Kafka’s Dimension of Critique

The authors in the text emphasize the critical dimensions of Kafka’s oeuvre, directing attention to the deconstruction of bourgeois subjectivity, the structure of institutions of the modern state, the questioning of modern distinctions between private and public space, work and free time, and other socio-political phenomena. In line with more complex understandings of critique as both a positive and negative procedure—a process of demarcation, questioning, and undermining existing boundaries of thought, sensibility, and social relations—they seek to highlight Kafka’s importance as a critic. They substantiate this through three blocks of questions: what Kafka destroyed, what he affirmed, and which phenomena he complicated through his literary procedures.

 

Here we are interested in the critical tones within Kafka’s literary work, bearing in mind that he is not the only writer who achieves the effects we are dealing with here. Nevertheless, we focus on Kafka because the dimension of critique in his work is often neglected, silenced, and insufficiently interrogated, in order to emphasize existentialist, surrealist, vitalist, theological, metaphysical, and similar tones that are thought to be detached from the socio-political dimension and separated from any layer of critique of social reality. This division between the social/imaginary, real/surreal, political/aesthetic, critical/descriptive, unreal as critique of reality/unreal as escapism is a crude genre distinction, while all good literature shakes and questions it. To that extent, Kafka’s moments of critique and politics are not detached from the surreal, and here we wish to highlight Kafka precisely as a critic of capitalist modernity.

For us, therefore, the question is not only whether there exists a dimension of critique within Kafka’s work, but also whether it opens something that concerns our contemporary situation. In other words: is Kafka relevant, not only in terms of aesthetics and the pleasure of reading, but in terms of socio-political problematics? Many have answered this question. For example, Deleuze (Gilles Deleuze) and Guattari (Félix Guattari) decisively rejected the idea of Kafka’s critique¹ and read him through their philosophical concepts of desire, machines, immanence, etc. Lukács (György Lukács), much earlier, despite acknowledging certain tendencies toward critique of capitalism, nevertheless denied Kafka the possibility of approaching what he designated as critical realism in bourgeois literature.² However, here we are not primarily interested in the history and theory of reading Kafka, but we will attempt to indicate where we see flashes of critique—and thus politics—within Kafka’s work itself. In this task, which we can only undertake in sketches, we will rely on a more comprehensive concept of critique.

Throughout history, critique has been established both as negative (critique in the sense of rejection) and as positive (critique in the sense of the art of evaluation, drawing boundaries, demarcation, questioning conditions of possibility). Critical questioning of the boundaries of fields of inquiry, of the boundaries of the object that critique co-constitutes, is at the same time the destruction of fixed boundaries (which modernity supposedly establishes). If from antiquity to Kant the concept of critique echoes a constant embodied in the figure of drawing a boundary and taking a side³—critique as demarcation—then Kafka can be thought of as a critic who questions and shakes existing boundaries, as someone who in his work outlines a critique and politics that call into question phenomena of modernity, i.e., capitalist sociality.

While critique delimits the relative autonomy of some whole, it does not fix it or separate it in such a way that the domain becomes independent of the totality. Critical drawing of boundaries as conditions of possibility of knowledge is at the same time the unmasking of rigid boundaries. To that extent, we read the landscape of critique in Kafka’s stories and novels as a procedure that does not describe given facts but captures objectivities through transformative efforts—showing boundaries, dissolving boundaries, and approaching reality non-apologetically in the cementing of boundaries.

Precisely along these lines, we read Kafka as a critic of reality, as someone who—even when using the landscape of the unreal—writes about reality. It seems to us that the very emphasis on Kafka’s surrealism detached from (the critique of) social reality testifies to a failure, on the one hand, to understand realism in a vulgar-empiricist way and, on the other, surrealism as an imaginary that relates exclusively to the dreamlike, unconscious, phantasmagoric, subjective-internal. Perhaps Kafka’s “surrealism” nevertheless more faithfully depicts certain parts of reality, and therefore we read the surrealist procedure here as a critical dimension of realism.⁴

Outlining critique in its negative, affirmative, and other layers, we group into three piles: 1. What did Kafka destroy? 2. What did Kafka affirm? 3. What did Kafka complicate? All three piles are part of the branching and dissolution of boundaries through the production of critique. Of course, this is an unfinishable activity, just as Kafka’s novels are not only unfinished but essentially unfinishable.

