{"title":"The People Are (Still) Missing: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart and the Problem of Minor Literature Today","authors":"Jason Skeet","doi":"10.51865/jlsl.2022.06","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proclaim the ‘productive use of the literary machine’ with the aim to extract from the text its ‘revolutionary force’ – their book on Kafka, in which the concept of minor literature is put forward, is their experiment in doing this. The premise of this article is that Bhanu Kapil’s book-length poem How to Wash a Heart provides an apt point of reference for thinking through the problem of minor literature today. Kapil’s work is part of a significant development within contemporary poetry and poetics, writing informed by and building on postcolonial and feminist critiques of humanism and its encoded whiteness. In the light of Kapil’s work, the three characteristics of minor literature identified by Deleuze and Guattari are examined: the deterritorialisation of language; the connection of the individual to a political immediacy; and the collective assemblage of enunciation.","PeriodicalId":40259,"journal":{"name":"Word and Text-A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Word and Text-A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.51865/jlsl.2022.06","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proclaim the ‘productive use of the literary machine’ with the aim to extract from the text its ‘revolutionary force’ – their book on Kafka, in which the concept of minor literature is put forward, is their experiment in doing this. The premise of this article is that Bhanu Kapil’s book-length poem How to Wash a Heart provides an apt point of reference for thinking through the problem of minor literature today. Kapil’s work is part of a significant development within contemporary poetry and poetics, writing informed by and building on postcolonial and feminist critiques of humanism and its encoded whiteness. In the light of Kapil’s work, the three characteristics of minor literature identified by Deleuze and Guattari are examined: the deterritorialisation of language; the connection of the individual to a political immediacy; and the collective assemblage of enunciation.
在《反俄狄浦斯》(Anti-Oedipus)一书中,吉尔·德勒兹(Gilles Deleuze)和菲姆斯·瓜塔里(fsamlix Guattari)宣称“文学机器的生产性使用”,目的是从文本中提取“革命力量”——他们关于卡夫卡的书中提出了小文学的概念,这是他们这样做的实验。这篇文章的前提是,巴努·卡皮尔(Bhanu Kapil)的书长诗《如何洗涤心灵》(How to Wash a Heart)为思考当今小文学的问题提供了一个恰当的参考点。卡皮尔的作品是当代诗歌和诗学的重要发展的一部分,他的作品是建立在后殖民主义和女权主义对人文主义及其编码的白人的批评之上的。在卡皮尔作品的基础上,考察了德勒兹和瓜塔里认定的小文学的三个特征:语言的非属地化;个人与政治直接性的联系;和集体集合的表达。