With a great preface Somewhere behind Milan Kundera, a close friend of Czech philosopher Karel Kosik (1926-2003), whose collection of essays is in front of readers (in Ilić's selection and translation), Franz Kafka's book Century deals with philosophical and literary topics.
Kosik, who experienced both fascism and communism, played a significant role in the Prague Spring of 1968, then lost his professorship at Charles University and had to change professions, known to local readers for his books Dialectics of the Concrete and Dialectics of Crisis.
In this book, as editor Jelena Majstorov puts it, “Kosik considers and comments on Kafka's belief that the modern age is hostile to the tragic, in whose place it places the grotesque. The attitude that we live in the post-heroic era is elaborated on the examples of the works of two great writers, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek, and their heroes Joseph K. and Joseph Schweik.
Kosik's view is that what happened to these two characters at the same time and in the same city, despite all the differences between them, is no coincidence: both J. Schwijk and JK are loners in a grotesque, absurd world in which not reason prevails, but the great mechanism of irrational human disposals, the mechanism of alienation and seizure of unpredictable human essence.
This is why Kosik is rightly called the 20th century by Franz Kafka, whose quintessence is embodied by one of his characters, the sister of Gregory Samsa of the Transfiguration – the Anti-Antigone of the Modern Age. “
Why are there no tragic heroes in the literature of modern times but only unhappy characters? What is the difference between the conception of the tragic in antiquity and the modern age?
What is the difference between Sophocles Antigone and possible modern Antigone? Is tragic possible in our day?
First of all, what is a tragedy?
Not only about the tragic, Kosik in these essays also considers the significance of humor, writes about laughter, about the inverted position of laughter and seriousness, about the fateful measure, about the fate of philosophers, about the public, about language, about the generous potential of communion, about totalitarianism, about lackeyism …
Kafka himself, as he prefaces Kunder, laughed with his close friends Max Brod, Franz Verfel and Egon Erwin Kisch as he read their prose and did not intend to outsmart politicians, win the market, criticize the state.
His work is neither a critique of totalitarianism, nor of capitalism, nor of ideology. Whether Kafka's work is interpreted in a social dimension, as a socio-political prophecy, or as a hermetic expression of the author's subjective world, it gives an image of the onslaught of the grotesque that will override the meaning of the tragic.
For while Dostoyevsky's guilt seeks punishment, in Kafka – punishment seeks guilt.
Explaining the character of Marxa Samsova, an insect-transformed sister of Gregory Samsa, arising from a relationship of reality and not arousing anyone, as does his death, Kosik shows that the character of anti-Antigone emerges as the embodiment of the power of banality – because there is no longer a tragic conflict between banalities and the sublime.
Everything is going on the same plane.
Is modern Antigone at all possible, Kosik wonders – of course, if we do not interpret Sophocles' Antigone “as usual and wrongly as a conflict of two equally justified necessities, a collision of state power bound to punish the traitor and the petite of the family obliged to bury their dead members “But as a deeper conflict, as” the collision of written and temporary human laws with the unwritten and eternal divine laws, therefore, the conflict of time, the collision of temporality with permanence.
This conflict plays out as an inevitable dispute between two individuals, Creonta and Antigone. The difficulty for a possible modern Antigone to become a true Antigone is that her opponent's player is not an individual.
The modern Creon is not an individual personality, but a personality without individuality, the modern Creont is, though, a power ubiquitous and commanding, but at the same time anonymous ”.
What complicates or even precludes the possibility of the tragic in our day, Kosik asks. Although he emphasizes that heroic acts are possible in this post-heroic era, the Czech thinker states that “whatever is sublime, grand, brave, heroic or poetic and beautiful, is immediately exposed to the threat of being drawn into the process of earthliness, prose, pettiness, and pettiness. banalities. A powerful force that influences public opinion is lackeyism.
Lakey does not know or acknowledge the hero, he transforms everything to his own measure, which is down to earth. “
Another obstacle is the banalization and domestication of death, an outward manifestation of disrespect for death in the form of a ritual of sadness that has a public character, because instead of paying homage to the deceased, the vanity and ambition of the living, who use the precious opportunity to parade in front of the audience, take the stage.
Just like “keep smiling – the laugh of an age where self-depiction suppressed truth, illusion rules over reality, a person is more than a man, and mask and function are valued more than humanity.”
Not claiming that Milena is Autumn's modern Antigone, Kosik notes that it is time for this Czech writer and journalist to “free herself from bending in the shadow of Kafka's work as a transient component of his biography” – remembered only by Milena's Letters.
Although her work cannot be compared to Kafka's, Kosik points out that Kafka's work suits Autumn's fate.
For, in her part, Kafka declares that she excludes our age tragically, and by her destiny – not in words – Autumn responds that this age can be saved, that is, to rise from the banality of evil, only by a tragic sacrifice.
His work and her destiny are driving this exciting dispute that gives birth to a new voice, a new possibility to doubt the omnipotence of anti-Antigone.
And Autumn's fate is that she simultaneously opposed the three forms of evil that defined her age: the evils of German Nazism, Russian Bolshevism, and the European Munich era.
Not only did she end her life in a German concentration camp, Kosik explains, her fate was certainly to end up in a camp of her day, because she stepped out of the silenced mass, went out of order, from each of those ranks, to be able to act against each of evil.
If it tragically lies in a dispute between the human and the divine, between the temporary and the permanent, between the banal and the sublime, the ancient polis, as Plato explains, and Kosik reminds, is based and renewed on that dispute.
The citizens of the polis maintained this conflict of human and divine and hence the claim that the cradle of tragedy is politics, not poetics, because politics is the communion of all, and poetics is only an area in which genius individuals create their works.
Source: danas.rs
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