Benjamin's 1934 essay on Kafka employs a unique gestural approach, focusing on the 'cloudy spots' or 'Vella' that refuse to be presented or cognitively grasped, which paradoxically become the very means by which Benjamin orients himself in Kafka's text. This reading connects to Benjamin's concept of the 'prehistoric world' or 'for-velt'—a realm of sheer antecedence that interrupts the present through a process of forgetting, creating a 'swamp world' where narrative and historical progress are fundamentally altered. The essay suggests that Kafka's fiction operates through a 'revolutionary practice of perpetual disorientation' that challenges traditional modes of understanding and presentation.
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Elective Affinities: Reading Benjamin Reading KafkaAdded:
all right yeah good morning everybody it is my pleasure this morning to welcome everyone here to elective affinities reading Benjamin reading Kasa um I'm Adam saaks a PhD candidate here at Penn and I'm very happy to introduce the faculty coordinator of this event and the moderator for our first panel Dr Ian fman Dr fman is an assistant professor of German and Cinema and media studies serving currently as The Graduate chair of the Department of Germanic languages and literatures he maintains academic affiliations with several academic programs and institutions at pent including the program in gender sexuality and women studies and the Alice Paul Center for research on gender sexuality and women as well as the pen program in the environmental Humanities he is a comparatist working primarily on literature and film in French German and English he has published widely on topics ranging from the Baroque to contemporary Cinema his first monograph and Aesthetics of injury The Narrative wound from bodair to Tarantino when the northeastern modern language Association best book award in 2015 please join me in welcoming Dr Ian fman thank you Adam for that kind introduction and thanks to all of you for being here uh with us wherever here might be these days uh for our discussion of Al Benjamin's 1934 essay on FR kka on the 10th anniversary of his death F Hoffman silence declared Benjamin's essay on the novel elective affinities by that other towering figure of German language letters [Music] Johan quite simply andc comparable recalling this description Hanah Alan proclaims the quote the trouble was that he was literally right it could not be compared with anything else in existing literature the trouble with everything Benjamin wrote was that it always turned out to be S generous true too even exemplary of this characterization benine study of Kafka is as enlightening as it can be bewildering moving from philology to Marxism metaphysics to messianism Da was and talmid this densely argued and richly elusive piece elliptically touches on countless kofka Works in just four short sections personally I've always been so baffled by the essay that I decided to dedicate an entire semester alone graduate seminar dep parsing it with two Brave students Mimi hacking and Matt Malone both of whom are with us today but I also knew that if we were going to make any Headway with this thing we were going to have to call in the experts I'm so profoundly grateful and honored that our four presenters Michael line Annie feifer relle Tobias and Dominic tesna responded with such enthusiasm to my quick sodic appeal and I'm looking forward immen immensely to their contributions and to geeking out together about this a planning for this colloquium began uh during the first days of the pandemic and well none of us could have predicted what the intervening months had in store it was a pleasure in isolation uh to imagine and think forward to this shared intellectual Mischief my original intent behind the colloquium was to Foster an intellectual Community for German studies in the greater region an opportunity for SCH for scholarly Gatherings without the carbon emissions of transcontinental travel and while we're unable to get together in person this time around I do hope that this will be the first of many such events to come and that those that follow might be more festive this event has been made possible by the generous funding of the Department of Germanic languages and literatures at the University of Pennsylvania the Jewish studies kchen sem uh seminar series the program in comparative literature and Theory the Wolf humity Center and the University Research Foundation as well as Sam Rossi Jonah fluger and Chris pasan from multimedia Services um uh whom I'd like to thank for keeping this webinar running smoothly fingers crossed uh thanks again to Adam Sachs um whom you just met and especially to Professor lindana Vice who'll be joining us later for moderating our discussion today and most of all I wanted to thank Mimi hacking um whom you'll get to see at the beginning of the second panel and without whom none of this would have been possible turning to our first panel I will introduce our speakers and then say a little bit about the format uh our first presenter Michael LaVine is a professor of German and comparative literature at ruers University where he focuses on intersections among literary philosophical and psychoanalytic discourses Holocaust studies and the Poetics of witnessing among other topics he is the author of four books writing through rep through repression literature censorship and psycho analysis from 1994 the belated witness literature testimony and the question of Holocaust survival from 2006 perhaps most person pertinently today a weak Messianic power figures of a time to come in Benyamin deanan 2013 and most recently in German at 2018 a book long study of a poem byan he is twice published on Benin kka essay first in the eth chapter of writing through repression on the sense of an uning kka aid and the Misfits of metamorphosis and later 20 years later I think in uh an essay in German quarterly wonderfully titled of big ears and bondage Benyamin Kafka and the static of the sirens we're honored to have him here to start things off today with a talk on Benyamin Kafka and the nebulous question of bearings our second speaker Annie feifer is an assistant professor of dramatic languages at Columbia University where she teaches 19th and 20th Century German literature and culture literary and political Theory the Frankfurt School and the intersection of modernity and fascism she's currently completing her first monograph on modernist practices of collecting portions of which she'll be sharing with us today she's published in the new German critique German life and letters and elsewhere and co-edited with together with J Zog the director of the go valza Center in Switzerland a collection of essays on valza and the culture of walking called walk absolutely must which appeared with vhan think last year she's also the editor of a new series on vza at think press writing has appeared in the oped section of the New York Times in The Huffington Post and she's been the recipient of numerous Awards including a d a post doal Fellowship an no Bower faculty fellowship and the Harry EST Truman Scholarship today she'll be treating us to a talk entitled a Stern Sultan in the Herm of objects The Collector as allegorist uh to explain the format a little bit uh Michael will speak first for about a half an hour followed by Annie um then they will will give each of our panelists a chance to respond to one another um before turning things over to a Q&A you'll see at the bottom of your screen that there's um a button there uh for you to submit questions or comments that you would like the panelists uh to respond to there is a possibility um for bringing people in live if you have your webcam uh enabled uh so if you would prefer to pose your own question um do signal that uh logistically and TimeWise it may prove most feasible uh for me as moderator and Liliana as moderator of the second panel um to read most if not all of the questions allowed so I do apologize if we don't get to everything um or if uh your your question is only uh delivered indirectly um but thank you so much welcome to everyone and with that Michael I will turn it over to you thank you very much Ian um it is rare that we as a community have the opportunity to focus on one particular text devoting an entire day to Benjamin's essay France kfka on the 10th anniversary of his death and what I imagine will be our diverse approaches to it I thank Ian fman and his Benyamin kfka seminar at pen for giving us the chance to do so needless to say we come together today as a virtual community with each of us coni confined to our homes offices and individual screens safely within we cannot of course ignore the dangers without or the suffering physical emotional and economic which so many around the world are currently experiencing whether we directly or indirectly address the extraordinary circumstances under which we meet there will of necessity be unintended resonances in listening to each other today may we also lend an ear to what hangs resonantly and precariously in the air when I first read Benjamin's essay in the early 1990s it completely transformed the way I read Kafka it was also around this time that I first came across Van's pathbreaking essays the word vula if it is one and the gesture in the name on Benjamin and Kafka together these three essays gave me a sense of how far one can and must go in attuning oneself to the gestural dimension mention of kth's texts as I hope to demonstrate in what follows Benjamin thematizes these gestures and highlights their importance first and foremost by reperform them in his own writing by letting his own text be implicated in the gestures he describes and analyzes let me begin however with cka and the famous letter to Max PO he wrote in June 1921 in which he played his literary production under the sign of a four-fold impossibility quote the impossibility of not writing the impossibility of writing German the impossibility of writing differently and finally even the impossibility of writing close quote as other parts of the letter make clear the sense of impossibility that is intoned with a kind of percussive insistence in these lines conveys More Than A Feeling of frustration for while the writer May indeed be confronted by obstacles at every turn the impossibilities mentioned are by no means mere impediments they are instead the very twists turns and interlocking holds of an ineluctable double bind each mention of a particular impossibility is nothing more or less than an attempt to seize an index stable not by one of its constituent threads an effort to display an overdetermined and ever mutating problem in a number of its determinate permutations kafka's enumeration of the manifold impossibilities of writing is prompted by Reflections on the current state of German Jewish linguistic relations and more specifically on the particular mode of linguistic performance known known as Maan and here I'd appreciate slide number there we go this Maan he says taken in the broadest sense the only sense in which it should be taken consists in a bumptious tacid or painfully self-critical appropriation of another's property less an acquisition than a light fingered theft it remains a foreign possession even though there is no evidence of a single linguistic eror that might give it away it is an organic compound of German and pantoon throughout the letter Kafka is exercised by the question of why Jewish writers should be quote so irresistibly drawn to the German language seeking a response he has gradually led to a formulation that comes close enough to Freudian theories of generational conflict to elicit a defensive gesture on his part slide three psychoanalysis lays stress he writes on the father complex and many find the concept intellectually fruitful in this case I prefer another version where the issue revolves around the father's jewishness most young Jews who began to write German wanted to leave jewishness behind them and the fathers approved of this but vaguely this vaguely this vag ESS was what was outrageous to them but with their hind legs they were still glued CL they still adhered to their father's jewishness and with their waving front legs they found no new ground the ensuing despair became their inspiration in this image of generational conflict the Jewish sons are captured rearing their front legs suspended in the the very gesture of revolt and while this prolonged suspension perhaps potentiates the uprising movement of rebellion it also conveys a sense of flailing filial impotence such gestures I would suggest Define kafka's own impossibly four-legged writing and its inspiration born of Despair and inspiration Kofi continues the next slide as honorable as any other but on closer examination showing certain sad peculiarities first of all the product of the son's despair could not be German literature though outwardly it seemed so they existed among three impossibilities which I just happen to call linguistic impossibilities it is simplest to call them that but they might also be called something entirely different these are as I said before the impossibility of not writing the impossibility of writing German the impossibility of writing differently might one might also add a fourth impossibility the impossibility of writing with the enumeration of these impossibilities kth's letter ceases to move forward in a progressive linear fashion instead as was suggested earlier it appears to falter at every step as though mired in the very sense of despair and feudal necessity about which it speaks in such circumstances the only possible step to be taken the only way to gain time and room to maneuver the only way to negotiate the double binds articulated here is paradoxically to write thus he adds a comment that it seems could only have been advanced in the suspension of a parenthetical aside since the despair could not be assuaged by the writing is an enemy both of life and of writing writing is here only a provisional solution as for someone who was writing his will shortly before he hangs himself an interim Arrangement that may well last a whole life like like kafka's own last minute provisor appended to the preceding list of linguistic impossibilities writing here functions as the very spacing the indispensable temporizing movement of deferral while it is doubtful that Benjamin ever had access to this letter his essay France kafa on the 10th anniversary of his death focuses on just this connection between writing dying and dilatory exper expedience and what follow follow S I would like to consider those aspects of his text that bear on such issues such an approach however is Complicated by the fact that Benjamin's essay is an interpretation of Kafka both in the hermen hermeneutic and performative sense as such it must be read both as a theoretical discourse whose primary aim is to elucidate and enfold the complexities of the text it treats and as a transferential repetition and creative displacement of the stresses and of the stresses and gestures of those texts Benjamin himself alludes to the necessity of such an approach when speaking about the unfolding or un enil of the parable in Ka the reader takes pleasure he says in smoothing it out so that he has the meaning on the palm of his hand Benjamin's own pleasure by contrast lies elsewhere not not on the palm of the hand where differences are ironed out and everything appears as it were as clear as day of hand but rather in the gestures and movements of the hands themselves this mute gestural language is compared earlier in the essay to Chinese Theater one of the most significant functions of which he says is quote to dissolve events into their gestural components close quote to follow this process of disillusion let us turn briefly from the hand to the back a turn that also involves a shift from handwriting to what might be called with reference to in the penal colony back writing in the section entitled the little Hunchback Benjamin addresses this kind of writing noting that this is slide six it is the back on which this lies the back on which everything depends and it was always this way with kaf of here the stress lies not only on the back but on the twice repeated verb Al playing on the terms double sense of lying and being dependent on Benjamin sets the term itself in motion refusing as it were to let it lie still that everything lies and depends on the back rather than on the palm of the hand on the place figuratively speaking where everything seems to lie as clear as day is not not just to emphasize one body part over another but moreover to turn the seemingly self-evident gesture of meaningful presentation back on itself to Repose it as a question and to interrogate the very gesture by which meaning presents itself as the smoothing out of a complication the elucidation of an enigma or the parabolic illustration of a teaching implication in this movement of reversion the reader is thus invited to turn back on Benjamin's own writing the question it poses to the wouldbe expositors of kfa's Parables slide seven but do we have the teachings which kofus Parables accompany and which K's postures and the gestures of his animals clarify it does not exist all we can say is that here and there we have an illusion to it kfka might have said that these are relics transmitting the teaching although we could just as well regard them as precursors preparing the teaching whether it is because they come too early or too late Kus Parables like Benjamin's essay fail to present any Doctrine any teaching any clear message or meaning rather than dissolving into a semantically transparent means of instruction they remain cloudy and opaque as hamaha has noted and this is the next Slide the mark of failure in kfa's Pros is what Benjamin calls on three different occasions the Cloudy spot Vella in his parables in connection with the pin anecdote toward the beginning of his essay he writes the Enigma which bouds it is kkas Enigma later he writes about the parable before the law the reader who encountered It In A Country Doctor may have been struck by the Cloudy spot in its interior and in the third section of his essay Benjamin takes up this strange metaphor for Kafka there was always something that could only be grasped in the gesture and this gesture which he did not understand constitutes the Cloudy region of The Parables the G from it emerges ka's literature curiously enough it is precisely by means of these cloudy spots which obscure more than they clarify that Benin gets his bearings in ca's text through them he is drawn not simply into here to for Uncharted regions but rather more deeply and ineluctably in this context I'm sorry inly into the very question of bearings itself this term it should be stressed is to be understood in this context not only in the sense of a fixed point of orientation but also in the related sense of a supportive weightbearing structure as a way of gesturing to the fact that this particular question that it is this particular question on which the entire essay Bears the text opens by invoking the stationary figure of Atlas shouldering the globe and closes with the moving figure of a man on Horseback quote whether it is a man or a horse is no longer so important if only the burden is taken off the back close quote the Strategic placement of these framing figures at the outset and end of Benjamin's text seems to suggest that the essay does not so much pose the question of bearings as set it in motion the shift is worth emphasizing since what is at stake is a particular volatilization of the question once set in motion it is no longer posed in the static oppositional terms of Bearer and born instead as it takes flight there is a slight but decisive shift in accent from the back upon which everything is said to lie and depend to the pointedly ambiguous verb Al such shifts are in turn accompanied by a gradual blurring of the distinction between Atlas And The Globe he is supposed to carry turning back on itself the forly static lobe spins itself free from the grip of its Ur Wild Bearer doing so in such a way as to sweep Atlas himself up in the movement of its revolutionary in every sense of the term flight through space it is no doubt for this reason that Benjamin is drawn to the world of assistance in Kafka whom he describes as falling as quote falling outside the circle or orbit of the family and this is slide nine none has a firm place in the world world or firm inalienable outlines there is not one that is not either rising or falling none that is not trading qualities with its enemy or neighbor none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence to speak of any order or hierarchy is impossible here again it appears that the question of bearings becomes increasingly volatile imposing itself more massively and with ever increasing urgency and as it does so identities come unhinged and in their place clouds of unstable Mercurial figures begin to form as these clouds gather the question of bearings itself becomes more nebulous yet as was stated earlier it is paradoxically by mean of these cloudy spots that Benjamin orients himself in kof's text orients himself that is in the direction of demanding of a demanding revolutionary practice of Perpetual disorientation needless to say there is more to this practice than simply losing one's bearings in an otherwise stable structure for it is a practice that also and perhaps above all involves listening to the distresses and accents the props supports and weightbearing structures of kafka's text as they shift about and give way to unsettling movements of displacement in the section entitled the little Hunchback Benjamine observes and I quote in the stories which Kafka left us narrative art regains the significance it had in the mouth of shaherazad to postpone the future thus commer h before continuing this citation it is not irrelevant to note that Benjamin here takes up the question of postponement as a way of introducing the life and death issues involved in the writing and execution of kafka's last will and testament a a document that as is well known was to have sentenced his unpublished literary Offspring to destruction Benjamin continues and this is the next slide in the trial postponement is the hope of the accused man only if the proceedings do not gradually turn into the Judgment the patriarch Abraham himself could benefit by postponement even though he may have to tray his place in Tradition for it Benjamin then cites the following passage from K I could conceive of another Abraham to be sure he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old clothes dealer and Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately with the promptness of a waiter but would be unable to bring it off because he can't get away while being indispensable the house needs him there is always something or other to take care of the house is never ready but without having his house ready without having something to fall back on he cannot leave this the Bible also realized for it says he set his house in order close quote while Benjamin refrains from commenting on the passage allowing it to speak for itself what apparently draws him to it is a connection implicitly made bya the Greek oos meaning both house and economy the term links the house Abraham is preparing to leave and the economy of deferral which provisionally shelters The patriarch's Offspring from the execution of the death sins he is prepared to carry out this time this time setting the titles of kafka's text in motion by treating their proper names as common nouns Benjamin implies that it is not only the Judgment but the text the Judgment that is adjourned through the post postponements of the trial through a singular recitation of the trial of Abraham in Benjamin's reading of Kafka deferral Al thus seems to have two related components first and most obviously it involves a process of temporal postponement which however May well last a whole life as kfka writes to go of the man sitting down to write his will shortly before hanging himself second and more importantly it implies a suspension of narratives and narrative citations into and through one another to put it a little differently deferral here involves a suspension within Narrative of elements that effectively interrupt and relay each other in a way that upsets the order of the house postpones closure and manages a stagnating