Introduction

If we look at Franz Kafka’s writings from the perspective of political theory, it seems that the politics he offers us, if any, are those of passivity, failure and doom. When his friend Max Brod asked Kafka if there was any hope, Kafka famously replies “Oh [there is], plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”1 This seems like a grim joke, a typically “Kafkaesque” commentary on the futility of resistance, on the inevitability of defeat. At the end of The Trial,  K., the central character, who seems to epitomize the hapless, anxious characters that people a Kafka novel or story, is stabbed in the heart by his tormentors and dies, in his own words, “Like a dog!” [“Wie ein hund!”],2 suggesting the fate of all of us, in the face of obscure and irresistible powers. Many scholars of Kafka have described the way he is supposedly a Zionist or the way he uses psychological or other kinds of symbolism to denote states of despair and the tyrannies of power, but it is not clear that any of this amounts to a political theory or a model for some kind of political resistance.3

Yet, when we read Kafka the way Walter Benjamin read him, a very different thinker emerges. To his credit, Benjamin never tries to unlock the secrets of Kafka’s text as so many other commentators have. Instead, I argue that Benjamin seeks to reread Kafka as a fellow conspirator, endowing Kafka with the same sort of conspiratorial strategies that Benjamin espouses in his own work. Towards the end of his life, Benjamin became increasingly interested in conspiracy. He devoted an entire “Konvolute” (section) of the Arcades Project to the question of political conspiracy and wrote broadly about it in his later works on the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

During the late 1930s, in the face of the overwhelming defeat of the left, it seems as if Benjamin began to turn away from (relatively) open rebellion and towards conspiracy as a form of resistance. While rebellion is overt, conspiracy is stealthy, a secret. While rebellion must end, one way or another, conspiracy is open-ended, potentially endless. The conspiracy that he turned to was not a typical sort involving secret plotting and machinations. As we will see further, the kind of conspiracy Benjamin calls for--the trans-temporal conspiracy that he calls Kafka to as well—is one that is so secret that it can function unbeknownst to its own agents; it is a secret that in some ways excludes every one of us.

This kind of secrecy and exclusion is required for Benjamin because our intentions, our conscious wishes and actions are highly suspect (something that is also true for Kafka as well, as we’ll see). For Benjamin, we are deeply compromised by our place in history, by our relationship to the forces of commodity fetishism, fascism and liberalism (which in Benjamin’s view are all versions of more or less the same phenomenon), and by the dynamics of power and authority in our time.  Under such circumstances, even the intentionality of the theorist is suspect. 

Given his mistrust of human intentionality, Benjamin’s engagement with conspiracy takes place in a purely literary and textual form (as it does for Kafka as well). Late in life, Benjamin increasingly sought to produce texts that decentered and subverted even his own authorial intent. He also looked for this effect in the texts of other, past authors (like Kafka, Baudelaire, and many others). Yet he always sought for such textual conspiracies to parallel and subvert actual political practices. Thus Benjamin writes that for Baudelaire, “His prosody is like the map of a big city in which one can move about inconspicuously, shielded by blocks of houses, gateways, courtyards. Words are given clearly designated positions, just as conspirators are given designated positions …Baudelaire conspires with language itself.”4 Such a “conspiracy with language” works to bypass (at least potentially) the compromises of human intentionality; it engages with the text’s “failure” to perfectly convey the meanings that we intend it to carry and hence, in a sense, allows us to conspire against ourselves and our own (usually unacknowledged) desire for capitalism to succeed.

Benjamin’s understanding raises a fundamental question: how can a conspiracy that excludes us  also be in a sense for us (Benjamin writes of Baudelaire that the strategies of conspiracy “had to remain hidden” from him)?5 If we are not let in on this secret, if the hope it offers is “not for us” what use is it to us? Most importantly, from the standpoint of political theory, what kind of politics, what sort of relationality, stems from a conspiracy that seems to deny what we have come to regard as the very basis of political life: the central role of human agency and intentionality? In this essay, I will argue that Benjamin finds in Kafka a potential answer to these questions. In Kafka, he discovers a way for human beings to act politically without simply reproducing the mythologies that both writers oppose. Such a reading of Kafka offers Benjamin a way to do an end-run around human intentionality, without giving up on the possibility of political resistance.

Key to Benjamin’s insight is the role of misrecognition in Kafka’s work.  Kafka shows us that, given our compromised status, given the failures of our intentionality, we will always misread and misrecognize the signs of order, community and authority that compose our world. Rather than try to save his characters from their delusions, Kafka gives them over to them, but in such a way as to subvert and distort their object. Kafka’s characters desperately try to conform to the powers that they see as organizing their lives but they fail, usually miserably, in their attempt. Such a failure can, in Benjamin’s conspiratorial light, be turned into an asset; it becomes a failure to read a faux mythology “correctly,” a failure to make sense of a symbolic order that they seem to have no choice but to submit to. 6

In addition to this failure, this stubborn (and providential) misrecognition, Kafka supplies Benjamin with one other, crucial element: a particular, and textual, form of messianism which subverts the central powers (of both the political and divine varieties) that unite and control his characters. As we will see further, particularly in The Castle, Kafka offers us a parable for what Benjamin would call “divine violence:” a messiah that voids or destroys its own symbols of power, its own mythologies. Such a self-voiding of the messiah disrupts the central narratives of authority, leaving the communities that are organized in the name of its worship and obedience in the strange position of becoming reluctant, or perhaps even unknowing conspirators against that which they most urgently seek to join up and collude with.

