Kafka Proces (Kafka's Trial) (Poster for a Warsaw dramatization based on Franz Kafka's novel) (1964) by Roman Cieslewicz. © 2025 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

One of the many unexpected treasures of teaching Kafka is the fact that Kafka himself gives us many clues about how he is to be taught and studied. In all of his novels and in many of his short stories and parables too, the figures of teachers and students are frequent and critical interlopers. By furnishing so many examples of pedagogy and learning, Kafka offers, not only a clue to how to think about the world in general but even more specifically how to think about the relationship created through teaching itself. Crucially, for Kafka, teaching is not about wise elders imparting knowledge to young students. In fact, I think that view is the opposite of what Kafka is trying to tell us. The assumption that there is this thing called “knowledge” which can unproblematically be transmitted to students is the epitome of what I like to call archism, that is, the doctrine, born out of the enlightenment along with other European political and intellectual movements that supports global capitalism, class, gender and racial hierarchies and other modes of power that have dominated the world for the last few hundred years.

The pretense to having access to universal knowledge, the homogenizing and absolutizing sense of a power that comes from such a view, and the sense of an entitlement to enforce the effects of that knowledge into the world are all hallmarks of what could be called an archist pedagogy. The term archism stems from the ancient Greek verb “arkhein” which means both to rule and to begin. Ruling is the political face of archism but the idea of beginning, of being an a priori truth that therefore can justly to be imposed upon the world (hence, also justifying ruling), is just as important. Archism claims to stand at the beginning, at what comes before (and hence what structures) the world around it. We can see versions of this way of thinking in any number of enlightenment thinkers ranging from Kant to Descartes. One cannot quibble with the before, it is presupposed by all that follows. The only proper relationship with the before is one of submission and acquiescence (if you are one of those meant to be lower down in the hierarchies it establishes) or acceptance and enjoyment (if you are one of those meant to be on top).

If archist pedagogy is about filling the students’ minds with this form of knowledge, Kafka’s entire life’s work is dedicated to undoing and unmaking precisely such a form of teaching. For Kafka, there is never a “thing” to grasp or learn. One of the pleasures of teaching Kafka’s texts, then, is to show students how not knowing and not grasping is itself a form of knowledge (perhaps counter-knowledge would be a better term). While from an archist mentality this may seem and feel loose and senseless, what Kafka helps us to do is to find our orientation in a world that has been freed—however temporarily—from the absolute mandates of archist knowledge. Much like a drug addict must learn to experience and appreciate the world anew without the heightened sensations that drugs bring, Kafka’s students (and teachers too!) must learn to experience a world that has been liberated from archist knowledge. Such a world appears grim and chaotic, or entirely flat because archism insists that it is the only way to think about and organize reality. Yet, through the example of his characters and especially his characters who are themselves teachers and students (although arguably everyone in a Kafka writing is a teacher or student of some sort or another) we see that there is another way.

Walter Benjamin, who is one of the greatest devotees of Kafka, was perhaps in particular drawn to the way that Kafka opposed archist forms of education and the sense of truth that it produced more generally. Looking at the figure of the student in Kafka’s work in particular, Benjamin writes:

The gate to justice is study. Yet Kafka doesn’t dare attach to this study the promises which tradition has attached to the study of the Torah. His assistants are sextons who have lost their house of prayer; his students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ [Schrift]. Now there is nothing then to support them on their “untrammeled happy journey.”1

On the surface of things, one would imagine that having “lost the Holy Writ,” Kafka’s students would be similarly lost and abandoned, bereft of any kind of purpose or possibility. But Benjamin sees that in fact these students have, in a sense, been saved through this selfsame loss. When you “have” the Holy Writ and you know what is true and what is false you are, Benjamin is suggesting, trapped within dogmas and fetishisms that serve as a form of archist superstructure (Benjamin’s own term for what I have been calling archism is “mythic violence.”)2 Calling their liberation from this knowledge the basis for an “untrammeled happy journey” shows that for Benjamin, pedagogical freedom is a far cry from being lost. Losing the Holy Writ, Kafka’s students find themselves. They are not, as I will explain further, perfectly contented beings as a result of their “loss;” their happiness is not of that sort. Kafka’s students struggle with the lack of guarantees, with the fact that they have to find their own purpose and their own path in life (something that they do not always succeed in doing).