economy it is is this very particular sense of stagnation as deferral and suspension that leads Benjamin to assert that K's novels are set in a swamp World in this remark is Justified not only by the observation that quote KFA did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time but moreover by the way in which the very sense of narrative and historical progress is altered in kafka's writings once again evidence of this alteration is to be found not only in the passages Benjamin cites from kfka but also in the odd narrative progression of his own text take for example the following sequence adduced in support of his claim that what is forgotten is not merely absent but rather actual by virtue of this very Oblivion and and this is the next slide whoops uh one back yeah an experience deeper than that of an average person can make contact with it I have experience we read in one of kafka's earliest notes and I am not joking when I say that it is a seasickness on dry land it is no accident that the first meditation was conceived on a swing and Kafka does not Tire of expressing himself on the fluctuating nature of experiences each gives way and mingles with its opposite close quote tellingly the final sentence of this citation each gives way and mingles with its opposite refers both to the fluctuating experiences mentioned in the preceding sentence and to the very movement of the passage itself in doing so the text itself stages a mode of experience that being closer to the swamp of Oblivion than to the ordered progression of conscious thought presents itself in an altogether different narrative manner as though moving from through a number of determinate alterations of a muddled and indeterminate relationship Benjamin proceeds from a particular experience of instability described of seas described as seasickness on dry land to an experience set in the shifting frame of a swing to a reflection on the unstable fluctuating nature of experiences rather than providing a sense of narrative or logical progression the passage repeatedly turns back on itself as each sentence each momentary consolidation of the this swamp-like experience gives way to mingles with and becomes mired in the others such a reading is supported by Benjamin's subsequent analysis of the following lines from kfa's knock at the Manor gate which follows directly on the heels of the passage just cited walking home with my sister I was passing the Gate of a great house house I don't remember whether she knocked on the gate out of Mischief or in a fit of absent-mindedness or merely shook her fist at it and did not knock at all Benjamin comments that and this is uh the next Slide the very possibility of the third alternative foron puts the other two the which at first seemed harmless in a different light it is from the swampy soil of such experiences that kavu's female characters rise up they are swamp creatures not only is much of the wit of Benjamin's commentary lost in zones otherwise competent translation but its very point is obscured for just as kfa's text is concerned with what transpires as the narrator and his sister proceed past a particular gate Benjamin is interested in the steps involved in a logical procedure slipping from the noun foron to theologically related verb for Benjamin playfully suggests that the footing gets especially slippery when the alternative or more literally the procedure mentioned in the Third Place Des and for allows the preceding one the y to step forth in a different light what Benjamin refers to as the swampy soil of such experiences is precisely the absence of progress the inability of the reader to move through the competing versions mentioned and establish some order of priority plausibility or sense of temporal succession so long as one is unable to order the Alternatives presented in terms of a rational sequence this swampy soil will remain a logical Quagmire similarly the swamp creatures which emerge from this soil are autous heroins only in so far as they spring from quote a promiscuous mingling of opposites giving way to each other or as Benjamin adds and this is the next slide they rise out of the dark deep womb the seeing of the mating whose Untamed voluptuousness to quote bachofen is hateful to the pure forces of heavenly light and which justifies the term used by Arius lute voltis elsewhere benyamine remarks not to find one's way in a city May well be uninteresting and benow it requires ignorance nothing more but to lose oneself in a city as one loses oneself in a forest that calls for quite a different schooling if losing one's footing in the muddle of experiences described above is itself to metamorphose an uninteresting and commonplace sense of stagnation into a creatively altered mode of experience one must learn how to proceed differently through logical or Alternatives that so obviously contradict and exclude each other one might view these Alternatives as threads of experience that run through one another in such a way as simultaneously to implicate displace and unfold each other as they go learning how to trace the passage of these Alternatives through one another certainly Myers one more deeply in the swamp world of kfa's novels yet it also enables one to see how Kafka who is Benjamin says quote could understand things only in the form of a gesture used such gestures to break through stable frames of reference into more fluid unfamiliar spaces consider in this regard the unusually violent language benam employs when describing the power of the gesture this the next slide just as this Bell described by vanacof in a commentary on fraide which is too loud for a doorbell rings out towards heaven the gestures of ktha figures are too powerful to for our accustomed surroundings on break out into wider areas a little further on Benyamin adds and this is the next and last slide what Kafka could fathom least of all was the Gus each gesture is an event one might even say a drama in itself the stage on which this drama takes place is the World Theater which opens up toward Heaven on the other hand this Heaven is only background to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery like El Greco Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture behind every gesture hint the paragraph then concludes Kafka divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection Without End in each of these three passages the violence is directed against some kind of support be it the stable orienting frame of familiar surroundings the props and painted backdrop of a stage or the traditional Main Stays of the human gesture in doing violence to these structures which are apparently as burdensome as they are weightbearing Kus gestures break or rather tamper with the laws of gravity they provisionally suspend these laws and in doing so open a different kind of space one whose Dimensions Benin implies can be measured only in negative and relativistic terms as particular movements of distortion displacement and disorientation the violence associated with the gesture is thus double-edged for the G for the very gesture that quote breaks into wider areas tears open the sky and takes away traditional supports is also the one that enables Kafka to grope his way in the unbearable lightness of such nebulous regions I would suggest that it is Benjamin's incomparable feel for the tentativeness of these gestures that leads him to the paradoxical observation that quote kfka could grasp some things only in gesture and this gesture which he did not understand forms the Cloudy part of The Parables from this gesture arises kfa's fiction close quote the gestures of Copus fiction must provide a very particular sense of disorientation for while they perhaps help one to lose one's bearings they also Supply in their stad and in lie of more familiar modes of cognition a grasp that is not that of understanding a grasp that instead dislocates understanding from within and makes of this creative misunderstanding a means by which to get a different hold on things thank you thank you so much Michael for uh setting the tone for today and for orienting or perhaps rather disorienting us um as we begin our investigation of this essay our next speaker is Annie feifer um from Colombia who is going to be giving a talk called a Stern Sultan in the harm of objects The Collector as allegorist and I look forward to exploring the resonances between these two papers hi thank you so much Ian for the invitation it's great to be here and to connect with all of you um and to exchange ideas I really look forward to our discussion after during the biblical flood Noah's Ark becomes an archive ordered by God to collect two types of each animal Noah assembles an ark which constitutes a complete set of all surviving creatures until he reaches is dry land in the cultures of collecting John ellner and Rog R Roger Cardinal identify Noah as the first collector whose Arc is quote the unique Bastion against the Deluge of time foregrounding the temporal dimension of collecting as a self-conscious preservation of a lost or disappearing World collecting becomes a tin sensitive battle against the threat of dispersion and the prospect of Destruction gives the collection of particular urgency while describing his own archive and unpacking my library Walter Benyamin espouses the theory of collecting that Echoes Noah's task quote to renew the old world this is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire things the task of renewal introduces another dimension of collecting that seems to conflict with preservation namely the impetus to generate and transform benyamine elaborates quote and and I'm sorry I don't have slides unlike Michael but I will try to read them slowly one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought much less a Wishful look because he found it lonely and abandoned on the marketplace and bought it to give it its freedom the way the Prince bought a beautiful slave girl in the Arabian Nights to a book collector you see the true freedom of all books reside somewhere on his shelves on the one hand he articulates the fantasy which often undergirds collecting namely the Noah esque rescue or Deliverance of an object from this Vantage Point book collecting or is a type of Salvage collecting a conservative practice that falls under the purview of what fredr nich calls antiquarian history which knows only to preserve Baden um not how to generate or soy on the other hand benyamine suggestion that the collection Grant grants true freedom to its object attest the conflicted nature of collecting which renews and transforms while trying to preserve its object benin's orientalist analogy provides an important clue to the intrinsic Dynamic of collecting namely The Collector seeks to free his objects from the despotic control of an unworthy possessor by extricating the object from its former context The Collection endows it with the freedom to achieve a new kind of existence with within its transformative framework yet even if it's staged as a labor of love collecting is never quite an innocuous practice as Benjamin's beautiful slave girl highlights not only does the prince have to purchase the girl's freedom but true Freedom or btif height is from the collector's perspective for this slave girl it merely means she has to change hands to her new keeper Benjamin's slave girl analogy reveals the way collecting is often underpinned by a gendered fantasy of Mastery and ownership even as it conceives of itself as liberating and Progressive an avid collector who himself theorized collecting Benyamin elegantly embodies the tension between collecting as a preservationist historical technique and a transformative artistic practice with revolutionary implications he was possessed by a lifelong zamani or Mania for collecting which according to Berlin childhood around 1900 began in Boyhood with butterflies picture postcards stamps and later continued with his collections of Baroque emblems toys rare books and ultimately as I will suggest uh culminated in an archive of citations and quotations in the arcades project in her introduction to illuminations Hana Arin even goes so far as to insist that collecting was Benjamin's Central passion in my book project uh which I'm going to give an excerpt of here I explore Benjamin's unfinished arcades project through the figure of The Collector as allegorist admittedly as Ian mentioned at the beginning I have also always struggled with benin's 1934 Kafka essay perhaps due to the very disorienting qualities that Michael LaVine just described so beautifully in his talk I'm grateful to Ian and the members of this colloquium for giving me the chance to orient myself in a text that I have often avoided for our colloquium I'm proposing to use Benjamin's concept of allegory as a way of exploring the elective affinities between Kafka and Benyamin in order to help us think about kafka's role in Benjamin's archive specifically one question which brings our work into dialogue is how we might connect Benjamin's kfka Essay with his other writings on allegory in this talk I will try to contextualize the Kafka essay within Benjamin's larger o by drawing out possible connections with his earlier work the origin of German tragic drama or trowers spe uh in 1928 as well as the arcades project which he was working on at this time while writing the Kafka essay um but before trying to address this question I'll begin by sketching out how benyamine attempts to resurrect allegory for modernity so let me start with the archive the archive against the Deluge of political chaos and financial ruin in the waning days of the bimar Republic Benjamin's personal life was growing increasingly desperate his divorce from his wife Dora had been finalized his mother passed away and because of the growing climate of fear censorship and anti-Semitism Benyamin was unable to publish his work in a letter to his friend gam schm in February 1931 he wrote quote that the atmosphere in Berlin had grown so stifling allowing one to scarcely breathe he described himself as a quote Shipwrecked person a drift on the wreck having climbed to the top of the Mast which is already torn apart but he has the chance from there to give a signal for his rescue end quote as the flood waters of fascism were Rising Benyamin as Noah had conceived of himself as a Castaway even before going into Exile in Paris in 1933 comprised of several essays in a brief text entitled The Ring of Saturn the arcades project consists of over 900 pages of notes and Reflections which benami divided into convolutes organized by capital letters a through z and 10 additional files marked by lowercase letters written on the subject of the Parisian arcades a network of historic covered shopping arcades The Staggering quotation collection of quotation citations notes and commentary was amassed over a period of 13 years an inexhaustible and ever expanding compilation of quotations the arcades project was the paradigmatically incomplete collection could Benyamin have even con conceived of the completion of his own life's work given its degressive discoursive structure the arcades project might well have been faded for Eternal incompletion even if benyamine had lived to continue working on it as plant but what if anything replaces the goal of totality or completeness for the collector or a modern collector such as bamin while some critics have lamented the Project's incompleteness others have deemed it quote an unfinished and fundamentally unfinishable collection of passages considering Benjamin's intellectual emphasis on historical materialism as an antidote to the sweeping myths of historicism it is conceivable that this fragmentary form might have been preferable to the traditional book form in his notes for instance beniamin describes his arcade not as a work but as an ongoing event a paretic meditation or FL the open-ended quality of collecting renders the closed completed book form insufficient for Benjamin's purposes rather it seems the best medium suited for his project would be a website blog or social media account that allows for continuous updates uh and this is why often Scholars have referred to it as sort of the first hypertext the arcades project adheres to what New Media calls variability namely the possibility of endless permutation and trans information which never allows for a final definitive version of the text but if a collection can never complete true completion can never achieve true completion how can we differentiate it from hoarding the maniacal compiling together of everything that existed that n so trenant sazed in on the use and abuse of History For Life collecting is by definition a selective process where the collector tries to amass as many of a particular class of thing as possible therein lies a distinction between hoarding and collecting collect a collection can theoretically contemplate its own completion or conclusion whereas hoarding has no determinate limits collections are finite because the life of The Collector is finite the collector's task is circumscribed by time resources and the potentially limited unlimited number of Acquisitions even if all the objects of a certain category are collected the collect becomes the entire known set if Noah had been ordered to include all animals his task would have been to conduct his senses rather than to collect for ordinary Mortals however completeness is in the eye of the collector who determines the criteria and hence the Contours of a collection from the standpoint of a collector the completion of a collection is disastrous as it signals the end of his Pursuit for instance Bor has library of Babel is in is complete but fundamentally inscrutable to humans as baz's short story brilliantly encapsulates excessive depression suicide and book burning ensue as people are confronted with the futility of their existence in the face of the complete but illegible collection incompletion grants potentiality and agency whereas completed signals closure powerlessness and death Bor has is life Library provides a clue to reading Kafka a warning which bamin Heats completeness means legibility which is completely meaningless in our absurd modern world the worlds that kfka dramatized perhaps as a clue to his own magnum opus bamin foregrounds the endless seriality of collection quote as far as the collector is concerned his collection is never complete for let him discover just a single piece missing fail and everything he REM collected sorry everything he's collected remains a patchwork Orvac which is what things are for allegory from the beginning according to Benyamin allegory resembles the collection in its incomplete fragmentary relationship to the irretrievable whole unlike the symbol which pres presupposes an organic Unity between a sign and its meaning allegory questions the possibility of a natural relationship between them as developed by the romantics the symbol conjoined an object with its meaning reinforcing the concept of nature that preserves unchanging complete and organic identities allegory a concept which had preoccupied Benyamin since his habon the origin of the German tragic drama was perceived to be inferior because it arbitrarily linked an abstract concept to a thing and thus could never reach the totality inhered in the symbol for this reason benyamine compares the allegorist with the collector who must go on adding without ever coming to completeness because allegory destroys any illusions of the organic Unity between sign and meeting it is accompanied by alienation and me Melancholy already in its Baroque Heyday ju supposing allegory with the symbol scholen posits quote the allegory arises as it were from the gap which opens the the form and its meaning end quote allegory itself illustrates this rupture if truth or meaning were directly accessible there would be no need for allegory acknowledging the ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning allegory has a protom modernist register prompting Benyamin to write in his 1935 expose The Gaze of the allegorist is the Gaze of the alienated man whose genius is nourished on Melancholy Visa V bodair and here I'm arguing as well as Kafka Benyamin attempts to resurrect allegory for modernity giving it a central role in the arcades project unlike the symbol that supresses history by claiming the Eternal value of nature allegory confronts history directly and Finds Its most poignant figuration in the ruin and here I'm thinking again of connections to the Kafka Essay with this preoccupation of ruin uh here he writes uh in in the uh trsh be bamin writes quote the allegorical physiognomy of nature history which is put on stage in the trow feed is present in reality in the form of the ruin in the ruin history has physically merged into the setting and in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible Decay allegory thereby declares itself to be Beyond Beauty allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things this explains the Baroque Cult of the ruin decoupled from the human subject of historical hermeneutics Natural History here stresses contingency Singularity transience and alterity their temporalities could not be more Divergent allegory depicts irresistible Decay and IM mortality whereas the symbol claims eternal life whereas the symbol's aspirations to totality and Transcendence cause it to appear as momentary and instantaneous allegory approaches temporality as quote a progression in a series of moments in allegory history manifests itself in decaying nature in a studied retrospectively without the symbol's pretention of finding Timeless truths by acknowledging temporality as nonlinear allegory emphasizes what H King has called the recognition of transience not a denial of it with its focus on ruins and remains allegory foregrounds lost delay and deferred meaning and here I think my essay uh might link well with um with Michael lavine's talk and the idea of deferral um and uh the the but Benjamin's focus on kafka's uh preoccupation with deferral exemplified by the shell shop in the Paris arcades allegory reveals the process of natural Decay that marks the survival of past history within the present drawing on the same rhetoric of petrification and ruin he later deploys in the arcades project Benjamin describes allegory in the following way quote whereas in symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption in allegory The Observer is confronted with history as a petrified primordial landscape everything about history that from the very beginning has been untimely sorrowful unsuccessful is expressed in a face or rather in a death's head and this to me also kind of hearkens back to hamaker's essay on failure benyamine Champions allegory for its materiality historical specificity and its transparency the same reasons he Embraces collecting as a tool of historical materialism like historical materialism allegory posits no Narrative of progress thereby avoiding the symbols claimed to a mythical state of unification allegory vamin writs in Central Park should be shown as an antidote to myth if allegory is a form of dialectical materialism then myth and the symbol are the tools of the historicist here we are in the bodian realm of the mortuary and rubbish Heap where the allegorist in the vein of a ragpicker acts as what Irving wolar has called quote the gravedigger in the Bourgeois world like hoarders Baroque allegorist pile up fragments ceaselessly without any strict thought or goal just as the ragpicker infuses rubbish with new meaning the allegorist rehabilitates discarded literary forms not only is a tragic drama based on the concept of the ruin the genre itself functions as a kind of cultural ruin a minor literary genre that was rarely studied the trowers was deemed by many scholars to be trash in the rubbish bin of history in salvaging this Refuge Benjamin provides us with an early blueprint for his archaeological mission in the arcades project it was the Baroque poets who first demonstrated to Benyamin that the ruins of his own time could be elevated to the position of allegory just as the Petrified Commodities of the arcade showcase the decay of capitalism the allegory exposes ruin in a way that it absent from the time collapsing transcendental symbol it is precisely their hollowed out fragmentary form that allows the algist like the ragpicker to Breathe new life and signification into these objects but rather than