On Kafka and hope – Adam Phillips in LRB:

“‘He has the feeling,’ Kafka writes in another aphorism, ‘that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way.’ Kafka clearly wants us to think about our relationship with the opportunity, with the option of giving up; or to the giving up which turning back, or blocking our own way, can sometimes entail. And about the way the idea of giving up figures in our lives, as a perpetual lure and an insistent fear. The giving up that involves leaving ourselves out of what we had wanted, or thought we had wanted. The giving up that is linked to a sense of impossibility, or of possibilities running out, of coming to the end of something. Of needing to exempt oneself. Excluding oneself – perhaps because one lacks the wherewithal or the know-how or the courage or the luck – from a project one had taken to be one’s own. ‘A courageous person,’ Jonathan Lear has suggested, ‘has a proper orientation towards what is shameful and what is fearful.’ We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and fearful. That is to say we tend to value, and even idealise, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not; giving up doesn’t usually make us proud of ourselves; it is a falling short of our preferred selves; unless, of course, it is the sign of an ultimate and defining realism, of what we call ‘knowing our limitations’. Giving up, in other words, is usually thought of as a failure rather than a way of succeeding at something else. It is worth wondering to whom we believe we have to justify ourselves when we are giving up, or when we are determinedly not giving up.”

(…)

“For our purposes, I want to read Kafka’s aphorism as, ‘From a certain point there is no more giving up. That is the point that must be reached’; and to say that our relationship to giving up is as formative in our lives as, say, our relationship to being helped; and to suggest, by implication, that there can be a tyranny of completion, of finishing things, which can narrow our minds unduly. Our relationship to giving up and our relationship to being helped confront us with what we take our dependence to be; our dependence on what we need, and need to do, and on what we need not do, or are unable to do. When we give up, or undermine, our dependence on our ego-ideals – on our fantasies about the people we believe we should be – both our dependence and the nature and function of our ego-ideals is exposed. When our preferred versions of ourselves are not an inspiration, they are a tyranny (a tyranny with which we can humiliate ourselves). Our history of giving up – that is to say, our attitude towards it, our obsession with it, our disavowal of its significance – may be a clue to something we should really call our histories and not our selves. It is a clue to the beliefs, the sentences, around which we have organised ourselves. If giving up tends to be the catastrophe to be averted, what do we imagine giving up is actually like? Not to be overly impressed by giving up shows us what we do then value. We make a world out of it.
Heroes and heroines are people who don’t give up; they may sometimes turn back but they ultimately persevere. And as we shall see, tragic heroes are our catastrophic examples of the inability to give up. In that sense tragedy invites us to re-evaluate certain versions of giving up. Kafka’s heroes are often extremely tenacious: they very rarely give up, despite the many inducements to do so (what is heroic in heroism is precisely the resistance to giving up, or perhaps the phobia of giving up).”

(…)

“There is something we want, or think we need (hope, destination, not turning back, satisfaction), but because we cannot give up wanting it we have to redescribe the process of wanting, how we go about wanting it (if there is hope but not for us we have to hope differently; if there is a destination but no way there we need a new attitude to destinations). The hunger artist never gives up on wanting to fast even though it is going out of fashion as a popular entertainment; but in order to go on fasting he must never die of hunger; to be a hunger artist means never to complete one’s starvation, just as in sadomasochistic relationships the sadist must never kill the masochist because he needs to go on torturing him. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, but as it turns out you may have to travel hopelessly and never arrive. You will certainly never arrive at exactly what you had anticipated.”

