About an absurd aspect of things, say digital bureaucracy, we often hear it to be Kafkaesque. The adjective is unfair because… Franz Kafka is not Kafkaesque. The “Kafkaesque” results from a superficial reading of the work and misunderstanding of our time. Gus would say that Kafka’s "fabulous" work is riddled with guilt, Jewish guilt…

Under the pretext that we consider our times to be rational and that Kafka deviates from our kind of rationality, he would be described as a writer of the absurd. But Kafka is an explorer of the metaphysical chasms of the human mind. Kafka is a religious character fallen in the abyss. He is a Jewish mystic. Yet, we must read the objection he raised in his Journal of February 25, 1918: "I have not been, like Kierkegaard, guided in life by the doubtless already weakened hand of Christianity, and I have not, like the Zionists, grasped just the last fringe of the Jewish prayer shawl that is flying away.”

ABOUT Kierkegaard:

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” is a quote from the 1844 treatise The Concept of Anxiety by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard used the phrase to describe the dizzying effect of freedom, and the boundlessness of one's own existence. He believed that anxiety is a kind of existential paradox of choice, and that without anxiety, there would be no possibility for growth and development.… [GUSNOTE: WE HAVE EXPLORED THIS CONCEPT MANY TIMES ON THIS SITE]

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was an astonishingly prolific writer whose work—almost all of which was written in the 1840s—is difficult to categorize, spanning philosophy, theology, religious and devotional writing, literary criticism, psychology and social critique. 

Kierkegaard’s mode of philosophy opposes system-building and owes in its approach to the ancients, particularly his hero Socrates, though his work draws strongly and creatively on the Bible and other Christian sources. 

The opposition to system-building means that Kierkegaard has often been understood as an arch opponent of Hegel, but scholarship in recent decades has challenged this view, suggesting both that some of Kierkegaard’s central ideas are creative developments of Hegel’s ideas, and that the main target of his critique is certain Danish Hegelians influential in his day, rather than Hegel himself. 

Often dubbed the “father of existentialism”, this label obscures as much as it reveals, especially to those who associate existentialism with atheistic figures such as Sartre. Kierkegaard’s thought has certainly influenced thinkers in the phenomenological and existential traditions (including Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, and Lévinas), but also thinkers in very different philosophical traditions, such as Wittgenstein who famously described Kierkegaard as a “saint” and “by far the most profound thinker” of the nineteenth century. 

In addition to influencing philosophers and theologians—inside and outside his own Lutheran tradition —Kierkegaard’s thought has also influenced various novelists and poets — including Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, One reason why Kierkegaard has had an impact upon a diversity of figures is his focus on the question of what it means to be an existing, finite human being, a concern he associates with “inwardness”, and which contrasts with what he takes to be the misguided idea that one can understand reality in a disengaged manner and from no particular point of view. 

He believed that the people of his time had in various ways forgotten this fundamental truth, an enormous failing manifested in both its philosophy and its theology.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself …

BACK TO KAFKA…….

Works of Franz Kafka

Sought out by leading avant-garde publishers, Kafka reluctantly published a few of his writings during his lifetime. These publications include two sections (1909) from Beschreibung eines Kampfes (1936; Description of a Struggle) and Betrachtung (1913; Meditation), a collection of short prose pieces. They also include other works representative of Kafka’s maturity: The Judgment, written in 1912 and published a year later; two other long stories, The Metamorphosis (published in 1915) and In der Strafkolonie (1919; In the Penal Colony); and a collection of short prose, Ein Landarzt (1919; A Country Doctor). Ein Hungerkünstler (1924; A Hunger Artist), four stories exhibiting the concision and lucidity characteristic of Kafka’s late style, had been prepared by the author but did not appear until after his death.

In fact, misgivings about his work caused Kafka before his death to request that all of his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed; Max Brod, his literary executor, disregarded his instructions and published the novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika in 1925, 1926, and 1927, respectively, and a collection of shorter pieces, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China), in 1931. Such early works by Kafka as Description of a Struggle (begun about 1904) and Meditation, though their style is more concretely imaged and their structure more incoherent than that of the later works, are already original in a characteristic way. 