lamenting the state of the Fallen World like his Baro predecessors bamin uses allegory to underscore the fragility of the socioeconomic order and to lay the foundation for revolution in Central Park for instance Benyamin draws on the rhetoric of Natural History to reveal how allegory offers a blue pint for descent he says allegory holds fast to the ruins it offers the image of petrified unrest although benami never explicitly mentions algori in France kofka on the 10th anniversary of his death the concept haunts his essay particularly his Reflections on Parable although the parable is often short and theologically infected the term is often used in interchangeably with allegory and here I'm sort of asking to kind of parse out some of the terms that Benyamin uses uh in his Kafka essay as developed in the tragic drama in the arcades project Benjamin's concept of allegory offers another way into the Kafka essay even on a rhetorical level Benjamin's descriptions of kafka's prehistoric swamp World evoke the Petrified primordial landscape of the Baroque ruins in the tragic drama in the vein of the allegorical world of irresistible Decay kafka's Country Village is populated by ruins putrid mixtures and overripe elements making no attempts to disguise its decaying disjunctive temporality rephrased in Trish be the terms the allegories in kafka's work refuse the eternal life and Mythic Unity of the symbol in the section a childhood photograph Benyamin describes the way kafka's parable unfold in the way a bud turns into a blossom but just a few lines later he qualifies this position switching from the German par to gness a shift that is undetectable in the English translation of parable they are not Parables gness and yet they do not want to be taken at their face value they lend themselves to quote ation and can be told for purposes of clarification I'm but do we have the doctrine which kafka's Parables or GLA interpret and which K's gestures of his animals clarify I think Michael LaVine also brought up this quote exactly it does not exist at all all we can say is that here and there we have an illusion to it Kafka might have said these are the relics of a Doctrine if they are not do Parables then what are they in fact these Parables seem more allegorical in their literary complexity raising the question why does benami not use the word allegory even as he concedes the limitation of parable and liberally applies allegory to the work of bodair and other essays written around the same time and even as he was working through this notion of allegory in the arcades project like bod's allegories kofus parables are the relics of a fragmented modern world in which Doctrine is missing and signification is no longer legible it is for this reason that his Parables quote are never exhausted by what is explainable on the contrary he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings writes benyamine about Kafka that is to say they rep represent their own unreadability at the same time Benjamin cautions us against an allegorical reading when he resists a supernatural interpretation of Kafka along theological lines this is perhaps why Benyamin in keeping with his aim in the arcades project settles on quotation instead of interpretation for Benyamin The consumate Collector it is a way of foregoing completeness acknowledging that quote everything he's collected remains a patchwork stac which is what things are from for allegory from the beginning so rather than reading Benyamin As an interpreter of Kafka I'm reading him as his collector now I'll get to the arc thinking back to the Noah's Arc reference as early as in the origin of German tragic drama bamin contemplated the relationship between allegory and collectic as a combination of visual IM image and linguistic sign the emblem was Central to the Baroque vision of nature as an allegorical representation of History by combining a title image and interpretive commentary the Baroque emblem could be thought of as a precursor to the Montage or collage like a collage the proliferation of meanings for each emblem produces an arbitrary fragmentary clutter of images Benyamin writes in the trowers spe in its fully developed Baroque form allegory brings with it its own Court the profusion of emblems is grouped around the figural center this court is subject to the law of dispersal and collectedness things are assembled according to their significance indifference to their existence allowed them to be dispersed again in the dialectic of this form of expression the fanaticism of the process of collecting is balanced by the slackness with which objects are arranged end quote allegory simulates the practice of collecting by assembling or grouping emblems albeit in a laxidasical manner because the allegorist has relinquished the possibility of reconstructing totality and completeness and accepts a fragmented world he does not share quote the most deeply hidden motive of The Collector namely the Noah likee struggle against dispersion each confronts the post alvian world of confusion and Scatter in different ways quote this is from the TR be uh sorry this is actually from the arcades project but it resonates with the quote I mentioned just before from the trp the allegorist as it were is the polar opposite of The Collector he has given up the attempt to elucidate things through Research into their properties and relations he dislodges things from the context and from the outset relies on his profundity to illuminate their experience The Collector by contrast brings together what belongs together by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time he can eventually furnish information about his objects nevertheless and this is more important than all the differences that exist between them in every collector hides an allegorist and in every allegorist a collector benin's text deconstructs itself while at the beginning the allegorist and collector are Polar Opposites the two are interwoven by The End by dislodging things from their context and abandoning the attempt to elucidate the inner connections benin's collector begins to resemble the allegorist ultimately it is this ability to dislodge and elucidate which invests The Collector with immense power because of the fragmentariness of the allegory according to tragic drama the algist assumes Paramount importance by determining its significance and power and here I quote from the trow essay once again it is unconditionally in his power namely the alist power he places it within his hands and stands behind it not in a psychological but in an ontological sense in his hands the object becomes something different through it he speaks of something for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge and reveres it as the emblem of this this is what determines the character of allegory as a form of writing Benyamin might as well have been speaking about the collector in the domain of the allegory Benyamin continues the allegorist rules with acts of Cruelty both lived and imagined like a Stern sulum in the Herm of objects it is indeed characteristic of the sadist that he humiliates his objects and then or thereby satisfies it end quote dripping with orientalist cliches his portrait of the allegorist recalls a passage from unpacking my library which I cited at the beginning of my talk perhaps the collector's fantasy of rescuing the beautiful slave girl is merely in order to give her true Freedom within his own despotic domain The Collection is feminized and exoticized as part of the collector's quest for order ultimately the collection crowns The Collector with sovereignty over its miniature world recalling the tragic drama Benyamin envis envisages the unconditional power of the collector who rules over his Dominion through order and cataloging in the arcades project he writes and this is the last quote um for The Collector the world is present and indeed ordered in each of his objects we need only to recall what importance of a particular collector attaches not only to his object but to its entire past whether This concerns the origin and objective characteristics of the thing or the details all of these come together for the collector in every single one of his possessions to form a whole Magic encyclopedia a world order whose outline is the fate of its object here therefore within the circumscribed field we can understand how great physiognomists and collectors are the physiologists of the world of things become interpreters of Fate no sooner does he hold them in his hand than he appears inspired by them and seems to look through them into their distance like an augur this vantage point in which the entire world is present and ordered from the collector's perspective once again recalls benin's quote about the algist as having the key to the realm of hidden knowledge like allegory collecting has despotic ramification when it endows The Collector with unlimited power to determine meaning and Order however Benyamin ends unpacking my library with a characteristic inversion which so often happens in his texts although it initially appears to be the collector who saves the lonely and abandoned object it is actually the opposite it is the collection which Saves The Collector by providing order and perpetuity against his imminent dispersion inside The Collector quote and this is from unpacking my library there are spirits or at least Genie which have seen to it for a collector and I mean a real collector a collector as he ought to be ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things not that they come alive in him it is he who lives in them so I have erected before you one of his dwellings gise with books as the building stones and now he is going to disappear inside as his only fitting in a similar way Benyamin himself vanishes into the introdu murmur of the archive present only as the hand that attaches quotation marks to the sites or passages and new constellations returning to Kafka the Kafka essay we might also say that Benyamin like a true collector comes alive in kafka's works now it is his colle ction which finds bamin lonely and abandoned on the marketplace and bestows freedom upon Him whereas Noah Arc became his archive Benjamin's archive is transformed into his Arc thank you thank you Annie um I'm gonna invite Michael back now and ask our two panelists to respond to each other briefly uh before uh turning things over to a more General discussion I uh wanted to uh remind everyone that there's a Q&A button at the bottom of your of your screen so you can click that and either put in a question in text form which we can read aloud um or if you'd prefer to jump in on video let us know that too and we can in uh send you an invitation and you can click yes and and and join us that way uh so Michael and Annie will respond to each other now and and I will be back in a moment um I'd be happy to begin and first would like to thank uh my friend and former colleague Annie feifer for a really uh terrific uh resonant talk um as you can imagine um the question I would want to ask has um to do with the status of citations u in your essay and the way in which in some ways like the slave girl um they're wrenched out of context um with the promise of rescue and a certain kind of Freedom only in your reading to uh enter into another kind of um uh ownership uh kind of position in other words they're kind of recontextualized uh by the sultan and I'm wondering um what dimension of Freedom uh remains among those things that have been wrenched out of context um that have been um like P quotes like pass that have been um taken out of context but then brought in a different kind of relationship perhaps less to what came before or what comes after but like The Parables which are kind of too late for the pre uh too late for the Rel too late for to be illust ative of a past teaching and perhaps too early to be precursors they kind of hover in this between space and I'm wondering about the kind of between space in which citations hover in Ben particularly in a text like the passage and I would I would one of the things I think I was trying to implicitly argue is that Ben means writing the um Kafka essay at the time that he's working on the passage and and I think he's already kind of experimenting with um this kind of citational uh logic um great um Mike thank you so much Michael for that question should I answer Ian or should I provide my response sorry I'm a bit confused about that either way that you like why don't you give an answer first and then respond to Michael and he can answer you okay got it and then we'll open it up to Q&A and then we'll open it up to Q&A all right perfect um thank you so much Michael I think that's a really uh important question and actually that sort of takes me maybe even to my response to your um uh wonderful talk uh which is uh to sort of make a parallel between what uh you call the creative displacement of of uh Kafka and there seems to be something very similar going on in the pasin where um Benyamin talks about he even uses the metaphor of um pushing the rock bodair as a rock uh which he pushes from its place uh to une Earth a different kind of relationship so there is a an element of displacement um that I think happens with both Kafka and bodair that really connects um uh the Kafka essay uh as you rightly mentioned uh I think he's experimenting with the practices that he will be employing in a sort of more revolutionary form in the arcades Project without any of the sort of um kind of transitions right that he provides for us in the in the kovka essay um so I think that um you're absolutely right to make that um that connection and I also think that um there's something and perhaps this might be a way also to bring our texts together which is uh what are the sort of politics of this practice um what are the politics of his gesture of of citation um and Michael in your um in your talk you uh bring up this wonderful quote um which is uh you say turning back on itself the formally stat Globe spins itself free from the grip of its AWI Bearer doing so in such a way as to sweep Atlas himself up in the movement of its revolutionary in every sense of the term flight through space um and I was thinking about what you meant by revolutionary um because I think it also connects to um kind of the Revolutionary quality of uh the disorientation which you mention um in your um you say I think um which I really like this this this formulation you said the Revolutionary practice of Perpetual disorientation which um I would say is also the condition of modernity which benyamine tries to capture in the arcades project as well as his writings on bodair um and in in in so far as one could make the connection again between the arcades project and the Kafka essay um you could say in the arcades project the diffused distracted absorption of the FL Earth mirrors the reader erratic movements through the text which ends up somewhere very different from what where he or she started right so the the uh ultimate aim in the arcades project is one of disorientation right that it shouldn't be read linearly that it's meant one is meant to flp between passages um like a flinner browsing in various stores going from one to the other without any clear trajectory or historical chronology um or linear sense of progress um and um maybe I can just actually start even going into my comments on your essay because I think they they fit together and then we can just uh open it up to your response and then um to the the audience questions um so I wanted to tell you first of all that um in spite of your themes of disorientation and nebulousness I think you Orient us very gracefully and lucidly and Benjamin's Kafka essay uh certainly it gave me a lot more clarity in in reading it by situating it both in kafka's larger of and biography and by connecting it to verer hamaker's influential essay uh citing hamaker's essay you aptly note it is paradoxically by means of these cloudy spots that Benyamin orients himself in kafka's text orients himself that is in the direction of a demanding revolutionary practice of Perpetual disorientation um so this is exactly what I wanted to sort of pick up up on which is the sort of politics of this practice of disorientation and whether one might be able to link it um to another essay he wrote in the same year namely the author as producer um or also you know the work of the art in the age of mechanical reproduction which was published in the following year um it might be interesting to sort of contextualize how this practice of disorientation these gestures uh work in a kind of revolutionary political format um let's see I don't think it was a coincidence that both of our talks weighed through Benyamin swamp world or sufel um and this is a world which takes us to the foggy recesses of what he refers to in the arcades project as Primal history and here maybe we could think about uh benin's own critique of the mythologies of his iism and how that might shed light on his interest in time or temporality in Kafka which depicts um so if I can rephrase it slightly benam mean's historical orientation or disorientation as you point out in Kafka um also dovet tales with the temporality of the arcades project which imagines time Beyond a symol linear narrative although he never uses the term historical materialis ISM in the Kafka essay I thought maybe it might be useful to think about how he would position Kafka historically um in fact at one point he says um and this seems to sort of be in line with a certain kind of historical materialism that he advocates in other places when he says Kafka does not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginning of time um I'm not going to talk for too much longer but I did just want to mention since you did bring up citation and I think this sort of refers also brings us to the comment you made um you wrote The Complex series of passageways through which Kafka is said to move is itself a figure for Benjamin's own citational practice his way of reading excerpted passages through one another as I heard this I immediately thought of both the penber um as well as the passages in kafka's unfinished Story the burrow um and I wonder if we could maybe even find a passage to Kafka through the arcades project um I'm thinking specifically of the line in Ka the Kafka essay where Benyamin writes can one not see the animals in the burrow or the giant mole Ponder as they dig in um uh okay um one more thing and then I will stop the practice of cting citing passages um is part of Benjamin's larger project of collecting And archiving since interpretation is no longer possible as Benyamin shows us in the Kafka essay citation seems to be the only way forward and here I thought it might be interesting to cite Hana arent in her introduction to illuminations she says Walter Benyamin knew that the break in Tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable and concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past in this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by citability and then in the place of authority there had Arisen a strange power to settle down peace meal in the present and to deprive us of the Mindless peace of complacency so here again I think we get to a sort of politics perhaps of a kind of gesture um and I was also thinking about the connection between the quote that you mentioned of um the uh Atlas uh in the Revolutionary movement uh with the gesture of Alf leag in which you br your essay with uh so I may maybe um I'll just open it up now to uh to sort of thinking about the connections between the two texts thanks you thank you so much Michael again for a wonderful Illuminating essay thank you for incredibly provocative questions in your own wonderful paper um let's just if if I'd like to as you said um one of the things that that's so um ironic paradoxical about Co about Benjamin's essay is that there's there is a kind of sharpness to his fuzzy terms and terms like um disorientation are always linked with a kind of muddiness and swamp like uh muddle and uh of um of air that is that's putrid and um air that that is thick and there which is to say I mean to stay with the soil it's not it it inhibits a kind of step-by-step logical process it becomes as I said a kind of logical Quagmire which one might think of in terms of say Freud's Cal logic and how One deals with contradictions of entertaining as um various competing versions of a situation um simultaneously and I think Dominic will talk about the question of simultaneity uh in his talk uh later on um so it's the question of of how One deals with um uh with that swamp world with the the with the um cloudy spots I don't think however that the foggy re recesses are are linked to a kind of fa a kind of prehistoric realm I think there there there's a as Benin is repeatedly saying and acting out there's a kind of real actuality to this forv I mean it's it's right it's written into his Pros itself it's Pros that doesn't progress that keeps that stagnates that keeps turning back on itself and I think that um I don't think Benjamin gives up interpretation uh in favor of say citability but I think he plays on interpretation as uh elucidation but also in the way that one interprets a piece of music I think he is replaying uh Kafka Shifting the accents um taking it up and and he's not citing Kafka as proof of an argument or kind of examples of a point that he's making I think his citations of kafa are um the way in which he is implicating himself in kafka's texts and bringing Kafka then into his own text and it's that kind of muddled inter implicated relationship that I would where I would locate you know Benjamin's interpretation I didn't mean to to interrupt I feel like I I I appeared in that phot a halt to Andy did you want to respond to that before we take some questions um well no I think that actually really sort of picks up provocatively um where maybe U my essay sort of or my talk tried to leave off which is that um Benyamin in some way inhabits his archive and uh comes to life in his own works and that's how I see um and and perhaps maybe we're we're debating over the use of the word interpretation what actually interpretation means um whe uh I think that his the interpretation and I like the way they use the word replaying because I think it comes back to this idea of a creative displacement um there's something uh that he's doing in this essay that seems to be Beyond uh a kind of uh both citation but also interpret ation it almost seems to be a form of inhabiting kafka's work of speaking through Kafka or speaking through his archive in some sense that um that also I think connects with with the arcades project in his larger sort of uh aim there but I'll stop thank you it's it's also it's a trans I'm just gonna use my My Prerogative as moderator to Trum it's a it's a transformative and I think Annie you showed this well it's also a transformative sort of Poetics of citation you know there's that ontological question that that that you once you own it and once you've collected it becomes what it is we kept because kofka talks about this logic and a lot of commentators on this text sorry Benin talks about this logic to talk about a similar logic um Michael it came up in what you were talking about the knock at the manner gate uh you know where the sort of the hypothesis becomes its own sort of ontological basis and almost aases the footsteps of what comes before it the example that we come kept coming back to in my seminar um was the Lessa the L surveyor in in the castle he appears he seems just sort of on a whim because he needs to come up with something says he's a land surveyor but from then on the ontology the text basically uh operates as as if that were um f uh I I I wonder what that does for the sort of distinction between um gesture uh you know on the one hand and and V performing um uh kaka's gestures um and collecting her allegory on the other allegory being as Annie you showed is sort of itself a kind of murky V you know a cloudy spot in this that what what should be what one would expect would be the sort of Master of the Griff uh in this essay isn't there and instead we get Gesture instead um so uh you know Benin as collector of kofka or performer of kofka and I wonder to what extent those are compatible or to what extent they might rub up against each other I will leave that there and just use that