1. What did Kafka destroy?

The imaginary of the bourgeois subject. Kafka destroyed the notion of the bourgeois individual as a free-thinking, independent, and self-confident subject who knows what he does and does what he knows. This is the liberal fantasy of a coherent, self-assured, rational, and entrepreneurial subject. In The Trial, Joseph K. is a projection of this bourgeois subjectivity which, in its efforts and exploits against the judiciary, attempts to affirm its Ego held high, trusted as the most secure point of the bourgeois world from which everything can be clarified, and by means of which every battle on the battlefield of modernity is supposedly won. As if, in the moment of doubt, he says to himself what the narrator quotes: “Was he not always so free a man that he could smash the entire court, at least as far as he, K., was concerned?” Here we hear dimensions of motivational techniques, so ubiquitous in today’s world where almost every obstacle and misfortune is supposedly resolved by the power of will, by encouraging the subject to be better, stronger, faster, more worthy, more active, more powerful…

Kafka turns this into ridicule. With every step, he pushes his protagonist in The Trial into ever greater degradation, until the moment before execution when he feels “like a dog.” Kafka’s dimension of critique shows that no (individual) self-confidence can save us from mysterious currents of power. The reverse side of Joseph K.’s bold exploits is interwoven with numerous stumbles, dizziness, weakness, fatigue, confusion (precisely in the presence of officials, within institutional spaces, etc.), inability to control basic affects in the presence of secretaries, waitresses, maids, sex workers, and other women by whom he is often surrounded. Just as in The Castle, where the protagonist K. arrives as a stranger in the village, summoned to service as a land surveyor: despite obstacles, traps, twisted moves, and stubborn impossibilities of reaching the high representatives of the castle, K. is also presented as a bourgeois subject who tries at all costs, using all means and all people as means to reach the goal.

And this is a subject who above all strives to reach his goal while everything is arranged so that there is no possibility of reaching it, because the ultimate destination actually does not exist. And despite efforts to behave as if he masters himself, as if structures are logical and rational, and as if the goal-oriented path is clear, Kafka’s critique shatters these liberal illusions to pieces. Nor here do we actually find someone who “masters himself,” who is “capable of daring to think with his own head.” Kafka destroyed this precisely where we fully expect this phantasmagoria—in the middle-class bank clerk (The Trial), the young ambitious man who devotes himself to his service with exceptional force, or the bold and assertive surveyor (The Castle) who behaves as if the whole world belongs to him. Modernity—together with liberal and Enlightenment ideas—projected the image of a strong and rational individual, a subject who knows what he wants and possesses what he wants, but modern society did not produce him. Kafka’s critical tone at this point is extremely close to Freud’s, as well as Marx’s.

The distribution of space and the security of “one’s own room.” Kafka’s critique also dismantled the notion of privatized space in which the citizen of the modern era retreats to rest from the shocks of squares and urban spectacle, noise, and hurried life in the crowd. When in the first scene of The Trial he is “arrested” in the room where he lives, Joseph K. laments his being caught off guard and in his imagination places this encounter with lower representatives of power within the framework of the workplace where—he thinks—he could calmly face the situation. Throughout The Trial, the impression is gained that Joseph K. feels safer, calmer, and more comfortable in the office than in his apartment. In the story The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug precisely in his own room.

Representatives of authority from The Castle appear in tavern rooms or chambers, and only there do we see them performing “public” duties. And while Marx wrote about that capitalist perversion that man feels human only in the private space of the home⁵—due to alienation and horror in the world of work—losing his essential property of humanity as a communal being, and some feminisms add analyses of the household as a space permeated by violence, it could be said that Kafka, too, critically, through his literature, shows how the home is actually not a space of freedom and security. Power at the very beginning of The Trial crosses this barrier, in the arrest scene in the bedroom, and reading begins with this porosity of boundaries.

In Kafka’s text, spatiality most often appears as “confused”: what is usually in the center is now on the periphery, what is usually private space is now shown as permeated by instances of public authority… In The Trial, the attic space plays an important role, but this time not as a private and secret space, but as a place of publicity and highly positioned instances of power in the social hierarchy.

