Kafka’s Parable, or, Literature Between Past and Future
Supriya Chaudhuri Suhita Sinha Roy Memorial Lecture, Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 9 January 2015. This lecture was delivered in the evening of 9 January, Professor Jasodhara Bagchi having passed away in hospital that morning. It was a long day of great grief and bitterness, ending with this formal, pre-arranged public occasion. For me it was an occasion of profound sadness and double remembrance, a ‘speaking to spirits’, as perhaps all memorial lectures should be. ————————————————————– I was recently asked to lecture on Hannah Arendt, and I found myself re-reading her 1961 book of essays, Between Past and Future, where she quotes this parable from Kafka: He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. Kafka’s parables, says Arendt, ‘unique perhaps in this respect in literature, are real παραβολαί, thrown alongside and around the incident like rays of light which, however, do not illuminate its outward appearance but possess the power of X-rays to lay bare its inner structure that, in our case, consists of the hidden processes of the mind.’ I am not quite sure what Arendt meant by ‘incident’ here, since no actual event is specified: rather, the story itself gives us the structure of an incident which remains partly hypothetical, projected in the parable’s dream-like conclusion. In the tale, an unnamed ‘he’ is pressed forward by an antagonist from behind, and pushed back by an antagonist from the front. He fights both, not unaided, for ‘the first supports him in his fight with the second … and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first.’ Yet, as Kafka says, it is not just a fight between the two antagonists, since ‘he’ too is present, and who really knows what his intentions are? But he has a dream, or a hope – that in a dark night, he would be able to jump out of the line of combat and watch, like an umpire, while the two antagonists fight each other. I will return to this parable and what it appears to illuminate. But let us begin with an obscurity, for the dream presents us with a textual difficulty I have not yet been able to resolve. The story Arendt cites is taken from a set of untitled aphorisms entered in Kafka’s diary between the 6th of January and the 29th of February, 1920. All the sheets on which they were written, except the first, were then torn out of the diary, possibly when he sent his diaries to Milena Jesenská (with whom, as is well known, he formed an intense attachment, and who translated his work into Czech). The ‘Notes from the year 1920’ were included in volume 5 of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Max Brod and published in New York in 1946 by Schocken Verlag, which is the edition Arendt used. It is a revised and expanded version of the first 5 volumes of the Prague edition of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, published in 1935-37 by Heinrich Mercy Sohn. Arendt quotes the German passage in its entirety, and notes that she has slightly modified Willa and Edwin Muir’s English translation, which also appeared in New York in 1946 in a collection named The Great Wall of China (Arendt 227-28): Er hat zwei Gegner: Der erste bedrängt ihn von hinten, vom Ursprung her. Der zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorn. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn nach vorn drängen und ebenso unterstützt ihn der zweite im Kampf mit dem Ersten; denn er treibt ihn dock zurück. So ist es aber nur theoretisch. Denn es sind ja nicht nur die zwei Gegner da, sondern auch noch er selbst, und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten? Immerhin ist es sein Traum, dass er einmal in einem unbewachten Augenblick – dazu gehört allerdings eine Nacht, so finster wi noch keine war – aus der Kampflinie ausspringt und wegen seiner Kampfeserfahrung zum Richter über seine miteinander kämpfenden Gegner erhoben wird. Max Brod’s edition of his friend’s writings was of course notoriously subjective, even idiosyncratic: moreover, Kafka is every editor and textual critic’s dream – or nightmare. So perhaps appropriately, in the new critical edition of Kafka’s works published by S. Fischer Verlag between 1982 and 1999, based on the all the extant manuscripts and early editions, the dream itself – that is, the conclusion to the parable – is missing. I have checked authoritative transcripts of the 1920 Diary, as well as the new translation of the Shorter Works, Volume I, also published under the title of The Great Wall of China by Malcolm Pasley – whose collection of Kafka manuscripts forms the nucleus of the Kafka archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford – and not only are there slight variations in language, but the episode itself ends at ‘und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten?’ (‘and who really knows his intentions?’) Er hat zwei Gegner, der Erste bedrängt ihn von rückwärts vom Ursprung her, der Zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorne. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der Erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn
In Praise of Historical Materialism as a certain Philosophy of Nature
