Whose Kafka? Franz Kafka’s Jewish minority and the shaping of French postcolonial thought

• In Event: France and Algiers

Abstract

“The fact is, Yiddish cannot be translated into German,” writes Franz Kafka in his 1912 “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language”; “if it is translated into German it is destroyed.” This statement Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari abstract wholly into their model of “minor literature” in their 1975 KAFKA: TOWARD A MINOR LITERATURE, the implications of which have resonated with minority identities far outside the bounds of Yiddish or of the Eastern European Jew. Yet the origins of minor literature extend outside a theorizing of Kafka’s work into a reading or archetyping of Kafka himself.

In this paper, I identify where Deleuze and Guattari abstract not just Kafka’s “minor literature” but also his minority itself into the theoretical frameworks that underlie their contribution to the transition from poststructuralist to postcolonial thought. I frame minor literature as not simply an ambitious (mis)reading of Kafka’s writing, but more specifically a broader appropriation of the continuum between Kafka’s literary work and biographical identity that Deleuze and Guattari believed together to stand for the minority status of the Eastern European Jew. Taking as my objects of study Deleuze and Guattari’s KAFKA alongside Kafka’s “The Burrow” and “The Great Wall of China,” I focus on how Kafka’s preoccupation with structure, mechanism, and construction uniquely positions Kafka for theorists searching to expose the socioliterary mechanism of a text. Deleuze and Guattari identify in Kafka a prominence of structures that seek to reveal from within the work rather than rely on hermeneutics applied from out, beginning with the “rhizome” principle of anti-interpretation and following through to minor literature.

Kafka’s Judaism, to Deleuze and Guattari, then functions as an internalized structure for the interpretation of Kafka himself just as minor literature served to characterize his literary identity, a structure of minority through which to “read” Kafka as author and biography alike. Ultimately, I reunite Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minority, and more broadly their role in expanding poststructuralist into postcolonial studies, with its foundation in an Eastern European Judaism that, like Kafka’s Yiddish, when translated into the majority ethnicity, territory, or identity is “destroyed.”

Author

• Tessa Haining, University of Oxford