University of Southern Mississippi
What Is a Minor Literature?
Author(s): Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Robert Brinkley
Source: Mississippi Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, Essays Literary Criticism (Winter/Spring, 1983),
pp. 13-33
Published by: University of Southern Mississippi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20133921
Accessed: 21/08/2009 12:54
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=usm.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
University of Southern Mississippi is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Mississippi Review.
http://www.jstor.org
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
WHAT ISAMINOR LITERATURE?
Deleuze
Note:
Editor's
how
to enter Kafka's
entrances.
many
"It
the passage
he finds himself
chosen.
importance,
any
Of
"the
of
troduction
itself
As
to anything
is an agent
codification-for
of
desire
who
the culture
problem
inhabit.'
of
signs
"liberation
as opposed
outlet."'
is the political
strategy
in
"blocks
the
does
not offer
which
The
the same
the
massacre
to evade
it. To
do
The
the word
seems
particularly
perspectives
time, Deleuze
we
all
desire."4
All
of
crucial
that are not
us
what
suggest,
suffer
Guattari
in
the
stake
is not
a matter
of
line of
flight,
escape.
be
a desire
to be against
to continue
the
calls
is at
is not
for
those
from
What
all, would
such
"territorial
is a matter
interpretation
so, after
reproduces
and Guattari
share.
to
not
Typically
to escape
desire
employ
interpreter-suffers
to submission-it
desire
and affirm
employs.2
the interpretation
code;
to deterritorialize
in which
us-even
which
to negate
At
is one
to be interpreted,
not
the code.
and Guattari
to remain minorities
they
each
Deleuze
or
social
of
instances
to de-code
want
"powerful
terpretation,
is
to which
that an interpretation
of a dominant
as
of minorities
terpretation;
exit,
in the terms
codification
ization"-the
minorities
a work
and map
entrance
relativity
of
Multiplicity
a desire
is always
there
remarks,
it considers
the material
important
to interpret
announces
an opening
if a different
change
involves.
. .the attempts
and expressed
the interpreter
as a result. More
entries"
the entrance
the condition
simply
for us to count."
doors
choose
has
"The Castle
but experimentation."'
Jean Baudrillard
be produced
will
The map will
is not
of multiple
the enemy.
too many
work
by wondering
they write.
no sign over
privileged;
following.
however,
principle
has
reader of Kafka's
is subjected
interpretation
which
seems
on Kafka
a burrow,"
in America
none
in. The
that this is the way
their work
begin
is a rhizome,
hotel
. The
these entrances,
Among
and Guattari
work.
to exist
of
. .an
in
in its
Copyright 1975 by Les Editions de Minuit. Front Kafka: pour une litteruture tnineure. Traiislated with per
mission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. and thepublisher.
14
and Guattari
Deleuze
terms.
The
to affirm
is rather
desire
terpretable.
Experimentation,
an alternative
is simultaneously
which
and Guattari
Deleuze
unin
to
is an alternative
suggest,
interpretation.
If Kafka's
work
is a rhizome,
then
its expression
does
not
into
crystalize
a
unifying form; instead the expression is a proliferation of different lines of growth.
The work resembles crabgrass, a bewilderingmultiplicity of stems and roots which
can
cross
at any
not
interpret
a tool with
reading,
they can be connected.
to find
which
the word
a way.
experiment
an act the outcome
a phrase
of which
from Lyotard,
threaten
not
works
In Kafka:
une
here
John
in terms of success
The
"a nomadic
will
a reading which
and
of
need
but a map,
an experimental
uses
failure,
it, "not
as
but simply
a nomad;
intensities."7
it entertains
them,
as
to borrow
it
As
such
and
minor
its own affirmation.
constitute
Deleuze
mineure,
of
Cage
reader becomes
instead
perspectives;
litterature
as
He
in the text
passages
is not an interpretation
is the production
used
becomes
reading
minor
where
can
Reading
as he reads.
connections
result
The map
being
connections.
possible
he can discover
is unknown."I
to produce
pour
of
The
of an act to be later judged
descriptive
literature
a variety
a reader makes
the text means;
and say what
lead, with what
does
to form
point
in these connections;
participate
enter Kafka's
and Guattari
work
by considering his mode of expression. What they discover is that expression in
Kafka
evades
distinction
works
toward
"less
and
less formalized
expressive
contents"
unformed
into
and
on
which,
the other
as
contents
particular
the form of
material"
and,
it-in
interpret
the content
the form of
an "unformed
formalizations
that might
models
the linguistic
between
well.
on
hand,
Hjelmslev's
the expression.'
Kafka
leads
the one hand,
the most
turns
works
Kafka
to
resistant
toward
a
deterritorialization which cannot be reterritorialized by an interpreter:what he
expresses
are "states
these states
literature
with
not
who
of desire
in a universal
finds
that
a specific
cultural
Deleuze-Guattari
book,
independent
way
if expression
context.
What
a chapter
of all interpretation,"
but as a Jew
and he expresses
in Prague,
as the writer
provides
an escape,
it does
follows
are portions
entitled
"Qu'est-ce
of chapter
qu'une
of a minor
so in connection
litterature
three of
mineure?
the
"9
Notes
'Gilles Deleuze
1975),
p. 7. On
and Felix Guattari,
of
the philosophy
pour une litt&ature mineure
Kafka:
see Deleuze
and Guattari,
rhizomes,
(Paris,
Mille
Plateaux (Paris, 1980), pp. 9-37.
2JeanBaudrillard, OublierFoucault (Paris, 1977), pp. 27-28.
3Cf. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, Expedient dans la deadence,
(Paris,
1977),
p. 116: Minorities
are "not
critics;
they are much
inRudiments paiens
'worse';
they do not
of the Law with
the
in the identity,
the coalescing,
they do not believe
of laws and
affirm another
space made of a patchwork
power; minorities
is more difficult
than
a center.. .Nothing
customs
(one says cultures now)-without
to be
to remain minorities,
who want
who want
of minorities
the struggles
into His Majesty's
them into new powers,
transform
as such. Societies
recognized
It interprets
them, that is, inscribes them.. .and
into the gas house.
opposition(s)-or
believe,
central
Deleuze
and Guattari
15
is necessary
to insist that the
so, it robs them of their own particular
power...lt
struggles of minorities
do not gain their force from any critique,
from being placed
in the course
in relation
to the center. They do not intervene
as vicissitudes
that
Empire and its idea run; they make events...
[Their] reality is no more real than the
reality of power,
the reality of the institution,
of the contract,
etc.; it is as real. But it
It
is minority
reality and thus it is necessarily
or, if you prefer,
multiple
singular.
does not live some place where
the politics of the great does not live; it lives on the
same surface, but in a different way."
