paul-denicola-literature-pure-mediality

Literature as Pure Mediality:
Kafka and the Scene of Writing
A Dissertation Submitted to the
Division of Media and Communications
of The European Graduate School
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
By Paul DeNicola
December 2007

Dissertation defended December 15, 2007
Awarded Magna Cum Laude
Committee:
Friedrich Ulfers (New York University)
Sigrid Hackenberg (European Graduate School)
Michael Anker (European Graduate School)
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Abstract
The utilization of an instrumental model that sees language itself as a means which is
capable of bringing us towards what might be called fixed “meaning,” is one of the
greatest limitations in the human attempt to establish an authentic understanding of the
dynamics of communication. An acceptance of language from this perspective constricts
our ability to have an adequate confrontation, or more accurately, experience of/with an
aesthetic work.
This text explores the impact of conceiving the literature of Franz Kafka in light of what
will be referred to as “Pure Mediality” via an a-teleological approach that calls upon the
thinking of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari, Barthes, Adorno, and Derrida - among others.
My reading of Kafka presents him as profoundly skeptical of instrumental language, very
much influenced by the Vienna School language critics of the turn of the century. Kafka
recognizes the inherent violence in any conceptual understanding of language, and
therefore conceives of literature, or more precisely, literary or poetic language, as capable
of an “un-judging” that deconstructs any previously “judged” version of the real. His
literary work thus constitutes an embrace of infinite relation, suspension of judgment and
radical undecidabilty.
Pure Mediality is not to be confused with an aesthetics of the autonomy of l’art pour
l’art; rather it is suffused with an inherent ethical aspect insofar as it constitutes freedom
from truth as the tyranny of univocity and teleology towards the truth of an a-topical,
endlessly de-territorializing and metamorphosing world. As such, this truth is always
already other in relation with itself, and thus ethical in its irreducible self-less-ness, its
inherent openness to, and interrelatedness with, the other. It is the ethical structure of the
“given” - not the anthropomorphically instrumentalized world - in which its
interpenetrating parts exist “poetically,” as metamorphic units. The text argues that
Kafka’s art of Pure Mediality is an art of alterity, constituting a “wounding” or “opening”
by alterity that demands a response. It is this character of responsiveness to the other that
implies ethical potentialities.
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1. Introduction
Table of Contents
1.1 Language and Meaning: The Structuralist Approach 4
1.2 19 th Century Developments: Kleist, Mach & Nietzsche 6
1.3 From Benjamin to Deleuze and Guattari 10
1.4 Derrida and the “Death of the Signified” 13
1.5 Kafka: Language and Communication 14
2. Moving Towards Pure Mediality:
2.1 Deconstructing the Teleological Perspective 19
2.3 Nietzsche and Binary Opposition 21
2.4 Benjamin and the “Un-mittelbar-keit” of Language 23
2.5 Derrida and Haunted Language 29
2.6 Kafka and the Language of Infinite Relation 32
3. Un-judging Judgment: Undecidability and Suspension in “The Judgment”
3.1 The Nature of Judgment 34
3.2 Undecidability in the Ancient Greek Tradition 37
3.3 A Literature of Re-Reading 39
3.4 Allusion: Hinting at Truth 41
3.5 Closure and Violence 44
3.6 Un-judging “The Judgment” 45
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3.7 Narrative Rupture 49
3.8 Death by Drowning 54
4. The Law Revisited: Deferred Judgment in “The Trial”
4.1 The Nature of Law 58
4.2 The Question of Access 59
4.3 The Figures of the Law 62
4.4 The Question of Transparency 65
4.5 Representing Justice 67
4.6 Acquittal: Incessantly Deferred 71
5. “Kafka’s Networks:” A Rhizomatic Approach to “The Metamorphosis”
5.1 Rhizomatic Thinking 76
5.2 A Departure from Arbolic Thinking 78
5.3 “Becoming-Animal” 81
5.4 Food and Decay: The Unknown Nourishment 85
5.5 The Violence of Demonstrative Language 90
6. Music and Pure Mediality
6.1 Music as A-Representative Art 95
6.2 Music and Language 97
6.3 From Tonality to Atonality 99
6.4 “Was he an animal?” 102
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6.5 “Josephine the Singer:” 108
Suspended Chords, Suspended Judgment
7. “A Country Doctor:” Writing Within Infinite Relation
7.1 The Space of Undecidability 115
7.2 Scenes from a Pigsty 117
7.3 The Role of the Doctor and Diagnosis 121
7.4 Words that Wound 123
8. Concluding Remarks
8.1 From the De-Centered to Pure Mediality 128
8.2 Kafka’s Reach 132
8.3 Chiasmic Unity and the Ethics of Alterity 133
9. Bibliography 137
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“Language is possible because it strives for the impossible. Inherent in it, at all its
levels, is a connection of struggle and anxiety from which it cannot be freed. As soon
as something is said, something else needs to be said. Then something different must
again be said to resist the tendency of all that has just been said to become definitive, to
slip into the imperturbable world of things. There is no rest, either at the level of the
sentence or at that of the whole work.”
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-Blanchot, The Work Of Fire
“We touch here on one of the most difficult points of this whole problematic: when we
must recover language without language, language beyond language, this interplay of
forces which are mute but already haunted by writing, where the conditions of a
performative are established, as are the rules of the game and the limits of subversion.”
Introduction:
1.1 Language and Meaning: The Structuralist Approach
-Derrida, Signature, Event, Context
Even in the current age, one immersed in an endless series of links that comprise the
internet, readers of Kafka’s labyrinthine texts still fall into the traps set up by traditional
metaphysics and structuralist linguistics. The proposed aim of this project is to attempt to
avoid this trap, to approach Kafka’s texts from a perspective on media that I will refer to
as “pure.” Fundamentally, the problem raised in the philosophy of language revolves
around the question of the “meaning” behind words, and the “structure” of the
communicative process. I begin with what is clearly recognized by deSaussure 1 , and
further articulated by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, “It is this: The
individual words in language name objects - sentences are combinations of such names.
1 deSaussure’s Course In General Linguistics outlines the correspondence theory of
signification.

In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: every word has a
meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word
stands” (29). What Wittgenstein is essentially referring to is an understanding of words,
language and meaning via a system that separates the signifier (that sign/symbol which
corresponds to a fixed, immutable thing), from a signified (that concept which embodies
the presence or meaning of the sign).
Preference for this instrumental model of communication that sees language as a means,
which is capable of bringing us towards what might be called fixed “meaning,” is one of
the greatest limitations in the human attempt to establish an authentic understanding of
the dynamics of communication. An acceptance of this perspective on language, spoken
or written, constricts our ability to have an adequate confrontation, or more accurately,
experience of/with media and communication. Schirmacher, in his essay “Media as Life-
World” attests to a concern with media viewed both from the traditional perspective of
structuralism, as well as what might be called “new media” theories:
When speaking or writing about media we still tend to think in terms of channels
to which sender and receiver are connected, a temptingly simple but inadequate
definition. Current media theory proposes the "Gutenberg Galaxy" has run its
course that the electronic media itself has become the "message" and its forms are
to be understood as "extensions of man." Following Marshall McLuhan and
considering the stunning developments of the "new media" theorists such as Neil
Postman, media is analyzed not only as a metaphor and representation of
knowledge, but as an activity, one shaping our social environment and subject to
media ecology. This shift in understanding necessitates a fundamental change in
our relation to media, and in our thinking. Yet although the distinctions between
reality and imagination, truth and fantasy seem to vanish, and the acceptance of
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media as an authentic life-world the next step, media theory is still reluctant to
face this consequence. Signification, representation, the ideology of an
independent reality as the measure of truth - these are compelling and long-held
presuppositions not easily cast aside (4).
What he notes here is that there has been reluctance, whether conscious or not, to move
away from the comfortable space of the definite, the signifying and the representative,
towards perspectives on communication that lend themselves to multiplicity and the
possibility of infinite interpretation. This preference for the representative value of the
sign over the possibility of limitless connotative understandings affords us only a
constructed/constricted space for encountering forms of media; speech, literature, the
visual arts, music, etc.
1.2 19 th Century Developments: Kleist, Mach and Nietzsche
Historical resistance to instrumental, sender/receiver, medium/message conceptions of
language emerge strongly during the early nineteenth century, prominently in the
literature of the German Romantics. Kleist, among others recognized the confines that a
traditional understanding of language can have on attempts to communicate:
And I should like to tell you everything, if that were possible. But it is not
possible, for this reason if for no other: that we lack the means. Language, all we
have, is not adequate to the task; it cannot depict the soul, and gives us only
shreds and fragments. That is why I feel something like horror whenever I am to
disclose my innermost self to anyone; not because that self is shy of being
uncovered but because I cannot show the person everything, simply cannot, and
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am fearful therefore that offering only fragments I shall be misunderstood
(Collected Writings of Kleist, 81).
Kleist’s fears of expression resulted from what he saw as the limits of language. These
limits horrified him. However, his fears were not a byproduct of his self-revelation to the
other, but rather pertain to an inability to self-reveal completely and openly. The
propensity he saw for the linguistic medium to be “misunderstood” and for his
message/thought to be undermined by the lack of clarity of his words is indicative of an
emerging skepticism of language, communication, and media that was proliferating
numerous aesthetic and philosophical arenas.
This resistance continues in the functionalism and logical positivism of Ernst Mach.
Mach argues that all phenomena should be seen as functions of all others, each having no
specified role independent of its infinite functionality, which essentially amounts to an
infinite relationality. According to Mach, the function of a thing is inseparable from its
form. This perspective anticipates the rethinking of medium and message as indistinct
from one another or inextricably bound. He comments in his introduction to The
Analysis of Sensations:
Colors, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times, and so forth, are connected
with one another in manifold ways; and with them are associated dispositions of
mind, feelings, and volitions. Out of this fabric, that which is relatively more
fixed and permanent stands prominently forth, engraves itself on the memory, and
expresses itself in language. Relatively greater permanency is exhibited, first, by
certain complexes of colors, sounds, pressures, and so forth, functionally
connected in time and space, which therefore receive special names, and are
called bodies (2).
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A functional explanation is one that relies on the decomposition of any type of system
into its component parts; it explains the working of that system in terms of the capacities
of the parts and the ways that the parts are integrated with one another. As a result,
Mach’s thinking moves ever-closer toward a monumental paradigm shift − as the eroding
of a structuralist theory of communication gives way to an a-teleological, non-
instrumental view of language and media.
It is Nietzsche’s thinking in the late nineteenth century that opens up the flood gates to a
post-structuralist interpretation of communication. Nietzsche was acutely aware of the
dynamics of understanding and misunderstanding. He speaks to the perspective of the
writer’s communicative intentionality in The Gay Science:
One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as
surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a
book when anybody finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the
author’s intention- he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.” Every
more noble spirit and taste selects its audience when it wishes to communicate
itself; and choosing them, it at the same time erects barriers against “the others.”
All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the
same time keep away, create a distance, forbid ‘entrance,’ understanding, as said
above- while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours (81).
The essential issue to address, in order to understand Nietzsche’s re-envisioning of
ontology and metaphysics, is his critique of the two-value, either/or world of ultimates
which, he claims, human beings have accommodated themselves to exist within. The
worldview that is generally considered the "real", that is, the world of presence, logic and
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substance, is a construct for him, created out of habit for strictly utilitarian purposes. He
sees this mistaken vision of reality as fiction, masquerading itself as truth, hiding behind
the facade of what humans believe they perceive as the "really real." This occurs due to
the human error of mistakenly taking unique phenomena, and placing them beneath the
umbrella of the general or self-same. Thus, the resulting error is one of human
translation. Ulfers addresses this Nietzschean perspective of “irreducible singularity” and
radical uniqueness as follows:
Nietzsche, in addition to calling the rationalization of irreducible singularity a
construct in the sense of fiction, points to the inherent violence of identity
construction done to the singularity's alterity. By alterity I mean this always-
already unlikeness of the singularity. Unlikeness doesn't mean that a self, a
singularity was first 'like' and then somehow became other to itself, it is the very
unlikeness that is misread for the sake of some need for a utilitarian program
which revolves around being versus the instability of becoming. Change, time and
temporality are all features of the given world that would produce the notion of
change and change-ability (EGS Lecture Transcripts, 9).
It is in this rethinking of opposition that Nietzsche reveals language to be a constructed
metaphysical system in need of deconstruction, as it is sorely inadequate in expressing, or
attempting to express the real. He speaks of the “shadow of god” (The Gay Science, 108)
that human beings will continue to live beneath, as long as grammar holds its place, as its
rules act as the foundation or building blocks of language. By “shadow” Nietzsche is
referring to the over-arching presence that this type of thinking continues to have, in
addition to our reluctance or inability to abandon it. That being said, Nietzsche is careful
to note that language, however inadequate in expressing the “real”, is necessary for the
survival and evolution of the human species.
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1.3 From Benjamin to Deleuze and Guattari:
The discussion surrounding a relational conception of form and function in language
continues in the work of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s conception of language focused
upon it as a medium that mediates only itself. He cites the German Romantics who, he
claimed, saw language as an, “infinity not of (linear) progression, but of relationality” 2
(I, 26). Following the Nietzschean deconstructive tradition, Benjamin refers to a language
or medium that is not itself mediated by anything outside. What is rejected here is the
two-value logic of language based on a model of representation. “Hence, it is no longer
conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental
relation to its object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some
convention. Language never gives mere signs” (“Of Language As Such and on the
Language of Man”, 69). Benjamin was convinced that language does not function as a
means to communicate meaning or message. It inherently communicates nothing other
than itself:
The name is that through which, and in which, language itself communicates itself
absolutely…But because the mental being of man is language itself, he cannot
communicate himself by it, but only in it. The quintessence of this intensive
totality of language as the mental being of man is the name. Man is the namer; by
this we recognize that through him pure language speaks...If mental being is
identical with linguistic being, then a thing, by virtue of its mental being is a
medium of communication, and what is communicated in it is- in accordance with
its mediating relationship- precisely this medium (language) itself (65).
2 “nicht eine Unendlichkeit des Fortgangs sondern des Zusammenhanges“ (Benjamin,
Gesammelte Schriften, I, 26).
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When, in one of his 1916 correspondences with Martin Buber, Benjamin speaks of the
“Un-mittelbar-keit” 3 of language, he is referring to this very conception of language and
communication that transgresses any instrumental view, moving away from the binary
oppositional thinking inherent to the classical signified/signifier relationship 4 .
Deleuze and Guattari partake in a similar system re-visioning with their explication of the
rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus. In opposition to the root-tree model, Deleuze and
Guattari offer the rhizome, a structure without a centralized, hierarchical organization, a
structure that, in many ways, reflects the more "natural pattern of geo-organic possibility”
(8). According to them, rhizomatic systems are "finite networks of automata in which
communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not pre-
exist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given
moment - such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result
synchronized without central agency" (17). The structure of the rhizomatic model is
therefore one which allows for a more expansive ontological perspective. “A method of
the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by de-centering it into other
dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a
3 Benjamin, II, 141-142. It must be noted that “Unmittelbarkeit” in everyday German
discourse means “immediacy.” Benjamin changes this meaning by stressing the
component “mittel” whose meaning is “means” or “instrument.” What Benjamin is
saying, then, is that with language as “Pure Mediality”, that is, as a system without an
outside reference or signified, no medium or signifier could have an instrumental
function in terms of the achievement of an ultimate signified.
4 Robert Musil similarly alludes to the structure of language and the world as “Pure
Mediality” when he writes that the “structure of the world” is “an unending system of
interconnectedness in which there are no independent meanings.” (Werke in Neun
Banden, 1002) Binary opposites, such as good and evil, are “not absolute values,” (748)
but “variable functions” (1073) whose values are always dependent on “circumstances”
(2507). Author’s translation.
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function of impotence” (8). This de-centered view of language and communication is one
in which both the content and form of the message are seen as immanent.
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome demonstrates that there is no central
controlling agent or transcendental signified. “The rhizome is an a-centered, non-
hierarchical, non-signifying system without a General and without an organizing memory
or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states" (21). Without hierarchy,
embracing a view of relationality, rhizomatic systems exist in the worlds of
undecidability and non-calculability. While allowing for infinite movement, flow and
flux, rhizomatic systems do not allow for a transgression back to metaphysical nostalgia
for stability or permanence, definition or end.
The presentation of the rhizome as encompassing radical relationality, as well as the
interpenetration of elements, corresponds back to Benjamin’s aforementioned
understanding of the relationality or non-instrumentality of language, and by extension,
the world:
Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication is the
fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this
immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic. At the
same time, the notion of the magic of language points to something else: its
infiniteness. This is conditional on its immediacy. For precisely because nothing
is communicated through language, what is communicated in language cannot be
externally limited or measured, and therefore all language contains its own
incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity (64).
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The interpenetration of elements is important in both Benjamin’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s worldviews. From both perspectives, there is no death as stasis, as final end. In
fact, in neither case is the world modeled on entropic becoming.
1.4 Derrida and the “Death of the Signified”:
In continuing to trace the evolution of the philosophy of language from structuralism to
the postmodern, one cannot fail to visit the contributions of Jacques Derrida. To begin
with, his work is steeped in a view of language which embraces the perspective of
relationality between form and function found previously in Nietzsche, Benjamin, as well
as Deleuze and Guattari. This infinite relationality, the transgression of instrumental
language, is what Derrida has come to refer to as the absence of the “transcendental
signified.” His text, Signature Event Context, begins by re-examining the possibility of
meaning in light of a non-instrumental language:
I have been constrained to predetermined communication as a vehicle, a means of
transport or transitional medium of a meaning, and moreover a unified meaning. If
communication possessed several meanings and if this plurality should prove to
be irreducible, it would not be justifiable to define communication a priori as the
transmission of a meaning. The meaning or contents of the semantic message
would thus be transmitted, communicated, by different means, by more powerful
technical mediations, over a far greater distance, but still within a medium that
remains fundamentally continuous and self-identical, a homogenous element
through which the unity and wholeness of meaning would not be affected in its
essence (1-2).
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We again find the instrumental or utilitarian view of language as suspect. Derrida is
pointing to the limitations of traditional signifier/signified, medium/message,
sender/receiver paradigms under which we erroneously function. Additionally, he is
critical of the notion of a singular or univocal meaning, in which a comprehensive
understanding or interpretation would be possible. In fact, Derrida sees a type of violence
inherent to instrumental communication. An embrace of instrumental language requires
the construction of a “concept” that reduces to a generality what is uniquely singular. The
concept in this case results from a process of violent pacification which does not allow
for pluralism or alterity.
1.5 Kafka: Language and Communication
From these aforementioned critical perspectives, the chapters that follow will seek to
explore the impact of conceiving the writing of Franz Kafka in light of the notion of
“Pure Mediality.” This will be accomplished via an a-teleological approach that calls
upon Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida among others. My approach implies an
attempt on the part of Kafka to create a literature that does not function solely as a vehicle
for the communication of conceptual meaning, but as MacLuhan noted in the early
1960’s, paradoxically involves the message as well: “Apropos ‘the medium is the
message’ I now point out that the medium is not the figure but the ground, not the motor
car but the web of intersecting highways…in all media the user is the content, and the
effects come before the invention” (Understanding Media 276). This study seeks to
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present the medium of Kafka’s literature as radically immanent onto itself, not simply, a
bridge leading the reader towards a meaning that lies elsewhere.
My reading, in other words, presents Kafka as profoundly skeptical of instrumental
language, very much influenced in this regard by the Vienna School language critics of
the turn of the century. Kafka recognized the inherent violence of any conceptual
understanding of language, based as it is on cutting the chiasmic interlacing of its
signifiers by way of decision or judgment, and therefore conceives literature, or more
precisely, literary/poetic language, as capable of an “un-judging” that deconstructs any
previously “judged” version of the real. His literary work thus constitutes an embrace of
infinite relation, suspension of judgment and radical undecidabilty. This perspective is
argued by Ronell in her text Stupidity:
…Kafka’s works reduce not only the image and putative function of the
poet-author but of writing as well. Kafka replaces the literary text with
newspapers, legal documents, letters, the gesang produced by the
humming sounds of a telephone and even, human flesh. In addition to
metamorphosing or technologizing modern literature’s portrait of the artist
and his work, Kafka’s oeuvre abandons such metaphysical comforts as a
transcendental signified on the one hand and the fiction of ultimate,
substantialized meaning or absolute presence on the other (188).
In my reading, I will focus on Kafka’s shorter works, namely “The Judgment,” “The
Metamorphosis,” “A Country Doctor,” “Josephine the Singer or The Mouse-Folk” as
well as selected passages from the Diaries and his novel The Trial. I will examine what
may be referred to as the primary hindrance of communication − the presupposition that
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communication is a teleologically oriented enterprise whose very ground lies in clarity.
Conversely, I will argue that the precedent for communication is something far closer to
what we commonly view as disturbance. Clarity is therefore not a ground, with the
occurrence of disturbance acting as momentary lapse in the communicative process.
Rather, what one perceives as disturbances from time to time are periodic reminders that
the primal state of communication is one which is always in flux. It is never grounded in
any sense of permanence or stability. Kafka recognized this, and perhaps offered his
writing as a means to circumvent traditional understandings of medium, message and
meaning.
In his Blue Octavo Notebooks, Kafka speaks to a perspective on language and
communication that is inherently allusive as opposed to one which is solely instrumental:
“For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but
never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the
phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations” (92). It is only
through this particular type of literary language, of which Kafka partook, that one can
become cognizant of this notion of Pure Mediality - as it involves positioning oneself
within the undecidables of metaphor and allusion.
The implications of this view will be explored with a particular emphasis placed upon the
dynamics of judgment and understanding. As Blanchot writes, “Our manner of excluding
(judging) is at work precisely at the moment we are priding ourselves on our gift of
universal comprehension” (The Work of Fire 205). Correspondingly, Derrida believes
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that the notion of understanding results from a traumatic process of violent tearing and
laceration which forces meaning to appear. Both critique the problematic conception of
instrumental language which compels definitive intelligibility and meaning. Kafka
inherently allows for the possibilities of the traumatic in his writing. It is precisely this
allowance for the “horrors” of infinite play and the radically undecidable that constitutes
what Kafka saw as the necessary disruption – an opening or loosening of the rigidity of
conceptual language. As Kafka puts it metaphorically in a diary entry: “Books must be
the axe for the frozen sea inside us” (Diaries, 279).
Given what I have stated, it would be inappropriate to use the following interpretive
perspective: “Instead of…examining the meaning and function of the story’s enigmatic
quality, critics have tended to want a kind of translation into a more normal code. This
would imply that Kafka’s meaning is not radically different from anyone else’s but that it
is expressed in a kind of private code; one goes to the diaries and letters to get the code,
uses it to decode the works, and is then left with a meaning which is now independent of
Kafka’s style of writing” (Ellis, 74).
What I argue as my thesis is a reading of Kafka’s writing that would attempt a solution of
the text’s problems from within, by an investigation of its structure. I would add that
Kafka himself suggests such a reading in letters to Felice Bauer to whom he was engaged
at the time. Speaking of the short story “Das Urteil” he says that it “is a bit wild and
meaningless,” but that it has an “inner truth.” That is to say that my reading will present
Kafka’s writing as radically immanent – whose truth is not some transcendental referent,
but an aspect of the immanence that constitutes Kafka’s writing, that is, the infinite
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interconnectedness of the world, a text that has “no outside” (Limited Inc., 17) as Jacques
Derrida puts it.
Put differently, my thesis is that Kafka’s writing follows the logic of dreams Freud
introduces in his The Interpretation of Dreams. It is a logic that ignores the Principle of
Non-contradiction or the Excluded Middle. On the contrary, Freud’s Unconscious and its
manifestation in dreams constitute the “middle,” in the sense of Pure Mediality, where
there is no “either-or,” but only a (chiasmic) “and” whereby “[e]ach train of thought is
almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart, linked with it by
antithetical association” (352).
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“Who could still be captivated by the thousand years of chatter about the
meaning of good and evil when it turns out that they are not constants at all but
functional values…”
-Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
“One could say that when at the moment I am writing, the receiver may be absent from
my field of present perception. But is not this absence merely a distant presence, one
which is delayed or which, in one form or another, is idealized in its representation?
This does not seem to be the case, or at least this distance, divergence, delay, this
diferral [difference] must be capable of being carried to a certain absoluteness of
absence if the structure of writing, assuming that writing exists, is to constitute itself.”
Moving Towards Pure Mediality
2.1 Deconstructing the Teleological Perspective
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-Derrida, Dissemination
In this chapter, I will explore some of the philosophical moves that are related to what I
claim in my thesis constitutes Kafka’s writing, namely, a text of pure immanence and a
kind of self-referentiality. This will involve a look at selected figures that prepare the
way towards Pure Mediality. In this section, I will also briefly summarize what is
involved in the teleological approach to the world.
Within traditional metaphysics, human life is commonly seen as a sequence of events,
radically contingent, leading toward an end. Human beings maintain the idea that the
sum total of life events inevitably leads towards a sense of stable presence, permanence
or being. Particular actions are not seen in their unique singularity, but rather as part of a

