Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” and the Acts of Saul’s trial and conversion in the New Testament: two stories alike. Paul’s and the ape’s convictions and stubbornness as departure points; submissions strengthening the weight of necessity. They had to give up being stubborn. They had to shake hands politically, socially.
Both needed to escape the inescapable. This is what is called an aporia: an impassable path, an irresolute conflict between rhetoric and thought, a way to think against oneself, to betray oneself. The aporia has also been defined as the moment of the unutterable, what we have to force to find the way out: when we are in a cage so as not to die “motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall”. It is in that sense that Paul must gather the living and the dead, this another impossibility.
Then, how to defy our own historical impossibilities? That’s the place of art. Art helps the ape to create a “belly thought” that is always, like art, about to be revealed, to talk, derived from an existential crisis that obliges us to introduce other identities. Aren’t these Paul’s and the ape’s cases, getting out of their previous identities? Do they not surprise the ones that face them, debate all the signs, those of their own and others’ identities, the signs of their lineages, their names, their unknown genealogies?We are confronted by ethics of disorder and astuteness, formation stories, as in the picaresque where the rogue educates himself believing that honor is to be crystalized from an acting or discursive simulation. Paul and the ape learn the art of mutating. Life becomes a survival stage on which to perform. Teaching and learning are very much involved here, learning how to survive the judgment. They need to learn to stop being what they are; to stop being an ape; to get out of the locker. They need a conversion. The rogue, then, dissolves into the converted. Paul and the ape are the sacrilegious attempting to destroy the world of beliefs, to embrace a new order.
Here the picaresque is a theater of tragic resistance where the rogue is an outsider looking for respect and honor: He has high aims and low origins. The rogues find the way to defer the conflict through an infinite postponement and extension of mimesis and trickery. The ape and Paul lose their innocence, play with institutions, and only irony allows the ape to admit that what was alive yesterday is now dead.Irony departs from the consciousness that believes it is possible to rise above the Law. It frees us from the weight of time and its meanings, makes opposites circulate so that everything is its opposite, generating an aporia. Irony is an unexpected change of direction and a cure for the melancholic lost self. It expands not only to the deep despair of the struggle but also to the deepest despair of its abandonment, when it talks about the adventures of wandering souls like the ones in these stories, about antiquated gods and gods yet to come. Thus, irony as the greatest “freedom” that can be reached in a world without God: a character that is first read as a buffoon and becomes a saint thanks to history. The adventures of wandering souls are adventures of mutations, departures. And in these departures we do not see a clear source but rather discords, costumes, astuteness, in order to reach the “way out”.
These texts call us to resist verdicts. If we are, along with literature, to resist the verdict, we need, like the ape and Paul, an outside and an inside: a resistance’s principle. The aporia experience is this experience of an unending passion, an infinite resistance of the indelible, of those trapped things that need the impossible, where the new idea is born, idea with which Paul agitated the Jews throughout the world. And to do that Paul and the ape had to devise a way out, to create a device, for without it they could not have lived. This device, the strategy, looks for a moment of freedom of decision obtained from a web of previous facts. The dilemma is imposed in terms of the link between strategies and the free impulse of actions. In these stories we can see a clear relationship between the political histories of truth and the human ability to build a self. Astuteness allows these characters to go from natural states to society, to politics, when the believer does not believe anymore but imitates beliefs. But is not to believe to imitate, as in the ape and Paul? The cultural device is a solution that both need. Even if it is false, it helps them to elude suicide or murder: they need their fictions to be, to devise a “way out”, to pursue the accident, to think against themselves, to maneuver chance and, like the ape, to achieve the impossible and then to see the promises. Paul persecutes Jesus who persecutes Paul. To investigate, to pursue, is to provoke a destiny, and that happens in both stories, where the ape and Paul are reckless, flinging themselves towards a way out. We have then the problem of the borders of action, when we are tortured, in worlds of gambles. And then it is time to bet knowing that we will almost certainly lose. This is a dark, fractured option, fruit of a damaged life picked in a moment when the aporia is over, when we have to choose if we want to exist.When time is not stopped anymore, when the instant is gone, it is time to step beyond. The will is the last step of the staircase. To exaggerate, to force an idea to the point of deformation, to harass it, is perhaps the only way to “jump” out of the aporia. That is why no serious explanation of anything must be considered seriously.
Hope, faith and madness are together in these stories. Paul is said to be mad because he is learning, attracting the foreigner, the risk, pursuing the accident. He is said to be on trial with respect to the hope and resurrection of the dead. The strongest faith is bound to become madness when the ways leading to the trascendental home have become impassable. In Western cultures growing consciousness has been viewed as a danger and an illness; and madmen as beasts (apes), as kids and as fools, as dreamers and prophets (Paul) trapped by demonic forces. “Acting” and “madness” are compatible in these stories too. The madman here is a deep comedian, a player that does not fool himself while he plays God, the king or the beast.There is no way back to the lost paradise, to the freedom of the ape, to lost time. If the only paradises are those that are lost, there is a closeness between passion and lost things that leads to confession. So these stories are a joke, a yoke, a revolution, a spasm of moved beings in which a lost time operates in the “thick of things”. How to combine irony with this passion? How to conquer the impossible in the most intricate labyrinths?: “For an ape it must always be possible”. At last we are faced with a new disagreement between art and history, and we must bear this lack of harmony as we bear the aporias.
Every madness carries a tragedy and a way out of the unbearable. And this is not a desperate way out: it is the way of a waiting spirit in internal expansion, with the necessary calm to survive, the calm that Paul and the ape have that inverts the delay and waiting of power pursuing the waiting accident.
The violence and torture of institutions, laws, limits, academies, authorities, theories, judgments are present in both stories. Like in the picaresque.[1]. Academies and Law are homes of the impersonal whose narratives are to be denied, betrayed: “Was I not already exhausted by theoretical instruction?” or “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit any one of another nation...”
And we always precociously jump that limit. Every testimony is as precocious and risky and unpredictable as love, delivered in “breathless gasps” breaking through the limits. Perhaps there is no other way out. Like in love, the other remembered time, where bursts or electric unloadings occur and natural entities melt. The ape’s nature is a threat to temporality because the simian is a simile for lost time. Time is the opposite of love, which only exists in a time without a past, a unique, fleeting time. Political strategies, ars amandi . Strategy as art to question the “freedom” of events and the inexorable conditions of a decision. Or passion pursuing a bursting point or an accident. Thinking about all this we arrive at the impossible thing in itself that needs a way out to breathe, the moment when the subject disconnects itself from vigilance to confess, to bear witness to an impossible truth. What is the relationship between passion and lost things, confession and loss? Confession is a speech act. And if philosophy could continue existing it should take into account confessed lives, waiting subjects that suddenly, unexpectedly, speak.
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