as a transition we've got a few questions in the audience I do want to get to the the first one on inanimate beings um but I'm going to skip it for now because I think that the second one uh that we've got here might um connect to that qu what we've been talking about more directly this is from Leo clausson at Colombia is benam mean via kovka pointing to a provisional totality by dealing with incompleteness put in a more open way what is the relationship between completion and totality in Benyamin this question might speak to the politics of the collecting of gestures citations if we think of Benyamin as at least in the family of thinkers of revocation alienation a theoretical notion that does point to a certain tality but a process that remains incomp that necessarily remains incomplete so you have that there thankfully I don't know that the audience will have caught that from my poor reading but uh if you'd like to respond to Leo's question uh where oh we have it in the chat oh thank you in the Q&A in the Q&A sorry I'm oh I see it now thank you that's helpful that's a lot um Michael uh I'm just gonna re reread the question and and think through I don't know Michael if you have any thoughts I guess it was more oriented towards me uh as uh dealing with completeness but if you have any thoughts Michael go ahead and I'll it it does say to both so so Michael is also on the hook I'm I'm very happy to to jump in I I would strongly come down on the side of a very of of a pointed kind of incompleteness in in Benjamin's Kafka uh in ways that he's always but a particular kind I mean that's why Benjamin's language here of clouds in his b bodair essay of crowds I think that um discreet figures and and and discrete images are are dispersed uh and discrete concepts are dispersed but that doesn't leave them uh kind of all over the place there's a different kind of organizational principle at work and that kind of organizational principle I think in time in TimeWise I would refer to it as a kind of um promiscuous mingling of opposites as as as vamin calls it that um contradictory terms um are held simultaneously in relation to each other so they're constantly um unfolding each other folded into each other like the assistance that uh that form a Koo at a at a certain point that the Benjamin quotes I think that there is this kind of ever mutating relationship which keeps which defers closure which manages a kind of stagnating uh economy um and there's actually um an amazing quote from um uh from kafka's from a letter from Kafka to Max Bol uh where he's describing um the lesion in his lungs when he already has um tuberculosis and he says um and he's he's describing to this Legion he says but there is no seeing it whole so turbulent and ever moving is the gigantic Mass which yet at the same time never ceases to grow and um I think this this turbulent ever mutating Mass um is is a kind of open wound which which doesn't allow of an overview doesn't allow of a grasp and um that Kafka is is is um is inhabited by let's leave it at that Annie you want to take over Annie you're muted still sorry um yes thank you um Michael well said I think that's a really I I also love that quote uh from you said it was from broad's letter from a letter of Kafka to B on September 14th 1917 so after he's coughed up blood and it's it's quite a gruesome scene which she also says was was the coughing up blood in the middle of the night was a way a kind of agreement reached by his brain and his lungs kind of behind his back doing what he this bloody outpouring becomes a kind of a kind of speech a kind of bodily speech that he in his own words could never have said and what would he have liked to have said he would have liked to have end to have ended this relationship with Feliz which the um tuberculosis allows him then finally to do so there's this kind of um body language for lack of a better term uh which I would also associate with the gestural language uh in Kafka it also has that you know function of confirming what was written as he puts in a country doctor he says I you know I sort of predicted this wound I wrote it there and here it here is in the flesh um so to speak so it's that same you know sort of ontological move where once once hypothesized once posited it just sort of becomes and as you said in a in a gesture Annie did you want to um respond to Leo's question yeah I'm still um puzzling over this idea of the provisional totality and what that means in the question I think it's highly suggestive but I'm still trying to um kind of unpack it one thing I will say um which is that um I think that for Benyamin totality in terms of the way that he sees it um is no longer the end goal of a collection and thereby I think actually Benyamin is sort of moving away from a different kind of model of collecting towards a kind of modern modernist form of collecting which um anticipates fragmentation which no longer tries to complete uh a collection where completeness totality is no longer longer the goal uh getting all the parts or getting all the stamps or getting all the you know um citations is no longer the goal because there is no totality there is no larger Hole uh to be collected um and so I guess I would sort of provisionally say that um that he also evades any sense of provisional totality within Kafka but I'll I'll think about it more I think it's an important question and helps me sort of understand also what the relationship between totality and completeness is so thank you for that question Leo we have another question here this one from Brad Harmon at John's Hopkins this one I think is directed more towards Annie again um but I I'm going to preface it with a less interesting question that I think brings it into dialogue with Michael and that is that um when you were describing the four-legged writing and those those flailing legs in the I don't know if you can see this but this this image came to mind and this cop drawing that you've got on the cover of the the German Edition um can do you see what I'm what I'm holding up yeah yeah um you know so it's we have the the hind legs you know mired in in uh in the mud there and then the front legs flailing but not being able to find any ground I've also always thought that this could be seen I mean I think it's a horse with a jockey on its back you know a horse being fled but to me it also looks like a man here's his beard and you know he's holding an axe um of some sort so that that sort of um you know Duck Rabbit image uh Liliana is is signaling that there's a new edition of previously unpublished drawings by kopka forthcoming that's even more Pon but so I love this image for that I was wondering if you wanted to sort of reflect on that and use that as um a way into thinking of the not entirely human nonhuman postum sort of grotesque creatures of kopka and whether that has to do with gesture if a move away from language into gestures also move away from from the anthropological um a more interesting version of that uh question is what Brad poses which is to take life out of it entirely and he asks and I will quote here remarking on the notion that collector that the collector owner lives in the objects rather than the opposite and that this is a most intimate relation what more could be said about Benyamin concerning the libidinal investment in material inanimate objects as opposed to other humans or animate beings so I'll ask you or invite you both to reflect on that Annie you want to go ahead sure thank you Brad um that's a great question um one thing that initially came to mind um and per perhaps this also takes us back to the Kafka essay is odra De um and the kind of uh material inanimate object odre de is this kind of linal object um which I'm sure you probably know a lot more about by now having read it uh in your seminar Ian so I'd be curious to hear uh what you guys talked about with odra but um as this kind of object that is suspended uh between being and non-being between the human and the uh inanimate world and the way that um Kafka or at least in in Benjamin's reading of Kafka he said say at some point I can't I was looking for the quote but I I can't find it off the top of my head where uh he says it's really the animals that speak um it's not the humans uh that's where uh sort of kof is at his most compelling and uh you know he talks about how uh it's listening to to the words of you know the the what is it is it the badger or the mole in in the burrow did did we ever figure out what animal it is I don't I don't think it's determined um C it's certainly the ferocity of a badger I don't know that that moral moles are necessarily that aggressive yeah exactly I think that it's still up for debate right um yeah so I I think that helps us kind of understand um how this uh inanimate World which is exactly the world that I think um Benyamin is also trying to to Showcase in the arcades project uh is where he sees this kind of intimacy um and that that that relationship is not a relationship of sort of commercial um uh sort of enslavement to capitalism for for Benyamin it's a kind of intimacy that's decoupled from a kind of economic fetishization right so it's it's a different kind of emotional investment that is outside of a kind of uh the capitalist reification of of sort of shopping and in arcades and that's precisely I think why he uses the arcades as the Locust of his investigation of the commodity uh precisely because it's it's the stripping it's the transformation of these kind of relations through the collector um that allows him to sort of reanimate objects um for uh for sort of perhaps almost spiritual I I'm I'm using that word Now sort of off the cff but for for Spiritual aims I would I would just to pick up just on that um Barbara Johnson makes a really wonderful observation of um in her reading of of the pasan b um picking up on you know the tradition the the definition of commodity fetishism as um uh rified relations among men and social relations among things and she says Benin you know takes that seriously and says so what would social relations among things look like and um a lot of I think benum means writings including um uh uh the Kafka essay um has has to do with with um um taking taking that question seriously ly um so I don't think it because the the the kind of rhetorical thrust in Marx is to kind of restore a kind of unified relation to humans and uh a more dignified sense of social relations all of which of of course is is to be maintained but the kind of historical Horizon that he's um announcing and analyzing is Gee what would social relations among things uh be and um I wouldn't even know what to call OD uh in this in this context certainly um there there's there there and I would defer to Dominic completely uh on on odra but um you know it's certainly something that will survive the the fear of the the housea is the survival of this uh I think Benjamin refers to it at some point as a as just a a refu of string um that kind of haunts the the the hallways and staircases of of the house um let me just stop there it also has no use value right in the household it's a useless object which is important for Benyamin because um uh once again even through the figure of The Collector he strips these objects from their use value um to kind of re-engineer their relationships outside of these kind of um economic relations so uh for him a collector is somebody who emancipates something from its use value in order to give it new meaning um so that's why also he says in the book collecting essay that the real book collector never reads his books um which is deeply comforting to me having a book shelf of books which I have yet to read so uh yes but I think that helps us kind of understand the the relationship between use value perhaps and and orex position in in kafka's work or Benjamin's reading of kafka's work I'm also gonna take um you know Michael's answer here and and say that I defer to Dominic on on all things OD um and in fact did defer to Dominic and had him come in and and talk about hamaha and and all deck in my class so I I didn't even teach it um I I listened in the audience uh that makes a good transition because domic had a couple of questions that he wanted to ask so I will um let him uh ask those and then we'll have to wrap up in about five minutes I apologize to to those questions that we that we didn't get to but uh we have uh the panel at noon as well for those uh can you hear me yeah thank you so much Michael and Annie for two really excellent thought provoking papers um what a um a way to spend us Saturday morning um it's a weird feeling to um be summoned every time someone mentions the word odra anywhere um um but I just want to append a footnote to what Annie just said about um autodex use value at the same time we would have to uh consider odod is uncollectible um on the one hand because he's one of a kind he doesn't fit in any collection but on the other hand because he's so Nimble that you can't catch him um so you would never be able to to fixate um him um I had a couple of questions and one for Michael Annie you touched upon already namely I was also entirely intrigued by this formulation of yours Michael namely you were talking about how the Cloudy spot calls for and Annie quoted this a demanding revolutionary practice of Perpetual disorientation and as Annie indicated this uh being a revolutionary practice touches upon the question of politics so it hints at the possibility of potentially deriving deriving a kind of kathin politics from Benjamin's cka essay um but the question um would then be what does this politics look like or what does this revolution look like because it would be by definition it would be a revolution in Perpetual disorientation as you said a goess uh Revolution and a revolution without Doctrine right because Doctrine is the very thing that that is is missing um so this is just I mean Annie approached uh touched upon this already before um but I wanted to go there again because it really struck me and the other thing that I found extremely thought-provoking in your paper Michael at the end was when you talked about or you emphasized the violence of the gesture and how how it breaks open spaces and how it it takes up space and makes room and um on the one hand one thingss about Benjamin's uh destructive character um in in this context but on the other hand I wonder if this taking space of the gesture is not on some level at odds with The Parables that insist in so many instances on um you know uh small enclosed spaces claustrophobic claustrophobic spaces like the borrow um like uh uh uh the the the enclosure of the law and before the law like all the claustrophobic spaces throughout the trial and so on and so forth so on the one hand you have the breaking open of the chest joint on the other hand you have these um monatic little spaces uh uh everywhere um and then uh for Annie I was totally intrigued by this uh resistance that you observed on Benjamin's part in the kavka essay uh toward the term allegory uh and the way in which he refuses to use it and I was wondering if that has something to do with um the dichotomy between allegory and symbol that you opened up in the beginning where you uh at one point you said mortality is on the side of allegory and eternal life is on the side of symbol and of course you complicated this later on but this is how it started and I wonder if in in in Kafka we can find um we can find tons of moments that elude precisely this and Escape precisely this dichotomy that fall neither on the side of mortality nor on the side of eternal life um one thinks about the end of the Judgment for instance with this uh seeming SU side or death verdict coinciding uh with with um the infinite traffic on the bridge and then you have the survival of Shame at the end of the trial phrased as a a hypothesis you have OD already mentioned whose finitude is questionable Hunter graus and you have the The deathless Disappearance of Josephine for instance at the very end of of kavas so all these moments the the weird thing about them is that they neither fall on the side of finitude nor do they fall on the side of eternal life and I wonder if you think that this has something to do with Benjamin's resistance um toward deploying allegory in the kfka essay because things are so murky um thank you so much great we have precisely I think 30 seconds which I I'm sure should be planning to answer those um those very simple question uh let me jump in about politics and um maybe just to to focus the the point um talk about Benjamin and Kafka and property relations because I think that there's an a Perpetual movement in Benjamin's reading ofka very uh deliberate in um treating proper names as common nouns for ex example the uh the only hope for the trial is that it doesn't turn into the judgment and of course he's talking about the text of the trial um being endlessly prolonged um in so far as it doesn't become the text uh the Judgment with the death sentence but in the process what's happening in in the trial is that um static relations static roles are being divided up and superimposed so that someone who's an accused is also a judge is also uh a defendant um is also a lawyer and and these roles come to be occupied uh multiply um the other and and Benjamin does the same thing with his citation of FM gazettes which he he cites one in its appearance as a separate Parable in uh deant and the other time uh at the end of the trial and I think what he's doing is is to is to say the text is is recontextualized in each of these occasions and the one has to then be read through the other so I think in terms of Benjamin's constantly working against titles and static texts and the delimitation of particular works and turning them into his text is a kind of Perpetual intertext um that that he reads Kafka as already performing and that his own reading teases out and perpetuates uh much more in a much more consequential way and that's I think what I in part what I was talking about in terms of this movement of Perpetual disorientation um let me just stop there any last words on on finitude or the lack thereof last words are difficult um I'll just maybe the last word I'll just mention which I think picks up on this very interesting question by Dominic and I unfortunately don't have time speaking of time and F finitude uh I lack the the finitude or totality to answer the question but um one thing to think about is in some way I guess what I was trying to get at and I don't really have a good answer why he never uses the word allegory like I don't know why this term is um is so conspicuously absent from Benyamin in a time where he was focused so much on allegory and other parts of his work um and I could see it sort of suggestively echoed in a lot of the descriptions of um specifically kafka's um landscape and it almost seems to me that allegory is perhaps a better word than Parable for the kind of movement that he's describing and I wonder why Kafka or why Benyamin is so invested in the word Parable even while he uses or admits its shortcomings and I wonder I'm I don't have a good answer but I wonder whether um allegory might also help us sort of illuminate uh the kind of shortcomings of the word Parable and getting to the kind of aoras I guess he's locating in in kafka's text um and then I would say one more thing about after lives which is I think where um in some way I think uh Benyamin is also getting us which is that um it's the afterlife of an object um or the afterlife of a text in some ways that at least to me connects you know a lot of sort of Benyamin themes in both the Storyteller but also um uh in the arcades project where uh that is this sort of and perhaps that also takes us back to this kind of displacement that uh Michael leine was talking about which is that kind of um that by inhabiting the afterlife or taking over the afterlife of an object we give it new meaning and sort of transformative context anyway I'll end there because I know we're well over time so thank you so much for those wonderful questions thank you fortunately we do have an afterlife for this panel uh in the next which begins at noon so thank you Dominic for those um wonderful concluding questions which I think will Bridge um uh into the next panel thanks to Michael uh and to Annie um for these wonderful and thought-provoking papers thank you to the entire audience I'm sorry that we didn't get to all the questions but I look forward to seeing you all back here at noon um we'll break now for uh lunch and see you then welcome or rather welcome back to today's colloquium elective affinities reading Benjamin reading Kafka I am Mimi hacking a PhD student here at the University Pennsylvania in the department of dramatic languages and literatures and this afternoon I take great honor and pleasure in introducing Lana Vice who will moderate our second panel today Liliana Vice is Christopher H Brown distinguished professor in arts and science and professor of German and comparative literature here at the University of Pennsylvania she has been a frequent visiting professor at universities in the United States and Germany in Austria and in Switzerland and the recipient of numerous Awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship the Berlin prize of the American Academy in Berlin and the humo research prize for her life's work among her book Publications are Hannah Charlie chap 2009 from 2011 2012 and of course with Andrea from 2018 she's currently writing a book about the medium of the postcard that focuses on the work of v benam and it is thus with immense admiration I hand things over to you Liliana thank you very much M Mimi um the admiration is of course Mutual uh Mimi I have to thank you not just for the introduction but for the tremendous work that you are doing for this colloquium and I also have to thank I Flashman uh for putting all of this together and doing the intellectual work both in the seminar and in the conference preparation to make today's event possible um ladies and gentlemen we have heard in the first session a lot about an idea of finitude and we should remember that while Benjamin's essay on Kafka was published in 1934 uh on the occasion of a very specific finitude namely the anniversary of kafka's death it was not an essay that uh came into being without resonance beforehand uh we know of uh Benjamin sending drafts to his friends and uh colleagues and responses by zik kakawa Theodor adoro um an blo and others um something that rol tman in his Edition has coined a Kafka Symposium so in some ways there was a Kafka Symposium before there was an essay on Kafka and what Ian is continuing here is the tradition to think about kfka now in with the help and with the reading of Benyamin and with the help of some other critics that have joined the Symposium since and we have heard from Michael for sure bahaha and many others it is my pleasure today to begin the afternoon colloquium by introducing our first Speaker relle Tobias who is a professor in the department of German and romance languages at Johns Hopkins University and for many years she was the director of the German subdivision and is now the director of the maxcard center for modern German thought also at Hopkins uh relle is a specialist is a is a scholar of literature and philosophy precisely the inter interj Junction of both of them uh testing philosophical questions of literature and vice versa in poetry and Pros among her Publications that I would like to mention here is her book on the discourse of nature in the Poetry of Paul Salan published in 2006 her forthcoming book Pudo Memoirs the Imitation of Life in modern German fiction um forthcoming this year she's also been the editor of helin's philosophy of nature uh published recently and phenomenology to the letter H and literature together and alone she is responsible for several special issues of the modern language notes for example Benjamin schm and the maok school religion and the state German Jewish perspectives and finally what is formulism her current work takes her to R phenomenology in the space of Consciousness but also back to Kafka in a reconsideration of Ethics phenomenology and kafka's metamorphosis I would at this point also like to introduce our second speaker the second speaker who would follow um in the uh uh Rochelle's talk is Dominic sner of whom we have heard briefly already uh in the first sessions