Kajetan Mojsak
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 18 Issue 2, 2021, pp. 245-258
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.21.017.13695The article discusses issues connected with monological and virtual aspects of intimate epistolography on the basis of letters written by Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenska. It is an example of particularly self-reflexive correspondence which does not supplement but fully replaces direct contact and at the same time serves as the foreground of literary activity. The above issues, interpreted among others from the Lacanian perspective with reference to the book by Vincent Kaufmann, lead us to ask the question of whether letters are a particularly “perverse” version of interrupting dialogue in order to listen to the author’s inward voice (as argued by Kaufmann) or rather the model of any kind of communication. The text also points out the radically critical attitude of the writer towards the trust he had earlier put in letters and discusses the “demonic” aspects of correspondence mentioned by Kafka in terms of virtuality/monologicality/mediation and game of projection.