1
Tearing down the wall: Franz Kafka and the possibility of a literary immunity1
In the beginning of the book on his Berlin childhood, Walter Benjamin claimed that the
writing of his childhood memories was comparable to an inoculation with homesickness. (9)
By ‘infecting’ himself, as it were, with a limited dose of an affliction which he can manage
and elaborate in his writings, Benjamin constructs an immunologic technique that can help
him face future, more virulent outbreaks of that affliction during his exile from Germany. In
Die Immunität der Literatur and Rituals of Dying, Burrows of Anxiety in Freud, Proust, and
Kafka: Prolegomena to a Critical Immunology, Johannes Türk argues that Benjamin’s
statement is exemplary for a “cultural technique that is of paramount importance to
modernity.” (2007a, 143) According to Türk, this “immunological function” is not limited to
exceptional cases but a general feature of literature, which he defines thus: “The
immunological function of literature consists in the articulation of new forms of feeling and
existing that enable us to face our time.” (2007a, 143) He gives the complex play with time
and memory in Proust and the construction of inadequate defense mechanisms in Kafka’s Der
Bau as two examples of this immunological function at work in the specific style of an author.
In Die Immunität der Literatur, Turk gives a historical overview of diverse authors who have
described literature in immunological terms, from Rousseau to Schiller. This makes him
conclude: “Lange bevor das Interesse der Medizin an Immunität als Resistenz gegen
Infektionskrankheiten erwacht, wird sie in literarischen Texten thematisch.” (2011, 10)
Literature is presented as an important ‘immunological institution’, which has the capacity to
increase irritation and in doing so it helps to prepare people to face future conflicts:
“[Literatur] als immunologische Institution verstehen bedeutet, ihr eine wichtige Aufgabe
1
The author’s research is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).
2
zuzuerkennen. Sie bietet Formen an, durch die es möglich wird, Konflikte und Zumutungen
zu provozieren, um einen Schutz gegen sie bereitzustellen.” (2011, 18)
Türk’s views on literature and immunity are highly influenced by the theories of Niklas
Luhmann. In Zur immunologischen Funktion literarischer Kommunikation, the capacity of
literature to cause irritation, elaborate discursive conflicts and engage emotionally increases
the ability of people to cope with unavoidable conflicts: “Literatur bildet also
Vorlaufprogramme für Bewusstsein und Emotion im Krisenfall aus, die Anschlussoperationen
leiten und Bewusstsein strukturieren. Durch diese re-arrangiert sie Konflikte. Diese
Programme haben deshalb eine Immunfunktion, weil sie ein Netzwerk an wahrscheinlichen
Kommunikationen ausbilden, das sensibel auch auf den Fall Störungen reagieren kann und
zeigt, wie es weitergehen kann.” (2007b, 321)
The literary immunological techniques Türk finds in the writings of Kafka are conceived as a
personal coping strategy, namely a form of protection Kafka develops against his own severe
illness and pending death. He theorizes the immunological functioning of literature by
adopting Freud’s theories about anxiety and his diverse suggestions about protection against
future anxiety. In Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Freud had suggested the possibility that people
could develop a greater anxiety-preparedness, a competence for anxiety. Freud, however,
claimed that death could never be the object of anxiety because one’s own death will always
be unrepresentable. Consequently, following Freud, Türk argues that Kafka’s and Proust’s
literary immunity techniques can only develop affective preparatory devices by analogy or
proxy, or in the words of Türk: “Emotion functions as a form that is directed against a
traumatic scene of dying in which the author mobilizes all analogous experience for
something that forbids analogies.” (2007a, 150)
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However inspiring, Türk’s attempt to theorize the possibility of a literary immunity does not
run into difficulties because of the question whether one’s own death is representable or not,
but because of the conception of immunity as a personal skill set. In this article I will
complement Türk’s views by situating Kafka’s texts in a context in which immunological
thinking was increasingly prevalent. There was the feeling that the personal lives of people
and the coherence of society were being overturned by the overwhelming surge of modernity,
triggering diverse, but often problematic, narratives about threat and protection. However, as
several scholars have shown, these collective immunity mechanisms have the dangerous
tendency to become destructive and ultimately self-destructive. In many great literary works
of the early twentieth century, we can find attempts to problematize the prevailing immunity
discourses and, in doing so, opening up the possibility to rethink the very notion of immunity
and its functioning. We can find authors developing a repertoire of tactics to render the
destructive immunity discourses inoperative and maybe no other author has developed such a
remarkable repertoire of tactics as Kafka. If we want to understand the full potential of
literature to function as an immunity mechanism, we should not restrict our focus to the
personal or autobiographical concerns of the author, but also include the way the author
develops specific literary tactics to displace a certain discourse on threat and protection.
First, an overview will be given of the diverse ways theorists have attempted to understand
the functioning of immunity, including the reasons why immunity mechanisms can become
(self-)destructive and critiques of Luhmann’s conception of immunity. Following the
overview of the difficulties surrounding immunity, we will look at Kafka’s short story Beim
Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, which exposes in a compact manner the problems with
immunity discourses. Finally, we can look at the way Kafka’s literary techniques present in
the story disrupt the rationale of destructive immunity discourses, in which precisely the
notion of the person is at stake, as Roberto Esposito has argued. Kafka’s writings show that in
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order to understand the full capacity of literature to function as an immunity mechanism, we
have to move beyond a personal conception of immunity and tensions present in the systemstheoretical view on the functioning of immunity mechanisms.
