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  • Kafka’s Intermediaries:Notes on Deferral, Gesture and Guilt
  • Wayne Stables (bio)

From a certain point onwards there is no return anymore. This point is to be reached.

—Franz Kafka1

Intermediaries

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out, because of impatience we cannot return.

—Franz Kafka2

There is a moment, says Maurice Blanchot, when impatience—the belief that ‘the goal is close or that one is coming nearer to it’—is abandoned.3 This ‘goal’ carries at least a double emphasis: it is at once the outside of language, the infinitely receding end towards which thought intends, and the vanishing point which governs action, the end that legitimates one’s present ‘point of view’. Such a perspective [End Page 553] directs itself towards an authority or generality capable of conferring meaning upon the contingent particular. Impatience hopes for closure; expending all its energies on ends without realising that there are ‘intermediaries’ which keep ends in perpetual flight, its negligence is towards this, the present moment.

Perhaps it goes without saying that this moment demands attention; for without it there would be neither sequence nor order, neither reading nor understanding. But how is one to know that an intermediary is an intermediary—that is to say that this moment is not in fact an end? And is this intermediary something that one cannot attend to, or is it rather that one cannot not attend to it? The resonance of these difficulties can be heard in Blanchot’s description of the predicament facing land-surveyor K.:

Scarcely having arrived, understanding nothing about this ordeal of exclusion in which he finds himself, K. sets out right away to get quickly to the end. He won’t expend any energy on the intermediaries; in their regard he is indolent. This is probably to his credit: doubtless it demonstrates the force of his tense striving towards the absolute. But his aberration is not any the less glaring. It consists in taking for the end what is only an intermediary […]4

The focus of K.’s journey spans outwards; thresholds are surveyed, interstices crossed. This demonstrates, no doubt, ‘the force of his tense striving’; to get to the centre or end K. must navigate a spatiotemporal field, an indeterminate stretch filled with possibilities and dangers, for which there is no a priori guide. At once invisible and ideal, beyond which there can be no further advance, that point is the formal condition for K.’s task, and it sets the trap.5

K. arrives as if out of nowhere, certain that he has crossed into a foreign place.

[H]e was lost or had wandered farther into foreign lands than no man before him, a place so foreign that even the air had no ingredient of the air of home, in which one must suffocate on foreignness and whose absurd [End Page 554] enticements were such that one could do nothing other than go further, go further astray.6

K. must forge a trajectory through a precarious domain, set to work and chart a pattern to place things into relation in space, map the terra incognita of text. K. will ‘go further, go further astray’; and we will follow him. Deciphering the frontier doubles as a search for where the law lies—where it has been set down—for the location of the thresholds that separate inclusion from exclusion, approbation from retaliation. As borders, as middles or intervals, they divide one place from another, the foreign from the proper, this moment from the next, pass from trespass; they mark the sites of potential transgressions and trace the distinctions upon which mediations depend.7 But precisely where the lines run (how they interconnect, where they begin or when they end) remains obscure. Named for an ideal point it does not represent, Kafka’s Castle solicits the determination of thresholds, each reader maintaining the distance from his or her castle in the very act of surveying its apparent frontiers.8

‘The act of fixing frontiers’, Benjamin remarks in his essay on violence, ‘is significant for an understanding of law […]. Laws and unmarked frontiers remain, at least in primeval...

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