series of events, which are somehow to be accumulated or amassed. In this way human
actions are given particular legitimacy because they are seen as part of some grander
scheme, pieces in the temporal puzzle which in their finality will bring about being or
permanence in a realm beyond the physical, i.e., the finite, temporal, impermanent world.
With this assumption of a realm beyond the physical, that is, of a metaphysical one, as
Aristotle defined it, comes the idea that eventually some fixed, immutable meaning or
truth will be discovered. This meaning or definitively revealed truth(s) will be revealed
not as ephemeral or transitory in character, but rather as absolute and unchanging. This
end, the elucidation of purpose, is viewed as the achievement of an ultimate goal.
Generally referred to as the teleological perspective, this metaphysical paradigm aimed at
the discovery of permanence behind a world of change and time, of a resting-place where
becoming terminated in being, absence resolved into presence, and a stability that
becomes equated with the very notion of the real.
It is such figures as Nietzsche and Benjamin that begin, during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, to radically re-envision this teleology. Later in the twentieth
century, this re-conception is continued by Derrida. Within the writing of all three
thinkers, certain common themes are pervasive; firstly that a worldview which relies
upon oppositional thinking needs to be unmasked as façade, as constructed fiction.
Secondly, rather than viewing human actions as strictly goal-oriented or teleological, we
need to consider the way in which they functionally relate to one another. Finally, that
language does not serve as an intermediary device which should be seen as a means to an
20

end in the communicative process. Rather, our perspective on language must move from
a tool which signifies something outside of itself, towards an infinite chain of signifiers
that point only to themselves. This chapter will examine the movement away from a
teleological view of the world and its inherent opposing structures toward the evolution
of what has been referred to as the Pure Mediality of which Kafka’s writing partakes.
2.2 Nietzsche and Binary Opposition:
It is in the work of Nietzsche that we are provided with an entryway into the nineteenth
century’s discontent with teleology. In his declaration of the “death of god” in The Gay
Science (108) Nietzsche accomplishes a deconstruction of the current human system of
values, a metaphysical system in the sense of its hierarchization of opposites. Nietzsche
found humanity to be engaged in a valuation process which favored being over
becoming, foundation over surface, good over evil and end over process. In light of this,
his agenda becomes clear right away:
To demonstrate the absolute homogeneity of all events and the application of
moral distinctions as conditioned by perspective; to demonstrate how everything
praised as moral is identical in essence with everything immoral and was made
possible as in every development of morality with immoral means and for
immoral ends-; how, on the other hand, everything decried as immoral is
considered, higher and more essential... (Will To Power 155).
This desire to unmask as fiction the teleological world view is apparent in The Will To
Power where he states: “There exists neither ‘spirit’, nor ‘reason’ nor ‘thinking’, nor
‘consciousness’, nor ‘soul’, nor ‘will’, nor ‘truth’: all are fictions that are of no use”
21

(480). Each of these concepts is constructed within the very metaphysical framework
that Nietzsche aims to deconstruct. All human attempts to group unique phenomena
under the umbrella of the similar become false impositions with no correspondence to the
“really real.” Nietzsche points to, and criticizes the human tendency to separate and
conceptualize notions such as good and evil, worthy and unworthy, truth and untruth. He
comments on these artificial separations, “There are no opposites, only from logic (a
human construct) do we derive the concept of opposites and falsely transfer it to things”
(298). If human beings erroneously create polarities through a distorted logic, and
Nietzsche removes the legitimacy of this logic by finding it to be fiction, then those
created polarities no longer exist as valid for human use in anything but a utilitarian
fashion. It would therefore seem that ultimate meaning, stable being, permanence, etc.
are also fictions created by human beings to serve as foundational pillars for this
metaphysical, teleological worldview. Ulfers addresses this as follows:
First he calls it fictional, it's an interpretation, secondly, where other philosophers
have spoken of the most peaceable values that we have received from a higher
sphere, he call it actually a violence. It is with this second move, regarding the
loss of a moral world that associates good with identity as the self-sameness of
being, that is accomplished with violence perpetrated on beings that as alterities
are intrinsically open to otherness, that Nietzsche de-masks the morality of good
and evil as unethical…. (EGS Transcripts)
The Nietszchean deconstruction of opposition, it is not strictly a destructive destruction,
but also a creative destruction, one which allows for the alterity of being. He is speaking
of a deconstructive process which recognizes radical singularity and infinite
22

interpretation, one that allows for what Levinas will later refer to as the, “other as other 5 .”
Any violence to otherness results out of this process of interpretation or conceptualization
in which meaning is violently forced out of that which is irreducibly distinct.
The problem that Nietzsche notes in terms of the creation of constructs lies in the human
process of translation and interpretation. According to him, unique and dissimilar
phenomena are categorized as selfsame via human interpretation. Human beings fail to
recognize that their perceptions of the "actual world" are fictitious, because they fail to
recognize their primary error: the mistaken translation of distinct phenomena into the
categorical.
2.3 Benjamin and the “Un-mittelbar-keit” of Language:
While the movement away from binary thinking - and a view of instrumental language
which is suspect- also receives significant attention from Benjamin, who writes
extensively on Kafka. We see Benjamin’s initial approach to an analysis of linguistics
and communications emerge in a June 1916 correspondence with Martin Buber. In this
letter he states:
I can understand writing as such as poetic, prophetic, objective in terms of its
effect, but in any case only as magical, that is as unmediated. Every salutary
effect, indeed every effect not inherently devastating, that any writing may have
resides in its mystery. In however many forms language may prove to be
5 Levinas’ text Otherwise than Being contains an extensive discussion of the “alterity of
being” which are discussed further in my “Concluding Remarks.”
23

effective, it will not be so through the transmission of content but rather through
the purest disclosure of its dignity and its nature…(Correspondence 80).
Benjamin regards language as having both a “magical” quality to it. He is especially
concerned here with what is traditionally referred to as the content of language as well as
its utility value. In order to grasp the magical perspective of which Benjamin speaks, we
must first remind ourselves of the structruralist paradigm which he is rebelling against:
the point of view which accepts language as the means through which content is
transmitted from a sender to a recipient. To view language in this way involves
conceiving of signifiers as things which express and refer to things outside of themselves.
In speaking of the utility value of signifiers, I am referring to the words/signs which
supposedly serve as bridges leading towards definitive meaning. It would be ridiculous to
imply that language does not function in a useful way, serving practical purposes for
human beings. We use language as our primary method of communication. Our contact
and experience of the world is at all times mediated in and through some sort of
language. However, we must also be cognizant of the fact that simply because we are
compelled to use it, does not mean that language is any less of a fictitious construct.
Language therefore must be analyzed in a new light, one which is open to an intrinsically
relational conception.
Benjamin contrasts the utilitarian view of language by referring to what he calls the “Un-
mittelbar-keit” of language. As I have mentioned, this is a conception of language and
communication that transgresses any instrumental view, deconstructing the binary
oppositional thinking inherent to the classical signified/signifier relationship. In referring
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to this un-mittel-bar-keit of language, Benjamin’s use of the German term “mittel 6 ” is of
particular importance because of the term’s possible implications. The double-meaning or
interpretation of “mittel” as both “medium” or “means” and “ends” at the same time is
used by Benjamin to describe the qualities of language he believed to be largely ignored;
its immediacy and infinite referentiality. In his correspondences, essays and even within
his doctoral dissertation, Benjamin illustrates a theory of language and communication
which is non-exclusionary, and a perspective on language which functions
simultaneously as both medium and message. His linguistic perspective actually
anticipates McCluhan’s “the medium is the message” thinking by some fifty years.
What Benjamin is speaking of is language which itself is not mediated by anything
outside, one that does not see signs as simply representational tools which serve in a
functional role. He goes on to say, “Hence, it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois
view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that the
sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention. Language never
gives mere signs” (“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” 69). Language
therefore does not serve the purpose of communicative tool, but instead all linguistic
signifiers are infinitely relational, referential functions of one another. Benjamin’s essay
is one of the first places we see him begin his departure from a model of language, and by
extension of the world, in which language does not function as a means or medium
leading towards a meaning (the signified) that would exist prior to language (the
signifier). He continues:
25

All communication of the contents of the mind is language, communication in
words being only a particular case of human language and of the justice, poetry,
or whatever underlying it or founded on it….What does language communicate?
It communicates the mental being corresponding to it. It is fundamental that this
mental being communicates itself in language and not through language.
Languages, therefore, have no speaker, if this means someone who communicates
through these languages” (62-63).
The real departure takes place via the prepositions “in” and “through” of his statement.
Typically, in would imply content inherent to signs while through would refer to the way
in which those linguistic signs communicate. For Benjamin, all communication is
communication of mental being which is always already in. There is therefore nothing
which language communicates through. The traditional conception of language as
containing content is thus flawed according to him, as language itself is the content. He
states: “The answer to the question “What does language communicate?’ is therefore ‘all
language communicates itself” (63). With regard to this subject of the content of
language, he continues, “There is no such thing as a content of language; as
communication, language communicates a mental entity-something communicable per
se” (66).
Perhaps the most fundamental of Benjamin’s assertions on the nature of language and
mediation is the temporal framework in which it exists. To discuss how language
communicates a message, or to imply that media occurs over a distance would be to miss
his most significant postures; that inherently language always holds the attribute of
absolute immediacy, and thus it appears magical. Similarly, Benjamin speaks of the
“frontiers” of language as being not limited, but rather limitless, “For precisely because
26

nothing is communicated through language, what is communicated in language cannot be
externally limited or measured, and therefore all language contains its own
incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity. Its linguistic being, not its verbal
contents, define its frontier (64). It is this border-less, wandering de-territorialized
language, which is without center or transcendental signified that he depicts. Rather than
be confined to a view of language which focuses upon fictionally constructed borders,
boundaries and restrictions, he offers a perspective in which language is “purified” - the
totality of all mental being:
So in name culminate both the intensive totality of language, as the absolutely
communicable mental entity, and the extensive totality of language, as the
universally communicating (naming) entity” (But because the mental being of
man is language itself, he cannot communicate himself by it, but only in it. The
quintessence of this intensive totality of language as the mental being of man is
the name. (65).
From an ontological perspective there is a certain equivocation. That is, Benjamin’s
approach identifies mental being and linguistic being as inherently the same. He states,
“If mental being is identical with linguistic being, then a thing, by virtue of its mental
being , is a medium of communication, and what is communicated in it is-in accordance
with its mediating relationship-precisely this medium (language) itself. Language is thus
the mental being of things” (66). The content or substance which is communicated
through the medium language is therefore self-same for him. By its very nature, it does
not point to an outside, but to the interpenetration and co-mingling of signifiers, never
resulting in a transcendental signified. Sokel also speaks of linguistic being as pure:
“These considerations therefore leave us a purified concept of language, even though it
27

may still be an imperfect one. The language of an entity is the medium in which its
mental being is communicated. The uninterrupted flow of this communication runs
through the whole of nature, from the lowest forms of existence to man…” (74).
Benjamin’s perspective at times, hints at an almost spiritual component to language. This
conclusion needs to be approached cautiously. By looking at language as something
which communicates the entirety of mental being, one can to easily misinterpret he
himself to be engaged in preferencing - if one understands him to mean that language is
spiritual in a metaphysical sense. My contention is that this is not the type of pure
language of which he was speaking. His distaste for oppositional thinking and antithesis
would preclude such an approach. To break down language and describe it within a
structure of opposition would undermine his perspective, and more importantly, working
with this view would be a gross misunderstanding of his philosophy of language. Rather,
when Benjamin speaks of the mental being of language, he is referring to the attributes of
it which are infinitely functional, which can not be heirarchized, and as a result, allow
language to maintain a suspended, even fluid-like quality. It is this suspended or
infinitely deferred quality that characterizes language as pure. For him, a language which
is pure should not be seen in contrast to one which is impure, but one that transcends this
antithetical thinking and hovers in the always-already undefined space between presence
and absence, being and non-being.
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2.4 Derrida and Haunted Language:
In a similar fashion, Derrida argues that communication within a new paradigm, one in
which the deconstruction of opposition has occurred, involves not singularity, but
minimally a double-ness. He remarks, “…it must by means of a double gesture, a double
science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a
general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruction would
provide itself the means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions it criticizes
(Margins of Philosophy 329). Derrida embraces an approach which recognizes the
reductionism embodied in either/or thinking in favor of a perspective which would be
open to the both/and and neither/nor. This project takes the classical search for the
transcendental signified 7 , teleology and univocity, and “replaces” it with multiplicity,
provisional meaning and differance 8 .
Derrida says of polarizing opposition that: “…The joyous affirmation of the play of the
world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without
fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This
affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than a loss of the center” (Writing
7 The "transcendental signified" is a signified which transcends all signifiers, and is a
meaning which transcends all signs. It is also a signified concept or thought which
transcends any single signifier, but which is implied by all determinations of meaning.
8 Derrida uses the term "differance" to describe the origin of presence and absence.
Differance is indefinable, and cannot be explained by the "metaphysics of presence." In
French, the verb "différer" means both "to defer" and "to differ." Thus, differance may
refer not only to the state or quality of being deferred, but to the state or quality of being
different.
29

and Difference 292). According to this perspective, playfulness, not absolute definition,
is the integral part of an interpretative process. A processual world, one who’s sole
constant is flux, is a-centered not de-centered. One might say that he is reverting back to
nostalgia for a lost metaphysical system. However, one may only speak of it as lost only
if it was at some time there to begin with. As Derrida points out, it is not the established
center which is being torn apart; it is our originally erroneous belief that there was a
center. The simpler truth is that the entire perspective which takes as given a world
which is centered is erroneous from the outset.
This spirit-like nature of language which floats incessantly between presence and absence
is also taken up by Derrida. In his interpretation of this phenomenon, Derrida speaks of
the ghostly elements of language and writing as they are related to what he refers to as
haunting. He says, “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to
introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept- of every concept, beginning
with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.
Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism” (Specters of Marx 8).
Derrida is purposefully playful with his use of the neologism hauntology which in French
has an identical pronunciation to ontology. Whereas ontology studies being or existence
and their basic categories and relationships, to determine what entities and what types of
entities may exist, hauntology refers to the paradoxical state of the specter, which is
neither being nor non-being. He continues:
[T]he specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain
phenomenal and carnal form of spirit. It becomes, rather, some thing that remains
30

difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh
and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which
disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the
return of the specter....One does not know whether it is living or if it is dead. (6)
He is speaking here of the notion of the double, of that which resides in the realm of the
neither/nor and both/and. The ghostly for him is that which remains perpetually
indeterminate and involves neither total presence nor total absence. It is this
unclassifiable nature which makes haunted language horror inspiring. A strictly utilitarian
and thus metaphysical understanding of language constitutes an avoidance of spectrality,
since to figure the ghost in terms of fact or fiction, real or not-real, is to attribute to it a
foundational ground, either a positive or negative facticity that the notion of ghostliness
continually eludes. It is this elusiveness that must not be ignored.
Ghosts are neither dead nor alive, neither corporeal objects nor stern absences. As such,
they stand in defiance of the binary oppositions of presence and absence, body and spirit,
past and present, life and death. For deconstruction, these terms cannot stand in clear,
independent opposition to one another, as each can be shown to possess an element or
trace of the term that it is meant to oppose. In the figure of the ghost, we see that past and
present cannot be neatly separated from one another, as any idea of the present is always
constituted through the difference and deferral of the past, as well as anticipations of the
future.
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2.5 Kafka and the Language of Infinite Relation:
Let me summarize the context of immanence and absence of binary logic established by
Nietzsche, Benjamin and Derrida in which my reading of Kafka will take place. Both
Benjamin’s and Derrida’s linguistic arguments embrace the Nietzschean deconstruction
of binary opposition, and like Nietzsche, bring forth a major paradigm shift. This shift
toward an always-already mediated linguistic perspective compels us to ask; what are the
dynamics of a language which communicates only itself? Is there a human disconnect
which occurs with a language existing as both content and medium? What are the
implications of such a view on theories of literary communication in general, and for our
specific purposes, on the literature of Kafka? How does Kafka operate within a language
of infinite relationality? And, how will he simultaneously use and usurp the medium of
literature via his writing?
Kafka’s writing implicitly recognizes and allows for multiplicity to exist within the very
world which has accommodated itself to antithesis. A case in point would be any
conception of language based on “judgment” – signifier versus signified – that is derived
from the violent operation of de-cision on prior undecidability. Kafka’s suspicions
regarding oppositional structures emerge early on. He comments upon an aversion to
them in his Diaries, “My repugnance for [them] is certain…They make for thoroughness,
fullness, completeness, but only like a figure on the ‘wheel of life’ [a toy with a revolving
wheel]; we have chased our little idea around the circle. They [antithesis] are as
undifferentiated as they are different” (157). As a result of this aversion, Kafka’s writing
32

issues from a radical skepticism/criticism vis a vis language as a falsifying construction,
the insight into which calls for deconstruction. “The assumption common to Kafka’s
view of language is the demand that truthful speech be the direct communication of
being. It is this view which Derrida has exposed as ‘metaphysical nostalgia’ for the
impossible presence of the referent- reality or being- in the signifying system that is
language” (Sokel, 176). Thus any attempt at interpretation originates from the very same
“unstable” nucleus born of deconstruction. In the final analysis, should we dare to speak
of one, Kafka’s literary project seeks to undermine language at the very level at which it
operates.
As I now move on to a close reading and more systematic discussion of Kafka’s literary
works in the chapters that follow, these perspectives of Nietzsche, Benjamin and Derrida
will be used a critical points of reference with regard to judgment, metamorphosis,
suspension, allusion and wounding. While my reading of Kafka’s writing will not occur
solely through the filter of these thinkers, they will nonetheless serve as pillars who have
set the stage with a process-oriented thinking that is essential to any serious interaction
with the texts.
33

“To refrain from judgment is the ‘judgment’, the yes of the refrain. Reflection on the
necessity and impossibility of judgment shows the extent to which art and artifice are
wedded together…”
34
-Pearson, Viroid Life
“The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary
spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for
nothing has yet happened”
- Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks
Un-judging Judgment: Undecidability and Suspension in “The Judgment”
3.1 The Nature of Judgment:
The legal process and the nature of law are themes of which Kafka was consumed. More
often than not, his education in the law and subsequent career in the area of workers
compensation and industrial insurance claims 9 are cited as contributing to this motif
which pervades his writing. There is no shortage of secondary analysis of his literature to
dispel this assertion, especially in the initial half-century following his death 10 . Much of
this literary criticism concerning Kafka and the law tends to deal with texts such as The
Trial and “The Judgment” from a perspective that invariably portrays judgment as
malevolent and alienating process. The texts are interpreted to be an expression of the
9 Kafka worked from 1907-1923, first at an administrative position in a Prague branch of
an Italian insurance company (Assicurazioni Generali) and then at the Workmen's
Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia.
10 For a discussion of Kafka from this perspective, see the literary criticism of Politzer,
Padovano or Huber.

