Book Reviews. Deleuze Studies 8.1 (2014): Edinburgh University Press

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1 Book Reviews Petr Kouba and Tomáš Pivoda (eds) (2011) Franz Kafka: Minority Report, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. This slim and elegant volume collects some of the lectures given in Prague at the Deleuze and Guattari summer school Franz Kafka and the Perspective of Minority in July The volume appeared only a few months after the event, and this rapidity in the publication process is perhaps the first problem we encounter. The book gives in fact the impression of a certain haste in the editing and publishing and also in the general concept, beginning with the fact that there is no proper introduction. The two-page-long introduction by Petr Kouba is limited to a few basic remarks: it specifies that the book is not about Kafka and his work (something that perhaps a different title or subtitle could or should have made clear), but rather about Deleuze and Guattari s reading of Kafka, and more precisely about the notion of minority ; and provides a very short definition of majority and minority, and of major and minor language. Kouba, however, does not dwell on the difference between the use of the noun and of the adjective, and more specifically on the problems that the use of the term minority generates in the current debate. I will return on this point later. A proper introduction could have provided a stronger concept and rationale for the volume. To my knowledge, in fact, there is no monograph or collection of essays focusing specifically on Deleuze and Guattari s take on Kafka. There are of course plenty of journal articles and book chapters, and the Kafka connection is in part explored also in a number of volumes focusing on Deleuze and literature. Kouba and Pivoda s volume, therefore, fills a gap in the literature, but it could have done it in a much more articulate and conscious way. What the introduction might have done, for example, is to discuss and clarify some issues arising from the title, which of course playfully combines the subtitle and central Deleuze Studies 8.1 (2014): Edinburgh University Press

2 142 Reviews concept of Deleuze and Guattari s book, Toward a Minor Literature, with the title of the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie, Minority Report (the arty cover is also a still from the film), but falls (or leads the reader to fall) into the trap of confusing and equating minor literature with minority literature. When they define minor literature in chapter 3 of the Kafka book, Deleuze and Guattari do not speak of the notion of majority and minority, but rather of major and minor literatures and uses of language. They do indeed briefly analyse the notions of majority and minority in Postulates of Linguistics, the second plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, quoted by Kouba in the introduction; however, they emphasise that what they are interested in is the major or minor mode or use of the language. This is no secondary issue, especially today, with the proliferation of, and an increasing interest in, the so-called minority literatures or literatures of the minorities. Ronald Bogue briefly touches on this problem in a footnote of his excellent contribution to the volume: in appropriations of the concept of minor literature by recent critics, he writes: all too often the term is used as a synonym for minority literatures, and through that term, Deleuze and Guattari are recruited for the defence of identity politics, which, of course, is antithetical to Deleuze and Guattari s conception of minor writing. (64) The issue is not mentioned elsewhere in the book, with the exception, implicitly and in passim, of Gregg Lambert s essay, which however does not dwell on it. Kouba and Pivoda missed indeed the opportunity to situate this volume and the notion of minor literature within the contemporary debate. Another sign of this haste in the publication is Miroslav Petříček s contribution, which is the simple transcript of the lecture he gave at the 2010 summer school; the lecture has not been reworked or expanded (it covers fewer than five pages), and not even the rhetorical mannerisms of the spoken address have been edited out. The short essay does not lack in interest: starting off from an analysis of the literary machine in the Kafka book, Petříček connects the notion of machine with that of structure and investigates the similarities and differences between the two, with the help of Deleuze s 1973 essay How Do We Recognize Structuralism? The argument is that the notion of machine is a sort of evolution of that of structure, an evolution which retains, develops and intensifies its implications (59). Of particular interest is the (brief) reference to the Prague structuralist school (better known as the Prague Linguistic Circle or Prague School, ), which developed a notion

