Jana Evans Braziel, Assistant Professor
229B Mc Micken Hall
Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of Cincinnati
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Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069
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Fax # (513) 556-5960
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Notes on "What is a Minor Literature" from Kafka:  Towards a Minor Literature

« Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature mineure? » /“What is a Minor Literature?” 

Deleuze and Guattari outline the three characterizing elements of a ‘minor literature’:

1) the deterritorializations of a major language through a minor literature written in the major language from a marginalized or minoritarian position;

Discussing the first element of a ‘minor literature’, Deleuze and Guattari explain that it does not arise from a literature written in a ‘minor’ language, or in a formerly colonized langue.  Rather, a ‘minor literature’ is written in a major language, or as in the case of formerly colonized countries, the colonizers’ langue.  According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the first characteristic of a minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16).

2) the thoroughly political nature of a ‘minor literature’;

The second characteristic of a ‘minor literature’, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is its political nature.  Everything
in them is political,” they explain.  The individual is inextricable from the socius, the subject linked to the political: “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.  The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating in it” (17).

3) and its collective, enunciative value.

This political nature of a ‘minor literature’, then, is inseparable from the third characteristic of a ‘minor literature’, its collective value.  Deleuze and Guattari explain the inextricability of the political and the collective:

What each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or
does is necessarily political, even if others aren’t in agreement.  The political domain has contaminated
every statement (énoncé).  But above all else, because collective or national consciousness is ‘often inactive
in external life and always in the process of break-down,’ literature finds itself positively charged with the
role and function of the collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation.  (17)

Its enunciative value is both political and collective; thus, ‘what each author says individually . . . [is] necessarily political . . . and even revolutionary’ (17).  The individual, then, speaks in a collective voice—a voice nevertheless ‘contaminated’ by the political domain.  A ‘minor literature’ is skeptical, yet produces “an active solidarity” (17) among the members of the collective group.  The evolutionary potential of a ‘minor literature’ is written from the margins, deterritorializing the “fragile community” from the border from whence it is possible “to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (17)].

Notes on Deleuze and Guattari’s Concept of a Minor Literature: 

• A ‘minor literature’ is political, collective, revolutionary, and even spatial—deterritorializing one terrain as it maps another.  According to Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘minor literature’ maps the passage of this deterritorialization; as such, it is a literature of the people; as such, it is also thoroughly political.  “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern” (18).
• As a ‘minor literature’ it refers to no subject.  “There isn’t a subject”), Deleuze and Guattari write, “there are only collective assemblages of enunciation” (18).  As an asubjective assemblage, the “minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (18).  Thus, a ‘minor literature’ is a “revolutionary force for all literature” which proceeds through “dryness and sobriety” and “willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities” (19).
• A ‘minor literature’ is not only asubjective, it is also non-representative, deterritorializing sound “irrevocably, absolutely” (21); in this way, a “language of sense is traversed by a line of escape” (21).  This ‘line of flight’ escapes figuration, metaphor, the proper name— “Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification” (22).
• Language in a ‘minor literature’ is no longer designatory.  According to Deleuze and Guattari, “Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits” (23).  A ‘minor literature’, then, escapes signification and representation: a ‘minor literature’ resists resemblance and mimetic representation, much in the way that abstract art resists figuration, representation or imitation of real life.  Language then enters ‘becoming’ through a non-significatory, non-representational ‘line of flight’ in which words and things are ‘intensities’ in which sounds vibrate.

Deleuze and Guattari adopt the linguistic theories of Ferguson, Gumperz, and Henri Gobard, which distinguish four languages (vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythic).  This tetralinguistic model is delineated by function: 

1.  the vernacular language, also referred to as the maternal or territorial language, functions within the rural realm (and is a language of territorialization);
2. the vehicular language operates within the urban, governmental or commercial realms (Deleuze and Guattari argue that is “a language of the first sort of deterritorialization” (23).
3. Referential language is the language “of sense and of culture” and entails “cultural reterritorialization” (23).
4. Mythic language, also a language of reterritorialization, is involved in the spiritual and the religious.

Notes on the Tetralinguistic Model: 

• Deleuze and Guattari explain that the four languages in the tetralinguistic model differ according to spatiotemporal location: “vernacular is here; vehicular language is everywhere; referential language is over there; mythic language is beyond” (23).
• The distribution of these language functions is also determined by historical, cultural and national location, as Deleuze and Guattari illustrate through the shifting functions of Latin (vehicular in the Classical Roman era; referential in the Medieval period; mythic during the Renaissance and after).
• This tetralinguistic model, however, may also be used to explain deterritorializations in language— “a blur, mixed-up history” (24).
• These language functions, Deleuze and Guattari write, “can have ambiguous edges, changing borders, that differ from this or that material . . . Each function of language divides up in turn and carries with it multiple centers of power.  A blur of languages, and not at all a system of languages” (24).

Each of these language functions, the authors maintain, should be assessed and evaluated for the degrees of territoriality, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization.

Deleuze and Guattari do just that in Kafka’s writings,  assessing his uses of Czech (the rural or vernacular language), Hebrew (the mythic language), Yiddish, “a nomadic movement of deterritorialization the reworks German” (25), and Prague German, the vehicular or major language by which “he will make the German language take flight on a line of escape” (25).  Within a ‘minor literature’, the writing-machine operates when the writer assumes a “a sort of stranger within his own language” (26); within the writing-machine, Deleuze and Guattari write, “there is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor” (26).  This process of “becoming-minor” (devenir-mineur) within the writing-machine of a ‘minor literature’ involves making the plurilingualism within one’s own language resound.

At the close of the third chapter, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that making use of the “to make a minor or intensive use of it”), opposing “the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality” and finding “points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape” (26-27).  A ‘minor literature’, then, is political and subversive: “Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor” (27).