Prof. Dr. Fernando de Toro

1. Prof. Dr. Fernando de Toro Franz Kafka 1883-1924 The Burrow, 1924

4. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • A Literature of Failure • Kafka’s workcan be taken literally. • In the sense that it functions on the surface of its signs and that the issue is not to interpret The Burrow but to experience the effects that are made of assemblages of nouns, • of heterogeneous orders of signsthat cannot be reduced to a binary structure.

5. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • A Literature of Failure • Walter Benjamin was able to avoid at every step the “dreary psychoanalytic interpretations”. • Thus, no matter how we approach it, Kafka’s work does not lend itself to domestication.

6. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • It resists on all levels that one simultaneously invent and experiences in its unfolding • not merely a new writing or a new mode of reading but a genuine “traversal of its writing” from which one does not emerge unscathed. • We can see a hint of nihilism that tilts Kafka’s wok in the direction of the literature of failure: • not far removed fromCamus and his philosophy of the absurd and of the futility of every human work, and the work of Samuel Beckett. 

7. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • The Burrow becomes obvious that Kafka has been misinterpreted and misunderstood. • This only because he has for a long time been judged to the embodiment of a concept of literature that is totally inapplicable to his work. • And in this he is similar to Jorge Luis Borges or Samuel Beckett.

8. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • This is a ‘minor literature’ as concept proposed by Deleuze and Guattari – a concept that opens up so many new avenues of research they give to the modern reader a means by which to enter into Kafka’s work without being weighted down by the old categories of genres, modes, and style.   • In this very last work he deconstruct modern narrative even before modernity ends by the mid 1950s.

10. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Writing against the current and from a linguistic space that is radically heterogeneous with respect to his great predecessors,Kafka appears as the initiator of a new literary condition: • a condition where reading and writing open up new perspectives, break ground for new avenues of thought, and, above all, wipe out he tracks of and old topography of mind and thought. • He brings Modernity to an end by not entering in it. 

11. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • With Kafka one has the feeling that literature has been given a new face: • it has changed both its addresser and its addressee.

12. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • If, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the principal strata that bind and imprison the human being are “the organism, meaningfulness, interpretation,subjectivization, and subjection, then theminor” language is the instrument par excellence of that destratification. • How? By introducing a rhizomatic writing and self-cancelation of statements, performativity, and the obliteration of meaning.

13. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • With Kafka we are no longer confronted by a “dialectic” or a “structural” correspondence between two kinds of “forms” – forms of content, on the one hand, and ready-made forms of expression, on the other, • – but by a machine of expression that is capable of disorganizing its own forms, of disorganizing the forms of content, so as to free up pure content that can no longer be separated from its expression. 

14. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Thus, the art that Kafka is effectively no longer an art that proposes to “express” (a meaning), to “represent” (a thing, a being), or to “imitate (nature). • It is rather a method (of writing)that consists in propelling the most diverse contents on the basis of (nonsignifying) ruptures and intertwinings of the most heterogeneous orders of signs and powers.  • The content becomes the form in a performative practice.

15. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • To find the “key” to Kafka’s work is to seek not to interpret it. • How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This wok is a rhizome, a burrow. • The castle keep [Burrow]has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. • So is the text, with multiple lines of flight

16. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • The whole description of the burrow functions to trick the reader. • We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged than another.

17. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Kafka and Minor literature: What Is a Minor Literature? • A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.

18. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • But the first characteristic of a minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization. 16 • The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. […] Minor literature is […] [a]cramped space [thay] forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. 17 • The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value. […].

19. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • To make the sequences vibrate, to open the word onto unexpected internal intensities – in short, an asignifying intensive utilization of language. • Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits.

20. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Reflections on The Burrow • The extended narrative monologue in “The Burrow,” represents an extreme for Kafka’s fiction • The project under construction is a literary as well as architectural object, bespeaking the same duplicity, illusoriness, impenetrability, and limit characteristic of a literary text that ends Modernity.

21. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Its functioning as an engraving; suggests the close affinities linking the passages of the narrative to the “burrowing”. • If the passages of the construction are the passages of the text, the construction is identified with the voice uttering it which the text is presumably a transcribed expression.  

22. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Since the construction is defined by physical as well as referential context, the voice of the animal becomes, in terms of this text, the voice of language in general. • The narrative’sthe limitless capacity of immediacy to generate itself without referent, only a reference constructe by language.

23. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • The bifurcation produce isotopies such as silence, tranquillity, Self, security, sleep, and burrowing. • The Burrow describes the animal’s entire adult life as having gotten lost in the transition between the initiation of the construction and the present (see p. 357) 

24. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • In this sense the text deals with death. • This is reflected in the verb Graber (to dig, engrave) where the animal itself is a Graber, as opposed to a Gräber (digger), is not merely simple digger, but a graver/engraver (see p. 357-358) • The writing which is the construction to death, and I would argue, the death of literature.

25. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • If the Gräber brings death thr passage defines the work of construction as the erasure of life. • It may well be that death enters the narrative in the final words: “But all remained unchanged” (359). 

26. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • What form of writing? • Most statements are augmented by qualifications which either cancel them or make mockery of their statements. • The burrow, says the animal, “has so many ….defects… indeed always” 332. • This technique of qualifications, suspensions, and invalidations characterizes Kafka’style in general, but in The Burrow it reaches proliferation and density rare in his writings.

27. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Aside from this the text deconstruct writing and the genre of the ‘novel’. • It obliterates meaning and structure, the text and the ‘story’ are one, circular, never closed. • Each line of flight is a beginning that can be continued with another line of flight. • So the texts ends predicating its own strategy: “But all remained unchanged. (359).

28. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Kafka and Beckett • There are a number of intersecting lines between Beckett and Kafka regarding a number of common devices. • The issues of restarting constantly (the construction/the speaking).

29. Franz Kafka: The Burrow/Der Bau • Kafka and Beckett • the circularity of of the text: it ends as it start: • the burrow it is and it is not secure, and after all the attempts to make it impenetrable, everything remains unchanged. • And the creation of a writing of failure that woull also characterise Beckett’s own wrting practice. • END