Minoring Shakespeare: Deleuze’s Storm – Caliban or the last of the Palestinians

ABSTRACT

There will be no more thinking with Shakespeare, only transposition of his corpus into a minor mode. Transposition and no more thinking ever: but transposition from Major to Minor, for ‘when one sees,’ writes Gilles Deleuze, ‘what Shakespeare is subjected to […], his magnification, normalization, one clamors at present for another treatment that would rediscover in him an active minoritarian force’. One must now rediscover this force both dissident (Hamlet) and minor, and regress with Shakespeare through the legacy of his Tempest, that is: a parcel of earth, an island situated precisely in the Orient, in the Middle East, and its inhabitant, as savage as legitimate, that creature, race-people, ‘oppressed, bastard, inferior, anarchic, nomadic, irremediably minor […] summoned forth by art and philosophy’: Caliban.     

Deleuze and the grandeur of Palestine: Song of Earth and Resistance

The article re-examines the Deleuzian concept of cartography and opens on the question of that race a fortiori minor called to philosophy and the constitution of an earth. Who are these people? Who are these people who, according to Deleuze, are missing? What is their name and what is their territory? The problem of minorities, “of the missing people”, analysed by Deleuze through Kafka finds a resonance and a quite particular affinity – and in this way a designation and a name – through the struggle of the Palestinian people; deterritorialized, “inferior, dominated, always becoming”. Deleuze’s pro-Palestinian engagement in no way manifests a rupture between philosophy and politics, but establishes itself as the essential correlate of a philosophically dynamic, creative and resistant reflection whose tenor has been constantly written into the realm of politics. After nearly 30 years, Deleuze’s pro-Palestinian positions are today the object of severe criticism, if not a cabal, launched by Eric Marty and Roger-Pol Droit, who aim at exhuming Deleuze’s philosophical corpus in order to extract from it a so-called “anti-Semitic complacency”.