Kafka’s Kantian Situational Comedy

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Almost Necessary: Kafkas KantianSituation Comedy

Erica Weitzman

In a letter of December 28, 1908 to Elsa Taussig (later to become thewife of Max Brod), Kafka writes the following:

Gndiges Frulein,

erschrecken Sie nicht, ich will Sie nur, wie ich es bernommen habe,rechtzeitig daran erinnern (und mglichst spt, damit Sie nicht mehrdaran vergessen), da Sie heute abend mit Ihrer Schwester ins Orientgehen wollten.

Schreibe ich mehr, ist es berssig und verringert gar noch die Bedeu-tung des Vorigen, aber ich habe immer noch leichter das berssigegetan, als das fast Notwendige. Dieses fast Notwendige habe ich nmlichimmer leiden lassen, gestehe ich. Ich kann es gestehn, weil es natrlichist.

Denn man ist so froh, da man das ganz Notwendige fertig gebracht hat(dieses mu selbstverstndlich immer gleich geschehn, wie knnten wir unssonst am Leben erhalten fr den Kinematographenvergessen Sie nicht anheute abendfr Turnen und Tuschen, fr allein Wohnen, fr gute pfel,fr Schlafen, wenn man schon ausgeschlafen ist, fr Betrunkensein, freiniges Vergangene, fr ein heies Bad im Winter, wenn es schon dunkelist und fr wer wei was noch) man ist dann so froh, meine ich, da man,weil man eben so froh ist, das berssige eben macht, aber gerade dasfast Notwendige auslt.

Ich fhre das nur deshalb an, weil ich nach dem Abend in Ihrer Woh-

nung wute, da es fr mich fast notwendig sei, Ihnen zu schreiben. Ichversumte dies endgiltig, denn nach der letzten Kinematographenvorstel-l Si d i d h lt j B i f h i f t


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aber natrlich nach einer andern, frmlich wertloseren Richtung, als esjene ist, in der das berssige liegt.

Als Sie mir aber letzthin sagten, ich solle Ihnen schreiben, um meineSchrift zu zeigen, gaben Sie mir gleich alle Voraussetzungen des Notwen-digen und damit des berssigen in die Hand.

Und doch wre jener fast notwendige Brief nicht schlecht gewesen. Siemssen bedenken, da das Notwendige immer, das berssige meistensgeschieht, das fast Notwendige wenigstens bei mir nur selten, wodurch es,allen Zusammenhanges beraubt, leicht klglich will sagen unterhaltendwerden kann.

Es ist also schade um jenen Brief, denn es ist schade um Ihr Lachenber jenen Brief, womit ich aberSie glauben mir bestimmtgar nichtsgegen Ihr briges Lachen sagen will, auch nicht z.B. gegen jenes, das Ihnenheute abend der galante Gardist bereiten wird oder gar der durstigeGendarm.1

All arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, Franz Kafkas much-debated comic sense is well in evidence in this early letter, functioninghere at once as opening gambit, compositional principle, and explicittheme. Such a multiple use of the comic is in fact typical for Kafka,

who not only applies and plays with traditional forms of comedy in his

work, butprecisely in doing soalso puts those forms into question,in this way generating a comedy of comedy with far-reaching conse-quences for every aspect of his writing practice.2 The present paper,however, will conne itself to an examination of situation comedy inKafka, dened as the comedy proper to Handlungor action, primarilythrough a reading of his early America novel, DerVerschollene. Theclaim will be that the above lines, irtatiously tossed off to the futureMrs. Brod though they may be, provide no less than a description innucefor Kafkas theory of comic plot: indeed, for his theory of plot

in general. For whatever its frequency in real life may be according

1Franz Kafka, Briefe 19001912, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,1999) 9294.

2For earlier approaches to the problem of humor/comedy/laughter in Kafka, see e.g.Jean Collignon, Kafkas Humor, Yale French Studies, 16 (1955) 5362; Felix Weltsch,Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas(Berlin: F. A. Herbig, 1957); MichelDentan, Humour et cration littraire dans luvre de Kafka(Geneva: Librairie Droz and Paris:Librairie Minard, 1961); Pavel Petr, Kafkas Spiele. Selbststilisierung und literarische Komik(Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universittsverlag, 1992); Joseph Vogl, Kafkas Komik, in

Kontinent Kafka. Mosse-Lectures an der Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, eds. Klaus R. Scherpeand Elisabeth Wagner (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2006) 7187; Peter Rehberg, Lachen Lesen.Zur Komik der Moderne bei Kafka (Bielefeld: Transcript 2007); Ulrich Stadler ber das


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to Kafka, the almost necessary actually occurs not at all rarely in hiswork, but rather constantly provides the criteria for situations andactions that are just as lamentable as they are amusing and as amus-ing as they are lamentable. From the rhetorical shift that turns DasUrteil from family romance to the tragedy of a failed Oedipus, to thehunger artist who would have been spared his otherwise inexorableanorexic oblivion had he merely been able to nd a food he liked,to the bedroom scene in Das Schlo in which K. sleeps through theone possibility of his success, a spurious escape valve within seeminginevitability and logical circularity not only provides a certain comictension, but furnishes the whole inner impetus and mechanism ofthe plot at large.

In his letter, Kafka already shows himself to be highly conscious ofthe peculiarity of this new ontological and narratological category.He graciously, but nevertheless pointedly, indicates the vast qualitativedifference separating the laughter evoked by the almost necessaryfrom the laughter evoked by the routine farces of the cinema of hisday. Kafkas claim that he gar nichts gegen [Elsa Taussigs] brigesLachen sagen will is clearly an example of paralipsis, the rhetorical

gure of denying in order to afrm (emphasizedas if emphasis werenecessarywith the humorous aside Sie glauben mir bestimmt). Thisso-called briges Lachen is specically the laughter of the moviesthat Kafkas letter is presently reminding Elsa Taussig to go and see,and whose clear frivolousness and formulaic character Kafka gentlymocks by his own parodically excessive formality.3 If the laughter thataccompanies such cinematic works is not quite das berssige, it is,as it were, its dryer distillate, brig, something by the way, a residueof the rst superuous erotic gushing forth, perhaps even what is left

over when the river (Flu) of simple, natural pleasures has dried up.So Kafka does clearly mean something against this kind of laughter,which, itself a remnant, only lls in the idle spaces of life after thefulllment of onerous duty.

It is precisely in speaking against this kind of laughter, however, thatKafka makes a bid for another, more fundamental, kind of laughtera

3Thus Hanns Zischler is incorrect when he cites this passage as evidence of KafkasLust am primitiven Film and describes Kafkas words as a dringende Kinoempfehlung.

