Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature PDF
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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 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 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
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