4Mark D. Seem,
5Deleuze
Interview:
and Guattari,
Felix Guattari,
Kafka,
Diacritics
4:3 (1974),
p. 41.
p. 13.
moves
6John Cage, Silence
(Middletown,
CT, 1973), p. 13: "Where...attention
those that
towards
the observation
of many
things at once, including
and audition
question
are environmental-becomes,
that is, inclusive
rather than exclusive-no
in the sense of forming
can arise (one is
of making,
understandable
structures,
tourist), and here the word experimental
is apt."
sur
Notes
Lyotard,
7Jean-Franjois
pulsionnels
(Paris, 1973), p. 318.
'See Louis
Hjelmslev,
Prolegomena
le retour
to a Theory
et
le capital,
of Language,
Whitfield (Madison,Milwaukee, and London, 1969), pp. 47-60.
'Deleuze
and Guattari,
Kafka,
pp. 29-50.
/aXl
14 ?/
'3 Iz
in Des
trans.
dispositifs
Francis
J.
16
Deleuze
and Guattari
Only expression provides themethod. Kafka does not consider
the problem
of expression
in an abstract
considers it in connection with minor
or universal
manner.
literatures-the
He
Jewish
literature of Warsaw
or Prague,
for example. A minor literature is
not the literature of a minor
language but the literature a minority
makes
in a major
language. But the primary characteristic
of a
minor
in which
involves all the ways
the language
is
literature
effected by a strong co-efficent of deterritorialization.1 This is the
way
that Kafka
defines
the impass which
bars Prague's
Jews from
writing and which makes their literature an impossibility: the
impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing inGerman,
the impossibility of writing otherwise.2 The impossibility of not
writing-because national consciousness, whether uncertain or
oppressed-necessarily passes through literature ("The literary
battle
acquires
a real justification
on the largest possible
scale").
The impossibility of writing other than inGerman: the irreducible
distance that Prague's Jews feel from primitive Czech territoriality.
And
the impossibility
in German
of writing
because
of the
deterritorialization of theGerman population itself-an oppressive
that speaks a language
minority
cut off from the masses,
a
"language of paper" or artifice, and so much the more so for Jews
who are at once a part of this minority
and excluded from it-like
infant from the cradle."
In
"gypsies who have stolen the German
in Prague
is a deterritorialized
short, German
tongue suitable for
strange, minor uses (cf., in another context, what Blacks today can
do with the American
tongue).
The second characteristic
of minor
literatures is that everything
In "great"
in them is political.
literatures, on the contrary,
the
question
of the individual
(familial,
etc.) tends to be
conjugal,
to other, no less individual questions,
connected
and the social
serves as environment
milieu
and background.
of these
None
is particularly
Oedipal matters
indispensible,
necessary,
absolutely
but all "form a unit" in a wide space.3 Minor
literature is com
because
it exists in a narrow space, every in
pletely different:
is immediately plugged into the political. Thus the
dividual matter
of the individual
even more
in
becomes
question
necessary,
dispensible, magnified microscopically, because an entirely dif
ferent story stirs within it.4 It is in this sense that the family triangle
to other commercial,
is connected
and
economic,
bureaucratic,
its value. When Kafka
indicates
judicial triangles which determine
one of the goals of a minor
"the purification
of the
literature,
of discussing
conflict between fathers and sons and the possibility
it," this does not involve an Oedipal
fantasy but a political
Deleuze
and Guattari
17
program.5 "Even if the question of the individual is often thought
through quite calmly, one still does not reach the boundary where it
connects into blocks with other, analogous
arrangements:
but one
it with politics,
one can
can reach the boundary which connects
before it is there, to see its limit
even strive to see this boundary
.What goes on down below in great literature and
everywhere...
cellar of the edifice, takes place here
constitutes a not indispensible
in the full light of day; what is of passing interest to a few over
there is a matter of life and death here. "6
is that everything has a collective value.
The third characteristic
in a minor
In effect, precisely
because
talents do not abound
literature, the conditions are not given for an individuated ut
and could be
terance which would
be that of some "master"
separated from collective utterance.7 As a result the rarity of talents
is, in fact, beneficial,
and makes
possible
a conception
of
other than a literature of masters: what
the solitary
something
writer says already constitutes
a communal
action, and what he
if others do not agree
says or does is necessarily
political-even
all statement,
with him. The political
field has contaminated
literature which finds itself positively
especially
charged with the
ut
and even revolutionary
role and the function of collective,
is "often
terance; because the collective or national consciousness
in the process
inactive
in external
life and always
of disin
it is literature which produces an active solidarity-in
tegration,"
if the writer lives on the margin,
is set
spite of skepticism-and,
this situation makes him all the
apart from his fragile community,
to force the
more able to express another, potential
community,
and another sensibility.
means
for another consciousness
Just as
the dog in the Investigations
speaks in his solitude of another
functions as the relay for a future
science. The literary machine
at all for ideological
but
machine-not
reasons,
revolutionary
because it provides a collective utterance, missing
else
everywhere
in this milieu:
literature is the affair of the people.8 This is the way
that the problem is posed for Kafka. What
is uttered does not refer
to a subject who makes
the utterance and would be its cause. It
does not refer to a subject of the statement which would be its
effect.9 No doubt at one time Kafka
thought in these traditional
two subjects:
author
and hero,
narrator
of
and
categories
But he soon renounced
dreamer
and dream.'0
the
character,
his ad
of the narrator,
principle
just as he rejected-despite
miration
for Goethe-a
literature of the author or the master.
the mouse renounces
the individual exercise of her song
Josephine
in order to blend into the collective utterance of "the innumerable
18
Deleuze
and Guattari
from the individualized
animal to
crowd of her people."
Passage
the pack, to collective multiplicity:
seven musical dogs. Or else, in
of the solitary
the Investigations
of a Dog again, the statements
investigatormove toward the arrangement of a collective utterance
if this collectivity no longer exists or is still to
of canine space-even
be given. There is no subject: there are only collective arrangements
literature expresses
these arrangements,
of utterance-and
not as
they are given on the outside, but only as diabolic powers to come
or revolutionary forces to be constructed. Kafka's solitude opens
that passes through history today. The letter K
him to everything
a narrator
no longer designates
or character,
it designates
an
arrangement
all the more machinic,"
l an arrangement
all the more
collective because an individual in his solitude finds his connection
to a subject
there (it is only in relation
that the individual
is
separable from the collective and conducts his own affairs). 12
The
three characteristics of minor
literature are
the
of the language,
the connection
of the in
deterritorialization
dividual and the political,
the collective arrangement
of utterance.