Hanns Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996) 16. To thecontrary, it is clear that the recommendation being given here is anything but urgent(and indeed not even really a recommendation at all) And while Kafkas pleasure here


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laughter which he must at the moment supposedly do without, butwhich, precisely in claiming to lack, he both characterizes and bringsinto being.This is as much as to say that the logic of the letter itselfis an exemplary demonstration of the almost necessary that willappear again and again in Kafkas works as the characteristic modelof his comedy of situation. It was almost necessary, Kafka says, to

write a letter to Elsa Taussig; therefore (or nevertheless) he did notdo so. Her request for a handwriting sample made a letter neces-sary, however, and this necessity, once minimally fullled, opened upthe opportunity for the superuous action of writing even more thatKafka remarks in the second paragraph. In the process, the almostnecessary is missed entirelyand yet, what results is exactly the sameas if the rare moment of the almost necessary had happened. Forin point of fact, the almost necessary doeshappen, albeit as a kindof accident or misdirection, and the letter that Elsa Taussig receives isprecisely the almost necessary letter that is leicht klglich will sagenunterhaltsam, even as Kafka laments, amusingly, the non-sending ofthe letter that he has in fact sent and the lack of ensuing laughterthatin factensues.

Already in this early letter, the characteristic technique of the unsyn-thesizable sliding paradox that Gerhard Neumann has distinguishedin Kafkas late work is evidentin this case unmistakably with comicintent.4 In keeping with Neumanns diagnosis, the logical puzzle thatKafka sets up between the terms necessity and superuousnessdoes not, in the manner of the traditional paradox, effect a mere

witty reversal of expected logic that could be either re-reversed intoits original truth or pushed towards a higher dialectical synthesis.(One could, for example, imagine an equally charming letter in which

movie-going and letter-writing were aspects of natural law, and ofcework was that which is extraneousness or accidental.) Rather, it divertsthe paradox towards a third, contradictory, term: in this case, thatof the almost necessary. It may here be recalled that in Kant (andnot just in Kant) the combination- and paradox-mechanisms of witmay, for all their inferiority vis--vis reason, still act as a Vehikel oderHlle fr die Vernunft und deren Handhabung fr ihre moralisch-praktischen Ideen.5 In Kafka, however, the deformation of traditional

4Gerhard Neumann, Umkehrung und Ablenkung: Franz Kafkas Gleitendes Para-dox Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 42: Sonderheft


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forms of witnot, n.b., through an elimination of wit, but throughits exponential overbidcome to undermine such applicability tomoral-practical ideas and indeed place these ideas themselves undersuspicion, creating a literary response to what Kafka, in one particu-larly terse diary entry, formulates as Das Grauenhafte des blo Sche-matischen.6 And insofar as wit, in its traditional elaboration, is notopposed to but rather parasitic upon reason, it thus appears almostas a matter of course that Kafkas play with the play of paradox in hismeditation on social pleasures and popular entertainment will also bea means by which to reexamine of some of the most basic questionsof philosophical inquiry. For if, as Neumann writes, Kafkas slidingparadoxes lenken nicht auf eine Synthese des Widersprchlichenhin, wie das traditionelle Paradox, sondern von jeder erwarteten Stim-migkeit ab; jede Ausung ist blo eine Reduktion auf neuerlich und

viel ursprnglicher Unbegreiiches,7 then Kafkas delivery of Kantianlogic over to the operation of permanent paradox will prove to evokea more signicant sort of laughter than the merely by-the-way laughterof cinematic farce indeed.8

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sets out to demonstrate the reso-

lution of a fundamental manifestation of what he lists as the thirdconict of transcendental ideas within the antinomy of pure reason:namely, the classic problem of causality, the apparent contradictionbetween free will and necessity, or in Kantian terms, the seemingconict between Freiheit and Natur.9 Kant lets the dogmatismof pure reason10 speak against empiricism11: the rst, the espouserof a world in which every action is one link in a chain of causes andeffects presumably leading all the way back to one singular and pri-mal cause; the second, a principle in which everything that exists or

happens is essentially random or contingent, did not have to be, and

6Franz Kafka, Tagebcher, in Kritische Ausgabe, eds. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Mller,and Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002) 517.

7Neumann, Umkehrung und Ablenkung, 706.8Zischler provides facsimiles of the original Path frres publicity cards with plot-

summaries for both lms. Adding to an understanding of Kafkas irony in the letter toElsa Taussig is the fact that while Der durstige Gendarm is clearly a crude burlesque,Dergalante Gardistappears to be the purest of high melodramacomplete with love affair,murder, an innocent falsely accused, and a last-minute salvation from the gallowsand

the laughter it might evoke likely to be only of the unintentional kind. See Zischler,Kafka geht ins Kino, 1819.

9Immanuel Kant Kritik der reinen Vernunft ed Jens Timmermann (Hamburg: Meiner


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could well be otherwise. Kant gives shorter shrift to the latter, at thesame time granting it a commonsensical truth as it applies to the worldof sensuous phenomena (i.e.as the label suggests, the empirical

world) butonlyin this limited sense. However, dogmatist determinismis no truer in Kants reasoning, in that it falsely presumes a temporal-ity that actually belongs to the phenomenal alone. Kant resolves theantinomy, therefore, by setting pure reason and the phenomenal asfar apart as possible:

Eben so, wie wir die Vernunft einschrnken, da sie nicht den Faden derempirischen Bedingungen verlasse, und sich in transzendente und

keiner Darstellung in concreto fhige Erklrungsgrnde verlaufe, also auch,andererseits, das Gesetz des blo empirischen Verstandesgebrauchs dahineinzuschrnken, da es nicht ber die Mglichkeit der Dinge berhauptentscheide, und das Intelligibele, ob es gleich von uns zur Erklrung derErscheinungen nicht zu gebrauchen ist, darum nicht fr unmglicherklre. Es wird also dadurch nur gezeigt, da die durchgngige Zufl-ligkeit aller Naturdinge und aller ihrer (empirischen) Bedingungen, ganzwohl mit der willkrlichen Voraussetzung einer notwendigen, ob zwar blointelligibelen Bedingung zusammen bestehen knne, also kein wahrerWiderspruch zwischen diesen Behauptungen anzutreffen sei, mithin sie

beiderseits wahr sein knnen.12

On the one hand, says Kant, the world is indeed made up of randomand contingentof superuousphenomena, and there is no ur-scene of temporal causality. On the other hand, however, pure reason,divorced from any obligation to appear as phenomena, allows for thesomewhat tautological category of the unbedingt notwendig, theblo transzendentalen und unbekannten Grund der Mglichkeitder sinnlichen Reihe berhaupt.13 In fact, it can be said that Kant

does not resolve the problem of freedom vs. determinism so much asset them together in opposition to his own, alternative proposition.Zuflligkeit and Abhngigkeit alike are qualities of alles dessen,

was zur Sinnenwelt gehrt,14 but true necessityas opposed to thedependent causal necessity attached to contingencyis the productof transcendental reason alone. This argument, as is well known,provides in turn the basis for Kants dismissal of theological proofsof Gods existence, together with his simultaneous insistence uponthe existence of God as a transcendental or regulative idea: we can-

not say with right that God doesexist; however, He mustexist, if in no


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other way then at least as the gathering place for concepts of DieNotwendigkeit, die Unendlichkeit, die Einheit, das Dasein auer der

Welt (nicht als Weltseele), die Ewigkeit, ohne Bedingungen der Zeit,die Allgegenwart, ohne Bedingung des Raums, die Allmacht, etc.15Only with God as regulative idea are both speculative thought andthe transition to considerations of practical reason possible.

