A reader soon realizes that any attempt to capture the irreducible singularity of Kafka, either the man or the writer, necessarily ends in failure. Even after a hundred years of probing and examining, Kafka remains a riddle. Perhaps this is how it should be. And like the man from the country in Kafka’s parable “Before the law”, you realize that you shall not be able to enter through the gates of truth into the essence of Kafka’s thinking and his writing – at least not yet. And much like the parable, at the end of all your attempts while you lie in the weariness of your defeat, Kafka, the gatekeeper of his own truth, roars into your ears that it was meant only for you and no one else. This paradox marks, at least provisionally, the point of entry into what we can call the problem of Kafka. The impenetrability of Kafka, the strangeness of his writing, the unfamiliarity of the world Kafka creates prompted Maurice Blanchot to write that the Kafka-problem is so “equivocally elusive that its indecisiveness overtakes who ever tries to face it”.[1] If we are to think of Kafka today – on the centenary of his death – then rather than seeking to solve the riddle called Kafka, giving him a tragic or prophetic voice, should we not try to reconstruct the Kafka-problem anew?

Elias Canetti has talked of Kafka’s “pronounced sensitivity to anything that related to his body”[2] particularly Kafka’s attentiveness towards his thinness which would become the symptom of a much larger and complex problem that would haunt him for the rest of his life – his weakness. Canetti recognizes in Kafka, from an early period, the desire to make his body into an object of thinking. “He had found, in his body, an object of observation, which never escaped him, which could not slip away from him”.[3] Kafka continuously thinks of outside dangers, alien forces which might penetrate his body. But it is not only the dangers without which remain invisible and unknown. The body itself – the interiority of the body – remains equally invisible and threatening. Thoughts about the body become more and more localized narrowing down into separate organs. It is as if precision in thought somehow makes the invisible visible. Consequently, Kafka starts thinking about himself in terms of organs-without-a-body which are in search of corporeal unity. Canetti argues that Kafka is attracted to those who practice natural healing because of this reason. He is intrigued by their idea of a unified body, which Kafka himself lacks. All he can do is search for ways to express his pain, as precisely as he can, since it is his only access to the invisible world of organs-without-a-body. He therefore meticulously categorizes and catalogs his symptoms, trying to give some semblance of order to the disorder and separateness of his organs. Verbalization makes visible – in language – that which insists on being invisible. By transforming his body into an object of observation, isn’t Kafka the first to think of himself as a problem? Isn’t Kafka the originary thinker of the Kafka-problem?[4]

Through an elaborate operation of association and dissociation of symptoms, which constitutes a process of naming, Kafka gives a certain fullness, if not unity to his body[5]. Kafka’s weakness, the thinness of his body, his vulnerability – “I am the thinnest person I know (and that’s saying something, for I am no stranger to sanatoria)”[6] – is not only sheltered by the meticulous descriptions contained in the litany of his complaints but they offer him a certain strength. As its originary thinker, Kafka therefore gives us the principal clue on how to approach the Kafka-problem. No matter what the modality of the problem is, or whatever form the problem takes, for Kafka, it is always ‘grounded’ on some kind of ambiguous collapse of opposites. In case of his body, weakness become indistinguishable from strength, just as solitude and vulnerability becomes a form of immunity – “just as when lying on the floor one cannot fall, so, when alone, nothing can happen to one”[7] – while passive suffering becomes a form of active vigilance through sleepless nights.

A principle of undecidability holds the key to the world Kafka seeks to construct. This explains why the symptoms of that alien world – which has accrued the name Kafkaesque – nevertheless seem so familiar to us.  Again, the man from the country, in “Before the Law” serves as a model for the equivocity which is at the heart of the Kafka-problem. By the end of the story, when he thinks he stands farthest from the law, the man from the country confronts the knowledge that he has been closest to it.  What is true of law – that it truly includes us within its snares by simultaneously excluding us from it – also becomes the principle of the world Kafka creates. Take for example the use of animals in Kafka. Most of the time, the world that Kafka creates seems weird not because it is filled with fantastic creatures – singing mice, talking horses, whistling dogs, erudite monkeys – but because these animals feel more intimate to us than many so-called realistic human characters in literature. Yet they are far away from the “continent of men”.[8] There is a sort of excess intimacy which informs the most unfamiliar characters. This doesn’t at all mean their intimacy signifies personifications of human characters. Such intimacy is not symptomatic of a simple case of anthropomorphism because the process can be reversed. The most familiar figures, a lawyer, a doctor, a land surveyor can be engaged in the most outlandish behavior or find herself in the most unfamiliar situation. It is this undecidability between intimacy and detachment, between familiarity and unfamiliarity which we can take as our provisional point of entry into the world of Kafka.

