The accompanying animation to this essay, Benjamin Memorial: Portbou, Spain, may be loaded in the background while one reads the essay
The pictures were taken with a disposable camera by the author in Summer 1998, in Portbou, Spain.
The Case of Extreme Danger: Central Europe, Kafka With Benjamin
What is "central" to "Central Europe"? Where is it? Why Kafka?
Let us dig right in. "The Burrow" (1923) starts in the perfect completion of Hegelian historicity, at the seeming "end of history": "I have completed the burrow and it seems to be successful" (Kafka 90). It offers "home," "my own house," "a protection," "great advantage" : it is a Heimat inasmuch as it is heimlich, known and familiar. And in the "center of the burrow," "as a refuge in case of extreme danger lies the chief cell, this Castle Keep" (93).
It is in the Castle Keep (Hauptplatz), the supreme space, the space central to the burrow, that the very teleology of the space announces itself: it is the central store, the concentration of all passages, but also the keeping, the feeding, "the life" of the burrow itself. We could say that it is the memory of the burrow, its first and central fold. It did not come easy, this con-centrated space of keeping, the essence of the entire spatiality of the burrow. Where "the soil" (Boden) was loose, it had to be hardened by the animal's beating of the soil with its forehead, until the blood (Blut) came (94). And it is in the Castle Keep, central to the burrow, that the animal will "calmly accept even the enemy's mortal stroke at the final hour, for my blood (Blut) will ebb away here in my own soil (Boden), and not be lost (mein Blut versichert hier in meinem Boden und geht nich verloren)" (107). The chronotopography of the burrow thus defines itself, comes into being, by an anticipated, or rather postponed futurity of death ("Kafka's stories 'postpone the future,'" Benjamin 129); the completion of history coincides with its absolute, deadly futurity. "Kafka's narratives are the most rooted in utter disaster," says Maurice Blanchot (Blanchot 10) — and in the literal sense of the word: they narrate the disaster of the root, what happens to the root (radicus), in the most radical of manners.
The spatiality of the Castle Keep comes to pass at the intersection of two competing regimes.
1) Technology: digging, communications, passages, transportation; it also includes the systematic, industrious, we could say industrial processing of bleeding flesh, "getting my spoil through the narrow and thin walled passages of the labyrinth" ("Road blocked with all the flesh in these narrow passages," 108).
2) The opposition to technology which brings danger: "sometimes I can only rescue myself from their [bodily] pressure by eating and drinking a clear space for myself" (108). That is, this space is opened by presence, immediacy, blood, eating, the digestion of history. A radical indeterminacy between the two opens up, whereby the very peacefulness of the space ("the silence is still with me," 93), predicated upon the prosthetic acceleration and technological progress, is at the same time evacuated of itself, its own tranquility, and the security of the burrow becomes best contemplated not from the inside, but from the outside. The exteriority, the utmost danger, becomes its most distinctive internal quality.
The collusion between what might be called the very spatiality of the space ("blood and soil"), and the technological means which lead to it, confront each other in a devastating collision. The more technology, the more passages, the faster the processing of the animal flesh and the power of the burrow to store them, to concentrate them in its bowels ("the most urgent jobs," 110), the more dangerous the space becomes, the soil more bloody, the hominess more unheimlich: "I find myself sensing the atmosphere of great danger" (98).
The observation of the burrow from the outside, in order to evade its internal dangers, is no safeguard against its threatening techno- spatiality: "Dare I estimate the danger which I run inside the burrow from observations which I make when outside?" (101). And within the burrow: "a complete reversal of things: what was once a place of danger has become a place of tranquility, while the Castle Keep has been plunged into the melee of the world and all its perils" (20). The space doubles itself, it is always a double: what is constitutive of the space of the burrow — its arche-spatiality marked by "blood and soil" on the one hand, and the concentrated keeping (lagern) symbolized by the Castle Keep — turns out to be the place of the utmost danger, haunted by its other. As Nicholas Royle says in his essay "Mole," the "I" of the burrow "is haunted by the ear, the whistling and the burrowing of the other" (Royle 16): "In its panic and pleasure, 'The Burrow' presents an animological experience of the impossible. It recounts an allegory of the trace of difference within the ear of the householder who recounts: this trace is at the origin but will never have been lived in the present" (ibid.).