Above many poor and modest apartments on the city’s periphery are attics filled with judicial offices. They are above the heads of the people who live and sleep there. These attics, as the painter Titorelli, one of the characters in The Trial, says, are spread throughout the entire city. From above, bureaucrats and clerks lurk, breathing down necks, literally standing over heads. Günther Anders noted⁶ Kafka’s tendency to use certain conventionally metaphorical expressions in their literal sense. “To experience something on one’s own skin” turns into inscribing the sentence on the convict’s back skin in the story In the Penal Colony, and in The Trial we encounter a literal representation of something we can still hear today from people—modern states, bureaucracy, bosses, and politicians climb on top of our heads and burden every thought.

In modern literature, the attic most often hides madness, ghosts, and monsters. But Kafka’s critique added to it the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state, which in itself summarizes many of these elements. Another characteristic of Kafka’s work is the representation of constant surveillance—which is again close to Freud, who, less than a decade after Kafka began work on The Trial, added to this “above” yet another disturbing feature, the instance of the Super-ego. This super-instance, however, in the psychoanalyst, is found in the interior of the psychic apparatus itself. In Kafka, it is dispersed everywhere, so during the trial we encounter numerous enigmatic figures observing K.’s moves, right up to the execution itself.

Rationality and intelligibility of institutions and law. Kafka destroyed the notion of rationality and logic that modernity associates with its fundamental institutions of security and protection (private property), such as the judiciary, law, and the bank. His delving into the mysticism of corridors, offices, and convoluted public spaces shows inconsistency where we expect homogeneity and order, decentralization where we demand centeredness and “conversation with superiors” who supposedly pull the strings and “know what they are doing,” the impression of dissolution where we would expect clarification and calming from “properly done work”… If we trust any of the mentioned institutions, the tentacles of the perverse judiciary already appear in the neighboring room in the figures of beaters, suspicious figures from the judicial apparatus, etc. We encounter them in the middle of Joseph’s bank, whipping lower clerks and whoever else needs it. Cathedrals are not spared; the court chaplain waits for him there too.

Instead of reaching some clarification of the situation and problems haunting man in offices, face to face with someone who “masters matter,” it seems that every visit to an institution ends with yet another layer of ambiguities and unfulfilled “obligations” toward the state apparatus—and this is an integral part of modern existence that reaches to the present day. Not only are papers, documents, connections missing, but also basic knowledge of where to go, whom to turn to, what else to obtain, “how to orient oneself in state thinking,” the field of law⁷ and power.

This is all the structure of the capitalist sphere of law today. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Jacqueline Rose in her book on violence⁸ compares Kafka’s figure of Joseph K. with a migrant woman in the United Kingdom in the 21st century, for whom everything related to legal regulations is impenetrable, incomprehensible (because there are no translation services), unjust, and meaningless. Everything is arranged to hinder understanding and prolong the right to asylum. Kafka precisely showed this: law is what fundamentally confuses.

The irrationality of the judicial process includes superstitions, reading bodily signs, and delirious interpretations of what does not seem logical and predictable, such as claims that Joseph K., judging by his lips, will be quickly condemned. Judges’ opinions differ, but so do interpretations of those opinions, so the framework of the judiciary is a framework of interpretation of interpretations, not a positivist framework of facts, precision, and accuracy (which is invoked but also problematic).⁹ Dynamics of norming and rule-setting by no means make the judiciary more transparent and understandable, and one of the foundational bricks of liberal democracies—independent and impartial judiciary—proves to be a myth.

In The Trial, Kafka did not throw someone from the lower class, a worker or working woman already denied much, into this vortex, but exposed a clerk, someone skilled and adept in bureaucratic matters, to it, to show his deconstruction as well. Similarly with the figure of the land surveyor in The Castle, where K. is someone who seems to have more connections with representatives of power and institutions, someone to whom class and cultural prerogatives are more accessible—but even he does not navigate the sphere of power permeated by irrationalities. Kafka’s knot of critique of alleged rationality, logic, and justification of institutions and law does not go in the direction of assuming that there is nevertheless some “better” law that has only not been reached due to corruption. Behind all complications, no clear field of regulations is discernible that should be liberated and cleansed of illogicality, reformed, and further ordered.

