We breathe Kafka's fear

Libertarian inspiration is written at the heart of Kafka's novels, which speak of the State - whether in the form of "administration" or "justice" - as a system of impersonal surveillance that crushes, suffocates or kills individuals. It is an anxious, dark, incomprehensible world, in which unfreedom reigns.

Somehow, I have the impression that each of us writes the same text from week to week. And somehow, I am more and more convinced that it cannot be otherwise. My smallness, for example, starts to write more and more "generally taken into consideration", while many of my respected colleagues write, on the contrary, about the details, because the devil hides in the details, sometimes, as we see these days, in the ashes. Well, for objective reasons I can't deal with the details, because for objective reasons I can't hang out in elite places and know what was said by whom, who said to whom and whose money is ours, but when sometimes I manage to in a more busy "social place" I listen to such things, and only then do I understand why it is so difficult for me to follow social networks and well-informed people, although by no means the purpose of their political involvement. Hate without limits? Ignorance beyond the tabloid? Absolute absence of empathy in every part of society.

It seems as if exact, clear, unambiguous history is forbidden in public discourse, to hide what is officially accepted of it (in schools, for example) because history, as a science, has divided the fate of society: both are ad hoc , both scenes, and any time can change everything. That is why my history is personal and yours, dear readers.

I promised the editor of a media outlet that I would write what I only know in the most devastating detail: What would happen to you if you tried to do the basic thing if, unprotected, without a steady income, close to no one, and a journalist, you try to provide dignified long and expensive illnesses in a house where you are the only caregiver and financier, and, finally, the death of your father and mother. I will write that, I promise. And it is not personal, and it has its own dynamics and its own story in history, in literature. In order to leave room for a quote that summarizes all of our present and past, my personal experience and your global suffering, I can only assure you of this: Whoever kills administrative ignorance and puts empathy for the citizen on a state pedestal will be the first reformer of Serbia. .

The following quote, for which I ask you to read the entire original, is important for us, ordinary, small people about whom high politics, elite media, and rich people do not give a single penny: Michael Löwy: "Franz Kafka and libertarian socialism": "(...) Kafka's work, contrary to what is often thought, especially his two great novels, is not a criticism of the old imperial Austro-Hungarian State, but of the state apparatus if it is more modern: its anonymous impersonal character as far as the alienated bureaucratic apparatus is concerned, "realized", autonomous, transformed in the end into itself. One passage from the Castle particularly clarifies such a point of view: "It would be said that the administrative organism cannot bear the tension, the nervousness that has lasted for years over the same thing, perhaps unworthy by its nature, so and she can pronounce the sentence herself without the help of officials".

The Process was often presented as a prophetic work: the author predicted with his visionary imagination the judiciary of totalitarian states, the Nazi or Stalinist processes. Bertold Brecht, a supporter of the USSR, reflected, in a conversation with Walter Benjamin, on Kafka in 1934 (before the trial in Moscow): "Kafka has only one problem: What seized him was the fear of the State, the anthill, the way to which people themselves are estranged through the forms of their common life. And he predicted various forms of this estrangement, such as the methods of the GPU".

Nothing illustrates this better than the conversation, in the Process, between K. and the abbot regarding the interpretation of the parable of the guardian of the law. For the abbot, "to doubt the guardian's dignity would be to doubt the Law" - a classic argument of all representatives of the order. K. adds that if that opinion is accepted, "one should believe everything the guardian says", which seems impossible to him: "No, says the abbot, we are not obliged to believe that everything he says is true, it is enough to keep it necessary. A sad opinion, says K., it will raise the lie to the height of the world's rule". Hannah Arendt: "In the conversation with the abbot, Kafka reveals a secret theology and intimate belief in bureaucrats as a belief in necessity per se, given that bureaucrats are in the last analysis servants of necessity".

(danas.rs)