capital k or the phantom pain of history - enrique vila-matasmarthe robert dit excellemment que les...

ACLA Congress, NYU, March 19-23, 2014 Political Fiction Today and the Phantom Pain of Capitalism

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Capital K Or the Phantom Pain of History

To Phil Watts

Call me crazy but I had this vision (Eminem)

“Call me crazy, but I had this vision” : a vision that all the twentieth century literature was utterly

under the rule of a capital K:

Kafka Kraus Koestler Kundera Kiš Kertész Koltès Kofler Kureishi Krasznahorkai

= the vision of a capital K as a key, a reading key for literature for one century, since the « violated

solitude » (as Kundera calls it1) of Kafka’s K : since Karl Rossman, “the disappeared” in AmeriKa, Joseph

K. in The Trial and K. in The Castle – a K as a « book surveyor » (“l’arpenteur des livres” said Marthe

Robert) – such as he was represented, during that period, by Klee (another K as a Key or as a Klee)

1 « Quelque part là-derrière », Le Débat, Paris, n°8, p. 58-59.


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Paul Klee, The Surveyor, 1915, Kunstmuseum, Berne

My vision, is that of a novelistic tradition stemming from this K :

- Stemming from K as an « identity number (or cipher) of the disappeared » as Walter

Benjamin argued (the same one that «says as much as an initial embroidered into a

handkerchief or on the lining of a hat”) : that is to say: a cipher as a secret key for those who

were seeking, as Kafka did (and Benjamin after him), to open the “doors of justice” (I am

referring here to the 1934 essay entitled “On the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death”);

- or yet, much later on, deriving from Deleuze and Guattari's "K Function": for whom Kafka

had become synonymous with a generative function of textuality, attached to the very letter

of the discourse. "Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all meaning” –

Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Kafka. Towards a Minor Literature2; and thus, in giving his name

the resonance of a Kabbalah revelation or a revolutionary mantra (if you listen closely, you

can hear "Kafka! Towards a Minor Literature!"), they thought that they could "demechanize"

(“démachiner”) classical hermeneutics and open the doors of justice by launching the process

of "rhizomatic" unfolding of literal fabulation and "deterritorialization" of literature.

Capital K : it would be the key-letter of literality, the one that turns the world – according to Barthes

in his beautifully written 1960 essay entitled "Kafka's answer"3– into "a place always open to meaning"

(although "the latter always disappoints") ; and the one that allows, occasionally, an understanding of

Kafka's secret humour - which, according to David Foster Wallace (in « Some remarks on Kafka’s funniness

from which probably not enough has been removed » [just as here]4), consists of taking literally that which

tradition considers to be a metaphor ; and this is why, as with the best of "joKes" (particularily Jewish

jokes – such as the briefest one : “God”), it K-not be explained. That is at least the argument Bruno

Schulz (another “disappeared” one) made in 1936, well before Wallace, in his afterword to his translation

of The Trial ["It is a work that lives its own poetic life - ambiguous, unfathomable, inexhaustible by any

interpretation"]5, or more recently did Agamben (in a serious tone that imitates a Jewish joke) : "What

was not to be explained is perfectly contained into what doesn't explain anything anymore."6

2 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, Paris, Minuit, 1975, p. 40. 3 « La vérité de Kafka, ce n’est pas le monde de Kafka (adieu au kafkaïsme), ce sont les signes de ce monde. Ainsi l’œuvre n’est jamais réponse au mystère du monde, la littérature n’est jamais dogmatique. En imitant le monde et ses légendes […], l’écrivain ne peut mettre au jour que des signes sans signifiés : le monde est une place toujours ouverte à la signification mais sans cesse déçue par elle. Pour l’écrivain, la littérature est cette parole qui dit jusqu’à la mort : je ne commencerai pas à vivre avant de savoir quel est le sens de la vie. » (Roland Barthes, « La réponse de Kafka » (1960), in Essais critiques (Points Seuil), pp. 143-147). 4 David Foster Wallace, , in Consider the Lobster (And Other Essays) (2005) (Abacus) 5 Bruno Schulz « Postface à la traduction du Procès » [Varsovie, Roj, 1936], traduit du polonais par Janusz Nowak, in La Quinzaine Littéraire, Paris, n° 402, octobre 1983. 6 Giorgio Agamben, « Kafka défendu contre ses interprètes », in Idée de la prose, traduit de l’italien par Gérard Macé, Paris, Bourgois, Collection Titres, 2006 ; p. 126.


