Midterm: "Schizo politeness, a drunkenness caused by water" (p. 174).

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? (p. 169).

Deleuze and Guattari, with their main influence as Kafka, believe that "a minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language" (p. 166). They separate 'minor language' into three separate categories in order to more wholly create and explain the term, the first of which involves language's deterritorialization. In a nation which consists of many different peoples, cultures, and languages, minor authors are faced with the challenge of longing to creatively escape, yet being barred within this escape because they have to use a language which connects them to solid ground, so to speak. They have to break free of the chains of major literature, while at the same time using defining aspects of major culture to express themselves. Minor authors must announce their oppressed status (thus adding an inevitable political connotation to their work), and find "his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert" (p. 168). If minor literature is at the heart of great literature, yet remains in an individual class on its own (holding its very separate title of 'minor literature'), all of the different forms of writing are separate parts to form a "collective machine of expression" (p. 168). Minor literature is thus capable of expressing a lack of the individual in the form of the writing itself.

These defining characteristics of minor literature illustrate only the beginning of the writers' struggles, and leads us into the revolutionary capabilities of minor literature; its strength, its depth. The author must honestly practice expression, even at his own detriment if necessary (as in, ‘to write is to fast’), and take the risk of diving into literature in order to tear it at the seams, away from its previous life of majors and metaphors, and into a world of intensities, "opposite dream[s]," inventions, sounds, etc.. The author must embrace the language and use it to create and develop his point. Kafka's invented method of achieving this escape and writing true minor literature is "[to] proceed[s] by dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities" (p. 169). Strip it bare, and steal away into the night with it.

Writers may transform themselves into nomads in relation to their language by means of using a language (Yiddish, for example) which has its roots in a mythic state, rather than one of solid reality. With this, they can carry their writing along and through this language, traveling with it and keeping it alive and vibrant. One must become a gypsy in even this situation, and also may become as such by using a language within a language, such as Prague German in all of its deterritorialized functions. The Jewish immigrant can utilize Prague German, and include within himself the very culture which rejects him, yes, but can use this writing to reject anything, to say anything, to modify, to empower, and “to bring language slowly and progressively to the desert,”(p. 174) just as he must become a desert himself to do so.