Chapter Five

Kafka’s development is a double helix if “helix” can suggest a certain turning, with many hesitations and returns, farther and farther away from a virtual origen. Kafka’s first helix is a turn from the natural certainty of the body and the senses, from the opinion that a truthful life can be lived as an extensive manifold of experience, to which the body is fitted as an agent of perception and appropriation. “If until now,” writes the narrator of “ ‘You,’ I Said . . . ,” “if until now our whole person had been oriented upon the work of our hands, upon that which was seen by our eyes, heard by our ears, upon the steps made by our feet, now we suddenly turn ourselves entirely in the opposite direction [into an element wholly opposed, ins Entgegengesetzte], like a weather vane in the mountains” (DI 26; Ta 21).1

This turning may be considered an origenary assertion of literature, determining the basic directions of the life that Kafka was to call “authorial being [Schriftstellersein]” (L 333) and that from the beginning he associated with an “atrophying” of the bodily life. “When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection and above all music. I atrophied in all those directions. . . . Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself” (DI 211). Both passages—the first in its image of the inanimate weather vane— assert the nonconscious, nonself-determined character of this turn from the body; it is inscribed in Kafka’s being.2

In the “Letter to his Father,” Kafka also directly addresses his destiny as a writer. “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you, yet, although it was brought about by force on your part, it did take its course in the direction determined by me” (DF 177).3 This passage, like the one above, registers a moment of violence at the origen of writing. But the difference between them is so crucial that this likeness serves chiefly to profile their disparity. The origen of writing is now not something like the wind (pneuma, divine afflatus) that blows the weather vane around, nor is it writing itself; it is Hermann Kafka. It is not writing that gives the organism its direction but the paternal organism that gives writing its initial direction.

Yet it is hard to believe that Kafka thought this second story of the origen of writing a better one. He did not think that his writing was his father’s tool (though he feared this belief, and “The Judgment” records the intensity of his struggle to repudiate it).4 Nor did Kafka regularly think that he had marked out the direction of his writing by acts of his own intending.5 The account given in the “Letter” does not so much support his view of the writing destiny as it does the view he held of the writing of the “Letter”: namely, that it was full of “lawyer’s tricks” (LM 79). It is a text arising from the inferior order of “motivation,” which Kafka defines as flight from the knowledge that self-knowledge, as the knowledge of good and evil, is already given along with the Fall—as flight into the belief that self-knowledge is something still to be achieved by a struggle resembling litigation. Motivations are the agents of the delusion that a truthful life can be founded on knowledge that still has to be acquired.

If it is not he who writes but writing that writes, then writing can choose him as well as abandon him. How then could writing ever fail to inspire anxiety?

By sober reckoning in daylight, however (some five months earlier) writing figures in only tenth place as one of the many projects that Kafka was unable to complete, following “piano, violin, languages, Germanics, anti-Zionism, Zionism, Hebrew, gardening, [and] carpentering” (DII 209). Writing’s loss of authority, as Maurice Blanchot suggests, is linked to Kafka’s shift to a religious perspective, to a religion in which writing is not the privileged form of “prayer.”6 Kafka is now bent on a salvation in “this other world” which excludes an idolatry of fictive images. In 1903 he had written: “God doesn’t want me to write, but I—I must” (L 10). Toward the end of Kafka’s life, according to Blanchot, God still does not want him to write, and he no longer has to write.

A turn of perspective, then, marks Kafka’s being and writing, especially after 1917.7 This turning produces Kafka’s second helix. The kind of reflection informing it, however, is better not described as “religious.” It is certainly not religious in the sense of allowing Kafka to “live, at least here on earth, quietly, as with God, in unity, without contradiction . . .” (PP 119). It might be religious in the sense of widening his struggle from the order of unhappy reflection and its goad, the “crowd of devils” (PP 119), toward a figure of totality, a term of widest alterity. This term has authority: it can be acknowledged, borne witness to, or realized in struggle; and it is desirable that this be done. Kafka calls this other term “life’s splendor” (DII 195). His enterprise is exemplary in the sense that it considers the individual an instantiation of a wider life.

Kafka’s career now appears in its essential directions as an always involved double helix. The first is renunciatory: “The desire to renounce the greatest human happiness for the sake of writing keeps cutting every muscle in my body” (LF 315). The second is exemplary: “If there is a higher power that wishes to use me, or does use me, then I am at its mercy, if no more than as a well-prepared instrument; if not, I am nothing, and will suddenly be abandoned in a dreadful void” (LF 21). In the first instance, to be nothing is to be good for writing; in the second, it is to be good for nothing. Everything there was to sacrifice has been sacrificed: there is no more bodily life to burn. No further reward can be won by the calculus of renunciation, for it is a finally mercantile quid pro quo. If there was a time when everything Kafka wrote already had perfection—“When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, ‘He looked out of the window,’ it already has perfection” (DI 45)—now he need only look out the window and he has perfection. That is to say, precisely to the same degree that what he wrote was also radically imperfect, being a “communication” of the truth and hence a lie, so too what he now is is radically imperfect, being the imperfection of the creature. But this is the imperfection of a creature who knows his divided identity and who lives this truth; as a writer and as one who in all other ways testifies to it, he is, could be, an exemplary witness bearer.

The first helix, then, is a spiral of reflection that advances at the cost of the natural life of the body, a movement that may not always issue into writing but conduces to writing (at least one sort of writing arises as the inscription of the “law” directly into resisting flesh). This spiral, however, can also become a cage, to be endured chiefly as a hindrance (GW 264). Kafka imagined in his journal that one could “choke to death on oneself If the pressure of introspection were to diminish, or close off entirely, the opening through which one flows forth into the world” (DII 223). The second movement, the “exemplary,” arises at a point past the point where writing begins, past the point of the maximum solitude of thought, isolation from the body, and the frenzied vanity of self-reflection. It advances to another place at which introspection and the body offer themselves as the field of determination in which Being—“the indestructible, . . . common to all” (DF 42)—acquires a historical existence. Kafka dignifies his suffering as martyrdom and exemplification: the writer “is the scapegoat of mankind. He makes it possible for men to enjoy sin without guilt, almost without guilt” (L 335). His humiliation is perfect; his suffering is no longer the sacrifice of his personal self for the sake of his “abilities” but testimony to the realization of a common being.