Fulfilment and guarantees are part of the false doctrines of archism. (recall that he writes “Kafka doesn’t dare attach to this study the promises which tradition has attached to the study of the Torah”). To be untrammeled, to be liberated from the strictures of true knowledge, is not an easy path but it is the only possible path for anyone who does not seek to be bound and totalized by false lies that pose as truth and unjust and hierarchical systems that pose as a perfect and free world.

If the “gate to justice is study,” what is being pursued is not the faux justice that Kafka eviscerates in The Trial, it is rather the justice of finding one’s own path, both individually and collectively. It is the much smaller, often sadder, but untrammeled truths that are offered by what could be called Kafka’s anarchist pedagogy that offers anything other than complicity and oppression. This is the hard lesson that Kafka tries to teach us. To teach Kafka is both to impart and to be affected by this same lesson.  

Kafka’s students

Throughout his texts, we see many, many examples of teachers and students. Not all of them are attractive characters and not all of them work to resist archism (recognizing that this is not a word that Kafka ever used). For example, in The Castle, very early on in the text there is a quite unpleasant teacher who strives to teach K., the novel’s protagonist, to “see” the Castle itself. Insofar as the Castle is at the center of a vast network of power and influence that utterly dominates the village, it’s physical form is a critical part of how that power is instantiated and accepted by the villagers themselves.

At the beginning of The Castle, K. arrives, purportedly to take up a job as a land surveyor. He can’t see the castle that dominates the village because it is nighttime. In subsequent moments however, K. repeatedly tries to both approach and see the Castle as such, yet his attempts to do so often result in uncertainty and confusion to the point where it is not even clear if there actually is a Castle atop the village hill. For example, in one such instance Kafka writes:

On the whole the Castle, as it appeared from this distance, corresponded to K.’s expectations. It was neither an old knight’s fortress nor a magnificent new edifice, but a large complex made up of a few two-story buildings and many lower, tightly packed ones; had one not known that this was a castle, one could have taken it for a small town. K. saw only one tower, whether it belonged to a dwelling or a church was impossible to tell.3

Here, after first asserting the Castle’s overall appearance, Kafka begins to sow doubt as to whether any particular building is or is not part of the Castle, making it unclear precisely what the Castle consists of. Later still, Kafka writes that: “as he came closer he was disappointed in the Castle, it was only a rather miserable little town pieced together from village houses, distinctive only because everything was perhaps built of stone, but the paint had since flaked off, and the stone seemed to be crumbling.”4

Eventually, K. is “taught” how to see the Castle better by, as is quite appropriate, the village school teacher, a strong enforcer of orthodoxy. Kafka writes:

“You’re taking a look at the Castle?” [the teacher] asked, more gently than K. had expected, but as though he did not approve of what K. was doing.  “Yes,” said K., “I’m a stranger here, I only arrived yesterday evening.” “You don’t like the Castle?” the teacher said quickly. “What?” countered K., somewhat baffled, but then, rephrasing the question more delicately, he said: “Do I like the Castle? What makes you think I don’t like it?” “Strangers never do,” said the teacher.5

The teacher here has anticipated K.’s disappointment in the appearance of a Castle that otherwise wholly dominates the village’s entire life world. The teacher here is acknowledging how the Castle may look (if it even exists!) to an outsider but through his tone, he obliquely warns K. that such views will not do if he is to remain a part of the village.

In other words, the teacher here is instructing K. on how to see the world, how to organize his visual field so as to produce maximum power radiating down from its imagined source (the “beginning”) to the lowly vision of the villagers themselves. This is a recipe for archism, disciplining the senses (and in particular the eyes) to not only accept the power system that holds them in thrall but also to make it realer than their own senses and their own collective forms of judgment. And, as the novel develops, the teacher is, in fact, one of K.’s main tormentors. K. is forced to accept a job as a janitor in the schoolroom (where he also has to live for a time) and suffers the teacher’s bullying and pettiness for large swaths of the novel.

Similarly, not all depictions of students in Kafka’s work are radical or even positive. In The Trial, a student of the law physically picks up and carries a woman away from Josef K. (she is one of his few allies) to bring her to the court and whatever forms of sexual predation that she will be subject to. He tries to get the student to drop the woman by shoving him hard from behind but the student bounds off and Josef K. is left meekly following them towards the court room. Subsequently “[Josef K.] realizes that this was the first clear defeat he had suffered at the hands of these people.”6  The student is merely following the orders of his higher ups, but in doing so he clearly shows his allegiance to the very power systems that The Trial is dedicated to exposing and subverting.

