Thinking With Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze by Gerhard Richter

Author:Gerhard Richter [Richter, Gerhard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, Philosophy, Movements, Critical Theory, Social Science, Sociology, Social Theory
ISBN: 9780823284047
Google: VuuaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Fordham UP
Published: 2019-07-02T23:08:39.638885+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

The Literary Artwork between Word and Concept

Adorno and Agamben Reading Kafka

The poet W. H. Auden once memorably averred that if one had “to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.”1 If this assessment still rings true today, it is because Kafka’s relation to our age is one not only of a certain spirit of the times, a cultural episteme, a given political configuration, or a certain Lebensgefühl, a feeling of life, in the experiential orbit of an alienated modernity. It also pertains with particular force to the ways in which Kafka’s writing incessantly takes as one of its main categories of reflection the very question of the philosophical interpretability of what we call literature. What is one to make, on the level of the concept, of a text that begins with a protagonist named Gregor Samsa who awakens one morning to the realization that he has been inexplicably transformed into a monstrous vermin, even an unthing (“Ungeziefer”), as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? And what kinds of philosophically interpretive thoughts are elicited by a related scene of awakening, in which the character Josef K., a high-ranking bank official, finds himself unexpectedly detained by two officers waiting in his apartment? “Someone must have slandered Josef K.,” Kafka famously begins The Trial, “for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”2 It is as if such scenes figuratively staged the experience of a baffled reader who awakens to a refractory text that he or she is now called upon to interpret—without a reliable key or a hermeneutically stable frame of reference. The reader, like Josef K. himself, comes to inhabit a certain narrative disruption. As the German writer Martin Walser rightly reminds us with regard to The Trial, the “event begins only at the moment when the disruption occurs.”3 In this state of disorientation and hesitation, the drawn-out trial of reading, as well as the exigent process of reading itself, commence—a double meaning that is encoded in the German title of Kafka’s novel, Der Process, which means both “trial” and “process.” But to whom or what does one awaken when reading a literary text from a philosophical perspective? And is this form of awakening not also a way of dreaming—that is, of learning to follow the singular dream-logic of an artwork?

In a reflection dating from the eight intensely creative months (September 1917 through April 1918) that Kafka spent at his sister Ottla’s house in the Bohemian town of Zürau, he writes:

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.4

[Die Kunst fliegt um die Wahrheit, aber mit der entschiedenen Absicht, sich nicht zu verbrennen. Ihre Fähigkeit besteht darin, in der dunklen Leere einen Ort zu finden,

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