The characters in these works fail to establish communication with others, they follow a hidden logic that flouts normal everyday logic, and their world erupts in grotesque incidents and violence. Each character is only an anguished voice, vainly questing for information and understanding of the world and for a way to believe in his own identity and purpose.

Many of Kafka’s fables contain an inscrutable, baffling mixture of the normal and the fantastic, though occasionally the strangeness may be understood as the outcome of a literary or verbal device, as when the delusions of a pathological state are given the status of reality or when the metaphor of a common figure of speech is taken literally. Thus, in The Judgment a son unquestioningly commits suicide at the behest of his aged father. 

In The Metamorphosis the son, Gregor Samsa, wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous and repulsive insect; he slowly dies, not only because of his family’s shame and its neglect of him but because of his own guilty despair.

Many of the tales are even more unfathomable. 

In the Penal Colony presents an officer who demonstrates his devotion to duty by submitting himself to the appalling (and clinically described) mutilations of his own instrument of torture. 

This theme, the ambiguity of a task’s value and the horror of devotion to it—one of Kafka’s constant preoccupations—appears again in A Hunger Artist. The fable Vor dem Gesetz (1914; Before the Law, later incorporated into The Trial) presents both the inaccessibility of meaning (the “law”) and humankind’s tenacious longing for it. A group of fables written in 1923–24, the last year of Kafka’s life, all centre on the individual’s vain but undaunted struggle for understanding and security.

Many of the motifs in the short fables recur in the novels. In the unfinished Amerika, for example, the boy Karl Rossmann has been sent by his family to America. There he seeks shelter with a number of father figures. His innocence and simplicity are everywhere exploited, and a last chapter describes his admission to a dreamworld, the “nature-theatre of Oklahoma”; Kafka made a note that Rossmann was ultimately to perish. 

In The Trial, Joseph K., an able and conscientious bank official and a bachelor, is awakened by bailiffs, who arrest him. The investigation in the magistrate’s court turns into a squalid farce, the charge against him is never defined, and from this point the courts take no further initiative. But Joseph K. consumes himself in a search for inaccessible courts and for an acquittal from his unknown offense. He appeals to intermediaries whose advice and explanations produce new bewilderment; he adopts absurd stratagems; squalor, darkness, and lewdness attend his search. Resting in a cathedral, he is told by a priest that his protestations of innocence are themselves a sign of guilt and that the justice he is forced to seek must forever be barred to him. A last chapter describes his execution as, still looking around desperately for help, he protests to the last. This is Kafka’s blackest work: evil is everywhere, acquittal or redemption is inaccessible, and frenzied effort only indicates an individual’s real impotence.

In The Castle, one of Kafka’s last works and also unfinished, the setting is a village dominated by a castle. Time seems to have stopped in this wintry landscape, and nearly all the scenes occur in the dark. K. arrives at the village claiming to be a land surveyor appointed by the castle authorities. His claim is rejected by the village officials, and the novel recounts K.’s efforts to gain recognition from an authority that is as elusive as Joseph K.’s courts. But K. is not a victim: he is an aggressor, challenging both the petty, arrogant officials and the villagers who accept their authority. All of his stratagems fail. Like Joseph K., he makes love to a servant, the barmaid Frieda, but she leaves him when she discovers that he is simply using her. 

Brod observes that Kafka intended that K. should die exhausted by his efforts but that on his deathbed he was to receive a permit to stay. There are new elements in this novel. It is tragic, not desolate. While the majority of Kafka’s characters are mere functions, Frieda is a resolute person, calm and matter-of-fact. K. gains through her personality some insight into a possible solution of his quest, and, when he speaks of her with affection, he seems himself to be breaking through his sense of isolation.

Kafka’s stories and novels have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Brod and Kafka’s first English translators, Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa, viewed the novels as allegories of divine grace. 

Existentialists have seen Kafka’s environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which to construct an authentic existence. Some have seen his neurotic involvement with his father as the heart of his work. Others have emphasized the social criticism, the inhumanity of the powerful and their agents, the violence and barbarity that lurk beneath normal routine. 

Some have found an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism in the random and faceless bureaucratic terror of The Trial. 