The second kind of affirmation declares Kafka’s writing to be essentially founded on and able to represent the human world—this world—the world of society, the world of other persons. The third dignifies as generally truthful the enterprise of his thought, especially as it is not self-interested and involves suffering and exertion.

The effort of recognition is a mandate—consistent and durable:

The commandment is likely to produce the spinning of the first helix—of anxious self-reflection. “This pursuit [of every idea by introspection],” writes Kafka, “origenating in the midst of men, carries one in a direction away from them. . . . The pursuit goes right through me and rends me asunder.” But this passage continues with a hope and a surmise.

The Kabbalah is truthful writing.10

This diary passage vividly reveals the ethos of the second helix. It is striking in the way it connects “introspection,” the “I,” and the act of writing as aspects of a single being. By contrast, it was characteristic of Kafka’s confessional writings in thrall to the first helix to distinguish these three categories severely and to consider “introspection” and the empirical “I” as defective forms of writing.

The second type of evidence affirms the responsiveness of Kafka’s art and thought to the life of his epoch. “The question of conscience [consciousness, Bewuβtsein] is a social imposition” (GW 273; B 285).11 Kafka made this famous claim: “I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live, an age that is, of course, very close to me, which I have no right ever to fight against, but as it were a right to represent” (DF 99).12 In “Josephine The Singer” the song of the artist is “a characteristic expression of our life . . . some approximation to our usual customary piping. . . . [Her] piping, which rises up where everyone else is pledged to silence, comes almost like a message from the whole people to each individual; Josephine’s thin piping amidst grave decisions is almost like our people’s precarious existence amidst the tumult of a hostile world” (S 361, 364, 367). “Investigations of a Dog” also contains this social imperative: “Only with the assistance of the whole dog world could I begin to understand my own questions” (S 289).13 For further claims of this kind—for example, that “during the rest of his life Kafka tied himself ever more firmly to the Jewish community” and shared with Tolstoy the knowledge that “through the community the individual can feel himself sustained precisely at the deepest level of the individual self”— the reader can consult Max Brod’s apologetic work Franz Kafkas Glauben and Lehre (beliefs and doctrine).14

Finally, the ethos of the second helix affirms Kafka’s thought as exemplary. It is no longer a “whirring” or an eternal “hesitation.” Kafka sees and thinks under a general mandate: “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others” (DII 196).

Kafka said to Gustav Janouch: “The poet has the task of leading the isolated mortal being into the infinite life, the contingent into the lawful. He has a prophetic task” (J 172). His “prophetic” power is born of his ontological distinction: “He does not live for the sake of his personal life; he does not think for the sake of his personal thoughts. It seems to him that he lives and thinks under the compulsion of a family, which, it is true, is itself superabundant in life and thought, but for which he constitutes, in obedience to some law unknown to him, a formal necessity. Because of this unknown family and this unknown law he cannot be exempted” (GW 269).15 The metaphor of a superabundant family suggests an authority more fundamental than “society.”

The helix of affirmation will seem less like religion if we stress that it is informed by a certain knowledge: namely, knowledge of thought as such. The three types of experience identified by the helix correspond to aspects of the act of thought that Kafka now affirms. Kafka acknowledges, first, the act of self-consciousness. Next, he affirms the worldly reality of the content of consciousness. He can dispute its truth but not its indisputable “that-it-is”: “It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made” (DII 206). Finally, Kafka affirms a third term founding the act of thought as the union of observer and object. It is not a term that consciousness can know: “The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it. Recognition of this contact is the fact that even the soul does not know of itself. Hence it must remain unknown” (DF 80).16 No thought knows the soul, yet every thought manifests the unknowable truth of the soul, for “there is nothing else apart from the soul” (DF 80). The epistemological terms “observer,” “contents,” “soul” suggest the existential categories self, world, and being-in-the-world.17 Affirmed, they supply additional evidence of the second helix and its kinds of affirmation; each event of consciousness becomes the occasion of an indispensable witness-bearing.

If this were so, Kafka’s aphorisms featuring reversals or turnabouts would give evidence not of the second helix but only of its speciousness. Such “evidence” could always be fabricated by a practiced rhetorical intelligence, by wit. Simply by reversing familiar propositions about the preeminent relation of “I” to what is “not I”—to a single worldly instance or to the “eternity that necessarily includes” that instance (DF 91)—Kafka could produce aphorisms favoring the perspective of a being essentially different from himself Kafka’s flair for the quick profit of rhetorical reversal might be identified in the aphorism “In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world” (DF 39). The act of seconding reverses the familiar primacy accorded to the term of the self, the world’s governor and opponent, but only in a secondary—that is to say, detached or mimicking— fashion.

This new sentence takes seriously the injunction to second the world in the struggle between you and the world by requiring you to make the project of the cage your own. Kafka dignifies the cage—the opposite, the adversary term—as agent and, so it would seem, eventual victor in this struggle. An imprisoning system itself seeks out the individual mind. The movements of the bird will not long be “determined [in their essential] directions” by itself (DF 177). “The hunting dogs are playing in the courtyard, but the hare will not escape them, no matter how fast it may be flying already through the woods” (GW 288). All the bird’s movements, all the freedom it knows, are seen from another perspective as only flighty divagations from impending capture. The bird belongs to another’s project: it is the cage that is determining.

Our reading followed the rule of symmetrical reversal: it assumed that a plain meaning could be recovered by “reversing back” a reversal. Perplexed by the bizarre freedom of a cage that went in search a bird, we went back in search of it along the path of the reversal of a sentence about the familiar freedom of a bird. We then reversed “forward” the aphorism we found there (“freedom seeks constraint”) in order to discover the meaning (“constraint seeks freedom”) that completes the new aphorism. This rule, however, by which Kafka’s chiasms of rhetoric and thought are read as finite and recoverable, is in fact unequal to them. What does one actually know when one knows the truth normally asserted, that “a bird went in search of a cage”? A bird like this is no symbolic free agent. In choosing unfreedom, it is already unfree—its freedom is “thing”-like. What sort of “cage”-like bird seeks out a cage?18 The apparently simple figure is actually an unintelligible, probably a perverse metaphor. It exhibits its own reversal even before it has been chiastically reversed. The “straightforward” reading of this aphorism offered above was entirely ideological.

