Kafka: A Blueprint of Desire

Desire in Kafka has been variously theorized, through the works of Freud, Lacan, Girard, Deleuze, and others. Yet there appears to have been, up to now, no inverse attempt: to extract from within his literature a theoretical model of desire. This dissertation fills this gap in scholarship and reveals Kafka as a great theoretician of desire. Since Kafka never wrote such a theory, my objective becomes to lift its blueprint from within his texts and to formulate an account of desire these works generate. I do so by tracing the author’s incessant experimentation with desire on a handful of key texts between 1912 and 1922. Within these works, desire appears as pure Verkehr, a force that tends towards the subject’s self-realization. His letters, novels and stories, as I demonstrate, entail a series of literary experiments that test the potency of written texts on the one hand and human bodies on the other to be employed as vehicles for desire—as means for this Verkehr towards becoming. In Briefe an Felice and Der Prozess Kafka takes up the former, exploring the possibility of liberating the symbolic self from the body through writing, by passing off written documents as a legitimate proxy of one’s identity. Unconvinced by the results, Kafka reverses the hierarchy of writing over corporeality as a mode of self-realization, shifting the site of desire from text to body in attempts to write (In der Strafkolonie), read (Ein Landarzt), and stage (Ein Hungerküstler) bodies as narrative texts. But this counter experiment reaffirms the supposition of duality between the corporeal and the symbolic selves as alternative modes of self-realization, so that desire remains thwarted by the limitations of the chosen medium. It is in his late novel-project, Das Schloß, that Kafka successfully dismantles this opposition and arrives at a more nuanced understanding of desire as a free multi-directional force of self-becoming. Kafka’s evolving conceptualization of desire has direct implications for the increasingly open narrative structure of his late writings: As the flow of desire ceases to be determined by the choice of a single vehicle (written texts or human bodies) and by its limitations, so too the Schloß-novel escapes the narrow parameters of a linear text and itself becomes multi-directional, culminating in a new literary form: a hypertext.Ph.D