The poet W. H. Auden once memorably averred that if one had “to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.”1 If this assessment still rings true today, it is because Kafka’s relation to our age is one not only of a certain spirit of the times, a cultural episteme, a given political configuration, or a certain Lebensgefühl, a feeling of life, in the experiential orbit of an alienated modernity. It also pertains with particular force to the ways in which Kafka’s writing incessantly takes as one of its main categories of reflection the very question of the philosophical interpretability of what we call literature. What is one to make, on the level of the concept, of a text that begins with a protagonist named Gregor Samsa who awakens one morning to the realization that he has been inexplicably transformed into a monstrous vermin, even an unthing (“Ungeziefer”), as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? And what kinds of philosophically interpretive thoughts are elicited by a related scene of awakening, in which the character Josef K., a high-ranking bank official, finds himself unexpectedly detained by two officers waiting in his apartment? “Someone must have slandered Josef K.,” Kafka famously begins The Trial, “for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”2 It is as if such scenes figuratively staged the experience of a baffled reader who awakens to a refractory text that he or she is now called upon to interpret—without a reliable key or a hermeneutically stable frame of reference. The reader, like Josef K. himself, comes to inhabit a certain narrative disruption. As the German writer Martin Walser rightly reminds us with regard to The Trial, the “event begins only at the moment when the disruption occurs.”3 In this state of disorientation and hesitation, the drawn-out trial of reading, as well as the exigent process of reading itself, commence—a double meaning that is encoded in the German title of Kafka’s novel, Der Process, which means both “trial” and “process.” But to whom or what does one awaken when reading a literary text from a philosophical perspective? And is this form of awakening not also a way of dreaming—that is, of learning to follow the singular dream-logic of an artwork?
In a reflection dating from the eight intensely creative months (September 1917 through April 1918) that Kafka spent at his sister Ottla’s house in the Bohemian town of Zürau, he writes:
Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.4
[Die Kunst fliegt um die Wahrheit, aber mit der entschiedenen Absicht, sich nicht zu verbrennen. Ihre Fähigkeit besteht darin, in der dunklen Leere einen Ort zu finden, wo der Strahl des Lichts, ohne daß dieser vorher zu erkennen gewesen wäre, kräftig aufgefangen werden kann.]5
If art swirls and circles around truth like a moth around the light of a flame, profoundly attracted by it yet always requiring a certain distance from it in order not to be destroyed altogether, it marks a site upon which the relationship between the aesthetic object and its possible illuminations, its Schein or appearance, first becomes a discrete matter of inquiry. One of the central questions that here impose themselves concerns the ways in which the elusively idiomatic artwork relates to the kind of rigorous conceptual labor that it, in addition to the pleasure that it typically affords, also elicits. If we can accept the premise that, as Gayatri Spivak puts it in a different context, “reading literature, we learn to learn from the singular and unverifiable,” then the relation between, on the one hand, the singularity and unverifiability of the artwork and, on the other hand, the concept that seeks general validity, is itself one of the main axes around which aesthetic production and its interpretation circle.6 The intricate question about the nature and potentialities of this complex relation inflects the way in which we may begin to understand Kafka’s image of art as it playfully yet purposefully swirls around the flame of truth without being consumed by it entirely.
There can hardly be a conceptually subtle understanding of the work of art without the aid of philosophy. Yet if the philosophical interpretation of the work of art were entirely successful—that is, if it did not leave a remainder within the artwork that also resisted the translation of aesthetic form into this or that meaning—the artwork would, in a sense, become superfluous. What it achieves conceptually could have been achieved in another way, through discursive logic. Therefore, a seminal concern that permeates Kafka’s writings, including his unfinished, fragmentary novel The Trial, is the very way in which a literary artwork both calls for philosophical interpretation and resists such interpretation at the same time. One way of registering this aporia is to appreciate how, as Kafka puts it in another observation from the Zürau period, for “everything outside the phenomenal world, language can be used only allusively [nur andeutungsweise], but never even approximately in a comparative [or analogous] way [niemals auch nur annähernd vergleichsweise], since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.”7 If the literary work of art unfolds precisely on the far side of the phenomenal world in which language can be said to operate in a comparative, analogous, and therefore principally other-directed way, the language of the literary text inhabits an orbit of signification in which it can only ever allude, but never actually fully name, what it may be “about” on the conceptual level. Another way of putting this is to say that the language of the literary artwork requires a certain philological, theoretical, and philosophical interpretation in order to address both its allusive character as such and that unspoken or hidden sphere of signification to which its allusiveness seems to point, but to which it cannot ever refer in any unmediated way.
