The yield : Kafka's atheological reformation

340 Pages·2015·2.44 MB·English

by  Kafka

Stanford University Press Stanford, California
© 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data North, Paul, 1971– author.
The yield : Kafka’s atheological reformation / Paul North.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8047-9445-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8047-9659-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Kafka, Franz,
1883–1924—Philosophy. 2. Philosophical theology. I. Title.
PT2621.A26Z8114 2015
833'.912—dc23
2015007376
ISBN 978-0-8047-9669-9 (electronic)
THE YIELD
Kafka’s Atheological Reformation
Paul North
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
2015
MERIDIAN
Crossing Aesthetics
Werner Hamacher
Editor
for caro
He strained my faith–
Did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust–
Did it then—yield?
—Emily Dickinson*
Contents
Conversations
Preface
A Note on References
Abbreviations
§ Introduction
1. Atheology
2. Thoughts
3. Four Circles
4. The Fourfold Atheological Analysis
PART I: KAFKA’S BEING AND TIME
§ Refutation of What Being Never Was
5. Toward a General Echontology
6. Language for Other Purposes
7. Possession, the Possessed
8. Against Having
9. Thing Being
10. What “Am” Does
11. Foreign That You Are
§ Better Weapons than Faith and Hope
12. Two-Sided Faith
13. Faith and World
14. Faith and Life
15. The Progress Idea
16. Letting Fall and Yielding
17. A Twofold Truth
18. The Garden Antinomy
19. The Messianic Share
20. Kierkegaard Codicil
§ Excursus: For a Kafkan Logic
21. Two Logoi
22. The Logic of Sense
23. The Logic of Speech
PART II: DEATH AND THE WILL
§ The Problem of Our Art
24. Death Knowledge
25. Death Image
26. Schein zum Tode
27. The Illuminated Corpse
28. Nietzsche’s Doubt
29. The Problem with Our Art
30. The Return of the Snake
§ The Yield: On Forgoing Power
31. The Way and the Wall
32. No More Than
33. What You Are
34. Yielding
35. Pressure to Act
36. Subservience
37. Ontological Freedom
38. Struggle, Will, Power, Strength
39. Heidegger, Letting and Leaving
40. Childish Measures
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Conversations
I’d like to thank Jeffrey Cassvan’s father, whom I haven’t met. If he hadn’t
handed Jeff a volume of Kafka with the nerve that only a parent has vis-à-vis a
child to transmit the most vexed and troublesome gifts, and if Jeff had not been
daring enough to whisper “Kafka” to me one night on the street in Queens in a
tone reserved for a god no one remembered, I would never have started reading.
I would never have started thinking had I not found myself in a seminar on
Kafka and Nietzsche taught by Peter Fenves at Northwestern University in 2003.
My engagement with Kafka continues to be driven by the dialectic laid out there.
Some of this book is Peter’s ground; I hope to have planted a few creepers in it.
In the summer of 2012, Werner Hamacher got up from his table in Frankfurt and
disappeared into his labyrinthine library. He returned, face shining, with the
passage on the illuminated corpse from a letter by Kafka. Our subsequent
dialogue about Rosenzweig’s nothing and its basis in Cohen’s Infinitesimallehre
added themselves to the continuous seminar that Hamacher has been holding in
my thoughts for many years. I am thankful for his mentorship and his
remarkable essays. The book also benefited greatly from his proposals. I am
grateful as always for the ongoing intellectual agon with Anthony Adler, from
whom in our cantankerous exchanges I keep experiencing what thinking can
possibly be. He read parts of the book with the courage he always has to point
out the broadest conceptual frame. Around Rüdiger Campe and his students at
Yale an international Kafka workshop formed that raised crucial questions about
the structure of address in Kafka’s writings. I am also obliged to Rüdiger for his
patient responses to my speculations at lunches in New Haven. Thanks to the
faculty of the Yale German Department for their support and to a Morse Junior
Faculty Grant from Yale for the time to write. Parts of the book were presented
at the Yale Whitney Humanities Center, Tufts University, the University of
Zürich, and the University of Tel Aviv. Gratitude is owing to Margaret Czepiel
