Major and Minor: Crossed Perspectives

Abstract

Over last few decades, influence of French thought on North American literary studies has been strong and widespread, especially in French-speaking Quebec, where conceptual borrowings from French critical corpus have been frequent. Consequently, one might expect to find Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor' to be an important borrowing in literary studies, since Quebec, for historic and linguistic reasons, finds itself among and marginalized cultures. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari use it as an example in their demonstration.2 However, despite pertinence of this concept to Quebecois cultural context, theoretical rendez vous has clearly not happened. Admittedly, expression literature has been a big hit in Quebec, but without its accompanying conceptual framework. The philosophers' theses act as a sort of theoretical unconscious, a blind spot in Quebecois perspectives on minor. I believe this stems from impossibility for a minority culture to subscribe to Deleuze and Guattari's statements about very meaning of minority. Further, this resistance seems strengthened by fact that in Quebec a number of intellectuals already had a specific conception of the that invested Deleuze and Guattari's categories in a totally different perspective. Using example of Quebec, I will attempt here to grasp meaning of this missed rendez vous, where gazes of major and minor cultures did in fact meet, but with no outcome, with no encounter on a theoretical level.