Kain

Race de Caïn, au ciel monte, Et sur la terre jette Dieu!
-Baudelaire

Aleph
Anyone who has read Kafka’s novels probably wondered at some point about their protagonists’ names: Karl Rossmann in Amerika, Joseph K. in The Trial, and especially K. in The Castle. From Brod’s first speculation that K. stands for Kafka, to Agamben’s latest suggestions that K. stands for kalumniator (slanderer in Latin) or even for kardo (a line traced by Roman land surveyors), interpreters seem to consider this letter as a crucial cipher to Kafka’s literary universe.

Bet
What follows is an attempt to advance an alternative hypothesis that, as far as I can tell, never received its due critical attention: that Kafka’s K. stands for Cain, Adam’s first-born son and the murderer of his brother, Abel. Even more specifically, I will claim that the letter K. functions in Kafka’s thought as the very “mark of Cain.”

Gimel
Though the English (as well as Italian and Spanish) spelling of the biblical name refutes right from the start the linkage that I wish to establish, in Czech and German, the two languages in which Kafka spoke and wrote, Cain is spelled “Kain,” as I will do herein. In Hebrew--a language that Kafka did not manage to master despite his repeated attempts--Kain, Kafka, and the protagonists of his posthumously published novels are all spelled with kuf (reproduced above).

Dalet
Another piece of circumstantial evidence that gets lost in translation has to do with the mark that God set upon Kain according to Genesis 4:15. The word for mark in Hebrew is ot, which could also mean sign or omen, though the most direct translation is simply “letter.” How, precisely, was Kain marked is anybody’s guess, and indeed wildly different opinions spread throughout the ages. Nevertheless, one of the most persistent suggestions is that Kain was marked on his forehead with one of the twenty-two Hebrew letters, hence “the letter of Kain,” though again there is little agreement which one. Branding a letter on the forehead was a common practice in the classical world: Greek slaves were often marked with a Delta (for doulos) and Roman slanderers, as Agamben points out, were marked with a K (for kalumniator).

He
On January 19, 1911, Kafka writes in his diary: “Once I planned a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison.” The novel about a brotherly dispute, those modern Kain and Abel (can you imagine Kafka retelling in his novel the parable of the Prodigal Son?) never materialized. But this narrative structure still survived in many pivotal compositions: the first is the short story “A Fratricide” (Ein Brudermord)--written in 1917 and published during Kafka’s lifetime in four separate places (a clear indication that it was considered by him as an essential text)--which gives a short and chilling account of a murder, though the title is the sole indication that the murdered is indeed the murderer’s brother. The second survivor is Amerika (Der Verschollene), Kafka’s first (though unfinished) novel about a young man who had been sent to the New World by his parents after he had an illegal child from their maid. The third possible survivor is the Letter to His Father, which is too often read under the sign of Oedipus, rather than under the sign of Kain.

Vav
God rejected Kain’s sacrificial offering of fruit and vegetables from his land, in favor of Abel’s nobler sacrifice of meat and fat from his flock. This was apparently the trigger for Kain’s heinous act of jealousy. His subsequent punishment was to become a nomad or a vagabond, to no longer be able to cultivate the land, though he soon settled, east of Eden, in a new city that he named after his son, Enoch. Humanity, however, did not descend from the inhabitants of Enoch, but rather from Seth, the third son to whom Adam and Eve gave birth after the death of their second son, and the disappearance of their first son.

Zayin
We read the following entry in Kafka’s diary from May 27, 1914: “I find the letter K offensive, almost disgusting, and yet I use it. This must be very characteristic of me.” The ambivalence that Kafka had toward the letter K, which seems to both repel and lure him, is also present in its Hebrew cousin, the letter kuf, which in Judaism is considered above all else as an abbreviation for kadosh, or sacred--a deeply ambivalent word that can designate something that is either holy or accursed, though in either way the sacred entity must be excluded from the normal sphere. The mark that God cast on Kain is also quite ambivalent: though it is usually conceived as a sign of shame and disgrace (ot kalon in Hebrew), it was clearly meant to be a mark of protection, signaling to anyone who wishes to harm Kain that any act of retaliation will not pass unnoticed, but will in fact be punished by God with an exceptional vengeance.