Such reections would seem at rst to have very little to do withthe structures of situation comedy in which, precisely, the chain ofcause and effectwhat Kant calls the nirgend geendigten Regressusin der Reihe empirischer Bedingungen16is placed squarely in theforeground: put through its paces, so to speak, and made to dem-onstrate every occasion for possible mishap. The world of situationcomedy, respecting the difference between pure and practical reason,is basically a world of immanence; it breaks only the laws that it itselfestablishes (and, often, puts them back together again). Thus situationcomedy tends perhaps more than any other form of the comic towardsconservatism or in any case restoration, because its comedy only exists

within a controlled situation. Where there is no more situation, thereis no more comedy. Corollary to this is that where there issituation,

there is comedy, because the situation is designed to prepare preciselythe kind of basis in which comedy likes to grow. Thus despite the factthat it often relies on clash, surprise, and the breaking of expectation,its comedy may be said to be necessary. However unlikely the initialpremises, and however extravagant the high jinks that might ensue

within a particular plotline, the undergirding logic of most situationcomedy is ultimately a conventionalindeed, a mechanicalone ofcause and effect. Or rather, situation comedy forms a kind of parodicexaggeration of causal logic, in which accident and chance set off a

series of rigidly determined actions until a second coincidence comesin to put an end to the chain of events. Thus such comedies are alsosuperuous, insofar as the comic mechanism is only the result of animmanent misunderstanding, and could actually be stopped (as theyultimately always are stopped) with a simple message, a clarication, a

judgment. The situation did not have to happen, and doeswith a bitof luck, smarts, or outside interventioneventually stop happening.

In Kafka, on the other hand, the situation (almost) must happen,and never stops happening. This is not to suggest that Kafkas plots

are illogical, something along the lines of the received wisdom that hisstories are dreamlike, uncanny, or surreal. To the contrary: just


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as Kafka often borrows from clowning theatricality and slapstick for hisimages and descriptions, his plots are carefully structured with toolsborrowed from the subgenre of situation comedy. However, whereasin a standard situation comedyor for that matter any literary workmaking even the smallest bid for realismthe causal relationships aregenerally linear and narrative, in Kafkas plots these relationships areessentially static and circular, or indeed intrinsic, almost necessary,to the point where the notion of causality actually ceases to be validat all. In this way, Kafka undertakes a conscious undermining of thenaturalistic or quasi-naturalistic tradition by stripping its methodsbarerobbing them of all context indeedwhile at the same timepushing the logical consequences of the genre to their breaking point.

The pathetic/amusing almost necessary structure of Kafkas plotsdifferentiates his novels both from their naturalistic or psychologicalpredecessorsabove all, from the model of the Bildungsroman, which

Der Verschollene, for one, also explicitly references and parodies17aswell as from the tragic form so often attributed to his works. In theideal or rather the schematic case, the Bildungsromantells the storyof a will increasingly in possession of itself and fullled in its origi-

nal potentiality through the overcoming of exterior obstacles andinner uncertainties. Tragedy, meanwhile, can be schematized as thenegative of this, a model in which a supposedly autonomous andperfectly realized will is undone necessarily by the rigid decrees offate. Broadly speaking, both of these modelsthe Bildungsromanhafteand the tragicrequire forms of sovereignty clearly not to be foundin Kafka: in the former, the sovereignty of the individual and a societygoverned by common rational laws; in the latter, the sovereignty ofGod, gods, or monarch. These forms of sovereignty, however differ-

ent from one another, provide a stable transcendent frame in whichan earthly contingency may and indeed must play itself out as causeand effect. For contingency is not opposed to action, but a necessarycomponent thereof: in a world where all was determined in advance,

where nothing could be other than how it is, choice and action wouldbe impossible.18 However, the opposite is just as true: where there is

17See in this connection Gerhard Neumann, Ritual und Theater. Franz KafkasBildungsromanDer Verschollene, inFranz Kafka. Der Verschollene/Le Disparu/LAmrique

critures dun nouveau monde?, ed. Philippe Wellnitz (Strasbourg: Presses Universitairesde Strasbourg, 1997) 5178, esp. 66.

18As Rdiger Bubner points out: Wo etwas notwendig geschieht unvermeidlich war


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onlychance, i.e., where the relations of cause and effect are utterlynugatory, there can be no action, because all actions are thoroughlyirrelevant to what happens: allactions are superuous. Precisely this isthe antinomy Kant attempts to solve in his creation of the possibility ofthought and action under the sign of regulative ideals, differentiatedfrom an ironclad causal determinism and a total empirical randomnessalike. The effect of this, however, is that necessity (if not determinism

per se) remains entirely on the side of the transcendent, and contin-gency entirely on the side of the empirical. Thus the problem that soconcerns Kant is not solved so much as displaced to a different realm,that is, shifted to the impossible non-realm in which the transcendentand the immanent wouldproblematicallycoexist.

This impossible non-realm of immanent transcendence is thetheater in which Kafka stages his plots. The following piece, forexample, one of the so-called Aphorisms from around 1918 (oneof several originally sorted by Brod, injudiciously or no, under thetitle Paradise) dramatizes the structure of the Kantian antinomy aspseudo-Promethean slapstick:

Er ist ein freier und gesicherter Brger der Erde, denn er ist an eine Kette

gelegt, die lang genug ist, um ihm alle irdischen Rume frei zu geben unddoch nur so lang, da nichts ihn ber die Grenzen der Erde reien kann.Gleichzeitig aber ist er auch ein freier und gesicherter Brger des Him-mels, denn er ist auch an eine hnlich berechnete Himmelskette gelegt.Will er nun auf die Erde drosselt ihn das Halsband des Himmels, will erin den Himmel jenes der Erde. Und trotzdem hat er alle Mglichkeitenund fhlt es, ja er weigert sich sogar das Ganze auf einen Fehler bei derersten Fesselung zurckzufhren.19

The literal chains that bind Kafkas nameless he recall Kants meta-

phoric Kette von Ursachen,20 disdained by the latter as an over-liter-alization of ideas of cause and effect. Here, however, Kafka refastensthe chains that Kant imagines to have cast off, as a fetter so forgivingthat one only feels it when one attempts to go between the spheresof heaven and earth, in the same way that Kants ontology only hurts

when one moves, that is, when the workability of the division betweenthe transcendent and the empirical comes once again into question.It is then in this contradiction of the groundsfor action, far more thanthe contradictions of actions themselves, that Kafkas meta-situationcomedy takes place. Nor can the comic nature of Kafkas plots be said


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to lie in the deliverance of human activity to mere chance in opposi-tion to ideologies of necessity and the hierarchy of meaningfulness,in the spirit of the romantic trope of divine laughter or humorouslassitude.21 The comedy lies rather in the compulsion to act withinthe almost total removal of possibilities for actingthe excising ofHandeln from Handlungwhen the categorical distinction betweenthe transcendent and the empirical spheres can no longer be main-tained. Or, more to the point, the comedy lies in the demonstrationthat, in the collapse of the distinction between the transcendent andthe empirical or in the doubting testing of the transcendent sphere,absolute necessity and absolute contingency effectively merge, reacti-

vating Kants antinomy of pure reason and confounding at least thelogicalpossibility for rational individual action.