futile plight of the individual pitted against authoritarian, bureaucratic and ultimately
malicious legal machinery intent upon tortuously withholding essential answers to the
most fundamental of human questions. Sokel remarks that Kafka “…conveys the
bewilderment, helplessness and terror of the human self suddenly confronted with a
world that utterly transcends any hope for comprehensibility, familiarity and protection”
(121).
Existentialist criticism in particular, depicts Kafka’s protagonists as caught within the
wheels of an unjust, unethical and corrupt legal framework which is unwilling to give
audience to their epistemological pursuits. The search for ultimate justice or
understanding bears no fruit, as the law thwarts the individual’s attempts at arriving at an
explanation. Besides refusing “access” to decision, many interpretations of Kafka would
lead us to believe that forces such as the law indicts, convicts and punishes without
rationale or justification. Allowing the protagonists knowledge, recognition or
comprehension of their transgressions is not a privilege which is granted, as it is in the
nature of the law to operate and condemn in secret according to rules of which we remain
unaware.
Kafka’s first story, “The Judgment” has been widely interpreted as a semi-
autobiographical tale that deals with such issues as the author’s inability to commit to
marriage and his difficult and often contentious relationship with his father 11 .
Psychoanalytic and Existentialist criticism contend that the condemnation of the father, as
11 See “Letter to my Father” (1919)
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well as the subsequent self-execution of that sentence by the son, can be traced back to
Kafka’s preoccupation with the law and culpability. Specifically Kafka is said to have
used the law in works such as this as an overarching metaphor to explore the insecurity,
uncertainty, guilt and anxiety of post-Nietzschean world. Similarly, The Trial’s Joseph K.
is often seen as the victim of an authoritarian bureaucracy which imposes upon the
freedom of the individual and his ability to function in the world. As a result, Joseph K.’s
time is spent obsessively attempting to comprehend and extricate himself from the
arresting judgments of a totalitarian conspiracy.
While these have been extremely popular critical positions on Kafka’s work, I will not, as
I stated earlier, espouse them here. Rather I will focus on Kafka’s understanding of
language and literature, and how he communicates a radical “undecidability” with regard
to the idea of judgment. This argument derives first and foremost from the fact that Kafka
has a specific and perhaps peculiar understanding of the relationship between literature
and the self. Whereas the author of a text may view himself to be the channeling medium
or creative force that gives birth to narrative, character and theme, Kafka’s understanding
moves far beyond this. He speaks literally and figuratively of himself and literature as
inseparable, one in the same in his Diaries, “I do not have literary interests; rather I am
made out of literature, I am nothing and cannot be anything else” (428).
Literature is not simply an art form, artistic medium or means of communication but
rather Kafka identifies it with the entirety of self. He continues, “My whole being is
directed toward literature; I have followed this direction unswervingly…, and the
36

moment I abandon it I cease to live. Everything I am. And am not, is a result…It is the
earthly reflection of a higher necessity” (Letters to Felice, 93). Kafka’s equation of
literature and being demands an approach to his work which does not seek only to
explicate characters and themes, but rather, one which takes into account how his
equation is intrinsically tied to a deconstructive paradigm shift- and a new perspective on
language and communication. This in turn, compels a deconstructive reading of his texts.
That being said, my reading of “The Judgment” approaches it from an a-metaphysical or
a-teleological perspective, that is, within the immanence of the world and language that
was alluded to in the previous chapter. Within this world, language serves not as a means
toward some fixed end, but as infinitely relational- thereby rupturing the comfort of any
metaphysical framework.
3.2 Undecidability in the Ancient Greek Tradition:
The notion of suspension of judgment or undecidability, as Derrida puts it, with regard to
oppositional logic is not novel by any means. In their efforts to devise a concise theory
of logic, and later mathematics, the "Laws of Thought" were posited by the ancient
Greeks. One such law - that of the excluded middle, states that every proposition must
either be true or false. It is here, in the formalization of the either/or framework, that we
see the origins of opposition begin to serve as the basis of formal logic. This framework
clearly does not allow for an intermingling of substance, ontological indeterminacy, or
the flux of process thinking. Aristotle would later write that when this "excluded middle"
37

is approached, the issue resolves into ambiguity in the mind of the beholder, not in the
fact itself: He speaks of tertium non datum 12 as follows:
...it is impossible, then, that 'being a man' should mean precisely 'not being a man',
if 'man' not only signifies something about one subject but also has one
significance...And it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing,
except in virtue of an ambiguity, just as if one whom we call 'man', and others
were to call 'not-man'; but the point in question is not this, whether the same thing
can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can be in fact"
(Metaphysics, 525).
Heraclitus proposed that a thing could be simultaneously true and not true. His classic
example of this - our inability to step into the same river twice- as perpetual movement
implies changes, has secured Heraclitus’ place as one of the first philosophers of process
in the western historical tradition. Plato eventually lays the foundation for what would
become fuzzy logic, indicating that there is a third region (beyond true and false) where
these opposites "tumble about" (Republic 97). While countless objections continue
throughout the history of philosophy, the either/or framework remains the dominant
perspective based upon its useful functionality.
Over two millennia later, Kafka is dealing with the same fundamental metaphysical and
ontological questions: How can one operate within a both/and paradigm considering that
all systems of communication are built upon the utilitarian structure of the either/or? How
does the artist create in an arena dominated by this type of thinking? I contend that
Kafka’s writing constitutes an embrace of the excluded middle, recognizing that
12 "the third is not given"
38

oppositional thinking has limits which must be overcome to express the human condition
as encompassing flux, indeterminacy, incessant motion and change.
Generally speaking, judgment revolves around achieving determination, closure and
singular or univocal meaning. By accommodating ourselves to function within a
metaphysical paradigm, human beings must thereby partake in a “forgetting”, which
serves us in a utilitarian way to avoid a fall into the abyss of cognitive dissonance.
Kafka’s writing conversely is in no way oriented or situated toward any type of
prescriptive definition, but something quite different. Rather, his literature takes part in
an active “undoing of the practice of forgetfulness” (Ulfers, NYU Lecture Notes, 2002).
For Kafka, writing serves an essential human need, acting as a means of “un-judging,”
and thereby deconstructing, the previously “judged” version of the real toward its
originary “un-judged” status.
3.3 A Literature of Re-Reading:
In his essay “Kafka and the Absurd”, Albert Camus writes, “The whole art of Kafka
consists in forcing the reader to reread. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggests
explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem
justified, require that the story be reread from another point of view. Sometimes there is
a double possibility of interpretation, whence appears the necessity of two readings. This
is what the author wanted” (93). It is this possibility and need for a multiplicity of
readings that Camus points to which are necessary strategies in confronting Kafka’s texts.
39

Any attempt to reduce a text like “The Judgment” to a narrative which contains meaning
outside is bound to fail because implicit in the way Kafka conceived of literature
necessitates a reading which does not seek resolution, but constantly participates in
avoiding it. By operating within an allusive language, Kafka’s texts thereby elude any
final interpretation.
Camus further asserts that Kafka was writing what he refers to as an “absurdist”
literature. Camus’ use of the term “absurd” in this context is not meant to be understood
as non-sensical- as opposed to rational. Kafka’s “absurdity” lies in the fact that his work
encompasses both presence and absence, both an excess and lack which thereby forces
the reader to indefinitely defer univocal understanding. This type of writing, which
transcends the constraints of metaphysical opposition falls into the realm of the absurd.
Camus continues:
These perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the
individual and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the
logical, are found throughout his work and give it both its resonance and meaning.
These are the paradoxes that must be enumerated, the contradictions that must be
strengthened in order to understand the absurd work (94).
This oscillation is achieved through the radical re-envisioning of the possibilities
of language. Thus, meaning within this conception is not something which can be
derived from a thinking which occurs in terms of polar opposition. Rather it is
oscillation and flux which provide the any possibility for a momentary glimpse at
meaning.
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To begin with, Kafka speaks of two types of language, one characterized by its
communicative or instrumental value, and a second which might be called
allusive, poetic, metaphoric or most appropriately “literary.” Instrumental
language is utilitarian, a language which Kafka says speaks in terms of “property
and its relations” (Diaries, 224). For Kafka, this is a language of grasping and
conceptualization - one which attempts to possess. Through the use of this
language, we describe and define- and by doing so- intrinsically limit. Critchley
argues that this conceptual language is the language of philosophical thinking,
and one which has inherent ethical problems: “To think philosophically is to
comprehend- comprendre, comprehendre, begreifen, to include, to seize, to grasp-
and master the other, thereby reducing its alterity” (29). The question then arises:
Is there something lost in the process of conceptualization that by its very nature
is exclusionary and violent?
3.4 Allusion: Hinting at Truth:
The second type of language, the language of Kafka’s literature, is one which
partakes only in hinting or alluding to any sense of meaning or understanding.
Thus, this poetic or literary language calls for interminable interpretation, and by
extension, infinite suspension of judgment. Grasping for Kafka is both monstrous
and logocentric and as a result, the need to subvert this informs his writing, and
requires of us a new type of reading. His writing compels us to read
hermeneutically, never achieving absolute definition, as the result of such a claim
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would be the end of hermeneutics and violence on to language. A hermeneutic
reading by its very nature does not encourage a linear approach, but rather
precludes linearity by rupturing this movement and thereby pointing to the limits
of logocentrism. These deviations in discourse are pivotal components of the
hermeneutic process clearly observed by Barthes:
The hermeneutic code performs an opposite action: it must set up delays
(obstacles, stoppages, deviations) in the flow of the discourse…it opposes the
ineluctable advance of language with an organized set of stoppages: between
question and answer there is a whole dilatory area whose emblem might be named
‘reticence,’ the rhetorical figure which interrupts the sentence, suspends it, turns it
aside (S/Z 75).
Barthes ties the hermeneutic code’s “performance” to an alterity which only
comes into being as a function of that process and open-ness. Intrinsic to the
hermeneutic approach is suspension, an avoidance of any fixed notion of
endpoint. Critchley too sees a hermeneutical reading to be non-reductionist and
involved in an understanding of language that philosophy, with its logocentric
tendencies, will not allow for. As a result, he says: “…As the attempt to attain a
point of exteriority to logocentrism, deconstruction may therefore be understood
as the desire to keep open a dimension of alterity which can neither be reduced,
comprehended, nor, strictly speaking, even thought by philosophy” (29). It is
therefore only this type of reading of Kafka’s texts which allows for a sense of
alterity and infinite relationality.
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An allusive language is tied to an ethical perspective because it does not point to
the exact location of truth, but rather proximity. In his analysis of the nature of
literary language Sokel states:
The way for literature is therefore not to try to express the truth, but to hint at it by
showing the undoing of untruth…All that can be uncovered are successive layers
of untruth. With this insight, the spiritualist perspective is approximated. For
such a procedure demonstrates the inadequacy of all languages to express the
truth. All language can show is the ‘retreat’ of untruth. The process of making
untruth evident is the only ‘light’ that language can shed on truth (180-181).
It is not the function of literature to express absolute truth, but rather to “hint” at
it. Kafka’s literature and his literary language operate transcending the
limitations of traditional metaphysical structure, thus resulting in an un-judging of
any previously fixed or defined judgment. His writing does not seek at closure,
but is comfortable meandering in the space of infinite suspension.
Ronell makes the argument that perhaps the ultimate ethical stance with regard to
a demand for absolute decisiveness would necessitate the individual to admit that
he is “stupid before the other” (66). She is not speaking here of stupidity in the
sense of intellectual lack. This interpretation would be a regression into the
antithetical thinking of stupidity versus intelligence. Her discussion of stupidity
is inherently tied to judgment, but more precisely, the suspension of judgment.
Where from a classical perspective, stupidity is ultimately tied to decision, Ronell
argues:
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Stupidity is…that which fails to judge - it indicates a lack of judgment. Where
judgment is mangled, there is a case of stupidity. So how can it be that stupidity,
on the contrary is said to be the passing of a judgment, if only an always
premature judgment? How can it disclose a lack of judgment that nonetheless
judges decisively? Stupidity is however precisely that which fails to judge-it
indicates a lack of judgment. Where judgment is mangled, there is a case of
stupidity. So how can it be that stupidity, on the contrary is said to be the passing
of a judgment, if only an always premature judgment? How can it disclose a lack
of judgment that nonetheless judges decisively? (70)
In the failure to judge, stupidity shows no lack. Stupidity ironically avoids the errors
inherent to premature judgment. Any passing of judgment results in a decisiveness that is
always already premature. In its very absolution and definition, it displays its
problematic ethical qualities. Rather than participating in a refusal to judge - as is the
case with stupidity - judgment forces upon uniqueness that which is self-same. Its refusal
to allow for singularity by forcefully compelling conceptualization via adherence to a
metaphysical paradigm shows the inherently unethical nature of judgment.
3.5 Closure and Violence:
Our tendency and inclination to participate in passing judgment is not all that far removed
from our attraction to psychological closure. Both judgment and closure in this light,
serve to provide a sense of finality and end, and place parameters around the limitless. In
seeking out closure, one attempts to achieve irrevocable conclusiveness. While from a
utilitarian psychological point of view, closure is often considered a desired, even sought-
after state, the way in which it functions is essentially exclusionary. By introducing limits
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and delineating space, we are faced with the constrictions inherent to inside/outside,
either/or thinking. While the creation of parameters may be useful in psychological
ordering, one must realize that the imposition of closure is a created fiction.
3.6 Un-Judging “The Judgment”
I now turn my attention to a close reading of “The Judgment”, a reading which explores
the text as a work engaged in something quite different from what its’ title suggests-
something that could actually be referred to as an active “un-judging.” By this I mean that
the text consciously works on the level of avoiding closure and thereby exposes as
fictitious a teleological/ arch-eological worldview which situates judgment as the
endpoint of that system. “The Judgment” as text is the space in which we initially see
Kafka’s departure from any perspective on conclusiveness or verdict, which is always
tied to the common understanding of law. From this point moving forward, the motif of
suspended judgment and incessantly deferred closure will permeate the entirety of his
literary work.
As Kafka’s first work, and that which is universally considered to be his literary
breakthrough, he comments significantly in his Diaries about his writing process during
“The Judgment”:
This story, "The Judgment," I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22 nd -
23 rd , from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to
pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The
fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing
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over water. . . . How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest
fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. . . . Only in
this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete
opening of the body and the soul. . . . (212-213)
This description of his experience of writing the work does not point in any way toward a
sense of closure, but rather an “opening” or breach required for the birth of the literary
work to take place. It is only through this fissure remaining exposed that literature can
become. By speaking of exposed vulnerability as compulsory to writing, and the
undivided attention necessary in the endeavor, Kafka suggests that the artist partakes in a
“wounding” during the process of creation. Consequently, he refers to the writing of “The
Judgment” as “the breaking open of the wound for the first time” (Diaries, 109).
The very title of the work, “The Judgment” (“Das Urteil”) hints at the suspension of
closure and undecidability in that the word allows underneath its everyday meaning of
“judgment” that of originary distribution. As Ulfers has pointed out, the term “urteil” of
which the English “ordeal” is cognate can be understood to refer to a type of distribution
or allotment (“A Lesson in Reading” , 2). One such example, the friend in St. Petersburg
embodies, “namely a kind of ‘share’ or ‘distribution’ that does not result from urteil as
judgment, and might be interpreted as a kind of ‘endowment’ a ‘lot’ or ‘allotment’ that is
informed by the notion of fortune or chance” (3). It is this “Ur-teil” that Derrida alludes
to when he writes in Limited Inc of, “a space that exceeds a calculable program” and
which constitutes the “experience and experiment of the undecidable” that is prior to any
decision or judgment (116).
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It is my position that the disruption of any form of judgment and binary logic by way of
the “urteil” as ordeal of undecidability leads to a series of narrative disturbances or
ruptures that occur at particular points in Kafka’s text. These ruptures are often read as
instances within the text that disrupt the narrative flow of what appears to otherwise be a
fairly straight-forward short story. I contend that Kafka used these instances in a far more
complex fashion: as reminders to his readers of the problems of a structuralist system that
sees communication as a clear flow between sender and receiver. The ruptures are used
to re-orient a view of the primordial of communication as neither linear nor orderly, but
rather as groundless and always in process. These occurrences are not merely momentary
breakages within the structured forward movement of the narrative, but serve as Kafka’s
vehicle to express an a-metaphysical worldview and an always-interconnected theory of
communication, one of Pure Mediality.
I have chosen to focus on three particular instances of rupture in “The Judgment”
specifically; the fiancé’s comment to Georg’s decision to have become engaged, the
father’s declaration that Georg is without a friend in St. Petersburg, and finally the
sentencing of Georg by the father to “death by drowning” (75). In each of these instances,
the ruptures, “challenge meaning and tempt the reader/teacher to look for answers outside
the text…” (Ulfers, 1) Yet it is not outside of the text that meaning can be located, but
inside, as one can attempt a solution of the texts problems from within by an investigation
of its structure.
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That is to say that the story’s structure explores its own infinite relationality that makes
possible only provisional meanings, a context in which the narrative ruptures function to
expose the presence/absence dichotomy as a fiction. With regard to this, Adorno
comments of Kafka’s work that, “In an art that is constantly obscuring and revoking
itself, every determinate statement counterbalances the general proviso of
indeterminateness” (Notes on Kafka 97). Kafka’s literature in this light, amounts to a
blurring of the lines of revealing, and results in meaning which is always indeterminate.
Thus, what might be referred to as the “true ground” (indeterminacy) appears periodically
to break the “artificiality” of the forward-moving narrative from a proper beginning to a
determinate ending.
Kafka was highly aware of the power of allusive language to circumvent the structure of
opposition. He remarks, “For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can
only be used allusively [as an allusion], but never even approximately in a comparative
way [as a comparison in the manner of an analogy], since, corresponding as it does to the
phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations” (Diaries 40).
Kafka proceeds to operate within an allusive or metaphoric language in “The Judgment”
using narrative ruptures to unmask the tensions between univocal meaning and
undecidability. His characters serve to explore these positions, and their interaction
within the story calls for a re-evaluation of the dynamics of language.
As a character, Kafka’s protagonist Georg is involved in a tireless quest for absolute
certainty. Ulfers refers to him as the “embodiment of a language” that is involved in
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property and its relations, i.e., in its ‘proper’ signified or meaning, compared to a
language that is irreducibly ‘allusive’, and thus a ‘signifier’ that is never ‘proper’ or with
‘property’ (Lecture Notes, 3). In his attempts to force signification, Georg actively
participates in the exclusion of all ambiguity. This dynamic is explored through Georg’s
principal relationships; the figure of the friend, (the symbol of the undecidable) his fiancé
Frieda, (the world of stable being) and his father (the figure of ambiguity).
3.7 Narrative Rupture
The first of the story’s narrative ruptures, and a clear example of Georg’s predilection
toward stable being, occurs with Frieda’s statement concerning the couple’s engagement.
Their conversation begins as a discussion of the peculiar relationship between Georg and
the friend, but evolves into Frieda expressing offense at Georg’s failure to inform the
friend of the couple’s news: “’So he won’t be coming to our wedding,’…‘and yet I have
the right to meet all of your friends” (66). In a scene which seems to shatter the forward-
moving narrative and disturb any realist reading of the story, Frieda, the figure of stable
opposites remarks, “If you have such friends, Georg, you should never have even gotten
engaged” (66). By its nature, engagement implies a movement from the unbounded, non-
committal position of the bachelor towards the definition and role of the future husband.
With the decision to become engaged, there is an intentional movement on Georg’s part
toward the arena of stable opposites, the distinctly categorizable. Through this decision,
Georg establishes a means by which he can be defined within the structures of binary
opposition. As an engaged man, Georg becomes bound to the same world of stable being
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as Frieda. By becoming tied to her in this way and committing to marriage, Georg is
capable of excluding the ambiguity of the both/and dynamic represented by his friend
who is a bachelor.
Therefore Frieda’s statement that he should, “never have even gotten engaged” points to
her horror at his association with the “friend”, who is emblematic of the monstrous, the
indeterminate and the undefined. “From the stand-point of stable opposites, of which she
is a figure, and to which Georg has bound himself, a relationship with the friend is
anathema because as ambiguity incarnate he is the monster that threatens the stable
difference represented by the couple” (Ulfers, 5). There is no direct response by Georg to
what in a realist reading is a non-sequiter other than his remark, “Well we both have that
cross to bear, but now I wouldn’t have it any other way” (66). In this comment, Georg re-
affirms that he was compelled to become engaged - as he can not imagine operating in
the indeterminate space that the friend represents. He can not live in any “other way”
(67). In becoming engaged, Georg flees the world of becoming, opting for the
comfortable space of stable being and definition. This rupture then, functions within the
narrative structure of the text to disrupt that world of stable opposition, to provide a
glimpse of the world in process, the world of the friend which Georg tirelessly attempts
to conceptualize.
A second significant narrative rupture occurs in Georg’s conversation with his father
about the friend in St. Petersburg. In recounting his composition of a letter to the friend,
Georg’s father comments somewhat strangely, “You have no friend in St. Petersburg.
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You've always been one for pulling people's legs and you haven't hesitated even when it
comes to me. How could you have a friend there, of all places! I can't believe it" (70).
This is another instance in which Kafka departs from the story’s forward moving
narrative flow in order to disrupt the reader’s comfort in the stability of being, and to
present the world in a processual state.
The friend serves as an embodiment of figurative or metaphorical language, the both/and,
which interrupts the laws that rest upon what Barthes calls the “wall of antithesis.”
Georg must separate from the friend in order to insert himself into normal society - as the
friend is the figure of ambiguity which Georg must ward off. It is the paradigm of
incessant process which the friend represents that Georg seeks to arrest and thus reduce to
univocity that which is a multiplicity. Georg seeks to accomplish this with absolutely
rigorous observation; he vows to observe everything “completely exactly” (71), which
always involves the violence of repression and exclusion.
Georg attempts to define the friend by the same recognizable categories that he does
himself. The friend is a business failure where Georg is a success, a bachelor where
Georg is engaged, a man living in a foreign land where Georg is the son who stayed at
home and the “big child” (73) where Georg is an independent man. Yet in this search for
unequivocal meaning, Georg excludes contradiction and ambiguity by artificially binding
unique events and translating them into concepts. In an attempt to make the world
comprehensible, he practices an exclusion that Blanchot’s remarks, “…is at work
precisely at the very moment we are priding ourselves on our gift of universal
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comprehension” (The Work of Fire, 118). Thus, any literary interpretation which
attempts to tie meaning to identity and concept is inherently limited. This second rupture
serves to circumvent that violence of conceptualization by re-introducing process,
thereby allowing for multiplicity to emerge.
Georg has a compelling desire to be judged by his father, a desire which remains
unfulfilled as the father does not provide for this closure. For Georg, definitive judgment
would confirm and validate his world view, one in which there are clear conceptual
delineations. His world must be categorized and conceptualized in order for smooth
functioning to occur. Any other framework results in cognitive dissonance. The father
does not participate in a judgment of the son, but rather in an “un-judging,” a withholding
of any decision. He appears not as Georg would like to view him, as a figure of authority,
but rather as one of ambiguity. The father is beyond the paradigmatic bifurcation which
his son so desperately desires. By stating, “You have no friend in St. Petersburg” (if by
friend as opposed to an enemy) the father functions to transgress the son’s paradigm of
oppositional structure. His suspension of judgment denies the very possibility of the
univocal meaning sought by the son, as the father does not operate in terms of the duality
of friend versus enemy.
To his father’s remark that he is without a friend in St. Petersburg, Georg responds,
“What a comedian!...but he realized just as soon the damage that had been done, and only
too late bit down-his eyes bulging- so hard on his tongue that he recoiled in pain” (73).
The comedian or actor, operates neither in the space of absolute truth nor untruth, but in-
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etween. Georg recognizes that the father’s suspension of judgment constitutes this
ambiguous space. Therefore he is compelled to react by his relentless drive to classify.
By relegating the father to the status of comedian (an “actor” who does/can not judge)
Georg is able to rationalize, to reduce to a playful jest the absence of definition. Yet
again, Georg can only work within the world of opposition, (jest versus serious) and
continues his attempts to reduce the father’s undecidability to a conceptual singularity.
To this end Ulfers comments:
As far as the father is concerned in this context, must we not infer that he, in his
undoing the very notion of judgment, reveals himself as a kind of fraud in terms
of the authority to judge and the concomitant seriousness and foundational aspect
of the law? The text hints at that via Georg’s insight that the father is an “actor”
(Komödiant), playing a masquerade, and the father’s saying that he is the “local
representative” of the ‘friend” in Petersburg, that is, the “undecidability” or
“playfulness” Georg desires to separate from by seeking the father’s “judgment”
(Lecture Notes 3).
The father comments on his collusion with the friend, communicating with him in letters
without Georg’s knowledge:
How you amused me today, coming to ask me if you should tell your friend about
your engagement. He knows it already, you stupid boy, he knows it all! I've been
writing to him, for you forgot to take my writing things away from me. That's
why he hasn't been here for years, he knows everything a hundred times better
than you do yourself, in his left hand he crumples your letters unopened while in
his right hand he holds up my letters to read through! (74)
Yet this is not the conspiracy the son interprets. Rather it shows an alignment between
the father and friend paradigmatically. Much like the figure of the friend epitomizes
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undecidability, so does that of the father and his refusal to judge. In a scene widely read
as containing the climactic “decision” of the father, what appears is quite different- a
suspension of any decision. The scene serves not to posit the judgment of the son by the
father, but to display that both the father and the friend represent the worldview in which
teleology and the conceptualization of the absolute crumble.
3.8 Death by Drowning:
A final narrative rupture occurs in the father’s subsequent “condemnation” of Georg to
death. Unanticipated from any realist narrative perspective, the father remarks:
So now you know there is more in the world than just you. Till now you've
known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still
more truly have you been a devilish human being!--And therefore take note: I
sentence you now to death by drowning! (75)
The pronouncement of Georg as both “innocent child” and “diabolical human being” (75)
by the father serves to further the argument that the text participates in a deconstruction
of polar opposition. In his juxtaposition and combination of the concepts
innocent/devilish and child/human being, the father speaks in terms of a mixture of
generally recognized opposites (innocent child/ diabolical man). Rather than a clear
delineation, he chooses to amalgamate mutually exclusive items. This choice calls
attention to an underlying philosophy of process that Kafka embraced, which he allows
us to glimpse through a momentary disruption of the structural constraints of
conceptualization. The father’s reference to Georg as, “a more truly a diabolical man”
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(75) is particularly noteworthy as the term “truly” does not have a comparative that one
could describe with “more”:
First, the phrase “more truly a diabolical man” cannot be read as an opposite to
“truly an innocent child.” Either something is “truly” or it is not. In other words,
the hyperbolic “more truly” cannot be encompassed within a binary opposition
structure and thus alludes to something “beyond.” This “beyond,” is hinted at by
the etymology (which Kafka was very fond of exploiting) of the word
“diabolical.” Etymologically the notion of “diabolical” is not an opposite at all,
but implies an element that “scrambles” opposites (from Greek diaballein: to
throw through one another). Georg thus is pronounced by the father as neither
innocent nor its opposite, both innocent and its opposite (EGS Lecture Notes, 8).
By linguistically transgressing polarity through the reference to an exaggerated “more
truly,” the father shows himself to again be aligned with a neither/nor, both/and
perspective, as he “un-judges” through a scrambling of the constructs innocent and
diabolical. Thus the judgment pronounced by the father, “reveals himself as part of the
‘undecidable’ [das Nicht-urteilbare] and is “not so much a judgment but an undoing of
Georg’s unconscious de-cision [Urteil] to cut loose from the undecidable” (EGS Lecture
Notes, 6).
The father’s “sentencing” is problematic in translation, specifically in understanding the
subtle variances between the transitive and intransitive forms of the German verb “to
drown.” The German term that can be translated into English as “to drown” is
“ertrinken” which alludes to an intransitive process. Now, it is to be noted that Kafka
chooses the intransitive verb to refer to a judgment and execution (i.e. to acts that are by
55

