Rendering Post-Anthropocentric Visions

Minor Media - Heterogenic Machines

This article proposes a reading of the medieval Franco-Italian epic collection La Geste Francor alongside Deleuze and Guattari's theory of minor literature. A text once condemned as a degenerate hybrid because of its language, which combines forms of Old French with elements of Italian vernaculars, the Geste also challenges norms of genre, thematic integrity, and poetic consistency. Like other minor literature, it troubles the constants of traditional literary analysis, precisely because our idea of "literature" has been defined in relation to major works. Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of literary polylingualism and their taxonomy of languages allow for a recuperation of works like the Geste; here, this leads to an interpretation that casts the hybrid language of the text as a means for managing and harmonizing the rival cultural, linguistic, and political claims found in medieval northern Italy. Ultimately, though, the Geste offers a different politics of the minor to that of Deleuze and Guattari: its hybrid tongue permits a cohabitation of respect for tradition and stability with vectors for change and innovation.

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.

Unlike many other minority literatures, Finland‐Swedish literature is very well embodied in the literary prize culture. Statistically, Finland‐Swedish authors are overrepresented among the nominees and recipients of the largest and most prestigious awards in Sweden and Finland, as well as the major joint Nordic literary prizes. Taking as a departure in Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's concept of “minor literature,” where everything assumes a “collective value,” I examine in this article how the collective value is negotiated by different actors in the literary field when Finland‐Swedish authors are awarded some of the most prestigious prizes. The study is based on discursive readings of the reporting on the prizes in the Finland‐Swedish press and of authors' acceptance speeches. The study shows that both the Finland‐Swedish authors and the cultural journalists often see the literature prizes as an honor for Finland‐Swedish literature in general. Thus, the prestige and the various forms of capital at stake accrue not only to the prize‐winning author but are also shared by all those involved in Finland‐Swedish literature.

This paper deals with the concept of Al-Waṭan, or ‘the homeland’, in Arabic in The Shell (Al-Qawqʿa) by Muṣṭafā Khalifa and Men in the Sun (Rijāl fīsh-Shams) by Ghassān Kanafānī. Analysis of how alienation from this concept has affected both Khalifa's and Kanafānī's characters is carried out through the lenses of Deleuze and Guattari's theories of rhizomatic associations and minor literature, as well as through the lens of affect theory. The paper also examines parallels between definitions of Al-Waṭan/the homeland in Ibn Manẓūr's classical dictionary Lisān al-ʿArab and Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the war machine and the apparatus of capture.

Bu çalışma; Gilles Deleuze ve Felix Guattari’nin kadın-oluş kavramıyla Türk sinemasının önemli yönetmenlerinden biri olan Ümit Ünal’ın Sofra Sırları adlı filmini ele almayı amaçlamaktadır. Çalışma, Sofra Sırları filminin moleküler kadın-oluşlar barındırdığı varsayımına dayanmaktadır. Dolayısıyla film, amaçsal örneklem yöntemiyle seçilmiştir. Çalışmanın amacı doğrultusunda öncelikle Deleuze ve Guattari’nin minör edebiyat kavramı ve oradan hareketle Deleuze’ün geliştirdiği minör sinema kavramına yer verilmekte ardından oluş ve kadın oluş kavramları irdelenmektedir. Ardından Sofra Sırları filmi “kaçış çizgileri ve yersizyurdsuzlaşma”, “özel alan-kamusal alan bulanıklığı” ve “kimliklerin çoğullaşması” başlıklarında çözümlenmektedir. Her türlü düzenlemenin yersizyurdsuzlaştırılma uçları anlamına gelen kaçış çizgileri filmde özellikle Neslihan üzerinde yoğunlaşır. Film, Neslihan’ın; kendisini kocasının hizmetine adamış, itaatkar, sessiz bir ev kadını hali ile planlı cinayetler işleyen, kendi istekleri doğrultusunda yaşayan hali arasında gidip gelmelerine dayanır. Neslihan’ın bazı tetikleyicilerle doğrusal bir dönüşüme girip sonunda bambaşka biri olma hikayesi değil de; terkedilmesi ve aldatıldığını öğrenmesiyle bir dönüşüme girmesi ama orada da kalamayıp tekrar eski haline dönmesi ve sonra tekrar cinayet işlemesinden oluşan bir döngünün sürekli kendisini tekrarlaması söz konusudur. Sonuç olarak Sofra Sırları filminde anlatıdaki hemen hemen bütün kadınların başlangıçta klişe bir kategori olarak kuruldukları ancak film boyunca moleküler ya da rizomatik bir kadın-oluş sürecine girdikleri söylenebilir.

