Aaron Schuster

Independent Researcher

Involuntary Insubordination and the Borderland between Loneliness and Community: Kafka and Psychoanalysis

18 March 2025, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

In one of his diary entries, Franz Kafka writes of “the borderland between loneliness and community.” I will argue that this borderland is precisely the domain of psychoanalysis, and that Kafka’s line provides a compelling formulation of what is at stake in the psychoanalytic view of the human being. Humans are creatures of the border, caught between sheer isolation and worldlessness, on the one hand, and their belonging to the community and insertion into the socio-symbolic order, on the other. Symptoms should be conceived as “solutions” that a person (unconsciously) invents for problems that the wider community cannot solve. They save the person from total isolation—from helplessly drowning in their problems—while at the same disconnecting them from the codes and frameworks that organize shared social life. This talk will explore how this borderland forces a reconsideration of freedom. The opposition between autonomy and heteronomy is complicated by voluntary servitude, defined as a willing of unfreedom or an autonomous affirmation of heteronomy. In opposition to this, I will propose an “involuntary insubordination,” a heteronomous autonomy or “freedom from behind,” as the form of freedom theorized by psychoanalysis and portrayed in Kafka’s fiction. Therein lies the warped or ironical optimism of both Freud and Kafka, whose lesson ought to be renewed today: however much the human being willingly accedes to its domination, there insists a certain measure of “unwanted freedom” that testifies to the impossibility of the individual’s smooth integration into society. Symptoms are political insofar as they are not simply disorders (sicknesses) but articulate tensions, gaps, and fault lines in the social order, and express a strange and idiosyncratic freedom.