Galili Shahar

This essay examines the notion of Narrentum (foolishness) in Franz Kafka's writings, reflecting Walter Benjamin's engagement with the legacy of Kafka's fools. The Narr, associated with playfulness, irony, and resistance, provides a comic perspective on the question of being-Jewish. Alongside its Germanic, mostly Baroque, heritage, the Narr incorporates traditional Jewish tropes, primarily rooted in Aggadic traditions. However, in Kafka's world, the Narr embodies performative skills also linked to Yiddish theatre. In Benjamin's readings, Kafka's Narr is associated with the crisis of modern Judaism and with different modes of wisdom. The Narr signifies particular sorts of nihilistic freedom, which Benjamin refers to as redemptive.

The article deals with the notion of the "Creature" as being displayed in Joseph Wittig's essay titled Der Weg zur Kreatur. This piece by Wittig (1879-1949), one of the co-founders of the journal Die Kreatur, himself a banished Catholic thinker, an excommunicated theologian, was published in the third volume of the journal in 1929/1930. The major argument to be presented here, following Wittig's essay, concerns the path (but also the method) into the world of the creature, namely, the way-back, a regression, which depends on counter-movements, suspensions, gestures of recollection and witnessing. This path is based on the potentialities of the "first question"-a demand for the first word, a proper name for the silent, forgotten creature, being invited to encounter. The encounter with the creatures is a method of thinking, a way of being in this world that is based on the possibility of asking rightly the "first question". For what this question performs is an attention, hearing of, a method of listening. In asking the question of (and for) the creature, language itself turns toward the world of the creation, in a search for a proper name, calling creation to be heard, to belong. I The "first question" is that of the creature. It is the question concerning the being of creation. The initial question (but perhaps the final one too)-the "prologue," the opening word, is also an "epilogue"-a testimony regarding the world of creation. This first question about the being of creation, however, studies the affinities between man and the animal, revealing the dialectics of human existence and the future of life on Earth. In asking the question of the creature, new attention is directed towards what being is. In asking this question , however, the human engages him or herself with It-with the nameless, silent creature. The question itself is an expression of attention, curiosity, awareness and responsibility for the being of the creature. This question about

1 The Hebrew word Eicha implies a question, the question " how? " This word that appears at the beginning of the biblical Lamentations is read, however, as a cry: Eicha is a liturgical expression of sorrow and anger, an articulation of anxiety, a question that repeats itself in verses and rhymes of lament. Eicha is not only a word, a name, a question, but also a sound – a foundational lamenting voice. In the Hebrew liturgical tradition it expresses the mourning of destruction (the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem), also transformed into a sad reflection of language itself, echoing its own (in)ability to articulate the meaning of loss. The word, the question, the cry, Eicha, is how Hebrew laments the disasters of being, exile and death, and also the downfall of the liturgical language itself. The word Eicha laments not only the ruin of Zion, but also the destruction of the holy tongue, failing to fulfill its own liturgical tasks by finding no answer and comfort in prayer. Eicha, following this line of thought, is how the liturgical poem reflects its own distortions and puts into question its own future. Something else, however, " another thing " is left out and heard in this word, in the syllable cha, a voice that is a sigh, a cry, a groan, a sound of lament and of relief. It is the breath itself, a sound of life – air and living, that appears before and after all words, as a pure (yet unmusical) sound of being. This sound also recalls the last breath, since there is death in life. Eicha, the question of the Hebrew prayer (" how "), the liturgical opening of language, is based on a voice which itself says " life and death. " In its ebbing and emptying, as the word of lament loses its meaning, being deprived of its semantic values, transformed into an opening of language – into an empty sign, it becomes a pure voice, a sound of beginning and end, the breath of a creature – all which was created. This voice, however, the sound of creaturely being (the breath, the voice of a creature – the sound of a body, human, animal), resonates and finds a strange, unfamiliar echo in the call, the cry ach, the German word that is also a voice of beginning and of end: a call, a sigh that recalls both birth and death.