With His Marvelous questions Dominic sner is an assistant professor at ratkus University before coming to ratkus he has studied uh German literature and literature in general and media both in Vienna at at New York University and has actually written on Kafka in his dissertation um and that is uh very much to the point his TI the title of his work the survival of literature since then he has published very widely on contemporary literature and 20th Century literature but I also want to uh point out as a special issue also of the mln um that he has edited um entitled The besto what is a prize before coming to rodus Dominic has also been a fellow um at uh Brown University uh the way we want to proceed here is very much like the first uh uh like the morning uh uh session we would like to ask relle to present her paper first followed by um Dominic and his paper we will then have um both of them um respond to each other's papers before um opening it up um to a general discussion for the general discussion I would like to ask you um to write your questions in the question and answer section here um on Zoom uh please not on chat but in the question and answer section if you um would like to appear um and ask your question um on the video screen please let me know as well although uh we are in time constraints and I can't promise that we can get everybody on the screen so the safer thing is always to ask the question in question and answer um so it's time to turn to helle forer may I ask you please for your paper which has the wonderful title Bliss forgetfulness and the prehistoric World in Kafka and Benyamin thank you so much relle and thank you for joining us thank you so much Liliana for that incredibly gracious introduction and um I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Ian Flashman for inviting me to participate in this um forum um I have always found um Benjamin's essay on Kafka to be um Elusive and Elusive um inspiring and frustrating at the same time because I never seem to be able to catch hold of it and while I'm not sure that I have managed to catch hold of it this time either at least I feel a lot more comfortable in the um model um my paper um this afternoon takes off from many of the themes that we're discussed in the morning session um including Michael lavine's uh um um um um analysis of bearing and um anim fifers then account of allegory um and debris so I hope that we can continue the discussion that started there um into the um afternoon Bliss forgetfulness and the prehistoric World in Kafka and Benjamin in untimely meditations n tells a story about ruminating animals presumably cows that would seem to prage kafka's work I quote consider the grazing as they pass you by a human being May well ask an animal why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me the animal would like to answer and say the reason is I always forget what I was going to say but then he forgot his answer too and stayed silent cows enjoy a bliss that is all but unimaginable for human beings because of their uncanny ability to forget such at least would seem to to be the import of this passage which reads like a fable with a clear dactic purpose and yet this interpretation misses the point of the story almost entirely forgetting is not a tool we use nor a strength we Marshal in difficult circumstances it is not a device or mechanism available to us one can never become a skilled or capable forgetter like n's ruminating cows rather forgetting happens to us it takes place without our knowledge or consent and this is why we need tals to imagine what otherwise escapes us I hear in n's Parable an echo of what Benyamin calls the prehistoric world or what could be translated as the world before the world the for in Kafka this is the region to which a host of marginal figures in kafka's fiction belong assistants Messengers absent-minded old men and young scholars one might even placed the character pkin whom Benjamin introduces at the outset of his essay in this group given pin's absent gaze and seeming some ambulance Benjamin's portrayal of pkin leaves little doubt that he is in a sleep-like state unaware of himself moving yet hardly conscious and I quote in semi Darkness pkin was sitting on his bed in a threadbear night shirt biting his nails penkin gave the Intruder a vacant stare then as though in sleep he started to sign and this ass sign the documents that um Shakin had brought into him um thinking that pkin would sign his own name and instead he signs it shalin in one of the many instances of orientalism in this essay though the the soul one to refer to Hindu Legends Benjamin compares the shadowy figures that populate kafka's text to to the gandaras whom he describes as unfinished creatures beings draped in fire in this they maror kafka's own description of himself as a being not yet born in January 1922 for example kfka writes in his journal the hesitation before birth if there is a transmigration of souls then I am still at the lowest level and he follows this observation up two months later with the comment not yet born and already compelled to walk around on streets and talk to men tonight yet be born and yet be forced to participate in the world is to be a marginal figure with no fraternal bonds no filial attachments no place in the community Benjamin picks up on The Messengers in his uh Benjamin picks up on kafka's perception of himself as a peripheral and still just stating being when characterizing The Messengers in his text as figures that have not yet been fully released quote from the womb of nature end quote in spite of their presence in this world World his Messengers still have a foot in another realm which Benjamin identifies with the maternal body the womb of nature albe it not the body of an individual mother since they are not yet members of a nuclear family rather The Messengers and kafka's work are still attached by a symbolic umbilical chord to Nature and it is important to underscore that this is a nature before the fall which is also before all judgment and all discussions of sin and Redemption judgment arises with the fall although Benjamin does not make this point directly in the Kafka essay he implies as much when he for example declares quote even the world of myth is incomparably younger than kafka's World which has been promised which has been promised Redemption by myth the temporal aspects of the statement are worth attending to as they contain in abbreviated form the relation of myth to an archaic p that nonetheless persists despite myth's efforts to replace it myth on the one hand is a latterday invention it arrives after the fact to provide order to a chaotic Universe in which there are no hierarchies no unequal distribution of power on the other hand myth claims for itself the privilege and power to judge and to promise salvation to a world it condemns as Fallen the Advent of myth changes forever how nature appears to us whatever shape it may have had before myth whatever Majesty it might have possessed it now appears as refuse in the two senses of the term both as the items we discard and those we refuse to recognize as things of value nature following the arrival of myth makes itself felt if it is felt at all as the bits and pieces of thread wound around the spool that is odek and cares of a house father or the dust and remnants of food that stick to Gregor Sam's back in the metamorphosis it is useful in this context to recall that the depressed pkin Benyamin refers to in the first section of his essay is the highest ranking off officer in the Imperial Russian government in his decrepit and spoiled soiled State stripped of all symbols of power he serves as the living embodiment of the phrase eomo this is man a creature indistinguishable from all other animals myth distorts nature whatever it cannot absorb into its system of value or alternatively suppress it classifies as debris not worthy of our attention and I quote odek is the form which things assume in Oblivion fessin height they are distorted the cares of a family man which no one can identify are distorted the bug which we know all too well represents Gregor samza is distorted end quote what triggers the transformation of the giving world into something misshapen and negligible that cannot be redeemed is an accident that assumes the magnitude of a transgression or even original sin Benjamin draws on a structure from the theory of tragedy to analyze the transgression which establishes the law not only as a written code but as a supreme power I quote laws and definite Norms remain Unwritten in the prehistoric World a man can TR transgress them without knowing it and then must strive for atonement but no matter how hard it may hit the unsuspecting tra the unsuspecting the transgression in the sense of the law IM is Not an Accident but fate zonal which appears here in all its ambig uity in a side glance at the idea of fate and Antiquity ham cohain came to the conclusion the very rules of Fate seem to be what causes and brings about the breaking away from them the defection in German the term is Abal end quote I've cited the passage in full owing to the complicated relation of terms which Benjamin presents in characteristically elliptical fashion whatever implicit legislation existed in the pre historic World it cannot be reconstructed after the fact since the explicit law that takes its place changes it retroactively Benyamin indicates as much when he notes that in the sense of in the sense of law in Z an accident or TFA becomes fate the established law turns and distorts contingencies into ontological predicates hem Cain's Insight that fate produces aberration from its order is is consistent with this point fate generates Abal both refuges and departures from the norm it needs a Fallen World Fallen nature over which it can exercise Authority in short it needs a guilty party the great Misfortune Of kfka Heroes is that they find themselves condemned for reasons never disclosed to them a mere misstep or accident sufa defines their fate and in spite of their best efforts they never learn what that misstep is and how they can redress it they are to this extent still innocent as Benyamin implies in quoting the following passage from The Trial quote it is characteristic of this legal system that one is sentenced not only in innocence but also in ignorance end quote at the same time they are guilty in the eyes of the law and subject to whatever punishment the law meets out it is a punishment not only of kafka's hero but of the prehistoric World which persists in them even if or perhaps because they are unaware of it benami draws attention to the historical if not Cosmic dimensions of Y of ca's case the proceeding against him quote takes us back beyond the time of the giving of the law on 12 tablets to a prehistoric World written law being one of the first victories scored over this world in Kafka the written law is contained in law books but these are secret by basing itself on them the prehistoric World exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly um I'm hoping that someone in the question and answer can explain to me what the 12 tablets of the law were I thought that Moses brought down two tablets um from Mount um sin but I could be mistaken in any event I will not claim to understand the quoted passage in its entirety but would point out the intricate relation between the prehistoric world and the law that follows it the written law which for Benyamin always emerges with myth sits in Judgment of the prehistoric World indeed it is Victorious over it the victory however is not absolute as can be seen in the continued exercise of the prehistoric world's power in those places where it operates in secret it would be tempting to say that the prehistoric World operates within the law sub verting and perverting its ends which would be consistent with benin's observation that the written law in the trial is never made public and as a result can be invoked without restraint this interpretation would account for the numerous dialectical reversals we see in kafka's texts The Authority which should be transparent turns out to be opaque the sphere which should be governed by reason proves to be arbitrary Justice which should be evenhanded shows itself to be be unjust and finally the innocent usher in their own guilt by asking why they have been accused of a crime the latter reversal is nothing but a more generalized statement of the relation of Father and Son according to Benjamin the son is guilty not because of Any wrongdoing but because of an accusation he makes an accusation that ends up being the truth though it is not to be stated explicitly at issue is who who is responsible for original sin and although the son is born born after the father he Bears this burden for in his very existence he is a reminder of quote the sin of having produced an air Duna AB which is Benjamin's derivation of the German term for original sin abunda seen in this light the sun is doubly burdened or twice accursed on the one hand as the heir or issue of another he is what Freud and on narcissism called a link in a chain in which a family persists albeit at the expense of its individual members who are mortal and limited to one generation on the other hand to reproach another for his Misfortune is to commit the sin of assigning blame which is Possible only in a post-lapsarian world in which everyone is already guilty this is why to accuse someone for one's Misfortune is a transgression in Benjamin's analysis it is to deny the culpability one bears as a fallen creature condemned to Misfortune from the beginning it is interesting to recall in this context that the first question Augustine poses in the confessions is when was I innocent for Benjamin as for Kafka the father and son are caught in a Perpetual struggle in which they alternate positions at one time the cause at another the effect and what proves to be more Grievous than the sin that launches historical time is the sin of exposing this fall this Tua that becomes Destiny it is for this reason that I'm skeptical of the idea that the prehistoric World overcomes the law by undermining it from within such a strategy it seems to me does not destabilize but perpetuates myth extending the order in which the father takes revenge on the son as myth takes Revenge on on its predecessor nature Benjamin himself would seem to recognize this danger when he recalls a conversation Kafka had with Max blo on the subject of Hope in response to bl's question whether there is hope for the world Kafka famously quips oh plenty of Hope an infinite amount of Hope but not for us Benjamin interprets this statement to mean that hope is limited to those who have escaped the spell Bond of the family family which turns out to be an astonishingly small circle neither GG zza nor odek belongs to it not even the animals that populate kafka's work are members of this tribe benyamine also excludes moths and Butterflies gpin vasin from this community which is noteworthy given that the hunter graos identifies himself as a butterfly I will return to this point later in the paper hope remains only for the assist of whom Benjamin States they fall outside this ring what is this ring and what does it mean to fall outside it in the context of the passage the ring refers to the family but the statement allows for a more General interpretation those who escaped the ring yoke or spell of the family also escaped Destiny which benine defines in the Treatise on gerta's elective affinities as the web quote the web of guilt connecting the living end quote um the Treatise on Gerta was published in 1924 the same year as kafka's death and the kfka essay could be said to honor the 10th anniversary of This truly seminal piece in Benjamin's writing as it does the 10th anniversary of kafka's death to escape the Yoke of the family is to hover in a realm in which there is no original sin and no guilt no judgment or myth n's her of ruminate ruminators partake of this Bliss they do so by forgetting which occupies a prominent place in Benjamin's essay Oblivion is the Fertile ground out of which kafka's characters emerge and I quote from the benyamine essay everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric World forms countless uncertain and changing leaon Fen yielding a constant flow of new strange Offspring and spawn alorton Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate World in KFA stories press toward the light end quote the sexual overtones In this passage in which things are said to mingle with each other and form casual Liaisons are as unmistakable as the metaphor of pregnancy forgetfulness is not merely a container or repository for kopus fiction it is a womb in which ideas and matters gestate a spawn alorton the passage recalls Benjamin's earlier characterization of kafka's Messengers as creatures that have not yet been fully released from the womb of nature here as there it is the incompleteness of these creatures that make them the harbingers of a world to come a world which even in the light of day would seem to be shrouded in fog elsewhere in the essay Benjamin as we've heard already today um refers to the region as a swamp world and a bog floor more Bodin which resonates among other things with several theories of the origins of life including Charles Darwin's theory that life originates in quote some warm Little Pond unquote with the perfect combination of chemical elements whether benyamine is alluding to Darwin with his swamp World matters little more important in this context is that the archaic World returns as a possible future in forgetfulness this future admittedly is not always greeted with joy more often than not it is in fact met with Dread because it is still seen in the sense of the law in to quote from a previously mentioned passage kafka's creative process Benjamin tells us is Guided by prehistoric forces that he could not make present to himself I quote only this much as certain he did not know them and failed to get his bearings among them in the mirror which the prehistoric World held up to him him in the form of guilt he merely saw the future emerging in the form of Justice past and future Meet In this passage in the most astonishing manner in which kfka said to turn backwards to guilt to look forwards to the form of Justice or what is equally plausible to look forwards to glance back the swirl of perspectives in the passage notwithstanding one thing is clear ktha does not face the pre prehistoric world as if it were an object before him he stares into a mirror in which he sees past guilt as future judgment and prior trespasses his Destiny in the figure of one he sees the figure of the other because they are reversible terms as long as there is guilt there will be judgment and vice versa since the two are nothing but images of the prehistoric World which can never be an object as it cannot be divided from anything else in other words guilt and judgment are two sides of the same coin which is never evident in itself and which can only be seen in its opposite that is its inverted Mirror Image we will see see this doubling again in the essay albeit as a double or miror image that is not recognized as such and which as a result can open to something we cannot comprehend judge salvage or or or or or um offer um salvation to the prehistoric world is to put it somewhat chily where it has always been it has neither faded into the past nor seated its place and yet we routinely miss it when we search for it indeed we miss it because we search for it Cas struggled to find clam in the castle is but one instance of this vain effort the hunter Gus's dilem is much the same he fails to reach the Nether world he seeks because the wind driving his ship keeps him from his destination in both cases it is not a misdeed that thwarts their efforts but something more basic the misrecognition that they are already in the prehistoric world or the world before the world and do not need to search for it for Benjamin and for Kafka we are always in the Garden of Eden but unable to recognize it not because our faculties are too weak but in fact because they are too strong our abilities trap us in what Benjamin would call a world of myth in which our only mode of attending to things is to judge them what kofus fiction enables us to imagine and in so doing teaches us is another form of attention in Blissful forgetfulness this is Malik's idea of attention as the natural prayer of the Soul with the emphasis on the word natural as noted at the outset of this paper forgetting is not something we will and this makes it an all but unnarrated event that Benjamine attempts to narrate in the final section of the essay is thus all the more REM remarkable even as he downplays his Discovery the topic comes up in a reflection on the alienation of modern man which would seem out of place in an essay in which the social context of kafka's writing is otherwise ignored and yet it is in this passage on our technologically mediated relation to ourselves that Benyamin is able ble to provide a rare glimpse into the pleasure of being unaware the joy of not having to be conscious I quote the invention of Motion Pictures and the photograph came in an age of Maximum alienation of men from one another of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones man does not recognize his own gate on film or his own voice on the phonograph the situation of the test subject in such EXP experiments is kfka situation this is what leads him to study where he may encounter fragments of his own existence fragments that are still within the context of the role he might catch hold of the Lost Jess gestos as P lamel caught hold of the Shadow he had sold he might understand himself but what enormous effort would be required it is a tempest that blows from Forgetting and study is a calvalry attack against it the metaphors in this passage are really just astonishing I've quoted the passage at length because it was one of the few instances in the essay where Benjamin tells a story about Kafka by which I mean a story in which he imagines Kafka as a character and speculates how he lived what could potentially be an into an intoxicating experience becomes in his narration a tragedy not to recognize your your voice in a recording or your gate in a film does not necessarily have to be a sign of alienation or if so it should be doubled for the alienation and issue here is alienation from on S a self produced through an act of alienation in which one is separated from nature expelled from the garden and condemned as guilty before having committed any act separation from separation estrangement from estrangement could be the heading of this narrative if one wants to read it as a fable the technical Medi of film and the phonograph confronts us with versions of ourselves as real not idealized bodies as nature not myth this accounts for the ex strangeness of the experience of the self or is it of the other in various media we do not know if kfco went to the cinema to study himself as Bening claims only that he went frequently and enjoyed it for all his similarities with his protagonists especially in their names kfka expressed little identification with them in his Diaries which would suggests that the pleasure in writing was the pleasure of becoming other of forgetting oneself and of being attentive to it ever presented itself without being summoned Benjamin pictures Kafka as a scholar engaged in a prolonged but futile battle with forgetting but as readers it is hard not to see this depiction as a projection on Benjamin's the Scholar's part in his portrait of Kafka we find a portrait of Benjamin laboring with his prodigious intellect to batten down the hatches of memory as the Tempest of forgetting wipes away all fixtures I do not mean to suggest with this reading that Benjamin is a tragic figure quite the contrary in not recognizing himself in losing himself in the portrait he paints he experiences the freedom of being disembodied of taking flight and of being transported that Kafka captured in his wish to be an Indian I quote if one were only an Indian instantly alert and on a racing horse leaning against the wind kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground until one shed one's Spurs for there were no Spurs threw a away the rains for there were no rains and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly Shor Heath when H's neck and head would