I've decided not to make the Galli's posts fit into an essay for the time being, as my intuition tells me that by the time I will be able to return to "Kafka unplugged" it will be necessary to rewrite the thing from scratch. I thought erroneously she might become the start, of course that is not undermining her achievement but simply stating that once I've entered the dialogue with Rose by hand it is impossible to reduce the categories; nonetheless the piece on Kafka must be finished, next step will be the input from LM. I believe the essay can be concluded with Kafka himself but I can't arrive there at face value, it requires certain hermeneutic tools that are in process of being constructed.
I want to set to work on Rose's thought on Rosenzweig, which seem to me flirtatious in their sobriety but before I can return there I must dwell on Athens & Jerusalem for a while. It proves undoubtedly necessary because the Critique of Reason she exercise is something previously unexperienced, an unintoxicated wording. It is also in tune with Eveline's book that while great can be significantly improved upon, not in philosophy (for it contains almost none) but in discoursiveness. Perhaps I err also in this point being heavily halted from my concerns by Benjamin and Rosenzweig's ideas of translation. Moreover one should never lose from sight that Eveline has her own Grittli, namely her lectures and the writings on the Jewish stuff. People will have to look for it themselves, I can only become the footnotes she never wrote.
On other thoughts I believe those of us dealing with German scholarship often neglect the Anglo-Saxon eye with its cool sobriety; if more of us would be familiar with people like Steiner, Rose, Canneti, Harvey Cox and the modernist Americans (like Arendt did) I think it could only enhance our quest for the lost language, for a philosophy of the experience. It's important to realize these thinkers are not analytical philosophers of any kind, and many of them unwittingly have turned to the "Abendland" for inspiration. The only sources I can make use of to find these gateways are Barbara and Aviva, that must be read carefully in order not to miss important authors. This becomes particularly important for discoursiveness, at least for those like me who are attempting an "exiled writing", namely not ever writing in the German language. The English literature shows how far-sighted the idea of exile is, for the rootlessness from the world is as old as Homer and is only slightly ameliorated by the modern literature. But obviously if one could define the German-Jewish literature of modernity as anything, it would be the literature of the exiles. Kafka from all peoples returns in the German language to a model that astounds Rosenzweig, "narrating along with them, translating, interpreting, transmitting the shifting temporal templates for living life" (Galli). His writing contains the impatience of prayer. It is the style of those who thought the Bible.
The next essay by Galli is that one on music, but I feel it's a little too much for the time being. Because I have to travel through Rose and Goodman-Thau in order to return to Kafka and through him to Rosenzweig, that only in order to start with the cultural writings! Music though, is a topic I've never good writing about, perhaps because I haven't read Adorno and Bloch on those topics, together in my brutality and vulgarity when it comes to interpreting music. Nonetheless at least the thing should be read carefully. Poetizing the world is perhaps what knocks on the door of time, what compels me to this study. It's an alleged recovery in a foreign language.
Such recovery is in the spirit of Benjamin's thoughts on language. It isn't a utilitarian projection but a symbolic one, whereas reality remains asymbolic, objective and edge-cutting. It becomes a theological epiphany and it's revealing only in that it's to be found only "in between" many other things, it isn't bound to a discipline or a method of analysis. Just as when Aviva speaks of Rashi with Freud... When we try to reconstruct the images we're slowly unmaking ourselves into the dust of the many and soon thereafter from the dust of the one (creatively speaking) we remake ourselves, we scrutinize our own earthliness in order to unearthen an slightly used image of ourselves, used only enough as to contain plurality. We reunderstand ourselves.
This thematic orientation proves very useful, for it allows us even to engage Aristotle and the Classics, showing no more than an universal problem that is simply hands-on-experienced by the Bible. It is something that provides a better understanding of bodiliness and embodiment. Whenever we speak about metaphysics of the experience by sheer force we're already speaking of "making" and therefore following the Greek we're engaged in ποιεσης, we're creating and in order to do so it's necessary to build spaces for ourselves both in time and space; as soon as this creating is on-going we're not only alive in a reflexive fashion but our eyes see constantly in a shifting present that trades templates every so often with a series of freedoms, such as dreamweaving, possible realities and the photographs of the memory that feed not our imagination, but our reality in that it creates it anew from a common source we share with the rest of our fellow-men in transversally-cut ways.
[]Dreamweaving
Our dreamweaving isn't unfamiliar at all to Hesiodus and Homer, nor is it to Joseph in Egypt or to Miriam in the wilderness. We're dreaming in the same way Kafka provides for us, chained to both the earth and the heavens... with only two possible escapes, the waters and prophecy. But the prophet isn't only that of Jerusalem even though as Rose often points us in our rebellion against reason we've turned to Jerusalem to look for prophets instead of philosophers, to make up for broken promises of eternity.
The waters drown us so that we need to protect from them by building houses of safety, this protects us from freedom but also from any possible knowledge, for once the water is experienced (Oddyseus' journey, The parting of the Red Sea, The Flood) language and thought (that is philosophical) are not merely unnecessary but have lost their power to imagine in that they've become rooted in truthful representations, those that are unavailable to us and force us to poetize the world, or in the case of Kafka poetize the universe from different oblique angles of the photograph in a way that is impossible to improve upon from both earthliness and worldliness.
It's a scripture being written as events unfold, unconceptually laid out. Nakedness in the waters is transformed into a rapture, through which we unveal our sexuality and our blood ties in the open, like the sons of Noah find him drunk and naked in the tent and the Midrash speaks about a rape. The secret of Western morality: An alleged attempt to keep ourselves from the water, but in that we've divorced word and world (Steiner) as the greatest intellectual achievement of Western mankind that gifted us consequently with Modernity, we're able to override those rules with readings of our own "dramatis persona" in the world that are separated from the magic power of creation - speech.
We dissect open the dreamweaving map of the human body in the quintessential heavenly boredom of speechlessness, but in the chains of time. Our models resemble the ancients all the more, and even our safety houses of steel and concrete are closer to Athens than they're to the French Revolution even; even though Athens remains deserted and the wilderness has been turned into speech, or speech representations (Midrash). Our surgerical abilities seem to be hindered by an acquired incapability to move in the invisible, dreams cannot be dissected like nations and human bodies, even though they wear our own bodies. We need to turn to the prophets, which nowadays wear boxing sweat and hot red glue for a skin.
The prophets are those who poetize the world in order to make it a little unreal, a little difficult to believe. Modern prophets are in strait needs to act differently though, they need to unmake our world in order to make it possible, that is, unreal. Prophets no longer speak in tongues, they utter pegs that joined together make up for the world of ideas lacking in the tangible, in the extreme philosophies of the experience that have summoned the demise of pronouns. Our sexuality has changed shoes and shifted the template of desire from the world, where not having was the underlying principle, to the earth - where every desire can be satisfied, but the violence of this relationship is paramount to desire itself; we return to the world before the Flood and therefore bound our destruction, not as individuals or nations but as a world. We need to summon prophecy and revelation, not in the way known to our forefathers.
[tomorrow possible realities and photographs of the memory]
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