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Capital K : it would be an "acoustic revelation" (as Hannah Arendt said to be the only possible truth

according to Benjamin7): a quasi-Kabbalistic letter or a pass sound, a shibboleth (Derrida would say) to gain

access to this place open to meaning, which functions as an "enigma" (an ainigma : that which is to be

understood, following Agamben's example, by way of allusion).

Capital K : it would be the enigma of the letter, reminiscent of the Lacanian myth of the "indivisible"

letter (whose ideal nature drew Derrida's disapproval8) : the letter as a “point de capiton” (a "quilting

point" [in the sense one uses to speak of a bedding or a sofa]) – this mythical point, the only one capable

of pinning down or attaching the meaning to the signified on the fabric/tissue of the Text - while, in

actuality, the meaning never ceases to elude it.

The vision I had (call me crazy) of this wandering, this haunting of the letter K in contemporary

literature would thus refer to the impossibility of pinning down the meaning; it would [denounce the myth

of the lost paradise of literary hermeneutics; and] reveal the phantom of a disappeared ideal meaning.

But more to the point:

Qu’a à nous dire ce K9 ? What K(c)an this K say to us?

What is it the sign of?

Perhaps it would be better to read the capital K as a gesture, by turning once more our attention to

Benjamin's essay on the 10th anniversary of Kafka's death:

Kafka's entire work is a catalogue of gestures that do not possess a predetermined symbolic meaning for the author, but rather are continually repeated in new contexts, in new experimental configurations around such a meaning10.

To read K as a gesture (and an experiment "around meaning"): it seems to me that this is exactly

what Kafka did in an entry to his Journal a hundred years ago (dated December 17th 1913), when he

conjured up "the figure of a man with his arms half lifted in an asymmetrical gesture ready to engage into

the confusing mist".

Something like this:

7 « Pour [Benjamin] le problème de la vérité se posait depuis le commencement comme celui d’une “révélation”, qui “doit être perçue, c’est-à-dire réside dans la sphère métaphysiquement acoustique”. » (Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin. 1892-1940, trad. de l’anglais par A. Oppenheimer-Faure et Patrick Lévy, Paris, Editions Allia, 2007, p. 108) 8 Comme le rappelle Peter Szendy, citant La Carte postale de Derrida, dans À coups de points. La ponctuation comme expérience (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013 p. 53) : « Comme le montre Derrida, l’indivisibilité de la lettre (du sêmeion, du point ou de l’atome signifiant, c’est en fait son idéalité, logée dans la prétendue matérialité que Lacan revendique pour elle » 9 Qu’a à nous dire Le K de Buzzati (comme réécriture de Moby DicK) ? Qu’a à nous dire le K de Philip K. Dick (« [Dick était] une sorte de Kafka passé par l’acide lysergique et par la colère. […] Pour Dick, tout art est politique », R. Bolaño, Entre parenthèses, p. 242] ? Qu’a à nous dire le K de JelineK ? 10 Walter Benjamin, « Franz Kafka. Pour le dixième anniversaire de sa mort » (1934), in Œuvres II, Paris, Gallimard, Folio, p. 425-426.


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k (police : handwriting Dakota)

Call me crazy, but it seems to me that this k foreshadows a very particular gesture of "engagement",

taking the form of a "study of silhouette"11 (of a sketch) : a gesture that belongs to the "high style of

allusions" (as Werner Kofler called it) and which Barthes identified, in his polemical "answer" to Sartre's

idea of commitment, as Kafka's "immense sign"12.

