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The Yield is a once-in-a-generation reinterpretation of the oeuvre of Franz Kafka. At the same time, it is a powerful new entry in the debates about the supposed secularity of the modern age. Kafka is one of the most admired writers of the last century, but this book presents us with a Kafka few will recognize. It does so through a fine-grained analysis of the three hundred "thoughts" the writer penned near the end of World War I, when he had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Since they were discovered after Kafka's death, the meaning of the so-called "Zürau aphorisms" has been open to debate. Paul North's elucidation of what amounts to Kafka's only theoretical work shows them to contain solutions to problems Europe has faced throughout modernity. Kafka offers responses to phenomena of violence, discrimination, political repression, misunderstanding, ethnic hatred, fantasies of technological progress, and the subjugation of the worker, among other problems. Reflecting on secular modernity and the theological ideas that continue to determine it, he critiques the ideas of sin, suffering, the messiah, paradise, truth, the power of art, good will, and knowledge. Kafka's controversial alternative to the bad state of affairs in his day? Rather than fight it, give in. Developing some of Kafka's arguments, The Yield describes the ways that Kafka envisions we can be good by "yielding" to our situation instead of striving for something better.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804796699 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2015 |
| Series: | Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Yield
Kafka's Atheological Reformation
By Paul North
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9669-9
CHAPTER 1
§ Introduction
1. Atheology
When a historical category loses its meaning and threatens to disappear, an opportunity arises that has a strange consequence. The category "Jew" in middle Europe during the first quarter of the twentieth century is an example of such a threatened category with its strange consequence. While the term "Jew" certainly continued to refer to a group of living individuals and was used by lovers and haters of them alike, its meaning, for many complex reasons, had for some time — since the Jewish Enlightenment at least — been becoming too diverse to signify one thing. All sides clung to the category with renewed force, however, despite or perhaps because of its splintering meaning. In what David Suchoff has recently called "the hidden openness of the tradition," the strange consequence was that it also became possible to reinterpret the category altogether. Since "Judaism" in Central Europe had become hard to parse, and many Jews who held on to the category often had, in point of fact, little or no experience with Judaism, their interpretations of it were precisely not grounded in the tradition. These Judaisms were not wholly, and often not even necessarily, "Jewish."
Some got their Judaism from books, some from personal experience of particular sects, and some, or so it seems now, got it largely from their imaginations. Franz Rosenzweig was in part such a figure: he "converted" to Judaism from assimilation, and his conversion involved inventing a highly elaborate theological system with no real precedent in Jewish history so that he could go back to "his" religion via an imaginative reconstruction of some thought complexes from German idealism. Consciously or not, for some of these figures, the tradition became available all of a sudden as source material for recreating what never was, and the montage work of putting it together also often brought other traditions, other doctrines, even ones that had previously been sworn enemies, back onto the drawing board.
Rosenzweig is a conspicuous example of what you do in the strange event of historical weakenings and emptyings of categories, in this case the category "religion." He ultimately rescues and reinvents a kind of religious practice by means of a highly formalized theology. We may find that all monotheisms contain somewhere within them a logic or logos of the divine, an attempt to justify by means of arguments or formulas the existence or preeminence of one God. Yet theology is a very technical activity, which is not always well developed and is hardly important at all moments. Theology, however it is construed, happily takes a back seat to practices, stories, political maneuvers, institutional habits, affective or mystical events, and so forth. Attempting to save religion or a religion, or secularity for that matter, from transformation or disappearance by means of theology is not a universal gesture; it has its own history, which is at key moments intertwined with the history of philosophy. To speak very generally, the first half of this history, which we might call "absolute theology," begins with Aristotle and ends with medieval Aristotelianism — with many exceptions, of course — and the second half, in which theology became an attempt to salvage religious hopes by transforming them, often beyond recognition, begins with Luther and the Reformation, transits through Spinoza, the Enlightenment, and Kant, and issues into the early twentieth century where theological thinking, poorly disguised in Heidegger, toyed with in Walter Benjamin, and systematized in Rosenzweig, could seem the only salvation for a tradition — here, peculiarly, the tradition of secular philosophy — perceived as irrecoverable.
In this epoch, in the years when Heidegger was reading Saint Augustine, Benjamin was in conversation with Gershom Scholem, Rosenzweig was corresponding with his cousin Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and Carl Schmitt was calling for a recognition of the theological underpinnings of the modern state — Franz Kafka, responding to some of the same philosophical, cultural, and social forces, was planning a different reformation, this time not using theology to save religion or, conversely, to reformulate and re-entrench a set of nominally secular beliefs about power, existence, language, or history. Kafka sketched out a reformation of the theo-logic — not Judaic and not not Judaic — on which these activities depended.