definition transitive) which would necessitate the use of “ertranken” - the transitive form
of “to drown.” Whereas one would expect the use of the transitive form for this
sentencing/execution, (actively being held under water in order to execute the sentence)
Kafka instead uses the intransitive form. This leads to my inference that the use of
“ertrinken” alludes to a judgment/execution that is between active and passive and thus
amounts to the father’s suspension of judgment to the very end.
After the imposition of the father’s “sentence,” Georg is described as feeling “forcibly
driven from the room” (75) and “driven towards the water” (75) where he feels a
compulsion to immerse himself in its fluidity. The fact that the water Georg immerses
himself in is a river is no coincidence. Although he longs for the stability of univocal
meaning, Georg feels a strange attraction to the water which is always in motion. At the
moment he throws himself from the bridge, his visualization of, “the ceaselessness and
diversity of the traffic” (76) again hints at the processual nature of the world which he has
always denied. This final description of the transitory nature of being, “evokes the
unending oscillation, the to and fro, of the textuality of life which no reading can de-cide
(de-cipher)” (Ulfers 7). Yet his death need not be construed in opposition to his life, but
contributing to the ontological perspective which always includes both life and death, but
never has a preference for life over death. Thus Georg’s departure from the world
suggests not to a departure in the sense of loss, as existence always involves the perpetual
coming into, passing away, and renewal. What some may interpret as the protagonist’s
final moments, can really only be understood as such within a teleological system.
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In closing, “The Judgment” provides numerous examples of narrative rupture functioning
to disrupt the forward-moving trajectory of the story. Yet one should be wary of simply
reducing these occurrences to departures from a movement toward finality and decision.
To do so would be to underestimate the skepticism with which Kafka approached
representational language. Kafka carefully utilized these disturbances to point to the
structural problems of a utilitarian communicative theory, in which messages are seen to
clearly pass from sender to recipient. In using these ruptures in “The Judgment,” Kafka
points to the necessity of a linguistic and ontological paradigm shift toward a conception
of Pure Mediality which is always immanent. His linguistic breakages allow us entry into
this space of infinite network which utility and habit have obfuscated.
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“What is deferred forever till death is entry into the law itself, which nothing other
than that which dictates the delay. The law prohibits by interfering with and with
deferring the ‘ference’, the reference, the rapport, the relation. What must not and can
not be approached is the origin of difference: it must not be presented or represented
and above all not penetrated. That is the law of the law, the process of a law whose
subject we can never say ‘There it is,’ it is here or there”
58
-Derrida, Signature, Event, Context
“Our laws are not generally known; they are kept secret by the small group of nobles
who rule us. We are convinced that these ancient laws are scrupulously administered;
nevertheless it is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not
know.”
-Derrida “Problems of Our Laws”
The Law Revisited: Deferred Judgment in “The Trial”
4.1 The Nature of Law
The Trial is another work in which Kafka explores the realm of the law, and implicitly
the concept of judgment. Alongside this exploration, he gives insight into his
communicative perspective, presenting a point of view on the language of literature as
that which defies any attempt to be totalized or understood in the classical sense. The
novel is not only a sophisticated exploration of the abstract ideas of innocence and guilt,
but perhaps more importantly points to the fundamental human error of expecting of the
world that which it is incapable of providing. In our endless search for metaphysical
presence or stable being, we apply an erroneous causality to explain a world in process
from a teleological perspective. In this creation of illusory meaning in an “outside”, we
assign fixity to that which is only transitory.

While Kafka’s text probes the ideas of justice and truth, it also provides an opportunity to
explore the “perpetual session” (107) of a court that his protagonist Joseph K. resists, and
thus provides a glimpse of a process-oriented worldview that infinitely suspends decision.
My approach in this chapter will be to first examine the depiction of the figures of the
legal process in order to determine how the text’s deconstruction of their traditional roles
points to the breakdown of a teleological paradigm. Additionally, I will examine Joseph
K.’s interaction with the painter Titorelli in an attempt to explore his demands for
absolute signification and utter resistance to suspended meaning. His need to understand
completely and to know precisely stems from a paradigmatic belief that the world,
particularly the world of the Law, operates in a logical, causal fashion. Unwilling to shift
this paradigm, Joseph K. only experiences frustration in this interchange. Though
Titorelli can provide Joseph K. with insight into some of the operating practices of the
legal system, he can not provide him with the set of rules by which he can expect to play.
This is the ambiguity against which Joseph K. revolts. In the novel’s ultimate irony, his
need for absolute understanding shows him to be far more of an authoritarian than the
novel’s other characters, so often accused of this offense.
4.2 The Question of Access:
A foundational principle of democratic societies involves the guarantee of individual
access to a legal framework that allows a means and process for mediation in civil
matters and the possibility for justice in criminal. This implies that it is a human right to
exist within a world in which the individual is both free from undue persecution, and
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afforded an opportunity to rectify experiences perceived to be unjust. While this is not the
promise of a just outcome, it is however minimal, the promise that a search for justice can
be pursued via access to a neutral legal system. This system is not relative to individuals,
but operates in a standardized way, through established rules and recognized practices.
This principle of access to a fair and impartial legal system has come to manifest itself in
the ethical codes of conduct and professional responsibilities of the system’s
constituencies – namely attorneys 13 and judges. 14
Yet this presumed right of universal access to the law 15 is radically challenged in The
Trial. When confronted with arrest, Joseph K. expects an explanation of the charges
brought against him. When attempting to resolve this situation in the courts, he assumes
access to a fair and objective system which will allow him the opportunity for
vindication. However, his experiences with various court constituencies, from magistrates
13 A recent statement (February 2005) of The American Bar Association contains
the following as a core principle: Access to justice for all people throughout the
world, which is only possible with an independent legal profession and an
impartial, and independent, judiciary.
14 The following resolutions were by the American Judges Association: WHEREAS, THE
PROTECTION OF RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO JUSTICE are inherent rights of all
people; and WHEREAS, without access to the justice system, there is no justice, and the
freedoms we celebrate today would be nothing but words; NOW, THEREFORE BE IT
RESOLVED, that the American Judges Association hereby declares that protection of
rights and access to justice of people who are poor, elderly, or with disabilities, are major
goals that all judges and lawyers should seek to provide and protect; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the American Judges Association encourages the development of ways
and means of implementing the above goals, through activities that will improve the law,
the legal system, and the administration of justice, for all people.
15 Derrida’s essay “Before the Law” is the seminal text in the discussion of this theme
from a deconstructive perspective.
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to clerks and judges, tell him something very different. His “rational” expectations of the
legal system will remain largely unfulfilled. Throughout the novel, Joseph K. attempts to
navigate this unknown territory of the Law, becoming increasingly frustrated with his
failure to access and comprehend the legal system in which he must operate. He remarks:
There can be no doubt that behind all the pronouncements of this court, there
exists an extensive organization. An organization that not only engages corrupt
guards, inane inspectors, and mediocre examining magistrate, but that supports as
well a system of judges of all ranks, including the highest, with their inevitable
entourage of assistants, scribes, cops, and other sides, perhaps even executioners.
And the purpose of this extensive organization? It consists of arresting innocent
people and introducing senseless proceedings against them, which go nowhere
(179).
Joseph K.’s understanding of the court and thus the law encompasses a set of pre-
conceived notions from which he operates. In partaking in the legal process; he imagines
that there are established, a priori rules of engagement. These rules somehow govern the
process, placing parameters around what is proper or improper, appropriate or
inappropriate. When faced with a process that does not correspond to this, Joseph K. is
both horrified and dumbfounded. His experience of cognitive dissonance occurs as a
result of his unwillingness to see transition, and not permanence as an ontological
perspective. As such, the incommensurability between Joseph K.’s expectations and the
world as it presents itself in his experience with the court reminds us of man's intrinsic
inability to know completely or to judge finally. It demands of us a re-envisioning of
ontology and epistemology which moves away from a world grounded in the absolute
and toward a perspective of Pure Mediality.
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4.3 The Figures of Law:
In an analysis of the legal process, the roles of key participating individuals must be
examined, principally those of lawyers and judges. By nature, each of these roles
inherently involves the formulation of a judgment derived from the separation of
opposites. As the traditional nature of law is understood, both attorney and judge are part
of a process which seeks to bring about a conclusive end. As such, these figures must, in
order to fulfill their responsibility within this system, participate in a process of exclusion
in order to ultimately lead toward definition. They are not only involved in decisions
about which evidence will be considered or what mitigating circumstances may have
occurred, but the much larger question of ultimate guilt or innocence. In this attempt to
arrive at a decision, these figures are compelled to isolate meaning and exclude ambiguity
in both a utilitarian and pragmatic manner:
…law in order to be law…cannot render itself dependant upon anything but rather
must establish itself as primordial ground, as the authority of the past. Yet in order
to fashion itself as the fundamental ground upon which order and the mechanisms
of ordering are built, the edifice of the law can not risk being equated with its
performative power to judge and to enforce its decisions, but must be produced as
an authoritative text that exists prior to its performance (Rast, 28).
However, one must ask of the implications of having a court system comprised of
attorneys and judges who regularly take part in a process whose very foundation requires
exclusion. From a utilitarian perspective, this process seems to make sense; yet, does not
this exclusionary process conceal the possibility of revealing a greater paradigmatic truth,
“Truth with a capital T” (Pondron, 54)?
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Lawyers, sought as authorities and experts on the process of law, take part in a multitude
of activities that involve conceptualization and judgment; they examine, decide,
determine, and ultimately generate and present an argument in order to achieve an end.
The lawyer works in the arena of writs, statutes, affidavits and injunctions. He acts as
representative for his client in the public arena and prides himself on his skillfulness in
oral and written argumentation. Perhaps most importantly, the lawyer uses an a priori set
of rules, regulations and precedents in order to elicit a desired determination. Within this
conception of the lawyer’s role, it is clear that any moment of wavering suspension, any
brief flirtation with indeterminacy, is perceived as a sign of weakness. Thus judgment is
demanded of this role, as the lawyer whose argument is inconclusive fails at a
fundamental level.
In The Trial, lawyers are largely portrayed as buffoons rather than as experts on the
process of law. As opposed to being viewed as negotiators of a complex territory, the
lawyer is merely endured, “For the defense is not actually countenanced by the Law, but
only tolerated, and there is even some controversy as to whether the relevant passages of
the Law can truly be construed to include even such tolerance” (114). For the most part,
lawyers are portrayed as incompetent, having little direct effect on the proceedings,
“…the first petition was generally misplaced or completely lost, and even if it was
retained to the very end, the lawyer had only heard this by way of rumor…” (113) It is
only through informal networking relationships that certain lawyers can effect positive
developments for their clients, “…but it’s another matter when it comes to behind-the-
scene efforts, in the conference rooms, in the corridors, or for example even here in the
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atelier” (150-151). Joseph K. finds lawyers to be of little practical use, deeming them
ineffectual “shysters” (152) who only contribute to his frustration by adding another layer
of bureaucracy to the legal process.
The judge, the respected critical authority figure of the court, is perhaps the ultimate
emblem of the absolute. He presides over and controls the courtroom as its chief
administrator, determining what information is relevant to the case at hand, and
controlling how the legal process is to be conducted. The judge is empowered to interpret
how established laws are to be used in changing circumstances, and is furthermore
charged with determining the extent of punitive damages. Yet judges in The Trial are
depicted as status conscious, vain and likely corrupt. As opposed to their portrayal as
independent arbitrators of the legal system, the text presents judges as more likely to be
influenced by interpersonal relationships than actual evidence: “If the judges could really
be swayed as easily through personal contacts as the lawyer had suggested, then the
painter’s contacts with vain judges were particularly important and should by no means
be underestimated” (151). The judge’s role becomes distorted in the text, as they
transform into nothing more than capricious instruments of the law, armed with the
ability to exert control indiscriminately: “If I were to paint all the judges in a row on this
canvas and you were to plead your case before them, you would have more success than
before the actual court” (149).
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4.4 The Question of Transparency
Within standard legal proceedings, it is an expectation that written records be kept
documenting not only indictments and causes for action, but also the eventual
case outcomes. As decisions are made over time, precedent is established and re-
established as a basis for future proceedings. These precedents are the baselines
used by lawyers to argue their positions before the court, as well as to facilitate
points of reference. At the conclusion of the legal process, it is the judge’s
responsibility to publish a public record of the determinations made in the case.
The importance of providing the public access to a written document which
explains the rationale behind judicial decisions is of paramount importance. By
making this information available and maintaining the transparency of the legal
process, its integrity and fairness can be insured. One contemporary member of
the judiciary states:
The process of reasoning which has decided the case must itself be
exposed to the light of day, so that all concerned may understand what
principles and practice of law and logic are guiding the courts, and so that
full publicity may be achieved which provides, on the one hand, a
powerful protection against any tendency to judicial autocracy and against
any erroneous suspicion of judicial wrongdoing and, on the other hand, an
effective stimulant to judicial high performance. (Kitto, “Why Write
Judgments” 790).
Within the structure of the courts in The Trial, Joseph K. learns that the act of recording
decisions is not practiced: “The proceedings are kept secret not only from the public, but
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from the accused as well…for even the accused has no access to the court records” (115).
What this lack of information amounts to is the complete absence of a framework for
understanding a system in which he must participate. Joseph K. first experiences this
lack of information in receiving no justification for his arrest, nor revelation of the crimes
of which he is accused, “You are under arrest certainly, but this need not hinder you from
going about your business. Nor will you be prevented from leading your ordinary life”
(20). His despondency is amplified when Titorelli informs him that:
…the proceedings are not public, they can be made public if the court considers it
necessary, but the Law does not insist upon it. As a result, the court records, and
above all the writ of indictment, are not available to the accused and his defense
lawyers, so that in general it’s not known, or not known precisely, what the first
petition should be directed against…(113)
This “unorthodox” system extends the withholding of knowledge from initial arrest to
final decision, “The final verdicts of the court are not published, and not even the judges
have access to them; thus only legend remains about ancient court cases” (154).
However, this lack of access to information should not be construed as derived from
some malignant intent on the part of the court. Rather, it might more accurately be
attributed to Joseph K.’s fundamental error - expecting the court, and by extension the
world, to operate in an end-oriented manner. As Kafka’s text deconstructs this telos,
Joseph K.’s expectations of clarity and search for closure are perpetually frustrated. As
Derrida observes, the same applies to all persons coming “before the law” seeking
explicit resolution:
…here is a situation where it is never a question of trial or judgment, nor of
verdict or sentence, which is all the more terrifying. There is some law, some law
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which is not there but which exists. The judgment, however, does not arrive. In
this other sense the man of nature is not only a subject of the law outside the law,
he is also, in both an infinite and a finite way, the prejudged; not so much as a
prejudged subject before a judgment which is always in preparation and always
being deferred. Prejudged as having to be judged, arriving in advance of the law
which only signifies ‘later’ (“Before the Law”, 206).
Derrida is speaking here of a judgment that is always deferred, or perpetually
delayed. This involves infinite referrals which never finally lead to a referent- an
unceasing referentiality. Does Joseph K. respond in the same fashion as the man
from the country, who accepts perpetually deferred access to the Law? No,
Joseph K. is baffled by what he perceives to be a counterintuitive structure, and
can not, or will not accept a court that allows for judgment to be deferred
indefinitely. From his perspective, it is the role of the court to indict, convict and
judge absolutely.
4.5 Representing Justice
One of the essential passages of the text in which Kafka explores aesthetic multiplicity
and its relationship to the law is in Joseph K.’s conversation with the painter Titorelli.
This exchange begins with a discussion of the painter’s artistic rendering of the “figure of
justice.” Upon first glance, Joseph K. has a difficult time deciphering the image, as it
does not conform to a traditionally fixed depiction. “He was unable to interpret a large
figure centered atop the back of the throne. In order to understand the image, Joseph K
must minimally take a second look, “…but then he held back for a moment and
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approached the picture as if he wanted to study it in detail” (145). It is only upon further
examination that the image becomes clearer to him, “Now I recognize it…there’s the
blindfold over her eyes and here are the scales. But aren’t those wings on her heels, and
isn’t she in motion?...That’s a poor combination…justice must remain at rest, otherwise
the scales sway and no judgment is possible” (145). Titorelli’s representation corresponds
to a vision of justice (judgment) as always in-process. This is clear in the reference to the
figure’s wings - likely an allusion to the oscillating nature of being. With regard to the
motion of the figure, Joseph K. can not, or perhaps refuses to understand how an aesthetic
depiction can be accurate if it shows uncertainty with representing the Law, where he
supposes that there is a stable framework.
Joseph K. finds this depiction troubling, as he believes the image should be represented in
a definitive fashion, reflecting its “actual” appearance as opposed to an aesthetic
interpretation. Any departure from a traditionally recognizable representation becomes
problematic for him. Titorelli’s artistic rendering is anything but traditional: a hybrid
which combines the figure of Justice with that of Victory. It is also no coincidence that
we see here an “unfinished” (145) (in-process) representation, one that remains
indefinable and subject to change. “What Titorelli’s paintings have in common with other
texts that represent the Law is that they cannot be grasped, that they posses no efficacy,
no firm or reliable substance; like the very text given the reader, the texts of the Law are
adequate only to sustain for a while the hope of the one who inquires of them, not to
reward that hope” (Grossvogel, 190).
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Within Joseph K.’s world view, representation can not involve the ambiguity of
hybridity. He finds Titorelli’s hybridization of justice and victory distressing, and fails to
recognize that the aesthetic is perhaps the one arena which refuses to totalize, a realm
which will not allow itself to be subsumed by the either/or violence of conceptualization.
Because Joseph K. has not moved toward a view of the law, and by extension, the world
which is in perpetual flux, he can not help but experience anxiety with what he finds
counterintuitive or unidentifiable. He continues to operate by a vision of law and
representation that, “fundamentally relies upon ‘enforceability’, that is, upon the promise
and possibility of referentiality, the possibility of punishment in the case of the law”
(Rast, 28).
As the conversation between Joseph K. and Titorelli evolves, we find the painter presents
Joseph K. with an unpalatable view of the inner workings of the court. Not the
organized, objective institution he believes it to be, Joseph K. learns that the law does not
conduct itself by what he deems to be a rational set of principles. “A number of subtle
points are involved in which the court loses its way. But then in the end it pulls out some
profound guilt from somewhere where there was originally none at all” (149). Titorelli
informs Joseph K. that his labors to prove his “absolute innocence” (148) will bear no
fruit, as his foundational understanding of the court’s functionality is fundamentally
flawed:
We’re talking about two different things here, what the law says, and what I’ve
experienced personally; you mustn’t confuse the two. In the Law, which I’ve
never read, mind you, it says of course on the one hand that an innocent person is
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to be acquitted; on the other hand it does not say that judges can be influenced.
My experience, however, has been precisely the opposite (153).
However, Joseph K. remains convinced that he should allocate his energies toward
demonstrating some error on the part of the institution of law while failing to reconsider
his own expectations of the system.
Joseph K. becomes puzzled with what might be called the courts’ locale and membership.
In terms of locale, his understanding is tied to a formal sense of place. From his
perspective, court proceedings would naturally occur in official locations and he therefore
becomes bewildered when the painter remarks, “There are law court offices in practically
every attic, why shouldn’t they be here too? In fact, my atelier is part of the law court
offices too, but the court has placed it at my disposal” (164). He is unable to grasp the
notion of proceedings occurring in such untraditional locations. For him, there needs to
be a clear delineation between the official and unofficial, and any mixture or combination
of what he sees as mutually exclusive horrifies him. He is unable to recognize a
perspective in which, “…it is no longer possible regularly to contrast opposites, sexes
possessions; it is no longer possible to safeguard an order of just equivalence; in a word it
is no longer possible to represent, to make things representative, individuated, separate,
assigned…(S/Z 215-216)
This blurring of court locales is related to what might be called the court’s
“membership.” He is shocked that even the children living within the painter’s building
are considered constituent parts of the legal system. Joseph K. learns from Titorelli that,
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“Those girls belong to the court as well…Everything belongs to the court” (150). It is
these very same children that Joseph K. describes as conveying a “mixture of
childishness and depravity” (141) - a reference to the combination of opposites,
(childishness/depravity) from which he experiences disgust. This combination of
elements is what Barthes refers to when he remarks, "Every joining of two antithetical
terms, every mixture, every conciliation—in short, every passage through the wall of the
Antithesis—thus constitutes a transgression" (S/Z 12). It is Joseph K.’s inability to re-
orient his worldview to this notion of mixture, continuing to see it as a “transgression” of
mutually exclusive opposites.
4.6 Acquittal: Incessantly Deferred
The notion of judgment as being deferred indefinitely is intimately explored in
Titorelli’s explanation of the “options” available to Joseph K. to pursue in his case. In
this portion of the text, Titorelli offers three possibilities within the realm of the Law
through which Joseph K. may seek relief. He refers to these as actual acquittal, apparent
acquittal and protraction. One must note that the painter only offers these options as
means to “pursue” relief, not as a guarantee of such. These opportunities essentially
provide only a continuation of the process, not a conclusion. Joseph K. would still be
involved in legal matters on some level, as the issues are never fully put to rest, and are
capable of arising at some future time without warning.
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The first option, “actual acquittal”, involves the courts reaching a determination that
solely relies upon the defendant’s guilt or innocence. I this case, an objective body of
evidence by which a defendant can be judged finally emerges, and a judgment based
upon these factual merits is rendered. This, of course, would provide Joseph K. with the
most desirable conclusion to his case. However, he learns from Titorelli quickly that such
an outcome is unattainable. “I never saw a single actual acquittal…such acquittals are
said of have occurred, of course…but that’s extremely difficult to determine” (154). With
actual acquittal, no outside help for the defendant is possible. Titorelli comments, “…I
don’t have the slightest influence on that particular result. In my opinion, there’s not a
single person anywhere who could have an influence on actual acquittal” (152). Actual
acquittal would amount to an upholding of the “metaphysics of presence,” which is why
within this unmediated system, it remains an impossibility. It is the solution most
attractive to Joseph K. because it forgoes ambiguity, and constructs metaphysical stability
upon a world of dynamic change.
Another option, “apparent acquittal” involves a complex process through which a
representative with access to the court - such as Titorelli - agrees to serve as guarantor of
the defendant’s innocence. On the defendant’s behalf, he circulates a document attesting
to this innocence for other judges to sign. The document is then brought to the trial
judge, who in consideration, may choose to place a moratorium on the proceedings. The
process then begins in Joseph K.’s words, “all over again” (159). Thus, the proceedings
continue perpetually. Titorelli remarks, “When you are acquitted in this sense, it means
the charge against you is dropped for the moment but continues to hover over you, and
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can be reinstated the moment an order comes from above” (158). This approach uses
personal relationships with court figures to attain some sort of case decision; however
that decision is not an ultimate one- it is always temporary. Titorelli tells Joseph K. that
with apparent acquittal, he would be free to some extent, “but only apparently free, or
more accurately, temporarily free. Judges on the lowest level, and those are the only ones
I know, don’t have the power to grant final acquittal, that power only resides in the
highest court, which is totally inaccessible to you and me and everyone else” (158). “Life
under ostensible (apparent) acquittal reflects the worldview of modern scientific
secularism, which knows no ultimate finality or certainty, no definitive answers, no
ultimate solutions, no permanent goal, and above all no justification of human existence,
and whose sole absolute is survival” (Sokel, 258).
In the final scenario Titorelli offers what he calls “protraction” - a term which implies a
prolonging or extending of the legal process indefinitely. This scenario requires the
highest level of bureaucratic interaction with the figures of the court, but enables the trial
to remain at its lowest possible stage- never garnering enough momentum to result in a
conviction or judgment. The approach here is to keep the trial, “…constantly spinning
within the tight circle to which it’s artificially restricted” (161). Thus the protracted
case’s evolution is restricted, and judgment is deferred continually. Protraction brings
with it a lack of ultimate security as, “No file is ever lost, and the court never forgets.
Someday- quite unexpectedly- some judge or other takes a closer look at the file, realizes
that the case is still active, and orders an immediate arrest” (158-159). At no time is the
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defendant granted a judgment in perpetuity that one could equate with ontological or
epistemological permanence.
Rather than providing for the closure Joseph K. so desperately desires, each of these
options provides the absence of a structure of finality. It is this world of infinite
possibility that Joseph K. rebels against - seeking to categorize and conceptualize at every
turn. He is hardly the violated victim that existentialist critics would have us believe,
harassed and tortured by bureaucratic chains and a system he is prohibited from
understanding. Rather, he is a character who attempts to impose definition and closure
upon a world which does not operate within these limits. Kafka’s protagonist incessantly
looks to the outside- to authority figures such as lawyers, judges and the court system to
provide him with explanations for his ordeal, but never once entertains the possibility that
the paradigm in which he functions ontologically is inherently flawed. In a certain sense,
Joseph K. holds the quintessential authoritarian position - as he is unwilling to
compromise and demands absolute adherence to a pre-conceived configuration of
existence.
The end of the novel has Kafka return to the notion that literary language is not oriented
towards closure. At the conclusion of the text, Kafka remains unwilling to fall back to the
stability of definition. “… (A) Verdict is never pronounced in ‘The Trial.’ It is merely
executed. The only voice coming anywhere near articulating judgment, in the sense of
supplying a reason for execution, is Joseph K.’s own. From the very beginning of his
arrest, K’s inner tendency is to arrive at a verdict that no one gives him, and that he
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finally gives himself” (Sokel, 253). Even the novel’s closing lines, “It was if the shame
was going to outlive him” (266) points more to an evolving perspective on the nature of
becoming; that is, the movement through and past language as art, to a non-
representational art without a signified, that is, to the geometry of a circle on the
circumference of which there are no privileged positions – no hierarchy – and every
ending is undecidably related to a beginning, making any finality of judgment
impossible. 16
16 The sheer processuality of the court system is alluded to in the “secondary meaning of
the German title of Kafka’s novel: Der Prozess. The primary meaning clearly is “Trial”
which is coupled with the anticipation of a verdict or judgment. The secondary meaning
– and this is the meaning that Joseph K. incessantly misreads is “Process” alluding to a
process that as such, is potentially endless.
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“We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for
anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with
what other things it does or does not transmit intensities…”
-Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
“Literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive)
access to a model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this
entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a legal structure of norms and departure, a
narrative or poetic Law, but a perspective [...], whose vanishing point is nonetheless
ceaselessly pushed back, mysteriously opened…”
“Kafka’s Networks:” A Rhizomatic Approach to “The Metamorphosis”
5.1 Rhizomatic Thinking
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-Roland Barthes, S/Z
The concept of network as explicated in the work of Deleuze and Guattari is of
paramount importance to my discussion of Kafka’s literature and perspective on
language. As I have already asserted, Kafka’s literary language does not seek to present
itself as a mode of communication in which there is the assignment of a fixed or
immutable meaning to the sign, but rather involves an infinite chain of signifiers without
ultimate resolution in a signified. His literary texts, seen from the point of view of the
unlimited passageways of a network, are able to operate in a space of crossover and
hybridity, never establishing absolute presence. Kafka’s texts refuse to provide over-
meaning, and function in a way that promotes the suspension of definition. As such, they
aesthetically subvert the utilitarian paradigm which suggests that definitive meaning is
communicated from a sender to a receiver.

