Page 73 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
Immortality, too, wither away, and with them, the theology of the tree of life 3⁄4 the immortality of the soul. There is only the memory of the theology’s consequence: sin, punishment, and banishment. Israel and Job are uprooted, K is groundless, and Titorelli, as if he was Hermes, sneaky and wily.
To guard his heaths against assault and intrusion, Titorelli hides his art-revolt under his bed. Titorelli protects the sombre, the mirage 3⁄4 the memory of guilt. The heath renders man free and acquitted. Job protects the luminous and the veiled: the mirage 3⁄4 the memory of innocence, and the veil 3⁄4 the injustice of God. His repentance renders man guilty, apparently acquitted. Josef K protects the luminous, the mirage 3⁄4 the memory of autonomous rights (T146). His death renders man free, fully acquitted. Titorelli’s sale of the heath landscapes to K is the sale of his art ideology of authentic acquittal 3⁄4 of really real liberty from Yahweh’s Wall and Satan’s Siege Works. Satan protects his siege works 3⁄4 the cell, the eternal return to sin. God protects his wall 3⁄4 the liberty of safety and prosperity within its bounds (1:10-11). Satan not only sieges God in his wager, but Yahweh despises Satan for inciting him against Job (2:3),425 but also traps Job’s offspring and friends with the winds of guilt.
As a primordial impersonator, Satan, the angel and eager incriminator of the disloyal in Yahweh’s court, crisscrossing with Goethe’s der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit of everlasting negation,426 unleashes Yahweh’s whirlwind to collapse walls, and passes like the wind before Eliphaz to whisper, in terrifying night visions, eternal doubt, “can a human being be righteous or pure before God, His Maker?” (15:15-16). Satan’s suspicion nags, and his malice and enmity subject humanity to the disquieting eternal return to original sin (13:25-27), its harassment,427 to the memory of the catastrophe in Eden Lost, a replication of another heath, Job’s. Thus the Wasteland of sin is replicated endlessly by Wind and Whirlwind. There, Yahweh’s praises of Job’s innocence whirl away. If God constructs innocence, Satan constructs guilt. If God constructs Eden’s Garden and Job’s Wall, Satan eagerly deconstructs them. Satan subverts God’s gift of liberty into oppression, of prosperity into stagnation. God’s Wall becomes Satan’s Siege Works of cell and loss. Job’s Wall criss-crosses K’s Wall of prosperity and Siege Works. The blocked beds and attic corridors tragically erected by master-slave structures,428 represent the infinitely divisible
unique and simple, since they cover the dimension of the rhizome and need no further additions. The fourth principle, “non-signifying rupture,” shows the possibility of interrupting or destroying a rhizome and the impossibility of having dualities. Rhizomes “deterritorialize” prominent cultural things and “reterritorialize” them within the rhizomorphous system. For example, the crocodile does not adopt the shape of a tree trunk and the chameleon does not take the colour of its skin from its environment. These animals do not imitate or reproduce; rather, they paint the world in their colours. They produce rhizomes; they produce worlds. The last two principles, “cartography” and “decalcomania,” signal to the absence of axis, to deep structures and objective units. The rhizome is a card of many entries, not a “copy of.” Deleuze and Guattari. Rizoma. Introducción. Traducida por José Vázquez Pérez y Umbelina Larraceleta. España: Pre-textos, 2000. 9-57. Originally published by Éditions de Minuit, 1976. These definitions have been extracted from this text and personally translated into English.
425 Peake argues that although Satan moved Yahweh against Job to destroy him without a cause, “Yahweh repudiates responsibility for causing Job’s former trial.” See footnote 3. Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 65
426 “It is likely that by the early post-exilic period, when the Book of Job was probably written, the expression “the Satan” had come to designate a particular divine being in the heavenly court, one whose specialized function was to seek out and accuse persons disloyal to God. The Chief evidence for this is Zech 3:1, which describes the heavenly trial of the high priest Joshua, who is “standing before the angel of Yahweh with the accuser [ha-satan] standing at his right hand to accuse [Satan] him.” Some scholars have speculated that the figure of the accuser in Zechariah and Job may be modelled on Aristophanes’ Acharnians, or officials in the Persian court who served as informers (“the eyes and ears of the king” (cf. Zech 4:2, 10b) and even as agents provocateurs although this is less certain. The accusing angel is a subordinate of God, a member of the divine court who defends God’s honour by exposing those who pose a threat to it. In that sense, he is not God’s adversary but the adversary of sinful or corrupt human beings. Yet in Zech 3:2, Yahweh rejects the accuser’s indictment of the High Priest, and rebukes the accuser instead. In Job 1-2, Yahweh and the accuser take opposing views of the character of Job. As one who embodies and perfects the function of opposition, the Satan is depicted in these texts as one who accuses precisely those whom Gods is inclined to favour. In this way, the ostensible defender of God subtly becomes God’s adversary... In later centuries, the figure of Satan develops into the dualistic opponent of God. The New Testament presumes Satan’s hostile image. In Job, the accuser is simply the wily spirit who embodies his given function to perfection. In Goethe’s famous phrase, he is der Geist der stets verneint, “the spirit who always negates.”” Summary by A. Carol. See The New Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. IV. Newsom, Carol A. “the Book of Job.” Introduction, Commentary and Reflections. Excursus: The Role of Satan in the Old Testament. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. 347-48
427 Job cries, “Will you harass a driven leaf/And pursue dry chaff,/That You charge my past actions against me/And make me inherit the sins of my youth?/You put my feet in the stocks;/You stand guard over all my paths/And make out limits for my footprints” (13:25-27).
428 Aristotle. “Politics.” 1252a-1253b. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. By Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. 1127-28 —73—