On one side, law appears as something behind the door (in the parable told toward the end of The Trial) or somewhere in some castle where it seems no one has ever been. On the other side, law is always already there, everywhere around, all are immersed in law, called into it and consent to it.¹⁰ Even when they rebel, they consent to the logic of law—and that logic is completely inconsistent. Law is thus out of reach, yet omnipresent: this ambivalence is precisely expressed by the syntagm standing before the law.

2. What did Kafka affirm?

Abstractions and functions in literature. Kafka affirmed the passion for creation under seemingly hopeless conditions. He showed how resistances are possible where we do not expect them, where we usually do not attach importance to them. The literary text offers hints of radical questioning and taking distance, even when starting from what is closest, when diving into the existing to the point where it disintegrates into its building elements, when in the forcing of concreteness it reveals its fundamental abstractions. This is evident in the portrayal of characters, who are somewhat faceless and whose relations are superficial. Kafka often reduces his protagonists to functions by attributing to them a certain dimension of their duties, as Günther Anders also claims. Thereby abstraction in literature is affirmed, in line with the method of scientific experiment.¹¹

The beater is only the one who beats, reduced to what his task is; he himself says so and expresses a certain degree of consent to it. Kafka, like a scientist in the laboratory, excludes all contingent characteristics, isolates the essence of the function, so his beater appears as an absurd figure that actually shows real positioning in social relations to a much greater extent than if he had been presented as someone hiding a series of warm and familiar human characteristics behind the function. Almost all female characters in The Trial and The Castle are portrayed that way: they are objects of desire, waitresses, landladies of apartments¹² or taverns, maids, objects of interest to judges and representatives of law or castle members, sex workers, etc. We know nothing deeper about them, just as about policemen, investigators, judges… There is no familiarization nor moral portrayal of characters. Reducing characters to functions is not a procedure of dehumanization, but a depiction of existing dehumanization in modern societies (while their humanization would be mystification).

Writing as questioning the obvious. Kafka affirmed a skeptical attitude toward what is most obvious, which according to some interpretations—for example, Althusser’s (Louis Althusser)—is one of the features of the critique of ideology. In the readiness to delve into the obviousness of modern urban life (in the case of The Trial), unwilling to accept them as such, insisting on the strangeness of every corner of the city, every crack in the wall, staircase and attic, street and traffic, in the tendency to present them in the light of becoming rather than self-emergence, Kafka affirmed the mode of writing as questioning the obvious.

Kafka’s skepticism toward proclaimed boundaries of modern societies thus opens a multitude of questions: where does the public end and privacy begin?; where does leisure begin and work time end?; where are the boundaries of power (state, judiciary, police)?; where does one enter the law, become recognized or initiated?; do we know the boundaries of modernity?; where does the modern that should break with the features of the old regime begin?…

Anti-authorship, non-human beings and non-beings in literature. Kafkaesque critique also affirms animals (moles, mice…), Odradek, various forms of non-human lives, “deformations” arising from the contact of life with the vortex of modernity, different forms of thinking (thinking of a bug, mouse, dog) and different forms of collectivity (mouse people). All this points to a departure from the personal and individual. Is there (today) a stronger antipode to autofictional outpourings than inventing an entire mouse people? Kafka’s texture is an affirmation of departure from what is supposedly ours, proper, personal, autofictional navel-gazing. This is a strong confirmation of anti-authorial creation of something that transcends the writer, that goes beyond authorial inviolability, romantic interiority, and everything that could belong to it as source, center, depth… Kafka thus affirmed characters and relations that are not portrayed intimistically. He affirmed politics as a foreground question.¹³ At this point he should be contrasted with all those readings that reduce him to an existentialist thinker and recognized even more as a critic.

Affirmation of grappling with the negative and entanglement. As Kafka writes in his diaries: “I have strongly received the negative in my time, which is very close to me and which I never have the right to suppress, but to a certain extent to advocate.”¹⁴ One should not turn away or deny, but grapple with the “negative of one’s own time”: today, in the time of domination of all shades of denialism, it is not easy to see this as affirmation.

Today, when mechanisms of denial operate on so many fields and to such a high degree, from denial of climate crisis and ecological catastrophes, through wars and threats of wars (everything is denied until it is in our backyard), to denial of illness and structural barriers to treatment (because it seems everything is up to us ourselves, everything is in our heads and habits, never in systems).

