Bat Chen (Laila) Seri, PhD student at Lund University
Walter Benjamin’s reading of Franz Kafka—laid out in three essays and many additional fragments—is replete with references to Jewish literature, from citations of alleged talmudic passages and hasidic stories to invocations of rabbinic categories. On one such notable occasion, Benjamin characterises Kafka’s works as bearing “a similar relationship to doctrine [Lehre] as the haggadah does to the halakhah.” Benjamin’s comment sets the stage for this research project, which addresses the dynamics of law and narrative in Benjamin’s reading of Kafka by setting it against the backdrop of rabbinic hermeneutics. Through contemporary rabbinic literary studies, the talmudic text is taken as a model for Benjamin’s reading of Kafka in two separate but interconnected aspects: methodically, addressing modes of reading and interpretation, and conceptually, focusing on the categories of law (halakhah) and narrative (haggadah). Viewed as talmudic hermeneutical practice, midrash has several unique characteristics, thus dictating a certain, and at times eccentric, way of thinking. Midrashic methods include the utilisation of fiction as an interpretive tool (Boyarin 2003), the exchange of one story for another of equal significance, a kind of textual barter (Boyarin 2011), and the use of imagery concepts instead of abstract concepts in a way that resembles literary texts more than legislative systems (Handelman 1982). Both Kafka and Benjamin, as scholars have pointed out (Boyarin 1990, Alter 1991, Handelman 1991, Steiner 2003, Miron 2019), show some close affinities with talmudic methods of reading, a tendency which comes to full fruition in Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, where we find the interpretive exchange of stories, the use of imagery concepts in place of abstractions, and the view of the text as a boundless repertoire of quotations, where every bit of text may be torn out of its original context as parole and be used as langue. This research project aims to show how the literary study of Talmud can serve as a guide on how to read Benjamin on Kafka and illuminate hitherto hidden aspects in the thought of two of the most thought-provoking voices of twentieth-century European Jewry on issues of law, literature, and Jewish tradition.
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Nordic Network for Jewish Studies 