Chet
Many commentators assume that Kain actually repented for killing Abel and was therefore forgiven by God. As a matter of fact, Kain is not considered as a particularly negative or dark character in many accounts. It was only after the Gnostics elevated him to the rank of a heroic figure and a victim of injustice, that the Jewish and Christian establishment reacted polemically by casting him in later texts as the pure incarnation of evil. In modern depictions of the story, Cain regains from time to time his Gnostic position as a positive figure that resents and resists the fallen world in which we all live, as in Byron’s Cain: A Mystery, and Hesses’s Demian.

Tet
But no one is responsible for the “re-branding” (in every sense) of Kain more than Baudelaire, who “defines the face of the modern, without denying the mark of Cain on its brow,” as Benjamin puts it. His poem, “Abel and Kain” from Les Fleurs du mal, is a perfect manifestation of the currents that seek to interpret the story from the fourth chapter of Genesis in a radical way. Humanity is divided into two groups or classes: the race of Abel and the race of Kain. The race of Abel is the successful one, the ruling class, the lucky throw, comprising of the favored sons or the bourgeoisie, if you like, on whom God smiles complacently (in Hebrew, abel simply means "vanity"). The race of Kain stands for the downtrodden, disinherited, and dispossessed, for the pariahs and the proletariat, if you wish. Nevertheless, it is in the hands of the race of Kain that at the very end of the poem Baudelaire entrusts the task of going up to heaven, grabbing God, and throwing him down to earth.

Yod
Even though, statistically speaking, the race of Kain is the source for a disproportionate amount of murderers and other garden-variety criminals, populating to our day the ever-expanding prisons around the world, no one assumes in his right mind that their crimes are the cause for their wretched condition, since the overwhelming evidences point to the exact opposite. God addresses this unfortunate injustice in Genesis 4:7, probably the most difficult sentence in the whole chapter, which should be translated thus: “If you are doing well [i.e., you are from the race of Abel], you will be forgiven and your honor will be upheld, no matter what you do; but if you are not doing well [i.e. you are from the race of Kain], sin will lurk at your threshold, desiring to have you, and so you must be its master.”

Kaf
At the very end of Kafka’s final letter to Felice, after their engagement was annulled, he finds it appropriate to tell her about his polemic against Brod’s idea that he is “happy in his unhappiness.” Though Kafka does not accept this simplistic judgment of his own condition, he nevertheless elaborates: “‘Finding happiness in unhappiness,’ which means simultaneously ‘finding unhappiness in happiness’ (although the former may be the more decisive)—these words may have been said when Kain was branded. It means being out of step with the world; it means that he who bears the mark is the one who has destroyed the world and, incapable of resurrecting it, is hunted through the ruins. Unhappiness, however, is not what he feels, since unhappiness belongs to life and this he has disposed of, but he sees the fact with inordinate clarity, and in this sphere that amounts to unhappiness.” One of the interesting ideas in this extraordinary passage is that Kafka insists that the forsaken or marked person does not pretend to be innocent (like Job or Jesus), that he is indeed the one who destroyed the world, and is now “hunted through the ruins” of his own making.

Lamed
In the biblical world, a state of lawlessness is not uncommon. Certain crimes, like murder, did not necessarily result in an official trial or punishment, but rather with a permission to kill the offender with impunity. In the Jewish tradition, such condition is best expressed in the phrase damo mutar, “his blood is permitted.” The homo sacer of the Roman world is in fact a native of various biblical heathscapes, beginning with Kain, who was doomed to “be a restless wander on the earth” who could be killed by anyone who found him (Genesis 4:14).

Mem
The usual way to deal with a lawless zone, with this state of legal exception, is to circumscribe it, to try and contain it to very particular events, places, or circumstances. The Bible, however, tells us of a very different way of coping with this situation in which everything is permitted. The mark of Kain, let us remember, is a way to protect him from random acts of violence. Instead of abolishing the state of exception in which Kain found himself, in which it is permitted to spill his blood, God decides to create an exception to the exception. To explain: the rule is that (a) killing a man is considered as homicide; the exception to this rule is that (b) certain offenders, like Kain, could be killed with impunity; the exception to the exception is that (c) a person marked like Kain is no longer forsaken. This final condition (c), however, should not be confused with the regular order (a).