Thus Kafkas doctrine of the almost necessary rst marks the sutur-ing point or the moment just before the suture of these two apparentpoles of the laws of causality, the by turns amusing and pathetic,barely or indeed never really existing space of the acting subject.22The fact that the actions in Kafkas plots are almost necessary doesnot mean, of course, that Kafkas characters could somehow achieve

a way out of their various predicaments, for example if they only triedharder or could nd someone to help them. Precisely this assump-tion is what all three K-characters so tenaciously and mistakenly holdto (an assumption that, although it fails to do the protagonists anyreal good, also drives the novels plots almost entirely). If an outexistsone thinks here, for example, of the ostensible acquittalheld out to Joseph K. in Der Proce23Kafkas characters are usuallyunable to recognize, much less avail themselves of it; indeed theymaynot, for the fault, such as it is, is not occasional, but constitutive

21See e.g. Weltsch, Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas, 8693. Sucha conception of the relationship between contingency and humor/the comici.e.,that the comic is comic primarily in regard to a non-comic necessity posited eitherin worldly values outside the action or in a transcendent ideal ofnon-contingencyismaintained in exemplary fashion by Hegel, who, for example, in the section of hisVorlesungen ber diesthetikentitled Die komische Behandlung der Zuflligkeit callsthe literature of adventure eine in sich selbst ausende und dadurch komische Weltder Ereignisse und Schicksale. G. W. F. Hegel, sthetik, ed. Friedrich Bassenge (Berlin:Aufbau-Verlag, 1955) 556.

22Among the many pieces in the Aphorisms addressing this topic, perhaps the most

explicit is that of the Dreierlei des freien Willens, which concludes, consonant withthe above argument, es ist aber auch, da [das Dreierlei] gleichzeitig ist, ein Einerleiund ist im Grunde so sehr Einerlei da es keinen Platz hat fr einen Willen weder


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a Fehler bei der ersten Fesselungto the point where it may notproperly be considered a fault at all, but the condition for acting assuch. Or, more accurately and more problematically: it is botha faultandthe condition for acting as such. In this way, the almost neces-sary functions as a reading both of the Judeo-Christian Fall and theKantian teachings of moral lawand this not just as critique (whichit also surely is) but also as the eternal incontrovertible ground rulesof the game. As such it is the performative irony of Kafkas comedyofHandlung, the comic error withinthe error that is in turn the onlything that makes errantryi.e., actionpossible.

The paradoxical structure of the almost necessary stands out per-haps most clearly in the third chapter ofDer Verschollene, the pivotalset piece Ein Landhaus bei New York. In this chapter, the youngimmigrant Karl Romann is dismissed summarily from his rich unclesgood graces after a farcically miscarried stay at the country house ofhis uncles associate Mr. Pollunder, an event that marks the breakbetween Karls initial secure and promising conditions in Americaand his subsequent abandonment to the dangers of vagabond life.

Arriving at Mr. Pollunders house for what he imagines will be a plea-

surable experience in his newly-adopted land, Karl is dismayed to ndPollunders fellow-associate and double Mr. Green at the door, andGreens presence indeed proves almost immediately to be a burdenand a bother. The early dinner scene foreshadows the catastrophe tocome in a (for Kafka) fairly plain use of authorial irony:

Die ersten Worte des Herrn Green bei Tische waren Ausdrcke des Staunensdarber, da Karl die Erlaubnis des Onkels zu diesem Besuche bekommenhatte. Einen gefllten Suppenlffel nach dem andern hob er zum Mundund erklrte rechts zu Klara, links zu Herrn Pollunder warum er so staune

und wie der Onkel ber Karl wache und wie die Liebe des Onkels zu Karlzu gro sei, als da man sie noch die Liebe eines Onkels nennen knne.Nicht genug, da er sich hier unntig einmischt, mischt er sich nochgleichzeitig zwischen mich und den Onkel ein, dachte Karl und konntekeinen Schluck der goldfarbigen Suppe hinunterbringen. Dann wollteer sich aber wieder nicht anmerken lassen, wie gestrt er sich fhlte undbegann die Suppe stumm in sich hineinzuschtten. Das Essen vergienglangsam wie eine Plage.24

Karls judgment that this pleasure-killing Einmischung between him

and his uncle is unntig will of course prove to be grievously in error,


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insofar as Greens only purpose for coming to Pollunders is the givingof the letter to Karl containing his uncles marching orderspresum-ably the very groes Geschft25 mentioned upon Greens arrival thatis to keep him at the country house the whole night through. Whilethe letter itself is apparently a consequence of Uncle Jakobs disap-proval of Karls acceptance of the invitation to the country house (aninvitation, however, which was initially a suggestion of Uncle Jakobhimself), it also seems in some vague way to be a consequence of thedisaster of the visit itself and Karls corresponding equivocation on

whether he should stay or go, and this disaster and equivocation inturn appearin a form of circular illogicas a product of Greensinitial meddlesome presence. What transpires after the torturous din-ner scenePollunders daughter Klaras sexualized aggression, Karlshumiliation in the face of Klaras anc Macks superior masculinity,the labyrinthine and merely provisional passages of the house itself,the supplication for return to Green and Pollunder, and the bizarremusical reconciliation with Klara and Mackis in fact merely displace-ment or postponement of, or indeed play in what is the scenessimultaneous premise and conclusion.

For again, the necessity of the letters delivery and nal message ofthe letter itself is presaged constantly and explicitly from the very rstscenes of the chapter. Upon entering the house, Greens rst act, likethe act of some overzealous archangel, is the shutting of the glass doorsagainst Karls pleasure at breathing in the houses EdenicGreen andPollinatedgarden. In this can be recognized a continuation of theexpulsion from Paradise motif, of which the famous sword-wieldingStatue of Liberty at the novels beginning is the clearest symbol.26 Inboth cases, Kafkas technique is to make the normal temporal chain

of cause and effect into a self-sufcient and atemporal circle, plac-ing the expulsion not just at the end but also at the beginning. Karlis already cast out from Paradise at the very moment he enters it.27

25Ibid., 78. The possibility that Greens phrase is an obscene joke on Kafkas partthusmaking Karl the excrement expelled from the bowels of good societyshould not beruled out. The same phrase also occurs in Der Proceas Joseph K.s description of histrial (see Kafka,Der Proce, 168). On excreta and allotriaor random play in Kafka (spe-cically, on the latter as a form of waste activityto match the former as wasteproduct)see Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton

University Press, 2004) 7273.26Kafka,Der Verschollene, 7.27Another of the several 1918 Aphorisms treating the concept of original sin whose


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Meanwhile, the yet-to-be-revealed contents of the letter that sends Karlonce again into exile are alluded to already during the conversationat dinner in Greens story of his aged manservant: Mein Gott, riefKlara, ist das eine Treue! Ja es giebt noch Treue auf der Welt, sagteHerr Green und fhrte einen Bissen in den Mund, wo die Zunge,

wie Karl zufllig bemerkte, mit einem Schwunge die Speise ergriff.28Lack of delity, of course, is precisely the accusation later lobbedagainst Karl by his uncle (signed, in a nal twist of the knife, Deintreuer Onkel Jakob29) and given as the apparent reason for Karlsbanishment, an accusation of which, moreover, Green clearly displayshis foreknowledge in his greeting to Karl at a moment past midnight,Sie sind tatschlich kein Mann von Wort.30

