On ‘Halt!’ and On ‘on’

Abstract

In this piece, two critics respond to each other about Kafka's brief tale Up in the Gallery. Vivian Liska explores several possible readings of the story correlated with the word ‘Halt!’—its key moment of interruption. She suggests that Kafka calls a halt to straightforwardly political and existentialist interpretations, based as they are on false antitheses, which, she claims, the story performatively undermines. She wonders if this necessarily ends up in a mere literature of intensities or if this subversive effect on thinking in dichotomies constitutes an intervention in the world. Paul North argues that the title, Auf der Galerie, should be read as a mode of being roughly equivalent to the spectator position. He suggests that the tale belongs to Kafka's critiques of the European onto-theological landscape, where the one continually spectates the suffering of the other.