What Barthes called "Kafka's answer" - (le “oui, mais”) the "yes, but" of modern literature seen as a

reinterpretation of the "ethical project" in the modern uncertainty of the signs13 – this is perhaps what this

k can tell us, this (phantom-like) silhouette of the writer engaging with the mist or with the mist-ification of

the real.

All these K(ays) represent the possibilities of literature when it decides to face the reality of the world

by literally exploring its mysteries and the forms of its mystification.

Calvino used to say that literature can hear the sounds of the world better than politics14. Maybe it’s

true, ever since Amerika (The Disappeared, renamed by Max Brod with the help of the K sign)

and until contemporary novel's obsession with news stories (pitiful as they may be in themselves) such as

the DSK "case" - in Karnaval by the Spanish writer Juan Francisco Ferré.

11 Pierre Senges, Études de silhouettes, Paris, Gallimard/Verticales, 2010 12 « Le système allusif de Kafka fonctionne comme un signe immense qui interrogerait d’autres signes. » (Roland Barthes, « La réponse de Kafka » op.cit., pp. 143-147) 13 « La technique de Kafka implique donc d’abord un accord au monde, une soumission au langage courant, mais aussitôt après, une réserve, un doute, un effroi devant la lettre des signes proposés par le monde. Marthe Robert dit excellemment que les rapports de Kafka et du monde sont réglés par un perpétuel : oui, mais… Au succès près, on peut le dire de toute notre littérature moderne (et c’est en cela que Kafka l’a vraiment fondée), puisqu’elle confond d’une façon inimitable le projet réaliste (oui au monde) et le projet éthique (mais…). Le trajet qui sépare le oui du mais, c’est toute l’incertitude des signes, et c’est parce que les signes sont incertains qu’il y a une littérature. La technique de Kafka dit que le sens du monde n’est pas énonçable, que la seule tâche de l’artiste, c’est d’explorer des significations possibles, dont chacune prise à part ne sera que mensonge (nécessaire) mais dont la multiplicité sera la vérité même de l’écrivain. » (ibidem) 14 Italo Calvino, « Usages politiques de la littérature », in La Machine Littérature, Paris, Seuil, 1984, p. 82.


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Karnaval is a multi-genre novel (blending narrative, essay, tragedy and comedy – or dramedy?),

predicated on the premise that "capitalims [is] this paradoxical machine that functions increasingly well

while giving the appearance of self-destruction", and dedicated to the "K God" [el Dios K, el Dé-éSé-K

deified], "sitting on his golden throne, governing the world of finance and international transactions from

the heights of his infinite magnanimity" before becoming a prisoner in "the city where he was declared

the enemy of humanKind."15 Karnaval is a monster-novel, conceived as the "agony of an endless

commentary" (as Blanchot wrote about The Castle16) and dedicated to the punishment (al castigo) of the

hubris of the God K, as well as the secret conspiracy which made it possible – in the very capital of

capitalism. A novel that places at its center, as an axis, a series of analyses of the DSK "case", attributed,

thanks to a virtuosic game of pastiches, to a number of well-kown key-intellectuals (such as Kristeva,

ŽižeK, ChomsKy, Kiernan, HooKs, FinKielKraut and even HouellebecqK) ; in its second half, the novel seeks,

through a string of political variations of an oneiric and fantastical nature, to conjure up the Kaos of the

financial crisis - and to examine, in the parallel world of fiction, the possibility of a radical social uprising

against capitalism.

Thus such a novel claims its place in a long-standing tradition, going from Amerika to Kárhozat

(Damnation, 1988) by the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai [an author celebrated by Kertész and Nicole

Krauss – other K-authors–, and whose novels Béla Tarr adapted to cinema, such as the Werkmeister

Harmonies, or Damnation and its TitaniK bar :

