Contemplations I

As I flippantly form a writing habit, I fear developing a regimentation of it. Drawing on two words—habit and regimentation—not too dissimilar, but their arrangement in the same line already begins to generate a static. A habit suggests a movement done without concentrated intentions, a reflex. A tap on the knee brings a shock to the lower leg—unintentional, yet it must happen in spite of being an undercurrent; it is something beneath one’s view, indirectly activated. A release of force delt out to reverberate across the plane, as though a gust of wind shifts untold amounts of tall grass to one side, not to an end. Regimentation: formal, intentional, orderly, numbered, systematic; ordered in both senses (order, order). That for so many minutes a day, you are to do something or another to say that, as it goes, at least someprogress was made; an end comes such and such distance closer. Yet, the regimented comes to appear as dull, passive habit. Habitual to greet one’s workplace superior as an underling. Habitual to place certain products in certain aisles. Your regimented script becomes the usual route: you trust your tongue to move in the way that it must when speaking to customers, clients, and whoever else demands to siphon you. In the imposition of the regimented—imposition by the fact that you cannot help but participate in it, ordered of you by an abstract force that otherwise kills—something quite precious feels at stake even as it has become ‘habitual.’ This feeling only unmasks itself in crisis; unmistakably it is the feeling of progress, continual motion, an urgency that has been instilled in everyone.

It is a disjointed feeling when progress is truncated, when the regimen does not follow its next natural step; a scramble to ‘get back on track,’ seeking relief from the disruption of a ‘workflow.’ This sudden waking from ‘the habit’ reveals the regimented as it is, a rigid procedure. The ‘undercurrent’ has halted, unveiled as overcurrent. That is, a procedure or process towards the continuation of a progression whose aim is not actually the end of the progression, but for continual progression as such, progress for the continuation of progress—to never reach satisfaction. There is no point at which the coffee shop says, ‘let us stop selling coffee, we have done our good deed.’ It goes without saying that those who cannot be regimented are of no use to progress. And so, to reiterate, my greatest fear is writing becoming some kind of regimen. A rigidity bearing up the aqueduct of progress.

A habit comes and goes. It is implied that one habit can be substituted for another: biting your nails, biting your lips, plucking out chin hairs. One habit ‘breaks’ into another. One is not ordered to perform a habit, it is a repetitive compulsion without an exact source; one might say they simply do it to do it, but to do it nonetheless activates that hidden undercurrent, a pulse, a grab, an indistinct lunge, extension. Perhaps this makes it a nebulous neurotic act to release tension; releasing the force contained in the coil of regimented restrain. The habit is that which is aimless, innocuous, floundering, but particular to one preference or point; rubbing your nail against your lip, flicking your thumbnail against your index finger until it blushes bright red, a spot on your beard so torn at that a patch has formed.

A habit of writing—or a habit of interrupting. A ramble, filling and filling and filling a page to then say not much of anything at all. Am I saying anything at all drilling this point into the page? Unregimented, perhaps this is nothing at all but an incoherence, words for show, bleeding from picking too hard at your scalp. Yet there are a thousand iterations of the way in which you picked at your scalp, a thousand iterations of how you flicked your thumbnail against your index finger, a thousand iterations of how you rubbed your nail against your lip; a trillion blades of grass flip over. The flexibility of a habit, its substitutions, its iterations. The flexibility of words, their iterations, substitutions. There is no progression; the end is not to sustain progression—it is as endless as the capacity to emit force, release tension; the open-endedness of habit even as habit obscures, distracts, and particularizes meticulously.

One is constantly speculating on the other because there is no mode that gives definitive access to the other—their full scope, every feeling. That general ‘copy’ of me, (person, spirit, what have you) is nonetheless not-me, terribly uncanny. How might I know you such that I may be comfortable? See through you (must I see through you)? Guessing the other each time is a displacement and substitution of a previous incarnation of them—a previous image, concept, symbol. One is continually rerendereding the other in an to attempt to be certain of the other’s shape and supposed internals, for comfortability. In fracture, when everyone is looking to themselves, looking to see themselves, to reiterate themselves in semblances to justify themselves (individuation), every word from the other is distrustful because of its assured inadequacy, or to say, the other’s word is inadequate because I am not hearing myself. Thus continual rerendering is necessary for a semblance of congruence. No, I do not believe that to be your real feeling, so I will render you, approximately, against a feeling or mood of my own—a widespread distrust amongst all. I will make you make the noise I imagine for you (a distortion to hear myself), or you will say nothing at all—destruction, elimination—be out of my gaze!

