Kafka at the open door

The philosopher Massimo Cacciari – who was mayor of Venice between 1993 and 2000 and between 2005 and 2010, and also a deputy in the Italian Parliament – ​​spoke about Franz Kafka this Wednesday at the Madrid Student Residence.

He commented that in many of his texts—he referred to them as fables—he connected with some of the issues that have most occupied thinkers of the 20th century.

He focused above all on the treatment of space, which no longer has anything to do with the closed conception that Aristotle or Dante had of it.

The cosmos breaks down for modern man, it explodes, so we navigate in an open space, without a clear destination, without a guide, without much protection.

“Through the event it is only possible to lead

irgendwohin,

to any place,” Cacciari wrote in an old text on Wittgenstein's

Tractatus

that he included in his

Posthumous Men

(Peninsula).

Anywhere.

There is no fixity, there are no closed areas, not even barriers.

What there are are open doors.

It is up to modern man to cross them, which is why a concept that is useful for reading Kafka is that of

the threshold,

Cacciari said.

He referred, especially, to the novels

The Trial

and

The Castle

and to stories such as

Josefina the Singer

or

Ante la Ley.

In the latter, a country man arrives before a guard who is next to an open door and asks him to enter the house. Law. To which he replies that “for now” he is not going to allow it.

He will continue to insist, he will continue to receive refusals.

One day the guard tells him: “If he attracts you so much, he tries to enter despite my prohibition.”

That's where the threshold proposal comes from.

The door is always open, it's just a matter of walking through it.

And enter into the Law. And what can be found there? What is on the other side? What can happen? Could they not be territories where barbarians graze?

With that Cacciari arrived at another of Kafka's great themes.

We wander, the moderns, adrift: there are no gods to welcome us nor great purposes to redeem us.

If anything protects us, it is the law, perhaps it is what is left in that open space (without walls, without walls, without fortresses).

But where does the legitimacy of the law come from? Cacciari asked himself, following Kafka.

The law is addressed to me, to the individual, it is the individual who has to obey it, but where do so many demands on each individual come from if the law is written in general terms, if it is addressed to everyone?

Is there any point where the law, conceived in universal terms, addresses the specific individual?

Cross the threshold if you want, the door is open, the guard told the increasingly restless man.

What he also explained to him was that he should not count on him, that the decision was his own.

A bit like Josefina, one day she also abandons her people, and she disappears.

Cacciari inaugurated the conferences on Kafka that the Residence has organized on the occasion of the centenary of his death (June 3, 1924), and coordinated by Francisco Jarauta.

“Everyone aspires to enter the Law,” the peasant tells the guard when he has very little left to live, “how is it that in so many years no one but me has requested entry?”

And he answers that that was impossible, that that entry was only intended for him.

There is no other choice, we are alone, and there is that law that in the end does not exactly take care of me, what will it say if suddenly “a large herd of small creatures” attacks me?

It is necessary to jump in, take the step, cross the door.

“There are possibilities for me, of course,” Kafka wrote in his diary in June 1914, “but under what rock are they hiding?”

Well that.

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