15 « Je vois le dieu K assis sur son trône d’or, gouvernant le monde des finances et des transactions dans sa très haute magnanimité. […] Je vois le dieu K versant des larmes socio-démocrates face à l’ampleur de la tragédie grecque […]. Je vois le dieu K, ce libertin opiniâtre, baisant pour la énième fois une prostituée de luxe […]. Je vois le dieu K méditant sur les limites de son pouvoir alors qu’il prend en toute hâte un avion pour fuir la ville où il fut déclaré ennemi de l’humanité. » (Juan Francisco Ferré, Karnaval, trad. de l’esp. par I. Introcaso et B. Jensen, Éditions Passage du Nord-Ouest, 2014, p. 77) 16 De Kafka à Kafka, Gallimard, Idées, 1981, p. 185-201. Le roman de J.F. Ferré comprend en son centre, en guise de pivot, une série d’analyses du « cas » DSK, prêtées, par un jeu de pastiches virtuoses, à toute une série d’intellectuels connus,


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We should note that in one of his latest novels, War and war

Korim, the protagonist, takes refuge in New York to deliver the apocalyptical message of a manuscript

found in Budapest, and makes the following statement: " I have not become crazy [...] but I can see as

clearly as if I were crazy".

And I too can see clearly (as if I were crazy) the contemporary legacy of AmeriKa – this novel that

prompted Benjamin to say that it was "first and foremost, a big joke": a joke left unfinished on purpose by

Kafka as if to lead us to imagine what could be hiding behind the Karnaval-like stage of the Oklahoma

Grand Theater: the story of the Kapital (whereby the Grand Theater is a metonymy for the American

dream and/or the Communist dream, or the “Commonist” dream as Benjamin Kunkel says now); as well

as the story of the Katastrophe (whereby the Grand Theater is a metaphor for the camps and the

disappearance they cause).

Thus my vision becomes more precise: from AmeriKa to Karnaval going through Kárhozat by

KrasznahorKai or Kassel no invita a la lógica by Enrique Vila-Matas, it is not so much a question of K as it is,

more precisely (and without betraying its acoustic truth), a question of Ka.

For, as Kafka already confessed in his Journal on August 20, 1911 : « The first and the last letters are

the beginning and the end of my way of feeling". The first and the last letters – K and A of K(afk)a –

would therefore be the alpha and omega of modern sensibility...

So Kall me crazy but I had this (new) vision: a vision of the kabbalistic presence of the Ka, not only

as the capital letter of authors' names such as these:

Ferenc Karinthy Roman Kasew [Romain Gary] Yacine Kateb Ismaïl Kadaré Leslie Kaplan Katrina Kalda Ken Kalfus Laura Kasischke

but also as the capital letter of the greatest titles of contemporary political fiction - such as in :


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Kassandra by Christa Wolf Kaddish for the Child Who Will Never Be Born by Kertész (Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért) Kar (Snow) by Orhan Pamuk

[I could also mention certain key-characters, historical figures who appear in contemporary political

French fiction like:

- Jan Karski in Yannick Haenel's eponymous book, an « istorical novel » which offers the fiction of the eye-witness by usurpating the identity of the famous Polish Resistant (Gallimard, 2009).

- or Kalachnikov in Olivier Rohe's Ma dernière création est un piège à taupes. Mikhaïl Kalachnikov, sa vie, son œuvre (Paris : Éditions Inculte, 2012) : an imaginary biography that uses the capitalist reappropriation of a socialist emblem – the AK 47, created by M. Kalachnikov and turned into a worldwide low-cost harbinger of death – to offer a historical crossing throughout all the armed conflicts post-World War II [a book written, maybe, in the horror of the AK as a specular effect of the KA!]

So: What Kan this Ka tell us?

- that: given the legacy of a hermeneutical crisis (the haunting of the letter K), the novel never

ceases to search for new ways to write the real and reinvent the alpha and omega of the past;

- and that the contemporary presence of Ka [material, dividable letter] operates therefore as a

literary sign/cipher for the phantom pain of history (and its meaning) : the very phantom pain,

which Christa Wolf discussed in a “preliminary lecture” in Kassandra, that defines the history

of capitalism and socialism as a (mirror) sensation of lost or not developed limbs of Europe:

[The pain Europe causes me is in part a phantom pain: not only the pain of a lost limb, but the pain caused by the limbs that never fully grew because of unperceived, unlived, unsatisfied feelings. All this is preserved in literature – since when ?17]

This idea has been often repeated since then, and very recently by the Croatian-Dutch novelist

DubravKa Ugrešić in her writing of the torment of ex-Yougoslavia, to define the trauma of war exiles as

the “phantom-limb syndrome”.18

And I actually believe that phantom pain is indeed present in the contemporary novel: as a motif of

the theme of historical experience, and also a metatextual model for novelistic writing19: reminiscent of the

use made in neuroscience of the mirror treatment to treat these types of conditions – that of a “mirror-box”

(V.S. Ramachandran20) that allows the visualization of the lost limb through a process of specular

17 Christa Wolf, Cassandre. Les prémisses et le récit [Kassandra. Erzählung und Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung], trad. de l’allemand par Alain Lance et Renate Lance-Otterbein, Bibliothèque cosmopolite, Stock, 2003, p. 147). 18 « Le choc qui m’avait secouée un peu plus tôt était beaucoup plus complexe qu’il n’y semblait au premier abord. Les mots « syndrome du membre fantôme » ou « nostalgie » désignent un complexe affectif qui découle de la perte et du non-retour. Ce qui signifie que l’on peut vivre de la même manière l’apaisement du sentiment de la perte, le soulagement d’être débarrassé de son propre passé, et l’aspiration à le retrouver. » (Le ministère de la douleur [Ministarstvo Boli, 2004, traduit du serbo-croate par Janine Matillon, Paris, Albin Michel, Les Grandes Traductions, 2008 ; p. 291) 19 Cf. die Kalte Mamsell (la préposée au buffet froid) figure la mélancolie et la mort chez Sebald (« Constructions du deuil ») 20 V.S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind, Fourth Estate, 1998. Pour une description du traitement-miroir, cf par exemple : Revista Social Española del Dolor, vol 19 n ° 4 julio-agosto 2012.


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inversion, and the decrease, thanks to an imaginary muscular exercise, of the pain generated by the

“phantom limb”.

[In truth, Melville had already invented the thing, in a dialogue between Achab and the Karpenter (« isn’t it a mystery ? »), but the dirty joke he used may have prevented readers from taking it entirely seriously21.] In a forthcoming article, I expound on the idea that the novel could constitute, through an operation

of specular substitution, a thinking experience similar to that of the mirror-box – an imaginary resolution, by way

of make-believe, of the impossibilities of representing the disappeared.22

So we could examine under this angle the case of political fiction as a mirror resolution (or

deconstruction) of the ideological catastrophes of the last century [including by using Kertész’ dark

humour quoting Kafka : « it is incumbent upon us to accomplish the negative: we’ve already been granted

the positive”].23

The haunting of the 20th-century history, a century delivered into the hands of national-(world)

capitalism as much as the Stalinist Kapital (see Poutine in Crimea): this haunting is inscribed into the very

body of contemporary political fiction, through the letter (Ka) of a mirror narrative.24 This, in order to

denounce, as Benjamin wrote in 1931, « the law of a new order […] that distorts things and men » –

21 « [Achab] – Écoute, charpentier, j’ose croire que tu te dis un bon ouvrier digne de son travail, n’est-ce pas ? Eh bien, ce qui parlera en ta faveur, c’est que je continue à sentir une autre jambe là où tu auras ajusté celle que tu fais, c’est-à-dire, charpentier ma vieille jambe perdue de chair et de sang, veux-je dire. Ne peux-tu pas chasser le vieil Adam ? [Charpentier (Carpenter)] – En vérité, sir, je commence à y comprendre quelque chose. Oui, j’ai entendu dire des choses curieuses à ce sujet, sir... et comment un homme démâté ne perd jamais entièrement le sentiment de son vieil espar, mais qu’il y sentira des picotements parfois. Puis-je humblement vous demander s’il en est ainsi, sir ? [Achab] – Il en est bien ainsi, homme. Tiens, mets ta jambe vivante là où autrefois se trouvait la mienne. Et maintenant l’œil n’y voit qu’une jambe, deux en voit l’âme toutefois. Là où tu sens vibrer la vie, là exactement là, à un cheveu près, je la sens. N’est-ce pas une énigme ? ». 22 Déjà Perec (l’auteur de la phrase : « J’ai voulu faire Proust et j’ai fait Kafka ») récusait, dans W ou le souvenir d’enfance, la possibilité d’une “prothèse” pour remplacer la douleur fantôme de l’absence de sa « famille » (cette douleur dont témoignent la disparition du e et son remplacement, en miroir, par une lettre hébraïque fantasmatique – une lettre absente de la Kabbale personnelle : ce carré ouvert qui fonctionne, notamment dans La vie mode d’emploi, comme programme d’écriture). 23 Imre Kertész, « Ce malheureux XXe siècle » in L’Holocauste comme culture p. 126. Et Kertész d’ajouter une phrase kafkaïenne de son cru : « si nous ne comprenons pas le passé ce n’est pas parce que l’histoire est incompréhensible, c’est parce que nous ne nous comprenons pas nous-mêmes ». 24 Et la silhouette en miroir de l’écrivain manchot (Cervantes) ou unijambiste (Achab chez Melville, chassant le K de Buzzati).


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going as far as to cause the writer’s forehead to bleed25; to denounce, in short, the “imprinted mark” on

things and foreheads by the Capital Law =, that is, Kapital’s Law: whether it be the false ideality of

Capitalism or the false materiality of Sovietism (the perverted literal reading of Marx’s Capital).

This is what the multiple « pinning » of Ka (pinhead or “point de capiton” of the Kapital), this

quilting of literature’s names, this acupuncture (bee sting) on the phantom body of literature, can account

for.26

[ As it is the case of Ka (Kerim Alakusoglü), the protagonist of Kar, the eponymous novel by Oran

Pahmuk and author of a poem entitled Snow who sees the clarity of his poetry darkened by the “shadow

of politics”, as he is caught between an authoritarian power, the Kemalist rebellion and the Islamist

backlash in a (deadly) simulacrum of a theatrical rehearsal in the town of Kars, in the Turkish

backcountry.

Or like in Karnaval, where an underground production à clef entitled «Unto Caesar (or Caesar) what

belongs to Caesar», foreshadows the « Karnaval-like apotheosis » of the fall of the god K, the fall of

recalcitrant kapo of the financial world order – which seems orchestrated to so that the god K cannot stop

the crisis of the euro zone, wanted and ruled by the “Emperor” of international finance, in the deepest

recesses of the New-York Underworld27…

Yet into the breach between Kapital and Capital, another literal point comes into play : since the

difference between languages leads to a graphic difference in their writing, which one is the original? And

which one the copy?

For this difference C/K [reminiscent not so much of Louis C.K. as of Barthes’ S/Z and also of the

Deriddian différance: a writing inscribed in the speech and pursuing, as I have been trying to do here today,

the event of the real in its “différantes” traces]: this difference may turn out to be of some value.

At least it is what I ( Call me Krazy) thought I glimpsed when I had one last vision:

Canetti Camus Calvino Carver

The vision of a Carré of aces whose direct heirs are, for example, several contemporary French writers

such as :

25 « Kafka se heurte en toutes circonstances à la loi ; on peut même dire qu’il s’y heurte jusqu’à en faire saigner le front (cf. la taupe et aussi < Kafka, Beim Bau des chinesischen Mauer, Berlin, 1931 >, p. 213 [« Son propre os frontal lui barre le chemin, il se met le front en sang en cognant contre son propre front », Pléiade III p. 493]), mais ce n’est plus nulle part la loi du monde des choses < Dingwelt > dans lequel il vit, ni d’aucun autre. C’est la loi d’un ordre nouveau face auquel les choses où elle imprime sa marque sont gauchies, qui déforme les choses et les hommes à travers lesquels elle se manifeste. (cf Walter Benjamin, Écrits autobiographiques, traduit de l’allemand par Christophe Jouanlanne et Jean-François Poirier, Paris, Bourgois, Titres, 2011 ; Mai-juin 1931 (180-210), 199-200) 26 Deleuze, dans « Sur quatre formules poétiques qui pourraient résumer la philosophie kantienne » (Critique et clinique, op. cit. p. 40-49) commente un extrait de « La muraille de Chine » pour mieux définir la loi kantienne, « que l’aiguille écrit sur nous », comme ce qui « se confond avec son empreinte dans notre cœur et notre chair » (telle la loi de la Colonie pénitentiaire de Kafka). 27 See also « Das Kapital » in the afterword of DeLillo’s great novel Underworld.


