paul-denicola-literature-pure-mediality

oppositional thinking has limits which must be overcome to express the human condition
as encompassing flux, indeterminacy, incessant motion and change.
Generally speaking, judgment revolves around achieving determination, closure and
singular or univocal meaning. By accommodating ourselves to function within a
metaphysical paradigm, human beings must thereby partake in a “forgetting”, which
serves us in a utilitarian way to avoid a fall into the abyss of cognitive dissonance.
Kafka’s writing conversely is in no way oriented or situated toward any type of
prescriptive definition, but something quite different. Rather, his literature takes part in
an active “undoing of the practice of forgetfulness” (Ulfers, NYU Lecture Notes, 2002).
For Kafka, writing serves an essential human need, acting as a means of “un-judging,”
and thereby deconstructing, the previously “judged” version of the real toward its
originary “un-judged” status.
3.3 A Literature of Re-Reading:
In his essay “Kafka and the Absurd”, Albert Camus writes, “The whole art of Kafka
consists in forcing the reader to reread. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggests
explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem
justified, require that the story be reread from another point of view. Sometimes there is
a double possibility of interpretation, whence appears the necessity of two readings. This
is what the author wanted” (93). It is this possibility and need for a multiplicity of
readings that Camus points to which are necessary strategies in confronting Kafka’s texts.
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