The Surrealists delighted in the persistent intrusions of the absurd. There is evidence in both the works and the diaries for each of these interpretations, but Kafka’s work as a whole transcends them all. One critic may have put it most accurately when he wrote of the works as “open parables” whose final meanings can never be rounded off.

But Kafka’s oeuvre is also limited. Each of his works bears the marks of a man suffering in spirit and body, searching desperately, but always inwardly, for meaning, security, self-worth, and a sense of purpose. Kafka himself looked upon his writing and the creative act it signified as a means of “redemption,” as a “form of prayer” through which he might be reconciled to the world or might transcend his negative experience of it. 

The lucidly described but inexplicable darkness of his works reveal Kafka’s own frustrated personal struggles, but through his powerless characters and the strange incidents that befall them the author achieved a compelling symbolism that more broadly signifies the anxiety and alienation of the 20th-century world itself.

At the time of his death, Kafka was appreciated only by a small literary coterie. His name and work would not have survived if Brod had honoured Kafka’s testament—two notes requiring his friend to destroy all unpublished manuscripts and to refrain from republishing the works that had already appeared in print. 

Brod took the opposite course, and thus the name and work of Kafka gained worldwide posthumous fame. This development took place first in France and the English-speaking countries during the regime of Adolf Hitler, at the very time when Kafka’s three sisters were deported and killed in concentration camps. 

After 1945 Kafka was rediscovered in Germany and Austria and began to greatly influence German literature. By the 1960s this influence became global and extended even to the intellectual, literary, and political life of Kafka’s place of birth, what had become communist Czechoslovakia.

MOST OF THE INFORMATION: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Kafka/Works

WE CAN SAY, without betraying Kafka, THAT AMERICA, EUROPE AND ISRAHELL ARE Kafkaesque: FULL OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS, IDIOCY AND... GUILT...

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME AMERICA.

Israel’s deliberate campaign of starvation in Gaza is exacting a punishing toll on its people. Just 30 aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip a day in November, according to Al Jazeera—a far cry what is needed to feed the area’s 2 million people. In North Gaza Governate, where a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing is underway, just 12 of 34 permitted aid trucks have arrived since Oct. 6, according to Oxfam. The Real News reports from Deir al Balah in Gaza’s south, where overburdened and under-provisioned bakeries struggle to feed thousands.

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

There’s people who camp overnight at the bakery. I swear—the last time I went, I found they’d laid out beds at the door. There are people who get there at 5am. I swear someone told me they arrived at 3am and left at night. For 19 packs of bread. Some get it and some don’t. 

Interviewer: 

How many meals are you eating a day? 

Um Yusuf Dalloul, Gaza City: 

There aren’t any meals! It doesn’t make up a meal, there aren’t any meals at all. There’s nothing. Right now, currently, there are no meals. There’s no food. People started hitting each other. The last time I was here, I got trapped in the middle of a fight. 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

Yes, they’re slaughtering each other. I swear to God, with sticks. They’re beating people with sticks. They hit people, last time they knocked over an old man and he dropped to the floor. 

Interviewer: 

All this for bread? 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

For bread. And the kid refused to pick him up. We told him: “Be respectful he’s old, help him up,” he said: “No, you help him.” Hitting people with sticks as if they were cattle. Not humans. 

Interviewer: 

Are there many conflicts? 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

Every day, every day, there are problems at the bakery. Every day. Not a day goes by without problems. A person before the war used to come and go, used to be strong. I swear I used to carry a sack of cement to the fourth floor, and go up and down two or three times. Now, nothing. Even water—from carrying the water so much—we don’t have any strength left. 

Um Yusuf Dalloul, Gaza City: 

I mean can they find us a solution? So we can just leave. We want to leave. Enough. We are exhausted. Illnesses. I have chronic illnesses and can’t find medications. Can’t find medications and can’t even find bread to eat with my medications. Since morning I’ve been wandering around trying to find bread. We’re suffering. 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

Everyone’s being diagnosed, everyone’s fatigued. If you go to the Jaa hospital, you can’t walk for people suffering from fatigue. 

Interviewer: 

From what?

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

From lack of food. 

