Vivian Liska

Neighbors, Foes and Other Communities: Kafka and Zionism

In his diary, Kafka writes of this “Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft . . . in dem ich mich angesiedelt . . . habe” [borderland between isolation and community in which I have settled].2 This borderland between solitude and community was the only country Kafka ever truly inhabited. His stories, letters, and diary entries draw and redraw the contours of this land, revealing at its borders two extreme modes of being in the world: a condition of isolation and hermetic self-enclosure on the one hand, and a state of total group cohesion on the other. Emblematic images of both are among the most poignant elements of Kafka’s legacy: here the one,“lonely like Franz Kafka,” excluded, without protection and at the remotest distance of human contact; there, more terrifying still, the many locked into each other, identical and interchangeable, constituting opaque instances of impenetrable unity. The borderland between loneliness and communal life is made up of Kafka’s longings in both directions, and of his alternating flights from one to the other. In his life, Kafka experiences this land as paralysis, emptiness, and living death. In his work, however, this region transforms into a language of force and movement that runs up against borders, confounding inside and outside, same and other, I and we. In Kafka’s writing, the lifeless desert is not the area in between, but that which lies beyond both borders: the most radical forms of Einsamkeit and of Gemeinschaft, autonomous separateness and homogeneous unison.

Introduction: The Instance of Trauma

At the instance of trauma, the purpose of this collection of essays might be described as the transmission of a charge. ‘Charge’, because its rich semantic modulations economically indicate the uncomfortable nature of this matter, involving the acceptance of commitment, care, duty, energy and exhortation as well as the suspicion of inappropriate and unacceptable appropriation. On the one hand, the charge is claimed – with varying degrees of shamelessness or sheepishness – as a surge of the power, or even a deployment of this power, that ought to be recognised as the proper motivating force of literary – or cultural – scholarship and teaching; on the other hand, the charge is voiced as an allegation of misplaced motive levelled at literature’s – or culture’s – self-appointed hermeneutic homilists. As far as the study and teaching of literature is concerned (which is also to say we’ll stop adding ‘or culture’, as if culture could be added or subtracted or indeed chosen at will), this divided state of affairs bespeaks the fact that literary studies – provided they are concerned with (or even involved in) the interpretation (or even the reading) of literature – are a practice haunted by the prescriptive. And one of the sites of this haunting in contemporary criticism – a space in which this haunting is under construction and investigation – is trauma studies. In the following pages we try to briefly indicate some salient features of this site, in a sketchy attempt to place the study of trauma within the genealogies of, especially, literary scholarship today.

Parricidal Autobiographies Sarah Kofman between Theory and Memory

When the French philosopher Sarah Kofman committed suicide in 1994 she left behind an impressive oeuvre in which both the autobiographical genre and the treatment of women play a central role. Her theoretical reections on both topics situate themselves in the interstices between psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstruction and share a common concern: the respect of alterity in all its guises. Kofmans resistance to the authoritative claim of the retrospective closure underlying traditional autobiographies is closely related to her celebration of an e ®criture parricide, a mode of writing which undoes the repression of multiplicity and otherness. Shortly before her death Kofman published an autobiographical account of her own childhood years after the deportation and death of her father in a concentration camp. This article addresses the striking discrepancies between the theoretical positions Kofman defends throughout her philosophical writings and the autobiographical turn of her own last words.

The Birth of the Poetess from the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: Else Lasker-Schüler's Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads (The nights of Tino from Baghdad) is an iridescent work, combining prose and poetry, the sublime and the grotesque, and the autobiographical and the fantastic. Critics have often regarded it as an immature early work. One of the first doctoral theses on the poetess remarked that one could indeed “write a commentary on the Nächte as on Faust,” but that “such a commentary would be unnecessary for literary studies” (Goldstein 12).1 What is considered “necessary” changes with the times, however, and already implies an interpretation: whereas the postwar period “needed” the restorative eternalizing of the poetess as a conciliatory figure of redemption, the seventies demanded the debunking of this mystification, and the eighties required a reading of her works as an example of feminist writing. Currently, as context-oriented cultural studies presents a challenge to the close study of literary texts, it is timely to see her work as a display of innovative poetics in which the power of literature unfolds its critical and creative potential. In this perspective, the Nächte, in which a self-reflexive writing style meets a performative autopoiesis, proves to be an early manifestation of the avant-garde that is as subversive of aesthetic conventions as it is selfcritical of the avant-garde’s own revolutionary confidence. The work

