Page 76 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
vulnerability,”438 that articulates “the guilty conscience.”439 K discerns the paradoxical nature of dim lighting: it propagates darkness, ‘es vermehrte vielmehr die Finsternis’ (T141),440 just as Job discerns the paradoxical nature of Eliphaz’ wicked speeches.
Eliphaz’ wicked speeches are Satan’s whispers: God trusts no one; no one is righteous, not even angels, and less so mortals (Satan 4:17; Eliphaz 15:14-16; Bildad 25:4-6). Satan’s rumours deceive just as K’s Court’s whispers deceive. Satan spreads the lie of guilt and divine mistrust, just as K’s Court spreads the lie it is attracted by Guilt. Hence, mass blindness prevails: only Job and K see things clearly.
In this exile, many metaphors impute guilt to Job and K. The wicked hide (23:13-18), disguise (23:14-16) and shun light (23:14). K’s guilt-verdict occurs in the twilight (T222-23), Job’s occurs in the ash heap. The light of the wicked goes out (18:5), does not shine (18:5), is put out (18:6) as the murderer arises at nightfall (23:14), the first born of death devours him (18:13), the memory of him perishes from the earth (18:17), he has neither son for posterity (18:19), this is the place of him who does not know God (18:21), and in his dwelling also dwell who are none of his (18:5). In this last passage, Beer and Voigt ingeniously read, “Lilith shall dwell in his tenth.” Lilith is the night daemon, the vampire type to hunt ruins with other uncanny creatures.441 If Lilith hunts Job, Lady Justice hunts K. All of these verses insinuate Job and Josef K share the same consequences derived from guilt.
In Titorelli’s heaths, no one is left. All are frail as the trees of good and evil and of life. To live is to err, to “fall short of moral and religious precepts.”442 No one survives on his self-virtue and self-merits, not even pious Job, or Jesus, the man, and let alone, flawed K. Job must repent and submit to the divine discourse of power intricately enmeshed with the rhetoric of guilt and restoration. At the crisscross of power and guilt, Job, a terrified, frail mortal, eternally returns to the master-servant discourse. His frailty and his Judaism trapped between two other susceptibilities, The Fall of Man and Immortality, dwell amidst The Fall’s apparent acquittal and Immortality’s actual acquittal. Titorelli enunciates nobody in Kafkabel is innocent, absolutely no one (T158). Records are never lost; the court never forgets. Innocence certificates can be revoked, the case reopened, and arbitrary arrests occur at any time (T158-59). Job and Josef K, condemned to existing in freedom and not freedom, in nausea, return to the consciousness of sin, to Satan’s cycles of suspicion and trials engenderer of the stifling lord-servant dynamics, K refutes (T158-59). Satan once more devours the image of innocence, tyrannizes, and Yahweh, his sponsor, removes understanding, leads people astray to waste to grope in the dark, without light, making them stagger like a drunkard (Job 12:14-25). The desired authentic acquittal, K’s ideal (T158) in this world order, is impossible: no file is destroyed, discarded (T158). Everything remains. Nothing disappears. To prohibit acquittal and negate the recovery of the authentic, innocent self, not as a maggot or a dog, is to be entangled in the midst of being and not being.
438 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 29
439 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 29
440 Sitting in a dark corner of Huld’s room, the ‘Kanzleidirektor’ (T91) hides at first unnoticed by Josef K. Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of
Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 29
441 Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 183. Please see footnote 15 on Lilith as the night-daemon
that haunts ruins. She is mentioned in Isaiah 34:14. The R.V. text translates “night-monster,” but has “fortunately placed ‘Lilith’ in the margin.” 442 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 21
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