Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka

Introduction
BEGINNINGS
"KAFKA IS NOT systematic, but he is coherent."1 Yet for all the progress made in cataloguing the stereotypes of Kafka's social environment (sexual politics, family politics, ethnic politics, technics of script and the other media), the fundamental figures of his thought remain unsolved.
After more than a half-century of investigation, one would think, there ought to be an answer to the question, What, then, is Kafka's argument? And yet a critic as incisive as Erich Heller, addressing the question of the meaning of The Trial, throws up his hands in the end, asking: "What is [K.'s] guilt? What is the Law?"2 And, what, indeed, is Kafka's Law? Here, as in everything in Kafka, it seems, in the words of Friedrich H�lderlin's hero Hyperion, "an instant of reflection hurls us down."3
I cannot say what the argument is, though I will discuss various constellations of images, tropes, narratives, aper�us, and aphorisms that resemble arguments. They are the exploding patterns of Kafka's thought. Walter Benjamin saw Kafka's work as a nebula of Kabbalah and Eddington; Theodor Adorno, as a cryptogram of the waste products extruded by late capitalism on its way to fascism; Walter Sokel, as the expanded myths of "authority and the self"; Gerhard Kurz, as the product of drastic awakenings. More recently, in Schriftverkehr (textual intercourse), Gerhard Neumann and Wolf Kittler have uncovered the modern medial dimensions of Kafka's stories of communication and failed communication.4 Within this giant, endlessly ramified complex, argument-like figures of thought readily emerge. But these sequences do not fit the patterns of lived experience of persons generally or the customary dialectical or deconstructive moves that inform contemporary analysis. Kafka's "business," it appears, like "our business," according to Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, "is not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable."5 The most important word is "allusions."
Consider a text of Kafka's, not chosen entirely at random, that illustrates the sort of conceptual difficulties I am envisioning. In spring 1922, in a notebook entry that is exceptionally clear and seemingly accessible to analysis, Kafka constructed one of the many parabolic houses that abound in his confessional writings. A building arises from his failure to write; or better, as he literally says,
Writing denies itself to me. Hence plan for autobiographical investigations. Not biography but investigation and detection of the smallest possible component parts. Out of these I will then construct myself, as one whose house is unsafe wants to build a safe one next to it, if possible out of the material of the old one. What is bad, admittedly, is if in the midst of building his strength gives out and now, instead of one house, unsafe but yet complete, he has one half-destroyed and one half-finished house, that is to say, nothing. (DF 350)
How intelligible this is. It is easy to understand what it might mean to live in a house that is unsafe, to want to build another, in doing so to want to justify even the elements of the first failed enterprise, to redeem them even, in proving them good enough to be reused. We understand, too, how one's strength might give out, and where would one be then? Neither at home in the first building nor the second, the first imperfect and yet complete, the second merely half-built: the builder is stranded between them. This is where the aphorism could end, and this is where we might reasonably conclude that here is a narrative intelligible on the grounds of its analogy with lived experience. But this is not where it ends. It continues:
What follows is madness, that is to say, something like a Cossack dance between the two houses, whereby the Cossack goes on scraping and throwing aside the earth with the heels [Abs�tze] of his boots until his grave is dug out under him. (DF 350, H 388)
The leap (it is swifter and less traceable than a leap) to another order of the imagination, where thought-in-images races, takes us out of a system of binary opposites--of "writing" versus "autobiographical investigations"--and out of a pattern of plausible reference to the building of a new house from the elements of the old. It takes us to another kind of literary intensity. The Cossack dance dances into the text, as text; the dance is without prototype in what has so far been given by the text and without fitting conclusion at an order of insight and reflection. The Cossack dance dances into the text as the very act of producing text. Protruding from the dancer's scraping boots are heels and, by association, pens--for Abs�tze means at once "heels" and "paragraphs"--while, quite consistently, Kafka's verb "scraping" (scharren) and the act of writing (schreiben) also share a root.