Title: Speeding Across the Rhizome: Deleuze Meets Kerouac On the Road
Abstract:Despite having limited himself to what one might call merely sporadic references to Jack Kerouac, the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has proven himself to be the most insightful among all of K...Despite having limited himself to what one might call merely sporadic references to Jack Kerouac, the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has proven himself to be the most insightful among all of Kerouac's commentators. 1 Akin to his more extensive philosophical engagement with the literature of Kafka (together with his frequent collaborator, Félix Guattari), Proust, Carrol, Sacher-Masoch, and Melville, Deleuze's allusive encounter with Kerouac constitutes a remarkable alliance with the latter's poetics—one that can be characterized as "minoritarian," despite the danger of evoking the very identity politics that this concept attempts to circumvent. That is, by using Deleuze's concept of "minor," I don't mean to engage in a literary revisionism in order to assert that "My guy is cool too!" Rather, "minor," as used in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense, characterizes a literature "in which language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization" (Kafka 16) and in which "everything [. . .] is political" and "takes on a collective value" (17). "Minor", in short, does not designate a specific literature or authors (that is, an existing and privileged identity) but "the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature" (18). Minor literature proceeds by "a willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities" (19), and it is the intensities that matter rather than the "author" him- or herself as a writerly subject. 2Read More
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 16
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