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9

Kafka, Hypertext and Assemblages

According to Guattari and Deleuze’s definition, a ‘minor literature’

is the literature of a minority that makes use of a major language, a

literature which deterritorializes that language and interconnects

meanings of the most disparate levels, inseparably mixing and

implicating poetic, psychological, social and political issues with

each other. In analogy, the Japanese media theorist Toshiya Ueno

has recently referred to Felix Guattari as a ‘minor philosopher’.

Himself a practicing psychoanalyst, Guattari was a foreigner to the

Grand Nation of Philosophy, whose natives mostly treat him like an

unworthy bastard. And yet he has established a garden of minor

flowers, of bastard weeds and rhizomes that are as polluting to con-

temporary philosophy as Kafka’s writing has been to German litera-

ture. (Broeckmann, Minor Media,online, para 1)

In 1975, Deleuze and Guattari, working within the conceptual

context of Anti-Oedipus, published a book entitled Kafka. Toward a Minor

Literature. Kafka is placed under the shadow of Oedipus and comes to be

projected into a scenario that goes far beyond the psychoanalytic

horizon. ‘An Exaggerated Oedipus’ is the title of the second chapter, but

Oedipus is not the key for interpreting the Kafka text: on the contrary,

Oedipus is described as a libidinal machine, an investment of neuroses.

It is not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis – that is, a

desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own

submission– that produces Oedipus. Oedipus, the market value of

neurosis. In contrast, to augment and expand Oedipus by adding to

it and making a paranoid and perverse use of it is already to escape

from submission, to lift one’s head up, and see passing above the

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