3 Reviews 143 of structure as open, or rather as an opening, and thus akin to the Deleuzian notion of productivity. However, these interesting insights are not developed into an articulate analysis and remain at the level of fragments or suggestions. The same applies to Catarina Pombo Nabais s contribution. Pombo Nabais is the only contributor who was not a speaker at the 2010 summer school, and her brief essay puts forwards a very interesting argument: from the Kafka book onwards, she writes, Deleuze subverts his own previous interpretation of Kafka, which still relied on a traditional, psychoanalytical notion of literature and literary interpretation, and embraces a new joy which liberates him from the psychoanalytical understanding of literature. She points out that Deleuze s previous interpretation of Kafka, contained in the second part of Proust and Signs (added in 1970 to the 1964 first edition), uses a Lacanian notion of law grounded in the tripartition symbolic/imaginary/real within desire. Here the consciousness of the law as identified in Kafka is called depressive, as opposed to the schizoid consciousness identified in Proust. The radical turn brought about by the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Pombo Nabais argues, is not entirely acknowledged and never explicitly discussed by Deleuze, and thus his new programme in the understanding of literature, as proposed in the Kafka book, is not completely honest (33). This is indeed a big claim, which should be extensively articulated and supported by a much more thorough analysis of the texts. Pombo Nabais instead drops the discussion precisely where she should have gone deeper. Moreover, in my view, she mistakenly underplays the role of Félix Guattari in Deleuze s fundamental theoretical transformation (41), a point that, again, the essay should have explored at length. Despite their limits, however, Petříček s and Pombo Nabais s texts also testify to one of the strengths of Kouba and Pivoda s collection: the volume puts together a number of perspectives coming from different cultural and philosophical traditions, enriching thereby the discussion and the analysis. Besides Petříček, who was a student of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, and Pombo Nabais, who comes from Portugal and works in France, Kouba s own contribution also opens to inputs overcoming the traditional circle of (anglophone) Deleuze studies, as does the essay by Nick Nesbitt, who, though coming from the American tradition of French studies, has lived and worked in Prague and is thus receptive to some different inputs. If these cultural and also stylistic differences do occasion a certain disharmony in the whole, they certainly and more importantly provide interesting

4 144 Reviews stimuli. Moreover, the above criticisms do not imply a negative judgement on the project as a whole, and do not intend to dismiss its undeniable qualities: some of the contributions are indeed outstanding, and many of the ideas and concepts put forwards are original and worth pursuing. Together with Ronald Bogue s, an excellent contribution is certainly that by Gregg Lambert, which deservedly opens the volume. In a way, Lambert s essay substitutes for the missing introduction, since it focuses on Kafka and the Question of a Minor Literature and attempts to situate the notion of minor literature within the contemporary debate. The essay is not limited to a mere exposition of the concept of minor literature, but rather extends the discussion to the questions what is writing?, why write?, and for whom does one write?, with reference to Kafka s status as modernist writer (and thus to the modernist ideology or clichés about the writer) and to the contemporary politics of writing. Lambert s starting point is the observation that today the project of becoming a writer has a meaning even before it is actually a project of writing, or before the question of whether the particular work has merit is even raised (9). That is to say, the project of writing is today always already framed by the ideology of globalised markets. This is the thesis put forward by Peter Hallward in Absolutely Postcolonial (2001), which updates and revises Jameson s famous theses about postmodernism, and is therefore the constant referent of Lambert s argument. Against Hallward s thesis, Lambert attempts to wrest the political value of the project of writing from this ideological framework, focusing on Deleuze and Guattari s notion of bachelor machine, which describes a social process, a social desire, and thus contrasts the logic of singularisation that Hallward identifies within modernist (and postmodernist, postcolonial) ideology. The importance and actuality of Deleuze and Guattari s book on Kafka resides precisely in the attempt of wrestling Kafka s work and more generally the project of writing from the always already of the ideologies of both the Kafkamyth and of the myth of the modernist writer. This scenario also constitutes implicitly the background against which to read Petr Kouba s contribution. Kouba focuses on the perspectives from the outside and starts off by reading Kafka s story The Burrow through the concepts of Umwelt (biological environment) and Umbegung (the totality of all Umwelten) developed by the biologist Jacob von Uexküll in his studies about animal and human worlds. The sound the animal in The Burrow hears

5 Reviews 145 is read as coming from an absolute outside and, as such, as that asignifying and thus deterritorialising sonority Deleuze and Guattari analyse in the first chapter of the Kafka book. Kouba links then this asignifying, deterritorialising sonority to the perspectives from the outside developed by the ethnological method, whose origins he seeks in Montesquieu s Persian Letters (1721) and Voltaire s Mocromégas (1752). Kouba certainly could have explored more in depth the link between Deleuze and Guattari and Uexküll, whose theories are mentioned in the discussion about Territoire and animal music in A Thousands Plateaus twelfth plateau, Of the Refrain ; moreover, on this connection, and on the notion of sonority, there exists a bibliography which should perhaps have been discussed. However, what strikes me most is the contrast between the notion of the writer as an outsider that Kouba proposes, and Lambert s long critique of the modernist ideology which pictures the artist as foreigner, as stranger, as criminal, as outcast or class-traitor and so on (21). Is a bachelor (in Deleuze and Guattari s view) the same thing as an outsider? Is there not an opposition between the bachelor s or even the nomad s deterritorialisation, which operates from within, and the gaze from the outside? That is, I have the impression that the all too traditional notion of the artist as outsider ends up reterritorialising Kafka and Deleuze and Guattari s interpretation into that modernist ideology that they attempted to dismantle. A different connection, that between Deleuze and Guattari s Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist, is thoroughly and masterfully explored by Ronald Bogue. Kafka notoriously considered Kleist one of his masters, and in the Kafka book Deleuze and Guattari draw a parallel and a distinction between Kafka s minor literature and Kleist s literature of war ; in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), they further explore the meaning of a war machine (plateau Treatise of Nomadology: The War Machine ) as related to, but distinguished from, Kafka s bureaucratic machine. Bogue, with the help of a little book strongly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari s philosophy, Mathieu Carrière s Für eine Literatur des Krieges, Kleist (For a Literature of War, Kleist, 1981) a true companion piece to Deleuze and Guattari s Kafka articulates the concept of a literature of war to show that Kleist provided Deleuze and Guattari with an important means of extending the notion of the literary in their subsequent works. The differences between Kafka and Kleist, Bogue argues, should be viewed not in terms of an opposition of minor literature and a literature of war, but rather in terms of