Kafka himself exhibits a keen awareness of this difficult-to-fulfill requirement throughout the entire trajectory of what he calls his Schriftstellersein, or constitutive “being-as-a-writer.” When, for instance, he writes to his two-time fiancé Felice Bauer—whose initials, F. B., are also those of the character Fräulein Bürstner in The Trial, one of protagonist Josef K.’s erotic interests—to inquire about the possibility of finding any meaning in the story he wrote concurrently with The Trial, “The Judgment,” he betrays his uneasy sense that a conceptual interpretation is both necessary and impossible: “Can you discover any meaning in the ‘Judgment’—I mean some straightforward, coherent meaning that one could follow? I can’t find any, nor can I explain anything in it [Findest Du im “Urteil” irgendeinen Sinn, ich meine irgendeinen geraden, zusammenhängenden, verfolgbaren Sinn? Ich finde ihn nicht und kann auch nichts darin erklären].”8 As the first reader of his own text—and thus as something akin to a primordial type of reader in relation to the constellation of challenges posed by the Kafkan text to the very category of understanding—Kafka finds himself pushed by language to the limits of what can be translated into a form of recognizable meaning or sense (“Sinn”), especially if by meaning or sense is meant a hermeneutic disclosure, an effect of meaning derived from linearity, coherence, and followability. Yet Kafka the reader is unable simply to content himself with the enigma that Kafka the writer has created for him—and, by proxy, for all readers. His text refuses to be explicated according to any conventional notions of conceptual unfolding, yet it continues to provoke, in its own singular idiom and perhaps against all better judgment, ceaseless attempts to explicate.
There are few philosophical readers of Kafka more attuned to the tension between the artwork and its conceptual exposition than Adorno.9 Indeed, his practice of the uncoercive gaze can hardly be understood without attending to this tension. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno puts the matter in an epigrammatically condensed way when he argues that “art stands in need of philosophy that interprets it in order to say that which it cannot say, whereas art only is able to say what it says by not saying it.”10 Adorno here puts his finger on the predicament at the core of the relation between philosophical commentary and aesthetic production. On the one hand, the artwork—especially the self-consciously self-reflexive, high-modernist variety of Schönberg, Alban Berg, Samuel Beckett, and, precisely, Kafka, that Adorno so often would explore—requires philosophical discourse to bring to the fore as a graspable, cognitive, and propositional structure the Wahrheitsgehalt—the speculative truth content, import, or substance—that, in the absence of critical commentary and conceptual elucidation, lies latent. On the other hand, the very thing that philosophy claims the artwork says, that on behalf of which philosophy acts as a kind of conceptual translator, can be said by the artwork only when it remains silent about it. If the artwork actually said what it says in a transparent cognitive proposition, shorn of the mediations and aberrations of its imaginative flourishes and its singular expression of beauty and form, then it would cease to be an artwork. It would simply be a philosophical treatise concerning a conceptual content that now no longer could claim membership in the domain of art. Yet if the artwork can be itself only by not saying what philosophy claims it says—that is, if the cognitive propositional content on which philosophy focuses cannot be verified in the articulations and inscriptions of the artwork itself, lest it abdicate its status as a work of art—then how can one clarify and verify philosophy’s claims about the content and meaning of artworks? Why does art continue to stand in need of philosophy’s translational services? And if Adorno’s uncoercive gaze is so acutely aware of this tension, what is it that makes him retain his conviction, even his “model,” the supposition of which is “that artworks unfold in their philosophical interpretation”?11
Any philosophical interpretation of an artwork must confront the following paradox: if the meaning of an artwork were to remain sealed off from all logical comprehension, then no philosophy could ever truly speak to this meaning. But if the meaning of an artwork were to reveal itself readily, then no artwork would be needed—since its “content” could have been stated more easily in prosaic, discursive language that would require no philosophy to expound upon it. One lesson to be derived from this state of affairs is that what is required in engaging with a literary text such as Kafka’s The Trial is a certain guardedness in relation to “the illusion that what is said is immediately what is meant [die Illusion, es wäre, was geredet wird, unmittelbar das Gemeinte].” Instead, the character of language as an elusive token (Spielmarke) reveals “the way that all words behave: that language imprisons its speakers one more time; that language, as the proper medium of its speakers, is a failure.”12 What a philosophical approach to a literary text would have to consider, then, is the relationship between, one the one hand, the tension obtaining between an aesthetic object and its conceptual content, and, on the other hand, the ways in which the aesthetic object breaks with what it appears to be saying at first sight.