The combination of our own failure to read the mythologies of the world correctly and the self-voiding of a messiah who makes such a misreading possible in the first place amount to a politics of “recognizing misrecognition” wherein signs are neither worshipped as true, nor abandoned altogether. From Kafka’ s perspective—one that Benjamin takes much from—we have no choice but to be drawn in and misled by the signs and symbols that compose our political order (insofar as there is no truth, no right way to read the world). Without some kind of conspiratorial stance, such misrecognitions on our part lead to a kind of political idolatry wherein our own sense of community and politics is replaced by mythologies that we attribute to the signs and symbols meant to represent ourselves. The sum of those delusions, the product of a kind of collective fetishism (very much including commodity fetishism) leads to what Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria,” a faux reality that has come to replace and over-determine our own lives and experiences to the point where, as we have already seen, our own intentions are completely complicit with it. Yet, for all the power and allure of the phantasmagoria, we are just as capable of misrecognizing in a more subversive manner; when we fail to read the phantasmagoria “correctly,” we disrupt the very narratives of power and authority that we subscribe to. Such disruptions produces less a sense of our own “agency” than a sense of participation in an ongoing conspiracy, one that formally excludes us even as it serves as the means for our (potential and only partial) redemption.

The value of reading Kafka and Benjamin together, akin to what Benjamin calls a “constellation,” is to get a better sense of the role that conspiracy itself can play in politics. While much of political theory has warned and defended against conspiracy as being secretive and unpredictable, we see a long subcurrent, dating back to Machiavelli --and perhaps even back to Plato--which accepts and engages in conspiracy. Reading Kafka through Benjamin, we can extend that conspiratorial subcurrent towards our own time, a time when more conventional understandings of open resistance and rebellion seem to have either run their course or perhaps (for many at least) have even become unthinkable, impossible.

Reading these authors in tandem, we also get a sense of how communities are formed and lives are lived quite apart from (even as intimately entangled with) the great narratives of state and divine power which supposedly organize them. When such narratives are disrupted these communities are not erased. Instead they emerge more clearly as having narratives of their own, narratives which are otherwise completely eclipsed by our constant attention to and desire for great and authoritative meanings.

Walter Benjamin’s Kafka: Hope, but Not for Us.

In his commentary on Kafka’s work, Walter Benjamin focuses on the particularities of Kafka’s secretive nature. It is he who reminds us that Kafka tells Brod, “[there is], plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”7 In this short back and forth between Brod and Kafka, we find a perfect articulation of what a secret means for Benjamin himself. This is not a secret to be kept from others; it appears to be a secret that excludes every one of us (at least “us” as we are presently constituted and considered).

Given his reading of Kafka, and given his interest in secrecy and conspiracies, as well as his own suspicion of human intentions, Benjamin does not seek to unlock Kafka’s secrets. Indeed, he characterizes those secrets in such a way that unlocking them does not really seem possible; in keeping with their shared interest in Jewish mysticism, the notion of an immanent and unfathomable doctrine which can be gestured at but not described or even remotely understood is central to both writers.8 Benjamin tells us “Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestus, and this gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables.”9 It is telling that for Benjamin even Kafka himself did not understand the nature of the gestures he describes: here, the author surrenders his traditional sovereignty over his characters and their actions.

In thinking about Kafka as Benjamin’s co-conspirator, we see a crucial development between his two principle writings on Kafka. The first, “Franz Kafka: on the tenth anniversary of his death” was written in 1934. The short fragment “Some Reflections on Kafka” was written in a letter to Gershom Scholem four years later. Under ordinary circumstances four years is not a long period of time but between 1934 and 1938 Benjamin’s life (and the world around him) was changing radically. The second writing, however short, makes an explicit break with his first reading when he says: “my main criticism of that [earlier] study today is its apologetic character” and goes on to write:

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure. 10

To focus on Kafka as a failure is very much in keeping with Benjamin’s fascination with failure more generally, as for example, he demonstrates in his study of the French poet Charles Baudelaire and all of the failed revolutionaries who lived, drank and died in nineteenth century France. As already noted, for Benjamin, particularly in his later years, failure was in fact essential in order to bypass or defeat compromised human intentions. The “successes” of this world subscribe to the dominant ideology of history, time, order and progress. To be out of time is to be a “failure” and as such, to fail to acquiesce to the hegemony of global capital whether in its fascist or liberal guise.

Benjamin’s first essay on Kafka is hardly “sunny” or “optimistic” and yet it is characterized by a certain version of redemptive possibility—one that he will retreat from in his later essay. This is especially evident when he writes about Kafka’s book Amerika (a.k.a. The Man Who Disappeared).11  In his reading of that book, Benjamin focuses on the end of that novel which describes the so-called “Theater of Oklahoma.” Benjamin tells us:

all that is expected of the applicants [to the Theater] is the ability to play themselves. It is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be.12

This seems to be a kind of triumph of self over intention. What “they claim to be” could mean these characters’ conscious, deeply compromised intentionality. The idea of being able “play [oneself]” seems to afford us the possibility of avoiding our own egos without falling into some kind of naturalizing positivism (where we would just “be ourselves”). This passage is highly reminiscent of Benjamin’s writings in “the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (written two years later, in 1936) where Benjamin lauds Soviet films where “some of the players…are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves”13 This idea of a kind of redemptive possibility for identity, whether it is produced in film (as in the Soviet Union), or by the doubly removed status of characters in a play (the Theater of Oklahoma) that is itself within a novel (Amerika), offers itself as an initial answer to the problem of intentionality.

