univ of minnesota pr kafka toward a minor literature sep 1986

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature This page intentionally left blank Kafka Toward a Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Translation by Dana Polan Foreword by Réda Bensmai'a Theory and History of Literature, Volume 30 University of Minnesota Press MinneapolLondon The University of Minnesota gratefully acknowledges translation assistance provided for this book by the French Ministry of Culture. Copyright © 1986 by the University of Minnesota Originally published as Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure Copyright © 1975 by Les éditions de Minuit, Paris. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Seventh printing 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka: toward a minor literature. (Theory and history of literature ; v. 30) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924—Criticism and interpretation. I. Guattari, Felix. II. Title. III. Series. PT2621.A26Z67513 1986 833'.912 85-31822 ISBN 0-8166-1514-4 ISBN 0-8166-1515-2 (pbk.) The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Foreword: The Kafka Effect by Réda Bensmai'a ix Translator's Introduction xxii 1. Content and Expression 3 2. An Exaggerated Oedipus 9 3. What Is a Minor Literature? 16 4. The Components of Expression 28 5. Immanence and Desire 43 6. Proliferation of Series 53 7. The Connectors 63 8. Blocks, Series, Intensities 72 9. What Is an Assemblage? 81 Notes 91 Index 101 Theory and History of Literature Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics Volume 4. Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde Volume 5. Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 2nd ed., rev. Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Volume 9. Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature Volume 10. Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Volume 11. Edited by John Fekete Th tructuraAllegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction Volume 13. Tzvetan Todorov MikhaiBakhtin he DialogicalPrinciple Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 Volume 15. Peter Szondi On TextuaUnderstanding nd therssays Volume 16. Jacques Attali Noise Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama Volume 19. Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Beholder Volume 20. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud Just Gaming Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem Volume 22. Klaus Theweleit MaleFantasies, Volume 1. Women, Floods, Bodies, History Volume 23. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, Volume 2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror Volume 24. Héléne Cixous and Catherine Clement The Newly Born Woman Volume 25. Jose Antonio Maravall Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure Volume 26. Andrej Warminski Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger Volume 27. Stephen Melville Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruc- tion and Modernism Volume 28. Edited by Jonathan Arac Postmodernism and Politics Volume 29. Peter Szondi Theory of the Modern Drama Volume 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature This page intentionally left blank Foreword The Kafka Effect Reda Bensmai'a Translated by Terry Cochran Writing is born from and deals with the acknowledged doubt of an explicit division, in sum, of the impossibility of one's own place. It articulates an act that is constantly a beginning: the sub- ject is never authorized by a place, it could never install itself in an inalterable cogito, it remains a stranger to itself and forever deprived of an ontological ground, and therefore it always comes up short or is in excess, always the debtor of a death, indebted with respect to the disappearance of a genealogical and territorial "substance," linked to a name that cannot be owned. —Michel de Certeau, L'Ecriture de ITiistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 327 In December 1934, the Jüdische Rundschau published an important text on Kafka by Walter Benjamin, in which we can read these decisive words: "There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka's works. One is to interpret them natu- rally, the other is the supernatural interpretation. Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points." 1 In 1974, when Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari devoted a book to Kafka's work, they took their point of departure from the same principle: one misses the mark in Kafka either by putting him in the nursery—by oedipalizing and relating him to mother- father narratives—or by trying to limit him to theological-metaphysical specula- tion to the detriment of all the political, ethical, and ideological dimensions that run through his work and give it a special status in the history of literature. At ix [...]... the study of a life; Deleuze and Guattari have gone through the full range of the primary texts and have covered the essential secondary literature Their reading of Kafka seems to stand as a challenge to previous readings of Kafka especially to that present reading of Kafka as a misanthrope of negativity, a case of Oedipalized neurosis, a refugee into the interiority of subjectivity as against the... treating previous readings of Kafka as forms of reterritorialization of a nomadic writing, Deleuze and Guattari suggest how the seeming integrity of academic specialization is actually an alibi for an inevitable exploitation of literary criticism to political ends Thus, although Deleuze and Guattari's reading of bent head-straightened head images as processes of submission and defiance, as against Marthe... enunciation of mass political action And, no doubt, the Deleuze-Guattari reading of Kafka as man of joy, as promoter of a radical politics, as rejecter of all submissions to the ostensible ties of family and neurosis could no doubt become part of the canon of the Kafka discipline However, throughout Kajka, Deleuze and Guattari argue that such a reading goes beyond specializations and disciplinary boundaries... least, this initial convergence between Benjamin's approach and that advanced by Deleuze and Guattari seems worthy of note When we read each of the studies carefully, we cannot help being struck by the care taken in each case to avoid what might be called a political-ideological recuperation of Kafka or, perhaps, to avoid falling back upon what Deleuze and Guattari call a hard segment: the binary machine... human But in writing Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari propose an experimentation of Kafka that refrains from—even in the name of a solemn gestus—referring to any idea of failure, of shortcoming, or of "immemorial" guilt This book represents a watershed and is invaluable for the modern reader of Kafka: instead of seeking to capture his work in one of the "segments" that constantly draw it toward some black... great predecessors, Kafka appears as the initiator of a new literary continent: a continent where reading and writing open up new perspectives, break ground for new avenues of thought, and, above all, wipe out the tracks of an old topography of mind and thought With Kafka at least with the Kafka that Deleuze and Guattari think through anew—one has the feeling that literature has been given a new face:... of a romance of Kafka the man, this escape should not lead to the assumption that one can ever fully escape to something else, to a final point at the end of a line In a sense, Kafka can do what Deleuze and Guattari say that Kafka was doing; each moment in the writing is only a sort of room that one can leave by going through a door, only to arrive in another room that one won't stay in and that has... slide-proces and processus interpenetrate, each engaging in unsystematic war-marchine attacks on the other Again, as part of the nonspecialist quality of the book, the languag is a language that glides between a number of accepted discourses, and it is again as an answer to the questions of translation that this translation works to convey a sense of the fields from which Deleuze and Guattari draw some of. .. an existential phenomenology in which style is understood to be an energetic and total investment of an author's (political) being-in-the-world means that Kafka can bear a certain resemblance to the traditional study of an author as some kind of necessary and transparent linking up of life and art in a univocally causal fashion But Kafka is not a book of life explaining art, or vice versa To be sure,... Kafka' s work-to say that Kafka is to modernity what classical myth was to traditional society Benjamin was one of the first "readers" of Kafka to see and then try to show-to demonstrate—that Kafka' s work was, from a certain point of view, to be taken literally: in a word, that it functioned on the surface of its signs and that the issue was not-at least, not only-to try to interpret it but, above all, . Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature This page intentionally left blank Kafka Toward a Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Translation by Dana Polan Foreword by Réda. mythical meanings into Kafka& apos;s work-to say that Kafka is to modernity what classical myth was to traditional society. Benja- min was one of the first "readers" of Kafka . States of America on acid-free paper Seventh printing 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka: toward a minor literature. (Theory and history of