Category: Kafka

What does Kafka’s hunger artist want, as he seeks from his circus cage to control his hunger, starving himself for his audience? On the one hand, to maintain his separateness in starvation – to show his audience, for example, that he never eats, even when they are not present; but on the other to have them acknowledge that starving for him is not so difficult – that starving is easy for one who can find nothing to eat: what choice does he have?

‘I had always wanted you to admire my fasting,’ says the Hunger Artist. ‘We do admire it,’ says the impressario who employs him. ‘But you shouldn’t admire it’ – ‘Well then we don’t admire it,’ says the impressario, ‘but why shouldn’t we admire it?’ – ‘Because I have to fast, I can’t help it.’ – ‘What a fellow you are,’ says the other, ‘and why can’t you help it?’ – ‘Because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.

The artist is to be admired for his starvation – for his discipline, his tenacity, and reviled (is this the word?) for being unable to do anything but starve. Is he a fake, then? Or is it merely that he lives according to a gift that separates him from others? Strange, separating destiny.

I have never dared to give birth to myself again in the creation of a character. By what strength to cross the line between the literal and the fictive? But I suppose, from another perspective, it might seem a weakness. In living again through a character, and bringing his life to an end, isn’t this a way of taking revenge on the incessance of writing, of its inexhaustibility? As though you could bring to term what, in life, you could never end.

Kafka says to Brod he will be content on his deathbed, providing the pain is not too great, and adds, ‘the best of what I have written is based on this capacity to die content.’ Which I interpret, remembering the bloody scenes of execution in ‘The Penal Colony’ and the banal death of The Trial, as pointing to a kind of relaxed happiness in the murder of his characters.

Their discontent mirrors his contentedness; they are his proxies, Kafka, who among all authors understands the demand of writing draws him through and beyond any tale he could tell. Let them take his place; let them die in his place – he is still alive, he lives and he suffers, but somewhere, too, he is dead; he has also brought his death to term.

In the end, of course, Kafka died a painful death. But remember the conversation slips he wrote to communicate with his friends when, towards the end, he could no longer speak.

That cannot be, that a dying man drinks.

Do you have a moment? Then lightly spray the peonies.

Mineral water – once for fun I could

Fear again and again.

A bird was in the room.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

My fantasy: now death is coming to Kafka, but slowly, so that it seems to become eternal. Did it seem, discontent, that death was as far away from him as ever? Now perhaps, it is the turn of the characters to die in his place. Wasn’t it the proofs of The Hunger Artist he was correcting on his deathbed? Perhaps death by starvation was already preferable to a dying that had lost its limit.

Now I imagine the conversation slip was written by Kafka to his characters, the ones who had always died for him.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

Die and give me strength by your death. Die and give me the limit of death. I imagine they all stand around him, his characters, woken by the coming end of their creator to assume his suffering. And then that it is what does not pass of Kafka’s passing that returns as I reread him.

I do not die content as they are brought to their deaths. Death wakes up in me; dying opens its eyes: it is as though Kafka knew he would suffer in advance: that he wrote from the discontent of dying, letting it mark itself in those stories that never came to an end. Is that why The Castle is important to me?

But what does not end in The Castle is also what fails to complete itself even in Kafka’s finished tales – this is what I tell myself, although without proof, without argument. But who will die for me? Who will put his hand on my forehead?

Sometimes Kafka would allow that nonwriting was also writing, but that was after the publication of The Judgement. He was published, even if it was in the gaudiest almanac – on the cover, Stach writes, a nude woman lying beside a declaiming poet with an outstretched arm. Arkadia, as it was called – and this name in cursive added to the kitsch – sold few copies in May 1913.

Non-writing: Kafka wrote in bursts. For long periods, he knew, he would write nothing. But once he had published, it seems he could allow that nonwriting was part of writing. It was in this period he began to refer to literature, too. He was made of literature, he told Felice. Literature was the devil; he’d been seduced, and in such a way that he was nothing apart from what had claimed him.

He is his books, he tells her and that it wounds him she has not read his little prose collection, Meditation. He is them – but isn’t it that publication gives him that foundation he can then abandon? His writing – literature – is evident in the world. Now he can bear non-writing; now he has a wall against which he is braced.

‘I will write again’; ‘I will be able to write again’. But what is this ‘again’, now he is separated from it by the ocean of non-writing? It waits in him; it anticipates itself. The devil needs Kafka, and this is the point – he is nothing without him, he rests nowhere. Writing needs him; literature waits for itself in him. And who is he who must sacrifice himself in order for writing to arrive?

‘Again’. Returning, the ‘he’ Kafka becomes, and that writing demands. But isn’t writing non-writing in that moment? After all, what can he achieve, he who is voided of himself? Without initiative, without power: here is the most ancient sign of inspiration, which sets itself back into the passivity of exposure, before it can lead to the accomplishment of a task.

Why is it only in moments of crisis that Kafka can write? Perhaps because it is only in these moments – breaking with his fiancee, neglecting the family firm – that the devil can come close to him. Who is he, Kafka? The one who is broken by a thousand demands. Who is he?

Terror: it is the devil. But seduction, too, for he knows a dreadful substitution is the price of writing. Then when he writes, using this word in this most ordinary sense, setting words on paper, it is non-writing that pushes him.

‘There is nothing for me in the world. I am humilated, worse than a dog.’ But Kafka’s ‘masochism’ is everything: how else to work that change where he lets the devil take his place? His place – or rather, what reveals that there is no place – that pure streaming that is also the devil; Cratylus’s river, into which it is impossible to step but once. He holds himself into his substitution; he welcomes it. This is the correlate of the passivity to which it subjects him.