Soumyabrata Choudhury What is an extremely sober and measured account of some of the greatest European philosophers of the 20th century is also a book smelted in the fire of a certain materialism. I will go to the extent of saying, a certain historical materialism. A certain natural-historical materialism – admittedly an enigmatic characterization though not without a trace of irony… I will, in a moment, speak of the work of fire, the exact temperature at which thought moulds and smelts, beyond which temperature thought burns and rages; I will speak of certain traces, unburnt and immaculate, as if glowing with a superior indifference to the inflamed surface of their emergence. But before that, a word in enthusiasm for the fact that such an elusive fire, such an exact book exists! Aniruddha Chowdhury’s Post-deconstructive Subjectivity and History: Phenomenology, Critical Theory and Post-colonial Thought commences with a fluent statement, encompassing a vast range of philosophical materials and operations, on the deconstruction of the history of western metaphysics and the possible dissolution of the Subject determined by this metaphysics as substantial and self-present identity – a deconstruction irreplaceably and disparately pioneered by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Then the book utters a “yet…” . It says, “Yet, the aim of the present work is to argue that the deconstruction is not only not a dissolution of the subject, as it is often opined, but a thinking of the subject, or better, subjectivity otherwise than the transcendental philosophy or even ontology.” (p.1). So the exact question to ask is, what is this “thinking of the subject…otherwise”? To my mind, it is a natural-historical materialist thinking that passes through several nodal points, also called “singular” points in this book, reaching up to the heart of the post-colonial puzzle whether the “subaltern” has access to the position of the ennunciative subject. My unqualified enthusiasm is for the fact that Aniruddha Chowdhury writes a consistently philosophical book with remarkable restraint, maintaining this calm passion in a milieu of thought attuned to the heteronomy, nay, inconsistency of history, an inconsistency that the book affirms. It affirms the thinking of the subject otherwise than metaphysically, hence, heteronomously, inconsistently, historically – and for this exact ‘fiery’ reason, philosophically. Everything hinges on the “yet” of the author which rises up in a kind of schematizing revolt at the exact moment when deconstruction promises – or threatens, depending on your taste – the delirium of a philosophy without the subject, an oceanic aphilosophy as it were. The “yet” interrupts the delirium every time to present the following schema (and here I am schematizing very quickly Aniruddha Chowdhury’s own epic schema): the subject is to be ‘otherwise’ thought, in the post-deconstructive cusp, as obligation, eschatology and natural-history. To this schema corresponds a brilliant constellation in the sky of European philosophy: Heidegger-Levinas-Walter Benjamin. Then come the last two ‘inconsistent’ chapters on Wilson Harris, the Carribean writer from mid 20th century and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the post-colonial Indian critic who provided the earliest passage for the English speaking world to deconstruction in the 1970s with her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. In a moment, I will dwell further on the explicit interest of the ‘inconsistent’ chapters. Suffice it to say that they provide a second ‘non-European’ articulation to the hinge, a second “yet” articulated with the initial one which, in a manner of speaking, interrupts the fundamental (de)constructive interruption launching Chowdhury’s project. But before that it is essential to point out that even within the Great Constellation, the star that is Walter Benjamin emits an ‘inconsistent’ light to make the Constellation tremble whereupon the sky of European philosophy shimmers, darkens, shimmers…This is the light of the notion of “natural-history”. In the chapter on Benjamin, the author prepares for the work of the German thinker’s singular notion by posing, in the light of the earlier chapters on Heidegger’s ‘gathering-abandoning’ of Dasein as a subject of obligation as opposed to being a historical subject, and Levinas’ opposition of eschatology-ethics to history, the following question: “…whether or not historiography can be reconciled, if that is the word, with the singularity and eventness of happening, and yet retain the critical dimension of thought without being totalizing.” (p.87) From the earlier chapter on Heidegger we learnt that Dasein’s authentic temporalization requires a return to its “ownmost” potentiality, which, in turn, means the freeing of its ‘historical’ structures toward a pure listening to the “call” of the irreducible other. This freeing movement frees Dasein towards a true existential history away from mere historical existence. But such existential history is always a structure of ‘co-belonging’ within the element of the pure distance of the Other, that is, a ‘being-with’ in the Other. This taking-place of ‘being-with’ is, peculiarly, the event of an obligated subject in (non) relation to an irreducible Other. The privileged place of this event of obligation is either a kind of “nameless” (Heidegger’s word from Letter on Humanism) discourse, or the ‘name-of-the-fire’ that is Poetry. We then learn about Levinas’ difficulty that Heidegger names the “nameless” too much; he signs the event too much along the contour of the “horizon” of the metaphysical figure of Man. The event then only returns to what it always was, an authentic ground and potentiality for an access and erection of meaning, of “ontological hermeneutics”. Levinas on his part radicalizes the gesture of obligation as the event of the other rather than re-absorb it into the authentic potentiality or capacity of a ‘subject’. To be sure, Aniruddha Chowdhury openly wagers the same radical ‘ethical’ gesture as a movement beyond hermeneutics, as present in Heidegger himself which the latter “disavows”, according to Chowdhury. The main point here however is that the readings and critique express a stake of the thinking of the subject “otherwise” and of the event “beyond being”, that go beyond both historical factuality and existential facticity. Beyond philosophy of history and ontology, a “beyond”, like the earlier “yet”, that philosophy must either incorporate into a superior consistency or
