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. 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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 xFOREWORD the least, this initial convergence between Benjamin's approach and that ad- vanced 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 of social classes, sexes, neuro- sis, mysticism, and so on. In both cases, we find ourselves face to face with the same attempt to avoid making Kafka just another great litterateur. Both pinpoint the need to make way for new philosophical, literary, and even psychological categories to come to terms with this unique work and to lead readers out of the impasse created by so many readings of exegesis. First, let us read and consider what Benjamin would have us think about Kafka: What is the substance of what he says? What is he attempting to have us experience, and not simply interpret or read? What writing machine— already! —does he want to connect us to? Recall that the study begins withap litical apologue: Potemkin was having a crisis and was therefore inaccessible, but affairs of state were pending. There was a stack of documents that urgently needed to be signed, and the high officials were at the end of their rope; but a or clerk named Shuvalkin who was informed of the problem took hold of the documents, impassively marched into Potemkin's bedroom, presented the papers to him, and pressed him to sign them. Without blinking—at least, so it seemed—Potemkin signed all the documents presented to him one after the other. Everyone knows what happened: when the high officials finally had the famous documents in hand, they were stupefied to decipher in each instance the name Shuvalkin. Benjamin continues in a way that is highly significant for us: This story is like a herald racing two hundred years ahead of Kafka's work. The enigma which beclouds it is Kafka's enigma. The world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms, is Kafka's world. The obliging Shuvalkin, who makes light of everything and is finally left empty-handed, is Kafka's K. (p. 112) The "reading" that Benjamin proposes for Kafka's work is clear from the out- set and is characterized-no less than that of Deleuze and Guattari—by never trying to find archetypes that claim to have "qualified" Kafka's "imaginary" or to interpret his work by moving from the unknown back to the known: the Castle is God, the world of the father, power that cannot be grasped; the cockroach is anxiety, castration, the dreamworld and its multiple metamorphoses, and so forth. But what is still more striking, neither does Benjamin try-he doesn't con sider it useful or necessary—to relate Kafka's work to a structure with preformed formal oppositions and a signifier of the kind in which "after all is said and done, xefers to y"! Not at all. The reading of Kafka both in Benjamin and in Deleuze and Guattari is determined by the prominence they give to a politics of Kafka; FOREWORDxi but, as Deleuze and Guattari go on to articulate, this politics is "neither imagi- nary nor symbolic." In characterizing the hordes of messengers, judges, assistants, intermedi- aries, and lawyers who haunt Kafka's text, Benjamin never takes refuge behind a symbolic, allegorical, or mythical interpretation: he considers Kafka's ances- tors to be the Jews and Chinese of ancient or contemporary history, or even the Greeks, rather than considering Kafka to be the descendant of "Atlases" who would carry the globe of the world on the back of his neck. Refuge behind myth, recourse to myth as the last hope, is radically rejected: Even the world of myth of which we think in this context is incom- parably younger than Kafka's world, which has been promised redemp- tion by the myth. But if we can be sure of one thing, it is this:Kafka did not succumb to its temptation, (p. 117; my emphasis) Nor would Benjamin have yielded to the temptation to take refuge behind myth; to do so would be to inject mythical meanings into Kafka's work-to say that Kafka is to modernity what classical myth was to traditional society.