The push and pull of calling forth and resisting philosophical interpretation, though shared in principle by all great literary works, is staged by a particular work in specific ways that are idiomatic and singular to the individual text. In others words, the heterogeneous ways in which literary works by Hölderlin, Goethe, Eichendorff, or Proust confront the tension between their apparent content and the philosophical interpretation of their import or substance are quite different from the variegated ways in which texts by Mann, Dickens, Wedekind, Beckett, or Heine approach the same tension—to cite the names of some of the authors to whom Adorno chooses to devote substantial essays, later collected in Notes to Literature. One central problem that arises out of this constellation of aesthetic form and the philosophical interpretation of its import is that of the nature of the relationship between the literal and the figurative nature of a text’s rhetorical operations. Adorno’s richly layered essay “Notes on Kafka (“Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka”) was begun in 1942 and first published in Die Neue Rundschau in 1953, and it represents—next to the many occasional references to Kafka throughout his work—his most sustained engagement with Kafka. There, he suggests that Kafka’s “two great novels, The Castle and The Trial, seem to bear the mark of philosophical theorems.”13 These theorems can be approached only through an interrogation of the ways in which literality and figurality interact with each other in a hermeneutically unpredictable manner.14 The “principle of literalness,” in which Adorno espies “a reminiscence of the Torah exegesis of the Jewish tradition,” is both upheld and undermined by Kafka’s writing.15 If Adorno is right that, from the perspective of the uncoercive gaze, “Kafka’s authority is textual,” it is a textuality that does not reside in any mere mastery of understanding or in an ability to spawn philosophical ideas with a palatable literary packaging but, rather, in the singular ways in which “Kafka’s works protected themselves against the deadly aesthetic error of equating the philosophy that an author pumps into a work with its metaphysical substance.”16 After all, if Kafka’s texts were to operate in this way, “the work of art would be stillborn; it would exhaust itself in what it says and would not unfold itself in time.”17 In order to guard against a premature hermeneutic desire that “jumps directly to the significance intended by the work,” two basic rules are to be followed: “take everything literally” and “cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above.” To follow this double precept, a certain “fidelity to the letter” is required. Yet, at the same time, absolute fidelity to the letter, which also entails a reticence, even a refusal, to say what an artwork cannot say on its own, poses the danger that the reader will “lose all ground on which to stand.”18 A critical reading therefore “must cling to the fact that at the beginning of The Trial, it is said that someone must have been spreading rumors about Josef K., ‘for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning,’ ” a clinging that presumably is motivated by the suspicion that the literalness of the novel’s sentences is also perpetually self-undermining.19 In other words, the demand for literalness is from the outset vexed by the very fact that the tacit content of that literalness speaks of phenomena of non-literalness, such as rumor, possible slander, or conjecture, all of which are matters precisely of interpretation rather than transparent literalness.