[Ich bin] durchaus ein Mann von Principien31: thus begins theletter that closes (and, effectively, opens) the chapter. In other words,Uncle Jakoband the world in which he holds swayoperates on thetranscendental plane of pure reason, whereas Karl largely persists inoperating on the immanent plane of practical reason. Perhaps theclearest sign that something else is in force in this scene other thanthe logic of cause and effect, upon which both empirical reality and

standard situation comedy depend, is the fact that at the end of thechapter, time, the very essence of the contingent and causal,32 is heresubordinated to the timelessness of principle itself.33 Jetzt ist viertelzwlf, says Green, putting Karl off on his stated wish to return to hisuncles house post-haste,

ich kann also meine Geschfte noch mit Herrn Pollunder zu Ende bespre-chen, wobei Ihre Gegenwart nur stren wrde und Sie knnen ein hbschesWeilchen mit Frulein Klara verbringen. Punkt zwlf Uhr stellen Sie sichdann hier ein, wo Sie das Ntige erfahren werden.34

Two pages later, standing before Klaras door, Karl asks the servantwho has accompanied him for the time:

macht es trotzdem mglich, da wir nicht nur dauernd im Paradiese bleiben knnten,sondern tatschlich dort dauernd sind, gleichgltig ob wir es hier wissen oder nicht.Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften II, 127.

28Kafka,Der Verschollene, 82.29Ibid., 123.30Ibid., 121.31Ibid., 122.32See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 621.33Cf Samuel Weber on the present tense of most jokes whose presence is not that


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Es ist ja schon halb zwlf vorber. Halb zwlf vorber, wiederholte Karlfragend, wie erschrocken ber diese Zahlen.35

Two pages still later (after a long conversation with Klara on the late-ness of the hour and the shabbiness of his piano-playing), Karl asksthe same servant the time yet again: Bald dreiviertel zwlf, sagteder Diener, to which Karl replies, Wie langsam die Zeit vergeht36;and on the following page asks again, Wie spt ist es? [. . .]. Drei-

viertel zwlf. Dann habe ich noch ein Weilchen Zeit.37 When theclock nally chimes midnight and Karl rushes to receive his letterfrom Green, however, what would ordinarily be a suspense-building

technique of counting down the minutes, perhaps together with anexpressionistic play of slowing down or speeding up time accordingto mood, turns out to be nothing more than a ruse that highlights anactual stasis of the always-already. (Dann ist aber hchste Zeit, saysKarl on page 118; Hchste Zeit, on page 121.) For the envelopethatliterallyseals Karls fate species that Karl is to be given theletter only at midnight, a letter whose message Green, idly playing

with the object at the very moment he exercises his delaying tactics,is durch hheren Befehl gebunden, Ihnen vor Mitternacht nichts zu

verraten.38 In other words, Karls fate is notcontingent upon eitherhis actions or the actions of others; ratherin every sense of thephraseit is written. Time, which in a situation comedy still retains thepower to unwrite, here serves merely an expressive or even a decep-tive purpose, creating a parody of madcap comedy by occurring, as ifunwittingly, within a technically timeless situation of transcendentallaw. Unlikethe standard situation comedy that it appears to resemble,then, the comedy here can no longer be located on the immanentplane of cause and effect, of actions (usually at cross-purposes) lead-

ing to more actions. And yet neither is it a comedy of philosophicalerrors, in which Karl emerges as laughingstock because he has failedthe test of Kantian ontology. (And as far as a comedy that would existpurely on the transcendent plane, this is impossible by denition.)The comedy is located rather in the irresolvable tension betweentheplanes of immanence and transcendence,39 those planes that in theKantian schema manage to coexist in their provisional separateness,

35Ibid., 115.36Ibid., 117.37Ibid 118


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but in the Kafkan universe are brought conclusively togetherif inbetrayal of the spirit of Kantian philosophy, then faithful to its let-terto bring about each others mutual collapse.40

Indeed, directly upon his learning of his banishment towards theend of the chapter, Karl appears at least temporarily to acknowledgethe fact of this impossible coexistence, thus momentarily annullingthe comedy of the scene (if also simultaneously creating a differentsort of comic effect, a more usual one of violated expectations). Karlssudden absolute and unperturbed acceptance of the situationSindSie fertig? fragte Green. Ja, sagte Karl, haben Sie mir den Kofferund den Regenschirm mitgebracht? fragte Karl. Hier ist er, sagteGreen41demonstrates that Karl too has the capacity to be, so tospeak, in on the transcendental game. His playing along allows himnot only to take in the contents of the letter without dismay or evensurprise, but also to dilate on the virtues of his suitcase and crack

jokes about his own absentmindedness. This harmonizing moment ofbeing able to play both sides of the antinomy without them cominginto contactan ability, it should be noted, which if maintained wouldbring with it the consolation prize of a new life in San Francisco, im

Osten [sic]42

is decidedly short-lived, however, as Karl quickly slipsback into a search for reasons, causes, and responsible parties:

Eines mssen Sie mir noch erklren. Auf dem Umschlag des Briefes,den Sie mir zu bergeben hatten, steht blo, da ich ihn um Mitternachterhalten soll, wo immer ich angetroffen werde. Warum haben Sie mich alsomit Berufung auf diesen Brief hier zurckgehalten, als ich um viertel zwlfvon hier fort wollte? Sie giengen dabei ber Ihren Auftrag hinaus. [. . .]Wenn Sie zu mde waren, htten Sie mir vielleicht gar nicht folgen knnen,oder ich wre, was allerdings selbst Herr Pollunder geleugnet hat, schon

um Mitternacht bei meinem Onkel angekommen oder es wre schlielichIhre Picht gewesen, mich in Ihrem Automobil, von dem pltzlich nicht

40Cf. Kierkegaard on Aristophanes comedy vis--vis Socrates irony: If it is assumed[. . .] that Socrates whole activity was ironizing, it is also apparent that in wanting tointerpret him in the comic vein Aristophanes proceeded quite correctly, for as soonas irony is related to a conclusion, it manifests itself as comic. Sren Kierkegaard, TheConcept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 145.

