ABSTRACT
In Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze writes: “Kafka (for Central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer”. Yet, are we to believe Deleuze when he suggests that a harmony exists between Kafka and Melville? Is it the same mode of collective enunciation of a minor people that we can find in Melville and Kafka? In Deleuze’s understanding of Kafka, the collective dimension of the literary experiment is the work of a minority within a major language as the construction of lines of flight, of lines of deterritorialization for singular or minority becomings. However, Deleuze’s reading of Melville’s universe seems a little different. Melville is not presented by Deleuze as being confronted with small nations asphyxiated by empires. On the contrary, America is a great nation, and Deleuze accentuates its nature as a place of universal immigration. Moreover, according to Deleuze, the political programs of the founding fathers have transformed America into a “wall of free stones”, a nation without cement or without an accomplished configuration. The diabolic forces from the outside that knock on the door of American communities of celibate people are not there any longer, as they were in Kafka. Nevertheless, can one see in these two authors a similar political dimension of the confabulatory function? Is it possible to assign the same prophetic role to the celibate characters of Kafka and to those created by Melville?