1.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dizzying changes in society, the rapid
circulation of people and information, the fast developments in science and technology and
the increasing industrial expansion, not to mention war on an unprecedented scale, had
significantly increased the feeling of threat. In his memoir, Stephan Zweig wrote that a
‘golden age of security’, when history was something you read about in the newspaper, was
replaced by a situation of extreme insecurity which the walls of the home could no longer
keep outside. (1962, 9) It was as if the interior of the domestic sphere, the social body and
even the self were breached and invaded by external forces. This led to a proliferation of
protective mechanisms and discourses which were supposed to protect the ‘interior’ (whether
of the self, the home or the community) against threatening dynamics. Moreover, the recent
innovations in bacteriology and immunology were strongly coloring the collective
imagination and political discourse. (Otis 1999, Cohen 2009, Haraway 199, Tauber 1994)
Many influential scholars, such as Peter Sloterdijk, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann or
Roberto Esposito have argued that modernity is characterized by the development of
immunity mechanisms. These immunity mechanisms, however, also have the problematic
tendency to become too rigid, ultimately becoming destructive and even self-destructive. In
immunity discourses there is an implicit conception about the integrity and boundaries of the
community or the self. Describing the immune system as a “polymorphous object of belief,
knowledge and practice,” Donna Haraway writes: “Pre-eminently a twentieth-century object,
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the immune system is a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other
in the dialectics of Western biopolitics. That is, the immune system is a plan for meaningful
action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the
crucial realms of the normal and the pathological.” (1991, 204) Immunity lends itself well for
implicitly or explicitly drawing strict boundaries between self and non-self or community and
the ‘foreign’, while what counts as ‘self’ or part of the community is presented as given,
homogenous and distinct from its surroundings. Alfred I. Tauber has pointed out that one of
the most problematic aspects of bio-medical immunity theories is how to define the
‘immunological self.’ He argues that the immunological self does not exist, but that it is a
dynamic and changing entity, which changes in the constant encounter between self and nonself. What is at stake in immunity discourses is the manner of thinking the self, identity, or
even the ‘essence’ of a human being or a community. As Tauber writes: “What was immune
identity if identity was ever-changing, dialectical and dynamic? What was the essence of the
organism? … Immunology is in this view only the latest participant in seeking to define
essence, qua immune identity, in a cosmos of ceaseless change.” (1994, 13)
To fully understand the ramifications of immunity discourses we need to understand the close
connection of immunity and what is a central concern in Kafka’s work: the law.2 The notion
‘immunity’ had a long history as a legal and political term before it was adopted by the biomedical world. Originally conceived in Roman law, ‘immunity’ had gathered a large amount
of problematic semantic connotations, including military and colonial imagery. According to
Ed Cohen and Donna Haraway, the adoption of the term, along with its connotations, by the
bio-medical world was a crucial moment in the constitution of the modern biopolitical body.
2
Rodolphe Gasché has shown that ‘the law’ in Kafka’s work, which Benjamin called a “cloudy spot”, is in fact a
complex amalgam of different laws: “The ‘cloudy spot’ in Kafka’s writings not only lacks clarity because nothing
determined about ‘the’ law can be discerned in it, but, particularly, because this law is just one of a swarm of
laws collected and kept from definitely forming. The sheer multitude of these laws alone which are packed into
the spot in question contributes to its indistinct nature.” (2002, 997)
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The consequence of this adoption, according to Cohen, is that “it restricts the complex,
contradictory, and yet entirely necessary intimacy of organism and environment to a single
salient type of engagement: aggression/response.” (2009, 5) Cohen claims that by taking up
the concept of immunity, the bio-medical world has naturalized a legal and military relation of
aggression-defense between two completely separated and antagonistic parties. Rather than a
new concept, the biomedical usage of ‘immunity’ can be seen as a metaphor or even a
catachresis. (2009, 14) It is not surprising that the political world in the early twentieth
century was so attracted to medical theories of immunity because immunity had always been
a legal-political term, only now ‘immunity-as-defense’ had gained a bio-medical, naturalized
authority.
Esposito has written that it is precisely the semantic strength of the notion immunity that it is
inscribed “on the tangential line that links the sphere of life with that of law.” (2008, 45)
Furthermore, Niklas Luhmann, who argued that social systems require regulative immunity
mechanisms, claimed that the law plays a crucial role in the immune system of a society:
“Man sieht diesen Zusammenhang von Recht und Immunsystem
deutlicher, wenn man
beachtet, daβ das Recht im Vorgriff auf mögliche Konflikte gebildet wird.” (1984, 509-510) In
Luhmann’s systems-theoretical approach, the law translates conflicts into a code which it can
manage. In a certain sense, one can say that the law states a series of problems that can be
expected and dealt with: “Es muβ der Gesellschaft durch Produktion eigener Unsicherheiten
und Instabilitäten zuvorkommen und darf dabei natürlich nicht ‘abwegig’ verfahren, nicht
auβerhalb der erwartbaren Probleme liegen.” (1984, 512) The immunity logic at work here is
that the law allows a certain amount of negativity, violence or conflict within society to
prevent conflict which is unmanageable. Luhmann is giving an ideal, value-free description of
the functioning of the law as an immunity mechanism, but what if society is faced with new
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problems and conflicts which no longer can be translated into the legal code or if the law
prevents the required flexibility to cope with new challenges?