‘Now you can write. Now, remembering your humilation, you can write.’ This is the secret link between suffering and writing. For the devil comes when you suffer. The devil burns inside you. You suffer. You cannot coincide with your suffering, which is pure streaming, the river in which you are torn apart.

But then, writing, you can repeat suffering, living it again. Living what you did not live, the pain you cannot synthesise into a memory. Repeat it – write non-writing; write what did not allow writing to coincide with itself. Write non-writing in writing; inscribe it by letting words tremble – by allowing them to become thick and rhythmic. Write it in the sonorousness of words, by setting them in flight.

That is the poet’s option. What of the prose writer? A kind of ‘reduction’ whereby the novel no longer refers to a world outside of itself. That does not realise a world in the thickness of details. Or rather, that lets those details tremble with what cannot appear. And figure in the narrative the return of the devil; let the characters die – even the innocent Karl of Amerika – so that you can lie down, dying, in the narrative.

(Question: but how does the devil allow himself to be remembered? What survives the Cratylean flux? A minimal ipseity, a witness who knows he has lost his place (or that the he, burning, is the one who burns in the writer’s place). The self-givenness Heidegger no less than Husserl, than Merleau-Ponty, than Henry feel necessary to posit? Task: tear phenomenology apart. Klossowski, Deleuze …)

Sometimes Kafka will speak of his double. He may appear vacillating and indecisive, he tells Felice, but this is because there is two of him. Two – but united in him, in Kafka.

Is it this a tragic rending? Is this tearing his agony, returning anew? But it also bliss – writing, for Kafka, is beatitude. He is happiest in those working holidays he takes from the Worker’s Insurance Agency, in the two weeks when he writes In the Penal Colony for example. A happiness without tragedy. And he is happy when he reads his from his work, laughing with his friends at the opening pages of The Trial.

All this is marvellous. Why, then, his love for Felice, which threatens writing, as he tells her over anew. Perhaps because she, too, lets him write – that to compose a letter to her lets the devil burn in him again, displacing Kafka blissfully from himself. He needs the tension – needs to be broken against the wall of non-writing in order to write. He needs suffering to awaken the desire to write. And so, in his correspondence, he writes of writing; he redoubles it, and speaks of what does not cease seducing him.

What does he need? A kind of external pressure. The threat of non-writing. Marriage with Felice. The coming World War, which prevents him moving into his own apartment. His illness. And his father, too, or perhaps first of all. The incarnation of the masochism to which he would subject himself; the avatar of everything in the world that opposes writing.

(Task: read the psychoanalysts on subject formation and the superego.)

Kafka suffers; he is faint with suffering. At one point Brod writes concernedly to his mother. Is her son suicidal? In one sense, he wants nothing else than to throw himself from the window. In another, despair robs him of initiative; he founders; he is capable of nothing. But writing is asking for him, and by way of his suffering.

The devil is burning. Take my place, says Kafka. Use me, he says. And writes from this substitution, writes in bliss as the double he becomes when he is given to writing.

K. of Kafka’s The Castle is a man on the move, says Waggish, and this is true. The land surveyor is, above all, a man unsure of his employment, his position – he is a person displaced as he wanders among a community to which he does not belong. What does he want? Security? But he has abandoned the country of his birth and has even forgotten this abandonment; once, he says, he was married, he had children, but now? He is the man who has forgotten everything except his position: land-surveyor and the rights which would accrue to him as a holder of such a position. If he was indeed married, he has become one of Kafka’s bachelors, an eternal Junggeselle, a ‘young-fellow’ who has not found his station.

But he moves, he is restless, and he is, in this sense, very different from Joseph K. of The Trial, who was the man who felt sure of his good position as a high-ranking bank official and does not know until too late he has already been thrown out of the world. Rewriting The Castle as a stage play, Max Brod will present K. as a man in search of a loving family; yet there is in K. such a power of contestation that he would reject this security as soon as he found it. Over and again he throws away whatever advantage he gains for himself. The housekeeper’s promise, the benevolence of the mayor, the offer of a job: he is suspicious of all good fortune; nothing satisfies him.

Blanchot comments:

If K. chooses the impossible, it is because he was excluded from everything possible as the result of an initial decision. If he cannot make his way in the world, or employ, as he would like, the normal means of life in society, it is because he has been banished from the world, from his world, condemned to the absence of world, doomed to exile in which there is no real dwelling place.

The choice and the decision had been made for K. before he crossed the wooden bridge through which he gained entrance to the village. Who decided? Fate? is that the word? But The Castle is not a tragedy; it is not fate that will break the tragic hero or heroine against the ultimate limit. Nor is it heroic death that would confront its readers with the magnificent fragility of the human being.

K. is not the magnificent tragic hero. He is febrile, restless, he seeks, but nothing satisfies him. Would the novel have ended with him finding acceptance as a member of the village? Walser comments, ‘the novel does not in fact "develop" at all. it simply shows us the unfolding of a relationship whose pattern is implicit right from the first page’. Then integration into the village community was impossible from the start. Would K., then, have defied the village, leaving it behind (at one point, he suggests to Frieda they should elope together)? Even this is impossible. K., who says, early in the novel, ‘I want always to be free’, is never free of his desire to receive recognition from the castle authorities. ‘I want no grace and favours from the castle but my rights’ he says, a little further into the book. What does he want? In one sense, K. emobides a new modernity: he confronts the castle, as Boa remarks, ‘as an equal and critical partner’; he is, after all, the landsurveyor, whose business it is to ‘measure and redefine prevailing relationships’. Unless K’s remark is disingenuous and this self-assertive man has duped himself. The drama of the novel – the collision between K., who wants to know he has a place in the village, and the implacable authorities would then be determined: it can only be a matter of frustration, of the alternation between moments of grace and moments of setback. Absurdity: nothing is possible; there can be no progress, no resolution, The Castle might run on forever.