Kafka’s own keen awareness of this tension is encoded, for instance, in the self-reflexive ways in which he introduces subtle hermeneutic doubt into the apparent matter-of-fact literalness of The Trial’s opening sentence. Although Adorno does not comment on this aspect of the text, it is germane to his discussion. In German, the sentence reads: “Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.”20 Kafka’s deceptively literal declarative sentence, which appears merely to report on an objective state of affairs, in fact stages an implicit call for nonliteral interpretation on an almost subterranean level. The “mußte” (“must have”) not only sets the stage for a novel that, despite being told for the most part through third-person narration, will unfold from the more limited personal perspective of its central character, Josef K. Its introduction of a decidedly interrogative and interpretive mood also serves to open the trial of reading and understanding: Josef K. “must have” been slandered, but he and we cannot be sure. Along similar lines, Kafka’s ambiguous reference to “etwas Böses” far exceeds the referential confines of the English “anything wrong,” for the German locution raises the interpretive stakes with respect to Josef K.’s possible guilt, alluding both to something naughty (as when a German child is scolded for having been “böse”—that is, for having been badly behaved) or, by contrast, something truly evil, das Böse. In addition, as has often been remarked in Kafka scholarship, the subjunctive form presented by the phrase “etwas Böses getan hätte”—which is impossible to reproduce in the English translation to the extent that it renders Josef K. as having done “nothing wrong” and thereby allows the character to appear simply as having been wrongly accused—introduces a subtle moment of interpretive doubt. This doubt is expressed merely by the umlauts that Kafka places over the “a” in “hätte”—he easily could have written “hatte,” thus “ohne das er etwas Böses getan hatte,” a straightforward past-perfect form indicating that Josef K. had not done anything wrong. Kafka’s seemingly innocent shift from “hatte” to “hätte,” from past perfect to subjunctive, works to open the proceedings of at least three interrelated trials: the novel The Trial as such, the perpetually deferred trial(s) of Josef K., and the textual trial of reading itself.21 It is no coincidence, one might add, that Kafka bore within himself a concern with the precarious aesthetics of the umlaut, the fate of “ä”; as he writes in a 1910 diary entry, “The ä, detached from its sentence, flew away like a ball on the meadow [Das ä, losgelöst vom Satz, flog dahin wie ein Ball auf der Wiese].”22
The movement of dispersal that characterizes Kafka’s recalcitrant writing even when it insists on keeping the category of literalness alive cannot be contained by the logic of symbolism and the symbol. The symbol works to gather what has been disseminated, collecting the fragments and shards of meaning into an allegedly stable relation. As Adorno emphasizes in his reading of Kafka, if “the notion of the symbol has any meaning whatsoever in aesthetics . . . it can only be that the individual moments of the work of art point beyond themselves by virtue of their interrelations, that their totality coalesces into meaning.” But, he adds, whereas even some of Goethe’s supposedly allegorical texts in the end work toward a movement of unification within the wholeness or totality promised by the symbol and symbolism, “nothing could be less true of Kafka.”23 On the contrary, in Kafka’s work, “which shoots toward” the reader “like a locomotive,”24
each sentence is literal [steht buchstäblich] and each signifies [bedeutet]. The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart and out of the abyss between them blinds the glaring ray of fascination. Here too, in its striving not for symbol but for allegory, Kafka’s prose sides with the outcasts . . . . It expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off. It is a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen: yet any effort to make this fact itself the key is bound to go astray by confounding the abstract thesis of Kafka’s work, the obscurity of the existent, with its substance. Each sentence says “interpret me,” and none will permit it [Jeder Satz spricht: deute mich, und keiner will es dulden].25
If Kafka’s text does not belong to the order of the symbolic, it is because, at odds with the correspondence-based operation of the symbol, it does not reconcile the literal and the figurative. In classical rhetorical understanding, the gathering force of the symbol is seen as superior to other modes of figuration such as allegory precisely because it unites within itself a certain literality and a figurative dimension. For instance, the crown acts as a symbol of monarchy because it depicts something that is literally part of the object for which it stands (the crown on the monarch’s head) in addition to signifying its object of reference in a more abstract or indirect manner. But in Kafka’s sentences, no such unification is to be found. On the contrary, the task that they impose on their interpreters is inseparable from the task of coming to terms with the multiply refracted ways in which their literal signification is at odds with anything that they may evoke on an allusive, figurative level. Indeed, the insurmountable abyss that opens up between the literal and the figurative level of Kafka’s sentences is precisely what calls for philosophical intervention and interpretive exegesis in the first place.26 It embodies, we might say, the tacit provocation of reflective engagement that Nietzsche, with whose thinking Kafka’s texts are in constant spectral conversation, conjures in aphorism 146 of Beyond Good and Evil: “And when you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”27
If the reader’s task, then, consists in looking into the abyss while also being looked at by the abyss, this task cannot be thought in isolation from the idea that a philosophically informed understanding of a literary text such as The Trial must remain perpetually mindful of how the literal and the figurative dimensions of the text unfold in uneasy relation to each other. For Adorno, one way of thinking the effects of this constantly shifting relation in Kafka’s writing—which makes itself felt, among many other ways, in the tension between his characters’ words and their enigmatic gestures—is to acknowledge the writing’s “ambiguity [Vieldeutigkeit], which, like a disease, has eaten into all signification in Kafka [die wie eine Krankheit alles Bedeuten bei Kafka angefressen hat].”28 But even this radical ambiguity, this sickness that has befallen signification in Kafka’s textual world, cannot be counted on to remain self-identical. As Adorno points out, even the ambiguity is ambiguous, even the Krankheit that has eaten into the text will not always retain the upper hand when it comes to the assignment of meaning, as it were. After all, what is the reader to make of the apparently literalist yet simultaneously dream-like depictions, in The Trial, of how “Leni’s fingers are connected by a web, or that the executioners resemble tenors”?29 How are we to tell when a passage or image in Kafka’s novel is to be taken literally and when figuratively—and when, by extension, the two dimensions are inextricably intertwined with each other in a space of indeterminacy?
