Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

136 Pages·1986·7.218 MB·English

by  Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
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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 FeketeThtructuraAllegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction
and the Power of Fiction
Volume 13. Tzvetan TodorovMikhaiBakhtinheDialogicalPrinciple
Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939
Volume 15. Peter SzondiOnTextuaUnderstandingndtherssays
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 TheweleitMaleFantasies,
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
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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