Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

Schizoanalysis is the deterritorialization of investments of desire; it is

a production of the unconscious capable of modifying the neurotic

frame, of opening it so as to include unforeseen objects and determine

restructurations of the psychic field.

Schizo-Kafka proceeds through metamorphosis and not metaphor.

Gregor Samsa’s beetle is not a metaphor, but precisely a metamorphosis.

Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism all signification, no

less than all designation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor.

There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a dis-

tribution of states that is part of the range of the word. The thing and

other things are no longer anything but intensities overrun by deterri-

torialized sound or words that are following their line of escape. It is

no longer a question of a resemblance between the comportment of

an animal and that of a man; it is even less a question of a simple

wordplay. There is no longer man or animal, since each deterritorial-

izes the other, in a conjunction of flux, in a continuum of reversible

intensities. (Kafka, 22)

Following the path traced by Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari come to

the elaboration of their own poetics of the minor. Minor literature,

they write, is not the literature of a minor language, but the literature

that a minority makes in a major language.

Against any populism or folklorism of resistance, they state here that

the sole terrain in which sabotage works effectively is the most

advanced, the most complex one. Enunciation must assemble elements

lifted out of the enemy’s territory because, above all, minor literature

acts as ‘a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ (Kafka, 16–18).

In this sense, Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for

the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something imposs-

ible – the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in

German, the impossibility of writing otherwise. (Kafka, 16)

The language in which the minor literature locates itself is the major

language, and only out of its tangle is it possible to construct rhizomes

that move outside the language, outside the order that the language pro-

tects; only out of the chaos of a language (that still pretends to be

ordered, grammatical, structured), only out of this chaos in language does

it become possible to create refrains able to assemble, to put in motion

collective deterritorializations, and to open the universe of singular sense.

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