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