“At Home in Distorted Life”: On Kafka’s Monster Jargon Roni Henig Abstract: In the winter of 1912, an audience of acculturated German- speaking Jews gathered in Prague’s Jewish Town Hall to listen to a recital of Yiddish poetry. An introductory lecture that preceded the recital was delivered by none other than Franz Kafka. The lecture centered on the dread that Yiddish (Jargon, as Kafka called it) invoked in its listeners and discussed its borderline position in between languages. This article approaches the question of the language of critique through a close reading of Kafka’s lecture on the Jargon. Focusing first on the monstrous linguistic figure that Kafka attributes to Yiddish, the analysis later zooms in on the relationship between Yiddish and German, a conflictual relationship, according to Kafka, in which Yiddish cannot be translated into German. To better grasp these relations of untranslatability, I turn to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida’s work on translation, drawing attention to the proxi- mity between Kafka’s perception of Yiddish and Benjamin’s famous reflec- tions on translation. Kafka’s monster Jargon, I argue, opens up an alternative linguistic position, in which language is experienced performa- tively, as a translation of sorts. As such, it helps theorize an idea of a lan- guage that enfolds a critique of identity from within its own vulnerability. Keywords: Kafka, Yiddish, golem, translation, Benjamin, Derrida, monster Golem In a diary entry dated 20 April 1916, Franz Kafka included a fragment, which he had later crossed out, depicting a rabbi working on a clay figure. “Naturally, it soon became known that the rabbi was working on a clay The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 65 2019 p. 113–137 doi:10.3138/ycl-65-006