Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 23

The 2001 Darwin Award for the most stupid act was posthumously conferred on an unfortunate woman from rural Romania who woke up during her funeral procession. Crawling out of her coffin and realizing what was going on, she ran away in blind terror, only to be hit by a truck on a busy road and instantly killed. So she was put back into the coffin and the funeral procession carried on . . . Is this not the ultimate example of what we call fate—of a letter arriving at its destination?

A letter can also reach its destination precisely insofar as its addressee refuses to receive it—as is the case towards the end of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s aforementioned neglected masterpiece, when the deceived lover Troilus rips up and throws away the letter from his Cressida in which she tries to explain her flirtation with Diomedes. We never learn what was in the letter, although the scene cannot but arouse our melodramatic expectations: will Cressida redeem herself, “explain it all”? The force of this expectation accounts for the fact that, throughout the eighteenth century, the version of the play usually performed was Dryden’s revision from 1679, in which Cressida is fully redeemed: we learn that she has plotted with her father an escape back to Troy and to Troilus, and that her seeming surrender to Diomedes was merely a ploy to enable that. So, what if Shakespeare wanted to make a point—and not just keep our curiosity in suspension—when he refuses to divulge its content? What if the letter was meant to be rejected? The scene to which this letter refers occurred earlier, when, after Cressida and Troilus spend their first (and only) night together, she was delivered by her own father to the Greeks, as part of a cold bargain, in exchange for a Trojan warrior captured by the Greeks. In the Greek camp, she was given as a booty to Diomedes; in his tent, she flirts with him, shamelessly offering herself under the gaze of Troilus, who has been brought to the tent by Ulysses. After Diomedes leaves the tent, she reflects aloud:

Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see. Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find: The error of our eye directs our mind. What error leads must err. O then conclude: Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude.

(V, 2)

The key question to be raised here is: what if Cressida had been all the time aware of being observed by Troilus, and just pretended to be thinking aloud alone? What if the entire seduction scene, her shameless attempt to arouse Diomedes’ desire, was staged for Troilus’s gaze? Let us not forget that Cressida announces her split nature already at the lovers’ first anxious meeting, when she ominously warns Troilus of how

I have a kind of self [that] resides with you—

But an unkind self, that itself will leave

To be another’s fool.

(III, 2)

thereby foreshadowing his bitter statement, after witnessing her flirting with Diomedes, that, in her, there is no “rule in unity itself.” This strange internal dislocation of hers is more complex than it may appear: part of her loves him, but this part is “unkind,” and, with the same necessity that it linked her to Troilus, will soon push her towards another man. The general lesson of this is that, in order to interpret a scene or an utterance, sometimes, the key thing to do is to locate its true addressee. In one of the best Perry Mason novels, the lawyer witnesses a police interrogation of a couple in the course of which the husband tells the policeman in unexpectedly great detail what happened, what he saw, and what he thinks happened—why this excess of information? The solution: this couple committed the murder, and since the husband knew that he and his wife would soon be arrested on suspicion of the murder and kept separated, he used this opportunity to tell his wife the (false) story they should both cling to—the true addressee of his endless talk was thus not the policeman, but his wife.¹⁶

And thus we come to Franz Kafka’s letter to his father, in which he articulated the crisis of paternal authority in all its ambiguity—no wonder that the first impression one gets in reading Kafka’s letter is that there is something missing in it, the final twist along the lines of the parable on the Door of the Law (“This door was here only for you . . .”): the father’s display of terror and rage is here only for you, you have invested in it, you are sustaining it . . . One can well imagine the real Hermann Kafka as a benevolent and nice gentleman, genuinely surprised at the role he played in his son’s imagination.¹⁷

To put it in Californian style, Kafka had a serious attitude problem with regard to his father. When Kafka identified himself as “Lowy,” assuming his mother’s name, he located himself in a series which comprises Adorno (who also shifted from father’s name, Wiesengrund, to his mother’s family name), not to mention Hitler (from Schickelgruber)—all uneasy with assuming the role of the bearer of the paternal name. This is why one of the points in the letter to his father is Kafka’s claim that it would have been possible for him to accept (the person of) his father, to establish a non-traumatic relationship with him, if he were his friend, brother, boss, even father-in-law, just not his father . . .