Still, it would seem K. may well have been meant to die. This, indeed, is what Brod remembers Kafka had intended for his hero. To die? I prefer the idea that Kafka could never reach death, that, like the weariness from which he suffered at the moment the secrets of the castle were about to be vouchsafed to him, he would likewise miss his appointment with death. And so he would live on in a phantom version of Kafka’s novel: a book with an infinite number of pages; a book which, somewhere, Kafka is still writing.

Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. (Kafka to Janouch)

That Kafka suffered is not in question; read the pages of the diaries. He suffers because he does not write, because he cannot find the time to write. How, then, to understand why writing too would entail suffering, why the release from suffering would imply suffering anew?

Kafka writes in his diaries:

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 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? 

I have commented on these lines before. Here, I want to note the ‘merciful surplus’ in question does not merely bracket Kafka’s suffering as if he had entered, with literature, into a space which had no relationship with his ‘empirical’ self. Suffering is transmuted – but what has it become? It is as though the ‘merciful strength’ has generated another self: the agent who rings changes on the suffering it reports; the self who is creative, articulate and generative. Who is this other self? It is not simply the negation of the first, suffering self who wrote of his suffering. It is still bound to it, but in the manner of a surplus. The ‘poetic’ self (I am borrowing Corngold’s expression, and some of his argument) is a ‘surplus-self’ who is able to ring changes upon suffering.

Suffering becomes literature. Yet literature, too, is suffering. Kafka says to Janouch, ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’. But why this new suffering? Is it because the changes one must ring upon suffering cannot be sustained from now until eternity – because, soon, the writer will fall from the surplus of strength and become once more incapable of writing, left in the same suffering with which he began? It is the gaps of non-writing within writing that are frightening. The second suffering, the suffering of art, arises from the sense that the literary work must be endless if it is to prevent the return of the suffering from which the writer began.

Write to escape suffering. Suffer because you can never write enough. This aporia, if it sums up the relationship between Kafka and writing, is dependent on the fact that neither the empirical self nor the surplus self is ever satisfied with what has been written. Writing itself does not aleviate suffering; this is clear enough from the pages of Kafka’s diaries where one finds over and again remarks like ‘wrote nothing today’.

Contrast this with the ‘surplus of strength’ of which Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo to describe the state of mind he was in when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy? It becomes, this surplus, the strength to comprehend the affirmation of life. It is the ‘ultimate, most joyous, wantonly extravagant Yes to life’, the ‘highest’ and the ‘deepest’ insight.

But Kafka’s fictions do not change his dissatisfaction. He once wrote to a correspondent that he was made of literature. And it is true, when borne on the draft of a merciful surplus of strength he writes, he can write – ‘The Judgement’, after all, was written in the course of a single night. But when he is not? When that strength fails him? Kafka suffers because he can never hold onto literature.

Still, thinking again of Nietzsche, this does not mean the relationship to literature must always be thought in terms of suffering. Might one think the writing practice of, say, Helene Cixous as testament to a writing of joy which begins in joy and then takes strength in joy?

It is often observed of Kafka’s The Castle that it is narrated exclusively from K.’s point of view. The novel was begun in the first person, Brod notes; it was only later in the manuscript Kafka switched from the first person ‘I’ to the third person ‘K.’ Deleted scenes, for example, one in which the villagers make fun of K. behind his back, attest to Kafka’s desire to maintain the perspective of the narrator close to that of K. We are always absolutely sure, as readers, of what K. is thinking. And what does he think? It is always a matter of coping with the course of events; his attention is always focused on his predicament.

It is a matter, for K., of working out the intentions of the denizens of the castle. What do they want with him? Can they clarify what his duties are as the new Land Surveyor? Can they reassure him that he even has this position? Was he right to think he had even been summoned to the village by the castle authorities? He seeks to confirm his station; he is a Vermesser, a surveyor, one who measures and delimits the world, and, as a commentator points out, one who presumes, sich vermessen, who causes a fuss because he will not accept his place.

When he arrives in the village, K. is confident, bold; but he is soon defeated by the distance of the castle itself (he tries to reach it on foot, but collapses, exhausted) and the inscrutability of the castle officials. K. is not the pilgrim on a steady way to his goal, but the weathervane, blown this way and then that, gaining confidence and then losing it again, hopeful and then resigned.

All along, K.’s pomposity is mocked by his assistants; their antics mimic the persistence of their master as it approaches hubris; but he, K., does not understand. His confidence, to which he will always return, withers only when K. is overwhelmed by weariness. We know, although the book was unfinished, that K himself was himself about to die. In the final lines, where K. listens to Gerstäcker’s dying mother, it is as though K. will die of his own weariness, as if that weariness itself were infinitely attenuated, that K. himself were stretched so thinly that there is nothing of him left. And it seems, in these final pages, that his defiance towards the castle and its officials has disappeared. His weariness is such that the castle can appear as what it is: co-extensive with the village, a ramshackle collection of huts, yet, for all that, repository of an expertise which will remain secret.

Joseph K. of The Trial is more defiant than The Castle’s K. At first, he believes his own trial is singular, separable from all others because he is innocent. His trial, he believes, may even become a test-case and he goes about the court believing the other accused believe him to be one of the judges or magistrates. Yet he too spins from assurance to unconfidence and he, like K., will fall victim to a weariness which brings him towards a kind of resignation: to his sense that the trial was his fate and he had to recognise its necessity.

