Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

“Writing as a Jew in Prague, Kafka makes German ‘take flight on a line of escape’ and joy­fully becomes a stranger within it. Deleuze and Guattari explore unique con­cepts, which provide a means for under­standing aspects of Kafka’s work that have pre­vi­ously been either ignored or mis­un­der­stood. Instead of inter­preting Kafka’s work according to pre-existing cat­e­gories or lit­erary genres, they propose a concept of “minor literature”—the use of a major lan­guage that sub­verts it from within.

In Kafka Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In con­trast to tra­di­tional readings that see in Kafka’s work a case of Oedi­palized neu­rosis or a flight into tran­scen­dence, guilt, and sub­jec­tivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a pro­moter of radical pol­itics who resisted at every turn sub­mission to frozen hierarchies.”