Disaggregating Territories: Literature, Emancipation, and Resistance
Disaggregating Territories: Literature, Emancipation, and Resistance

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the implementation of literature for the democratic opening of the human being-in-common in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. Deleuze and Guattari advocate a quasi-traumatized, “animally” disfigured discourse that testifies to the impossibility of bearing witness to the unpredictable whirl of becoming, not only in philosophical but also in literary writing. Kafka exemplarily blurred the boundaries between his representing and represented subjects, drawing them into an unrestrained field of immanence. It is through such persistent revivifying of polyphony that his minor literature unleashed the suppressed creativity of major literature and language. It subverted literary language from within its identity, deterritorializing its monolingual molecules and pushing its subjects beyond the politically acknowledged threshold of representation. By invading the subject’s speech, action, and behavior, minor literature revolutionizes its agency. In Rancière’s work, political regulation of the subject from above is the main target of oppositional literary deregulation from below. For both Deleuze and Rancière, literary politics consists of the disarticulation of the politically authorized selection of sensations by an unpredictable revolutionary assemblage that escapes it. Now oriented inwards, toward the subject’s perception apparatus, instead of outwards toward other political subjects as before, revolutionary politics in Deleuze’s and Rancière’s rendering deactivates the agency, and departs from an inarticulate molecular area excluded from the scope of its activity. Despite undeniable divergences between their thoughts, this paradoxical “action through non-action” connects their conceptualizations of literature. However, as the genealogy of the messianic tradition has shown, the deactivation of majoritarian agencies does not merely achieve emancipating effects; it simultaneously empowers the minoritarian assemblage introduced in the place of agencies. As a result, the initially democratic assemblage suddenly resurfaces as the major agency of revolutionary terror. I argue that placing literature at the service of the allegedly egalitarian force of negation entertains this risk in both philosophies.

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