What bothers Kafka is the excessive presence of his father: he is too much alive, too obscenely intrusive. However, this father’s excessive presence is not a direct fact: it appears as such only against the background of the suspension of the father’s symbolic function. This father’s “too-muchness” (as Eric Santner would call it) is ultimately the too-muchness of life itself, the humiliating quality of the father’s excess of vitality which undermines his authority—let us note how Kafka’s notices his father’s

taste for indecent expressions, which you would produce in the loudest possible voice, laughing about them as though you had said something particularly good, while in point of fact it was only a banal little obscenity (at the same time this again was for me a humiliating manifestation of your vitality).

Again, one should bear in mind the proper order of causality: it is not that his father’s excessive vitality undermines his symbolic authority; it is, rather, the other way round, namely, the very fact that Kafka is bothered by his father’s excessive vitality already presupposes the failure of symbolic authority.

What is the true function of the Name-of-the-Father? It is, precisely, to allow the subject to “symbolically kill” the father, to be able to abandon his father (and the closed family circle) and freely set out on his own path in the world. No wonder, then, that Kafka’s reluctance to assume the Name-of-the-Father is the very indication of his failure to break away from his father: what the letter to Kafka’s father bears witness to is a subject who was doomed to remain forever in the paternal shadow, caught up with him in a libidinal deadlock. Far from enabling him to elude his father’s grasp, Kafka’s refusal to accept the father’s name is the surest sign of this imprisonment.

Not in any sense a passive victim of his father’s terror, Kafka was directing the game (recall from the long debate between the man from the countryside and the Priest, which follows the parable about the Door of the Law in Kafka’s The Trial, the Priest’s claim that the man from the countryside was in the superior position and that the guardian of the door was really subordinated to him). The proof? If there ever was a screen memory, it is the accident from when he was two months old that Kafka claims as the only thing from his childhood of which he has a “direct memory” (and appeals to his father that he should also remember it). It was (re)constructed afterwards, probably from what the parents told Franz about it—but covering what, we may ask? Like the primal scene of the Wolfman, it is a retroactive fantasy:

There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You may remember it, too. One night I kept on whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche [the Czech word for the long balcony in the inner courtyard of old houses in Prague], and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. I am not going to say that this was wrong—perhaps there was really no other way of getting peace and quiet that night—but I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and then the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.

The gurgling signifying chain of the child intended to provoke the father is like the obscene soft sounds on the phone line from the Castle, or the US marines’ marching chants . . . There is thus a hidden link between the “subversive” pre-symbolic babble of the child and the inaccessible Power that terrorizes the Kafkean hero, between superego and id.

The true underlying reproach to the father is not his power and arrogant display of authority, but, on the contrary, his impotence, his lack of symbolic authority. Are the father’s terrifying outbursts of rage (Wuten) not so many signs of his basic impotence, signals that his cold and efficient authority has failed? The father himself accounted for his “imperious temperament” as “due to [his] nervous heart condition”—not exactly a sign of power, but, as is clear to Kafka himself, a method of cheap manipulation worthy of a weakling: “the nervous heart condition is a means by which you exert your domination more strongly, since the thought of it necessarily chokes off the least opposition from others.” Here is another of the father’s ritualistic displays of power: “It was also terrible when you ran around the table, shouting, grabbing at one, obviously not really trying to grab, yet pretending to . . .”—a ridiculous, self-undermining, display of power. Furthermore, what kind of a father feels so threatened by his two-month-old son that he has to undertake the absurdly excessive measure of taking him out of the apartment? A truly authoritative figure would deal with the problem with a cold stare . . . (And, incidentally, in the standard patriarchal family which the Kafka family certainly was, is the first sign of the lack of authority not already the fact that it was the father, not the mother, who came to respond to the child?) It is no less clear that the description of the father’s “intellectual domination” is sustained by a barely concealed fear that this obvious fraud, this semblance of authority, will burst like a balloon, laying bare father’s stupidity . . .

