Lia’s Reviews > Kafka's The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives > Status Update

Maurice Blanchot refers to how “The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.” For Blanchot, Kafka’s language is thus oriented toward achieving what he calls anonymity.

Ha! I wasn’t that far off in my [Internet] anon trolling language comparison!

↑ This kind of “performatively self-contradictory” assertions are so common these days, there’s nothing remarkable about them. They fail to unsettle, or puzzle, or troll anymore. People don’t even pause or laugh in response.

We need to bring Kafka back to improve trolling in the 21stCE.

Titorelli will only help on the assumption that the trial goes well. But if the trial goes well, K. will not need his help. K. understands Titorelli’s words... Titorelli, we might say, is making a claim that, while propositionally adequate, is performatively self-contradictory. He can say it, but he cannot mean it.

Hintikka’s cogito, ergo sum is a performance and not an inference. Descartes proves his existence in and through the act of thinking. Any attempt to think the denial of one’s existence would involve a performative self-contradiction between the thought (of one’s nonexistence) and the condition of its intelligibility, namely that the thinker exists... skepticism about one’s own existence ... is self-canceling.

this perennial—that is, nontransitional— estrangement was severely criticized by Lukács in his interpretation of Kafka:

Since the world view of these writers . . . holds fast to the immutability of objective actuality... the possibility of human action is a priori rendered powerless and meaningless. . . . This feeling of powerlessness—which is intensified and elevated into a world view ...

Kafka: “Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before. source: Franz Kafka, Dearest Father and Other Writings

In last three years there have been a number of excellent works that see the writings of Kafka and Wittgenstein as having kindred ethical projects. This is not surprising, since the Tractatus, published four years prior to The Trial, is itself a kind of masterpiece of philosophical modernism that uses nonsense, as The Trial itself does, to motivate its critical project.

[Art] must not be at home in [an evil world]