Reviews for Kafka la Pesquisa

The average rating for Kafka la Pesquisa based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-12 00:00:00 Kenneth Budny All works of psychoanalysis, especially of the Jungian variety such as this, are extraordinary works of hermeneutic gymnastics. But the symbolic web woven here ends up portraying a tapestry which is purely fictive. What it loses touch upon in all of its discussion of shadow selves and ego-ideals is the "reality" that moves subversively beneath these terms and eludes them - that is, the reality that Kafka was a writer. He himself wrote "I am literature, and nothing besides," and such a claim should be taken seriously (it is not even brought up in this text). Sharp interprets Kafka's writing as his attempt at working out his neurosis, coming to a psychic stability between the fractured aspects of his psyche. And though writing was cathartic for Kafka, it was also not just a symptom of his problem, but was his very affliction itself. The exigency of writing tore him to pieces, and yet it made him who he was to have been as well - a name and a voiceless voice, detached and alienated from any life. What this work fails to note is that Kafka failed to "be cured," but in a perverse sense was "cured" of himself, of the trappings of an always already fractured and broken egoity beyond repair (identity being the impossible, the absolute idea), by his affliction which came to replace who he had been, who he hated, casting this self into the abyss of the neutralizing night from whence he wrote and experienced the ecstacy, the beatitude, of expiating himself of the vitriol of his life. Hope? No hope. Only a hopeless hope, knowing without knowing that he could hope for nothing, and yet revelling in this failure as the very success of his distorted destiny. The secret raven was not "his" shadow self, but rather the shadow of literature, which haunts writing - the voice which compells, demands to be written, to speak, so that all may disappear into the void that it invokes. The shadow haunting language, accompanying us all, and yet no-one. Kafka was religious, as Sharp correctly notes, though without God - his religiousity was that of writing, being bound to the exigency of effacement, compelled to bear withness to the vacuous space that the absence of God presents us with as our own burden. An interesting read, but totally off base in its flights of Jungian analysis. This, of course, is not very different from the deluge of literary criticism surrounding Kafka's name. Though this at least appears to find its roots in his life and his diaries, it neglects to relaize that these diaries too are writing - they are just as bound up to the fictioning and absolution so sacred to Kafka as were his fictions. Kafka is but a name here, as he must always be. A no-one, a name devoid of life, signifying only an obscure trace, a secret, which eludes the work and the text like a raven in flight in the depths of midnight.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-14 00:00:00 Brett Byers Jungian analysis of Kafka's inner life. His lifelong conflict between inability to live a provisional life while also devoting time for his artistic calling, is explained using concepts of puer aeternus that seem to have caused his lifelong neurosis. As per the author, while Kafka was unable to integrate his anima with his ego complex (ultimate way to escape the puer personality and grow into an adult) until the very end of his life (which by the way was cruelly cut short due to poor health), he avoided complete psychological destruction mainly due to his writing and a constant undercurrent of hope, that finally resulted in spiritual denouement - experience of the reality of the psyche shortly before his death. One point deducted for overreach of retroactive explanation drawn from Kafka's diaries.