Even in that first essay however, Benjamin anticipates the darker view of Kafka he will espouse in 1938 (thus performing a kind of constellation with himself). He writes:

[Kafka’s testament] which no one interested in Kafka can disregard, says that the writings did not satisfy their author, that he regarded his efforts as failures, that he counted himself among those who were bound to failure. He did fail in his grandiose attempt to convert poetry into doctrine, to turn it into a parable and restore to it that stability and unpretentiousness which, in the face of reason, seemed to him to be the only appropriate thing for it. No other writer has obeyed the commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’ so faithfully.14

It is the last sentence of this passage especially that gives us a clue as to what Benjamin is trying to work out. It suggests that only because Kafka failed at representation was he able to follow the second commandment. In other words, for Benjamin, the only way to avoid idolatry is to blatantly and legibly fail in one’s attempt to produce an idol (rather than successfully “play” ourselves). Our failure and misrecognition is all that saves us from our own implication in and compromise with the phantasmagoria and the more clearly and legibly we fail, the better. 

If we compare two passages from Benjamin’s 1934 and 1938 essays on Kafka, we can see a stark contrast that may help to further illuminate this relationship between failure and representation. On the one hand, in “Franz Kafka,” Benjamin tells us that Kafka’s prose pieces “have…a similar relationship to doctrine as the Haggadah [the representation of the divine law] does to the Halakah [the divine law itself].”15 In other words, Kafka’s texts serves divine truth in same the way the representation of God’s law (Haggadah) reflects the law itself (Halakah). Yet in 1938 he writes to Scholem that:

[Kafka’s parables] do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.16

Here we see a much darker and more conspiratorial view on Benjamin’s part (and by extension on Kafka’s as well). As World War II and the holocaust come down over his head, Benjamin comes to appreciate ever more the virtues of failure, now recast as a form of subversion, even in a sense the subversion of the Halakah itself. As I see it, the purpose of this subversion is not so much directed against God per se but against our anticipation of God and law. He tells us further that “[Kafka] sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element.” 17 In light of this, we might say that this “mighty paw” raised against Halakah is a gesture against idolatry; it is to favor transmissibility, the materiality of  the Haggadah itself over the kinds of truth that are promised by such acts of representation, but never delivered. We must in effect betray God to save God as an aporia, an interruption of our own mythological narratives. Here again, the “failure” of representation, the conspiratorial use of Haggadah against Law becomes a way to preserve Law in its own “purity” and “beauty,” allowing for hope (“an infinite amount of hope, but not for us”). Raising a “mighty paw” against Halakah means keeping open a space of resistance both against our own intentions which (often unconsciously) serve the phantasmagoria, as well as the phantasmagoria itself. 18

Whereas, when left to its own devices, Haggadah, as we have seen “modestly lie[s] at the feet of the doctrine,” when it is engaged with conspiratorially, Haggadah becomes a weapon of misrecognition, the “mighty paw” which we raise against the false manifestations of Halakah and the means by which we fail to read those manifestations “correctly.” This gesture “against” God, Law and fate is in fact the epitome of what I am calling Kafka and Benjamin’s shared conspiratorial style. In Kafka’s case this conspiracy takes the explicit form of the parable.19

Kafkaesque Parables

In his own discussion of Kafka’s use of parables, Benjamin tells us that Kafka “took all conceivable precautions against interpretation.”20 He also tells us that ordinarily with parables “it is the reader’s pleasure to smooth [the parable] out so that he has the meaning on the palm of his hand. Kafka’s parables, however, unfold in…the way a bud turns into a blossom.”21 Thus in terms of their legibility, for Benjamin Kafka’s parables are beautiful, and possibly familiar but not necessarily illuminating.

In his own treatment of parables, Kafka openly espouses his desire to be cryptic. In his short essay “On Parables,” he tells us:

all these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: this is a different matter.22

Yet, Kafka does not leave it quite at that, because as we have already seen, representation and Halakah are in a relationship for him, even if it is at times a necessarily confrontational one. Thus he goes on to write:

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.23

This is of course “a parable,” indeed it is a “parable about parables” (reminiscent of de Man’s “metafigure” which means to “write figuratively about figures”)24 In this case, the parable addresses the very question of how parables are related to daily life, that is to say (at least in the emphasis I am focusing on here) on the question of politics, of the ordering of our lives. Kafka tends to punish those who would painfully work out his logic by deliberately withholding that logic in the first place. It is perhaps more profitable to focus, as Benjamin suggests, on the gesture that his parable makes.  Taken in this spirit, we might say that this fragment suggests that, although it is futile to attempt to understand Kafka’s parables, to make the attempt nonetheless is to be “rid of all your daily cares.” Our struggle with a parable, it seems, is meant to be lost but the encounter with it is still meant to allow us to “win” in our daily life; we are not left unaffected by our brush with it even though it offers us nothing at all.

Such an interpretation of parables may be even more clear in what is perhaps the most paradigmatic moment of parable reading that Kafka executes, namely the scene toward the very end of The Trial where K. encounters a priest who seeks to interpret (along with K. himself), the parable “Before the Law.” This encounter with the priest comes when K. is increasingly desperate. His “case is going badly” as the priest informs him (but K. already knows this).25

The parable of “Before the Law” is so well known that I will only briefly paraphrase it here: a man from the country comes before a doorway to the law and the doorkeeper there bars his entry. The man asks if he can get in later and the doorkeeper says “That’s possible,” and so the man waits, on a stool the doorkeeper provides him with, for his whole life, year after year, never being let in. 26 At the end, as he is dying, the doorkeeper bends over the man to hear his last question:

‘Everyone wants access to the law,’ says the man, ‘how come, over all these years, no one but me has asked to be let in?” the doorkeeper…shouts to him: ‘Nobody else could have got in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I’ll go and shut it.’27

As parables are wont to do, this parable forces us to examine it closely, to try to discern its meaning. As if not content to trust in his own inscrutability, in The Trial Kafka has K. and the priest themselves unsuccessfully try to discern the meaning of “Before the Law.” This is one of those rare and wonderful meta-textual moments when two characters in a story attempt to work out what we, the readers are meant to work out (or not work out, as the case may be) for ourselves; by this device the normal lines between author and reader become blurred; we become implicated all the more in the process of interpretation even as Kafka himself directly interferes with that process.