Which
amounts
to this: that "minor"
no longer characterizes
the revolutionary
conditions
of
certain literatures, but describes
any literature within what we call the great (or established).
to be born in the country of a
Everyone who has had the misfortune
literature must write in its tongue, as a Czech Jew writes in
major
or as an Uzbek Jew writes in Russian. To write as a dog
German,
who digs his hole, a rat who makes his burrow. And to do that, to
his own jargon, a third
find his own point of underdevelopment,
world of his own, a desert of his own. There has been a great deal
is a marginal
literature?-and
also: What
is
of discussion on: What
a popular
the
literature, a proletarian
literature, etc.? Evidently
to define so long as we do not work first in
criteria are very difficult
that of a minor literature. '3 It is
terms of a more objective concept,
only the possibility of instituting from within a minor use of even a
to define
it possible
which makes
popular
major
language,
literature, marginal
literature, etc. Only at this price does literature
of expression
that can sweep
really become a collective machine
contents along with it. Kafka says precisely that minor literature is
the material. '4Why? What
is this machine
more fit for working
of
to language is that of
expression? We know that its relationship
the situation of the Jews who have
multiple
deterritorialization:
the Czech
abandoned
language at the same time that they have
the rural milieu, but the situation as well of German as
abandoned
a " paper language." Now one can take this further; one can push
in expression
still further.
this movement
of the deterritorialization
Deleuze
and Guattari
19
one can enrich Prague's German
ar
But two ways are possible:
it with
all the resources
tificially
and inflate
of symbolism,
a hidden signifier-this
is what
the
oneirism,
esoteric meaning,
Prague School does, Gustav Meyrink and many others, including
Max
Brod.'5
The
attempt
implies
a desperate
effort
at symbolic
reterritorialization (with archetypes, the Kabbalah, alchemy); it
accentuates
the break with the people and only finds its political
that is the "dream of Zion." Kafka moves
in
outlet in a Zionism
or rather invents one. To opt for the German
another direction,
language of Prague,
such as it is, in its very poverty. To push
always further, intensifying the deterritorialization-soberly. Since
is desiccated make it vibrate with intensity. To any
the vocabulary
symbolic use of language, any signifying or even significant use,
oppose a purely intensive use. Arrive at a perfect and unformed
expression-an intense, material expression. (In connection with
these two possibilities-doesn't all this work in different cir
cumstances
affirmative
for Joyce and Beckett.
Being Irish, both exist in the
conditions of a minor literature. It is the glory of such a
literature to beminor, that is, revolutionary for any literature.The
use of English and every tongue in Joyce. The use of English
French in Beckett. But Joyce constantly works with exuberance
and
and
overdetermination; Joyce constantly works to achieve global
reterritorializations. Beckett works drily, soberly, in deliberate
poverty,
and pushes
deterritorialization
to the point where
nothing
but intensities remain.)
How many people live today in a language that is not their own?
Or else, no longer even know their tongue-or
do not know ityet
and know a major
tongue which
they are forced to use poorly?
Problem of immigrantsand especially of theirchildren. Problem of
minorities.
Problem of a minor
literature, but also the problem of
us all: how to wrest a minor literature from our tongue, a literature
that can hollow
the language out and spin it along a sober,
revolutionary
line? How to become the nomad and the immigrant
and the gypsy of our own language?
"Steal the infant from its
cradle," Kafka says, "dance on a tightrope."
Rich or poor, every language implies a deterritorialization-of
the mouth,
of the teeth, of the tongue. Mouth,
tongue, teeth have
to the
their primitive
themselves
territory in food. In devoting
of sounds, they deterritorialize
articulation
themselves. There is a
between
and speaking-still
certain
more,
disjunction
eating
no doubt
between eating and writing:
it is
despite appearances,
than to eat while speaking, but writing
easier to eat while writing
transformswords into things capable of rivaling food. Disjunction
20
Deleuze
and Guattari
between content and expression. To speak, and especially towrite,
is to fast. Kafka has a permanent
obsession with food, with meat
(the essence of animal food), with butchers, with teeth-large
gold
teeth, unclean
teeth."6 This is one of the principal problems with
Felice. Fasting is also a constant theme in what Kafka writes; it is a
long history of abstention.
The Hunger Artist, watched
by but
chers, ends his career as a neighbor of the wild beasts who eat their
meat raw; he gives visitors an irritating alternative. The dogs try to
keep the mouth of the dog of the Investigations
busy by filling it
with food in order to make him stop asking questions-and
here
too is an irritating alternative:
"Why not drive me out instead, and
forbid me from posing questions? No, this is not what they wanted;
they certainly did not have the least desire to hear my questions,
but
to drive me out." The dog
for these very questions,
they hesitated
of the Investigations
oscillates between two sciences, the science of
is of the earth and of the bowed head ("Where
nutrition, which
and the science of music,
does the earth get its nourishment?"),
which is of the "air" and the raised head, as the seven musical dogs
at the beginning and the singing dog at the end show: however,
the
in common
since food can come from above,
two have something
and the science of nutrition
progresses
only through abstention.
Just as music is strangely silent.
a tongue compensates
for its deterritorialization
Ordinarily
in meaning.
No longer the organ of
through a reterritorialization
It is meaning
the instrument of Sense.
as the
sense, it becomes
of what sounds
literal sense which presides over the attribution
designate (the thing or the state of things that the word designates).
sense which presides over the at
It is meaning
in the figurative
tribution of images and metaphors
(the other things to which the
or aspects). Thus there is not
word applies under certain conditions
in the "meaning,"
reterritorialization
but a
only a spiritual
physical one through this same meaning.
language exists
Similarily
and complementary
nature which
only because of the distinction
and a
exits between a subject of utterance
(in relation to meaning)
subject of statement
(in relation to the thing designated-directly
This ordinary use of language could be called
or metaphorically).
or representative:
the reterritorializing
function
of
extensive
language (thus the singing dog at the end of the Investigations
forces the hero to abandon his fast, a kind of re-Oedipalization).
in Prague-a
of the German
But here, the position
language
intermixed with Czech or Yiddish-makes
desiccated
language
invention possible. Because that is the way it is ("that's the
Kafka's
the
way it is, that's the way it is," a f6rmula dear to Kafka,
Deleuze
protocol
of a state of fact.
. .), one gives meaning
and Guattari
up,
implies
21
it,
retainsonly its skeleton, itspaper silhouette:
1. Since articulated
sound
is a deterritorialized
noise, but is
is going to
in meaning,
it is sound now which
reterritorialized
deterritorialize itself absolutely, without return.The sound and the
word which cross this new deterritorialization
do not belong to a
sensible language though both derive from it; they do not belong to
music or formal song though they have musical
effects: Gregor's
whine that blurs words,
the mouse's whistling, the monkey's
also the pianist who does not play, the singer who does
cough-and
not sing, the musical
dogs,
their bodies all the more musical
because they produce no music at all. Everywhere
formalized music
is crossed by a line of abolition and meaningful
language is crossed
by a line of flight-to
free a living, expressive material
which
speaks for itself and no longer needs to be formed. 7 This language
wrested
from meaning
has no direction except in the accent of a
"I live only here and there in a small word in
word, an inflection:
the inflection of which I loose my useless head for a moment...