Joseph K.’s death is not tragic; he dies ‘like a dog’; he ‘perishes’ rather than ‘dies’, as Heidegger would say, contrasting such annihilation from the death of resolute and authentic Dasein. He perishes; he does not die the great death in which he runs up against his own finitude. His is not an experience so much of the limit but of the limitlessness of that limit; his death, like a dog, does not allow him to bring himself up against what would be majestically human. Still he perishes, but even as he does so, it is as though he has to die for Kafka to bring a book to a close which would otherwise stretch for a million pages. He perishes, but The Trial, like The Castle, is unfinished and it is as though within its pages there were another story: the infinite account of K.’s own weariness, his perishing, a detour which cannot find its term in death.

From Kafka’s Diary:

On the way home, I said to Max that on my deathbed, provided the suffering is not too great, I will be very content. I forgot to add, and later I omitted this on purpose, that the best of what I have written is based upon this capacity to die content. (December 1914)

What does this mean? Writing depends upon the exertion of a kind of mastery over your own death. No longer is it the limit of what you can or cannot possess – the extreme to which you cannot bring yourself into relation as a sovereign equal – and this is the point: such mastery is tempting because of the very extremity of death. The strength required to realise a book demands the author must summon every power, must become control itself, the literary toreador. Then it is against death that the author must test his will. But this is not right. Kafka is not Hemmingway or Leiris; writing is not a bullfight.

What, then, is the contentedness Kafka seeks? What would it mean for him to enjoy his death? One suspects a kind of ruse: Kafka, after all, dreams of leaving writing in order to emigrate to Palestine; he puts down his work to take up carpentry. Yet he fills his notebooks, page after page, not with sketches and plans of future stories like Henry James or Dostoevsky, but with tales which launch themselves with apology – which begin and then break off, never to be completed. There are pages of such fragments.

It may appear, from this fragment in his Diary, that Kafka is playing with death, that it is his toy. It is as though his alleged contentment in death recalls Hegelian wisdom: the conversion of negativity into positivity; the transformation of death into a condition of possibility of truth and the world. Death gives form to the formless and definition to the indefinite.

But Kafka is not concerned with truth or the world. Reading the pages of the Diary, it becomes clear that his insistent appeal for a content death is a mirror of his dissatisfaction with life; who has written more eloquently of the difficulty of their relations with the world? Such dissatisfaction does not afford him mastery over death, but it makes death into a refuge. A refuge from what? From the office, from the demands of his fiancée and his difficulties with his family. But also – surely- from writing, from the uncertainty of writing. From the man who created Gracchus, we understand what a contentedness in death would mean: a still pen. Kafka dies content when he joins his characters in death. He writes; he dies – but then, when the character is dead, he is given back to his dissatisfaction. And then? He begins writing again.

‘If I do not save myself in some work, I am lost. Do I know this distinctly enough? I do not hide from men because I want to live peacefully, but because I want to perish peacefully’. Poor Kafka begins anew. Why? Because contented death is his wage as an artist; it is the aim of his writing and its justification. Blanchot: ‘The capacity to die content" implies that relations with the normal world are now and henceforth severed. Kafka is in a sense already dead. This is given him, as exile was given him; and this gift is linked to that of writing’. One recalls the passages in his Diary on ‘the merciful surplus of strength’: the gift of writing gives him strength to as it were live on in this deathly condition; it is born from his suffering – this surprises him – and it outstrips it. Literature begins when Kafka begins to ring changes upon the suffering that has befallen him.

But what kind of literature does he realise? The passage from the Diary comes just after he read ‘In the Penal Colony’ to his friends. It is cruel tale; one might wonder whether Kafka plays with his characters as a cat does a mouse. And what of the characters from other tales? Do they not, in some way or another, inhabit death’s space (I’ll have to substantiate that another day)? Is it not the movement of dying which claims them as they seek vainly for the castle or the trial?

It is as though, like Kafka, they seek a way to come to death, to find contentedness. But what do they find? Death ‘like a dog’ in The Trial; the incompletion of The Castle (death without terminus). Either way, Kafka himself survives the death of the characters who die; as for those who do not, he breaks off the tale and begins another. Burn my books, he tells Brod, and he means: burn what cannot bring itself to the end. Burn what survives me in the stories I wrote to find my way to death. Burn everything in me that cannot die.

Elsewhere in the Diary Kafka writes: ‘Write to be able to die, die to be able to write’. Write to be able to die – write in order to discover the contentment of departing a miserable life, a kind of safe suicide. Die to be able to write – this is the other side. What does he mean? That Kafka is in lieu of what he seeks and of the power of seeking. The work fights back; Kafka becomes the work’s mouse; his cry is Josephine’s: pathetic and piping.

I am still commenting on Kafka’s Diary entry I quoted a couple of days ago.

What is lost in Kafka’s writing is the particularity of his despair. Yet even as language fails to express its concreteness, literature begins. Whence the mercy and the surplus: as he enters literature, Kafka is given over to the experience of language without end. Sentence must follow sentence; one can never write sufficiently clearly; more images are required, more embellishments.

How to escape this apparently infinite task? One can rejoice in the power of writing, in the virtuosity of an authorship who will present the world with delights, flashing the glory of the world back to itself. There is the satisfaction of being praised by the critics and loved by one’s readers, of anticipating one’s place in the pantheon of great writers; one will have contributed to the great work of culture, illuminating and educating humankind. But what of those who are no so easily pleased – for whom culture is always a step behind and the critic never quite up-to-date in his tastes? What of the avant-garde writer who attempts to plunge the literary work into a kind of refusal of culture, turning it into an obelisk without meaning?

