FILIATIONS OF THE NEGATIVE IN FRANZ KAFKA, PAUL CELAN, AND ANDRE GREEN

Within the specific theoretical framework developed by the French-Jewish psychoanalyst André Green (1927-2012) the dissertation investigates the work of the Negative in the late writings of two crucial German-Jewish authors: Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Paul Celan (1920-1970). Providing a new interdisciplinary re-elaboration of Green’s theory of the Negative between psychoanalysis, literature, and Jewish studies, the work investigates the role of the Negative in Kafka’s and Celan’s late writings, aiming at expanding the understanding of their works in the context of 20th century Judaism. Moreover, the dissertation explores Green’s psychoanalytic theory in the context of contemporary Judaism and literary creativity, advancing a new reading of the Negative as a meta-theoretical thread running through Green’s writings and thought. The question of the Negative in Kafka and Celan has drawn the attention of many scholars from diverse fields of research such as philosophy, comparative literature, and Jewish studies, becoming a topic of primary importance in the contemporary reflection upon the transformation of Jewish cultural and literary expression. However, the specific contribution of psychoanalysis in such a debate has often been neglected. Unlike other philosophical, literary, or theological approaches, Green provides an original psychoanalytic contribution, envisaging the work of the Negative as the matrix of the structuring of subjectivity in relationship with the alterity of a lost object. His theory puts forward a structural model of the psychic activity and functioning in its heterogeneity, the complexity of which is characterized by the ineliminable dimension of the limit, understood both as a protective barrier of the psychic apparatus, as well as a transitional area of transformation. The question leading the present investigation is how such liminal dimension is transformed through the process of sublimation into a stylistic fingerprint, into a form of writing which reorganises the complexity of the psyche. Showcasing the creative power of the subject of coping with absence, loss, and mourning through the act of representation, the Negative becomes for these authors (borrowing Green’s expression) a “framing structure for the representation of the absence of representation.” The work is divided in three chapters devoted to Green’s metapsychological studies (Chapter 1), Kafka’s "Ein Hungerkünstler" (1924, "A Hunger Artist") (Chapter 2), and Celan’s collections "Schneepart" (1971, "Snowpart") and "Zeitgehöft" (1976, "Timestead") (Chapter 3). The exploration of the representational vicissitudes of the Negative in the writings of these authors, or what I call their ‘filiations of the Negative,’ allows to track the transformation of Jewish creativity in different forms and historical contexts, before and after the Shoah, and to rethink from a new perspective the question of representation of absence, memory, and transmission.