This quotation from Kafka has always fascinated me (this weblog was intended to be an extended commentary on these lines from the Diary):
I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness — my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness — sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength (Überschuß der Kräfte) at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it?
What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write ‘I am unhappy’? A peculiar strength – a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. But what does it mean to invoke mercy here? Does the capacity to write mean my unhappiness is any less complete? That I am less unhappy than I thought?
A surplus of strength: at least I can ring changes on my suffering, at least, using my talent, I can begin to write. But does it alter my basic situation? Does it offer therapy or cure? At the least, if allows me to take distance from my suffering – but it is the same distance which causes me to lose my suffering anew.
Recall Levinas’s reflections on suffering in From Existence to Existents: physical pain, in whatever degree, means I cannot escape my situation; it remains; existence binds me to myself such that I drag my being behind me like a great weight; I long to escape, to flee the moment in which I am in pain, to leave it behind me, but cannot.
Does the fact that I can add flourishes to my writing – that I can orchestrate it, transforming it, perhaps, into a story, transmute that suffering? It does not; although it does not mean it does not possess me in its entirety. One cannot protest that such flourishes are lies whatever their beauty. Valéry remarked that Pascal’s despair was too well-wrought to be believable. But what Valéry has misunderstood is the strength which gives birth to writing itself: the way writing solicits a writer as soon as one writes ‘I am suffering’. For that ‘I’ is not the ‘I’ who suffers; to write is to discover the strength of creativity – of a power to generate sentence after sentence.
A work of art can be born from my suffering – but what does this have to do with me? It is not that another person writes in my place, but that a merciful strength makes writing possible even as my suffering seems to make everything impossible. For isn’t it the case, in a formulation to which Levinas frequently returns, that, suffering, I am ‘unable to be able’ (this is his translation of Heidegger’s Sein-können, which the translators of Being and Time render as potentiality-to-be)? That suffering bears the mark by this inability to be able, the impossibility of possibility understood as force or power? Then the merciful strength is a power recovered in the midst of powerlessness – a potentiality which awakens in the loss of potentiality. But from where does it open? From where does the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ arise? Who writes in Kafka’s text?
Lars Iyer's Blog 