Adorno’s insistence on confronting the elusive ways in which the literal and the figurative relate, or fail to relate, in Kafka’s text raises the fundamental question as to the status of the rhetorical in any attempt at providing theoretical or philosophical readings of a literary text. Whereas Jacques Derrida’s assessment, in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” allows us to appreciate the ways in which a philosophical text is ultimately unable to control, even through an elaborated concept of figuration, its own metaphoric productions, Paul de Man’s consideration of the divergence of figurative and literal language that can occur within one and the same utterance helps to cast the question of the rhetorical dimension of the specifically literary artwork into sharp relief.30 When working (ultimately unsuccessfully) to decide whether, for instance, the final line of Yeats’s poem “Among School Children” (“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”) is to be understood figuratively or literally, the reader confronts the consequences of a precise insight: what is at stake is not the notion “that there are simply two meanings, one literal and the other figural, and that we have to decide which one of these meanings is the right one in this particular situation.” Something else makes itself felt here. The properly rhetorical moment is reached “not when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely incompatible) prevails.” From the vantage point of such “vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration,” de Man suggests that one should “not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figurative potentiality of language with literature itself.”31 To the extent that literature acts as a site upon which the rhetoricity of language makes itself felt with an idiomatic and uncontainable force, the reading of a literary text is no longer directed at decoding this or that meaning. The critical task would then not be to adjudicate between the rhetorical prevalence of a literal meaning and that of a figurative meaning but rather to trace the specific and each-time-singular ways in which the very idea of being able to decide between the two levels is exposed as the more or less concealed trademark of the text.
Although, unlike Adorno, de Man does not take Kafka as his touchstone, it is apparent that a concern with the relation between the literal and the figurative dimensions of the text and its interpretation inflects Kafka’s sentences at every turn. The Trial’s pivotal doorkeeper legend, which can be said epigrammatically to condense the novel as a whole, self-consciously speaks to the problem of how to relate to the vexed relation between the literal and the figurative. Kafka first included this short text as a freestanding story under the title “Before the Law” in his 1919 collection A Country Doctor, six years before Max Brod published a version of it in The Trial from Kafka’s literary estate in 1925, the year after Kafka’s death. Here, the man from the country who approaches the gate, guarded by a doorkeeper, behind which he believes the law to reside, presupposes a literalist understanding of the law, according to which it is in principle possible to enter that law. In the course of the episode, the man from the country misinterprets the doorkeeper’s deferral of the permission to enter as its denial. If the doorkeeper episode, like The Trial as a whole, rigorously demands interpretation (on the part of the man from the country as well as from the reader) while also strenuously resisting it, the question of the text’s own literalness is cast precisely into figurative terms. As Derrida points out in his reading of Kafka’s parable, it “does not tell or describe anything but itself as text,” which is to say that it “guards itself, maintains itself—like the law, speaking only to itself, that is to say, of its non-identity with itself . . . . It is the law, makes the law, and leaves the reader before the law.”32 In this sense, the man from the country fails to appreciate how “the singular crosses the universal, when the categorical engages the idiomatic, as a literature always must.” As a result, the “man from the country had difficulty in grasping that an entrance was singular and unique when it should have been universal, as in truth it was. He had difficulty with literature.”33 This difficulty with literature, with the nature and implications of the specific interpretive demand issued by The Trial as well as with literature as such, is the difficulty whose traumatic wound Kafka’s novel will never quite allow us to close, as if it were another textual instantiation—or iteration—of the horrific wound, infested with living worms, into which Kafka dares us to stare in the story “A Country Doctor.”