Esposito has pointed out Luhmann’s view on law as good example of how immunity
mechanisms function but also as an example of the dangers they ultimately lead to. The fact
that Luhmann presents the immunological functioning of the law as value-neutral makes it
extra ideologically loaded. (Esposito, 2011, 9) Luhmann’s law “functions exactly on the basis
of this binary code, transforming certain cognitive expectations into normative expectations.”
(2011, 48) It transforms the uncertainties of the environment into the manageable codes and
expectations of the social system. In Luhmann’s view, the relation of a system to its
environment is a closed one. In the words of Esposito: “But this relationship is a closed one,
since systemic communication with the environment is, in principle, impossible, other than
through a progressive inclusion of its exteriority.” (2011, 47) Luhmann’s immune system, of
which the law is just one instance, ultimately translates everything into its own code and
normative expectations, and runs the danger of sucking everything up into itself: “From
Luhmann’s perspective, the outside is the inside, conflict is order, and the community is
immunity. … Hence, immunization is not only the protective shield for something that
precedes it, but the object itself of protection: self-protection.” (2011, 50) Peter Sloterdijk,
who, in his Sphären trilogy, has developed his own theories of the immunological
mechanisms and practices which societies develop, has formulated similar objections to the
way Luhmann theorizes systems and their immunity mechanisms: “Wir bleiben dem
Substanzfetischismus nach wie vor verfallen in dem Maβ, wie wir glauben, daβ zuerst die
Dinge als einzelne kommen und dann ihre Beziehungen zunander. Die bislang letzte und
subtilste, überaus erfolgreiche Form des individualistischen Substantialismus tritt heute unter
einem fast perfekten Incognito auf, in der Gestalt der Systemtheorie. In ihr werden Systeme
als Quasi-Monaden angesetzt, die sich von ihren spezifischen Umwelten unterscheiden…
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Luhmann macht aus diesem Motiv seines Theoriedesigns kein Geheimnis, da er offen erklärt,
Systeme verhalten sich vorrangig zu sich selbst und nur marginal zum sogenannten Anderen.”
(2001, 149-150)
As we have seen, several contemporary scholars have indicated the problems with immunity
mechanisms and even the notion immunity itself. Esposito and Cohen point out that
‘immunity’ is etymologically the direct opposite of community. (Esposito 2008, 51,Cohen
2009, 29) Someone who is immune is exempt from munus, which can be translated as duty,
debt or obligation towards others. However, some of these scholars also argue for the
possibility, or even necessity, to rethink immunity in another manner, which will have to
emphasize the close intimacy and inter-dependency of an organism and its environment, a
community and what counts as the ‘other’ of that community, self and non-self. Esposito calls
this a shared or common immunity. (2011, 165-177) Haraway writes: “Immunity can also be
conceived in terms of shared specificities; of the semi-permeable self able to engage with
others (human and non-human, inner and outer), but always with finite consequences; of
situated possibilities and impossibilities of individuation and identification; and of partial
fusions and dangers.” (1991, 225)
The problem of immunity and the way this problem is critically elaborated in literary texts is
not just a subject matter like another, but leads us directly into a series of related concerns: the
question of the self, personal and collective identity, the nature and boundaries of a
community, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, politics of time and space, the relationship
between an organism or system and its environment, the functioning of the law… The
problem of immunity functions like a vector connecting a series of important concerns,
revealing close affinities between them.
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2.
The disputes, ambiguities and theoretical problems surrounding immunity are concisely
explored in Kafka’s short story Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer. This story, told by an
unnamed narrator and set in an undefined time period, tells about the construction of a
massive wall to protect the vast Chinese empire against the nomadic tribes from the north.
The construction of this wall is such a Gargantuan undertaking that it would take several
generations to finish. In only a few pages, Kafka brilliantly exposes all the illusions about this
protective barrier and shifts his attention to the formative impact this barrier has on the
community it is supposed to protect. The ‘central command’, the obscure institution in charge
of the construction of the wall, had ordained that the building of the wall proceeds in a
piecemeal manner, always constructing a part in a different area instead of continuing where
the last stretch ended. The rationale behind this procedure is that the workers and architects
involved in the construction would become demotivated by such a vast undertaking, requiring
many lives. A system was set up whereby the workers, on their way to a remote and desolate
region, pass by finished parts of the wall and the traces of the industrious activities required
for the completion of the wall. The narrator quickly makes it clear that the functional impact
of the wall is not so much protection against the nomadic tribes, but the arousing feeling of
unification and brotherhood the construction of wall inspires in the people: “Jeder Landmann
war ein Bruder, für den man eine Schutzmauer baute, und der mit allem, was er hatte und war,
sein Leben lang dafür dankte. Einheit! Einheit! Brust an Brust, ein Reigen des Volkes, Blut,
nicht mehr eingesperrt im kärglichen Kreislauf des Körpers, sondern süβ rollend und doch
wiederkehrend durch das unendliche China.” (1970, 335) The protective wall seemingly
transforms a vast and dispersed area populated with people who would never in their lifetime
come in contact with each other into one social body.