.My
way of feeling is related to that of a fish." I8Children are very good
at this: repeating a word whose meaning
they only vaguely un
the word vibrate on itself (at the beginning
of
derstand, making
The Castle the school children speak so quickly that no one un
derstands what they are saying). Kafka
relates that as a child he
repeated an expression of his father's over and over again, spinning
it out along a line of non-sense:
"end of the month,
end of the
. ."19 Proper names, which have no meaning
month.
in themselves,
are especially suited to this: Milena with the accent on the i, begins
lost in Bohemia,
by evoking "a Greek or Rumanian
violated by
when the approximation
Czechs, betrayed by the pronunciation";
ismore precise, it evokes "a woman you carry in your arms, whom
you rescue from the world or save from a fire," the accent marks a
instead "you jump for joy under
fall that is always possible-or
your burden."20
2. It seems to us that there is a difference
(though
relative,
of the name Milena:
the one
shaded) between the two evocations
still returns to an exclusive and figurative scene that is a type of
fantasy; the second is far more intensive already; itmarks a fall or a
leap as the threshold of intensity that is included in the name itself.
is actively neutralized:
as
This is what happens when meaning
it gives immediate
says, "the word reigns as master,
Wagenbach
birth to the image." But how do we define this process? All that
is what is needed to direct the lines of flight.
remains of meaning
is no longer designated
in terms of a literal sense;
Something
22
Deleuze
and Guattari
are no
metaphors
the thing as images
scale or circuit of
from top
another,
But
longer assigned in terms of figured meaning.
now forms only a sequence of intensive states, a
pure intensities
that can travel in one sense or
to bottom or from bottom
to top. The image is
the course itself, it has become becoming: becoming-dog of the
human and becoming-human of the dog, becoming-monkey or
beetle of the human and the reverse. We are no longer involved in
an ordinary,
full language in which,
for example,
the immediate
for the word "dog" would be an animal, and would
designation
to other things (of which we would say "like
apply metaphorically
a dog").2'
Journal 1921: "Metaphors
are one of the things that
make me despair of literature." No less than all designation,
Kafka
deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification.
is the contrary of metaphor.22
There is no longer
Metamorphosis
or figurative sense but a distribution
of states in
any true meaning
fan. The thing, other things are now only intensities
the word's
crossed along their line of flight by sounds or deterritorialized
words.
It is not a matter of a resemblance between the behavior of
an animal and that of the human, even less a play of words. Now
there is neither human nor animal since each deterritorializes
the
other in a conjunction
of flux, in a continuum
of reversible
in
tensities.23 It involves a matter of becoming which instead includes
of difference
as difference
the maximum
in intensity, the crossing
of a threshold,
rise or fall, sinking, or erection, accent of a word.
The animal does not speak "like" a human but extracts tonalities
without
from language; the words themselves are not
signification
"like" animals but climb up-on
their own-bark
and swarm
being dogs, insects, or mice that are actually verbal.24 To make the
to open
the word
to unheard-of
sequence
inner in
vibrate,
intensive use of language. Here
tensities-in
short, an asignifying,
again, there no longer is any subject of utterance nor subject of
no longer the subject of statement who is a dog, the
statement:
subject of utterance remaining like a man; no longer the subject of
a may-bug,
utterance who
is "like"
the subject of statement
remaining human. Instead a circuit of states which form a mutual
an arrangement
that is necessarily multiple
or
becoming-within
collective.
In what way does the position of German
in Prague-desiccated
vocabulary,
incorrect
syntax-favor
this usage?
In general
we
could call intensive or tensor the linguistic elements (however
varied) which express the "inner tensions of a language."
It is in
this sense that Vidal Sephiha
calls intensive "any linguistic
tool
which makes
it possible
to stretch the limit of a concept or to go
Deleuze
and Guattari
23
beyond it," marking
a movement
of the language toward its ex
tremes, toward a reversible here and beyond.25 Sephiha
nicely
demonstrates
the variety of such elements: all-purpose words; verbs
or
prepositions
assume
which
any meaning
whatsoever;
pronominal
or inherently intensive verbs (in Hebrew,
for example);
conjunctions, exclamations, adverbs; terms which connote suf
fering. We
discordant
particularly
could also mention
the inner accents of words,
their
It appears that a tongue of a minor literature
function.
develops these tensors or intensives. Wagenbach,
in his
wonderful analysis of the Czech-influenced German of Prague,
cites as characteristics:
the incorrect use of prepositions;
the abuse
of the pronominal;
the use of all purpose-words
for
(like Gibben
the series "to put, sit, place, remove," which
in
thus becomes
tensive); the multiplication
and succession of adverbs,
the use of
words which connote sorrow; the importance of the accent as an
inner tension in the word;
the distribution
of consonants
and
vowels which create an internal discordance. Wagenbach
stresses
that all these characteristics
of Czech-influenced
German occur in
Kafka, but that they are used creatively-they
serve a new sobriety,
a new expressiveness,
a new flexibility,
a new intensity. "Not a
word or almost none that I have written
is harmonized with any
other; I hear consonants
grating against each other with the noise
of scrap iron, and the vowels sing as Negroes
at the Exposition."
ceases to be representative
in order to stretch toward its
Language
or its limits. Suffering
extremes
is a connotation
which
ac
this metamorphosis:
words become Gregor's
companies
painful
Franz cries "in a single burst and on a single note."
whinning;
Think of the use of French as spoken language in Godard's
films.
Here too an accumulation
of stereotyped adverbs and conjunctions
in the end constitute
which
a strange poverty
all the sentences:
which makes French a minor language in French, a creative process
which connects
the word directly to the image; a manner which
emerges at the end of the sequence and in relation to the intensity of
the limit (c'est assez, assez,
a generalized
in
il y en a marre);
with a panorama which the camera turns
tensification-coinciding
and scans without being displaced-makes
the images vibrate.
The comparative study of tongues isperhaps less interesting than
the study of
the language
function
which
can work
for a given
group in different tongues: bilingualism, and evenmultilingualism.
Only this study of the functions
that can be incarnate in different
tongues takes direct account of a wide variety of social factors,
power relations, centers of power; it escapes the "information"
myth
and evaluates
the hierarchic
and
imperative
system
of
the
24
Deleuze
and Guattari
language as a transmission
of orders, the exercise of power,
the
resistance to that exercise. Henri Gobard
(relying on the research of
Ferguson and Gumperz) proposes a tetralinguistic model for
language functions: the vernacular,mother, or territorial tongue of
the rural community
or of rural origin;
or even global tongue-the
change,
bureaucratic
the vehicular,
urban,
state
language of society, commercial ex
transmission,
etc.,
the tongue
of
the first
deterritorialization; the referential tongue, the language of sense
and culture that effects a cultural reterritorialization; themythic
tongue-at
the cultural
horizon-the
language
of
spiritual
and
religious reterritorialization.The spatial and temporal categories of
these different tongues differ summarily: the vernacular tongue is
here; the vehicular tongue is everywhere; the referential tongue is
over
tongue,
But
above
all the
there; the mythic
beyond.
distribution
of tongues varies from one group to another and, for
the same group, from one epoch to another (for a long period Latin
was the vehicular tongue in Europe before becoming referential,
thenmythic; today English is the global vehicular tongue).26What
can be said in one tongue cannot be said in another, and the body
of what can be said and what cannot be said necessarily varies from
tongue to tongue and according
to their relations with each other.2"
all these factors
Furthermore,
can have ambiguous
fringes,
divisions
that move, differ in this or that matter. One tongue can
fulfill such and such a function
in such and such a matter
and
another function in another matter. Each language function in turn
is divided and involves multiple
of
power centers. A mishmash
the
tongues. Not a system of language at all. We can understand
indignation
purists feel as they weep because
the mass
is said in
French and Latin has been stripped of its mythic
function. They
and scholastic
mourn
the forms of ecclessiasatic
power which
worked
through Latin and are replaced today with other forms.
