People fear collapse and carry their own powerless enemy within themselves

Evidence

Those savages of whom it is recounted that they have no other longing than to die, or rather, they no longer have even that longing, but death has a longing for them, and they abandon themselves to it, or rather, they do not even abandon themselves, but fall into the sand on the shore and never get up again-those savages I much resemble, and indeed I have fellow clansmen round about, but the confusion in these territories is so great, the tumult is like waves rising and falling by day and by night, and the brothers let themselves be borne upon it. That is what, in this country, is called “giving someone a leg up”; everyone here is always ready with such help. Anyone who might collapse and remain lying without ground [or: without cause] is dreaded as though he were the Devil, it is because of the example, it is because of the stench of truth that would emanate from him. Granted, nothing would happen; one, ten, a whole nation might very well remain lying and nothing would happen; life in all its might would go on just the same; the attics are still chockablock with flags that were never unfurled; this barrel organ can play only one tune, but it is eternity in person that turns the handle. And yet the fear! How people do always carry their own enemy, however powerless he is, within themselves18 The powerlessness that inscribes itself throughout this text would certainly participate in stripping the musical instrument, life, of any force of its own, thus maintaining the need for an outside player, an outside and even divine force or power. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 747

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Kafka’s parable about the fear of the collapsed one, the ‘stench of truth,’ and how people carry their own enemy within themselves is dense and layered — the collapse-as-devil fear and the internal enemy resonate across the whole book’s theme of the enemy.
• BMF: The image of people dreading the one who collapses and lies without ground because of the ‘stench of truth’ and the fear that dooms him — evokes the priest/confessor scenes in Things Fall Apart where Okonkwo’s dread of weakness turns the endangered one into the community’s enemy.
• XREF: connects to: Those who serve power fear the trusting gaze that recalls their lost spirit; Purely self-interested individuals collapse when organization and terror arrive — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 169; Difficult conditions activate underlying weakness beneath nations’ superiority beliefs, motivating self-defense. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 98