Canetti identifies this excess intimacy in Kafka’s writing as the mark of a self which resembles itself too closely. He writes, “There are writers, admittedly only a few, who are so entirely themselves that any utterance one might presume to make about them must seem barbarous. Franz Kafka was such a writer”.[9] Canetti goes on to argue that it is not merely in his letters that one finds this ferocious intimacy. On the contrary it is through some of his most outlandish stories that Kafka becomes most intimate. “For, while reading them (the letters to Felice), one realizes that a story like The Metamorphosis is even more intimate than they are”.[10] This is not surprising. In his conversations with the young and aspiring Czech poet Gustav Janouch, Kafka calls his writings “personal proofs of my human weakness”.[11] Kafka harbored the desire of the writer to touch the real-in-itself not only vis-à-vis the world but also his own self. In the same conversations, Kafka talks about the difficulty to touch reality – “the road from appearance to reality is often very hard and long, and many people make very poor travelers”.[12] But we must never mistake this desire to touch the ‘real’ of the self as a personal or autobiographical attempt to understand the ‘authentic’ self. There is not a shadow of any discourse of authenticity in Kafka. He makes it quite clear in these conversations that any attempt to return to the self – in other words any form of narcissism – is the root of what he considers “an original sin”. Kafka tells Janouch, “We attempt to set our narrow world above the infinite phenomena in the cosmos and on the earth move in cycles, like the heavenly bodies, it is an eternal repetition; man alone, the concrete living organism runs a direct course between life and death. For man there is no personal return. He only follows a declining path”.[13] This makes man “forfeit life” in the name of biological survival. As “a concrete living organism we are not content to die and survive as members of a species”.[14] To possess and preserve life in its natural state we expose ourselves to being unnatural. This failure to return is perhaps the source of Kafka’s ambiguous intimacy: the knowledge that we are forever outside ourselves caught within “a maze of distorting mirrors”.[15]

The problem is no longer that of returning to the self but how to escape a self which is trapped in such a hall of mirrors. Because we are always caught in different kinds of grids of power and because our own imprisonment often remains invisible to us – “one’s imprisonment is therefore organized as a perfectly ordinary, not over-comfortable form of daily life”[16] – all we can do is “stumble from one false perspective into another”[17] till we are able to form an ‘image’ of reality. Kafka tells Janouch, “One photographs things in order to get them out of one’s mind. My stories are a kind of closing one’s eyes”.[18] A gesture which recurs in Kafka’s conversation with Janouch is this act of closing one’s eyes. But to close one’s eyes is not to turn a blind eye to reality but to grasp the real of existence. “It isn’t visible. But if one closes one’s eyes, one can hear its rush and roar”.[19] Like in so many of his writings, here too, the possibility of escape is cited through a certain sonority. In Kafka’s stories, music is often linked to the desire to escape but such music lacks form. It is often reduced to a “pure and intense sonorous material”[20] – for example the piping of Josephine the mouse in the story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” – where the act of producing music is more important than its musicality. The whole process is symptomatic of an excess of intimacy captured in the act which seems to bear the trace of the unfamiliar; just like closing one’s eyes allows one to hear the “fall” of existence. Like a lover closes her eyes awaiting her beloved’s touch, withdrawn from the distractions of the world, concentrated onto a possibility which might or might not befall in the future, Kafka waits, in the intimacy of his solitude, for his destiny: to escape through writing. “Seen from the point of view of literature my destiny is very simple. The sense which leads me to portray my dream like inner life has pushed all my other senses into the background”.[21] This perhaps is what Canetti means when he counts Kafka among those rare breeds of writers who are “so entirely themselves”.

