shoulders of the father what had really been the question all along: an
entire micropolitics of desire, of impasses and escapes, of submissions
and rectifications. Opening the impasse, unblocking it. Deterritorial-
izing Oedipus into the world instead of reterritorializing everything in
Oedipus and the family. (Kafka, 10, emphasis in the original)Kafka constructs Oedipus as an obsessive cartography, but his desir-
ing investment, his textual libido, is a line of flight that moves in a
thousand directions and is not reducible to Oedipus.
The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory, as Deleuze and Guattari
wrote in Anti-Oedipus. There are no fixed roles that we would be required
to adopt and to perform, but rather parts of a machine, assemblages of
enunciation that lock and unlock labyrinths from which one toils to exit,
and paths of flight that lead into another territory.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafkais not a psychoanalytical book, nor is
it a book about the unconscious in Kafka’s literature. I would rather
say that it is a book about hypertext. Even if they don’t use this word
(which was not in use in those days), this is in fact the concept on
which they were working.The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose
locations aren’t very well known. The hotel in Amerikahas innu-
merable main doors and side doors that innumerable guards watch
over; it even has entrances and exits without doors ... Only the
principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the
enemy, the Signifier ... (Kafka, 3)The philosophical imagination of the rhizome is at work here, and
the model that it traces is the hypertext, that is, a semiotic construc-
tion in which any sign can introduce transversal series of assemblages.
The act of connecting does not assume the form of interpretation, nor
is it the explication of something that was already implicitly there. There
is no implicit-explicit relation in hypertextual semiotic assemblages, but
the crossing of discursive planes, processes of distancing and undistanc-
ing, lines of flight, the passage from one plane of consistency to another.
The hypertextual principle is a declension of a-dialectical becoming;
the passage from one configuration of the world to the next is not the
passage from an implicit state to an explicit one, but a deterritorial-
ization. In the same way, the schizoanalytical path does not consist in
the passage from a problem to a solution, but in the displacement of
our foci of attention.Kafka, Hypertext and Assemblages 899780230_221192_10_cha09.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 89