In their discussions of the parable, K. and the priest agree on nothing. Suffering from arbitrary justice,  K. empathizes with the man from the country. He sees how justice is wrong, arrogant and indeed arbitrary. The priest, who works for the state (he claims to be a prison chaplain), takes the side of the doorkeeper, offering legalistic arguments for why he is right. In the hands of many an author matters might have been left there; we come to the determination that a parable is always interpreted from our own position.

Yet Kafka pushes this further; as is often the case in his work, an alternative way to read this parable comes closer to the middle than the end of this discourse. K. tries to pin the priest down by saying “So you think the man was not cheated, do you?” and the priest answers:

Don’t get me wrong…I’m just pointing out the different opinions about it. You shouldn’t pay too much attention to people’s opinions. The text cannot be altered, and the various opinions are often no more than an expression of despair over it.28

Here, we see that “the text cannot be altered.” In other words, we are not permitted to understand the text but that doesn’t mean that the text has no effect on us; it has a form, a material presence that we continually return to. The parable thus serves to preserve the inscrutability of parables—it insists on (and therefore gives evidence of) its secret and just as sternly lets us know that we will never come to know it.29

Yet, even in the face of such an absolute denial, we see that we are not left unaffected by such a gesture. We are affected not so much by the “truth” of the parable, since that is unknown to us, but by the way we organize--and live--our lives in the face of the parable itself. The “daily cares” and the “truth of the parable” are thus not total strangers; in the face of the parable, our acts of interpretation, however random and arbitrary they might be, serve as a kind of anchor through which we form connections with one another, determining how we see ourselves in relation to others.

In this way we begin to see the relevance of Kafka for political theory. Whether the doorkeeper is above or below the man from the country (both positions are argued), whether the priest is a stern representative of the state of an ally of K., the parable serves as a point of contact, a mode of organizing which then produces relationships based on our own responses. In this way the act of interpretation itself becomes profoundly, and importantly, political.

We see the effect of this interpretation in the kinds of intimacies and relationships that are produced in the face of the mysteries of the law. In The Trial, we see the strange banality of the court’s rooms, mixed up with ordinary people doing their wash and cooking cabbages, the intense jealousies produced between K., his lawyers and other, equally hapless clients, the various women that alternately intercede in K.s situation and leave him to his fate. These relationships are all produced not despite but because of the mystery that Kafka himself sternly guards (not unlike the doorkeeper himself).

It is at this point that it becomes particularly useful to read Kafka through the lens of Benjamin’s interpretation; Kafka’s gesture serves here to render parables legible qua parables, even while rendering them illegible as a font of meaning or authority. He thus indeed “raises a mighty paw” against Halakah by confounding it with its symbolic representations (Haggadah). Kafka reveals our understanding of Halakah to be merely text, obscure and tantalizing at the same time, He subverts the notion that there is some “hidden truth” which lies within or beneath his parables. At the same time, by stripping away their content (or rather, by making it clear that the content is unavailable to us) Kafka shows how the parable serves to organize and form our responses nonetheless.  This exposure of a parable’s effectiveness even without having any authoritative meaning renders visible a process which is otherwise obscured by content, by our desire to “know what the text means.” This shows us that we can and do come together in ways that are not necessarily organized by clear and authoritative meanings. While we are busy seeking “the truth” and meaning, we are in fact already engaged in a kind of community, one that is produced out of our own conspiratorial acts. It is this unrecognized (or more accurately, as we will see further, misrecognized) subterranean community that forms the heart of Kafka’s politics.

Unfolding the Parable: The Castle

The same dynamics that we see in The Trial are also clearly visible in what might be considered Kafka’s magnum opus, The Castle.30 Here, in the last book that Kafka wrote (and which he died without finishing), we also see how parables serve to organize our life without recourse to definitive and authoritative meanings. At the same time we see far more clearly the kinds of subterranean rumors, the conspiratorial resistances which amass even in the face of Halakah itself. In The Castle, for all the passivity that its narrator (also named K.) seems to display, we see the processes of conspiracy on the part of the author, the character and the readers alike (even without their necessarily realizing or desiring their own participation).

Just as crucially, The Castle also illustrates the particular and unique form of messianism that I see as a necessary complement to the conspiracies of its characters. As we will see further, the fact that Kafka’s messiah is never recognized--or even consciously noticed as such--is essential to the form of redemption that it brings to the community that it visits. Were it to be recognized, this messiah would instantly become merely another instantiation of dogma, of myth posing as divine truth. Kafka’s stealth messiah preserves our misrecognition and in this way allows us to continue to fail in bold and spectacular ways in our attempt to convey and understand Halakah. This failure permits us to potentially succeed in our rebellion against Halakah’s false appearances—a rebellion that we are neither conscious nor necessarily desirous of but which is in fact what redeems us (if anything does) at the end of the day.

