The Sexual Strategy of the son in Kafka (2001)

Abstract

Abstract. Seven years after The Metamorphosis and The Judgment, Kafka wrote a long and painful Letter to Father. With deep melancholy, he confessed the broken will of the Son when faced with the prohibitive nature of the Father. As opposed to the Sons in his short stories, Kafka made tactical, not strategic solutions. The difference is in the time and the planning: strategy’s Subject plans its operation, while tactics’ Subject acts only when it feels directly jeopardized. Kafka, whose letter can be read as an effort of the tactician, never actually sent this Letter to Father. Although he saw his father as a pragmatic patriarch and tyrant, Kafka chose to live near him even in his adult years. His entire work is an evidence of the ambiguity of the Symbolic Order and the lethality of not having a strategic position for defense from it. Or an evidence of the fundamental impossibility to actually have one.

Regardless. Kafka lead his life consciously subverting it - he spent his daytime doing routine office work, and his night writing. Is this not one of the facets of the Son’s terrorism against the Symbolic Order? A passive-aggressive solution, alike that of Samsa. A pessimistic response, similar to the pessimism of his Sons. Kafka tried Bendemann’s recipe - exile, only once. He left for Berlin, to distance himself from the family ties and to dedicate himself to writing. That was in 1923, and he past away only one refugee year later.