NEPODNOŠLJIVOST SUSEDOVANJA
THE UNBEARABILITY OF BEING A NEIGHBOR

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the immunological practices of Kafka’s anonymous inhabitant in an unfinished late narrative “The Burrow” (“Der Bau”, 1923-1924) who builds a labyrinth within the burrow in order to safeguard it from imminent or proleptic future intruders. The mole-like builder of the labyrinth-like structure is securing its house from parasites “known” only by the noise they make. This noise – against which the obsessive stuffing of holes and drilling of passages take place (including the infinite displacement of the center and margin) – corresponds to the radical faceless alterity, given that the “face” of noise is precisely the muddied face of the burrower. Entrances in Kafkaesque literary worlds are in fact the limit of the passage as such, the impossibility of being only inside or only outside. The aggressive covering of porous and loose walls, and closing all potential passages is endangering the burrow structure as such. The burrow becomes the centralized system, always suppressing the heterogeneity of gateways, entrances and exits, the difference that will erode the silenced fixity of centered identity. Ultimately, the burrow becomes infinitely fractalized. The question of alterity, within the tradition of guarding the wholeness of the subject (its body, its proper place, its identity and its name), is often reduced to the question of corporeal, political, cultural parasites of the communal body. The other, as a parasitical emblem, destabilizes the notion of the limit (between the host and the guest), and is the sign of a host being always already a frightened guest of its own homely place.

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