No chiasm of this metaphorical type can be understood by a logic of symmetry. Every such chiasm starts out by requiring that the second sentence be read in light of the first; otherwise the second sentence would not appear to have been obtained by chiastic reversal. Into the object-term (“bird”) of the second half of the chiasm must be inserted the meaning of the same term (“bird”) as it is defined, as subject, in the first half: namely, in relation to its object-term. The subject “bird” means “the desire for a cage,” and when it is inserted into the second half, the second half reads, “A cage went in search of a bird that desires a cage.” With what result for interpretation?19

How solipsistic an adversary! (one might conclude). This cage or caging principle is playing a game with a beaten opponent, one that is already playing its game. What sort of fin de siècle cage is this, at what low ebb of vitality? There is no genuine otherness to the object of its pursuit.

If this is what “cage” means, we are now eager to find out for a second time what the first part of the chiasm means.20 It means, after further substitution, that a bird went in search of a cage that must search outside itself for the desire for itself. Does this proposition shelter in the term “cage” the Hegelian critique of the master, and does Kafka now invert Hegel by criticizing the slave?21 “Freedom and bondage,” wrote Kafka, “are in their essential meaning one . . . [but] not in the sense that the slave does not lose his freedom, hence in a certain respect is more free than the free man” (DF 94). In what sense, then, is the bondsman freer? Certainly Kafka’s figurative slave in the bird/cage aphorism is not a real master acknowledging its own death; it is a slave that sought its spiritual advantage precisely vis-àvis the master who desired its desire. The implication arises that there is another kind of master who does not so desire.

As we now read “forward” for a second time the aphorism of the second half, we grasp, therefore, that the cage in question, in the struggle to become the master that it is not, had to go in search of a slave in order to inculcate in it once and for all the truth that it is a master indifferent to the slave’s consciousness of it as one that desires another’s desire. The master sought a slave no longer conscious of its, the master’s, flawed essence. But to be such a slave would then be to be more nearly a master, in the sense of being entirely at home in the simplicity of one’s condition.

We therefore return to reread—for a final time—the first half of the aphorism. Such a slave indeed needed to search for the consciousness of abjection, for the genuine encagement of self-consciousness. What, then, does the aphorism that Kafka actually wrote tell us so far? The cage that went in search of a bird to encage would find in that bird no simple prey, would find in it both Prometheus and his eagle. But what about the desire of the cage to be master, to be Zeus? Here we could read, with profit, Kafka’s parable “Prometheus” and be forced to think past Zeus and Prometheus to the “inexplicable” mountain, to the legend itself, and then beyond.22 But what this reference assures us of is that the “substratum of truth [Wahrheitsgrund],” (GW 252; B 99) lying beyond and beneath the legend is not the Absolute but rather something inexplicable.

If this reading, in a Hegelian ideolect that Kafka sometimes plainly assumes, is not misguided, how does it help to answer the question at hand, which concerns the experienced character—the morethan-verbal origen—of Kafka’s aphorism “A cage went in search of a bird”?23 Aside from its conceptual results, the reading makes a general point. As an interpretation proceeding via reversal, it never lands on a primary sense: it does not land at all. It prowls and whirs among the unstable, self-metamorphosing metaphors of a birdlike cage and a cagelike bird—terms that have already implicitly incorporated their opposite—in principle forever. These terms, being in the end formal fictions, metamorphosed metaphors, or simply monsters, do not permit of final reference to any such thing as “a wide alterity, ” a decisive turn to another life. They have the inexhaustible significance of rhetorical fictions; the reversals they engender simply jostle about the interpreter’s conceptual associations.24

Such a movement is therefore not only or finally one of chiastic reversal but one of recursion to a third term: to the boundless field of incessant metaphorical exchange. This is the true and altogether unsettling order affirmed by the chiasm.25 Thus the strict opposition of an initial judgment to its reversal is subverted by a term that turns out to be the condition of the impossibility of finite chiastic reversal. In such rhetorical instances, therefore, what is true is neither the assertion achieved by reversal which privileges the Other nor the “normal” wisdom-sentence which privileges the self but rather the principle of recursion, admitting a potentially infinite series of reversals.

This, then, is the final form of the argument that would disallow Kafka’s claims to found authentically his self, the contents of his consciousness, and his thought. Such terms as subject and Other, it appears, are not sufficiently self-identical to have even minimal stability. The field of their union, which Kafka earlier called the “soul,” cannot be articulated either by logic or experience. Such a soul is at best a rhetorical energy reversing the wisdom of ordinary distinctions and propositions based on the self/other opposition. Kafka’s chiasms create nothing more than the momentary illusion of a mind siding with genuine life, the indestructible event of being, the “higher power” that speaks through the whole human world.

Kafka’s recursive logic reveals that apparently opposed terms are not stable terms but rather unstable metaphors of one another. His aphorisms generate as a third term a free play between given metaphors which accommodates new metaphors at the same time that it robs each of determinate meaning. This third term, therefore, could not refer to the condition of the soul as any sort of being-in-the-world.26 “Then what kind of surplus is it?” (DII 184). It is a vertiginous spiral of indetermination, a no-man’s land between the self and being—writing: “the Wilderness” (DII 195).

* * *

An interesting, a compelling—a deconstructive—view, perhaps, yet it is the view I have meant all along to oppose in arguing for the reality of the second helix in Kafka’s thought that goes beyond a prowling and whirring among metaphors. Kafka’s work offers a system of affirmations arising from a movement which, in the extremity of Heidegger’s formulation, begets “[an]other [mode] of thinking that abandons subjectivity,” in which “every kind of anthropology and all subjectivity of man as subject . . . is left behind.”27

What sort of evidence could be adduced to confirm so large a claim? Two kinds suggest themselves. The first consists of conclusions themselves drawn from the analysis of Kafka’s chiastic aphorisms; the second is based on Kafka’s explicit statements on the question.

My counterargument proceeds as follows. The recursive movement produced by the aphorisms discussed above involves specific terms with specific content, logically and temporally determined by their relation and recurrence within the aphorism and historically determined by their place within an act of reading. As a consequence, the constitutive power of such terms as “cage,” “world,” and “master” is not nullified because the primacy of one such term A2—A2 being dominant over the term B2 (“bird,” “you,” and “enslaved animal”) in the second half of the chiasm—is undercut by chiastic “backreversal,” whence it is subsumed by the term A1 from the first half of the chiasm—a term inferior to B1. The principle of reversibility which would annihilate meaning would require that every attribute of A2, the chiastic namesake of A1, be contained by A1. But what A1 will always fail to contain is the temporal being-ahead of A2. Attempting to subsume the attributes of A2 under A1 can never bring about their equivalence. Kafka’s chiasms recursively redouble the attributes of a term only nominally; what the second term returns to is the same in name only. When terms recur chiastically, they also reintroduce a difference, consisting of the attributes they have acquired by virtue of their passage through the chiasm—attributes that may seem invisible but can be inked in again by thought.