This chapter examines Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as a linguistic and
communicative model of which Kafka’s writing both foresees and partakes. By this I
mean that his writing, with its inability to be totalized, navigates the space of
indeterminacy, and functions as a-representational art. By eluding definitive meaning,
and critical approaches that suggest as much, the texts themselves compel a radical re-
envisioning of permanence and stability- transcending the either/or of oppositional
thinking. I examine here “The Metamorphosis” in light of the movement by Deleuze and
Guattari away from the hierarchal thinking of a “tree model” and toward a rhizomatic
perspective that, “deterrorializes arbolic striated spaces and ways of being” (A Thousand
Plateaus, 8). It is this perspective in which, “…no point must come before another, no
specific point must be connected to another point, but all points are and must be
connected” (7).
I then move to a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “becoming-animal”
– a challenge to abandon the apparently common sense viewpoint by which judgments
are made on the basis of partial human perception, and the subsequent call to merge
ourselves with an entire ecology of perceptions. This is a transformation which, “lets
nothing remain of the duality of a subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement;
but rather constitutes a single process, a unique method that replaces subjectivity”
(Toward a Minor Literature, 36). Not an aberration or regression, the becoming-animal
implies the crossing of a threshold into a world of “absolute de-terriorialization,” (18)
where there is “no longer anything but movements, vibrations, thresholds in a deserted
matter” (129). Perhaps most importantly, the “becoming- animal” does not refer to the
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imitation of the animal, or “being animal” but rather points to an ontological
intermingling in which the parameters of the human/animal opposition become too fuzzy
to be differentiated. As such, the identity thinking which structures via the categories
“human” or “animal” breaks down.
Finally, I explore the idea of the monstrous in the text- focusing particularly on the
relationship between monstrosity and demonstrative language. This is approached
through an examination of Kafka’s use of metaphor, and his understanding of the power
of metamorphic language. It also comes to light in the Samsa family’s position that what
can not be known “clearly and precisely” (37), or absolutely, must be viewed as
monstrous and horrifying. Via a discussion of the family’s denial of the abject, and their
rejection of a transitory understanding of being, I hope to show Kafka’s keen awareness
of this tension between demonstrative and metaphoric uses of language.
5.2 A Departure from Arbolic Thinking:
In their text A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the limitations of using
an arbolic system as communicative model. This is primarily due to its implicit linear
and hierarchical nature. They see the arbolic model as a totalizing construct, specifically
designed to function as a restrictive stratum, imposing its forms on a maximum of flows,
particles, and intensities. “Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of
significance and subjectification” (17). Within this model, an element only receives
information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along pre-
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established paths. This type of system is rooted in a binary logic which is, “…the spiritual
reality of the root-tree." (5). Deleuze and Guattari call for the abolition of this model,
remarking that, “We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and
radicles. They've made us suffer too much” (16). To strictly centered systems, the
authors contrast a-centered systems, rhizomatic systems, in which communication runs
from any neighbor to any other.
The rhizome is, in botany, an underground, horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out
roots and shoots from its nodes. Deleuze and Guattari move past this strictly botanical
definition and toward an application of this concept to describe the interaction and
relationality of entities in a general sense. The stems or channels of the rhizome do not
pre-exist - they are defined only by their state at a given moment. “The rhizome is not a
tracing mechanism, but is a map with multiple entry points. That is, maps can exist as
themselves without need for anything outside of the map to exist while tracings can only
exists as representations” (12). Deleuze and Guattari argue that any point in a rhizomatic
system can be connected to any other point without partiality:
It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion... A
rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely
alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be', but the fabric of the rhizome is the
conjunction, 'and...and...and...'. This conjunction carries enough force to shake
and uproot the verb 'to be'... The middle is by no means an average; on the
contrary, it is where things pick up speed... The rhizome operates by variation,
expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots... (17)
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The rhizome is not reducible to a particular that is subsumable under a generality. It is
rather a singularity comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in
motion. “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure,
tree, or root. There are only lines…unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any
point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same
nature…” (A Thousand Plateaus, 8) The rhizome has neither beginning nor end, but
always middle. It constitutes multiplicities within dimensions having neither subject nor
object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency.
Deleuze and Guattari then move to a discussion of how a rhizomatic model can be
understood specifically from the point of view of language: “In the ideal text, the
networks are many and interact, without any one being able to surpass the rest; this text is
a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning, it is reversible; we
gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be
the main one...for the plural text, there cannot be a narrative structure, a grammar or a
logic” (6). This perspective amounts to a deconstruction of the classical ontological
perspective, involving a movement away from a system of stable being and toward one of
infinite relationality. The rhizome principally can be seen as a model for apprehending
the constitution and reception of a text. This labyrinthine model- an irreducible
metaphoricity- extends itself to a conception of Kafka’s writing as Pure Mediality and
treating Kafka texts as “a rhizome, a burrow” (A Thousand Plateaus, 8).
Kafka’s literary activity was oriented toward a worldview that encompasses this
rhizomatic and web-like approach. That is to say that his view of language is that it is
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always-already inter-connected, spreading easily through a co-mingling of equally
weighted entities. All elements within this linguistic system are related to one another a-
priori. This linkage is central to his aesthetics, and also is inherent to any perspective that
leaves behind the structure of duality. Thus, Kafka’s texts operating as rhizome at no
point seek to ascribe univocal interpretation of meaning, but rather consciously withhold
any such attempt:
Thus, the art that Kafka tried to introduce is effectively no longer an art that
proposes to “express” (a meaning), to represent (a thing, a being), or to imitate (a
nature). It is rather a method (of writing) that consists in propelling the most
diverse contents on the basis of (non-signifying) ruptures and intertwinings of the
most heterogeneous orders of signs and powers (Toward a Minor Literature,
XVII).
5.3 “Becoming-Animal”
The attention that Kafka gives to food and nourishment in “The Metamorphosis” is of
paramount importance to a discussion of his literary texts as operating rhizomatically - as
neither food (nor music) serves in the text as a means toward bringing about gratification
in the form of a transcendental signified. On the contrary, we see a profound critique of
signification masquerading itself as the real. By understanding the function of food
practically, as an agent to satisfy hunger, we are immediately speaking of a relationship
of utility; with food serving as a means toward achieving a goal, nutrition. It becomes
clear though, that in this context, fresh food does not satisfy, if by satisfy we mean
address a lack or make complete. Even though ravenously hungry, the “becoming
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animal” Gregor experiences a profound disgust with the fresh milk he is offered to eat by
his sister Grete:
He almost laughed with joy, for he now had a much greater hunger than in the
morning, and he immediately dipped his head almost up to and over his eyes
down into the milk. But he soon drew it back again in disappointment…because
the milk, which otherwise was his favorite drink and which his sister had certainly
placed there for that reason, did not appeal to him at all. He turned away from the
bowl almost with aversion and crept back into the middle of the room. (16)
Fresh food is no longer desirable, as it belongs to the world of absolute signification- of
which he is no longer part. Any attempt by Gregor to attain nourishment via this food
will leave him invariably unsatisfied. “The fresh food, by contrast, didn't taste good to
him. He couldn't bear the smell and even carried the things he wanted to eat a little
distance away” (18). This revulsion is one elicited by the presence of the absolute or
permanent which no longer applies to the “becoming- animal” in a state of transition.
Gregor now operates in an environment which is not oriented toward some distant goal,
being, but is discontinuous, interrupted, incoherent, full of gaps within itself. His world is
now non-sequential - comparable linguistically to a sentence with abrupt breaches in
syntax.
Julia Kristeva refers to Gregor’s revulsion as an experience of “abjection” – that which
results from transgressing the boundaries of previously stable opposites.
Characteristically, the abject, “does not respect borders” and “functions as the ‘in-
between’ of borders....at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable…” (Powers of
Horror, 117) Abjection is a response to the co-mingling of opposites, in a place where
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singular identity collapses and indeterminate multiplicity emerges. Kristeva speaks
directly to this experience of the abject with regard to food:
Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection.
When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk - harmless,
thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail pairing - I experience a gagging
sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the
organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause
forehead and hands to perspire (Powers of Horror, 117).
Gregor’s experience of the abject correlates directly to his transformation, as he now
occupies the state of the in-between, neither fully human nor inhuman. He reacts to what
he experiences as, “…one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat
that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of
the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Powers of Horror, 114). In place of what was
once stable identity he is faced with a new variable constitution, one that no longer
capable of providing singular definition. Moving from an arbolic to a rhizomatic
paradigm elicits this experience of abjection, as the rhizomatic model does not provide
for the hierarchical structure or stable substance which would allow for the type of
categorization that Gregor seeks.
What now becomes attractive in place of fresh foods are articles in the process of
decaying and food that is decomposing. It is only this transitory matter that comes to
excite the “becoming – animal”:
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There were old half-rotten vegetables, bones from the evening meal, covered with
a white sauce which had almost solidified, some raisins and almonds, cheese
which Gregor had declared inedible two days earlier... In addition to all this, she
put down a bowl—probably designated once and for all as Gregor's—into which
she had poured some water... Gregor's small limbs buzzed now that the time for
eating had come. (18)
It is in their provisional nature that these objects hold allure for him. This is because the
decaying food bears a likeness to his in-between state. The food can no longer be
categorized as such, as it is neither fresh nor completely decomposed, but in a state of
becoming. It does not seek to serve the explicit purpose of nourishment, or exist with a
strictly functional goal. It is transitional, and not fit for “human” consumption, which is
why it is attractive to the “ungeheuer.” I contend that Gregor’s predilection for these
transitional objects amounts to a subversion of the poles of binary opposition and thereby
provides a glimpse into a Pure Mediality in which a transcendental signified is never
reached. This Pure Mediality runs congruent to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic
approach to reading Gregor as “becoming - animal”:
To become animal is to participate in movement…to cross a threshold, to reach a
continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of
pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations,
signifiers and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of de-territorialized
flux, of non-signifying signs (Towards a Minor Literature, 13).
If bodily self-control is the prerequisite to membership in the world of the human, then
we see another instance of Gregor losing this identity in his inability to control his insect
limbs. These new “animal” legs are described as being involved in rapid wriggling and
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vibration over which Gregor has no power, “…he had only many small limbs which
were incessantly moving with very different motions and which, in addition, he was
unable to control” (14). Much like the structure of the rhizome, his limbs are not under
the control of an organizing will nor central controlling agent. There is no hierarchical
structure in place that is at work directing their operation. Thus, much like fresh food
does not serve some utilitarian function in his transitory state, neither do these new
extremities.
5.4 Food and Decay: The Unknown Nourishment:
From the point of view of aesthetics, the promise of art has always presumably been to
fill a human need which, because of its constraints, logic and reason can not. With this in
mind, one should not overlook the similarity between the role of the decaying food in
“The Metamorphosis” and that of music 17 . Much like food, music does not provide for
stability, permanence or absolute presence. Kafka recognized the inherent qualities of
music to be its temporal and relational nature. Its very essence requires it to be
continually involved in movement and change, with the end of the musical piece, its final
note, never corresponding to its goal. It is then no coincidence that it is in this experience
of the processual nature of music that the metamorphosing Gregor experiences “unknown
nourishment”:
For him it was as if the way to the unknown nourishment he craved was revealing
itself. He was determined to press forward right to his sister, to tug at her dress,
17 Though I discuss it here briefly, I dedicate the entirety of the next chapter to the role of
music in Kafka’s literature.
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and to indicate to her in this way that she might still come with her violin into his
room, because here no one valued the recital as he wanted to value it. (36).
Recognizing that the music exerted a force upon him that was beyond his control, Gregor
begins to self-question: “Was he an animal that music could move him so” (36)? This
questioning indicates an inability to move beyond the structural dichotomy of animal
versus human. “Gregor hangs between two worlds—between the insect and human
worlds. For Gregor to complete the metamorphosis, he must willingly leave behind the
human world of consciousness and language” (Lippit, 146).
His transformation should mandate accommodation to rhizomatic operationality, without
reliance upon pre-ordained structures which seek to force definition through the process
of exclusion. Nevertheless, he makes attempts to adhere to his previous stable identity, to
the world of the human. By defining his status through its opposite- the inhuman- the
animal, Gregor continues to frame his existence via oppositional thinking. Rather than
shifting paradigmatically from a perspective of absolute being to one of perpetual
becoming, his reference to “animal-like” tendencies still only involves conceiving of the
identity “animal” as opposite to the “human.”
Gregor, clinging to a semblance of “human” identity, panics, and in an attempt to retain
some remnant of this identity, responds to Grete removing the items in his room by
frantically grasping on to the hanging picture which he himself had once framed:
…he really didn’t know what to salvage first, then he saw hanging conspicuously
on the wall, which was otherwise bare already, the picture of the lady all dressed
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in furs, hurriedly crawled up on it and pressed himself against the glass, which
gave a good surface to stick to and soothed his hot belly. At least no one would
take away this picture while Gregor completely covered it up (26).
Gregor’s attempt to keep possession of this framed picture, a remnant of his human
identity, is interesting in an ontological context. It points to the problematic worldview
that understands content and format (medium/message) as intrinsically separate. It also
makes apparent the demands of this framework that process be contained within
absolutist constructs. As the woman in the picture has half of her arm covered in fur, (the
animal) the image itself represents Gregor’s transitionary state, that of the “becoming -
animal”, or that which can not be categorized within the identities human or animal.
Gregor’s operating principles require that parameters be placed around becoming in order
to frame that which by its nature is unruly. By this I mean that that some type of form is
necessary to ensure that this previously unruly content can be categorically organized in
order to make it palatable. This type of framed perspective is that which allows us to
clearly delineate, to exclude with a surgical precision, the strangeness that does not fit.
We are especially predisposed to exclude when it comes to the kind of “content” which
involves the illicit mixture of opposites. Gregor’s attempt to hold onto this picture
indicates at this stage, a holding on to the identity “human” – a remnant of the enframing
that makes us a final subject - whereas the picture symbolically represents the structure of
a human identity, and abandoning it would require him to begin to let go of that identity.
Kafka’s literature works on the level of deconstructing the need for this framing,
removing the content/form and human/animal oppositional structures, thereby allowing
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for this uncontained state to freely emerge. It goes back “before the law” began the
process of defining the rules of containment and framing. Kafka’s work takes part in
what might be called the un-framing of utilitarian opposition, and moves towards a
rhizomatic perspective that encourages an ontology of becoming. Kafka was highly
cognizant of the relationship between writing and becoming as described by Deleuze and
Guattari:
To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived
experience. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the
midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived
experience. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-
woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of
becoming-imperceptible” (Literature and Life, 94).
Through his use of allusive language, which achieves only temporary meaning, suspends
judgment and withdraws from permanence, Kafka points to the fact that we betray the
unruly by attempting to frame it. The text thus comes to work as a rhizome, in which
unruly content is not judged as such, as the previously requisite hierarchical structure is
no longer the working model.
Gregor’s mother disagrees with Grete, believing that perhaps the family should not
remove her Gregor’s personal belongings from his room. She remarks, “I think it would
be best if we tried to keep the room exactly in the condition it was in before, so that,
when Gregor returns to us, he finds everything unchanged and can forget the intervening
time all the more easily" (24). In her reluctance to make these changes, to remove the
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items which are emblematic of her son’s human identity, she attempts to hold on to any
last semblance of the world of which Gregor was once part. In her comment, “They were
clearing out his room; depriving him of everything he loved…” (24), she too indicates a
refusal to accept Gregor’s current state, as she can only think of these items in terms of
Gregor’s former relationship with them. In her comments, we see her hope that Gregor
will return to his previous identifiable state. But this return is not possible, as Gregor has
forever departed from the world of stable being and clearly discernible identity.
At this point in the text, a movement begins on the part of Grete to linguistically de-
personalize Gregor, as she proceeds to identify him as no longer existing within the
constructs of the human. In place of his previous identity as “brother” we now see his
identity transform to that of an “animal.”: “But how can it be Gregor? If it were Gregor,
he would have long ago realized that a communal life among human beings is not
possible with such an animal and would have gone away voluntarily. Then we would not
have a brother, but we could go on living and honor his memory. But this animal plagues
us” (38). Gregor’s failure to fit into the constructs of the human results in the relegation
of his status to that of a monstrosity. It is now this neither/nor monstrosity that must be
precluded from participating in their human community.
In order to release themselves from the burden of this monstrosity, the family must
exclude him/it:
"If he only understood us," repeated the father and by shutting his eyes he
absorbed the sister's conviction of the impossibility of this point, "then perhaps
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some compromise would be possible with him. But as it is. . ." "It must be gotten
rid of," cried the sister. "That is the only way, father. You must try to get rid of
the idea that this is Gregor (37).
This passage is also of interest from a grammatical perspective. Grete changes her
pronoun usage in referring to Gregor, no longer utilizing “him.” She now turns to a usage
in which Gregor becomes de-humanized, an “it.” This shift is indicative of her inability to
cope with Gregor’s non-categorizable state. It thus becomes clear that what remains
indeterminate, that which can not be assimilated, must invariably be done away with:
Things cannot go on any longer in this way. Maybe if you don't understand that,
well, I do. I will not utter my brother's name in front of this monster 18 , and thus I
say only that we must try to get rid of it. We have tried what is humanly possible
to take care of it and to be patient. I believe that no one can criticize us in the
slightest (37).
Her movement from the subjectivity of the human to the “inhuman it” is a result of her
need for a stable means by which to identify. However, this is a stability which can no
longer be ascribed to Gregor. In a final movement, Grete ceases referring to Gregor as an
“animal” and finally begins to refer to him in the pejorative, as a “monster.”
5.5 The Violence of Demonstrative Language:
The relationship between the becoming-animal’s monstrosity and figurative expression is
one which can be traced back to the understanding which Kafka had of the dynamic
18 Emphasis mine.
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possibilities of literary language. He was of the position that only an a-representative
communication involving metaphor and allusion is capable of circumventing the
conceptualization inherent to demonstrative language, and thus allow for operation within
the rhizomatic. His approach to writing is one which revolves around the, “staging of a
contest between the conceptual and the metaphorical aspects of language, with the latter,
as the language of "allusion," informing Kafka's ‘writing self’…” (Ulfers, 3) In a similar
sense, Sokel remarks:
This allusive use of language is obviously the kind of writing toward which Kafka
aspired …language- i.e., a very special kind of non-referential, merely allusive
language- is a means by which human beings may receive an inkling of the
invisible, true world …To be sure, language can never hope to represent the
extrasensory reality, but it can hope to point toward it and thus sharpen human
awareness for it…The way for literature is therefore not to try to express the truth,
but to hint at it by showing the undoing of untruth” (Sokel, 180).
In Kafka’s view, it is only in a poetic or metaphoric language that “truth,” if we may
speak of it, momentarily emerges or is hinted at. This type of literary language takes
away the power of premature judgment and promotes the enfolding of opposites into one
another- as metaphor does not seek engagement with absolute judgment or decision. As a
result, his writing amounts to a conscious undermining of instrumentality and the goal of
definitive comprehension.
Conversely, a demonstrative language is one that is judged, discreet, isolated, calculable,
countable and atomistic. Its promise of absolute signification involves a forced
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formulation of judgment. By its very nature, demonstrative language is exclusionary as it
always aims at providing for the illusion of permanence. Comprehension in this light,
becomes the process of taking that which is radically unique and arranging it within
utilitarian categories of classification. Etymologically speaking, the term “demonstrate”
is interesting for purposes of this discussion. The infinitive verb “monstrare” from the
Latin translates in English into, “to show” (Mirriam-Webster, 2004), from which we
derive the English term “to demonstrate.” Demonstration thus involves a presentation, a
type of monstrous showing that according to Hartman, “…is a sham; it is not a science
but a pragmatic and consensual exercise; one that can distract from the true cogency of
speech by interposing a mechanistic model of communication” (Saving the Text, 120).
Kafka was highly suspicious of the use and effects of a purely demonstrative form of
language. For him, this type of language fosters both a limited aesthetics because it fails
to allow for a multiplicity of interpretations and refuses to permit for the suspension of
absolute meaning. Rather than upholding the classical signifier/signified relationship
inherent to demonstrative language, Kafka’s writing disrupts that system by advocating
through his use if figurative language, an a-representational communicative model that.
“…disturbs the alliance of signifier with signified by deconstructing a stable ‘concept’
(the glue that holds them together), or by undoing the ‘unique’ charm of particular texts:
the illusion that they have a direct, even original, relation to what they
represent…presence is thus a ghostly effet de realite produced by words, and is dispelled
by the same means (Saving The Text, 121).
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Corngold, who writes extensively about the role of metaphor in Kafka’s work, claims that
the author tampers with metaphor, and that this tampering is the very “spring of Kafka’s
revolutionary force” (16). He points to the relationship between metaphor and
monstrosity as one that intrinsically tied to metamorphosis. He remarks, “If I carry over
from the vehicle to tenor properties in excess of the metaphor, such as the automatic
adjuration and violent punishment which a devil calls forth—if I carry this violence over
to a son--- then I have made the metaphor monstrous” (Lambent Traces, 15). According
to him, “The Metamorphosis” as a text can be read as a metaphor for becoming in the
“capacity of metaphor to engender monstrosity” (19).
More than anything else, it is the movement towards a rhizomatic perspective
which The Metamorphosis challenges its readers to embrace. The text works
without hierarchy of structure, in which its networks are, “many and interact,
without anyone being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers,
not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning, it is reversible; we gain access to
it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the
main one…"(S/Z 6). Kafka’s accomplishes this deconstruction via a language
that is radically infinite, and profoundly a-representational. In summary, his
writing serves as a reminder of the “truth” we must, “simplify and thereby falsify,
as well as repress, but which asserts itself in modern thought, literature, and art”
(EGS Lecture Notes, 4). Any insistence upon holding fast to an understanding of
being within an arbolic system will invariably lead us toward an inadequate
reading of the work as, “Any purely ideological reading of Kafka… will miss
[his] most original contribution: the figuration of that which dooms interpretation
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to failure, even a correct one… Gregor’s abjection is…more than a symptom to
be read and decoded, more than a condensation of social forces or contradictions”
(Santer 11).
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“I’ve often wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might
have been - if the invention of language had not intervened - the means of
communication between souls.”
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-Proust
“We see that literatures are in fact arts of "noise"; what the reader consumes is this
defect in communication, this deficient message; what the whole structuration erects
for him and offers him as the most precious nourishment is a counter-communication;
the reader is an accomplice, not of this or that character, but of the discourse itself
insofar as it plays on the division of reception, the impurity of communication…
Whereby we see that writing is not the communication of a message which starts from
the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the
text, only the reader speaks.”
Music and Pure Mediality:
6.1 Music as A-Representative Art:
-Barthes, S/Z
One important aspect in Kafka’s attempt to achieve Pure Mediality in his writing is the
role of music. In this chapter, I wish to discuss the phenomenon. Certain fundamental
questions arise when we consider music: its aesthetic role and perhaps its communicative
functionality. Does music exist solely as an artistic phenomenon which functions to bring
about some ultimate sense of meaning? Is it communicating a message, and if so, is that
message communicated between a sender (musician) and a recipient (listener)? Further, is
music related to language, perhaps as some other form of language, or is it actually an
escape from the limitations inherent to the linguistic?