of the Bodleian Library at Oxford for facilitating work with the manuscripts and
to Hans-Gerd Koch for sharing a draft of the 1918–20 volume of Kafka’s Briefe
before funds were found to publish it. Finally, a host of encounters and
exchanges with some of the most interesting people on the planet brought many
thoughts to formulation and many to the scrap heap. I am profoundly beholden
to Carolina Baffi, Andrew Libby, Eyal Peretz, Yue Zhuo, Roshen Hendrickson,
Demetra Kasimis, Friese Undine, Anna Glazova, John Whalen, Katrin Trüstedt,
Paul Grimstad, Carol Jacobs, Michael Levine, Henry Sussman, Thomas
Schestag, Jacques Lezra, Paul Fleming, Kirk Wetters, Vivian Liska, Avital
Ronell, Hindy Najman, Eckart Goebel, Rainer Nägele, Michel Chaouli, Paul
Franks, and Liliane Weissberg for the generous exchange of so many sentences.
Thomas Stachel’s careful and precise editing of translations and his fact-
checking for the final revision were invaluable. The final revision happened
within the penumbra of David Farrell Krell, who read the manuscript afternoons
on a Greek isle and gave it the kind of epimethean shock treatment without
which such a promethean venture would surely not have survived. He noticed
that the pivot point of my argument and Kafka’s movement of thought was,
whether I knew it or not, the concept of eternal recurrence, and this enabled me
suddenly to see the book as it should have been. You will, however, read the
present version of it, in which I have only briefly sketched out this relation. The
real book will come in the next revision, the one after this one, the one after the
last—
Preface
To understand how Kafka, working through some theological issues, came to a
peculiar conclusion about the good, the true, and the being-ground of everything,
you will first, I think, have to accept a peculiar idea. You will have to be willing
to accept a replete universe, everything together at once in a cosmos in which
there is absolutely no room to breathe or move or change, no chance to be
anything other than you are at this very instant. Such a universe is saturated with
itself, chaotic maybe, but still all is there, filling every corner. This peculiar idea
has serious repercussions: the only creation in this kind of universe is decreation,
the only possible addition is subtraction, the only movement is pause, the only
freedom is a species of bondage, and, yes, the only production is the production
of inequality. This last corollary will take some time to explain.
Who would desire such a universe? No one would like to live there, or even
be able to imagine it: everything packed into the pleroma that no one can see.
Inside it, an entity or an event only happens when someone or something steps
back, makes room. Making room is the only real act in such a cosmos.
A minor motif in Genesis, a tale ancillary to the story of creation but
important for it too, may make this packed universe seem less peculiar an idea. It
is a motif of making room, of yielding. The motif is remarkably consistent
across the P and J sources for Genesis. It appears at three pivotal moments: the
Garden of Eden, the forming of Adam, and the initial gestures of creation.
Reading backward, God planted a garden (Gen. 2:8), God formed human being
from earth (2:7), and God began to create the all (1:1). Reading forward, creation
happens to an “unformed” earth. The earth “brings forth” vegetation (1:11, 1:12).
Soon all living creatures emerge from it (1:24). Then the human being is formed
out of earth, a geolassic creature before it is a pneumomorphic one. God needs
earth. Why? The earth lets him do what he wants to do; it has give. The same
give of the earth makes for the creation of the world, the creation of the model
human, and the creation of the Garden, and in the Garden, also by grace of earth,
come all the growths and especially the two trees, of life and of moral judgment.
No doubt earth’s give is a minor issue when compared with God’s great feats
and disasters in those early years. Yet if creation is formation, something needs
to be formless, and what’s more, it also needs to be formable. We can imagine a
medium that is formless but cannot take a form. Water is like this, and that is
why when heaven and earth are created the waters are immediately separated off.