Yiddish and Other Linguistic Creatures: On Kafka’s Monster Jargon

• In Event: Jewish Difference Across Borders

Abstract

If we accept the premise that subjects are constituted in a language that necessarily exceeds them, we must account for a difference, an uncontrollability, that dwells in the relation between language and speaking subjects. Building on this difference, this paper asks under what circumstances can a language be thought of as a way out of identity? Such an approach to language is evident in Franz Kafka’s engagement with Yiddish (or “Jargon,” as he called it). In 1912, Kafka addressed an audience of acculturated German-speaking Jews who gathered in Prague’s Jewish Town Hall to listen to a recital of Yiddish poetry. Kafka, who organized the event, also opened the night with an introductory lecture on the Yiddish language, given in German. The lecture centered on the dread that Yiddish invoked in its listeners and discussed the borderline position of Yiddish in between languages as well as its untranslatability into German. This paper aims to think with Kafka’s “Introductory Lecture on the Jargon” in order to outline an alternative linguistic attachment, whereby language is imagined as a monstrous creature whose linguistic function resembles that of translation. Through a close reading of Kafka’s work, I argue that his monster Jargon opens up an alternative linguistic position in which language is experienced performatively, as a translation of sorts. As such, it helps theorize an idea of a language that enfolds a critique of identity from within its own vulnerability.

Author

• Roni Henig, New York University