Kafka tells Janouch “I carry the bars within me all the time”.[22] We find the figure of the entrapped, the caged, the imprisoned everywhere in Kafka’s stories. The ape in “Report to an Academy” caught in the civilizing process; the hunter Gracchus, in the story by the same name, forever condemned to roam the world of the living; or Odradek, that most wretched of all Kafka’s creatures, a star shaped distortion imprisoned within the indifference of family life in the short piece “The Cares of a Family Man”. Then there are the more famous ones: Gregor Samsa of “The Metamorphosis” doubly entrapped in his insect body and the bourgeois household; or Joseph K. of The Trial, caught in the labyrinthine legal system. Kafka’s world is populated by such figures who are ensnared. Of all writers, Kafka perhaps remains the greatest expert on the various and often seemingly harmless and intimate ways in which power grips the subject. Undoubtedly, one of the most terrifying descriptions of power in Kafka, which encompasses both the immanent animality of its violence and the transcendental scope of its reach, is found in the volume Dearest Father. Kafka writes “I was defenseless confronted with the figure, calmly it sat there at the table, gazing at the tabletop. I walked around it in circles, feeling myself throttled by it. And around me there walked a third, feeling throttled by me. Around that third there walked a fourth, feeling throttled by him. And so, it went on, right out to the circling of the constellation, and further still. Everything felt the grip at the throat”.[23] Here we have an image of power which is being played out on a cosmic stage. We are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s words, “Kafka’s world is a world theater”.[24] But this cosmic theater of power is nevertheless a theater of gestures. Kafka devoted his life identifying power, detecting it in its most insidious and deceptive forms; where others would see nothing out of the ordinary, Kafka sensed entrapment. While talking of his home to Janouch, Kafka says “I am going home…in reality, I mount into a prison specially constructed for myself, which is all the harsher because it looks perfectly ordinary bourgeois home and – except for myself – no one would recognize it as a prison. For that reason, every attempt at escape is useless. One cannot break one’s chains when there are no chains to be seen”.[25] The invisibility of power, however, does not make it untraceable. Kafka needs to mark the point where power becomes visible. Although we can no longer recognize the transcendental origins of power – which inhabits the mysterious world of the inaccessible Castle in Kafka’s novel by the same name – power hollows out the world of immanence by exposing us to our mortal life. It is this negative transcendence which makes everything that we hold as solid, comfortable and real dissolve into nothingness. “Everything looks as if it were made of solid, lasting stuff. But on the contrary it is a life in which one is falling towards an abyss. It isn’t visible. But if one closes one’s eyes, one can hear its rush and roar”.[26]

To make visible that which resists vision is a tricky thing. For Kafka, sonority is akin to something like the expressivity of gestures which are still not completely formed. Again, Benjamin is instructive here. He proposes that Kafka’s thinking is gestural. The function of the gesture, Benjamin argues, is to “dissolve happening into their gestic components”.[27] But while disappearing, they leave a trace of the invisible onto the surface of appearance. Kafka’s words are not merely meaningful; they are gestural. They have the magical function of leaving traces of those realities which are important for him, but which remain invisible. Talking of the magical quality of words, Kafka tells Janouch: “They leave finger marks behind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye becomes the footprints of history”.[28] That is why the suddenness of the gesture has a close resemblance to what Kafka understands as “image” which no longer conforms to its traditional meaning. Image, for Kafka, is not preconditioned by visibility. Kafka talks of his stories not as realities “full of life” but images of the invisible: “My stories are a kind of closing one’s eyes”.[29] Here image and act are no longer separate; they converge on gesture. They abide by the principle of undecidability which we find everywhere in Kafka. The ambiguity about gestures is also at work at the level of meaning. This is again underlined by Benjamin “…Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever changing contexts and experimental groupings”.[30]

Nowhere is this ambiguity of gesture more evident than in the idea of withdrawal from power which pervades Kafka’s life and works. There is no great concept of liberty in Kafka but only the possibility to find a way out of the insidious ways in which power reels us in. “No freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out…”[31] cries the ape in “A Report to an Academy”. Kafka wants to make himself small, like a mouse or a mole, in order to slip through the bars of existence that he carries with himself all the time. But the effort often ends in failure. Fragile, easily humiliated, failing mostly in his life as well as in his work, Kafka seeks to uncover in his own weakness a symptom of exit from the world. Elias Canetti says that for Kafka, “freedom to fail is preserved as a sort of supreme law, which guarantees escape at every fresh juncture. One is inclined to call this the freedom of the weak person who seeks salvation in defeat”.[32] But a gesture of withdrawal from the world and its power is an act of resistance as well as a way out. All gestures of withdrawal into the self, immunity sought in the solitude of one’s own existence are symptoms of exit. But to exit or find a way out is not the same as freedom. To escape to freedom is a decisive form of action where the self remains undamaged even though the action might objectively fail. Such failure exhausts the possibility of escape. It does not preserve the possibility of freedom to “escape at every fresh juncture”. That is why the ape does not seek freedom which he knows shall inevitably end in death. It is akin to suicide; an act which Kafka held “as a form of egotism”.[33] The process does not let you slip through the bars which you carry within yourself. Suicide is an act of useless expenditure; to “throw away” the last thing the self believes it possesses – itself. Such an idea of escape cannot uncover the ‘unfreedom’ which often looks like freedom. “And that too is human freedom I thought ‘self-controlled movement’”[34] says the ape. To find an exit is to first and foremost find a way to shatter the self. “Every defense is a retreat, a withdrawal. A blow at the world is always a blow at oneself. For that reason, every concrete wall is only an illusion, which sooner or later crumbles. For inner and outer belong to each other”.[35]

