I. Introduction

This section introduces the creative background and themes of Kafka’s short story "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk." Completed in 1924 during the final stages of Kafka’s life while he suffered from severe tuberculosis, the story intertextually mirrors the hunger artist’s inability to eat and the "squeaking" art of singing. Through the mouse folk and Josephine’s singing, the story explores the boundary between art and non-art, as well as individual and collective identity. Kafka portrays the mouse folk and their whistling as "denaturalized, deterritorialized animals," transcending biological and cultural realities to construct a linguistic truth. Deleuze and Guattari argue that Kafka focuses on "a certain intense, pure sonic materiality," a sound liberated from symbolic meaning, becoming a deterritorialized musical note. This paper aims to examine the potential and limitations of Josephine’s singing to understand the possible pathways of Kafka’s paradoxical literary expression.

II. The Potential of the Impossible

This section explores Josephine’s singing ability through the ancient Greek philosophical concept of potentiality (dynamis). Aristotle distinguishes between "being" and "potential," viewing potential as latent rather than actualized, while "capacity" involves the transition from potential to actuality. Josephine’s uniqueness lies not in her ability to whistle but in her capacity not to whistle, setting her apart from her people. Her silence becomes a moment of absence in whistling, activating individual potential. Agamben emphasizes a secondary form of potentiality related to loss—the capacity to hold onto loss. Josephine’s ability not to whistle transforms whistling from a communal trait into an individual skill, pushing her to the margins of her folk. The text paradoxically confirms this difference, noting that Josephine’s whistling is not an inherent behavior but a bodily action. Her singing temporarily frees the mice from daily constraints, offering liberation. Josephine’s singing embodies messianic potential—an availability that cannot be possessed. She relinquishes ownership-like property, turning the everyday into a usable resource for life.

III. The Remnant: Josephine "or" the Mouse Folk

This section examines the relationship between Josephine and the mouse folk in Kafka’s short story. Josephine holds a unique position among the mice, possessing a name, gender, and profession, while the others are preoccupied with survival. Her singing causes the mice to pause their whistling, enjoying a collective solemnity in silence. Her voice gathers individual silences into a collective identity. She is both part of the mouse folk and an external element, capable of outlining the folk’s inner totality. Josephine’s political identity is ambiguous—she acts as an individual yet refuses to share rights or obligations with others. Her existence challenges the division between whole and part, as her visual centrality does not equate to political or power centrality. The mouse folk perceive her art as a mass gathering, and her artistic demands clash with patriarchal authority. As the "remnant-people," Josephine disappears amid plenitude, losing meaning, yet her meaningless actions resist uniform significance, making her the only true political subject.

IV. Weak Power and the Vanishing Voice

This section discusses the weak power and disappearing voice of Josephine in Kafka’s story. Though her performances are striking, her strength is not overwhelming but "delicate by nature." Her voice is faint and small, yet it drives the mouse folk. This juxtaposition of "smallness" and "vitality" resonates with Benjamin’s "weak messianic power" in "On the Concept of History." Agamben detects the hidden presence of Pauline texts in Benjamin’s work, emphasizing that "power is made perfect in weakness." The messianic "power" deactivates the law, rendering it inoperative to preserve potential. Josephine’s power of struggle lies in the weak form through which she exerts it. Her faint whistling subtly nullifies the rigid laws of the world, restoring potential to the act. Ultimately, Josephine disappears, and her whistling returns to silence. This vanishing voice can be understood through Aristotle’s duality of potential and non-potential. Her disappearance is a double negation of potential—the loss of the "potential not to whistle." Her vanishing and forgetting constitute a departure, a distancing from collective memory and the scripting of national history, while also advancing in that distance.

V. The Poetics of the "Minor" and the "Non-"

This section explores Kafka’s poetic approach to the "minor" and the "non-." In his 1918 notes, Kafka writes that becoming infinitely small is the beginning of action, while making oneself infinitely small is the end. This perspective is closely tied to his identity as a Prague Jew writing in German. Kafka views minority literature as "diary writing," integrating the internal while serving as a marginal collective’s expression in public life. In "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," Josephine leaves no trace in history or collective memory yet endures through the narrator’s account. The mouse folk disregard historical research, while literature writes forgotten time outside secular chronology. The narrator’s first-person perspective expresses both personal views and collective speech, aligning with Kafka’s "minor" diary writing. Kafka recognizes German literature’s institutional dependence on Goethe, leading to a loss of diversity, yet he does not abandon German but revises it from within. Kafka’s "minor" literature is not defined by quantity or weakness but points to movements within things that diverge from their expected development. His "becoming-minor" relates to his complex feelings toward children. He proposes the paradox that action often occurs in a state of "not" or "non-." In a letter to Brod, Kafka expresses the impossibility of being a Prague Jew engaged in literary writing. His literary work and thought reflect the anxiety of the individual in modern society. Kafka’s restrained literary technique deliberately avoids emotional embellishment and linguistic richness. His unfulfilled will carries a "Josephine-like" quality—self-destruction to preserve the integrity of potential. Kafka uncovers a poetic approach of the "minor" and the "non-" at the margins of style and literary production, where literature briefly suspends life’s laws and reveals its limits.