This speculating ruminative act leaves discarded multitudes of the same other-figure in an immense mental pit; their many shadows, iterations of silhouettes, old experiments of a gaze. Thus, different versions of people or of a people. Then this, now that, or, now that, then this. What are your exact proportions? How close is my word, my concept, against you? How close is your concept, your word, against yourself; are you certain your ego is a good craftsman? Does it matter? Afterall, the other demolishes your ‘inner’ creation (a creation whose existence can only be an outward, emotional projection); they say: I will make you harmless glitter! “And I say to myself: One’s own feelings, ideas, even one’s own vocabulary, resist those of the other. To such an extent that those of the other are either excluded or deformed until they can be safely assimilated within preexisting structures. In other words, until they are reduced to harmless glitter. It worries me a lot when someone understands me. I wonder if he didn’t hear me right. Maybe I failed to make myself clear?”^[1]Perhaps this is about control, or absorption; to think: I read you, your word, in such a way that I can understand you such that I can absorb you by distortion, such that we are the same; I must undo the not-me, this uncanny feeling! Render you glitter to decorate myself! They say: my concept of you encapsulates you—you are what I have set you to, we are the same in that way, or you are nothing at all, excluded and buried.

Attempting the equivalence of things for the end of sameness culminates in the dirtiest, most heinous, and destructive work (equalization and sameness—the germs of fascism). Dissimilarity for the equalizer is despair and dissatisfaction; they try with all their might to affirm that propped-up equals sign, a thin cardboard sign so delicate the faintest breeze blows it away.

I will always be distinct from you, you distinct from me, your word distinct from itself, my word distinct from itself. I do not think anyone should seek to understand, to see with complete clarity right through another.

Obscurity and the opaque—no need to explain, only to hear different forces in resonant sympathy.

***

I have a fear of coming off corny—I feel puppeteered by Adorno, or Nietzsche, that my word is subsumed under theirs. Or, that when you crack open the lid of my word, Adorno, Nietzsche, and whoever else are in there meddling, pushing around my word’s contours.

III

I find citing Nietzsche difficult. Trying to do it intentionally is feels as though I am simply tacking him into my phrasing—an entirely awkward cramming. However, it is not Nietzsche that is being crammed in, it would be the starts and ends of my words in a sentence being pushed out by Nietzsche. Nietzsche writes with a personality that would be by any contemporary academic standard inappropriate. His arrogance—that chin tilted up—is tangible; a real fury for Socrates that takes one aback, to making a mockery philosophical certainties in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil. It is so powerful that I can hear him—yes audibly!—interlaced between each printed line, or that, behind every blank space between sections you might catch his eye. Thus, to put Nietzsche between two quotation marks does not feel right, it is to let him speak loudly over your word. It is best to speak of Nietzsche in allusions; manifestations of him should only arise as plays on him, a propulsive hidden force. A habit.

It has become difficult for me to write with the intent to prove something. Yet, I find that in reading texts and reproducing extensive quotations, I am condemned to profess a purpose for doing so. For what purpose are you reading? Taking so many meticulous notes? To construct a proof of argument is the most ingrained purpose and the expected response; it is also the response which seems to declare ‘I am not wasting time, I am out to prove something of worth, to say something about this reading.’ To say—in a line-by-line tearing of it—that the text is this, reads as that, or that the text, by way of my clever selections, proves me. I make the text affirm me, justify me—I write through Spivak’s tongue here!

I want to know how to read without the preemptive intent to prove, to write with the intent of only saying. Saying with the intent of breaking, splitting, flipping, displacing, congealing, even circuitous spinning. Points should be nodal in the Freudian sense; an immense, taxing “conversion” of thoughts, a concentration or a tangled mess of paths. The point should leap to another distant thing in a brilliant flash. In fact, it stops being a point at all in this sense. It is only a point at first glance, it is something else entirely walking through it, phasing into it; reader-observer-walker—move into it, cavern explorer! The reader-writer of such points will find themselves moving horizontally into the page, through the hole torn by the point; opposed to this is the verticality of a chain of points which falls straight down into a conclusion. We must insist on the horizontal plane, the expanse, the field.

