Sentence

In the previous post, speculating on the relation between Art and Act, I cited Kafka’s composition of ‘The Judgement’. I find in Santner’s Schreber book, which I am reading piecemeal, the following:

In a diary entry of September 23, 1912, Kafka registered the miraculous composition of “The Judgement” in the course of a single night’s labour, one he would, the following year, characterize as a kind of couvade [ha! shows what the spellchecker knows!] in which his story emerged covered with the “filth and mucus” of birth.

What one gives birth to is outside the Symbolic Order, smeared in formless matter, discharging its insistent, unanswerable pre-linguistic distress signal (activated by its passage into humanity). In some ways it is a repellent thing.

But K.'s metaphor is perhaps less about this delivered thing than about the experience of delivery – of being delivered of this alien, incipient being which is ultimately not-you, an Other. An experience that is minimally ‘miraculous’ in the sense that every conception is miraculous (immaculate) – there is this gap, this unaccountable interval between cause and effect. This ‘interval’, this void, is perhaps what draws and binds the writer.

The most obvious point about the text itself is that it concerns a binding – fatal – Paternal Sentence:

"[Father] How long it's taken you to grow up! Your mother had to die--she couldn't live to see the happy day--your friend is going to pieces in Russia, even three years ago he was yellow enough to be thrown away, and as for me, you can see what condition I'm in! You have eyes in your head for that!"
"So you've been lying in wait for me!" cried Georg.
His father said pityingly, in an offhand manner, "I suppose you wanted to say that earlier. But now it is no longer appropriate."
And in a louder voice: "So now you know there is more in the world than just you. Till now you've known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!--And therefore take note: I sentence you to death by drowning!"

Well, there’s a lot to get one’s psychoanalytic teeth into there. Too much. The invitation to Psychoanalytic reading is itself almost lewdly suggestive, embarassingly visible. And if the aforementioned isn't enough, here's an excerpt from Bataille's take on the story, starting with Kafka's comments to Brod:

‘Do you know,’ he {Kafka] asked, ‘what the last phrase means? As I wrote it I thought of a violent ejaculation.’Does this ‘extraordinary declaration’ give us a glimpse of an ‘erotic basis’? Does it mean that ‘In the act of writing there is a sort of compensation for the defeat before the father and the failure of the dream of transmitting life’? I do not know, but in the light of this ‘declaration’ the phrase expresses the sovereignty of joy, the supreme lapse of being into that nothingness which the others constitute for the being.

Isn't there, though, a very telling ambivalence in what Kafka says. Does he mean that he thought of the Father's Sentence as a 'violent ejaculation', or that the thought of the the violent ejaculation attached to his writing of the sentence. Like two glimpses of the same jouissance.

How, dear readers, would you characterise the relation between these two 'sentences'? Or perhaps someone might tell me whether the Sentence/ sentence pun actually works in the original German??