{"id":9823,"date":"2012-11-19T15:48:19","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T20:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9823"},"modified":"2013-04-21T19:32:06","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T00:32:06","slug":"kafka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/19\/kafka\/","title":{"rendered":"164 Kafka odradek"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017d\u017eek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology<\/em> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006<\/p>\n

Odradek<\/span>, 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<\/span> embodied: \u201cJouissance<\/span> is that which serves nothing,\u201d as Lacan put in his seminar 20, Encore<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are different figurations of Thing-jouissance<\/span>\u2014 an immortal (or, more precisely, undead<\/strong>) excess<\/strong> \u2014 in Kafka\u2019s work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without us knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won\u2019t heal yet does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most \u201cirrational\u201d aspect; and, last but not least, \u201cpartial objects\u201d like Odradek.<\/p>\n

They all display a kind of mock-Hegelian nightmarish \u201cbad infinity\u201d \u2014 there is no Aufhebung<\/strong>, no resolution proper; the thing just drags on. We never reach the Law; the Emperor\u2019s letter never arrives at its destination; the wound never closes (or kills me). The Kafkan Thing<\/span> 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<\/span> is that which we cannot ever attain and that which we cannot ever get rid of.<\/p>\n

Kafka\u2019s genius was to eroticize bureaucracy, the nonerotic entity if there ever was one.<\/span> 164-165<\/p>\n

Back to Odradek<\/span>: in his concise analysis of the story, Jean-Claude Milner first draws attention to a peculiarity of Odradek<\/span>: 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s other heroes, Odradek<\/span> becomes human only when he no longer resembles a human being (by metamorphosing himself into an insect, or a spool,or whatever).<\/p>\n

He is, effectively, a “universal singular,”<\/span> a stand-in for humanity by way of embodying its inhuman excess, by not resembling anything \u201chuman.\u201d The contrast with Aristophanes\u2019 myth (in Plato\u2019s 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 \u201cpartial object,\u201d Odradek<\/span> does not look for any complementary parts, he is lacking nothing<\/strong>. It may be significant, also, that he is not spherical.<\/p>\n

Odradek<\/span> is thus simply what Lacan, in his seminar 11 and in his seminal \u00e9crit \u201cPositions de l\u2019inconscient,\u201d developed as lamella, libido as an organ, the inhuman-human \u201cundead\u201d organ without a body<\/strong>, the mythical pre-subjective \u201cundead\u201d<\/strong> life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization<\/strong>, the horrible palpitation of the \u201cacephal\u201d drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed domicile.<\/p>\n

The choice underlying Kafka\u2019s story is thus Lacan\u2019s \u201cle p\u00e8re ou pire,\u201d<\/strong> \u201cthe father or the worse\u201d: Odradek<\/span> is \u201cthe worst\u201d as the alternative to the father.\u00a0 166-167<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017d\u017eek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, 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: \u201cJouissance is that which serves … Continue reading “164 Kafka odradek”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138,35,125,21,15,103,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butlerethics","category-concrete_universal","category-drive","category-jouissance","category-subjectivity","category-universal","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9823"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10881,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9823\/revisions\/10881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}