential genre”, must
learn this…