Um Yusuf Dalloul, Gaza City: 

Yes, many have died of hunger. As someone with a chronic illness, if this continues, I could die. Maybe a week and I’ll die. It’s normal. Because I suffer from a lot of chronic illnesses. I’m suffering even from talking, because I have high blood pressure. 

Sa’ada Barakat Rashid Khel: 

I went to the clinic to get checked, I told them I get dizzy and my eyes glaze. They said you need blood tests, I told them my blood is definitely bad because I’m not eating. I’ve lost more than half my weight. My son gets bad headaches, and he went to the clinic and they gave him vitamins. And my youngest daughter, they’re always telling me: “Her face is yellow, her face is yellow.” They lack nutrition, vitamins, food, and drink. Even at the clinic, they have no medications. 

Interviewer: 

Are you hungry now? 

Ahmed Hassan Usman Ali Al Arshi: 

Yes, honestly, a lot. I mean, before the war I was—I’ve lost a lot of weight. Before the war, my weight was almost 41 kilograms. Now, 38 kilograms—around that. Before the war I used to eat fruits and chicken and vegetables and we had everything. We used to eat, we weren’t hungry. Now there’s nothing. We’ve started to crave chicken. We crave everything, we haven’t found stuff to eat. The soup kitchens, we force ourselves to eat that. There’s nothing to eat. And lentils. Honestly, we used to hate lentils. Now though, we’ve started to love them. 

Interviewer: 

From lack of food? 

Ahmed Hassan Usman Ali Al Arshi: 

Yeah. 

Sa’ada Barakat Rashid Khel: 

Most of the time my kids sleep hungry. Most of the time they sleep hungry. If—if—they manage to get food from the soup kitchen, they eat it. If not, then there is nothing. That’s it, there’s no bread, no flour. My daughter is always saying: “Mum, I want to eat.” What can I do about it? What can I say? If we have lentil soup, I say: “Go drink the soup,” she says: “It doesn’t fill me up!” I say: “Well, what can we do?” Just go to sleep. 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

I fear for my kids, not for myself. That’s what made me leave Gaza City, I’m not scared for myself; I’m scared for those with me. I mean, when it comes to food and drink in general, we can’t afford it. Even when we go to the bakery, we can’t afford a packet of bread. People buy it from the bakery for 3 shekels (0.85 USD), and sell it for 20 ($5), 25 ($7), or 30 shekels ($8). We can’t afford it.

Um Yusuf Dalloul, Gaza City: 

That’s it. Greed and selfishness has consumed everyone. There are traders who buy and sell: they buy it for 3 shekels ($0.85) and sell it for 15 ($3.5). A cucumber for 10 shekels ($2.75)?! Prices are sky high. We’re living in Hell. Life is unbearable. 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

A bag of flour has reached 400 ($112) or 500 ($140) shekels. And we can’t get it. I swear there was a day when I sold a bag of flour for 5 shekels ($1.40). In the summer, it wouldn’t keep, it would go bad. Now it’s 500 shekels ($140), we can’t afford it. 500 ($140), 600 ($168), and 700 ($196). Today it reached 800 shekels ($224). Today I asked the price of a bag of flour they told me 800 shekels ($224). Where are we going to get that from? We can’t even get a packet of bread. 

Um Yusuf Dalloul, Gaza City: 

Enough! If they don’t want us then just kill us. Because we are fed up. Seriously. We’re fed up. We’re here dying, I swear we’re dying. Our health has gone, our wealth has gone. 

When will this be solved? The whole world has wars and then they solve them, apart from us? We’re the forgotten. I swear we’re forgotten. Until when? 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 
To the world? I say: wake up from your sleep. Come out of your coma. Look at the Palestinian people. Feel compassion for them. That’s what I say. People have run out of patience. People have run out of space. People have forgotten what meat is. When you ask about meat, they’ll say: “What’s that?” 

Interviewer: 

How long has it been since you ate meat? 

Mahmud Zuhair Hussain Abu Zaideh: 

From the day they closed the crossing. People are suffocated. 

https://therealnews.com/my-kids-go-to-sleep-hungry-gaza-starves-amid-israeli-blockade

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME AMERICA.