The unfortunate lesson: literature must mean if it is to be literature – the text cannot become an obdurate thing, closed upon itself, it depends for its life on its readers and therefore upon the meaning its readers will give it. The other temptation is to replace pages full of writing with the blank page, to refuse to work, running the work into silence. Yet the page itself has significance; it belongs to literary meaning. Culture has triumphed as it must; the book must go out to meet its audience, the author whether happy or unhappy must bathe in the reflected light of the work (this does not mean that there might not be another triumph awaiting the book, just that book cannot withold itself from the work of the world).

The literary writer, born of literature, cannot escape it; for the writer, there is no death. The literary writer wanders through language, Blanchot argues, as Kafka’s Gracchus wanders through the world. Gracchus a great hunter of the Black Forest fell and bled to death in a ravine; somehow the ship of death which was supposed to carry him away took a wrong turn. Gracchus, who had stretched himself out on the planking of the ship, happy to die as he had been happy to live sang out to the mountains, but he was not taken to the other shore. Before he came on board the ship, he had thrown away his hunting rifle and had slipped into the funeral shroud as happily as a young girl into her wedding dress. He lay down and waited. ‘Then’, Kafka writes, ‘the disaster happened’.

Blanchot, remembering this phrase, comments:

This disaster is the impossibility of death, it is the mockery thrown on all humankind’s great subterfuges, night, nothingness, silence. There is no end, there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope: such is the truth that Western man has made a symbol of felicity, and has tried to make bearable by focusing on its positive side, that of immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for life. But this afterlife is our actual life.

No death, no end; in this case, Kafka is condemned to the order of meaning and can never reach the immediacy of anguish. Language has run away with him; literature has captured this author whose notebooks are full of story-scraps commenced and then abandoned and whose writing rarely finds a form that satisfies him. What good is writing?, asks Kafka; but this is an idle question: he documents at length the harm writing does him and others, yet he writes. He complains of that great rarefaction which has left him unable to desire anything other to write, and yet his writing disappoints him – he never has enough time, more: he never has the courage to make time enough.

There is his job, of course, his life at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague to which he will send a note saying he will be late on account of a dizzy spell the night after he writes ‘The Judgement’. Then there is his family, his engagements … But then when he finally obtains leave, when he has time to write, he can produce nothing which satisfies him. Futility; there is no escape from the demand of writing, of literature. Kafka knows this, which is why he will sometimes dream of emigrating to Palestine and giving up writing for a new life of manual labour, of devoting himself to his studies of Hebrew and Italian. But all of this is a sign of bad conscience. Is it Kafka’s alone? Or is it ours, too, as we read his life and work as pure anguish, as misery without joy, as neurosis? For Kafka’s disaster – the disaster of a life lived in disappointment – is a mirror of our own as we try to escape the order of meaning, of light, of a day without end. The fascination with Kafka’s life – as well as the lives, happy and unhappy, of the authors we read in biographies – is a way of sidestepping our own disaster.

Our disaster? Do we not live from the world, as Levinas will put it, from fine spectacles and good food, enjoying the air and our good health? It is true that for the most part we enjoy the world and its glories; we rejoice in the present passing, in the happiness of living alongside others. Yet there is a menace concealed in apparent joy of this life. Levinas will argue that the obscure threat of the sheer ‘il y a’, the there is of existence weighs upon us. This is what he claims vouchsafes itself to us in the experience of physical pain, which can no longer, for him, be understood simply in terms of an absence of enjoyment. It has its own force; it testifies to a lingering sense of disquietude in human life, the sense that existence is a burden and that this burden is unbearable. Is it this Blanchot recalls when he claims that we compensate the disappointments of this life with the dream of an afterlife? ‘But this afterlife is our actual life’, writes Blanchot. The experience of pain bears witness not to the death which will bring suffering to an end, but to a dying which will not come to term: to an instant that cannot be determined and placed.

Existence is interminable, it is nothing but an indeterminacy; we do not know if we are excluded from it (which is why we search vainly in it for something solid to hold onto) or whether we are forever imprisoned in it (and so we turn desperately toward the outside). This existence is an exile in the fullest sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never stop being there.

No escape. Nothing endures such that we can hold on to it; the great day of the world, the ongoing production of meaning is a mockery of the one who strives to secure a place for herself; everything happens, but it is as though nothing has happened since the instant is too fleeting, joy too temporary, and there is always a rush of deadlines that are barely possible to keep. Signs circulate; chatter is everywhere; Heidegger will complain that empty curiosity, a ‘passing the word along’ characterises the chatter of Das Man, the ‘they’: no one talks of what really concerns them. But it is not Blanchot’s aim, like Heidegger, to turn each to the quest for authenticity, to reclaim oneself in one’s confrontation with death, that possibility which spells the impossibility-of-Dasein. In one sense it is of the order of possibility that we are tired – of existence as the temporal transcendence that opens the world to us as project. In another, it is sense of a kind of impossibility of possibility – of a freezing or suspension of time that prevents the same transcendence. It is the latter which intimates itself in the experience of physical suffering.

No doubt, where it is a matter of a measured suffering, it is still endured, still, of course, suffered, but also brought back into our grasp and assumed, recaptured and even comprehended in the patience we become in the face of it. But it can also lose this measure; it is even of its essence to be always already beyond measure. Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it, and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it. A singular situation. Time is as though arrested, merged with its interval. There, the present is without end, separated from every other present by an inexhaustible and empty infinite, the very infinite of suffering, and thus dispossessed of any future: a present without end and yet impossibility a present.