We are used to classifying Kafka either as an extremely peculiar person or as a quintessentially literary writer or both. Literary writer par excellence was a post he held for the twentieth century's foremost thinker of "the literary," Maurice Blanchot. More than this, Blanchot's Kafka was a writer of literature for whom literariness and writing were constant topics of concern. Even those critics who consider Kafka a "thinker" of this or that topic other than "writing" see his "thinking," about the law, say, to give one example, as interesting precisely because it presents a literary viewpoint and not a legal one. Only recently has the fact that Kafka was not only a lawyer but a legal theorist in his own right begun to be taken seriously. Reading his legal writings, we discover that the government agency where he worked called upon him not only to defend this or that worker or to process claims under this or that insurance law. While grumbling about the time stolen from his literary writing, he also wrote elaborate briefs about how workers' insurance laws should be conceived, written, and applied.
A handful of books and articles over the past two decades present the many spheres, law being only one, in which Kafka was thinking about something other than writing or his own personal life, and in a mode other than literature. Arnold Heidsieck, Barry Smith, Stanley Corngold, Benno Wagner, and Andreas Kilcher, among others, have contributed to this small library. To be sure, "other than literature" is a questionable phrase, especially given how many of these areas already involve literary strategies: law, phenomenology, Jewish thought, theology, and so forth. And yet in a few critical texts, like Heidsieck's relatively unknown study, the reverse turns out also to be true. It emerges that the "literary" for Kafka in point of fact already involved elements from these other spheres: ideas about perception and consciousness from Brentanian "descriptive psychology," recondite practices of language from jurisprudence, and from his theological reading concepts of time, being, the self, good and evil, and many others.
When Kafka began to think seriously about aspects of theology, in line with what some called Judaism, but few in his circle could define definitively, with reference to what some would have considered to fall well outside Judaism, that is, nominally Christian theological motifs — two things made his thinking along the lines, along the fault lines, of theology unprecedented. First of all, he used theology neither to rescue religion nor to condemn it, and he didn't hope directly to improve anyone's life in the world by means of it, including that of the Jews. From theology he sought a justification, not for changing the world, but for interpreting it differently, which, it seems to me now, he imagined would produce a much more fundamental shift than a revolution would have done. Unlike his friends, who found new justifications for action in religious motifs, Kafka was interested primarily in the logos of theology, which was interesting for him because it was flawed. So, secondly, Kafka engaged with theological themes, which included Jewish and non-Jewish, Christian, pagan, and animistic themes and other notions and scenarios, in order to demonstrate that what was called theology, which he believed was the main resource for our conceptual commitments, was precisely not logical; no divinely perfect logic stood behind it, and thus a stark opposition between the secular and the religious could not properly be asserted. In short, the prefix a- in "atheology" modified both theos and logos. He pursued this uncommon track, not because he believed that the secular was ultimately religious, although in many ways he might have agreed that it was, but because the only interesting thing about secular modernity was that its logic was a-logical in a variety of ways that could be explored, and exploited, and shown to correspond to theology, rightly understood.
We have an opportunity here to sketch out the parameters of a further possibility for theology that is neither its triumphant return nor its total demise at the hands of secular thought, that is, a path other than political theology (exemplified by Carl Schmitt) or theological politics (exemplified by Spinoza), a path that comes to us from Kafka's writing of the late teens. The path emerges from perhaps the one work by Kafka that calls for a complete reconstruction, although it has never had one. In the winter of 1917–18, Kafka wrote more than three hundred pensées (he had read Pascal the summer before), which can be seen as "wisdom literature," provided one credits "wisdom" with the potential to reveal the inconsistencies in a world system, to present, very wisely indeed, a world "dysstem." In fact, these extensively small but intensively massive passages, often known as the Zürau Aphorisms, though they are better described as "thoughts" and not "aphorisms," constitute Kafka's only explicitly and thoroughly critical work, his "atheological-political treatise." They cover almost every significant theologoumenon in the history of European thought. Each individual "thought" in Kafka's treatise undertakes a complex linguistic and philosophical operation to reduce a theologoumenon to an original confusion, absurdity, inconsistency, or contradiction. In this way atheology, the procedure he undertakes, brings to language a set of specific alogoi that animate Kafka's thinking work on the afterlife of the mono-god. In the Greek-derived terminology expressive of erudite scholarship, his atheology could be described as alogotheic.
It should go without saying that Kafka's atheologic and alogotheics can't be adjudged simply Jewish or Christian, pagan or animistic, although they draw into their fire elements that have been counted under each of these names at different historical moments. I make no attempt to class phenomena or doctrines rigorously under one or another such historical name.