(…)

“We suffer from not acknowledging the suffering of others. So another useful reason for writing that particular aphorism is to warn people of the cost to themselves of ignoring, or wanting to avoid, the suffering of others. Once again in Kafka it is the giving up that has to be given up on, as though for Kafka the struggle was always to get to the point at which there was no turning back. Kafka’s concern – the theme of many of his parables, and the desire of many of his heroes – is the cost, the suffering involved in giving up. How not to give up is his obsession (in the language of Freud’s late mythology of the instincts, Kafka was always trying to avert the triumph of the death instinct, but without affirming the life instinct). We could conclude that for Kafka giving up was a forbidden pleasure: the allure of giving up, the joys of failure, had to be resisted. Having given up was the unthinkable, the unwritable, for Kafka. But in the service of what? Of not wanting to be the kind of person who gives up? Or, in Freudian language, of betraying one’s ego-ideal, the person one wants to be?”

(…)

“Darwin’s answer – somewhere between a riddle and a joke – is that survival is worth surviving for (survival entailing reproduction ad infinitum). Freud’s answer, more commonsensical and just as disturbing, is that pleasure is worth surviving for. Marx’s answer is social justice, non-exploitative social relations. Each of us, of course, may want or need to have our own answers, while also wondering why good reasons – or indeed any reasons at all – are required to go on living, when no other animal seems to need them. Reasons, of course, are made with language.
Good reasons (or, as Winnicott more interestingly calls them, right reasons), and reason itself, are what suicide provokes us to think and talk about: what is it that sustains someone’s wish to go on living, as opposed to giving up on or attacking that wish (and it is always worth considering what or who giving up is an attack on). There are always two perhaps obviously striking things about suicide (though that they are obvious should also give us pause): it is always profoundly disturbing, and it makes everyone who knows the person obsessed by causality, by the question of how and why it could have happened, and what anyone could have done to prevent it (Winnicott said that whenever someone told him they wanted to kill themselves, he never tried to dissuade them, he just tried to ensure they were doing it for the right reasons).”

(…)

“When Freud suggests in his paper on narcissism that ‘hate is older than love’; when he proposes that the organism wants to ‘die in its own way’ and writes of the ‘instinctual forces which seek to conduct life into death’, he is not merely writing about the fact that, as it were, something inside us eventually kills us; he is also arguing that there is a part of the self that actually desires death, that wants to kill off the so-called life instinct, that doesn’t want survival at all costs, despite Darwin’s preferred truth (though Darwin did, of course, show us that our lives are nothing special, and that there is nothing special about this fact). Freud’s two ‘mythical’ instincts, Eros and Thanatos, describe what Freud takes to be this constitutive war within us. ‘The aim of Eros,’ he writes, ‘is to establish even greater unities and to preserve them thus – in short to bind together; the aim of the destructive instincts is, on the contrary, to undo connections and destroy things.’ One of the reasons giving up has such a bad press – we never say ‘she is really good at giving up’ or ‘giving up is good for you’ – is that the giving up that occurs regularly in everyday life is felt to be an ominous foreshadowing of, or reminder of, the ultimate giving up that is suicide, or just of the milder version of living a kind of death-in-life; or, in Freud’s language, the insidious, ‘silent’, incremental triumph of the death instinct, the numbing of passion, the destruction of everything enlivening. As though giving up is a really bad sign. As though wanting to give up is the worst sign, and the wish to give up is something we should be extremely wary of in ourselves. As though it is like a virus, or a contagion. And there were versions of psychoanalysis after Freud – most notably those of Melanie Klein – that were more or less about the workings of the so-called death instinct and about working out the ways in which it might be contested and managed.”

(…)

“ I want to suggest that we are, or may be, unduly terrorised and intimidated by the wish to give up, and that the daunting association of giving up with suicide has stopped us being able to think about the milder, more instructive, more promising givings up. And has stopped us thinking truthfully about suicide. If sex needs to be detraumatised by uncoupling it from incestuous desire, giving up needs to be detraumatised by detaching it from suicide. If we need to talk about instincts in this context (though we don’t need to), I want to redescribe Freud’s death instinct as a ‘giving-up instinct’, as a way of taking giving up more seriously. And that means not giving it an aura of earnest portentousness – we could, for instance, see Sisyphus as a comic turn. Giving up, which is in everybody’s repertoire, should be taught in schools. We need to wonder what giving up would look like, would sound like, if suicide was not the paradigm, or the only paradigm, of giving up, and if it was not taken for granted in some quasi-religious sense that life is essentially worth living. We are torturing people when we force people whose life is torture to go on living.”

