Securing the Community of One - Un/Common-scape of Homesickness

This paper deals with the immunological practices of Kafka’sanonymous inhabitant in an unfinished late narrative The Burrow (DerBau, 1923-1924) who builds a labyrinth within the burrow in order tosafeguard it from imminent or proleptic future intruders. The molelikebuilder of the labyrinth-like structure is securing its house fromparasites “known” only by the noise they make. This noise – againstwhich the obsessive stuffing of holes and drilling of passages take place(including the infinite displacement of the center and margin) – correspondsto the radical faceless alterity, given that the “face” of noiseis precisely the muddied face of the burrower. Entrances in Kafkaesqueliterary worlds are in fact the limit of the passage as such, the impossibilityof being only inside or only outside. The aggressive covering ofporous and loose walls, and closing all potential passages is endangeringthe burrow structure as such. The burrow becomes the centralizedsystem, always suppressing the heterogeneity of gateways, entrancesand exits, the difference that will erode the silenced fixity of centeredidentity. Ultimately, the burrow becomes infinitely fractalized. Thequestion of alterity, within the tradition of guarding the wholeness ofthe subject (its body, its proper place, its identity and its name), is oftenreduced to the question of corporeal, political, cultural parasites of thecommunal body. The other, as a parasitical emblem, destabilizes thenotion of the limit (between the host and the guest), and is the sign of ahost being always already a frightened guest of its own homely place.