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“Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.”

— Walter Benjamin, An Aesthetic of Redemption

Perhaps Kafka's wish was to disappear, discretly, like an enigma that wanes to escape being seen. But this modesty gave him over to the public, this secret made him famous. Now the mystery is spread everywhere, it is in broad daylight, a main attraction

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Mankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.

Walter Benjamin (via alterities)

..The courts, to be sure, have law books at their disposal, but people are not allowed to see them

Walter Benjamin. Illuminations - on the law becoming a superego

The locomotive: as swift as an eagle, an iron horse, a race-horse on wheels. Such cliches, he believes, create "an allegorical poetry ... in the precise sense that elements of technology, when fused with others from living nature, take on a new, autonomous existence as a Janus figure" (p. 26). This has nothing to do with allegory. The taste guiding such language reflected the need to escape a threat. This threat was thought to lie in the "rigid/' "mechanical" qualities associated with technical forms. (In reality, it was of a different kind.) What was generally felt was the oppression emanating from technology, and refuge from it was sought in Ludwig Knaus's paintings of groups of children, Griitzner's monks, Warthmiiller's rococo figurines, and Defreggees villagers,'O The railway was invited to join the ensemble-but it was the ensemble of the genre painting. Genre painting docllments the failed reception of technology. Sternberger introduces the concept, but his interpretation of it is entirely flawed. "In genre painting," he writes, "the onlooker's interest ... is always actively engaged. Just as the scene that has been frozen, the living image, needs completion, so this interested onlooker is eager to fill the gaps in the painting's patchwork ... with the joys or tears it evokes" (p. 64). As I ha ve said, the origin of genre painting is more tangible. When the bourgeoisie lost the ability to conceive great plans for the future, it echoed the words of the aged Faust: "Linger awhile! Thou art so fair. "11 In genre painting it captured and fixed the present moment, in order to be rid of the image of its future.

WALTER BENJAMIN

#walter benjamin #allegory #the work of art in the age of reproducibility

Often for strange reasons Kafka's figures clap their hands. ..We encounter these holders of power in constant, slow movement, rising or falling. But they are at their most terrible when they rise from the deepest decay-from the fathers.

WALTER BENJAMIN ON FRANZ KAFKA

"Could fools get tired?'" One can see that the fools are akin to the indefatigable assistants. But there is more to this clan.

It is casually remarked of the faces of the assistants that they seem to be those of "grown-ups, perhaps even students." Actually, the students who appear in the strangest places in Kafka's works are the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan. " 'But when do you sleep?' asked Karl, looking at the student in 'surprise. 'Oh, sleep!' said the student. 'I'll get some sleep when I'm finished with my studies.'" This reminds one of the reluctance with which children go to bed; after all, while they are asleep, something might happen that concerns them. "Don't forget the best!" Weare familiar with this remark from a nebulous bunch of old stories, although it may not occur in any of them. But forgetting always involves the best, for it involves the possibility of redemption. "The idea of helping me is an illness and requires bed rest for a cure," ironically says the restlessly wandering ghost of the hunter Gracchus. While they study, the students are awake, and perhaps their being kept awake is the best thing about these studies. The hunger artist fasts, the doorkeeper is silent, and the students are awake. This is the veiled way in which the great rules of asceticism operate in Kafka. Their crowning achievement is studying. Reverently Kafka unearths it from long-lost boyhood. "Not very unlike this-a long time ago-Karl had sat at home at his parents' table writing his homework, while his father read the newspaper or did bookkeeping and correspondence for some organization and his mother was busy sewing, drawing the thread high out of the material in her hand. To avoid disturbing his father, Karl used to put only his exercise book and his writing materials on the table, while he arranged the books he needed on chairs to die right and left of him. How quiet it had been there! How seldom strangers had entered that room!" Perhaps these studies had amounted to nothing. But they are very close to that nothing which alone makes it possible for something to be useful-that is, to the Tao.

- WALTER BENJAMIN

ritual is the erasing of sins from the book of memory." What has been forgotten-and this insight affords us yet another avenue of access to Kafka's work-is never something purely individual.

Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange proctucts. Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka~s stories presses toward the light. "Here the very fullness of the world is considered as the only reality. All spirit must be concrete, particularized ========== Benjamin. Illuminations

In the stories which Kafka left us, narrative art regains the significance it had in the mouth of Scheherazade: to postpone the future. In The Trial postponement is the hope of the accused man only if the proceedings do not gradually turn into the judgment.

