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?
3 Radical Intellectuals Or, Why