Saturation with denialism contributes to blocking any attempts at mobilization, producing even more intense withdrawal into oneself—where problems cannot exceed the level of individuality and remain in the domain of personal cry—and solidifies the reactionary idea that a better world is imaginable only as interiority and that there is no alternative. Kafka, however, affirms going outside and allowing the “negative” to penetrate inside: one must lower shields, lower guard and expose oneself, get one’s hands dirty, against maintaining moral purity…

In Kafka, morality is put in brackets, as Anders established; he is a “morally unusable” writer. This has the consequence of opening space for treating structural dead ends, penetration of collectivity and historical situation. Again, he should be distanced from readings focused on the interiority of existential drama—the drama is not produced by inherent dead ends of human a priori constitution that supposedly has ahistorical validity, but by anchoring and harnessing in relations and instances, entanglement with the world as it is in the historical moment. Kafka’s characters above all get entangled; that is what makes them interesting, what they are. Affirming entanglement as a method of inquiry and as a practice is also a layer of critique.

3. What did Kafka complicate?

Spatio-temporal relations of the modern era. Can there be talk of free time in Joseph K.? Can his existence produce something like care of the self and care for others, beyond utilitarianism? Free time is only a pale echo of work time, and days are organized so that they are not touched by more meaningful leisure or any play. Something similar is observed in the relation of general and individual interest. In Kafka, people are narrowed, the entire dimension of human interaction, solidarity, and communality is cut off from them.

In The Trial, it is emphasized that there is no common interest of the accused and the whole process is organized so that everything is individualized and relativized, to ultimately prove futile. “Nothing can be done collectively against the court, each case is examined individually, because this is the most accurate court.”¹⁵ And instead of assuming and consenting to clear boundaries and divisions of the sensible, here complication is the effect of critical activity: non-consent to simple formulas private/public; work/free time; mine/other’s… In Kafka’s work, existing social divisions disintegrate and the text forces us to question whether they expose their reverse sides somewhere, how that happens and what it serves, whether it is accidental complication or structural contradiction… We do not read about what is outlined as known, but question the very outlining of it. Is this not again on the trail of (critical) shaking and complication of boundaries?

Family, established matrices of growing up, and marriage. Kafka portrayed the family as a kind of coercion and anxious, conflictual structure—yet another closeness to Freud that we register here. Letter to His Father, The Judgment, and diary entries bring us images of family relations in which accumulation of guilt and fear plays a key role. For Kafka, as for Freud, it is not about accidental deviations on the principle “there are, you see, some bad fathers, some bad sons and bad daughters” and the like: it is primarily about a terrain suitable for the emergence of negative effects. Something in the structure itself is rotten, something that should be addressed in a deeper sense.

In capitalist society, the family as a separate private realm reproduces relations of dependence that, besides economic, have their psychic effects and coercions. Kafka, together with numerous modern critical voices, voiced precisely this aspect. Let us read him, once again, therefore, more as a witness to these structural dead ends than as an inept son, incapable of entering the marriage his father desires. Eternal Son is the title of one of the biographies, while Kafka’s goal is not to be a son. Children in his works are often portrayed as if they appear more as adults or as if they have no guardians, and anti-marital and anti-family tones permeate both The Trial and The Castle.

Although surveyor K. briefly gets engaged to Frieda, one of the protagonists again reduced to her function—mistress of a high castle representative, or potential connection to reach the castle—the relation is depicted as community through fetishized social relations of alienation and interest. The short pre-marital life of K. and Frieda is complicated by living in a school classroom, sharing space with two assistants (imposed on the surveyor) who follow him everywhere, by the fact that it is an untrustworthy and superficial relation. In the novels there are no great family or marital sagas, no warm, deep, and intimate relations, no family as the dominant organizational form of the collective, no idealization of family connectedness… Obvious are functions, duties, interests, and power relations within those social dynamics, and that is already complication of what in capitalism is drawn as private and primarily moral space.

