From: Leskenoi-AT-cs.com
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 20:01:41 EDT
Subject: Re: kafka


In a message dated 6/26/02 2:12:15 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
Dreamduke-AT-aol.com writes:

<< is anyone working on kafka through deleuze and guattari, in particular 
their sense of minor literature in relation to modern and postmodern 
literature >>

At the risk of being a little glib in characterizing what is not an easy book 
to summarize, I would say that the problematic in D and G's Kafka book is a 
little different than this way of posing the issue (that is, in terms of 
modern/postmodern literature).  I would choose to say rather than the 
category of minor literature dismantles the concept of the "literary" as 
such, from within.  Kafka's writing, for D and G, is a machine that 
dismantles the literary and all of its organizing concepts (genre, period, 
style, national literature, etc.).  That's why they radically reduce the 
difference between Kafka's literary and "nonliterary" textual production:  
it's all part of the same writing machine, for them.

Perhaps the concept of the "machinic" could be related to a problematic of 
modernity and postmodernity, but I don't sense that's what D and G are really 
interested in.  I think the property of the machinic in Kafka's text D and G 
identify could be more productively related to an ontology of becoming, a 
line of flight outside of the realm of the literary and its codifications, 
and really has more to do with a phenomenology that passes beyond the limits 
of the human body and subjectivity.  This is why the animal stories in Kafka, 
and the proposition of becoming-animal, is so important to their approach to 
his work.  Their book aims to show how Kafka's writing machine subverts all 
manner of abstractions, from religious transcendence to the law to literature 
as such.  They see Kafka as an imminent, worldly writer whose writing machine 
has more to do with a "visceral philosophy" or even ontology than it does 
with purely literary or temporal categories.

For what it's worth.