The arrested present cannot be transcended. One cannot flee upstream from this moment into the future, transcending it by incorporating it into our project. Here, transcendence is explicitly linked to the order of possibility – to what a human being can achieve for itself. Suffering, then, is the interruption of this capacity. It entails the impossibility of possibility. It is the correlate, therefore, of Gracchus’s impossible death. At the same time, the possibility of possibility is also suffered: the dimension which offers hope, transcendence, a future, is also unbearable.

‘We are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never stop being there’, Blanchot writes: there is an oscillation between these dual experiences of existence. There are two kinds of suffering, two ways in which we experience our inability to escape. What, then, of Kafka? On the one hand, the order of possibility is unbearable: he cannot express his suffering in a universal language. But language must be universal; one cannot escape the light of meaning. On the other hand, suffering itself is unbearable; it belongs to the side of impossibility, where nothing can be done (this is why writing is experienced as a ‘merciful surplus of strength’). The universal, the possible, the everyday are all linked to an unbearable absence of determination, an impersonal streaming. But this absence is also experienced in the very concreteness of suffering; suffering too, as Levinas argues, is likewise impersonal, and this is its horror. So there is no escape for Kafka; literature and life defeat him, each in a different way. But no so much that he can find momentary solace in literature in his living, his work and his relationship with his family, and in life as he writes, and finds writing impossible.

In the diary entry upon which I have been writing with Blanchot over the last few posts, Kafka proclaims himself puzzled as to how pain itself can be objectified by the writer. Blanchot comments:

The word ‘objectify’ attracts attention, because literature tends precisely to construct an object. It objectifies pain by forming it into an object. It does not express it, it makes it exist on another level. It gives it a materiality which is no longer that of the body but the materiality of words which represent the upheaval of the world that suffering claims to be. Such an object is not necessarily an imitation of the changes that pain makes us live through: it shapes itself to present pain, not represent it; first of all, this object must exist, that is, it must be an always indeterminate conjunction of determined relationships. There must always be in it, as in everything that exists, a surplus that one cannot account for.

The concreteness of my suffering is not expressed through my writing; it is, rather, transmuted, lifted onto a universal plane. Kafka loses the particular concreteness of his suffering as he begins to write. He gains literature, which is also to say, the impossibility of ever returning to his suffering in writing. But what has he gained?

Everyday speech has, at its heart, the ideal of a pure communication, which would transform ‘the heaviness of things’, in Blanchot’s words, to ‘the agility of signs’, the ‘materiality of things’ to ‘the movement of their signification’; they are nothing in themselves: abstract tokens to be used in exchange. The sentence in the story has another function: it does not seek to become the sign of an absent being, but to present that being to us in language. It is a question of allowing language to ‘revive a world of concrete things’. It is not, moreover, a question of revealing the concreteness of this or that thing, but a world of things.

‘In the novel, the act of reading is not changed, but the attitude of the one who reads it makes it different’, Blanchot writes. The value of words is no longer that of labels attached to particular meanings. Let’s say I hear the phrase ‘The head clerk himself called’; I am able to conjure up a world in which this sentence has meaning: I know the head clerk himself, the office in which he or she worked, and so on. The sentence is unobtrusive; I know what it means. When I read the sentence ‘The head clerk himself called’, in The Castle, the situation is different: it no longer belongs to a world with which I am familiar; the only access to the world of the story I am reading is through the words of that story. Literary works characteristically strive for verisimilitude by elaborately constructing a world. In the case of Kafka’s novels, however, we are left with the starkness of the words themselves.

In The Trial, Joseph K. is arrested – and our attention is arrested because we are not told why he is arrested or even, ultimately, by whom. We no longer have any distance with respect to the text; the reader is no longer a spectator, since there is no secure place with respect to the narrative from which to grasp its unity, but is, so to speak, enfolded in the very unfolding of a narration. But nor do we feel the reassuring presence of an author who is in charge of the narrative.

This is the uncanny experience of reading Kafka: there is no point of fixity to which one can anchor oneself. The work opens as a void or hollow. The events the novel narrates stand out against a kind of nothingness. The reader, for Blanchot, is more distant from Kafka’s narrative than she might be with respect to a more traditional novelist since she is unable to interpose a context for the events as they occur; they seem to come from nowhere. Yet in another sense, she is closer – too close, perhaps – because all she has are the words which attest, in Kafka’s work, to the void against which those words appear.

No escape: Kafka could not escape from his suffering; he wrote, and that suffering was transformed. And when we read Kafka’s fictions, born of suffering? Fascinated by the texts, close to them, far from them, there is no escape for us. Is this suffering? No: it is a kind of lightness, even a joy. And here is the difference between Blanchot and Levinas on being, a topic to which I will return very soon.

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?

Kafka’s Diaries and letters are a boon to any biographer but are also misleading. Compared to writing, everything, for Kafka disappoints. He falls short of his vocation and this is why, writing to friends, to his lovers, and to himself (but does he write to himself?) in his diary, it seems always that he is in lieu of his own existence. But one should not be too quick to understand the privation to which he seems bound by his desire to write, nor indeed to read his Diaries or even his literary writings as marked by despair. Think of what Kafka wanted from writing – think of what he allowed this word to name.

