Kafka
Fall 2010
G65.1512, G51.1512
Prof. Friedrich Ulfers
Course Description:
The course will deal with Kafka’s work largely in the light of the author’s preoccupation
with language particularly with the way this preoccupation affected his writing, indeed
provided the topic of it.
The point of departure will be the experience of “language crisis” among intellectuals and
writers in turn of the century Austria, which led to the radical criticism of conceptual or
referential language– already foreshadowed by Nietzsche – of Fritz Mauthner and
Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others.
The course will then show Kafka’s response to this crisis: his insight that
conceptual/referential language and oppositional/binary involves an abstraction of the
“truth” or the “real,” which is only apprehensible in a space of radical undecidability
between opposites, demanding a language of irreducible allusiveness, a language that is
constitutive of Kafka’s texts.
In the context of this undecidability and allusivesness, which Kafka attributes to his
“dreamlike inner life” that he claims informs his writing, his becoming “literature,”
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams will be used as a reference. In this work Freud
asserts that many psychological “processes which are described as irrational are not in
fact falsification of normal processes—intellectual errors—but are modes of activity of
the psychical apparatus that have been freed from an inhibition” (Freud 644), and that in
dream thinking, “Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its
contradictory counterpart, linked with it by antithetical association” (Freud 346). It will
be shown that Kafka’s texts are suffused with this kind of thinking, a thinking that allows
opposites to coexist as a both/and that never achieves resolution. As Freud puts it: “Both
of the alternatives [of a logical opposition] are usually inserted in the text of the dream as
though they were equally valid” (Freud 351).
Another context in which Kafka’s writing will be read in this seminar is that of
contemporary Continental Philosophy, especially the texts of Deleuze and Derrida that
have interpreted Kafka’s writing in terms of the alterity of a “minor literature” and the
putting in question of judgment and the law, respectively.
The seminar will then deal with Kafka’s insight into the inherent violence involved in any
conceptual understanding, in relation to which literature, that is, poetic or radically
metaphorical language functions as a countermeasure in that it has the capacity of “unjudging” the real, leaving us with texts that constitute an embrace of infinite relationality
and the concomitant undecidability.
Finally, we will look at Kafka’s writing in terms of the possibility of embodying an
inherent ethical aspect insofar as it constitutes freedom from truth as the tyranny of
univocity and teleology towards the truth of an a-topical, endlessly de-territorializing and
metamorphosing world. As such, this truth is always already other in relation with itself,
and thus ethical in its irreducible self-less-ness, its inherent openness to, and
interrelatedness with, the other. It would be the ethical structure of the “given” - not the
anthropomorphically instrumentalized world - in which its interpenetrating parts exist
“poetically,” as metamorphic units that constitute an “ethics of alterity,” that is, an
irreducible responsiveness and responsibility to the other as other.
Required Texts:
Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. New York,
London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: Scribner. (ISBN 0-684-80070-5)
Franz Kafka. The Trial. New York: Schocken Books. (ISBN 0-8052-1040-7)
Secondary Literature:
Available at the beginning of the semester
Schedule of Classes:
1.
Introduction
2.
“The Judgment”
3.
“The Judgment”
4.
“The Trial”
5.
“The Trial”
6.
“The Trial”
7.
“The Metamorphosis”
8.
“The Metamorphosis”
9.
“The Metamorphosis”
11.
“A Country Doctor”
12.
“A Country Doctor”
13.
“A Country Doctor”
14.
General Discussion