Throughout my reading of Kafka’s texts I have discussed his use of language as pure, and
thus not a utilitarian tool toward some teleological goal. I have argued that Kafka uses
language to undermine the structuralist signifier/signified relationship and expose its
inherent metaphysics. I seek now to explore the role of music as a medium that is an
expression of the un-signified. Only via music, which models process thinking through
its transitory and relational qualities, might a-metaphysical, a-representational
communication occur.
Although Kafka admits in his diaries that he felt no great appreciation for music, the
presence of the musical, and more precisely the presence of music as a-representational
art is present in many of his works. I focus here on two of Kafka’s works, namely “The
Metamorphosis” and “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse-Folk.” I contend that music,
through its temporal and allusive nature, transcends the typical sender-receiver
communicative model and exists on a plane apart from the strictly utilitarian. Music can
be seen in this light as a signifying process never resolving in a signified. This has
tremendous consequences for a study of the role of music in Kafka’s literature.
Consideration must now be given to items such as the suspended chord and atonal music
which do not allow for classical resolution, but rather infinite transition. This new way of
conceiving Kafka’s communicative point of view compels a re-evaluation of his literary
work and aesthetic sensibility in light of Pure Mediality.
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6.2 Music and Language:
Many classical musicologists have applied to music the same treatment given to
linguistics. From this point of view, music is conceived as a form of mediation which
follows the sender-receiver model, participating in the communication of a message
through another form of language - a musical language. This musical language is
structured, signifying and strictly hierarchical. It corresponds to a given set of rules which
govern its creation and articulation with regard to its constituent elements such as key,
rhythm and melody. This representational model in which music is conceived of as an
aesthetic medium which seeks only to communicate a message to its listener faces the
same problems and limitations as the structuralist linguistic theory I have discussed
previously. As Nietzsche recognizes in The Birth of Tragedy, “Language, as the organ
and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of
music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music”
(55). Thus, it would be an error to simply apply the rules of conceptual language to the
domain of music.
From an a-representational perspective, music can be seen as a medium which
circumvents signification and thereby allows for communication without telos. In his
Essays on Music, Adorno argues that music operates by a “different law” (116)
concluding that musical interaction both retains and transgresses meaning whereas
signifying language must endlessly point toward the “impossible” (116). He continues:
Music shows its similarity to language once more that, like signifying language, it
is sent, failing on a wandering journey of endless mediation to bring home the
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impossible. Except that its mediation unfolds according to a different law from
that of signifying language, not in meanings that refer to each other, but in their
mortal absorption into a context that preserves meaning even as it moves beyond
that meaning with every motion (116).
Music, which encompasses both form and content, which suggests in a subtle way rather
than defines, which comes into being and passes away, inherently allows for radical
undecidability. Music might be conceived of as an a-teleological art that transgresses the
merely linguistic - “the show that does not show” which does not seek to represent
something outside of itself. By remaining always ambiguous and allusive, music can
only be likened to the figurative language of metaphor, which seeks to relate only
indirectly.
This ontological and aesthetic perspective is echoed in the contemporary work of
composers, such as John Cage, who argue that certain types of music, because they
operate in a sphere apart from opposition, are capable of showing a more “authentic”
vision of the world - one that is neither absolute nor stable, but in process. Cage believes
that music is capable of showing the world in its original state, prior to the distortion
which occurs in the process of conceptualization. He remarks:
Before we wished for logical experiences; nothing was more important to us than
stability. What we hope for is the experience of that which is. But ‘what is’ is not
necessarily the stable, the immutable. We do know quite clearly, in any case, that
it is we who bring logic into the picture. It is not laid out before us waiting for us
to discover it. ‘What is’ does not depend on us, we depend on it. […] And
unfortunately for logic, everything we understand under that rubric ‘logic’
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epresents such a simplification with regard to the event and what really happens,
that we must learn to keep away from it (A Year From Monday, 80).
Thus for Cage, music involves both presence and absence as its existence involves
passing into and out of being. He speaks of the insight into a “real” whose terms are
complementarities, such as “presence and absence, together,” as “wisdom”: “…the
thought of wisdom … which reveals in each term of duality the complement of the
other…” (94). Elsewhere, he expresses that: “…the situation must be yes-and-no, not
either-or. Avoid polar situations” (79). He recognizes clearly that music functions in a
way that transcends oppositional structures. As music is experienced not as written
notation, but as a series of physical vibrations occurring over time, musical “presence” is
at once always fleeting, and can only be spoken of through the relationship of the
vibrating tones to one another. Additionally, like Kafka, Cage makes use of disturbance
and dissonance within the aesthetic to interrupt any linear temporal or spatial expectation.
Noise functions not as a departure from music, but as a differently conceived musical
paradigm.
6.3 From Tonality to Atonality:
One can understand musical tonality as, "the organized relationship of tones with
reference to a definite center, the tonic, and generally to a community of pitch classes,
called a scale, of which the tonic is the principle tone; sometimes also synonymous with
key” (New Harvard Dictionary of Music). It involves the organized relationship of
musical sounds, as perceived and interpreted with respect to some central point of
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eference that seems to co-ordinate the separate musical items and events, and to lend
them meaning as component parts of a unified whole. By its nature, this system must
function through a series of rules and prohibitions on pitch relationships and their
relationship to a tonic center. In particular, what are prohibited in a tonal composition are
repeated dissonances, in other words, critiques of differences. In his text A Time of Need,
Barrett discusses tonal music:
The whole of tonal music was a magnificent and elaborate artifice built upon a
very simple foundation: the key with its tonic and dominant tones. However
intricate his variations, however surprising and complex his harmonies, the
composer must return to the tonic. After many wanderings through which we
were never homeless, we do in fact come home… (229)
Tonal music is therefore a clearly delineated system which the composer accommodates
himself to working within. It provides very distinct parameters around which the musical
composition can be created. Faced with a finite series of aesthetic options, twentieth
century composers sought to not only challenge the limits of tonal systems, but more
importantly, to deconstruct the system which by virtue of its structure, imposes these
aesthetic limitations.
Atonal, a departure from the structure of the tonic - is generally used to designate a
method of musical composition in which the composer has deliberately rejected any
system of harmonic tonality. This conception of music rejects the notion that any one
particular chord is central and that all surrounding harmony is to be viewed in
hierarchical relation to that single chord. Atonal music has no tonic, no dominance, and
no pitch hierarchy. It is built absenting these traditional structures. To create completely
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atonal music involves an absence of repetitions, accent, durational difference, cadence
and strategic placement. Composers of atonal music attempt to avoid reminders of tonal
music, evading major and minor chords, scales, keys, dominant functions, regular
rhythms and repetition. The absence of structure demanded by key opens the door to
what is possible for music as Pure Mediality. “It is only dissonance, which destroys the
faith of those who believe in harmony, that the power of seduction of the rousing
character of music survives” (Adorno, 18). Hence, atonal music is a language that refuses
to be constrained by “An ideology of scientific harmony…the mask of a hierarchical
organization from which dissonances (conflicts and struggles) are forbidden…” (Attali
61).
An interesting correspondence can be made between Kafka’s literature and atonal music.
Barrett remarks:
Something like this happens in our encounter with Kafka. On first reading we
feel that something is off key, and inevitably we listen for a key that is not there
but that we expect always to be on the verge of hearing; and then we take refuge
in ‘interpretations’ that would seem to supply the key but ultimately fail because
they do not accord with the actual texture and surface of the narratives
themselves; until finally it dawns on us this is an atonal world without any key at
all (A Time of Need, 230-231).
It is this dissonant and atonal world that I suggest Kafka’s literature explores - one in
which the two-value world of tonality has broken down, and we can no longer rely upon
the comfortable structures of old.
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To read/listen Kafka’s writing/music thus requires an exquisitely keen ear, perhaps even
a different type of hearing- although it is likely that human hearing has been so
erroneously preconditioned that it is no longer sufficient for this task. Perhaps this is why
where music appears in Kafka’s texts, it is generally transitionary characters that are
found. I suggest that it is through the musical experiences of these “becoming-animals”
(those in metamorphosis) that Kafka continues to explore the paradigm of Pure
Mediality.
6.4 “Was he an animal…?”
The role of music in metamorphosing into a transitional state, as Deleuze and Guattari
put it “becoming animal” is primarily explored in “The Metamorphosis” and “Josephine
the Singer.” I will address “The Metamorphosis” first. This text presents one of the
earliest explorations of music and sound in Kafka’s work. Music is presented here as a
force that operates in the realm of the a-representative, and as a result, does not aim at
some outside signification. Through an examination of the change which occurs to
Gregor’s voice as well as the influence of Grete’s violin playing, we are led to an
“always-evolving” perspective on the nature of existence.
Let us begin with the change in the qualities of Gregor’s voice, specifically the sounds he
creates. We are told that the metamorphosing Gregor, in his attempt to communicate
through the bedroom door with his inquisitive mother, "made an effort with the most
careful articulation and by inserting long pauses between the individual words to remove
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“everything remarkable from his voice.” (5) We immediately see here an attempt by him
to cling to the stable identity of his past. By trying to remove the remarkable from his
new transforming voice, Gregor initially attempt to deny his becoming. The voice of the
metamorphosing Gregor is not wholly identifiable, as it approaches meaning but
simultaneously withdraws from it, thereby suspending the perception of stable identity.
By attempting to use “as clear a voice as possible” (91) Gregor is clearly making a
conscious effort to remain identifiable, to revert to his previously assimilated self and to
deny the transformation which he is undergoing. Kafka describes the tonality of that
voice:
Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice, answering hers, unmistakably his
own voice, it was true, but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it
like an undertone, which left the words in their clear shape only for the first
moment… (91)
The sound of his words achieving what might be called comprehensibility is only
momentary, as their sonority “…quickly rose up reverberating around them to destroy
their sense, so that one could not be sure one had heard them rightly” (91). Perfectly clear
to the monstrous animal, these words become garbled to the intended recipient of his
speech-act. But this inability to communicate “clearly and precisely” (91) can only be
considered as such along the representational lines which are part of the stable sense of
identity-thinking to which Gregor clings.
After this “failed” attempt at verbal communication, Gregor recognizes that he can no
longer articulate himself in a way that is remotely comprehensible to his family:
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All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed
clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because his ears had gotten
used to them. In order to get as clear a voice as possible for the critical
conversation which was imminent, he coughed a little, and certainly took the
trouble to do this in a really subdued way… (11)
Although these sounds seem perfectly clear to him, Gregor is nonetheless in the evolving
state of being in-between. His transitioning has removed the ability of language to
communicate a message outside of itself, to point to something exterior. In this
circumstance, language articulated with sound (speech) can no longer be conceived as
communicating a discernable message from its sender to its receiver.
Gregor comes to characterize even his indistinct noises, such as coughing, as inhuman.
He states, “…it was possible that even this noise sounded like something different from a
human cough” (92). In his remark that, “the change in his voice was nothing but the
precursor of a severe chill…” (92), Gregor continues to attempt to adhere to the rules of
the binary world. In his treatment of these sounds as anomalies, he relegates processual
being to the status of a sickness. This becoming is seen as an aberration from the norm (a
disturbance against its opposite - health) and as such, it is implied that the sickness is
something which needs to be set aright and returned to its original (healthy) state. In this
context, Gregor also makes the comment that he is no longer capable of making once
clear judgments of his voice, “…since this noise too might not sound like a human cough
for all he was able to judge” (99). His predilection to clearly separate and categorize, to
conceptualize, is a remnant of the world of stable being, not of becoming. Yet one must
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not view this change as loss, but rather as transition. Any attempt to see the transitory as
lack functions on the level of nostalgia for a lost teleology.
Gregor’s mother still functions within this teleological world, as upon hearing the voice
of her son declares him to be unwell and in need of medical attention:
Did you understand a single word?" the manager asked the parents, "Is he playing
the fool with us?" "For God's sake," cried the mother already in tears, "perhaps
he's very ill and we're upsetting him. Grete! Grete!" she yelled at that point.
"Mother?" called the sister from the other side. They were making themselves
understood through Gregor's room. "You must go to the doctor right away.
Gregor is sick. Hurry to the doctor. Have you heard Gregor speak yet?" (10)
Her denial of the transitory nature of Gregor’s being confirms the representational point
of view from which she operates. She is caught in the same trap, understanding
disturbances in the communicative process to be disruptions in an otherwise teleological
system. It is only the manager, a voice from outside of the life of the family, who
confirms something very different about the sounds, "That was an animal's voice" (10),
thereby confirming a truth she is either unwilling or incapable of seeing (hearing).
The perspective that I have described on voice and sound in the story is similarly
applicable to performed music. This can be established by examining the scene in which
Gregor’s sister Grete begins to play the violin for the family’s lodgers. In this portion of
the text, we see Kafka address the influence of sound on his “in-process” protagonist.
Although Gregor secludes himself from almost all human contact throughout the story, at
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the point at which his sister commences her performance, it is if he has been summoned
by a force beyond his control. He loses all of his former reluctance:
The sister began to play… Attracted by the playing, Gregor had ventured to
advance a little further forward and his head was already in the living room. He
scarcely wondered about the fact that recently he had had so little consideration
for the others. Earlier this consideration had been something he was proud
of...(10)
It is as if the music has a quality which overwhelms him in its stimulating and
communicative power. The transitory being is attracted to the transitory sound, as it
displays to him the world that he is far more “in tune” with, one of perpetual becoming.
He becomes compelled to reach this musical emanation, or perhaps more precisely, to
experience it (and his own becoming) more acutely, abandoning concerns over his
appearance, and with no thought given to consequences:
On his back and his sides he carted around with him dust, threads, hair, and
remnants of food. His indifference to everything was much too great for him to lie
on his back and scour himself on the carpet, as he often had done earlier during
the day. In spite of his condition he had no timidity about inching forward a bit on
the spotless floor of the living room (35).
While he experiences this music profoundly, he is still not fully aware of the
ramifications of awakening to the processual, and responds by questioning the very
foundation of his identity, asking, “Was he an animal that music so captivated him” (35)?
This self-questioning presents the crisis of a character that is slowly becoming aware of
his transitionary nature.
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In being summoned by this music, Gregor experiences an instance of the breakdown of
opposition, or what Barthes calls transgressing the “Wall of Antithesis”:
…it is fatal, the text says, to remove the dividing line, the paradigmatic slash
mark which permits meaning to function (the wall of the Antithesis), life to
reproduce (the opposition of the sexes), property to be protected (rule of contract).
In short, the story represents (we are in a readerly art) a generalized collapse of
economies: the economy of language usually protected by separation of
opposites… (S/Z, 13)
Gregor’s stabilized conceptualizations have been transgressed as Kafka scrambles and
disorients, via his use of language, the binary logic under which his character functions.
It is Gregor’s attraction toward the transgressive world of becoming that is of importance
here as Kafka suggests that in order to “understand” music; one must become
“monstrous”, or operate in the abject world that allows for the presence of such
monstrosity. As the classical oppositions of being/nothingness, subject/object,
inside/outside break down, we are left with this abjection, what Kristeva describes as a
“privileged place of mingling, of the contamination of life by death, of begetting and of
ending.” (Powers of Horror, 149) What disturbs identity and system order presents
abjection, as it, “…does not respect borders, positions, rules, the in-between, the
ambiguous, the composite” (Powers of Horror, 4). I suggest that Kafka’s literature, as
expressed through his treatment of music may be seen as an embrace of the dissonant, the
abject, “a vision that resists any representation, if the latter is a desire to coincide with the
presumed identity of what is to be represented” (Powers of Horror, 151).
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“The Metamorphosis” presents a vision of music as a signifying process that never
resolves into a signified because of its very processual nature and temporality. At no
single point within music can absolute presence or univocal meaning be established, as
one can not judge or evaluate singular tones apart from their relationship to others. Yet
the question still arises: Is anything at all revealed or communicated through music? In
this regard, I am inclined to agree with Adorno in that music’s, “…quality of being a
riddle, of saying something that the listener understands, yet does not understand is
something it (music) shares with all art. No art can be pinned down as to what it says, yet
it still speaks” (Essays on Music, 114).
6.5 “Josephine the Singer:” Suspended Chords, Suspended Judgment
“…Opposition is possible only at a distance, when you sit before her, you know: this
piping of hers is no piping.”
Perhaps the most prominent exploration of music in Kafka resides in the last story
published in his lifetime, the cryptic - “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk.” Critics
have long approached this text from a biographical perspective, arguing that the story’s
central character corresponds to its author, and that the work serves as an opportunity for
Kafka to meditate one final time on the role of the artist in society. I find this perspective
far too narrow, as I believe the story encompasses a much larger space. Kafka clearly
recognized the erroneous human tendency to appropriate language and via his literature,
sought for its de-appropriation. I contend that he is grappling here again with an
communicative theory of Pure Mediality, using the text to offer alternate models for
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aesthetics, language and communication. Music thus proves to be an aesthetic medium
for this dis-appropriation.
Quite unlike the words of a language which refer to a signified, music in “Josephine the
Singer”, though it has a precise operationality, never has a stable reference to a code of
the linguistic type. It is not a myth coded in sounds instead of words, but rather a
“language without meaning” (Attali 23). While musical language bears some
resemblance to linguistics, music does not represent clearly and precisely, but rather
alludes to meaning. It can thus circumvent the traumatic and violent process of
conceptualization generally required for meaning to be revealed. Through the narrative
of “Josephine the Singer,” music retains its place as a-representational art, not
functioning to signify toward some greater end. The story actively transcends the
boundaries of opposition, where the utilitarian sender-receiver communicative paradigm
no longer operates. As such, we have communicative immediacy which I have
previously referred to as “pure.”
Kafka again uses an animal protagonist to explore this medial space. His parable
describes a congregation of “mouse people,” who communicate in high pitched sqeaking
noises. This community partakes in the vocalization or “piping” of the protagonist,
Josephine. The narrative wavers between superlative praise for Josephine and a
communal indifference to her performance, between her singings evoking an effect, to it
compelling no reaction at all. The nature of Josephine's piping is ultimately so deeply
questioned that one wonders if her performances involve any vocalization at all.
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Within the first paragraph of the text, Kafka begins questioning what message is actually
communicated in Josephine’s singing. The narrator asserts the community’s belief that
they are able to grasp or comprehend a message articulated by her. Yet doubt is quickly
inserted, as we move from the community “understanding” the singing to a denial of the
possibility of understanding,
I have often thought about what this music of hers really means. For we are quite
unmusical; how is it that we understand Josephine's singing or, since Josephine
denies that, at least think we can understand it. The simplest answer would be that
the beauty of her singing is so great that even the most insensitive cannot be deaf
to it, but this answer is not satisfactory. If it were really so, her singing would
have to give one an immediate and lasting feeling of being something out of the
ordinary, a feeling that from her throat something is sounding which we have
never heard before and which we are not even capable of hearing, something that
Josephine alone and no one else can enable us to hear (192).
We learn, all too quickly, that this understanding does not occur. Rather, the community
is depicted as devoid of emotional response to the singing. The narrator continues,
“…that is just what does not happen, I do not feel this and have never observed that
others feel anything of the kind” (192). The narrator’s description moves from
Josephine’s music as being capable of having an emotional/aesthetic effect on the
community to it serving no real aesthetic or use-value, as Kafka seizes another
opportunity to explore the double nature (both/and) of existence through contradiction.
The music is revealed as both evocative and simultaneously ineffectual, and neither
wholly present nor absent. In this way, Josephine’s music resists artistic or
communicative representation, and refuses to be conceptualized.
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Josephine herself recognizes that while there is general recognition of her singing by the
mouse folk, she can not hope for any “real understanding”:
She believes anyhow that she is singing to deaf ears; there is no lack of
enthusiasm and applause, but she has long learned not to expect real
understanding, as she conceives it. So all disturbance is very welcome to her;
whatever intervenes from outside to hinder the purity of her song, to be overcome
with a slight effort, even with no effort at all, merely by confronting it, can help to
awaken the masses... (195)
Disturbance as it is referred to here is not to be seen as an impediment to comprehension,
but a reminder that communication, even aesthetic communication, is not comprised of a
“clear” signal transmitted from sender to recipient. Clarity and consistency are
conceptualizations that do not actually exist in a world unmasked as perpetually
becoming. These concepts are remnants of a metaphysical system that Kafka has left
behind. Josephine calls for these disturbances to intersperse themselves into the “purity”
of her singing so that the absolute may be hybridized. As such, she is Kafka’s agent,
embracing communicative and artistic immediacy. It is only through the presence of
these disturbances that she can “awaken the masses” (195) to a re-envisioning of the
world as process.
The question then becomes, does Josephine’s singing in any way serve to
communicate a message? Kafka again juxtaposes contradictory statements here,
suggesting that the message of the music while at times seems to be purpose-less,
occasionally resounds and exposes provisional meaning, allowing for a glimpse
of the intermingling of presence and absence. The narrator describes the
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community’s experience of Josephine’s singing in this respect as, “fleeting and
transient” (195-196) and as to the goal of her work:
…her singing is supposed to save us, nothing less than that, and if it does not
drive away the evil, at least gives us the strength to bear it. She does not put it in
these words or in any other, she says very little anyhow, she is silent among the
chatterers, but it flashes from her eyes, on her closed lips. (198)
There is the implication here that meaning emanating from Josephine’s singing never
fully arrives to “save us” (196) but rather appears fleetingly “flashes from her eyes” (196)
as it comes into and passes out of being. The temporal existence of music is such that as
one tone or series of tones decays, another must become present to allow for the
continuity of melody. Yet it is only in the way that these tones relate to one another as
constituent parts that music can be understood to exist.
At another point in the text, the narrator speaks to the role of music within the mouse
community, specifically to the lack of musical interest on the part of the older members.
Interest in music is relegated to the domain of the youth: “…it is only the very young
who are interested in her singing as singing, …whereas the real mass of the people—this
is plain to see—are quite withdrawn into themselves” (202-203). Perhaps this is because
the “old,” those unwilling to depart from a structuralist paradigm, have long since
accommodated themselves to a model of communication that demands a message travel
from a point of origin to a definite endpoint, as well as a belief that the purpose of art is
to communicate some grander ultimate meaning. The “old” resist opening themselves to
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new “young” (unmediated) perspective, which results in alienation from a process-
oriented ontology that they can not accept:
We have no youth, we are all at once grown-up, and then we stay grown-up too
long, a certain weariness and hopelessness…Our lack of musical gifts has surely
some connection with this; we are too old for music, its excitement, its rapture do
not suit our heaviness, wearily we wave it away (202).
The narrator’s statement that some of the mouse folk are “too old for music” (202)
reflects their unwillingness, or perhaps inability to experience the world as infinitely
relational, and music as a model of that world. It is only the young, those with “fresh
ears” who are attracted to, and can appreciate Josephine’s singing as singing.
Much like in “The Metamorphosis”, Kafka chooses to have “Josephine the Singer” occur
within the animal world. For him, this is the world of the in-between, the space most
aligned with a conception of communication as immediate. In no place in his literature
does he have his human characters respond to music in the peculiar way his animals do.
Their animality places them beyond the oppositional structure of human/inhuman and
thus beyond utilitarian models of communication. Kafka reserves for his animals a place
from which they can experience the world in flux, a world which is open to, but generally
ignored by his human characters.
Both “The Metamorphosis” and “Josephine the Singer” present music for Kafka as a
realm in which the hierarchy of opposition breaks down. An a-representational art form
involving relationality of tones, music is experienced temporally, and models a world in
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which one can no longer grasp onto stable being. The language of music thus reveals
itself as a “pure” one that communicates only itself and not some external signified. In
Gregor being summoned by the violin and Josephine’s communal piping, we see Kafka’s
protagonists experience sound as the arena of the limitless. This indeterminate space is
unsettling as it exposes the metaphysical world as fiction. At the same time, it opens the
door to new communicative and ontological paradigms. Music disrupts that which is tied
to teleology, and acts aesthetically to communicate the incommunicable without falling
into artistic representation.
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“Poor young man there’s no helping you. I have found out your great wound. You are
dying from this flower on your side.”
-Kafka, “A Country Doctor”
“I don't mean it as a joke when I tell you it's like being seasick on dry land. It's a
condition in which you can't remember the real names of things and so in a great
hurry you fling temporary names at them. You do it as fast as you can. But you've
hardly turned your back on them before you've forgotten what you called them.”
“A Country Doctor”: Writing Within Infinite Relation
7.1 The Space of Undecidability:
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-Kafka, Diaries
I have argued that Kafka’s work is steeped in a profound a-metaphysical critique of
instrumental language, and by extension, definitive judgment. His literature points to the
limitations of the classical signifier/signified construct, consciously undermining it
through an aesthetic approach which provides a glimpse into an ontological framework of
radical undecidability and perpetual becoming. My contention has been that Kafka’s texts
present what is often forgotten or ignored within a strictly utilitarian worldview- the
position(s) of undecidability which, “harbor(s) within itself (a) complicity of contrary
values…prior to any distinction-making…” It has “no stable essence, no ‘proper’
characteristics, it is not, in any sense of the word… a substance” (Derrida, Dissemination
126). Kafka’s literary undertakings thus allow for an expression of this undecidability,
embracing the breakdown of the two-value world.
Kafka is cognizant of the limitations of oppositional structures, and his texts participate in
an active deconstruction of this paradigm. I argue that his work is permeated by the

