Hoe construeer je een relatie tussen Kafka en Spinoza?
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Brendan Moran & Carlo Salzani (Eds), Philosophy and Kafka. Lexington Books, 2013
"Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom. [books.google]Daarin in het deel “Philosophical Investigations” een hoofdstuk van Dimitri Vardoulakis, "Kafka's Empty Law: Laugther and Freedom in The Trial.”
Ik hoopte dat Vardoulakis, die al vaker over Kafka en Spinoza schreef (zie dit blog) iets méér zou weten te vertellen over wat Kafka nu echt van Spinoza afwist en met hem op had, maar hij construeert alleen maar een “intellectuele affiniteit”, door een overeenkomst te ‘zien’ tussen de TTP en Kafka’s Het Proces. Maar naar wat ik er van kon waarnemen, lukt dat alleen maar door een nogal idiosyncratische lezing van de TTP te ontwikkelen. Ik geef hier de samenvatting van zijn hoofdstuk uit de inleiding van het boek:
“Also with an emphasis on a known but rarely acknowledged freedom that is the ultimate law, Dimitris Vardoulakis's "Kafka's Empty Law: Laughter and Freedom in The Trial" draws on Spinoza in order to consider the law in Kafka's The Trial, like Deleuze, Vardoulakis notes an intellectual affinity between Spinoza and Kafka. Spinoza 's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Kafka's The Trial are concerned with a freedom that is an empty law requiring not submissive obedience but rather rebellion against attempts to fill the emptiness. For Spinoza, the law's emptiness signifies its liberatory potential. Vardoulakis adapts this aspect of Spinoza's outlook to suggest that laughter is an expression of freedom in the world of The Trial. Humor draws on the freedom that is an omnipotent and omnipresent empty law. Adapting Deleuze and Guattari, Vardoulakis portrays Kafka's humor as immanent in Josef K.'s failures to live up to ostensibly transcendent claims can be laughable, and—in Kafka's world—such laughter is the conduit to freedom. In Vardoulakis's reading of the priest's story about the gatekeeper and the man from the country (also known as the separate story "Before the Law"), the gatekeeper suspends access to the law so that the law can remain open. The gatekeeper functions as Spinoza's figure of the philosopher, whose role is to resist any stultifying obedience. For Vardoulakis, it is as if the gatekeeper is conveying to the man from the country that it might be best to desist from submissively waiting for an entrance to the law and instead to rebel. Such a rebellion would be in accord with the Spinozan admonition to stop seeing the empty law as a tool that leads to resigned obedience.”
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De stroom Kafka-boeken zal nooit eindigen...