already be gone because so much of kafka's fiction hinges on falling falling asleep at the wrong moment falling through doorways and especially falling for false Idols we pay less attention to the instances of flight in which a character like the anonymous writer in um kava's wish become weightless and escape the encumbrances of daily life this is the metaphors metamorphosis at stake in kafka's fiction and we witness it even in his darkest tales as in the Hunter Kus who is condemned to travel eternally the Waters of the Earth because his death barge fails to take him to the underworld yet he is as he tells us also a butterfly and who would want to disagree that the tale delivers him and us to the heights of Freedom thank you very much for your attention thank you very much relle um I'm sorry it took a moment to get uh my um to unmute myself um we have heard about the weightlessness of language and the weightlessness of objects this morning and now and Annie has given us a little bit weight in a kind of paradoxical dialectics because of the objects um that are part of this material culture is as well that can become weightless at any moment but relle you have pointed uh us to something very important that the question of reading kavka um cannot proceed without um a rumination a thinking about what narrative and telling stories May mean and that is not only a process in Kafka to be considered but of course at the center of Benjamin's work we will continue with Dominic sner now whose paper at least two Benjamin's kfka and the temporality of gesture will bring us back to the gesture with which we started this morning with Michael's talk thank you Dominic it's your turn thank you so much um Liliana for these um generous words um and thanks to everyone really at the University of Pennsylvania who made this event possible especially Ian fleshman of course and discr students Mimi and Matt and Sam and Jonah for their technical support and all um my fellow uh panelists really in our um in our little uh penel or penal colony here I remember in the early stages of planning this event Ian made it a point to think regionally seeking to bring together local talent quote unquote um in Philadelphia to think about Kafka and Benjamin and while it is quite regrettable that we're not together in person I'm nonetheless very very honored by the invitation to speak in such a distinguished Forum um and to share my thoughts on Benjamin and kfka with you I initially meant to write a paper about the hermeneutic confusion caused by the strange title of this event and as we learned this morning I think I wasn't the only one who felt prey to this confusion elective affinities reading benam reading Kafka for isn't that a different Benjamin essay elective affinities and isn't the eclipse signifier here the name of G um occupied and overshadowed by France kfka who as some of you may know never got to realize his own planned essay about G's terrible nature his inly his Vis but I soon changed my mind and tried to refocus on the question of what it means to read someone reading in Benjamin's case this question is even more complicated because we never really witnessed Benyamin reading per se because there's always someone who already read Benyamin reading already posed the question already followed the path deciphered the trace hence when we read benam we not only read him reading others be it GTA be it Kafka we also inevitably read um the great readers of his Benjamin's own work from adoro to aand from Weber to fenes from Dara to LaVine from Bak moris to fabba and so on and so on when it comes to Benjamin Kafka essay however one reader who definitely stands out as unavoidable is vanak and Michael already mentioned him uh this morning his essay titled the gesture and the name is path breaking in numerous ways and in my case it's the one reading I simply cannot shake when I read benam reading Kafka I cannot in the Contex of this paper reconstruct to you the various moves H makes in the of his argument I just would like to remind you of the way in which he insists on the problem of gesture with respect to Benjamin's perspective on Kafka and its connection to what Benjamin calls the Cloudy spot or Vella characterizing kafka's Parables gestures or cloudy spots um and we discussed some of this this morning already are moments that refuse to be PR to presentation and in consequence they possible to cognize these moments lie beyond the sphere of linguistic transparency as they lack a positive semantic F semantic function within the economy of the text as hamaha argues the reason his reading is so decisive however is because it shifts the locus of the gesture from the parable to the sphere of names superimposing it onto a profound onomastics so the stud of names profound onomastics that demonstrates how the gesture subversion of presentation is operative not only within kafka's Parables which serves as the stage which which serve as the stage for Benjamin's main insights but in the names connect connected to the distorted bodies that populate kafka's world not least the name Kafka itself if the principle of the name is shared with that of the parabolic Cloudy spot onomastic investigation will have to yield similar results as an analysis of the parable and indeed both the parabolic and the onomastic gesture can be said that they mean that they do not mean and I can say more about the structure of meaning not to mean um later on during discussion Perhaps it is thereby critical to understand that Ham's agenda in putting his focus on the name is not to privilege the onomastic over the parabolic in order to point out that in order to point out a blind spot with respect to Benjamin's argument as though the actual or essential location of the Cloudy spot were in the name instead of the parable rather Ham's intervention is so felicitous because it succeeds in Breaking open the concept of gesture just like the gesture itself breaks open as Michael reminded us this morning breaking open the con concept of gesture in such a way that it becomes irreducible to the parabolic and the parable staged and exaggerated motions in this sense Ham's essay functions as an invitation further to refine our understanding of the chestal and in refining it finding it elsewhere elsewhere than in the parabolic elsewhere than in the onomastic elsewhere than on the stage of Benjamin's World Theater and otherwise than a Spott cloudy spot for a cloudy spot amongst elements that carry a semantic function is still in danger of being coerced into representation if only negatively taking up this invitation further to unfold the chestal en cafka and Benyamin I propose for the remain remainder of my paper to dwell on an issue upon which hamaka only briefly touches and whose treatment in Benjamin As I Shall demonstrate momentarily is prone to some misunderstanding I'm referring ref in to the problem of time and the question concerning the gestures specific temporality and I'm very glad that Rochelle already laid some of the groundwork in this regard if one were to look for break points and non- congruent movement separating hamaha reading from Benjamin's quote unquote original Endeavor the problem of temporality with no doubt figure among the possibilities in fact hamaha veers away from Benyamin a few times for instance when admonishing him for upholding ative understanding of the body as benam emphasizes the distorted dimensions of corporality in kfka another such point of fracture would be his rejection Ham's rejection of Benjamin's definition of odic as quote the form which things assume in Oblivion hamah contends thate one can also say and argue on better philological grounds that OD is the name that withdraws from the law of naming end ofe while this emphatically philological reading of ODC as onomastic sign ostensibly stays closer to pin's principle of the gestal and the Cloudy spot Ham's rejection of the problem of Oblivion what Benjamin calls festen hiide Bears on a lar larger Eclipse that has to do with the question of time in general one observes that hamaha privileges kafka's onomastic signifiers over the bodies by which they are carried and whom they Mark hence he privileges the signature over the life form it underwrites in consequence questions concerning Lifetime and finitude are not really Central to his analysis the only temporal aspect on which hamaha dwells at some length is related to his interpretation of kfka which he reads as Escaping The Law of continu on which a vulg understanding of modernity is based such vulgar understanding depicts modernity as a continuous series of failure and renewal but discontinuity is bound to collapse through what Benjamin terms the falling ill of tradition this odd kind of illness is connected to the chest in such a way that it marks a SE surra within historical experience which means that instead of connecting the past to the present kavas Pros introduces a disconnect thus provoking a situation in which it becomes impossible to carry a past truth or a Doctrine over into the future the impact of this Cur lies at the heart of the structure of the parabolic in that it makes it impossible for the parable to let its Doctrine arrive in other words if Doctrine qua transmit ible meaning functions as the critical relay between tradition and modernity kavas Pros actively disables this relay namely in such a way that Doctrine may be anticipated but its meaning must not arrive hence the reader experiences a historical displacement a disconnect of epocal proportions the EPO of History if you will a falling ill of tradition its transmission of something hopelessly un transmittable to return to my central concern namely the problem of temporality I think it is safe to argue that it's only through this motif of a history without historical content without a transmissible meaning whose passing on would establish a secure connection and continuity between past present and future that hamaka takes seriously to use his own turn of phrase the temporal dimension of kafka's gestures it's also from this sight of a ruinous law of continuity a tradition Fallen ill and a history void of history that hamaha can anticipate through Benyamin kfka the kind of Futurity that will escape the law of presentation it's quote in the disintegration of presentation he argues that something else something hid hither to unknown and unprecedented is preparing itself the logic behind this anticipation is firm once a law once the law of presentation and its guiding principle of historical continuity are interrupted the future must fail to conform to the hither to transmitted patterns of cognition and experience this Escape From Any pregiven models from any pregiven model bestows an umbrage on of alterity upon what's to come future arising from a crack in presentation future taking form in the void of content that is pure transmissibility it's these vast epocal historical considerations to which Ham's reading relegates the problem of temporality yet there is more to discover about the temporal logic of gesture itself the time of the Cloudy spot if you will and the way in which it interferes with the Pres just as much as it interrupts presentation if we now take a closer look atamin himself we see that things stand quite differently in his 1934 essay a cursory look suffices to discern that reference to the temporal and different layers of temporality permeate the text um that the essay is Rife with markers of time and temporal relations reaching from the macr logic of traditions falling F of traditions falling ill to the minute situations in which quote decrepit officials aroly and strikingly of unid appear in the fullness of their power from the students learning whose industriousness May someday open the gate of Justice to the beem mentioned form which things assume in Oblivion that Benyamin recognizes in the body of OD it is precisely this steady in insistence on fessin and forenight forgetting forgetfulness Oblivion that characterizes Benjamin's argument throughout forgetting and forgetfulness in themselves describe a temporal relation if a remarkably precarious one forgetting one could say establishes a negative link between two or more layers of time um one could argue that forgetting is Remembrance without content forgetting remembers that it does not remember what can easily be what can easily be misconstrued however is that the poal complexity of these movements of forgetting we find scattered throughout Benjamin's argument it lies in the nature of forgetting to Mark a laws whose reference is located in the past rarely do we think of forgetting as oriented toward the future more often does it describe a severed relation to what has been a disturbance an interruption a disturb a disturbance and Interruption disconnecting a given present from a vanished past at first glance Benyamin seems to rely on such a conventional understanding of oblivion's temporality especially if we consider the main object of forgetfulness in Kafka namely The Peculiar Sphere for which Benyamin reserves the term forid the pre-World archaic world prehistoric world when kavka creature kavka creatures found their way to us what has been forgotten benam um clarifies in the pen penultimate SE section of his essay is never something purely individual everything forgotten mingles with that with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world for end of quote we thus learn that the processes of forgetting that underpin kavka Pros are never reducible to the subjective consciousness of a given identifiable individual rather they refer to an oblivion greater than any local instance of forgetting could Encompass an oblivion stemming from and referring to a strange kind of prehistory an archaic world that is not ours but which through cfus stories is somehow able to disturb our present time Benjamin makes reference to this prehistoric World throughout his essay as we learned from from um Ral Tobias before and I would like um to suggest that this that its semantic insistence on a realm of sheer antecedence suggested by the prefix for or pre makes the argument vulnerable to misunderstanding for the idea of an ancient world that relates to the reader present through a process of forgetfulness at least to some extent seems to adhere to the the possibility of a simple separation between present and past what is more it seems to construe kfka Pros as subject to a backward oriented Poetics whose regard for the future would be negligible compared to its investment in exploring the remembrance of a forgotten prehistory in kfka present some of Benjamin's formulations seem to confirm such a reading if we for instance take a look at the first mention of this all determining forel in his essay we get the impression that the temporality at stake in Kafka is firmly one of pastness located at an extreme remove from the European forms of peak civilization which had just just survived their first and were already anticipating a second world war during the time of kafkas and Benjamin's missed encounter the following remarks are made in the context of kfka um insistence on the loss opacity which makes it possible for someone like Joseph Kay to be sentenced quote not only in innocence but also in ignorance end of quote Benin draws the following conclusion and I quote we are taken back far beyond the time of the giving of the law on 12 tables to a prehistoric World written written law being one of the first victories scored over this world in Kafka the written law is contained in books but these are Secret by basing itself on them the prehistoric World exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly it is hard to understate how radically this claim impacts any possible understanding of the law in Kafka if the prehistoric World takes us back to a Time prior to any written law the opacity and obscurity of kfka law as manifested for example in the parable before the law lose their hermeneutic prerogative for in our ignorance Vis the law it is thus less a problem for our ignorance Vis the law is thus less a problem of the signifi withdrawal or its idioms unreadability as Shak Dara argued then it is due to the laws as of yet Unwritten character in other words it's not so much that we do not understand the law but that this lack of understanding is conent on the laws not yet having been written the law is inaccessible to us because its location is situated prior to the Triumph of written law over the prehistoric World they initially raised question concerning presentation thus also undergos a shift for if the law is yet to be written the blackout of it of its presentability is less due to an interruption than owed to the laws unscripted form form it is not presentable because the Triumph of presentation has not yet taken place the presentational disconnect that causes the so-called falling ill of tradition Fallen ill of falling ill of tradition would therefore be nothing inherently modern instead of being affected by an interruption of and in the present tradition would be displaced from itself already prior to its very Inception in the for in other words if the cloudy spot is related to this uh prehistoric world and if this world takes place prior to the presentational intervention of any written law kafkas modernity is inherently archaic essentially prehistoric it's interrupt it interrupts its own presentation from before its Beginnings it is perhaps the powerful possibility of such misprision that guided Theodor Adano admonition in a famous letter from December 1934 in which he detects in Benjamin certain quote symptoms of archaic enthralment the unex unexcited into the vulgar platitude of designating modernity as regressive and anachronistic backward oriented and primitive um as it fails to profess the necessary appreciation for the intricate sense of temporality at play in Benjamin's formulations only a bad reading could take the prehistoric world of which kfka speaks for granted in order to locate in it the moments of forgetfulness whose power in turn whose power in turn would be responsible for the decisive interruptive quality of kavka modernity instead of viewing for as a pregiven historical mythical category the task one is summoned to carry out when reading Benjamin's essay lies in explicating an understanding of prehistory as the name of the specific paradoxical temporality that marks kfka gestal Poetics prehistory then would not determine a nameable identif ible Epoch subject to historical experience and cognition um the world as it once was the world before the world nature but it would form the index of a temporal the index of a temporal Dynamic that would characterize the time and the temporal complexities of Kafka curas interruptions cloudy spots and gestural processes prehistoric would be the attribute of the temporal Speck that would interfere with the present in order to stop it from presencing consider the following passage wherein Benjamin determines kafka's critique of the category of progress taking up once again the motif of an archaic World quote Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time his novels are set in a swamp world the fact that it is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present on the contrary it is actual by virtue of its very Oblivion end of quote Benjamin's essay is replete with formulations such as these they are notoriously hard to unpack precisely due to the seemingly aortic temporality um that they indicate what at other points Benjamin calls prehistoric World here is termed swamp world situated at the beginnings of time the CRS about this obsolete Antiquated Ultra ancient sphere however is precisely that it is precisely that is not radically removed from the present but to the contrary that it invades and overlaps with the present the mode of it of its invasion is called forgetting one could argue that the swamp World which Benjamin discerns in Kafka functions as a kind of unconscience of the present it affects the entire content of this present determines this present from within from underneath yet only in such a way that its guise itself cannot claim presence that kfka present presents a prehistoric world in the mode of its oblivion means that it presents merely the inability of presenting presenting that which by definition with draws from presentation in other words it is not the need separation of temporal spheres past and present um and therefore the fantasm of an epocal temporal continuity that determines kfka Pros but the sheer simultaneity of temporal spheres their congruence so fitting so intense that the present of the one blurs and disables the presencing of the other a lot seems to hinge then on how we read and understand benin's concept of forgetfulness as the mode in which the prehistoric world may extend into the present rather than marking a sheer and irretrievable loss forgetfulness forgetting and Oblivion describe predicaments of representation rather than indicating a simple negativity foress has the positive value of reaching into the present without her ever coming to presence in any meaningful way for this reason it is also the case that Benjamin can allow forgotten objects nonetheless to take form I quote again ODC is the form which things assume in Oblivion yet this form must cease to signify it must mean without meaning and carry a name that refuses to name hamaka rejects the category of Oblivion instead philologically to account for this disturbance through the withdrawal of positive semantic value such withdrawal however is provoked not by the sheer absence of semantic positivity but by its overdetermination so much so that one could argue that the Cloudy spot in Kafka be it of an onomastic or a parabolic nature simply means too much coherently to mean anything at all Ham's preferred rhetorical register to signpost such Surplus is the phrase at at least two meance starting with the designation of cfas onomastics as quote the collision between at least two linguistic and social orders um end of quote when things of uh the two Origins at stake in the beginning of the cares of the family man the Slavic versus the Germanic Providence of the word ODC hamak insistence on at least two reasons languages incom incompatible orders meanings uh Etc pervades his reading doubling and tripling into its culminating installment in the last paragraph and I quote this is the experience of C this is the experience kfer undertook with himself with his writing and with his name belonging to no order and no Epoch and yet always belonging to at least two at the same time between at least two languages at least two cultures as a Jewish intellectual and nationalist Prague living as a useless writer in a family of merchants capable of writing and yet always unable to write end of quote one could argue that the structure of this at least two determines the form of the gesture in kavka the nature of gesture is less a matter of parabolic doctrine that refuses to arrive nor one of semantic distorted names that withdraw from naming such refusal such withdrawal is M merely symptom and effect of a dynamic that insists on entangling at least two registers it is telling that the additional qualification at least two uh at the same time this additional qualification of at the same time in the passage just quoted at least two at the same time is absent from M's original text thus the responsibility of Peter fenes who carried out the texts in parenthesis otherwise Exquisite translation perhaps the phrase at the same time is already implicit in hak's argument and fenis simply brought it to the four simply brought to the four something already obvious be that as it may the supplemented phrase at the same time emphasizes a dimension that has remained latent throughout Ham's discussion of gure namely its temporality if we recall Benjamin's above qued Insight that kafka's quote swamp World extends into the present it now becomes clear that this extension occurs precisely in the mode of fases at the same time this simultaneity uh causes the Integrity of the present to collapse um as the content pushing itself into its realm is covered by an unliftable Veil of Oblivion the resulting presentation is a distorted one and this Distortion is temporal in nature if Oblivion uh in Benyamin means more than an individual's loss of memory it marks such a pushing into presence of an imageless archaic time it means the at least two of for and present whose D whose dilemma