Franz Kafka by Stanley Corngold

Author:Stanley Corngold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 2017-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Consternation: The Anthropological Moment in Prose Fiction (Cervantes, Flaubert, Kafka)

By the “anthropological moment” I mean the moment when one human being, to his or her consternation, perceives another as inhuman, while struggling to conclude that this strangeness is part of a design. The struggle aims to escape consternation—“a sudden, alarming amazement or dread that results in . . . paralyzing dismay.”1 In the anthropological moment the object that alarms and amazes is another human being. The subject suffering consternation seeks relief, even by violent means. If the meaningful design is grasped, relief from interpersonal pain comes with the “negative pleasure” of the sublime.2 With the waning of the true sublime—“a moribund aesthetic”—the anthropological moment gains sway.3

Thus described, the anthropological moment corresponds to an empirical moment in the practice of anthropology, which describes cultures remotest from the observer’s own while struggling to produce a logic of this other humanity. The moment harbors the fundamental power of philosophical reflection; it breaks down the observer’s idea of the human and makes a natural prejudgment a matter for wonder. According to Heidegger, this power should not be confused with what German authors call philosophical anthropology, which is supposed to make harmless the radical strangeness of human beings to one another and to themselves. It is too sociable a science. In his book on Kant, Heidegger terms philosophical anthropology “a reservoir of essential philosophical problems”: that is, a place where these problems are stored in forms in which they have been settled for small stakes.4 The movement of Heidegger’s thought—the so-called Kehre or turning from the existential project of Being and Time to the fundamental ontology of the later work, to a thinking of being as language—is based on “ [an]other [mode] of thinking that abandons subjectivity,” in which “every kind of [philosophical] anthropology and all subjectivity of man as subject . . . [are] left behind.”5 I also point up a moment of “abandonment,” when intersubjective dialogue in literature is left behind for a moment that contests the power of subjects to understand language, including literary language.

A genuine anthropology would be one in which hermeneutics and the impossibility of hermeneutics contend. The predicament of the consternated interpreter is schizophrenic. Derrida writes in a Heideggerean manner about Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytical study of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry that the work affords “an exemplary access to the essence of schizophrenia in general: this essence of schizophrenia is not a psychological or anthropological fact available to the determined sciences called psychology or anthropology.”6 Lacanian psychoanalysis, which aims to be an undetermined science, provokes between analyst and patient (as Stuart Schneiderman explains) this very schizophrenic consternation:

Whereas normal conversation attempts to gain some sense of mutual understanding leading to communication, [Lacanian] psychoanalysis tries precisely to break down communication and whatever understanding the analysand has already arrived at. . . . Lacan, like most analysts, listened to something other than what was said; he listened as if the remarks that were about him were really addressed to someone else and as if the remarks of the analysand that were supposed to be about himself were really about another.

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