"steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope"

“A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”

“literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.”

“The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons, but because the literary machine alone is determined to fulfill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu . . .”

“There isn’t a subject, there are only collective assemblages of enunciation, and literature expresses these acts insofar as they are not imposed from without and insofar as they exist only as diabolical powers to come or revolutionary forces to be constructed.

“How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope.”

(Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature)