David Cunningham (Westminster): ‘Abstract Times: Benjamin, Kafka and the Modernism of Tradition’

In his published essay on Kafka and later letters to Scholem about the author, Benjamin struggles with the significance of Kafka’s distinctive ‘failure’ as a modern writer. For Benjamin, Kafka’s work is marked by the tensions it instantiates between the properly modern, the theological and the (literary) forms of folk tradition (‘the German as well as the Jewish’, as Benjamin puts it), and of their respective modes of temporality. The singularity of Kafka’s writings lies in the ways in which they render legible the negation of the ‘tradition’ as a viable form of historical temporalization via the repetition of the literary forms of that tradition itself (the story or fable). In doing so, Kafka ‘sacrificed [the ‘content’ of] truth for the sake of clinging to [‘the form of’] transmissibility’. This paper will consider Benjamin’s analysis of Kafka’s ‘clinging’ to the form of tradition, as a mode of transmissibility, in light of his readings of Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel, and, in particular, of the latter’s analysis of the novel’s tendency to abstraction in that work. In doing so, it will explore the ‘archival ramifications’ of the intersection of such early twentieth-century debates around the novel as a (distinctively modern) form with a range of conceptions drawn from German Hegelian-Marxist philosophies of time.