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The construction of the wall in a piecemeal manner blatantly undermines its protective
function. Instead of being a solid barrier against threats from the outside, the chosen way of
construction leaves the wall open, exposed and vulnerable: “Ja, eine solche Mauer kann nicht
nur nicht schützen, der Bau selbst ist in fortwährender Gefahr. Diese in öder Gegend
verlassen stehenden Mauerteile können immer wieder leicht von den Nomaden zerstört
werden, zumal diese damals, geängstigt durch den Mauerbau, mit unbegreiflicher
Schnelligkeit wie Heuschrecken ihre Wohnsitze wechselten und deshalb vielleicht einen
besseren Überblick über die Baufortschritte hatten als selbst wir, die Erbauer.” (1970, 333)
Rather than protecting against the nomadic tribes, the wall is exposed and vulnerable to the
tribes, who, due to their greater mobility, in fact have a better knowledge of the progress of
the wall and can perfectly anticipate its further construction. The nomads, the presumed threat
from the outside, have a better view on the building of the protective barrier than the people it
is supposed to protect.
The narrator unambiguously confesses that the people from the north do not pose any form of
threat to them, the people living in the south of the empire. The empire is so vast that they
would never see these tribes from the north, even if they stormed on horses towards the south
as fast as they could. Images of the nomads and stories about their alleged cruel and
remorseless urges are used to scare unruly children, but nobody has ever seen them nor will
they. The narrator is well aware that the nomads from the north will never be a threat, but that
they serve as an image to consolidate a sense of unity amongst the inhabitants of the empire.
Both the protective wall and the presumed nomadic threat have the function of shaping life on
the inside of the barrier, if we can still use the spatial image of inside/outside.
Kafka seems to present in his story two opposing views on the function of the protective wall
and its effects on life on the ‘inside’. The contrast between the official narrative about the wall
and the actual situation as the narrator perceives it could not be bigger. The official narrative
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is a view on threat and protection in which there are unambiguous threats, located on the
outside of a unified social body, the empire, around which a clear border can be drawn. This
border completely closes off the inside from the outside, excluding and demonizing the
nomadic tribes. Disturbances only come from the outside. In the other view presented by the
narrator of Kafka’s story, the wall simply does not protect at all. In fact, since the wall is not
continuous, one cannot even distinguish where the ‘inside’ ends and the ‘outside’ begins. The
nomadic tribes are no threat at all and might actually dwell on the ‘inside’ of the wall, or,
better, they occupy a zone of indistinction between inside and outside. In the second view, the
empire is not distinguishable from the outside, is internally in motion (the narrator describes a
revolution which took place in a part of the empire) and the unfinished wall fulfills the
function of forming a homogenous community.
Esposito has pointed out that the problematic conception of immunity, which would become
increasingly popular and institutional in the first half of the twentieth century, requires
borders, using the actual Great Wall of China as an example: “From another part of the world,
the Great Wall of China answers in kind to the same demand for protection. As Carl Schmitt
pointed out so well, the nomos initially meant separation. The nomos is introduced by
inscribing within land the distinction (as well as opposition) between mine and yours,
between ours and yours. From its origin onward, human civilization has practiced how to
trace limits, terms, borders and raising walls between one territory and another.” (2013, 127128) However, Esposito argues that the drawing of borders between members of the nation or
community and the ‘outside’, creating a hierarchy between those who belong to the
community and those who do not (in Kafka’s story the mysterious nomadic tribes), will
eventually find an extension in the drawing of borders within human life: “Borders, we recall,
were initially erected so as to limit the sovereign territory of single states as well as to protect
the individual bodies of single citizens. At a certain point, however, they are understood to be
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thresholds within human life itself that allow the division of one part that is said to be superior
from another that is considered inferior.” (2013, 130)
Kafka’s narrator is well-aware of the illusionary aspect of the protective wall, due to his
experience with the peculiar manner of construction and his keen interest in what he calls
“vergleichender Völkergeschichte” (1970, 338) and the more obscure workings of the empire.
However, this does not lead to a gesture of exposure or unmasking of the central place of the
wall in the collective identity. The narrator knows that a lot of the claims about the wall are an
illusion, but he remains attached to the effects of the illusion. The wall functions as a form of
social cement, uniting the people within the vast empire with a common enthusiasm. There is
a genuine cult around the wall and masonry is one of the highest esteemed skills. This cult
surrounding the construction of the wall is instilled in the children from a very young age by
their teachers.
Not only does the wall unify dispersed communities into one single social body, it also shapes
the people’s coordinates of time and space. The empire is so vast that villagers could not
reach the capital Peking. No imperial message could reach them. They are even, as Kafka
writes, unaware of revolutions in nearby regions. Yet, the construction of the wall creates a
sense of belonging to one and the same place, the Chinese empire, a feeling which can be
found amongst people living in areas who could never meet. The temporal effects are even
more remarkable. The people do not know which emperor is currently reigning. In fact, they
prefer to revere emperors that belong to the past: “Je mehr Zeit schon vergangen ist, desto
schrecklicher leuchten alle Farben…” (1970, 384) They even situate the current emperor
amongst the dead. The narrator emphasizes the eagerness of the people to obliterate the
present.