The patriarch himself is to benefit by postponement, even though he may have to trade his place in tradition for it. "I could conceive of another Abraham-to be sure, he would never get to be a patriarch or even an' old-clothes dealer-, an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away !I being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready; but without having his house ready, without having something to fall back on, he cannot leave-this the Bible also realized, for it says: 'He set his. house in order.' " This Abraham appears "with the promptness of a waiter." Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestuS, and this gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables. Kafka's writings emanate from it. The way he withheld them is well known. His testament orders their destruction. This document, which no one interested in Kafka can disregard, says that the writings did not satisfy their author, that he regarded his efforts as failures, that he counted himself among those who were bound to fail. He did fail in his grandiose attempt to convert poetry into doctrine, to turn it into a parable and restore to it that stability and unpretentiousness which, in the face of reason, seemed to him to be the only appropriate thing for it. No other writer has obeyed the commandment "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image" so faithfully. "It was as if the shame of it was to outlive him." With these words The Trial ends. Corresponding as it does to his "elemental purity of feeling," shame is Kafka's strongest gesture. It has a dual aspect, however. Shame is an intimate human reaction, but at the same time it has social pretensions. ========== Benjamin. Illuminations

Willy Haas: "Kafka's upper world, his so-called Castle, with its immense, complex staff of petty and rather lecherous officials, his strange heaven plays a horrible game with people ... and yet man is very much in the wrong even before this god."

This theology falls far behind the doctrine of justification of St. Anselm of Canterbury into barbaric speculations which do not even seem consistent with the text of Kafka's works. "Can an individual official forgive?" we read in The Castle. "This could only be a matter for the over-all authorities, but even they can probably not forgive but only judge." This road has soon led into a blind alley. "All this," says Denis de Rougemont, "is' not the wretched situation of man without a god, but the wretched state of a man who is bound to a god he does not know, because he does not know Christ." It is easier to draw speculative conclusions from Kafka's posthumous collection of notes than to explore even one of the motifs that appear in his stories and novels. Yet only these give some clue to the prehistoric forces that dominated K;afka's creativeness, forces which, to be sure, may justifiably be regarded as belonging to our world as well. Who can say under what names they appeared to Kafka himself? Only this much is certain: he did not know them and failed to get his bearings among them. In the mirror which the prehistoric world held before him in the form of guilt he merely saw the future emerging in the form of judgment. Kafka, however, did not say what it was like. - WALTER BENJAMIN citing HAAS Illuminations

There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka's works. One is to interpret them naturally, the other is the supernatural interpretation. Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points.

The first kind is represented by Hellmuth Kaiser; the second, by numerous writers, such as H. J. Schoeps, Bernhard Rang, and Bernhard Groethuysen. To these last also belongs Willy Haas, although he has made revealing comments on Kafka in other contexts which we shall discuss later; such insights did not prevent him from interpreting Kafka's work after a theological pattern. "The powers above, the realm of grace," so Haas writes, "Kafka has depicted in his great novel The Castle; the powers below, the realm of the courts and of damnation, he has dealt with in his equally great novel The Trial. The earth between the two, earthly fate and its arduous demands, he attempted to present in strictly stylized form in a third novel, Amerika." ========== Benjamin. Illuminations

Kafka was a writer of parables, but he did not found a religion. Let us consider the village at the foot of Castle Hill whence K. 's alleged employment as a land surveyor is so mysteriously and unexpectedly confirmed.

In his Postscript to The Castle Brod mentioned that in depicting this village at the foot of Castle Hill Kafka had in mind a specific place, Zurau in the Erz Gebirge. We may, however, also recognize another village in it. It is the vil1age in a Talmudic legend told by a rabbi in answer to the question why Jews prepare a festive evening meal on Fridays. The legend is about a princess languishing in exile, in a village whose language she does n<?t understand, far from her compatriots. One day this princess receives a letter saying that her fiance has not forgotten her and is on his way to her. The fiance, so says the rabbi, is the Messiah; tAe princess is the soul; the village in which she lives in exile is the body. She prepares a meal for him because this is the only way in which she can express her joy in a village whose language she does not know. This village of the Talmud is right in Kafka's world. For just as K. lives in the village on Castle Hill, modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile toward him. It may happen that a man wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into vermin. Exile-his exile-has gained control over him. The air of this village blows about Kafka, and that is why he was not tempted to found a religion. The pigsty which houses the country doctor's horses; the stuffy back room in which Klamm, a cigar in his mouth, sits over a glass of beer; the manor gate, to knock against which brings ruin-all these are part of this village. The air in this village is not free of all the abortive and overripe elements that form such a putrid mixture. This is the air that Kafka had to breathe all his life. He was neither mantic nor the rounder of a religion. ========== Benjamin. Illuminations

Kafka took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings. One has to find one's way in them circumspectly, cautiously, and warily.

