HumanitiesLiteraturePhilosophyLiterary CriticismLiterary StudiesLiterary TheoryAuthoritarian Regime BreakdownHistorical FictionTextual DemystificationTextual Instability
Kafka's fiction often confronts its critics with a collapsed or collapsing center of authority, a dead or powerless father, who condemns those in his orbit to a circuitous ruin. No one or nothing is in control; no one has the power to authorize. And yet all the subjects still seem to be controlled and continue to work. This paradox of inertia and ceaseless activity, of masterlessness combined with continued servitude, is the central feature of one of Kafka's most interesting parables, Eine kaiserliche Botschaft. Michel Foucault's description of certain texts as heterotopias is particularly relevant for Kafka's parable, because it names the possibility of a text or system composed of disconnected infrastructures, a text made up of asymmetric parts which can only work or operate provided there is a condition of disorganization or entropy, a mechanics of resistance, frustration, dysfunction.1 Kafka's texts, like the heterotopias Foucault describes, display this kind of perverse operating procedure whose economy is initiated by the collapse of the center, often represented as the death of the father, and having clear Oedipal aspects. It is in the Oedipus complex that we might locate the mechanism of resistance (the machine desirante, to appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal term) that at once accounts for the absent father and makes possible the work of his subordinates in the shadow of his absence.' The Oedipal situation is responsible for at once an imposition of its regulatory apparatus over the father, its symbolic content in the Lacanian sense, which results in the slaying of the father, and a suffering of guilt and loss of control that such an absence of the father inaugurates. What we must realize is that such a complex or mechanism of desire does not serve so much to inhibit or limit Kafka's writing to a simple principle, a constellation or dynamic which in itself becomes a substitute for the center effaced within the text, but that such a complex is an entropaic principle of disper-