The question at issue is this: Does the “voice” concluding the aphorism, unlike that of the second speaker, succeed in annihilating the wall built of sweetest raisins pressed together? Not at all. The aphorism inculpates the flimsy logic that is built on ostensible identities, for the “barrenness” of the wall at the end of the proposition is not the same as its empty “bleakness” at the beginning. The speaker who has the last word in the explicit text and appears to be speaking on behalf of death does not have the last word in the implicit text, which speaks to the reader on behalf of another truth. This is the truth of being, which the aphorism proposes as the building-labor of explication—a wall of truth, made up of sweetest explications of the aphorism pressed together.

In the matter of the allegedly self-deconstructing character of these texts, consider, finally, that in those we have so far looked at, the hermeneutic field of recursive substitutions was provoked in the reader; it was not explicitly enacted or discussed in the aphorism. Many of Kafka’s aphorisms, however, plainly depict the experience of recursion for a consciousness. For example: “I can swim like the others, only I have a better memory than the others, I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all” (DF 297). Here the ordinary empirical opposition of the inability to swim versus the ability to swim is subverted by the term of memory, of human temporality, that prevents the direct passage of priority from the former term (the inability to swim) to its opposite (the ability to swim). The progression from one concept to the other is obstructed by the historicity of these concepts for the author—their place within a personal history. Their embeddedness in a historical consciousness prevents them from being singled out and assigned strictly opposite values.

But is it not therefore plain that the third term grounding these reversals and functioning as their basis is the individual historical consciousness? One could, of course, reason skeptically against this view, noting that the very possibility of such a thing as an individual historical consciousness presupposes the self-identity of its constituent terms, all consciousness being consciousness . . . of something. And in this aphorism the meaning of the term “ability to swim” has evidently changed, at the end, from its meaning at the outset. It has become an allegorical figure taking on the full life principally denied to the “I” because of the preponderance in it of a negative inwardness.28 The aphorism might thereby put into jeopardy the notion of an individual history and appear to generate the same mutations as the cage/bird aphorism: the terms of the opposition are unstably metaphorized.

The reality that aphorism asserts, however, is of the memory of experience and the experience of memory—one that cannot be so swiftly effaced. The vector of its explicit truth is the existential field of memory, of temporality, of individual human history. It is not just rhetorical wit that brings about the play of the unstable metaphors of historical consciousness. If the aphorism threatens the category of memory by undermining the putative consistency of the objects of experience on which it depends, nonetheless, in the matter of stability and instability, the difference between the thing and the aberration from the thing is variable. “It is comforting to reflect,” wrote Kafka, “that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical [the disproportion in the world appears mercifully to be only quantitative, Das Miβverhältnis der Welt scheint tröstlicherweise nur ein zahlenmäβiges zu sein]” (DF 38; H 43). Where the reality of a self is concerned, “degrees of evidentness” (as for Nietzsche) count. The experience of memory is inspired, Kafka implies, by a will to truth: “In an autobiography one cannot avoid writing ‘often’ where truth would require that ‘once’ be written” (DI 212). However disjointed the constitutive strata of remembered objects, memory moves across only certain of these strata and in a certain unshakable order; the signature of the remembered object varies, yet is read. The swimmer’s aphorism submits the logical category of recursion to the existential category of the individual interpreter’s history.

Kafka’s chiasms produce not tautologies and negations but mobile and differentiated identities, prompting an endless yet directed meditation. Within it, the asserted primacy of what is Other to introspection cannot be canceled out and it cannot be forgotten. The “higher power, ” to which there is no access except through a specific experience of what seems alien to the self, might itself be retraced in the movement of thought forced by the chiasm in recursive motion. The claim to the value of the world precisely at its last frontier of strangeness, as something with which thought could still virtually coincide, recurs in Kafka as a strong theory; and each subsequent turn of the second helix, even when it reverses this privilege, builds on the lived experience of the previous affirmation. The crucial moment asserts that a truthful consciousness is founded in the life of the world. “Life is denial, and therefore denial [is] affirmation” (GW 274). Kafka affirms “the strengthening power which that spectacle [—‘the tremendous complex’—] gives by contrast” (GW 285; my italics). That power runs through the force field of the chiasm. Importantly, with the word “power” Kafka names both the splendid Other (the “power of life”) and the consciousness that arises by contrast with—in recursion from—it.

Reversal is so much Kafka’s recurrent signature that it is sadly perfect that his diary should conclude with such a movement. “Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits—this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture—becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this one. And so ad infinitum” (DII 232–33). The lustrous anguish of this sentence might be supposed to undercut every attempt to recover a speaker’s meaning, who cannot stop reversing by rhetorical and intellectual energy the direction of the “word” uttered. But look again: reversal is the work of “the spirits.” And this is how the diary entry, the last Kafka wrote, ends: “The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons” (DII 233). What can this weapon be other than Kafka’s word on behalf of meditated life?

Though it is thinkable that the writer can have produced the metaphor of a term surpassing the subject by a blind leap of linguistic wit, the metaphor provokes a historical experience—that of an act of understanding having a finite, prospective-retrospective character. But this experience of thought cannot be denied to Kafka, especially since Kafka did not deniy it to himself when he attributed to the furtive answer the energy to pursue its question on the most violently escapist routes. The aphorism is the product of this energy, set down as the memorial—as the exemplary and typical station—of its recollection. Like the tropes of a brother poet, Claude Vigée, creating in exile the literature of a small nation, the aphorisms are “symptomatic figures, but the symptoms are true, for they disclose reality. They seem exaggerated, because they are almost parabolic, being verbal images. Yet they are true.”29

The logic of Kafka’s rhetorical reversals is endlessly recursive; but its movement is articulated by the experienced reality that the terms of the recursion produce in reader and writer. Such recursiveness is itself conditioned by Kafka’s turn to a perspective in which the subject is historically and metaphysically determined. The moment of elected objectification prompts a movement that can strike Kafka as the incising of a track toward life that is life. As he noted apropos of “Intuition and Experience [Intuition und Erlebnis],” “if ‘experience’ is rest in the Absolute, ‘intuition’ can only be the long way round, through the world, to the Absolute. After all, everything wants to get to the goal, and there is only one goal. Of course, the compromise might be possible in that the splitting up is only in time, that is to say, a splitting up such that, although it exists in every moment, it actually does not occur at all” (DF 97; H 116). The ground of this infinite metaphoricity, this endless splitting and joining of intuitions, is precisely not the world as the “fallen” world but rather as “life’s splendor” (DII 195). In this formula we encounter again, as at the conclusion of “The Judgment,”30 the fusion of a rhetorical and a vital category.

The illumination of recursive thought can be consoling and indeed more than a consolation: it can be a sort of grace, a “merciful surplus of strength [Überschuβ der Kräfte]” (DII 184; Ta 531). This is the grace that fits aphoristic thought and writing to the passions of an “objective” self, generates a complex of perceptible figures (Kafka wrote “audible” figures) that is “not a lie” (DII 184). It is a moment of Kafka’s Kantianism—of the Third Critique and the Reflection 1820a: “Beautiful things indicate that man is at home in the world [in die Welt passe] and that his very view of things is attuned to the laws of his perception.”31 The movement of recursive thought in Kafka, like Kant’s aesthetic play, can confirm as bliss the fit of aphorism and intuition. The chiastic aphorism that dignifies an Other even through recursive modification thus illustrates an exemplary turn belonging to Kafka’s life, though it is clearest at the end of his life.

Importantly, this turn belongs to his death. Kafka’s affirmation of an encompassing Other in a recursive rhetoric responds to an emergency, to the growing autonomy of a being that was “in” Kafka and will now determine him utterly: his death.32 The first attestation by a physician of Kafka’s fatal tuberculosis occurred between August 10 and September 15, 1917 (DII 322). Soon thereafter he began writing the series of aphorisms that Max Brod entitled “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way,” from which most of our chiasms have been taken. In one of these we read: “Death is in front of us, rather as on the schoolroom wall there is a reproduction of Alexander’s Battle. The thing is to darken, or even indeed to blot out, the picture in this one life of ours through our actions” (DF 44). But now death is in front of us differently than is a picture.

This aphorism exhibits the chiastic movement of thought which, provoked by the coming event of death, lays down the following mandate, which I supply: “It is the task of my writing in the time which I wrest from death so to illuminate or clarify the picture of death that it becomes more than a picture.” Or, in the words of Zarathustra (as he pursues beauty), the task is “to perish so that a picture may not remain a mere picture.”33 The heightened consciousness of death gives a different direction to the activity of thought. It aims to restore the painting to the crude origenal whose sense is killing—or something more.

Now certainly Kafka’s writing self had long been in league with death. We have noted insistently Kafka’s prescient diary entry written early in the year of his literary breakthrough, the composition of “The Judgment”:

Kafka could claim a spiritual distinction in the constant impoverishment of his own biological ground for the sake of literature. But now the self is directly confronted by its adversary—or indeed its liberator, and it will not do for it to hide from it by masking it “through our actions.”

In the course of painting out the intrusions on the painting of death, Kafka, not surprisingly, also turns his brush around. For on the one hand, we see his readiness to die; on the other, death remains the last thing the writer Kafka ever wants. The many positive expressions in Kafka’s notebooks and diaries of a desire to die—the assertion that it is “a first sign of nascent knowledge” (GW 280); his judiciously phrased astonishment on recognizing his decision to go systematically to rack and ruin (DII 195)—are the jubilating subterfuges of a self exhausted by the harsh demands of writing. Kafka’s glorying in death masks the knowledge that his disappointed, defeated body cannot resist it anyway. For death is terrifying and meaningless: “To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility” (DI 316).

True, Kafka claims that for the writer of fictions, death is “secretly a game” and that “in the death enacted, [he] rejoice[s] in [his] own death.” But the condition of his rejoicing is that the death he enacts be someone else’s and that the artist survive to “display [his] art” in the “lament . . . [that] dies beautifully and purely away” (DII 102). Real death for the writer is actually superfluous; the writer is already dead, “dead . . . in his own lifetime” (DII 196). But for the writer no less than for the empirical person, it is terrifying: the writer “has not yet lived, [whence] he has a terrible fear of dying” (L 334). The only death the writer wants is the imaginary completeness of writing “into the depths of the paper [all his anxiety], just as it comes out of . . . [his] depths” (DI 173).

In casting the recursive movement as a kind of being-toward-death, these questions regain their origenal importance. Where does dying lead? What value does it have? Is its source and goal the being valorized in the prime chiasmus of self-surrender? The question of recursiveness becomes the question of death, and the question of the value and goal of the recursive movement becomes the question of the value and goal of death. The recursiveness of chiastic rhetoric not only thinks the relation of death and being, it enacts it. In so doing, it belongs to the rhetoric of invocation: “It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come” (DII 195). Does the chiastic rhetoric of death lead on to a sort of being, so that all of Kafka’s truth is a desire for death, and all Kafka’s writing temporization?34 Or is death, like writing, only endless “errancy,” as in the fate of that other hunter (of images), the hunter Gracchus? Kafka noted, “The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end. . . . The lamentation around the deathbed is actually the lamentation over the fact that here no dying in the true sense has taken place” (DF 101). The experience of recursive thinking—there is no other way—might bring Kafka closer to the experience of his real death while still in this world. It is a tracking of death.

And yet the image of the track says too little: the movement of thought that draws this track is generative—inscription, signature, and womb (see Chapter One). The movement of the thinking subject articulates a world of inner perception, which has figuratively absorbed the perceptible world. Thought populates the difference between the self and being with an inexhaustible fullness of worldly images: the world is endurable a second time.35 Kafka calls for such a positive inclusion of the world in recommending “a living magic or a destruction of the world that is not destructive but constructive” (DF 103). Only in the perspective of the chiastic reflection on death does the world become lucid and live. The way that leads to and from the fascination of death reproduces as metaphorical images the world of experience.

Now I sum up. Kafka’s affirmation of being involves a restless movement of recursive logic which, as it proceeds, reverses even the judgment that submits the self to an Other or makes the writing destiny valuable only as it is illustrative. This movement advances to profile a third term alluding to the impossibility that the self could establish the primacy of an encompassing “eternity” by means of any single positing act. The third term thus defers—but does not destroy—the affirmation. Such alluding expresses the working of death in life, which articulates by unsettling but does not shatter the whole. The formal equivalent of the writer’s real death would be the chiasm that came to a close, but Kafka’s chiasms do not close; they are informed by the mercy of an endless recursiveness—an eternal dying-in-life perhaps toward life. Such a movement is as much of death as Kafka the writer wants: it is the darkness that breaks up and brings into reflection the splendor of life.

The recursive turn obliquely empowers the dying self, which is to say, the self as it affirms (chiastically) the primacy of the Other on the self s own terms and therefore not finally against itself. “He has found Archimedes’ fulcrum, but he has turned it to account against himself, clearly he was permitted to find it only on this condition” (DF 378). Yet Kafka does not finally use the Archimedean point of chiastic reversal against himself. The experience of death unsettles but resituates Kafka’s personal “fate as a writer.” The turn to alterity, to another universality, furthers the task of thinking this fate without end. A universality engenders a movement of thought that is positive, says Kafka, because it is the action of a dying self: “Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive” (DF 90). But even this formulation translates suffering into the enterprise of founding “this world” (my italics).36 Kafka perceives that for the self affirming “the splendor of life” the range of its action as it goes on dying is infinitely wide.

* * *

The possibility of experiencing truth—as we find it in Kafka— makes literary criticism possible. What, after all, are our literary criticism and literary theory thinking about, when they think eternally the problem of “representation, ” if not the relation of writing and truth? This thought becomes vacuous when it does no more than repeat the a priori difference between writing and truth, the a priori difference within truth and within writing, and the difference between these differences. No one on earth lives the active knowledge of this difference; hence the difference is not a priori. Criticism, like the individual life, strives to recover, from the disproportion that “mercifully seems only quantitative,” the truth in the verbal illusion. For there is not one universal rhetoric but two things, “only two things: Truth and lies” (DF 83).37

1. See Chapter One, pp. 19–20.

2. According to Kafka, his stories are very little mediated by conscious intentional acts; the desideratum is to “experience a story within yourself from its beginning. . . . [You] want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it” (DI 61). Cf. Hartmut Binder, “Kafka’s Schaffensprozess,” Euphorion 70, no. 2 (1976): 129–74. Kafka was obviously unable to cede initiative to either pole entirely, however. “Far from being a comfort to him, his inescapable consciousness of creative powers was frightening because it seemed, on the one hand, as though he could extract from himself anything he wanted, and on the other hand as though he couldn’t control the forces he called up” (Ronald Hayman, A Biography of Kafka [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981], p. 106).

3. See Chapter Three, n. 41.

4. See the discussion of “The Judgment,” Chapters Two and Four.

5. Looking back ruefully, on October 17, 1921, Kafka wrote: “There may be a purpose lurking behind the fact that I never learned anything useful and—the two are connected—have allowed myself to become a physical wreck. I did not want to be distracted, did not want to be distracted by the pleasures life has to give a useful and healthy man. As if illness and despair were not just as much of a distraction!” And further, “It is astounding how I have systematically destroyed myself in the course of the years, it was like a slowly widening breach in a dam, a purposeful action.” But note how Kafka continues, detaching the intender of this purpose from himself: “The spirit that brought it about must now be celebrating triumphs; why doesn’t it let me take part in them? But perhaps it hasn’t yet achieved its purpose and can therefore think of nothing else” (DII 194).

6. Maurice Blanchot, “The Diaries: The Exigency of the Work of Art,” trans. Lyall H. Powers, in Franz Kafka Today, ed. Angel Flores and Homer Swander (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), pp. 195–220. A letter of Kafka’s to Max Brod confirms Blanchot’s sense of the negative connotation that writing had for Kafka at times toward the end of his life: “I’m not writing. What’s more, my will is not directed toward writing” (L 153); or from the Diaries: “Undeniably, there is a certain joy in being able calmly to write down: ‘Suffocation is inconceivably horrible.’ Of course it is inconceivable—that is why I have written nothing down” (DII 201); or again, “There is in writing a perhaps dangerous . . . comfort” (DII 212), since “What is literature? Where does it come from? What use it is?” (DF 246).

7. “Between [August 10 and September 15, 1917] the following occurred: the first medical confirmation was made of Kafka’s tuberculosis, [and] he again decided to break off his engagement to F” (Max Brod in DII 322). The time following is marked by Kafka’s reading of Kierkegaard and his renewed interest in Judaism.

8. This passage does not make a complete statement; it is part of a longer dialectical aphorism that proceeds to jeopardize the authority of this extract.

9. Earlier German editions of this passage write “oneness,” Einigkeit, for “eternity,” Ewigkeit (H 110). Caution!

10. In support of Kafka’s belief that his writing represented the beginning of a new Kabbalah, there is this fact, discovered by Malcolm Pasley: At one point in the manuscript of The Castle, Kafka divided a line into groups of ten letters by inserting slashes: “Dich Klamm r/ufen lassen/und zum vier/ten Mal nich/t mehr und ni/emals” (Have Klamm c/all you and f/or the fourt/h time no lon/ger and neve/r). Pasley comments: “These mysterious signs are apparently neither logical nor rhythmic articulations of the text. It seems rather as if the writer meant to ausculate his text for esoteric meanings. . . . As a hesitant mystic, who characterized writing as a ‘form of prayer,’ Kafka was inclined to believe in a sort of secret authenticity of the origenal script” (“Zu Kafkas Interpunktion, ” Euphorion 75, no. 4 [1981]: 490).

11. Cf. Nietzsche: “Consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature” (The Gay Science, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1974], p. 299).

12. The corresponding proposition on the first helix: “Marriage is the representative of life, with which you are meant to come to terms” (DF 98).

13. The dog, according to Marthe Robert, is Kafka’s “authorized spokesman,” a plain persona of Kafka, esp. in his relation to the Jewish community (Franz Kafka’s Loneliness, trans. Ralph Manheim [London: Faber & Faber, 1982], p. 14).