There are more serious examples which cross social groups. The
revival of regionalisms,with reterritorialization through dialects or
it serves a global or
which
jargon of the vernacular
tongue-by
to revolutionary
super-state
technology,
by which it can contribute
movements
because they also carry with them archaisms into which
to
they try to inject a current meaning.
. .From Servan-Schreiber
the Breton bard to the Canadian
singer. And yet this is not the
the Canadian
the most
frontier, because
singer can also perform
the most Oedipal Oh Mama,
oh my
reactionary reterritorialization,
a tangled
country, my cabin, oh oh. As we said: a mishmash,
history, a political affair, that the linguists do not know at all, do
not want
to know-because,
as linguists,
they are "apolitical,"
Deleuze
and Guattari
25
pure scientists. Even Chomsky only compensates for his apolitical
stance
as a scientist
through
his
courageous
against
the
Empire:
the crises,
the
ac
fight
VietnamWar.
To
return
decomposition
in the Habsburg
to the situation
and fall of the Empire multiplies
centuates everywhere themovements of deterritorialization, gives
rise to complex archaic, mythic, or symbolist reterritorializations.
Among
Kafka's
contemporaries
we
can cite at random:
Einstein
and his deterritorialization of the representation of the universe
(Einstein
teaches
in Prague,
and
the physicist
Philipp
Frank
lec
tures there-with Kafka present); the Austrian atonalists, their
deterritorialization of musical representation (Maria's death cry in
Lulu's
Wozzeck,
a path in music
cry, or else the redoubled si-these
seem to follow
that is close in some ways
to Kafka);
the ex
pressionist cinema, its double movement that deterritorializes and
reterritorializes the image (RobertWiene, a Czech; Fritz Lang who
was born
in Vienna;
Paul Wegener,
his use of
themes
that come
from Prague). And of course, psychoanalysis inVienna, linguistics
in Prague.28 What
is the particular situation of Jews in Prague in
connection with the "four tongues"? For Jews who come from a
the vernacular
rural environment,
is Czech, but Czech tends to be
it is generally scorned or
forgotten and repressed. As for Yiddish,
Kafka says. The vernacular tongue in the cities
feared-itfrightens,
is German;
it is the bureaucratic
tongue of the state, the com
mercial
tongue of exchange
(though English has already begun to
be indispensible
for this). The referential and cultural function
is
also filled by German,
this time the German
of Goethe
(and
secondarily by French). Hebrew is themythic tongue (withZionism
still only an active dream). We need to evaluate
just beginning,
each of
the coefficents
of
these
tongues
territoriality,
for
of
deterritorialization, of reterritorialization.Kafka's own situation:
he is one of the few Jewish writers in Prague who understands
and
in his
speaks Czech
(and this language will be very important
relations with Milena). German plays the double role of being both
on the horizon (Kafka
the vehicular and cultural tongue-Goethe
a little English).
also knows French,
He only
Italian, probably
learns Hebrew
later on. His relation to Yiddish
is complex: he sees
it less as linguistic territoriality
for Jews than as a movement
of
nomadic deterritorialization for German. What
fascinates him
about Yiddish
is less that it is the language of a religious com
than that it is the language of a popular
theatre (Kafka
munity
26
Deleuze
and Guattari
and impressario
serves as patron
The way that Kafka
company).29
traveling
of the Isak L6wy
to a rather
speaks of Yiddish
hostile, bourgeoisie Jewish audience at a public meeting is rather
remarkable: Yiddish
is a tongue which arouses even more fear than
it is a tongue that
disdain, "fear mixed with a certain repugnance";
emigre words that
has no grammar and lives off stolen, mobilized,
"force ratios":
it is a
have become nomads and have internalized
that works so much from within
tongue grafted onto High German
being abolished;
that it cannot be translated into German without
the heart.
you can only understand Yiddish by "feeling it" -from
a
In short, an intensive tongue or an intensive use of German,
language or use which must sweep you along: "Only then
minor
and you
the true unity of Yiddish,
will you be able to experience
will experience it so violently that you will be frightened, no longer
of Yiddish but of yourself...
.Enjoy it as best you can! "
through Czech.
Kafka's way does not lead to reterritorialization
use of German, with the higher Hebraic
Nor to a hypercultural
and mythical-bids
the oneiric,
that we find in the
symbolic,
lead to an oral and popular
Prague
School. Nor does Kafka
to which Yiddish points
Yiddish.
Kafka goes in the direction
converts German
into a unique and solitary
quite another way-he
writing. Because the German of Prague is deterritorialized, in
tensify it, but in the sense of a new sobriety, a new, unheard-of
In the sense of raising your
a ruthless rectification.
correction,
head. Schizo civility. Intoxication on pure water.30 Spin German
down a line of flight; fulfill yourself by fasting; pull out all the
that Prague's German wants to hide;
points of underdevelopment
from it the dog's
it cry out-a
cry. Wrest
make
sober, vigorous
a syntax of
cough, may-bug's
buzzing. Make
bark, monkey's
Push it to the point where no culture or myth
desiccated German.
deterritorial
for deterritorialization-absolute
can compensate
ization even if it is slow, viscous, coagulated.
Slowly, progressively,
carry the tongue away into the desert. Use syntax to cry out; give
syntax to the outcry. 3'
To hate all literature
is great and revolutionary.
Only the minor
fascination with servants and employees
of masters. Kafka's
(the
in Proust, with servants,
their language). What
same fascination
of making one's own tongue,
remains interesting is the possibility
it unique, or, if a major
tongue now or in the past, then
supposing
of a minor use. To be as a stranger in
the possibility
supposing
it is still a mish
one's own language. Even if a tongue is unique,
a Harlequin
suit in which different
mash, a schizophrenic melange,
what
functions of language and distinct power centers act-airing
Deleuze
can and cannot
be said. Play one function
against
and Guattari
the other,
27
bring
the coefficients of territorialityand relativedeterritorialization into
play. Even if it ismajor,
a tongue is capable of intensive use which
spins it out along creative lines of escape, a use which now forms
and constitutes an absolute deterritorialization. An enormous
amount of invention and not only lexical-in
order to write as a
dog (But a dog does not write.-Precisely,
precisely.); what Artaud
what along another
did to French,
line, Celine
shouts-whispers;
did, the exclamative taken to the extreme. Celine's syntactic
to Death
on the Installment
to
Plan
evolution:
from Journey
Band (following which, Celine had nothing more to say,
Guignol's
to write,
that is, he no longer wanted
except about his misfortunes,
he only needed money. And that is always the way its ends, lines of
flight from language: the silence, the interrupted, the interminable,
or still worse. But meanwhile
what a mad creation, what a writing
for Journey when he
machine.
