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Kafka’s Birthday
Walter A. Davis  July 3rd is Franz Kafka’s birthday. Kafka—the contemporary of the future who described the psycho-logic of the System that would come to control every area of human consciousness. Kafka—the equal to Marx and Freud in the massive contribution that Jewish thinkers have made to the understanding of mass psychology. Especially the mass psychology of fascism and why fascist imperatives remain the key to understanding contemporary history.
Ahh but I will be reminded, psychoanalysis is a bogus pseudo-science that has been thoroughly discredited. We’re all Darwinians now and so no doubt Dennett and Pinker and others can explain the “survival value” of what is currently being acted out in Gaza. Freud would have offered us a more chilling lesson. About what history does to does who can only learn rebarbative lessons from it. Identification with the aggressor. As the lesson of the Holocaust. The inability to live out the trauma of the genocide one experienced in any other way. Do unto others what was done onto you. The only deliverance from the trauma of one’s dehumanization is to remake oneself in the image of the Nazi. Projection of that brutality onto another is the proof that one has learned the lesson. The lesson that one has internalized the fascist imperative: Orwell’s boot brought down on the face of everything human in the other. After all, the other’s humanity can only remind one of one’s own weakness, recall one’s abjection in Auschwitz as something one must exorcise. Repeatedly—and with greater brutality each time. A repetition compulsion that demands genocide. Those who fail to understand the past…the proverb is somewhat musty. Might alone delivers a collective psyche from the traumatic memory of its collective past. The State becomes the means whereby a mass psychology projects the inversion that defines both. Renewed identification with the aggressor one has now become through actions that turn the other into what one once was. Recall this the next time you hear some pious soul worrying that Israel might become like Nazi Germany. Historical time dances to a far darker tune; and sadly such conveniently humanistic sentiments always come long after the fact. All this is the kind of thing psychoanalysis might have contributed to our understanding of historical and political events. And that, I suggest, is why it had to be refuted on “scientific” grounds. (Science an ideology…perish the thought.) Freud enables us to know things that can only serve to set our teeth on edge. He offers the deepest lesson—how Thanatos or death-work can come to rule nations as well as individuals. I know, there are economic reasons why Israel is doing what it’s doing in Gaza. Even geo-political ones since this is a dress rehearsal of sorts for the action against Iran that, like the Iceman, soon cometh. But there are also psychological reasons why things like Gaza, Hiroshima, and Iraq happen. And only when we recover an authentic and radical psychoanalysis will we be in a position to know them—and act accordingly. But of course all the above can only flicker in the nation’s consciousness today. Tomorrow the firecrackers. And tomorrow and tomorrow…July 4th—a feast, a glut of ideology, a day the necessity of which Kafka alone perhaps could understand. Biographical: Walter A Davis, Editor in Chief at MWC News Contact Dr. Davis
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