From Freud to Kafka by Refabert Philippe;

Author:Refabert, Philippe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

PART II

… Japanese jugglers climb on a ladder whose base is not resting on the ground, but on the raised soles of a man half lying down, so that the ladder is not leaning against a wall, but rises straight up in the air. I cannot reproduce this feat, and not only because my ladder has no soles.

—Franz Kafka, The Kafka Diaries (1948)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Failure of the paradoxical system (1): before the Law

He has discovered the Archimedean principle, but has turned it against himself; evidently, it was only on this condition that he was permitted to discover it.

—Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (2006)

The soul murder that occurred on the deserted city street is a perfect crime. There were no witnesses and the victim has no choice but to become an accomplice, like it or not, to the crime committed against him. Such an event finds no psychic place of inscription that could testify to it, does not have the right to exist, and cannot be recognised. In certain familial configurations—as illustrated by the case of Daniel Paul Schreber1—the child cannot turn to either parent because they form what Melanie Klein so aptly calls a “combined parent.”2

Kafka is the writer who describes most accurately, and in the most colourful terms, the feat that has to be performed by a person who must maintain the symptom serving as a vicarious paradoxical foundation, a foundation he himself constructed without knowing it. Kafka shows what exploits such a person has to accomplish in order to hold together the blend of positivity and negativity he himself created out of dire necessity, how such a person exhausts himself living an existence whose conditions he must simultaneously set in place.

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at the moment.” Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stops to peer through the gateway into the interior … (Kafka, 1915, p. 3)

The year when Freud illustrated his conception of repression using a scene where a visitor who wants to break down the door is confronted by a doorkeeper determined to prevent him from doing so, Kafka was putting forth3 the notion that closure is not a psychosomatic configuration universally acquired at birth, and that the fate of K, the hero of his book, which begins to unfold in 1913 and which seems never to reach closure, is to confront openness (Robert, 2012).4 We see Kafka’s proposition as being related to the conditions necessary for the establishment and unfolding of a normal psychic or psychosomatic process. This process finds its equivalent in Freud’s parable of repression.

In Kafka’s story, the doorkeeper stands aside and the man leans forward to look inside.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.