Page 89 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

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prevail in Plato’s Den, it is best to kill himself at the executioner’s quarry than to perish by the enemies’ knife. In this most noble yearning, K too fails. He does not fear death as much as he fears shame. Josef K fears a shameful death will outlast him (T231).
Who may understand these cruelties and these absurdities? Where K had willed to live, hoping to cease the world with twenty hands (T225), he was executed like a dog. Where Job had cursed “the day” willing to “rouse up Leviathan” and “to end the whole world along with him,”484 Yahweh had restored him. Where Job returns to original sin in his rebellion, K returns to more goodness, to an innocence of sorts.
Job accepts the apparent acquittal K rejects. Josef K sees what Job does not, because K observes, rationalizes, and criticizes. Enlightened, he dwells is two world ideas: a Republican and a Moral Religious world. The first is governed by ideals of rights, non-interference and non-domination, the second one, by sin, submission and domination. He can discern their differences. There is a better possibility for justice, liberty and actual acquittals in the first, and universal lies, persecution, and only apparent acquittals in the second. The first is not arbitrary: it protects and allows citizens to live a life; the second is arbitrary: it condemns and wastes a life (the Parable of the Law). Job’s orthodoxy, instead, only sees one moral and political reality: the terrible dimension of sin, submission and domination. There 3⁄4 Job is never is acquitted. Never free, he is entangled: he is free and not free. And he must behave like a dog to survive. There 3⁄4 man dwells terrified. He is always guilty, impure, polluted. He is nothing: a maggot. Restorations are arbitrary, and life, a mimicry of the absurd. There 3⁄4 the infinite series of accusations added + 1 + 1 materialize, endlessly so, in the spirit of the numberless heath landscapes. Never truly acquitted amid the trees of Eden, he is hounded. If the Judge’s whim accuses him again, nothing will deter Satan from future calumnies or Yahweh from heeding them to prove what He may. Dwelling in a fallen man consciousness, Job, ever exiled from the divine, appears to be millennia away, yet he is in the near abysmal of Josef K. Their orthodox moral courts oppress and criminalize, inculpate and dehumanize. Arbitrarily interfering, they abuse their mighty might and imprison Josef K (T190)485 and Job in chains.
This is the triumph of Josef K’s impotence. His refusal to submit to omnipotence. It suffices.
484 Cox, Dermot. “Both Dhorme and Weiser hold that Job is calling upon the forces of primal chaos to end the whole world along with himself. Many authors, however, claim that “those skilled to rouse up Leviathan” are professional astrologers or magicians. However, Cox argues that normal magicians and astrologers are unlikely to rouse Chaos, which is returning to primal chaos, which is to undo the work of creation. See Dhorme, P. Livre de Job. 27ff. See Weiser A. Das Buch Hiob ubersetzt und erklart. ATD; Gottingen, 1956. 40ff. In Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 42
485 When K dismisses Huld the lawyer, Huld gets personal (T190). Huld complains that K, treated all too well, must learn a lesson. He must be shown how defendants are actually abused. It is better for K to be in chains than free (T190), affirming Josef K is another dog on a leach. In reversing completely Rousseau’s philosophy, Huld does not defend rights, equality and liberty, a prerogative of his legal duties, but remains a despot and accuser. To Rousseau, “man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains” (The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 6). To be free, man must shake off tyranny’s yoke by entering into a social contract amongst equals: “each to all and all to each” (The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 4). By ceding his rights, man does away with oppressive Suzerain-like covenants where the inferior cede their rights to the Master’s will in a covenant of “absolute dominion, advantage and obedience” to survive (The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 4). Josef K, like Job, revolts against the Judge’s and the Court’s implicit covenant where the General Will has absolute dominion over citizens. Rousseau. The Social Contract. Trans. Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin Books, 1968. During the Hittite Empire, Suzerain covenants were the formal basis of the empire. It established a relationship between the Hittite State and its vassals whereby the state protects the vassals in exchange for their forced allegiance. In some instances, the vassals were protected from the overlord’s arbitrary action. There are also many similarities in redaction and style between a Suzerain covenant and the Old Testament Covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites, relevant to the study of the scriptures in general, and in this particular instance, to the Book of Job, and to Kafka’s works. Archtemeier, E.R. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. “Covenant.” Ed. Arthur Buttrick and Emory Stevens Bucke. Volume I. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962. 714-23
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