One must keep in mind Kafka's way of reading as exemplified in his interpretation of the above-mentioned parable. His testament is another case in point. Given ,its background, the directive in which Kafka ordered the destruction of his literary remains is just as unfathomable, to be weighed just as carefully as the answers of the doorkeeper before the law. Perhaps Kafka, whose every day on earth brought him up against insoluble behavior problems and undecipherable communications, in death wished to give his contemporaries a taste of their own medicine. Kafka's world is a world theater. For him, man is on the stage from the very beginning. The proof of the pudding is the fact that everyone is accepted by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. What the standards for admission are cannot be determined. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves. ========== Benjamin. Illuminations

Kafka ..divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end. Strangely enough, these reflections are endless even when their point of departure is one of Kafka's philosophical tales.

what matters is neither freedom nor love, but the riddle, the secret, the mystery to which they have to bow-without reflection and even against their conscience." ========== Benjamin. Illuminations

Alle großen Puppenspieler versichern, das Geheimnis der Sache sei eigentlich, der Puppe ihren eigenen Willen zu lassen, ihr nachzugeben.

Der große Dichter Heinrich von Kleist (das sage ich für die paar Erwachsenen, die hier sich zwischen den Kindern versteckt haben und denken, ich sehe sie nicht) hat in seinem Aufsatz über das Marionettentheater sogar bewiesen, daß der Puppenspieler sich ganz und gar wie ein Tänzer verhalten muß, wenn er die Figuren richtig bewegen will. Dann kommt dieser schönste Anblick zustande, wie die Kleinen gleichsam mit ihren Zehenspitzen den Boden kitzeln, weil sie ja, wie die Engel, von oben herunter kommen und nicht, wie richtige Schauspieler, an die Schwerkraft gebunden sind. Aber ihre Überlegenheit hat ihnen auch schon viel Haß und Verfolgungen eingetragen. Erstens durch die Kirche und durch die Obrigkeit, weil die Puppen sich so leicht, ohne boshaft zu werden, über alles mokieren können. Sie brauchen ja die größten Männer nur nachzumachen, dann sieht es so aus: »Was der Mann kann, das kann ja jede Puppe. « So haben sie zum Beispiel im alten Österreich die Tyrannen lächerlich gemacht. Dann aber sind sie bisweilen auch eine gefährliche Konkurrenz für die richtigen Theater gewesen. In Paris zum Beispiel haben die Schauspieler nicht geruht, bis sie sie aus der inneren Stadt in die äußersten Gegenden des Weichbildes verjagt hatten. Daß die großen Puppenspieler große Originale gewesen sind, ist bekannt. Erstens leben sie nur für ihre Puppen, alles andere ist ihnen egal. Darum werden sie sehr alt. ========== benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften - Band 2

Kafka is like the lad who set out to learn what fear was. He has got into Potemkin's palace and finally, in the depths of its cellar, has encountered Josephine, the singing mouse, whose tune he describes: "Something of our poor, brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness which can never be found again, but also something of active presentday life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet real and unquenchable. "

WALTER BENJAMIN

It cannot be guilt that makes them attractive . . . nor can it be the just punishment which makes them attractive in anticipation . . . so it must be the mere charges brought against them that somehow show on them." From The Trial it may be seen that these proceedings usually are hopeless for those accused-hopeless even when they have hopes of being acquitted.

It may be this hopelessness that brings out the beauty in them-the only creatures in Kafka thus favored. At least this would be very much in keeping with a conversation which Max Brod has related. "I remember," Brod writes, "a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. 'Weare nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head,' Kafka said. This re~ minded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. 'Oh no,' said Kafka, 'our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.' 'Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.' He smiled. 'Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope-but not for us.'" These words provide a bridge to those extremely strange figures in Kafka, the only ones who have escaped from the family circle and for whom there may be hope. These are not the animals; not even those hybrids or imaginary creatures like the Cat Lamb or Odradek; they all still live under the spell of the family. It is no accident that Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug in his parental home and not somewhere else, and that the peculiar animal which is half kitten, half lamb, is inherited from the father; Odradek likewise is the concern of the father of the family. The "assistants," however, are outside this circle. These assistants belong to a group of figures which recurs through Kafka's entire work. ========== Benjamin. Illuminations

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