Celine was still being congratulated
had already gone so much farther in Death on the Installment Plan,
the language
is
then in the extraordinary
Band where
Guignol's
nothing but intensities. He spoke "minor music." Kafka too, also
another one, but always deterritorialized
minor music,
sounds, a
runs head first, swaying). These are true minor
language which
authors. An exit for language, for music,
for writing. Pop music,
Pop
philosophy,
Pop writing: Worterflucht.
of your own
polylingualism
use of it, set the oppressed
find
oppressive
character,
To
use
the
tongue, to make a minor or extensive
its
character of this tongue against
its points
of non-culture
and un
derdevelopment, the zones of linguistic third-worlds throughwhich
an animal is grafted,
an arrangement
a tongue escapes,
is con
(even very
nected. How many
styles, genres,
literary movements
fill a major language function,
small ones) have but one dream-to
to offer their services as the language of the state, the official
tongue (psychoanalysis
today which thinks that it is master of the
of word-play).
Fashion the opposite dream:
signifier, of metaphor,
know to create a becoming-minor.
(Is there a chance here for
philosophy,
philosophy
which for so long has formed an official
not profit today from the moment
and referential genre? Why
when antiphilosophy wants to be the languageof power.)
translatedby Robert Brinkley
28
Deleuze
and Guattari
Notes
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
and Schizophrenia,
'See Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism
and Guattari
1977) where Deleuze
introduce
Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York,
the terms territorialization,deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, termswhich
may
be defined
as the creation
and perpetuation
of a cultural
space,
the dissolution
of that space, its recreation. Codification, decodification, and recodification can
serve roughly as synonyms. By emphasizing cultural space, however, Deleuze and
of cultural
can formulate
as alternatives
to coded behavior,
a dissolution
Guattari
of a nomad
through a territory. These
formulations
boundaries
and the movement
to the mobile
and metamorphic
which
seem particularly
geographies
appropriate
Kafka
presents
in his narratives.-Ed.
to Friends,
Family,
and Editors,
ed.
2Letter to Max Brod (June 1921), in Letters
trans. Richard
and Clara Winston
(New York,
1977), pp. 286-89. Cf. Klaus
Brod,
Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend 1883-1912 (Bern, 1958), in
the chapter Prag um die Jahrhundertwende.-D
& G. In the letter to
particular,
to Literatur
that "what we have
Brod and in reference
by Karl Kraus, Kafka writes
here is the product
of a sensitive
feeling for language which
has recognized
that in
for them, only the most
are really alive, and except
in
German
only the dialects
dividual High German,
while all the rest, the linguistic middle ground,
is nothing but
to a semblence
of life when
can only be brought
embers which
excessively
Jewish
hands rummage
through them. That is a fact, funny or terrible as you like. . .[T]here
or more precisely
young
is a relationship
between
all this and Jewishness,
between
with the frightful
inner predicament
of these generations.
Jews and their Jewishness,
. . .Psychoanalysis
and many
find the concept
lays stress on the father-complex
the issue revolves
In this case I prefer another version, where
fruitful.
intellectually
the father's
Jewishness.
Most
young
not around
the innocent
father but around
to leave Jewishness
behind
them, and their
Jews who began to write German wanted
was what was outrageous
to
of this, but vaguely
fathers approved
(this vagueness
them). But with their posterior
legs they were still glued to their father's Jewishness
anterior
and with their waving
legs they found no new ground. The ensuing despair
An inspiration
as honorable
as any other, but on closer
their inspiration.
became
sad peculiarities.
First of all, the product
of their
certain
examination
showing
it seemed
to be so. They
literature,
though outwardly
despair could not be German
I just happen
to call linguistic
im
three impossibilities,
which
existed
among
of not writing,
the impossibility
of
possibilities.
. . .These are: The impossibility
One might
of writing
differently.
also add a
writing
German,
the impossibility
of writing.
. .Thus what
a
the impossibility
resulted was
fourth
impossibility,
in all respects,
a gypsy literature which had stolen the German
literature
impossible
out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training,
for
it was
even a German
someone
has to dance on the tightrope.
(But it wasn't
child,
was dancing)
said that somebody
[BREAKS OFF]"-Ed.
nothing;
people merely
child
because
3Great literatures produce
"Oedipal matters"
they turn social questions
in this production
of individuals.
into the problems
Freud participates
and dilemmas
to interpret the agonies of family life-not
as effects
when he uses the Oedipus myth
as the psychic
of the
the family represents-but
of the society which
production
comes first?" Deleuze
and Guattari
ask in Anti
children who suffer them. "Who
or the child? Psychoanalysis
acts as if it
father and the mother,
Oedipus.
"[T]he
. .The first error of
were the child (the father is sick only from his own childhood).
is in acting as if things begin with the child. This leads psychoanalysis
psychoanalysis
Deleuze
to develop
an absurd
theory
and their real activities
child" (pp. 273-75).-Ed.
'The word
story
and
translates
of
and Guattari
29
in terms of which
fantasy,
the father,
the mother,
must
first be understood
as fantasies
of the
passions
the French
I'histoire
which
can also mean
history.
Ed.
'Kafka, Diaries,
ed. Max
trans.
Brod,
Joseph
Kresh
(New York,
1948),
December
25, 1911, I, 193. Translation
For Kafka,
modified.
and Guattari
Deleuze
write, "the question
posed by the father is not how to become
free in relation to him
(the Oedipal
question),
but how to find a path where he did not find one.
. . . [Tlhe
father appears as the man who had to renounce
his own desire and faith (if only to
get out of the rural ghetto where
he was born) and who calls upon his son to sub
mit-but
only because
the father himself
has submitted
to a dominant
order in a
to have no escape.
which
appears
. . .In short
it is not Oedipus
that
it is neurosis,
neurosis;
the desire that submits and tries to communicate
its
which produces Oedipus."
submission,
At the same time, to write as Kafka writes,
to present Oedipus
as a political
issue, is to "evade submission,
. .. to see over your
father's
shoulder what was in question
from the beginning
in this matter:
a whole
situation
produces
micropolitics of desire, of impasses and exits, of submissions and rectifications."
What
you notice
is that the father has only become
the representative
of other
political
figures,
"judges,
commissioners,
bureaucrats,"
who "are not substitutes
for the father" because
"the father is a condensation
of all these forces to which he
submits
and invites his son to submit"
(Kafka,
pp. 19-22). By specifying
these
forces, however,
of evading
the possibility
them also emerges,
a possibility
which
the other half of Kafka's
constitutes
political program.-Ed.
'Diaries,
I, 194. Translation
modified.-D
& G.
7Throughout
the English
utterance
translates
the French
and
l'e'nonciation
should be distinguished
from statement
which
translates
l'enonce.
L'enonciation
can be defined
as the speech act; 1'enonce, as that which
the speech act produces,
as
the statement which
is uttered.-Ed.