Yet, not everyone involved in education is of this ilk in Kafka’s world. This is especially true for students who are a recurring and important character in Kafka’s novels. It makes sense that, as Kafka portrays them, students tend to be more in keeping with anarchist pedagogy than teachers insofar as the teachers may have some vested stake in existing power systems. In any event, it is the students, as Benjamin points out, that really carry forward the mission of “losing the Holy Writ” and abandoning power systems in favor an “untrammeled, happy journey.”

One example of such a student comes in Amerika, Kafka’s unfinished novel (the first he attempted) about a young man named Karl who goes to America to “seek his fortune.” After many misadventures, Karl (who is only seventeen years old and thus the age of a student himself) comes to the house of an opera singer named Brunelda. Her neighbor is a student who is studying on a balcony that adjoins Brunelda’s. Upon seeing him, after a short and unpleasant exchange, Karl keeps looking at him:

Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. At home it hadn’t been so different…when Karl sat at his parent’s table writing his homework…And what had he achieved through all that studying! He had certainly forgotten everything; if he had to continue his studies here, it would have been very difficult.7

The student tells Karl that he has a very hard life. He works full time as a salesman in the day and studies at night, living off black coffee and never sleeping at all. When Karl offers that he sometimes regrets having given up his own studies, the student says:

You can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself have been studying for years, out of pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent future. And in any case, what sort of prospects did I really want! America is full of bogus doctors.8

When pressed, the student admits that if forced to choose he would pick his post as a salesman over his vocation as a student without question, yet he perseveres in studying nonetheless. Saying “see how much work I’ve still got to wade through,” he dismisses Karl and goes back to his books (Even as he is talking to Karl, he sometimes looks like he is still reading; Karl could never be sure one way or the other).9

The student holds an interesting position in a book that depicts one disappointment after another. In this novel, everyone in America, or nearly everyone, it seems, is some kind of sociopath. His rich uncle, who initially takes Karl in with open arms, disowns him because Karl accepted an invitation to a dinner party that he didn’t want Karl to go to (even though he never said that). He later takes up with a couple of users named Robinson and Delamarche who rob him blind and generally take advantage of him. Then, when Karl finally gets a job as an elevator boy at a fancy hotel, Robinson shows up drunk and gets him fired. It is Robinson who brings him to Brunelda where he and Delamarche are now busily exploiting her for their own ends.

The want Karl to become a servant in her (but really in their) thrall. In all of this, Karl is constantly being sought after by various forms of transactional predators and keeps escaping their clutches (or being ejected; it comes to the same thing in the end).

The student is somewhat different. He doesn’t have any interest in Karl whatsoever. He only talks to him because Karl has interrupted his studies and he says it takes him a while to get back into the mode so they might as well talk for a little while. He is an indifferent observer of American life rather than a direct participant in it. Or perhaps more accurately, he mixes his life (as a salesman) within America with a second life spent contemplating something else. But what is that something else? Why and what does the student (his name is Josef Mandel) actually study?

If we take Benjamin’s short passage as a guide, we can see that it is not what he studies so much as that he studies that is key. The student seems to merely gaze at the page, not necessarily taking anything in. There is indeed nothing to learn in America (“America is full of bogus doctors.”) The act of studying offers the student, not so much access to truth (which would be impossible since there is no truth to convey) as much as a mode of being that, precisely because it is useless and non transactional, offers the student a bit of a respite from the otherwise full on hustling mode of America. He is himself such a hustler by day but by night he gets out of that world and that mentality. Studying itself becomes its own end, its own basis for an “untrammeled happy journey” of sorts.

Yet, as previously noted, happy is perhaps too strong a word to use to describe the student’s experience. The student doesn’t seem happy at all. Nonetheless, he has found a source of peace, something that no one else in the novel has, especially not Karl. This peace has not spread itself beyond the student’s own experience. When Karl asks him if he should remain with Brunelda and, hence, Delamarche who is truly horrible, the student say “absolutely,” even as he continues to read.10 Kafka then writes that for Karl “it seemed as if he had not uttered that word but rather as if it had come from a voice deeper than the student’s; it continued to resound in Karl’s ears.”