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The interwovenness of the problem of immunity with conceptions of selfhood, individual and
collective identity and the nature of a community is clearly visible in Beim Bau der
Chinesischen Mauer. The wall gives the inhabitants of the empire the feeling they belong to
one community, without transience or internal difference and with a clear center and edge. As
Kafka makes clear in his story, a rigid conception of immunity will endorse a static,
homogenous and harmonic view of the self, identity and community with clear, strict
boundaries between inside and outside. This kind of immunological thinking serves to freezeframe a topographical image of interiority and exteriority in a relation of threat-defense.
In Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Kafka also makes the connection between the wall and
the law explicit: “Auch die Lehrer des Staatsrechtes und der Geschichte an den hohen Schulen
geben vor, über diese Dinge genau unterrichtet zu sein und diese Kenntnis den Studenten
weitervermitteln zu können. Je tiefer man zu den unteren Schulen herabsteigt, desto mehr
schwinden begreiflicherweise die Zweifel am eigenen Wissen, und Halbbildung wogt
bergehoch um wenige seit Jahrhunderten eingerammte Lehrsätze, die zwar nichts an ewiger
Wahrheit verloren haben, aber in diesem Dunst und Nebel auch ewig unerkannt bleiben.”
(1970, 339) At the same time exerting an inescapable injunction on the people and remaining
elusive as if clouded by fog, the wall, or the narrative about the wall, has all the features of the
infamous law in Kafka’s other writings.
The narrator knows that the high command has not always existed, nor the plans to build the
wall. He also knows that the obscure high command chose to construct the wall in this
particular piecemeal manner to enhance a certain effect: “Bleibt also nur die Folgerung, daβ
die Führerschaft den Teilbau beabsichtigte. Aber der Teilbau war nur ein Notbehelf und
unzweckmäβig. Bleibt die Folgerung, daβ die Führerschaft etwas Unzweckmäβiges wollte. –
Sonderbare Folgerung!” (1970, 337) The narrator is well aware of the contingencies
surrounding the construction of the wall and even the inexpedient, false claims about the need
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for such a wall. Yet, he prefers to live in this illusionary state: “Vielmehr bestand die
Führerschaft wohl seit jeher und der Beschluβ des Mauerbaues gleichfalls. Unschuldige
Nordvölker, die glaubten, ihn verursacht zu haben, verehrungswürdiger, unschuldiger Kaiser,
der glaubte, er hätte ihn angeordnet. Wir vom Mauerbau wissen es anders und schweigen.”
(1970, 338) The narrator likes the effects of the wall and claims he has never seen more pure
morals than in his village. The illusionary blessings are a feature that one can be certain to
find in the people of different areas of the empire, maybe even the only feature they have in
common. The narrator ends the story by stating that a certain weakness in the people, a desire
to keep on living in ignorance, is their greatest unifying factor. Questioning this would be
pulling away the ground beneath their feet.
In an earlier section of the story, the narrator told a little story which seems to reveal a
tendency opposed to this need for a blissful ignorance and the wish that things remain the
same for time immemorial. He tells the story of a scholar who believed that the construction
of the Tower of Babel failed because of the weakness of its foundation. This scholar claims
that the massive wall, once finally finished, could serve as the solid foundation for a new
Tower of Babel. Given the extreme utopian nature of such an idea and the fact that the wall
does not form a circle and never will, the scholar might have meant that the wall could be a
spiritual foundation. Nevertheless, the scholar’s absurd idea shows a need to not remain
satisfied with the current state of affairs and the urge to move beyond the current confines.
Kafka’s narrator derives from this story a universal lesson about human nature: “Das
menschliche Wesen, leichtfertig in seinem Grund, von der Natur des auffliegenden Staubes,
verträgt keine Fesselung; fesselt es sich selbst, wird es bald wahnsinnig an den Fesseln zu
rütteln anfangen und Mauer, Kette und sich selbst in alle Himmelsrichtungen zerreiβen.”
(1970, 336) Human beings will not remain content with their present confines and will always
seek to move beyond their current state.
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What happens exactly to the two opposing narratives about the relation of the wall and the
community in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer? Though the narrator questions the official
narrative about the wall and the popular views on the empire from an insider’s perspective, he
nevertheless seems to prefer the performative effects of this narrative. The two perspectives,
which are two different perspectives on immunity and, more specifically, on the immunity of
a community, are presented side by side and the tension between them is the main tension arc
of the story. This is a stylistic feature commonly found in Kafka’s writings. Certainly, the
narrator calls the construction strategy chosen by the central committee “unzweckmäβig” but
he also praises the high standard of moral life which is instilled in the people by the specific
manner of constructing the wall. Though the narrator pleads for the official narrative, he has
nevertheless exposed the falsity of its claims, expressed moral indignation about the spreading
of false information about the wall and avowed his doubts about what to believe. Can the
reader still follow the endorsements by the narrator of the official narrative about the wall
after he exposed its illusionary nature? Is the narrator not trapped in a rhetorical paradox,
pleading for a view in such a way that his rhetoric undercuts his persuasive power? It is not by
morally condemning a narrative or presenting a preferable alternative that Kafka’s critical
poetics works but precisely by presenting two perspectives which are left in a contrapuntal
tension. Instead of a resolution or a final perspective, the contradiction is sustained and
elaborated.
3.
Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner have argued that presenting two opposing perspectives
is a key stylistic feature of Kafka’s poetics. They add another ‘perspective’ to Beim Bau der
Chinesischen Mauer, by claiming that this story has to be read in conjunction with the short
fragment Ein altes Blatt. In this fragment we are presented with a similar setting, though here
16
the Chinese empire is overrun by the nomads. This fragment can be read as the inverse
situation of what is presented in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer. While in the latter the
positive effects of the protective measures are glorified, leading to a peaceful and stable
empire, in the latter the empire is invaded, plundered and the people are left in despair and
impotence about how to cope with the situation.
The reading by Corngold and Wagner is informed by a renewed scholarly interest in Kafka’s
professional activities: his job as a legal expert for the Workmen’s Accident Insurance
Company. Because of this profession, Kafka was very familiar with the theories adopted by
insurance companies to map the prevalence of accidents and professional risks as well as the
formal procedures and difficulties for a plaintiff to seek retribution after an accident.
Corngold and Wagner have found in Kafka’s writing traces of legal and statistical theories,
official protocols for the registration or declaration of damage, bureaucratic documents such
as punch cards or diagrams to describe an average situation such as the so called ‘accident
clock’. What they derive from this is a lot more than finding documents which functioned as a
source for Kafka: they believe that Kafka derived from his professional activities a poetics
which has the capacity to assess different cultural discourses. They argue that Kafka’s work
functions as a ‘cultural insurance’. (2011, 195-202)
They give the two opposing stories about the Chinese empire as an example of how Kafka’s
texts operate as a cultural insurance. Kafka does not make a choice between alternatives, but
leaves two or more situations in a state of ‘epistemological bipolarity.’ (2011, 192) By
presenting different cultural discourses and modes of reasoning next to each other, he
‘assesses’ the risks involved in these different discourses and takes away their rhetorical
force. A cultural insurance cannot work by means of statistical formalization but can only
proceed by “discursive calculations on the dangers inherent in disparate cultural issues”.
(2011, 202) Such a discursive practice could work as a safeguard against appropriation of
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stigmatizing tropes by different conflicting parties, groups or nations: “By bringing to light
alternately and tendentiously each of the groups on both sides of the Chinese-nomads
language game, Kafka reverses effects of dissociation and exclusion. This stigmatizing
gesture appears as a common feature reaching across the national segments of a rapidly
globalization culture.” (2011, 202) What matters to me here is that Corngold and Wagner read
certain stylistic features such as this ‘epistemological bipolarity’ and the strategic citation of
snippets from different discourses as a mechanism capable of deactivating the force of these
discourses and, consequently, capable of providing protection. Pulling cultural narratives of
unity and exclusion, including narratives about the protection of the community, into a zone
of epistemological ambiguity or uncertainty renders the rhetorical and dispositive force of
these narratives inoperative: “In the end, Kafka’s poetics of accident aims to do more than set
down and critique the contemporary discourse of power and its truth games. His stories carry
a potential for intervention, resulting from their cultivation of the intertextual space between
them and their many contexts, both contemporary and traditional.” (2011, 201)
A second stylistic feature of Kafka’s writing is the constant problematization of boundaries,
spatial configurations of inside and outside, and distinctions between human and animal
categories. In Über das Zaudern, Joseph Vogl analyzes the topographical insecurity in Das
Schloss or Der Process. In Das Schloss, the castle is not so much a topos, but a series of
relays and boundaries. At the same time, the entire village seems to be the castle and the
castle is not reachable. As Vogl writes: “Man kommt nie ins Schloss und ist immer schon
dort. Das Schloss ist nichts anderes als die Schwelle zum Schloss.” (Vogl 2007, 81) Similarly,
in Der Process, K is exposed to a confusing series of rooms, doors and passages that make
him end up in the opposite direction of where he intended to be. Vogl writes that thus the
entire symbolic space of the novel is turned into a threshold-zone. He follows Walter
Benjamin who pointed out that a threshold, a Schwelle, is a zone and not a boundary. (Vogl
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2007, 83-84) The space in Kafka’s novels is not topographically structured but topologically.
The threshold in Kafka’s works functions as an atopos, “weder ein bestimmter Ort noch ein
Nicht-Ort, sondern ein entorteter Ort, eine räumliche Lage, die jeden bestimmten Platz ins
Wanken und Gleiten bringt.” (Vogl 2007, 84)
What exactly happens here in this transformation of boundaries into thresholds, by means of a
process which Vogl calls tarrying (zaudern) and which leads to a decision problem
(Entscheidungsproblem)? This process suspends all determinations, which are always haunted
by their opposite, and eschatological movements by turning them into indeterminate, liminal,
states. For Vogl, tarrying “markiert stattdessen einen Ort, an dem sich die Komponenten, die
Bedingungen und Implikationen des Handelns versammeln, an dem sich also die Tat nicht in
ihrem Vollzug, sondern in ihrem Anheben artikuliert.” (Vogl 2007, 36) What Vogl describes
is a rendering inoperative of the necessity of certain divisions, spatial and temporal
configurations, formations of the self and the inevitability of actions. It brings us back to the
moment before things are consolidated into concrete form and decisions are taken. This
procedure undercuts the necessity or determinate nature of certain configurations, narratives
and actions.
In Ort der Gewalt, Kafkas literarische Ethik, Vogl points out a similar rendering problematic
of the unity and boundaries of communities. He refers to Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer
as an example of the problematizing of the spatial configuration of a community with a clear
center in the middle and strict boundaries separating it from its exterior. In the story, Peking is
a mythical place which nobody has seen and which nobody could reach. The boundary of the
empire is a not a clear border marked by a wall, separating the Chinese from the nomads, but
an open, discontinuous zone, where the people on the ‘outside’ are always on the move.
