I acquired Adorno’s Prisms[1] some time ago mainly, if not only, because the book contained his “Notes on Kafka.” Incidentally, Adorno’s “notes” are hardly that—the amorphous and dense text stretches over twenty-seven pages and nine indistinguishable sections. The solidity of the text is practically discouraging. But this I had yet to learn. The point is that I avoided this particular essay for a while. Adorno is dear, but Kafka is dearer. Thus, the threat of understanding had to be assimilated in stages. Huxley, Spengler, and even Benjamin—and this I admit with great difficulty and pain—had to be approached first. This undoubtedly exposed the respect I had felt for Adorno, from whom, I childishly assumed, I had learned so much. And I read the essay today, all the misgivings notwithstanding. Naturally enough, I ultimately learned almost nothing about Kafka from Adorno’s notes, and I consequently stumbled across another problem: whence the initial discomfort from that very possibility—the possibility of understanding? What could Kafka suffer from Adorno’s pen? What could Kafka suffer from anybody’s pen, for that matter? What did I secretly expect? What was my tacit objective? Etc. But then I realized that this question, as well as the very possibility of such a question, was in itself threatening enough. It would only invoke another round, hopefully equally unsuccessful, of destruction. My occasional notes on Kafka are nothing but notes. They do not pretend to offer much. The bitter aftertaste of Negative Dialectics[2] surfaced and lingered. And that is where I stopped. Although I could not accept a mere profession of everlasting ignorance, as a matter of principle, the underlying invitation to outdo Adorno, let alone Kafka, was even less acceptable, not to say less appealing. At this juncture I could not but start hoping that my ignorance and stupidity were indeed genuine, for in that case I could safely hide behind objective circumstances, that is, inherent limitations. Necessity, however, is always such a poor device when one is confronted with oneself in others. The only thing that remained for me to do was to find the strength to write the last sentence, decorate it with a period, and stick to it…

Addendum (August 31, 1982)

There is nothing as practical as a good theory—or so the philistines tirelessly expound. In fact, there is nothing as theoretical as a good practice. Everything we indeed know militates against the ponderous depths of this relationship. If we only knew how to distinguish between the two, we could perhaps attack the problem of synthesis. The task, however, is not to entertain the prior analytical foundation, nor to indulge in dialectical somersaults that would bridge the abyss, but to expose the origins of the missing foundations. And that task would lead us back to the need of fathoming our own quotidian lives, which exercise is bound to result in infinite regress. The stultifying taboos of formal logic prevent us from doing precisely this—on practical grounds, of course—although there is no other procedure that would allow us to learn about the world and ourselves within it. And it is here that Kafka offers much more than Adorno, for instance. It is here that Kafka rightly demands the impossible.

Footnotes

1. Adorno, T.W., Prisms, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1981.

2. Adorno, T.W., Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 (first published in 1966).