Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

Are we not focusing perhaps on the same problematic, the literary blos-

soming that in the last decade was called (inadequately) postcolonial?

Kafka wrote in German as Naipaul wrote in English, not because those

were his roots, but precisely because it was his rhizome. Rushdie, Kureishi,

Bharati Mukherjee also write in a major language to construct their laby-

rinths of glances. Minor literature does not seek to constitute an identity,

nor does it try to rediscover it; it does not seek to reterritorialize signs

through the imposition of the Signified. There is no identitarian inten-

tion in minor literature, but a path of singularization starting from a post-

identitarian condition.

Minor literature is the gaze from the outside, the gaze of somebody

who observes the ritual without knowing the code and thus under-

stands its a-signifying nature.

How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small

ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in lan-

guage, to offer themselves as a sort of state language ... Create the

opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor. (Kafka, 27)

Becoming-minor – today, at this end of the century in which aggres-

sive identities are being consolidated, anxious to create a territory in

which to impose violence and authority – is the sole tolerant hope, the

sole path leading to a happy drift.

In postcolonialliterature, two directions confusedly overlap: one is

that of identitarian claims, the rancorous reaffirmation of a com-

munity of roots. The other is that of happy non-identity, of the provi-

sional community of desire. The collectivity of enunciation is a fragile

architecture based on the sharing of a refrain, on the creation of a path

of sense not guaranteed by any root, by any integrity, by any violence,

but only by friendship and its provisional eternity.

The possibility of assemblage is based on the provisional eternity of

friendship.

What is an assemblage (agencement)? It has nothing to do with con-

tradiction or dialectical connection, nor with an implication of homo-

geneity or opposition.

On the one hand, [the assemblage] is segmental, extending itself over

several contiguous segments or dividing into segments that become

assemblages in turn ... The segments are simultaneously powers and

territories – they capture desire by territorializing it, fixing it in place,

photographing it, pinning it up as a picture, or dressing it in tight

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