From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. It did sometimes happen that you had no opinions whatsoever about a matter and as a result every conceivable opinion with respect to the matter was necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason.

No wonder Kafka’s “exclusive sense of guilt” has been replaced by “insight into our helplessness, yours and mine.”

We have thus to be very precise when we are dealing with the topic of paternal authority: authority is not to be confused with an overbearing, violently intrusive presence. That is to say, one way to read Kafka’s bewilderment with regard to his father is to decipher it as the experience of the gap, the contrast, between the ridiculous, pretentious, and impotent figure that is the reality of his father and the immense power he nonetheless exerts: “How can such a pathetic figure nonetheless exert such power?” The answer would then be the socio-symbolic network that invests an empirical person with power, and the gap would be that of symbolic castration. From the traditional rituals of investiture, we know the objects which not only “symbolize” power, but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effectively exercising power—if a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown, his words will be taken as the words of a king. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them in order to exert power. As such, they “castrate” me: they introduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (that is, I am never fully at the level of my function). This, however, is not the way Kafka experiences his father; the problem for Kafka is rather that his father’s bodily presence disturbs the efficacy of the paternal symbolic function. In other words, his father’s excessive, almost spectral, towering presence whose impact exceeds the immediate reality of his person is not the excess of the symbolic authority over immediate reality; it is the excess of the fantasmatic obscenity of the Real. In Freudian terms, the problem with Kafka’s father is that, in Franz’s eyes, he has “regressed” from the agency of symbolic Law to the “primordial father [Ur-Vater].”

There are two modes of the Master, the public symbolic Master and the secret Evil Magician who effectively pulls the strings and does his work during the night. When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he acts as an appendix to his symbolic title, that is, it is the big Other, the symbolic institution, which acts through him: suffice it to recall a judge, who may be a miserable and corrupted person, but the moment he puts on his robe and other insignia, his words are the words of the Law itself. On the other hand, the “invisible” Master (whose exemplary case is the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” who, invisible to the public eye, pulls the strings of social life) is a kind of uncanny double of public authority: he has to act in the shadows, irradiating a phantom-like, spectral omnipotence. The disintegration of the patriarchal symbolic authority, of the Name-of-the-Father, gives rise to a new figure of the Master who is simultaneously our common peer, our “neighbor,” our imaginary double, and for this very reason fantasmatically endowed with another dimension of the Evil Genius. In Lacanian terms: the suspension of the ego ideal, of the feature of symbolic identification, that is, the reduction of the Master to an imaginary ideal, necessarily gives rise to its monstrous obverse, to the superego figure of the omnipotent Evil Genius who controls our lives. In this figure, the Imaginary (semblance) and the Real (of paranoia) overlap, due to the suspension of proper symbolic efficiency.

The Kafkean Law is not prohibitive, not even intrusive or imposing: its repeated message to the subject is “You are free to do whatever you want! Don’t ask me for orders!”—which, of course, is the perfect superego formula. No wonder that the message of Kafka’s father to his son was: “Do whatever you like. So far as I’m concerned you have a free hand. You’re of age, I’ve no advice to give you . . .” The series of the father’s “rhetorical methods” as enumerated by Kafka—“abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and—oddly enough—self-pity”—are the most concise rendering of the superego’s ambiguity. Kafka’s father was definitely a luder, if ever there was one, a figure out of which an “orgy of malice and spiteful delight” emanated. (The link here is between Kafka and David Lynch: namely, the excessive clownish figures of terrorist authority in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Dune, Lost Highway. . .)

The superego’s basic trick consists in reproaching the subject for not living up to its high expectations, while simultaneously sabotaging the subject’s efforts (or mockingly expressing disbelief in the subject’s capacities, and then laughing at the subject’s failure). Kafka clearly noticed this paradox apropos of his father’s demands that he should become an autonomous person who succeeds on his own:

But that wasn’t what you wanted at all; the situation had, after all, become quite different as a result of all your efforts, and there was no opportunity to distinguish oneself as you had done. Such an opportunity would first of all have had to be created by violence and revolutions, it would have meant breaking away from home (assuming one had had the resolution and strength to do so and that Mother wouldn’t have worked against it, for her part, with other means). But that was not what you wanted at all, that you termed ingratitude, extravagance, disobedience, treachery, madness. And so, while on the one hand you tempted me to it by means of example, story, and humiliation, on the other hand you forbade it with the utmost severity.