'Diaries,
is less a concern
of literary history
I, 193: "Literature
than of the
people."-D
& G.
The diary entry which Deleuze
and Guattari
cite here refers explicitly
to the
of Jewish
situation
in Warsaw
and contemporary
literature
Czech
in
literature
Prague rather than to the situation of Prague's
Jewish writers.-Ed.
'The subject of the statement
is the subject
to which
a statement
refers. In the
sentence
I think; therefore,
I am, the subject
is I. The subject of utterance
is the
subject who utters the statement.
In the preceding
the subject of utterance
example,
in the sentence
is not the I represented
but the writer who produces
the statement
and whose
existence
langue, in Problemes
the statement
de linguistique
indexes.
generale
Cf.
Emile
(Paris,
Benveniste,
L'homme
1966), I, 258-266.-Ed.
dans
le
in the Country:
'Cf. Wedding
Preparations
"And so long as you say 'one' in
'I,' there is nothing
in it and one can easily tell the story" (trans. E. Kaiser
and E. Wilkins,
in The Complete
ed. N. N. Glatzer,
Stories,
New York,
1971, p. 53).
The two subjects appear later ("I don't even need to go to the country-myself,
it isn't
I'll send my clothed body,"
necessary.
the narrator can stay in bed if he
p. 55.) when
stead of
30
Deleuze
and Guattari
in The
becoming-animal
of Gregor's
this is the origin
is a beetle.
No doubt
preferring
to stay
to go and join Felice,
refusal
(also of Kafka's
Metamorphosis
and
the animal has the value of a true becoming
asleep). But in The Metamorphosis
no longer merely describes
the inertia of the subject of utterance.-D
& G.
the
the French machinique,
that does not exist,
translates
a word
"Machinic,
of course
The word
a gadget,
a whatchamacallit.
form of le machin,
adjectival
sounds like machine. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write of desiring
the
literally names
but which
is not metaphorical
in con
work
language,
or whatever
the world,
"It is at work
the passage:
begins with
Anti-Oedipus
they insist
the body,
a term which
machines,
in which
parts of
ways
each other.
It
times in fits and starts.
at times, at other
smoothly
functioning
to have ever said the id.
a mistake
it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What
breathes,
ones: machines
driving other
it is machines-real
ones, not figurative
Everywhere
nection
with
everywhere,
machines, machines being driven by othermachines, with all the necessary couplings
the
into an energy-source-machine:
is plugged
An organ-machine
and connections.
that produces
a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine
one produces
to it. The mouth
of the anorexic wavers
a machine
coupled
milk,
and the mouth
it is an eating
as to whether
is uncertain
its possessor
several functions:
between
(asthma
or a breathing
machine
a talking-machine,
machine,
an anal machine,
each with his little machines.
For every organ
attacks). Hence we are all handymen:
machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions.... Something is
(pp. 1-2). In an essay
not mere metaphors"
in the
(the essay was included
for Desiring Machines
add
and Guattari
Deleuze
edition of Anti-Oedipus),
French
in
or little homemade
to do with gadgets,
have nothing
that "desiring-machines
but from the opposite
Or rather they are related,
or with phantasies.
ventions,
and phantasies
are the residue
contraptions,
because gadgets,
improvised
direction,
laws of the foreign
they have come under the sway of specific
of desiring-machines;
of psychoanalysis.
. . .Desiring
or of the home market
of capitalism,
market
. . .What defines
life of the unconscious.
the non-oedipal
constitute
machines
of con
for an unlimited
number
their capacity
is precisely
desiring-machines
in itself is the break
in every sense and in all directions.
. . [T]he machine
nections,
in relation
to the social
has to be directly conceived
. . [T]he machine
flow process.
are indeed the same as technical and social machines,
body..
.[D]esiring-machines
in Semiotexte
2,
as it were"
(trans. Robert Hurley,
but they are their unconscious,
the effects
produced:
entitled
Balance
but not
1977, pp.
of
a machine,
Sheet-Program
in the English
117-32).-Ed.
cf. Guattari,
of the letter K in Kafka,
Semiologiessignifiante
'20n the designation
in Psychoanalyse
et semiotique
(Paris, 1975), pp. 151
et semiotiques
a-signifiantes
"An
as the pronoun
it functions.
to Guattari,
according
163. The letter K functions,
the potential
articulation
for any pronoun...
.The it constitutes
it can be substituted
contents
are relatively
less formalized
.... It does not
whose
of links of expression
does not
a grouping.
It does not surcode statements,
it diagrams
represent a subject;
the diverse modalities
of the subject of utterance."
them by manifiesting
a connection
that is the momentary
it serves as a connection,
than a subject,
"Behind
function,
you can
of other connections.
any pronominal
arrangement
is then
from outside
A subject who
articulates
language
imply a me-I.
always
is what we call the subject of
in discourse;
this mark
to imprint its mark
supposed
to
statements
and treats them according
transcends
A flow of subjectivity
utterance.
intensities will then remain as
.
norms.
. . Desiring
social and economic
dominant
transcend
Rather
tributaries
of
a world
of mental
representations,
organized
around
a fictive
sub
Deleuze
ject."
and Guattari
31
On
the infinitive
the other hand, when we "consider
we could
to-go-toward,
the diagramatic
of multiplicity.
it-goes-toward
and thus make
expression
of a complex machine
is the mark
which
It-goes-toward
could manifest
itself in
dependently
of all subjective
affectation:
does it involve a person,
an army, a flea,
an object, a machine,
of to-go-toward;
an affect, an idea? It applies to all modalities
it conserves...
.its machinic
character."
-Ed.
also write
in par
de la litterature proletarienne
en France,
3Cf. Michel
Ragan,
Histoire
ticular the discussion
of the difficulties
of finding criteria and the necessity
of a
of the second zone.'"-D
"literature
& G.
"Diaries,
I, 193: "A small nation's
large one and so can digest the existing
on the situation
I5Cf.Wagenbach
in the Prague school.-D
& G.
memory
materials
of
'6The insistence
of the theme of
butcher;
the alley of the butcher shop
meat except when he slept with Felice
in Nouvel
qui as de si grandes
dents,
texts on Kafka.
best
A
the German
in Kafka.
by the school;
at Marienbad.
teeth
language
of a
in Czechoslovakia
and
The grand-father
who was a
Felice's
jaws; the refusal to eat
Cf. Michel Carnot's
article Toi
April
17, 1972. It is one of the
Observateur,
opposition
between
eating
outlet in non-sense.-D&G.
similar
and a comparable
Lewis Carroll,
is not smaller than the memory
more thoroughly."-D
& G.
and
speaking
occurs
in
'7Cf. The Trial,
trans. by Willa
and Edwin Muir,
rev. E. M. Butler
(New York,
that they were
1968), p. 72: "At last he noticed
talking to him, but he could not
make out what
they were saying, he heard nothing
but the din that filled the whole
note like that of a siren seemed to ring.'
place, through which a shrill unchanging
D&G.
'8Diaries,
I, 61-2. Translation
modified.-D
& G.