41Kafka,Der Verschollene, 123.42Ibid., 124. Kafkas curious geographical error can be claried by a look at Genesis

4:16: And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land ofNod, on the east of Eden. This would, in addition, reect on Karls chosen appellationNegro in the Theater of Oklahama chapter as well as the fact that despite Karls status


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mehr die Rede war, zu meinem Onkel zurckzubringen, da ich so danachverlangte, zurckzukehren. Besagt nicht die berschrift ganz deutlich, da

die Mitternacht fr mich noch der letzte Termin sein soll? Und Sie sindes, der die Schuld trgt, da ich ihn versumt habe.43

Here too Karl is mistaken, for the question of who is to bear the blameis here actually a non-question. Karl is caught from the very begin-ning in an impossible situation, that is, the situation of transcendentnecessity, in which perhaps only the search for empirical causes andeffects, for a consistent ground of personal action, can be considereda blameworthy act. Kein Wort weiter! yells Green after Karls attempt

at getting to the bottom of things in einem Tone, als wre er Karl,der doch schon lange schwieg, mitten in die Rede gefallen.44 But infact Karl has interrupted the prevailing discourse with his mistakensearch for real empirical motives.45 The episode therefore comes toan end, and Karl stand erstaunt im Freien,46 for a moment free ofboth pure and practical reason and therefore temporarily also free ofplot. If there is to be a question of error or indeed a question at all,it can at most be one, again, of a Fehler bei der ersten Fesselung:that is, of the very concept of a heavenly law that apparently has no

direct connection to the earthly one and is only connected indirectlythrough the mediation of the acting subject, whose innocent necknevertheless hangs on both systems simultaneously.

In this way, the structure of the almost necessary reveals itselfessentially as the structure of the double bind: no longer the antinomyof pure reason, but its aporia.47 Kants beiderseits wahr seinknnen appears in Kafka as no less than a version of Freuds kettlelogic: an Einanderaufheben von mehreren Gedanken, von denen

jeder fr sich gut motiviert ist.48 But whereas in Freuds famous joke,

43Kafka,Der Verschollene, 12526.44Ibid., 12627.45It is also telling that, in the paragraph directly after the uncles reluctant approval

which will of course turn out to be no approval at allin which Karl and Pollundertry in vain to parse the uncles motivations, the word trotzdem appears three timesin the space of seven lines (see ibid., 73).

46Ibid., 127.47For an exemplary analysis of double bind of the law in Kafka, see Jacques Derrida,

Before the Law, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992)

181220. See also Joseph Vogl, Ort der Gewalt. Kafkas literarische Ethik (Munich: Fink,1990) 17576 on Kafkas approach to a similar double bind in Kantian ethics, which,as Vogl notes bietet auch Anla zu komischen und ironischen Verdrehungen Vogl


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the rational and disinterested observer can see that only one of theoptions (if indeed any at all) can actually be the case, in Kafka reignsa kettle logic for which there is no outside, no possible rationalobserver or joke-teller, and thus no possibility of reality-testing orrecourse to the punch-line of a judgment that would in some waysatisfy the requirements of truth.This is one possible source of thecommon opinion that Kafkas texts are dream-like, insofar as in theunconscious, according to Freud, the Einanderaufheben of kettle-logic is impossible: the unconscious kennt [. . .] kein Entweder-Oder,nur ein gleichzeitiges Nebeneinander.49 But, as Freud observes in afootnote to this phrase, the either-or that dreams exclude can never-theless be reinstated vom Erzhler als Deutung. Thus in the end,the permissive juxtaposition of dreams and the catastrophic mutualAufhebenof the joke is only a matter of judgment, and one could sayof Kafka that, by forgoing a transcendent narrative consciousness, heisrather than seeking recourse in the oneiricsimply taking the jokeof Kantian ontology at face value. Just as Karl experiences freedomin the very moment of suspension before he bums it out to his occi-dental captivity in Ramses, in this real-life kettle-logic, one can only

exist as a paradoxical freier und gesicherter Brger of two mutuallyexclusive realms, whose freedom and fettering alike refer back to anoriginal comic error that is not even precisely identiable, much lessresolvable or correctible. Here is where the aporia of Kantian ontol-ogy intersects with the Jewish implications of the Christian doctrineof original sin: that is, how one is to understand a concept createdto justify the immanence of the Messiah, if the Messiah is not in factto be understood as immanent. As the always-already-fallenness ofKarl Romanns situations show, for Kafka, the only possible answer

is that it is the double bind itselfthat is original, and yet not a sin inany Pauline sense, but rather the joking ruin of dialectics that freesand fetters all action, the aporia and the a prioriof historical beingall at once. In this sense, the controversial Theater of Oklahamachapter that endsDer Verschollenecan indeed be considered a properresolution, as it presents a kind of end to historyAlles was er bishergetan hatte, war vergessen, niemand wollte ihm daraus einen Vorwurfmachen50and thus (even if only within the eternal static mechanismsof bureaucracy) a proper dnouementof the double bind of action.

With this, however, Kafka should not be seen merely as writing reli-gious ideology critique or shifting the story to the solemn sphere of the


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purely transcendent. Instead, with these series of nested aporiasorperhaps just the ultimate combining of the venerable traditions ofthe lawyer joke and the Jewish jokeKafka also raises the stakes ofthe comic. For as Kant never tires of reminding his readers, there canbe no actual situation of transcendental law: the attempt to createsuch a thing is a perfect example of what Kant calls Subreption 51or category error between two spheres that must remain separate inorder to hang together.52 Such a crossing of the lawfulness of the trans-cendent with the randomness of the quotidian is, however, precisely

what the set-pieces of Kafkas novels, the Landhaus chapter ofDerVerscholleneforemost among them, dramatize with a kind of relentlessbemusement. Drawing out the implications of Kafkas category of thealmost necessary from ontology to poetics, they dramatize pseudo-transcendent states in seemingly real life situations, stage contingentHandlungas transcendental logic. They thus perform natural law assituation comedy and situation comedy as natural law, in both casescutting off the actions of the main characters before they are evenbegun and making a mockery of the very notion of the protagonistaround which the history of the novel constructs itself.53

But even this does not exhaust the issue. For just as Kafkas aphorismsdiverge from conventional paradox in their lack of a stable truth toturn wittily on its head, there is also not even an actual transcendentlogic against which worldly events could collide, but only a seemingone or the idea of one. (And if this concerns the essence of the law,

writes Derrida, it is that the latter has no essence.54) And just as thefatedness of tragedy relies on a certain kind of order in distinctionfrom the Trauerspiel(for which a lackof order is the prerequisite), sotoo does Kafkas work distinguish itself both from tragedy and the

deterministic comedy that is its counterpart. Kafka may of course besaid to parodicallyimitatesuch tragedy, easily leading to the mistakenconclusion that itisthis, and to parodically imitate such comedy, lead-ing to the idea that Kafkas clowning around is that of the ordinary,i.e. the purely situational kind. Benjamin notes that Im sterbenden

51Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 709.52See ibid., 647.53This structure bears similarities to what Vogl, following a distinction made by

Deleuze, describes as the crossing of humor (as a downwards and miniaturizing move-ment mocking the sublime with earthly detail) and irony (as an upwards movementtaking aim at logical contradictions in the origins of the law) in Kafka which together


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Sokrates ist das Mrtyrerdrama [which Benjamin sees as the immedi-ate precursor of the Trauerspiel] als Parodie der Tragdieentsprungen.Und hier wie so oft zeigt die Parodie einer Form deren Ende an.55But not only is the parody of tragedy the death of classical tragedyand the beginning of the modern Trauerspiel, butTrauerspiel(perhapsprecisely because of its origins in parody) prepares a place for anensuing or indeed a coexisting Lustspiel.56And where Benjamin speaksof the Skularisierung57 of the medieval passion plays in baroqueTrauerspiel (in which, doubly interesting for the present discussion,the beamtete Person58 as comic intriguer now lls the function thatpreviously the devil had lled), in Kafkan comedy we can speakaccording to the durable Marxian model of farcical repetitionof asecondsecularization.