This is the obscene superego in its contrast to the Name-of-the-Father: the very injunction “be autonomous,” in its mode of operation, sabotages its goal; the very injunction “Be free!” ties the subject up forever in the vicious circle of dependence.

One can retell in these superego terms even the remark allegedly made by Brecht apropos the accused at the Moscow show trials in the 1930s: “If they are innocent, they deserve all the more to be shot.” This statement is thoroughly ambiguous—it can be read as the standard assertion of radical Stalinism (your very insistence on your individual innocence, your refusal to sacrifice yourself for the Cause, bears witness to your guilt which resides in privileging your individuality over the larger interests of the party), or it can be read as its opposite, in a radically anti-Stalinist way: if they were in a position to plot and execute the execution of Stalin and his entourage, and were “innocent” (that is, they did not grasp the opportunity), they effectively deserved to die for failing to rid us of Stalin. The true guilt of the accused is thus that, instead of rejecting the very ideological framework of Stalinism and ruthlessly acting against Stalin, they narcissistically fell in love with their victimization and either protested their innocence or became fascinated by the ultimate sacrifice they were making to the party by confessing their nonexistent crimes. So the properly dialectical way of grasping the imbrication of these two meanings would have been to start with the first reading, followed by the common-sense moralistic reaction to Brecht: “But how can you claim something so ruthless? Can such a logic which demands blind self-sacrifice for the accusatory whims of the Leader not function only within a terrifying criminal totalitarian universe? Far from accepting these rules, it is the duty of every ethical subject to fight such a universe with all means possible, including the physical removal (killing) of the totalitarian leadership?” “So you see how, if the accused are innocent, they deserve all the more to be shot—they effectively were in a position to organize a plot to rid us of Stalin and his henchmen, and missed this unique opportunity to spare humanity from terrible crimes!” This, again, is the twisted superego logic at its purest: the more you are innocent, the more you are guilty, because your innocence itself (innocence in the eyes of whom? With regard to what? With regard to the obscene criminal power) is the proof of your guilt (of your complicity with this power) . . .

Although Freud uses three distinct terms for the agency that pushes the subject to act ethically—he speaks of the ideal ego (Idealich), ego ideal (Ich-Ideal), and superego [Überich]—as a rule he conflated the three (he often uses the expression Ichideal oder Idealich (ego ideal or ideal ego), and the title of chapter III of The Ego and the Id) is “The Ego and Superego (Ego Ideal).” Lacan, however, introduces a precise distinction between these three terms: the “ideal ego” stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, I would like others to see me); the ego ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and pushes me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize; and the superego is this same agency in its vengeful, sadistic, punishing aspect. The underlying structuring principle of these tree terms is clearly Lacan’s triad Imaginary—Symbolic—Real: the ideal ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the “small other,” the idealized double image of my ego; the ego ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic identification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) myself; the superego is real, the cruel and insatiable agency which bombards me with impossible demands and which mocks my failed attempts to meet them, the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings and live up to its exigencies.

What follows from these precise distinctions is that, for Lacan, the superego “has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned.”¹⁸ The superego is, on the contrary, the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization of our ethical betrayal. So which one of the other two is the proper ethical agency? Should we—as some American psychoanalysts propose—set up the “good” (rational-moderate, caring) ego ideal against the “bad” (irrational-excessive, cruel, anxiety-provoking) superego, trying to lead the patient to get rid of the “bad” superego and follow the “good” ego ideal? Lacan opposes this easy way out—for him, the only proper agency is the fourth one, missing from Freud’s tripartite list, the one sometimes referred to by Lacan as “the law of desire,” the agency which tells you to act in conformity with your desire. The gap between this “law of desire” and the ego ideal (the network of social-symbolic norms and ideals that the subject internalizes in the course of her education) is crucial here. For Lacan, the ego ideal, this seemingly benevolent agency which leads us to moral growth and maturity, forces us to betray the “law of desire” by adopting the “reasonable” demands of the existing socio-symbolic order. The superego, with its excessive feeling of guilt, is merely the necessary obverse of the ego ideal: it exerts its unbearable pressure upon us on behalf of our betrayal of the “law of desire.” In short, for Lacan, the guilt we experience under the superego’s pressure is not illusory but actual—“the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire,” and the superego’s pressure demonstrates that we effectively are guilty of betraying our desire.