The Castle is a sprawling, loosely connected and incomplete narrative but one thing that unites it quite clearly is its strong attention to questions of representation. As is fairly well known, the book begins when the narrator, K. comes to a village dominated by a castle. The denizens of the village live in the shadow of the castle both literally and metaphorically. The entirety of their lives is spent in anticipation of the wishes and whims of the castle itself.

There is an intense hierarchy that emanates from the Castle, forming levels within levels. There are peasants, ordinary villagers, messengers such as Barnabas (who delivers K. his first so-called message from the Castle), and then the Castle officials themselves. One of these officials in particular, a man named Klamm is the focus of much of the book’s intrigue.

Klamm is first encountered as a mere scrawl, a signature on a letter sent to K. informing him of his service (a letter that K. then reverently hangs on his wall). Thus Klamm (whose name in German as in English is redolent of silence and secrecy) is introduced as a kind of failed or obscure sign.31  K. is told that Klamm’s letter “is valuable and even venerable because of Klamm’s signature, which appears to be genuine.”32 But he is also told by the local village chairman that the letter’s contents (which read like a fairly straightforward letter of acceptance) is unofficial to which K. complains “you interpret the letter so well that all that’s finally left is a signature on a blank sheet of paper.”33 Such attention to legibility, signature, and its relationship to identity and meaning, reinforce and make visible the material nature of representation. Kafka here seems to be reminding us that representation, for all its mystery and power, is nothing more than lines on paper, images, sounds and pictures.

At some point we find out that Klamm might not even exist. Well into the book Olga, who is Barnabas’ sister, offers a long speech that simultaneously dispels and confuses much of what we have assumed to be true up to this point. She offers that “Barnabas doubt[s] that the official identified…as Klamm really is Klamm.”34 Klamm is only sighted in glimpses. Barnabas “once saw Klamm through a carriage window, or thought he saw him.”35 But later, the man who was introduced to him as Klamm looked totally different. K. himself only sights Klamm—if that is really who he was--once, through a key hole.36

The effect of this cumulative undermining of Klamm’s existence is twofold. On the one hand, Kafka seems to be playfully but purposefully unraveling our automatic deference to certain authority structures. This unraveling includes the authority of an official like Klamm, as well as the authority of the author of the text, in this case Kafka himself (whom we otherwise generally defer to). Even before Olga’s speech but certainly by that point, we can see Kafka busily undermining these assumptions on our part.  Yet on the other hand, Kafka also seems to be highlighting the way that such authority systems (of both the political and authorial sorts) produce intense responses and expectations. The letter that K. hangs on his wall was probably not written by Klamm (that was probably not his illegible signature) and yet the letter is “venerable” nonetheless. Even (or perhaps especially) as an exposed aporia, we see how power and authority function.

In his playful undermining of assumptions, his false starts and red herrings, Kafka exposes the complicity of his characters and even our own complicity as his readers in terms of our collective desire for clear, authoritative meanings. He is thus setting the grounds for a conspiracy, one that is set exactly against those authority symbols that so deeply implicate the characters in this book (and perhaps the readers as well).

The Erotics of Klamm

For all of his elusiveness, and even his possible non-existence, Klamm has a powerful effect on those around him. The very suggestion of Klamm’s presence excites and activates the villagers in myriad ways.  K. gets caught up in the worship of Klamm insofar as he himself becomes engaged to Frieda, a woman that Klamm “summons” (assuming that the summoner really is Klamm). The minute Frieda tells K. that she is Klamm’s mistress, he becomes much more interested in her, soon falling in love with her and in effect taking her away from Klamm himself.37

As the novel progresses, the Klamm-inspired couplings and uncouplings gain speed and become almost impossible to keep track of. In every case, Klamm serves not as an actual person or agent but as a pure marker of desire.38 The erotic charge all of these characters receive is not from the “gentlemen” of the Castle but rather from their cipher (if there is in fact any difference between these things). In all cases, whether with women or men, the desires of the officials are conveyed by letters, by messengers and intermediaries, in other words, by signs. Barnabas himself, for example, is filled with joy at the letter he delivers to K. It is in fact, the first message he has been entrusted with (even if Klamm didn’t write it or send it). The allure of such semiotic power is nearly irresistible to the villagers. Olga tells K. “we know that women cannot help loving officials when the officials approach them, and indeed even beforehand they’re in love with the officials, no matter how strongly they attempt to deny it…”39 The letters and the states of excitement and meaningfulness they produce organize the reality of these villagers even while we increasingly recognize that this is a system without a center, an enormously complex phantasm that nonetheless compels our responses. It may very well be that the Castle itself is empty, or that only its outer halls are occupied by people who themselves imagine that there are tremendously important personages lurking in the inner halls.  The actual high Castle officials, so crucial for the lives of the characters of this book are never seen except in the most hesitant and uncertain glimpses.

Missing the Messiah

With one crucial exception: In one of the most telling moments of the whole book, K. actually has an encounter with one of the high lords of the Castle but doesn’t even realize it. Hoping that he’ll get a sighting of Klamm, K. stands by a fancy sleigh parked in the courtyard of the “Gentlemen’s Inn” (he assumes it must belong to Klamm).40 He is invited into the sleigh to get some cognac by the coachman.  While taking a long sip of cognac “it became bright, the electric light came on, not only inside, on the stairs, in the passage, and in the corridor, but outside above the entrance.”41 K. jumps out of the sleigh, very nervous at being caught and a “young gentleman, extremely goodlooking, pale and reddish, but quite grave” comes over. K. thinks that:

Actually, the worst part was that the gentleman had surprised him and that there hadn’t been enough time to hide from him and to wait undisturbed from Klamm, or rather, that he hadn’t shown sufficient presence of mind to stay in the sleigh, close the door, and wait there on the fur blankets for Klamm…42

The gentleman says “Come with me,” to which K. responds “I am waiting for someone.” The gentleman repeats “Come.” And K. repeats “But then I’ll miss the person I’m waiting for.” The gentleman responds, “You’ll miss him whether you wait or you go.” And K. responds in turn, “Then I would rather miss him as I wait.” 43 After this exchange, the gentleman leaves. The courtyard is locked and the lights switched off; K. is left alone and once again in the dark.