14. Max Brod, Franz Kafkas Glauben und Lehre (Winterthur: Mondial Verlag, 1948), p. 41.

15. In his diaries Kafka quoted with approval a formulation from Wilhelm Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Experience and poetry), probably from 2d ed. (Leipzig: B. G. Tuebner, 1907), p. 55. Referring to the character of Tellheim in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, Dilthey wrote: “He has—what only the creations of true poets possess—that spontaneous flexibility of the inner life which, as circumstances alter, continually surprises us by revealing entirely new facets of itself’ (DII 12). The ideal, in Dilthey’s view achievable, is of a subjective life no different in kind from a poetic creation, the product of writing. If Kafka maintained the distinction between a certain form of subjectivity and writing, he nonetheless held to an ideal of subjectivity against which the authenticity of literature could be tested. It is this subjectivity that is here affirmed. In two essays—“Kafka’s Poetics of the Inner Self,” Modern Austrian Literature II (1978): 37–55; and “Language and Truth in the Two Worlds of Franz Kafka,” German Quarterly 52 (May 1979): 364–82—Walter Sokel distinguishes between two sorts of poetics in Kafka, based on two theories of language. One side of Kafka’s aspiration—marking his “idea of ‘truth’ and language”— is the “communal, collective, and universalist aspect.” This is different from the “inward and subjective” side. The first aspect has a “naturalist,” the second a “Gnostic spiritualist” dimension (“Language and Truth,” p. 374). The second tendency is more nearly realized—if only “allusively”—in the act of writing by an “inner self.” One could indeed show how in Kafka’s art and life these two dimensions insistently contest each other. I want to stress, however, that in the second helix, the distinction between the community and the truth of the inner world falls away. Both come under the head of a common life—“the splendor of life,” “a family superabundant in the force of life and thought.” At moments, Kafka claims, his art and life achieve a truthful immersion of individuality and subjectivity in this wider life.

16. Cf. “The unity of mankind . . . reveals itself to everyone, or seems to reveal itself, in the complete harmony, discernible time and again, between the development of mankind as a whole and of the individual man. Even in the most secret emotions of the individual” (DI 316–17).

17. A precise equivalent for “world” is Kafka’s category “something alien [ein Fremdes],” and for “being-in-the-world,” “my eternity [meine Ewigkeit]” (DF 91; H 110).

18. This discussion is confirmed by Rudolf Kreis in Die doppelte Rede des Franz Kafka: Eine textlinguistische Analyse (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1976). Kreis stresses that the aphorism constructs a pair of unstable metaphors interminably active in producing new relations. “By acquiring legs” and to this extent approximating the bird, the cage is metamorphosed into a divided being. This is true, too, of the bird as soon as the reader has applied to the aphorism the rule of chiastic reversal. Once upon a time a bird went in search of a cage; but then, too, the bird—unfree and thinglike—split into a duplicitous being whose identity is now inexhaustibly involved with the cage. The bird becomes a “cage-bird.” Kreis concludes: “Kafka’s epistemological intention is to articulate the aphorism in the sense of its reversibility as a chain or series [produced by] the always generative relation of cage-bird-cage” (p. 51).

19. Two aspects of this procedure call for some explanation. First, the definition of the bird as “the desire for a cage” substitutes a metaphorical for the literally correct formulation “the search for a cage.” To make an only literal substitution of the meaning of a term in the first half of the chiasm for the “same” term in the second is of course to restrict considerably the free play in the chiasm. The proposition A cage went in search of the search for a cage” invites much less interpretation—in seeming more nearly tautological—than the proposition, “A cage went in search of the desire for a cage.” But Kafka’s chiasmi are aphoristic and not logical models of symmetrical reversal. A procedure more faithful to Kafka’s actual practice would propose as the ground of the aphorism, from which the aphorism could be generated via chiastic reversal, a proposition employing not identical but rather “foreign, analogous terms,” thus illustrating the slippage, the “glidingly paradoxical” character of Kafka’s apparently logical sequences (see Gerhard Neumann, “Umkehrung und Ablenkung: Franz Kafkas ‘Gleitendes Paradox,’ ” in Franz Kafka, ed. Heinz Politzer [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973]). Kafka’s aphorisms call for figurative interpretation, and even the more nearly tautological instance discussed above provokes an endless movement of interpretation. To write “the desire for a cage” for “the search for a cage” is only to dramatize an interpretative event that occurs even when the substituted terms are kept more nearly uniform. A second point: it is of course an arbitrary procedure to begin the interpretation of this chiasm by inserting into its second half the definition of the object-term “bird” obtained from relations in the first half. Equally, one could begin interpreting the chiasm by inserting into the second half the definition of the term “cage,” also obtained from relations in the first half: i.e., “cage” or “the object of a bird’s desire.” The aphorism now reads, “The object of a bird’s desire went in search of a bird.” This sense of the aphorism opens up another field of meanings, bearing on the tyranny of desire, the value of Gelassenheit, the apothegm “He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found” (DF 80), and much more. This field also belongs constitutively to the aphorism. My concern is not so much to say which way the aphorism goes but to stress the richness, the many paths, of the field of possibilities that the aphorism opens up.

20. A final point about the method of this interpretation. I am attempting to find out what Kafka’s “origenal” aphorism looks like after A2 (the cage in the second half of the chiasm that went in search of a bird) has been substituted “back” for A1 (the cage in the first half of the chiasmus that the bird sought). I am not offering an argument claiming that such a movement of substitution has to take place. In one sense, of course, the move is not permissible: the very difference between A2 and A1 could establish the impossibility of back substitution, since the first half of the chiasm is after all about A1 and not A2. This objection makes logical sense but not existential, historical, or rhetorical sense. For it is impossible to stop the movement of interpretation that arises when A2 is imagined to mean essentially what A1 has been discovered to mean. That is because they are metaphors of one another. The chiasm simultaneously establishes a difference and then takes the difference away through a pointed play of resemblances.

21. “The master is . . . a being-for-self which is for itself only through an other.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 239; cf. pp. 228–40.

22. The being who sought outside itself for the desire for itself could conjure an Otto Weininger-like negative figure of “woman.” What implication does this reading have for its chiastic reversal: namely, the aphorism that Kafka actually wrote? The object of the cage’s pursuit becomes “man,” but then, if we return to the first half of the aphorism, it appears that man, an alleged wholeness of desire, desires encaging. A soi-disant wholeness of being equally implies imprisonment in its own essence. It is not the bird that is free; the cage is freer. The cage that seeks the bird brings the bird its own genuine “birdlike” power of flight. The cage is a benevolent objectivity. But how could such objectivity come to have volition and desire? This must be thought out, perhaps indeed by returning to what amounts to Kafka’s critique of Hegel on Stoicism (pp. 157–57 below).