(1990, 208-217) By presenting the insider’s view of the narrator, Kafka undercuts the
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formative mythology of a community and the clear distinction between the community and
‘foreign’ people.
Vivian Liska has clarified Kafka’s ambiguous relation to communities: he inhabits the
borderland between the desire to belong and not being able to belong to a community. He
knows the fascination a community exerts but also the potential terror involved in the
workings of a closed community. Kafka’s stories unmask the foundation myths and
exclusionary mechanisms at the heart of the formation of closed communities. Liska
concludes: “Making the strange familiar, it creates links between foreign grounds and widens
the horizon of possibilities; making the familiar strange, it dissolves unquestioned bonds and
self-righteous certitudes. At the crossing of these movements, there is a different ‘we’ and
another community, one in which impermeable walls turn into porous partitions that connect
as they divide.” (2009, 25) The strict boundaries around a community, implicit in rigid
immunity discourses, are made porous and connecting.
In an original reading, Giorgio Agamben finds a similar tactic of destabilizing boundaries at
work in Kafka. He counters Max Brod’s view that K tries to gain the acceptance by the castle.
Instead, Agamben focuses on the consequences of K’s profession, land surveyor, an activity
he never literally performs in the novel. For Agamben, K’s principal activity is not the
acceptance by the castle but the questioning of the constitution of limits, especially “the
boundaries that separate the castle (the high) from the village (the low).” (2011, 35) Agamben
writes: “K does not know what to make of the village as it is, and even less so of the castle.
What the land conveyor is concerned with is the border that divides and conjoins the two, and
this is what he wants to abolish or, rather, render inoperative. Where this border actually
passes, no one seems to know. Perhaps it does not really exist but passes, like an invisible
door, within every human being.” (2011, 36)
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Not only spatial boundaries are problematized in Kafka’s work, but also the lines of
separation drawn between different species and groups of people. By doing so, the explicit or
implicit hierarchical ordering between them or dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are
destabilized. It is well known that Kafka created unlikely protagonists that combine human
and non-human features, such as Gregor Samsa-turned-into-vermin in Die Verwandlung or
the ape Red Peter in Ein Bericht für eine Akademie. Corngold and Wagner write that Kafka
makes strategic use of stereotyping images: “He invests such stigmatizing metaphors as
‘nomads,’ ‘apes,’ ‘vermin,’ and ‘dogs’ with features and values that are common to each of
the conflicting groups; in this way, cultural propaganda, a discourse of enmity and
dissociation, becomes, in Kafka, a discourse of likeness and community.” (2011, 8) Strict
divisions and social categories are blurred by the unlikely combination of characteristics.
Finally, the series of tactics to disrupt the working of the law have to be mentioned. For the
‘delegitimation of the law’ as Vogl calls it (1990, 196), Kafka deploys diverse and creative
techniques. Being a legal expert himself, he knew very well the lacunae and dangers inherent
in the law. Agamben, for example, reads in Der Process the legal problem of slander or selfslander, which was very important in Roman law. The ‘K’ in the protagonist’s name reminds
him of the Roman practice to mark the forehead of those who falsely accused someone with a
K, the initial of kalumniator or slanderer. The working of the law is disrupted in the strange
case of self-slander, when the accuser slanders him- or herself, so that the accused and accuser
are one. This practice of self-slandering is very different from merely confessing. When
someone self-slanders him- or herself, they know they are innocent, yet guilty of slandering
himself. This creates a fundamental paradox for the law, where the credibility of both the
accuser and accused are undermined. For Agamben, self-slander is the Kafkaesque situation
par excellence and an important strategy in his struggle with the law.
21
As we have seen, a destructive immunological mechanism works by drawing a strict
boundary between belonging and not belonging, constantly pushing elements to the ‘outside’
and turning the relation between inside and outside into an antagonistic dynamic of
aggression-defense. The unresolved tension and ambiguity between two perspectives, the
constant problematization of divisive mechanisms and boundaries separating inside and
outside, the re-appropriation of parts of cultural discourse and descriptive group
characteristics, the human-animal hybrid characters and the disrupting of the functioning of
the law, which are all prominent stylistic features of Kafka’s work, operate as tactics to render
the unfolding rationale of destructive immunological mechanisms inoperative.
4.
