Neighbors, Foes and Other Communities: Kafka and Zionism

C'est la littérature qui produit une solidarité active, malgré le scepticisme; et si l'écrivain est en marge ou à l'écart de sa communauté fragile, cette situation le met d'autant plus en mesure d'exprimer une autre communauté potentielle, de forger les moyens d'une autre conscience et d'une autre sensibilité.

It is literature which creates an active solidarity, in spite of its skepticism; and if the writer is in the margin of or at some distance from his fragile community, this situation puts him only more in the position of expressing another potential community, of forging another consciousness and another sensibility.

--Deleuze and Guattari1

In his diary, Kafka writes of this "Grenzland zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft . . . in dem ich mich angesiedelt . . . habe" [borderland between isolation and community in which I have settled]. ² This borderland between solitude and community was the only country Kafka ever truly inhabited. His stories, letters, and diary entries draw and redraw the contours of this land, revealing at its borders two extreme modes of being in the world: a condition of isolation and hermetic self-enclosure on the one hand, and a state of total group cohesion on the other. Emblematic images of both are among the most poignant elements of Kafka's legacy: here the one, "lonely like Franz Kafka," excluded, without protection and at the remotest distance of human contact; there, more terrifying still, the many locked into each other, identical and interchangeable, constituting opaque instances of impenetrable unity.

The borderland between loneliness and communal life is made up of Kafka's longings in both directions, and of his alternating flights from one to the other. In his life, Kafka experiences this land as paralysis, emptiness, and living death. In his work, however, this region transforms into a language of force and movement that runs up against borders, confounding inside and outside, same and other, I and we. In Kafka's writing, the lifeless desert is not the area in between, but that which lies beyond both borders: the most radical forms of Einsamkeit and of Gemeinschaft, autonomous separateness and homogeneous unison.

Why start here in thinking about Kafka and Zionism, about a possible beyond? Undoubtedly, it was his yearning to belong, and to gain the self-confidence that accompanies belonging, that drew him to Zionism; it was his fear of dissolution as a self in a group that kept him from adhering to it fully. Beyond this personal vacillation, one recognizes in Kafka's borderland a delimitation from the individualism of modernity, and more specifically of the assimilated Westjuden on the one hand, and from the seductions of communal ideologies on the other. Yet not only the recuperation of his work for any ideology, including Zionism, but also its opposite, the interpretation of his writing in terms of an omnipresent, politically conceived flight from fixation (which Deleuze and Guattari call "deterritorialization" and see directed against fascism, Stalinism, and capitalism alike), miss Kafka's specific insight into the attractions and dangers of closed and homogeneous collectivities. The "lignes de fuite" ("vanishing lines") which Deleuze and Guattari detect everywhere in his work, these vanishing lines which prevent Kafka's writing from ever settling on firm ground, describe only one of its movements. The battles Kafka fought happened in showdowns at borders, where lines meet, touch, and hook into each other, where they exert contrary forces and wrestle like the interlocked bodies of the adversarial yet interdependent neighbors he describes in one of his dreamlike diary entries. ³ If the connections drawn by these lines, if the marks of their crossings don't deliver answers--one would hardly go to Kafka for that--they do sharpen the questions, and occasionally, through the sheer pressure against the obstacles, point, like Walter Benjamin's "Destructive Character," at a "a way where others see nothing but a wall." ⁴

Just as there are many entrances to the burrow of...