Learning to learn from the singular and unverifiable form of writing we call literature, then, involves learning to read a text figuratively and literally at the same time. To appreciate its “law,” we must not repeat the error that Kafka’s man from the country makes when he mistakes the literal for the figurative, as well as the singular for the universal. Yet how such learning might be accomplished is itself a matter of dispute in the logic of Kafka’s writing. It is no accident that in the “Cathedral” chapter, in which the doorkeeper parable is put into the mouth of the prison chaplain, Josef K. jumps to the apparently false interpretive conclusion that the doorkeeper must have deceived the man from the country by withholding from him access to the law. “ ‘Don’t be overly hasty,’ ” the chaplain reprimands Josef K., “ ‘don’t accept someone else’s opinion unchecked [übernimm nicht die fremde Meinung ungeprüft]. I told you the story word for word according to the text [im Wortlaut der Schrift]. It says nothing about being deceived.’ ”34 The category of deception is disqualified from the discourse of interpretation because the text’s literal level, its Wortlaut, does not contain it. In light of Josef K.’s hasty efforts to assign figurative meaning to the literality of what the parable presents, the chaplain issues a categorical warning: “ ‘You don’t have enough respect for the text [or for writing, Schrift] and are changing the story [‘Du hast nicht genug Achtung vor der Schrift und veränderst die Geschichte’].’ ”35 What Josef K. fails to appreciate in the course of the novel is that although the literalness of the text cannot be maintained in interpretation, its translation into a figural meaning harbors just as much danger, which is to say, causes the text to change into something that it is not. Paradoxically, then, the philosopher’s or critic’s intervention through interpretive commentary is both necessary and superfluous, a sign of abiding faithfulness to the text and its simultaneous violation. It is also because of this aporia that the prison chaplain instructs K. that “the text [or what is written, writing, Schrift] is unchangeable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair over it [die Schrift ist unveränderlich und die Meinungen sind oft nur ein Ausdruck der Verzweiflung darüber].”36 Writing remains identical (merely) with itself, withdraws into its own self-referentiality, yet simultaneously is exposed to its radical nonself-identity in the force field of critical attempts to provide philosophical commentary upon it.
By the same token, this special form of interpretive despair attaches to a related conclusion that Kafka’s prison chaplain relays to K.: “Correct understanding of something and misunderstanding of the same thing are not entirely mutually exclusive [Richtiges Auffassen einer Sache und Mißverstehen der gleichen Sache schließen einander nicht vollständig aus].”37 Presumably, if the lesson of the chaplain’s sentence is correct, then that lesson applies also to the sentence itself, in which case we cannot even be sure that we have begun to understand the sentence correctly in the first place and thus may have to renounce the apparent lesson that it has taught us and that forms the basis, presumably, upon which it itself is to be interpreted. The particular basis of this renunciation, however, in turn could have come into being only through our attempted interpretation of the sentence. Is this merely an aberrant thought on Kafka’s part? Is it a manifestation of the “disease” that Adorno suspects has befallen all meaning in Kafka’s literary world? Or is such perhaps the ultimate fate of all attempts at philosophical readings of literature?