In 1829, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was later to write “Das Lied der Deutschen,” published one of the first scholarly articles on what was known as the Gaunersprache (rogues’ language), Rotwelsch. His article included a poem in Rotwelsch he had written himself. Against the backdrop of Hoffmann's nationalist persuasion and participation in the nationalist project of Germanistik, this paper discusses the question of why he turned to writing in a language he portrays in the same article as hybrid and criminal. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of minor literature, this analysis of the poem itself and of its publication context concludes that Hoffmann participates in an older tradition of inverted minor literature in Rotwelsch, that is, a literature that a majority constructs within a minor language. Thus, Hoffmann's poem appears as an attempt at naturalizing Germanness by ascribing the artificial and deterritorializing aspects of any language to the Other.

This chapter considers how the practice of non-translation has implications for the development and critical practice of ‘world literature’, taking the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses as its focal point. In particular, non-translation offers a route to re-read two related and important literary-historical models that have been influential in conceptualizing world literature: the idea of a ‘minor literature’, as elaborated initially by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and that of a ‘dominant language’ within a ‘world history of literature’, elaborated by Pascale Casanova. It is important to do so because, remarkably enough, despite the obvious relevance of non-translation, neither model addresses the phenomenon of plurilingual, macaronic writing. The matter of non-translation offers an illuminating index through which to consider, and revise, these influential literary-historical models. The chapter also examines the contemporary context of language reform exemplified by the Society for Pure English.

Reviewed by: Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics by Marco Puleri Anna Vozna (bio) Marco Puleri, Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics ( Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020). 294 pp. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-3-631-81662-2. People in Ukraine keep speaking and creating in Russian. But no one seems to know what to do about it. What should the status of their language be in Ukraine? How should the cultural artifacts they produce be treated? It is challenging to answer these questions because to find the solutions, one first needs to understand who the Russian speakers in Ukraine are exactly, what culture they are more a part of, Ukrainian or Russian, and whether speaking and creating in Russian makes them closer to the ideology of the country Ukraine is now at war with. So far, there is no consensus on this matter. A possible explanation for this absence could be one offered by Ilya Gerasimov: that the positionality of Russian speakers in Ukraine is so peculiar that the available ontological and epistemological tools cannot serve to describe it since the Ukrainian revolution and its aftermath involve an unprecedented historical process in the making in which conventional [End Page 336] categories and models are becoming obsolete (P. 39).1 To be sure, some propositions for redefining the status of Russian in Ukraine have been made. The Ukrainian politician Boris Filatov, the American historian Timothy Snyder, and the Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov have, at different times, suggested reappropriating Russian as a Ukrainian cultural good and institutionalizing it so that Ukraine develops its own center of Russian that would be independent from the Russian Federation. However, while such propositions have been made, they do not seem to be supported by substantial theoretical grounds that would clearly explain what Russophone culture in Ukraine is and why one would want to support it. Marco Puleri's new book offers precisely this theoretical substantiation and attempts to define the scope of Russophone culture in Ukraine through the lens of hybridity. The author proposes viewing Ukrainian Russophone culture as both Ukrainian and Russian and explains how and why it can be accepted as a valuable element of the Ukrainian cultural scene. He achieves this by first analyzing the works of Russophone Ukrainian writers and then extending his analysis of literary works to the broader cultural processes in Ukraine. His work demonstrates how these writers function within the literary markets of the two countries, how they reappropriate literary works from both literary traditions, and how they permeate their works with the peculiar local language, which, uttered using Russian words but relying on syntax emerging from the Ukrainian political realities, is both Ukrainian and Russian. Chapter 1 of Puleri's book provides a brief historical overview of how the current positionality of Russophone Ukrainian writers has emerged and outlines what is so problematic about it from the postcolonial perspective. Analyzing examples of Gogol and Shevchenko, Puleri shows that hybridity has a long history in Ukraine and is an inalienable feature of Russophone Ukrainian literature. He also argues that the drawing of ethnolinguistic borders in Ukraine is a part of the political and cultural clash between Ukraine and Russia. Chapter 2 develops this analysis from the vantage point of literary markets. Here the author reconstructs the most common language ideologies and the ways Russian is perceived in Ukraine. He also traces the impact of the literary markets of Ukraine and Russia on how these perceptions emerged. Russophone Ukrainian authors, Puleri suggests, have long been perceived as Russian [End Page 337] because they have published their works in Russian publishing houses, received Russian literary awards, and distributed their works in Russia. Now that they choose not to engage with these markets, the author speculates, Ukrainian readers' perspectives on them might change and so might their perspectives on what can be counted as Ukrainian literature. In chapter 3, Puleri offers a new perspective on Russophone Ukrainian works by analyzing them through the lens of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of minor literature. This allows him to view the Russophone literature of writers working in...

