Major and Minor: Crossed Perspectives

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the influence of French thought on North American literary studies has been strong and widespread, especially in French-speaking Quebec, where conceptual borrowings from the French critical corpus have been frequent. Consequently, one might expect to find Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "minor" 1 to be an important borrowing in literary studies, since Quebec, for historic and linguistic reasons, finds itself among "minority" and marginalized cultures. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari use it as an example in their demonstration. 2 However, despite the pertinence of this concept to the Quebecois cultural context, the theoretical rendez vous has clearly not happened. Admittedly, the expression "minor 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 the minor. I believe this stems from the impossibility for a minority culture to subscribe to Deleuze and Guattari's statements about the very meaning of minority. Further, this resistance seems strengthened by the fact that in Quebec a number of intellectuals already had a specific conception of "the minor" that invested Deleuze and Guattari's categories in a totally different perspective. Using the example of Quebec, I will attempt here to grasp the meaning of this missed rendez vous, where the gazes of the major and minor cultures did in fact meet, but with no outcome, with no encounter on a theoretical level.