Kafka's response to political theology, which insists that secular concepts are at base theological, would be substantially the same as his response to theo-politics, which insists that theological concepts are at base all-too-human, interested, and political. He shows that the concept of theology — itself not theic but fallen — out of which both develop their arguments is ambiguous and frequently self-contradictory, and so it can neither become a foundation for thought and action, nor be criticized and negated as the basis for yet another God-free logic. Theology's ambiguities are undoubtedly endemic to "Europe." Kafka's "thoughts" thus respond to the question "What to do?" in a Europe with ambiguous foundations and no pure "theology," in which neither theism nor atheism are coherent options, when neither can be thoroughly negated or completely affirmed. What to do? Kafka's response is summed up in the word "yield," the central concept animating both his so-called aphorisms and this book. In this seemingly untenable situation, you might do nothing — or, in fact, less than nothing.
The mode and manner of "yielding," a word that has no single German correlative, I describe as "atheological" in a special sense. I am not the first to use the term "atheology," of course; it is being used increasingly often these days. Unlike "theology," it has not, however, become a technical term; it does not name a body of argument that we could refer to and no branch of learning corresponds to it. The word appears early in a still not well-understood gesture by Georges Bataille — the title of whose projected series of five volumes, La somme athéologique (The Atheological Summa), was meant to signal, with no little irony, the conviction motivating a highly unsystematic corpus of writings. Bataille's conviction was that lived experience had to be valued for itself, on the basis of the impossible. We might sum up theology — unfairly, no doubt, but not without some truth — by saying that it works to make transcendence acceptable to reason by means of reason. That is, from the perspective of human thought, theology makes God seem at least possible (that is, not contradictory) and at most real. Bataillean atheology does the converse: it works to make transcendence seem impossible, by means of non-knowledge. Non-knowledge is the proper attitude toward the impossible, and both correspond to life insofar as it is made up of chance occurrences and profanities such as bodily excretions — which break the frame of theology. At one point Bataille gives what he calls a "definition" of atheology: "the science of the death or destruction of God." This shows in some sense why religion was crucial for Bataille to achieve his Nietzschean objective: because Abrahamic religions were the ones that paid serious attention to the profanities that hindered the progress of the faithful toward transcendence. Profanities offered perfect absurdities on the basis of which experience could, on good grounds, abandon anything higher or more explanatory than itself. God is dead already in flesh, for example, and more than "dead" in flesh's putrid decay and waste, which makes spirit indeed seem ridiculous. "Atheology" was the name Bataille gave to the special non-science with special methods that described risible things such as waste, chance, laughter, and other phenomena.
Jean-Luc Nancy resurrects the word "atheological" in a project he calls the "auto-deconstruction of Christianity"; Nancy expects from this word a rise in respect for the "nothing" that Christianity brings into the center of "the world." "Nothing" here takes the place of Bataille's "impossible." It is a Bataillean project; Nancy gives it this label himself. Yet unlike Bataille, Nancy believes that non-knowledge emerges within Christianity and has a special status there. Within nominally Christian theologoumena, Nancy finds an atheological moment, a moment in which one concept or another — faith, eternal life, the mono-god, messianism — is not only not affirmed but in fact turns out to be essentially nothing. From this essential nothing, Nancy wants to show, furthermore, that atheism is an essential component of mono-theism, or at a minimum that the two are mythical twins born from the same parent. When the capricious, humanoid, and plural gods of Greece are reduced to one, the divine effectively disappears. It vanishes behind all the new strategies that are suddenly needed in order to make a one — that may be an abstraction, a force, a principle, a unity, an alpha or an omega or both — thinkable. The way of this new singular god- principle, this first of firsts, is precisely to vanish behind the world, nature, knowledge, and so forth. For Nancy, atheism and theism operate within the same "horizon of a subtraction, of a retreat, an absence," the primary phenomenological event of a nothing that makes both logics possible. And yet, this phenomenological "atheology" is quite reasonable; Nancy shows that the operations of the non-God are consistent, even in his retreat. Nancy's conception is a-theos, and yet he seems to avoid anything too a-logos.