The contemporary academic point is stiff by design. In a linear path it exists to prove or directly supplement something said above it, then priming something after it in an extensive vertical chain of point-evidence-point-evidence-point-evidence—…conclusion. And then repeated in a different text; point-evidence-point-evidence-point-evidence—…conclusion. The skeleton of an academic work is designed such that its body cavities may be filled with any kind of material, but the reader can always glide through it as if the last article was the same as the one they are currently reading—the rapid pace of a skimmer’s surf to nowhere! There is no need to think twice when the contemporary literature has splayed itself out in the same order. Here the reader’s gaze rushes downward, a race to collide spectacularly with the conclusion and splatter into a million pieces—it has no depth to nestle into.

The academic paper is not vulnerable with itself. The academic is not vulnerable with themselves. Splatter onto the pavement, reader! Meet your conclusion!

I have been bombarded by infuriating, insistent advertisements as of late. Two have been competing for my attention, Vinted and Depop. However, their respective pitches are not for you to buy but to sell; to sell your used clothes ‘to the next guy.’ Kelis’ “Millionaire” plays over the Depop ad accompanied by a montage of people exploding in cash as they sell their clothes; ‘I ain’t rich, ‘til he is rich, and she is rich, then we is rich,’ sings Kelis over a series of people coming into an abundance of cash instantaneously. It hits you over the head relentlessly—you too can be a seller, and thus, a controller of your independent, momentary circumstance. In fact, to alter your circumstance in such a way is to enrich others by encouraging them pick up the practice in a relational cascade. I ain’t rich, ‘til he is rich, and she is rich, then we is rich. Every seller has their opportunity, every seller can be something.

A burst of money surrounds you upon a sale, how fortuitous! No, not by chance—how brave of you to take the step to resolve your financial conundrums entrepreneurially! And indeed, it suggests a kind of community of sellers and winners, this we is critical to articulating a kind of collective triumph over circumstance. In this fiction everyone wins, everyone can get by if we simply participate in a collective entrepreneurial revival. The young woman in the beginning of the ad is able to go out with her friends after making a sale. The horror really, is that something seems to stand between us and our ability to see each other, that something prohibits us from coming together in the first place! But no matter—we should all sell to enrich ourselves, and thus we might all ‘be rich together.’

Nietzsche – Deleuze – Glissant. By the sea and sand, I will, at the very least, learn to say something.

VII

Writing about writing is a delay, a cop-out—a mode of avoiding the ‘real things’ I am supposed to be writing about. It is comparable to the relief of habitual lip biting. The intended word is not discernible when the lips are caught between teeth. Nonetheless, something indirect does spill out the sides.

A ‘substantive’ topic with a traditionally outlined scope which has been narrowed by way of reductive framing and reframing has an end in mind—one (problematically) prefigures the results upon embarking; it is true that the end may not be definitive—at best it is gestured toward, endlessly toward as to establish a lineage: “I leave it to the next person to continue figuring this out, but this my piece.” Humble! The great wheel is pinpricked with another coordinate. With time, the circle will be complete (no, they have only been sent to work so the others above them can feast, twofold, threefold, tenfold!).

Writing about writing is an endless deferral of the thing to be written about; endlessly about the production of writing, its style, performance, the anxiety of being upheld and molded by references and antecedents; how to manipulate the elements of writing, finesse them, such that one can actually begin to write about something? Desperate to come to a point of readiness, or: “I know what it is I wish to really express. I know the manner in which I would like to express it.”

I try to come to a beginning that is satisfactory enough, a definite architecture for the expression of a thing; developing the sharpest aiming reticle such that the written pierces straight through the thing when shot. I have read to write, and what I will write has been hashed out. Yet writing dodges itself when you attempt to make it solid, formulate it. You cannot actually reach a definitive writing practice even when writing about writing—it pushes itself away. No beginning is adequate, no trusted center to emerge from. No mode of expression can become the thing itself as it is—it is just that, expression, a mark, a sketch. As you write about something you go roundabout it, this is true of writing about writing if you have any compassion to not freeze it.