Back to Kafka: he formulates this same insight apropos the father’s reactions to his attempts to get married:

The fundamental thought behind both attempts at marriage was quite sound: to set up house, to become independent. An idea that does appeal to you, only in reality it always turns out like the children’s game in which one holds and even grips the other’s hand, calling out: “Oh, go away, go away, why don’t you go away?”

What the father was thus preventing is Kafka’s marriage: in his case, the father did not act as the guarantor of marriage, as the agent of symbolic authority (see Lacan’s thesis that a harmonious sexual relationship can only take place under the cover of the Name-of-the-Father), but as its superego obstacle, as what Freud, in his analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Sandman, calls LiebesstoÈrer, the obstacle which disturbs/prevents the love relationship. We encounter here the superego paradox at its purest: the father who prevents the love relationship is precisely the obscene father who enjoins us to “do it,” to engage in sexual promiscuity without constraints; and, inversely, the father who opens up the space for a love relationship is the father who is the agency of prohibition, of the symbolic Law. That is to say, Kafka’s desire for a proper father is not a masochistic desire for subordination to an authority; it is, on the contrary, a desire for freedom and autonomy. The paradox is thus that freedom from his father means assuming his father’s name, which puts them on the same level: “Marriage certainly is the pledge of the most acute form of self-liberation and independence. I would have a family, in my opinion the highest one can achieve, and so too the highest you have achieved.” The choice Kafka confronted was between the two ways of escaping from his father, two modes of independence: marriage or writing, le père ou pire, his father or the “almost nothing” of writing:

in my writing, and in everything connected with it, I have made some attempts at independence, attempts at escape, with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any farther; much confirms this for me. Nevertheless it is my duty or, rather, the essence of my life, to watch over them, to let no danger that I can avert, indeed no possibility of such a danger, approach them. Marriage bears the possibility of such a danger.

And he continues,

the final outcome is certain: I must renounce. The simile of the bird in the hand and the two in the bush has only a fiery remote application here. In my hand I have nothing, in the bush is everything, and yet—so it is decided by the conditions of battle and the exigency of life—I must choose the nothing.¹⁹

Kafka’s self-humiliation, which includes excremental identification (“And so if the world consisted only of me and you, a notion I was much inclined to have, then this purity of the world came to an end with you and, by virtue of your advice, the filth began with me”), is thus profoundly deceptive: it is easy to discern in Kafka’s claim that he is “the result of your upbringing and of my obedience” the stratagem of denying one’s own libidinal involvement in one’s sad fate. The strategy is clear here: I willingly assume my filth in order for my father to remain pure. This becomes especially clear when one bears in mind when, precisely, this self-identification with “filth” occurs: at the exact (and most traumatic) point of the letter, when Kafka reports on the (rare) moments when his father offered him “realistic”/obscene advice on how to deal with sex (do it discreetly, have your fun, do not take things too seriously, do not fall for the first girl who offers herself to you, remember they are all the same whores, just use them and move on . . .). For example, Kafka recalls a “brief discussion” that followed

the announcement of my latest marriage plans. You said to me something like this: “She probably put on a fancy blouse, something these Prague Jewesses are good at, and right away, of course, you decided to marry her. And that as fast as possible, in a week, tomorrow, today. I can’t understand you: after all, you’re a grown man, you live in the city, and you don’t know what to do but marry the first girl who comes along. Isn’t there anything else you can do? If you’re frightened, I’ll go with you.” You put it in more detail and more plainly, but I can no longer recall the details, perhaps too things became a little vague before my eyes, I paid almost more attention to Mother who, though in complete agreement with you, took something from the table and left the room with it. You have hardly ever humiliated me more deeply with words and shown me your contempt more clearly.