If I had the Diaries here, I would quote from them, but they are familiar enough. If you find despair in its pages, it refers to what is an impossible task: to pursue a story across days and nights, to maintain that prolific energy which allowed Kafka to write the tales for which he was famous in short bursts. Of course this energy failed him; stories were botched, and could not find their way to a conclusion. And if he had time, all the time in the world, would he be able to write? If he needed no sleep and just wrote, one day after another, would be create a work which would allow him to answer his vocation? Perhaps he was like that man from the country who asked the doorkeeper for access to the Law. The doorkeeper says he can’t let him in now. ‘Later then?’, asks the man. ‘Its possible’, says the doorkeeper, ‘but not now’. The man waits for days and years, until, in the last moments of his life, he realises that no one else has ever asked for admittance to the Law. Why?, he asks the doorkeeper. ‘No one else could have been admitted here, for this door was intended only for you. I’m now going to shut it’.

Perhaps this is what Kafka seeks as he pursues the work night after night. Does he realise that its essential characteristic is to be interminable and that to write lines on a page is already to betray the peculiar absence of time which marks the work? The absence of time? What does this mean? The impossibility of undertaking tasks, projects and personal initiatives, of suspending a kind of suspension which prevents action. For this is the peculiar absence which disjoins time from itself, a disarticulation which unjoins Kafka from the chance of even beginning the great task which opens to him. Of course it is a pseudo-task: you can’t complete what does not even allow you to begin and you can’t begin a task which seems to require that you relinquish the very possibility of setting out.

How to understand the strange drama of writing, this demand which sends you on a great detour before you ever write a line? Kafka’s Diaries and letters allow him to mark time with respect to the absence of time, to find himself just as he begins to lose himself; they save him, but what can we expect from them but despair? As soon as he writes, he is lost. And when he writes about losing loss – when he writes about writing he is lost again.

Doubly lost, and commenting on the great refusal to which writing is linked, I wonder whether Kafka doesn’t come closest of all to the condition of writing. For isn’t all writing a lament for what it is not? Whence the temptation to ally writing to a great political cause, or to give up writing altogether – for who can justify this vain effort? A temptation to which Kafka often resorts in his Diaries and Letters, setting out his plans to emigrate to Palestine or reporting his new habit of undertaking two hours of manual labour each afternoon. But he does not yield to this temptation; writing saves him. But from what does it save him? A life lived outside writing. But isn’t writing precisely the door which will not admit him? Isn’t the way barred by the great doorkeeper with his Tartar beard? The man from the country tries to bribe him, this doorkeeper, but he must return to his stool at which he sits and waits, as others, presumably wait by other doors. Kafka waits. He is eminently patient. And whilst he waits, he writes with a writing outside writing. It disappoints him, it is true, but at least it allows him to keep hold of himself. To keep hold? Ah, but that is what he doesn’t want!

A whole series of authors from Holderlin onwards wanted to write about writing, to seize upon the origin itself and make it speak. Each of them wanted to make writing speak of itself and only of itself, to give birth in their works to the impersonal words which were spoken without them. What did they achieve? Often, their lives are ruined, tragic. Still more often, their lives can be presented hagiographically: they are testament to a kind of purity, a flame which consumes only itself, or a star which has broken away from everything but the night. But written across their lives, written with the whole of their lives there is the writing that reverberates with a kind of murmuring or rumbling, as if, in it, there were allowed to resound the tuneless song sung in the absence of time, time’s void. What differentiates each author from another (Holderlin from Rilke, Mallarme from Beckett, Pessoa from Blanchot, Duras from Bataille) is only the way in which that resonance reverberates: the tone of the work.

If writing is your vocation, get another vocation. If it is to write that you desire, then desire another desire. Get a job, work, lest you disappear into the worklessness to which writing is bound. I do not like empty, open days. To be alone with writing. What, then, do I do? Write? No: I write of the impossibility of writing, like a wheel which spins in the air. What you need is friction: the contact with the world which would allow you to think you move forward. This is why I am happy to have a ‘real’ job, and that that job is mundane (administration, meetings, form-filling).

Mundane work: it belongs to the world, to the security and solidity of the world. Kafka in the Worker’s Insurance Company: he had a short working day, home for lunch by two o’clock. Janouch reports Kafka took up carpentry. Good, honest labour which filled his afternoon. It was only insomnia which allowed him to write. Permitted him at the same stroke that it severed him from everyone around him. Gave him the dream of writing even as it woke him from those nights of sleep which would have been him rest sufficient to work. Blanchot: ‘Writer: daytime insomniac’: yes, because to write is to be awoken from that daytime slumber which is work. (This, by the way, is the real meaning of the ‘primal scene’ of The Writing of the Disaster: it is a story of the writer who without words (infans) turns from work to the sky in which only being and nothingness turn and unfurl.)

Poor Kafka has to work; he cannot find enough time for writing. He lacks time, he is never solitary enough, there is always too much noise, he is always too weary. Then, becoming ill, he realises that there is still not enough time, that time is not time enough and that writing requires something else from him. But what is this demand? Blanchot compares his predicament to Abraham’s.

Recall: Abraham must sacrifice not only Isaac, but God – his faith in God. For Isaac is the bearer of God’s future on earth; he is the one from whom God’s people will find the Promised Land. Isaac is the promise, the future, and it is the future of God’s chosen people that Abraham must sacrifice. Abraham must act without guarantee; he does not sacrifice Isaac in the faith that all will be returned to him in the afterlife. Isaac himself is hope; he is the future – God’s future, the future of the chosen – which must be destroyed. But Abraham, we know, will receive the future through his willingness to obey God’s command. But this is not a simple resignation to a higher power. Remember Kierkegaard’s distinction between the knight of resignation, who, seeing no alternative, obeys God, and the knight of faith – Abraham – who can maintain his faith in what appears to the unbeliever to be simply absurd. What faith does Abraham maintain? That Isaac is the future. That God requires him to sacrifice the future, then, in order to receive the future.

