Writing of Kafka’s short stories and parables (which include all kinds of animals from mice and apes to dogs and moles), Walter Benjamin takes note of the reader’s experience as an angle for understanding them: “the reader follows these animal tales for a fair distance without even noticing that they do not deal with human […]
In a vignette dated May 1920, Kafka’s favorite writer, Robert Walser reflects on smallness by way of moods, one in the morning, the other in the evening, that return to smallness. I would like to argue that it can be read as a fascinating reflection on what Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism) calls Tzimtzum. Tzimtzum is a […]
I am always on the look out for shrinking people and things. Becoming small is a religious kind of theme. It is also an obsession of secular writers (with a penchant for the mystical) like Franz Kafka and one of his favorite writers, Robert Walser. Many of Kafka’s characters are like humans who have […]
Does attention to detail make one a thinker? Isn’t it the attention to the whole? Robert Walser’s portrayal of the philosopher – in his prose piece “The Philosopher” – makes him into a person who is obsessed with small things. He is, as Walser says, like a child who is “groping for small things.” […]
Recently, a friend of mine who happens to be a philosophy professor and a fellow lover of Robert Walser referred me to Walser’s reflection on “the philosopher” (written in 1919). I was struck by Walser’s portrait because it shows that he, as a writer, also identifies in some way with the thinker. However, he does […]
Writing on Snow White, the Freudian thinker and Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim argues that the “fairy story permits the child to comprehend that not only is he jealous of his parent, but that the parent may have parallel feelings”(195, The Uses of Enchantment). It can “help to bridge the gap between parent and child” and […]
Nietzsche was obsessed with the relationship of the body to thought. And whenever he articulated his reading of the body, he always made sure to put it forth in what Peter Sloterdijk (winking at Diogenes) called a “cheeky” manner. He looked to offend and this gesture, for Nietzsche, was healthy. In the beginning of his […]
In school we just don’t learn things. We also grow and develop. School is preparation for the real world. And most children take teachers as their role models. Students respect the boundaries that are put between them as they would respect the boundaries between parents and children. These ideas, regarding the meaning and purpose of […]
What I love about a great novelist is his or her ability to surprise the reader. However, sometimes the surprise throws everything the reader thought about the writer into question. This is especially prescient when the main character of his or her novels is often someone we find charming, pitiable, and yet insightful. What […]
Click here to see my latest essay for Berfrois: “How Simple is Simon? Unemployment, Masochism, and Daydreaming in Robert Walser’s “The Tanners.” It takes Robert Walser’s novel, The Tanners as its subject and tests out Walter Benjamin’s reading of poverty and unemployment. As the title suggests, I read Walser through the spectrum of unemployment, daydreaming, and masochism. Since it […]
Schlemiel Theory 