The “real meaning” of this advice was clear to Kafka: “what you advised me to do was in your opinion and even more in my opinion at that time, the filthiest thing possible.” For Kafka, this displacement of “filth” onto the son was part of the father’s strategy to keep himself pure—and it is at this point that Kafka’s own identification with “filth” occurs:

Thus you became still purer, rose still higher. The thought that you might have given yourself similar advice before your marriage was to me utterly unthinkable. So there was hardly any smudge of earthly filth on you at all. And it was you who pushed me down into this filth—just as though I were predestined to it with a few frank words. And so, if the world consisted only of me and you (a notion I was much inclined to have), then this purity of the world came to an end with you and, by virtue of your advice, the filth began with me.

Again, it is here that Kafka cheats: it is not his father’s, but his own, desperate striving to keep the father pure—it is for Kafka himself that any notion of his father following similar advice (and, consequently, dwelling in “filth”) is “utterly unthinkable,” which means: totally catastrophic, foreclosed from his universe.

There follows a weird but crucial conclusion: the father’s prosopopoeia. In his father’s reply as imagined by Kafka, the father imputes to Kafka that whatever he would have done (namely to support or oppose Kafka’s marriage plans), it would have backfired and have been twisted by Kafka into an obstacle. The father evokes here the standard logic of (paternal) prohibition and its transgression:

My aversion to your marriage would not have prevented it; on the contrary, it would have been an added incentive for you to marry the girl, for it would have made the “attempt at escape,” as you put it, complete.

One has to be very precise here and avoid confusing this entanglement of the law and its transgression (the law sustained by a hidden call for its own transgression) with the superego proper as its (almost) symmetrically opposite. On the one hand, it is the hidden (non-articulated) injunction “Enjoy! Violate the law!” that reverberates in the explicit prohibition; on the other (much more interesting and uneasy) hand, it is the hidden (non-articulated) injunction to fail that reverberates in the explicit permissive call “Be free! Enjoy!”

The last paragraph does break the vicious cycle of mutual accusations and is thus hesitantly “optimistic,” opening up a minimal space of truce and a symbolic pact.

My answer to this is that, after all, this whole rejoinder—which can partly also be turned against you—does not come from you, but from me. Not even your mistrust of others is as great as my self-mistrust, which you have bred in me. I do not deny a certain justification for this rejoinder, which in itself contributes new material to the characterization of our relationship. Naturally things cannot in reality fit together the way the evidence does in my letter; life is more than a Chinese puzzle. But with the correction made by this rejoinder—a correction I neither can nor will elaborate in detail—in my opinion something has been achieved which so closely approximates the truth that it might reassure us both a little and make our living and our dying easier.

What we have here is effectively a kind of (self-)analysis punctuated by the father’s (analyst’s) imagined intervention which brings about the conclusion: it is as if Kafka’s long, rambling flow finally provokes the analyst’s intervention, as a reaction to which Kafka (the analysand) finally enacts the shift in his subjective position, signaled by the obvious but no less odd claim that “this whole rejoinder—which can partly also be turned against you—does not come from you, but from me.” The parallel is clear with the conclusion of the parable on the Door of the Law, when the man from the country is told that “this door was here only for you”: here too, Kafka learns that all the spectacle of father’s outbursts and so forth “was here only for him.” Thus the letter to father did indeed arrive at its destination—because the true addressee was the writer himself . . .

In this way, Kafka’s subjective identification shifts—minimally, but in a way which changes everything—from the “almost nothing” of being (father’s) filth to “nothing at all”: if all of it “comes from me,” my nullity can no longer be (the other’s) filth. The move that concludes the letter is thus the one from death to sublimation: Kafka’s choice of nothing as one’s place, the reduction of his existence to the minimum where “nothing but the place takes place,” to paraphrase Mallarmé, creates the space for creative sublimation (literature). To paraphrase yet again Brecht’s motto from The Threepenny Opera, what is the filth of engaging in small sexual transgressions compared to the filthy purity of writing, of literature as “litturaterre” (Lacan’s pun), as the litter defiling the surface of earth?