Abstracts

Dror Pimentel (Bio)

Odradek: Kafka’s Name for the Nameless

The protagonist of Kafka’s short story “The Cares of a Family Man” is Odradek, a strange creature that presents the reader with a riddle about its identity: Is it a signifier or a signified? Inanimate or animate? Is it merely alive, or is it also a living being who speaks (zoon logon)? Odradek is all of these things and none of them. Just as it wanders throughout the house, so it vacillates between these categorical distinctions. As such, it poses a threat to the consistency of the various economies that constitute the house and are regulated by the figure of the father. Chief among these is the economy of language, which strives to supply at least one signifier for every signified, in an attempt to ensure that not even a single signified will elude signification. Odradek offers a stubborn resistance to this premise in various ways. For instance, Odradek undermines the validity of the underlying assumption, according to which no signifier does not point to at least one signified. This assumption ignores an entire group of signifiers devoid of signifieds, which, among others, includes invented signifiers, whose quantity is potentially infinite. This group also includes the register of semiotic signifiers, as Kristeva calls them, which are characteristic of the pre-Oedipal use of language. This group also includes poetic language, as well as the language of children, which involves an echolalic use of signifiers and strange linguistic inventions of different kinds. This group also includes Odradek, as an invented signifier that resonates with the language of abjection and with that of children. As such, it resembles the word pallaksch, which the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin mumbled in his moments of madness, ensconced in his tower in Tübingen. The meaning of this word remains unresolved so that it can be seen as a signifier pointing to the loss of meaning as such. Odradek is thus the name of a linguistic hospitality that severs, in different modes, the bondage between the signifier and the signified, and thus opens up a rift within the hermetic array of signifiers. In this way, it allows for the hospitality of the nameless, which cannot be included in the economy of language.