—a metaphysics in which multiplicity replaces substance, event replaces essence virtuality replaces possibility.

The "reading" that Benjamin proposes for Kafka's work is clear from the outset and is characterized-no less than that of Deleuze and Guattari—by never trying to find archetypes that claim to have "qualified" Kafka's "imaginary" or to interpret his work by moving from the unknown back to the known: the Castle is God, the world of the father, power that cannot be grasped; the cockroach is anxiety, castration, the dreamworld and its multiple metamorphoses, and so forth. But what is still more striking, neither does Benjamin try-he doesn't con sider it useful or necessary—to relate Kafka's work to a structure with preformed formal oppositions and a signifier of the kind in which "after all is said and done, xefers to y"! Not at all

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1975) Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Kafka: For a Minor Literature, by Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus c he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility.

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1975) Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Kafka: For a Minor Literature, by Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986

v1975) Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Kafka: For a Minor Literature, by Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986