Commentary

Commentary Eugene W. Holland The essays collected here address the status and prospects of modern Greek studies as a "minor" or "minority" field within the western academy today. This hesitation between "minor" and "minority" is symptomatic. As the special issue's title, "Empowering the Minor," as well as references in many of the essays suggest, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "minor literature" has had considerable impact on discussions of variously marginalized literatures and cultures. However, the validity of this notion for the study of cultures outside the mainstream has quite rightly been questioned and doubted, as Gregory Jusdanis does here in considering the situation of modern Greek literature and studies. I want to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari's definition of a "minor literature" does not fit the works of Kafka himself (much less what is usually thought of as "minority literature" in the political sense), but at the same time insist that their notion of "minorness" has important and useful implications for modern Greek studies, in some of the ways the essays in this issue suggest or demonstrate. Deleuze and Guattari's definition of "minor" depends crucially on their notion of "de-territorialization." As a first approximation of this very complex term, we may gloss de-territorialization as the process of "freeing" someone or some organ from an initial object of investment—as when English shepherds are forcibly removed by the Enclosure Acts from the common land, only to be re-territorialized onto textile looms, to take an example from the Anti-Oedipus (1972); or when, in the process of language-acquisition, the lips, tongue, and teeth no longer process only food as their object of investment, but process sound as well, eventually to be re-territorialized as meanings in language, to borrow an example from their study of Kafka. It would take us too far afield to situate Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure (1975) adequately between the Anti-Oedipus (1972), where the notion of "de-territorialization" has a socio-historical grounding in primitive and on-going accumulation as a socio-material process of the capitalist Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 125 126 Eugene W. Holland mode of production, and Mille Plateaux (1980), where the notion has become considerably more general, referring to semiotic processes found in geology and biology as well as human history. But this much will become clear: the chapter on "What is a Minor Literature" in the Kafka book tries to have it both ways (at least): de-territorialization here refers both to the material situation and relation to language of Prague Jews (including Kafka), who are at so great a remove from their "primitive Czech territoriality" (1986: 16) that they have no choice but to write in German, while this German is itself the property of a de-territorialized but oppressive (statistically-) minority population serving the Hapsburg empire, whom the Prague Jews serve in turn as a subordinate minority-within-a-minority; and at the same time to Kafka's own use of the German language in his letters, short stories, and novels, which de-territorializes meaning and representation by making (literary) expression run ahead of (worldly) content: "A major, or established, literature follows a vector that goes from content to expression . . . But a minor, or revolutionary, literature begins by expressing itself and doesn't conceptualize [content] until afterward" (1986: 28). The problem is, how are these two versions or fields of de-territorialization—the material/historical and the literary/ semiotic—understood to be related in the case of Kafka, who is taken as a model for all "minor, or revolutionary" literature? The first characteristic of a minor literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that "in it language is affected with a high coefficient of de-territorialization" (1986: 16) —with the crucial ambivalence that term entails and/or conceals. The second characteristic is that everything is political: whereas the social space of major literatures is so large that individual concerns predominate within in it, usually never intersecting with social and political matters, the "cramped space [of minor literature] forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics" (1986: 17). Deleuze and Guattari's analysis shows brilliantly, and against...