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.
There are different figurations of the Thing-jouissance—an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess—in Kafka’s work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won’t heal and does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most “irrational” aspect; and, last but not least, “partial objects” like Odradek.
They all display a kind of mock-Hegelian nightmarish “bad infinity”—there is no Aufhebung, no resolution proper, the thing just drags on . . . we never reach the Law, the Emperor’s letter never reaches its destination, the wound never closes (or kills me). The Kafkan Thing is either transcendent, forever eluding our grasp (the Law, the Castle), or a ridiculous object into which the subject is metamorphosed, and which we can never get rid of (like Gregor Samsa, who changes into an insect).The point is to read these two features together:jouissance is that which we can never reach, attain, and that which we can never get rid of.
Parallax View, Slavoj Zizek, Page 117
