On reading a reference to Deleuze & Guattari's magnificent work Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature on a friend's blog, I recalled how much this book once meant to me, as I was preparing my PhD thesis and struggling to find productive concepts to help me articulate the marginality of the poets & poems on which I was then focusing. Here is an excerpt from my notes:
'Reterritorialisation’ is a term that has gained currency in contemporary critical theory. It refers to a process of cultural change which entails the restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced ‘deterritorialisation’. The latter term alludes to a weakening of ties between culture and place, implying therefore a removal of cultural subjects and objects from a certain location in space and time. Both definitions were productively assimilated into literary studies by the theorisation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In an important book on Kafka, they propose the concept of ‘minor literature’ to refer to the literature that a minority constructs within a major language. [1] This applies not only to Kafka’s use of German, but also to Joyce's and Beckett’s use of English, for example. According to Deleuze and Guattari, such a literature is characterised by three defining elements: a) the deterritorialisation of a major language through a minor literature written in the major language from a marginalised or minoritarian position (‘Language [is] affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialisation’); b) its thoroughly political nature; c) and its collective, enunciative value. [2]
‘If the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community’, write Deleuze and Guattari, ‘this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’. [3] But a ‘minor literature’ is not only political and collective: it is also spatial, in that it deterritorialises one terrain as it re-maps – reterritorialises – another. It draws language out of its context and into a ‘line of flight’ that creates a new context not yet ready to be understood.
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
[2] Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 16-17.
[3] Deleuze and Guattari, p. 18.
‘If the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community’, write Deleuze and Guattari, ‘this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’. [3] But a ‘minor literature’ is not only political and collective: it is also spatial, in that it deterritorialises one terrain as it re-maps – reterritorialises – another. It draws language out of its context and into a ‘line of flight’ that creates a new context not yet ready to be understood.
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
[2] Deleuze and Guattari, pp. 16-17.
[3] Deleuze and Guattari, p. 18.
Drawing language into a ‘line of flight’ that creates a new context not yet ready to be understood... In a sense, this is what every genuinely new, innovative work of art - or work tout court - does, more often than not at the risk of being misunderstood or ignored in its own time. Perhaps all innovators work, write, create for an imagined but unforeseeable future, and possess thus a unique sense of time and space. We must definitely re-think our notions of 'minor' (and 'major') authors and literatures.
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