A special test case for this particular constellation of questions may be found in Giorgio Agamben’s recent interpretation of The Trial as Kafka’s commentary on the relation between law and slander. For, as we shall see, Agamben’s interpretation of Kafka’s novel works tacitly to place under erasure the abiding undecidability that obtains between the literal and the figurative and that is irrevocably lodged at the heart of Kafka’s text. Much of the critical commentary on the novel since its appearance has focused, often in an existentially oriented perspective, on motifs of guilt, accusation, and a denied proper trial. We might think here of influential early studies by such critics as Heinz Politzer, a collaborator of Brod’s in the editing and dissemination of Kafka’s texts. In Politzer’s view, The Trial mobilizes K. primarily as a figure in whom the court can anchor its problematic, even illegitimate, claims and juridical manipulations so that the novel can be seen fundamentally as placing the court itself on trial.38 Implicitly breaking with this exegetical tradition, Agamben, by contrast, shifts our attention to the question of slander and, in particular, self-slander. Pointing out that in the tradition of Roman law with which Kafka, as a lawyer, was well familiar, a false accuser could be punished by having the designation of “kaluminator,” Latin for slanderer, engraved upon his forehead in the form of the abbreviation “K,” which also, of course, is the only initial by which the last name of the novel’s main character is known and which also is the single initial-name of the protagonist in The Castle. Whereas critics in the wake of Brod have tended to reduce the K. by expanding it into “Kafka,” here it becomes the mark of slander as such. Although Agamben does not mention this, it is worth noting that already Kafka himself problematizes—and thereby turns into a matter of debate and interpretation—his employment of the letter “K.” when he writes in a diary entry on May 27, 1914, the year in which he commences work on The Trial, that “I find the letter K offensive, almost disgusting, and yet I write it down, it must be very characteristic of me.”39 For Agamben, reinterpreting the letter K. is a crucial step toward the recognition that “slander represents the key to the novel—and, perhaps, to the entire Kafkaesque universe, so potently marked by the forces of law.”40 And he goes even further when he suggests that if the letter K is not merely seen as referring to a false accusation, or kalumnia, but rather is thought to point to the false accuser, kaluminator, himself, then the protagonist of The Trial can be understood to conduct “a slanderous trial against himself. The someone (jemand) who, with his slander, has initiated the trial is Josef K. himself.”41 The novel as such can then be read as the record of a slanderous self-accusation in which the protagonist struggles to come to terms with the consequences of his illicit self-betrayal.
In order to substantiate this interpretation, Agamben reminds us that not only is Josef K. advised by a court official that he does not know whether or not he has been accused; he is also told that his having been detained is not to be construed as requiring a departure from his ordinary life. Indeed, “the judges do not seem to have any intention of initiating” a trial against K., and “the trial exists only to the extent that K. recognizes it as such,” a state of affairs that “K. himself anxiously concedes to the examining magistrate during the initial inquiry.”42 As further evidence of his understanding of the text, Agamben adduces the words said to K. by the prison chaplain at the end of the “Cathedral” chapter: “The court does not want anything from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”43 From the perspective constructed here, the court is not the instigator of the trial but merely the site, imaginary or real, upon which the juridical and ethical negotiations between a subjective consciousness and its experience of the “lawness” of the law—the law as law—find a stage as well as an archive.
One of the conclusions that Agamben draws from this interpretation of The Trial is that Josef K.’s self-accusatory slander speaks to a certain condition within the relation between law and subject. Indeed, he argues,
every man initiates a slanderous trial against himself. This is Kafka’s point of departure. Hence his universe cannot be tragic but only comic: guilt does not exist—or rather, guilt is nothing other than self-slander, which consists in accusing oneself of a nonexistent guilt (that is, of one’s very innocence, which is the comic gesture par excellence).44
But this comic gesture has a rather serious purposiveness. If, as Agamben argues, humans will slander themselves, it is the task of the law to distinguish, in the cases that come into its orbit, between groundless accusations and those that are potentially legitimate. From the perspective of such a distinguishing function of the law in relation to slanderous self-accusation, it becomes possible to read “the subtlety of self-slander as a strategy to deactivate and render inoperative the accusation, the indictment that the Law addresses toward Being” because the “only way to affirm one’s innocence before the law (and the powers that represent the law: for example, the father, or marriage) is, in this sense, falsely to accuse oneself.”45 The paradoxical need for self-slander to protect one’s innocence when faced with the law then becomes a way for Josef K. to attempt to avoid a trial, to defer the machinations of the legal system. Such a reading opens up the sense in which “K.’s strategy can be defined more precisely as the failed attempt to render the confession, but not the trial, impossible.”46
