Description
Book Synopsis“The people are missing” is a constant refrain in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s writings after the 1975 publication of
Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure. With the translation of this work into English (
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature) in 1986, the refrain quickly became a hallmark of political interpretation in the North American academy and was especially applied to the works of minorities and postcolonial writers. However, in the second cinema book,
Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps, the refrain is restricted to third-world cinema, in which Deleuze and Guattari locate the conditions of truly postwar political cinema: the absence, even the impossibility, of a people who would constitute its organic community.
In this critical reflection, Gregg Lambert traces the “narrowing” of the refrain itself, as well as the premise that the act of art is capable of inventing the conditions of a “people” o
Trade Review“Lambert’s book is mesmerizing. . . . Serious literary and political theorists will want to read this.”—Dorothea E. Olkowski, author of
Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn“
The People Are Missing is a commanding intervention by one of the most original and incisive readers of Deleuze today. Lambert assuredly offers the reader what is undoubtedly the most penetrating and systematic analysis to date of this famous Deleuzian concept of ‘minor literature.’”—Nick Nesbitt, author of
Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to GlissantTable of ContentsProvocations: Year 0—The Refrain “The People Are Missing”
1. The Axiom of Political Interpretation
2. The Principle of “Anti-interpretation”
3. The Tautology of Literary History
4. The Ethical Duty of the Writer and the Critic
5. The Weakness of the Moral Analogy
6. The Final Sense of the Refrain
Year 2021: Minor Literature Today
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