PARA/ INQUIRY Postmodern Religion and Culture Victor E ... - IMIC

acquittal. The horror of the text is not simply that the sentence is carried out; it is theseemingly eternal postponement of the sentence, the Law. One is not asked to choosebetween guilt or innocence, as if the reader magically were placed in a jury room fordeliberation. There is nothing to deliberate, no charge, no evidence, no prosecution ordefense. Kafka has, according to Deleuze and Guattari, introduced a minor language, aparagrammar, into the language of the state. Kafka’s minor literature moves differently fromthe major literature of his time. Writing minor literature supplants the dominant structure ofthe major language by calling attention to the structurality of language, its old physics; inother words, minor literature points out that the dominant has/is a structure. This is therevolutionary force that is extracted from the text.FOUNDATIONAL FRAGMENTS: INVOKING THE SACREDHow many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream:to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an officiallanguage (for example, psychoanalysis today, which would like to be a master of the signifier, ofmetaphor, of wordplay). Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor. (Is therea hope for philosophy, which for a long time has been an official, referential genre? Let us profit fromthis moment in which antiphilosophy is trying to be a language of power.)(Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka)14Writing is an arrogant enumeration of a structure. The revolutionary force of a text bringsforward the limitlessness of written language and the undecideability of interpretation.A major literature conceals the variability of language. Not only is a major languagedominant, it is indeed central and sacred. The sacrality of a major literature is not merelyexpressed stylistically. Its sacrality affirms its centrality. Kafka, the writer, stood outside ofthe German literary tradition; Kafka, the Jew, stood outside of German culture. In onerespect, the Czech and Yiddish speaker caught within the German language finds a resonancewith the Jews suspended in the Diaspora. Language and religion are bound to national andlinguistic identity, and it is the sacrality of both structures that fashions a margin for theminor element. Kafka, writing in German, finds that the discursive finite is assembledalongside the imaginative infinite, leading him to uncover an unsolveable problem (theproblem of diasporic language) that is much like Borges’s inevitable, ineffable center that iseverywhere and nowhere: “La Biblioteca es una esfera cuyo centro cabal es cualquier hexágono,cuya circunferencia es inaccessible.” 6 [The library is a sphere whose exact center is any one ofits hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.]Nevertheless, when writing, one must make an initial cut or have a topos, as ill-suited tothe infinite as it is. Within a modernist hierarchy, it is the sacred that holds the center firmly inplace. Borges’s library represents an anti-thesis to this modern hierarchy rather well. Thetopos now in question concerns the presentation of the inaccessible circumference of thecircle, here the sacred in the age of postmodernism. The sacred, a well-worn and muchabandoned concept today, is generally invoked as that archaic foundation which has been lostor forfeited by collective humanity to a thoroughly (post)modern secular world. The invocationof the sacred, if it is not indeed drowned in an aria of scorn, often includes humanity’s