Hesitation – Retreat – Depressive Position (allows for a relation to the good object)
Retreat – Retrait – Re-Trace
Nancy’s Retreat
Rouseau – Writing – the sign of something degraded or lacking – if you were in the space of writing you wouldn’t need to write
Plato – Socrates – who’s the powerful one – the writer linked to shit – evacuation – non-presence
Ecriture - Écriture féminine – associated to the weak (Eckerman), the scribe, the scrivener -
The Test – Improvisation – Music – Rhythm – Bach’s Inventions
The Test – Kafka
- The servant without work – the slump, the intermission, the void, the retreat
- What happens when you’re in the
- Pianissimo
- Kafka beating a retreat
- military register? not that kind of turnover
- war weary – shell shock
- Benjamin – the very experiencability of experience has died down – you can’t experience experience in the traumatic aftermath of war
- The Country Doctor – text
- Getting in bed – to write or to read
- The ontological state – sleepiness / slumber – the state of being is one of slumber
- Falling asleep on duty – leaving one’s post (leaving a letter?)
- Post - Before the Law – the post that holds up a door – hallways – administration
- Leaving the post – if you are a servant without anything to do …
- Serving out your uselessness
- Two calls coming in simultaneously – Abraham, Abraham
- The Letter to Father
- The only way to address mother may have been to
- Father related to fate – is the mother so primal / behind the scenes / that you can’t even address her
- The Panic of the Political – Jean Luch Nancy LaCoueLabarthes
- The predicament of writing being
- Who called you to do your work – you’re waiting for some kind of recognition / certification
- The Trial
- beings with the 33rd birthday – ready for crucifixion
- anahistory / incongruence
- referring to things that don’t come up as the master discourse
- stray shots of meaning – anashemia
- Lacan says this about Freud – where something is skipped or deleted
- Diacritical marks – parentheses –
- Lyotard – there is stuff you can’t record – stuttering, speaking,
- Lacan - méconnaissance
- Defoe – Crusoe – epistle – epistemology
- If someone comes to you with something that offers understanding – TRUTH – then they should be regarded as weird. Kant vs. Bataille. Life exceeds us.
- Servant – Servitude – Masters – Mastery
- so much of philosophy is the drama of mastery – claims to truth
- Neitchze teaches to go to where it hurts – the vomiting philosopher (vomiting as a healing – expunging poisons…)
- territories where you’re not welcome
- Every letter – structurally – is a letter from a dead person
- Michael Kohlhaas – how do you get justice? is it
- restitution
- Derrida: We don’t have an image for justice – our only images would include Salmonic justice where a baby is about to be sliced in half
- if history is the history of trauma and trauma is that which can’t be re-appropriated/remembered in a stable way (blurry flashbacks - shell shock) – history is built on that which cannot be totally recalled. All of history is written to deal with the trauma…
- “guest already sitting in my spot…” – guest / ghost / host / sacred guest –
- local / regular – observation – Norm in Cheers – the norm
- not daring to look at him – ejected / pushed away
- he recognises something – there is something familiar / from the past
- “why do you want to run away” (from your past from your embarassment from looking at yourself)
- the gift breaks any kind of economy – “ill pay” – offering to get something
- cadeau empoisone – gift gift (german of gift is poison) – poisoned challice
- hospitality – real hospitality
- identification – visa – vide
- note that he is being offered something that he doesn’t like
- the only and brief position that this person has – has been displaced
- arriving in pure subjection to the position of the other
- Perhaps you are sorry now that you invited me so I better go
- the hand reaches out – strong – coercive
- “That was only a test”
- “That” – referring to the place of the servant?
- The drink?
- The questions?
- Takes his place at the offering of the other – to take a place is to be possessed
- Parable – parabola – Heideggerian – ‘thrownness”
- it’s not a matter of a subject position – not subjectivity or intersubjectivity
- the thrownness itself that occurs (swallowing the beer that he doesn’t like)
- finitude – the visitation of death – “passed” the test – “passing on”
- the strike of the ‘new’ (a new technology)
- Robert Walser – Kafka admired him… writing became tiny and tinier
- Kafka strips the subject so radically – power steering the technology of removal of the self
- A the questions undecidable or incomplete or un-understandable, or incomprehensible
- The subject as never having a place…
The Test – Kafka (Full Text)
I am a servant, but there is no work for me. I am timid and don’t push myself to the fore, indeed I don’t even push myself into line with the others, but that is only one reason for my nonemployment, it’s even possible that it has nothing to do with my non-employment, in any case the main thing is that I am not called upon to serve, others have been called yet they have not tried harder than I, indeed perhaps they have not even felt the desire to be called, whereas I, at least sometimes, have felt it very strongly.
So I lie on the pallet in the servants’ hall, stare at the beams in the ceiling, fall asleep, wake up, and promptly fall asleep again. Occasionally I walk over to the tavern where they sell a sour beer, occasionally I have even poured away a glass in disgust, but at other times I drink it. I like sitting there because from behind the closed little window, without the possibility of being discovered, I can see across to the windows of our house. Not that one sees very much there, to my knowledge only the windows of the corridors look out on the street, and moreover not even those of the corridors leading to my employers’ apartments. But it is also possible that I am mistaken; someone, without my having asked him, once said so, and the general impression of this house front confirms this. Only rarely are the windows opened, and when this does occur it is done by a servant who may lean against the balustrade to look down for a while. It follows therefore that these are corridors where he cannot be taken by surprise. As a matter of fact I am not personally acquainted with these servants; those who are permanently employed upstairs sleep elsewhere, not in my room.
Once when I arrived at the tavern, a guest was sitting at my observation post. I did not dare look at him closely and was about to turn around in the door and leave. The guest, however, called me over, and it turned out that he too was a servant whom I had once seen somewhere before, but without having spoken to him. “Why do you want to run away? Sit down and have a drink! I’ll pay.” So I sat down. He asked me several things, but I couldn’t answer, indeed I didn’t even understand his questions. So I said: “Perhaps you are sorry now that you invited me, so I’d better go,” and I was about to get up. But he stretched his hand out over the table and pressed me down. “Stay,” he said, “that was only a test. He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”
Questions
- Readings of the text as a non-human… VCR / horse
- Redundancy – redundant technologies – the test – the test drive
readings