The Literary Element in "Mille Plateaux": The New Cartography of Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

Twelve years have passed since Gilles Deleuze and F6lix Guattari shocked the French intelligentsia with their provocative assault on the systems of structuralist, psychoanalytic, and political signification in L'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrinie I.1 While their subsequent works go virtually untranslated2 and have inevitably been judged as outmoded in Parisian circles, Deleuze and Guattari have continued elaborating the system of schizo-analysis, their most thorough development being the recent second volume of Capitalisme et Schizophrinie, entitled Mille Plateaux. 3 In both volumes of this mammoth project, as well as in the intervening works,4 they have cast literature as an exemplary mode demonstrate systems of functioning; how literature, books, and writing operate in terms of such functioning in terms of the rhizomatic analysis presented in Mille Plateauxconstitutes the focus of this study. While literary works played an important role in Anti-Oedipus, 5 it was not until the subsequent analysis entitled Kafka. Pour une littirature mineure that the works of a single author were considered thoroughly in light of machinic concepts.6 The purpose of this critical work seems double: on the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari continue their anti-oedipal polemic, this time against certain literary and psychoanalytic interpretations of Kafka's works; and on the other hand, the authors seek move beyond the schizo-analytic terms suggested in Anti-Oedipus, situate the functioning in the organic as well. Thus they not only posit minor literature's existence vis-a-vis the great or major literatures, thereby extending their view of literature as locus of desire and of the real; they also advance their terminology in another important direction: the molecules of the expression-machine function as rhizome (Kafka's letters, K, pp. 53-62); as animal-becomings (le devenir-animal) and as lines of flight (Kafka's short stories, K, pp. 63-68); and finally as machine assemblage (l'agencement machinique) (Kafka's novels, K, pp. 69-73). While Kafka represents a limited example of the next step of the schizoanalytic project, to see how, effectively, simultaneously, the various tasks of schizo-analysis proceed (AO, p. 382),7 a year later there appeared a slim