Kafka’s opaque divine is the concept of the Other pushed to the limit

Evidence

It is this unpredictability which Kafka’s art attempts to describe in The Trial and The Castle. In one sense everything which K. and the Surveyor are doing belongs strictly to them in their own right, and in so far as they act upon the world the results conform strictly to anticipations; they are successful acts. But at the same time the truth of these acts constantly escapes them; the acts have on principle a meaning which is their true meaning and which neither K. nor the Surveyor will ever know. Without doubt Kafka is trying here to express the transcendence of the divine; it is for the divine that the human act is constituted in truth. But God here is only the concept of the Other pushed to the limit. … That gloomy, evanescent atmosphere of The Trial, that ignorance which, however, is lived as ignorance, that total opacity which can only be felt as a presentiment across a total translucency—this is nothing but the description of our being-in-the-midst-of-the-world-for-others. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 738

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the desire-for-silence theme from the reader’s earlier reading — being opaque to oneself across the Other’s look is structurally parallel to living ignorance of one’s own meaning. — connects to: Divine kenosis and reason’s inaccessible beyond are one and the same event — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 758
• DEFINE: Illustrates and names ‘being-in-the-midst-of-the-world-for-others’ through Kafka’s Trial and Castle.

Broader Connections

• Divine kenosis and reason’s inaccessible beyond are one and the same event #expands (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 758