I find myself looping around this task: “how will I set myself straight to write about x?” In other words, to prepare myself for a beginning, for a style, to lay a background for the thing. The need to prove reappears. “Do I have a topic, one meticulously defined? If I do not write in this structured way, then will I be able to prove anything about it? Have I settled anything?” This is what is so convenient about the outlined scope and narrowed frame. Its intent is to prove something mechanically to then persist off its imperfect endpoints. What is it that I would like to write? Or rather, what is it that you intend to do with what you write? And further, what is your intent within the text itself? The question begs a practical, exchange-colored answer: “I would like to write (about) this for that.” ‘I would like to write about x to publish and advance a field, I would like to write about x to make a living,’ etc. And within the text—as winding as the path can get—one builds a circuit between A and B so that A cannot exist without B and vice versa; a surefire bond is conjured. Further, it is useful because I have said something about A which defines B and B defines A. Useful! Something not-muddled to navigate the world with, a categorical map. Useful because I can sustain myself practically.

Yet, I want to refuse to write a this for a that, and I do not want to write about anything, to make anything subject to my eye, holding it in place. To do so is a mutual degradation, as in, it degrades me and degrades the thing as I hold it and rub its roughness into a sphere, a circle (that I would have the gall with my eye to grasp something—blind myself from the thing gouging my eyes with its shiny outer edges, and the thing disappears, casting itself in shadow which appears as a perfect thing across the wall). My want is to say something as if it came from nowhere, its grounding obscured, a little feeling which appeared suddenly out of the tiled floor, bright and new—to have said something unattached to a center. It has no way but its own, yet it propels off the things surrounding it, bouncing off them, spiraling, spiraling. As to say, I propel myself off Nietzsche, but I go on. Perhaps this is what he meant by forging his own language.

I mention things, but do not make what I say about them. I bounce, I weave things, intertwine them, but it is not about them. So open the doors turn inside out; one must not make writing to be about something in order to let that thing go about its business—I will not impose on you, thing. If you’ll allow it, I will watch you patiently and caress you softly. I will not attempt to hold you, complete you—deferral, deferral!

Have you caught anything that has spilled out the sides of my mouth?

VIII

A long-term detachment from the Caribbean has brought in awkwardness when thinking of it. It is as though I am thinking of a fantasy land, or a dream. I think of my recent essay and wonder if I can even imagine the sea anymore. To think of it and write it down, am I going to sleep? I am not there, but it felt real.

If I described it to anyone there, would they care?

There is kind of language which I have come to call casual-systematic. There is a kind of spell or hypnotism which causes one to speak it. It is a trance-like state; the affluent coffee shop employee asks: “Good morning, just getting through Monday today? Are you dragging through the start of the week? Or is anything special going on?” I replied, “I have an interview this morning—I’m so nervous!” He wished me luck and ended his remarks with “cheers!”—my cue to pay and sit down. The person behind me approaches the register and the employee starts up again: “Good morning, how’s your Monday? Getting the routine started or is something special going on today?” And again, “Hey how’s your Monday going? Starting off strong?” And again, “Hey there how’s your Monday? Getting on track this week?” and so on. A never-ending feel-good platitude chain. We know that the employee has no interest in hundreds of Mondays. It is a façade, completely indirect about its purpose, which is: “I am forced to have this causal-talk with you in order to achieve a certain plastic level of enjoyment for you, I act as though I am your colleague, friend, neighbor—generous hospitality.’ Casual, but entirely structured, repeatable, indirect; the language circles around its object: the swipe of the card