The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the Third World is not only a geographical term, but also one that denotes the linguistic zones, another term of the minority. The essay argues that the concept of the Third World is related to minor literature, the minor or intense use of language. This ‘transcendental exercise’ of writing is an opposition to the initial purpose of language, namely representation. Language must escape from its normative usage, and then be liberated to a new spatio-temporality, in other words, the linguistic Third World zones. My conclusion is that the creation of Third World linguistic zones is the repetition of differences against the generalisation of representation, such as becoming non-human and non-European, not in imitation of the molar form of the animal or a non-continent extending terrestrial power into the ocean, but as the right way to invent the people missing in the Third World. Inventing the people of the Third World is the right condition in which alternative political subjects can be produced through desubjectification, not domestication, by capitalist axiomatics. In this way, Deleuze's political philosophy aims to use the virtual politics of the Third World to radicalise the actual representation of the existing Left.

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to explore the insight that can be brought by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature with regard to questions of field access within the context of organizational ethnography. This paper draws from an ethnographic account of scientists negotiating access during a field expedition to Fiji. While the scientists could secure access prior to their departure by abiding by the legal dimension of plant collecting in the field, they had to renegotiate access in the field by engaging with different epistemologies, codes and forms of relationality. Positioned as an ethnography of field access, this paper highlights the enmeshment of codes, practices and trajectories in the negotiation of field access and seeks to set the lines of a ‘minor politics of access’ within the context of organizational ethnography.

Although Ramos Otero's literature has achieved a cult status among Puerto Rican intellectuals, his complete works are yet to be reedited. As a result of this, the writers and scholars that went to university during the 2000s read Ramos Otero in photocopies. How can a literary work reside and resist in a place as precarious as a photocopy? How is it that a book can generate enough interest to be obsessively photocopied by a whole generation of literature students, but not enough interest for it to be reedited by a publisher? This precarious afterlife is not only a quality of this writer's reception, but also a topic intrinsic to his work. The ghostly existence beyond the grave is one of the main topics within his work. Hence, through a revision of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature, Nietzsche's idea of Dionysian art, and the literary and scholarly response to Ramos Otero's work, I argue that his texts have the exceptional quality of reproducing in their reception the recurring topics intrinsic to his literature.

Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however, Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through that very motion. Katy Masuga provides a new reading of Miller that is alert to the aggressively and self-consciously writerly form of his work. Critiquing the categorization of Miller into specific literary genres through an examination of the small body of critical texts on his oeuvre, Masuga draws on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a minor literature, Blanchot's 'infinite curve,' and Bataille's theory of puerile language, while also considering Miller in relation to other writers, including Proust, Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. She shows how Miller defies conventional modes of writing, subverting language from within. Katy Masuga is Adjunct Professor of British and American literature, cinema, and the arts in the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Royal Academy artist William Orpen (1878–1931) was once the most sought-after and the highest-earning portrait painter in Britain. His posthumous fall from favour was partly due to Tate director John Rothenstein's damning critique of Orpen's inability to fulfil his artistic potential thanks to his ‘divided loyalties’ to Britain and his native Ireland. This essay argues rather that it was precisely Orpen's complex positionality that informed the most innovative of his works, leading him to develop a new approach to representation as such. In this essay Orpen is proposed to operate within the paradigms of ‘minor art’, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conception of minor literature. Orpen's self-portraits are presented as an early instance of a shift of artistic focus from the represented to the process of representing, prefiguring the interests of artists working with post-representative strategies some fifty years after his death.