But who or what is this other of the Heimat, of the home and the proper, familiar and circumscribed by the circle of technology, blood and soil? This impossible, utmost danger? Where is it coming from, this double of the space, the concentrated keeping (Konzentrazions Lager) of the Heimat?
"Now I could not have foreseen such an opponent" (Kafka 122). But what if the opponent is just the very double of this spatiality, inhabiting or haunting it from the very beginning, the originary violence that leaves its bloody trace on the soil in the very center of the space? "What is happening now is only something which I should have really feared all the time, something against which I should have been constantly prepared: the fact that someone would come" (122). But there is still time to be freed by labor, "I am still quite fit for all sorts of hard work" (127), even when it "sees that his work requires his ruin" (Blanchot 74).
We should have seen the disaster. But no vantage point for viewing is safe, as long as we think the spatiality of space circumscribed by a certain sacrificial understanding of techne, blood and soil. In any case, what does the animal see or hear? It hears that it is coming. The signs were all there, written in the traces of blood and soil, the utmost danger of technology, the big muzzle, someone, the other, sending the animal into an "existence in an exile in the fullest sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never stop being there" (Blanchot 9). This animal, "the receptacle of the forgotten" (Benjamin 132), what does it remind us of? What does this central keep, blood, soil, techne, labor which makes free (Arbeit macht frei), the industrial processing of flesh, "mechanized food industry," the animal looking "for the solution" (Kafka 126) at the very center of a space (or does this space have by now a name?) remind us of?
" An individual (by the name of Franz Kafka) [was] confronted with that reality of ours which realizes itself theoretically, for example, in modern technology [ . . . ] What I mean to say is that this reality can virtually no longer be experienced by an individual, and that Kafka's world is the exact complement of his era which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale. The experience which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with. " (Benjamin 143; in 1938)
Because Kafka's world is just the complement, slightly changed, of the world he lives in, its double, there is no safe point of reflection of that space. We are in danger both inside and outside, as long as this spatiality does not anticipate the utmost danger that went into its making or start undoing its conditions. Neither inside, nor outside. In the burrow, the animal does not die, but does not live either. And this is actually what Blanchot says of "us" in Kafka: "We do not die, it is true, but because of that we do not live either; we are dead while we are alive, we are essentially survivors" (Blanchot 8). We are survivors who will have experienced the very singular destiny of Kafka's animal, its absolutely particular event, only when we all will have been exterminated, absolutely final in our singularity, but exterminated as masses. Because of a sacrificiality which circumscribes blood, soil, nation: of that future anterior we are all survivors. In his infinitely thoughtful Heidegger and the "jews" Lyotard refers to Kafka's writings: "What is most real about the actual Jews is that Europe at least doesn't know what to do with them. Christian Europe demands their conversion, monarchic Europe expels them, Republican Europe integrates them, Nazi Europe exterminates them. 'The Jews' are the object of the non-place by which the Jews in particular are really affected. They are the population of souls which the writing of Kafka, for example, in an exemplary fashion, has only sheltered so as to better expose them to their condition as hostages" (Lyotard 3). The other name of that impossible experience, central to Europe, central to the West, but located in Central Europe—and which cannot but metonymically stand for the West—may be Shoah. "In the apocalypse at Auschwitz it is no more or less than the essence of the West that is revealed—and that has not ceased since that time to reveal itself" (Lacoue-Labarthe 35).
The inscription at the end of the stairwell reads : "It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the nameless." — Walter Benjamin, On The Concept of History
NOTES
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Harry Zohn Tr. New York: Shocken
Books, 1968.Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Charlotte Mandell Tr. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995.Kafka, Franz. Sämtliche Erzählungen. Frankfurt a/M: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1970.———. The Basic Kafka. Eric Heller Tr. New York: Washington
Square Press, 1979.Lacoue-Labarth, Philippe. Heidegger, Art and Politics. Chris Turner Tr.
New York: Basic Blackwell, 1990.Lyotard, Jean-François. Heidegger and the "jews." Andreas Michel and
Mark Roberts Tr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.Royle, Nicholas. "Mole," manuscript, 1997.