What are we to make, at this point, of the lingering problem that is named by the tension between literal and figurative understandings of the artwork—between, on the one hand, letting the artwork, as it were, rest in and as itself and, on the other hand, helping the artwork say what it cannot say on its own, even at the risk of thereby making it superfluous as a work of art? Could it be that The Trial lends itself to legal-political (re) inscription in the history of the aftermath of a particular legal system—in this case, Roman law? It is as though Agamben’s interpretive strategy, for all its perceptive meritoriousness, implicitly followed the dictates of a certain displacement. It works to displace the fundamental tension between the literal and the figurative dimension of the language of the artwork onto the question of how the thematic complex of the protagonist’s guilt—and, by extension, his relation to the lawness of the law as such—engenders a certain perpetuation and simultaneous rupturing of certain elements inherited by our tradition from Roman law. In this sense, Agamben’s reading privileges the figurative dimension of the artwork, rendering The Trial in principle as an allegory of the political implications of self-slander within the framework of a certain legal and moral-juridical inheritance. By translating the refractory and meaning-resistant language of the novel, through an admittedly bold new reading, into the conceptual discourse of the politics of self-accusation, Agamben believes to have found the hermeneutic key that Adorno tells us has been purloined. It is from this perspective, too, that Agamben feels emboldened to assert that the politicizing question of self-slander is lodged so deeply in the core of the artwork that this “is precisely what an attentive reading of the novel demonstrates beyond all doubt.”47 “Beyond all doubt”—as though as readers we were free to disregard the prison chaplain’s warnings to Josef K. about the uncontainable aberrations and dangerous vicissitudes of interpretation itself.48
The wish to establish “beyond all doubt” the relations among slander, self-slander, and the law in The Trial presupposes the possibility of a remain-derless translation between the literary text’s literal and figurative dimensions, as well as their often aleatory interaction with each other. Yet this premise is complicated by the resistance of Kafka’s literary language itself. When Maurice Blanchot writes that “Kafka’s trial can be interpreted as a tangle of three different realms (the Law, laws, rules),” he is quick to add that this “interpretation, however, is inadequate, because to justify it one would have to assume a fourth realm not derived from the other three—the overarching realm of literature itself.” “But,” he reminds us, “literature rejects this dominant point of view, all the while refusing to be dependent upon, or symbolized by, any other order at all (such as pure intelligibility).”49 If literature refuses to be derivable from other principles and realms of signification, and if it will not allow itself to be subsumed under external categories as their subspecies, its particular modes of signification also will not permit the construction of a close stretto between a text’s literal and figurative levels. The reader, standing not just before the text of the law but also before the law of the text, will have to learn to do better than the man from the country. This learning, if it is to come to pass at all, would indeed have to be situated on the far side of pure intelligibility. It would have to register, along with any propaedeutic mission, something of the self-reflexive despair to which Kafka himself confesses in a diary entry from December 6, 1921, five years after he had abandoned the fragments that constitute The Trial: “Metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing [Die Metaphern sind eines in dem Vielen, was mich am Schreiben verzweifeln läßt].”50
To the extent that a “disease of all signification” makes itself uncannily felt in The Trial, it helps us register more precisely the contours and uncontainable effects of a certain aesthetic idiomaticity: the vicissitudes of symbolic and allegorical language that bestow upon the literary text a restless and searching experience of cognition and its deferral each time these linguistic vicissitudes come to pass in a new and singular way in a different literary artwork. A philosophically motivated reading of a literary text such as The Trial would have to take into account the destabilizing effects of this particular mode of deferral. In other words, a philosophically oriented interpretation would need to open itself up to the far-reaching implications of the fact that a rigorous confrontation with the text cannot occur in isolation from the experience of our abiding inability to differentiate between the literal and the figurative dimensions of the aesthetic object. If Kafka’s German biographer Reiner Stach worries that “Kafka’s Trial is a monster”—regardless of whether one considers the “genesis, manuscript, form, content, or interpretation of the novel”—and that “nothing here is normal, nothing is simple,” with “obscurity wherever one looks,” we might say that the burden of this obscurity is both perpetuated and illuminated by the irreducibly necessary yet rigorously unmeetable demand of conceptual interpretation that Kafka’s novel issues with each sentence anew.51 It is here that the artwork becomes recognizable not merely as the sensate appearance, or even embodiment, of an idea but rather as an aesthetic form that both elicits and resists its philosophical interpretation. And it is here, too, that the trial(s) of language will have commenced with no authoritative court and no hermeneutically stable basis for judgment in sight.52 Before the philosophical imperative to know and to decide, the literary work of art remains an outlaw.