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Kafka Toward a Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari |
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In this classic of critical thought, Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka's work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of "minor literature"—the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German "take flight on a line of escape" and joyfully became a stranger within it. His work therefore serves as a model for understanding all critical language that must operate within the confines of the dominant language and culture. For Deleuze and Guattari, literature—especially minor literature—cannot be a refuge. They see such writing as essentially political in nature, intimately concerned with the relation between language and power. Their analysis ultimately leads to a view of Kafka's work as a new mode of writing-a machine of expression-that allows us to account for the "machines" that condition our actual relation to the world, to the body, to desire, and to the economy of life and death. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992) also coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Among Deleuze's other books are Cinema 1, Cinema 2, Essays Critical and Clinical, The Fold, Foucault, Francis Bacon, Kant's Critical Philosophy, and Proust and Signs. Dana Polan is professor of critical studies in the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. Reda Bensmaïa is professor of French and comparative literature at Brown University. 104 pages | 6 x 9 | 1986 |
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$17.50 paper