The Revelatory Texts of Kafka and Proust

I am starting to get into the swing of the one sentence a day translation project.  While it seems to be cluttering up my other blog posts quickly driving all-too-important blog posts down into the depths of scrolling where no will venture I will (for now) continue to pop them up here.  In any event, I find myself fascinated by the daily unfolding of these two writers.  What intrigues me is the stark contrast in the navigational world offered to the reader.  Proust from the outset allows existence to pour out its possibility shifting between dream-life and waking-life, exploring relationship with objects, consider light, sound, memory, clarity, obscurity, etc.  All is phenomena but phenomena is more.  Kafka on the other hand is revelatory in his limitations.  He offers a stranger we don’t know, a narrator we don’t know, a room they are in, an adjoining room with other people we don’t know, a predictable land-lady who is now suddenly unpredictable.  Revelation is a mystery in its depth according to Proust.  Revelation is a mystery on its surface according to Kafka.  Both draw us forward because we know, we know certainly that something will be revealed.  But just as importantly both styles instill in us an equal certainly that what they reveal is not all . . . there is more.

Irony and Change; Or, Why Porn is F**king Boring (Or is that Other Way Around?)

Kierkegaard begins the second part of The Concept of Irony exploring the place of irony in shifting or changing of historical eras.

Catholicism was the given actuality for the generation living at the time of the Reformation, and yet it was also the actuality that no longer had validity as such.  Consequently, one actuality collides here with another actuality. (260)

Kierkegaard goes on to explore the difference between the ironist on one hand and the prophet and hero on the other.  The prophet articulates presentiments and the hero battles for the new over the old but the ironist perceives the old “in all its imperfection” (261).

For the ironic subject, the given actuality has lost its validity entirely; it has become for him an imperfect form that is a hindrance everywhere.  But on the other hand, he does not possess the new. . . . He is the one who must pass judgment.  In one sense the ironist is certainly prophetic, because he is continually pointing to something impending, but what it is he does not know.  He is prophetic, but his position and situation are the reverse of the prophet’s. The prophet walks arm in arm with his age, and from this position he glimpses what is coming. . . . The ironist, however, has stepped out of line with his age, has turned around and faced it.  That which is hidden from him, lies behind his back, but the actuality he so antagonistically confronts is what he must destroy; upon this he focuses his burning gaze (261).

The negative work of irony here is not of particular phenomena but of the whole, infinite absolute negativity.  Here Kierkegaard begins to drawn heavily on Hegel noting that the ‘negative’ in Hegel’s system is ‘irony’ in actual history.  He then moves on to articulate a position that sounds very much like the Hegel/Kierkegaard synthesis that Zizek promotes.

[S]ince the ironist does not have the new in his power, we might ask how, then, does he destroy the old, and the answer to that must be: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself; but it should be remembered nevertheless that the new principle is present within him [potentially], as possibility.  But by destroying actuality by means of actuality itself, he enlists in the service of world irony.  In his Geschichte der Philosophie, Hegel says: “All dialectic allows as valid that which is to be valid as if it were valid, allows inner destruction to develop in it – the universal irony of the world” (262). [emphasis mine]

The means of destruction are provided by what is to be destroyed.  Let me take an example that may be more or less controversial depending on my reader.  I grew up with pornography being a dark, shrouded and heinous sin.  In my evangelical youth I remember various works emerging to deal with this problem.  Pornography was treated like acid.  To even inadvertently cast a less-than-pure glance over a cheerleader as you (religiously) watched football was to risk being splashed with its scarring spew.  Eye poison.

Now I can appreciate the need to address pornography on a number of levels but I began to see this approach heaping supernatural power on nearly every form of possible sexual expression.  Now for any of you wander off the straight and narrow path of internet browsing (perhaps finding less-than-legal sites for sampling music or whatever) it does not take much to come across some pretty hardcore stuff.  First glances raise all that historical baggage but then I actually looked at what was being promoted.  How incredibly unattractive and downright boring this stuff is.  I can see why the industry has to be the fastest evolving in terms of technology and expression because it plays out so quickly.  In other words the seeds of its destruction are within.  I am not looking to downplay the reality of addictions.  I mean getting drunk becomes pretty boring as well.  The question may be to help people into a space where they can see clearly what is at play and name it for themselves as opposed to having someone else name it for them.  Or at least to understand where these names come from and who is invested in them.

Now perhaps we can move on to economics . . .

Du Côté de Chez Swann – Day 18

J’avais oublié cet événement pendant mon sommeil, j’en retrouvais le souvenir aussitôt que j’avais réussi à m’éveiller pour échapper aux mains de mon grand-oncle, mais par mesure de précaution j’entourais complètement ma tête de mon oreiller avant de retourner dans le monde des rêves.

I had forgotten that event during my sleep, I rediscovered the memory immediately as I managed to wake myself up in order to escape the hands of my grand-uncle, but as a measure of precaution I would bury completely my head in my pillow before returning into the world of dreams.

Du Côté de Chez Swann – Day 17

Ou bien en dormant j’avais rejoint sans effort un âge à jamais révolu de ma vie primitive, retrouvé telle de mes terreurs enfantines comme celle que mon grand-oncle me tirât par mes boucles et qu’avait dissipée le jour,–date pour moi d’une ère nouvelle,–où on les avait coupées.