“Mrs. R. P. Sengupta”
Keya Chakravarty (1975)[i] [translated by: Trina Nileena Banerjee] [In 1975, two years before her accidental death at the age of thirty four, Keya Chakravarty, group-theatre actress and long-time member of Nandikar under director Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay, wrote a brief three-page essay called ‘Mrs. R. P. Sengupta’. This is ostensibly not a piece about theatre. It appears, on the surface, to be a record of entirely mundane daily chores of a woman who seems to be exceedingly harassed by the demands of her household activities. However, in the course of just about three pages, ‘Mrs. R. P. Sengupta’ manages to answer several questions about women’s artistic labour in the theatre that were so far deemed unintelligible within the ideological logic of the group theatre itself. Keya makes her most important point perhaps in writing a piece about a theatre actress (namely herself) that seems to have little or nothing to do with theatre. Women’s problems in the theatre have everything to do with their lives outside of it, she seems to suggest; far from being irrelevant, these ‘external’ or ‘personal’ problems determine women’s productivity as artistes/ actresses and must be taken into cognizance in any intended assessment of their creative and political work. This essay was first published in 1975 in the journal ‘Durba’ in the special edition celebrating International Women’s year. It was later reprinted by Nandikar after her death in a commemorative volume called ‘Keyar Boi’ (‘Keya’s Book’, 1981), under the category of ‘Romyorachona’[ii].] ———————————- This is the sixth time I had to get up. In half an hour. That is, in the half an hour that I have sat down to write. The first time it was the milkman, I had to open the front door. My husband could not find his vest, I found it for him. Then it was my neighbour asking for some mustard. There were two phone calls. My husband and my brother-in-law are at home. But there is, of course, no one to pick up the phone but I. The last time I had to get up I felt a little angry. My brother-in-law’s friend came to visit and tea was needed. I have made tea five times since the morning. I will have to sit down and rearrange everything now. I had planned to write about theatre, but my head is full of other thoughts. Perhaps it’s because I had to get up so many times. Why do I have to get up so many times when I sit down to work? But who else will get up? My brother-in-law has his accountancy exams. He sits at home and studies. If there are no exams, he is never at home. ‘He’[iii] wakes up at eight, reads the newspapers while he drinks his morning tea in bed. It gets past nine, he goes for a bath. Then after his food, his college. I don’t think I’ll find the time to bathe today. I woke up at six thirty am. Till nine, I was making and finishing breakfast. Now it’s time for lunch. He doesn’t like to be served by the maid. I feel it strange too. We have started rehearsing a new play. The director says I must learn to sing for this one. But when? When? Where is the time? There is a cook – part-time. This is all in spite of that. It’s after marriage, that girls … but why blame marriage? I had no time even in my father’s house. Father would drink tea without sugar in the mornings, everyone else with sugar, and my grandmother would drink chiretar jawl[iv] on an empty stomach. My brother Poltu would come back from the market and ask for tea. Then there would be his vests, pajamas and undergarments to wash almost every day. Mother had high blood-pressure. It was my responsibility to cook her salt-free meals. Listen, say, Poltu’s examinations. Mine as well. Why would no one ask him to do anything? Because he was a boy? Because he would have a job in the future? Or let’s go back a little further. Poltu was put into an English-medium school. My father had said once, ‘We could have put the girl in one too’, but where was the money? Therefore, I and my neighbourhood’s ‘Saraswati Niketan’. When I finished my B.A., I went for this job interview. I did not get it because I could not speak English. That hurt a lot then. If I had just gone to an English-medium, maybe the job…. But then, father really did not have the money to send both me and Poltu to an English school. To leave the son out for the daughter – but why not? I am the elder one; I have always done better than Poltu at school. Oh, I see! Such a cartload of money would be spent on my wedding, how could one spend more on top of that on my education? Was it that? But no, no … surely my father did not calculate that much. Still, it’s true that my father had to spend a big amount on my wedding. Why? Who had asked him to? Was it in order to protect his social ‘prestige’ amongst relatives? Of course, he did not have to pay any cash as dowry. Other girls’ fathers have to. Why? Does cooking and cleaning for our husband’s family all our lives not pay for the cost of our upkeep? Even a maid to take care of the children must be paid a salary. Oh, I have to go. Someone’s knocking on the door again. The peon. Just delivered a registered letter. Mr. and Mrs. R. P. Sengupta. It feels very strange when I see something like this written on an envelope. I feel as if I am not there, I am just not there anywhere at all.