Clearly divided periphery and center. Kafka complicated the portrayal of bourgeois existence as separated from the rest of the world and indicated relational perception of class in The Trial. Recall the scene in The Trial when Joseph K. for the first time goes to court, which is strangely located on the city periphery, among shacks and working-class quarters teeming with life, women breastfeeding children while hanging laundry, cooking, and performing other socio-reproductive activities. In that phantasmagoric and somewhat vitalistically depicted reality of the periphery, he notices something unexpected—reading signs above warehouses that do not exist in the city center, he recognizes them. They are signs from documentation that passes through his hands daily in the bank.

Then for the first time he sees that he somehow participates in all that; that the periphery is not so distant from him; that his hands very much touch this misery, although he does not dwell in it and does not suffer anything from it that he now has the opportunity to see. Kafka here brings us closer to the relational logic of periphery and center: the city center, where financial management and “properly” made-up institutions are conventionally located, has its other side in that reality separated and segregated by spatial barriers, where life unfolds differently. Kafka’s lucidity is in the (literary) production of their clear connectedness: recognizing in the periphery the logic of the center, its cruel isolation and violent distance, as well as its complicity.

The relation of village and castle in The Castle outlines similar dynamics: the boundary of what was conventionally presented as centralized place of power separated from the periphery (village) is visibly disturbed. Castle offices are scattered throughout the village, in taverns and inns; officials sleep and receive parties in inn rooms, the count of the castle is barely mentioned figure, while the entire bureaucracy of the castle is everywhere in the village… Capitalist spatiality here is complicated, and thereby reveals the possibility of changeability of social divisions.

Clearly divided pre-capitalist and capitalist phenomena. Kafka complicated fundamental distinctions of modernity such as that between archaic and modern: superstitions and rationality (of the judicial apparatus), pre-modern and modern state, aristocratic practice and modern institutions, desecralization and what in its sacral dimension mutates and extends through the space of modern archipelagos, personal and impersonal dimensions of power. The archaic spills over into the modern. Tentacles of pre-modern practices reach into the rationality of bourgeois order. The castle as a pre-modern figure radiating an aura of inaccessibility is internally filled with modern bureaucracy. One must be received, initiated. It is not enough to just fill out forms.

The accused in The Trial often resort to superstition in their lostness; judges have their portraits made by the court painter like princes and sovereigns; the cruel practice of punishment in the penal colony is executed by an automaton, apparatus, an extremely modern figure, at the press of a button. The construction of the (ancient) Chinese Wall shows a modern problem of industrial production—fragmentation of the product in workers’ experiences, so the mysterious leadership decides on segmented structure of the construction process so that the worker after months of engagement goes home somewhat more satisfied when seeing the part of the building on which he toiled so long, instead of the unclear base of the wall that does not have nearly as majestic an impression. Precisely these places of deconstruction of the boundary between capitalist modernity and pre-modern regimes attracted Walter Benjamin’s attention.¹⁶

He complicated the image of work, city, village, court, police and state, bank, love, sex and passion, freedom and consent, social cohesion (in the story Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk), the possibility of change and transition from one regime to another through the poetics of non-arrival, complicated the idea of progress, modernity itself. Kafka as complicator, as the need for re-examination of modernity, critique as complication, showing implicit complications that would like to appear as clear and pure, simple formulas and slogans in their manifest forms. The anxiety that arises when reading is testimony to these critical effects, Freudianly speaking—articulation of resistance. Discomfort is the language one must learn, because it is also Kafka’s language.

The dimensions of critique in Kafka’s work are somewhat marginalized. Mostly analyses of mood and atmosphere are insisted upon, existentialist and theological “foundation” and similar tendencies are emphasized, language and etymologies are more accented, surrealist moments detached from reality, psychological, internal or biographical dimensions are highlighted… Escape from critique is thus justified by claims that there is no critique in Kafka’s work, not even in traces. However, instead of the absence of critique, perhaps it would be better to notice the absence of moral reflection here and to highlight Kafka’s critical dimensions of capitalist modernity in a more political way.

We read critique through dimensions of rejection, affirmation, shaking, and complication of existing distributions of reality, and such nuanced moments of critique could also point to its transformative aspect: critique as part of struggle, critique as part of revolutions, as a way of radically changing not only thinking but also sensibility… Kafka did not write political pamphlets and programs, but literature that questions reality and shows some of its barrenness. That is precisely the politics of literature we want.

