Charlottenstrasse revisited

Eric Santner on Kafka and the Big Other.

“Gregor’s fall into abjection [can] be understood as a by-product of his encounter with the ultimate uncertainty as to his place in the community of which his father is the nominal master. Gregor’s mutation into an Ungeziefer , a creature without a place in God’s order… points to a disturbance within the divine order itself.

Gregor discovers one of the central paradoxes of modern experience: uncertainty as to what, to use Lacan’s term, the “Big Other” of the symbolic order really wants from us can be far more disturbing than subordination to an agency or structure whose demands are experienced as stable and consistent. The failure to live up to such demands still guarantees a sense of place, meaning, and recognition; but the subject who is uncertain as to the very existence of an Other whose demands might or might not be placated loses the ground from under his feet. The mythic order of fate where one’s lot is determined behind one’s back .. is displaced by a postmythic order in which the individual can no longer find his place in the texture of fate.”

A thought: In my ‘Ontological Bureacracy’ post I assumed that the affinity between bureaucracy and human nature which Kafka suggests resided in the fact that bureaucracy made into a kind of huge exoskeleton - embodied in buildings, paperwork, dictates, Organisations - the Symbolic Order that regulates and defines subjects.

What the passage above suggests, on the contrary, is that what bureaucracy lays bare, at least in Kafka’s understanding, is that this Symbolic Order is ultimately without transcendental guarantee. The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’ but never what they represent.. all this carries with it the ominous rider that there is no Big Other.

What happens therefore is that when the Big Other achieves its most complete historical embodiment (modern bureaucracy) instead of this being its apotheosis, its Truth, it is instead the moment it is revelaed as as lie, or a as a gaping absence.