Karl, it would seem, remains in the fantasy of America. He superimposes over the ordinary and banal reality of his life the magical and fantastic miasmas that continue to push him ever further West (a direction that turns out to be continually disappointing). The student’s cast off answer (he already said that he hated Delamarche so it clearly is not a well-considered position) is taken by Karl as some kind of prophetic utterance (although Karl does ultimately leave, as he always does).

The student may not be learning anything but he does have one precious resource that Karl does not have. Unlike Karl, he knows that there is no “there, there,” in America. He doesn’t always know this, to be sure. When he is working as a salesman at a major store, he is as bought into the myth of America—the idea of the “self made man” and the American dream—as anyone else. But when he is studying, precisely because he is not learning or even necessarily reading anything, because he knows this is a waste of time and won’t lead him to any imagined better future, he is free, for that time from that illusion. He thus knows that there will be no resolution to what Karl is searching for, no perfect culminating truth that makes Karl or America itself whole in the end.

But the student cannot share this knowledge with Karl because Karl himself is not a student anymore. Karl still believes in things that can be learned and in the possibility of getting life just right. Later in the novel, Karl applies for a job at the “Theater of Oklahama” (the misspelling is deliberate on Kafka’s part) which purports to be an exact duplicate of the real world only in a way somehow transcendent and perfected.11 When the student tells Karl that he can be “happy about giving up [his] studies,” he is recognizing the allures of the American dream but, even as he says this, his eyes are looking at his books so he is also acknowledging, however indirectly, the benefits of not believing in any of those things for a time.

The case of a giant mole…

A much shorter story, “The Village Schoolmaster [the Giant Mole]” vindicates the role of (some) teachers in a story that tells the story of a village teacher (the schoolmaster) who claims that he has seen a giant mole (as in almost six feet long). The story is narrated by an unnamed man who turns out to be a businessman from a nearby city. Seeking to convince others of the truth of this event, the teacher had written a pamphlet describing the giant mole and detailing its size. A prominent scholar, comes to the village and downplays the mole’s size. He tries to offer a scientific explanation for the size of the mole, telling the teacher that “the soil in your neighborhood is particularly black and rich. Consequently, it provides the moles with particularly rich nourishment, and so they grow to an unusual size.” To which the teacher exclaims “But not to such a size as that!”12

Kafka records that the scholar “obviously looked upon the whole affair as a great joke.”13

The narrator himself, hearing of this event, seeks to back the teacher up and produces a pamphlet of his own attributing the discovery to the teacher himself. Yet, he records that:

When later I read the schoolmaster’s pamphlet—it had a very circumstantial title: “A mole larger in size than ever seen before,”—I found that we actually did not agree on certain important points, though we both believed we had proved our main point, namely the existence of the mole. These differences prevented the establishment of the friendly relations with the schoolmaster that I had been looking forward to in spite of everything.14

The narrator recognizes in advance that his efforts will be in vain. Favorably comparing the teacher’s pamphlet to his own, the narrator says:

The few opponents of his who had really occupied themselves with the subject, if but superficially, had at least listened to his, the schoolmaster’s views before they had given expression to their own; while I, on the strength of unsystematically assembled and in part misunderstood evidence, had published conclusions which, even if they were correct as regarded the main point, must evoke incredulity, and among the public no less than the educated.15

This tale of two conflicts, one between the teacher and the scholar and one between the teacher and the narrator shows us that the truth of the issue (was there a giant mole at all? If so, how big was it really?) is far less important than the question of the authority of any person to attest that something is true. The conflict between the scholar and the teacher is a very brief one. The scholar basically dismisses the teacher as a crackpot. But the conflict between the teacher and the narrator is far more complex because it involves two people who are nominally allied, both interested in the same event (the recognition of the mole’s existence).

The narrator claims that his attempts to back up the teacher were purely altruistic, to promote the teacher’s own claims to knowledge. Yet, having never seen the mole himself, the narrator is dealing with an entirely ephemeral question, the nature of belief and how one goes around proving something in the first place. The teacher, for his part, claims that the narrator’s own stated altruism is false and that the narrator is somehow trying to associate himself with the mole in lieu of the teacher.