The text is financed by funds from the Fund for Promoting Pluralism and Diversity of Electronic Media of the Agency for Electronic Media for 2024.

Lazar Petković | Maja Solar

Source: Slobodni filozofski Texts on literature on the P.U.L.S.E. portal

Notes:

¹ “It is rightly observed that there is nowhere critique in Kafka.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka, Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića, Novi Sad, 1998, p. 81. Deleuze and Guattari do not see this as a lack; they see in Kafka the deconstruction of arrangements as something more effective than critique. “Precisely thanks to the power of his non-critique Kafka is so dangerous.” Ibid., p. 107.

² See: Lukács, G., The Meaning of Contemporary Critical Realism, Kultura, Belgrade, 1959, p. 42 ff.

³ See: Koselleck R., Critique and Crisis. Study on the Pathogenesis of Bourgeois Society, Plato, Belgrade, 1997, p. 146 ff.

⁴ Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari read Kafka as a hyperrealist, in line with his anti-lyricism and anti-aestheticism: “‘To grasp the world’ instead of extracting impressions from it, to work with objects, persons, and events in the real, not with impressions. Kill the metaphor. Aesthetic or sensory impressions or representations of imagination still exist for themselves in Kafka’s first sketches, where a certain influence of the Prague School is felt. But Kafka’s entire further development consists in erasing those influences, in favor of a sobriety, hyperrealism, and machinism that go another way.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka, p. 123, 124.

⁵ The concept of home here does not refer only to the physical object, and on the social dimensions of home see the text: Maja Solar, Behind the Back of Corona: Work, Home, and Time.

⁶ Anders, G., Kafka – For and Against (Foundations of the Dispute), Kiša, Novi Sad, 2015.

⁷ Law is not thought only as a specific legal act but as part of the repressive apparatus of the state, as connectedness with economic-political dynamics, but also as a pulsating field of effects it produces. As Poulantzas notes, precisely in analogy with Kafka, repression (of law) is not only violence and its interiorization, but also mechanisms of fear. “These are real, not purely subjectivized mechanisms: I called it the theatricality of the modern state, the true Kafkaesque Castle. Theatricality incorporated into modern law, into labyrinths and corridors where law is realized: based on the monopoly of legitimate violence, and to understand this, one should look in Kafka’s Penal Colony.” Poulantzas N., State, Power, Socialism, Globus, Zagreb, 1981, pp. 82-83.

⁸ Jacqueline Rose, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, chapter 9 (At the Border).

⁹ The words of the merchant Block, who also conducts a trial and tries to get an appointment with the lawyer whose maid he practically lives with, are telling. “Here, this judge thinks the trial begins at a different time than I think. It is only a difference of opinion and nothing more. According to an old custom, when the trial reaches a certain stage, a bell is rung. In this judge’s opinion, that is when the trial begins. I cannot now tell you everything that speaks against this, and you would not understand it anyway, but let it be enough if I tell you that many things speak against this.” Kafka, F., The Trial, Novosti, Belgrade, 2004, p. 192.

¹⁰ “Man only comes to the law, and the doorkeeper is already there.” Ibid., p. 214.

¹¹ Anders, G., Kafka – For and Against (Foundations of the Dispute), pp. 14, 69 ff.

¹² Illustratively, even the landlady herself, Mrs. Grubach, in The Trial answers the question why she works at night: “During the day I belong to the tenants; and if I want to put my things in order, only evenings remain.” Kafka, F., The Trial, p. 21. Lack of time, especially time for personal activities and relations with others, is Kafka’s obsessive theme. See Fuchs, A., “The Trouble with Time: Kafka’s Der Proceß” in: Kafka’s The Trial. Philosophical Perspectives (ed. Hamer, E.), Oxford University Press, New York, 2018.

¹³ As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out when speaking of what they call minor literatures—in them everything is politics. Deleuze G. and Guattari F., Kafka, p. 28 ff.

¹⁴ Quoted according to: Anders, G., Kafka – For and Against (Foundations of the Dispute), p. 7.

¹⁵ Kafka, The Trial, p. 171.

¹⁶ Benjamin, W., Essays, Nolit, Belgrade, 1974, p. 246 ff.

  Critique, Franz Kafka, Lazar Petković, Literature, Maja Soler