Nevertheless, one must be careful not to confuse this abandonment of the self and the world with religiosity. Although the great rules of asceticism apply to Kafka, it fails to found a religion. Therefore, a gesture of withdrawal cannot be treated as a theological problem (neither can it be treated as a psychological problem belonging merely to an immanent reality). Perhaps it is in the demand of writing and the crisis it generates that we find a clear understanding of what is meant by gesture of withdrawal.  In his January 1912 diary entry Kafka writes,

When my organism realized that writing was the richest direction of my being, everything pointed itself that way and all other capacities, those which had as objects the pleasures of sex, drink, food, philosophical meditation and especially music, were abandoned. I have thinned in all those directions. This was necessary because my strength, even when gathered all together and devoted to one aim, was so small that it could only half reach the goal of writing.[36]

The demand of writing allows weakness to be turned into force. But even writing can become something religious. Maurice Blanchot has developed this problem of religiosity in Kafka brilliantly. He demonstrates how in Kafka’s attitude towards writing the weakness that he cherished as the source of his strength ceases to be something decisive and becomes something akin to prayer – the indecisive waiting for grace to befall. Kafka tells Janouch, “Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts”.[37] And yet, we must insist that the force of uncertainty which fuels Kafka to compare the gesture of artistic creation to prayer lacks religion. Kafka is too critical a thinker not to recognize that in the modern world religion is impossible because transcendence has become “a form of escapism”[38] where “power which gives meaning to life is transformed into a source of charm”.[39]

So how then do we understand writing as a form of prayer if not from a religious perspective? Yet again, Walter Benjamin leaves a few clues. According to Benjamin, Kafka who “could understand things only in the form of a gestus”[40] was never sure what they meant decisively. Gestures remain incomplete and undecidable in the end. They leave traces of something whose meaning cannot be completely fixed and therefore cannot be completely exhausted. Kafka’s writing expresses a deep sense of care of the self and the world, but such care is precariously balanced on such a point of undecidability. In a letter to Felice, he writes “Have you ever observed how, within yourself and independent of other people, diverse possibilities open up in several direction, thereby actually creating a ban on your every movement”.[41] Should we not understand art as prayer as a symptom of indecision where the outstretched hand waiting for grace becomes a gesture of care for a sick world whose cure, nevertheless, remains a secret? Kafka tells Janouch, “One look out of the window will show the world to you. Where are the people going? What do they want? We no longer recognize the metaphysical order of things”.[42] Illness, for Kafka, is always a warning symptom while health remains a sign of “miracle” that one awaits. “By illness I am perpetually reminded of the full extent of my frailty and therewith of the miracle of life”.[43] In order to seek a cure from the “hopeless decline” of the world which is not heading towards any decisive end but suspended in the indecisive and undiagnosed sickness, Kafka gathers the symptoms of a sick world. Like the land surveyor in The Castle, he surveys a polluted world lingering in its sickness which is no longer heading towards definite ruin – “if everything were in ruins, we should already have reached a point of departure towards new possibilities of development”.[44] Without the inevitability of an apocalypse, we are denied salvation. What can an artist do when she is deprived of the “purity of feeling” that religion granted in a bygone time when salvation was perhaps still possible? The artist becomes a clinician who carefully gathers the symptoms of the sickness that afflicts a suspended world in the hope of finding a cure. Isn’t this what writing means for Kafka – to describe an incomplete world which has forgotten salvation? To search and assemble, most attentively, the symptoms of an ailing world in order to approach a new idea of health – isn’t that the destiny of literature for Kafka?