6 146 Reviews literature s immediate relationship with a war machine in Kleist and with a bureaucratic machine in Kafka (64). The final contribution by Nick Nesbitt could have provided a companion piece to Bogue s thorough analysis: like Bogue, Nesbitt aims at developing an insight which is briefly mentioned in the Kafka book a connection between Kafka and masochism enclosed in a long parenthesis in chapter 7 but which remains unexplored. He thus links Deleuze s definition of masochism in Coldness and Cruelty (his 1966 introduction to Sacher-Masoch s Venus in Furs) the enactment of a systematic subversion of the law via dissidence (91) to the experiment in emancipation undertaken by the bachelor machine of the Kafka book. He then extends the analysis of dissidence to an (all too brief) reading of Jan Patočka and Václav Havel, who, unlike Deleuze and Guattari, emphasise the necessity of a dissident politics of truth to be counterpoised to the state s politics of lie. The idea is extremely interesting, and it is a pity therefore that Nesbitt proceeds tentatively and without articulating in depth the connections and the differences between the Sacher-Masoch essay and the Kafka book (and between Deleuze/Guattari and Patočka/Havel). Moreover, he takes a surprising text as an example of Kafka s emancipative/dissident strategy: the Letter to His Father. This letter, Nesbitt argues, expresses Kafka s masochistic politics of dissidence, in which, like Sacher-Masoch, he signs a contract with the Mother to escape from the Law of the Father. In short, Nesbitt attributes a sort of truth-value to the letter, and this stridently contrasts with Deleuze and Guattari s reading in the first few pages of chapter 2 of the Kafka book, where they write right at the beginning: Kafka knows quite well that nothing in it [the Letter to His Father ] is true (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 9). And right after the parenthesis on masochism in chapter 7, they emphasise that the pact with the Mother (Oedipal incest) entails reterritorialisation, and that a true deterritorialising pact (schizo-incest) happens only with sisters, maids and whores (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 67). Nesbitt risks here therefore to re-oedipalise the bachelor machine and the masochistic pact. This is not the place to explore these issues and problems, which must however be pointed out to the reader. Though the last contribution to the volume perhaps leaves the reader a bit disappointed, Kouba and Pivoda s collection is finally to be welcomed. It fills a gap in the literature, contains some excellent essays and proposes original and interesting ideas and insights, which hopefully will be pursued in future publications. Moreover, it emphasises the interest and the importance of Deleuze and Guattari s interpretation of

7 Reviews 147 Kafka, which must be explored further. The reader is left asking for more, and this little book could work as stimulus for new research. On the other hand, Kouba and Pivoda s volume is a missed occasion because it keeps its ambitions too low: certainly, it defines itself as a collection of reports, which besides originate (though this is not specified anywhere in the book) from a punctual and limited experience, the 2010 summer school in Prague. However, even within the limits of this modesty, there were the premises for a stronger contribution to both the Kafka and the Deleuze and Guattari scholarship. Carlo Salzani DOI: /dls References Carrière, Mathieu (1981) Für eine Literatur des Krieges, Kleist, Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hallward, Peter (2001) Absolutely Postcolonial, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kouba, Petr, and Tomáš Pivoda (eds) (2011) Franz Kafka: Minority Report, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Patricia Pisters (2012) The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press. The history of science is populated with magical entities: phlogiston, the ether and animal spirits, as well as borderline beings that migrate from magic to legitimate consecration. The God particle, atoms, planets, the gay gene and perhaps the brain are undecidably poised between fanciful fictions that might close down inquiry by operating as a black box, or that might be genuinely real insofar as their posited existence allows for more explanation and richer worldly engagement than other possible objects. What happens when an entity is poised between philosophical creation and scientific function? One might say that atoms are at once philosophical concepts, allowing us to imagine life as if it were composed of basic irreducible units, at the same time that atoms are also functions,