(…)

“Tragedy is what is created by people who refuse to give up. And by the same token it explores, often by implication, what it might be at any given moment to give up. It makes us wonder what catastrophe is being averted by not giving up. For the tragic hero giving up means a change of heart, or changing one’s mind. It means giving up on an organising set of beliefs. Like the tyrant, the tragic hero is an extreme version of a person who needs to overly regulate the complexity of their own mind. In this context, giving up is disillusionment, which always brings with it the possibility of either reillusionment or a greater realism. To be disillusioned is to allow doubt, is supposedly to see something more clearly, whatever that may feel like, whatever the consequences (a love affair, a revolution, a religious commitment, a choice of job). So at one end of this imaginary spectrum there is giving up as a kind of enlightening disillusionment, which brings with it the question, and the possibility, of a future; at the other there is the terminal disillusionment that leads to suicide. Giving up as a transitional state, or as an absolute and determinate ending; giving up as a making sense of an ending, or as a sabotaging of sense-making, and of all future endings. Giving up as the bearing of loss, or as the abolition of loss. It is a question of where we get our ideas about giving up from, or our pictures of giving up from; a question of what we imagine giving up to be like. Or of what we can use giving up to do. And this is where tragedy can be instructive.”

(…)

“Giving up requires a sense of an ending: it is knowing, in so far as it is possible, when the business is finished. A sense of an ending, of course, may not involve a sense of completion. Things can often end before they are finished: there are ruptures and abandonments and failures of nerve, loose ends that continue to trouble us. Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow nation, told Frank B. Linderman, a local hunter and trapper, that after the Crow were confined to a reservation, and the buffalo they depended on were destroyed, the life of the tribe effectively came to an end. Their lives were ruptured. ‘When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.’ After this nothing happened. It is very difficult actually to imagine this experience. The Crow had lived in a land they understood to be given them by God; when it was taken away there was nothing they could do but give up on their lives. Just as people tend not to be mad but to be driven mad, people tend not to give up but to be forced into giving up. It is this that the tragic hero resists, and at great cost. The Crow, overpowered and outnumbered by the white colonisers, could neither resist nor redescribe their predicament. In Radical Hope, his book about the Crow, Jonathan Lear explained that battle had been a means of protecting their way of life, from other tribes and then from white men. Before battle the Crow would perform what they called the Sun Dance: ‘The Sun Dance, being a prayer for revenge, was naturally saturated with military episodes.’ ‘What is one to do with the Sun Dance,’ Lear asks, ‘when it is no longer possible to fight?’ For a culture faced with this kind of devastation, he suggests, there are three choices: 1. Keep dancing even though the point of the dance has been lost. The ritual continues, though no one can any longer say what the dance is for.
2. Invent a new aim for the dance. The dance continues, but now its purpose is, for example, to facilitate good negotiations with whites, usher good weather for farming, or restore health to a sick relative.
3. Give up the dance. This is an implicit recognition that there is no longer any point in dancing the Sun Dance.’”

Read the article here.

If there is hope but not for us, we should hope differently. But how?

To hope differently we might need to detraumatize giving up, says Phillips, we need to separate giving up and suicide. If we have separated it from suicide, from the victory of the death instinct, have we also distinguished giving up from failure?

Tragedy is the inability to give up, but to give up right away, in other words fatalism, resignation, is also a tragedy, the lack of tragedy might be the biggest tragedy.

The fact that many of us love tragedy in subtle or less subtle form points to our resistance to our own death instinct. The tragic hero might die but he or she has not given up.