One of the most compelling "auto-deconstructions" Nancy discovers is that of the concept "faith." The theologoumenon is special to Kafka as well. To Nancy faith is special because it preserves a conspicuous nothing at its core, a nothing that, furthermore, is not nihilistic. Nothing does not come from nothing, but we are surprised to discover that everything does. Nancy writes in the essay "Atheism and Monotheism," translated and reproduced in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity: "That 'God' himself may be the fruit of faith, which at the same time depends only on his grace (that is, exempts itself from necessity and obligation), is a thought profoundly foreign — perhaps it is the most foreign — to the theism/atheism pair." This sentence is a lesson in Nancy's method and a clue to his hopes for atheology. He seeks to move beyond the theism/atheism pair by uncovering an identical moment in each of their structures. The reciprocal production of God by faith and of faith by God is the moment when both atheism and theism are born from nothing. The pivot on which everything turns is faith. "But faith?" he writes in the introduction, "Should it not form the necessary relation to the nothing: in such a way that we understand that there are no buffers, no halting points, no markers, no undeconstructible terms, and that disenclosure never stops opening what it opens ('Europe,' metaphysics, knowledge, the self, form, sense, religion itself)?" This list must go on, perhaps to infinity. Everything, in this new kind of genesis, derives from faith, which means that it is "grounded on nothing." This idea of a generative and almost infinitely productive nothing whose conduit is faith, it should be said, is echoed avant la lettre in a theopolitical book by Kafka's bosom friend Felix Weltsch: "Faith overcomes itself, by creating. For as soon as something is actually believed, it is no longer the case that: it is because it is believed; rather, it is believed because it is." Faith is its own miracle: it reverses the order of things and makes an absolute out of a relative and an objective out of a subjective act. Weltsch does not say, as Nancy does, that with the act of faith, a nothing irrupts into perhaps the most meaningful modern moment, but he does, like Nancy, associate the moment of faith with a pure, incorrigible human freedom, the hope that I take it stands behind Nancy's use of the same verb, "create." In his book Gnade und Freiheit (Grace and Freedom), Weltsch calls the source of faith "creative freedom" (schöpferische Freiheit), and also "freedom with respect to grounds" (Freiheit zum Grund). The positive reference points in Weltsch's argument are Jakob Böhme and Friedrich Schelling. For this reason, the similarity with Nancy is not fortuitous. In the era of neo- Kantianism and phenomenology, with his late work still largely unexplored, Schelling became an almost irresistible figure for Weltsch, not to mention for Rosenzweig, and soon also for Heidegger, whose Schellingian view of human freedom, sometimes called Freiheit zum Grund, resounds throughout Nancy's work.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Yield by Paul North. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction chapter abstractThe introduction describes the historical and intellectual contexts for the composition of the "thoughts" Kafka wrote in the winter of 1917–18. It offers an analysis of the genre of these texts and locates Kafka's models for it. At a point in history when the category "Jew" had lost a lot of its meaning for those in Kafka's milieu, Kafka turned to the Book of Genesis to construct a new Judaism out of the contradictions in the originary legends. He does this, following the example of Pascal, in the format of "thoughts," though Kafka's aim not to console but to terrify. The thoughts are intricately interconnected such that they have to be read traversely.
1Refutation of What Being Never Was chapter abstractUnlike Martin Heidegger ten years later, Kafka wants to eradicate "being" from our conceptual vocabulary. This division demonstrates Kafka's arguments for why being is equivalent to "having" in the Western tradition, and the division then gives Kafka's analysis a genealogy, tracing the hidden presence of "having" and "possession" in conceptualizations of being from Aristotle to Kant, paying special attention to the construction of tables of categories. It demonstrates how Kafka exposes the "possessive" undergirding of language and in the concepts of things and of the self.
2Better Weapons Than Faith and Hope chapter abstractThe set of "thoughts" treated in this division exposes the dependence of the sequential, directional time concept on the attitude of faith and proposes various experiments to lead us to drop our concept of time. Antinomies of the garden of Eden and of the messianic idea are presented in order to frustrate faith and lead to a milieu with no time.
3The Problem of Our Art chapter abstractThis division presents Kafka's claim that human beings never die—there is no evidence that they are finite, although this does not mean they are immortal. Kafka imagines a third alternative, an indefinite finitude. Kafka's critique of temporality challenges us to think of ways to live when life means something like "being indefinite," rather than being certainly defined by an ultimate limit, whether the other side is heaven or nothingness. Death is treated as an image, an illusion, and the rest of the chapter describes Kafka's critical techniques for working with images such as the image of death, in order that they lose their hypnotic power over human beings.
4The Yield: On Forgoing Power chapter abstractThis division presents Kafka's critique of the will, with reference to Nietzsche and also briefly to Schopenhauer. On one hand the division describes the ontological basis for a world without power. Kafka's cosmos has no room for any becoming; everything can be no more than it is, and so it cannot use power to become something it is not. On the other hand, for anything to be anything depends on a prior yielding. After a critique of Nietzsche's obsession with struggle and a critique of Heidegger's own critique of the will, the chapter describes Kafka's attempt to articulate how human beings come to yield and what a world of yielding beings looks like.