In a book which many claim is about waiting for the messiah, the messiah comes and leaves and K. doesn’t even notice; he is in fact, so fixated on Klamm, a lowly and possibly nonexistent servant of the Castle that when a true lord appears, he is unable to register his presence as anything but a distraction. 44 It is not until the lord begins to leave, “quite slowly, as though wanting to show K. that it was still in his power to call him back,” that K. seems to have some regrets. 45  Even so, Kafka writes: “perhaps he had that power, but it would have done him no good; to call the sleigh back would be to drive himself away.”46

We see in K’s bedazzlement with Klamm shades of idolatry—an idolatry that runs rampant throughout The Castle. Here the symbol has supplanted what it stands for. Klamm, a cipher, a joke, has become more important than a high lord and gentleman. By fixating on Klamm, K. is left (literally) in the dark. At this point, we seem to have reached the dark heart of this novel, the end of hope (for us, anyway), a failure and a dead end.

Yet, when read through Benjamin’s lens as a co-conspirator, we can read K’s actions in a different light. We can see K’s actions as an example once again of what Benjamin refers to as “rais[ing] a mighty paw” against Halakah. In this example, the Haggadah (if we think of Klamm as symbol or cipher) is indeed the vehicle for this conspiracy; the cipher is used to deliver us from our expectation of redemption. Kafka here reveals his conspiratorial strategy; rather than deride the “false symbol” to embrace the true God, he uses that false symbol to void any possibility of the true deity, cleansing that site of any representational aspirations. K.’s fixation on Klamm ensures that K. will never find the meaning he is searching for, never be “saved” from his own semiotic failure.

But note that K. does not act alone. He has an ally, albeit one he barely notices, namely a true lord of the castle, we might say, a messiah.  Now that the messiah has come, and gone, K. experiences a kind of freedom. Having missed God confers onto K. certain strange benefits:

It seemed to K. as if they had broken off all contact with him, but as if he were freer than ever and could wait as long as he wanted here in this place where he was generally not allowed, and as if he had fought for this freedom for himself in a manner nobody else could have done and as if nobody could touch him or drive him away, or even speak to him, yet—and this conviction was at least equally strong—as if there were nothing more senseless, nothing more desperate, than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability.47

The key thing to note here is that K. is still waiting at the end of this passage. Nothing has really changed (in keeping with the Jewish notion Benjamin conveys to us that the messiah “would only make a slight adjustment in [the world]”).48 This is not Simone Weil’s “waiting for God” wherein the waiting itself is sanctified by what it waits for. K. now knows (at least on some level) that he is waiting for nothing and there is a modicum of peace—and despair—in that knowledge.49

Here, we come to the center of Kafka’s parable.  Suitably, this messianic arrival—and subsequent abandonment--occurs not at the end of the book but tucked away in the middle. Just like the event it conveys this section of the book comes and goes virtually unnoticed but it also transforms the meaning of the text. This moment definitively undoes any hope for some kind of final, perfect redemption, for some great resolution of meaning wherein the parable tells us some profound truth. This is thus a kind of ur meta-textual moment, when the text announces its own impossibility of self resolution. We, the reader, are left, like K. in the dark, but perhaps now (not unlike K.) relatively freed of the need to understand or discover the parable’s meaning (since such a meaning has been tantalizingly dangled before us then removed once and for all). The structures, allures and powers of text become legible and perhaps more available minus that great centralizing organizing principle, the sovereign voice of the author/messiah who promises us something certain as a reward for our striving to interpret.

In this way, the messianic figure in The Castle does what Kafka does as author throughout his texts; it forcefully intervenes in the narrative in order to demonstrate that all of the narrative structures we attribute to its agency are in fact without meaning. In the face of that meaninglessness, all of our allegiance and subservience to the symbols of power become, as it were, useless, leaving us in the position of being stooges and wannabes who have no choice now but to rebel against what we would otherwise seek to worship and obey; the signs and symbols by which we would come to “know the truth” become empty markers, tools that we are forced to use as we see fit in the absence of such a certainty.

It might seem as if Kafka is suggesting that we can dispense with these divine and political constructions of authority altogether, that we might be able to form “sideways” communities, unorganized and free of any taint of representation. But Kafka is too complex, too tragic a thinker to offer such a ready solution. To think this would be to presume that the messiah really had freed us, even from itself, whereas Kafka’s messiah, it is important to stress, does nothing at all. In The Castle we are not so much liberated from the symbols and structures of authority as those symbols are displaced and de-centered. The function of the messianic, in this case is to retain the crucial role of symbolic organization of our lives, but to do so in ways that do not preclude our own response, our own resistance.

