Page 78 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
Man to Christ. It is to negate Nietzsche and Christ’s ways. If Nietzsche negates Christianity, Jesus the man, the rebel, the anti-Jew, negates Judaism with his “New Way” philosophy. Just as Nietzsche is the rebel par excellence against Judeo-Christianity and the idols, Jesus is the rebel par excellence against Judaism and its idols. Thus, he has the authority to forgive sins. In the glad tidings, Jesus abolishes Judaism’s concept of sin and the whole of Jewish ecclesiastical teaching.449
Announcing the end of times, of the temple, of the old-world order, Jesus is the supreme de-constructor of Judaism’s guilt and sin, sacrifice and punishment ideology. If Job succeeds in deconstructing God’s theodicy, only to return to it, Jesus succeeds in deconstructing Judaism, only to depart from it. Jesus’ rebellion against Judaism is not only Nietzsche’s revolt against Christianity, but also Josef K’s and Job’s. To deconstruct master servant structures is to liberate man from domination and impotence. To rebel and confront oppressive world orders is to resist tyranny. At the very end of their trials Job, K and Jesus cease to resist. They cease to defend their rights. Job is intimated; K is exhausted; Jesus dies as he preached and lived: “not to resist even the evil man 3⁄4 to love him... (the enemy).”450 If Jesus provokes his death,451 so does Josef K. He never sees two steps ahead. Earlier in their trials, Jesus valiantly resists the Priesthood and Satan, the evil one; Job resists God and unbeknown to him, Satan, the loyal one; and Josef K resists the Judge and Satan, the prosecuting one. As the Old Law sun sets in the horizon, so begins Nietzsche’s twilight of the idols to sunset. Kafka of the arid heath, like Christ of the Mount, and Nietzsche of the mountaintops, longs for another sunrise.
If Deleuze and Guattari envision Kafka’s works as the demolition of the transcendental and a motion towards the immanent in a rhizome,452 Titorelli’s fading away of the tree of life announces a similar ontology: a yearning for presence in an immanent paradise. But is the rhizome immanence in Kafka? Behind Josef K’s skene, there is a summons for song453 (T155) and light in the window that opens like a light (T230) and at the cathedral. Why had music been murdered? Where had the dulcet and mellifluous music gone? Where the liberator of the will?454 Where Hermes’ lyre? Where Apollo’s morn? Where courage’s song of the valiant deeds of heroes gone?455 Where the murmurs of light? Josef K is a flashlight unto the twilight (T205-9). His sins or flaws are redeemed in Jesus. If
449 Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. See Aphorism 33. Trans. By R.J. Hollingdale. USA: Penguin Books, 1990. 158
450 Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. See Aphorism 35. Trans. By R.J. Hollingdale. USA: Penguin Books, 1990. 159
451 Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. See Aphorism 35. Trans. By R.J. Hollingdale. USA: Penguin Books, 1990. 160
452 Deleuze and Guattari adulate rhizomes in six principles. Rhizomes are chains of different codifications and of different biological, economic, political, or
cultural systems. The first two principles, “connection” and “heterogeneity” express the proliferation of the rhizome in all dimensions of n-1, to its changes in shape, accidental quality, and to its rejection to form genealogical trees, dualities or deep structures. The third principle, “multiplicity,” is the absence of an object and a subject, one can only apprehend a rhizome through determination, quantity, and dimension. Symbolically, a rhizome is a simultaneous network. Rhizomorphous lines of discourse, poetry, and text are 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.
453 Josef K ironically hears the murdering of a tone in a gramophone (T155).
454 To Schopenhauer, art, not reason, reveals the eternal forms in varying degrees, passing, successively, from architecture to sculpture to painting to lyric and tragic poetry to music. Music, in particular, is almost a revelation of the Will, because it is beyond every spatial representation; it is the very expression of sentiment just as it is: pure, real and removed from causal motivations. Music is the pure abstraction of suffering and joy, and consequently, the liberation of the Will’s suffering, given its serene vision and dominion. Music is the highest expression of universal language: geometry and number, hence it is a-priori. In Kafkabel, music is murdered; it cannot liberate the will from suffering. Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. Two Volumes. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. USA: Dover Publications, 1969. Vol. I. 261-64
455 West, Martin. Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer. London: Harvard University Press, 2003. 117-18 —78—