lies precisely in their faithful simultaneity in the disfiguring corrosion of presence through prehistories Oblivion if we viewed the temporality of kafka's gesture as reducible to the tension between the prehistoric world and the present however our reading would once again fall prey to the danger of misconstruing the two as independent identifiable temporal spheres in order to avoid the the pitfalls of this dich it is critical to Fathom kfka prehistoric world that pushes itself into the textual present under the of Oblivion not as a designated era or period of time or whatever um but as the name of any Interruption of the present due to the collisions anticipated by the phrase at least two this would mean that the phrase at least two is never reducible to the binary of prehistory and history Oblivion uh remembrance nature myth swamp world and modernity and so on rather it would seem to be uh it what seems to be at stake in Benjamin Kafka is the idea that whenever at least two temporalities Collide a cloudy spot emerges that provokes the Oblivion of an archaic world to interrupt the process of presentation the prehistoric world is not that which collides but that which emerges from Collision it's the tense relation of two temporalities or two or more temporalities thus the pure mediacy of time disconnected from any determinable historical context and experience its Interruption reminds us that no present is elevated above what Benyamin in the above mentioned context calls the beginnings of time an de side at one moment in the course of his argument and with this I will end Benjamin introduces the Trope of the specular to capture kfka temporal relations quote in the mirror bamin rights which the prehistoric World held before him in the form of guilt kfka merely saw the future emerging in the form of judgment end of quote if this proposition is to suggest more than the formal similarity between past present and future in kfka writings we ought to ask ourselves what exactly this mirror shows which the prehistoric World holds before us this is one of the very few moments in the essay when Benjamin explicitly turns to the question of the future and he connects it to the intervention of prehistory its extension into kfka present which as we learned causes the breakdown of presentation the collapse of any presencing of the present yet rather than marking a point of termination for any kind of historical experience Benjamin's mirrror allegory indicates that it is precisely in and through the Cloudy spot that gesture and its multiplying temporality at least two and at the same time that a kind of future announc it itself that this future emerges in the form of judgment does not hide the fact that it could also emerge and arrive otherwise or not at all for the law of continuity that would allow for prehistoric guilt neatly to become translated into a future judgment is essentially Disturbed the site of this disturbance is the mirror which permits us to behold kava's theater of gestures gestures whose observation teaches nothing about what is to come for allte perform amounts to a withdrawal from their own image Benyamin makes this obvious when um in the preceding sentences he states that not only did kfka fail quote to get his bearings amongst the prehistoric forces that dominated his creativeness more than that he did not know them at all whatever kfka saw in the mirror of his writing cannot therefore be subject to processes of cognition or recognition eluding any formal identification of present and future escaping the logic of adherence to a formal continuity between prehistoric guilt and emerging judgment if kfka simply did not know the archaic forces that dominated his creativeness their cognitive negativity pushes these forces past the realm of historical experience and cognition and it pushes the prehistoric world that haunts his Pros beyond the precincts of what will ever be knowable rather than understanding this forid as the receptacle of all the odd figures that find their way toward presentation in kfka Pros I propose to interpret Benjamin's conceptual choice such that it becomes readable as a sheer Dynamic of disfiguration as the static of as the static and Distortion the withdrawal and representational breakdown that owe their occurrence to temporalities at least two at the same time thank you very much thank you so much Dominique for your wonderful paper um and a paper that is wonderfully complimenting Roselle's uh paper as well um I think for all of us who are listening and uh also viewing uh this event um they must be aware of the irony that it's taking place in the framework of a university an academy whose purpose seemingly is the acquisition of knowledge and here we are talking about Oblivion and forgetting and not just the importance of forgetting but even interestingly enough the productivity of forgetting and what can be rescued from this um we want to continue with the session uh by calling uh relle uh back on the screen and relle would you like to respond to Dominic's paper um I feel there is um there are a lot of connections and then maybe Dominic you can respond to Roselle's and we can start a conversation thank you H um thank you so much Dominic that was really um just um a tremendous um paper um and I I I so admir the um structure of forgetting um and your analysis of what then the um forel you know does to the present into any representation I thought in my response I would pull on um one strand um in your paper because um it's it's actually something that that um I'm I'm myself chewing on at the moment so um I did write this up but it's very quick um so one of the many pleasures of reading your papers following the connection that you draw between the concept of gesture and Benjamin's essay and the idea of the prehistoric World gesture disrupts presentation it is not a a sign or act but a moment of disrup disruption or friction when signs are withdrawn and all acts are suspended gestures are cloudy as Benyamin puts it and hamak underscores because they do not bring anything to light but this doesn't make them any less conspicuous if anything the opposite is the case gesture stands out precisely because it does not deliver anything concrete it does not refer to or profer an object in thwarting this expectation then gesture does two things at once it reveals the way in which things are presented and meaning is forged and it opens a space in which something other than an intentional object can make itself felt the forth has a similar status in Dominic's reading it is never present as an object it is not a prior age or an archaic past which would imply that it has elapsed the that never subsides because it has never yet come to pass as Dominique succinctly puts it the for velt interrupts its own presentation from before its Beginnings it resists every form of presencing and this means that it can only come to the for in moments of forgetting as that which does not fit or belong to any Continuum the Fel is not a past or present but always something other it eludes our grasp and yet it grasps us us Benjamin might say that kfa's fiction is always in its grip as that mysterious force that eludes his protagonists a curious feature of the prehistoric world is that it is never something purely individual this is a quote from the benyamine essay that Dominic quotes everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world end quote Dominic's perceptively notes that forgetting is never an individual experience it is not limited to a sing single Consciousness um that um it is um um the opposite of anything that's a um huran phenomen who would consider in phenomenology and yet I'm trying to figure out if what's at stake here is in fact the subject at all or if Benjamin's point is that the forgot is that the Forgotten are never individual things to be able to say I forgot the book The Story or the argument is already to identify it and remember it however vaguely as some something but what does this mingling of the Forgotten with the Forgotten tell us about the archaic world or the figures that seem to emanate from it in Kafka what changes if we if we think of the Forgotten as a world rather than a thing how can the collectively forgotten disrupt the presentation of discrete objects what does the mingling of everything forgotten bring to the four um and um finally is it the indivisibility of the archaic world its Unity or seamlessness and does that indivisibility itself also make it unrepresentable uh thank you relle uh Dominic would you like to respond and maybe then also engage with Rochelle's essay um they're they're so wonderfully complimentary and what's what's even more uncanny is that I think that my response to Roselle's paper responds to her the question that she just asked because it has to do with with um precisely with with um formation and let's say with what happens with what takes place in this sphere of the forid um and um I want to pick up on before I start um and then I guess we can just all of us discuss what what happened um before I start with with my response I would like to remind us of a formulation that Michael used this morning and which um hasn't left my mind ever since he spoke about the gesture and the Cloudy spot as well and he said it causes a dispersion of discrete figures and these discreet figures I'm interested in that we have in our world but that don't are not possible in the for because for is marked by incompleteness by things coming to form by what relle calls calls gestation and there is a a link here between the gesture and the gestation the gesture in the gestation and so on and so forth that we could think about but perhaps I will just read my response and then we can discuss any any open questions that um that still linger um so first of all I would like to State how um grateful and excited I am for the opportunity to share the panel with a noble mind such as foral um and my excitement is only reinforced forced having listened to her paper which in a light-footed fashion draws our attention to a series of key moments in Benjamin's essay the interest in which Rochelle and I share in an uncanny way so much so that two of the main problems that motivate her talk also stand at the center of my own intervention as you just heard namely the so-called forv or prehistoric World better yet as relle calls it the world before the world and its mode of presentation namely Oblivion Melle Tobias rightly insists on the importance of the problem of Oblivion for Benjamin's essay while at the same time reminding us of The elusive character the obscurity surrounding Benjamin's fesen height making it impossible to grasp or make sense of at the beginning of her paper relle identifies nche as a legitimate predecessor of Kafka citing a parable in which Blissful forgetting is at stake and I couldn't help but thinking of um a Kafka fragment which I am sure everyone here is familiar with but which I'm going to site anyway uh for it so beautifully corresponds to the forgetting on which Rochelle's paper commences and I quote this is from kafas fragments I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than the others I have not forgotten my former inability to swim but since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is useless and I cannot swim after all end of quote I would like to suggest that the structure of this short Parable inverts the relationship between for and its presence the way Ral Tobias understands it in her reading of Benyamin whereas here it's a pressing kind of remembrance that fails even in forgetting what ought to be lost the force behind Roselle's argument is that of forgetfulness and what's lost is the prehistoric world it is impossible to pinpoint this for in Benjamin and relle reminds us of this impossibility when she holds that quote the for has neither faded into the past nor seated its place and yet we routinely miss it when we search for it end of quote in other words this world before the world is not a formed entity or object on the contrary it's a place of sheer occurrence where objects may take form in the first place these processes of taking form pertain to the Lexicon of bearing and birth that permeates Benjamin's rhetoric throughout the essay as relle reminds us um quote Benjamin picks up on kafka's perception of himself as a peripheral and still gestating being when characterizing The Messengers in his texts as figures that have not yet been fully released from the womb of nature end of quote what's critical in this formulation is Roselle's insistence on the incompleteness or not yet released of uh these cfin creatures the fact that they quote have not yet been fully released into our world implies a certain degree of imperfection um as though these figures are not phenomenally constituted the same way an object belonging to our world would be in other words these creatures lack form their ontology is not one of existence per se but one of precariously coming to form if this is the case however this also implies that Benjamin's forid is designated as the place of formation it's the very Dimension where phenomena are constituted where forms take shape as it were yet once this process is complete the for world would receive and its creatures would depart into the realm of fully constituted phenomena the world of formed beings quote unquote our will the predicament that weighs down on kavka universe according to Benyamin and according to Ral deas however is that this departure from the fore never really takes place at least not for All Creatures some remain stuck in the process of being formed which is to say that even if they appear as seemingly intact phenomena their for haunts them permeates them as the Oblivion of Their Own coming to being as she explores the structure of this Oblivion relle calls our attention to its intricate temporality um and she reminds us that it's precisely in The Haunting Persistence of a formless for that kfka permits the anticipation of something like a future quote it's in the incompleteness of these creatur of these creatures she states that uh it's the incompleteness of these creatures that makes them the harbingers of a world to come a world which even in the light of day would seem to be shrouded in fog and she determines it as the context in which the ancient past returns as a possible future in forgetfulness end of quote now how are we to understand this odd temporality According to which precisely that which is forgotten somehow announces an unknown future how are we to understand the temporality which requires us to find the future not in what lies ahead but in a world before the world a world so ancient that it's only a mode of that its only mode of coming to presence lies in Oblivion and that she insists that this temporality hinges on the incompleteness of the creatures um who act as its indices relle Tobias suggests that um what the future sh shares with the for in Kafka is precisely its unformed nature the this future is unknown because it fails to repeat known pattern it fails to present itself in known forms as its morphology is one of radical incompleteness as we said of phenomenal deconti defigurates this fear in a kind of nature that lies before the fall she follows benyamine ins situating it prior to the mythical that is prior to a lawful semantically consistent logical order that could make sense of the loss of for it the entire cunning of myth one could argue with relle Tobias lies in repressing the ways in which the prehistoric World extends into the present in pretending that the for is lost one could argue with relle that here I come and here I come full circle and return to the short Parable I quoted in the beginning that myth succeeds in forgetting even forgetting itself it is the Oblivion of Oblivion relle calls this quote the Mis recognition that we are already in the prehistoric world and do not need to search for it end of quote we are trapped there for in myth and the only way out or at least the only way uh out that relle the bias is willing to show us would lie in surrendering all sense making activities and give in to the special kind of attentiveness one that is able to forget itself one that realizes itself in Blissful Oblivion now even though there are many more IES movements gestures really that one could that would deserve to be um underscored in in this response I should come to a close and I want to ask do so with a question um and it has to do with one term that one concept that both relle and I touch upon in our papers but which I suppose for several reasons we avoided to dwell on at greater length and it is the term or violence bamin speaks of prehistoric forces that permeate kafka's Pros but which kfka himself is not able to recognize since the term Gite Loom so large in Benjamin's I was wondering and I wanted to ask you Rosal if we could designate the prehistoric World especially in its capacity capacity to withdraw from presentation as the receptacle of the unformed and not yet constituted um if we could designated this world the place of what benam in essay to uh toward the critique of violence called Divine violence that is one of pure traceless Annihilation just like you relle separate the sphere of nature from the sphere of myth in your essay Benjamin separates mythical violence from its Divine counterpart and he argues that while the former posits the law the latter annihilates it it is am I pushing the limits of the analogy too far or would you agree that kfka world before the world World potentially opens up a space for the occurrence of divine violence that's it thank you Dominic um the that it is quite a strong word after this response uh relle would you like to respond to Dominic right away do you want to think about it a moment and I bring in another questioner uh what would you prefer let me just give very much at the core not just of your paper and your conversation but also I think of the Symposium absolutely let me just make then one provisional comment um um um first and I was really um thank you so much Dominic that is an incredibly thoughtful response um and it I was thinking very much of um Benjamin's um um critique of violence when when when when reading this essay and writing um this paper because it seems as if the fael really has this the same status exactly as um um the um um um Divine violence that you um um um that that that you bring bring up as the ways in which I mean it's it's it's it seems as if in the same way to the extent that that that myth does violence right to um um that disorder that that constantly threatens it um that the um reverse of this is true as well that there is then from forel this um um penetration into um the mythical world I was hoping maybe and this is also just to bring back also Annie and and and and and and Michael from this morning too um is that I wonder if um maybe we shouldn't be thinking about the far but also um Divine violence in um um the critique of violence as that which is um I will say unoriginal in a very specific sense it has no no origin it does not originate in anything nor is it and it breaks my heart to say this as a phenomenologist nor is it ever originary given right um it um um this reminds me of the uh of the word uspr itself uh which comes to this kind of double um that Dominque has talked about um relle what would you suggest should we ask Michael and Annie to come in right now um and let me just announce something general generally we have two people already in line with questions I would like to invite more people to put questions in the Q&A um I won't forget the people who have already uh signed up with questions uh but I would like to address follow your suggestion Rochelle and address uh uh Michael and Annie do you have a response to this uh Central discussion of violence now yeah I'd be happy to to jump in um violence and and the for and um it's its temporal status uh the way it um pushes into the present the way it's not pre in any successive sense as as both of you of have argued um in this context um and particularly prompted by Michelle's um fantastic paper um I been puzzling over the passage about absend it's it's one one of the absolute densest uh most convoluted passages in the entire essay and I wonder in the context of our discussion of of forgetting and the insistence uh of something that does not um yield to a linear narrative it seems that what Benjamin is doing in this particular passage is he's taking I mean it's it's lost in the English translation of ABA as original sin because that really puts it um it locates it in the past it locates it as an original event where as in Benjamin it seems that [Music] the he keeps taking the phrase and turning it back on itself um abunda becomes the sin of transmission becomes the sin of inheritance um it's un uh it's a sin that is committed from generation to generation that is transmitted from generation to generation without ever taking place uh once and for all so again this kind of position side but it's also complex in the way that the position of Sinner and accuser are repeatedly turned back on themselves and U Benjamin will will uh Describe the Father in at the beginning of the paragraph As the accuser um then in turn become the accused uh accused of having begotten a son um and so I think what is at stake in this passage is um is again the it's it's IM immensely Tangled quality and it's in this um this knot um which is not to be undone um that I would say that there is a kind of Enclave of the unconscious in Consciousness that Benjamin is performing this the presence of the F in his and in the doubling back repeated reversions of his Pros he's he's acting something out that has that cannot be a straightforward content of his thought uh but that is is working it that that he's performing in his very writing itself and this takes us to the other question um from transmission of uh of of of the abunda as a kind of um questions about inheritance and nonlinear inheritance to what we've been saying about um the falling ill of tradition and the way in which Benjamin will uh applaud Kafka for saying uh Kafka had had left the consistency of Truth far behind and what he means by the falling ill of tradition is that it no longer has a kind of intactness it doesn't have a healthy body um it doesn't have um internal consistency and he says Kaa turns from that from the level of content to to clinging to transm transmitt ability and to questions of Decay and of rumor and of what is kind of hanging in the air and he talks about kafka's e dropping on tradition as as though to say that Kafka and this comes back in in some ways to Belle's point about what kind of attention is required what kind of um listening and and from what I heard you said in terms of if you if you you're not going to find it precisely if it it if it's the object of a search but Kafka seems to kind of listen to rumors rumors that kind of um travel on their own and it's um it's the attentiveness to the decomposition to decomposing bodies to trans to to what Dominque called also a kind of static in the transmission to that which never yields as a con content that I think is is really at stake in Benjamin's reading of of k sorry for that very long- winded intervention um I would like to turn to Annie now because relle addressed both you and Michael Michael and Annie um Annie has a bit of a problem turning the video on um Sam in the background can you help Annie and we can uh maybe move on and then come back to Annie uh would that be okay Annie's back now yeah Annie's back now wonderful I don't see her Annie please uh uh um respond because relle uh um addressed it to all of you okay um I'll just be very quick because I I want to make sure we leave time for questions as well from the audience and I'm cognizant of time um I wanted to the sort of connection I was trying to make um in my paper um is also the the link between the collector and the allegorist that they both have a kind of um subversive Bond according to Benyamin um and he talks specifically about bod's rage in Central Park which he talks about is a testiment to the destructive underpinnings of allegory um and I'll just read one quote he says bod's allegory Bears traces of the violence that was necessary to demolish the harmonious facade of the world that surrounded him um and here we might even think about um Benjamin's destructive character um as another potential text where um both