Odradek
Odradek is an entity in Kafka's short story "The Cares of a Family Man".
Slavoj Žižek in The Parallax View talks about Odradek:
- Odradek as an object which is transgenerational (exempt from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside fintude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility, is jouissance embodied: “Jouissance is that which serves nothing,” as Lacan put in Seminar XX:Encore
- Odradek is simply what Lacan, in Seminar XI and in his seminal écrit “Positions de l’inconscient,” developed as the lamella, the libido as an organ, the inhuman-human “undead” organ without a body, the mythical presubjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the Life-Substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephalic” drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed abode.
- Odradek is the father’s sinthome, the “knot” onto which the father’s jouissance is stuck.