Social subjectivity in a permanent revolution, literature.

 Social subjectivity in a permanent revolution, literature.

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“We need books that excite ourselves like misfortune—one that scares us so deeply. These books feel like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, feel like we’ve been separated from others, and feel like we’ve been expelled, even suicide. A book must be like an axe to the frozen sea within us."

 - Kafka, <Letters to Friends, Family and Editor>

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You have to break the numbness of feeling free from oppression. Of course, to do that, you will have to get yourself out of the state of insensitivity.

Like the sound of a fingernail scraping a blackboard, or an axe hitting the frozen sea that 'grips' and gives an unpleasant thrill to the hand, the books of our time should be so objectionable. Unfortunately, the lack of explicit restraint is increasingly mistaken for freedom.

Perhaps the times of outright oppression, that is, the times of dynasties or fascism, were better. At that time, progenitors were everywhere, and solidarity could easily be established. Now the solidarity is getting harder, and the waiting reinforcements show no sign of reaching them. It's frustrating and I really can't. You have to fight against the oppression that has penetrated deep into you. You have to dream of freedom and show it to the world.

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"Dreams are the indirect realization of repressed wishes." - Freud

Humans make the impossible in reality possible even in dreams. The same goes for literature. This is because literature is also an indirect realization of repressed desires. If all love were realized in reality, or democracy was achieved, novels would no longer be necessary. Unfortunately, however, the oppression has not gone away, it just seems to have disappeared. This is because oppression is now conducted indirectly and secretly rather than directly and explicitly. If the mechanism of oppression is too far away or too close, the fight will inevitably unfold to that extent.

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Freud says

"The artist concentrates his attention on the unconscious in his mind. He listens to the possible developments of the unconscious and gives them artistic expression rather than suppressing them with conscious critique. In this way he learns from others within himself- The unconscious activities experience the laws to which they must obey - Jensen's hallucinations and dreams in Gradiva

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If a free community or a society with less oppression has been established, literature may take its last happy breath and leave us. However, if there is a person who calls for the end of literature even though this is not the case, it can be said that he has the intention to undermine the human power to dream of the impossible and throw the human into a state of idle servitude. After all, it can be said that the story Sartre told in 1948 is still valid.

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"Concrete literature will be a synthesis of negativity as a force to escape from given conditions and speculation as a drawing of a future order... It is not enough to give the author the freedom to say everything. The reader who will read the article should also have the freedom to change everything, so not only does the class disappear, but all dictatorships are abolished, social institutions must be renewed all the time, and when order begins to harden, it must be constantly dismantled. In short, literature is by its very nature the subjectivity of society in the midst of a permanent revolution." - What is literature?

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Until all authoritarian mechanisms that suppress human freedom, whether macroscopic or microscopic, disappear, literature must remain with us like a breath or like an unstoppable hope. As Sartre said, literature itself is freedom. Since there are oppression and restraint, it is specific freedom to overcome them, so literature demands not only the freedom of the writer but also the freedom of the reader.

Readers are likely to turn away from literature when they are thrown into a political and economic situation that cannot bear the pressure of literary works that demand freedom. Human beings are capable of 'escape to freedom'. 

He was afraid that the plosive sound of the axe hitting the frozen sea would awaken him, who was conforming to the system. If he doesn't know, it's enough, but the moment he realizes that he is oppressed, all human beings long for freedom. This is the power of literature as a "social subjectivity in the midst of a permanent revolution," and this is the reason why the system and its guardians are so eager to bury literature.