Page 25 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
If Josef K’s Court is secular, the repudiation of its overwhelming power ennobles Josef K as he suspects it, examines it and defies its barbarism, seeing acutely, with the keenest eye, its hounds, its corruption, its paralyzing powers. To revolt, to rage in impotence until the dying of the light, to subvert against State Power, in a desperate plight to forge his destiny, is heroic. Josef K becomes a timeless hero, as he sublimates the desire for perfect justice and an idyllic liberty that weeps for immanent innocence. Josef K, the sublime hero, in his Kantian and Miltonian quest for sapere aude, autonomy and liberty, leaps from self-interest to self-interestedness, from flaw to virtue to duty, from the particular to the universal, to deconstruct the State Court’s arbitrary, absolutist powers, to defend humanism’s primordial ideals of justice and the noblest Republican ideals of liberty and rights as non-domination and non- interference. He merits our devout libations, candid applause, warm eulogies and praises as Heaney’s Lupin 3⁄4 the Lupin of the Lupin Fields103 3⁄4 for standing for his autonomous rights and not ceding to the Court’s intimidation in the manner Job trembles, bows down and cedes to Yahweh.
If Josef K’s Court is transcendental, the rejection of its master-servant and guilt-punishment edifice is notoriously laudable. With Job’s perspicuity, Josef K discerns its darkening paths, its nets and traps, its siege works and the suffocating absurdity of the incomprehensible. Josef K, a lapsed Christian and the future scapegoat in the block, lurks in the twilight of the profane cathedral-Court and sees Christ entombed in the altarpiece’s masterpiece. Then and there, Josef K contemplates his irremediable destiny, whether at the stone quarry or the cliff of Azazel.104 Josef K, the Grecian Hero, the scapegoat’s antithesis, must submit to his inevitable, untoward fate by negating to subject himself ‘to ridicule’ and ‘the ridicule’ (T213). At the crisscross between life and death, to dissent, to die, to shun Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, to reject the nets and traps and siege works, the eidolons of the absurd and their shadow puppetry in the asphyxiating Theatre of Twilight is to annihilate the Court’s absurd theatre of the incomprehensible, its vicious hounds, and be redeemed in glory.
The absurd theatre of human suffering in a terror-world-terror in constant social, political and religious upheaval, of atrocious injustice and dispossession, of the violation of suzerain treatises, covenants, social contracts and constitutions, where traitors diffract and lurk at every corner, is as perennial and timeless as the excruciating agonies and abuses of power recorded in ancient Sumerian and Egyptian Literature.105 The notion of Camus’ Absurd unfolds in three works: L’Étranger, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, and Caligula. “What is absurd,” says Camus “is the confrontation between the sense of the irrational and the overwhelming desire for clarity which resounds in the depths of man.”106 To be aware of the incomprehensible “...constitutes the feeling of absurdity.”107 Our
103 “They stood. And stood for something. Just by standing/In waiting. Unavailable. But there/For sure. Sure and unbending./Rose-fingered dawn's and navy midnight's flower.” Heaney, Seamus. Electric Light. “Lupins.” London: Faber & Faber, 2001. 5
104 To Girard, when Job refuses to accept the guilt stigma, he ceases to be a scapegoat. Quoted in Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 192. See also Girard, René. La Route antique des homes pervers. Paris: Grasset, 1985. 56, 165-67. If Girard argues Job is not a scapegoat, Lasine argues K is not a scapegoat because he denies his guilt (Lasine, 192). However, I argue Josef K is a scapegoat, because he begins to doubt his innocence (T213). It is true that Josef K, the rebel, does not wish to emulate the majority in their desire to survive in a corrupt system. To Girard, society’s sins, visited on an innocent goat or pharmakos (a human scapegoat), expel him from society during a catastrophe (plague, famine, revolution, etc.) to expiate or purify the community. To scapegoat is a mechanism to discharge violent energy so that the group (nomos) may preserve itself against individual threat. Humans are driven by mimetic desires, “they covet not the possessions but the desires of those whom they choose as their models” (Segal, 285). Thus, desiring what they desire, so as to become like them, they “turn models into rivals and rivalry into violence” (Segal, 285). Therefore, humans are prone to aggression to achieve their means and to survive. In this case, a surrogate victim who does not adhere to the masses’ drives and desires is victimized and “blamed for the woes of society and killed” (Segal, 285). Violence is discharged against the victim, who in turn, is blamed for his ostracism. “The scapegoat can range from the most helpless member of society to the most elevated, including the king” (Segal, 285). Segal, Robert. The Myth and Ritual Theory. An Anthology. Ed. By Robert Segal. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Please see Chapter 18 on What is a Myth? By René Girard. 285- 303
105 Cox, Dermot. The absurd appears in many archaic texts. See the Dialogue on Human Misery, Man and his God, the Eloquent Peasant and the Dispute over Suicide. Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 25
106 Camus, Albert. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Paris, 1942. 19. In Cox’s footnote 4. Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 26
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