To briefly extend this analysis to another of Kafka’s texts already considered, in “Before the Law,” we can see that the Doorkeeper, rather than being a villain might actually be the messiah as well. Although the man’s fate of lingering at the door of law seems awful, it would have been far worse if the doorkeeper relented and let him into the door of law and exposed him to all of its secrets.50 If that had happened, the man from the country would have been confirmed in all of his delusions about Halakah, there would have been no space for resistance, no mighty paw of haggadic uprising; the very distinction between law and its representation would have been erased. So in a way, the doorkeeper and the man from the country can be read as fellow conspirators collectively denying some great resolution and thereby keeping their conspiracy going against far greater and more irresistible powers.

In the meantime, they have established a de facto society, a society of two to be exact. What they chose to do with their time is irrelevant (at some point, the man from the country gets very well acquainted with the doorkeepers’ fleas). What matters is that they are situated in a site of irresolution. Their community, by virtue of its explicit exclusion from the law is somewhat left to its own devices, a position afforded them by their mutual conspiracy. If the doorkeeper is the messiah, he goes unnoticed and unappreciated, even apparently the villain of the parable. He, like the messiah in The Castle saves the world, but nobody notices (certainly not the man from the country). The communities that are established in his wake go similarly unrecognized, so fixated are we on the faux symbols, the Klamms, sovereigns, authors and potentates that leave us truly bereft.

 Conspiring With the

If we think further about the relationship between these moments of messianic interruption and our own acts of conspiracy, we can begin to see how for Kafka, as for Benjamin, such events are simultaneous—possibly identical in some sense, even as they are mutually implicated. In an act of “divine violence,” the messianic serves to destroy its own representation “which [Benjamin tells us] myth bastardized with law.”51 At the same moment, our own duty is to conspire against our own time and intentions, to use the Haggadah as a  “mighty paw” to raise against the false appearances of Halakah. We can see that both gestures are the same: the exposure and de-centering of false idols.52

For Benjamin (and I’d suggest for Kafka as well), these gestures must be simultaneous to succeed. In keeping with the Jewish mystical tradition that the messiah is always here,  Benjamin famously tells us that “[l]ike every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic force…”53 But this force is nothing, or rather provides nothing but an opportunity,  if we don’t act ourselves. Thus, in the case of The Castle, while K. may indeed be “redeemed” by the messianic gesture of self-voiding, that redemption seems useless unless it somehow comes to K’s attention.

Here we come to the trickiest part of Kafka’s notion of redemption because, as we have seen, K. cannot know that he has been redeemed—he must miss the messiah to avoid reasserting the very mythologies that the messiah has (potentially) voided. Given the unfinished and unresolved nature of The Castle itself (is K. redeemed? Does he know? How could we tell?) a consideration of a different writing, Kafka’s short parable “The Silence of the Sirens” (Das Schweigen der Sirenen) may offer us some illumination about how to think further about K’s role in his own conspiracy. In “The Silence of the Sirens” (wherein, in a classic act of misrecognition of his own, Kafka completely twists the story of Ulysses around to suit his purposes), we are told that Ulysses bound his ears with wax and chained himself to the mast to avoid the lure of the Siren’s song. In doing so he didn’t know that “the sirens have a weapon more fatal than their song, namely their silence.”54  While his ears are blocked up, Ulysses imagines that he is escaping their songs; little does he know that they aren’t making any noise at all.55

Here we see a failure, an accidental conspiracy by a human agent. Yet, via his own confusion and misrecognition, Ulysses earns redemption even though he doesn’t know what that redemption means or looks like (or how it came about). His conspiracy, his turn to wax and chains does work but to do so, it must be simultaneous with crucial messianic function—the aporia of the Siren’s silence. Indeed, Kafka suggests that the Siren’s are silent because of the spectacle of Ulysses’ joy at his own brilliant scheme—a mutual case of misrecognition with happy results for Ulysses himself. 56

With this parable in mind, we can turn back to K’s fate in The Castle. 57 Due to his obsession with Klamm, K. encounters the messiah (he would never have been in that sleigh if he hadn’t been waiting for Klamm). By an act of grace, the same act of idolatry on K.’s part becomes transformed into a redemptive moment because the exact same gesture of missing God coincides with God’s act of becoming missed. This is how the two gestures are in fact one even as they are not legible in the same way.

By voiding itself, the messianic function allegorizes the signs of the divine (or perhaps more accurately in Kafka’s case, renders them into parables). The failure of the sign to mean anything becomes legible, exposed, albeit in ways K. misunderstands and only dimly perceives (without however annihilating the sign or K.’s attachment to it).  In the face of such an exposure, the quest for meaning that drives us to idolatry is disrupted, potentially turning us from complicit stooges into co-conspirators with the divine.

The two acts in question, one of messianic intervention and the other of our own conspiracy, haunt and inform one another. If the messiah acted without the obscurity of our own obsessions (that is to say, if we saw it for “what it was”), we would be condemned to a perfect form of idolatry, a myth without antidote insofar as the messiah itself would be implicated in our belief.58 If we acted without the messiah’s act of self-voiding we risk thinking, along with Ulysses, and K., that our delusions are correct; that we were saved by wax and chains, or that Klamm really is going to save us. Such a delusion without redemption returns us to the very mythologies that both Kafka and Benjamin are trying to save us from.59 In either case, it is the balance and simultaneity of these gestures, the way they cast one another into doubt, that proves redemptive, if anything is.