double-nature of existence, its undecidability, which is exposed through the mixture of
what in utilitarian terms, are viewed as mutually exclusive elements. This is the double-
nature that Derrida describes as:
Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or" such as, among others:" neither a
plus nor a minus, neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference,
neither the inside nor the outside, neither remedy nor poison, neither a presence
nor an absence, neither the incised integrity of a beginning [...] nor simple
secondariness. (Positions 43).
With this starting point, I turn my attention in this chapter to the short story “A Country
Doctor,” which works at probing the space of the undecidable. This is a text in which
metaphoric and allusive language prove to be ways of circumventing utilitarian trappings,
presenting instead a communicative perspective which I have referred to with Benjamin,
as Pure Mediality.
I focus here on three central aspects of Kafka’s story. I begin with a discussion of the
opening scene in which the doctor finds within his “own house” (18) what might be
called a, “transportation of immediacy” - one which no longer requires us to think
ontologically in terms of means and goals. I contend that these newly discovered horses
can be read as symbols of undecidability, allowing for a medial perspective which is
itself unmediated. I then move to an examination of the role of the doctor, both
traditionally as diagnostician, and in the text, as a figure of un-judging who’s analysis
always minimally requires a “second look.” I argue that the doctor no longer views the
world, “…in terms of neat, dichotomous classifications” but rather, “by way of the
scrambling of opposites such as human and animal, horses and pigs, of the indeterminacy
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of the ‘aroma’ arising from the pigsty, which thus create(s) an aura of undecidability, of
‘playfulness,’ that eludes the ‘proper’ or ‘propriety’ that inheres in the very notion of
‘property’” (Ulfers, 2). I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the boy’s “wound,”
focusing upon the power of the figurative “language of literature” to inflict a trauma
which in Kafka’s words, “…hit(s) us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of
someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had
been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be
the axe for the frozen sea within us” (Diaries, 77). It is this inherent power of literary or
poetic language to inflict a trauma on an instrumentalized language that, “believes it has
totalized and purified itself in a unified meaning, beyond the ‘wound’ of equivocity
inherent in all language…” (Ulfers, 3) that Kafka embraces. From the dynamics of the
scene in the pigsty to the questions raised in the process of a diagnosis, to the wound
which is also a “flower”, it is my contention that “A Country Doctor” can be interpreted
as a radical critique of instrumental language, a breaking through of the “wall of
antithesis” (Barthes) that allows for an ontology of becoming to re-emerge.
7.2 Scenes from a Pigsty:
At the beginning of the text, the doctor is operating within a functional paradigm. By this
I mean that he conceives of the world as structured teleologically- in terms of an ultimate
achievable purpose. His desired travel to treat the sickness of his patient requires a means
(horses and carriage) in order to achieve a desired end (arrival at the location). Kafka
begins the text:
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I was in great difficulty. An urgent journey was facing me. A seriously ill man
was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant. A severe snowstorm filled the
space between him and me. I had a carriage—a light one, with large wheels,
entirely suitable for our country roads. Wrapped up in furs with the bag of
instruments in my hand, I was already standing in the courtyard ready for the
journey; but the horse was missing—the horse. My own horse had died the
previous night, as a result of over exertion in this icy winter (220).
Although prepared to make the journey and transverse “all the wide space between him
and me” (220), the absence of a means of transportation temporarily delays him. These
first lines are wrought with an imagery that refers to the problems posed by a strictly
utilitarian worldview. The doctor’s comment on the distance between him and his patient
refers back to a functional perspective in which means are always separated from ends.
From this point of view, the doctor can only interpret himself to be impeded by a “severe
snowstorm”, which presumably blocks the “roads” that he would travel. The snowstorm
is conceived of only as an impediment to reaching his goal, and the road is likewise seen
only as a means toward the achievement of his purpose. At this point in the text, the
doctor is clearly operating from an ontological perspective which sees the world through
the oppositional structures of medium/message and content/form.
According to the doctor, his own horse, his means of transportation, died “as a result of
overexertion” (220) the night prior. This explanation might be understood to symbolize
the over-reliance that human beings have placed upon instrumental modes of
communication. In our drive toward purpose and absolution, we come to abhor any sense
of indeterminacy, and thus participate in a radical exclusion of multiplicity. But the
illusion of the absolute can not hold, and thus breakdown, seen in this light as death,
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ecomes inevitable. We should note that the doctor had previously utilized a single horse
- another allusion to a communicative paradigm that aims at singular, univocal meaning.
The death of that single horse and subsequent entry into the pigsty bring forth
concomitant entry into a world of immediacy and perpetual becoming. The doctor is now
confronted with dual horses, a clear allusion to an ontological perspective that is always
at least double. “Two horses, enormous creatures with powerful flanks, one after the
other, their legs tucked close to their bodies, each well shaped head lowered like a
camel’s, by sheer strength of buttocking squeezed out through the door hole which they
filled entirely” (220).
These two horses, borrowed from the brutish groom are found in the doctor’s,
“uninhabited pigsty” (220) which itself models this new unruly world:
Distracted and tormented, I kicked my foot against the cracked door of the pig sty
which had not been used for years. The door opened and banged to and fro on its
hinges. A warmth and smell as if from horses came out. A dim stall lantern on a
rope swayed inside. A man huddled down in the stall below showed his open
blue-eyed face. “Shall I hitch up?” (221)
I interpret the breaking down of the pigsty doors and the discovery of the horses as a
turning point, one in which the doctor figuratively breaks through the “wall of antithesis”
(Barthes) and is radically transformed. It is in the pigsty that the doctor experiences for
the first time the undecidability that Derrida describes as, “a medium as element
enveloping both terms [of an opposition]; a medium located between the two terms…”
“What counts here is the between, the in-between-ness…” (51) It is in this atmosphere of
unruliness, of the in-between, in which oppositions such as death and life co-mingle, that
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the doctor now opens himself to the immediacy of communication, and the goal-less
nature of becoming.
In reference to the appearance of these horses, the housemaid Rose remarks, “One
doesn’t know the sorts of things one has stored in one’s own house…and we both
laughed” (221). This statement and particularly their laughter are of significance.
According to Ulfers, “What is getting lost in the translation of this sentence is the
housemaid's reference to vorrätig - the adjective to the noun Vorrat, reserve or surplus”
(3). This allusion to reserve/surplus/extra indicates an overflowing, an excess that
according to Nietzsche, "was revealed as truth, contradiction; the bliss born of pain spoke
from the heart of nature" (The Birth of Tragedy, 27). It is in this excess or surplus of
contradictory elements that “truth”, if we can even speak of it, can emerge. Derrida refers
to this as, “unbounded excess,” as, for example, in “painful pleasure,” which “partakes of
both good and ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable” (Dissemination, 99).
Consequently, their laughter may be viewed as an involuntary response to that which no
longer fits into the ordered world of stable being. The laughter signifies the breakdown of
self-control, as one may conceive of it to be a, “manifestation of the loss of composure
going hand in hand with the de-composition of the ‘proper’ order of things that ensues
with the opening of the pigsty” (Ulfers 2).
The most convincing example of the doctor’s movement toward an ontological
and communicative perspective of Pure Mediality comes in Kafka’s description of
the actual journey to his patient’s home. This is a description which does not
chronicle a movement over distance and time, but rather, one that occurs
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essentially instantaneously. In describing the experience, the doctor remarks,
“Then I am already there, as if the farm yard of my invalid opens up immediately
in front of my courtyard gate” (222). This instantaneous arrival removes any
notion of “journey” from the narrative, if by journey we mean a process involving
a starting point, endpoint and medium.
As opposed to the former teleological view in which the doctor would need to arrive at
his destination via a means, we have now what might be called Pure Mediality or “always
already with” of existence- one that is intrinsic to a philosophy of becoming. Being
transported in an instance is thus an undermining of the linear conceptions of space and
time.
7.3 The Role of the Doctor and Diagnosis:
In looking at the complex textual interaction between the doctor and the boy, one might
first reconsider the traditional role of the doctor and associated expectations of the
patient. In general, the doctor serves to evaluate health. He is expected to empirically
arrive at a prognosis through causal reasoning, and subsequently prescribe treatment for
the alleviation of symptoms. By calling upon the doctor, the patient expects definitive
judgment - entering into the consultation with a low threshold for ambiguity regarding his
condition. The doctor is often unrealistically expected to possess some god-like ability to
make medical determinations that are far beyond the scope of what can be known in any
absolute sense. Thus, the doctor who is unable to come to a conclusive diagnosis is often
perceived by his patient as an anomaly - or worse, a failure. Kafka’s text alludes to the
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country doctor’s anger and frustration with such patient expectations in his observation
that:
Incidentally, it’s easy to write prescriptions, but difficult to come to an
understanding with people…That’s how people are in my region. Always
demanding the impossible from the doctor…They have lost the old faith. The
priest sits at home and tears his religious robes to pieces, one after the other. But
the doctor is supposed to achieve everything with his delicate surgeon’s hand.
Well, it’s what they like to think. I have not offered myself. If they use me for
sacred purposes, I let that happen to me as well” (222).
In exploring the dynamics of a profession that generally requires a stance of decision and
certainty, and then proceeding to deconstruct these assumptions, I contend that the text
itself engages with the radically undecidable. This evolves via Kafka’s decision to
operate from a perspective on language which radically departs from the utilitarian model
by suspending the very concept of absolute decision. Rather, Kafka makes the demand
that any examination by a doctor, and by extension, any examination of a literary text by
a reader, must always minimally require a “double take”, as we see the doctor initially
come to a prognosis, only moments later to recognize its inadequacy. In this recognition,
there is the realization that the doctor must defer his prior conclusion in favor of a second
examination, or attempt at interpretation.
In the doctor’s first contact with the boy, the patient seems to exhibit no symptoms which
can be recognized as those of a sickness, if by sickness we are referring to some type of
deviation from a ground state of “well-ness.” The family is described in this context as
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anxiously anticipating his rendering of diagnosis, described as if it were akin to a court
decision:
Thin, without fever, not cold, not warm, with empty eyes, without a shirt, the
young man under the stuffed quilt heaves himself up, hangs around my throat, and
whispers in my ear, “Doctor, let me die.” I look around. No one has heard. The
parents stand silently, leaning forward, and wait for my verdict (223).
Thus, the doctor proceeds to render his initial judgment: “I confirmed what I already
knew; the boy was quite sound…” (222) However, this is a premature rush to judgment;
one that Kafka has the doctor reconsider directly following the diagnosis. It is in this
reconsideration, which brings with it the possibility of a both/and ontological perspective,
that we see the doctor continue to break with a vision of the world which is dichotomous
and neatly constructed. This breakdown of the oppositional structure sick/healthy -
indicative of the larger reorientation which began when he kicked open the door of the
pigsty – is one in which there can no longer be univocal interpretation or definitive
conclusion. The text can thus be conceived of as the site of the “contest of the logic of
tropes and binary logic”, (Corngold, 117) in which there is ultimately a reaffirmation of
the position that the language of literature has the potential to un-judge - where our
habitual tendency is to reduce plurality to singularity.
7.4 Words that Wound:
The notion of the traumatic wound is discussed frequently within contemporary
discourse. From traditional psychoanalysis to the approaches of cultural criticism, trauma
pervades the modern discussion. This trauma though, is rarely discussed from a
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linguistic point of view. Although we sometimes speak of the meaning behind words as
capable of eliciting an effect that may be equated with trauma, for the most part, we fail
to consider the sign itself as a weapon capable of inflicting a wound. However, as
Hartman observes, “Words are always armed and capable of wounding: either because,
expecting so much of them, looking to them as potentially definitive or clarifying, we are
hurt by their equivocal nature” (123). This potential “violence” of literary language, its
ability to wound, was something of which Kafka was fully aware. He embraced this
power, utilizing the literary word to inflict trauma upon the illusion of stable being.
Thus, it is in the “reconsideration” of the doctor’s diagnosis of the boy’s trauma that we
see the emergence of the wound as a site of abjection. In the site/symbol of the wound,
we see the human reaction of horror to the threatened breakdown in meaning caused by
the loss of distinction between subject and object or between self and other. As Kristeva
remarks of abjection:
[W]e may call it a border: abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while
releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it -
on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also,
abjection itself is a compromise of judgment and affect, of condemnation and
yearning, of signs and drives. Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of
pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which the body
becomes separated from another body in order to be - maintaining that night in
which the outline of signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable
affect is carried out (Powers of Horror, 16).
Upon the doctor’s second examination of the patient, the recognition is made that there is
indeed something wrong with the boy that was not apparent during the initial inspection:
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“I was somehow ready to admit conditionally that the boy might be ill after all” (223). It
is in the process of this secondary investigation that the doctor is led to his great
discovery - the “Rose-red” wound within the boy’s side:
On his right side, in the region of the hip, a wound the size of the palm of one’s
hand has opened up. Rose colored, in many different shadings, dark in the depths,
brighter on the edges, delicately grained, with uneven patches of blood, open to
the light like a mine. That’s what it looks like from a distance. Close up a
complication is apparent. Who can look at that without whistling softly? Worms,
as thick and long as my little finger, themselves Rose colored and also spattered
with blood, are wriggling their white bodies with many limbs from their
stronghold in the inner of the wound towards the light. Poor young man, there’s
no helping you. I have found out your great wound. You are dying from this
flower on your side (224).
Kafka’s description of the boy’s wound is of import, as it implicates an intermingling of
both life and death simultaneously. We see it referred to as both a blossoming flower
(alluding to creation or coming into being) and that which is killing the young man
(destruction or passing away). The blossoming of the “flower” simultaneously signifies
both vitality and impending death, as the cycle of the flower always involves a process,
(bloom, death and rebirth) and not ultimate purpose. This new diagnosis of the wound
shows the doctor as incapable of rendering judgment in an absolute sense any longer, as
the wound indicates movement towards a process-oriented worldview, and an ontological
perspective that embraces undecidability and becoming. The text continues:
I came into the world with a beautiful wound; that was all I was furnished with.”
“Young friend,” I say, “your mistake is that you have no perspective. I’ve already
been in all the sick rooms, far and wide, and I tell you your wound is not so bad.
Made in a tight corner with two blows from an axe. Many people offer their side
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and hardly hear the axe in the forest, to say nothing of the fact that it’s coming
closer to them.” (225).
As the world no longer makes sense in terms of the previous ordering of stable
opposition, we begin to see a more synaesthetic understanding of reading and
interpretation - one which transcends the strictly visual. As Hartman argues, an approach
to reading such as this, involves an inherent commingling of multiple senses of
perception. He remarks:
Reading is, or can be, an active kind of hearing. We really do ‘look with ears’
when we read a book of some complexity. A book has the capacity to put us on
the defensive, or make us envious, or inflict some other narcissistic injury. When
literary critics remark of literature, ‘there’s magic in the web,’ they characterize
not only what distinguishes the literary from the merely verbal, but what
distinguishes critical from passive kinds of reading… What active reading
discloses is a structure of words within words, a structure so deeply mediated,
ghostly and echoic… (128-129)
The doctor may thus be seen as conducting a double- reading of this wound, a wound
described as being created by an act of hearing. According to Ulfers, this stripping of the
"axe in the forest" of its "visible" aspect, making its "strokes" an auditory phenomenon
that is beyond the confines of sounds attached to familiar or known meanings, the
"forest" (8).
In transcending our habitual need for stability and demand for presence, “A Country
Doctor” compels a new type of reading and an altogether different approach to
interpretation. As readers, we too often view our role to be comparable to doctors
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diagnosing illness. We then apply this same mistaken logic to the search for an
understanding which is “comprehensive.” However, the more we masquerade around as
physicians in search of a “cure”, the more we do violence on to the text. Conversely, the
more subtly we engage in a reading, the more we tend to move towards an ethics of
alterity - allowing for unrestricted potentiality. “There are thus two interpretations of
interpretation. . . . The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin
which escapes play. . . . The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms
play” (Of Grammatology 292). We are thus challenged by Kafka, although never
overtly, to read “A Country Doctor” in a way which promotes play, one which requires of
us the vigilance to keep the wound open, and the refusal to allow for it to heal. Perhaps it
is only in this approach to reading that we may ever-so-briefly experience the truly
nomadic nature of the text.
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“At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge.”
128
-Kafka, The Judgment
“They were given the choice of becoming kings or kings’ messengers. As is the way
with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only
messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each
other the messages that have now become meaningless.”
Concluding Remarks
8.1 From the De-Centered to Pure Mediality:
- Kafka, Diaries
In Structure and Sign, Derrida comments elegantly on the classical conception of the
universe as centered, which he argues may be coming to the end of its reign as the
predominant ontological paradigm. He points to the importance of an “a-centered”
ontological perspective of infinite playfulness and process rather than the fall-back
teleological position that mandates absolute ground and the achievement of permanence
at some ultimate end:
Thus, it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique,
constituted that very thing within a structure which, while governing the structure,
escapes structurality...the center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the
center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its
center elsewhere . . . The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a
play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a
fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the
reach of play (279).