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Olivier Cadiot Nicole Caligaris Emmanuel Carrère

As it were: a last family of Cas to encrypt literature’s game with the documents of the real (Capote) and

the powers of the fable (Carpentier): that stretches from Cabrera Infante to Bernardo Carvalho [; or even

from Carson McCullers to Cormac McCarthy]

It is the legacy of the Capital Ca received from Castorp by Mann and playing the enduring rewriting

of The Magic Mountain against the current “Davos summit”. [as in The Hand of Joseph Castorp by João

Ricardo Petro],

It is the Capital Ca of a writing that is the direct heir of political philosophy (from Cassirer to

Castoriadis).

It is the Capital Ca of a [« Lazarean »] novel [Cayrol], that, even though « opened up to the four

winds » (as Calvino put it in the section « multiplicity » of his 6 memos for the New Century], still embodies

the consistency of literature, through the interplay of the difference between the letter and the spirit –

through the interplay of this « différance » C/K that is everywhere [as it is inscribed in the very name of

BeC/Kett, the absolute loner who represents, after Kafka, another Capital of modern literature] [see also

BeCKmann in the Neue Galerie exhibition].

This Differance C/K tells us of the powers of literature and the paradoxical reinvention, between

Europe and America (AmeriC/Ka28), of a political fiction that abandons neither the potential of literality

nor the “allusive system” of literary writing.

ConKlusion :

This has only been a sketch (or a silhouette study) of a secret history of contemporary fiction in the

age of « late-capitalism » and in the age of the troubling forms nostalgia can take when it sets out to

reinterpret and absolve past instances of totalitarianism.29

A secret history, written « by ear » (an otographie, Derrida would say), and hidden in the memory (or

the haunting) of a lecture by Foucault titled “The Language in Madness” (“Le langage en folie »), dating

back fifty years (halfway between the time that separates us from Amerika) : a lecture that attributed to the

“sign” alone the conscience of possibilities :

I think it could be said that, in reality, today we do not believe in political freedom anymore, and then the dream, the famous dream of an unalienated man has become the subject of mockery. Of all those pipedreams, what are we left with ? Oh well, the ashes of a few words. And our possibilities, those belonging to the men of today, we do not entrust to others, to men, to History, to institutions, we entrust them to signs”.30

28 Ce passage qui fait la différence entre Conrad et Korzeniovski, par exemple (cf commentaire chez Sebald). 29 cf Svetlana Alexiévitch, La fin de l’homme rouge 30 M. Foucault, « Le langage en folie » [émission de l’ORTF, 1963] in La grande étrangère p. 54.


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And in actuality: perhaps the issue is still that of a conditional trust, at the risk of using a mad

method, similar to the one Roberto Bolaño spelled out in his « Caracas Speech31 » (1999) :

My dyslexia could conceal a bastard method, semiotical, graphological, metasyntactical or phonematic, or simply a poetic method.32

And thusly, this method, (mad and dyslexic) that turns contemporary literature into a grand off-

Kafkaesque, off-Camusian and off-Calvino undertaking, allows us to hear (in a more serious key)

something like a continuation or a response to the « C/Kafka’s answer » by Barthes: in spite of the world’s

desertion and the signs’ uncertainty, let us hope that political fiction will always prove itself capable,

following K’s example, to engage with the mist and enlighten our path.

Thank you for your attention

31 Dedicated to the novels of Rómulo Gallegos, Cantaclaro and Canaima 32 Roberto Bolaño, Entre parenthèses. Essais, articles et discours, Bourgois, 2011, p. 42

capital k or the phantom pain of history - enrique vila-matasmarthe robert dit excellemment que les...

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