Nun
The mark of Kain is not an isolated case. It first reemerges in the Bible during episodes in which offenders flee to the exceptional zone of the altar, holding one of its four corners, and thus saving their lives, because it was agreed that anyone who entered the sacred space of the altar was untouchable. This practice was then institutionalized and codified in the shelter city (ir miklat). If you killed someone by mistake and without premeditation, any member from the family of the dead was still permitted to “make justice” by killing you. In order to avoid this fate, you had to flee your home and enter the shelter city, where you were protected, and you could not leave this city as long as the High Priest was alive. Upon his death you were pardoned, and were permitted to return home safely. (The Talmud relates that the mother of the High Priest used to visit the shelter city and give alms to its inhabitants, with the request that they will not pray for her son’s death.)

Samech
The ancient shelter city is the inverse image of the modern concentration camp. Though they are both exceptional zones, the camp (an exception to the rule) allows killing, while the shelter city (an exception to the exception) prevents it. In the same manner, while the tattoo on the arm of the camp inhabitant means that he is forsaken, the mark of Kain means that he is safe.

Ayin
If the exception becomes the rule, if anyone is a potential homo sacer whose life is bare life, then the best strategy to resist such a predicament is not to reverse the process backwards, but to work with it, to take it to the extreme, by creating an exception to the exception, or a real state of exception: marks of Kain, shelter cities, where the forsaken can be safe. Sometimes, for some people, a shelter city is an actual place (for blacks, Irish, Jews, homosexuals, and so many others, New York used to be precisely that). But the notions of “city” and “mark” can also be understood metaphorically. They stand for essentially any time or space, any constellation or configuration, in which your life cannot be separated from its form. For Kafka, for example, the mark of Kain was simply called “writing.”

Peh
The Jewish psyche has always feared the flood. In order to be protected, its main strategy has always been to build an arc. The State of Israel is an elaborate attempt to construct such an enduring arc, or a permanent shelter city, where being Jewish (the mark of Kain) is no longer a mark of shame but of power. Today, this place is ruled by the race of Abel, in their relentless oppression of the Palestinian race of Kain.

Tsadi
If today every war could be conceived as a civil war, if it is true that we slowly but surely enter into a global civil war, then this also means that every war is essentially a family dispute, and every homicide is a fratricide. This is not to say that humans are ever going to live in brotherly love. As we all know, there is no dispute that is as bitter as the one between members of the same family. But only those who can see themselves as an extended family (as Loraux demonstrates in The Divided City) could also somehow forgive one another for, and even forget, any deed, as terrible as it may be, in order to continue and share their lives with each other.

Kuf
However one imagines the coming community, whatever the coming politics may be, a single questions must always persist, like a thorn in the flesh of each and every person: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Instead of an Afterward

for What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays

No light; but rather darkness visible
--John Milton, Paradise Lost

The by now agreed upon English rendition of Foucault’s “dispositif” as “apparatus” is one of those fortunate choices that gains in translation an aspect of the original term still hidden from view. Think, for example, about the “Apparat” from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and especially about the uncharacteristically happy ending of this fable, where the operator of the torture machine is being subjected to his own device. Soon after the apparatus is set to inscribe with precise little needles the sentence “Be Just” onto the flesh of the executioner, the mechanism goes out of control, destroying itself while brutally killing its long time operator. In an early gloss on this parable, Agamben suggests that Kafka’s apparatus stands for language itself. He claims that “the ultimate sense of language...is the commandment ‘Be Just.’ Nonetheless, precisely the sense of this commandment is what the machine of language is absolutely incapable of understanding.” Twenty years later, “What is an Apparatus?” elaborates on the same idea, now calling language “the most ancient of apparatuses -- one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.” but the idea that language can be conceived as an apparatus dates back to Freud’s first book, On Aphasia, where he speaks explicitly and consistently about “the speech apparatus” as the exclusive field of his investigation. This is a clever move that enabled Freud to treat language as a sort of a complex machine that can break down from time to time in a thousand different ways, thus leading to aphasia, this partial or colossal loss of the capacity to produce or understand language, this array of speech impairments. Given Agamben’s call for a relentless fight, or a hand-to-hand struggle, with the apparatuses in which our life is captured, it could be helpful to follow the strategies embedded in Freud’s analysis. For example, Freud is already interested at this early stage in what we call today a “Freudian slip:” this fleeting breakdown of the speech apparatus. One way to cope with our oppressive apparatuses is therefore to notice their pathologies in everyday life, their blemishes or blunders, which might signal deeper or broader vulnerabilities still hidden from sight.

