Stance of undefeated despair

In his essay on Kafka Walter Benjamin reports about a discussion Kafka had with Max Brod. They started off talking about the end of civilization and at one moment Kafka remarked that we are just nihilistic, suicidal thoughts in the mind of god. This reminded Brod of the gnostic idea of god as an evil demiurge and the world as his sin. "No," Kafka responded, "nothing like that, we are merely the result of a bad day, a gloomy mood." From this Brod gathered: "Then there is still hope?" At which moment a broad smile illuminated Kafka's face: "As much hope as you like, endless hope ... just not for us."

In the story At the building of the Chinese wall there is a myth about a royal message sent out to a lowly subject. The story also exists independently under the title A royal message, following a pattern that was not unfamiliar to Kafka: structuring his stories like fractals. The same structure can be found in The Process, where the entire novel is condensed into the story from the introductory scriptures of the Law. A royal message starts like this:

Der Kaiser - so heißt es - hat Dir, dem Einzelnen, dem jämmerlichen Untertanen, dem winzig vor der kaiserlichen Sonne in die fernste Ferne geflüchteten Schatten, gerade Dir hat der Kaiser von seinem Sterbebett aus eine Botschaft gesendet.

The king - so it is said - had sent to you, the individual, pitiful subject, the shadow that is chased to the remotest corner by the light of the royal sun, to you of all people the king had sent a message from his dying bed.

The message must be very important because the king had it repeated to his ear, before finally nodding his approval to the messanger and sending him on his way. But there is a problem: the messenger - the fittest man in the whole of the land - can not move forward for the mass of the people. He will never be able to leave the inner palace, and even if he could by some miracuolous fate achieve this, it would be in vain, because there are steps beyond that, and then the yard, after that the outer palace, and again steps and yards. It is quite impossible that you, the lowly subject, will ever receive the royal message,

- Du aber sitzt and Deinem Fenster und erträumst sie Dir, wenn der Abend kommt.

- But yet you sit at your window and dream it into existence as the evening comes.

In both stories we can see a sense of hope in spite of hopelessness. This feeling resonates in Adorno's and Horkheimer's metaphor of the message in a bottle (that their theory is intended for some imagined future recipient, for a time when things will not be as bleak). More recently though it is what John Berger described as the Stance of undefeated despair in his report from Ramallah. The New York Times write - almost cynically - about the "densely populated Gaza Strip", completely ignoring the question whence this overpopulation comes from: it is the progressing stranglehold of the Israeli occupation that is robbing Palestinians of living space. Ironically, the same world-view is found among Jews, persecuted in Europe, and Palestinians, persecuted by Israel. Ironically, a wall is featured in both stories. Berger notes that "oddly, it doesn’t look final, only insurmountable," and continues:

When it’s finished, it will be the 640-km-long expressionless face of an inequality. At the moment it’s 210 km long. The inequality is between those who have the full arsenal of the latest military technology to defend what they believe to be their interest (Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, F16’s) and those who have nothing, save their names and a shared belief that justice is axiomatic. The stance of undefeated despair works like this.