Some say Isaac is a version of Regine, the fiancee whom Kierkegaard renounced in order to write. He had to sacrifice her – but to receive what? Another future; no longer one lived in the ethical sphere of existence, but in the religious one. But think of Kafka. If he sacrifices his engagement, what then? He will not enter the religious sphere; he will not receive the future by placing it at stake. And if he gives up work in order to write, if he does nothing else but write? Kafka links the demand of writing to his own salvation. He is a bachelor; he will have no attachments – why? Because his attachment to writing is greater. Greater than what? Than anything.

One might say that it is not a question of Kafka’s choosing to sacrifice everything to writing; he has no choice. But what is it that he sacrifices everything for? What does he sacrifice by writing and through writing? Read his notebooks. Kafka begins stories again and again; he does not complete them or trouble to rewrite them. They begin; another story begins, and it is as though it is not completion he wants, but something else. It is as though writing is nothing at all, as though his hope lies in an impossible writing that demands he complete none of his stories, that he sacrifices them to a still greater demand. Hardly a kind of writing, the labour to produced a finished and complete work, it is an unwriting, an unworking – Blanchot would perhaps call it a désoeuvrement.

‘I cannot write’ – ‘you must write’- ‘I cannot finish a story’ – ‘in not finishing, you write, you give yourself to writing’. Comparing Kafka to Abraham on Mount Moriah, Blanchot notes, ‘For Kafka the ordeal is all the graver because of everything that makes it weigh lightly upon him’; then writes, ‘What would the testing of Abraham be if, having no son, he were nevertheless required to sacrifice this son? He couldn’t be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at. That laughter is the form of Kafka’s pain’. The laughter, one imagines, of Kafka’s family, his colleagues: ‘you have produced nothing. You are wasting your life’. Incredulous laughter. Worse: there is the pain of the fiancée he deserts; the disappointment of those around him.

None of this matters when you think of the horrors that awaited many of those close to Kafka. The struggle of a writer with writing – what significance does it have? And the struggle of those of us who read in a manner analogous to the way Kafka writes – who feel the demand of a writing which draws us beyond a simple faith in verisimilitude, beyond the novel which would give us back the richness of the world, beyond a literature content to represent the world?

Kafka’s Zionism: he has hopes for everyone except himself. For himself, he is an anti-Zionist; he does not have hopes for himself. Blanchot: ‘He wants it even if he is excluded from it, for the greatness of this rigorous conscience was always to hope for others more than for himself and not to measure mankind’s unhappiness by his personal misfortune’. Yes, this is an extraordinary gift. Remember Kafka’s aphorism: ‘Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery’; the latter is not Kafka’s vice. But isn’t his misery assuaged by the writing towards which misery leads him – the writing which is the ‘merciful surplus’ through which he rings changes on his misery? Perhaps it is this which permits him to affirm Zionism for others but not for himself.

After Kafka’s death, Max Brod sees to the publication of everything – not only the unfinished novels and stories, but also letters, including the letter Kafka wrote to his father. What indiscretion! And then there are his dramatisations of Kafka’s books, his three critical studies of Kafka, the prefaces he appends to the volumes which collect Kafka’s work, and even the novels where Kafka appears barely disguised as Garta. Brod’s admiration of his friend’s genius leads him to promote Kafka’s work but also to interpret it, to fill in the void which opens so marvellously in Kafka’s writings the better, Brod thinks, to preserve their greatness. So – don’t laugh – K. in The Trial is guilty, for Brod, because he cannot love.

This reminds me of Bruckner’s eager friends, promoting his work even as they demanded that he makes cuts and changes. We might say Brod is Kafka’s ape, a ludicrous, capering figure and, insisting that the various interpretations of The Castle are ridiculous, secure our own good conscience; we are not apes. But then if The Castle inscribes an experience bound up with the experience of writing … if the void in question is linked to the movement of writing itself, if it is something like the secret heart of the work itself such that it can only be covered over and lends itself happily to its own dissimulation, then Kafka is already his own ape, and The Castle is a buffoon’s book.

From Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka:

‘The only definite thing is suffering,’ [Kafka] said earnestly. ‘When do you write?’

I was surprised by the question, so I answered quickly:

‘In the evening, at night. During the day very rarely. I cannot write during the day.’

‘The day is a great enchantment.’

‘I am disturbed by the light, the factory, the houses, the windows over the way. Most of all by the light. The light distracts my attention.’

‘Perhaps it distracts it from the darkness within. It is good when the light overpowers one. If it were not for these horrible sleepless nights, I would never write at all. But they always recall me again to my own dark solitude.’

Max Brod points out that the name Gracchus, by way of the Latin noun graculus, meaning jackdaw, is an approximate translation of Kafka’s own family name which, in its original Czech form, also means jackdaw.

(the above from Brod’s biography of Kafka, by way of Leslie Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot.)

Excerpted from an online translation by Ian Johnston:

“Are you dead?”

“Yes,” said the hunter, “as you see. Many years ago—it must have been a great many years ago—I fell from a rock in the Black Forest—that’s in Germany—as I was tracking a chamois. Since then I’ve been dead.”

“But you’re also alive,” said the burgomaster.

“To a certain extent,” said the hunter, “to a certain extent I am also alive. My death ship lost its way—a wrong turn of the helm, a moment when the helmsman was not paying attention, a distraction from my wonderful homeland—I don’t know what it was. I only know that I remain on the earth and that since that time my ship has journeyed over earthly waters. So I—who only wanted to live in my own mountains—travel on after my death through all the countries of the earth.”