Conspiring by Design

Having laid out this argument about what could be called the accidental structure of our salvation (i.e. the way our own misrecognition and failure are crucial elements in freeing us from the delusions of idolatry), it must be said Kafka occasionally indicates what appears to be another version of conspiracy that comes a bit closer to the kind of open, conscious forms of resistance that one would expect to make for a properly political theory. After all, we expect our political actors to know what they are doing, to avoid stumbling on redemption by accident or by factors utterly beyond our control.60

We see something of this element in Kafka’s initial decision to make K. more aware of his conspiracy, a decision that he rescinded in later iterations of The Castle. As Mark Harman points out, in his rewriting of The Castle, Kafka “flattened his characters” and especially K.61 The original hero has a “decisive deed [“entscheidenden Tat”] to perform in the Castle. As Harman tells us “[the original K.] is an aggressive and duplicitous character who openly admits his willingness to cheat and lie to gain what he wants.”62 Any hint of this mission is however eliminated in the “final” text (that is to say the text that Max Brod actually published posthumously, against Kafka’s explicit wishes).63 Thus, via his editing, Kafka has produced his subject’s passivity. In rendering K. as a kind of confused, stumbling everyman, Kafka is de facto reducing his own agency in the text (Harmon also notes how Kafka deleted references that made it obvious that K. was an autobiographical foil for Kafka himself).64 In this way, Kafka makes space, whether intentionally or not, for the kind of messianic delivery that K. “experiences,” which is to say, he abandons K. as an extension of himself and his own agendas, he allows K. to similarly be abandoned by the messiah in the text and left truly to his own devices.65

We see indications of this more “conscious” style of conspiracy elsewhere as well, including in  “The Silence of the Sirens” itself. Kafka ends that parable by saying that there is a “codicil to the forgoing that has been handed down:”

Ulysses, it is said, was so full of guile, was such a fox, that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armor. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and opposed the afore-mentioned pretense to them and the gods merely as a sort of shield.66

Although beyond “human understanding”, this alternative view of Ulysses does more than gain redemption by accident. This conspiracy might just take on the question of “raising a mighty paw” against Halakah (in this case with the wax and chains, the symbols by which the sirens are “not heard”) in a more open, acknowledged way.67

Yet in this case it is not clear that we are really dealing with another form of conspiracy so much as that, from our limited and compromised position, it becomes tempting to read such a conspiracy along the lines of how we think politics (and conspiracy) ought to be promulgated. We see in effect the author of these texts, Kafka himself, occasionally following the path of Ulysses, insofar as he attributes (at least some of the time) to his characters a fuller power over their own salvation (or doom). The fact that even an author as esoteric as Kafka displays this tendency suggests how it is impossible from within the context of our own perspective to ever perfectly portray a pure messianic event or to recognize the difference between a subject who has been redeemed by the messiah and one who has redeemed her or himself.

Yet when Benjamin says of Kafka that “No other writer has obeyed the commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’ so faithfully,” he is pointing to a way in which Kafka, perhaps even more than Benjamin himself, resists this temptation towards intentionality. Or rather he does not so much resist it as he allows his intentionality to be displaced, overwritten, we could say, by what Benjamin calls the “intention of the sign,” by the messianic intrusion he depicts in his various texts.68

We need not be too mystical about this messiah. Insofar as the messiah in Kafka’s texts remains itself a character, we can never know (nor should we ) the messianic function perfectly but can only gesture at it. Even Kafka as author does not have access to some kind of “outside” perspective that he is privy too—he too can only relate the messianic function through symbols and representations (and, as we have seen, the messianic function is itself always performed by Kafka, the author himself).  By the same token, we can only gesture at a subjectivity that we might gain were we to become the “us” for whom there is “plenty of hope.” For “us” as we find ourselves now, such a possibility exists only as a “rumor” (as Benjamin puts it) that haunts and subverts the workings of our own conspiracy. 69 We can never (nor should we) overcome our place within the symbolic order, but as Kafka shows (and Benjamin appreciates) we can subvert and complicate that position.

In the meantime, we always have the kind of redemption and the kind of community that Kafka’ shows us is already here, even if we don’t quite know it. The messiah will always come misrecognized, misunderstood, a model for our own failure and self-voiding, our own act of rebellion against its mythic instantiations. The coming, and going, of the messiah allows for our fragile but persistent communities to occur in its wake (even when those go unrecognized as well). As Kafka tells us in his most direct reference to the messiah itself (in “The Coming of the Messiah” [“Das Kommen des Messias”]:

The messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but the very last.70

We will never, indeed must never, catch the messiah at its function. To do so would be to return us to the very delusion that the messiah’s arrival (and departure) has voided. The value of our own conspiracy, even though we are hopelessly compromised, even though we are total failures, is to give us a way to understand what has become possible even while excluding and hiding the messianic function itself. Such a move allows us misrecognize the messiah’s actions and hence remain redeemed; it transforms our clumsy and collaborationist acts into conspiracies. Perhaps the key point to grasp here in reading Kafka is the need to “recognize our misrecognition” that is to say to remain open to the kinds of misrecognitions that we require in order to navigate the realm of representation. Rather than either seeking “the truth,” or nihilistically give up on representation altogether (in the end both gestures lead us to the same level of delusion), Kafka suggests that we can just possibly learn to recognize how valuable our failures and misrecognitions are, to recognize how our various alliances and relationships, while equally based on misrecognition nevertheless constitute a ground for (perhaps the only ground for) a good life and a decent politics. When we recognize our misrecognition, we remain bound by the signs and symbols of authority and power but when the overwhelming presence of some central narrative figure is distorted or removed, we gain more access to our own politics, our own relationality that is produced in the wake of such figures.  We may be hopeless (indeed, we must be hopeless) but in that forgotten space without hope, we can yet learn how to endure and perhaps even to thrive a little.

James Martel is a professor in the Department of Political Science at California State University. He is the author of eight books, most recently Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight (Duke University Press, 2022).

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