As the short story progresses, the teacher and the narrator have a kind of showdown. First the teacher (who is much older than the narrator) says that, as a wealthy and prominent businessman, the narrator cannot help but take over the entire story of the mole’s existence, effectively sidetracking the teacher regardless of his motivations. The narrator, perhaps reluctantly, comes to agree with the teacher, saying that had his pamphlet worked as it was intended to (it does not), it would have led the teacher to a brief moment of recognition which would itself dissolve into a more general form of diffuse knowledge. He said that he might have tried to get the teacher a more prominent academic post and resources by which to promote his knowledge but more likely than not, this endeavor would fail. He further says:

Your discovery [of the mole] of course would be carried further, for it is not so trifling that, once having achieved recognition, it could be forgotten again. But you would not hear much more about it and what you heard you would scarcely understand. Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.16

For this reason, the narrator says that he is withdrawing from any attempt to back up the teacher and the teacher accepts this (although the narrator notes that he does not leave the narrator’s room, seemingly wanting something else to happen).

In this complex story, we see the question of “what really happened,” become almost besides the point. Knowledge in this case is entirely caught up with prestige and status, in other words with the obsessions of archism. There is a deep irony in this story because here, “the truth” (if we do assume that there ever was a giant mole) is the teacher’s sole possession. Only he saw the mole and only he really is speaking from experience. Normally this is the position of archism itself. It is archist pedagogy that insists on a “truth,” or on what “really happened.”

Yet the fog of Kafka’s literary style assures that such assurances are never actually possible to nail down. And indeed, we can never absolutely know that there ever was such a mole. We can only take someone’s word for it. But whose word do we take? And why? We are of course inclined to take the teacher at his word but our own interest is, of necessity, caught up with that of the narrator whose own well-meaningness cannot lead to anything but a reassertion of hierarchy and who has what could be called the “right to be right.”  Is there any way to know for sure that the teacher is right? Doesn’t any attempt to “prove” that there was such a mole only produce, like King Midas with his magic touch, more of the same lack of certainty?

In this way, Kafka in this story has effectively reversed the power of facticity and truth. The truth of the mole’s existence is itself buried under layer after layer of prestige and authority. Although he technically is the only one who truly “knows” whether there ever was a giant mole, the teacher in effect serves to undermine all of the assurances of those who stand above him; the narrator, the scholar, the public more generally. His access to the truth in this case has made a firm belief in the truth all but impossible and so the teacher, the village schoolmaster, has in effect actually taught us all a lesson. By sticking to the truth, he has unmade all of our own convictions in such a thing and left us puzzled and confused about who can say or assert anything at all.

In this reversal of power relations then, the teacher does the opposite of what the teacher does in The Castle. This teacher does not offer anything at all. Or rather (and more subtly) by offering the example of the giant mole, the teacher takes away all possible forms of knowledge about that event. Rather than making a case for ordinary reality, something that can be seen even by the simplest person (because such a claim would immediately become fodder for archist assertions), the teacher shows that any decision about reality is, of necessity, a political and collective one. The teacher asserts his position but he knows that his claims cannot be believed due to his lowly status. But rather than bending to that unbelief and giving up, he stubbornly clings to his claims and, in so doing, turns them into a weapon against the very regimes of truth that are being employed against him.

As with the student in Amerika, this reversal does not do the teacher much good. Here too his “happiness,” if we stick with Benjamin’s language, is not of the sort that we normally envision with such a word. The narrator told the teacher that, had his own scheme worked “you would remain in your village, you would be able with the extra money to feed and clothe your family a little bit better.” 17 But, he also concedes once again that “your discovery would be taken out of your hands, and without your being able with any show of justice to object; for only in the city could it be given its final seal.”18 He finally offers that, had this all taken place, they might have built a little museum in the village to commemorate the giant mole and “they could give you a little medal to wear on the breast of your coat, like those worn by attendants in scientific institutions.”19

In fact, none of this came to pass. But I think that in the end, the failure of the entire scheme is far preferable to the alternative. Rather than being given a token of his own discovery, the nothingness that he receives via the lack of any recognition afforded to him is in a way far more precious because it represents, not a pyramid of truth built on the body of this one amazing mole’s possible existence, but rather the fact that no truth, no matter how much it stands out and announces itself (a six foot mole!!!) can ever be certainly true. In a way then, the village schoolmaster has taken his revenge on a system that would relegate him to obscurity (even the well meaning narrator knows that he can’t avoid such a fate).

Even though no one in the story realizes that they have been thwarted and subverted, their smug sense of their own righteousness remaining undisturbed, with the important exception of the narrator himself, the “truth” of the story—that is to say the fact that truth can never be known absolutely—has in fact won out. This is then a different kind of happiness, not the happiness promised by archism (which turns out to be nothing of the sort) but rather the happiness of freedom, of peace from the lies and distortions and frantic activity of archist power.