Kafka and the universal

entity, whose anonymous omnipresence K. immediately feels yet also rejects as inacceptable, inescapable, unjust, and merciless. In other words, there is no outside the law in the case of K. “Before the Law” is the law. The law does not accept a beyond where its power is neutralized or suspended. All ambiguities stem from this “not beyond.” The law is as much external as it is internal; it is as much the instance of an accusation whose authority K. is unable to undo as it is the object of his desire. K.’s strivings to claim his freedom and to prove his innocence before the court, and his laziness or distractedness are equal effects of the omnipresence of the law. The indistinctness of K.’s desire and responsibility becomes especially evident in the scenes of his attempts to take responsibility for his trial, attempts which are time and again disturbed by erotic escapes with women he meets (apparently by accident) in the immediate proximity of the instances of authority: these include the woman of the examining magistrate in the session of the empty courtroom; the nurse Leni tending to the ill lawyer whom K.’s uncle has requested to defend K. before the court; the hunchbacked girl who is close to the painter who is asked to paint the judges of the court. In these scenes, K.’s approach to the court’s authority is each time mediated by the presence of a woman who seems, to K., to be familiar with the instances of the court, yet who also attracts and seduces him, precisely because of his being accused. It is the same position of the accused that both leads him to look for support in regard to the inaccessible court’s authority and renders him the chosen object of an erotic desire; hence, the distinction between K.’s interest in the court and his erotic attraction becomes unclear. In his conversation with the woman of the magistrate, K.’s intention to plead his innocence before the court is easily substituted by another aim: And probably there could be no more fitting revenge on the Examining Magistrate and his henchmen, than to wrest this woman from them and take her himself. Then some night the Examining Magistrate, after long and arduous labor on his lying reports about K., might come to the woman’s bed and find it empty. Empty because she had gone off with K., because the woman now standing in the window, that supple, voluptuous warm body under the coarse heavy, dark dress, belonged to K. and to K. alone.13 The indistinctiveness between the intention to prove his innocence and the intention of his erotic desire can also be shown in a reverse way, as when K. contem13 Franz Kafka, The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, revised and with additional materials translated by E.M. Butler, Vintage Books, New York 1969, 70–71. Desire and Responsibility: The Case of K. 141 plates profiting from his arrest by exploiting it as a means to seduce his flatmate, Fräulein Bürstner.14 However, the ambiguity is not restricted to K.’s unfortunate position with regard to the authority of the court. The Trial is not just a narrative about the double bind of the protagonist’s behavior in a world ruled by an abstract, omnipresent law. The law’s authority is itself represented as the origin of that ambiguity, in that it is both (and each through the other) the instance that accuses and the object of erotic desire. The painter shows K. the portrait of a judge that he is painting. He explains that it is a picture of justice, “actually it is Justice and the goddess of Victory in one” and that he has to paint it according to the instructions given by the court: “my instructions were to paint it like that.”15 The picture attests the relations between the painter and the judges of the court, and these relations guarantee the authenticity of the representation as required by the court. Yet the painting is not the representation of a general idea of justice; rather, it is the portrait of a single man: “their superiors give them permission to paint them like that. Each one of them gets precise instructions how he may have his portrait painted.”16 However, upon looking closer, K. realizes that the figure resembles “a goddess of the Hunt in full cry”: “But the figure of Justice was left bright except for an almost imperceptible touch of shadow; that brightness brought the figure sweeping right into the foreground and it no longer suggested the goddess of Justice, or even the goddess of Victory, but looked exactly like a goddess of the Hunt in full cry.”17 The ambiguity is not only that the authority of the judge is represented by a goddess and that the representation of the goddess of Justice is so easily transformed into the representation of the goddess of Hunt; what is more important is that the court’s authority authorizes these ambiguities. This authority installs simultaneously a law of justice that accuses and a law of desire that attracts, a law of justice as a law of erotic desire. Being accused is being in search of an erotic substitution. From this, it follows that the court and all its representatives are in the ban of a radical, unresolvable ambiguity. The girls and women whom K. encounters in his attempts to make contact with the court are time and again considered to be trustworthy guides to the representatives of the court: “Thanks to her [the hunchback], he was able to make straight for the right door.”18 Yet, in their bodily 14 Cf. Kafka, The Trial, 29–38. 15 Kafka, The Trial, 182. 16 Kafka, The Trial, 183. 17 Kafka, The Trial, 184. 18 Kafka, The Trial, 178.

