Abstract
I begin in a space between bars—two expressions of futility snatched from the lore surrounding the figures of Georg Lukács and Franz Kafka. It is well known that the Hungarian Marxist remained a party loyalist long after it was fashionable and that he notoriously privileged realist literature over its “decadent” modernist other because the latter was unable “to grasp the totality of social relations.”1 After his arrest by the Communist Party in 1956, when he was “deported, locked up in a castle and held without trial in Romania,” Lukבcs was prompted to rethink his aesthetic allegiances while confronting Iron Curtain governmentality.2
Kafka was a realist after all.
—Georg Lukács
[There is pllenty of hope … only not for us.
—Franz Kafka
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Notes
Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 187. For Lukács, a realist novel gives us a concrete totality in Marx’s Hegelian sense to the extent that it includes “all of the mediations that linked the seemingly isolated facts.” (Ibid., 105.)
Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, eds., Marxist Literary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 141. Having previously relegated Kafka’s works to the politically incorrect side of literary art, “Lukács finds himself ridiculous,” as Simon Critchley suggests, “because reality has conspired to bring about a situation which directly contradicts his aesthetic judgment.”
Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002), 107.
Max Brod, Franz Kafka: a Biography, trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (New York: Schocken, 1947), 75.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 167.
Todorov adds here that, “One can even say that it is to some degree because of literature and art that this distinction [between the real and the imaginary] becomes impossible to sustain.” (Ibid.) Paul Reitter and Brett Wheeler also cite Todorov to emphasize that Kafka’s stories represent “the operations of fiction itself, how literature works, making the unreal real at the end of the period in which this is still possible as hope” (Paul Reitter and Brett Wheeler, “Reflections on Kafka’s Urban Reader,” German Politics and Society 23.1 [2005]: 58–70, 74.)
I am grateful to my colleague Michael O’Driscoll for alerting me to the concept of the fatal performative contradiction in Derrida’s explication of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism in Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), in particular pp. 63 and 67–68.
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: the ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’”, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 244.
Klaus Mladek, “Gotta Read Kafka: Nine Reasons Why Kafka Is Crucial for the Study of the Law,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 31 (2004): 89–117, 97.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), section 16: 84–85.
Ibid. Peter Stine affirms that, “Kafka regarded the ability to forget as vital to survival in the modern world, a way of editing a metamorphosing self for the sake of a parodic wholeness of being” (Peter Stine, “Franz Kafka and Animals,” Contemporary Literature 22.1 [1981]: 58–80, 60).
Ibid., 61. Stine reminds us that Kafka was a “strict” vegetarian and relates an anecdote of Brod’s: “Once at a Berlin aquarium … Kafka began speaking to the fish in their illuminated tanks: ‘Now at last I can look at you in peace. I don’t eat you anymore.’” (Ibid., 70; citing Brod, 74.) In “Force of Law,” Derrida foregrounds the ruthless mistreatment of animals among the forms of “hostage-t aking” and “terror” that enjoin a reconsideration of “the very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited.” (Derrida, “Force of Law,” 257.) On this cluster of themes, see also Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369–418.
Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’: Or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Who Comes After the Subject, eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96–119.
Karyn Ball, “Primal Revenge and Other Anthropomorphic Projections for Literary History,” New Literary History 39 (special Issue on “Literary History and the Global Age”) (2008): 533–563 [for a commentary on Derrida’s “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”].
Robert Kauf, “Once Again: Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy,’” Modern Language Quarterly 15.4 (1954): 359–365, 362. “A Report to an Academy” was published along with “Jackals and Arabs” in the 1917–1918 volume of Der Jude, edited by Martin Buber. Following William C. Rubinstein (1952), Robert Kauf (1954) interprets “A Report” as ironically commenting on debates among Western European Jews of Kafka’s time about the relative perils of Zionism and assimilationism. Rubinstein previously argued that two courses are open to the ape to extricate himself from an unbearable confinement: “to attempt an escape to freedom (Zionism), or to become a human being (assimilation and conversion).”
William C. Rubinstein, “Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy,’” Modern Language Quarterly 13 (1952): 372–376, 375.
Since the Zionist option is too dangerous, Kauf claims that “A Report” “attacks that type of assimilationism which, based upon opportunism, sacrifices a spiritual heritage and destiny to a crude materialism.” (Kauf, 365.) For more recent analyses of Jewish motifs in Kafka, see Iris Bruce, “Kafka and Jewish Folklore,”, The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julian Preece (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150–168.
Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).
Vivian Liska, When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,”, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 259.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 362–363.
Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,” Comparative Literature 53.4 (2001): 283–297, 292.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 173.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
Eric Santner, “Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the Writing of Abjection,” in MM 1996, 195–210.
Walter Benjamin, “Notes from Svendborg: Conversations with Brecht,”, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: New Left Books, 1973), 110.
Stine, 61 (citing Franz Kafka, I Am a Memory Come Alive, ed. Nahum Glatzer [New York: Schocken, 1974], 191).
Stanley Corngold, “Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the Metaphor,” in MM 1996, 89.
Ibid., 103. Dwelling on its Middle High German roots, Corngold notes that the word Ungeziefer connotes Gregor’s status as an unclean animal that can be killed, but is not suitable for sacrifice. He is also ungeheuer [monstrous], “a creature without a place in God’s order.” (Stanley Corngold, Introduction to The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold [New York: Bantam, 1986], xix.)
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.
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© 2011 A. Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis
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Ball, K. (2011). Kafka’s Fatal Performatives: Between “Bad Conscience” and Betrayed Vulnerability. In: Kordela, A.K., Vardoulakis, D. (eds) Freedom and Confinement in Modernity. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118959_10
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