Žžek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006
Odradek, as an object that is transgenerational (exempted from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside finitude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility, is jouissance embodied: “Jouissance is that which serves nothing,” as Lacan put in his seminar 20, Encore.
There are different figurations of Thing-jouissance— an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess — in Kafka’s work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without us knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won’t heal yet does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most “irrational” aspect; and, last but not least, “partial objects” like Odradek.
They all display a kind of mock-Hegelian nightmarish “bad infinity” — there is no Aufhebung, no resolution proper; the thing just drags on. We never reach the Law; the Emperor’s letter never arrives at its destination; the wound never closes (or kills me). The Kafkan Thing is either transcendent, forever eluding our grasp (the Law, the Castle), or a ridiculous object into which the subject is metamorphosed and which we cannot ever get rid of (like Gregor Samsa, who changes into an insect). The point is to read these two features together: jouissance is that which we cannot ever attain and that which we cannot ever get rid of.
Kafka’s genius was to eroticize bureaucracy, the nonerotic entity if there ever was one. 164-165
Back to Odradek: in his concise analysis of the story, Jean-Claude Milner first draws attention to a peculiarity of Odradek: he has two legs, he speaks, laughs; in short, he displays all the features of a human being. Al-though he is human, he does not resemble a human being, but clearlyappears inhuman.
As such, he is the opposite of Oedipus, who (lamenting his fate at Colonus) claims that he became nonhuman when he finally acquired all properties of an ordinary human: in line with the series of Kafka’s other heroes, Odradek becomes human only when he no longer resembles a human being (by metamorphosing himself into an insect, or a spool,or whatever).
He is, effectively, a “universal singular,” a stand-in for humanity by way of embodying its inhuman excess, by not resembling anything “human.” The contrast with Aristophanes’ myth (in Plato’s Symposium) of the original spherical human being divided into two parts, eternally searching for its complementary counter-part in order to return to the lost Whole, is crucial here: although also a “partial object,” Odradek does not look for any complementary parts, he is lacking nothing. It may be significant, also, that he is not spherical.
Odradek is thus simply what Lacan, in his seminar 11 and in his seminal écrit “Positions de l’inconscient,” developed as lamella, libido as an organ, the inhuman-human “undead” organ without a body, the mythical pre-subjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephal” drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed domicile.
The choice underlying Kafka’s story is thus Lacan’s “le père ou pire,” “the father or the worse”: Odradek is “the worst” as the alternative to the father. 166-167