Lambent Traces
Franz Kafka
Introduction
BEGINNINGS
"KAFKA IS NOT systematic, but he is coherent." 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?" And, what, indeed, is Kafka's Law? Here,
as in everything in Kafka, it seems, in the words of Friedrich Hölderlin's
hero Hyperion, "an instant of reflection hurls us down."
I cannot say what the argument is, though I will discuss various
constellations of images, tropes, narratives, apercus, and aphorisms that
resemble arguments. They are the exploding patterns of Kafka's thought.
Walter Benjamin saw Kafka's work as a nebula o ... read full excerpt from Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka ebook
