isopod23

The position in which thought finds itself after 1945 forces Hannah Arendt to leave the realm of philosophy and turn to literature. Only there does she encounter the question preoccupying her. In her “Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future,” which precedes the essays of her 1961 volume Between Past and Future, the moment in which she moves into a reading of Kafka is rooted in an experience that refers to the relation between thought and reality: “reality has become opaque for the light of thought.”1 For Arendt, the present Now in which she writes and thinks is marked by the fact that thinking and reality are no longer linked with one another. Thought does not withstand the shock of reality. Therefore, thinking - “no longer bound to incident as the circle remains bound to its focus” - risks “either […] becom[ing] altogether meaningless” or relying on truths that have been passed down, “old verities which have lost all concrete relevance.”2 Through the quote from René Char's Feuillets à Hypnos [Leaves of Hypnos] that introduces her essay - “Notre héritage n'est précédé d'aucun testament - 'our inheritance was left to us by no testament'”3 - Arendt's reflections on the divergence of thinking and reality are temporally and logically connected back to the time of the resistance and to the realization of the abyss into which the grounds of reality, der Boden der Tatsachen, have changed, as she writes in an earlier text. So it is the wish to describe this particular situation in exact terms that leads Arendt to Kafka. She reads Kafka's text - an account from the series of the “He” pieces from 19204 - as a “parable.” In this term, she follows the word's etymological traces of meaning (para, next to, and ballein, to throw) and describes the text as a kind of missile of rays, which sheds light on the hidden inner structure of occurrences. It is precisely in this image that she sees the singularity of Kafka's literature. These rays of light, “thrown alongside and around the incident […] do not illuminate its outward appearance but possess the power of X rays to lay bare its inner structure that, in our case, consists of the hidden processes of the mind.”5 Kafka's text constructs a thought-image in which a man, “he,” is caught between two antagonistic forces: “The scene is a battleground on which the forces of the past and the future clash with each other; between them we find the man whom Kafka calls 'he,'' who, if he wants to stand his ground at all, must give battle to both forces.”6 Arendt emphasizes that the time currents of the past and the future collide as antagonistic forces only because “he” is already there: “the fact that there is a fight at all seems due to the presence of the man.”7 The term “presence” here emerges in its spatial connotation. Arendt's commentary moves back and forth between “the human being” and the “he,” the pronoun that occurs in Kafka's text; this oscillation thereby signals how the contradiction between the universal and the singular in her reading is at once opened up and settled. “Seen from the viewpoint of man,” she notes, time is not a continuum; rather, it is precisely “at the point where 'he' stands,”8 broken or cracked open. In the course of Arendt's reading, her formulation of “the point where 'he' stands” - in which the place available to “him” has shrunk to an extreme minimum, to a point on a line - translates itself into the “standpoint,” addressing the capacity of judgment: “'his' standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which 'his' constant fighting, 'his' making a stand against past and future keeps in existence.”9 Thus, Arendt's interpretation introduces the figure of speech of the “ground under one's feet” [Boden unter den Füßen] and links it to a reflection on temporality by reading it as an “insertion in time”: “Only because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses.”10 For Arendt, it is precisely this insertion, this point of rupture in the indifferent flow of time, that marks the beginning of a beginning, as she writes with recourse to Augustinus. Kafka's “he,” in its third-person singular form, appears as a pronoun that designates a person who can jump out of the line of battle only in dreams. In this sense, one can claim that the form of grammatical speech in Kafka's text enacts the tension, or perhaps even the conflict, between the singular and the universal: the “he” in Kafka at once opens and limits generalization; it does not mediate between the singular and the universal. Arendt, however, wishes to develop a generally valid metaphor for the activity of thinking via her insertion of and commentary on Kafka's text. She searches for a metaphor that allows her to think the activity of thinking in such a way that it is bound to and remains anchored in the present - “rooted in the present.”11 Thus, she is concerned with a thinking that remains embedded in “human time”12 and does not surrender to “the old dream which Western metaphysics has dreamed from Parmenides to Hegel of a timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm as the proper region of thought.”13 Arendt brings the jump of which Kafka's “he” “at least” dreams, namely, that “some time in an unguarded moment - and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet - he will jump out of the fighting line,”14 into accord with the jump that thought makes from human time into the timeless sphere of metaphysics, as passed on in the Western history of philosophy. For Arendt, Kafka's “he” has barely enough room to stand, because Kafka clings to the traditional image that presents time as a straight line.15 She replaces the figure of the line with a parallelogram. According to her argument, this form comes into being due to the mere fact that the “he” is imprisoned in the flow of time: “The insertion of man, as he breaks up the continuum, cannot but cause the forces to deflect, however lightly, from their original direction.”16 This tiny deflection of powers allows something spatial, an angle, to appear, and so the geometric metaphor changes: the line becomes a plane. Or in Arendt's words: the interval, the gap where “he” stands, becomes something like a parallelogram of forces. Yet what is decisive for the genesis of this metaphor of the activity of thinking, which Arendt gleans from her reading of Kafka, is that now the point where the forces collide becomes the origin of a third figure: namely, a diagonal line. Exactly inverting the two forces that meet in the point, this diagonal force would be limited from its point of origin but infinite with regard to its end. The movement of thinking expressed in this image would thus have a determined direction through past and future, yet at the same time it would not be completable. Arendt describes the figure constituted in this way as a “small non-time-space in the very heart of time,”17 which cannot be passed on but must be constantly reinvented. According to this thought-image, then, it is the activity of thinking itself that forges a narrow path of non-time in the time-space of the mortal human. Thus, we see that the attempt to open the battlefield outlined by Kafka characterizes the direction that Arendt's reading of Kafka takes. However, citing an insertion from Kafka's text, Arendt emphasizes that “this is only theoretically so”18 - so […] aber nur teoretisch ist.19 According to Arendt, it is more likely that “he” - unable to find the diagonal - perishes from fatigue, “aware only of the existence of this gap in time which, as long as he lives, is the ground on which he must stand, though it seems to be a battlefield and not a home.”20 Moreover, Arendt clarifies that her aim is to confront “the contemporary conditions of thought” with the help of a metaphor. She emphasizes that her claims apply only to mental phenomena, in other words, to thought in time, and cannot be transposed to historical or biographical time. But fragments from the ruinous landscape of biographical and historical time can be touched and sheltered by thought and memory and saved into the (previously noted) “small non-timespace in the very heart of time.”

About me

. May 23rd 2008

. Music: Duster; Radiohead; Coma Cinema; hey, nothing; Helvetia and others

. Movies, shows: Donnie Darko; Where The Wild Things Are; Alice in Borderland; Killing Eve and others

. Traditional & digital art - Ibis Paint X, Krita, Drawception, MS Paint

. Videogames: Disco Elysium, Dredge, Minecraft