The Collector and allegorist are sort of equipped with weapons to resist and and destroy the status quo by destroying the mythical Unity between objects and their meanings um so that's just one sort of potential connection also with one-way Street and the kind of armed um quotations um and this kind of uh violent rhetoric at stake in in so much of benin's writings around this topic can I just throw in one very quick point and I promise it won't take more than 30 seconds but it has to do with the chain of transmission um and I think that we forget that I mean the text opens with um a kind of train of transmission that Shakin you know lives in the hand of pokin who is a writer um and I do think that there is something that is being said in that you know Parable there if you will about a kind of um non original non originally not originally given form of writing that enables um something like um um Shakin to find himself um um writing and written in another hand um Ian wants to jump in now Ian uh please as long as we're doing a free-for-all as the as the convenor I I not quite a freefor all I want to jump in too no I'm very excited by this this whole conversation um and Michael what you were saying about uh the absent and the way it turns around on itself it becomes a sort of you know an AA borous of sorts reminds me of of Dock's reading of the of the mirror which I've never really understood before but looking at it is sort of seeing the past in a rearview mirror you know projected um into the future was was very helpful to me I'm glad that Annie was able to to rejoin us because my question actually was about this sort of Act of collection or the sort of obsessional citational practice um because it seems to me that Annie I think you referred to it also in nich and terms as a sort of monumental history sorry an antiquarian history um whereas Michelle what you're talking about is the ahistorical from that from that same essay um and so if we're if we're making Divine violence K or if we're seeing reading Divine violence as akin to the for or as akin to this fre floating attentiveness is there a way that you know Michael you're trying to make not trying to make I I'm not skeptical of it but but you're reading Benjamin um as performing the kinds of cofton Dres that he discovers uh whereas Annie you know you're more focused on the sort of citational collection collection practice and it seems to me that precisely for that reason those might be opposed that this the citationality seems to be the kind of forgetting of forgetting um that would permit that free floating um attention you know that sort of obsessive Gathering and holding on to um would would seem to be opposed to the gester reality of what we're looking at here and I that you know that's a tension that's reflected in the text itself Michael in the span of a page or two you quote one bit where Benyamin says K could could only understand the gestal and then later the thing that he could least fathom was the gestos um you know and that comes up again I think maybe both Dominic and relle quoted a moment uh the the schlam moment the commisso illusion and where it's the Forgotten gesture so you know the status of of the gesture and it's um whether we can math it or not whether we can grasp it or not is is open so that's more of an invitation to riff than anything and can we uh take this as a comment for the moment because we have a lineup and I feel if we just talk about among ourselves um there will be a lot of very frustrated people who who want to talk about the same issue um I'm particularly concerned about a person who is very much in the background and like MiMi hacking is also responsible for this conference um to function at all and that is Adam saxs a graduate student in the background who has a question and I would like to call him for forward on screen if possible Adam come up and ask your question for all I'm here to see you yes thank you thank you so much Liliana and and thank you all for your wonderful papers um yeah my question concerns this idea of fael I came into today really wanting to learn what the fael was and I don't know if I quite know yet but I have more questions and that's great um and so my question really circles around this idea of exchange gift exchange thinking a bit with with deraad there but is Benjamin alluding to a process of Exchange where there's a certain indebtedness formed between the fael and our world right when he first brings up the fael he talks about that it's something that is even pre the right there's there's this there's this moment of giving but there's even an earlier moment that he's referring back to and in relle in your paper you talk about this idea of there's no clean or full formation of the Fel and incompleteness uh particularly of kafka's creatures and I'm wondering what this means for the cleanness or the linearity of this exchange um are we still in a process of waiting for this gift is the gift exchange is the exchange between our moment and the for velt and the forel and Our Moment incomplete purposefully because there is perhaps if there is this full and complete Exchange this destruction this Annihilation this Divine violence that you both were talking about earlier so that's that's really my question is there is there a potential of exchange here and how does that play out and how does actually what Benjamin is talking about here through Kafka trouble the idea of a clean or linear exchange Adam may I direct the question to Rochelle uh Rosa would you like to respond to this the question of gift and exchange um well um thank thank you so much I mean I'm actually gonna um um draw on Dominic's paper because I think he actually answers this question so um well that the for velt is always you know um it's maybe one shouldn't think of it as something but rather as that which withdraws or what um um in any presentation um itself can never um assume presence um and in that sense it it's what um it it is you know it is always at one and the same time um um giving um impetus for um um new new myth at the same time that it is always puncturing whatever order or regime is placed um um upon it um and I don't know if there's really any way um outside of um uh of of of that Dynamic where um you will always have um that that um which um um um the forevel as that that which disrupts any um um gift and any exchange that it can't be part of any such um economy because it is never even there as itself but it's there to remind us that whatever um um myth has um um set up comes only um at the um um expense of this other um um experience of world almost um I don't know Dominic you want to add to that I I basically agree with you I think that if there is such a thing as an economy of exchange or a textual economy um I think what's important at least this is the inter interpretation quote unquote of the reading that I like to um emphasize what's important is to understand the for as not being part of that economy it's precisely that which escapes it so if the for world has to do with um with a sense of giving as you indicate in your question it would be it it it would be the sheer possibility of giving but not the giving of something particular that would in the for would open up the possibility of giving um um as opposed to for instance the positiveness of the law um in in myth or the the positiveness of narrative in in myth um but as soon as you think that the for world is part of a relation the for is here and the present is here or the for world is the giver and the recipient is whoever kco or the reader or Benjamin um I think then you're in danger of misunderstanding the complexity of of of that concept and I think I mean what I also tried to emphasize in in the paper is that benam is very unclear about it and it's prone to understanding if you read the term forward obviously you think that it's somehow discoverable or it's somehow graspable or it somehow relates to a sense of historical cognition and historical experience and it could be accessible to that but it's not if you follow um Benjamin's argument um uh Dominic and all we have now questions lining up this is a compliment to the incredible incedible discussion that's going on here we have Patrick mccor asking for Dominic so good that I have you in full uh picture right now in front of my screen um I site I was struck by your distinction between written and unwritten law before 1200 law in Europe was essentially Unwritten socially transmitted from one generation to another orally in Vice heighten perhaps even as far back as prehistoric time law in Kafka is not civil law I understand but are religious laws orally transmitted just as questionable as Unwritten ones um the question is directed to you but we can all jump in here what I would say this requires a lot of of um thinking and contemplation but what I would say and consideration but what I would say as a as a tentative first response would be um that that's another moment where one can easily misread Ben Benjamin when it comes to the distinction between um written law and unscripted law because he talks about and um relle you indicated rightly some confusion about that the 12 tables which uh I think what he means by that is the is the first codified Roman law the 12 tables of the law um but even those were not the first written laws obviously they were just the first kind of unifying cific of laws that existed before already it just ordered those laws so so I think it's a it's another um potential misprision or another potential misunderstanding to say okay there's written law and then there's uh the the previous unwritten law um when Benjamin says that uh written law is a Triumph um uh over the uh prehistoric world I think it's it's helpful to understand written law here in terms of representation or presentation even um orally transmitted laws would somehow um um partake in in cognizable forms of presentation and representation and what Benjamin insists on is that the law in kka does not come to representation it canid it refuses to come to presentation if that's orally or if that's in a written form is is secondary what matters is that that you cannot determine in the parable the doctrine or in the trial the law or in the case of Hunter graas the mistake that he made according to the protocols of proper dying um he had an accident he died he was supposed to enter the Beyond and somehow he wasn't able to and there's a major confusion about where the mistake was um here um and it it the important thing about that mistake is that it has to remain unidentifiable that's precisely the nature of the Cloudy spot which is why any reading that tries to go after the Cloudy spot and determine it and read it as an allegory for something or as a metaphor for this and that is to say a bluntly a bad reading um because it it tries to make the Cloudy spot disappear um which you can't do and tries to translate it into cognizable um propositions which it can't do um but yeah there's more to be said about this but uh the next question uh um to our panelists uh relle and Dominic of this session uh begins with a praise that I just have to give you I mean how can I deny you this the incredible Rich discussions on the for by both Rochelle and Dominic as well as the original sin and their violences seem to me to be calling out to towards the notion of in the beginning was the word and the origin myths of language it's Brett Harman writing how could we relate language to violence in the realm of the for World um I think this picks up some of the issues that we're already in discussion um maybe relle you can then expand on this later but I what I find important is that in in that one decisive moment in the essay where Benyamin talks about Origins and and and and beginnings and it's precisely when he talks about the Triumph of uh written law over uh for he talks uh about Beginnings in the plural he speaks about an. site so there already in the beginning there's multiple Beginnings there is a dissemination of Beginnings a multiplication of Beginnings I think the phrase I have it here is Kafka did not I think Michael Ed it relle cited it I cited it it's a very important moment in the text um and he writes Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time anang at De side so so anang would already be an an ultra emphasis on the the actual origin and then that's being um compromised by making it plural so much so that one thing at that side would be an oxymoron almost um there can only be one and not and that's already um a linguistic moment that happens here it's something that occurs in in in in Benjamin's language and in the decision to speak not of one origin but and not about but about and but maybe relle wants to expand on this yeah please relle um well one of the things that interest me very much is this idea of something being um um the first um and um why this is such a problem for um um Benyamin that there would be um a first instance of anything and and I'm just I'm very you know this is sort of answering um Brad's question with something you know of of of a parable too um but it's one of the few that we haven't discussed today which is the hidic Legend um of the um um of of the the beggar sitting um in um a a Tavern where a bunch of other people are discussing what it is that um they they would want and he tells the story of how he would want that he would have once you know that that he was once a king and um etc etc um um and now you know um had abandoned everything now he's whatever a beggar and they say well what do you get from all of that and he said a shirt um and the Reas um the reason I I sort of like this and I think that it's also about the you know the the origins of of of language he's being asked where do you come from right and and where do you want to go um and instead he Pro provides this alternative history um this doubling you know of his own life in order to at least um be able to get a fresh shirt for himself um by by by way of fiction so that you know and it's it's when you're asked what in the beginning was the word and this is a word on the beginning of the word and and so on and so forth that you're always doubling and redoubling it um and you can never get back to that first instance and I think the fa velt is always this reminder that there you know that that when when when an interrupts it makes you um you know forget um um um um that you've even forgotten that that that it ends up um taking what what what Prides itself always on being a unique first instance and showing it to you know have already to have already been sort of redoubled before it even began so to take sort of the notion of the A and F and maybe transfer them to the realm of of of fiction or storytelling that there is no first instance and that and and any um um story of the origin of language or pronouncement about the origin of language is already a second a third a fourth or a fifth word relle isn't it also a strong critique of the Enlightenment that has been preoccupied with the origin of human beings the origin of language and so on in competition in treatises and so on nobody could get away in the 18th century without writing an essay or something on the origins um and here we have kind of turned it around in some ways um both the origins but also what enlightenment could be I mean that's a really interesting observation that it comes after the fact as a um um um that that any um positive origin is always the myth of origin yeah that's that's and and that would be sort of what motivates the enlightenment too and it it links to the work that adona has done in a very different way about the enlightenment um Annie I have the feeling that you want to jump in oh I just wanted to quickly add to your point um about the Enlightenment and um adorno saying that I think in some ways we could even put this into conversation with Jame uh with Benjamin's kind of aversion to the overvaluation of originality also in his work of art essay where he denounces outmoded Concepts like creativity and genius um whose uh uh uncontrolled application uh leads to data Pro processing of data in a sort of fascist sense um and so one might think about the way that this has sort of larger implications for Benjamin's politics I just wanted to say that quickly no I I think I like um can ium Michael wants to jump in as well yeah I don't see so please jump in okay uh I wanted to come back uh to a couple of things one to Dominic's very strong contention that the law in Kafka does not come to presentation and I'd like to relate that to what I've been trying to say about Benjamin and performance and what I've think I meant to say is that the sense of performance is also a transferal repetition of Kafka transferential repetition suggests that Benjamin finds himself in the very strange position of being implicated in kapka's text that it's not a reading of Kaa from without but that he finds himself before the law of kfa's text that Kaa that before the law is before itself that it already prepositions Benyamin in such way to limit his moves limit the way in which he reads and I think benin's way of assuming that implication is to write in the way he does so I I really would like particularly I mean Dominic's um argument about the law not coming to presentation well then how does it make its itself felt and I think it makes itself felt in the transferential toils in which Benjamin finds himself in relation to Kafka so it's not Benjamin's reading of Kafka but in some way the way in which Benyamin has been read finds himself read into Kafka read by Kafka anticipated by Kafka condemned to play out certain moves that have been prescribed by kka uh Michael uh can I provoke you for a moment because we are at the end of the conference so we can I think be a little bit over the top um our Symposium is reading Benjamin reading kfka in C at certain moments we had reading hamaha reading Benjamin reading Kafka would your argument about finding yourself in the text be true for hamaka as well not so much in Kafka but in Benjamin um I think that hamah is trying to work I would say the short answer is yes the question is then how how does hamaka find himself self implicated in Benjamin's text positioned by Benjamin's text and I think the way he does is he tries to kind of work with it at the margins of it trying to develop tensions in it that with which it's already kind of pregnant and to exactly and and that pushes me to a follow-up question um I don't think you you know I'm I'm not sing ham is not perhaps the most singular example that I want to choose here but I want to kind of push it towards the question of reading of how we read in a way that we find ourselves in the text and push it to the Border uh that it becomes obvious in Benjamin's reading of Kafka that it is obvious but less obvious in the way of hamah reading Benjamin reading kfka uh but that this kind of that this particular examples can show us something about what it means to read seriously and that goes back to I think Rochelle's reading of Kafka uh where where where roelle you put up front the question of falling falling into falling down uh in some ways this kind of falling into is also part of reading can I add a quick um footnote to this discussion you just had with with with Michael um uh and it has to do with something that that has been on my mind regarding the the Cloudy spot that makes that invites reading um um in Kafka but makes it impossible at the same time and I think that um there's there's moments in the hamaha text on on which you just insisted Liliana um that explicitly uh posed the question of reading for instance the moment where he talks about the Cloudy spot as lacking a positive semantic function within the economy of the text and um and then he goes into explaining what exactly the Cloudy spot does and so on and so forth but what what he says here is that the Cloudy spot lacks semantic function within the economy of the text which means that there's no um meaning or semantic function that we can ascribe to the Cloudy spot but it's surrounded by um elements that can take on a semantic function there is an economy of the text which means that the text is not only cloudy spot that's why it's a cloudy spot that's why it's lo localizable as spot it's Spott as spot it's not a cloudy fog that surrounds the entire text the text what I what I'm what I what I want to say with this is that the text has to remain legible it has to remain readable to a very um great extent and then this ability to read it breaks off precisely at those moments of the gesture and of the Cloudy spot and that's the problem here it's not entirely inaccessible entirely unreadable it invites reading it invites you in it in invites you to perhaps even transferential attached to these gestures but at these um moments uh at this Stell you know um reading uh encounters it its very impossibility is so I just was going to respond very quickly I mean I feel like there sort of two different um movements um or impulses um you you you find um between Benjamin and and and and Kafka and I tried to talk about this a little bit that um Benjamin paints Kafka at the end of his essay as a scholar someone who studies um um and works to understand things when in fact what enabled kafka's fiction to continue was the opposite that um that that that he let himself be guided by that which he could not understand right um and and and and so it seemed as if the the you know the the writer and and and the reader function in very different ways and one of the um things I mean I'm I'm I'm certainly um um self-conscious about um and that I read in this essay too is um becoming the parasite that is the fathers and the um um civil servants who feed off of um you know the son because we come up with the law right you know that that um um um in operation um in in in in a text and how you can um let yourself be um um guided without having to make a principle of something is maybe the toughest task of re reading itself um um certainly something that I feel like um one can only be vigilant about um because it is so easy to become sort of like the father feeding off the son as as as a reader it's the question of vigilant can I just jump in yes please please jump in we we are trying to to finalize a message here and it gets more and more complicated Michael okay I mean it's around the question of vigilance uh I'm thinking of Roselle's beautiful highlighting of pkin in his pajamas uh performing actions as though in his sleep and um in in terms of the question of Benjamin's relationship to kka and to find himself implicated in the text I wonder if the initial gesture of Benjamin's text of shalin finding himself written into pin's text written by pkin but pkin not doing so even even as a willful act and that's why Michelle's highlighting of he does he does it in a depressed melancholic sleep walking kind of state and nevertheless he manages to conscript uh Shakin into his text and I wonder if there's that kind of power exerted by kofus text over Benjamin that he is in this way from the very beginning acknowledging Michael this is a beautiful last word for our panel because it is an Open Door and signing off now I don't know with which signature I'm signing off except it cannot be poin um Annie and Michael I would like to thank you as a listener for the first panel Dominic and relle I would like to thank you as a moderator for your contributions these have been marvelous for contributions that are not only a compliment to you but also a compliment to Ian who has invited you and had the premonition that it might work out the way it has worked out so my last thanks go to Ian and of course to everybody in the background uh Mimi Adam uh Sam and Jonah and uh I Turn to You in I just want to reiterate those thanks to all of our our panelists and presenters and and moderators and all the help as well as to the Department of dramatic languages and literature the program in comparative literature and Theory the Jewish studies kitchen seminar series The W Humanity Center and the um University Research Foundation this really has been um a pleasure I found it riveting um a wonderful way to sort of wrap up the semester thank you all so much and I look forward to uh continued discussions on this and other topics and Ian let's thank our audience as well thank you all for joining the webinar bye-bye thank you
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