On Kafka and the political

A FB friend posted about the doorkeeper and the man from the country in Kafka's "Before the Law." My thoughts:

1) Kafka is not explained by his contemporary Freud, who inhabits and hails from a place not far from his. To say that what Kafka describes is a castration complex would be irrelevantly true, because it is reductive. And it would be better described by more fully articulating the concrete relationships implicated to the social world at the time.

To call it a 'Jewish' predicament is equally reductive, as everyone acquainted with the cinema of Woody Allen knows. It makes for an extended joke that illuminates nothing and so is a conservative gesture of living with something you cannot understand. Kafka understands it with a rigor of precision, though of course he is in no way reconciled to it (as the successful psychoanalytic patient by definition is, or as academics usually are).

In fact, it is a modern predicament. It is a political problem that has no ethical solution, which is one reason it remains a problem. The resources of the therapeutic society do not offer any solution. Kafka's heroes face something that could also be reductively described as a political oppression, in that case reducing, to the potentiality of politically involved or relevant actions, a characteristically modern predicament -- which is partly the untenability of subjectivity at least as then recognizable, and the 'impassible' character in the late modern world of social and political authority, which people are made to depend on, yet without it offering them anything very useful to them, including in living with the impersonal bureaucratic and capitalist modern state.

Kafka is and is not a Jewish writer, because he draws on modern Jewish experience as part of a larger experience of the modern European world, but in no way does he propose or suggest in any of his writings any ideologically tenable position or stance, and since today all Jewishness is an identity-political reliance on some such stance, he is not a "Jewish" writer in modern terms, just a European one. As such, it is a legacy to a broader late modernity.

The ideologues offer ‘solutions’ to the social problems the best art works of our time describe. The relevance to all such thinking of various forms of, usually implicit, anti-semitism, is only this: the modern European Jews was a kind of permanent, ontological exile in a society that was unique in the insistence and violence of its demands for obedience and conformity to an all-inclusive state. That state was Roman Christianity’s legacy to modern European societies and their heirs.

The Jew was a figure of the unassimilable outsider in that essentially closed social world. For two centuries, this situation was figured as a problem that could be solved, through the socialist or radically democratic movements and through nationalist ones. The future of both these ideas is today very much in question, the first at least since 1989. A third figure endures that is dependent on neither of these: the artist as pariah and, much more importantly, the pariah as artist. This figure was nourished among segments of the bourgeoisie in an earlier form of capitalism, but it now continues to be evoked and to flourish even among lower classes, partly because of an entertainment-oriented mass culture that tends to a falling cost of its commodities. Jews in America may be the most easily targeted political and religious minority, but grasping the figure of their identity as such is only a continuation of a much older discourse, fortunately linked to some of the founding ideological memes of American society. This has made them the model European-American minority. In broad social functioning, the figure of the Jew as pariah has been replaced by the figure of the pariah as artist. As social precarity particularly affects pariahs, artists may want to organize more as artists than as bearers of a particular identity. As with Marx’s concept of the proletarian, which itself borrowed on classical figurations of Jewish identity, the artist today is a figure of a particular subject who may be identified with a universality of interest.

If we had available ‘answers’ to problems posed in social theory and art, those answers would be like commodities that you could purchase, and the getting and having of which will cure your malaise (a term that is translated as 'sickness’ but also means ‘ill at ease’). You might be asked to pick up your own straw in this way before rejoining the company team and there do your job as worker. Yes, the society is capitalist and artists are in general proletarians. Not that the identity of artist is a ‘solution’; there is none. That is the real cause and meaning of much anxiety today. Medicine, therapies, and ‘spiritualities’ cannot cure it. We are unfixable. When things aren’t working, or we aren’t, it isn’t us who have the problem, but the system.

What Kafka leaves us with is a perfectly political understanding of the contemporary world that is without either a practical politics or, more importantly, the hint of any viable way of being a person in the contemporary world, wherever contemporary ideologies of whatever kind are operative, which is everywhere. The post-Kafka writer has much to be against and nothing to be for, unless it is writing, art, and, maybe, some form of 'critique'.

The Kafkaesque subject is a minimal, weak, very precarious one socially, whose strengths and powers of action lie entirely in his writing or art and whatever else about living a life in the world may be connected with it. His literary voice is separated from a personal subjectivity that can be represented as an identity. More completely than the internationalist worker according to Marx, he has no country, being an exile everywhere. I imagine post-Kafka subjects talking eloquently, as they think lucidly, about the world they live in and its problems, and having little nothing to say when asked, "But what about you?" They, we, may describe what we are into and what we do, but will necessarily clam up when asked, "But what is your identity? What category or type of subjectivity do you belong to?" Or, "So what team (religion, nationalism, type of gender and sexuality, etc.) do you play for?" For "Everything is about you," you in particular.

2) The doorkeeper in "Before the Law" is an American company that wants to hire you provided that you satisfy an impossible double bind, showing that you are who you are and you can turn over all of it to the bosses, and that because you are who you are, you are not what they want of you, and so you will be turned away after being told, We wanted to hire you, you are the perfect candidate, but we can't hire you because it's perfectly impossible, and it's your fault. Because it's not about how things are here that is in question, but whether or not you can deal with them, or rather, how it is that you cannot, loser.

This is also the standpoint of the father who pronounces that the son has failed to do, or be, what the father commands. This is because he, the son, cannot be what he must be and must be what he cannot be. Families and their own -ism is no more of a solution to the problems of being than anything else.