The method of comprehending a function by observing its dysfunction is also instrumental in approaching Agamben’s second essay in this book, “The Friend.” At its core you will find an exegesis on “the ontological basis of Aristotle’s theory of friendship,” which begins with the latter’s curious and seemingly unimpressive observation that “he who sees senses that he is seeing, he who hears senses that he is hearing, he who walks senses that he is walking.” What happens, however, when you lose this sensation of being, this sixth sense or “inner touch” (as Daniel Heller-Roazen calls it)? Neurophysiologists call the sense of one’s own body “proprioception.” You have a sense of the external world and a sense of your internal world, but people rarely think about the perception of their own selves. Oliver Sacks explains the idea of proprioception by saying: “If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self--himself--he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.” The perception of our own being is arguably the most important sensation that we have, but precisely because of its simplicity and familiarity it usually escapes our attention. This is what stands behind Sacks’ story about Christina, “The Disembodied Lady,” who overnight had to face the horror of no longer sensing her body as her own. She was not paralyzed: after three months she re-learned how to walk, but she could no longer sense that she was walking. This condition is not as abnormal as it may sound, since babies also have virtually no proprioception. Christina’s uniqueness lies in her ability to use language and share her experience (or its lack thereof) with other people, thus offering us a rare window into Agamben’s main idea in his essay: that friendship is the shared sensation of being. Sacks compares Christina’s case with one of the characters from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty who doubts the existence of his own body. Wittgenstein famously objects anyone who would raise his hand and utter a sentence like, “I know that this is my hand,” which the philosopher takes to be neither true nor false, but merely nonsensical. There is, however, at least one person in the world towards whom Wittgenstein would probably make an exception. As counter intuitive as it may sound, for Christina, the woman who could not sense that she exists, saying, “I know that this is my hand” would make perfect, painful, sense.

Similarly, the guiding question in Agamben final essay, “What is the Contemporary?” calls forth a particular experience that cannot be expressed, that dissipates at the moment in which one utters the words, “I am at this moment contemporary” (which is like saying, “I am fashionable,” or “I am cool”--the moment you say it, you lose what you thought that you have). Nevertheless, one way to sense, so to speak, contemporariness, can be found in Agamben’s passages dedicated to the sensation of darkness, where he claims that to be contemporary is to be able to perceive this darkness. “Light,” as he comments elsewhere, “is only the coming to itself of the dark.” There seems to be little hope in his philosophy that light really has the capacity to enlighten. A light can only flicker, like a distant star, and the darkness that surrounds it is not meant to understand it. In fact, even the heavenly “total darkness” that we see at night is considered as “the testimony of a time in which the stars did not yet shine.” Even Arendt’s Gnostic faith in the power of singular bright “men in dark times” to ever more slightly make a difference in this world does not seem to play the same role in his thought. That said, it is also clear that Agamben is possessed by an exigency, a demand to which he cannot not answer: it is difficult to miss (though many still do) that in all his writings he tries to bear witness to a certain light, or at least a glimmer. If you ever tried to catch fireflies with your hand on a hot summer night, you may have experienced this curious philosophical comportment. As a contemporary, Agamben operates within what may be called a “dialectic of endarkenment,” by which I mean a perpetual attempt “to perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot.”

Book Bash

To mark the publication of Giorgio Agamben’s What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford University Press), please join the translators David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella for a celebration of the work of one the world’s leading philosophers and radical thinkers. The three essays collected in this new book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben’s recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of “apparatus” (or dispositif), a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on the singular relation with one’s own time that we call contemporariness. The evening will also include a sneak-peak reading from Agamben's forthcoming book, Nudity.   

Friday, June 5th, 7pm
Bluestockings Books, 172 Allen Street, New York City (directions)

Call for Reviews

For the past two years, I have been working on a book dedicated to Agamben’s philosophy. It would be the second volume of To Imagine a Form of Life, a self-standing sequel to my book on Wittgenstein. I am neither done writing all the chapters, nor am I fully content with the present state of the ones that are complete, but I feel that I could really use some feedback at this stage. It occurred to me that the invisible community of readers who follow this blog is the natural forum to solicit such reviews. So if you would like to receive a single chapter to read and comment on, please write to my gmail account (formoflife). Of course, your help will be acknowledged in the published version of the book.

