Deleuze and Guattari 1986

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Content and Expression

"Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction fo the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work tha tis actually only open to experimentation." (3)

proliferation of photos and portraits

form of content (bent head) vs. form of expression (portrait-photo) form of content -- bentness of the head/content form of expression -- any form by which something is expressed; book, photography, etc.

not a hermeneutic interpretion, not a categorizatnio of images or psychoanalytical interpretation or structural analysis

in answer to the bent head, the head that straightens (4) -- "intrusion of sound often occurs in Kafka in connection with the movement to raise or straighten the head" (4)

"Music always seems caught up in an indivisible becoming-child or becoming-animal, a sonorous block that opposes the visual memory." (5)

straightened head as a form of content, musical sound as a form of expression

bent head/portrait photo == blocked, oppressed, neutralized desiry, memory, teritoriality

straightened head/musical sound == desire that moves fwd, opens to new connections, deterritorialization

not the composed note that interests Kafka, but "a pure sonorous material" (5); "What interests Kafka is a pure and intense sonorous material tha tis always connected to its own abolition -- a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words -- a sonority that ruptures in order to break away fro ma chain that is still monotone and always nonsignifying" (6); "Sound doesn't show up here as a form of expression, but rather as an unformed material of expression, that will act on the other terms" (6)

"We won't try to find archetypes that would represent Kafka's imaginary, his dynamic, or his bestiary (the archetype works by assimilation, homogenization, and thematics, wehreas our method works only where a rupturing and hetereogenous line appears). morover, we aren't looking ofr any so-called free associations (we are all well aware of the sad fate of these associations that always bring us back to childhood memories or, even worse, to the phantasm, not because they fail to work but because such a fate is part of their actual underlying principle). We aren't even trying to interpret, to say that this means that. And we are looking least of all for a structure with formal oppositions and a fully constructed Signifier; one can always come up with binary oppositions like 'bent head-straightened head' or 'portrait0sonority' and bi-univocal relations like 'bent head-portrait' or 'straightened head-sonority.' But that's stupid as long as one doesn't see where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is oging to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure ,no less than it breaks hermeneutic interpretation, the ordinary association of ideas, and the imaginary archetype." (7)

--> "We believe only in a Kafka politics that is neither imaginary nor symbolic. We believe only in one or more Kafka machines that are neither structure nor phantasm. We believe only in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests of experience" (7):

Kafka has: POLITICS MACHINES EXPERIMENTATION

there is no writer, only a "mahine-man, and an experimental man" (7) -->"To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it -- these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation." (7) --> not an issue of being free, but of FINDING A WAY OUT, OR A WAY IN

"Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process." (8)

An Exaggerated Oedipus

"The question fothe father isn't how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn't find any." (10)

"it's not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis -- that is, a desire tha tis alraeyd submissive and searching to communicate its own submission -- that produces Oedipus." (10)

possibilities of escape from family triangle: BECOMING-ANIMAL, BECOMING-BEETLE (12); "To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, or nonsignifying signs. Kafka's animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as wella s from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them." (13)

also, the becoming-man of the ape in "Report to the Academy" --> "Flight is challenged when it is useless movement in space, a movement of false liberty; but in contrast, flight is affired when it is a stationary flight, a flight of intensity." (13) --> linking up with abstract machiens

"The act of is a capturing, a possession, a plus-value, but never a reproduction or an imitation." (13)

"Thus, we have two effects of the development or comic enlargement of Oedipus: the discovery a contrario of other triangles that operate beneath and, indeed, in the familial triangle, and the a posteriori outlining of paths of escape of the orphaned becoming-animal." (14)