I have begun this article with Johannes Türk’s view on literary immunity as a personal coping
mechanism to prepare oneself emotionally for future blows and more specifically in the case
of his two examples, Kafka and Proust, as a preparation for their mortal sickness and pending
death. Though Türk’s reading of Kafka’s poetics as an immunity mechanism is rich and
impressive, his attempt to theorize this dynamic runs into difficulties as a consequence of his
choice to reduce immunity to a personal affective coping mechanism in the face of one’s own
death. Not the fact that death is an unrepresentable object, as Freud argued, puts pressure on
the theoretical development of a literary immunity but the idea of a person individually and
autonomously developing personal affective coping strategies against his or her personal
death, is what causes problems. Esposito has discerned the very notion of the ‘person’ as a
key element in the development of (self-)destructive mechanisms of immunity. He argues that
to avoid the destructive consequences of immunity mechanisms and to reconceive immunity
in a better way, one would either have to deconstruct immunity discourse, including the
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affects it deploys to persuade people and the constructs it relies on, such as the notion of the
‘person’, or rethink immunity on an impersonal basis such as Deleuze’s theories about life as
such and depersonalized affects. (Esposito 2012)
Further difficulties arise with the usage of a view on the functioning of immunity as Luhmann
conceived it. Luhmann had argued that an immune system does not work by banning out
uncertainty but by proliferating contradictions and instabilities: “Sie [Widersprüche] dienen
der Reproduktion des Systems durch die dazu nötige Reproduktion von Instabilitäten, die die
Einrichtungen des Immunsystems in Operation setzen können, aber nicht müssen.” (1984,
504) It is precisely by proliferating instability that an immune system is stimulated and the
continuous reaction to the environment is perpetuated. An immune system can never be the
preservation of a given state of affairs: “Es ist nicht einfach ein Mechanismus der Korrektur
von Abweichungen und der Wiederherstellung des status quo ante; es muβ diese Funktion
selektiv handhaben, nämlich vereinbaren können mit dem Akzeptieren brauchbarer
Änderungen.” (1984, 504) In the words of Türk: “Das Immunsystem operiert nicht auf einer
‘konservativen Grundannahme’: nicht der Schutz und die Bewahrung von Strukturen durch
die Elimination von Abweichungen und Störungen, sondern die ‘selektive Handhabung von
Abweichungen’ ist seine Aufgabe.” (2007b, 318) In this view, the immunity mechanism does
not try to resolve or diminish paradoxes or select the best solutions from different options, but
keeps its full ‘negativity’ by maintaining the different options side by side, even by
proliferating paradoxes and contradictions, without deciding in favor of one option. As Türk
writes: “Es setzt daher Widerspruch ein und versucht nicht, ihn auszuräumen.” (2007b, 318)
There is a tension between the view that an immunity system produces paradoxes, and refuses
to reduce or resolve them, and the view that this can lead to a personal skill set, which makes
conflict manageable or foreseeable, which reduces diverse phenomena to certain ‘key
scenarios’ and which facilitates the making of choices. Between the mechanism of increasing
23
irritation and conflicts to evoke immunity reactions and the mechanism of reducing the
endless diversity of possible conflicts to a personal, manageable and limited set of possible
conflicts remains a gap. Türk argues that in literature reaction-patterns are selected and
integrated into a narrative framework. Literature has a differentiating function by selecting
and presenting different ‘key scenarios’ for conflicts and the way they tend to develop.
(2007b, 319) This way, people could develop a greater capacity to respond adequately to
conflict situations. Luhmann’s view on immunity as the proliferation of instability does not
lend itself to become a personal property or skill to freely adopt. If anything, such an
immunity would relentlessly destabilize, change and question the person allegedly ‘using’ it.
Does literature proliferate conflicts and paradoxes while maintaining different options without
making a decision, or does it somehow help us to select the best options in order to be able to
make better future choices?
Kafka’s writings do not reduce ambiguity, complexity or frustration in any way. While
sometimes two perspectives are presented side by side, they are left in a state of tension
without offering a decision. Rather than differentiating, they also blur boundaries and increase
confusion. Even stronger, as Vogl has pointed out, Kafka’s texts lead to a
Entscheidungsproblem, which renders making a decision even more difficult if not
impossible. They do not offer a repertoire of possible threats and responses out of which one
can choose the most apt, but they do contain a repertoire of tactics to relentlessly proliferate
ambiguities and problematize the categories used to make sense of the world.
A different picture arises if we cease to regard immunity in personal terms and situate Kafka’s
oeuvre in a context in which a dangerous and destructive immunity rationale was escalating.
Kafka’s literary immunity is most productive and effective as the rendering inoperative of a
(self-)destructive immunity rationale or discourse. Kafka’s writings break open the rigidity
and the affectively persuasive character of immunity discourses by exposing and staging their
24
aporetic nature. In doing so the reader witnesses the formation of discourses about immunity,
follows their rationales to their aporetic culmination point and experiences the hollowing out
of the intense affects immunity discourse tries to mobilize.
If a destructive view on immunity leads to a specific spatio-temporal, exclusionary
configuration of a community with a clear boundary separating inside and outside, a static
conception of the self (including the notion of a distinct and autonomous person) and a
problematic functioning of the law based on such conceptions, then Kafka’s repertoire of
creative literary tactics disrupts the necessary unfolding of this immunological dispositive
towards its destructive and, ultimately, self-destructive auto-immunitary consequences. At the
same time, they open up once again the moments of formation of conceptions of community,
the self, territory and cultural discourses at large, including forms of immunological thinking.
Thus, a discursive space is opened up in which these important notions can be continuously
reconfigured and renegotiated. If Kafka’s writings have the ability to function as a protective,
immunological mechanism, it is by hollowing out the affective persuasive power of immunity
discourses and by staging their aporetic nature, thus reopening a discursive space for the
reformulation or renegotiation of immunity. One of the many consequences of this process is
that immunity is no longer considered to be the possession of a person, a group of people or a
nation. Instead, crucial for the development of a more positive form of immunity is the
problematization of overly strict boundaries and separations, replacing it with the awareness
of a strong co-dependency, co-development and mutual implication.
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