ABSTRACT
Immanent in Kafka’s Jewish pessimism about the fate of ‘human beings’ is, however, the realisable possibility of a trans-human and trans-being existence. This immanent unconscious of Kafka’s Jewish consciousness, implicitly articulated by the tripartite schema we have extracted from him, is allegorically expressed by the actual coming of the messiah in Jesus, resulting in the rupture-like birth of Christianity from Judaism. It is this immanence in Kafka’s riddles of the law and its exception, and the possibility that this immanence can be actualised, that drew the Marxist in Benjamin to the Czech-German writer. To blindly follow Benjamin on Kafka, without recognising the productive tension in the ambiguities of his Judaic-Marxism, could be disastrous. And yet, it’s only the encounter with and awareness of such tensions that can enable the illumination of the real trauma in Kafka’s soul and aid the production of an authentic revolutionary subjectivity.
