Kafka and the metaphysics of death

I came across an interesting part in Adorno's metaphysics lectures (transcripts from lectures on metaphysics he held in the summer semester of 1965). It reads as follows (first is the original, followed by my translation):

Ich habe seinerzeit in meiner Einleitung zu den "Schriften" Walter Benjamins versucht auszudrücken, daß so etwas wie der Begriff des Lebenswerks heute problematisch ist deshalb, weil unser Dasein längst nicht mehr nach einem ihm immanenten, quasi organischen Gesetz verläuft, sondern derart bestimmt wird von allen möglichen Mächten, die eine soche immanente Entfaltung ihm versagen; daß das Vertrauen auf eine solche Ganzheit des Lebens, der dann als ein Sinnvoles der Tod soll antworten sollen, bereits den charakter der Chimäre hat.

In my introduction to Walter Benjamin's "Writings" I have tried to convey that the concept of the life-work has become problematic because our life does not follow an imminent quasi organic law any more but is subjected to diverse forces that prevent such an imminent development; that the faith in such a totality of life, which is meaningfully concluded by death, is chimeric.

Two associations came to my mind: the one aesthetic the other sociological. Let us venture down the path of art first, since it illuminates the same idea from a different viewpoint, hopefully helping the sociological application to make more sense. Nowhere is the sentiment that Adorno expresses - and it is above all a sentiment, a certain experience of the world - captured so clearly as in Kafkas Prozess. It ends with death, a completely meaningless death: "like a dog!" is the last train of thought going through K.s mind, feeling that "shame was to outlive him." What takes all meaning from death is not the fact that it is beyond our control (it always is, and in the case of suicide it is more than ever) it is the fact that it is not organically attached to the life-course. The total war Adorno witnessed is of course a perfect example: not so much for the people fighting on the front where some delusions of the meaningfulness of sacrificing ones life for the sake of the arian race could still flourish - if for no other reason than that it is hard to come to terms with the meaninglessness of ones death - but for the victims of the death camps, who were faced with completely arbitrary annihilation. In Der Prozess the life of K. takes the form of arbitrary events - as I mentioned in an earlier post, there is nothing to prevent the addition of chapters to the novel ad infinitum since there simply is no organic logic tying the whole of the narrative together.
When we arrive at the last chapter, death is as much a surprise for us as it is for K. Not that we believed the process could end victorious, it is because the narrative form suggested infinite repetition. This is the life that Adorno described in the quote: a series of episodes the "subject" (compare earlier posts on subjectivity for an explanation of the quotation marks) goes through, looking for meaning while being shuffled to and fro like a leaf in the wind, the leaf having no less understanding about the functioning of wind than the "subject" has about the forces that affect his life. A very similar sentiment can be found in Ravel's Bolero (no matter how often one hears it, the silence at the end comes as a shock) and more recently in No country for old men.

The sociological explanation takes us to theories of individuation and the life-course. To put it shortly throughout the period known as modernity we have witnessed the gradual transition of prescribed life-courses, mediated by ritual, upheld by tradition and guarded by authorities, to a self-selected life-course, where individuals have been burdened with the freedom of constructing their own life-course. This has resulted in a feeling of disorientation, some reactionary authors write about the crisis of meaning - fact is that it is harder to make sense of ones life today as it was say a hundred years ago. Since meaning is not given to the individual from above, he is forced to not only negotiate with the outside forces entering his world without the proper information to make an informed decision (market failure in the US, nuclear accident in France, pollution in China, to name but a few extreme hypotehtic examples), he must also make sense of the arbitrary character his life seems to take in these circumstances. When Anthony Giddens talks about self-identity as the narrative of the life-course, he completely feitishizes the phenomenon (the individual must cope with objective forces). If this conservative argument is not acceptable, neither is the reactionary that laments the disorineting loss of perspective, calling for the reinstitution of traditional values. Traditional guardians of the life-course were not emancipatory forces, they just softened the impact an arbitrary world made upon the individual. What individuation has done is break away those barriers and let the world break in, making the individual feel its full impact - if this has traumatizing consequences on the one it also has an emancipatory potential on the other side, since the need for an emancipated society is as strong as it never was. Each individual feels it with unprecedented force, not just intellectually, but in every aspect of his daily routine.