In Kafka appears the comic secularization of the Kantian attemptto recuperate transcendental ideals for an age of enlightenment inthe wake of early modern secularization and the subsequent spreadof empiricist and proto-positivistic philosophies. Kafkas comedy isthus not even onlyalthough it also still isthe correctible comedyof subreption, the erroneous attempt to demand of the transcendent

that it appear in the Sinnenwelt, expressed already by Friedrich The-odor Vischer in 1837 with the punchy formula,das Komische sei eindeutlichgemachtes Erhabenes.59 It is also the irony of this comedy, i.e.a comedy of the loss of grounds for even the meta-comic comedy ofcategory error. Vischers ensuing, not quite anti-idealist argumentatone point he calls his study a Metaphysik des Komischen60providesnot only an insight into the comedic history of Kant reception, butalso an instructive hint for the reading of Kafkas own comic aspect:

Man kann nmlich weitergehen und zugeben, da nur ein scheinbar Erha-

benes dem Lachen preisgegeben werden drfe, aber dann hinzusetzen,da es nichts wahrhaft Erhabenes gebeund da auch das in Vergleichung mitbloer Prahlerei reellere Erhabene doch nicht absolut erhaben sei, dadaher der Geist der Komik ihm nur zufge, was rechtens ist, wenn er esebenfalls nicht schont.61

55Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte SchriftenI.1, eds.Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1974) 203430, here: 292, my emphasis. On Socratic vs. tragic irony, see 297.

56Ibid., 304.57Ibid., 305.58Ibid.59Friedrich Theodor Vischer ber das Erhabene und Komische (Frankfurt am Main:


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In other words, the operation of forcing together the transcendentand the immanent, itself a form of comic business, leads to thediminishment of the transcendent. Indeed, it leads to a collision ofthe transcendent and the immanent that is no longer a category errorat all, but simply fact.62

Kafkas comedy is thus a comedy of the regulative ideal withoutregulative ideal, both a lacking comedy and a comedy of lack. Bythe very act of establishing a comedy of the transcendent within theimmanent, the sphere of transcendence is destroyed; thus the pos-sibility of therelatively speakingsimple comedy of clash betweenthe transcendent and the immanent is destroyed.63 And yet out ofthe ruins of this initial comedy emerges once again a space of comicpossibilitymore, a comic almost-necessity. Deleuze and Guattarinote that Kafkas insertion of humor into the Kantian moral lawgives one more rotation to the Copernican turn: out of Kants self-

justifying and self-perpetuating law is made an entirely different sortof machine, which needs this image of the law only to align its gearsand make them function together with a perfect synchronicity.64The argument here, however, is that it is not even so much that

Kafka puts humor into the Kantian conception of law as that thislaw forms the very basis of his humor itself. The double bind of theKantian system, rather than leading to immobilization, melancholia,or crisis, in fact furnishes the opportunity for the proliferation of itsown comedy. It is in thissense that Kafkas humor achieves the levelof gleeful nonsense potentially even leading to actual laughter: as akind of playful repetition compulsion of the paradoxes of the law inthe absence of the laws telos. It is not incidental that Karl, althoughhe rst resists Klaras jujitsu erotic advances and protests that Ich

bin, wenn ich ehrlich sein soll, froh, da fr das Spiel schon zu spt

62Cf. Lacans couched allusion to Kafka in Linstance de la lettre dans linconscientou la raison depuis Freud: Folie, vous ntes plus lobjet de lloge ambigu o le sagea amnag le terrier [the word used in French to translate Kafkas Bau] inexpugnablede sa crainte. Sil ny est aprs tout pas si mal log, cest parce que lagent suprmequi en creuse depuis toujours les galeries et le ddale, cest la raison elle-mme, cestle mme Logos quil sert. Jacques Lacan, Linstance de la lettre dans linconscient oula raison depuis Freud, incrits(Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966) 493528, here: 526.

63In an interpretation of the opening scenes ofDer Proce, Neumann argues for aRi in [Kafkas] Werk zwischen Erhabenheit und Komik. With Vischer, however, I

would like to claim that the comic exists less in contrast to the sublime than as a ssurewithin the sublime itself. See Gerhard Neumann, War es eine Komdie, so wollte ermitspielen Zu Kafkas Inszenierung des Anfangs im Proze-Roman in Vom Erhabenen


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ist, denn ich kann noch gar nichts,65 in the end yields at least par-tially to her temptation to play.66 From the standpoint of empiricalcausality this might be interpreted as a terrible succumbing everybit on the magnitude of Eves acceptance of the apple, which leads,

just as in the biblical story, to Karls irrevocable exile from his LowerManhattan Eden. But since the chapter utterly resists and indeedparodies just such moral-psychological interpretation, the delay andpostponement that Karl is made to undertakeat rst through coer-cion, then through willis of no decisive importance; or rather, itsimportance lies not so much in the fact that this is some sort of fatalaw or original sin, but that, in absence of a moral law guaranteeingthe essential meaningfulness of the universe and the importance ofindividual action, delay and postponement is in fact all there is.67 (Asthe model American Mack says, Karl may have einige Fehler gemacht,immerhin hat es mich sehr gefreut, abgesehen davon, da ich dasSpiel keines Menschen verachte.68) Once again the bildendeclaims ofthe bourgeois novel are undone in a parodic exaggeration of the factthat a narrative only exists by virtue of its unresolved complications,its eternal continuation or proliferation of comic business.69 In the

stalling of the Kantian grounds for rational Handeln, every action isLustspiel. Butin Kafkas works at leastit is also an uneasyLustspielthat is constantly forced to justify itself on the moral and rationalgrounds of whose nonexistence it is nevertheless the main witness,and thus, more than just a satire of the perversities of idealism, it is aself-implicating comedy of the very inescapability of these perversitiesby any clear escape route.

65

Kafka,Der Verschollene, 116.66See also Vischer, ber das Erhabene und Komische, 176: the laughing person sieht,da das Erhabene schon vorher klein war, aber nicht so, da es darum nicht erhabengewesen wre, sondern erhaben und doch nicht erhaben. Dies ist ein Widerspruch,eine contradictio in adjecto, und dieser Widerspruch ist eben das Komische. Das Er-habene wird nicht geleugnet, nicht anulliert: dies wre frivol. [. . .] Das Erhabene unddas unendlich Kleine spielen ineinander, und dieses Spiel ist das Komische. Vischersrenement of his thesis acts as a warning against conceiving of Kafkas comedy merelyas anti-onto-theological satire; his comedy is a constant deployment of and play withcontradictions, nottheir exposure and expurgation (which would anyway have to relyon the instantiation of new forms of transcendence).

