The Powers of the False: Envisioning the Past, Reclaiming the Future

The power of the false as well as the related term minor literature, conceptualized by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, inherently hold a distinctive temporality: with both terms, the two thinkers connect a potential of literature that can foresee future developments, is forward-looking, and participates in the shaping of the future. At the same time, literary works have the possibility to call forth forgotten, silenced, tabooed past events and contexts, and to make them present in readers’ consciousness, initiating a commemoration of what has been left out of historical knowledge and representation. 

In my talk, I will compare Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of literature’s potential with the understanding of storytelling that award-winning Kiowa author, painter, and scholar N. Scott Momaday has developed in his oeuvre. Focusing on Momaday's latest publication Earth Keeper (2020), I will show how Momaday initiates a notion of presence that aims not at the future but at futurities of a relational web of life. I will connect and contrast Momaday’s conceptualizations of time and temporality with Deleuze and Guattari’s comprehensions, and demonstrate how the form of time, the role of memory, and the idea of the future is impacted by these different conceptualizations, to demonstrate the consequences of their respective understandings of time.