Another example. Causal-systematic language is active in the job interview. The state of hypnosis is evident in the small talk, the recounting of skills and experiences (which is an indirect way of saying: here is how you may put me to work!), in the completely inoffensive joke for an airy, puffed out, and deflated chuckle. Capital forces this awkward engagement. It puppeteers the interviewer and the interviewee. Pretending to not see the white flashes of the clear plastic strings, the interviewer asks what interests the interviewee in the role. The interviewee replies, “I am looking to progress my career in this field, to move up the ladder; I am looking to gain a new experience in this corporate environment, I welcome this new ‘opportunity;’ I see myself as a manager, director, etc. in the future, etc., etc.; in this hypnotized state, I cannot tell you that I need this to ‘live’—in fact it is forbidden of me, it would break the thin membrane that keeps this performance believable. I cannot come off desperate to ‘live,’ it would be a downer; like anyone else, I want to enjoy and keep enjoying—‘life’!—no limit, there is no summit where one might say, ‘I am satisfied;’ ‘life,’ or rather, I—need—the—money.” When speaking in casual-systematic language you are subtle, less hard, as though you are not aware of the potential of disappearing into a pitfall. Rather, you should pretend that you would get by just fine without the job! Appear willing to work, what a wonderful opportunity to be subject to whittling away! I do this because I want to, I will it, I cause it. I will go as far as to say that I made this meeting possible.

When the interview is over, you may briefly snap out of it—who was that just now? How could I lay myself out in such a way, give myself away without a second thought? I could not even hear myself speaking—the language is so slick, so inoffensive, completely disciplined, spoken as though there are no stakes, cool. Speaking with a tongue cut out; it is as though words have been premeditatively placed in the empty space and the mouth simply opened to let them escape. Without reflection, would I have noticed? Is it possible to notice it as it occurs? To disrupt the interview and say: I need this to ‘live’: to access that perpetual stream of enjoyment through the ultimate mediator (money). Is it possible to foresee the tongue’s removal, to feel it occurring but we are helpless to avoid it? Are we always under hypnosis?

The mechanisms of power and the marketplace are exploiting the analysis of language in order to reduce us to absolute passivity. Reading, speaking, listening to speeches, watching television are steadily becoming forms of hypnosis. Antipodes of the thinking I, of the I as subject of its own thought, we are objects of a systematic propaganda that amazes and seduces in order to transform us into a nonthinking, never-thinking I. Propaganda is the Latin of our day and we all speak Latin. But we speak it without already knowing that it is a dead language, that it has always been dead, that death is its only reason for existing.^[2]

Casual-systematic language as evidence of a hypnotic state on the road to death through dead-speak, propagandistic; a kind of language that is part of a mechanism to access plastic enjoyable experiences and ‘live’ them out—plastic experience, or ‘life in this time,’ plastic experience is now the mode of life, as crucial as eating and drinking; indeed, even accessing eating and drinking and the action of doing so are made ‘elevated,’ plastic experiences. To survive now is necessarily to engage in plastic excesses, it is unavoidable.

We may call casual-systematic language a kind of dissimulative language which occurs at every possible point of exchange, which is to say, everywhere all the time (advertisements, with coworkers, in customer service interactions, certain instances where hypnotism takes hold between friends, etc. In this same coffee shop, two individuals talked at length about their corporate positions in relation to grant funding, one of them glossing their achievements in securing funding at a dinner party without having to do much convincing, etc.; a conversation consistently interwoven with ohmigoshes and slick nothings, dry hollowed words that convene for the movement of a managerial process; again, it must appear as though there are no stakes, as though we are friends and this ‘company’ is just a background element—a plastic conversation. Casual-systematic). Moreover—tweaking Armand slightly—it is arguable that we are vulnerable to having our tongues cut out precisely because we are not ‘thinking I’s’ to begin with, rather we are thought to be thinking I’s, we interpret ourselves as such. A stalwart thinking ‘I’ that knows itself would not allow its tongue to be cut as it is every time we must speak casual-systematically! It is not that the thinking ‘I’ has been pacified into a nonthinking entity, rather it is that through this very uncertainty of ‘I’ and the dissolution and banishment of the ‘we’ that the construction of an illusory definite ‘I’—a causal ‘I’—is possible.

