paul-denicola-literature-pure-mediality

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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