There is a very small indication that at the least the narrator understands what has transpired, at least obliquely. At the end, the narrator finds himself earnestly wishing that the teacher, with his stinking pipe would leave his room but the latter lingers filling the room with the miasma of doubt that he has instigated. The stink of the teacher’s pipe doubles as a form of doubt that undermines archism’s own miasmic projections and lies. In this way, albeit in the most subtle and complex of ways, the teacher has taught at least one person (and through the foil of the narrator, all of the readers too) a valuable lesson.

Teaching Kafka

When it comes to teaching Kafka’s texts, it is critical for the teacher (in this case myself) not to reproduce the initial assumptions of the narrator in “The Village Schoolmaster.” That is to say, it is important not to kill the power of the text with kindness, to seek to make sense of and relegate the text to a safely benign meaning. Students often find Kafka’s stories to be deeply disturbing and unsettling and I always tell them that this is a sign that they are having their desired effect, that they are reading him correctly.

On a very ordinary level, one of the challenges to teaching Kafka is that students find his work depressing and do not like the foggy delirium that seems to descend over them when they read especially some of his very long passages. It is so tempting at that point to be like the narrator of “The Village Schoolmaster” and try to save the day with some kind of easy summation. Yet, as that story makes clear, to do so would be to succumb to the temptations of archist pedagogy; the student would get a minor reward, perhaps (understanding the text! Getting a good grade on their essay!) but they would have squandered an opportunity for allowing the more radical aspects of Kafka’s “minor literature” (to cite Deleuze and Guattari) from having an effect on them.20

Rather than trying to rescue the students, I try to stay true to the kind of anarchist pedagogy that Kafka often models in his own stories. In some sense, that means to leave people to their own devices and to their own experience but it also means to remind them that they are part of a collectivity, the class itself, and that the responsibility for interpreting and responding to this text lies with the whole group, to decide, together, what this text is doing to each of us separately and collectively.

I think the reason that Benjamin loves Kafka so much is that the latter is exceptional in the way that the author refuses to serve as an authority in the text. That’s why students find his writing depressing and meandering. There is no firm and constant voice to rely upon. Even the narrator can be fickle and complicated. The narrator in “The Village Schoolmaster,” for example, turns out to be no friend to the reader, no sure guide but rather someone who maybe betrays their automatic trust in such a figure.

That betrayal can be read as a bad thing, the solid ground of interpretation is undermined by the kind of simmering class wars and interpersonal rivalries that are always present in Kafka’s work. But it can also be read as being of a piece with the role of the teacher in “the Village Schoolmaster” and the student in Amerika. Showing how not to read and interpret a text forces the students (and the teacher too) involved in interpreting these texts to turn more to their own devices. Who are you going to trust when the narrator tells you that they are leading you to a dead end? Where do you go when the author leaves the reader stranded, with no sure guidelines or guiding light?

The answer to those questions will be as varied as the different students and teachers and their own individual and collective responses. That, to me is the heart of anarchist pedagogy which always points to the local and the collective forms of judgment, shifting over time and space instead of the archist universal, homogenous and ever true. With the deauthorization of the obvious and “real” answer (Kafka is an expert at shutting those kinds of doors in our collective faces), we have no choice but to figure out smaller, lesser and “minor” (to cite Deleuze again) answers instead. In this way the larger deauthorization in the text produces another form of authorization: that of the classroom to come to their own conclusions that will shift and change even within a given class. Students and teachers alike don’t feel comfortable with this kind of contingency (I for one was trained in a most archist fashion) but there is also something uniquely exciting about having the chance  (a nicer way than saying that one has no option but to) to invent our own readings from the remnants and shards that Kafka leaves us with.

After teaching some of the same texts by Kafka many times over, I am always amazed by how each time I teach it, it is as if for the first time. Each time I teach him, it is an entirely novel and different experience than every other time. I, like all of us, am thoroughly a product of an archist education and so, each time I teach Kafka, I too worry that he will be depressing or meandering. I worry for the students and struggle with my desire to rescue them from a negative experience. In the time after covid, when students are far less likely to read anything at all, my anticipatory dread of the class experience is worse than ever. Yet each time, including at the time of this writing when I am teaching a graduate class on Kafka that covers his three novels,  I find the courage and strength, both from Kafka’s own characters and also from my students, to persevere and to relearn a lesson that cannot be readily summarized but which, I think, is far more valuable than all of the archist certainties that students more typically learn. Or, if not more valuable, at least one that presents a healthy and critical alternative that the students can take with them as they enter into a world marked by the very hierarchies and myths at which Kafka takes aim.

