DELEUZE, GUATTARI, AND APULEIUS: METAMORPHOSES OF MINOR LITERATURE

Abstract

Despite this paper's title it is only fair to warn the curious reader that it is not about reading Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, or using modern theory to better understand it. At least this is not its main intention. Instead, my wish is to experiment with the Metamorphoses, to wander inside it, to move from the actual to the virtual and the potential; to explore how things connect, proliferate, intensify—rather than learn how they actually are. The paper wishes to provide the readers means whereby they can experience the Metamorphoses, rather than examine categories of genres, style, or mode that lead to interpretation of the text. In other words, this paper addresses the Metamorphoses as Deleuze and Guattari do in their reading of Kafka's work in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. It focuses on modes of becomings, motions of desire, operating machines, assemblages, and language. According to Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature demonstrates literature's ability to challenge the major order, to undermine the doxa, to unstitch the seam between signifier and signified. It breaks forms and encourages ruptures and new routes, which forces reconstruction of content in new ways. It produces lines of flight, flows, streams, ramifications, and junctions instead of immobile paradigms and moulds; it prefers multiple centres to a centre and periphery; it relinquishes principles of unity for the benefit of experiencing multiplicity. Minor literature therefore is a political action containing the possibility of subverting the major order governed by structures of language, fixed and steady position, and state apparatuses.