Agamben on Tiqqun

Agamben sur Tiqqun
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Paris, April 19, 2009

Marx in Scranton

“People will never go out of business.”
-M. Scott

Melville was probably the first great writer to use the workplace as the focal point of his stories. It is easy to forget that the Pequod, the ship in Moby Dick, was essentially a workplace, conducting a very risky business, funded by what we call today venture capital, with workers who received dividends based on future profits. Melville had little trouble saturating his novel about this floating workplace, headed by an insane boss, on a mission to hunt the great white whale, with many hair-raising tales (as well as endless hairsplitting details). But he probably had much more difficult time when he attempted to achieve the same level of dramatic effect in a much shorter story, which also revolves around a workplace: the office of a Wall Street lawyer. With no cannibals, harpoons, and the great expanse of the ocean, Melville had to conceive a different narrative scheme to animate his novelette. His solution was to make his hero, Bartleby, a competent scrivener who joins the office in the beginning of the story, utterly inoperative. Whatever his (rather congenial) boss asked him to do, Bartleby replied, “I prefer not to.” The tumult in the workplace sparked by this seemingly innocuous catchphrase and its stoic utterer was more than enough to make from “Bartleby, the Scrivener” a belated classic.

This is not to say, however, that Melville, a native of Manhattan, the great capital of capitalism, was simply trying to glorify the workplace for the enjoyment of the bourgeoisie. The workplace at stake in both Moby Dick and Bartleby is actually a battlefield between capitalist forces and their antagonists. In the former example, Captain Ahab is not interested at all in the enterprise of systematic whale hunting, which aims to reduce these magnificent animals into barrels of blubber. His monomania was to catch Moby Dick, a singular whale (which thus becomes the indisputable hero of this novel, without uttering a single sentence) not for the sake of profit, but for the sake of revenge. This is what leads this capitalist venture, and the workplace at its center, to its final demise at the story’s end. In the example of Bartleby, the refusal to work (or, more precisely, the preference not to work, which was also a preference not to go home after work, and then not to leave after he was let go) was not as devastating. Nevertheless, it was disturbing enough to lead the business to relocated to a new office, merely to get rid of the unsightly sight of a workless worker.

The relationship between American culture and the capitalist machine is much more subversive than what one may expect. American culture rarely deals with the end of the capitalist world as we know it, its complete annihilation for the sake of some communist utopia, since it simply knows better. Instead, it looks for various ways to subvert the machine, depict its blunders, and show its utter irrelevance to the true life of human beings. A paradigmatic example is, of course, Chaplin’s Modern Times. But I would like to speak now of a very interesting contemporary example which is full with beautiful insights about the current condition of late capitalism: The American television comedy, The Office.

What could ever happen in the Scranton branch of a corporate paper company? Nothing much, if you ask the Marxist critics who like to talk about the alienation of labor. Just a bunch of disaffected workers sitting in a nondescript workplace reaping some profit for the faceless capitalist pig sitting in his Manhattan headquarter. Besides, it is just a cookie-cutter American TV series, for heaven’s sake, produced in order to entertain the mass consumers to death. But if you look closer, you will discover a very curious strategy for action against (or through, or by means of) capitalism, in the direct tradition of Melville and Chaplin.

Michael Scott, the office’s boss, bears various similarities to Ahab, Bartleby, and the factory worker in Modern Times: either intentionally or unintentionally, they don’t come to the workplace in order to be the good, diligent, and industrious workers-machines that the capitalist hopes to find there, but to somehow undermine this workplace as we think that we know it. Though Scott loves his workplace (it is his whole life), he does not like to work, and so he involves his mystified underlings (who, besides one eccentric exception, seem to have very little respect for him) with various activities that have absolutely nothing to do with productivity. To the surprise of all, the Scranton branch is actually declared as the most profitable branch of them all. This is the reason why the latest episodes, where a new, efficient, and no-nonsense boss is introduced into the plot-line is so unnerving to watch, because it jeopardizes all that the office managed to achieved over the years. In a nutshell, The Office shows us how to transform the grey workplace into the many colors of the tree of life; how to divert the alienation of labor in such a way that it can draw humanity a little bit closer; and how to insist that people are not reduced to the hours that they can work, since they are first and foremost reflected through the relationships they can have with each other.

Marx in South Park

Today we slowly come to realize that Benjamin's thesis could not be closer to the truth: capitalism is a religion. But one question remains open: which religion was he thinking about? The latest episode of South Park--one of the most intelligent voices in American discourse that sometimes manages to insert a truly radical message behind its scatological and popular facade--brilliantly retells the Jesus narrative in terms of the present economic crisis. In this version, however, Kyle "pays for our debts so we could spend once more." So please put aside for a moment your rarefied intellectual taste and enjoy yourself, for a change: