1

Chapter One - Literature and the Right to Death, 1947

Surely, one can write without questioning why she writes. As a writer watches her
pen forming letters, has she even the right to lift it to yell, "Stop! What do you know of
yourself? Why do you proceed? Why can't you see that your ink isn't leaving marks; that
while you move forth freely, you're slogging through the void; see that the reason you
never encounter any obstacle is that youve never left your starting place? Yet you write on,
uninterrupted; unveiling to me what I dictate to you, revealing to me what I know. The
others, while reading, enhance you with what they derive, and give back to you what you
taught them. Now, you achieve what you did not achieve before; and wrote what you did
not write before. You are doomed never to be erased." Let us admit that literature begins at
the moment it becomes a question. This question is not to be confused with the doubts or
scrupules of a writer. If she happens to question himself while writing, that is her concern;
if he is engrossed by what he writes and indifferent to the possibility of writing it, to the
point of not thinking about anything, that is his right and his good fortune. But this truth
remains: as soon as the page is written, the question that perhaps incessantly nagged the
writer while she wrote-- though she may not have been aware of it-- is now seen upon the
page; and now the same question within the work, awaiting the approach of a readerany
reader, shallow or profoundlies silent, addressed toward language, behind the person
who writes and reads, by language that has become literature.
One may condemn this self-preoccupation that literature has, as obsession. It is
futile for literature to speak of its nothingness, its lack of seriousness, its bad faith; such is
the very abuse which we accuse of it. It claims to be important while viewing itself with
doubt. It confirms its existence as it degrades itself: this is more than it ought to do, because
literature might be one of those things that deserve to be found, but not sought after.
Perhaps literature has not a right to deem itself as illegitimate. Perhaps literature
lacks a claim to self-importance. But the question it regards has nothing to do, so to speak,
with its value or right. If it is quite difficult to grasp the meaning of this question, it is
because the question tends to turn into a lawsuit against art, taken with its abilities and
intentions. Literature is built atop its own debris: this paradox has become clichd to us.
But we must still ask whether the objection brought forth against art by the most illustrious
works of art in the last thirty years is not based on the redirecting, and displacement of a
force laboring in the secrecy of works and unwilling to emerge into the open air, a force
whose power was originally quite distinct from any degradation of literary activity or
literary Thing.
Lets point out that literature, as its own negation, has never signified the mere
denunciation of art, or of the artist, as a mystifying or a deception. Without a doubt,
literature is illegitimate; yes, there is a fundamental deception about it. But certain people
have discovered something beyond this fact: that literature is not only illegitimate, but also
invalid, and this invalidity may constitute an extraordinary force, a marvelous force, as long
as it is isolated in a pure state. To turn literature into the disclosure of this void within, so
that fully opens up to its nothingness, and realizes its own non-reality- this task is one of
the undertakings of surrealism. Hence, we are right to recognize surrealism as a powerful

negative movement, but no less correct to attribute to it the grandest creative ambition,
because if literature coincides with nothing for an instant, it is immediately Everything, and
the Everything starts existing: what a miracle!
The matter isnt of abusing literature, but rather of trying to understand it; of seeing
why we can only understand it by discrediting it. It has been observed with awe that the
question "What is literature?" got only meaningless answers. But what is even odder to us,
is something that appears in the very form of such a question that withdraws all its gravity.
People can and do ask the questions, "What is poetry?", "What is art?", or even: "What is the
novel?" But literature that constitutes both poem and novel seems to be the element of the
void present in all these earnest things, and towards which reflection, with its own gravity,
cannot turn once more without losing its seriousness. If reflection, imposing as it is, is
approached by literature, literature becomes an acidic force, capable of destroying what
could in reflection be imposed upon it. If reflection withdraws, then literature once again
becomes something important and essential; more important than philosophy, religion or
the worldly life that it welcomes. But if reflection, astonished by this vast power, returns to
this power and inquires what it is, it is instantly consumed by an acidic and explosive
element. It can only disparage a Thing so conceited, so vague and so impure, and in this
scorn and this vanity be consumed in turn, as the story of Monsieur Teste has
demonstrated well.
It would be incorrect to say that the powerful negative contemporary movements
responsible for this volatilizing and volatile force seem to have turned into literature.
About a century and a half ago, a man who had the highest idea of art that anyone can
havebecause he saw how art can become religion and religion, artthis man (named
Hegel) described all the ways in which someone who has chosen to be a man of literature
condemns himself to belong to the "animal kingdom of the mind." From his very first step,
as Hegel1 basically states, a person who wishes to write is halted by a contradiction: to
write, he must have the talent of writing. But in themselves, gifts are nothing. As long as the
writer has not yet sat down at his table, he has not written a work, and the writer is not yet
a writer and does not know if he has the capacity to become one. He has no talent until he
has written, but he needs talent in order to write.
From the start, this difficulty sheds light on the anomaly that is the essence of
literary activity, and which the writer should and should not overcome. A writer is not an
idealistic dreamer, and he does not contemplate the intimacy of his beautiful soul, nor
immerse himself in the inner certainty of his talents. He puts his talents to work; that is, he
needs the work he produces in order to be conscious of his talents and of himself. The
writer only finds himself, only realizes himself, through his work. Before his work exists,
not only does he not know who he is, but he is nothing. He exists only as a function of the
work; but then how can the work exist? "The individual, says (egel, cannot know what he
is unless he has made himself an effective reality through action. However, this seems to
1

In this argument, Hegel is discussing human work in general. It should be understood that the remarks that follow are quite distanced from the
text of the Phenomenology and make no attempt to illuminate it. The text can be read in Jean Hippolyte's translation of the Phenomenology,
which is pursued further in his important book, Gense de la Phnomnologie de lesprit de HegeI.

imply that he cannot determine the goal of his action until he has carried it out, and in any
case, since he is a conscious individual, he must have had the action in front of him
beforehand as entirely his own, i.e. as an end2." Now, the same is true for each new work,
because everything starts again from nothing. And the same is also true when he creates a
work part by part: if he does not see his work before him as a project that is already
completely formed, how can he dedicate himself toward the conscious goal of his conscious
acts? But if the work is already present in its entirety in his mind and if this presence is the
essence of the work (the words themselves taken to be inessential), why would he realize it
any further? Or it is also as an interior project that it is everything it will ever be, and the
writer, from then on, knows everything about it that he can learn, and so he will leave it
there to lie in its twilight, without translating it into words, without writing itbut then he
will never write it: nor become a writer. Or we can even say that in realizing that the work
cannot be planned, but only carried out, that it has value, truth and reality only through the
words which unravel it in time and inscribe it in space, he will start writing, but begin from
nothing and with nothing in mindlike a nothingness working in nothingness, to borrow
an expression of Hegel's.
In truth, this problem could never be surmounted if the person who is writing has
hoped for its solution to give him the right to start writing. "For this very reason," Hegel
notes, "He is justified to begin immediately, and to proceed in the act, whatever the
circumstances, and without further ado about the beginning, means, or end 3." In this way,
he can break the circle, because in his eyes the circumstances under which he begins to
write become the same thing as his talent. The interest he takes in writing, and the
movement which propels him forward, drive him to acknowledge these as his own, and to
see his own goal in them. Valery has often reminded us that his best works were created
from chance, and not birthed through personal necessity. But what did he find so
remarkable about that? If he had set out to work on Eupalinos of his own accord, what
reasons did he have to do it? Holding a shell fragment in his hand? Or that opening a
dictionary one morning, he had happened to read the name, Eupalinos, in La Grande
Encyclopdie? Or that he wanted to try dialogue as a form and happened to have available a
piece of paper that lent itself to that form? One can take the most trivial circumstance as the
starting point of a great work; nothing is compromised by that frivolity: the act by which
the author makes a crucial circumstance of it is enough to incorporate into his genius and
his work. In this sense, the publication Architectures which prompted Eupalinos by Valery,
was really the form in which he had originally possessed the talent to write it: that
command was the beginning of that talent, was that talent itself, but we must also add that
it only became real, only became a true project through the existence, and talent of Valery,
along with his conversations in the world and the interest he had already shown in this sort
of subject. Any work is a work of circumstance: this simply means that each work has a
beginning; that it starts in time, and this moment in time is part of the work, since without
it the work would only have been an insurmountable problem, and nothing beyond the
2

Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.W. Miller, p. 240, Oxford University Press. 1977; Chapter V. Section 1a: The spiritual animal
kingdom or the deceit of the matter in hand in itself.
3

idem, translated

impossibility of writing it.

Assume the work is written: with it, the writer is born. Before, there had been no
person to write it; beginning with the book, an author exists, and he is confused with his
work. When Kafka chances to write this sentence, "He was looking out the window," he
finds himself, he says, in a state of inspiration such that this sentence is already perfect. He
is its author-or rather because of it, he is an author: it is from it that he draws his existence;
he has made it and it makes him; it is him and he is completely what it is. From there arises
his joy, an unadulterated, and flawless joy. Whatever he may write, "the sentence is already
perfect." Such is the strange and profound certainty by which art makes itself into a goal.
What is written is neither well nor badly written; is neither important nor frivolous,
memorable nor forgettable: it is the perfect act through which what was nothing when it
was inside, emerges into the monumental reality of the outside as something that is
necessarily true, as a translation which is necessarily faithful, since the person who
translates it exists only through it and in it. One could say that this certainty is in some
sense the writer's inward paradise and that all automatic writing has simply been a way of
manifesting this golden age in reality- what Hegel calls the pure joy of passing from the
night of possibility to the day of presence- or again, the certainty that what breaks forth
into the light is none besides what was sleeping in the night. But what results from this?
The writer who is completely bundled up and enclosed in the sentence: "He was looking
out the window" cannot apparently be asked to justify this sentence, since for him nothing
else exists. But at least the sentence exists, and if it really exists to the point of making the
person who wrote it a writer, this is because it is not merely his sentence, but a sentence
that belongs to other people who can read it- a universal sentence.
At this point, an uncomfortable process is initiated. The author sees others taking
interest in his work, but the interest they take in it is different from the interest that made
the work his pure self-expression: that difference of interest changes the work; transforms
it into something else where he does not recognize the original perfection. For him, the
work has vanished, and it has become a work pertaining to other people, a work inclusive
of them while excluding him, a book that takes its value from other books, and is original if
it does not resemble them, and is comprehended by being their reflection. Presently, the
writer cannot overlook this new stage. We have seen that he exists only in his work, but the
work exists only when it has become this public, unfamiliar reality, constructed and
undone by crashing into other realities. So he is really inside the work, but the work itself
disappears. This is a particularly crucial moment in the experiment. In surmounting it, all
kinds of interpretations come into play. The writer, for example, would like to protect the
perfection of the written Thing by keeping it as far away as possible from exterior life. The
work is what he has created, and not the book that is purchased, read, pulverized, praised,
or ruined in the marketplace of the world. However, then, where does the work start, and
where does it finish? At what moment does it begin to exist? Why make it public if
necessary to preserve the brilliance of the pure ) in the work, and why take it to the
outside, or actualize it in words that are everyones? Why not withdraw it into an enclosed
and secret intimacy without producing anything besides an empty object and dying echo?
Another solution- the writer himself accepts crossing himself out, since the only one who

matters within the work is the one who reads it. The reader builds the work; in reading it,
he creates it; he is its real author, the consciousness and living substance of the written
thing; and so the author has a sole goal, that of writing for this reader and being one with
him. A futile aim. Because the reader has no use for a work written for himself, what he
wants is exactly an extraneous work where he can discover something unknown, a
different reality, and a separate mind capable of transforming him and which he can
transform into himself. An author who writes precisely for the public, does not really write;
it is the public that is writing, and for this reason the public can no longer be a reader; the
reading is only a semblance, and truly it is nothing. For this reason, works created to be
read are insignificant: they are read by no one. This is why it is dangerous to write for other
people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves: the fact
remains that other people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone
else's voice, a voice that is real and profound, unsettling like the truth.
A writer cannot retreat into himself, for he would then have to relinquish writing. As
he writes, he cannot sacrifice the pure nighttime of his own possibilities, because his work
is living only if this nightand no other thingturns into day, and if what is most singular
and most distanced from existence that is already revealed, now reveals itself within
communal existence. In truth, the writer can aim to justify himself by undertaking the task
of writingthe simple operation of writing, made conscious of itself apart from its results.
We recall that this was Valery's path to salvation. Let us accept this. Let us accept that a
writer may concern himself with art as pure technique, with technique as nothing more
than the search for the means by which something that was not yet written becomes
written. But if the experience is to be valid, one cannot detach the operation from its
results, and the results are never stable or definitive, but infinitely varied, and woven into
an ungraspable future. A writer who pretends to be unconcerned with how the work comes
into being sees his interest get bogged down in the world, and become lost in the entirety
of history. For the work is also made outside him, and all the rigor he had placed within the
awareness of his deliberate actions, and his careful rhetoric, is soon absorbed into the
affairs of a living contingency that he can neither control or watch. But his experiment is
not lacking value: in writing, he has demonstrated himself as nothingness at play, and after
having written something, he proves his work to be something that vanishes. The work
disappears, but the fact of vanishing remains, and appears as essential, a deed that allows
the work to be actualized as it enters the course of history, to be made real as it disappears.
In this experiment, the writer's real goal is no longer the ephemeral work, but something
beyond it: the truth of the work, where the individual who writesa force of creative
negationseems to join with the moving work through which this force of negation and
excess is affirmed.
This new notion, which (egel calls the Thing itself, has a large task in literatures
project. Regardless of having such numerous and varied meanings: it is an art that is above
the work, the ideal that the work seeks to represent, the World as it is sketched out of the
work, the values at stake in the effort of creation, the authenticity of this effort; it is
everything which, above the work constantly being dissolved in things, preserves the
model, the essence and the spiritual truth of this work just as the writer's freedom wished

to manifest it and recognize it as his own. The goal is not what the writer creates, but the
truth of what he creates. Because of this, he deserves to be called an honest, disinterested
conscience: the honest man. But here we run into trouble: as soon as honesty comes into
play in literature, impersonation is already there. Here bad faith is truth, and the greater
the pretension of morality and seriousness, the more surely do mystification and deceit
reign. Certainly, literature is the world of values, since above the mediocrity of created
works, everything they lack appears endlessly as their own truth. But what results from
this? A perpetual lure, an extraordinary game of hide-and-seek where the writer claims as a
pretext that what he has in mind is not the ephemeral work but the spirit of that work and
of every work. Whatever he does, whatever he has not been able to do, he adapts to it, and
his honest conscience draws knowledge and glory from it. This honest conscience is
something we should listen to; we are familiar with it because it is working in all of us.
When the work has failed, this conscience is not troubled: it says to itself, "Now it has been
fully accomplished, for failure is its essence; its disappearance constitutes its realization,"
and the conscience is content with this; lack of success relishes it. But if the book does not
even arrive to be born, does it remains a pure nothing? Well, this is still better: silence and
nothingness are the essence of literature, "the Thing Itself." It is true: the writer is willing to
attach the highest value on the meaning his work has for him alone. Then it does not matter
whether the work is good or bad, famous or forgotten. If circumstances neglect it, he
congratulates himself, since he only wrote it to deny the circumstances. But when a book
that comes into being by chance, produced in a moment of idleness and lassitude, without
value or significance, is suddenly made into a masterpiece by happenstance, what author is
not going to take credit for the glory himself, to the depth of his spirit; what author will not
see his own merit in that glory, and his own work in that gift of fortune, with the working of
his mind in providential synchrony with his crime?
A writer is his own first deception, and he fools himself the second that he fools
others. Listen to him once more: he states that his function is to write for others, that as he
writes he bears nothing in mind but the reader's interest. He says this and he believes it.
But it is not true at all. Because if he were not chiefly attentive to what he is doing, if he
were not concerned with literature as his own action, he could not even write: he would
not be the one who was writingno one would be writing. For this reason, it is useless for
him to take the seriousness of an ideal as his guarantee, and futile for him to claim stable
values: this seriousness is not his own seriousness and can never fixate definitively where
he believes himself to be. For example: he writes novels, and these novels imply certain
political affirmations, so that he seems to side with a certain Cause. Others people who
directly support the Cause, are then inclined to recognize him as one of themselves, to see
his work as proof that the Cause is really his cause, but as soon as they make this claim, and
become involved in this activity and appropriate it, they realize that the writer is not on
their side, and that he is only on his own side; that what interests him in the Cause is his
own operationand they are puzzled. It is easy to understand why men who have
committed themselves to a party, and who have made a decision, distrust writers who
share their views; because these writers have also dedicated themselves to literature, and
at the end of the account, literature, by its very activity, denies the substance of what it
represents. This is its law and its truth. If it renounces this in order to bind permanently to

a truth outside itself, it ceases to be literature and the writer who still claims to be a writer
enters another aspect of bad faith. Must he then refuse to take interest in anything, and
turn to the wall? The problem if he does this, is that this equivocation is no less great. First
of all, facing the wall is also turning towards the world; one is transforming the wall into
the world. When a writer sinks into the pure intimacy of a work which interests no one but
himself, it may seem to other people-other writers and people involved in another activitythat at the least they have been left at peace to themselves in their Thing and their work.
But not at all. The work created by this solitary person and enclosed in solitude contains a
point of view that concerns everyone, implicitly passing judgment on other works, on the
current problems, complicit with whatever it neglects, and the foe of whatever it abandons,
its apathy blending hypocritically with everyone's passion.
What strikes us is that literary deceit and mystification are not only unavoidable but
that they form the writer's honesty, whatever hope and truth there are in him. These days
people often speak of the disease of words, and we even become irritated with those who
speak of it, suspecting them of making words sick so they can speak of it. This could be the
case. The trouble is that this sickness is also the words' health. Doesnt equivocation
wrench them apart? Equivocation is a good thing-without it there would not be dialogue.
Doesnt misunderstanding falsify them? But this misapprehension is the possibility of our
comprehension. Doesnt emptiness penetrate them? This emptiness is their very meaning.
Naturally, a writer can always make it his ideal to call a cat a cat. But what he cannot attain
is then believing that he is on the path to health and sincerity. On the contrary, he is
mystifying things more than ever, for the cat is not a cat, and anyone who claims that it is
has nothing in mind but this hypocritical violence: Rolet is a rascal4.
This impersonation has multiple causes. We have now been discussing the first:
literature is made up of different stages that are distinct from and opposing each other.
Honesty, which is analytic because it wants to see clearly, separates these stages. In
honesty do the author, the work, and the reader pass successively; as do the art of writing,
the written Thing, and the truth of that thing or the Thing Itself; successively, the writer is
without a name, a pure absence of himself, pure idleness. Then the writer who is work, who
is the action of a creation indifferent to what it is creating, then the writer who is the result
of this work and is worth something because of this result and not because of the work, as
real as the created thing is real; then it is the writer who is no longer affirmed by this result
but denied by it, who saves the transient work by saving its ideal, the truth of the work, etc.
The writer is not just one of these stages to the exclusion of others, nor is he even all of
them put together in their unimportant succession, but rather he is the action that brings
them together and unifies them. Consequently, when the honest conscience judges the
writer by freezing him in one of these forms, and when, for instance, it tries to doom the
work because it is a failure, the writer's other honesty protests in the name of the other
stages, in the name of the purity of art, which sees its own triumph in the failure-and
likewise, each time a writer is challenged under one of his aspects he has no choice but to
present himself as someone else, and when addressed as the author of a beautiful work,
4

Blanchot is referring to a remark made by Nicolas Boileau (1637-1711) in his first Satire: "J'appelle un chat un chat et Rolet un fripon" ("I call
a cat a cat and Rolet a rascal"). Rolet was a notorious figure of the time.

disowns that work, and when admired as an inspiration and a genius, sees in himself only
application and hard work , and when read by everyone, says: "Who can read me? I haven't
written a thing." This shift on the part of the writer makes him perpetually absent, an
irresponsible person without a conscience, but this shift also forms the extent of his
presence, his risks and his responsibility.
The problem is not that the writer is many people as one, but that each stage of
himself denies all the others, demands everything for itself alone, and does not permit any
reconciliation or compromise. The writer must answer several absolute and completely
different commands simultaneously, and his morality is composed of the encounter and
opposition of unyielding, hostile rules.
One rule tells him: "You will not write, you will remain nothing, you will keep silent,
and you will not know words." The other rule says: "You will know nothing but words."
"Write in order to say nothing." "Write to say something." "Not the work, but rather, the
experience of yourself, his knowledge is unknown to you." "A work! A real work,
recognized by others and important to them." "Erase the reader." "Erase yourself before
the reader." "Write to be true." "Write for the sake of truth." "Then be a lie, because to write
with truth in mind is to write what is not yet true and perhaps never will be true." "It
doesn't matter, write in order to act." "Writeyou who are afraid to act." "Let freedom
speak in you." "Oh! Do not let freedom become a word in you."
Which law should we obey? What voice should we listen to? But the writer must
listen to all of them! Which confusion! )snt clarity his law? Yes, clarity too. (e must
therefore oppose himself, deny himself even as he affirms himself, and look for the depth of
the night in the aptitude of the day, looking in the shadows which never begin, to find the
certain light that cannot end. He must save the world and be the abyss, justify existence and
allow what does not exist to speak; he must be at the end of all eras in the universal
plenitude, and he is the origin, the birth of what does nothing but come into being. Is it all
of this? Literature is all that, in him. But isn't this what literature would like to be, when in
fact it is not? In that case, literature is nothing. But is it really nothing?
Literature is not nothingness. People who have disdain for literature are mistaken to
believe they are condemning it by taking it for nothing. "All that is only literature." This is
how one creates a distinction between action, which is a concrete initiative in the world,
and the written word, which should be a passive expression upon the worlds surface;
people who are in favor of action reject literature, which does not act, and those seeking of
passion become writers in order not to act. But this is condemning and loving it abusively.
If one sees work as the force of history, the force that transforms man while transforming
the world, it is necessary to recognize a writer's activity as the highest form of work. When
a man works, what does he do? He produces an object. That object is the realization of a
plan which was not real up to that point: it is the affirmation of a reality different from the
elements which constitute it and it is the future of new objects, to the extent that it
becomes a tool capable of building other objects. For example, my project might be to make
myself warm. As long as this project is a mere desire, I can turn it every possible way and it
will still not make me warm. But now I build a stove: the stove transforms the empty ideal

which was my desire into something real; it affirms the presence in the world of something
which was not there before, and thereby denies something which was there before; before,
I had in front of me stones and cast iron; now I no longer have either stones or cast iron,
but instead the product of the transformation of these elementsthat is, their denial and
destructionby work. Due to this object, the world is now different, all the more different
because this stove will allow me to create other objects, which will in turn deny the former
condition of the world and prepare its future. These objects, which I have produced by
changing the state of things, will in turn transform me. The idea of heat is nothing, but
actual heat will turn my life into a different kind of life, and every new thing I am able to do
from now on because of this heat will also make me someone different. This is how history
is formed, say Hegel and Marx- by work which realizes Being by denying it, and by
unveiling it at the end of the negation5.
But what is a writer doing by writing? Everything a man does when working, but to
a maximal degree. The writer, too, produces somethingwork in the highest sense of the
word. He produces this work by transforming natural and human realities. When he writes,
his starting point is a certain state of language, a certain norm of culture, certain books, and
also certain objective elements, paper, and printing presses. To write, he must destroy
language in its current form and re-create it in another, denying books as he forms a book
out of what other books are not. This new book is truly a reality: it is visible, tangible, and
can even be read. In any case, it is not nothing. Prior to writing it, I had a notion of it, and at
the least, I set out to write it, but I believe there is the same difference between that idea
and the volume in which it is realized, as the difference between desiring heat, and the
stove that makes me warm. For me, the written volume is an extraordinary, unexpected
innovation such that it is impossible for me to conceive what it is capable of being without
writing what it cannot grasp, no matter how consciously they were produced, and in the
face of which I shall be unable to remain the same, for this reason: in the presence of
something else, I become another. But there is an even more decisive reason: this other
thingthis book, which I had thought of, and which I could not possibly have known of
beforehand, is precisely myself become another.
The book, the written thing, goes into the world and carries out its work of
transformation and negation. It, too, is the future of many other things, and not only books:
by the projects which it can give rise to, by the endeavors it encourages, by the worlds
totality of which it is a modified reflection, it is an infinite source of new realities, and
because of these new realities existence, it will now be something that it previously was
not.
So is the book nothing at all? Then why should the act of building a stove seem to be
the work which forms and produces history, and why should the act of writing appear as
pure passivity that remains at the borders of history and is nonetheless shaped by it? The
question seems unreasonable, and yet it weighs down upon the writer, overpowering him.
At first glance it appears that the malleable capacity of written works is incomparably
5

Alexandre Kojve offers this interpretation of Hegel in his Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Leons sur la Phnomnologie de lEsprit,
selected and published by Raymond Queneau).

10

great; one has the impression that the writer is given more power to act than anyone else,
since his actions are inestimable, and without limit: we know (or we like to believe) that a
single work can change the worlds fate. But this is exactly what makes us think twice. The
influence authors hold is very great, and goes infinitely outside their actions, to such an
extent that what is real in their actions does not spill over into their influence and that tiny
grain of reality does not contain the real substance that the coverage of their influence
would require. What is an author capable of doing? Everything-first of all, everything: he is
chained up, enslaved, but as long as he can find a few moments of freedom to write, he is
free to create a world without slaves, a world in which the slaves become the masters and
formulate a new law; thus, by writing, the fettered man immediately obtains freedom for
himself and for the world; he denies everything he is, in order to become everything he is
not. In this sense, his work is a prodigious act, the greatest and most important one. But let
us examine this a little closer. Insofar as he is immediately granted the freedom he does not
have, he is negating the actual conditions for his emancipation, and neglecting to do the
necessary striving to make real the abstract notion of freedom. His negation, to him, is
global. It not only negates his situation as a shut-in man, but exceeds time that will form
gaps in these walls; it negates the negation of time, and negates the negation of limits. This
is why in the end, this negation negates no thing, and it is why the work in which it is
realized is not a truly negative, destructive act of transformation, but rather the realization
of the inability to negate, the refusal to participate in the world; it transforms the freedom
that must be incarnate in things in the operation of time, into an ideal above time, empty
and out of reach.
A writer's influence is bound to this privilege of being master of all. But he is only
master of all, for he grasps just the infinite; he lacks the finite, and limit escapes him. Now,
one cannot be in the infinite, and one cannot accomplish anything in the unlimited, so that
if a writer acts in a very real way as he produces this real thing which is called a book, he is
also discrediting all action by this action, since he has replaced the world of determined
things and defined work, with a world where everything is instantly granted and there is
nothing left to do but to read it and to enjoy it.
Generally, the writer appears to be placed in inactivity because he is the master of
the imaginary, and those who follow him into the imaginary lose sight of the problems of
their true lives. But the danger he represents is much graver. The truth is that he ruins
action, not because he can access what is unreal, but because he makes all of reality
available to us. Non-reality begins with that whole. The imaginary is not a strange region
situated beyond the world. It is the world itself, but also the world as a whole, as manifold,
the world as total. This is why it is not in the world, for it is the world, grasped and realized
in its entirety by the overall negation of all the individual realities which one finds within it,
by their place outside the rules, their absence, and by the realization of that absence itself,
with which literary creation begins, which is given as illusion, when literary creation
retraces over each thing and each being, in creating them, because now it sees them and
names them beginning from everything, from an absence of everything, that is to say, from
nothing.

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Literature that is called "purely imaginative" surely has its dangers. First of all, it is
not pure imagination. It believes itself to stand distanced from everyday realities and actual
events, but the truth is that it has distanced from them; it is this distance, this retreat from
the everyday which necessarily takes the everyday into account, and describes it as
distance, as pure unfamiliarity. What is more is that from this distance it makes an absolute
value, and this separateness then seems to be a source of general understanding, the ability
to grasp everything and attain everything immediately, for those who submit to its
enchantment enough to emerge from both their life, which is but limited understanding,
and time, which is but a constricted perspective. All of this is the lie of a fiction. But
ultimately, this kind of literature has going for it the fact that it is not trying to deceive us: it
presents itself as imaginary and only puts to sleep those who want sleep.
Much more mystifying is the literature of action. It calls upon people to do
something. But if it still seeks to be genuine literature, it represents this "something to do,"
this predetermined and concrete goal, upon a world where such an action returns to the
non-reality of an abstract and absolute value. This "something to do," as it may be
expressed in a work of literature, is never more than "everything remains to be done,"
whether it presents itself as this "everything," that is to say, as an absolute value, or
whether to justify itself and prove that it has merit, it needs this "everything," into which it
disappears. The language of a writer, even if he is a revolutionary, is not the language of a
demand. It does not give orders: it presents; and it does not present by making present
what it shows, but by portraying it behind everything, as the meaning and absence of this
everything. The result is either that the call of the author to the reader is only an empty call,
and expresses only the effort which a man cut off from the world makes to reenter the
world, while he stands discreetly at its peripheryor that the "something to do," which can
only be recovered by beginning with absolute values, appears to the reader precisely as
something which cannot be done or which requires neither work nor action in order to be
done.
As we well know, a writer's main temptations are called stoicism, skepticism, and an
unhappy consciousness. These are all ways of thinking that a writer adopts for reasons he
believes himself to have reflected upon, but which literature brings out as reflection in him.
A stoic: he is the man of the universe, which itself exists only on paper, and, a prisoner or a
miserable man, he endures his condition stoically because he can write and because one
minute of freedom in which he writes is enough to make him powerful and free, sufficient
to grant him not his own freedom which he mocks, but universal freedom. A nihilist,
because he does not simply negate this or that by methodical work which slowly
transforms each thing: he negates everything at once, and he can only negate everything,
having only dealt with everything. Oh, unhappy consciousness! One sees too well that this
unhappiness is his most profound talent, since he is a writer only due to his fragmented
consciousness split into irreconcilable moments which we call: inspiration which negates
all work; workwhich negates the nothingness of genius; the fleeting workwhich is
created by being negated; the work as everything-in which he withdraws everything which
he seems to give to himself and to other people. But there is yet another temptation.

12

We will recognize that in a writer is a movement that goes forth without stopping,
and almost without passage, from nothing to everything. In him let us see this negation that
is not satisfied with the non-reality in which it moves, because it wishes to realize itself and
can only do so by negating something real, more real than words, more real than the
remote individual in control: so it keeps pushing him this way toward a worldly life and a
public existence in order to drive him to imagine how, even as he writes, he can become
this very existence. It is then that he encounters those decisive moments in history when
everything seems put in question, when law, faith, the State, the world on high, the world of
yesterday-everything plunges effortlessly, without work, into nothingness. The man knows
he has not left history, but history is now the void being made real; it is absolute freedom
which has become an event. Such periods are called revolutions. At this moment, freedom
which aspires to be realized in the immediate form of everything is possible, everything can
be done. A fabled moment- and no one who has experienced it can completely recover from
it, since he has experienced history as his own history, and his own freedom as universal
freedom. These moments are in fact wondrous moments: in them, the narrative speaks; in
them, the speech of the narrative becomes action. It is wholly justified that they tempt the
writer. Revolutionary action in every aspect correlates to action as incarnate in literature:
the passage from nothing to everything, the affirmation of the absolute as event and of each
event as absolute. Revolutionary action unleashes itself with the same force and the same
facility as the writer who has only to put a few words side by side to change the world.
Revolutionary action also has the same requirement of purity, and the assurance that
everything it does has absolute value, that it is not just any action performed to bring about
some desirable and reputable goal, but that it is itself the final goal, the Last Act. This last
act is freedom, and the only option left is between freedom and nothing. This is why, at that
point, the sole acceptable slogan is: freedom or death. Thus the Reign of Terror comes into
being. People stop being individuals working within assigned roles, acting here and only in
the present: each person is universal freedom, and universal freedom and knows neither
elsewhere nor tomorrow, knows neither of work or a finished work. At such times there is
nothing left for anyone to do, because everything is fulfilled. No one has a right to a private
life anymore, everything is public, and the guiltiest person is the suspect-the one who has a
secret, who keeps a thought, an intimacy to himself. And in the end no one has a right to his
life any longer, to his actually separate and physically distinct existence. Such is the
meaning of the Reign of Terror. Each has a right, so to speak, to death: death is not his
condemnation, but is the essence of his right; he is not suppressed as a guilty person-he
needs death so that he can proclaim himself a citizen and it is in the disappearance of death
that freedom causes him to be born. Where this is concerned, the French Revolution has a
clearer meaning than any other revolution. Death in the Reign of Terror is not the only way
to punish seditionaries; rather, since it becomes the unavoidable, in some sense the desired
fate of everyone, it appears as the very operation of freedom in free men. When the blade
falls on Saint-Just and Robespierre, it executes, in a sense, no one. Robespierre's virtue,
Saint-Just's rigor, are simply their existences already suppressed, the anticipated presence
of their deaths, the decision to allow freedom to assert itself completely in them and
through its universal nature, to negate the particular reality of their lives. Perhaps they
caused the Reign of Terror to take place. But the Terror they embody does not come from
the death they inflict on others, but from the death they bring on themselves. They bear its

13

features, they think and decide with death on their shoulders, and this is why their thinking
is cold, unyielding; it has the freedom of a decapitated head. The Terrorists are those who
want absolute freedom, while knowing that this constitutes a desire for their own death,
they are conscious of the freedom they affirm, as they are conscious of their death which
they realize, and consequently they behave during their lifetimes not like people living
among other living people, but like beings deprived of Being, like universal thoughts, pure
abstractions beyond history, judging and deciding in the name of all of history.
Death as an event has no further importance. During the Reign of Terror individuals
perish, and it signifies naught. )n (egels famous words, " )t is thus the coldest and most
brutal of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or
swallowing a mouthful of water. Why? )sn't death the achievement of freedom, that is, to
say, the richest moment of meaning? But it is also only the empty point in that freedom, a
manifestation of the fact that such a freedom is still abstract, ideal (literary), an
impoverishment and platitude. Every person dies, but everyone is alive, and that really also
means that everyone is dead. But "is dead" is the positive side of freedom which has
become the world: here, being is revealed as absolute. "Dying," on the other hand, is pure
insignificance, an event without concrete reality, one that has lost all value as a personal
and interior drama, for there is no longer any interior. )t is the moment when ) die that
signifies to me as I die a banality that there is no way to take into consideration: in the
liberated world and in these moments when freedom is an absolute apparition, dying is
unimportant and death has no depth. The Reign of Terror and revolution- not war-have
taught us this.
The writer recognizes himself in the Revolution. It attracts him because it is the time
when literature becomes history. It is his truth. Any writer who is not driven by the very
fact of writing to think, ) am the revolution, and only freedom allows me to write," is not
truly writing. In 1793 there is a man who identifies himself completely with revolution and
the Reign of Terror. He is an aristocrat clutching onto6 the slots of his medieval castle, a
tolerant man, rather shy and obsequiously polite: but he writes, he does nothing but write,
and it doesn't matter that freedom puts him back into the Bastille after having brought him
out, he is the one who understands freedom the best, because he understands that it is
when the most rogue passions can turn into political reality, a time when they have a right
to be seen, and are the law. He is also the man for whom death is the greatest passion and
the last platitude, who cuts off people's heads the way you slice a head of cabbage, with
such great difference that nothing is more unreal than the death he causes, and yet no one
has been more acutely aware that death is sovereign, that freedom is death. Sade is the
writer par excellence; he reunites all the writer's contradictions. Alone: of all men he is the
most alone, and yet at the same time a public figure and an important political personage.
Forever locked up and yet absolutely free, a theoretician and symbol of absolute freedom.
He writes a vast body of work, and that work exists for no one. Unknown: but what he
portrays has for everyone an immediate significance. He is nothing more than a writer, and
he depicts life raised to the height of passion, a passion that has become cruelty and
6

Hegel, op. quoted, p. 360

14

madness. The most bizarre, most hidden, the most irrational kind of sentiment he turns
into a universal affirmation, the reality of a public speech which is inscribed in history to
become a legitimate explanation of the general condition of humankind. He is finally
negation itself: his writing is nothing but the work of negation, his experience the act of
raging negation, motivated to blood, denying other people, denying God, denying nature
and, within this circle in which it endlessly hurries, basking in itself as absolute
sovereignty.
Literature views itself in revolution, it finds its justification in revolution and if it has
been called the Reign of Terror, that is because its ideal is indeed that moment in history,
that moment when "life bears death and is sustained in it" in order to obtain from death the
possibility and truth of speech. This is the "question that seeks to be accomplished in
literature, the "question" that is its essence. Literature is tied to language. Language is
simultaneously reassuring and disturbing. When we speak, we gain control over things
with an ease that satisfies us. I say, "This woman," and she is immediately available to me
as I push her away, I bring her close, she is everything I want her to be, she becomes the
sites of the most surprising kinds of formations occur and actions: Speech is life's ease and
safety. With a nameless object, we dont know how to do anything. Primitive being knows
that the possession of words gives it mastery over things, but for him the relationship
between words and the world is so close that the manipulation of language is as difficult
and dangerous as contact with living things: the name has not left the thing, as it is inside
the thing which has been placed dangerously outside and yet it is still in the hidden
intimacy of the thing; so the thing has not yet been named. The more closely man
approaches civilization, the more he can manipulate words with innocence and calmness. Is
it that words have lost all relation to what they designate? But this absence of relation is
not a defect, and if it is a defect, from it alone will language derive its full value, so that of all
languages the most perfect is the language of mathematics, which is spoken rigorously, and
to which no living thing correlates.
I say, "This woman." Hlderlin, Mallarme, and all poets whose theme is the essence
of poetry have felt that the act of naming is a disquieting marvel. A word may give me what
it signifies, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, "This woman" I must
somehow take her flesh and bones reality away from her, to render her absent, to
annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The
word is the absence of this being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being-so
to speak, the very fact that it does not exist. From this point of view, speaking is an odd
right. In a text dating from before The Phenomenology, Hegel, here the friend and kindred
spirit of Hlderlin, writes: "Adam's first act, which made him master of the animals, was to
give them names, that is, he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures) 7."
Hegel means that from that instant, the cat ceased to be a uniquely real cat and also became
an idea. The meaning of speech, then, requires that before any word is spoken there must
be a kind of immense hecatomb, a preliminary flood plunging all of creation into a total sea.
God created living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on
7

From a collection of essays entitled Symptom of 1803 and 1804. A. Kojeve, in his Introduction a la lecture de Hegel, interprets a passage from
the Phenomenology and shows, astonishingly, that for Hegel, comprehension was akin to murder.

15

meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had
disappeared; only, in place of beings and, as we say, existents, there remained only Being,
and man was condemned not to be able to approach anything or experience anything
except through the meaning he needed to create. He saw that he was enclosed in daylight,
and he knew this day could not end, because the end itself was light, since it was from the
end of beings that their meaning-which is Being-came forth.
Undoubtedly, my language kills no one. And yet: when I say, "This woman," a real
death has been announced and is already present within my language; my language means
that this person, who is there now, can be detached from herself, erased from her existence
and her presence, and abruptly thrown into a nothingness in which there is no existence or
presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction, and it is at
any moment an unwavering allusion to such an event. My language kills no person. But if
this woman were not really capable of dying, if she were not at any moment of her life
threatened by death and tied and joined to death by an essential relation, I would not be
able to carry out this ideal negation, this delayed murder that constitutes my language.
So it is precisely correct to say that when I speak: death speaks in me. My speech is a
warning that at this very moment death is unleashed in the world, that between I, who
speak, and the person I address, it has suddenly emerged: it is there between us as the
distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated,
for it holds within it the condition for any understanding. Only death permits me to grasp
what I wish to obtain; it exists in words as the sole possibility to bear meaning. Without
death, everything would drain away to absurdity and the nothing.
This situation has multiple consequences. Clearly, within me, the ability to speak is
also tied to my absence from being. I call my name, and it is as if I were singing my funeral
hymn: I separate myself from myself, I am no longer my presence or my reality, but an
objective, impersonal presence of my name, which exceeds me and whose transfixed
immobility performs the exact same function for me as a tombstone pushing against the
void. 'When speaking, I deny the existence of what I say, but I also deny the existence to the
person who is stating my speech: if my speech reveals Being in its nonexistence, it also
affirms that this revelation is made on the basis of the non-existence of the person making
it, out of his power to remove himself from himself, to be other than his being. This is why,
if true language is to begin, it is necessary for the life that will carry this language to have
experienced its nothingness, to have "trembled in the depths; and everything in it that was
fixed and stable to have been shaken." Language can only begin with the void; no plenitude
or certitude ever speaks; something essential is missing in everyone who expresses
himself. Negation is tied to language. When I first begin, I do not speak in order to say
something, but rather nothingness requests to speak, nothing speaks, nothing finds its
being in speech and the being of speech is nothingness. This formulation explains why
literature's ideal has been as follows: to say nothing, to speak so that one says nothing. It is
not the brooding of aristocratic nihilism. Language perceives that its meaning derives not
from what exists, but from its own withdrawal before existence, and it is tempted to
proceed no further than this step backwards, to attempt negation in itself and build all from

16

nothing. If we are not to speak of things except to state what makes them nothing, well,
saying naught is really the only hope for speaking everything of them.
Of course, it is a problematic hope. Everyday language calls a cat a cat, as if the living
cat and its name were one, as if it were not true that when we name the cat we have left of
it nothing but its absence, and what it is not. In any case, everyday language is momentarily
justified, in that if the word excludes the existence of the thing it designates, it still refers to
it through the things nonexistence which has become its essence. )f you wish, naming the
cat is rendering it a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but
this does not mean we are making it a dog, or even a non-dog. Such is the main difference
between commonplace and literary language. The first concedes that once the nonexistence
of the cat has passed into the void, the cat himself is fully and undoubtedly resuscitated in
the form of its idea (its being) and its meaning: the word, on the plane of Being (idea), gives
back to the cat all the assurance it had on the plane of existence. And indeed this certitude
is even greater: if they must, things can change; sometimes they cease to be what they arethey remain hostile, unusable, inaccessible; but the being of these things, their idea, does
not change: the idea is definitive it is for certain: one even calls it eternal. Let us retain
words without reverting to things, let us not release our grasp on words, nor believe they
are ill. Then we shall be in peace.
Commonplace language is undoubtedly right that this is the price we pay for peace.
But literary language is made of disquiet; it is also built of contradictions. Its position is
hardly stable or secure. On one hand, its only concern in a thing is its meaning, in its
absence, and it would like to obtain this absence absolutely in and for itself: to grasp the
infinite movement of understanding as a whole. Moreover, it observes that the word cat is
not just the nonexistence of the cat, but a nonexistence made into a word, that is, to say, a
fully determined and objective reality. There it sees a difficulty and even a lie. How can it
expect to have achieved what it set out to do, since it has transposed the non-reality of the
thing onto the reality of language? How could the infinite absence of comprehension
concede to be confused with the limited and constrained presence of a single word? And
isn't everyday language deceived itself when trying to persuade us of this? Indeed, it
deceives itself and deceives us, too. Speech is not sufficient for the truth it contains. That
one bears to listen to a single word: in it, nothingness scurries, laboring away; relentlessly
digging, doing its utmost to find a way out, invalidating what encloses it- it is infinite
disquiet, a formless and nameless vigilance. Already the seal which held this nothingness
within the limits of the word and a false meaning has been broken; now there is access to
other names, names which are less fixed, still ambiguous, more capable of adapting to the
savage freedom of the negative essence-they are unstable groups, still ambiguous, no
longer terms, but their passage, "turns of phrase" endlessly sliding, and ending up nowhere.
So the image that does not directly designate the thing is born; it designates what the thing
is not, speaking of a dog instead of a cat. This is the beginning of the pursuit where all of
language, in movement, is asked to give in to the uneasy demands of one single thing that
has been deprived of Being and which after oscillating between each word, tries to latch
onto them all again in order to negate all of them simultaneously, so that they will
designate the void as they sink down into it-this void they can neither fill nor represent.

17

Literature, even if it terminated at that point, would already have had a strange and
embarrassing job. But it does not stop there. It recalls the first name which would have
been the murder Hegel speaks of regarding the "existent" was called out of its existence by
the word and became being. This Lazare, veni foras summoned the obscure cadaverous
reality from its murky depths of origin, and gave it in exchange the life of the mind.
Language knows that its kingdom is day and not the intimacy of the unrevealed; it knows
that in order for the day to begin, for the day to be the Orient sighted by Hlderlin- not light
that has become the repose of noon, but the terrible force by which beings arrive in the
world and are illuminated: something must be left out. Negation cannot be created out of
anything but the reality of what it negates; language derives its value and its pride out of
being the achievement of this negation; but in the beginning, what has been lost? The
torment of language is what it lacks because of the necessity for it to lack exactly this. It
cannot even name it.
The person who glimpses God dies. In speech, what gives life to speech dies; speech
is the life of that death, it is "the life which bears death and is sustained in it." What
excellent power. But something was there which is there no more. Something has
disappeared. How to recover it, how to turn around and look at what exists before, if all my
power resides in making it into what exists after? The language of literature is a looking out
for this moment that precedes literature. Generally, literature calls it existence; it wants the
cat as it exists, the pebble on its side of things, not man, but the pebble, and in this pebble
what man rejects by speaking, what is the foundation of speech and what speech excludes
in speaking, the abyss, Lazarus in the tomb and not Lazarus returned to the day, who
already emits a stench, who is Evil, Lazarus lost and not Lazarus saved and brought back to
life. I say a flower! But in the absence where I note it, by the oblivion to which I relegate the
image that it gives me, in the depths of this heavy word, itself surging upwards like an
unknown thing, I passionately summon the darkness of this flower, the perfume that passes
through me while I still do not breathe it, this dust that impregnates me even as I do not see
it, this color that is a trace and not a light. Then what hope do I have of attaining what I
push away? My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are also
things, and a sort of nature-what is given me, and gives me more than I can understand.
Just before, the reality of words was an obstacle. Now, it is my only chance. A name stops
being the ephemeral transit of nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a clump of
existence; language, abandoning sense, the meaning which was all it wanted to be, attempts
to be senseless. Everything physical takes priority: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and then
the paper on which one writes, the lines of the ink, the book. Fortunately, yes, language is a
thing: it is a written thing, a piece of bark, a slab of rock, a fragment of clay in which the
reality of the earth survives. The word acts not as an ideal force but as an obscure power,
an incantation that coerces things, rendering them present truly outside themselves. It is an
element, a piece hardly detached from its subterranean milieu: no longer a name, but a
single moment of universal anonymity, a bald statement, the stupor of a confrontation in
the depths of obscurity. And in this way language insists on playing its own game without
man, who formed language. Literature then disperses the writer: it is no longer this
inspiration at work, negation asserting itself, this idea inscribed in the world as if it were
the absolute perspective of the world in its totality. It is not beyond the world, but nor is it

18

the world itself: what exists is the presence of things before the world, their perseverance
after the world has disappeared; the stubbornness of what remains when everything is
wiped clean, and the stupor of what appears when nothing exists. That is why it cannot be
confused with consciousness, which illuminates things and makes decisions; it is my
consciousness without me, a radiant passivity of mineral substances, and clarity in the
depths of torpor. It is not the night; it is the constant fear of the night; it is not the night, but
the consciousness of the night, which lies awake watching for a chance to surprise itself due
to what is constantly being dissipated. It is not the day, but the side of the day that day has
rejected in order become the light. And it is not death either, because it manifests existence
without Being, existence which remains under existence, an inexorable affirmation,
without beginning or end- death as the impossibility of dying.
By changing itself to the powerlessness to reveal anything, literature aims to be the
revelation of what is destroyed by revelation. It is a tragic endeavor. Literature says: "I no
longer represent; I am, I do not signify; I present." But this desire to be a thing, this refusal
to want to mean anything, a refusal immersed in words turned into salt; this destiny that
literature ultimately becomes as it becomes the language of no one, the writing of no
writer, the light of a consciousness deprived of self, this mad effort to bury itself in itself, to
hide itself behind the fact that it can be seen- all this is now manifested and shown by
literature. If it were to become as mute as a stone, as passive as the corpse trapped behind
that stone, its decision to lose the capacity for speech would still be legible on the stone and
be sufficient to wake this fake death.
Literature learns that it cannot exceed itself towards its own end: it hides, and does
not expose itself. It knows it is the movement through which whatever disappears keeps
appearing. When it names a thing, whatever it designates is eliminated; but whatever is
eliminated is also maintained, and the thing has found a refuge (in the being that is the
word) rather than a threat. When literature refuses to name anything, when it turns a name
into something obscure and meaningless, a witness of primordial obscure, what has
disappeared in this case-the meaning of the name-is wholly destroyed, but in its place
signification in general has emerged, the meaning of lack of meaning encrusted in the word
as expression of the obscurity of existence, so that although the precise meaning of the
terms has faded, the very possibility to signify is now affirmed, the empty power of words
that give meaning-an odd, impersonal light.
By negating the day, literature reconstructs day as fatality; by affirming the night, it
finds the night as the impossibility of the night. That is its discovery. When day is the light
of the world, it sheds light upon what it lets us see: it is the capacity to grasp, to live, it is the
answer "understood" in each question. But if we take the day into consideration, if we
reach a point where we push it away in order to find out what precedes the day, under it,
we discover that the day is already present, and that what precedes the day is still the day,
but in the form of an inability to disappear, not the capacity to make something appear: the
darkness of necessity, not the light of freedom. The nature, then, of what precedes the day,
from the existence of twilight, is the dark face of the day, and this dark side is not the
undisclosed mystery of its beginning, but its inevitable presence-the statement "There is no

19

day," which merges with "There is already day," its appearance coinciding with the
moment when it has not yet appeared. In the course of the day, the day allows us to escape
from things, it lets us comprehend them, and in doing so, it makes them transparent and as
if null- but we cannot escape from the day: within it we are free, but it itself, is fatality, and
day in the form of fatality is the being of what lies before the day. It is an existence we must
turn away from in order to speak and comprehend.
From a certain point of view, literature lies on two slopes. One side of literature
faces toward the act of negation by which things are separated from themselves and
destroyed in order to be known, subjugated, and communicated. Regarding this act of
negation, literature is not content to accept just its fragmentary, successive results: it wants
to grasp the movement itself and to attend to their results in their totality. If negation is
assumed to have mastered everything, then real things, taken one by one, all refer back to
that unreal whole which they form together, to the world which is their meaning as a
group, and this is the point of view that literature takes up as its own-it looks at things from
the point of view of this still imaginary whole which they would really constitute if negation
could be achieved. From there we have its non-realism- the shadow it preys upon. Hence its
suspicion of words, its need to apply to language itself, the actt of negation, and to exhaust
it, too, by realizing it as that whole on the basis of which each term would be nothing.
But there is a second side of literature. Literature is a concern for the reality of
things, for their unknown, free, and silent existence; literature is their innocence and
forbidden presence, the being that protests against revelation, and the defiance of what
does not want to be produced outside. In this way, it sympathizes with darkness, with
aimless passion, and violence without law, with everything in the world that seems to
perpetuate the refusal to come into the world. In such a manner, too, it allies itself with the
reality of language, it makes language into matter without contour, content without form, a
force that is fickle and impersonal and says nothing, reveals nothing, and simply
announces-through its refusal to say anythingthat it comes from night and returns to
night. This metamorphosis is not in itself deficient. It is quite true that words are
transformed. They no longer signify shadow, or earth, they no longer represent the absence
of shadow and earth which is meaning, the shadow's clarity, which is the transparency of
the earth: opacity is their response; the flutter of shutting wings is their speech; physical
weight is present in them as the stifling density of an amassing of syllables that has lost any
meaning. The metamorphosis has taken place. But beyond the transformation that has
solidified, petrified, and stupefied the words, two things reappear in this metamorphosis:
the meaning of this metamorphosis, which illuminates the words, and the meaning the
words hold by virtue of their semblance as things or, if it should happen this way, as vague,
uncertain, ungraspable existences where nothing appears, the heart of depth without
appearance. Literature has certainly triumphed over the meaning of words, but what it has
found in words considered apart from their meaning is meaning that has become
something: a meaning detached from its conditions, separate from its instances, wandering
like an empty power, a power with which one can do nothing, a power without power, the
simple inability to cease to be, but due to which appears the proper determination of an
indeterminate existence deprived of meaning. In this effort, literature does not restrict

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itself to rediscovering within what it tried to leave behind on the entrance. For what it
discovers, as if it were the interior, is the outside which has changed from the exit it
formerly was, to the impossibility of leavingand what it finds as the darkness of existence
is the being of day which has been changed from explicatory light, and creator of meaning,
into the aggravation of what one cannot prevent oneself from understanding and the
suffocating obsession of a reason without principle, without beginning, which one cannot
take into account. Literature is the experience through which consciousness discovers its
being in its lack of ability to lose consciousness, in the transition where, as it disappears, it
tears itself away from the punctuality of an I and is recreated beyond unconsciousness as
an objective spontaneity, the earnest eagerness of a rugged knowledge that knows nothing,
which no one knows, and which ignorance always discovers behind itself as its own
shadow transformed into a gaze.
One can, then, accuse language of having become an endless recycling of words,
instead of the silence it expected to achieve. Or one can complain that it has immersed itself
in the conventions of literature when it only wished to be immersed in existence. This is
true. But this endless recycling of words without content, this continuity of speech through
an immense plunder of words, is precisely the profound nature of a silence that speaks
even when mute, a silence that is speech empty of words, an echo constantly speaking in
silence. And in the same way literature, a blind vigilance which in its attempt to escape
from itself, only sinks more deeply into its own obsession, is the only translation of the
obsession of existence, if this here is the very impossibility of coming from existence, if it is
being which is always thrown back into being, something which in the bottomless depth is
already at the bottom of the abyss, a return against which there is no return8.
Literature lies on two slopes. The problem is that despite their apparent mismatch,
they do not lead toward distinct works or goals, and that art which claims to follow one
slope is already on the other. The first slope is that of meaningful prose. Its goal is to
express things in a language that designates things by their meaning. Everyone talks like
this; many write the way they speak. But still leaving this side of language, there comes a
moment when art realizes the dishonesty of everyday speech and leaves it. Why does art
reproach everyday speech? It says it lacks meaning: art feels it is mad to think that in each
word is something fully present by absence that determines it, and so art embarks on a
quest of language where this absence itself is grasped again, and the endless movement of
comprehension is represented. Lets not return to this position, for we have already
described it for a while. But what can we say of such art? That it is a search for a pure form,
and a vain concern with empty words? Actually the opposite: it only seeks true meaning; it
is only preoccupied with safeguarding the motion by which this meaning becomes truth. To
be fair, it is necessary to consider it more significant than any current prose, which only
survives on false meaning: it represents to us the world, it teaches us to discover the
worlds total being, it is the labor of the negative in the world and for the world. (ow can
8

In his book De LExistence et l'Existant, Emmanuel Levinas uses the term il y a ("there is"] to shed light" on this nameless and impersonal flow
of being prior to all being, being that is already present in the heart of disappearance, that in the depths of annihilation still returns to being, being
as the death of being, nothingness as existence: when there is nothing, being of il y a. See also Dedication, [Existence and Existents, trans. A.
Lingis. Kluwer, Boston, 1978]

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we not admire it as active, lively and lucid art par excellence? Undoubtedly. But then we
must appreciate these aspects in Mallarme, who is the master of this art.
On the other curve of literature, we also find Mallarme. Generally, it is there we find
all the people we call poets. Why? Because they are interested in the reality of language,
and because they are not interested in the world, but in what things and beings would exist
if there were no world; because they dedicate themselves to literature as a personal power
that wishes only to be swallowed up and submerged. If poetry is this, at least we will know
why it should be pulled from history, in whose margins it produces an odd insect-like
buzzing, and we will also know that no work that lets itself slide down this slope towards
the gulf can be called a work of prose. Well, then, what is it? Everyone understands that
literature cannot be divided, and that in choosing your exact place within it, in persuading
yourself that you are truly where you wanted to be, you make yourself vulnerable to the
greatest confusion, because literature has already insidiously made you cross from one
slope to the other and changed you into what you were not before. Such is its treachery,
and also its contorted truth. A novelist writes in the most transparent kind of prose,
describing men we could have met ourselves and actions we could have performed; he says
his aim is to express, as did Flaubert, the reality of a human world. But ultimately, what is
the single subject of his work? The horror of existence deprived of the world, the process
by which whatever ceases to exist continues to be, whatever is forgotten is always
considered by memory, whatever dies encounters only the impossibility of dying, whatever
seeks to grasp the beyond is always still here. This process is day that has become fatality,
consciousness whose light is no longer the lucidity of the vigil but the stupor of the absence
of sleep. It is existence without Being, as poetry tries to recapture it behind the meaning of
the words, which reject it.
Here we have a man who observes more than he writes: he enters a pine forest,
glances at a wasp, picks up a stone. He is a sort of scholar, but this scholar shrinks before
what he knows, sometimes before what he wants to know; he is a man who learns for the
sake of other men: he has crossed over to the side of the objectsometimes he is water,
sometimes a pebble, sometimes a tree, and when he observes things, he does it for the sake
of things, and when he describes something, it is the thing itself that is described. Well, this
is the surprising quality of transformation, because turning into a tree is in fact possible,
and as for making it talk, is there any writer that cannot achieve it? But Francis Ponge's tree
is a tree that has observed Francis Ponge and that describes itself as it imagines Ponge
would describe it. These are strange descriptions. Certain traits make them seem
completely human: the fact that the tree knows the weakness of men who only speak about
what they know; but all these metaphors borrowed from the picturesque human world,
these images which for an image, really represent the perspective of things regarding man,
they truly represent the singularity of human speech animated by the cosmic life and the
power of seeds; this is why other things slip in among these images, amidst certain
objective notions-because the tree know that between the worlds, science is a common
ground of understanding: reminiscences arising from deep down in the earth slip inside,
expressions that are in the process of metamorphosis in which a thick fluidity of vegetable
growth hints at itself in the clear meaning. Of these descriptions, written in perfectly

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meaningful prosedoesnt everybody believe he understands them? Who does not place
himself on the clear and human side of literature? Yet they do not belong to the world but
to the beneath of the world; they do not attest to form but to lack of form, and they make
themselves clear only to someone who does not probe them, contrary to the oracular
speech of the tree of Dodona-another tree-which were obscure but hid a meaning: they are
clear only because they conceal their lack of meaning. Truly, Ponge's descriptions begin at
that theoretical moment after the world has been achieved, history complete, nature made
near-human, when speech comes forth to meet the thing and the thing learns to speak.
Ponge catches this touching moment when at the edge of the world, there is a meeting of
existence, which is still mute, and speech which we know murders existence. From the
depths of muteness, he hears the effort of language preceding the great flood, and in the
clear speech of the concept, recognizes the profound work of the element. In this manner
he becomes the mediating will between what rises slowly toward speech, and speech
which that descends slowly toward the earth, expressing not existence prior to the day, but
existence after the day: the world of the end of the world.
Where in the work is the start of the moment that words become stronger than their
meaning and the meaning more physical than the word? When does Lautramont's prose
lose its name of prose? )snt each sentence comprehensible? Every set of sentences logical?
And don't the words say what they mean? At what moment, in this maze of order, in this
labyrinth of clarity, did meaning deviate from the path? At what point did reason perceive
that it had ceased "following," that something else was continuing, advancing, concluding in
its place, something similar to it in every aspect, something reason believed it recognized as
itself, until the moment it woke up and discovered this other that had taken its place? But if
reason now retraces its steps to denounce the intruder, and the intrusion dissipates into
the air, and reason finds just itself there, and prose is prose once again, so that reason
starts off once more and loses its way once again, allowing itself to be replaced by a
sickening physical substance, resembling a walking staircase, a corridor that unfolds
ahead-a type of reason whose infallibility excludes all reasoners, a logic that has become
the "logic of things." Where is the work, then? Each moment has the clarity of a beautiful
language being spoken, but the work as a whole has the opaque meaning of a thing that is
being eaten and that is also eating, and is devouring, swallowed, and recreating itself in a
futile attempt to change itself into nothing.
Is Lautramont not a true writer of prose? But what is Sade's style, if not prose? And
who writes more clearly than he does? What other person, who grew up in the least poetic
century-is ignored, despite his concerns of a literature seeking obscurity? And yet in what
other work can we hear such an impersonal, inhuman sound, a "gigantic and haunting
whisper" (as Jean Paulhan says)? But this is simply a defect! The weakness of a writer who
cannot write briefly! It is certainly a serious defect- literature is the first that accuses him of
it. But what it condemns on one side becomes a merit on the other; what it denounces in
the name of the work, it admires as an experience; what seems unreadable, is really the
single thing worth being written. And at the end of everything is fame; beyond, there is
oblivion; further ahead, anonymous survival in dead culture; even further beyond,
perseverance in the eternity of elements. Where is the end? Where is this death that is

23

hoped for by language? But language is the life which bears death and is sustained in it.
If we wish to restore literature to the act that lets every ambiguity be grasped, the
act is here: literature, like normal speech, begins with the end, the only thing that allows us
to comprehend it. In order to speak, we must see death, we must see it behind us. When we
speak, we are leaning on a tomb, and the void of that tomb is what makes language true,
but at the same time void is reality and death is made being. There is beingthat is to say,
a logical and expressible truthand there is a world, because we can destroy things and
hold existence in limbo. This is why we can say that there is being because there is
nothingness: death is man's possibility, his chance; it is through death that the future of a
fulfilled world remains for us; death is man's greatest hope, his only hope of being man.
This is why existence is his only real dread, as Emmanuel Levinas has demonstrated well 9;
existence frightens him, not because of death which could terminate it, but because it
excludes death, because there it is beneath death, a presence in the depth of absence, an
inexorable day in which all days rise and set. And there is no question that we are
preoccupied by dying. But why? Because in dying, we leave behind not only the world but
also death. Such is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a
power that humanizes nature, and lifts existence to being, and it is within every person, as
our most human quality; it is death only in the world- man only knows death because he is
human, and he is human only because he is death in the process of becoming. But dying is a
shattering of the world; it is the loss of the person, annihilation of the being; and so it is also
the loss of death, the loss of what made it death in it and for me. As long as I live, I am a
mortal man, but when I die, I also cease to be mortal by ceasing to be a man. I am no longer
capable of dying, and death which looms ahead brings me horror because I see it as it is: no
longer death, but the impossibility of dying.
Some religions have called the impossibility of death immortality. That is, they have
tried to "humanize" the very event that means: "I cease to be a man." But only the contrary
movement makes death impossible: through death I lose the advantage of being mortal,
because I lose the possibility to be human; to be man beyond death could only have this
strange meaning-to be, despite of death, still capable of dying, to go on as though nothing
had happened, with death as a horizon and the same hope-death which could have had no
result but "going on as though nothing had happened," etc. That is what other religions
have called the curse of rebirth: one dies, but dies badly because he has lived badly, and is
condemned to live again. You live again until, having become completely human, you die
and become a blessed man--a man who is truly dead. Kafka inherited this theme from the
Kabbalah and Easter traditions. A man enters night, but the night ends in his awakening,
and there he is, an insect. Or the man dies, but he is in fact alive; he passes from village to
village, carried along by rivers, recognized by some, helped by no one, the error of ancient
death laughing by his bed; he is in a strange situation: he has forgotten to die. But another
man believes he is alive; he has forgotten his death, and yet another, knowing he is dead,
struggles unsuccessfully to die; death is over there, the great castle no one can attain, and
life was over there, the native land one left in answer to a false call; now there is nothing to
9

He writes. "Isn't dread in the face of being--horror of being--just as primordial as dread in the face of death? Isn't fear of being just as primordial
as fear for one's being? Even more primordial, because one could account for the latter by means of the former." (De L'existence et L'existant)

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do but to struggle, to work to die completely, but struggling is still living; and everything
that has brought the goal closer has also made it inaccessible.
Kafka has not made this theme the expression of a drama about the afterlife, but he
did seek to use it to depict the present fact of our condition. He saw in literature the best
way not only to describe this condition, but to try to find an exit for this condition. That is
high praise, but does literature deserve it? Indeed, there is powerful duplicity in literature,
a mysterious bad faith that in allowing it to play everything two ways gives the most honest
people an unreasonable hope of losing and at the same time, winning. First, literature, as
well, is working towards the dawn of the world; it is civilization and culture. In this sense, it
already unites two contradictory movements. It is negation, because it pushes the inhuman,
indeterminate side of things back into nothingness; it defines them and makes them finite,
and it is in this sense that literature is really the work of death in the world. But at the same
time, after having denied things in their existence, it conserves them in their being; it
causes things to have a meaning, and the negation which is death at work is also the arrival
of meaning, understanding in action. Additionally, literature has a certain privilege: it goes
beyond the immediate place and time, and places itself at the border of the world, as if at
the end of time, and it is from this position that it speaks about things and is preoccupied
with humans. With this new power, literature seems to have gained a more eminent
authority. By revealing to each moment the whole of which it is a part, literature lets it be
mindful of the whole that it is not and to become another moment that will be a moment in
another whole, etc.; because of this, literature can be called the greatest ferment in history.
But it results in an inconvenience: this whole which literature represents is not simply an
idea, since it is realized and not an abstract formulation- but it is not realized in an
objective way, because what is real in it is not the whole but the particular language of a
particular work, which is itself immersed in history: furthermore, the whole does not
present itself as real, but as fictive, so to say, exactly whole, as everything: a perspective of
the world, taken from that imaginary point where the world can be seen in its entirety.
What we are talking about, then, is a view of the world that is realized as unreal, in terms of
language's peculiar reality. Now, what comes out of this? Concerning the task which is the
world, literature is now seen more as a disturbance than as a serious help; it is not the
result of any true work, since it is not reality but the realization of a point of view which
remains unreal; it is foreign to any real culture, because culture is the work of a person
transforming himself gradually over a period of time, and not the immediate pleasure of a
fictional transformation which disposes of both time and work.
Dismissed by history, literature plays a different game. If it is not really in the world,
working to make the world, it is because its absence of being (of intelligible reality) causes
it to refer to an existence that is still inhuman. Yes, it recognizes that this is such, that in its
nature there is a strange oscillation between being and not being, presence and absence,
reality and non-reality. What constitutes work? Real words and an imaginary story, a
world where everything that occurs is borrowed from reality, and this world is
inaccessible; characters are shown as living-but we know that their life is not really living
(but stays a fiction); then, is it pure nothing? But the book is there and we can touch it; we
read the words and we cant change them; is it the nothingness of an idea, then; of

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something that exists only when understood? But fiction is not understood; it is
experienced through the words from which it is realized, and for me as I read or write it; it
is more real than many real events because it is impregnated with the full reality of
language and it is substituted with my life solely by existing. Literature does not act: but it
plunges into this depth of existence that is neither being nor nothingness: where the hope
of doing anything is radically done away with. It is not explanation, and it not pure
understanding, because the inexplicable emerges in it. And it expresses without expressing,
offering its language to what is murmured in the absence of speech. So literature appears to
be tied to the strangeness of the existence which being has rejected and which eludes all
categories. The writer senses that he is in the prey of an impersonal power that lets him
neither live nor die: the irresponsibility he cannot overcome becomes the expression of
that death without death that waits for him at the border of nothingness; literary
immortality is the very movement by which the nausea of a survival that is not survival, a
death which does not end anything, is insinuated into the world, a world drained by brute
existence. The writer who writes a work is erased while writing that work, and is also selfaffirmed. If he writes it to do away with himself, it turns out that the work engages him and
recalls him to himself, and that if he writes to reveal himself and live in it, he sees that what
he has done is nothing, that the greatest work is not as worthy as the most trivial act, and
that his work condemns him to an existence that is not his own, and to a life that has
nothing to do with life. Or once more he has written because in the depths of language he
has heard the work of death as it prepared living beings for the truth of their name: he has
worked for this nothing and he himself has been nothingness at work. However, to realize
the void, one creates a work, and the work, born out of fidelity to death, is in the end no
longer capable of dying; and to the person who wished to prepare an untold death for
himself, it has brought nothing but the sneering of immortality.
Then where is the strength of literature? It plays at working in the world, and the
world views its work as a worthless or dangerous game. It is opened up to the path leading
to the obscurity of existence and does not succeed in uttering the "Never more" that would
lift its curse. Where is its power? Why would a man like Kafka decide that if he failed to
reach his destiny, being a writer was the only way to miss it with truth? This is perhaps an
indecipherable destiny, but if it is one, the source of the mystery is literature's right to
indifferently elicit a negative or positive sign from each of its moments and each of its
results. A strange right which is related to the question of ambiguity in general. Why is
there ambiguity in the world? Ambiguity is its own response. We can only answer it by
rediscovering it in the ambiguity of our response, and an ambiguous answer is a question
about ambiguity. One of its means of seduction is the way it gives rise to clarity, a struggle
that is like the struggle against evil that Kafka speaks of, which finishes in evil, "like the
struggle with women which ends in bed."
Literature is language becoming ambiguity. Commonplace language is not
necessarily lucid, does not always say what it says; and misunderstanding is another one of
its paths. This is inevitable. We only speak to turn a word into a monster with two faces:
one being reality, physical presence, and the other meaning, which is ideal absence. But
normal language limits equivocation. It solidly encloses the absence in a presence, it places

26

a term to understanding, to the vague movement of comprehension; understanding is

limited, but misunderstanding limited, as well. In literature, ambiguity is almost committed
to excess by the opportunities it discovers, and exhausted by the extent of the abuse it can
carry out. One could almost say there is a hidden trap to make ambiguity reveal its own
traps, and that in submitting without reserve to ambiguity, literature is trying to keep out
of the worlds sight and thought-in a realm where it is accomplished without risking
anything. Here ambiguity is at odds with itself. It is not merely that each moment of
language can become ambiguous and state something different from what it states, but that
the general meaning of language is unclear: where its uncertain whether it expresses or
represents, if it is a thing or means that thing; if it is there to be forgotten or if it only lets
itself be forgotten so it can be seen; if it is transparent due to having so little meaning, or
clear because of the exactness with which it says it; obscure because it states too much, or
opaque because it states nothing. Ambiguity lies everywhere: in its insignificant facade-but
what is most trivial may be the mask for the serious; in its disinterest, but behind this
disinterest lie the forces of the world with which it conspires without knowing them, or
still, it is in this disinterest that ambiguity protects the absolute nature of the values
without which action would halt, or become mortal; its non-reality is therefore both a
principle of action and the inability to act: in the same manner that the fiction in se is truth
and also indifference to it; in the same manner that if it relates itself to morals, it corrupts
itself, and if it avoids morals, it still perverts itself; in the same manner that it is nothing if it
is not its own end, but it cannot have its end in itself, for it is endless. It ends outside itself,
in history, etc.
All these inversions from pro to contraand those described herecertainly have
very different causes. One has seen that literature devotes itself to irreconcilable tasks. One
saw that in moving from the writer to the reader, from the labor to the final work, it passes
through opposite moments and can only recognize itself in the affirmation of all these
contrary moments. But all these contradictions, these hostile demands, these divisions and
oppositions, quite different in origin, species and meaning, refer back to a final ambiguity
whose strange effect is to draw literature to an unstable point where it can indifferently
change both its meaning and sign.
This final vicissitude keeps the work at bay in such a manner that it can decide
whether to take on a positive or negative value, and as though spinning invisibly around an
invisible axis, enters the day of affirmations or the counter-day of negations, without its
style, genre, or subject being responsible for the radical transformation. Neither the
content of the words nor their form are in play. Whether obscure or clear, poetry or prose,
insignificant or important, whether it speaks of a pebble or of God, there is something in
the work that does not depend on its qualities and that deep inside itself is always in the
mode of being changed from the bottom upward. Everything happens, as if in the core of
literature and language, beyond the visible movements that transform them, a point of
instability were conserved, a force of substantial metamorphoses, capable of changing
everything while changing nothing. This instability can appear to be the effect of a
disintegrating force, for it can make the strongest, most forceful work become a work of
unhappiness and ruin; but this disintegration is also construction, if it abruptly turns

27

distress into hope and destruction into an element of the indestructible. How can such
imminence of change, present in the depths of language outside the reach of meaning
which affects it and the reality of this language, be nonetheless present in that meaning and
in that reality? In the word, could its meaning introduces something else with it, something
which, while protecting the precise meaning of the word and not risking that meaning, is
capable of completely transforming it and changing the material value of the word? Could
there, concealed in the intimacy of speech, a force that is simultaneously friendly and
hostile, a weapon intended to build and to destroy, which would act behind signification
rather than upon signification? Must one suppose a meaning for the meaning of words
which while fully determining that meaning, surrounds this determinacy with an
ambiguous indeterminacy that switches between yes and no?
But we have nothing to suppose: for a long time we have examined this meaning of
the words meaning, which is the movement of a word towards its truth as much as its
return through the reality of language to the obscure depths of existence; this absence by
which the thing is annihilated, destroyed in order to become Being and idea. It is this life
which bears death and is sustained in it- death, the tremendous power of the negative, or
freedom, by whose work existence detaches from itself and is made meaningful. Now,
nothing can stop this power-in the very moment it attempts to understand things and, in
language, as it specifies words-or this power from being affirmed as a constantly alternate
possibility, or from perpetuating an irreducible double meaning, an alternative whose
terms are blanketed by an ambiguity that makes them identical and all the while opposite
to one another.
If we call this power negation or non-reality or death, then presently death,
negation, and unreality, which operate in the depths of language, will signify the arrival of
truth in the world, an intelligible being that is formed, the creation of meaning. Yet just as
quickly, the sign changes: meaning no longer represents the marvel of understanding, but
returns us to the nothing of death, and intelligible being only means the rejection of
existence, and the absolute concern for truth that is expressed by the inability to act in a
true manner. Otherwise, death is portrayed as a civilizing force that results in an
understanding of being. Simultaneously, however, death that ends up in being represents
an absurd madness, the curse of existence-which reunites in itself both death and being
and is neither being nor death. Death results in being: such is the human hope and task, for
nothingness itself helps to build the world, nothingness is the creator of the world as
mankind labors and understands. Death results in being: this is man's laceration, the
source of his unhappy fate, since by man, death comes to being and by man, meaning rests
upon nothingness; we can only comprehend by depriving ourselves of existence, by making
death possible, by infecting what we understand with the nothingness, of death, so that if
we emerge from being, we fall outside the possibility of death, and the exit becomes the
disappearance of all exits.
In this original double meaning, which is at the heart of every word like a condemnation
that is still unheard of, and a happiness still invisible, literature finds its origin, for

28

literature is the form this double meaning has chosen to reveal itself behind the meaning
and the value of words, and the question it inquires is the question literature asks.

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Chapter Two - Reading Kafka, 1943

Kafka wished to destroy his works, maybe since to him they seemed doomed to
perpetuate universal misunderstanding. When one observes the chaos in which this work
arrives to uswhat is made known to us, and what is disguised; a partial light cast on this
piece or that, the scattering of the texts themselves, which are incomplete, to start off, and
which one divides further, reduced to dust as if they were relics with indivisible force--and
when we see his silent work invaded by the prattle of commentaries, these unpublishable
books made the material of endless publications, this atemporal reaction now a footnote to
history; one begins to wonder if Kafka himself had been aware beforehand of such a
disaster in such a triumph. His desire, perhaps, was to disappear discreetly, like an enigma
wishing to evade the gaze. Now the mystery reaches everywhere, in broad daylight, like a
public
attraction.
What
must
one
do
about
this?
Kafka wanted to be nothing besides a writer, as the private Journal show us, but the
Journal succeeded only in making us see Kafka as more than a writer. They give us someone
who has experienced, rather than someone who has written: henceforth, it is he we watch
out for in his work. This work forms the disheveled remains of an existence it lets us
understand, the priceless evidence of an exceptional destiny without which it would have
stayed invisible. Maybe this is what makes books such as The Trial and The Castle bizarre;
that they let us return without end to a truth outside of literature, something with which
we should nonetheless not identify it.
This tendency is inevitable. All these commentators beg us to seek stories in these
stories: events signify only themselves, and the surveyor is, yes, a surveyor. Do not replace
the unfolding of events that we must consider as a real story, with dialectical
constructions. But several pages along, one can find in Kafkas work a theory of
responsibility, perspectives on causality, and ultimately, a holistic view of human destiny.
All three are sufficiently coherent and independent from their novelistic form to endure
being transposed to purely intellectual terms 10. This contradiction may seem odd. And it
is true that these texts have often been translated with a peremptory decisiveness, an
obvious contempt for their artistic nature. But it is also true that Kafka himself gave the
example by commenting at times upon his narratives, and seeking to clarify their meaning.
The difference is that aside from a few details whose evolution but not meaning are
explained to us, he does not transpose the story onto a plane that may make it more
comprehensible to us; his commentary rests in fiction and cannot be distinguished from it.
The Journals are replete with remarks that seem tied to a theoretical knowledge that
is easily recognized. But these thoughts remain unfamiliar to the generalization from which
they take form: they are there as if banished, and collapse into an equivocal style that does
not allow them to be taken either as the expression of a sole event, or the explanation of a
universal truth. Kafkas thinking does not conform to a uniformly valid rule, but neither
does it merely refer to a particular event in his life. His thoughts waver between these two
Claude-Edmonde Magny, Empedocless Sandals.

10

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currents. As soon as they become the transcription of a series of events that actually
happened (as is the case in a journal), they pass, undetected, in quest of the meaning of
these events; they wish to continue pursuing. Then the narrative starts to combine with its
explanation, and it does not arrive at the point of what it should be explaining, and above
all, does not succeed in rushing past it. It is as if it were drawn by its own heaviness, toward
the particularity whose closed character it must rupture; the meaning that it places in
motion meanders around the facts. It is an explanation only if it is freed from them, but it is
an explanation only if it is inseparable from them. The endless meanderings of thought,
where an image that cuts the reflection starts again, the exact rigor of reasoning applied to
a nonexistent object, constitute a style of thinking that plays at generalization but is
conceived only when caught up in the density of a world reduced to a particular moment.
Madame Magny notes that Kafka never wrote a single platitude, not because of an
extreme refinement of intelligence, but because of a kind of innate indifference to
secondhand ideas. His style of thinking is actually quite banal, but this is because it is not
completely thinking. It is singular; that is to say, it rightly pertains to a single person; and to
no success, it uses abstract terms, such as positive, negative, good, and bad; it is similar to a
strictly individual story whose occurrences might be obscure events, which never having
been brought about, will never again take place. Kafka, in his attempt at autobiography,
described himself as a grouping of particularities, at times secretive and sometimes
obvious, endlessly throwing himself at the law, and not succeeding in being either
recognized or made obscure. Kierkegaard moved toward the heart of this conflict, but
Kierkegaard had taken the covert side, while Kafka could take neither side. If he concealed
what was odd about him, he hated both himself and his destiny, and considered himself evil
or condemned; if he exposed his secret in the open air, it was unrecognized by the
community, which cast it back at him, and newly imposed the secret upon him.
As for allegory, symbol, and mythic fiction whose wondrous developments are given
to us by his works, they become essential in Kafka due to his reflections character. )t sways
between two extremes of solitude and the law, of silence and everyday speech. Neither one
nor the other can be had, and this oscillation is also an attempt to escape oscillation. His
thought cannot find rest in generality, and although it complains at times of its insanity and
containment, it is not absolute solitude, because it speaks of this solitude, and it is not
nonsense, for it has this nonsense as meaning. It is beyond the law, because its law is this
exile that is simultaneously its reconciliation. Of the absurdity by which one attempts to
size up this thinking from what he says of the wood louse, we could say this: Only try to
make yourself understood by the wood louseif you succeed in asking it the goal of its
work, you will at the same time have exterminated the notion of wood lice. As soon as
thought faces the absurd, this meeting signifies the end of the absurd."

So all of Kafkas works are doomed to speak of something particular, when they
seem only to express its general meaning. The narrative is thought turned into a series of
unjustifiable and incomprehensible events, and the meaning that haunts the narrative is
the same thought pursuing itself across the incomprehensible like the common sense that
reverses it. Those who remain with the story penetrate something opaque that he does not

31

understand, while those who hold onto the meaning cannot reunite with the darkness of
which it is a light that gives it away. These two readers can never run into the other; we are
one, then the other, and we always understand more or less than is necessary. True
reading remains impossible.
Whoever reads Kafka is thus made a liar, but not a complete liar. This is the anxiety
unique to his art, an anxiety certainly more profound than the anguish over our fate, which
usually seems thematic. We pass through the immediate experience of an impersonation
we believes we can elude, and against which we wrestle (by reconciling opposite
viewpoints)and this effort is misleading, and yet we agree to it, and this laziness is
betrayal. Subtlety, shrewdness, candor, loyalty, negligence are equally the means to an
error (deception) that is in the truth of the words, their exemplary power, and their clarity,
interest, and assurance; their capacity to string us along, let us fall, and pick us up again, in
our steadfast trust in their meaning that does not allow us either to depart from or follow
it.
How can Kafka depict this world that slips out of our grasp, not because it is elusive
but perhaps because we have too much to grasp? The commentators are not essential
disagreeing. Their words are almost identical: the absurd, contingency, the will to make a
place for oneself in the world, the impossibility of keeping oneself there, the desire for God,
the absence of God, despair, and anguish. But of whom do they speak? Some people have in
mind a religious thinker who believes in the absolute and even hopes for it, yet struggles
without end to attain it. Others think of a humanist who lives in a world without a cure, and
in order not to increase its chaos, stays as much as possible at rest. According to Max Brod,
Kafka discovered many paths to God. According to Mme. Magny, Kafka found his main
solace in atheism. For another, there is indeed a world beyond, but it is inaccessible, and
perhaps evil, perhaps absurd. For another, there is neither a beyond or movement toward
it; we exist in immanence, and what matters is the omnipresent awareness of our finitude
and the unresolved mystery to which it reduces us. Jean Starobinski says: A man afflicted
with a strange sorrow, this is how Franz Kafka appears to us a man watching himself be
devoured. And Pierre Klossowski: Kafkas Journals are the journals of a sick man who
yearns for a cure. (e wants health so he believes in health. And again: Nowhere can he
be spoken of as though he had no final vision. Starobinski: There is no final word, and
there can never be one.

These texts reflect the discomfort of a reading that seeks to conserve the enigma and
its solution, the misunderstanding and the expression of this misunderstanding, the
possibility of reading inside the impossibility of interpreting this reading. Still the
ambiguity does not satisfy us; the ambiguity is a subterfuge that grasps the truth in the
mode of sliding, of morphing, although the truth that awaits these writings is probably
unique and simple. We cannot know for certain if we could understand Kafka better if we
answered each assertion with an assertion that disrupts it, with themes infinitely laced
with nuance, and others oriented otherwise. Contradiction does not rule in a world that
excludes faith but not the pursuit of faith, hope but not the hope of hope, truth there below
and beyond but not a call to a fully conclusive truth. It is true that to explain such a work by

32

referring to the historic and religious situation of the person who has written it, by making
him into a sort of superior Max Brod, is an unsatisfying ruse, but it is also true that his
myths and fictions lack ties to the past; their meaning sends us back to elements that this
past clarifies, to problems that would certainly not be posed in the same manner if they
were not already theological, religious, and impregnated with the tormented spirit of an
unhappy conscience. That is why we can be equally restricted by all the interpretations
given to us, but we cannot say that they are all equal to each another, equally true or false,
indifferent to their object, or true only in their disagreement.
Kafkas principal narratives are fragmentary, and the entre work is a fragment. This
absence could explain the absence of certainty that makes them unstable, without changing
the direction, form, and content of the reading. But this lack is not accidental. It is
incorporated into the very meaning that it mutilates. It coincides with the representation
of an absence that is neither tolerated nor rejected. The pages we read have the greatest
fullness; they indicate a work from which nothing is missing; moreover, the entire work
seems given in these minute developments that are abruptly interrupted, as if there were
nothing more to say. Nothing is missing, not even the absence that is their goal: it is not a
lacuna, but the sign of an impossibility that is present everywhere and never admitted: the
impossibility of a communal existence, the impossibility of solitude, and the impossibility of
living with these impossibilities.
What makes our effort to read so anguished is not the coexistence of different
interpretations; but rather, it is for each theme, the mysterious possibility of appearing at
times to have a negative meaning, and sometimes a positive one. The world of Kafka is a
world of hope and a world that is doomed, a universe that is forever closed, and an infinite
universe, a universe of injustice and wrongs. He himself speaks of religious knowledge
Knowledge is simultaneously a step leading to eternal life, and an obstacle raised in front
of this life and this must be said of his work: everything there is an obstacle, but also a
step ahead. Few texts are graver, but nonetheless, even those whose end outcome is
without hope remain ready to be opposed to express as ultimate possibility, an unknown
triumph, the radiance of a claim that cannot be realized. In delving into the negative, he
offers it the opportunity to become positive, but only a chance; a chance whose counter
keeps being revealed, and is never fulfilled.
Kafkas entire work sets off on a quest of affirmation that it wants to gain by
negation, an affirmation that as soon as it pops forth, is concealed, and seems to be a life
that is in this way excluded from being an affirmation, making affirmation newly possible.
For this reason it seems very strange to say of such a world that is does not know of
transcendence. Transcendence is exactly this affirmation that can assert itself only by
negation. It exists due to being denied; and is present due to its absence. The dead God has
found in this work some kind of impressive revenge. For his death does not deprive him of
his power, or of his infinite authority and infallibility: dead, he is even more terrifying,
more unconquerable, in a fight in which there is no longer any way of being defeated. It is
with a dead transcendence we are fighting, a dead emperor the functionary represents in
The Great Wall of China, and in The Penal Colony; it is the inactive former Commander

33

whom the torture machine constantly brings to life. As Starobinski writes, isnt the
supreme judge in The Trial dead, the person who can do nothing but condemn us to death
because it is death contituting his power, deathnot lifein its truth?
The ambiguity of this negation is tied to the ambiguity of death. God is dead, which
can only signify this more difficult truth: Death is not possible. In the course of a brief
narrative entitled The (unter Gracchus, Kafka tells the adventure of a Black Forest hunter
who having succumbed to a fall in a ravine, has not succeeded in reaching the beyondand
now he is both living and dead. He has joyfully accepted life and joyfully accepted the end of
lifeonce killed, he awaited death in joy; he lay outstretched, ready. Then, he said, the
disaster arrived. This disaster is the impossibility of death: scoffing upon all of
humankinds great subterfuges, night, nothingness, and silence. There is no end, and no
possibility of being finished with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope; this is the
truth that the Western man has made a symbol of happiness, and has sought to make
tolerable by engaging its positive side, that of immortality, of a survival of death that would
compensate for this life. But this survival is our true life. After a mans death, Kafka wrote,
a particularly refreshing silence intervenes for a bit on earth for the dead; a terrestrial
fever has had its end, one no longer sees death being pursued, a mistake that appears to
have distanced, as even for the living it is an occasion to catch ones breath and open the
window of the death chamberuntil this relieving seems illusory and the pain and
lamentations start.
Kafka repeats: Deathbed lamentations are really what they are because one is not
truly dead, not in the real sense of the word. We must thus content ourselves with this
mode of dying; we keep on playing the game. And with even more clarity: Our salvation is
death, but not this death. We do not die, as we see is true, but due to this, we do not live
either; we are dead while alive, and also essentially surviving. In this way death ends life,
but it does not end our possibility of dying; it is as real as an end to life and as illusory as an
end to death. Hence this ambiguity, this double ambiguity that lends a bizarre quality to
even the smallest actions of these characters. Like the hunter Gracchus, are they dead
people ending their death in vain, beings drowning in waters of who knows where, kept
floating by the mistake of their previous death, not only with the mocking that
accompanies it, but also its softness, its infinite politeness, in the familiar environment of
ordinary things? Or are they living people struggling without comprehending the reason,
struggling with dead great foes, with something that is finite and infinite, that they cause to
be born again by pushing it away, that they distance from as they seek it? For this is the
origin of our anxiety. It does not arise only from this emptiness from which we are told
human reality would emerge only to fall back into it; it stems from fearing that even this
refuge might be stripped from us, and that there might not be this nothingness; that this
nothingness may just be being. From the moment we can depart from existence, this
existence is unfinished, and it cannot be fully experiencedour struggle to live is a blind
one that does not know if it is struggling to die and is ensnared in a potential that becomes
even less. Our salvation is in death, but our hope is also in living. It follows that we are
never saved and also despairing no longer, and it is in some way our hope that makes us
lost; it is hope that is the sign of our despair, so that despair also has a freeing quality that

34

drives us to hope. Not despairing even of what you do not despair This is precisely what
we call living.

If each word, each image, each story is able to signify its oppositeand the contrary
of it as wellthen we must seek the cause of what attracts us in the transcendence of
death, unreal, and impossible, which deprives us of the single really absolute ending, still
without departing from its image. Death overpowers us, but overpowers only through its
impossibility, and that not only means we are born My life is the hesitation before birth
but also that we are absent from our death You talk on and on of dying, but do not really
die. )f night is abruptly questioned, then there is no longer day or night; there is only the
murky gleam of twilight, which is sometimes the memory of day, and sometimes a longing
for night; an end of the sun and sun of the end. Existence is interminable, and is nothing but
an indeterminate, not letting us know if we are excluded from it (and this is why we seek
inside in vain for a solid grasp) or whether we are forever shut in it (and hence we
desperately turn toward the outside). This existence is an exile in the strongest sensewe
are not there, we are somewhere else, and we will never stop residing there.
The theme of Metamorphosis illustrates the torment of literature whose subject is its
own Achilles heel, which carries the reader off in a daze where hope and despair answer
each other incessantly. Gregors state characterizes someone who cannot depart from
existence; for him, existing is being condemned to falling continuously back into existence.
Turned into a pest, he continued to live at a degenerate level, and sinks into bestial
solitude; he gets closer to the absurdity and impossibility of living. But what does he do? He
continues living. He does not even try to escape his discontent, but into this unhappiness he
brings his last resource, his last hope. He still struggles for his spot under the couch, for his
mini-excursions on the coolness of the walls, for a life amidst filth and dust. In this manner
we must go on hoping along with him, because he hopes, but we must also despair of this
frightening hope that he pursues without a goal, in the void. And then he dies an
unbearable death, abandoned in solitudeand yet it is almost a happy death, due to the
feeling of deliverance that it represents, by the new hope for an end that is now final. Soon,
nonetheless, this last hope is also torn away; it is not true, there is no end, life goes on, and
the young sister's gesture, her act of waking to life, the calling of the sensual quality with
which the story ends, is the height of horror. There is nothing more frightening in the
whole story. It is the curse and it is revival, and hope, for the girl wants to live, when to live
is already the escape of what is inevitable.
Kafka's narratives are among the darkest of literature, the most anchored in
absolute disaster. They are also the ones that torture hope most tragically, not because
hope is doomed, but because it does not succeed in being doomed. The infinitesimal margin
continues, no matter how fulfilled the catastrophe. We dont know if this maintains hope or
oppositely, ostracizes it forever. We find it inadequate that God himself submits to his own
verdict and succumbs to the most wretched collapse, an inward caving of scrap metal and
human organs that is unheard; we must still await his resurrection and the new arrival of
the unfathomable justice that eternally condemns us to terror and consolation. It is not
enough that the son, who obeys the unjustifiable and incontestable verdict of his father,

35

throws himself into the river in an expression of calm love for him: this death must be
associated with the continuation of existence in the last sentence: "At this moment, the
traffic on the bridge was literally mad," where Kafka himself has affirmed the symbolic
implications and precise physiological meaning of this sentence. Lastly, what is most tragic
of all is that Joseph K. in The Trial dies, following a parody of justice, in the derelict suburb
where two men execute him without a word. )t is not enough that he dies "like a dog; he
must still have his share of survival, of the shame which the lack of limit assigned to him by
a crime he did not commit. This condemns him to living, as well as dying.
"Death is before us, a bit like the painting Alexander's Battle, hanging on a classroom wall. It
remains for us, from this life onward, to reduce the light or even wipe away the painting
with our actions. "Kafkas work is this painting that is death, and it is also the act of
obscuring it, of effacing it. However, exactly like death, its light cannot be dimmed; on the
contrary, it shines superbly from the futile effort it made to be extinguished. That is why we
understand it through disloyalty, and our reading nervously turns around
misunderstanding.

36

Chapter Three - Kafka and Literature, 1949

) am nothing but literature, and neither am ) capable or willing to be anything else.
In his Journal and letters, Kafka treated himself as a writer, and he derived his pride in
claiming this title which the majority of todays population despises. For many of his
commentators, admiring Kafka immediately follows from his condition as a writer. He was
able to ascribe an almost religious meaning to literature, states Jean Starobinski. It is in the
category of sanctity and not of literature, Max Brod notes. He does not have to create a
work, says Pierre Klossowski, but to acquit a message. "I find my situation unbearable
because it contradicts my unique desire and my unique vocation of literature. --"Everything
that is not literature is dull." -- "Everything that does not concern with literature, I hate."
My opportunity to utilize my faculties and each possibility in whatever manner is fully in
the realm of literature."
At times it appears that Kafka offers us the chance to foresee the essence of
literature. But it is not necessary to start by judging the indignity of a theory that he did not
even denounce, but which he esteemed as the only thing that offered salvation, if he could
achieve it. It is odd that a man who made presumptions about nothing viewed words with a
kind of confidence. He did not feel threatened by what had become our worst threat (for us,
and, lets not forget, for many writers of his time. Kafka selected Goethe and Flaubert as his
masters, but he lived during the epoch of the expressionist avant-garde movement). He
questioned only his own ability to write, but not the possibility to write, or the value of art
itself.
Kafka sought with all his strength to be a writer. He was driven to despair each time
he thought he was impeded from becoming one. He wanted to commit suicide, when having
become head of his fathers factory, he believed himself unable to write for two weeks. In
the lengthiest sections of his Journals, we find the everyday struggle he needed to maintain
against business, others, and himself, only so that he could write a few words in his
Journals. This obsession is impressive, but we know it is really not so odd. )n Kafkas
situation, it would be more natural to acknowledge how he chose to attain his spiritual and
religious destiny through literature. Having committed his entire life to art, he saw it
become vulnerable when his activity gave rise to another path. This was when in the real
sense of the word, living stopped for him.
How can existence be entirely dedicated to an interest of laying out some number of
words in a particular order? This is unclear. Let us admit that for Kafka, writing was not a
matter of aesthetics; he did not bear in mind the creation of a literary work as such, but
rather his salvation; the fulfillment of his lifes message. The commentators want to keep
wholly artistic concerns distinct, by viewing them as secondary to inward concerns, the
only ones worth exploring in themselves. Aesthetic meditation, we are told, does not
belong here. So be it. But then lets look at what literature becomes. A strange activity it is:
if it has a mediocre purpose (for example, that of producing a well-written book), it
demands an approach that is attentive to the whole of the work and to details, mindful of

37

the technique and composition, and aware of the power of its words; but if it aims higher
(for example, in examining the very meaning of life), then its approach is free of all these
conditions, and can come about by completely neglecting the very substance of which it is
composed. Let us note that this very idea of literature, understood as an activity capable of
being practiced without taking the means into account, is not a mere theoretical dreamit
has the established name of automatic writing, but precisely such a form has stayed
unfamiliar to Kafka.

So he writes stories and novels. In his Journals, he describes the scenes in which he
was present, and the people he met. (e passes judgment on his work: The description of R.
did not seem effective to me. Often he describes objects in detail. Why is this? )t is because,
as Max Brod claims, the truth is able to be seen everywhere, and he finds it everywhere? Is
it not rather the fact that he is practicing, and trying to learn? We know that he had studied
Kleists icy style at length, and that Goethe and Flaubert taught him to recognize the worth
of a perfectly wrought form. What ) am lacking, he wrote to Pollack, is discipline ) want
to work with fervor, for three months on end. Today I know this is more than anything: art
has more need of artisanship than artisanship has of art. ) dont believe, of course, that one
can force oneself not to have children, but I do believe that one can force oneself to educate
them. Kafka asked more from literature, and got more out of it, than many others have. But
above all else he had the honesty to accept it in all its forms, with all its restraints, as both
artisanship and art, as a task and privileged activity. From the moment one begins writing,
he thought, one cannot do it without doing it well.
It would be far too easy for someone who writes out of concern for life or morality,
to find himself immune to aesthetic considerations. Literature is not a multi-story house
where each person chooses his place, and if someone wants to live on the top story, he will
never need to use the back stairs. The writer cannot simply drop out of the game. As soon
as he begins writing, he is within literature and is there completely; he must be a good
artisan, but also an aesthete; a seeker of words, and of images. He is compromised. That is
his fate. Even the famous instances of total sacrifice in literature change nothing in this
situation. To master literature with the sole intent to sacrifice it? This assumes that what
one sacrifices exists. So one must first believe in literature, and in ones literary calling. One
must make it existto be a writer of literature, and be one to the end. Abraham was willing
to sacrifice his son, but what if he was not sure if he had a son, and what he took for his son
was really just a ram? And then, silence is not enough to make a writer more than a writer,
and whoever tries to leave art to become a Rimbaud still remains incompetent in the
silence. We cannot even say that Kafka rejected his work because he deemed it morally bad,
or unfaithful to the message he wishes to deliver, or inferior to the silence. He might have
wanted to destroy it simply because he considered it literarily imperfect. How does one
distinguish between the messenger who says, Pay no attention to my message, and the
artist who declares, My work is a failure, so let it be destroyed ? )n one sense, the artist
alone has the right to make this decision. The messenger is not master of his words; even if
they are bad, they are beyond his control, for that might be their very meaning. To be bad,
all that one is able to grasp is that the will to destroy it may be incorporated into the

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message itself: the secret desire of speech is to be lost, but this desire is vain and speech is
never lost.
What is strange is not only that so many writers believe their entire existence to be
dedicated to the act of writing, but that in this dedication, they will still give birth to works
that are masterpieces from only the aesthetic point of view, which is exactly the point of
view they denounce. Moreover, the very people who wish to give a fundamental meaning to
their activity, a search implying the whole of our condition, succeed only in carrying this
activity through to the end by reducing it to the superficial meaning they exclude, the
creation of a work well done, and this creation forces them, in the least momentarily, to
separate themselves from existence, and disengage themselves; lose interest in it. Write
with blood, spoke Zarathustra, and you will learn that blood is mind. But it is the
opposite which is true: one writes with the mind and one thinks that one is bleeding. Kafka
himself said, ) will not give way to weariness, ) will dive completely into my story, even if )
gash my face. The image is undoubtedly dramatic: the writer emerges from his work, his
face slashed with cuts, but it is merely an image. Camuss Caligula has the heads cut off of
people who do not share his artistic sentiments. There is no Caligula for the writer. His
overbearing (and for some, degrading) situation comes partly from his success: he claims
to undergo great risk in his work, but the risk he runs is perhaps no risk at all; far from
succumbing to it, he gets out of it with an admirable work that aggrandizes his existence.
Hence the alibi for so many bloody wordsthere is no blood. Hence, too, all the scoffing
words about those with pen in hand.
We can imagine Racine writing under the limitation of a truth to seek. One can also
imagine him being led by this search to a sort of asceticism, to a disgust with the
harmonious, to a refusal of perfection; in short, not to the silence of Phaedrus, but rather to
some Phaedra by Nicholas Pradon11. This is the problem. We have seen writers relinquish
writing out of disliking it, or the need to go beyond literature by sacrificing it. We have seen
others ready to destroy masterpieces because they seemed to betray themselves. But we
have never seen anyone give up being a good writer, out of fidelity to his inner existence,
and continue writing because it was necessary, but rather go on writing more and more
badly. A Rimbaud never became a Sully-Prudhomme. How strange! Even Hlderlin, in his
madness, continued being a good poet. And Kafka could condemn his work, but he never
condemned himself to the emptiness of mediocre language, to death from banality and
stupidity (only Flaubert sometimes makes us think of this suicide).
Why did a man like Kafka feel lost if he did not become a writer? Was that his
calling, the true form of his command? But how did he come by this half-certainty that
while he might not fulfill his fate, his own way of missing it was to write? Innumerable texts
demonstrate that he attributed an immense importance to literature. When he notes, The
immensity of the world ) have in my head Better to explode a thousand times than to
suppress it, or bury it in me; for that is the reason )m here, and ) havent the least doubt
about this, he expresses again in his usual way the urgency of a creation that blindly
11

The interior dramatists play, performed two nights after Racines masterpiece on the same subject, was used against Racine by his enemies.

39

clamors to be released. It is most often his own existence that he feels is at stake within
literature. Writing causes him to exist I have found meaning, and my monotonous, empty
and misled, bachelor life is justified )t is the only path that can allow me to progress. )n
another passage: brave, naked, powerful, and surprising, as ) am usually only when )
write. This text tends to reduce literary activity to a means of compensation. Kafka was not
very good at living; he lived only when he wrote. All the same, even in this perspective, the
main point remains to be explained, for that we want to understand it, why does one
write?And not an important work, but insignificant words The particular kind of
inspiration in which ) find myself is such that ) [can do] everything, and not only what is
intended for a definite work. When ) arbitrarily write a sentence like this: (e looked out
the window, this sentence is already perfect ; to write (e looked out the window is
already to be more than oneself.
Kafka lets us understand that he has the capacity to unleash latent forces from
himself, or even at a time when he feels locked up and enveloped, he can discover through
this method some nearby possibilities that he had previously overlooked. In solitude, he is
dissolved. This dissolution makes his solitude very risky; but at the same time, something
important can rise from his confusions, provided language can grasp it. The drama is that at
such a moment it is nearly impossible for him to speak. Usually, Kafka found it immensely
tough to express himself, due to the amorphous contents of his mind; but at present, this
difficulty surpasses everything which is possible. My powers are not enough for even the
most insignificant sentence. Not one word, when ) write, goes with another My doubts
surround each word even before ) can make it out, what )m saying is that )ve made this
word up! At this stage, its not the quality of the words that matters, but the possibility of
speaking that is at stake, which is what one experiences. (ave listened to myself from time
to time, sometimes perceiving inside me something like the mewing of a kitten.

It seems that literature means trying to speak at the moment when speaking
becomes most difficult; turning toward those moments when confusion shuts out all
language, and thus necessitates a return to a language that is most precise, the most aware,
and the furthest removed from vagueness and confusionto literary language. In this case,
the writer can believe that he is creating his spiritual possibility for living ; he feels his
creation bound, word by word, to his life, and recreates and regenerates himself. Literature
then becomes an assault on the frontiers, a hunt that by opposing forces of solitude and
language, leads us to the extreme limit of this world, to the limits of what is human in
general. One could even dream of seeing it develop into a new form of Kabbalah, a new
secret doctrine from centuries past that could recreate itself today and begin to exist
starting from and beyond itself.
That is a work which will likely not be finished, but it is surprising enough that it
could be thought possible. We have said that in the midst of general impossibility, Kafkas
trust in literature was still remarkable. He rarely lingers on the inadequacy of art. If he
writes, )f art flies around truth, but with the resolve not to get burned by it, its skill
consists of finding a place in the void where the ray of light focus most powerfully, without
knowing beforehand the location of the lights source itself, he himself is responding to
this other, darker reflection: Our art is to be blinded by truth: the light on the grimacing

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face as it pulls back, that alone is true and nothing else. And even that definition is not
without hope: it is already something to lose sight of, and further, to see while blind; if our
art is not light, it is a form of darkening, a possibility of attaining a flash through the dark.
*According to the pious Max Brod, whose commentaries strive to bring the friend he lost
closer to himself, art should be a reflection of religious knowledge. On sometimes has the
completely different impression that for Kafka, art went further than knowledge.
Knowledge of oneself (in the religious sense) is one of this means of our condemnation: we
raise ourselves up thanks only to it, but it is also is the only thing that prevents us from
raising ourselves; before being acquired, it is the necessary path; afterward, it is the
insurmountable obstacle. This ancient idea from Kabbalah, in which our downfall appears
to be our salvation, and vice versa, perhaps lets us understand why art can only succeed
where knowledge fails because it is and is not true enough to become the way, and too
unreal to change into an obstacle. Art is an as if. Everything happens as if we were in the
presence of a truth, but this presence is not one, that is why it does not forbid us to go
forward. Art claims knowledge when knowledge is a step leading to eternal life, and it
claims non-knowledge when knowledge is an obstacle drawn up in front of its life. It
changes its meaning and its signs. It destroys itself while surviving. That is its
impersonation, but it is also its greatest dignity, the same thing that justifies the saying
Writing is a form of prayer.

At times Kafka is captivated like so many others by the mysterious nature of this
transformation, and seems ready to recognize in it the evidence of a strange force.
Throughout his literary activity, he relates having experienced (at times) illuminating
states, states during which ) lived entirely in each idea, but also realized each one of them,
great harrowing states in which he believed himself to be exceeding his limits and reaching
universal ones; but he adds, )t was not in this state that ) wrote my best works.
Illumination may then be related to this special linguistic activity in practice, without
knowing if it presupposes or provokes it. (This state of dissolution, related to solitude, of
which we spoke before, is vague as well: there is dissolving from the impossibility of
speaking while still visible to speech; silence and the void seem to exist only to be filled.) In
any case, the extraordinary is assigned to the level of language, either by causing the
magnificence of life to float up from the depths by the magic power of the right word,
which does not create, but invokes, or by turning against the person who is writing, like a
sword in the hands of spirits. The notion of spirits and magic explains nothing by itself; it
is a warning that says: There is something mysterious here, so be on your toes.

This is the mystery: ) am unhappy, so ) seat myself at the desk and write, ) am
unhappy. (ow is this possible? The possibility is strange, and to a certain point,
scandalous. My state of unhappiness signifies an exhaustion of my strength. From the side
of sadness, there is the impossibility of everythingliving, existing, thinking; from the side
of writing, the possibility of everythingharmonious words, accurate exposition, felicitous
images. Furthermore, by expressing my sadness, I assert a negation and yes, by asserting it,
I do not transform it. I communicate by the greatest luck the most complete disgrace, and
this disgrace is not mitigated. The more luck I possess, that is to say, the more gifted I am in
making my unhappiness felt by description, embellishments, and images, the more the bad

41

luck reported by this misfortune is respected. It is as if the possibility that my writing

represents essentially exists to express its own impossibilitythe impossibility of writing
that constitutes his sadness. Not only can it not be put in parentheses, or accommodate it
without destroying it or being destroyed by it, but it is really possible only because of its
impossibility. If language and in particular, literary language did not constantly hurl itself
eagerly at its death, it would not be possible, since it is this movement toward its
impossibility. If language, particularly literary language, did not throw itself eagerly toward
its death, it would be impossible, since it is this movement towards its impossibility that is
its nature and foundation; it is this movement, which anticipating its nothingness,
determines its potential to be this nothingness without actualizing it. In other words,
language is real because it can project itself toward non-language, which it is and does not
actualize.
)n the text on which we have just commented, Kafka writes: ) could never
understand that it was possible, for almost anyone who wanted to write, to objectify pain
while in pain. The word objectify attracts our attention because literature tends
specifically to construct an object. It objectifies pain by forming it into an object. It does not
express it, but makes it exist on another level, granting it a physical reality that is no longer
that of the body, but that of the physical reality of words that represent the mayhem of the
world that suffering claims to be. Such an object is not necessarily an imitation of the
transformations that pain makes us live through: it shapes itself to present pain, not represent it; first of all, this object must exist, that is, it must be a constantly indeterminate
totality of determined relations. There must always be inside it, as in everything that exists,
this excess that we cannot take into account. )n order to write a story, ) do not have the
time to stretch myself in all directions as ) should. This regret by Kafka shows us the
character of literary expression: it radiates in all directions and indicates the character of
the movement pertaining to any literary creation; one makes it authentic only by searching
for it in all directions, chased by it but outrunning it, pushed everyplace by pulling it
everyplace. The ) am unhappy is unhappiness only when it grows more dense in this new
world of language, where it takes a form, descends, becomes lost, is obscured, and survives.
It seemed remarkable to several commentators, particularly to Claude-Edmond
Maguy, that Kafka had experienced the fecundity of literature (for himself, for his life, and
in order to live) as soon as he had sensed that literature was the movement from Ich to Er,
from ) to (e. That is the great discovery of the first important narrative that he wrote, The
Judgment, and we know that he commented on this event in two ways to bear witness to
this overwhelming encounter with the possibilities of literature and to elucidate to himself
the connections this work allowed him to make clear. It is, says Madame Maguy, taking up
an expression from T.S. Eliot, that he had succeeded in constructing an objective
correlative from his originally incommunicable feelings, and she adds that it is a question
of a kind of self-annihilation which the artist consents to, not for the sake of inner progress,
but in order to give birth to a work that is independent and complete. With no doubt. And
yet, it seems that something even more curious is happening.

So it isnt enough for me to write I am unhappy. As long as ) write nothing else, )

am too near to myself, too near to my unhappiness, for this unhappiness to really become

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my own in the form of language. I am not yet truly unhappy. It is only from the moment I
arrive at this strange substitution, He is unhappy, that language begins to form into a
language that is unhappy for me, outlining and gradually depicting the world of sadness as
it takes place in him. Then, perhaps, I will feel involved, and my unhappiness will be felt by
the world from which it is absent; a world in which I and it are both lost, where it cannot be
comforted, pacified, or pleased; where, foreign to itself, it neither remains nor disappears,
but lasts without the possibility of lasting. Poetry is deliverance, but this deliverance
signifies that there is nothing more to deliver, and that I have become involved in another
in whom ) no longer find myself. This explains, in part, why Kafkas tales are myths,
extraordinary narratives out of the range of the plausible and realistic: it is because he
expresses himself in them by this incalculable distance, the impossibility of recognizing
himself in them. It is not possible that this villain is himself, so it is himself in his most
intimate and irreducible nature.)
From the impersonal and mythological narrative, considered loyal to the essence of
language, certain contradictions arise. We have noted that language is real only from the
vantage point of a state of non-language, which it cannot realize: it is the reaching towards
a dangerous horizon where it tries in vain to vanish. What is this non-language? )t isnt
necessary to elucidate it here. But we must recall that it is a reminder to all forms of the
expression of their inefficacy. Language is possible because it strives for the impossible.
Inherent in language, at every level, is a relation of struggle and anxiety from which it
cannot be released. As soon as something is said, something else must be said. Then,
something else must be said once again, to resist the tendency of everything that was stated
to become definitive, to slip into the unfathomable world of things. There is no rest, not at
the level of the sentence and not at that of the entire work. Neither is there any pause from
the struggle which cannot state anything without correcting itselfand neither is there any
in that of silence. Language cannot actualize itself by staying mute; saying nothing is a
manner of expressing oneself, and its illegitimacy throws us back into speech. Furthermore,
it is within words themselves that the suicide of words must be attempted; a suicide which
haunts them but cannot be achieved, and leads them to the temptation of the blank page, or
the madness of a world lost in pettiness. All these solutions are illusory. The cruelty of
language comes from its endless depiction of its death, without ever being able to die.
Chinas Great Wall was not completed by its builders, and neither was the narrative
The Great Wall of China finished by Kafka. The fact that the work is connected with the
theme of failure by its own failure, must be seen as a sign of discomfort that is at the heart
of all literary designs. Kafka cannot prevent himself from writing, but writing prevents him
from writing; he interrupts himself, and he begins once more. His effort is as endless as his
passion lacks hopemerely, the absence of hope sometimes turns into this tireless hope,
while the impossibility of ever ending is only the impossibility of continuing. What is most
striking is that this struggle (without which there is no language, or literature, or authentic
research, but which alone is not enough to guarantee research, literature, or language; that
does not exist before its object as unpredictable in its forms as the act it overturns) is seen
in Kafkas very style, and this style is often its manifestation which is almost fully revealed.

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We know of these developments, which are oddly constructed, especially in the

Journals. There is a main statement, around which secondary statements are arranged, so
that they support it as a whole, while partial reservations are suggested. Each reservation
leads to another that completes it, and each of them, bound to one another other, constitute
a negative structure, parallel to the central one, which continues on and terminates at the
same time. Having reached the end, the assertion is simultaneously developed and fully
withdrawn; we dont know if we are grasping the outside or the inside, whether we are in
the presence of the building or the hole into which the building has disappeared. It is
impossible to know in what direction thinking faces us; it turns toward and away so often,
as if, like a weight hanging on a string, its only purpose were to reproduce its torsion. By
the fact that Kafkas words attempt an unquestionable regression into the infinite, they give
the impression of leaping beyond themselves in a dizzying manner, as much as of pressing
against the void. One believes in a beyond of words, a beyond of failure, and in an
impossibility that may be more than impossibility, and thus gives us hope again. The
Messiah will arrive only when he is no longer needed; he will come only a day after his
arrival, and not on the last day, but the very last. Or once more: Nothing but a word,
nothing but a prayer, nothing but a breath of air, nothing but a proof that you are still alive
and waiting. No, no prayer, nothing but a breath, and not even a breath; nothing but a
presence, not even a presence, nothing but a thought, not even a thought, nothing but the
tranquility of sleep. But when the words stop, we have hope neither for an actualized
infinity nor for the assurance of something completed. Driven toward the limitless, we have
renounced limits, and at last we must give up what is unlimited, too.
Generally, Kafkas language would try to maintain a questioning method, as if under
the cover of something that escapes yes or no, he hoped to capture something. But the
questions repeat themselves in delineating themselves; they increasingly throw aside what
they seek, damaging their possibility. They desperately continue in the sole hope of an
answer, and they can only continue by making any answer impossibleand whats more,
by annulling the very being of the person who questions. What is this, then? Who then
moves away under the trees on the bank? Who then is completely abandoned? Who can no
longer be saved? On the grave upon which the grass grows? Or What troubles you? What
moves you to the bone? Who is bumbling at the latch of your door? Who calls you from the
street without entering through the door which is open? Ah! It is precisely the one you
trouble, the one you move to the bone, the one at whose door you bumble, the one whom,
without wanting to enter through the open door, you are calling from the street! )n truth,
the language here appears to exhaust its resources and to have no other aim than being
pursued at any price. It seems confused with its emptiest possibility, and this is also why it
appeared to us to have such tragic fullness, for this possibility is language, frustrated by
everything and realizing itself only by the movement of a dispute that finds no more to
challenge.
Literature is the site of contradictions and controversy. The writer who is most
bound to literature is also the one who most driven to detach himself from it. It is
everything to him, and yet he cannot be content with it or stick to it. Kafka, so sure of his
literary vocation, feels guilty due to everything he sacrifices toward it to exercise it. He had

44

the obligation to conform to the law (notably in getting married), and in place of this he
wrote. He should have sought God by participating in the religious community, but rather
he made himself content this form of prayer that is writing. One sees for a while already,
that nothing more was written. God does not want me to write, but when it is up to me, I
must. There are perpetually highs and lows, but when everything is said and done, God is
strongest, and the unhappiness is greater than you can imagine. What was formerly
justification turned into sin and condemnation. (e knows that one cannot write
redemption, one can only live it. )n the story Josephine, he demonstrates how as the
artist, in vain, believed himself to be the soul of his community, the chief resources of his
people in facing the calamities that strike them; he will not be released from his portion of
work and communal responsibility, and his art will suffer for it, perish, evenwho cares,
his decadence is nothing but a little episode in the eternal unconsciousness of our people,
and our people will soon rise from this loss. This apology signifies clearly that even at its
peak, art has no rights before action. It has no rights, but the conscience of this illegitimacy
does not resolve the conflict. The proof of it is that to announce it to us, Kafka has yet to
write another piece of literature, and he himself will actually die while correcting the
proofs for this one last book. In this sense, the person who places himself in the role of
writing is already quite lost. But he can no longer interrupt his task without believing from
then on that it is by interrupting it that he will become lost. He will try all the solutions.
Everything, even silence and action, will be nothing more than modes, more or less
deficient, of art, where he will only free himself at the very request of art: the renouncing of
tragedy by Racine makes up a part of tragedyand at the same time, Nietzsches madness
or Kleists death. Recently, it has been shown us that any writer who feels contempt for
literature pays for it by a multiplied return to literary mediums. One will soon discover that
when literature sees to make itself forget its gratuity by affiliating itself seriously with
political or social action, this engagement is performed all the same upon the mode of
disengagement. It is this action that becomes literary.
From outside and inside, literature is in cahoots scheming with its threat, and in the
identical manner, this threat is ultimately plotting the same way with literature. Literature
can only contest itself, but this challenge re-gives it to itself. It sacrifices itself, and this
sacrifice, far from making it disappear, enriches it with new strengths. How can one
destroy, when destruction is the same as what it destroys, or even, like the living magic of
which Kafka speaks, when destruction does not destroy, but builds? This conflict adds on
top of all the ones we have seen in these pages. Writing is engaging oneself, but writing is
also disengaging the self, engaging oneself in the manner of irresponsibility. Writing is
putting ones existence into question, the world of values, and, to a certain measure,
condemning the good; but writing is always seeking to write well, searching for the good.
And then writing is handling the impossibility of writing. )t is, like the sky, to be silent, to
be an echo only for the mute; but writing is naming, writing in the process of preventing
oneself from writing. Art resembles the temple from which The Aphorisms speak. Never had
construction been edified so easily, but on each stone can one find the engraving of a
sacrilegious inscription, so deeply engraved that the sacrilege will last a while, and it will
become more sacred even than the temple itself. In this manner, art is the site of anxiety

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and complacency, of dissatisfaction and security. It bears a name: self-destruction, infinite

dissolution. Its other name is happiness and eternity.

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Chapter Four - Kafka and the Exigency of the Work, 1958

Someone takes it upon himself to write, determined by despair. But despair cannot
determine anything, for "it has always and immediately exceeded its goal" (Kafka, Journals,
1910). At the same time, writing would not have its source in "true" despair, which has
invited nothing and diverted everything, and immediately withdrawn its pen from the one
who writes. This signifies that the two movements have nothing in common but their own
indeterminacy, and thus have nothing in common except the interrogative mode with
which one can only grasp them. No one can say to oneself: "I am in despair," but rather:
"You are in despair?" and no one can state: "I write," but simply: "Do you write? Yes? You
wrote something?"
Kafka's case is troubled and complex12. (lderlins passion is pure poetic passion,
which brings him out of himself by an exigency that carries no other name. Kafkas passion
is also purely literary, but not always so, and not all the time. His preoccupation of salvation
is quite immense, as far as it is strong enough to be despairing, and despairing to the point
of being uncompromising. This preoccupation certainly passes with a surprising constancy
through literature and for quite a long time is confused with it, since it passes once again
through. But it is no longer lost in literature, in the tendency of serving it, and as literature
never accepts becoming average, which Kafka knows, it results in obscure conflicts even for
him, and even for us, along with an evolution that is difficult to clarify, but which is
nonetheless clarified for us.
The Young Kafka
Kafka has not always been the same. Until 1912, his desire to write is very great,
given that his works do not persuade him of his gifts, and persuade him less of his direct
knowledge of wild forces, of a devastating plenitude, where he does almost nothing,
deprived of time, but it also seems that he can do nothing about it, because he "fears these
12

Almost all the quoted texts in the pages that follow are taken from the complete edition of Kafkas Journals. This reproduces thirty notebooks
in fourths from 1910 to 1923. Kafka has written down everything that was important to himevents from his personal life, meditations on
dreams, works he had just begun, interruptions, re-beginnings. Thus it is not merely a "Journal" in the sense that one would understand it today,
but the same movement of the experience of writing, at the closest to its beginning, in the essential sense that Kafka has amended to give to this
word. It is from this viewpoint that the Journal should be read and questioned.
Max Brod affirms that he had not done several deletions which were insignificant; he had lacked reason to doubt them. In revenge, he is sure that
Kafka, thanks to his decisive moments, has destroyed a great number of his notes. And after 1923, the Journal lacks all this. We ignore the
destroyed manuscripts at his request by Dora Dymant which may have included the course of his will: it is very probable. One must say thus that
after 1923, Kafka becomes a stranger to us, for we know that the majority judges him very differently because of what they believe of him.
The Journal (which completes the Will of Voyages), has not revealed to us almost any of his opinions about grand subjects which might have
interested him. The Journal speaks of Kafka in this anterior stage where there are no opinions and Kafka is barely there. Such is his essential
value. The book by G. Janouch (Conversations with Kafka, translated into French under the title: Kafka m'a dit) permits us on the contrary to
understand Kafka in the happenstance of more mundane conversations, where he speaks also of the future of the world as he does of Jews'
problems, Zionism, religious forms, and sometimes his books. Janouch knew Kafka in 1920 in Prague. He has noted almost immediately the
conversations that he relates and Brod has confirmed the fidelity of such an echo. However, in order not to deceive through the medium of the
spoken word, one must repeat what they have said to every twenty-six-year-old man, where the youth, the navet, the trusting spontaneity have
reached Kafka, but they have also without doubt been edited to sugarcoat his thoughts for the end of not rendering them corrupting to the young
soul. Kafka, a scrupulous friend, often feared troubling his friends with the expression of a truth that was not disappointing except for him. This
does not signify that he does not say what he thinks, but rather that he sometimes states thoughts that are not very profound.

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moments of exaltation as much as desiring them." Thus in many respects, Kafka is similar
to every young man in whom a joy in writing is awakened, by which he has recognizes his
vocation, along with certain exigencies, and lacks the proof that he will also demonstrate
himself. That he was, in some sense, a young writer like the others, is seen most strikingly
in the novel that he begins to write in collaboration with Brod. A certain part of his solitude
shows that Kafka still skips around it. He perceives this very quickly, as indicated by this
note from the Journals: "Max and I function differently. As much as I admire his writings
when they are before me as if totally inaccessible to my attention and anyones attention...,
as much as each sentence that he writes for Richard and Samuel seems to me related, in my
view, to a concession that is repugnant to me, and which I feel painfully to the very depths
of my being. At the least it is so today" (November 1911).
Until 1912, he did not entirely dedicate himself to literature, giving himself this
excuse: "I cannot risk anything for myself as long as I have not succeeded in a greater work,
capable of satisfying me fully." This achievement and proof, which the night of September
22, 1912 brings him, the night he writes The Verdict in one stroke, and which relates him
decisively to this point where it seems that "everything can be expressed, that for
everything, for the strangest ideas, a great fire is ready, in which they appear and
disappear." A bit later, he reads this novel to his friends, a reading that confirms it: ) have
tears in my eyes. The undoubtable characteristic of history was confirmed. "(This need to
read to his friends, and often to his sisters, even to his father, what he has to write, also
belongs to the mediocre realm. He will never completely renounce everything. This is not
literary vanity---as much as he himself denounces it--, but a need to physically hurry
against his work, to let himself overcome it, draw him out, in allowing it to be deployed in
the vocal space that his great gifts from the reader give him the ability to evoke.)
Henceforth, Kafka knows that he can write. But this knowledge is not one of his
ability being his own. Besides a few exceptions, he never finds proof in his work that he can
truly write. It is all the more a prelude, a work approaching recognition. Of The
Metamorphosis, he says: "I find it bad, perhaps I am definitely lost," or later: "Great aversion
for The Metamorphosis. Illegible end. Almost radically imperfect. It would have been much
better, had I never been disturbed by the business trip" (January 19, 1914).
The

Conflict
This last line alludes to the conflict where Kafka faces himself and breaks down. He
has a profession, a family. He belongs to the world and should belong to it. The world gives
him time, but disposes of it. The Journal --at the least until 1915-- is crossed by hopeless
remarks, where he fantasizes about suicide because he lacks time: time, physical forces,
solitude, and silence. Outward circumstances are certainly unfavorable for him, and he
must work evenings or nights. His sleep is troubled, the inquietude exhausts him, and it
would be futile to believe that the remaining conflict could disappear due to a better
organization of things. Later, when illness gives him leisure, the conflict remains,
aggravated, changed in form. There are no favorable circumstances. But even if one gives
"all his time" to the demand of work, "everything" still isnt so; for it never has to do with
dedicating time to work, of passing ones time by writing, but of spending another kind of

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time where he is no longer working, of being approached from this point where time is lost,
where one enters the fascination and solitude of the absence of time. When one has all the
time, one lacks more time, and friendly outward circumstances have become this act
hostilewhere there are no longer circumstances.
Kafka cannot write, nor consent to write "in small doses in the incompleteness of
separate moments. This is revealed to him the night of September
, when, having
written a line, he has re-grasped in its fullness the limitless movement which drives him to
write. "Writing is not possible except like this, in continuity; a work so complete in body
and soul." And later (December 8, 1914): "Seen afresh that everything which is written in
fragments, and unaffiliated with the course of a greater share of the night and all the night,
has less value and I am condemned by my lifestyle to this lesser value." We have the first
explanation of several narratives abandoned where his Journal, in its current state, reveals
to us impressive fragments. Quite often, "history" doesn't come further than such lines, for
it rapidly attains coherence and density and is nevertheless captured at the end of page;
sometimes it is pursued during several pages, and is affirmed, extendedand nonetheless
captured. There are many good reasons, but at first Kafka does not find them in the time
he disposes of the understanding which would permit the story to evolve, as it wishes,
except in all directions; history is never but a fragment, and thus another fragment: "How,
in parting from fragments, can I establish a story capable of taking flight?" It is such that
not having been mastered, not having been raised in the proper space where the need to
write must be simultaneously repressed and expressed, the story is unleashed, goes astray,
then reunites with the night where it arrives and painfully retains something that has failed
to bring it the day.
Kafka needed more time, but he also needed less of the world. At first the world
constitutes his family where he bears constraints with difficulty, and without the ability to
ever free himself. It is later his fiance, his essential desire to accomplish the law which
wants the human to realize his destiny in the world, to have a family and children, to
belong to his community. Here, the conflict takes a new appearance, entering a
contradiction that Kafkas religious situation aggravates. When he inevitably analyzed his
new engagement with F.B., broken and renewed, with an always great tension, "Everything
which was for or against my marriage," he always faced this exigency: "My unique
aspiration is my unique vocation... it is literature... anything I have done is nothing but a
result of solitude... thus, I will never be alone again. But this, this." During his engagement
in Berlin: "I was related to a criminal; if one had placed me in a corner with true chains,
with gendarmes before me... it would not have been worse. And this would have been my
engagement, and everything would have been forced to be modified, and not been
achieved. A bit later, the engagements were undone, but the aspiration remained, the
desire of a "normal" life, which the torment of having wounded someone close to him gave
a heartbreaking strength. One has compared Kafkas story and engagement to that of
Kierkegaard. But the conflict is different. Kierkegaard can renounce Regine, he can
renounce the ethical stage: the access to a religious stage is not a compromise, but is rather
made possible. Kafka, on the other hand, if he also abandons the security of an upright life,
places himself under the law, and deprives himself of the sun and the path where he needs

49

to be. In a certain sense, he neglects the law. This is the eternal question of Abraham. What
is asked of Abraham, is not only to sacrifice his son, but to sacrifice God himself: The son is
the future of God on earth, for it is time which is, in truth, the Promised Land, the true and
single sojourn of the chosen people of God, and his people. Or Abraham, sacrificing his only
son, should sacrifice temporal existence and the sacrificed time will not be certainly made
to him in the eternity of the beyond; the future of God in temporal existence. The beyond is
Isaac.
The proof for Kafka is heavier and everything which makes it light (what would be
the proof for Abraham, if, lacking sons, he had been asked to sacrifice daughters? One
cannot take it seriously, one can only laugh, and this laugh is the form of Kafka's pain). The
problem is also such that he steals it and steals from his indecision which seeks to sustain
it. Other writers are known for similar conflicts: Hlderlin fought against its mother who
wished to see him as a pastor. He could not commit to a determined role, he could not
devote to something he loves. He loves precisely what he cannot conform to, a conflict
which he resents with all his might, and in part breaks him. However, he never placed
himself in the cause of the absolute exigency of poetic speech out of which, at least by late
1800, he no longer possessed exigency. For Kafka, everything is more troubled, because he
seeks to confuse the exigency of the work with the exigency which could carry the name of
his salvation. If writing condemned him to solitude, and makes his existence a celibate
existence, without love or relationships, and writing thus seemed to him-- at the least often
and for a while--the sole activity which could justify it, it is, by all means, a threatening
solitude in him and emerging from him. The community is no longer anything but a
phantom and the law which speaks once again in it is not even the forgotten law, but rather
the dissimulation of the oblivion of the law. Writing becomes thus, once again, within the
distress and the weakness where this movement is inseparable, a possibility of plenitude, a
purposeless path perhaps capable of corresponding to this pathless purpose which is the
only thing he failed to await. When he does not write, Kafka is not only alone, "alone as
Franz Kafka," he writes to G. Janouch, but of a sterile solitude, cold, and petrifying coldness
which he calls habit and which seems to have been the great danger that he dreaded. Even
Brod, anxious of making of Kafka a man without anomaly, recognized that he was
sometimes as absent as a dead man. Very similar once again to Hlderlin; to the point of
being alike, to complain of themselves, using the same words; Hlderlin: "I am numb, I am
stony," and Kafka: "My incapacity to think, observe, notice, remember, speak, and take part
in life with others becomes greater each day; I become stony... If I do not save myself in
work, I am lost "(July 28, 1914).
Salvation in Literature
"If I do not save myself in a work..." But why could this work save him? It seems
Kafka has precisely recognized in this terrible state of dissolving himself, where he is lost
for others and for himself, the center of gravity of the demand of writing. Where he feels
destroyed until in the depths, emerges the profundity which substitutes possibility of a
greater creation for destruction. A marvelous return, hope always equal to great despair,
and like the one who understands that from this experience, he withdraws a movement of

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faith that he will not put into question voluntarily. The work becomes then, above all in his
young years, like a means of psychological salvation (still spiritual), the effort of creation
"which could be related, word by word, to his life, which it to attracts to him so that he
withdraws it from himself," what he expresses in more naive and stronger manner in these
terms: "I have today a great desire pulling anxiously in me, which also comes from
profundity, from introducing it to the profundity of my paper, or of placing it in writing, of
such a sort that I could entirely introduce the written thing in me" (December 8, 1911) 13. If
serious that he could change, this hope will not completely be denied, and one always
found it in every epoch, in his Journal, in the notes of this genre: "The firmness which
brings me the lesser writing is indubitable and marvelous. The glance with which,
yesterday, during the stroll, I embraced everything in a single view!" (November 27, 1913).
At this moment writing is not a call, the attention to a grace accompanying an obscure and
prophetic accomplishment, but something simpler and more immediately pressing: "the
hope of not sinking or more precisely of sinking more quickly from himself is also of
grasping himself at the last second. A duty more pressing than all others, which leads to the
note of July 9 4 with these remarkable words. )t is the general mobilization. K. and P. are
called. Now I receive the salary of solitude. It is despite its pain a salary. Solitude does not
bring anything but punishments, but this doesnt matter, ) am a bit touched by all this
misery and more resolute than ever... I would write in spite of everything, at all costs: it is
my struggle for survival."
Change of Perspective
It is still the onset of the war, but even more so the open crisis of his engagements,
the movement and deepening of writing, the difficulties that he encounters. It is the
unfortunate situation in general which, little by little, will clarify existence differently for
the writer in him. This change is never affirmed, and doesnt result in a decision, for it is
nothing but a slightly distinct perspective, but there are certain indicators in the situation
in the meantime: in 1914, for example, he once again tries passionately, despairingly
toward his one goal, finding some moments to write, obtaining fifty days of hiatus which
will be used for nothing but writing, subordinating everything to this single, supreme
exigency of writing. But in 1916, if he asks once again for a hiatus, it is to engage himself.
"The immediate duty is without condition: becoming a soldier," a project which will not
happen immediately, but it does not matter, for the vow which is its center shows how
much Kafka has progressed from "I will write despite everything" in July 31, 114. Later, he
seriously thinks of joining the pioneers of Zionism and leaving for Palestine. He says to
Janouch: "I dream of departing for Palestine as a laborer or agricultural worker." -- "You
would abandon everything here?" -- "Everything, to find a full life of meaning in security
and beauty." But Kafka is already sick, and the dream is nothing but a dream, and we never
know if like another Rimbaud, he could have renounced his single vocation for love of a
desert where he would find the security of a justified life-- of even if he would have found it
there. Of all the tentative situations in which he dedicates himself in order to orient his life
differently, he himself remarked they are nothing more than broken attempts, despite radii
13

Kafka adds: "This is not an artistic desire."

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which bristle from points in the center of the unfinished circle which is his life. In 1922, he
listed projects he saw as failures: piano, violin, languages, Germanic etudes, Anti-Zionism,
Hebrew etudes, gardening, carpentry, literature, attempts at marriage, independent living,
and he adds: "When the time comes to push the radius a bit further than habit, exercises of
right, or engagements, everything was worse than what was represented by my effort to go
further" (January 13, 1922).
It was unreasonable to take absolute affirmations from passing notes that contain
them, which were also forgotten to him here, that one cannot ever forget how he never
ceased to write, and that he wrote to the end. However, between the young man who said
that which he watches as his future grandson: "I am nothing other than literature and I
cannot and do not wish to be anything than it" and the same man who, ten years later,
places literature under the same plan as his short essays in gardening. It remains that the
inward difference is great, but still outwardly the written force remains the same. It seems
to us the same toward the more rigorous and more just end, which becomes for us The
Castle.
What is the source of this difference? Speech will make itself master of the inward
life of the infinitely reserved man, still secretive to his friends and elsewhere a little
accessible to himself. No one can pretend to reduce to a certain number of precise
affirmations what could not await him in the transparency of a graspable speech. There
needed to be something besides a community of intentions which are not possible. At the
least, that one that certainly committed no outside errors in saying that, as much as his
trust in the powers of art often were great, his trust in his own abilities, always from the
vantage point of evidence, was also clarified by this proof of his exigency, the clarification
above all of what he demanded from art: no longer giving to his person a reality and
coherence; that is to say, saving him from insanity, but saving him from perdition. Kafka
senses himself banished from this real world, where he is already perhaps the citizen of
another world where he must fight not only with himself, but with this other world.
Writing appeared to him as no more than a means of fighting, sometimes deceptive and
sometimes marvelous, that he can lose without losing everything.
One can compare this to two notes; the first is from January 1912: "I must recognize
within me a quite heavy concentration in literary activity. When my body takes note that
writing was the most fecund direction of my being, everything is directed toward it, and all
the other capacities are abandoned, those which are for the object of pleasures of sex, of
drinking, eating, philosophical meditation, and, before all else, music. I am emaciated in all
these directions. It would be necessary, because of my gathered strength still being small so
that they could not do anything to half await the goal of writing... The conversation of all
this is clear. It suffices to reject the work of the office-- my development being achieved in
myself not having any more to sacrifice, as far as I could see it... to commence my real life in
which my face can age to the end in a natural manner from nothing but the progress of my
work." The lightness of this irony should not indeed deceive us, but a lightness, an
insouciance that is still sensible, clarifies by contrast the tension of this other note, where
the sense is apparently the same (dated August 6, 1914): "Seen from the point of view of

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literature, my fate is quite simple. The sense which carries me to represent my dreamy
interior life has refused all the rest as an accessory, and all this is terribly stunted, and
continues being stunted. Nothing else could satisfy me. But now, the force of representation
strikes all calculation; perhaps it has never disappeared; perhaps returning again another
day; the circumstances of my life are not naturally favorable to him. It is also that I vacillate,
but in these lower regions, with these greater forces; they threaten to fall, appearing to
sustain them, which walk close to them at the end. However, for myself, it is at the top that I
vacillate; it is unfortunately not death, but the eternal torments of Dying."
Here, three movements cross each other. An affirmation: "nothing (besides
literature) can satisfy me." A self-doubt, related to the inexorably uncertain essence in his
gifts, which "thwart all calculation." The feeling that this uncertainty--it happened that
writing is never an ability that one disposes ofbelongs to something extreme in the work,
a central exigency, mortal, which "is not unfortunately death" but is death held at distance,
"the eternal torments of Dying."
One can say that these three movements constitute, by their vicissitudes, the proof
which exhausts Kafkas loyalty to "his unique vocation" which, coinciding with religious
preoccupations, lead him to see something else in this sole exigency: another exigency
which tends to subordinate it, and at the least to transform it. The more Kafka writes, the
less he is sure of writing. Sometimes, he attempts to reassure himself in thinking that "if
one has once received the knowledge of writing, it cannot fail nor sink, but also, quite
rarely, something surges, which exceeds the limit." A consolation without strength: the
more he writes, the closer he becomes to this extreme point to which the work reaches
toward its origin, but which cannot look at anything except the profound void of the
indefinite. "I cannot continue writing any longer. I am at the definitive limit, before which I
must perhaps remain again over the years, before being able to begin a new story which
will again remain unfinished. This destiny pursues me" (November 30, 1914).
It seems that in 1915-1916, if it is futile that he should wish to date a movement
which strikes in time, and accomplishes the change of perspective. Kafka has reconciled
with his old fiance. These relations which lead in 1917 to new engagements, immediately
after his illness ended, throws him into torments which he cannot overcome. He keeps
discovering that he does not know how to live alone and that he cannot live with others. It
is what he is guilty of in this situation, in his bookish existence in what he calls bureaucratic
vices, stinginess, indecision, a mind of calculation, and grasping in obsession. In this
bureaucracy, little by little, one must strike, and one cannot account, for this, in literature,
for this work is stolen, for it has its part in the impersonation of irresponsibility, and it
demands solitude, but is also annihilated by it. It concerns the decision of "Becoming a
soldier". At the same time appearing in his Journal in allusions to the Old Testament, they
convey the crisis of a lost man: "Take me in your arms, it is the abyss, welcome me into the
abyss; if you refuse now, thus later." "Take me, take me, I who am nothing but the
interlacing of madness and pain." "Have pity on me, I am the fisherman of every reply of my
being... Don't reject me among the lost."
These texts were previously translated into French while adding in the word God. It

53

does not appear there. The word God hardly appeared in the Journal, and never in a
significant manner. This would not indicate that these invocations, in their uncertainty,
could not have a religious direction, but that one must conserve of them the force of this
uncertainty and not deprive Kafka of the spirit of reserve where he has always shown
respect for what was most important to him. These distressed speeches are from July 1916
and correspond to a journey which is made to Marienbad with F.B. They travel a bit
happily, but which finally reproached them intimately. One year later, he has a new fiance;
a month later, he throws up blood; in September, he leaves Prague, but the sickness is still
modest and does not turn threatening until he leaves in 1922 (according to him). In 1917,
again, he writes the "Aphorisms," the only text or spiritual affirmation (under the general
form, which does not concern the particular) struck at times by the proof of a negative
transcendence.
For the years that follow, the Journal is almost entirely missing, with not a word in
1918. Some lines in 1919 where he is engaged during six months to a young girl of whom
we know almost nothing. In 1920, he meets Milena Jesenka, a sensible young Czech woman,
intelligent and capable of a great liberty of mind and passion, with whom he was in a
stormy relationship for two years. It was at the start very hopeful and happy, but later
doomed to distress. The Journal becomes more significant again in 1921 and above all in
1922 where the crossings of this friendship, while his sickness aggravated, carrying him to
a point of tension where his mind seemed to oscillate between two long quotations. The
first text is dated January 28, 1922: "A bit unconscious, fatigued from luging. There are
once again arms, if rarely employed, and I hatch a path with much difficulty through them,
for I am unfamiliar with the joy of using them, for, as a child, I have not learned how to do it.
I have not learned, not only "due to my father's fault," but also because I wished to destroy
"rest," to disturb the equilibrium and thus I did not have the right to allow myself to be
reborn on one hand as someone that I forced myself to bury on the other. It is true, I return
there by "fault," for why would ) wish to exit the world? Because he did not let me live in
the world, in his world. Naturally, today, I cannot judge clearly either, for now I am already
citizen of this other word which has with the habitual world the same relation that the
desert has with cultivated lands (during forty years I have wandered in Canaan). It is as a
stranger that I look back; without doubt, in this other world, I am nothing but the smallest
and most anxious (I have carried these traits with me, it is my paternal heritage), and if I
am incapable of living down there, it is none but a reason of proper organization besides
which, even for the most sick, there are terrible elevations, naturally also of crushing which
lasts millions of years and as under the weight of all the sea. Despite everything, shouldnt )
be recognized? Wouldnt ) have failed to find the path to arrive here? Wouldn't I have
arrived if not for the "banishment" down there, coupled with my exclusion here, which
erased me from the frontier? And is it not the force of my father that the expulsion has been
so strong so that nothing can resist him (to her, not to me)? It is true, it is like the voyage in
the desert and the infantile wait (particularly in what concerns girls): "Will I not stay in
Canaan?", and between the years I have been in the desert for a long time, and there is
nothing but visions of despair, above all in these times where below, I am the most
miserable of anyone and Canaan needs to be offered as the sole Promised Land, for there is
no third earth for men."

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The second text is dated the next day: "Attacked in bed, this evening, in the snow.
Always, the mix of representations, somewhat like this: in the world the situation was
frightful,--here, only in Spindlermhle, the most safe a bed abandoned where one did not
cease to make a misstep in obscurity, in the snow; more of a bed deprived of sense, without
an earthly aim (it leads to the bridge? why below it? elsewhere I have not even awaited it);
further, in this place, I myself abandoned (I cannot consider medicine as a personal aide, I
have not won it by my merits, I have not had at the bottom with it anything but relations of
fees), incapable of being recognized as a person, incapable of standing being the object of
knowledge, in the deep depths of an infinite resounding before a society or before parents
with their children (at the hotel, marvelously, there is never too much gaiety, I will not go
except only to say that I am its cause, in my quality as a "man in shadows too big," but
effectively my shadow is too great, and with a novel resounding, I lead the force of
resistance, the obstinacy of certain beings to want to live "despite everything" in this
shadow, merely in it; but here another thing is added where it remains to speak); further
abandoned not only here, but in general, still in Prague, my "country of birth," and not
abandoned by men, it would not be the worse, as much as I see I could run after them, but
of myself in relation to beings, of my strength by relation to beings; I appreciate those who
can love, but I cannot love, I am too far; I am excluded indeed, since I am nevertheless a
human being and roots want food, have I there "below" (or on high) my representatives of
lamentable and insufficient comedians (it is true, they suffice me in no manner and this is
why I am rather abandoned) that suffice me for the sole reason that my only nourishment
comes from other roots in the other air, from roots that are also lamentable, but still more
capable of living. This leads me to the mix of representations. If everything was as it
appeared under the bedcovers it would be frightening, I would be lost, it would not be
understood as a danger, but as an immediate execution. But I am elsewhere. The force of
attraction of the world of men is monstrous: in an instant it can be completely forgotten.
But also great is the force of attraction of my world, what loves me loves me, because I am
"abandoned" and not perhaps like the vacuum of Weiss, but because they feel, that in the
happy time, under another plan, I have the freedom of movement which I am completely
missing here."
The Positive Experience
Commenting upon these pages seems superfluous. One must remark each time how,
in this date, the deprivation of the word reverses in a positive experience 14, that of another
world, where one is already citizen, where it is uncertain that the smallest and most
anxious, but where he knows also of lightning elevations, where he disposes of a liberty
where the men sense valor and subvert prestige. Meanwhile, in order not to alter the sense
of such images, it is necessary to read them, not except the Christian communal perspective
(except where there is this world, since the world is beyond, the single one which had
valor, reality, and glory), but always in a perspective of "Abraham," for, in all manners, for
Kafka, being excluded from the world is akin to being excluded from Canaan, and
wandering in the desert. It is this situation which makes his fight pathetic and his
14

Some of his letters to Milena also allude to what is for himself unknown in this terrible movement (see the etudes published in this volume:
Kafka and Brod, Milena's Check, The Truly Final Word)

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despairing expectation, as if, thrown in the world, in the wandering of his infinite
migration, he needed to fight continuously to do something out of another world and in
their error the principle, the origin of a novel freedom. Fighting without issue and
certitude, where what one must conquer, it is its own loss, the truth of exile and return to
same from dispersion. Fighting that one reproaches it of profound Jewish speculations,
when, above all, following the expulsion to Spain, the religious minds attempting to
surmount the exile in pushing to their end15. Kafka has clearly alluded to "all this literature"
(his) like to "a new Kabbalah," "a new secretive doctrine" which "could have developed" "if
Zionism had not been overcome between time" (January 16, 1922). And one can
understand it most because it is in the Zionist and anti-Zionist time. Zionism is a garrison of
exile, Jewish people do not have only a book as their remains, the Bible, but the Earth is no
longer the dispersion in temporal existence. This reconciliation, Kafka profoundly sees, he
sees it even if he is excluded from it, for the grandeur of this ethical conscience has always
been to hope for the others more than for him and of not doing personal disgrace the extent
of common misfortune. "Magnificent, all this, save for me, and with reason." However, in
this truth, he does not belong, and it is because he must be Anti-Zionist for himself under
penalty of being condemned to immediate execution and the despair of absolute impiety.
He already belongs to the other shore, and his migration does not consist of reproaching
Canaan, but in reproaching the desert, the truth of the desert, when, also disgraced in this
other world and attempts once again by the joys of the real world ("particularly concerning
women"; this is a reference to Milena), he tries to persuade us that he perhaps still remains
in Canaan. If he was not Anti-Zionist for himself (this is not to say, naturally, that as a figure
he was not), that he had nothing but this world, thus "the situation was frightening," thus
he was lost on-field. But he is "elsewhere," and the force of attraction of the human world
remains quite big to carry him back until frontiers and he maintains there as if he were
crushed, not at the least great is the force attracting him from his own world, where he is
free, liberty where he speaks with trembling, an air of prophetic authority which contrasts
with his habitual modesty. That this other world was something to see with literary
activity, this is not sweet, and the proof is in that Kafka, if he speaks with "new Kabbalah,"
speaks of it precisely of "all this literature." But that this exigency, the verity of this other
world henceforth exceeds, to his eyes, the exigency of the work, should not exceed by it and
not be accomplished at all except imperfectly in it, this also lets itself be sensed. When
writing becomes this "form of prayer," it is what undoubtedly is of other forms, and yes,
due to this unhappy world, he was not on point, writing, in this perspective, ceases of being
15

On this topic, it is necessary to revisit the book by G. G. Scholem, The Great Currents of the Jewish Mystique: "The horrors of Exile
influenced the Kabbalistic doctrine of metempsychosis which henceforth won an immense popularity in insisting on its various steps of the exile
of the soul. The most dreadful fate that could befall the soul much more horrible than the torments of 'hell, was to be "rejected" or exposed, a
state of exclusion, or the revival or very admission into hell The absolute privation of a home was the sinister symbol of an absolute impiety, of
a moral degradation and spiritual extreme. The union with God or absolute exile became the two poles between which a system was elaborated,
offering Jews the possibility to live under the domination of a regime that sought to destroy the forces of Exile. And this once again: There was
an ardent desire to surmount Exile in aggravating their torments, in savoring their bitterness to the extreme (until the night of the Shekhinah
herself) (p. 267). That the theme of The Metamorphosis (and also the obsessive fictions of brutality) were a reminiscence, an allusion to the
tradition of Kabbalistic metempsychosis, is something one can imagine, even if it is uncertain that Samsa was a play on samsara (Kafka and
Samsa are the apparent names, but Kafka refuses this relation). Kafka states at times that he is not born once again: The hesitation before birth:
If there is a transmigration of souls, when I am not once more degraded to the extreme; my life is hesitation before birth. (January 24, 1922).
Lets recall that in the Hocheitvorbereitungen auf dem Lande, Raban, the hero of this tale of youth, jokingly expresses the health of becoming an
insect (Kafer) which could lounge upon the bed and shirk disagreeable duties of the community. The carapace of solitude seems also to be an
image that would be animated in the impressive theme of The Metamorphosis.

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the approach of the work to turn the attention of this sole moment of grace where Kafka
recognized the watchman and where he no longer found it necessary to write. To Janouch
who says to him, "Poetry tended thus to religion?" he responds, "I would not say that, but to
prayer, yes," and, opposing literature and poetry, he adds: "Literature is forced to place its
things in a pleasant light; the poet is constrained in elevating them in the kingdom of the
truth, of the purity and the duration." A significant response, for it corresponds to a note in
the Journal where Kafka asks himself which joy can once again reserve literature for him: I
can once again draw a momentary satisfaction from labor like La Medecine de campagne, to
suppose that I could once again succeed in something similar (quite improbable). However,
happiness solely in the case where I can elevate the world in the pure, the true and
inalterable" (September 25, 1917). The "idealistic" or "spiritual" exigency becomes
categorical here. Writing, yes, writing once again, but only in the dimension of the law
which pertains to chance," as I state once again to Janouch. However, rather, the question is
posed: is it therefore possible? Is it quite certain that writing does not pertain to the bad?
And the consolation of writing would not be anything more than illusion, a dangerous
illusion, from which one must retreat? "It is undeniably in a certain contentment of being
able to write peacefully: smothering is terrible beyond all thought. It is true, beyond all
thought, of the sort that it is new as if there were nothing to be written" (December 20,
1921). And the most humble reality of the world-- has it not been a consistence which lacks
the strongest work: "Lack of independence of being written: it depends on the servant who
makes fire, of the cat which rubs itself against the poet, while the old man who is rubbed
becomes impoverished. Everything is of autonomous accomplishments, having their
proper law. Only writing is deprived of everything, and does not remain in itself, it is the
pleasantry and despair" (December 6, 1921). A grimace: grimace of the face which recoils
before the light; "a defense of birth, a cautioning of birth, a shuffle of gaiety prepared for
birth": this is the act.
Meanwhile, if the trust of his young years was placed in a view that always became
more rigorous, it remains that in these most difficult moments, when it seems -- toward his
integrity, when he suddenly the part of the unknown of near-sensible attacks ("Like this
spy: for example under the bed to go to the doctor, down there, constantly"), but still, he
continues to see in his work, not in what threatens him, but what can aid him to confront
the decision of saying goodbye: "The consolation of writing, remarkable, mysterious,
perhaps dangerous, perhaps a salvation: it is jump out of the line of martyrs, an observation
which is act [Tat-Beobachtung, the observation which has become an act]. There is an
observation-act in the extent where a higher sort of observation is created, higher, not
more acute, and more triers], it is the less dependent, the more it follows the proper laws of
its movement, the more it climbs onto its bed, joyously, striking all calculations" (January
27, 1922). Here, the literature is announced as the power which freed, the force which
departs the oppression of gorge," it is the liberating passage of "I" to "He," of the
observation of himself which has been the torment of Kafka in a higher observation,
elevating itself around a mortal reality, toward the other world, the world of freedom.
Why Art is, or Isn't Justified

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What reason do we have for such trust? One can ask oneself this. One can respond in
thinking that Kafka belonged to a tradition where what is highest is expressed in a book
which is writing par excellence16, tradition where the ecstatic experiences have been
driven to leave from the combination and manipulation of letters, where it is said that the
world of letters, those of the alphabet, is the true world of beatitude 17. Writing is the
conjuror of spirits; it liberates them, perhaps, from us, but this danger pertains to the
essence of the power which frees18.
Meanwhile, Kafka was not of a "superstitious" mind," there was in him a cold
lucidity which was said of him by Brod, in attending Hassidic celebrations: "In truth, it was
a bit almost as in an African tribe, of greater superstitions19." Thus he did not need to have
explanations that were correct, but which, at the least, do not let us understand why, if
sensible to bewilderment which constitutes each of his steps, Kafka has given this to
himself with much madness in the essential wandering that constitutes literature. This,
again, would not be sufficient to repeat that, since his adolescence, he has been
extraordinarily influenced by artists like Goethe and Flaubert, who were often ready to
place before everything because they placed their art before it all. In this conception, Kafka
is never undoubtedly separated by all means, but if the passion of art has been since the
start quite strong and has seemed to him salutary for a while, it is that, since the start, and
by "the fault of his father," he has found himself thrown out of the world, condemned to a
solitude where he did not have to make literature responsible, but rather to thank it in
having clarified this solitude, in havingand opened him to another world.
One can say that his debate with his father has allowed him to banish the negative
aspect of his literary experience to the shadows. Still, when he sees that his work requires
what he despairs, still more gravely when he sees the opposition between his work and
marriage, he by no means concludes that there is a mortal force in the work, a speech
which pronounces the "banishing" and condemns it to the desert. He does not conclude it,
because, since his debut, the world has been lost for him, the real existence has been
retired from him, or it has never been given to him. When he speaks again of his exile, of
the impossibility of stealing it, he says: "I have the impression of not being of all come here,
but already, small child, in having been forced since I fixed below with chains" (January 24,
1922). Art has not given him misfortune, has never helped him there, but on the contrary
has clarified it, has been "the awareness of misfortune," his novel dimension.
16

To Janouch, Kafka states that "the poet's role is a prophetic one: the word "just" drives him; the word that is not just seduces. It is not chance if
the Bible calls it Writing."
17

But what of it would be done by even him: being a poet? This act of writing, it is a gift, a silent and mysterious gift. But his price? In the night,
the striking response always has my eyes, with and dazzling clarity: it is the salary received from diabolical powers that one has served it. This
abandon of obscure forces, this concatenation and everything that passes once again in the profundities, of what does do we know of it? Myself, I
do not know of this, in these nights where the anguish torments me at the edge of my sleep.
18

Of also that, the ruthless condemnation (to which he attended) that Kafka carries against the Jewish writers who serve the German language.

19

However, it follows that Kafka seems to have become constantly more attentive to this form of devotion. Dora Dymant comes from "a
reputable, Hassidic Jew family." And Martin Buber has perhaps influenced it.

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Art is immediately the awareness of misfortune, and not its compensation. Kafka's
rigor, his loyalty to the exigency of the work, his fidelity to the exigency of unhappiness
which was spared this paradise of fictions which includes some weak artists that life has
disappointed. Art has not been the object of reveries, nor of "constructions." But this does
not describe the truth further: the truth has not been known or described, it has not even
recognized itself where earthly salvation asks to be accomplished and not interrogated, nor
included. In this sense, there is no place for art: rigorous monism excludes all idols.
However, in this same sense, if art is not justified in general, it is at the least for solely
Kafka, for art is related, precisely, as it is Kafka, to what is "beyond" the world. He expresses
the profundity of this beyond without intimacy and repose, which surges when, still with
ourselves, still with our death, we no longer have relations of possibility. Art is the
awareness of "misfortune." He describes the situation of a lost man, who cannot say "me"
any longer, who, in the same movement, has lost the world, the truth of the world, who
pertains to exile, to this time of distress, where, as Hlderlin puts it, gods no longer exist,
and never will again. This does not signify that art affirms another world, if it is true that it
has its origin not in another world, but in the Other of the entire world (this is surely on
point, one sees, -- in the notes which translate his religious experience rather than in his
work-- that Kafka accomplishes or is ready to accomplish the leap that art does not
authorize)20.
Kafka wavers pathetically. He seems to do everything to create a dwelling among
men where "the force of attraction is monstrous." He seeks to be occupied, he makes a
garden, he exercises manual work, he thinks of Palestine, he procures himself lodgings in
Prague to conquer not only solitude, but independence as a mature and living man. Under
this plan, the debate with his father remains essential, as the new notes of the Journal
always confirm. They demonstrate that Kafka does not hide anything that psychoanalyst
could uncover in him. His dependence on the opinion of his family not only rendered him
weak, a stranger in virile roles (something that he affirms), but as this dependence gives
him horror, it also makes all forms of dependence unbearable for him-- and, to begin, his
parents marriage which he recalls with disgust21, the life of failure where he could
disengage himself, but in which he wished also to engage himself, for it is the
accomplishment of the law; it is the truth of his father, which attracts him despite his
refusal of it so that really ) stand before my family in this circle and without ceasing )
brandish a knife to wound and simultaneously defend them." "This is on one hand."
But on the other, one sees always the more, as illness naturally helps him see, that
20

Kafka, without denouncing what there is in attempting, of the facility of trying in this very determined distinction of these two worlds: "The
ordinary, the sharing (of these two worlds), seems very determined to me, dangerous in its determination, sad and very dominating" (January 30,
1922).
21

One must at least cite the passage of the draft of the letter to his fiance where he elaborates with the greatest lucidity his relations with his
family: "But I come from my parents, I am related also to them who have my sisters by blood; in everyday life and because I vow myself to my
proper goal, I do not sense, but at the depth of it, it contains more value than I can know. Sometimes I pursue this with my hatred: the view of
conjugal relations, of drapes of the bed which are used, of shirts from carefully extended nights that sent me vomiting, taking everything from
inside me outwards, it is as if I had not been definitively, as if I always came into the world out of this obscure life in this obscure chamber, as if I
had always failed to search there again for the confirmation of myself, as if I had always been, at the least in some sense, indissolubly linked to
these repugnant things, once again it holds back my feet which would have run, which are once again stuffed into the formless primordial soup
(October 18, 1916).

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he pertains to the other shore, which, banished, he should not use cunning with this
banishment, nor remain passively turned, as if crushed against its frontiers, toward a
reality where he feels excluded and he has not yet traveled, for he has never been born.
This new perspective can simply be that of absolute despair, of nihilism which one can
easily attribute to him. The distress was its element; how was it born? It is his journey and
his time. And yet this despair is never without hope; this hope is nothing but the torment
of distress; not what gives hope, but what prevents one from grasping himself in despair,
what makes him "condemned to finishing it. One is also condemned to defending himself to
the end" and perhaps therefore promised to reverse condemnation into deliverance. In this
new perspective, that of distress, the essential is in not turning oneself toward Canaan. The
migration has the desert as its destination, and it is the approach of the desert which is now
the true Promised Land. "Is it below, that you lead me?" Yes it is there. But where is it, the
Lower Regions? It is never in view, the desert is once again the least definite place in the
world, and is nothing but the approach of the desert, and in this earth of wandering. One is
never "here," but always "far from here." And meanwhile, in this region where the
conditions lack a veritable journey, where one must live in an incomprehensible
separation, in an exclusion where one is in some sense excluded as if one is excluded from
oneself, in this region which is that of migration because one does nothing but wander
without end; there subsists a tension, the same possibility of wandering, of going around
one's wandering, in coming close to his end, of transforming what is a path without
purpose into the certitude of the purpose without a path.
The Step Outside the True Surveyor
We know that in this stage, the history of the surveyor represents the most
impressive image to us. Since the beginning, the hero of inflexible stubbornness is
described to us as having never renounced his world, his birth country, and a life where
there are women and children. Since the start, he is therefore emerging from salvation, and
belongs to exile, this place where he is not only at home, but outside it, in the same beyond,
a region that is absolutely deprived of intimacy, where the beings seem to be absent, where
everything that one believes in seizing, is taken. The tragic difficulty of the radical
separation is that everything is fake and inauthentic since they are first seen, everything
you miss since one supported them, but while the depth of this absence is always newly
given as an indubitable presence, absolute, and the absolute word is here in its place, or
separated; as if separation, proven in all its rigor, could be reversed in being absolutely
separated; absolutely absolute.
One must elaborate that Kafka, who always had an upright mind and was by no
means satisfied by the dilemma of everything or nothing which he conceives with still more
intransigence than anyone else, lets it be sensed that in this excess of the truth, there are
certain rules, perhaps contradictory and untenable, but which again authorize a sort of
possibility. The first is given in the same wandering: one must err and not be negligent as it
is with Joseph K. of The Trial, who is imagined that the things will always continue and that
he is once more in the world, when, since the first sentence, he is rejected by it. Joseph's
fault, as Kafka undoubtedly related it to the epoch in which he wrote, is the desire to win

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his trial in the same world, to which he always believes himself to belong, but in which his
cold, empty, heart his celibate and bureaucratic existence, his indifference to family-- all
these traits of character that Kafka recognized in himself-- prevent him already from taking
foot. Certainly, his insouciance stops little by little, but it is the fruit of the trial, and at the
same time the beauty which illuminates the accused and which makes them agreeable to
women, is the reflection of his own dissolution, of death which advances in him, like a truer
light.
This trialthe banishmentis undoubtedly a great misfortune, and also perhaps an
incomprehensible injustice or an inexorable punishment, but it is also -- it is truly only in a
certain sense, it is the excuse of the hero, the trap where he lets himself be taken-- a gift
that he does not suffice to refuse in invoking in these hollow discourses a higher justice,
where one must on the contrary attempt to take part, without the rule that Kafka has made
his own: "One must limit oneself to what possesses, once again." The Trial has at least its
advantage of making known to K. what is really, in dissipating the illusion, these deceiving
consolations which, due to having a good employment and several indifferent pleasures,
allow him to believe in his existence, in his existence as a worldly man. But the Trial is not
the current truth; it is on the contrary, a trial of error, like all that is related from it, these
"exterior" shakings where one is thrown with the force of banishing, a trial where if hope
remains, it is he who advances, not by the opposing current or a sterile opposition, but in
the same sense of error.
The Essential Fault
The surveyor is almost entirely exceeded by Joseph Ks faults. (e does not seek to
return to his birthplace: he lost his life in Canaan; effaced the truth of this world; in pain if
he remembers its brief, moving instants. It is not a negligent disadvantage, but always in
movement; never captured, almost never discouraged, going from breakdown to
breakdown, by a tireless movement which evokes an inflexible obstinacy, always in the
sense of the extreme wandering, denigrating the village which has again some reality, but
wants the Castle which has perhaps none, detaching from Frieda and having some thoughts
to turn toward Olga, Amelie's sister, the excluded doubling, the rejected, once more, who by
a frightening decision, has voluntarily agreed to be it. Everything thus turned toward the
best. But it is none of it, for the surveyor endlessly falls for the fault that Kafka deems the
most grave, that of impatience22. Impatience within the error is the essential fault, because
it misunderstands the same truth of the error which imposes, like a law, in never believing
that the goal is near; it never needs to finish with the indefinite; it never needs to grasp as
the immediate, as the already present, the profundity of the inexhaustible absence.
Certainly, it is inevitable and it is the desolate character of such a search. What is not
impatient is negligent. What is given to inquietude of the error loses the insouciance which
exhausted time. In the penalty without understanding anything in this proof of the
exclusion where it is K. immediately who places himself en route to achieving anything to
22

"It is two humane capital punishments where all the others are discharged. Impatience is negligence. Due to their impatience, they have been
banished from Paradise. Due to their negligence, they never return there. Perhaps there would have been nothing but a capital punishment,
impatience. Due to impatience they never return there." (Aphorisms.)

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its end. He neglects the intermediaries, and undoubtedly is a merit, the force of tension
toward the absolute, but does not resort it to the same his aberration which is of losing for
the termination what is nothing but an intermediary, a representation without "means".
One deceives oneself assuredly while the surveyor deceives himself, when one
believes in recognizing in bureaucratic phantasmagoria the upright symbol of a superior
world. This figuration is solely in the extent of impatience, the sensible form and error, by
which, for the impatient regard, it is substituted without end to the absolute of the
inexorable force of bad infinity. K. always wishes to attend the purpose before having
attended to it. This exigency of a premature denouement is the principle of formation, it
engenders the image where if one sees the idol, and the malediction which is attached to it
is what attaches itself to idolatry. The human wishes for immediate unity, he wishes it in
the same separation, he represents himself by it, in this representation, the image of unity,
and reconstitutes rather the element of dispersion where he loses himself increasingly, by
an image, in such images, and can never attend to it, and he steals it, beside it, the unity
where it is an image, it separates from it in making itself and it inaccessible.
Klamm is by no means invisible; the Surveyor wants sight and has it. The Castle, his
supreme aim, is by no means behind sight. In some scenes, he is constantly in his
disposition. Naturally, even on close examination, these figures deceive. The Castle is
nothing but a mass of villagers' shacks. Klamm is a heavy, tall man sitting in the front of an
office. Nothing but the ordinary and ugly. It is also the chance of the surveyor, it is the truth,
the deceptive honesty of these images that are not seductive in themselves, but are nothing
which justify the fascinated interest that one can convey to it, they also repeated that it is
not their true aim. Simultaneously, however, in the insignificance of another truth being
forgotten, of knowing that they are nevertheless images of this purpose, that they
participate in their radiance, in their ineffable value that cannot be attached to them, it is
already deviating from the essential.
A situation which one can resume as: the impatience which renders the inaccessible
termination in substituting the proximity of an intermediary figure in him. It is impatience
which destroys the approach of the end in preventing recognition of the immediate figure
in the intermediate.
Here we must limit ourselves in these indications. The bureaucratic
phantasmagoria, this idleness of affairs which characterize it, these doubles which are in
the process of executing it, guardians, aides, messengers, who always go by two as if to
sufficiently demonstrate that they are nothing but the reflections of another and the
reflection of everything invisible; every chain of metamorphoses, this methodical belief of
the distance which is never given as infinite but is indefinitely deepened in a necessary
manner, by the transformation of the end in obstacles, but also of intermediary obstacles
leading to the end. All this powerful imagery does not include the truth of a superior world,
and neither of its transcendence. It rather includes the fortune and misfortune of the
inclusion, of this exigency by which the exiled human is obliged to make wandering a
means of truth and which indefinitely deceives it from the ultimate possibility of grasping
the infinite.

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The Space of the Work

In a certain sense, has Kafka taken responsibility to be aware of the analogy of this
surpassing with the movement by which the work tends toward its origin; this center
where only it can be accomplished, in the seeking of what is realized and which, awaited,
makes it impossible? To what extent has it reproached the proof of his hero in the manner
where he himself, through art, attempted to open himself to a view toward the work and,
by the work, towards something true? (as he often thought of Goethes speech, that it is in
postulating the impossible that the artist procures all that is possible?? At the least, the
evidence is striking: the fault which he punishes in K. is also something in himself, a
reproached artist. Impatience is his fault. It is what precipitated the story toward its
denouement, before it was not developed in all directions, and did not exhaust the extent of
the time which was in it; has not elevated the indefinite to a true totality where each
inauthentic movement, each image partially forced, could be transfigured into an
unwavering certainty. An impossible role, a role that if accompanied to its end, would
destroy this same truth towards which it reaches, as the work is lowered if it touches the
point which is its origin. Many reasons prevent Kafka from achieving almost any of his
"stories," bringing them the grief of beginning any of them, of leaving any of them to try to
appease himself in another. He often knew the torment of the exiled artist of his work at
the moment where it was affirmed and reformed, and he says so. He sometimes abandons
the story, in anguish, that if he did not abandon it, unable to return to the world, he says it,
but is uncertain that this worry has been strongest in him. He often abandons it, because all
denouement carries in him the happiness of a definitive truth that he lacks the right to
accept, something to which his existence does not correspond once again, this reason
seemed also to have played a great role, but all these movements return to him: Kafka,
perhaps in his blindness, has profoundly shown that writing it living incessantly and, by
anguish, anguish of impatience, worried scrupulously by the exigency of writing, and he has
no longer refused to make the leap which alone allows incompleteness, this insouciant and
happy trust by which a termination is (momentarily) made interminable.
What one has quite improperly called his realism betrays this same instinctive
search that makes him impatient. Kafka has often demonstrated that he was a swift genius,
capable of several traits of attending to the essential. But he is increasingly impeded by
minutiae, a sluggishness of approach, and a detailed precision (which are even found in the
description of his own dreams), without which the man, exiled from reality, is rapidly
avowed to bewildering confusion and is close to the imaginary realm. The more one is lost
outside it, in the strangeness and insecurity of this loss, the more he needs to call forth the
mind of rigor, of scruples and exactitude, and be present in the absence by the multiplicity
of images, by his determined appearance, modest (unaffected by fascination), and
energetically maintained by his coherence. Someone who pertains to reality does not need
so many details which, we know, do not in any way correspond to the form of a real vision.
But he who pertains to the profundity of the unlimited and the remote, in the misfortune of
his excess, yes; it is he who is condemned to the excess of the measure and the seeking of a
continuity without failure, without lacuna, without patchwork. And condemned is the right
word, for it is patience, exactitude, and cold mastery which are indispensable qualities to

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avoid losing oneself when nothing more subsists in something that could be retained.
Patience, exactitude, and cold mastery are also the faults which, dividing the difficulties and
extending them indefinitely, perhaps delay the shipwreck, but surely delay the deliverance,
constantly transforming the infinite into the indefinite, as it also constitutes the measure
which prevents the unlimited from ever being accomplished in the work.
Art and Idolatry
"You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or
on the earth beneath or in the waters below." Felix Weltsch, Kafkas friend who has spoken
at length of his fight against impatience, believes that he has seriously abided by the
commandment in the Bible. If he has also done this, that one represents a man upon whom
this essential forbidding weighs, who, upon pain of death, must exclude himself from
images and which, suddenly, is discovered exiled in the imagination, without other remains
or subsistence that the images and space of images. The presentation thus obliges to live
from his death and constraints, in his despair and to strike this despairthe immediate--,
constrained from making the sole vow of salvation from his condemnation. Was Kafka
consciously this man? One could not know enough to say it. One has perhaps the sentiment
about this essential forbidding. The more Kafka searches to remember (for it is by all
means forgotten, since the community where it is living is almost destroyed), the more he
thus searches to remember the religious sense which lives hidden in this forbidding. This is
with an always greater rigor, in creating the void, in it, around it, at the end of his ideas
which should not be welcomed, more a counterpart which seems ready to forget that this
interdiction also turns around to apply to his art. From it, a very unstable equilibrium
results. This equilibrium, in the illegitimate solitude which is his, allows him to be loyal to a
spiritual motion that is always more rigorous, but which is abandoned in a certain idolatry
of all the rigors of an ascetic who condemns literary realities (uncompleted works,
repugnance of all publications, a refusal to be created into a writer, etc.), which in other
words, is most grave, and subordinated art to its spiritual condition. Art is not religion, "it
does not even drive religion," but, at times, the distress which characterizes it, the times
where we lack gods, times of absence and of exile, art is justified, which is the intimidation
of this distress, which is the effort manifested to us, by the image, the wandering of the
imagination; and the limit, the ungraspable truth, forgotten, which this mistake finally
dissimulates.
Kafka had an immediate tendency to relate religious exigency to literary exigency,
since above all, toward the end, he had a tendency to relate his literary experience to
religious experience, while confronting them in a very troubled manner in passing from the
desert of madness to the madness in a world which is no longer the desert, but another
world where he is freed. It is this that the notes in the Journal forebode? "Is speech what I
swear to?" (January 30, 1922). In the page we have quoted, Kafka repeats what he says is
humans' only option: searching for the Promised Land on the side of Canaan, on the side of
this other world of the desert, "for, he adds, there is no third world for humans." Certainly,
there is none, but perhaps it would be necessary to add that the artist, the human which
Kafka also wished to be, is concerned with his art and seeking after his origin. The "poet" is

64

the person for whom there does not exist in even one world; for there does not exist for
him anything but the beyond, the trickle of the eternal beyond.

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Chapter Five - The Happy Death, 1952

In a note in his Journal, Kafka makes a remark we can reflect upon. "Returning to the
house, ) said to Max that on my deathbed, provided my suffering wasnt too great, ) would
be very content. I forgot to add, and a bit later I had omitted mentioning, that what I have
best written is founded upon an aptitude in being able to die content. In all these good
passages which are strongly convincing, it happens to always concern someone who dies
and finds it quite difficult, seeing it unjust. Everything, at least in my view, is quite moving
for the reader. As for myself; I believe in the ability to be content on my deathbed, from
such descriptions being secretly a game; I rejoice even in dying in death, I thus use a
calculated manner of the reader's attention which also resembles death. I retain a mind
much clearer than his, where I suppose that he will lament his deathbed. My lamentation is
thus as perfect as possible: it will not be interrupted abruptly like an actual lamentation,
but it follows its beautiful and pure course..." This reflection is dated December 1914. It is
not certain that it explains a point of view that Kafka had already admitted later; it is
elsewhere, as if he had presented an impertinent side. However, even due to his provoking
lightness, it is revealing. The whole passage can resume thus: one cannot writes unless one
remains master of oneself before death, if one has established relations of sovereignty with
death. Is death something before which one loses capacity; something one is unable to
contain? Then does death withdraw words from beneath the pen, cutting speech; the writer
no longer writes, he cries, a maladroit cry, confused, that no one understands, by which no
one is moved? Here Kafka feels profoundly that art is a relation with death. But why death?
It is the extreme. He who disposes of death, disposes extremely of himself, and is connected
to everything that he can do, is fully able to do. Art is master of the supreme moment,
supreme master.
Concerning the phrase: My best writing establishes itself on the aptitude in being
able to die content," if it has an attractive aspect that arises from its simplicity, there still
remains something difficult to accept. What gives Kafka this assurance? Is he already
sufficiently close to death to know how he will fare in its face? He seems to suggest that in
the "good passages" of his writing, where someone dies, dies an unjust death, he has placed
himself at risk in dying; is it thus a sort of closeness to death, accomplished through the
guise of literature? But the text does not indicate that, exactly: it undoubtedly indicates an
intimacy between the unhappy death which is produced in the work, and the writer who
rejoices in it; it excludes the cold rapport, distant, which permits an objective decision; a
narrator, if he knows the art of emoting, can tell the story of a moving manner of events
which are unfamiliar to him; the problem, in this, is that of rhetoric and the right to resort
to it. But the mastery from which Kafka speaks is other and the calculation where he calls
for it is more profound. Yes, one must die in death, in the truth which requires it, but one
must be capable of satisfying oneself in dying, of finding in the supreme dissatisfaction a
supreme satisfaction, and maintaining, at the instant of his death, a clarity of a perspective
that comes from Hegelian wisdom, if it consists of making satisfaction and self-knowledge
coincide, in finding in extreme negativity, in death that has become possibility, work and
time: the extent of the Absolute positive.

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It remains that Kafka does not directly place himself here in a quite ambitious
perspective. It remains, as well, that when his capacity to write well is related to his ability
to die well, he does not allude to a conception which would concern death in general, but to
his own experience: it is because for one reason or another, he is extended upon his
deathbed without trouble as he can direct a perspective to his heroes without trouble:
uniting himself to his death with a clairvoyant intimacy. In which of his writings does he
envision himself? Undoubtedly, in the work In Der Strafkolonie, Au Bagne23 where, several
days previously, he has made a reading to his friends that has given him courage; he thus
writes The Trial, several uncompleted stories where death is not his immediate goal. In all
his narratives, those who die, die in several rapid and soundless words. This confirms the
thought that is not solely when they die, but apparently when they live, it is in the space of
death that the heroes of Kafka accomplish their advances, it is in the indefinite time of
"dying" that they belong. They are the proof of this strangeness and in them, Kafka is also
proven. But it seems to him that he might not be able to do it well, in drawing a narrative
and work that in a certain manner, is in advance in agreement with the extreme moment of
this proof, if it is equal to death.
What strikes us in this reflection, is that it would seem to authorize the treachery of
art. Why describe as an unjust event what one feels capable of agreeing with contentedly?
Why does it make death frightening to us, if we are content in it? It gives the text is a cruel
lightness. Perhaps art demands from the text that it plays a game with death, perhaps
introducing to it a game, a bit of a game, where there is no longer recourse or mastery.
But what does this game signify? "Art flies around the truth, with the decisive
intention of not burning itself up." Here, it flies around death, it does not burn up, but it
makes the burning sensible and it becomes something that burns, then emotes coldly and
deceptively. A perspective that would suffice to condemn art. Anyhow, to be just with
Kafka's remark, one must also understand it differently.
Dying content is not, in his eyes, a good attitude in itself, for what it immediately
demands is discontentment with life, the exclusion of happiness in living, this happiness
that one must desire and love above anything else. "The aptitude in being able to die
content" signifies that the relation with the normal world is nonetheless already broken:
Kafka is in a certain sense already dead, something that is given him, like the exile given to
him, and this gift is related to the person from writing. Naturally, the state of being exiled
from normal possibilities does not grant, by itself, mastery of extreme possibilities: the
state of being deprived of life does not assure the happy possession of death, does not
render death content in a negative manner (one is content in finishing it in discontentment
with ones life). There we have the insufficiency and superficial character of the remark.
But precisely, twice this same year, Kafka writes in his Journal: ) don't write of
humans in order to live in peace, but in order to be able to die in peace." This gap, this
exigency of solitude is imposed by his work: "If I do not save myself in writing, I am lost. Do
I distinctly know as well, that it is? I do not shrink before beings because I want to live

23

Most often translated in French as La Colonie Pnitentiaire

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peacefully, but because I want to perish peacefully." This work is writing. He retreats from
the world to write, and he writes to die in peace. Now, death, the content death, is the
salary of art, the vision and justification of writing. Writing to perish peacefullyyes, but
how does one write? What is it that allows writing? The response is familiar to us: that one
cannot write unless one is apt in dying content. The contradiction restores to us the
profundity of the experience.
The Circle
Each time thought clashes in a circle, it touches something original where it takes off
and cannot cross it except to return to it. Perhaps we would take a step towards this
original movement if we modified the clarification of formulas by erasing the words
"peacefully" and "contentedly". The writer is thus the person who writes to be able to die. It
is he who considers his power of writing from an anticipated relation with death. The
contradiction subsists, but is clarified differently. At the same time that the poet does not
exist except in the face of the poem and beyond it, as long as it would be necessary that
there would be first of all a poet so that there would be a poem, at the same time that one
can predict that if Kafka approaches the ability to die through the work that he writes; this
signifies that the work itself is an experience of death where it seems that it previously
failed to dispose of itself to achieve the work; to achieve death.
But one can also predict that the approaching movement within the work; the space
and usage of death, has not fully been made within the same movement which would drive
the writer to the possibility of dying. What one can still suppose is that the quite strange
relations of the artist and of the work; these relations which depend upon the work of he
who is not possible except in the weaving of the work; a certain anomaly arises from this
experience that motivates the forms of time, but comes more profoundly from its
ambiguity, from its double aspect that Kafka expresses with too much simplicity in the
phrases that we take from him:
Writing in order to be able to die -- Dying to be able to write, words which we close
in their circular exigency, that oblige us to part from what we wish to find, to search for
nothing except the point of departure, and to also make of this point something where one
is not approached except in distancing from ityet they authorize this hope: where the
interminable is stated: that of seizing, and bringing forth the term.
Naturally, Kafkas sentences may appear to express a gloomy view that was his own.
They face the ideas which are current in art, and in the work of art, where Andrew Gide,
after some others, has repeated for himself: "The reasons that press me to write are many,
and the most important ones, it seems to me, are the most secret. It is this, above all:
placing something in the shelter of death" (Journal, July 27, 1922). Writing so that one does
not die, trusting in the survival of works, it is this which binds the artist to his role. The
genius insults death, and the work is death made futile or transfigured, where, except for
the evasive words of Proust, rendered "the least loved," "least inglorious," and "perhaps
least probable."

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It could be so. In these traditional dreams available to creators, we are not opposed
to the comment that they are recent, but pertain to our new West. They belong to the
development of a humanistic art, where the human seeks to glorify himself in his works
and to concern himself with them in perpetuating himself in this action. That is certainly
important and significant. But art, at a certain moment, is no longer anything but a
memorable manner of unifying oneself to history. The great historical characters, the
heroes, the great men of war, no less than artists, are also placed in the shelter of death;
they enter the memory of people; they are examples, active presences. This form of
individualism soon ceases to be satisfying. One perceives that if something matters, it is
first of all the work of history, of action in the world, the common effort towards truth. It is
vain to want to remain beyond the provision, to desire to be immobile and stable in a work
which would surpass the times. It is vain, and moreover, contrary to what one wants. What
is necessary, is not to remain in the slothful eternity of idols, but to change; to disappear in
order to cooperate in the universal transformation: to be without name and not to be a
pure inactive name. Thus, the dreams that survive their creators seem not only petty, but
rather also offensive; and any true action, accomplished anonymously in the world and for
the arrival of the world, seems to affirm a more just triumph over death, one that is more
sure, and in the least, is freed from the miserable regret of not being more of oneself.
These dreams which are quite strong, bound to a transformation of art where one is
not already present to oneself, but where the one who believes himself master of art,
wishes to render himself present, to be one who creates, being, in creating, one who
escapes, even if a little, in destruction, having struck it, that they demonstrate to the world
that they are its creators" engaged in a profound relation with death, and this relation,
despite its appearance, is also one that Kafka pursues. One and the other wish for death to
be possible: here, in order to grasp it; there, to maintain distance from it. These differences
are negligible, and are inscribed in the very horizon of establishing with death, a relation of
liberty.

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Chapter Six, Kafka and Brod, 1954

Max Brod recognized that there was something slightly unsettling in Kafkas glory,
something he allowed himself to regret in having aided birthing. When ) see how humanity
rejects the salutary gift contained in the writings of Kafka, I sometimes suffer in having torn
away this work to the obscurity of destruction where its author wished to see it collapse.
Kafka would not have felt the abuse in which his work could be exposed. Is this why he did
not wish to authorize its publication? )t was probably a tad late for the question. Due to
the effect of the posthumous years, Brod was no longer holding his breath for the discreet
fame he wanted to achieve, --but, since its start, had he not longed for it to be brilliant? Did
he not suffer when Werfel, while reading the first writings of their mutual friend, had
inquired, Beyond Tetschenbodebach, will anyone understand Kafka? Would he have been
recognized in the glory where he had complained a bit about himself, and wasnt it also to
some degree his image that was unrelated to Kafkas reservation, but related to the urgency
having to do with Brod, related to his forthright optimism and decisive certitude? Perhaps
Kafka needed Brod nearby so he could surmount the discomfort that prevented him from
writing.
The collaborative books they wrote are a sign of their collective destiny: a
collaboration where Kafka speaks discontentedly, wherein he dedicates himself to each
phrase, and to his concessions of which he says that he suffers merely in their profundity.
This collaboration ceases almost immediately, but, preceding Kafkas death, it is revived,
more narrowly than it had ever been, also heavier for the living friend who with an
extraordinary faith is devoted to his place in the day of a work dedicated, without him, to
his disappearance. It would be unjustnot to mention frivolousto say that there is, in
each writer, a Brod and a Kafka and that we do not write except to the extent where we
fulfill the active part of ourselves, or where we become famous so that at a certain moment,
we deliver ourselves over entirely to the unlimited loyalty of friendship. The injustice
would consist of reserving to Kafka all the merit of literary purity--hesitation before
writing, refusal of publication, deciding to destroy his works--and assigning the powerful
and friendly doubling of all the responsibilities related to the worldly management of a
work of literature that is too glorious. Kafkas death is intimately responsible for a survival
where Brod was the obstinate instigator. Otherwise, why would he make Brod his legatee?
Why did he wish to make his work disappear, rather than let it be destroyed? Why did he
read it to his friends? Why has he sent Felice Bauer and Milena many of his manuscripts,
certainly not with a literary vanity, but rather so that he can prove himself in his dark
regions and unlit destiny?
Brods fate also compels us. )mmediately haunted by his admirable friend, he made
his friend the hero of one of his novels-- strangely morphed, a sign that he felt aligned to a
man, but not to the obligation of not troubling him. So he undertakes the publication of a
work which is the first, and for a long time the only one. He recognized its exceptional
value. It was necessary for him to find editors: the editors avoiding him, it was necessary to
gather the texts that were not avoided in the least, to affirm their coherence, and discover

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in the dispersed manuscripts where nearly nothing is terminated, a hidden fullness. The
publication begins, which is also fragmentary. In large novels, certain chapters are reserved
for an unknown reason. This and that, one does not know how each seized page emerged in
the collection, such a section that escaped from a hearth still unknown, gleaming and then
put out. In the Journal, because one must protect living people, one excludes the most direct
documents or the notes that appear insignificant, one limits oneself to the essential, but
where is it? Meanwhile, the glory of a writer rapidly becomes powerful, soon completely
powerful. The unpublished sections could not rest. It was like an avid force, irresistible,
which goes searching in the most protected depths, and little by little everything that Kafka
say for itwhat he liked, what he disliked, is a book, in the greatest disorder, in an
abundance of commentaries, themselves disordered, contradictory, respectable, cheeky,
tireless, and such that the most impudent writer would hesitate to resist such curiosity in
comparison.
However, there is nothing to approve of in this awful time. It turns out the decision
of publishing is hurried, and it will follow that everything will be published. Everything
must appear; this is the rule. Which piece is submitted under this rule, even if it is
repulsive? Since there was the project of the complete edition of works-- it is close to
finished--, the arbitrary and hazardous parts are diminished as much as possible. We would
be familiar with everything, in the order that it is reasonable-- yet always contestable-- to
know it, with the exception of the letters: for example, in several letters, one has already
rejected the passages which bring up certain living causes, yet these quickly disappear.
Already, the ordeal of the war and persecution to the extent it is not necessary to
remember, has wiped out witnesses and the respects which they are due, and it is true, the
testimonies along with an important part of the work, which was already in part destroyed
by Kafka, during his lifetime, then after his death, according to instructions he had left for
Dora Dymant, particularly for the Journal. (The Journal is missing parts in the last part of
his life, since 1923, when he reportedly found peace and reconciliation. We are told this,
but we do not know for certain, and when, reading his Journal we see how differently he
judged himself from the way he was judged by friends and relatives, we ought to realize
that the sense of events which mark the approach of his end that is unknown for the
meantime.)
But who is Kafka? During the beginning of the public exposure of his friends
manuscripts, according to his mediums, and due to his existent fame, which in its
misunderstandings and its falsifications, tried to decipher his enigmatic face; Brod
resolved to write a book for the masses in order to clarify it. A book of biography, but also
of interpretation and commentary where he searched to make amends to the work in a just
light where he desired that it would be seen24. A book of great interest, but concerning the
events of Kafka, necessarily reserved, a bit disorganized and allusive, and the rest quite
incomplete, because its only witness did not know everything. Brod, occupied in
recognizing the grand complexity and central mystery of the genius that resided in his
24

Diary, note from May 3, 1915

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friend, who had always protested with a preference for black against quite somber colors in
those of posterity, was pleased to see this figure and his work.
The other friends of Kafka have otherwise fully recognized, loved, and celebrated in
him a living force, his gaiety, the youth of a spirit that was sensible and marvelously just.
Did Kafka perfectly vanish? wonders Felix Weltsch, and he responds: )t is quite difficult,
and nearly impossible, to see this man who was open to all impressions, whose eyes
emitted a helpless light, as someone in despair. )n a general manner, says Brod, every
person who has formed an impression of Kafka from his writings has before their eyes a
tonality that is essentially darker than those which we personally knew in him." This is why
the biographer recognized having accumulated in his biography all the proper traits to
correct this conventional schema. This is an important testimony that is totally confirmed
elsewhere. But must we forget the other face, "the man in the great shadow;" forget his
profound sadness, his solitude, his remoteness from the world, his moments of indifference
and coldness, his anguish, his obscure torments, his fights that one has carried to the limit
of bewilderment (particularly in 1922 in Spindlermhle)? Who knew Kafka? Why, then,
does he reject in advance his friends judgment of him25? Why is it that those whom he has
known, when they pass from the memory of the young man, sensible and gay, to the work-novels and narrativesare astonished to pass to a nocturnal world, of cold torment, a
world not without light, but where light robs at the same time it lightens, giving hope, but
making hope the shadow of anguish and despair? Why does the person who, in the work,
passes from the objectivity of the narratives to the intimacy of the Journal, descend to a
night that is once again darker, which conveys the crisis of a lost man? Why, the more one
approaches his heart, does one seem to approach an inconsolable center from where at
times a piercing flash bursts forth, an excess of pain and joy? Who has the right to speak of
Kafka without making understood this enigma which speaks with complexity, the
simplicity of enigmas?
After having published and commented on Kafka, and made him the hero of one of
his novels, it happens that Brod, in pushing the double life further away, has sought to
introduce himself to the world of Kafka by transforming what is likely the primary work.
The Castle, making what was an unfinished narrative into a complex piece of theater. A
decision that one cannot compare to that of Gide and J-L Barrault achieving some years
previously, the same work for The Trial. Gide and Barrault have done wrong, assuredly,
wishing to make themselves recognized in the space of theater and the space of ambiguous
dimensions, which is at the time completely superficial, without profundity, as if denuded
of perspectives, but deprived of depth, and, due to this, quite profound, in the world of
infinite bewilderment that was represented by The Trial. Brod seems to have ceased his
more intimate attempt, that of living in the life of a central hero, in bringing him closer, in
bringing also ourselves closer; the life of this timehumanizing it, making of it the
existence of a man who fights with an indiscreet despair, to find work, resources, and
existence, where he can be nothing but an unwelcome stranger.
25

Brod, in absence of a biography, has dedicated to his friend several volumes where he elaborates upon what has happened, except the views,
the beliefs and education of Kafka.

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So Brod has adapted The Castle to a play. Let us set this decision itself aside, though
this manner of having a work pass from one form to another, of creating a work with the
work, and forcing it to be what it cannot, by imposing another space of growth and
development, is a kind of abduction that prohibits the one engaging with it from being too
severe for the enterprises of modern nihilism. Let us set aside the certainty that any
adaptation of Kafkas works, even if it is faithful and because it cannot be too faithful only
to certain instances and not to the concealed whole of the work- which escapes all
faithfulness- must not only falsify the work but substitute a trick version for it, from which
will now make it more difficult to return to the offended truth of the original that is treated
as dead. Lets finally forget the right that any producer has taken upon himself, pursuing
what he believes are dramatic necessities, and adding a conclusion to a narrative that does
not resolve itself; a conclusion that was perhaps in Kafkas mind at a certain moment; a
conclusion that was undoubtedly spoken about by his friend, but which he had never
resolved to write, and which had never entered into the life and intimacy of the work. It
moreover remains that this scene in which we are present at K.s burial, a burial that
symbolically corresponds with his reconciliation with the earth upon which he had desired
to dwell, this scene in which each person comes to throw a word, and a handful of dust on a
body that is finally at rest, is one of the best in the play, although it is Brods invention
entirely, which goes to show that this play would have much to gain by owing nothing to
Kafka. But why did Brod think it beneficial to introduce himself this way to the secret of a
work which he had contributed, more than any other, in keeping intact? Why did he, who
had so forcefully castigated Gide and Barrault for committing an unprecedented error in
their dramatization, change the center of the work in a way that was no less manifest, and
replaced the central character with a character who no longer has anything in common
with him except a kinship of wordsnot in order to elucidate the spiritual meaning of his
actions, but to bring him down to a pathetic human level?
It remains an enigma. Assuredly, the producer wished to make the story work on a
level which according to him was now most capable of reaching us; he wanted us to
comprehend that Kafka was not some bizarre author, the demon of the absurd and the
unsettling author of sarcastic dreams, but a profoundly sensitive genius whose works have
immediate human import. A commendable intention, but what resulted from it?
From the perspective of the story, the complex myth of the land surveyor has
become the unhappy face of a mad without employment and influence, a displaced person,
who does not succeed in being accepted into the community to which he would like to
belong. From the standpoint of the demand that the central hero must face, of the obstacles
he encounters which lie outside him only because he is already completely outside and as if
in exile from himself, on this level the transposition is such that it is a true mockery to pas
k. off as the bombastic character who expresses everything he feels with a spasm of
emotion, as he rages, shouts, and collapses.
There is undoubtedly a huge price in trying to create the human at all costs.
Brod has reproached Barrault-Gide for having made a mockery of The Trial by
turning its hero into a persecuted innocent and the novel into a detective story in which

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the fugitive and detectives pursue each other through the games of a superficial
melodrama. But what criticisms should he not have directed toward himself, someone
who has not only removed from K.s fate a flaw he is perhaps doomed to make, but has
reduced K.s step outside the truth to a coarsely pitiable struggle that is hopeless and weak,
against adversaries who symbolized the modern world--a step that is itself mistaken,
marked by the serious flaw of impatience, yet nonetheless in error, constantly reaching
toward a great goal.
What can be done by a man who is entirely convinced of the necessity of wandering,
a man who, because of an obscure impersonal decision has renounced his native land, and
has abandoned his community, has left behind his wife and children, and has even lost
memory of them? The man of absolute exile, of dispersion and separation? The man who no
longer has a world and who, in absence of a world, still tries to find the conditions of a
genuine home? This is K.s fate, of which he is very conscious. )n this he is quite different
from Joseph K., who in his negligence, indifference, and satisfaction of the man provided
with a nice situation, does not realize that he has been rejected from existence and whose
entire trial is a slow coming to terms with this radical exclusion, this death by which from
the start, he has been stricken.
This spirit of the work has disappeared from Brods play as the result of a spell;
under the show of pathos and humanity, everything that makes it so poignant and indeed
so human has vanished, but the emotion is one that slips away, refusing the cries, the
vehemence, and futile complaints, and which passes through a silent refusal and a certain
cold indifference related to the loss of all inward life, the initial wound that allows us to
understand the search that drives the work.
)n such a way that everything that could have been positive in the work has
disappeared from Brods playnot just the background of the Castle, which no longer
offers even a direction to the efforts of the exhausted vagabond (the Castle appeared, at
most, as an arbitrary collection of power, a quintessence of authority and stinginess, under
whose influence and fear the larvae of the village develop their own tyrannical activities
and moreoever, everything which radiates from the force of the level of powerlessness is
lost; a concern for truth in the depths of distraction, an inflexible determination in the loss
of self, a clarity in the empty and vague night in which everything has already disappeared.
Why does this happen? Why is it that Brod, who is so convinced of the non-nihilistic
meaning of the work, has emphasized only its trivial and unhappy side?
One of his mistakes is having intentionallyout of concern for humanity and
realityreduced the myth of The Castle to the story of a man who searches vainly, in a
foreign land, for employment and the good fortune of a stable family. Is this what K. wants?
Without doubt, but he wants it with a will that is not content with it, an avid and
dissatisfied will that always exceeds the goal and reaches beyond it. To misjudge the nature
of his will, this need to wander, which in him is extreme, is to place oneself in the position
of understanding nothing about even the superficial fascination of the narrative. For
otherwise, how can we explain that every time K. has attained a result, he pushes it away

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rather than holding onto it? No sooner that he obtains a room at the village inn, does he
wish to stay at the Herrenhof. No sooner does he obtain a job at the school that he neglects
it and condescends toward his employers. The innkeeper offers him her intervention,
which he refuses; the mayor promises his kind support, which he does not want. He has
Frieda, but also wishes to have Olga, Amalia, and (anss mother. And finally, when he
receives an unexpected interview from the secretary, Brgel, during which the latter gives
him the keys to the kingdom, an hour of grace when everything is possible, the slumber
he then slips into, causes him to pass up this offer and is just another form of the
dissatisfaction that always presses him to go further, never say yes, and to keep a part of
himself reserved, secret, and insatiable by any visible promise.
In a small fragment that does not belong to the edition of The Castle, but which
obviously refers to the same subject, Kafka writes: When you want to be introduced to a
new family, you seek out a common acquaintance and ask this person to mediate for you. If
you do not find this mediator, you are patient and wait for a favorable occasion. In the small
country where we reside, such an occasion will not be missing. If one is not found today, it
will be found tomorrow, and if not found at all, you will not rock the columns of the world
for so little. If the family can get by without you, you can do without them as well. This is
obvious, and yet K. does not understand. He has recently gotten the idea to make his way
into the family of the master of our estate, but he has refused to utilize the ways of societal
life, and wants to attain it directly. Perhaps the usual way seems too cumbersome to him,
and this is right; but the path he is trying to follow is impossible. )ts not that ) want to
overstate the importance of our master. An intelligent, industrious honorable man, but
nothing more. What is it that K. wants from him? A job on the estate? No, he does not want
this, he himself has property and lives free of such worries Is it then that he loves his
daughter? No, no, he cannot be suspected of this.

K., too, wishes to reach his aimwhich is neither employment (which he

nonetheless desires) nor Frieda, to whom he is attachedhe wants to reach it without
passing through the tedious paths of patience and measured sociability, but directly, an
impossible path with which he is unfamiliar, and furthermore, which he can only sense, and
which leads him to reject all other routes. Is it thus his mistake, a romantic passion for the
absolute? In one sense, yes; but in another, not at all. If K. chooses the impossible, it is
because he was excluded from everything possible with an initial decision. If he cannot
make his way in the world, nor borrow, as he would like, the normal means of life in
society, it is because he has been banished from the world, doomed to exile where there is
no place to stay. Wandering is his law. His dissatisfaction is the very movement of this
error- it is the expression, the reflection, and itself is essentially false; yet, nonetheless,
constantly progressing toward error is the only hope left for him, the only truth he must
not betray, to which he remains faithful with a perseverance that thus makes him the hero
of inflexible obstinacy.
Is he right? Wrong? (e cannot know, and we dont know. But he suspects that all the
opportunities offered him are temptations from which he must escape, all the more they
are advantageous: the innkeepers promise is doubtful; the mayors benevolence is

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malicious; and the small job he is offered is a trap designed to capture hm. )s Friedas
affection sincere26? Was it not the mirage of his half-shadow, the grace which through the
interstices of the law that Brgel, the smiling secretary stands toward him? 27
All that is attractive, fascinating, and true; but true as any image can be, illusory as
an image can be, if one attaches oneself to it by this exclusive devotion where the gravest
perversions of idolatry are born.
Kafka senses that everything outside himselfas he himself is projected outsideis
only an image. He knows that one cannot trust images nor become attached to them. He is
strong with a power of measureless contestation, whose only equivalent is a measureless
passion for a single, indeterminate point. If this is his situation, if, in acting with this
impatience, he is only obeying the rigorous monism that animates him, where does it come
that this impatience is exactly his flaw, as negligence is the flaw of Joseph K.? It is because
these images are nonetheless images of the purpose. They participate in its light and
misrecognizing them is to already have become blind to what is essential. The impatience
that escapes the temptation of figures also escapes the truth of what they figure. The
impatience that desires to go straight to the goal, without passing through the
intermediaries, succeeds only in having the intermediaries as a goal and in making of them
not what leads to the goal, but what prevents one from reaching it: obstacles that are
infinitely reflected and multiplied.
Would it then suffice to be discreet, patient, and to follow the advice of the
innkeeper, to remain besides Frieda with a peaceful and friendly heart? No, for all of this is
but an image, the void, the unhappiness of the imaginary, loathsome phantasms born from
the loss of self and all authentic reality.
K.s death seems to be the necessary end of this progression in which impatience
pushes him to the point of utter exhaustion. In this sense, the fatigue from which Kafka has
intimately sufferedfatigue, coldness of the soul no less than of the bodyis one the
forces of the imagination and more specifically one of the dimensions of the space where
the hero of The Castle resides, in a place where he can only wander, far from all conditions
of true repose. This fatigue that the actor, too vigorous for the role, has tried to represent in
the play with a spectacular exhaustion does not, however, signify the fatal misstep toward
failure. It is itself an enigma. Undoubtedly, K tires himself out because he goes back and
forth without prudence and patience, expending himself when he should not, in activities
destined not to succeed, and having no remaining strength when he needs it to succeed.
26

In a later chapter Pepi, Frieda's replacement who tries to seduce K., explains to him at great length the conspiracy in which Klamm's girlfriend
has engaged herself by throwing herself around the neck of a stranger, to attract suspicion with a scandal and reclaim a bit of the prestige that her
weak physical traits and disagreeable character have caused her to lose. Furthermore, is she Klamm's girlfriend? Everything leads one to think
that this is a rumor cleverly concocted by ambitious Frieda. Such is Pepi's point of view, in keeping with her own miserable little existence. K.
himself puts no faith in it, though he is tempted to find refuge in the underground passageways of a sad servant's life. "You are mistaken," he
says. In the final pages, he tries, not without success, to strike up a new plan with the wife of the innkeeper of the Herrenhof. Thus everything
begins again, but his incessant re-beginning of situations also shows that everything is stuck, even the book, which can only interrupt itself .
27

In a fragment, an observer from the village mocks what he calls "the adventure" that K. has had with Brgel, He says, It is all too comical that
it had to be Brgel. Indeed, Brgel is the secretary of Frederic, an official of the Castle, who has fallen into disgrace for some time, and no longer
has any influence. This is all the more good reason for it to be Brgel, who is a secretary of the lowest rank.

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This fatigue, the effect of a dissatisfaction that refuses everything, that refuses everything,
the cause of the stupor that accepts everything, is thus another form of the bad infinity to
which the wanderer is doomed. A sterile fatigue, which is such that one cannot rest from it,
such that it does not even lead to a rest that is death, because for the one who, like K., still
exhausted, continues to act. He lacks this bit of strength that would be necessary to find the
end.
However, at the same time, this lethargy, which is secret, furthermore; which he
does not display; and which he conceals on the contrary through the gift of discretion that
belongs to him--would it not also be the sign of his condemnation, the way of salvation, the
approach of the profundity of silence, the sweet and insensible sloping toward deep sleep, a
symbol of unity? It is at the moment he is exhausted that he holds the meeting with the
secretary in which it seems to him possible to reach the goal.
This occurs at night, as do all interviews that come from there. Night is required; the
deceiving night, the pleading night where the mysterious gifts are swallowed up in
oblivion. So what is it, in this case? Is it in the exhaustion of fatigue that he must miss the
marvelous occasion? Or is it in the consolation and grace of sleep that he could approach it?
Undoubtedly it is one and the other. He sleeps, but quite deeply, and it is not yet pure or
real sleep. He must sleep. "Sleep is what is most innocent, and the man without sleep is the
one who is most guilty." One must sleep, at the time one must die, not from this
unaccomplished and un-actual death where we are contented with our quotidian
weariness, but in another death, unknown, invisible, unnamed and elsewhere inaccessible,
where it seems in the meantime that K. arrives, but not in the limits of the book: he arrives
in the silence of the books absence, which Brods play, by a supplementary punishment,
has unfortunately come to disturb.

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Chapter Seven - Milenas Check, 1954

Milena was a sensible and intelligent young lady, whose friends compared to
Matilda de la Mole or Sanseverina. She belonged to a very old family from Prague, and by
her love for life, liberty of her preferences, the vehement mastery where she demonstrated
following her passions fully, without dread and scrupules, while nonetheless a devoted and
generous friend, exerting her generosity without accounting for everything that she had
and everything she wasshe seemed to leave the impression of one of these chronic
Italians from whom Stendhal had borrowed several of his great female characters. She was
also strongly cultured. They say she wrote with talent and had translated certain Czech
works by Kafka which were discovered around 1920. He found himself in a friendship with
her which soon resulted in a greatly passionate sentiment, and this sentiment, immediately
happy, soon exhausted in torment and despair. It seems that this episode was unique in his
life. It was the only relationship in which he found passion in its captivating aspect, along
with its storms and force of tempest. The engagements which he annulled twice with Felice
Bauer, the woman from Berlin, were perhaps taken up again, because he was so young that
he had thus become aware of the intensity of his contradictions, of his solitary vocation, of
his desire to strike away solitude with marriage, and by this marriage and the duties of
community, to also assure his spiritual salvation. But he has himself marked the limits of
his sentiments, noting in his Journal: "The sweetness of relations that one can have with a
loved woman, as in Zuckmental or in Riva, I have not ever had with F. beyond letters, but
simply an unlimited admiration, submission, compassion, despair and self-contempt"
(January 24, 1915)28. In 1920, he gets engaged a third time with a young girl from Prague to
whom he seems a bit attached, and leaves quite brusquely to be agreeable to Milena. Later
on, one knows that he meets Dora Dymant, who stays with him to the end: a union that is
undoubtedly privileged, although death has already seized it.
Why had he loved, or not been able to love Milena? In 1920, when he travels from
Merano in order to fight tuberculosis, he starts to write in a ceremonious, but also flattering
manner, and with the desire to please him, it is he, it seems, who goes before her. Quickly,
as far as one can recognize from an incomplete and undated correspondence 29, "Dear
Madame Milena" becomes "Milena," and "tu" replaces "vous," but, already, it is the young
woman who has taken initiative, and, with her promptitude of decision, her vibrant force,
her passionate knowledge-- he is thirty-eight years old, she twenty-four, but of infinitely
richer experience--she speeds up events and, it so happens, Franz Kafka saw himself
delivered to a grandiose sentiment before which he retreats, frightened. She wrote to him:
"You are frightened by what has fallen into your arms;" and he returned to her with his
28

The note again in July 1916: "I have never once again trusted a woman, save in Zuckmantel. Since again with the Swish of Riga. The first was
a woman, myself not knowing anything, the second a baby, myself distraught completely. The young girl of Riga was Christian and he says of
her, at the moment they met, in October 1913: "The stay in Riga has held great importance for me. For the first time I have understood a young
Christian girl and lived in her circle of action."
29

Letters to Milena, published and post-faced by Willy Haas (a friend of Milena), under the direction of Max Brod, editors S. Fischer Verlag in
Frankfurt and Schocken Books, New York.

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delicate sincerity: terrified, yes, as were the prophets, "Weak children who understand how
the voice called them. They were terrified and did not want it." Milena lives in Vienna; she
is married, but her marriage is in part undone, already once broken, and later again,
definitively. Kafka must leave Merano to begin his life in Prague once more. She asks him to
pass Vienna, a proposition from which he recoils in fear; she insists, he refuses with
increasing anxiety. "I don't want to (Milena, help me...), I do not wish to (it is not from
stuttering) to go to Vienna, because spiritually I would not resist the effort. I am spiritually
sick, the sickness of the lungs. It is only the spiritual malady which has left its shore..." "I
would not certainly come, but yes, to my startled surprise, I nonetheless had to find myself
in Vienna-- this did not arrive-- I did not need lunch or dinner, but rather a stretcher on
which to lie down for a moment." Thus Milena's passionate force unleashes, her letters
becoming outrageous, penetrating the room of her correspondent "with a whistle of
seduction." This vehemence, spontaneous, but which she also directs, adroitly, seized Kafka
to the end: it immediately prolongs his stay in Merano, since he decides to come to Vienna,
where he remains four days.
The two last journeys left him in great hope of happiness. Back in Prague, he writes
to himself of letters which illuminate a raving sentiment. "And, despite everything, I believe
it sometimes: if one can die of happiness, it must happen to me. And if some of our destiny
to die, can, from the force of happiness, remain in life when I would remain in life."
Meanwhile, there are obstacles: she is Christian, but is it an impediment? Not for one who is
already married to a Jew30, and not for Kafka who does not feel separated from her by this
trait, but only more anxious before Milena's youth, while being younger than her he is free
of the heavy charge of the times which weighed upon a Jew. She is married, but in her
letters, this spouse seemed to be the obstacle which captures them, it seems, since she was
already once separated and since later they will separate definitively in mutual agreement
which Milena has not hesitated to make himself free if other difficulties had not been
overcome. What divides them, then? One day, she asks him to come to Vienna, and so that
he obtains the brief hiatus he needed, she suggests to him to address a letter to the office
with these words: "Aunt Clara gravely sick." An innocent subterfuge, but Kafka cannot lie;
he wished to, but he cannot; the office "is a living being which looks at me, or where I exist,
with its innocent eyes, a being with which I have not found related to a manner unknown to
me, while it should be more unfamiliar than the men who at this moment pass in an
automobile on the boulevard. It is also more foreign to the point of absurdity, but precisely
this demands attention... and so I cannot lie."
This incident reveals part of what separated them. Milena gives all privilege to her
passions, she does not know what she desires, and what she desires suffers no hesitation,
division, limits. They meet once more in Gemnd for several hours, and this encounter is
not happy as in Vienna, for she does not bring them together, but on the contrary, separates
them almost irreparably. Later she intervenes in bizarre intrigues. At the same time Milena
was jealous of Kafka's fiance, Kafka was jealous of Milena's friends who tried to turn her
30

Meanwhile, this marriage had been strained due to family.

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treacherously from him. These misunderstandings result in misunderstandings. There

becomes less of it because Kafka takes note of his destiny which makes of him an animal of
the forest, a stranger to worldly life. In vain, the young woman tries to make projects of the
future, by appeasing his distress and giving him hope; in vain, she seeks to maintain, at the
least, contact through letters almost daily: she faces herself, in him, in the intransigence of
despair, in the strength of solitude, in the ferocious desire of bringing silence and retiring in
silence. If the force brought about an impassioned exigency in her, she cannot do anything
against this force which now protects the silent intimacy of Kafka. No longer writing, no
longer receiving letters, he sees it, and with their friendship left to break, it is with a
violence that is uncontained except for the trouble he has the strength to wish: "It is
because I call upon you, letting myself be soundless..." "These letters are nothing but
torment, arising from a torment without remedy, bringing nothing but torment without
remedy. Being silent is the unique means of living, here and there31."
Has Milena thus eschewed, despite her impetuosity, the radiant magnificence of her
sentiments, or if it this strength of passion which explains her defeat? One is naturally
tempted to believe it, tempted to say that immediately attracted by the force of the gift
which was given him, Kafka has also been diverted by this force. He has submitted with
fear, with anguish, the outrageous choke, and to the end, when his relations trouble him
more and more, he falls into such a deep torment that he is ready to sacrifice the young
woman to strike away these disorderly movements which take away all rest.
Kafka's relations with the feminine world have always been rather ambiguous: his
stories have given us a sense of them; several notes in the Journal have confirmed this, but
the letters to Milena reveal it to us by demonstrating with what attraction he turned
toward this world, attraction that he submits to by the same reason of the repulsion that he
demonstrates. Milena, a young and open woman, was not made to desire in vain, when
after the journey to Vienna where they had only understood one after the other calmly in
the forest, she sees that he hesitates before a night in Gemnd. She asked him if he was not
seized by a form of anguish. He tells her, thus, his first night. He was 20 years old, he
studied things devoid of sense for his first State exam. It was summer, he was quite hot, he
stood at the window, and, by signs, without exchanging a word, and he communicated with
a young girl employed in a cake shop, situated across the way. He needed to go search for
her that evening, around 8 o'clock, but when he descended, someone else was there. "This
didn't change anything great, I feared the entire world and this man." The young girl
nonetheless made him a sign to follow them, and while she drank beer with her other
companion, he sat at an adjacent table and attended. Finally, the young girl returned home
and Kafka left again in hate to rejoin Kafka, who drove her to a hotel. "All this, even before
the hotel, was attractive, exciting, and abominable. At the hotel, it was not otherwise, and
when, in the morningit was always hot and pleasantwe crossed Karlsbrucke again to
return to the house, I was still happy, this happiness was due to rest, where it left me with
this eternally tormented body, but this happiness arose, above all, from what everything
had not been yet more abominable, yet more dirty. Meanwhile, after having met her once
31

Thus, Milena and Kafka see each other again in Prague. The Journal alludes to it briefly. Milena is dead in the camp at Ravensbruck, on May
11, 1944. Mme Buber-Neumann has spoken in a poignant manner of his companion during this time.

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again, he turned around from the girl in the store at the point of being unable to look at her,
even as she pursued him constantly with eyes that understood nothing. ) do not want to
say that the unique reason of my hostility surely, it wasnt that was that the young girl at
the hotel, in complete innocence, had made a small horror (not the penalty of speaking of
it), had said something slightly dirty (not the penalty of speaking of it), but the memory of it
remains. At this same instant that I had never forgotten it and at the same time I knew or I
believed in knowing that this abominable and dirty thing, outwardly fortuitous, certainly,
but inwardly quite necessary, was in profound accord with everything, and that it was this
abominable and dirty thing (where her small action, her small word had not been anything
but a small sign) which, with an also insensate violence, had precisely attracted me in the
hotel in which, just now, I had taken off my clothes with all my strength. And it remained
like this always. My body, often calm during the years, was newly shaken until it was
unbearable due to this desire of a small, completely determined abomination, something
that was lightly repulsive, punishable and dirty; in the best which arrived to me on this
subject, there was still a small odor, a bit of suffering, a bit of hell."
With Milena, he adds, he has entered another world for the first time: "This is why it
is not only the approach of your body, but yourself, who exercises upon me such a troubling
and soothing effect... Also I had no "anguish" for a night in Gemnd, but only habitual
"anguish"--ah! The habitual suffices..."
Meanwhile, sometime previously, evoking the passing hours in Vienna with Milena
in the forest, when his head rested in the shoulder of the young girl (it is a marvelous page;
rarely was Kafka's language more worthy of happiness), he adds: "But truly, between this
world of the day and "this half-hour in the bed" where in a letter you have spoken to me
with contempt as from a thing of the man (this contempt was certainly there only to
reassure Kafka; at the least, it is the view of the editor of the letters], there is for me an
abyss that I cannot cross, likely because I do not want to. Below, on another side, it is a
thing of the night, in every sense and absolutely, a nocturnal affair; here is the world, I
possess it, and I would need to jump to another side in the night to take possession of it
again?...I needed to go to the other side by a love for occult magic, a bag of tricks, a
philosophical stone, alchemy, an enchanted ring? All this is far from me, and I have feared it
terribly. Wishing to trap that with magic, in the hate of a night, in heavy breathing,
abandoned, possessed, wishing to magically trap what gives you open eyes each day
("perhaps" one cannot have children otherwise; "perhaps" the children also appear
magically. Let's consider this question for a moment). This is why I am certainly
recognizing you (you and everything), and it is why it is quite natural that I am on one hand
extremely calm and extremely agitated, extremely constrained and extremely free; it is also
why, after this trial, I have renounced all other lives. Look me in the eyes!"
Kafka expresses himself with such simplicity, great clarity, and such lucidity, that
one risks being fooled to the extent of understanding what has not been gained except for
another form of expression. If the world of desire is this nocturnal thing for Kafka, where
he speaks with a shudder of horror, he has affirmed enough that he wants to turn away
from it, and he knows well that in belonging almost completely to the night he has bound

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himself to it with this sinister strangeness; this is why he cannot stick to the distance; and
this is why, if he loses himself in penetrating it, he also senses that for the one who like him
is by all means engaged in the complexity of the night, there is a deceiving force, illusory,
tormenting, but perhaps healthy, a source from which he wishes to eagerly drink, with the
greed that forced Joseph K. to quench his thirst upon the fresh face of Mademoiselle
Brstner. For Kafka, writing is still a pact established with the danger of the night: "an
abandon to obscure forces," "an unleashing of forces that were habitually had on edge,"
"impure embraces," all this is at stake, he says, when one writes. "Does one still know
something of it, up there, when one writes stories, in full daylight, in full sun?" "A silent gift,
mysterious gift, but an essentially impure magic--and also something that is trusted more
than Kafka, as if a privileged means of salvation, in this gift and in this magic? Perhaps it is
the same for desire."
)t is in the letters to Milena, that one finds the word anguish most often repeated,
the liveliest expression of the part of him that anguish has obtained from him. It is also in
the letters that he seems sometimes to debase himself, especially when the hope takes
place in despair, as he perishes in a feeling of distraction that is almost without limit, where
excessive expressions seemed suspect in the editor of the letters, Willy Haas. Kafka, before
the young girl and not only at her face, but in everything which revolves around hercan
he truly be convinced of the indigence and ooze that he wanted to represent in her eyes?
Does he not surpass the limits of sincerity? Which of this is just of him, when he also
precipitates himself, with a certain loving pleasure, in the lower regions which he
reproaches himself for having sought to abandon a moment?
It is true that there is a somewhat troubled concern in Kafka, perhaps an enjoyment
of torture that he denounces in himself and which is like a ruse to disarm the sort in
exposing itself, in advance, to his cruelty32. But he does not need to deceive himself any
longer; when he feels tied to anguish, and he says to Milena: "We are married, one and the
other, you in Vienna, me in Prague with anguish, and you are not the only one of us two to
pull through our marriage in vain," it is not only in the poverty of nothingness and the
haunting of the fear that he feels unified, but in the intimacy of what he has richer and
better. He must give reason to anguish, granting what she desires and even more to what
she doesnt want, and if Milena loves him, it is due to this anguish, it is the anguish that she
loves. The most beautiful of your letters... are those where you give reason to my
"anguish, all the while seeking to explain why ) should not be anguished. For myself as
well, even if I sometimes have the air of extinguishing "my anguish" than by interest, it is
the most profound one in me that I probably give reason; yes, I draw from it my
consistency [I am made of it] and it is perhaps what I have the most. And since it is my best
trait, it is also perhaps the only thing that you love. For, out of it, what would there be to
find in me which was worthy of love? But this thing is worthy of love."
"This thing worthy of love," Kafka designates here, but not without fierceness, the
self of selves he is ready to deny, this destiny of disquiet and of torment, which
32

In one of his last letters, Kafka writes: "Yes, torture is extremely important for me. I don't occupy myself with anything other than being
tortured, and the exercise of torture. Why do I do it?"

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undoubtedly obliges him to be aware of himself as one being ruined, shaken by

nothingness, a thing that is thus terrible and makes him tremble, but where there is no less
of what is worthy of love, as if love or desire were the very center, the pure intimacy of
anguish.
In one of his last letters, he describes to Milena what he is and what she is: "It is
something like this: myself, the animal of the forest, I was thus punished in the forest, I was
reclining somewhat in a muddy pit (muddy only due to my presence, naturally); so I see
you in the liberty that arises from it, the most marvelous thing that I have ever seen. I
forgot all about it, I forgot myself, I dressed, anxiously, it is true, in this new liberty, albeit
familiar, I approached myself once again, came up to you, you were quite nice, I snuggled
close to you, as if I had the right to do it, I put my face in your hands, I was quite happy,
quite proud, free, powerful, at home, always anew here: quite at home, but in the depth I
was not yet anything but an animal, I never belonged to anything but the forest, and if I had
lived here freely, it was not by anything other than your grace; without knowledge (for I
have forgotten everything), I read my destiny in your eyes. This could not last. It failed well,
even if you had passed your favorable hand upon me, as you notice my singularities which
the forest had announced, which indicated this origin and my true lineage. Here come the
inevitable speeches about "anguish" which were inevitably repeated, and tormented me
(alongside you, but you in an innocent manner) until my nerves were alive. I was always
forced to see more of that improper wound, that obstacle, that genesis I had everywhere for
you... I was repelled by what I was, in your eyes I fought the end of the illusion, I proved this
fright of dreams (that of driving oneself, as if one had been at home, where one has no right
to be), I had this fright in the same reality, I had to re-enter obscurity, and I could no longer
stand the sun, I was in despair, truly like a bewildered animal, I began to run breathlessly. I
constantly thought, "If I could carry it with me!" and another thought: "Is there an obscurity
where it is?" You ask me how I see: it is in this manner!"
One must try to read this page as Kafka had written it, in thinking that he no longer
had anything to do with the image, in the usual sense of the word, but that Kafka truly
belonged to the depths of the forest and that his world is the world of obscurity which he
does not escape except in momentary grace. Exiled, thus, from the world, from the
Promised Land, excluded from hope, is he condemned to despair? Condemned to the
desert, to the confusion of the profound void, can he not make of this bewilderment his
path, make the desert into the promise of another land, exile into his new lineage? He spoke
of it in a note of the Journal written a bit later33, and to Milena, he also speaks in mysterious
terms which predicted that the animal of the forest sees what was unseen, knows what was
unknown by the happy people of this world: "You can't exactly understand, Milena, what it
has to do with or what it has to do with in part; I myself cannot understand, I tremble only
in the unleashing, I torment myself until I am mad, but what it is, and what one wants the
distance, I don't know. I only know of what one wants in proximity: silence, obscurity,
groundedness, that is my vow, I cannot act otherwise34. It is an unchaining wishes passes,
33
34

January 28 and 29, 1922, in Spindlermhle.

This is Luther's speech: Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. [I stay here, as I cannot do otherwise.]

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passes partly, but the forces which make it emerge trembling in me, before, after; yes, my
life, my being is made of this subterranean threat; if it stops, I also stop. It is my way of
participating in life; if it stops, I abandon life lightly and naturally as closing one's eyes. Was
it not always there, since we knew ourselves, and would you have thrown me a furtive
glance, had it not always been there?
This is why, where Kafka seems to express himself in a manner that is out of
character, and humiliates his genius, what he says has not only the acerbity of a denigrating
force, but shudders as if in reminder, as if in approach from what infinitely surpasses
common experience, a movement which astonishes and scares it, but because it also
predicts the vertiginous force of exaltation for it: "But this is still not the highest point of
astonishment, the most astonishing point. If you wished to go toward me, if you wish it
thenin judging it in musical termsabandoning the entire world to descend toward me,
in such a depth where you would be, one would see nothing more, and one would need to
attend to this purposevery strangenot only in humbling you, but in elevating you in a
superhuman manner quite above, over you, so strongly that you would be perhaps torn
from it, until you'd fall apart and disappear (and thus myself, certainly with you). And this
to arrive to a place which has nothing seductive, where I travel without happiness, without
unhappiness, without merit and without fault, uniquely because one has disposed me
there" (this Letter, it is true, was written before the days of distress, but does not express
less of the same truth: to rejoinder Kafka, where he is, in the depths of obscurity, one must
lower oneself infinitely, but also be elevated, exalted, to the point of disappearing-"strange, strange").
Brod has stated that in The Castle, Kafka had conveyed his relationship with Milena.
There is something quite accurate in this intuition, but is Milena Frieda? Is Klamm her
husband? )s Olga Kafkas fiance, this young simple girl and a bit of defense against with
Milena's jealousy is unleashed with an unjust violence? And Milena's friends, treacherous
friends who speak out against Kafka, do we find them in the figure of the innkeeper woman
where they demonstrated a rather sneaky, rather open hostility? One doesnt know what to
say: the real story does not clarify the work, does not bring it closer to us. Everything one
can predict, is that it is prolonged in the work, not for it to be translated, whether in the
haste of transposition, but to form another experience, irreducible, which is developed
according to her demands and her own goals, an experience that matters less to Kafkas
fate than to the story of his unfortunate passion. Meanwhile, when one reads the letters,
when one remembers The Castle and if one is carried away in reconciling these two worlds,
one is astonished and almost frightened in thinking that this Milena, a splendid figure who
is elevated above everything by Kafka's ecstatic declarations, could well, in the truth of the
work, not have been anything more than this almost insignificant Frieda, without great
traits and without any merits other than what she takes from her union with Klammand
even in this passion, if good, where the letters speak to us in such a way that we are ready
to speak the sublime, as did Stendhal, is she called to become, in the work, in the experience
of the work, these sad relations, these pitiable embraces, without happiness and future,
between a disloyal stranger and unfaithful servant? How could someone who loved Milena
with such an impassioned admiration been able to diminish his sentiments, mastering

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them, piercing them in the day to the point where he found the movement which ought to
have driven K to unite himself with Frieda in a very empty and cold intimacy? Is this then
the truth that one must read beneath these beautiful passionate sentences of the letters?
And this truth does not speak in manner still more cruel than what we would believe of
Milena's check?
It is indeed also this. But in admitting that one is right to want to recapture a
reflection of Kafkas true sentiments in the book, one must push the reading further and not
limit oneself to an analysis of relations of such and such a character. It is the entire work, in
its compact reality, which should speak to us of a tormenting force, obscure, grasping,
which has traversed the real story. Thus, everything changes perhaps, and it is not only the
sorrow of miserable relations that one must note in Kafka's relationship, but also the
radiant mystery of the Castle, and, once again, the excessive passion of a search, never
satisfied, never extinct, which, even there where all the forces lack something, is forced
again, and never renounces. One can also say that The Castle is truly the book of an
extraordinary passion, which through its passion (which is lacking in The Trial), explains
the force which a new day brings nonetheless, for the young man of Merano to the young
woman of Vienna. A great passion, an eschewed passion, because it does not reach its goal
except to surpass it. Kafka, who always speaks of his weakness, has also become aware of
this terrible force, omnipotent, which could seize him (I have moved far away), now,
against all the rules and left to mix up the game, I would also like to occupy the place of the
reign-- I, pawn by pawn, consequently a piece which no longer exists and thus cannot
participate in the gameand since at the same time I would like, perhaps as well, to occupy
the place of the king and even checking altogether, to the point that if I really wanted to, it
would need to arrive by other, more inhumane means." Such is then the passion of Kafka,
this prodigious force that animates him, when he longs for Milena (but more strongly so
that he does not pine for the infinite beyond), and such is also the cold passion of K., himself
pawn by pawn, a figure that no longer exists, who disturbs all the rules, who is outside the
game and still wishes to play and, if he truly wanted, could pass all the goals in a manner
that is inhumane, but, due to this same will that is exceeded; and impatience, infinite
ignorance, he cannot reach anything. He can do nothing.

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Chapter Eight: The Narrative Voice (the "he," the neuter), 1964
I write (I pronounce) this sentence: "The powers of life are sufficient only to a
certain point." In uttering it, I think of something quite simple: the experience of fatigue
that at any moment makes us feel that life is limited; you take a few steps down the street,
eight or nine, then you fall. The limit placed by fatigue limits life. The meaning of life is in
turn limited by this limit: a limited meaning from a limited life. But then there is a reversal
one can discover in different ways. Language transforms the situation. The sentence I utter
tends to draw into the very inside of life the limit that was only supposed to mark it on the
outside. Life is deemed limited. The limit does not vanish, but it receives from language the
perhaps not unlimited meaning that it claims to limit: the meaning of the limit, in affirming
it, contradicts the limitation of meaning or at least displaces it; but by it we risk losing the
knowledge of the limit understood as limitation of meaning. Then how are we to talk of this
limit (speak of meaning), without allowing the meaning to de-limit it? (ere, its necessary
to enter another kind of language, and in the meantime realize that the sentence "The
powers of life..." is not as such fully possible. Lets stick to it, however. Let us write a
narrative in which it has a place as an achievement of the narrative itself. In these two
identical sentences, what is the difference? Certainly it is quite big. I can depict it more or
less like this: the narrative is like a circle that neutralizes life, which isnt to say there is no
relation with life, but a neutral relation. Within this circle, the meaning of what is, and what
is said, is certainly still given, but from a position of retreat, a distance where all meaning
and all absence of meaning is neutralized in advance. A reserve that goes beyond every
meaning that is already signified, without being taken as a richness or a pure and simple
deprivation. It is like speech that does not clarify or obscure.
Very often, in a bad narrative-given that there are bad ones, which is not always
certain- one has the impression that someone speaks in the background and cues the
characters or even the events to talk: an indiscreet and clumsy intrusion, we could say; the
author speaks, a tyrannical and smug "I" still rooted in life and intruding without selfrestraint. True, it is indiscreet-and the circle is erased in this fashion. But it is also true that
the impression that someone speaks "in the background" truly belongs to narrative
singularity and the truth of the circle: as if the circles center were outside the circle,
backward and infinitely far back, as if the outside were precisely this center, which could
only be the absence of any center. Well, this outside, this "far back"-which in no way is a
space of domination or height from which one could perceive everything in a single view
and rule the events (of the circle )-we could say it is the very distance that language
receives as its limit, from its own lack, a distance that is no doubt fully outside, but inhabits
language and in some sense shapes it, infinite distance, so that to stay within language is to
be always already outside it, and that if it were possible to accept this distance, " relate" it
in the sense appropriate to it, one could then speak of limit, that is, bring to the point of
speech an experience of limits and then limit-experience? Seen from this point of view,
then, is the hazardous space where the sentence "The powers of life... could be asserted in
its truth, but where, in turn, all sentences, even the most innocent ones, risk taking on the
same ambiguous status that language takes up at its limit. A limit that is perhaps the neuter.

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) will not return to the subject of the use of personal pronoun in the novel," that has
brought about so many noteworthy studies35. I think I should go further back. If, as has
been demonstrated (in The Space of Literature), to write is to go from " I" to " he," but "he"
when substituted for "I" does not simply designate another me, nor an aesthetic
disinterest-an impure contemplative jouissance that allows the reader and the spectator to
participate in tragedy as a distraction-it remains to find out what is at stake when writing
responds to the demand of this "he" which cannot be characterized. In the narrative form,
we hear-and always as if in supplement to other things-the speech of something
indeterminate, which in the evolution of this form outlines and isolates, so that it shows
little by little, though deceptively. The "he" is the unlit occurrence of what takes place when
one tells a story. The distant counter-epic narrator tells of exploits which are produced, and
that he seems to be reproducing, regardless of whether he saw them. But the narrator is
not a historian. His song is heard, where in the presence of a reminder, comes the speech of
an event which is accomplished: memory, muse, and mother of muses, -contains within it
the truth, that is, the reality of what takes place; it is in the song that Orpheus truly
descends to the underworldsomething we communicate by adding that he descends
there through the power of his singing; but this song, already instrumental, signifies a
change in the narrative account. Recounting a story is quite mysterious. The mysterious
"he" of the epic account divides very quickly: the "he" becomes the impersonal coherence
of a story (in the full and almost magical sense of this word); the story stands alone,
performed in the thought of a demiurge, and as it exists independently, there is nothing we
can do but tell it. But the story soon gets disenchanted. The experience of the disenchanted
world introduced into literature by Don Quixote is the experience that dissolves the story
by contrasting it to the banality of the realby which realism is grasped for a while by the
form of the novel, which becomes the most effective genre of the developing bourgeoisie.
The "he" is then an uneventful everyday life, which happens when nothing happens,
the course of the world such that it is unnoticed, the passing of time, routine and
monotonous life. At the same timeand in a more visible waythe "he" marks the
intrusion of a character: the novelist is a person who refuses to say "I," but confers this
power to others; the novel is filled with little torments, ambitious, unhappy, yet always
satisfied in their unhappiness; the individual is affirmed in his subjective richnesshis
inner liberty, his psychology; the novelistic narration, that of individualitylet alone the
content itselfis already marked by an ideology to the extent that it assumes that the
individual, with all his particular characteristics and his limits, is sufficient to express the
world, that is to say, given that the fate of the world remains that of individual particularity.
So we see that the "he" has split in two: on one hand, there is something to tell, and
that is the objective reality as it is immediately given to the interested gaze, and on the
other, this reality is reduced to a constellation of individual lives, of subjectivities, a
multiple and personalized "he," an "ego" manifested under the veil of a seeming "he." In the
interval of the narrative, the voice of the narrator is heard with more or less justification,
sometimes fictive, sometimes without a mask.
35

I am referring to Michel Butor's Repertoire II (Editions De Minuit).

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What did the surrendering in this remarkable construction? Almost everything. I

will not dwell on it any longer. There is another remark that we should make. Let us
compareall the while remaining aware of the clumsy character of such a process, for it
simplifies to exaggeration, the impersonal nature of a novel such as it is rightly or wrongly
attributed in Flaubert, and the impersonality of a novel by Kafka. The impersonality of the
novel is that of aesthetic distance. The word of order is imperious: the novel must not
intervene. The author--even if Madame Bovary, is myselfdoes away with all direct
relations between himself and the novel; reflection, commentary, and moralizing intrusion
such that it is still authorized, with applause, to become, in Stendhal or Balzac, capital sins.
Why? For two very different reasons that nearly combine. The first: what is told has
aesthetic value to the extent that the interest one takes in it is distanced interest;
disinterestan essential category in the judgment of taste since Kant and even Aristotle
means that an aesthetic act should not be based on any real interest, if it wishes to create
legitimate interest. Disinterested interest. In this way the author must heroically move
away and keep his distance so that the reader or the spectator can also remain at distance.
The ideal stays the representation of classical theater: the narrator is there only to raise the
curtain; the play is really performed since the beginning of time, and as though without
him; he does not tellhe shows; and the reader does not readhe looks, attending, taking
part without participating. The other reason is almost the same, albeit fully different: the
author must not intervene, because the novel is a work of art that exists all by itself, an
unreal thing, in the world outside the world, and it must be left free, removing the
accessories, cutting the moorings, so it can have its status preserved as an imaginary object
(but here Mallarme, who we can say is an entirely different requirement, is already ahead).
For a moment lets consider Thomas Mann. (is is an interesting case, because he
does not respect the rule of nonintervention: he constantly involves himself with what he is
telling, sometimes through intermediary people, but also in the most direct manner. What
about this erratic intrusion? It is not moralizinga stance taken against some characterit
does not consist of illuminating things from outside the swooping thumb of the creator as
he fashions his figures to his judgment. It represents the intervention of the narrator
challenging the very possibility of narrationintervention that is thus essentially critical,
but in the manner of a game, of a malicious irony. Flaubert's form of impersonality, edgy
and difficult, still affirmed the validity of the narrative mode: telling stories was showing,
allowing something to be or making it exist, without there being validity-despite the great
doubts one could already entertain-to interrogate oneself about the limits and the shapes
of the narrative form.
Thomas Mann knows well that our naivet has been lost. So he tries to restore it, not
by ignoring illusion, but on the contrary, producing it, letting it become visible so that he
plays with it, just as he plays with the reader and by doing so pulls him into the game.
Thomas Mann, who possesses a keen sense of the narrative feast, succeeds this way in
restoring it as a feast of the narrative illusion, transforming it for us into a second-degree
deceit, that of the absence of deceit. One could thus say that if aesthetic distance is
denounced in Mann, it is also affirmed by a narrative awareness that is incorporated as a

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theme, whereas in the more traditional impersonalized novel it vanished, placing itself
between parentheses. Storytelling was self-evident.
But storytelling was not self-evident. The narrative act, as we know, is generally
directed by a certain character, not that this character, in telling the story directly, lets
himself become the narrator of a story that has already been lived or is in the process of
being lived, but because he constitutes the center around which the perspective of the
narrative is organized; everything is seen from this point of view. There is thus a privileged
), even if it is merely a character depicted in third person, who takes great pains not to
exceed the possibilities of knowledge and the limits of his position: such is the domain of
James's ambassadors, and it is also the reign of subjectivist formulas, in which the
narratives authenticity depends upon the existence of a free subjectformulas that are
correct insofar as they represent the decision to stick to a given bias (obstinacy and even
obsession form one of the rules that seem to be imposed when there is writing involved
form is obstinate, that is its danger), correct but in no way definitive, because on one side
they wrongly assert there might be some kind of equivalency between the narrative and
the transparency of a consciousness (as though to tell stories were solely to be conscious,
to project, to unveil, and to veil by revealing), and the other hand they maintain the priority
of individual consciousness, which would be only secondly and even secondarily an
eloquent consciousness.
For now, Kafka has written. Kafka admires Flaubert. The novels he writes are
marked by a rigor that would allow a distracted reader to sort them into Flauberts line.
Nonetheless, everything is different. One of these differences is essential to the subject we
are discussing. Distance-creative disinterest (apparent in Flaubert to extent that he has to
fight to maintain it)-the distance which was the writer's and reader's distance from the
work and permitted the jouissance of contemplation, now enters, under the semblance of
an irreducible strangeness, into the very sphere of the work. No longer put into question,
introduced as something denounced, as in Thomas Mann (or Gide), it forms the
surroundings of the novelistic world, the space in which the narrative experience unfolds in
unique simplicity- the experience one does not recount, but which is at stake when one
recounts. A distance which is not only lived as such by the central character, always at a
distance from himself, just as he is at a distance from the events he lives or the beings he
encounters (this would still only be the manifestation of a singular I); a distance that
distances even himself, removing him from the center, since it constantly decenters the
work, by a method that is not measurable and not discernible, at the same time it
introduces in the most rigorous narration, the alteration of another form of speech, or the
other as speech (as writing).
The consequences of such a change will often be misinterpreted. One result, which is
immediately visible, catches our attention. For the reader who up to that moment identified
himself, but from afar, with history in the making (living it by his account in the mode of
contemplative irresponsibility), from the moment that the distant stranger is put at stake
and seems to be the substance of history, he can no longer be disinterested; that is to say,
enjoy it with disinterest). What has happened to him? What new demand has befallen him?
It is not that it concerns him: on the contrary, it does not concern him at all, and perhaps it
does not concern anyone; it is in some way the nonconcerning, but in turn, it is no longer
possible for the reader to take a comfortable distance from it, since there is no way that he

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can situate himself in a justified manner in relation to what does not even present itself as
impossible to be situated. Then how is he to distance himself from the absolute distance
that has in some sense taken up all removal again? Without any support, deprived of the
interest of reading, he is no longer permitted to look at things from afar, to keep between
himself and them this distance of the gaze, for what is far away, in its non-present presence,
is not at-hand either close, or far away, and cannot be the object of a gaze. Henceforth,
vision is no longer what we are dealing with. Narration ceases to be what is presented to
sight, through an intermediary and from the point of view of a chosen actor-spectator as
intermediary. The realm of the circumspect consciousnessof narrative circumspection
(of the "I" that gazes at all around it and stands firm under its gaze)has been subtly
rattled, obviously without coming to an end.
Even if it cannot be directly attributed to him, Kafka teaches us that storytelling
brings the neuter into play.
Narration ruled by the neuter remains in the watch of the "he," the third person that
is neither a third person, nor the simple cloak of impersonality. The "he" of narration in
which the neuter speaks is not content to take the place that is generally occupied by the
subject, whether the latter is a stated or implied "I" or the event as it takes place in its
impersonal signification36.
The narrative "he dismisses subjects, just as it takes away every transitive action or
every objective possibility. It does so in two ways: 1) the speech of the narrative lets us
constantly feel that what is being told is not being told by anyone: it speaks in the neuter;
2) in the neuter space of the tale, the bearers of speech, the subjects of the action-who used
to take the place of characters-fall into a relation of non-identification with themselves:
something happens to them, something they cannot hold again except by giving up their
power to say "I" and what happens to them has always already happened: they can only
account for it indirectly, as though in forgetting themselves, this forgetfulness that
introduces them into the present without memory which is that of narrating speech.
Rest assured, this does not mean that the narrative necessarily tells of a forgotten
event or the happening of the forgetfulness under whose dependence, separated from what
they arewe could even say, alienatedmove as though in their sleep to try to catch up
with themselves.
It is the taleindependent from its contentwhich is forgetfulness, so that to tell a
story is to put oneself to the test of this forgetfulness that precedes, opens, and destroys all
memory. In this sense, storytelling is the torment of language, the incessant search for
infinity. And the narrative is nothing but an allusion to the initial detour brought by
writing, which carries writing away and that encourages us, as we write, to submit to a kind
of perpetual detour.
Writing, this relation to life, a deviating relation by which what does not concern us
is affirmed.

36

The he does not simply take the subjects traditional place; as a moving fragmentation, it changes what we mean by space,

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The narrative "he," whether absent or present, whether affirmed or hidden, and
whether or not it alters the conventions of writinglinearity, continuity, readability
indicate in such a manner the intrusion of the otherunderstood as neuterin its
irreducible strangeness, in its twisted perversity. The other speaks. But when the other
speaks, no one is speaking, because the otherwhom we must refrain from addressing
with a capital letter that would establish it in a majestic substantive, as though it had some
substantial presence, or even a unique one, is never just simply the other; rather it is
neither one thing nor the other, and the neuter that marks it withdraws it from both, as
from the unity, always establishing it outside the term, from the act, or the subject where it
claims to be. The narrative voice (I do not say narrating) draws its lack of sound from here.
It is a voice that has no place in the work but does not hover over it either, far from falling
out of some sky under the assurance of a superior Transcendence: the "he" is not the
"encircling" of Jaspers, but rather a kind of void in the workthis absence-word that
Marguerite Duras describes in one of her tales: "a gap-word, hollowed out in its center by a
gap, this gap in which all the other words ought to have been buried," and the text goes on:
"One could not have spoken it, but one could have made it resound--immense, endless, an
empty gong...37 This is the narrative voice, a neuter voice that speaks the work from this
place without placewhere the work holds its tongue.
The narrative voice is neuter. Let us quickly examine what traits characterize it at
first glance. On one hand, it says nothing, not only because it adds nothing to what there is
to say (it knows nothing), but because it lies beneath this nothingthe "silencing" and the
"being silent"where speech is here and now already engaged; thus it is not heard, firstly,
and everything that gives it a distinct reality starts to sell it out. Then again, without its own
existence, speaking from nowhere, suspended in the whole of the narrative, it is not
dissipated there either, as in the form of light which though invisible, makes things visible;
it is radically outside and comes from exteriority itself, the outside that is the singular
enigma of language in writing. But let us also consider other traits, which are the same as
the others. The narrative voice which is inside only to the extent that it is outside, at a
distance without any distance, cannot be embodied: even though it can borrow the voice of
a sensibly picked character or even create the hybrid function of a mediator (a voice that
undoes all mediation), it is always different from what utters it, and it is the indifferentdifference which alters the personal voice. Let us (whimsically) call it spectral, ghost-like.
Not that it comes from beyond the tomb or even because it may once and for all
represent some essential absence, but because it always tends to make itself absent in what
carries it, and also to erase itself as a center, therefore being neutral in the decisive sense
that it cannot be central, does not create a center, does not speak from a center, but
oppositely, at the limit, the work would be prevented from having a center, withdrawing
from it all privileged focus of interest, even that of a lack of focus, and no longer allowing it
to exist as a fulfilled whole, accomplished once and forever.
Implicit, it attracts language diagonally, indirectly and under this attractionthat of
oblique speechlets the neuter speak. What does that tell us? The narrative voice bears
37

La Ravissement de Lol V. Stein [Gallimard], The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, trans. Richard Seaver, Grove Press, 1966, pg. 38

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the neuter. It bears the neuter in that: 1) Speech in the neuter is speech at a distance,
preserving this distance, without mediation or community, and even while testing the
infinite distancing of distance, its lack of reciprocity, lack of rectitude, and lack of
symmetryfor the biggest distance governed by lack of symmetry, without one or another
of its edges being privileged, is precisely the neuter (one cannot neutralize the neuter); 2)
Neuter speech neither reveals nor conceals. It is not to say that signifies nothing (by
claiming to forgo meaning in the form of a non-meaning), it means that it does not signify in
the same manner that the visible-invisible signifies, but that it opens up another power in
the language, one that is unfamiliar to the power of illumination (or of darkening), of
understanding (or misunderstanding). It does not signify in the optical mode; it remains
outside the light-shadow reference that seems to be the final reference of all knowledge
and communication to the point of making us forget that it has only the value of a
venerable, that is to say, inverted metaphor; 3) The demand of the neuter tends to suspend
the attributive structure of language, its relationship to being, implicit or explicit, that is
immediately suggested in our languages the moment such a thing is spoken. It has often
been remarkedby philosophers, linguists, and political commentatorsthat nothing can
be denied that has not already been brought up before. In other words, all language
enunciates, and in enunciating, affirms. But it could be that the (writing) is drawing
language into a possibility of saying that would say without saying being and still without
denying it eitheror, more clearlytoo clearly, that it is establishing the center of gravity
of speech elsewhere, where speaking is not a matter of affirming being nor of requiring
negation in order to suspend the work of being, the work that normally takes place in every
form of expression. In this respect, the narrative voice is the most critical one that can lend
itself to our ears without being heard. That is why, as we listen to it, we tend to confuse it
with the skewed voice of unhappiness or the skewed voice of madness38.

38

This voice-the narrative voice-is the one I hear, perhaps hastily and perhaps justifiably in the narrative by Marguerite Duras which I brought
up shortly. The night forever without a dawn-that ballroom in which the indescribable event happened, which cannot be recollected and cannot be
forgotten, but one's forgetting holdsthe nocturnal desire to turn around in order to see what belongs neither to the visible nor to the invisible,
that is, to momentarily remain, through one's gaze, as close as one can to strangeness, where the rhythm of revealing oneself, concealing-oneself
has lost its driving force; the need (eternal human desire) to create acceptance in another person, in other words, to live again in another person, a
third person, the dual relationship, intrigued, disinterested, irreducible to any mediation: a neuter relationship, even if it implies the infinite void
of desire-finally the imminent certainty that what has happened once will always start up again, and will always betray itself and reject itself:
these really are, it seems to me, the "coordinates" of narrative space, the circle which, in entering, we constantly enter from the outside. However,
who here is really telling the story? Not the reporter, the one who formally and also sheepishly does the speaking, and actually assumes authority,
to the extent that he seems to us an intruder, but actually he is something that cannot tell a story because as its wisdom and madness, it carries the
anguish of impossible narration and knowledge that precedes the reason-unreason schism) under the extent of this outside, where in attaining it,
we risk falling under the seduction of a completely exterior speech: sheer extravagance.

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Chapter Nine: The Wooden Bridge (The Repetition and Neuter), 1964
If all narratives, by the mention of the neuter, are already the site of extravagance,
we understand why Don Quixote, in a quite visible manner, ushers in the tormented era that
will be ours, not because it unleashes a new sort of freakishness, but because it relies
ingeniously upon a single act of telling stories, it engages in "extravagance" and, in the same
move, puts to the test (denounces) something which, we will then, perhaps momentarily,
call literature39. What is Chevaliers madness? )t is ours, and everyone's. (e has read much
and he believes what he reads. He decides, with a mind of exact coherence, loyal to his
convictions (he is by all means a dedicated man), to abandon his library and live rigorously
by his books, in order to learn if the world corresponds to literary fantasy. Thus we
undoubtedly have for the first time, a work of creation which is deliberately passed off as
imitation. The hero who is the center of it all to present himself well as a character of
action, who like his peers is capable of prowess in accomplishment. What he does is always
already a reflection, but at the same time he himself can be nothing but a double, while the
text where he speaks of his exploits is not a book, but a reference to other books.
After reflecting upon this, we see that if there is madness in Don Quixote, there is
even greater madness in Cervantes. Don Quixote is not reasonable, although he is logical,
and if he thinks that the truth in books is also good for life and sets out to live as in a book,
it is a marvelous and deceiving adventure, since literary truth is deceptive. For Cervantes,
things become otherwise, because for him, it is not in the street that Don Quixote is forced
to descend after placing into practice a life of books; it is once again in a book that he has
striven to do this. What does he hope to prove and to prove of himself? Does he takes
himself as his hero, who, on one hand, views himself not as a man, but a book, and pretends
for the meantime not to be read, but to be lived? A surprising madness, a laughable and
perverse derision that conceals all culture, but which is also its hidden truth, without which
it would not be raised, and upon which it is majestically and futilely edified.
Let's approach things more simply from another perspective. We have read a book,
and we comment on it. In commenting, we perceive that this book is none other than a
commentary, the setting in the book from other books, to which it returns. We write our
commentary, and elevate it to the level of a work. It becomes a published and public thing,
and in turn it will attract commentary, which, in turn... (so on and so forth). We recognize
that this situation pertains to us quite naturally, and that it seems to have had a lack of tact
in formulating it in its own terms. It is as if we would divulge, in a kind of ill pleasure, a
family secret. We ought to avow indelicacy. But I take as one of the great merits of a work
by Marthe Robert, this interrogation to which it drives us, a frightening or double
interrogation that is twice-formulated: how much of it is a word of commentary? Why can
we talk of such a speech, and, whats more, can we do it, save to have it here, injuriously, as
39

In a very visible manner, However, in the work that is dedicated to Quixote, then a second part of The Castle by Kafka, it is Martha Robert
who, in pursuing a reflection on literature through the means of two books, has uncovered, mostly as a totally other commentator, the devastating
undertaking of Cervantes by something that the Age of Gold of Beautiful Letters has its end, or begins ending. I re-invoke this rich work, The
Ancient and the New; From Don Quixote to Franz Kafka (Garcett); where I "redouble" the movement here.

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silence; that is to say, to have the work, the good master of the work that we revere for
being incapable of speaking for himself? Consequently, what would happen to these works
of creation which would be their own exegesis to themselves? Do they reveal a poverty of
literature, the event of a civilization of decadence, delayed and exhausted, the "sentimental"
fastidiously repeating the "naive," or should they not be further distanced, but placed closer
to the literary enigma, no longer reflected, but further inside the movement of thought, and
in this manner, do not redouble literature, but are accomplished in virtue of a more original
redoubling that precedes it, and involves the presumed unity of "literature" and "life"?
A word of commentary: it doesn't have to do with any critique, in this quite varied
sense, which although confused, is sustained by this word. It has to do with a pretension
which perhaps in effect surrounds all critiques, in repeating the work. But in repeating it, it
is grasping-- understandingin it the repetition which founds its uniqueness as a work.
Yet this repetitionthis original possibility of existing as a double partdoes not reduce
itself to imitation of an interior or exterior model: this model is the book of another writer
or even worldly life of the author, or perhaps the sort of project which in his mind would be
a work already completed, but in theory reduced, and he would be content in transposing it
beyond, in enlarging it, or, again, in reproducing it under the command of a homunculus
inside him who is God. The redoubling supposes a deceit of another kind, something that a
work speaks, speaks by keeping something silent (but not by a secretive affectation: the
work and the author should always say everything that they know; this is why literature
cannot stand any esotericism which would be outside it; the only secret doctrine of
literature, is literature). Furthermore, it says this in silencing itself. There is in it an
emptiness of the person who constitutes it. This lack, this distance, unexpressed due to
being recovered by expression, is something from which the work, said once, perfectly
spoken and incapable of being restated, strives irresistibly towards being restated,
denigrating this infinite speech of commentary, where, separated from itself by the
beautiful cruelty of analysis (which, in truth, does not separate it arbitrarily, but in virtue of
this separation which already works within it, would be a non-coincidence that would be
its very light heartbeat), it awaits for an end to the silence it deserves.
A wait that is naturally disappointed. Repetition of the book through this
commentary is this graceful movement by which a new speech, introduced in the lack
which makes the work speak, a new speech and meanwhile the same speech, pretends to
fill and to satisfy it. An important speech: one goes to the end knowing what one
approaches, and one will know that what lies beneath the Castle and the phantoms of Tour
of Ecrou are nothing but phantoms born in the feverish head of a young woman. A
revelatory and usurping speech. Forit shows too wellif the commentary mentions all
the interstices, or even, with this omni-speaking speech, it completes the work, but renders
it mute, having erased its space of resonance and, consequently, in turn, is itself struck
mute; or, it is content in repeating the work, in repeating it from this distance which is its
reserve, not in obstructing it, but on the contrary in leaving it empty, that it is designated in
circumscribing it most distantly, that it translates it in its ambiguity by an interrogation
that is all the more ambiguous, since it carries an ambiguity that is in turn carried upon it
and ends by being dissipated in it. Then to what good do we comment?

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Yes, to what good? Always, the phrase "to what good" is superfluous as well;
whether we deem it unsuccessful or dangerous, the necessity of repetition can by no means
be eluded, since it would not superimpose the work and is not imposed by the sole habits
of social communication. When the commentaries have not again imposed their reign, for
example in the times of the epic, it is in the interior of the work that the redoubling is
accomplished, and we have the mode of rhapsodic compositionthis perpetual repetition
from episode to episode, a development of place, an interminable amplification of itself-which forms not a loyal reproducer from each rhapsody, an immobile thing that repeats,
but something which carries repetition beforehand, and, by it, fills the voids or widens
them by the means of new events, work, a cavern of fissures, and, finally, from the strength
of satisfying the poem, stretches it toward volatilization. A mode of repetition that is no less
compromising than the other. The critique is a sort of rhapsody, and this is what it must
see; to distract it from this power of being repeated, that it takes from its origins, and
which, allowing it to do so, risked undoing it indefinitely; or, once again, an emissary that
one sends to the confines of the literary space, loaded by all the offensive versions of the
work, so that while remaining intact and innocent, it is affirmed in the single example taken
to be authenticwhich is elsewhere unknown and perhaps nonexistentthe unique work
conserved in its archives of culture, which is not complete, as though it lacks something, an
absence which is its infinite relation with itself, an abundance of its default mode.
But then, what part of it comes from these modern works which would be their own
commentary and do not simply return to what they are, but to other books or, at best, to
the anonymous, incessant, and obsessive movement, the source of all his books Do his
works, also commented upon from within (as with Don Quixote, which is not only an epic
poem, but the repetition of every epic, and consequently, still its own repetition-- as well as
derision), by the act, which in telling of them, speaks of them in the second degree, not
risking (if it is a risk: a chance, rather) making difficult or impossible the exercise of every
other commentary? Yes, wont the proliferation of such works not entail such an end of
critique? The response is reassuring: it is actually the contrary. The more a work is
commented upon, the more it calls upon commentaries; the more it converses with its
center of relations of "reflection" (of redoubling), and the more it is made enigmatic due to
this duality. Such is the case with Don Quixote. This is the case, once again with more
evidence, for The Castle. Who does not remember this, or feel guilty of having added to it?
Which abundance of explications, which madness of interpretations, which fury of exegesis,
which are theological, philosophical, sociological, political, and autobiographical, forms of
analysisallegorical, symbolic, structural, and evenliteral? Which is essential: each one
not being usable except for the person who has forged it and not opened a door except to
close the others. From where does this delirium come? Why has the reading never satisfied
the one who reads, and never stopped replacing it with another text which in turn
provokes another?
This is what Marthe Robert states; and it happens in Franz Kafka's book as in that of
Miguel de Cervantes. It isn't formed by an immediate tale, but by the confrontation of this
narrative with those of the same type, some of them old, some original; significant, or
dissimilar in style, which occupy in advance the literary area which he also wished to take

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place. Said otherwise, the Surveyor does not survey imaginary or still virgin encounters,
but rather the immense space of literature such that one cannot prevent oneself in
imitating-- and reflecting-- all the heroes who have preceded in this spaceso that The
Castle is no longer solely the unique work of a solitary writer, but like a parchment where
all the versions of a millenary adventure, at times distinct, can be read, juxtaposed, and
entangled, summoned and resumed from the Universal Library where one sees K.s hero
rather than a novel of mores (a misfired one which seeks to fulfill it with women), rather
than a novelette (the hero of a great heart who defends the weak in the face of tyranny
from a privileged caste), rather than a fairy tale, and, more precisely, of a new cycle of the
act of King Arthur, in waiting to find his true role which is that of repeating The Odyssey,
succeeding Ulysses, proving the epic of epics and with it the good Homeric order; that is to
say, the Olympian truth. A purpose which Marthe Robert boldly attributes, not to the
fatality of the lecture which condemns all cultivated men in seeing nothing but the crossing
of the decomposing prism of culture, but to Kafka himself, an also strongly cultivated man,
where it says that he was attracted to the Greek success in the critical moment of his life,
during which, converted to Zionism and ready to depart for Palestine, he was given the role
of understanding and classifying the monstrous archives of Western culture from which he
could not exclude his own works.
Let's reflect for an instant, on this remarkable, and I think, wholly original thesis (in
this manner, would it be this, the meaning of The Castle, his last secret? An imitation of The
Odyssey, a critique of Olympian bureaucracy40; this sounds immediately unfamiliar); at least
to welcome or refuse it except to take up the standard again and ask ourselves if it would
not be possible to apply it differently. We admit that the Surveyor is in a hurry, in an
indirect and invisible manner, not only with the forces that represent the Castle and Village,
but, through and behind them, with the supreme instance that is the book and with the
infinite modalities which constitute their approach through oral and written exegesis; thus,
this space of the Book, we know quite well is for Kafka, by the tradition to which he belongs
and the tormented epoch where he writes his tale, a space that is at the same time sacred,
doubtful, forgotten, and has interrogations, etudes, unlimited research, since it is the same
weft of Jewish existence since the millenaries. If there is a world, where, in seeking the
truth and rules of life, one finds not the world, but a book, the mystery and commandment
of a book, and Judaism, where one is affirmed, in the beginning of everything, the force of
Speech and of Exegesis, where everything departs from a text and everything returns there,
a unique book in which a prodigious suite of works is exercised, not only a universal
Library, but something which takes place in the universe and is more vast, more profound,
and more enigmatic than it. Whether stolen or exposed, a writer, in Kafka's situation and
with Kafkas concerns, cannot avoid this question: how can a writer without a command
enter the shut world - sacred - of the written, and how, as an author without authority, did
he pretend to add a speech, which is strictly individual, to the Other Speech, the ancient, the
frighteningly ancient, which covers, understands, and encircles all things, all the while
remaining stolen in the depths of the tabernacle where it may have disappeared; a still
40

Marthe Robert states precisely that "tempted towards being late, as was Don Quixote, by the least donquixote-esque model and the one most
appropriate to once again provide, perhaps, an immediately utile norm, Kafka thus tends to be closely related to the Homeric thought, a task to
which he dedicates his last novel".

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infinite speech, which has always said everything in advance and upon which, since it has
been pronounced, it does not remain for Masters of speech, mute depositors, who have
guarded it in repeating it and to others to listen to it while interpreting it? The writer
needed to movesuch is the irreducible exigencytoward the source of the written, for he
did not begin to write until he succeeded in engaging in a direct relation with the original
speech, but, to approach from this high place, he has had had no other means except to
already speak, that is to say, to write, riskily, by this premature speech, without tradition,
without justification, in once again further obscuring the relations from Speech and Sense,
which were impenetrable for him.
However, I would also add that in bringing up these remarks, I can by no means
propose a new interpretation of The Castle, nor suggest that K. is purely and simply the
writer Franz Kafka, the Castle is the biblical speech, the Offices are Talmudic
commentators, the Village the place for the faithful, where the repeated speech would be at
once living and dead, just like a commandment, authentic if one approaches it from the
inside, but on the contrary deceiving, seen as absurd, if one approaches it from the outside
in pretending to judge it further and speaking without having received prior teachings (as
it necessarily happens to the writer today, who has no legitimacy besides the exigency of
writing, to which he allows neither reference nor caution, all the while he is not at all
content with any relative satisfaction). What is appropriate only to note, is this: First of all,
in writing and posing the question of writing-- one knows with what magnitude and what
seriousness,it is not immediately with the academic space of (omers epic that Kafka has
to be compared, but with three thousand years of Jewish writing; second, that if The Castle,
contrary to Quixote, does not have the previous world of books as its explicit subject (K. is a
Surveyor, this is neither a reader or writer), if he thus does not directly pose the question of
Writing, he meanwhile detains this question in its very structure, since the essence of the
narrative, the essence of K.'s peregrination, does not consist of going line to line, but in an
exegesis of exegesis, from a commentator to commentator, in listening to each of them with
passionate attention, since in intervening and discussing with everything according to a
method of exhaustive examination which it would be easy to reproach with certain turns of
the Talmudic dialectic (lets call it this to simplify and to elaborate that for competent men,
it would be more demanding than where K. is obliged to satisfy himself).
So all of this seems to me what one has the right to put forward. The Castle is not
formed by a series of events where the events are more or less aligned, but by an always
more stretched out course of exegetic exertions, on which they do not carry anything but
the very possibility of exegesisthe possibility of writing (and of interpreting) The Castle.
And if the book halts, incomplete, unable to be completed, it is enlisted in the
commentaries, each demanding moment an endless gloss, each interpretation giving place
not only to a reflection (midrash halachah), but to a narration (midrash haggadah), which
one must understand in his turn, that is so to speak, interpret in different levels, each
character representing a certain elevation of speech and each speech, in its level, speaking
figuratively but not literally. We can affirm that K. was able to end his narrative with his
half-justified death, but in which death was he able to die well? Not in his beautiful death,
but rather in an exegetic death, of the commentary of his death and in the condition of

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having been able, in advance, to discuss and refute all the possible interpretations of this
end, not personal (deprived), but only general (official), recorded in an external text and
eternally forgotten (his march toward death and his march toward speech are on the same
path: march to death by speech and march to speech toward death, each one anticipating
and annihilating the other). One night, the final night of the narrative, when he found
himself completely faced by the possibility of salvation, was he truly before his salvation?
By no means, but he was in the presence of an exegesis of salvation, to which he could not
answer except through his weariness, an infinite weariness to the extent of an endless
speech. And there is nothing derisive here: the "salvation" cannot arrive, and if it does, it
only does so by decision rather than speech, but the speech of salvation assured nothing
but the salvation of speech, valuable only in general (was it as an exception), and thus
incapable of being applied to the singularity of exigency, reduced to muteness by life itself
and weariness of life.
As understood, I would insist once more that The Castle is only this, and it is also the
force of images, the fascination of figures, the decisive trait of the narrative which
constitutes a unique truth such that it seems to always say more than everything one can
say of it, and, by this, it engages the reader, but immediately the narrator, in the anguish of
a commentary without end41. This is where we return to our point of departure which is in
questioning this necessity of recalling what the work contains in it, in its precisely silent
part, in its unknown crossing that sustains this word of commentary, a word of speech, a
vertiginous pyramid constructed above a void--a fallthat is recovered for a while and
perhaps forgotten. Certainly, between the internal and external commentaries, there is an
evident difference: the first utilizes the same logic as the secondthrough literary
41

I stay reserved in newly entering the glosses in which The Castle takes place. One must nonetheless observe that if all the interpretations are
justified (more or less), they cannot be as if maintained on the level where the method in which they are reclaimed have established them and
remains coherent, that is, in showing that they cannot remain this way. At the same time, one can research all the predecessors of the work, all the
myths they repeat, all the books to which they return. But this repetition, true in itself, and for those of us who read it, would not know how to be
the of the same manner, if one decides to make of it the truth of the book as well, such that it was able to be proposed to Kafka himself and like
his future. In reality, we know quite well how the story of the Castle has been borrowed by Kafka from a novel that captivated his adolescence.
This novel, entitled The Grandmother, written by a Czech writer Bozena Nemcova, tells of difficult relations between the Castle and the village
that is dependent upon it. In this village, one speaks Czech; in the Castle, one speaks German, the first trait that distances them. The Castle is
governed by a Princess who is a very lovable person, but is unapproachable: between her and the peasants are a somber horde of villainous
knaves, bounded officials, and hypocritical bureaucrats. And here is the remarkable episode: a young Italian courtier pursues Christel with
diligence, the pretty girl of the innkeepers, and makes indecent propositions toward her. Christel feels lost: her father is a brave man, but timid,
and what can he do against the men of the Castle? The Princess is just, but one cannot reach her or inform her; and furthermore, she is the most
absentee; one never knows where she resides; if the young girl ends by feeling guilty, already touched by this fault that seeks and covets her. The
single hope is in the other functionaries, given that one can succeed in interesting them. "It is, she says, our only hope, since they have questioned
him, they will perhaps help us. But often it happens that one examines an affair, without really arriving to its aid. One simply notes that it isn't
possible and one can never be satisfied." Well, what is the name of this immoral courtier in Nemcovas novel? This is our surprise. He bears the
name Sortini. It is thus evident that we have there, at once, the first input of the Castle and the first sketch of the strange episode of Amalia, and it
is also evident that Kafka, in keeping the name Sortini, wanted to recall the memory of his novel. Naturally, between the two works, the
difference is immense. The Czech narrative is an idyllic one: the grandmother, the central character of the book, breaks the charm, triumphs
obstacles, and gets through to the Princess where she attains justice and reparation for the persecuted. In sum, she succeeds where Kafka fails,
playing the role (as in Max Brod's remark which offers us this information) of one who redresses wrongs that K. refuses, being for the remainder
incapable of assuming it. The comparison of two works helps, I believe, in understanding it: in the work of Kafka, the decisive invention, and the
most enigmatic one, perhaps does not bear upon the Castle, but upon the village. If K., like the grandmother, belongs to the village, his role would
be clear, his character transparent, would be disgusted, and resolved to place an end to the injustices by the high class. He would be the man of
salvation, who vows to symbolically demonstrate the infinite distance between here-below and there-on-high. But K. comes from a third world.
He is doubly and triply a stranger, a stranger of the strangeness of the Castle, a stranger of the village, and stranger of himself, since, in an
incomprehensible manner, he decides to break from his own familiarity, as if in advance drawn toward these relations nonetheless without traits,
by an exigency where he cannot justify himself. From this perspective, one would be almost tempted to say that the entire meaning of the book is
already borne by the first paragraph, borne by the wooden bridge which leads from the great road to the village and upon which "K remained for
a while, lifting glances toward the empty likeness".

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enchantment, it reasons and speaks under a charm; the second speaks and reasons about
this charm and this logic, haunted by and grafted on a charm. Howeverand this is what
forms the strength of a work like The Castleit seems that it stops, as its center, the
relevant, unclear relation from which there is more of the "interior" and "exterior" of the
art which puts at stake a dialectic, and of the dialectic that pretends to encompass art
which, in other words, stops the principle of all ambiguity and ambiguity as a principle
(ambiguity: the difference of identity, the non-identity of the same); principle of all
languages and the infinite passage of one language to another, like art to reason and reason
to art. The outcome is that all the hypotheses that one can develop about this book seem to
be also as exact and impotent as those which develop inside, as long as they are preserved
and sustain infinite character. This is what returns to say that in a certain fashion, all the
books will pass by this book from now on.
Lets try nonetheless to better understand what this means. In general, in reading
this narrative, one lets himself be carried away by the most visible mystery, the mystery
which descends from an inaccessible site which would be the hill of the count, as if the
whole secretthe void from which the commentary is elaboratedwere situated there.
But soon, if one reads more attentively, one perceives that the void is in no way situated
and that it is equally shared by each point of the narrative upon which the interrogation is
directed. Why do all the answers about the relation between K. and the Castle always seem
insufficient, so that they seem to infinitely exaggerate and infinitely devalue the meaning of
this site in which the most reverential and denigrating judgments convene and do not
convene? It is strange: it is beautiful to go pick the supreme designations, those which since
the millenaries, humanity has refined to characterize the Unique, one has often said: "But
the Castle, it is the Grace; the Graf (the account) is Gott, like the identity of capital letters
show; or it is also the Transcendence of Being or the Transcendence of Birth, or it is
Olympus, the bureaucratic birth of the universe42." Yes, one has said everything there and it
can be said, speech in an endless deepening does not remain anything less than the most
profound identifications, the richest and most sublime we could dispose of, while not
refraining from deceiving ourselves again: as if the Castle were always infinitely more than
that, infinitely more, that is to say, also infinitely less. Then what is there above
Transcendence, and what is where below the Transcendence? Yes lets respond hastily,
since only hate authorizes the response), this is in the regard of what all evaluations
denigrate, that it should be the highest or the lowest, and indifferently strikes all possibility
of evaluating and, with it, challenges all the guardians of values, that they should be
celestial, worldly, and demonic and take their authority from the rational, irrational, or
surreal. Is it very mysterious? Certainly, but at the same time, I believe, without mystery,
since each time that we speak, we put it at stake, abandoning it when we force ourselves to
speak, to retreat, to recover by our very expression. We momentarily choose to give it the
most modest, most effaced, most neutral name, in choosing precisely to call it neuter
42

I would incidentally say that for Kafka, the bureaucracy is not solely a late event (as if the gods, the first powers, pitifully achieved their reign
in becoming functionaries), and as neither is it a solely negative phenomenon, no longer that it is the demand of the relation to the spoken world.
To his friend Oskar Baum, he writes something that asks for reflection: "The bureaucracy, quite a judge before me, is the closest to the originally
human nature of the totally other social institution (June 1922, the epoch of The Castle.)

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because in naming the neuter, it is perhaps, or surely dissipating it, but necessarily still to
the benefit of the neuter. In these conditions, have we the right to suggest that the Castle,
the residence of the count, would be nothing more than the sovereignty of the neuter and
the site of this strange sovereignty? Unfortunately, one cannot say this simply, yet the most
profound part of the book, that in the least I correspond to the most, should be where
Marthe Roberts demonstrates that sovereign power here is neither transcendent nor
immanent43; but neuter, restricting itself "by recording actions, and the judgments which
precede and follow them; the thoughts, the dreams, all this with a neutrality and a passivity
that the individual bizarrely resents like a weight and an injustice." An important remark,
maybe a decisive one. We cannot only stick to it, because the neuter would not be
represented or symbolized nor even signified and in addition, it is carried by the infinite
indifference of all the works, and is above all, within it (at the time that the whole world,
says Olga, belongs to the Castle, where it would be necessary to conclude that there is no
Castle), as if it were the point of infinite escape to share some of the spoken word of the
narrative and, in it, all the narratives and all the speech about every narrative receiving and
losing its perspective, the infinite distance of relations, its perpetual reversal, and its
abolition. (owever, lets stop there out of fear of committing ourselves in our turn to the
infinite movement. It remains that if The Castle detains in it as its center (in the absence of
all centers) what we call the neuter, the action of naming it cannot totally be without
consequences. Why this name?
Why this name? Is it really a name? -Is it a figure? -Thus it is a figure which does not
appear to be a figure. -And why a single speaker, a single spoken word that we cannot
succeed despite its appearance, in naming it? There must be at least two people to
speak. --I know. There must be two of us. --But why two? Why two speeches to say the
same thing? --It is always the other who speaks.

43

Truly, Marthe Robert states that The Castle has nothing transcendent and that it constitutes an immanent power. But there cannot be an
approximate manner of speaking. One of the essential traits of the neuter is that it does not let itself grasp things, either in terms of immanence or
in terms of transcendence. Thereby it attracts us to a totally other sort of relation.

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Chapter Ten: The Final Word, 1959

Since they formed the last volume of Complete Works, the "Letters," when published
in the German edition (in 1958), appeared to be the final word of Kafka. We would be ready
to expect final revelations in the ultimate writings which, like the day of last Judgment,
would give a form to the enigma. Hence our naively anxious lecture, infantilely crestfallen.
It does not have the last Judgment, no more than it has an end. The strange character of
posthumous publications is their inexhaustibility.
Surely, due to the war, the persecutions, and the changes of regimes having formed a
void around it, destroying accounts and testimonies, there would have beenand there
will hardly cease beingmany perhaps important, and insignificant documents. Interviews
were conducted concerning his infancy and adolescence, and results were gathered. In a
certain manner, the biography remains to be written44. Until the present, what we know is
the face and the life such that they were known by Max Brod; and this knowing is
irreplaceable. The letters have once again confirmed it: and to no other person was he so
close, related by a firm trust, and I would not say it is such due to the tendency of his
nature. "Max and I are radically different." But it is this difference which create a strong and
virile understanding from their friendship; even if Kafka admires Brod for his life force, his
capacity for action, his strength as a writer, which he places well above him, he is never
humiliated in his face and by their relations, with his passion for self-deprecation that was
known to others. But precisely it has been otherwise with the others; and with himself. So,
who was he? It is this invisible self that remains hidden to us, and remains the object of our
naive curiosity and our necessarily disappointed searching.
The letters span twenty years of his life. If they reveal to us less than we expect,
there are certain themes we can trace. Immediately, they were already partially known,
Brod had utilized them in his biography and his other books. Further, they remain quite
fragmentary, of such publications being always painfully and haphazardly submitted which
conserve and destroy without reason. Also we have almost nothing from letters exchanged
with his family. From his adolescence has been saved a bit by the passionate
correspondence with his classmate, Oskar Pollack, since a bit later with a young girl,
Hedwig W., whom he met in the course of a journey to Moravia in 1907, the first draft of his
tormented relations with the feminine world. Later, the essential is constituted by his
letters with Brod, F. Weltsch, and O. Baum, his lifelong friends (from letters to Werfel,
almost nothing); later once again, with R. Klopstock, the young student in medicine who,
beside Dora Dymant, helped him to the end. The chance is that the poorest years of the
Journal are the richest in important letters: on a journey to Zurau, when the tuberculosis
was declared, upon the journeys to Matliary, to Plana, and the years 1921, 1922, when he
wrote, since abandoning The Castle, we now have the most precise relation; from clarified
allusions, from deepening obscurities, we feel we are confirmed about the mysterious
44

It is this biography that Klaus Wagenbach undertakes to write, a very instructive work (Franz Kafka, A Biography of his Youth, 1958). Cf. the
following text, dedicated to the letters written by Kafka to his first fiance, Felice Bauer, letters excluded from this first volume of his
correspondence following arrangements with editors.

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character of certain moments. The curve of this rare existence lets itself best be predicted,
and the negative of the revelation is most sensible to us.
Still this is nothing which by the force of the unexpected, can be regarded on the
same level as letters to Milena45. Nothing more which gives us the sentiment of being close
to crossing the threshold, as it happens in the Journal. It is such that, if near to what should
happen to his correspondents, in his delivery of what was more secret, speaking of himself
with inexorable frankness, he maintains an insensible distance destined to spare both their
truth and his own. You should not say that you understand me," he repeats to Brod. His
friends are always ready, convinced of his admirable personality, to bring up all the reasons
he has not to despair. But it is precisely this that leads him to despair: not that he was
happy except for a perfect misfortune, but because all too favorable interpretation of what
they recognized the best, shows the inaccessible character of his bad traits (misfortune and
pain), and also shows the profundity of this ill, and the bad courage of solutions where one
rocks them. "What you say for my case is just; out of it, it is presented well also; it is a
consolation, but the moment it arrives, also a despair; for this shows that nothing pierces from
these frightening things and that everything remains reserved in me. This obscurity that I am
only to see in myself is always, already the outcome of the day, and I no longer see t. However,
I know it is there that it awaits me..."
It is necessary to add that Kafka has always had an extreme respect for the truth of
others; he keeps them as far as possible from the hole of the dismal experience where he
stands, and in the advice he gives them, in the judgments that he carries of them, as in the
shining of light gaiety, persuades them of an opening of the expectation that he soon
refuses, since one wants to make them participate. In a late letter to Klopstock (July 1922),
I find the lines "If we were on a right path, renouncing would be the despair without limits,
but since we are on a path that does nothing but drive us to the second, and this one to the
third, and also immediately; since the true way doesn't surge for a while, and perhaps never
will, since thus we are delivered completely to uncertainty, but also to an inconceivably good
diversity, the accomplishment of expectations... remains the always unattended miracle, but in
always possible compensation."
We have here, rarely described by Kafka, the positive aspect of search that is
apparently entirely negative (since the true way which is unique, isn't given to us, and
there is no path, but an infinity, and we have something that is infinitely varied, and
scintillating, the incomparably good scintillation of reflections which procure aesthetic joy
for us), but of this consolation where it takes part in his discouraged friend, I doubt that it
was accepted that one applied it to himself46. Another example. Brod has always placed in
45

I recall that Letters to Milena were published in a separate volume in 1952.

46

He writes to Brod: "The bad opinion that I have of myself isn't an ordinary bad opinion. This opinion constitutes rather well my sole virtue, is
where I never become, never doubt, after having traced it to the reasonable limits in the course of my life: it places in order in me, and myself
who in face of what I cannot embrace soon collapses, it makes me peaceably peaceful." This reflection is from 1912: the bad opinion is again
nothing but methodical, but more circumscribed and measured. "What I have written, is said in the same letter, and has been written in a tepid
bath. I have not lived the eternal hell of true writers." The letters confirm what we present: that the dramatic relations with life start toward the
thirtieth year, at the moment where from one part writing becomes the absolute exigency and where, on the other hand, he meets his fiance. 1912
marks precisely the rupture. Until this point, during the years dominated by his father, it is certainly scintillating and almost light, watched by

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value, as the center of Kafka's madness, this aphorism, "Theoretically, there is a perfect
possibility of earthly happiness: belief in what is indestructible in oneself and not being
forced to await it." But we see, by a letter, that this thought was related by one of Max
Brod's essays (Paganism, Christianity, Judaism): "Perhaps one would be related the most to
your conception, if one said: 'There is theoretically a perfect possibility of earthly
happiness: believing in what is decidedly divine and not forced to be waited upon.'" This
possibility of happiness is also impious that inaccessible, but the Greeks are perhaps the
most related to it than all others. "Would this then be the truth of 'blasphemy'?" This
commentary sufficed to remind us of a prudence that Brod's generous optimism has made
him sometimes forget.
The life of Kafka has been an obscure struggle, one that is protected by obscurity,
but we see it clearly in the four aspects represented by the relations with his father, with
the feminine world, and the three forms of struggle that were re-translated most
profoundly to give form to his spiritual struggle. Naturally, with each of these relations, all
the others are placed in cause. The crisis is always complete. Each episode says everything
and retains everything. The worry of his body is the worry of his entire being. Insomnia,
each dramatic difficulty of each of his nights, expresses all his difficulties. Constructing his
biography around his four most hidden centers has not then been the interest of us to make
momentarily perceived except his lights more or less great that we have of each of his
enigmas, which are of a very different quality. We would find by example that the problem
of his father where he is occupy by a quite visible manner and well that developed with the
three others (we perceive immediately how it complicates the problem of his marriage
extremely, ho it forms one of the obsessive themes of his writings, how finally he finds
himself implicated in all the questions of Judaism), is probably the least charged of secrets
and what he accompanies the least far. The most extended is the problem of the writer. The
most obscure, that of the spiritual world, necessarily hidden, since subtracted in all direct
grasping: "I cannot speak of the essential; it is, even for me, closed up in obscurity of my
bosom it is there that it stands by my illness, on the same common tie."
Regarding each of these forms of himself, the letters carry to us, if not clarification,
at least the possibility of a more prudent and more nuanced comprehension. Above all, we
feel most the movement of all this life which, whatever since the rooted youth in the
extreme statements where he seems to no longer depart and did not cease to be
transformed. It is this movement in the immobile which makes him rich and enigmatic. The
speeches of adolescence, those of the age can seem to be superimposed they are the selves,
they are quite different, and It can well be understood that this history and this movement
are raised in the movement in the literary creation which always remains the truth in
which it tends. To the end, he remained a writer. On his relation to death, deprived of force,
of voice, of breath, he once again corrects the proofs of one of his books (An artist of
hunger). As he cannot speak, he notes on his paper, addressing his companion: "Now, I will
read them. This will perhaps agitate me greatly; it is still necessary that I live this one more
aesthetic pleasure, where for example: "For I am, as I have seen this morning before getting dressed, disappointed for ten years, and only the limit
more or less aligned of this determined despair my humor of the moment. Here I am at the cafe, I have read some pretty things, I am well, and I
don't speak of my despair with enough conviction that I have wished, at my house..." (1908). It is in common with this cry? In the fields, out of
the insanity of my head and my nights. What being I am, what being I am. I torment it, and myself, unto death" (1916).

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time." And Klopstock reports that, his finite lectures, his tears cover his face for a while." It
was the first time that I saw Kafka, always if master of himself, letting himself into a
moment of emotion." The sole and almost hard letter that had taken place in the collection,
he has written it to defend his solitude as a writer. I quote it to show that despite his
marvelous attention to the other, there is a limit that he cannot let pass. Klopstock, this
young student in medicine where he had made acquaintance in Matliary and what he still
likes, almost with tenderness, seemed to desire a closer friendship, wanted to see it further,
found that he had changed since the first days of meeting them: "I concede that between
Matliary and Prague there is a difference. Between times, before having this torment by the
periods of madness, I began writing, and this activity, in a manner which makes it quite
cruel for all people of my entourage (unspeakably cruel, I cannot speak of it), is for me and
that there is more important on the earth, as can "being his delirium for him which is mad
(if he loses, he becomes "mad") or for a woman, her pregnancy. This has nothing to do with
the valor of the written, I know it all too well, this valor, but the valor that it has for me. And
it is why, in a trembling of anguish, I preserve writing of everything that could trouble it,
and not only writing, but the solitude pertaining to it. And when I have said to you
yesterday that you should not come Sunday night, but only Monday and what has two
breaks you have asked: "So, not this evening?" and that it failed to respond to me at the
least the second time: "Rest then," it was a perfect lie, for he wished for nothing but to be
alone."
On the central problem of the necessity of writing which is also a fatality and threat,
we find two of the most important texts in the Letters. They are dated July and September
1922. They are also important in themselves because they reveal in some circumstances,
The Castle was abandoned. I resume in part and cite in part these texts which are quite
long. ) start with the most recent: ) am here in Plana since a week ago: ) have not passed
quite gaily, for I have abandoned, manifestly for always, the story of the Castle, this one
could not be more returned since the "collapse" which has started this week before the
voyage to Prague, as I have written to Plana was not also bad that what I knew..." Kafka tells
how his sister Ottla (who lived with him) being obliged to re-enter Prague soon and
definitively, the domestic he has offered to his sojourn and this place he loves. He accepts,
everything was decided. "I remain here for the winter, I am once again grateful..." "Once
again, in pain I was at the heights of the staircase leading to my room that was produced" the
collapse" ... I should not describe the exterior side of such a state, you also know it, but one
must think in what there is more extreme in your experience... Before everything, I know that I
cannot sleep. The force of sleep is gnawed until its center. I already anticipate insomnia, I
suffer as if the last night had already been without sleep. I sleep, I cannot think of anything
else, nothing but a monstrous anguish occupies me, and in the clearest moments, the anguish
of this anguish... What is it then? As I can penetrate it with thought, it is nothing but one thing.
You say that I must search to prove myself in these great subjects. This is correct..., but I can
also prove myself in my hole of worries. And this single thing is the fear of complete solitude. If
I remained alone here, I would be fully solitary. If I could speak with men, and I would do it,
solitude would not have been but augmented. And I know, at the least of a related manner, the
fears of solitude--not enough of solitary solitude that solitude among men, the first time in
Military where several days in Spindlermhle, but I wish not to speak at all about it. How is it

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with solitude? The solitude is my ... goal, my greatest temptation, my possibility, and my ... that
one could say I have "organized" my life, when it has been organized for solitude... well. And
despite this, the anguish before hat I life as much..."
This desire which is anguish, anguish before the solitude where it is present,
anguish where it is absent, anguish once again before all solutions of compromise, one sees
that it seems that we understand ell, but we do not hate understanding. In a letter a little
previously, Kafka clarifies, but in a more enigmatic manner, the entanglement of all these
relations. It has to do, one again, with a grave crisis. He needed to go to Georgental, for a
sojourn near his friend Baum. It came to him to write, which he accepted.
Everything pleased him on this voyage, or at the least he saw no reasonable
objection. And yet the "collapse," the infinite anguish, the night without sleep. "While during
this night without sleep these thoughts come and go between my painful times, I was newly
conscious of what had almost forgotten in these last, almost peaceful times: of what weak sun,
or even inexistent, I see, above the darkness of a sort where in will the dark force, in which
without regard for my trembling destroys my life. Writing maintains me, but wouldn't it be
more just to say that writing maintains this sort of life? Naturally, I don't wish to pretend that
my life is better when I don't write. It is even worse, completely unbearable and leads to
nothing but madness. But this, it is true, to charge for me, even if, it is the case in this moment,
I do not write, not even as a writer; and a writer who does not write is completely a
monstrosity who courts insanity. But what of it is this, then, this writer? Writing is a delicious
and marvelous recompense, but for us paid with what? The night, with the --- of infantile
lessons, I have seen clearly that it was the salary for service of the demon. This descent toward
obscure forces, this unleashing of normally mastered minds, these doubtful embraces and all
which could pass below, where one no longer knew anything when one writes stories in broad
daylight. Perhaps there was another manner of writing, I knew nothing more than these ones
in the night, when the anguish didn't let me sleep, I knew nothing besides this. And what is
diabolical seems to me quite clear. It is the vanity and the concupiscence that does not cease
to turn around my person and around which an unfamiliar person and in enjoying it, by a
movement which does not make itself multiply, veritably solar system of vanity. The health of
a naive man: "I wanted to die and see how I would be mourned", such a writer constantly
realizes it, he dies (or he does not live any longer) and cries constantly. From here comes
his terrible anguish of death, which is not expressed necessarily by the fear of dying, but is
manifested also in the fear of changing, fear of going to Georgental."
But why this fear of dying? Kafka distinguishes two series of reasons, which he says
are perhaps confusing. And, indeed, they seem to be recalled in this thought: the writer has
a fear of dying because he has not yet lived, and not only because he lacks the happiness to
live with a woman, children, a fortune, but because in lieu of entering the house, he makes
himself content in admiring from outside, and crowning action, excluded from the
jouissance of things by contemplation which is not possession. One sees the kind of interior
monologue of this writer:" What I have played will actually arrived. I am not redeemed by
writing. I have passed my life in dying, and I actually died further from it. My life was sweeter
than that of others, my death will not be anything but more terrible. Naturally the writer who

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is in me died rather, for such a figure lacks sun, and any reality. He is not even made of dust; it
is not possible, a bit possible that in the earthly life in which it is more insensate, and not that
a construction of greed. Such is a writer. But myself, I cannot continue living, since I have not
lived, I am not ---, and the spark that I did not know how to transform into fire, I have not
made to serve except to illuminate my cadaver." "This would be a bizarre burial," adds Kafka:
"the writer, something who no longer exists, transmits the old cadaver, the cadaver of always,
to the pit. I am quite a writer to want to fully enjoy this in my full oblivion-- and not with
lucidity, self-forgetting is the first condition of the writer-- where, he who returns to himself,
to wish to tell a story of it; but this would no longer arrive. And why not speak of the true
death? In life, it is the same thing..." Kafka, a bit before, makes two remarks: "I must add that
in my fear of leaving the thought that during several days would be discarded from my table
to write, to play a role. This ridiculous thought is in reality the sole legitimacy, for the
existence of a writer really depends on his table, there is no right to distance himself if he
wishes to strike madness, and he must cling to it with his teeth. The definition of a writer, of
such a writer, and the explication of an action that he exerts (if there is such a one): he is an
emissary goat [scapegoat] of humanity, who permits men to enjoy a sin innocently, almost
innocently."
Without pretending to comment on these lines, one can remark that the affirmations
which follow here are by no means on the same plane. There are some clear affirmations:
writing is placed outside life, it is enjoying oneself in death by an imitation which becomes
frightening reality; the poor, real self to whom one offers the possibility of a small voyage is
literally beaten, tormented and whipped by the devil. Henceforth, the world is forbidden,
the life is impossible, and solitude inevitable... "... With this, it is decided that I have no
longer the right to attend the Boheme, rather I should limit myself to Prague, then to my
chamber, and my bed, and then a certain position of the body, and then to nothing. Perhaps
I could thus freely renounce his happiness in writing-- yes, freely and in the happiness, see
what is important." The anguish of being alone is here almost described. Writing is thus a
bad activity; but not only for these reasons: for other that are more obscure. For writing is a
nocturnal thing; it is to be abandoned to somber forces, descending in the regions below,
living in impure embraces. All these expressions have immediate truth for Kafka. They
evoke the tenebrous fascination, the somber explosion of desire, and the passion of what is
unleashed in the night where everything finishes with a radical death. We don't know it.
However, little by little, he associated words and the usage of words with the approach of a
spectral reality, avid of living things and capable of extenuating all truth. It is why, same as
my friends, it ceased the last year close to writing and above all n speaking from it: "It is
true, I write nothing, but not because I have something to hide (for as soon as it is not the
vocation of my life)... Before everything, as I am not a law out of these last years for
strategic reasons, I lack trust in my words neither in the letters, in my words neither in my
letters; I want to share much of my heart with other humans, but not with the specters
which play with the words and read the letters, the pending language."
The conclusion should therefore flatly be this: no longer writing. Thus it is always
otherwise (and during twenty years, it never varied): "Writing is for me what is more
necessary and more important." And this necessity, it is not missed, of making known to us

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reasons, and still of repeating to us in these different letters: it is really that it was never
written, it became insane. Writing is madness, is its madness, but this madness is its reason.
It is its damnation, but damnation which is its sole vow of salute (if it remained in it).
Between two certainties of losing oneself-- lost in writing, lost in no longer writing--, he
tries to create a passage, and by this writing once again, however a writing which invokes
the specters in the hope of conjuring them. In the letter to Brod where he speaks in a quiet
disquieting manner of his words books to phantoms47 he incidentally adds this, which
clarifies to us perhaps many of his hopes as a writer: "Sometimes it seems to me that the
essence and the existence of art is not explicated except by such "strategic considerations": to
make possible a true speech from human to human."
I would like to translate the impression left by the letters written during the last
year. Kafka, whom the least move disrupted, made the decision to live in Berlin, far from his
family and friends, with Dora Dymant, whose acquaintance he had made in Munich in July
1923 (he died in June 1924; thus he lived with her for only a few months). Until then, it
indeed seemed that although ill, he was not yet dangerously ill. The illness was worsening,
bur slowly. It is this stay in Berlin that proved fatal. The harsh winter, the unfavorable
climate, the precarious conditions of existence. the scarcity of this big city starved and
agitated by civil war represented a threat that he could only be very conscious of, but from
which, despite the entreaties of his friends, he refused to remove himself; it took the
intervention of his uncle "the Country doctor," make him decide to change residences
several weeks before the tubercular laryngitis declares itself. This indifference to his health
is a new phenomenon. It is also marked by this feature: until 1923 his least discomforts
occupy him greatly, he almost refrains from speaking about them as soon as the situation
becomes more serious; and it is with a remarkable sobriety and discretion that he makes
his condition known, henceforth disastrous: "If one comes to terms with the tubercular
laryngitis. My condition is tolerable, I can swallow again, for the time being." And in the last
sentences of his last letter to Brod, after the latter had come from Prague to see him one
last time, he is anxious to point out that {here are still joyful moments: "Aside from all these
subjects of complaint, there are also naturally several minuscule gaieties, but it is
impossible to describe them or they have to be saved for a visit like the one that was so
miserably spoiled by me. Goodbye. Thank you for everything." This refusal to complain, the
silence about himself that, in their reticence, almost all the Berlin letters make sensible, is
the only sign of the change that has occurred in his life. A silence that is tense, watched
over, voluntary. "There is little to tell about me, a life somewhat in the shadows; he who
does not see it directly will notice nothing about it." "In reality it is very calm around me,
never too calm, moreover." And to Milena: "My state of health is nor essentially different
from what it was in Prague. This is all. I will not venture to say more; what is said is already
too much."

47

Equally true in these last letters to Milena, but nonetheless with more humor.

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silence48.

We can interpret this

Does he refuse to speak of himself because his destiny is too
close to that of another being of whom he does not consent to speak? Does he want
henceforth to keep his secret for this being? Or else, with greater force and coherence than
ever before, has he closed himself in on his solitude, become even for himself the "man
buried in himself, imprisoned within himself by foreign locks" of whom he speaks to
Klopstock in 1922? Does he truly distrust written words and the ghostly way of
communicating that wears away truth by entrusting it to deceitful and unfaithful
messengers? This last point, though it does not explain everything, is certain. Even on the
subject of his literary writings, he remarked that fiction shows reality the way. Thus, in
The Country Doctor, in which he describes a strange bloody wound, he sees the
anticipation of his hemoptysis, which occur shortly later. Once again more impressive,
when in March 1924, the terminal phase of the illness was announced by an extinction of
voice, he came to finish his narrative Josephine where it is spoken of these singing mice who
believed doubted from an exceptional gift to peep and whistle, because it is no longer
capable of means of expression in usage in his people. He thus says to Klopstock: "I believe
that I have the enterprise in the good moment my research of an animal peeping." How to
not evoke here his remark about the anguish discovered in the writer, when this, at the last
moment, was seen hurried to the word by the reality? "What I played at will really come to
happen." What was it also for him? The game of speech takes a visible and painful end, and
was refused by him to speak once again below it, henceforth applying all his attention to
welcome in the silence of silent approach of the event? While this distrust of words did not
prevent him in pursuing his role of writing to the end. Completely on the contrary, unable
to further speak, it was no longer permitted of him to do anything but write, and rarely has
such agony been written except his. As if death, with its humor, had had also in order to
announce that it prepared to change a writer entirely-- "something that does not exist 49.

48

We know as well in many other texts of his that he does not blame his art for his life outside the world to which he is condemned: it has been
imposed upon him immediately by his relations with his father; it is by him that he was exiled from life, forced out of the frontiers, condemned to
wander in exile. Art has done nothing but translate, exploit, and deepen this anterior fatality. Kafka from the rest is far from speaking always
unfavorably of this life out of the world that he, on the contrary, obstinately seeks. In June 1921, to Brod: "The first day a bit passable after fifty
days as a martyr. This life outside-the-world that I take is not in itself worse than the other, there is no reason to complain, but when, until in this
life outside-the-world, the world, violence of the grave, placed to cry, I leave my hinges and I strike myself really in the head against the door of
madness, which is never anything but ajar. The most trivial thing was enough to put me in this state."
49

In his last days, Kafka stood strictly by his mandate not to speak, not even in whispers. To the end, he communicated with his friends by
writing short sentences in which the sensibility and originality of his forever living language was expressed.