I Der Ring ist das Objekt, das Ding, das im Folgenden Gegenstand der Be­ trachtung sein wird. Es soll hier um verschiedene Aspekte und Implikatio­nen des Rings gehen, genauer: um dessen Darstellung in der Ringparabel in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Theaterstück Nathan der Weise (1779) und in Richard Wagners Musikdrama Das Rheingold (1854). Dabei werden eine Reihe von Fragen aufgeworfen, gleichsam einen Kreis, einen Ring, bildend, die thematisieren, wie das Objekt eines Kunstwerks zu einem Machtsymbol wird. Folgende Aspekte, die im literarischen Kontext der Werke von Lessing und Wagner besprochen werden, stehen dabei im Fokus: 1. Das Objekt, der Ursprung und die Erschaffung (die poetische Frage) 2. Das Objekt und die Souveränität (die politische Frage) 3. Das Objekt, die Sprache und die Theatralität (die »jüdische Frage«). Der erstgenannte Punkt widmet sich also den Positionierungen und Funk­tionen von Objekten im Prozess der künstlerischen und literarischen Kreation. Dies berührt das Verständnis von Kunst und Literatur überhaupt, hier umrahmt von der Suche nach dem Ursprung (der Substanz des Anfangs). Die Zweite Frage beschäftigt sich mit den Implikationen des Rings im politischen Kontext und untersucht die verschiedenen Funktionen des Objekts im Diskurs. Der dritte Punkt verbindet die Erkenntnisse aus den beiden vorangegangenen in einem neuen Referenzrahmen, der sich mit der Rolle des Rings (als Objekt) im Kontext von Sprache und Drama (Theatralität) befasst, die auch von der »jüdischen Frage« in Deutschland (wer oder was ist jüdisch?) berührt wird. Die vorliegende Diskussion ist als Dialog strukturiert und bedient sich deshalb der komparatistischen Methode, um die grundlegenden Ähnlich­keiten und Unterschiede zwischen den poetischen und politischen Implikationen des Rings in Lessings und Wagners Werk zum Vorschein bringen zu können. Wagner nach Lessing zu lesen erfordert es, auch die jeweilige his­torische Dimension des künstlerischen Schaffens in Deutschland mit einzubeziehen. Lessing schrieb den Nathan Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, also während das deutsche Theater gerade weitreichende Neuerungen

The tale is well known: the story of the king's daughter who left home and lives captured in exile, in solitude and sorrow, and prays to be saved and to return to her homeland. The tale has various sources and variations in the Jew-ish tradition. It can be found in the Midrash literature, in Kabbalistic texts, and in the Chassidic corpus; 1 it has been adapted and retold and has obtained different interpretations, a few of which have become part of the tale itself and have served as a poetic solution that carries a messianic message. The tale of the king's daughter is a story of a feminine body, thrown out and banished, and who prays for redemption. In this tale, however, literature itself is reflected – the possibility of telling a story as the expression of exile. The story of the king's daughter is thus the story itself – the revealing of ›what literature is‹ – the fate of language in the permanent state of ›not being at home‹. This essay discusses three literary versions that deal with the figure of the king's daughter and that offer different perspectives on the question of literature and exile. Although we present here three literary ›examples‹, we know that literature itself is never an ›example‹. Rather, literature has a life of its own; it embodies a power of resistance, the resistance against becoming ›an example‹. Literature refuses to be at home and to find an end. It denies solutions, conclusions, and generalizations, and thus resists becoming ›an example‹ (an exampling body). Literature is essentially unheimlich (not at home, uncanny), not because of its frightening subjects, figures of anxiety and bodies of denial, but rather because of the way it is delivered. Literature delivers itself in readings and translations, and it relocates itself between the languages. Literature depends on movement, travels and paths of escape. Being in exile thus implies the literary condition itself – the necessity/freedom, the compulsion/choice of writing. Nevertheless, the versions of the tale of the king's daughter who lives in exile and prays to be saved and to return home, mark the condition of literature. The 1 The figure of the king's daughter (or the king's son) being banished or lost in exile is found in different versions, for example in the Zohar, in the books Kana and Pli-ah, and in the legends of the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Nachman of Breslav. Biblio-graphic details will be rendered in the following.

The question of Hebrew, the conditions and possibilities of its "renaissance" and its rebirth as a secular language and a source of modern national discourse, was one of the central concerns of the Zionist enterprise around 1900. In his famous letter of December 1926 dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig and titled "Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache," Gershom Scholem expressed his anxiety with the Zionist project and reveals his apocalyptic view of the future of the New Hebrew. The author of this essay attempts to reconstruct the historical, metaphysical, and philological context of Scholem's letter. The author discusses the letter's theological background (the Kabbalistic theory of God's names, the figure of the "demon") and its political implications and considers Scholem's dialogue with Rosenzweig and Bialik as an additional context for the understanding of its complexities. The author also provides a model of cultural criticism that explores the dialectic of Jewish secularization and exposes the paradoxes of theopolitics and modernism in Zionist thinking.

... protagonists, Kafka's characters are born and vanish in the peripheries of German history and literature ... 3 The psychoanalytic thesis, despite its speculative nature and dogmatic implica-tions, reveals a critical ... Both experience gender differences and live in longing and absence. ...