An ‘I’ that believes itself to be a mover, that says ‘I am doing this, I am thinking to do this and acting in a way to achieve it (thought = action) because it is to my benefit, my infinite enjoyment, my prosperity. All without breaking a sweat.’ In the hypnotic state, we are the causal ‘I’, the causal ‘I’ speaks this casual-systematic language, confident that they are paving the road forward but really the schematic to follow has already been made. It is simultaneously a hypnotic delusion of having control and a false display of control, a language of coolness with no traceable scent of desperation; the cafe employee projects that his casual, good-natured warmth comes naturally through his language, that he is there asking about Mondays because he is truly curious, that he really does want to know because he is ‘in control.’ The interviewee projects their willingness to work, their want to work, because they are ‘in control.’ Neither are ‘thinking,’ rather they are projections of ready-made disposable/reproducible affects acclimated to satisfy those who it is projected at. These affects are the materials of the plastic experience. The employee may at the end of the shift hang up his apron and sigh, “God, I performed a falsehood all day,” but in the moment, they are engaging with the public as if they really are in the driver’s seat because they must appear to be. Indeed, we are paralyzed into this waking trance where we are actively invested in such work-activity because we see enjoyment on the horizon. Money is the ultimate gateway to excess, it is the embodiment of the possibility of an infinite enjoyment, the possibility of enjoying every plastic experience imaginable, it is casual-systematic language which is part of the mechanism of accessing it.

***

…[M]y present unhappiness itself consists of nothing but confusion. This confusion lies in the following: My happiness, my abilities and any possibility of being in some way useful have always resided in the literary realm. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) that are in my opinion very close to the clairvoyant states described by you Herr Doktor, in which I dwelled completely in every idea but also filled every idea and in which I felt myself not only at my own limits, but at the limits of the human in general. …I couldn’t live off literature if for no other reason than the slow emergence of my works and their special character; moreover, my health and my character also hinder me from devoting myself to what is in the most favorable case an uncertain life. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance institute. Now these two professions could never tolerate each other and permit a shared happiness. The least happiness in one becomes a great unhappiness in the other.^[3]

Kafka describes life against ‘life.’ Kafka is subjected to ‘life,’ plastic life, he is overtaken by the office; here is a display of the causal-systematic embedded in the work towards ‘life,’ to attain a ‘living,’ plastic enjoyment, experiences. Kafka feels his fleshy cut off tongue while dictating a report to a typist:

At last I have the word ‘stigmatize’ and the sentence that goes with it, but still hold everything in my mouth with a feeling of disgust and shame as if it were raw meat, cut out of my own flesh (so much effort it has cost me). At last I say it, but retain the great horror that everything in me is ready for a literary work and such a work would be a heavenly dissolution and a real coming alive for me, while here in the office for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body capable of such happiness of a piece of its flesh.^[4]

One is forced to abandon a rebirth towards aliveness which is already in the body; forced to abandon the dissolution of the hypnotic state and to come alive, to open into a clairvoyant, heavenly language beyond the horizon of plastic enjoyment (survival). Kafka holds his cut tongue in his mouth but foresees its cutting (its robbing) as he feels ‘life’s’ subjugation come upon him.^[5] He knows himself capable of life yet nonetheless deluded, numbed to appear as a controlling dictator of language. This is a terribly agonizing picture because his hand is coerced to do the cutting, to diminish himself to a bloody lump.

Clairvoyant, heavenly language: the tongue in articulation spreads itself across life to speak of it flexibly, never nailing it in one spot as it is aware the future will change. A language that saturates the world with soaking wet words, a saturation so deep that the tendrils of spread ink seep into the next thing gently, through their natural channels. Not clear or clarifying but saturated, filling to the point of being just full, opaque, solid; the contours shape themselves out across innumerable channels, I have come alive. I have foreseen the attempt to cut my tongue out, and so I soak the world, I soak in the world, I vanish into it as I speak it, leave myself (in)visible, uncertain!

A life, a life, a life.

Bibliography

Armand, Octavio. Refractions. Translated by Carol Maier. Lumen Books, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. City Lights Books, 1998.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey. Basic Books, 2010.

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Kafka, Franz. The Diaries. Translated by Ross Benjamin. Schocken Books, 2023.

Nietzche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. The Modern Library, 1966.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Encounters. West Den Haag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u32824cjTf8.

^[1] Octavio Armand, Refractions, trans. Carol Maier (Lumen Books, 1994), 67.

^[2] Armand, Refractions, 104.

^[3] Franz Kafka, The Diaries, trans. Ross Benjamin (Schocken Books, 2023), 16-17. Emphasis mine.

^[4] Kafka, The Diaries, 27. Emphasis mine.

^[5] Kafka, The Diaries, 17. “In the office I outwardly live up to my duties, but not my inner duties and every unfulfilled inner duty turns into an unhappiness that never leaves me.”