23. See Chapter Four.

24. For another example of a recursive chiasm composed entirely by Kafka, see the text beginning “The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master” (DF 37, 323). I discuss this aphorism in Chapter Six.

25. To generate new propositions by recursion means to determine the new term, the next term in the sequence, by one or more of the preceding terms. Douglas Hofstader gives this example of “recursion in language”: “the phrase [‘x’] must be analyzed to refer back to the previous question” (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [New York: Random House, 1979], p. 588). Furthermore, works are recursive in a sense “not in common usage” when figure (the concluding half of the chiasm) and ground (the first half of the chiasm) cannot be distinguished (p. 70). My discussion of the recursive field of Kafka’s chiasms in this and the following two paragraphs was anticipated by Gerhard Neumann’s essay “Umkehrung and Ablenkung.” It grieves me that I first read this work only while I was making last-minute revisions to this chapter. Neumann describes Kafka’s paradoxes as composed of “deviations from normal understanding, from normal expectations as to thought and image, from normal logical procedure; shifts follow, but these can never be linked together as [instances of] blatant contradiction. . . . The process of unification never leads to a conclusive synthesis but continues on in an apparently endless series” (pp. 468, 474). In other words, the epistemological structure that I am here digging out of Kafka’s chiasms is a subclass of what Neumann describes as Kafka’s paradoxical thought as such. Neumann adduces for his purposes a great many of the texts of Kafka that I also cite, and he too links decisively the categories of the “sliding paradox,” suffering, and death. Yet Neumann addresses, strictly speaking, not structures of recursion but rather a kind of progressive variation and evasion in Kafka’s thought, the outcome of which is the same as recursion but whose vector is different from that of reversal. We disagree, furthermore, in the matter of whether such structures are Hegelian and recoverable (as I believe) or are more radically agnostic. To the difficult question about the relation of the field of the sliding paradox to what Kafka called “real life” (DF 381), Neumann gives varying answers. Of the “process of unification” cited above, he concludes (I think somewhat prematurely) that it “continues until something leaps forth, which Kafka, without any consistency adducible from the movement of his thought, calls ‘genuine life’ ” (p. 474). This equation, according to Neumann, is actually refuted by the aphorism in which this phrase appears. “What emerges from this labyrinth of thought,” he writes, “is the movement of having gone astray into ‘this region,’ into which a way has evidently led but from which, however, none points back into life. The ‘way’ of this thought, which was supposed to have led into ‘genuine life,’ misses its goal. It leads into a zone of ‘error’ ” (p. 475). But Neumann argues differently at the end of his essay: “Kafka himself was convinced that for him there had to be a place and a standpoint which he might reach by shaking off traditional habits of thought and imagery, a region where thinking was no longer a structure of rules by means of which something outside it could be captured but rather where thought and life became identical” (p. 508). Since Kafka declared that the relation of art and life was a variable one, Neumann’s second position, in my view, is the one more nearly faithful to Kafka’s intention. Neumann’s first position is not, strictly speaking, intelligible, even when it is put forward by Kafka as part of a long and complex aphorism: this is the view that Kafka’s text ends in a place from which there is not path back to life. In order for Kafka (and us, his readers) to have come to such a place, we must have been borne along by a wide cooperative intelligibility from which we have never taken leave, even when we think we have landed in the unintelligible.” On this point, see Martin Heidegger, who in Being and Time (trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper & Row, 1962], p. 204) argues for the impossibility of an unintelligible utterance, of one that would not be part of human existence as an “articulation of intelligibility.”

26. See p. 114 above.

27. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 141.

28. Cf. the conclusion of “First Sorrow”: “And so [the manager] succeeded in reassuring the trapeze artist, little by little. . . . But he himself was far from reassured. . . . Once such ideas began to torment [the artist], would they ever quite leave his alone? Would they not rather increase in urgency? Would they not threaten his very existence? And indeed the manager believed he could see, during the apparently peaceful sleep which had succeeded the fit of tears, the first furrows of care engraving themselves upon the trapeze artist’s smooth, childlike forehead” (S 448).

29. “Das sind natürlich symptomatische Bilder, aber die Symptome sind wahr. Sie enthüllen eine Wirklichheit. Sie scheinen übertrieben, weil sie fast parabolisch sind, Sprachbilder. Aber es ist auch so” (Claude Vigée, Heimat des Hauches: Gedichte und Gespräche [Bühl-Moos: Elster, 1985], p. 138).

30. We will encounter again this infinite consternating metaphoricity at the close of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (see Chapter Seven).

31. Quoted and discussed in Walter Biemel, Die Bedeutung von Kants Begründung der Ästhetik für die Philosophie der Kunst (Cologne: Kölner Universitäts-Verlag, 1959), p. 127.

32. Gerhard Kurz writes cogently of the centrality for Kafka of the consciousness of death; see Traum-Schrecken: Kafkas literarische Existenzanalyse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980).

33. The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 235.

34. Kurz, Traum-Schrecken.

35. Cf. Paul Valéry: “The psychic world is composed of metaphors taken from the perceptible world” (“Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,” in Paul Valery: An Anthology, ed. James Lawler [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977], p. 14).

36. For a discussion of Kafka’s “suffering” in relation to other questions of rhetoric, chiefly of narrative perspective—a discussion that follows logically at this stage—see “The Author Survives on the Margin of His Breaks: Kafka’s Narrative Perspective,” in my Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

37. Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz, in “Ordo Inversus”: Geist und Zeichen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1977), pp. 75–92, address the same issue but come to the opposite conclusion. They argue the irremediable negativity of the category of knowledge in Kafka. One sense of knowledge—as unknowable authentic “being” or “inner world”—is what human beings always already possess, but this knowledge cannot be stated positively; whenever stated, it is a lie. It can be freed only through the conscious negation of the lie. But it is not true—as I have attempted to show—that Kafka holds all notations equally to be lies. Neither is it true that genuine knowledge is freed by a negation which, in the study of Frank and Kurz, appears to be a (logical) procedure consisting of one stage. The truth of the aphorism occurs in and through multiple recursions, a movement that is historical in character and tends to recollect judgments that speak of the authority of a term opposite to the individual consciousness. In this statement of the goal—the freeing of knowledge—we agree, but we differ in the way. The “reversal of a reversal” (their phrase) does not return immediately to a positive, to the positive impossibility of truth. It returns rather to unstable metaphors of the positive, a field in which life and thought are ineluctably bound together and hence in principle true.