Disruptive Noumena
Siddharth Soni I. Linda Gascrif’s visual poem appears in a September 2005 edition of the Times Literary Supplement: “… I give you blank space { } to protest.” Only a few weeks from then, a Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had run a series of cartoons that depicted the Muhammad in a satirical manner. Islam has always had a strong tradition of aniconism, and the cartoons were expeditiously labeled as blasphemous, based on which a fatwa was issued against the cartoonists. The incident ensued a fashionable debate between creative expression (or expression per se) and inclemency of religious (and social) proscriptions. The newspaper denounced the reaction to their cartoons claiming that they were not to disenfranchise Muslim population or to belittle god, but to make them an equal part of the Danish satire tradition. A bigger debate about self-censorship in the modern world was also born. Deeper south in the restless Israel-Palestine, poetry is impulsive and loud, but manages to be theologically blind, to articulate a phenomenal depth of personal and political experiences that are forced upon by circumstances of violent conflict. A deadening struggle of ‘being’ becomes the thematic preoccupation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry: “I have a name without a title / and the color of poetry is coal-black.” Even when the poetry is not about Islam or Judaism, or when its religious convictions are oversighted, it remains incontestably political, as if its aspiration is to ‘do’ something for proper peace between Israel and Palestine. An echo of the same kind of aspiration is found in the literature written in the earliest of our three considerations: Jewish novelists, poets and war-reporters from the World War II and cold war era, whose trusts and sympathies were inexorably linked to the Jewish in the Soviet Union. Their work glistened with reality, delaminated Soviet practices and demanded emancipation of the Soviet Jewry. The politburo found the political nature of their work so threatening that Mikhail Suslov explained to Vassily Grossman; the ideological chief at politburo to the novelist who spearheaded the Jewish Anti-Fascist Movement: “Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us?… Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?” 1 At some point, what was incipiently only a kind of ‘resistance literature,’ becomes in an unwarrantable manner, a kind of ‘resistance towards literature’ – a kind of censorship. It is essential to outline what behavioral counteraction is responsible for creating that ‘resistance towards literature’. Is that counteraction explainable in a heteronomous world? Is censorship ethical? To answer these questions, it is also critical to enquire what created the action for the counteraction to be made possible: What is the nature of this resistance literature? It may be worthwhile to recall here those ideas of enlightenment that reasoned for freedom of expression with a certain litheness and tact. One of its principal tacticians, Immanuel Kant is relevant for a modern trial yet again. We will rephrase and transfer our question to him: Is it possible to fancy absolute freedom of expression in the modern world, as it involves essentially uncensored views on religion, state and society? Does the Kantian freedom of expression depend on its ability to resonate with what domain of consciousness, private or public, it’s applied to? If so, is that freedom any freedom? The readily acceptable answers are no, yes and it isn’t. In Kantian terms, an argument henceforward will introduce a case for the counteraction as due to disruptive noumena– a definitive category that could be appended to every such action that is a political expression not based upon mathematical or logical reality, and that disrupts or disagrees with a norm or an ideological touchstone. Danish cartoons in Jyllands-Posten,Darwish’s poetry and Soviet Jewish literature are all examples of political expressions that both shake an ideology, and is based out of pure intellectual intuition. 2 All kinds of expressions against a norm or an ideology is generated by what Kant would call alterations in someone’s perception or “sense-cognizance towards its object.” 3 Knowledge for him, was a “phenomenon” that was built upon “non-objectionable” (and reasoned) derivatives of interactions with anything that appeared to the senses. This knowledge was derivative, and was therefore based on a priori (or what was precedently composed). A judgment of reason, thereupon, became inapplicable to everything that was in the realm of “indescribable” or “metaphysical” which he called “noumenon.” 4 All noumena were unknowable as they were not observable occurrences but “ideas of a philosophical mind.” 5 Poetry, pamphlets, cartoons, novels, critical theory and almost every discipline under philosophy become noumenal actualities of the world, to which the salient ‘non-objectionableness’ of his definition of human knowledge is irrelative. Even by Kant’s own rigorous trials of human understanding, the deficiency of his enlightenment theory to explain what to do with polemical judgments of reason with unorthodox-intellectual-political-expression, or disruptive noumena, is the bane of why absolute freedom of expression is an unyielding enterprise. An interesting observation here is that Schopenhauer, one of Kant’s foremost critics also fails to answer how a state should deal with disruptive noumena. However, he undertakes a facultative project to establish his meaning of the term ‘noumena’ against Kant’s: “But it was just this understood difference between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception that [Kant] ignored: What is thought (noumenon) to what is perceived reality (phenomenon).[…] Kant, who […] entirely neglected the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his things-in-themselves and his phenomena.” 6 Our definition of ‘noumenon’ consorts more closely with Schopenhauer than with Kant, and remarkably so, as ideological exercises in poetry, novels and cartoons are inarguable to be seen as ‘things-in-themselves’ since their antecedental existence isn’t defined. There was no ‘poetry as black as coal’ before Darwish thought