Educative violence

In his “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin speaks of what he calls “educative violence,” an answering message to the mythic violence that he is so critical of.21 In the section of the essay where this term appears, Benjamin has just introduced the concept of “divine violence,” a godly power (God-like violence is a more literal translation) that serves to unmake all of the lies that mythic violence attributes to God, nature or other transcendent forces. Divine violence, for Benjamin, does not produce new truths in the world (these would quickly become fodder for more mythic violence) but is a force of pure destruction, one that leaves human beings freed, if only temporarily, to come up with their own judgments now “untrammeled” by the distortions of mythic violence.

At this point in the essay, Benjamin writes:

This divine violence acquires attestation not only through religious tradition; on the contrary, it also has at least one hallowed manifestation in present-day life. What, as educative violence, stands in its completed form outside of law is one of its forms of appearance. These forms are thus not defined by God immediately exercising divine violence in miracles but rather through moments of bloodless, striking, de-expiating implementations. Through the absence, in the end, of all positing of law. To this extent, it is doubtless justified to also call this violence annihilating; but it is annihilating only in a relative sense, with regards to goods, law, life, and the like, never absolutely with regard for the soul of the living.22

In the latter part of this passage, Benjamin is not referring to educative violence but rather divine violence more generally yet, by applying this term to “present-day” acts of education, we can see a bit more clearly how Kafka’s forms of anarchist pedagogy works through his texts. Benjamin tells us that educative violence, like divine violence more generally, is the opposite of any sort of positing of a law. You could in fact call it the dis-positing of law, or, once again, a form of anarchist pedagogy. While it annihilates, it only annihilates those things that are effects of mythic violence (once again what I have been calling archism), the way that reality is falsely organized and imposed upon to support the hierarchies and regimes of capitalism and archism more generally.

Even as it unmakes the lies of mythic violence, divine violence never annihilates “absolutely with regard to the soul of the living.” Benjamin’s use of the term “the living” here is telling because he offers a bit earlier that, whereas mythic violence leads to “mere life,” reducing human subjects to the most minimal, transactional selves, divine violence is for the sake of “the living,” that is human beings in their fully (happy and untrammeled) forms.23 We are, for Benjamin, always both mere life and the living, both reduced in status as fodder for archist power and at the same time autonomous and thoughtful creatures that are fully capable of thinking and acting in community in ways that defy and undermine archist predations. Educative violence, akin to what I’ve been calling anarchist pedagogy, is one way to permit our status of being the living to win out over our status of being mere life, if not once and for all (that is, once again, the language of archism and mythic violence) then at least for a time.

In this way, I would submit that Kafka’s descriptions of (some) teachers and (some) students itself partakes in a form of educative violence. Anarchist pedagogy and educative violence are essentially two terms for the same phenomenon. There are an infinite number of texts that help to undermine archist power. Authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Octavia Butler, Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf immediately come to mind as fellow travelers to Kafka himself. Furthermore, through the techniques of unknowing and dis-positing that we see being practiced in Kafka’s texts, among others, we can learn to read virtually any text at all in this light. I don’t want to claim that Kafka is unique or uniquely good in the way that he teaches us to fight the lies and distortions of archism but I do think that he is one of the very best and most deliberate of such writers. If the cost of such attention is to make the experience of reading Kafka initially difficult or even unpleasant (for some; some people love him the minute they sit down with one of his writings), that is, I think, a small price to pay for the powerful and radical changes that his form of writing allows in us. That is why I continue to love reading, writing and thinking about and, above all, teaching Kafka’s work.

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James Martel teaches political theory in the department of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of many books of political theory, most recently Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight (Duke University Press, 2022). He is currently writing a new book entitled Continuous Assembly: The Power and Promise of Non Archism. *** This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.

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MORE FROM THE TEACHING SERIES

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“VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D”: TEACHING WALT WHITMAN

by Stephen Haven

The Montréal Review, August 2024

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TEACHING MILOSZ: THE EVOLUTION OF A POET

by Ira Sadoff

The Montréal Review, February 2025

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