Or well in sleep I joined effortlessly an age forever gone from my earlier life, to be found in one of my childhood terrors like the one of my great-uncle grasping my locks which were cleared that day – the date for me is a new era – in which they were cut.

Der Prozeß – Day 17 – Ambiguity?

Immerhin faßte es der Fremde so auf, denn er sagte: »Wollen Sie nicht lieber hierbleiben?«

In any event the stranger took it as such, because he said, “Would it not be better for you to stay here?”

The German seems simply enough but since I am so lousy at it I am not sure how ambiguous the language itself is trying to be.  The context is certainly highly ambiguous.

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony – Mid-Point Reflections

I have to say that The Concept of Irony has been a pleasant surprise.  It has provided a sorely needed introduction to Socrates.  Kierkegaard’s continual engagement with Hegel has also been helpful.  Surprisingly this engagement is primarily positive.  Hegel is an authoritative source to which Kierkegaard consistently appeals.

The method of Socrates is a thorough-going negativity.  All is clearing away, nothing is planted or established.  Kierkegaard reflects on the role of Socrates’ daimon as enabling a shift away from both state and religious control.  The daimon is not to be equated with consciousness but is a sort of necessary shift for the possibility of individuality.  Instead of state law or religious oracle there is now an internal / external authority.

Instead of the oracle, Socrates now has his daimon.  The daimonian in this case now lies in the transition from the oracle’s external relation to the individual to the complete inwardness of freedom and, as still being in this transition, is a subject for representation.  [citing Hegel] . . . “The daimon is not Socrates himself, nor his opinion, nor his conviction, but it is something unconscious; Socrates is impelled.” (163-164)

What is important for Kierkegaard is that the daimon only warns.  It, again, offers no positive content.  It remains negative.  Socrates brings nothing but silence and space, the vanishing point.  This is irony.

[Socrates’] whole position, therefore, rounds itself off in the infinite negativity that turns out to be negative in relations to both a previous and a subsequent development, although in another sense it is positive in both relations – that is, infinitely ambiguous.  Against the established order of things, substantial life of the state, his whole life was a protest. (218)

With regard to morality the good then becomes the process of becoming and not arriving.

There are clear and strong seeds and outlines here of what Kierkegaard will take up in later writings.  What interests me will be how and if he explicitly addresses his move away from Hegel and beyond Socrates (in Christ).  He seems to maintain the role of negativity.  There is high view of clearing away and creating space and yet joined to that is the possibility of the ‘leap’ which seems to allow for positivity that is not trapped in a Platonic or Hegelian idealism.  This text is far more invigorating than I expected.

I have an unusually high amount of free time this weekend so hopefully I can finish off this volume shortly.

A Faithful Life?

I notice a tension between a substantive conception or articulation of a faithful life on the one hand and its entirely contextual and unexpressable nature on the other.  The notion of the substantial reality of faith is most often employed as a negative presence.  This is why my life is not faithful.  The most common refrain being that I live in the midst of and am embedded in powers and principalities that benefit the few at the cost of the many.  In Yoderian language I cannot say that I live independently of these powers.  Therefore my life is not faithful. But I can look to the ungraspable notion of grace and hope in apocalyptic action (of which I seek and participate).  So maybe my life is not faithful but God is faithful.  I am internally in contradiction.  I live in tension.  I would argue, though, that this tension is not a creative dialectic but a binding and entangling cord.  It is only a negativity.  Perhaps a negativity that will serve a purpose or has a place but it is a negativity nonetheless.

I think of a family I know.  She works and receives an increasingly rare middle-class salary.  They have bought a modest house in a ‘bad’ but developing neighbourhood.  He suffers from mental illness and requires stability but is still unable to work.  They have a young girl who he cares for.  This is not a dramatic home (well I cannot attest for everything that goes on there) but also not an easy life.  They discuss and strive for faithful choices in daily life.  I would characterize this house as faithful in the sense that Jean Vanier speaks of when he refers to enough stability for healing and growth and enough chaos and uncertainty to keep life open.

My life is not much different.  But I struggle some days even to conceive of their life as faithful never mind my own.  Negativity can always appeal to a lower (or higher) denominator.  This is binding, indebting and imprisoning.  It is not Gospel.  But I don’t know another way forward.  Is this process I am in necessary . . . is it helpful?  What would freedom mean?  Can I enact that freedom (who will rescue me from this body of death . . . )

Am I stuck in morality?  Do I need to move beyond good and evil as they say?  There is not enough nuance in the world to account for its complexity, at least in terms of possibility.  Who then is the righteous fool?  Who is the faithful one?

Der Prozeß – Day 16

Es fiel ihm zwar gleich ein, daß er das nicht hätte laut sagen müssen und daß er dadurch gewissermaßen ein Beaufsichtigungsrecht des Fremden anerkannte, aber es schien ihm jetzt nicht wichtig.

He noticed immediately that indeed, he had not needed to say this out loud and that in so doing, in a sense, he acknowledged the authority of the stranger, but it did not seem important now.