“Oblivion is the container from which the inexhaustible intermediate world in Kafka’s stories presses toward the light”[45] remarked Benjamin.  Do we not return here to the heart of the Kafka-problem? What forces one to be attentive, to gather the symptoms and gestures of such an incomplete world? Isn’t it a form of power which becomes indistinguishable from its absence? The desire to slip through the interstices of power to an indeterminate elsewhere seems co-incidental to an act of thinking which is forced by, what Blanchot calls, “the inpower (impouvoir) of thought”[46] – the capacity to think the inexistence of totality. Through the problem of weakness in Kafka, do we not encounter the limit of thinking – the unthinkable element in thinking which activates as well as blocks thinking? Are we not back to the principle of undecidability which is at the heart of the Kafka-problem? Isn’t there a secret thinker within Kafka who shatters any idea of ‘the thinking self’ making a play out of the thinkable and the unthinkable – isn’t riddle always already a form of play? These questions remain undecided.

 

Notes:

 

[1] Maurice Blanchot “Kafka and the Work’s Demand “in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, (Lincon, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 62.

[2] Elias Canetti Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. Christopher Middleton, (London: Penguin Books, 2012), p. 28.

[3] Ibid., p. 32.

[4] In this regard Kafka’s writings can very well be seen as confessional, insofar as confession allows the person to take herself as an object of thinking. However, the operation of confession functions under the doctrine of Christianity while Kafka’s confession functions in the absence of any doctrine. On this point see Michel Foucault’s writing on confessions. See, Michel Foucault “Christianity and Confessions” in Politics of Truth, eds. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), pp. 199-235

[5] Canetti’s book is extraordinary in connecting Kafka’s meditations on weakness, as a form of exit from power to his own bodily weakness. See, Kafka’s Other Trial.

[6] Franz Kafka Letters to Felice, eds. Eric Heller & Jurgen Born, trans. James Stern & Elizabeth Duckworth, (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), p. 21.

[7] Ibid., p.176.

[8]  “It is possible to read Kafka’s stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all. When one encounters the name of the creature – monkey, dog, mole – one looks up in fright and realizes that one is already far away from the continent of men”. Walter Benjamin “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 122.

[9] Kafka’s Other Trial, p.33.

[10] Ibid., p.33.

[11] Gustav Janouch Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronway Rees, (New York: New Directions Book, 2012), p. 27.

[12] Ibid., p.39.

[13] Ibid., p.81.

[14] Ibid., p.80.

[15] Ibid., p.82.

[16] Ibid., p.54.

[17] Ibid., p.82.

[18] Ibid., p.31.

[19] Ibid., p.54.

[20] Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari   Kafka: Towards a minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 6.

[21] “Kafka and the Work’s Demand “, pp. 65-66.

[22] Conversations with Kafka, p.21.

[23] Kafka’s Other Trial, p. 95.

[24] “Franz Kafka”, p.123.

[25] Conversations with Kafka, p.55.

[26] Ibid., p. 54.

[27]“Franz Kafka”, p 120.

[28] Conversations with Kafka, p.60.

[29] Ibid., p.31.

[30]“Franz Kafka”, p.120.

[31] Franz Kafka “Report to an academy” in The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Vintage, 2018), p. 273.

[32] Kafka’s Other Trial, p.118.

[33] Conversations with Kafka, p.44.

[34] “Report to an academy”, p. 273.

[35] Conversations with Kafka, pp.33-34.

[36] “Kafka and the Work’s Demand “, p.65.

[37] Conversations with Kafka, p.47.

[38] Ibid.,p. 55.

[39] Ibid.

[40] “Franz Kafka”, p.129.

[41] Kafka’s Other Trial, p.34.

[42] Conversations with Kafka, p.102.

[43] Ibid., p.110.

[44] Ibid., p.102.

[45] “Franz Kafka”, p.131.

[46] Gilles Deleuze cites Maurice Blanchot while talking of Artaud’s films and their relation to his thoughts. Deleuze argues that Artaud’s thoughts are powered by a kind of force of nothingness which leaves its trace in the images Artaud creates through a particular method of de-totalization and a refusal to synthesize them in time. An interesting comparison can be done between Artaud’s experience of corporeal illness and his force of thinking with that of Kafka. See Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London:  Continuum, 2005), p.162.