ABSTRACT
Deleuze and Guattari subtitle their study of Kafka Pour une littérature mineure, “For (or Toward) a Minor Literature,” and in some ways Kafka’s work can be seen as simply the occasion for Deleuze and Guattari’s development of the broad concept of minor literature, one suggested by Kafka, exemplified in his writings, but characteristic of several other writers of diverse practices and tendencies. Central to the concept of minor literature is a particular use of language, a way of deterritorializing language by intensifying features already inherent within it. Such a minor use of language proceeds via a collective assemblage of enunciation and functions as a political form of action. Precisely how the elements of minor literature are related to one another, and in what ways they are manifest in language per se, are questions that require careful elucidation. Deleuze and Guattari detail the elements of minor literature in Kafka and elaborate on the concept in A Thousand Plateaus, offering in both cases occasional examples of a minor usage of language in authors other than Kafka. And in a 1979 essay on the Italian playwright Carmelo Bene, “One Less Manifesto” (SP), Deleuze extends the concept to the theater. What these texts suggest is that minor literature is above all linguistic action, and that the theater is a paradigmatic instance of such action in its incorporation of speech within gesture in a pragmatic context.