67On unlimited postponement and the mutual immanence of a decoded law and a

deterritorialized desire see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 5152.68Kafka,Der Verschollene, 120.69It may be recalled again that the two forms of legal proceedings available to Joseph


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Nor are such questions merely a matter of idle metaphysical specula-tion for Kafka. In his professional processing of claims for the Work-mens Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia inPrague, the question is always that ofwho bears responsibility. Even more,and more paradoxically still, the question is who bears responsibil-ity for accident, that for which at least by denition no one can bearresponsibility: who has causedand ultimately, who pays fortheZufallof the Unfall, a legalFallof a vertical Fall, a Notfallapparently

withoutNotwendigkeitand therefore also aFalle, aFehler, or indeed evena Sndenfall.70 At the same time, Kafkas job also involves the fairlyrecent practice of the systematic fostering of methods for risk assess-ment and accident prevention. Thus on the one hand, Kafkas workentails a humanitarian effort to control workplace injury and loss oflife by way of the most coolheaded observations and most moderntechnological means, and to hold some actor accountable when thenecessary precautions fail to have been taken. On the other hand,however, such work involves a calculation of risk factors according tostatistical norms, and the dispersal of the individual subject along across section of the population. Here causality and potentiality; there

probability and statistical necessity. Kants Euthanasie der reinenVernunft,71 his name for an unreective and aggressively empiricalskepticism, is thus ironically reinscribed in the algorithms of actuarialtables and risk assessment. That is, the empirically unprovable yetlogically and ontologically indispensable force that Kant locates inthe laws of practical reason and, from there, in a supreme being,72 isnow to be found in nothing so much as the calculation of statisticalaverages: a praxis into whose esoteric laws Kafka as juris doctorhadliterally an initiates insight.

Among the several conclusions to be drawn from this is the fact thatthe business of risk assessment collapses Kantian ontology yet again,perhaps this time denitively, as a codied, ultra-secular, biopolitically-motivated empiricism reaches the levels, not only of pure mathemat-

70See Paul de Man, Aesthetic Formalization: Kleists ber das Marionettentheater, inThe Rhetoric of Romanticism(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 26390, esp.28990; also Benno Wagner, Kafkas Poetik des Unfalls, in Die Unordnung der Dinge.Eine Wissens- und Mediengeschichte des Unfalls, ed. Christian Kassung (Bielefeld: Transcript,

2009) 42154, esp. 44243.71Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 513.72Hermann Lbbe making the analogy to secular (economic and legal) forms of risk-


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ics, but also of pure reason.73 Kafkas professional dutywhich in thissense is practically a Satanic oneis the almost unthinkable or (inthe Kantian sense) undutiful duty of taking the laws of probability totask, to alter them or, in the case that they cannot be altered, to seekan often elusive source of accountability, in governmental repetitionof Karl Romanns attempt to exit the double bind of his situation.

Yet Kafka, as a consequence of his occupation, also thus manages tooccupy one of the few patches ofSpielraumbetween random accidentand statistical probability, a space (however practically limited) of reor-dering, or at least of imagining, things otherwise.74 The recognitionof this position adds a further valence to Kafkas designation of thealmost necessary as leicht klglich: it is, also, literally the space ofthe Klage, the legal or professional grievancewith which, it should berecalled, in Karls vain advocacy for the StokerDer Verscholleneeffectivelybegins. The grievancewhich, for Dr. Kafka, was more often than nota written documentalso shapes the letter to Elsa Taussig, in the formof a parody of the genre of the lovers plaint, specically the circularlyparadoxical complaint that by furnishing alle Voraussetzungen desNotwendigen und damit des berssigen for the writing of the letter,

she has prevented the occurrence of that rare and amusing thing, thealmost necessary, of which the letter she is reading is in fact a livingspecimen. And lastly, it can be said that a whole cycle of complaint,in this case in highly lapidary form, makes up the essence of the thirdand fourth chapters of the Bibleand thus the essence of the veryorigin of Judeo-Christian historyas the serpent rst brings chargesagainst God, then God accuses Adam and Eve, Adam blames Eve, Eveblames the serpent, God denounces Cain, and Cain, nally, registershis grievance with God. These attempts at attributing guilt and rectify-

73As Benno Wagner notes in regard to the social organization theories of AdolpheQutelet by way of Franois Ewald, Die Wahrheit ber den Menschen fhrt nur berseine Ausung in Datenstze und seine Wiedergeburt als Mittelwert mit Aussagekraftauch fr die Zukunft, als berechenbares Risiko. Die epistemologische Operation, diediese Verschiebung ermglicht, ist die Verknpfung der Statistik mit der Wahrscheinlich-keitstheorie. Erst durch die Transformation von Gegebenheiten in Wahrscheinlichkeitenwird es mglich, in dem Gewimmel individueller Besonderheiten die Regelmigkeiteines Gesetzes zu erkennen. Benno Wagner, . . . in der Fremde, aus der Sie kommen. . .. Die Geburt des Schreibens aus der Statistik des Selbstmords, in Odradeks Lachen.Fremdheit bei Kafka, eds. Hansjrg Bay and Christof Hamann (Freiberg: Rombach Verlag,

2006) 193228, here: 203.74See e.g. Kafkas mordantly witty remark in a report on safety measures in rockquarries: Abb V Die Bildung des umgekehrten Keiles ist hier derartig hug da


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ing wrongs are just as futile as Karls arguing on behalf of the Stoker(who is identied by the captain as ein bekannter Querulant75) orseeking rational causes for his intra-American exile, as in all cases, alogic of contingency comes into comic conict with the unknowable

will of the divinitybe it a divinity of theology, of power, of statistics,or of Kafkas own hesitations that keep his writing hand in check. AsKafka writes with obvious exasperation in a 1915 report: Die Klagenlaufen von allen Seiten ein.76 The category of the almost necessaryis thus more than just the comedy that puts the Kantian antinomy ofpure reason out of its misery. It is also the space of narrative and ofhistory itself, in the form of ludicrously irresolvable tension and vain

yet eternal complaint.77 Rarely, howeverbut this rarely is also analways and only on this conditionsuch tension manages to providethe impetus for action, for situation, for writing, for beginning, in acomedy of the comedy of the comics own becoming.

New York University

75Kafka,Der Verschollene, 24.76Kafka, Amtliche Schriften, 255.77Consider the fact that at the moment Karl comes under Uncle Jakobs protection,

Keiner lachte, alle hrten geduldig und ernsthaft zu, as the narrative explains,

Schlielich lacht man auch nicht ber den Neffen eines Staatsrates bei der erstenGelegenheit, die sich darbietet. Kafka,Der Verschollene, 39. Postlapsarian history (whichis history per se) could then be said to begin for Karl in the following chapter when


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670 Contributors

(1993); Mikrologien. Literarische und philosophische Figuren des Kleinen(co-author,

together with Gunnar Schmidt, 2003); Kleist lesen (co-editor, 2003), Wahn-

Wissen-Institution, 2 vols. (co-editor, 2005, 2007), Lehren bildet? Vom Rtsel

unserer Lehranstalten, (co-editor, 2010); Kafkas Tierleben (forthcoming from

Stroemfeld, 2011);

Erica Weitzman is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at New

York University and fellow of the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Lebensformen und

Lebenswissen at the Europa-Universitt Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) and the

Universitt Potsdam. She also holds a masters degree from the New School

for Social Research. She is currently completing her dissertation, of which

the present essay is a part, on the aesthetics and ethics of the comic in early

twentieth-century German-language literature.


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