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Chapter Eleven - The Truly Final Word, 1968

Commenting one day upon Kafka's letters which had recently emerged in their
original form, I noted that since the character of posthumous publications destined them to
be inexhaustible, there would always be a missing final volume from the Complete Works:
why is this? Firstly, for factual reasons. We had then been missing the letters to his fiance,
Felice Bauer, letters that a difficult negotiation had momentarily left out from the edition.
Also missing, and no doubt missing for a long time, not to say forever, is information that is
able to further clarify the encounter with Dora Dymant with which his life came to an end.
(I mean not that the external testimonies that one can still collect, but Kafka's judgment,
speech, and the notes from his Journal).
This commentary dates approximately ten years50. Today (since October 1967), as
we possess all the letters to Felice B., with a few exceptions, which include those to Grete
Bloch, the enigmatic friend of the two fiancs (in other words, a volume of over seventyfive pages); now that we have in hand the documents that were gathered slowly and
painstakingly by Klaus Wagenbach (the first volume of the biography that he seems to
elaborate in 1958, translates since the Mercury editions in France; since the KafkaSymposium, edited by him, with several other authors and reuniting documents about
diverse unclear points, notably a chronology of texts, in addition to a long and imposing
letter addressed to Julie Wohryzeck's sister, the second fiance; and finally the small book
of the Rowohit edition, a sort of Kafka by Kafka himself (and Wagenbach), where the
constrained form permits us in seeing best what one knows, what one does not know, and
what one does not yet know about a life that is too greatly manifested), we are closer, but
also more diverted in posing true questions, no longer completely having the force of
letting them come to us in their innocence, in protecting them from the biographical
rumors which attract and consume them when the flames are fed.
1. Let's attempt to gather several traits in order to liberate ourselves from them.
After having read as a single movement of letters, it was perhaps necessary to ask
ourselves if they teach us anything new, save for always being hidden from what is said
with such an intention of evidence. Immediately, what is confirmed is that each time that
Kafka enters in relation to the feminine world, it is a sort of grace, of lightness, a seductive
and seducing temptation. His first letters are carried by a desire for charm which charms.
Even when he writes to Mademoiselle Bloch in which, at the last at the start, he asks for
nothing but amicable sympathy or a contact of confidence, he does not lack in writing in
such a manner that this young woman, still quite young, in being visibly troubled at one
point, voluntarily, involuntarily, in contributing to the breach of first engagements, since
later in inventing perhaps a strange episode, an imaginary child that she attributes to
Kafka. Let's say that at the least, it has to do with a hypothetical episode that K. Wagenbach
has been mistaken in transforming in certitude when he remains in the limit of the
improbable probable*.)
50

Cf the preceding text

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Even if the difficulties arrive quicklyand in some sense, almost instantly,they

were initially part of an act of young passion which does not lack a certain happiness. It is
during this relatively happy time (of this narrative he says to F., "It is such an exceptionally
repulsive story that I am laying it aside to rest and think of you; it is more than halffinished, and on the whole, I am not displeased with it, but it is infinitely repulsive, and you
see, such things come from the same heart in which you reside and which you tolerate as
your residence"). He met the woman who will twice become his fiance, in August 1912 (in
Prague, at the house of his friend, Max Brod's parents); he writes to her a few weeks later
(at the end of September) and does so almost once every day or several times a day, soon
after that. It is at the start of 1913 that relations suddenly get dismal. On several occasions,
Kafka confirms this change: "I am different from the way was in the first months of our
correspondence; this is not a new transformation, but a relapse that threatens to last... I
was different in the beginning, you will concede; it is nothing that could not be repaired,
except that it is not a human development that has led me from here to there, but, on the
contrary, I have been entirely transported back to my old path and between roads, there is
no direct connection, not even a zigzagging one, but a sad path through the air, followed by
ghosts." Why? To this question we can only offer inconclusive answers.
)ts around this time that Kafka, prompted by his feelings and undoubtedly solicited
by his friend, considers traveling to Berlin, after escaping an encounter at Christmas: a trip
that strikes him both as appealing and repulsive, but takes place on March 23. Almost all
the encounters will be disappointing. Reading the letters (we don't know about the ones
from the young lady, except from secondhand sources), we have the feeling that Felice
appears more reserved than affectionate, and that as socially lively as she appears to be
hen she is with others, she seems lifeless, distraught, and tired on the rare occasion that she
is alone. This is in the least Kafka's impression, as he formulates it to her (but it should not
be accepted too readily; just as when he declares himself incapable of social relations, he
contradicts the accounts of his friends who saw him as an amiable figure, at east, and often
warm, though sometimes, it is true, withdrawn and strangely absentee). About Felice, he
always said that he recognized in her the qualities he thinks he lacks: she is an assertive,
active, and courageous young woman, knowledgeable in business, from which it would be
too easy, and certainly deceptive, to conclude that she attracts him through his
shortcomings: physically, she is far from attractive at first glance; in his Journals, he
describes her in almost cruelly objective terms, and even worse, will speak of her to
Mademoiselle Bloch with a certain repulsion (her spoiled teeth, her mottled, rough skin,
and her bony skeleton). And at the same time he loves her with a passionate desperation.
At the same time, in the same time; this is everything that can be said about it without
falling into psychological futility. Should we add that she represents life for Kafka; the
change to live? The possibility of reconciliation with the world? This is true, but according
to which truth? I would say instead--and this is the feature she shares with Milena and
perhaps with Julie Wohryzeck, as well as the unknown woman from Zuckmantel and the
adolescent girl from Riva--that she bears, in the manner of a memory, the trace of the
absence of a trace, that is of a non-culpability, and which does not exactly signify innocence.
On the first day of the first encounter, when he notes in his Diary, "Mademoiselle F.B.,...
bony and empty face openly bearing its void," the word empty, not only repeated here but

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bared, not as a feature of insignificance but that as the discovery of an enigmatic possibility,
makes him feel the attraction of a flaw that is like the absence of error, this "outside error"
whose obviousness the feminine world incarnates, but also already incarnates, in its
presence, the equivocal distance. From this world, in effect, all temptations arrive (which
should not, however, be understood in a naively Christian sense as seduction of the flesh,
although Kafka has here, as we know, his difficulties)51. It is rather this seduction of life that
attracts him because it seems so strange in its remoteness from guilt, but it is such that the
attraction immediately makes the one subject to it forever guilty by turning him away from
himself, doomed henceforth to the deception of the turning away and fated to the
enchantment of oblivion this will be one of the meanings of The Trial, and also partly of The
Castle, both of which were written under the provocation of the strangeness of the feminine
world.
(In a letter to Weltsch, at a particularly unhappy moment, Kafka explains himself
with unfailing lucidity concerning what his also very lucid friend calls Kafka's happy feeling
of guilt: "You think that my feeling of guilt is an aid, a solution, no, I have a feeling of guilt
only because, for my being, it is the most beautiful form of remorse, but one does not need
to look at it very closely to see that the feeling of guilt is nothing but the exigency to go
backward. But immediately, much more formidable than remorse and far above any
remorse, the feeling of freedom, of deliverance, of measured contentment already rises. "To
feel guilty is to be innocent because it is to strive, through remorse, but to thereby make
oneself twice guilty, because it is to devote oneself to the idleness of the absence of time,
where nothing more happens, and is thus hell or, as Kafka himself says in this letter, the
inner courtyard of hell.)
2. Yet why, after the first months of an alliance passionately in search of itself, does
everything become unhappier? I spoke of the trip to Berlin, and nothing can be explained
by this. What does he himself say about it (for our task is only to repeat him)? During the
same period, as he wrote in tormented but impetuous bursts, and an almost timeless
regularity (every night in the infinity of the night: The Verdict, just one month after having
met F.B.,. and two days after sending her the first letter; then the continuation of his novel,
Amerika; and simultaneously, The Metamorphosis), suddenly the writing comes to an end.
Not only this, but in rereading the "notebooks of the novel," he is convinced that with the
exception of the first chapter, which does not depart from an inward truth, "all the rest was
written only in memory of a great but radically absent feeling and must be scrapped. This is
to say that of over 400 pages, only 56 have the right to remain."
It is commonplace to show Kafka struggling for the solitude of writing and Kafka
struggling for the exigency of life, which passes by way of the necessary relations of men,
which thus pass by way of marriage or worldly salvation. Numerous passages of the
correspondence--numerous, or let us say, almost innumerable--would confirm it. He has
already begun writing to the person with whom he is not yet on familiar terms, that he
51

I refer here to the letter that Kafka wrote Milena, in which he describes his first night with his merciless candor (Milenas Check)

*See end of text

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confides in her unreservedly. "My life consists and has in fact always consisted in trying to
write, and most often failing. But were I not to write, I would remain stretched out on the
ground, deserving nothing more than to be thrown away. ...As thin as I am... there is nothing
in me, which, with regard to writing, is not already excessive in the good sense... Even the
thought of you is related to writing, only the ups and downs of writing determine me, and
surely, during a barren period, I would never have had the courage to turn to you." Felice
soon takes fright at such outbursts and advises him, as a reasonable person, more
moderation: "My heart [he responds] is more or less in perfect health, but it is not easy for
any human heart to hold out against the melancholia of bad writing or against the
happiness of good writing... If you considered my tie to writing, you would cease advising
me" 'Mass und Ziel,' moderation and limitation, human weakness is but too drawn to setting
limits to everything. Should I not engage everything I have in the one thing I am able to do?
...It may be that writing is nothing, but then and certainly I am truly nothing." 52 Then comes
the surprising letter of January 15, 1913, in which, to the person he already considers his
life companion, he describes the ideal existence: "One day you wrote that you would like to
sit beside me as I wrote, but think of it, then I would no longer be able to write (as it is, I
barely can), but in that case I could no longer write at all. Writing means opening oneself up
to limitlessness, the extreme openness in which a person already feels he is losing himself
in human relations and from which, if he is a being of reason, he will always try to
withdraw, stricken--for every person wants to live for as long as he is alive--this openness
and this gift of heart are not enough for writing, not by far--unless it goes otherwise and the
sources of the depths are silent--is nothing and collapses the moment a true feeling comes
to shatter this ground situated above. This is why one can never be sufficiently alone when
one write; this is why there is never enough silence around oneself, when one writes; night
is never night enough... I have often thought that the best way for me to live would be to set
myself up, with my writing material and a lamp, in the innermost room of a spacious locked
cellar. I would be brought food, but always far away from the place in which I would be
sitting, behind the cellars outermost door. My only walk would be to fetch this food, in my
bathrobe, through the many vaults of the cellar. Then I would return to the table, I would
eat slowly and solemnly, and immediately after this, I would resume writing. The things I
would write! The depth from which I would tear it up! Without effort! For extreme
concentration knows no effort. My only reservation would be that I would not be able to
keep it up for long, and at the first failure I would fall into a grandiose fit of madness,
perhaps impossible to avoid even in these conditions. What do you think, my dearest? I
hope you won't shrink from your cellar dweller."
This narrative (for it is one) is impressive, but at this date, still enlivened by the
illusions of youth, Kafka initially seems to believe (does he believe it?) that when Felice
understands the necessity of the underground life, she will be happy with it, happy with the
cellar, because the cellar will also belong to her ("a cellar," he will say a little bit later, "a sad
possession for you, all the same"); then he seems to believe (but does he really believe it?)
52

One day, when Felice evokes his penchant for writing: Not a penchant; I have no penchant, for writing is my whole self. A penchant; one
could wipe out or reduce it. Certainly, one could do away with me, but what would be left for you?

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that the cellar might suffice for his isolation and bring him help: the cellar, the emptiness of
a presence full in its retreat, livable and comfortable, in other words, madness itself, but
well converted and as if protected (in the years 1915-1916, when he looks for a room in the
city in which to work, he cannot even tolerate that it is deprived of a horizon, but this is
because he is then in the truth of solitude, and no longer in its musing). It is indeed true
that almost all of his behavior with Felice seems capable of being explained by his sole
desire to protect his work, and by the wish not to deceive his fiance about the conditions
of their future together, if there ever is a future; barely, he says, will they see each other for
an hour a day. Later, after the break of July 12, 1914 (when he is brought to trial), when, in
November, he again takes up his explanation with the young lady, it is in this truth that he
will propose to her with new authority and austerity: "You were unable to see the power
that the work has over me; you saw it, but only incompletely, very incompletely... You were
not only the greatest friend, you were at the same time the greatest enemy of my work, at
least from the perspective of work, and as the latter loved you at its center beyond all
limits, it had to defend itself against you with all its might in order to protect itself... You
want me to explain why I behaved like this 53, and this explanation consists in this: your
fear, your disgust were constantly before my eyes. It was my duty to watch over my work,
which alone gives me the right to live, and your fear showed me and made me fear (with a
much more unbearable fear) that here was the greatest danger for my work.. This is when I
wrote the letter to Mademoiselle Bloch... Now, you can turn the whole thing around and say
that you were no less threatened in your essence than I, and that you fear was no less
justified than mine. I don't believe this was the case. I loved you in your real being, and it is
only when it touched my work with hostility that I feared it... Even if this is not completely
true. You were threatened. But did you not wish to be? Ever? In no way?" (A questioning
traversed by the movement of sovereignty that was also the least visible, the least
contestable part of Kafka, and of the writer in him.)
3. The conflict of writing and life, reduced to such simplicity, can offer no sure
principle of explanation, even if to explain here is only deploying affirmations that call each
other forth in order to put themselves to the test without limiting themselves. To write, to
live: how could one hold oneself to this confrontation of terms that are precisely so poorly
determined? Writing destroys life, protects life, demands life, is ignorant of life, and vice
versa. In the end, writing has no relation to life, if it is not through the necessary insecurity
that writing receives from life, just as life receives this necessary insecurity from writing an
absence of relation by dispersing itself in it, never refers to itself in this absence, but to
what is other than it, which ruins it, or worse still, disrupts it. Kafka is made aware of this
"other than"--the other in the neuter--that belongs to writing insofar as writing cannot
belong to itself, cannot designate a belonging, through the stubborn, interrupted, unbroken,
unquestioned attempt to be united to Felice, to rejoin her (rejoin the disjunction). His
relations with the young woman are first and foremost established on the level of written
words, consequently in the place that words control and under the truth of the illusion that
53

In particular on the day of the trial when he gives up justifying himself and also when he 'writes a letter to Mlle. Bloch in which, although
recently engaged, he speaks of his horror of marriage, a letter that his correspondent mistakenly shows Felice, such that Felice is struck by the
feeling of painful duplicity, for the truth, of which she had been warned so many times by Kafka directly, had become a power of fatal objectivity
(as it always happens) as soon as it had been communicated to her by someone else.

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they necessarily provoke. When he tells her (before they meet in Berlin for the first time),
"It sometimes seems to me that this exchange of letters, which I almost incessantly long to
get beyond in order to arrive at realty, is the only exchange that corresponds to my misery
(my misery, which naturally I do not always experience as misery) and that were we to
ross this limit that is imposed upon me, we would be led to a common unhappiness," he is
still only expressing the apprehension of an encounter that is frightening in all regards, but
he also senses the contradiction to which he is exposing himself. Through letters--this
mixed communication, which is neither direct nor indirect, neither of presence nor of
absence (he designates it as a hybrid or bastard, Zwitter)--he shows himself, but to
someone who does not see him (one night, he dreams that Felice is blind), and if he thus
wins the young woman's heart, it is in the mode of non-possession and also of nonmanifestation, that is, of non-truth ("I am going to Berlin for no reason other than to tell
and show you, who has been misled by my letters, who I really am").
In a certain sense, at least in the dramatic development of the year 1913, which will
lead, even before the official engagement, to a first break-up, the only thing at stake for him
is the truth: the truth about himself, or more precisely, the possibility of being true. How is
one to avoid deceiving the young woman? How is one to convince her of what it is, as he is
in the depths of solitude that he reaches only in the nights of writing? How is he to unveil
himself in such a way as to be seen as he searches for himself through invisibility which is
outside all veiling and unveiling? "My letter today will arrive torn; tore it on my way to the
station, in a movement of impotent rage at not being able to be true and precise when I
write to you, such that even when I write, I am never able to hold you firmly or to
communicate to you the beating of my heart, there being nothing from this moment on to
expect from writing." And a little earlier, in a manner that is even more striking, he says:
"Naturally, I cannot forget you when I write to you, because I can never forget you at all, but
I would like in some way not to rouse myself from the dizziness of the reverie without
which I cannot write to you, by calling your name." Practically speaking, this movement can
be translated as this: to say everything (and not only to her, but to the young woman's
father, to the highest authority) which means to tell how he will make her unhappy, or
more precisely, the impossibility of conjugal life to which he is condemning her, and this is
with nothing to compensate for it, so that she may accept it and see it precisely as
impossible, from which it will follow that none of the answers she gives him can satisfy
him. For if she says to him, perhaps out of levity, or out of affection, or perhaps also out of a
proper concern for nuances: "you speak too abruptly about yourself," or "things are
perhaps as you say, but you cannot know that they will not change when we are together,"
this hope that she maintains despairs him: "What must I do? How can I make you believe
the unbelievable?..." There exist hindrances that you know to a certain extent, but you do
not take them seriously enough and you would still not take them seriously enough, if you
were fully aware of them. No one around me takes them seriously enough, or one will
neglect them out of friendship for me... When I see how much you change when you are
with me, and the indifferent fatigue that takes ahold of you then, to the young woman who
is normally so self-assured, whose thinking is quick and proud... the result of this is: I
cannot assume the responsibility, for I see that it is too great. You cannot assume it, for you
can hardly see it."

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On the one hand, this happens. But on the other, if she takes her distance, convinced
or eventually hurt, and becomes reticent, formulating doubts and writing less, then the
greater is his despair, for he has the feeling that she misjudges him precisely because she
knows him, therefore deciding according to the knowledge he gives her of himself, instead
of deciding, not blindly, not by weighing reasons, but in all clarity under the attraction of
the impossible. There are, he says, three answers, and there are no others that she can
make. "It is impossible, and therefore I do not want it." "It is impossible, and for the time
being, I don't want it." "It is impossible, and thus I want it." The third answer, the single
correct one (which might take this form from Luther: "I cannot do otherwise, in spite of
everything."), Kafka will one day claim to have received it--he, too, out of languor, from the
one he then calls his "dear fiance," and not without adding: "I will say for the last time that
I am insanely afraid of our future and of the unhappiness that may arise as a result of my
nature and my faults, in our life together and that must first affect you, for I am, at my core,
a cold, egoistic, and insensible being, in spite of my weakness that dissimulates but does
not mitigate it." Where the impossible speaks, a relation of strangeness (of transcendence?)
is introduced, which cannot be designated as such: a relation in which it would be
deceptive to see any trait of the sublime (in the romantic manner), but which Kafka
nonetheless refuses to perceive with practical reason. When Felice, overwhelmed and
perhaps rightly so, writes to him: "Marriage would lead us both to give up many things; we
do not want to weigh the side on which the greatest weight would reside; for both of us, it
would be great," he is deeply hurt, specifically because she reduces the impossible to a sum
of possibles, here, therefore producing a sort of bargaining of accounts. "You are right, we
must keep accounts; unless this is not unjust, but deprived of meaning... This is my opinion
in the end." And finally, the exigency of truth always returns: "A lasting life together is
impossible for me without deception, just as it would be impossible without truth. The first
glance I would cast upon your parents would be deceptive54.
4. Before going on, I would like to quote two or three of the most serious texts. I
quote them as if in parentheses, not because they are of secondary importance but because
of their seriousness. They explain why (this is not the only reason; it is even a reason that
Kafka expressed himself, to himself, only at every critical moments), when he believes he is
losing the young woman who seems to have distanced from him, he is immediately certain
of losing himself. "In my letters, my perpetual concern is to free you of me, and as soon as I
have the appearance of success, I go mad." It is not the madness of a lover split between
movements of contradictory passions, it is madness itself from which she, Felice--and she
alone, because she forms his only and essential human bond--can still protect him, for she
is still capable, when he is not writing and at the times he is, of keeping him away from the
monstrous world he carries inside his head, a world that he does not dare confront except
in the nights of writing. "Traversing the nights in a fury of writing, this is what I want. And
54

On the relation to truth," one would have to quote the letter of Sept. 10, 1917the penultimate letter, I believe-- already partially published
in the Diary: "For five years you have been kept informed as to the progress of the struggle, by word and by silence and by a combination of both;
and most of the time, it has tormented you If you ask whether it has always been in keeping with the truth, I can only say that with no one else
but you, have I kept myself so strenuously from conscious lies. There have been certain attenuations [Verschleierungen] but very few lies,
assuming that regarding lies, it is possible for there to be 'very few.''' The continuation can be read in the Journal with the following, at the end
and in the form of a verdict: "In sum, it is only the tribunal of men that is important to me, and it is this tribunal that I wish to deceive, though;
without deception.

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to perish like this or go insane, this is also what I want, because it is the long-anticipated
consequence." But soon after, the other affirmation, the desire to find in her, against this
threat, a return, a protection, a future. "It is justifiable anguish that prevents me from
wishing you were coming to Prague, but more justified still, and it exceeds it much, this
monstrous anguish that I will perish if we are not together soon. For if we are not together
soon, my love for you, which does not tolerate any other thoughts in me, will direct itself to
an idea, a specter; something unattainable, all in all and forever necessary, that would
really be capable of tearing me from the world. I tremble as I write this." I'll permit myself
to translate in this way; I tremble with writing. But what writing? "You don't know, Felice,
what a certain literature can be in certain heads. It creates constant chaos, like monkeys
lost and unable to be otherwise. What should one do?" Once again, there is no longer the
desire of the hope of being protected by Felice, but the fear of being exposed to a more
serious threat while under her protection, and the worse fear of also exposing her to a
danger he cannot name: "At present, I only torment you in my letters, but as soon as we
lived together, I would become a dangerous madman fit for burning... What holds me back
is in some sense a command from heaven, an anguish that cannot be appeased; everything
that seemed of greatest importance to me, my health, and my small resources precisely
with her... I have the certain feeling that I'll be exposed to doom, through marriage, through
this union, through the dissolution of this nothingness that I am, and I will not be exposed
alone, but with my wife, and the more I love her, the swifter and more terrible it will be"55.
5. When in Berlin for the first time, he sees the person he had approached only by
the detour of his letters, he will be as if repelled from all living relations. And upon his
return, he writes to her: "My true fear--certainly nothing more awful could be said or
heard: never will I be able to possess you. In the most favorable case, I would be limited to
kissing your casually abandoned hand in the manner of a crazy rabid dog, which would not
be a sign of love, but the despair that you would feel for an animal condemned to muteness
and eternal separation... In short, I would remain forever excluded from you, if you were to
lean toward me so far as to be in danger." To Brod, he will confide the next day: "Yesterday,
I sent the big confession." Thus it is a confession. We must not give it too simple a meaning,
however, one that would contradict what we know of his various brief affairs which his
friends speak about. In 1916 in Marienbad, when he sees in Felice a person he could love,
more than from at a distance, he writes again to Brod, I will recall three features of these
very controlled reflections that he then composes for the benefit of his friend. "I did not
know her at all" (until the final days in which he established intimate relations with her)"56,
what bothered me (prevented me), other scruples notwithstanding, was essentially the fear
55

On "literature" and the danger it represents, responding to Felice, who judged herself, in everything, to be less than him: "I would be 'more
advanced than you in everything'? A small capacity for judging men and for putting myself in their place out of pity this I have I have no
memory, not for things learned, read, experienced, or heard; it is as if I had no experience of anything; I know less about most things than does
the smallest schoolboy. I cannot think: in my thinking. I constantly come up against limits; certainly, I am still able to grasp this or that isolated
point, but a coherent thought, capable of elaboration, is impossible for me. I cannot even tell a story, or even speak . . . . All I have are certain
powers that focus themselves in view of literature at a depth that cannot be recognized under normal conditions; powers to which I do not dare
give myself over in my present professional and physical state, because in face of the inner demand of these powers there arc as many inner
warnings. If I were able to hand myself over to these powers, they would straightaway carry me out of all of this inner desolation, and of this I am
certain" [must one specify? out of life].
56

On these very new relations, there is a brief note in the Journals that Max Brod himself did not authorize for publication, but that Wagenbach
nonetheless read in the manuscript.

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of having to regard as real the one who writes letters to me. Here, therefore, and very
distinctly, the retreat before the reality of presence is expressed, not as such but through
the relation of writing (the non-presence of writing), that is the refusal to pass from one to
the other, the impossibility of this crossing. Second indication: "What (at the moment of the
official engagement ceremony) she crossed the great hall and came to my encounter to
receive her engagement kiss, a terrible shudder passed through me, the matter of the
engagement, accompanied by my parents, was for me and at every step a constant torture."
From which one must recall, however, that what is disagreeable to him to the point of
horror is not contact with a feminine face but rather, through it, the approach of
conjugality, the falsehood of his institutional obligations, and also, certainly, of everything
that the word marriage evokes for him, and first of all, conjugal intimacy, which in his
parents always filled him with disgust, because it reminded him that he was born out of it,
and still had to be born all the time in connection to those "distasteful things" 57- It is the
very idea of marriage--the law, in other words--both solemn, sovereign, but also
sovereignly impure (and sovereign because it is impure) that as Felice crosses the great
space of the hall to make her way toward him, an infinite insurmountable space, rises up
and imposes its sanction on him, a sanction that is like a punishment in advance58. Finally,
as the third feature, the strongest, perhaps, he will say to Brod, evoking his new familiarity
with Felice. "I have now seen the confident intimacy in the gaze of a woman and could not
remain closed to it. A laceration as a result of which many things that I had always wanted
to keep protected (it is nothing in particular, but a whole) are brought to light [aufgerissen,
are torn from me], and through this laceration [Riss] so much unhappiness will emerge, this
I also know, that a man's entire life cannot suffice, but I did not call forth this unhappiness;
it was imposed on me." I think this passage is important. It gives not only the meaning of
what has happened in Marienbad in 191659 (this finally changes nothing regarding the
difficulty of their relations, which confirms that this difficulty had yet another origin),but
perhaps the meaning of the entire story of the young woman, a story the decisive nature of
which Kafka never misrecognized, even apart from his own feelings, for he knew that it
helped change him almost radically, in the sense that it unveiled him before his own eyes
and constituted a warning that it was his duty never to forget.
Indeed, this was put to the test of "the wound"; the circle in which he had thought he
could keep himself pure, as much by the constraints of isolation as by the pressure to
write pure means without falsehood, but does not mean true this he never intended,
but rather, outside falsehood, just as outside truth)--was broken, and with a break that did
not take place at any moment or because of particular events, but revealed itself as always
having taken place, as if previously, before any place and before any event. A revelation,
57

I recall the letter on his relations with family, of which an important excerpt is published in the Journals (Oct. 18, 1916)

58

Except the conventions-- the conventions! it is evidently Kafka, who ought have crossed the great space and met again with his fiance, but
Kafka "is bound like a criminal; if one has placed me in a corner, with true chains..., it would not have been worse" (Journal, June 1914).
59

On the sojourn to Marienbad, Kafka writes again in his Journal, on January 29, 1922, when he is frightened by the thought that Milena could
come: "It remains to resolve this sole enigma: why I was happy for fifteen days in Marienbad and why, consequently, I might also perhaps be
happy here with Milena, after the most painful breaking up and forcing of barriers, of course. But it would probably be much more difficult than
in Marienbad, my ideology is more solid, my experiences more vast. What was then a thread of separation is now a wall or a mountain; or better
yet: a grave.

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which in turn, dad not occur at a specific moment or progressively, no more than it was
empirically or internally experienced, but was rather implied, and put into practice in his
work, and in his relation to his work.
6. Thus the great "warning." The letters to Felice only confirm it, in my opinion, and they
accomplish it in two ways.
A) During his entire youth as a writer--a youth that ended (markers are still needed,
however, indecisive and however deceptive they may be) with the "failure" of his youthful
novel (Amerika)--he had confidence in writing, a tormented confidence, most often
unhappy, but always once again intact. His thought was that writing--if he could ever writewould save him, this word understood not in a positive sense, but a negative one; that is, it
would defer or delay the sentence, and would give him the possibility, and who knows?
Provide a way out: who knows? Who knows? Living in the cellar, writing it endlessly and
thus dwelling (living, dying) nowhere, but in the outside is yet an interior, a "warmth," as
he writes in this quite revealing sentence: " cannot be thrown out of writing, for have
sometimes thought that I am already settled at its enter, in its greatest warmth.") "Ah, if
only I could write. This desire consumes me. If above all else I had enough freedom and
health for this, ) dont think youd have understood that writing is the single thing that
enables my existence. It is no wonder, I express myself so badly, I only begin awakening in
the space of my inner figures." One must conclude from this that in this space, he maintains
the hope of reaching a certain awakening. However, little by little and always suddenly, he
will have to renounce the hope that this exigency seemed to carry: not only is writing
essentially uncertain, but writing is no longer keeping oneself intact in the purity of the
closed circle; rather, it is attracting the dark powers toward the upper reaches, and giving
oneself to their perverse strangeness, and perhaps bind oneself to what destroys. I am not
saying that he needed the interminable failure of his story with Felice (he certainly needed
much more, and much less, too) to arrive at this insight--hidden, moreover--about his
future as a writer, but these two movements pot to one another by way of each other, not
because they are directly related, but because they repeat at different levels the conditions
of absence--of alterity--(the break, but in this break, the impossibility of breaking it off)
that precedes, ruins, and supports any possibility of a relation, whether or not it is the very
relation engaged in the movement, removed from any affirmation of presence, that is the
movement of writing.
B) Barely had he begun corresponding with Felice, that he confides this essential sentiment
to her: "It is one of my failings that I cannot write down in the flux of a single continuous
movement what has gathered itself in me according to a pre-set order. My memory is
definitely bad, but even the best memory could not help me to write down even a short part
of what had been deliberate and simply marked, for within each sentence, there are
transitions that must remain suspended before the actual writing." In truth, if he thus
confides himself to the person he still does not call Felice, it is because six days earlier, he
had been victorious in his attempt at an uninterrupted writing, having completed The
Verdict in an eight-hour stretch, in a single nocturnal stroke, a decisive experience for him,
which gave him the certainty of a possible contact with the unapproachable space, and he

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immediately noted in his Journal: "My certitude is confirmed, it is only thus that one can
write, with such a stream of coherence, with also a perfect opening of the body and the soul."
The search for an absolute continuityuninterrupted in every sense-- how to maintain
what is outside the writing, this lack where nothing lacks anything but its absence,
otherwise than by a perpetuity without dissidence, transparence of a compact sort or a
compactness, of such a sort, which, transparent, given in time as something outside time,
given in a single time as infinite repetition? "I need to write in isolation, not as a "hermit,"
but as a dead man. Writing in this sense is a more profound sleep, and thus a death, and at the
same time that one cannot take a dead man from his grave, one could not tear me from my
table at night. This has nothing immediate to do with my relations with men, but it is only in
this rigorous manner, continued and systematic that I can write and thus also live." Thus, the
trait of such a movementinterminable except for all dimensionswhere it immediately
seems to him that only his manner of living (office work) took him to the gap, but with
which it failed to recognize that this gap was a relation with "essence," always differed
because it was continual, and by this continuity, united to difference. Kafka was only slowly
persuaded and always needed to persuade himself that he did not need stop it except as a
lack (break or absence) and that this is to part from this movement as a lack that he could
also achieve perhaps writing being his gift: no longer thus the uninterrupted without
his becoming, but coming into being from interruption. This was his eternal struggle. All his
uncompleted works, and immediately the first novel where the incompleteness was his
condemnation as a writer, and therefore also his condemnation as a living man, incapable
of living with Felice60, in some sense placed under his own eyes their proper completion,
this new manner of being accomplished in and by interruption (under the spell of the
fragmentary), but, unable to be anything but blind to what could be read there), unable to
wait for it except by an exigency in which he faced himself being destroyed and not
confirmed; he needed (and it is like this, each time, for the writer without privilege), to see
himself retired of the power to read himself, ignorant that the books that he believed not to
have constituted writing, which he had destined for a definitive destruction, had received
this gift from being almost liberated from themselves, and, effacing all ideas of masterpiece
and all ideas of work, in being identified with the absence of the book, also completely
offered to our proper impotency of reading, an absence of book soon deprived of itself,
reversed and finally returned to workestablished once more in the shaking assurance of
our admiration and our judgments of culture.
7. Kafkaas the correspondence confirmsreads nothing (save for certain
moments when he lacked strength) to break up with Felice, by a deliberated initiative:
contrary to some biographical affirmations, when he is placed under trial in Berlin in the
Askanischer Hof, in the face of a tribunal constituted by his fiance, the sister of his fiance
(Erna), the friend of his fiance (Grete Bloch), and his single ally and friend Ernst Weiss
(but hostile to Felice and to this marriage), he has, not unjustifiably, the intention of
60

I recall that he abandoned Amerika one evening without the intention of starting again (save for writing the last chapter in October 1914 and
perhaps also Bruneldas episode on the same date), having reread 400 pages that were already written, he could not re-grasp the truth of the
whole.

**See the end of this essay

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finishing it with a story by which he sees himself condemned, whatever the consequence.
Before leaving for Berlin, he writes to his sister Ottla: ) would naturally write from Berlin;
for an instant that one cannot speak anything certain about the matter nor about himself. I
write not as I speak, I speak, not as I think, and I think other than how I should not think, so
that it all runs forth into the greatest depths of obscurity." Nothing can be interrupted,
nothing can be broken**. The same illness (which intervened scarcely a month following
the second engagement, and the official engagements never lasted more than several
weeks), to which he gave the clearest sense of a spiritual symptom, and could not decide
anything: it all depended once again on the young girl ("Don't ask me why I pull a line. Don't
humiliate me like this either. Give me the word, and I am newly at your feet"). The
tuberculosis is nothing but a weapon in this combat, a weapon no more or less efficacious
than all these "innumerable" that he has used until this and that he enumerates in the
penultimate letter of correspondence, when he recounts all the events from the last fifty
years: the names by which he designated them, not without a certain irony, mentioning
"physical incapacity," "work," "greed," designations that always tend towards what cannot
be designated, even when he adds: "In what remains, I tell you a secret in which I
momentarily do not believe (despite how I may be convinced by the obscurity that falls
around me as I try to work and think), but which must be true: never again will I be in good
health. Precisely because this is no longer tuberculosis that one reaches for a lounge chair and
stretched out upon it, but a weapon where the exterior necessity subsisted for as long as I
would remain alive. And the two cannot remain alive together." He also says that the most
probable would be the eternal fight; or the impossibility of finishing it. When he meets Julie
Wohryzeck in Stdl pension a year later, in Schelesen, whom he befriends in conditions of
extreme physical and moral destitution, a new engagement is also broken; almost on the
same date, he abandoned himself to the passion of Milena and his passion for her, and
wished to bring the young girl to undo his marriage in the perspective of a quite uncertain
union; when at last with Dora Dymant he begged heaven itself, by the intervention of a
highly revered rabbi (Gerer Rebbe, friend of the young girl's father), for the authorization
of a marriage by which he receives, with a head shake of absolute negation, a silent refusal,
a last response of consecration (yet nonetheless all the same a response which indicated,
was it negatively, under the form of a refusal, a sort of recognition from above), it is always
the same division that is exposed, the proof each time, to the limit, as the impossibility of
breaking where, more profoundly, like the exigency of exclusion, which, having always
already been pronounced, always needs to be solicited anew, repeated, and, by repetition,
effaced, at the end of its perpetuation, being reproduced in the infinite impotency, and
always novel, from its lack. Is it thus the world or life with which he wishes to be reconciled
by these attempts at marriage where he does everything to exhaust its real character in
advance? It is rather with the law that he pursues the tragic game (provocation and
interrogation), the law where his stubbornness gentle, that is to say, inexorablewaits
for it to be pronounced, not authorizing or even in striking him, but in being designated as
unassignable, of such a sort that he is driven to predict why writing-- this movement where
he has expected a sort of salvationhas, always and forever, placed him outside the law,
where, more justly, it has driven him to occupy this space from beneath, a radical
exteriority (aorgic), in the subject of which he cannot knowa leap in writing, and writing
until non-writing occurs-- if, exterior to the law, it indicates the limit or is itself indicated in

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this limit where once again, provocation from provocations, it is denounced as a

disturbance or preceding all laws. It remains striking, that, even before the marriage with
Dora Dymant is rejected by the highest court, Kafka continues nonetheless, opposing social
conventions, and arranges a sort of conjugal life with the adolescent. Dora is 19 years old
and he is 40; almost a daughter or his very young sister (precisely, he has never hidden his
preference for the young Ottla whom he would say, in completely innocent language, that
she was his sister, mother, and spouse). As always, the transgression - the decision to fail in
what could not yet exist-- preceded the promulgation of the prohibition, thus making it
possible, as if the limit were not crossed except insofar as it is impossible to jump over, and
reveals itself to be uncrossable only by the crossing itself. The "No" of the rabbi precedes
shortly precedes his death. Was Kafka finally permitted to break it? Finally freed, could he
write, that is to say, die? At last. But eternity had already begun: the posthumous hell, the
sarcastic glory, the exegesis of admiration and pretension, the grand containment of
culture, and, precisely here, once more the last word that could not be proposed except to
simulate and dissimulate the awaiting of the very last.
*An obscure and unfortunate tale. This is what we know of it, at the least what I know of it.
Grete Bloch, twenty-two at the time and a recent friend of Felice, traveled to Prague on
Felice's behalf and met Kafka in October 1913. She lived and worked in Vienna. Kafka
begins to write to her and it results in a correspondence comprising about seventy
published letters, going from October 29, 1913 to July 3, 1914. On July 12, the engagement
is broken off. In the month of October 1914, the young woman writes to Kafka attempting
to restore connections between the former fiances, relations she had contributed to
ruining; Kafka answers on October 1914, and it is the last letter to G.B that we possess.
According to the editors, Erich Heller and Jrgen Born, there is no proof that Kafka kept
writing to her. (I find, in the Journal dated October 8, 1917, when having taken ill, he must
retract his "word" from his fiance: "accusatory letters from F.; G.B. threatens to write
me.") He speaks at times of her to Felice, either to ask for news or to send his regards, or
even advice, and also, at a painful moment, to express deep sympathy. We know that Felice,
Grete Bloch, and Kafka vacationed together in Bohemia on May 23 and 24, 1915. Let's add
that the letters, published today, albeit marked by the desire to please, and often very
affectionate, almost seductive words, remain rather ceremonious, at the same time. "Dear
Miss Grete" is the tenderest address. What else do we know? This Max Brod published
parts of a letter that Grete Bloch, on April 21, 1940, sent from Florence to a friend in Israel.
She reveals to him that she had a son who died suddenly in Munich in 1921, when he was
seven years old: an "illegitimate" child whose father was unnamed, but the addressee of the
letter (Brod's only source in this story) maintained that Grete Bloch regarded Kafka as the
child's father. What is there to say? In a certain manner, obviously nothing. Let us indicate
the reasons for doubt, reasons that are themselves dubious. Wagenbach asserts that in the
beginning of Fall 1914, a regular and intimate correspondence is established between
Grete B. and Kafka, but no doubt he has made a mistake: the only known correspondence
between them lasted the fall of 1913 to the summer of 1914, and was never such that it
would allow one to conclude that there was a relationship between the correspondents. If
one recalls the rule of absolute candor for Kafka (when he had broken with Felice for the
first time and spent intimate days with the young Swiss woman in Riga, he does not fail, as

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soon as relations have been established, to tell everything to the woman who is no longer
his fiance), it seems quite unlikely that he could have kept silent about such a relationship,
one that would also have been a double betrayal. Nevertheless, one can imagine that he
kept silent in order not to compromise G.B. What a strangely muddled situation it was. The
following testimony must have also been mentioned: friends of Grete Bloch said that the
young woman, during her stay in Florence (thus at the moment when she revealed the
story of the child), expressed profound melancholia or delirious distress. But what is the
worth of such an assertion? It is as vague as it is intolerable. Imaginary or not, the child of
which Kafka was unaware had this spectral existence, real and unreal, does not allow us,
for now, to give it life outside of dreams. Grete Bloch and Felice remain friends until the
end. When she had to leave Germany, Grete confided to her friend one part (approximately
half) of the letters she had received from Kafka. The remainder she deposited in Florence
with a notary who later placed photocopies of them in Max Brod's possession. Twelve of
these letters had been torn in half in a "rather bizarre manner," but with the exception of
one, they were able to be put back together because one of the halves was in Felice's hands,
and the other in the notary at Florence. Grete Bloch, who lived in Israel since she left
Germany, had the misfortune to return to Italy. When the country fell under Nazi
occupation, she was taken away with many other Jews and died during the deportation to a
camp; an inquiry by the Red Cross has not allowed it to be known with certainty. Felice
escaped from such a fate: married, lived first in Switzerland and then in the United States,
where she died in 1960. I will also add that in Kafka's Journals, in January and February
1922, during his solitary and quite tragic stay in Spindlermhle--he is still friends with
Milena, but without hope-- certain notations can be read in which the initial G. appears;
thus on January 18: "A little peace; on the other hand, G. is arriving. Deliverance or
aggravation, one or the other." On February 10: "New attack from G. Attacked from the
right and left by extremely powerful enemies, I cannot escape." And on January 19,
although no name intervenes and in an enigmatic manner, which led me some time ago,
perhaps hastily, to read these passages in the light of an almost "mystical" obscurity:
"Attack on the way, at night, in the snow." "I got away from them," and later, on March 24:
"How I am spied upon: for example, on the path on the way to the doctor, on the path
constantly." Tears of an oppressive strangeness. Wagenbach, who knew the manuscripts of
the Journals, seems to have read: "New attack by Grete." I give this indication, without
knowing more.
**To offer better proof of this for myself, I would like to establish a short chronology of the
breaks, at least during the course of the first two years. They occur almost simultaneously
with the correspondence, which begins September 20, 1912, we should remember. Already
in mid-November, Kafka rites (the young lady had remarked without malice that she did
not always understand him or that some of his traits made him seem strange to her): "Let
us be done with it, if our life is dear to us." Distraught, the unfortunate Felice then appeals
to Brod, who answers her: "I beg you to let many things pass with Franz, given his
pathological sensitivity; he obeys his mood (Stimmung) of the moment. He is someone who
wants the absolute in everything... He never accepts compromise." On November 20, Kafka
writes again: "But I have no news from you. I must therefore openly repeat the adieu that
you silently gave me." Their written relations take up their passionate force once again.

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At the start of January 1913, the change, which is no longer one of circumstance or
mood, begins to take place in Kafka, one that will not ease to aggravate itself without,
however, attenuating the relationship--on the contrary, it strengthens it. On March 23, is a
meeting in Berlin, after which is the letter of confession: "My true fear, never will I be able
to possess you," which for him does not at all signify that he is distancing from her, but that
she seems to take it otherwise: she spaces out her letters, and takes advantage of a trip to
Frankfurt to interrupt them, with a candidness that nearly drives Kafka insane. On May 11,
is another meeting in Berlin during Pentecost vacation. This meeting gives him a little hope,
the hope that one day, at least, he "will be able to seriously discuss [their future] with her, a
certain number of awful things and thus little by little, reaching fresh air." Yet he adds:
"When I was packing my bags in Berlin, I had a completely different text in my head
"Without her, I cannot live, nor with her, either." The torment of the truth arrives, and at
the same time, in a letter begun on June 10, which is interrupted, and courageously finished
on the 16th: "Would you like to think it over and consider whether you want to be my life?
Do you want this?" Following this is a debate that will soon come to a close on July 1, 1913
with these words: "So you want, in spite of everything, to take the cross upon yourself,
Felice? To attempt the impossible?" It is after this that the first serious breakup happens.
The couple, engaged out of intimate feelings and not officially, fail to meet up to spend their
vacation together. Felice has a quite cheerful stay in Westerland ("What awaits you is not
the life of happy people in Westerland, not a joyful chatter with arms linked, but a
cloistered life at the side of someone who is morose, sad, silent, discontent, sickly, and
bound to literature by invisible chains"), Kafka goes off to Vienna under the pretext of a
congress, then to Italy, where he writes that he will stop writing to her: "I can no longer go
forward; it is as if I were ensnared. We should separate" (September 16, 1913). He remains
for some time in Riva, befriending young G.W., "the Swiss woman."
Back in Prague, he will be visited by Grete Bloch; she is sent by Felice to attempt to
resolve their misunderstandings. The correspondence is far from resuming with the same
momentum. On November 8, he travels to Berlin for an interview, and manages to catch
only a glimpse of her in effect, and we don't know if F is eluding him out of intention or
negligence. At the start of March 1914, still in Berlin, an explanation leaves him quite
discouraged, and he notices that Felice tolerates him with difficulty. Meanwhile, the
correspondence with Mademoiselle Bloch seems to turn increasingly warmer: "You are too
important to me... Your little card made me happier than anything else I received in Berlin...
Dear Miss Grete, I have an ardent desire to see you, as if it were a manifest nostalgia... What
person in Berlin, for the love of God, can want to touch your head without caressing it? And
when Felice says to him, "You seem to be attached to Grete," he does not deny it. However,
on the twelfth and thirteenth of May, the encounter occurs, during which the official
engagement is decided. (The ceremony, with invitation, a kiss, and congratulations, will
take place June 1.) Kafka comments on the event for Grete. "Berlin was neither good nor
bad, but in any case as was necessary for my undeniable sentiment." And for Felice: "In
spirit, I am united to you in a manner so indissoluble that no blessing of any rabbi could
ever touch it." But Kafka keeps writing to Grete, communicating his disillusionment, and
even his repulsion: "Sometimes--you are the only one to know it for now-- I really don't
know how I can assume such a responsibility, or how my getting married came to be." This

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is one of the letters that Grete (with what intention?) will share with Felice, as we learn on
July 3, 1914, when he writes to Miss Bloch, and thereby, or shortly thereafter, breaking ties
with her: "You should not have quoted letters... Well, then, I have now convinced you, and
you begin to see in me not Felice's fianc, but Felice's threat." There is also painful arguing
on the material conditions of their future; Felice wants an apartment that is comfortably
furnished and to her taste (the apartment, furthermore, will be rented), just as she doesn't
want to give up an ordinary social life. Finally, Kafka is brought to court at the Askanischer
Hof on July 12, 1914, and the engagement is officially undone, much to the horror and
shock of both their families.
I end here with this short history of the break-ups. The correspondence picks up
again in November 1914, newly by Grete Bloch's intervention (in the Journal, October 15:
"Today, on Thursday... letter from Mademoiselle Bloch, I don't know what I must do, and I
know that it is quite sure that I will remain alone... I don't know if I love F. any longer (I'm
reminded of the disgust I felt when I saw her dancing...), but despite everything, the unceasing
temptation comes back..."), but never again will the exchange of letters have the same pace
as in the beginning. Kafka has changed and is changed; since July 29 (five days after his
condemnation) he has commenced with The Trial, writing each evening and each night
over the course of five months. In January 1915, he will see Felice once more in Bodenbach,
without any genuine feelings of fondness. It will require the happy reunion in Marienbad,
July 1916, for it to bring up the question of another engagement, and with it, another
question of a new split.