ABSTRACT
In part two of Proust and Signs, Deleuze asserts that the Recherche is a machine, thereby stressing the work’s function as a force of production. The Recherche produces truths, neither discovering preexisting truths nor creating them ex nihilo, but bringing them forth through an experimentation on the real; and it produces effects, both within the work itself and in readers. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Deleuze and Guattari develop further the notion of the machine, treating the entirety of Kafka’s work as a “literary machine, a writing machine or expression machine” (K 52; 29). In Kafka, however, the focus is less on the problem of the transversal unity of multiplicity than on the question of the literary machine’s effect within the real. Kafka is a practitioner of “minor literature,” Deleuze and Guattari claim, a literature immediately social and political, affected by a high level of linguistic deterritorialization and expressive of a collective assemblage of enunciation. Kafka’s literary machine is a minor machine, one whose components include his diaries, letters, short stories and novels, and whose function discloses “diabolic powers to come or revolutionary forces to be constructed” (K 33; 18). It is also a desiring machine, whose proliferating series, connectors and blocks transmit flows and intensities, induce movements and open lines of flight. In this chapter we will
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