The shift in perspective that comes with the absence of a center as reference point, along
with the concomitant deconstruction of the binary oppositional thinking that enabled that
concept of center, have served as the departure points of my argument in this project, as it
is in this very a-centered universe that I contend that the literature of Franz Kafka
operates.
Throughout this text I have argued that Kafka’s literature is steeped in a subtle, yet
revolutionary, critique of structuralist linguistics, resulting in a profound a-metaphysical
paradigm shift with staggering repercussions. Following Nietzsche’s lead, Kafka’s
literary texts operate within the worldview of the neither/nor and both/and, embracing a
view of language and communication as free of all instrumentality. The implications of
this shift in perspective allow for an evolution in communication theory toward a model
in which the previous artificial separation of medium/content and sender/receiver breaks
down, and language is no longer reduced to solely the vehicle of meaning. Addressing
this point, Derrida continues:
Is it certain that to the word "communication" corresponds a concept that is
unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word,
communicable? Thus, in accordance with a strange figure of discourse, one must
first of all ask oneself whether or not the signifier "communication"
communicates a determinate content, an identifiable meaning, or a describable
value. However, even to articulate and to propose this question I have had to
anticipate the meaning of the word communication: I have been constrained to
predetermine communication as a vehicle, a means of transport or transitional
medium of a meaning, and moreover of a unified meaning. If communication
possessed several meanings and if this plurality should prove to be irreducible, it
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would not be justifiable to define communication a priori as the transmission of a
meaning (Limited Inc. 1)
Kafka recognized that a language which is strictly representational, while a utilitarian
necessity, is always borrowed. In order for human beings to function pragmatically, we
have been driven to partake in a process that forcibly infuses meaning into signifiers.
However, Kafka’s texts reveal an understanding of language and by extension,
communication which moves beyond the utilitarian towards the networked. Thus, the
“death of the signified” is revealed in Kafka’s writing, as his texts actively subvert the
tyranny of absolute signification by way of an a-representational approach in which,
“…each ‘present’ element in a linguistic system signifies in so far as it differentially
refers to another element, and thus is not itself present” (Critchley, 37).
I have argued that Kafka’s aesthetic use of language participates in counter-use. Through
narrative disruptions, his texts stifle our unconscious drive to judge, freeing up the
playfulness of the sign. Within his writing, we see a network of infinite signifiers which
“acting as if in a burrow” (Towards a Minor Literature, 17), suspend absolute judgment.
Rather than forcefully creating meaning by pushing everything that does not fit into the
parameters of the concept, Kafka presents transitory characters that are “in process”, or
incessantly becoming. His allusive, literary language thus allows for infinite
interpretation. As such, “All that can be uncovered (from his texts) are successive layers
of untruth…For such a procedure demonstrates the inadequacy of all languages to
express the truth. All language can show is the ‘retreat’ of untruth. The process of
making untruth evident is the only ‘light’ that language can shed on truth” (Sokel, 181).
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The fluidity of this literary language works its way into the fluidity of meaning as the
text’s signifiers always refer ad infinitum. “We speak of different or remote places
communicating with each other by means of a passage or opening. What takes place, in
this sense, what is transmitted, communicated does not involve phenomena of meaning or
signification” (Dissemination, 18). By this, we see the circumvention of the metaphysical
ground which language, by virtue of its grasping nature, attempts to hold on to.
The search for some transcendent comprehension of their human condition has been
traditionally interpreted as the central preoccupation of Kafka’s characters. His figures
have been understood to be faced with incessant obstacles to achieving their goals.
However, as I have shown, this perspective only makes sense when viewing the texts to
contain some great mystery to be solved. Once the reader abandons this telos, and
recognizes that Kafka’s world is one that is radically undecidable, we begin to see that
the, “…resolution of non-resolution brings the stories into being and sustains them”
(Signature, Event, Context, 34). On the contrary, the achievement of unequivocal
meaning would result in what might be referred to as the “death of life.” To this point,
Barthes remarks that, "All criticism rests in the notion that the text contains meaning that
is supposed to take its preeminence from an ‘over meaning’...now, the notion of structure
does not support the separation of foundation and design, insignificant and
significant...everything signifies something else" (S/Z 51). He is referring here to the
recurring problems posed by functionalist utilitarian approaches to language in which
every signifier is tied to a signified.
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8.2 Kafka’s Reach:
Let me conclude here by addressing the impact of Kafka’s writing. The influence of
Kafka’s literature is extremely far-reaching. At last count, the Library of Congress listed
over 12,000 commentaries on his work; second only to Shakespeare in terms of the sheer
volume of citation. Perhaps even more impressive though, is the influence he has cast
upon the literary giants of the twentieth century – including the likes of Borges, Camus,
Beckett and Orwell - in whose works the Kafkaesque oeuvre is unmistakable. However,
Kafka’s shadow looms not only over modern and postmodern literature, but has also
pervaded theatre, art, cinema, psychoanalysis and popular culture. He has been
conveniently co-opted by such diverse groups as the Fantasists, Existentialists, Marxists,
Abstract Expressionists and Conspiracy Theorists, among other.
In light of this, it would be remiss to not pause and ask: What is it about Kafka’s writing
that has touched upon, and continues to touch upon, the pulse of our age? Some have
argued that it is Kafka’s heightened attenuation to the absurdity of bureaucracies, his
explicit examination of existential angst and his harrowing portraits of psychological
terror that make him the quintessential allegorist of a century dominated by authoritarian
regimes, World Wars and genocide. I however, do not ultimately find this an adequate
explanation for why his work resonates so dramatically.
Instead, I offer the position that Kafka’s body of work speaks to an even greater concern.
It fundamentally addresses the role that art, in this case a literary one, has in pointing to
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the truths that have been either forgotten or obfuscated by useful habit or lazy
convenience. The very crux of his literature always involves an overflowing, a remainder
which can not be categorized within the totalizing constructs of the pragmatic world.
Consequently and by example, it points to the fact that modern art must always act as the
“reminder of the remainder” vehemently refusing to provide for the closure which would
assuredly be the end of not only interpretation, but of human potentiality. When Adorno,
in “Notes on Kafka” says that the author’s texts actively elude understanding, he points to
the essential functioning element of the works; their capacity for limitless resistance to
any ultimate totalizing interpretation. In the final analysis then, there can be no final
analysis. These are texts which refuse to provide a finality of meaning, whose
revolutionary force lies in their radical re-envisioning of ontology and their re-opening of
the gateway to infinite interpretability, without the possibility for closure .
8.3 Chiasmic Unity and the Ethics of Alterity:
At this point, I would like to, based on my thesis, suggest that with Kafka’s aesthetics of
Pure Mediality there may be the opening of an ethics that is conceived differently from
normative morality. I am making this inference based upon Levinas’ proposal of a
postmodern ethics in his text Otherwise Than Being. Levinas’ central concern is that
western philosophy has been preoccupied with the concept Being, the totality, at the
expense of what might be called, “otherwise than Being”, or that which lies outside of the
totality of Being as transcendent, exterior, infinite, the Other. In short, Levinas' ethics is
situated in an "encounter" with the Other which cannot be reduced to a symmetrical
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elationship. That is, it cannot be localized historically or temporally. Ethics, in the
Levinasian' sense, does not refer to what is generally understood as morality, nor a code
of conduct governing how one should behave. “The ethical is the location of a point of
alterity, or what Levinas calls exteriority, that cannot be reduced to the same…and ethics
is simply and entirely the event in which I am related to the face of the other” (Critchley
5).
The figure which Levinas employs to explain this meeting or dialogue, is that of the
chiasmus 19 , itself derived from the Greek letter X, which denotes a crossing, or
interlacing. “It is the belonging together or interlacing of two moments, or paths, of
reading- repetition and alterity- that best describes the double gesture of deconstructive
reading: the figure of the chiasmus” (28). Ulfers refers to the similar notion of, “chiasmic
unity,” in his discussion of Kafka - a one or a whole in the form of the entanglement of
opposites, of their undecidable fusion and separation. He remarks:
Chiasmic unity by definition violates the principle of non-contradiction, the
principle on which binary logic is based. But this violation does not call for a
“corrective reading that would lead us back to binary logic. Rather, chiasmic unity
constitutes the domain of a different “logic,” a logic that makes the principle of
non-contradiction dysfunction, and is viewed as prior to it. Chiasmic logic
suspends the system of binary oppositions on which non-contradiction is based,
but without reducing the oppositions to some form of the “same” (7).
I contend that Kafka’s texts may also be seen as participating in this entanglement, in the
unity of the chiasmus, which allows for an “open-ness” or vulnerability that is congruent
19 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the chiasmus as, "A grammatical figure by
which the order of words in one of two of parallel clauses is inverted in the other."
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with the Levinasian ethics of alterity. Thus, the Kafkan figures that withhold definition or
decision – ironically seen as “unethical” in their refusal to decide/judge – are perhaps, by
their very (in)action, the ethical in the sense of allowing for the “other to be other” –
rather than be assimilated to sameness. The perceived “impediments” faced by the likes
of Joseph K. or Georg Bendemann can only be thought of as such within a framework
that does not allow for this open-ness or vulnerability. One cannot overlook that at the
center of Kafka’s aesthetics is an art of suspension and deferral, of withholding, or
infinite postponement of judgment and perpetual delay, which might constitute the arena
of the ethical. It is only within the aesthetics of Pure Mediality that this convergence of
the aesthetic and the ethical could occur.
The ethics that I am alluding to here is one that Robert Musil associates with the
aesthetics of “essayism” (see footnote # 4): “For me the word “essay” binds together
ethics and aesthetics 20 ” (Gesammelte Werke in Neun Bänden, 8, 1334). What Musil
implies with the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in the form of essayism is the ethics
of a liberation from truth as the duress of univocity and the tyranny of teleology towards
the truth of the world as a non-totalizable experimental site, of a world that is forever
“other” to itself, and thus inherently and irreducibly open to the Other. In contrast to a
world whose parts are isolated “selves,” this world constitutes an ethics of other-
relatedness as its parts are chiasmically linked, making them “alterities” – corresponding
to the dyadic units of poetic/metaphorical language - where each part “loses its
independent meaning and gains a sense of neighborhood 21 ” (Gesammelte Werke in Zwei
20 Translation: Friedrich Ulfers
21 Ibid
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Bänden, 1084). It is this sense of neighborhood that Kafka approaches, as I have shown,
by his “allusive” writing that in its infinite playfulness suspends the “unethical” violence
of judgment that results in the closure of the open “both-and” structure, the Pure
Mediality, of the world and its construction as one of “either/or.”
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