ABSTRACT
In their critique of Kafka in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari mention the emancipatory potential of writing “like a dog (but a dog can’t write-exactly, exactly)” (26). Mystifying and absurd as this suggestion is, it yields, on further reflection, a very savvy theorization of formless expressivity, or the practice of opposing “a purely intensive usage of language to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it” (19). Deleuze and Guattari here are discussing the possibilities of “minor literature,” a singular and minor usage of a major language. Minor literature does not necessarily rise from a minor language, and is rather that which a minority (though not necessarily an ethnic one) constructs within a major language.