'9"No longer requiring an exact sense, the expression
end of the month
remains
for me a painful
the more
so since it is repeated
secret," Kafka writes-all
every
He suggests
it is because
month.
that if the expression
remains devoid of meaning,
of laziness and "weak curiosity,"
a negative
which
instances
the failure
explanation
or impotence
or hides his
that Wagenbach
describes.
Kafka
commonly
presents
in this way.-D
objects of passion
& G.
20Diaries,
I, pp. 278f.-D
& G.
of Kafka's
in this
commentators
are so much
the worse
2'The interpretations
regard because
they are metaphoric:
thus Marthe
Robert
reminds us that the Jews
to us to be a simplistic
are like dogs.
This
seems
of the literary
conception
of all metaphor.-D&G.
machine.-Robbe
Grillet
insists on Kafka's
destruction
in the last sentence of The Trial: "But the hands of
The phrase
like a dog occurs
one of the porters were already at K's throat, while
the other thrust the knife deep
into his heart and turned it twice. With
failing eyes K could still see the two of them
immediately
dog!'
he said;
before
it was
him,
cheek
leaning
as if the shame
against cheek, watching
the final act.
of itmust outlive him" (p. 229).-Ed.
'Like a
32
Deleuze
and Guattari
of metaphor:
22Cf. Jacques Lacan's
definition
"The creative
spark of metaphor
does not spring from the conjunction
of two images, that is, of two signifiers
equally
It springs from two signifiers,
actualized.
one of which
has taken the place of the
in the signifying
other
chain,
the hidden
signifier
remaining
present
through
its
(metonymic)
relation
unconscious,
trans.
to the rest of
the chain"
(The
insistence
of
the letter
in the
Jan Miel,
in Structuralism,
ed. Jacques Erhman,
Garden
City,
NY,
1970, p. 115). Metaphor
can be read as a metamorphic
movement
which
is
I use a dog to figure a
blocked
by a return to the subject of the statement. When
man,
I replace one sign with another.
The second continues
to represent
the first.
Metaphor
turns a dog into a likeness of aman.-Ed.
to mean becoming
23Becoming-animal
should not be interpreted
(devenir-animad)
an animal.
In The Metamorphosis
an insect. He remains a
does not become
Gregor
man who
is becoming
an insect. Becoming-animal
for Kafka
a con
constitutes
tinuing deterritorialization of the human, a continuing metamorphosis. "Every
this, constructs
and tests these lines of escape,
these animal-becomings...
are absolute
deterritorializations.
. .To become
is to
animal
the escape
in all its positiveness,
to cross the threshold
and
no longer have any value except for them
a continuum
of intensities which
child does
Animal-becomings
make
the movement,
reach
selves" (Kafka, pp. 23-24).-Ed.
for example,
24Cf.,
the Letter
to Pollak,
Feb.
4, 1902,
in Letters
pp.
1-2.-D&G.
in Languages.
a l'etude de l'intensif,
We
Introduction
Sephiha,
it in order to indicate
tensor from J-F. Lyotard who employs
the
between
& G.
intensity and the libido.-D
25Cf. H. Vidal
borrow
the word
connection
26Henri Gobard,
January 1972.-D
De la vehicularite
& G.
de
la langue
anglaise,
in Langues
modernes,
insists on the importance
of the distinction
27Michel Foucault
between what can be
said in a language at a particular moment
and what cannot be said (even if it can be
Devereux
the case of young Mohave
done). Georges
(cited by Gobard)
analyzes
in their vernacular
Indians who speak very easily about their sexuality
tongue but are
for them English.
it in the vehicular
incapable
of articulating
This is not
language,
it is also a problem
of
only because
the English
teacher has a repressive
function;
languages.-D
& G.
and its role in linguistics,
cf. Change,
3 and 10. (It is true
28On the Prague School
in 1926. But Jakobson
came to Prague
in
that the Prague School was only founded
and connected
1920 when
there already existed a Czech school inspired by Mathesius
to Anton Marty,
a disciple of Brentano.
and
Marty
taught at the German
university
in reunions
from 1902 to 1905 Kafka both attended Marty's
classes and participated
of Brentano's
followers).-D
& G.
Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography,
Winston
(New York,
1960), pp. 110-16;
29Cf. Max
Richard
30An editor
child"
of a magazine
(cf. Wagenbach).-D
says of Kafka's
& G.
trans. G. Humphreys
and Wagenbach.-D
prose
that
it is "like
Roberts
and
& G.
a clean
and neat
Deleuze
3Cf.
account
Deleuze's
use
of Nietzsche's
of German:
and Guattari
"Confronted
33
with
the
ways in which our societies become progressively decodified and unregulated, in
which
our codes
no attempt
are
break
down
still only
children.
at every point,
Nietzsche
is the only
thinker who makes
says: the process
still has not gone
. .In his own writing
and thought Nietzsche
at recodification.
attempt at decodification-not
He
far enough, we
in the
assists
in the relative sense, by deciphering former, present,
or future codes, but in an absolute
that cannot be
sense, by expressing
something
all codes is not easy, even on the
codified,
confounding
all codes. But to confound
I can find here is with Kafka,
simplest
level of writing
and thought. The only parallel
in what
within
of Prague's
he does
to German,
working
the language
Jews: he
a battering
ram out of German
constructs
and turns it against
itself. By dint of a
certain indeterminacyand sobriety, he expresses somethingwithin the codified limits
of
Nietzsche
the German
language
that had never been heard before.
Similarily,
to be Polish
in his use of German.
maintained
or supposed
himself
His masterful
him to transmit
of
siege of language
permits
something
uncodifiable:
the notion
. .An aphorism
is a play of forces,
recent of which-the
the most
style as politics.
the final force-is
latest, the newest,
and provisionally
always
the most
exterior.
to know what
if you want
Nietzsche
puts this very clearly:
I mean,
then find the
force that gives a new sense
we encounter
the problems
to what
I say, and hang the text upon it. . .At this point,
posed by those texts of Nietzsche
that have a fascist or
.
at the level of ttxtual
need not argue Nietzsche
resonance.
. We
because we cannot dispute at that level, but because
the dispute
is no
anti-Semitic
analysis-not
longerworthwhile. Instead, the problem takes the shape of finding, assessing, and
to
forces that give a sense of liberation,
a sense of exteriority
of Nietzsche's
character
phrase. The revolutionary
thought becomes
it is his method
text into
the level of method:
that makes Nietzsche's
or
not
to be
in itself
as
characterized
'bourgeois,'
something
'fascist,'
'revolutionary,'
but to be regarded as an exterior field where fascist, bourgeois,
and
the response
revolutionary
forces meet head on. If we pose the problem
this way,
assembling
the exterior
each
various
at
apparent
conforming toNietzsche's method would be: find the revolutionary force" (Nomad
Thought,
trans. David
B. Allison,
in The New
Nietzsche,
1977, p. 143-46).-Ed.
22
Zi'
4
26
ed. Allison,
New
York,