Winged Words and Wounded Voices: Geoffrey Hartman on Midrash and Testimony

Geoffrey Hartman’s distinctive contribution to Jewish Studies encompasses two separate spheres—a reflection on testimony, poetry, and culture after the Holocaust, as well as an exploration of the Jewish textual tradition, more particularly Midrashic commentary. While seemingly unrelated, Hartman’s writings in the two domains display striking similarities. Both bodies of texts are informed by a tension between two forces: on the one hand an attraction towards an unnamable absolute that eludes representation, disrupts the quotidian, and escapes human grasp, and on the other a humanizing impulse turned towards the unintelligible, the moderate, and the concrete that embraces the impure diversity of everyday life. A reconstruction of the oscillation between these two poles in Hartman’s “Jewish” writings will focus on the intersection between his idea of Judaism and the role of literature and commentary in invoking an intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical intensity without succumbing to the totalizing dangers of the ecstatic and the sublime.

Walter Benjamin's Dialectics of Attentiveness

Walter Benjamins literary, phenomenological, and analytical reflections on the concept of attentiveness reveal how distinctly his critical thinking was attuned to new forms of perception that arose from the cultural and aesthetic transformations taking place in the early twentieth century. Challenging existing distinctions between different modes of attentiveness—mainly absorption and concentration—he explores a radical form of attentiveness that enlists unexpected components, such as distraction or the power of habit. Tracing the development of a critical approach to the concept from the early to the late works, this article provides insights into Benjamins alternative idea of attentiveness, one that emerges from a dialectics of opposites and is aligned with a “physical presence of mind” (“leibhaftige Geistesgegenwart”).

What does the Veil know

What does the veil know but will not tell us directly? This phrasing may sound like an odd personification—the veil is not a person and cannot know anything—but for the moment I would like the question and the figure of speech just to cross your mind, like an epigraph or a haunting melody. Against this background music, we can reexamine how we define knowledge, knowledge by experience or personal acquaintance, knowledge as awareness of facts, knowledge as an understanding of patterns of relations, and realize that the veil insists, knows that there is more to it than we can ever know about it.

Upon Revisiting—the Veil

The veil is one, it divides into two, it occupies the place of a third, and offers the observer the position of a fourth. But is the veil one? Does it partition in two, since it generates relations as much as it divides? Not taking up much space, it surely does not occupy a place, be it a “third.” And does it allow for an observer’s “fourth” position, or any position at all?

A Travel Guide to Palestine. Walter Benjamin in Israel

Walter Benjamin never reached Palestine. It is doubtful that he ever looked at the travel guide he mentions in his letter to Scholem and even more uncertain whether he would have enjoyed it if he had. Benjamin never had the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the land that Scholem had made his home and, unsuccessfully, tried to depict to Benjamin in his letters. Yet, piecemeal and belatedly, Benjamin’s work has arrived there; and it endures. One can only imagine his surprise if he heard that his thoughts had become prominent in modern Israel – albeit among a limited number of academics, intellectuals, and artists – and that he would eventually be invoked by some as a guide to an imagined Palestine that is not only unlike what he could have seen in 1924, but is also very different from anything to be seen there today. “If I were in Palestine, it is quite possible that things would look completely different.” 2 This sentence, written by Benjamin in 1931 in a letter to Scholem, is part of a lengthy and somewhat apologetic explanation of his commitment to communism, a response to Scholem’s attempt to “prevent [him] from hanging the red flag from his window.” 3 Benjamin concedes that if he were in Palestine, he would not need to become a communist since there are “totally different methods of unambiguously differentiating yourself from the bourgeoisie