I. Kafka, “the greatest theorist of bureaucracy”

Kafka sympathized with the Socialists. Nietzsche dreamed of the reign of political genius, which he missed in his contemporary politics, so that there are many state-critical places in his work, especially in Zarathustra. It was precisely this book that Kafka appreciated, about which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their monumental work A thousand plateaus 1980 write: “Kafka is the bureaucracy's greatest theorist [...] . ”¹ This is particularly evident in his two novels The process and The castle.

But for Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka is no critic of bureaucracy. Rather, they note in 1975 in their book about Kafka: “What makes Kafka so dangerous is precisely the power of his non-criticism.” (p. 84)

Their joint work has a project character. It starts in 1972 with the Anti-Oedipus ends 1991 with What is philosophy?, is in between A thousand plateaus — and the important book about Kafka: For a little literature. Kafka also plays an important role here in general, as does Nietzsche. They combine both as challengers of the modern state.

Like Nietzsche, they are sharp critics of the state and, like Kafka, they do not simply want to spell this out conceptually, but to present it in the way they write themselves; especially the A thousand plateaus have something Kafkaesque, describe something extremely bizarre, namely the rule of the state, in a bizarre way. At the beginning of Kafkas The trial If the main character K. is arrested but does not know why, K. loses his grip on the ground as a result, he no longer determines himself, and is thus deterritorialized. Every person in the modern state is faced with a power that dominates him; he therefore does not belong to himself. In castle It says: “The senseless appeals to the head, to the secretaries, lawyers, scribes began, usually he was not received, and if he was received by chance [...] [,] he was rejected extremely quickly and never received again.” (p. 239)

You can come up with explanations for this and come to terms with them. But what happens to people cannot be explained with such explanations, whether lawyers explain the law to them or politicians describe their actions or sociologists portray society. It is not self-evident that people take the state for granted. How does one state representative say to the other about K.: “[...], he admits that he does not know the law and at the same time claims to be innocent. ”²

On the other hand, political and social powers force people to function in a certain way, which gives them support in a certain sense, so that life continues as usual. K. comes in trial They do not go to jail, but are forced back to work in the bank and thus reterritorialized.

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II. “Make a war machine out of thinking”

Kafka thus demonstrates the absurdity of life in the modern state, to which he sees himself at the mercy of; that you cannot even bring up the critical concept that you do not understand in this way. You just have to present it soberly — Kafkaesque — which is ultimately much more revealing of the law. As explained in trial a priest: “[M] an doesn't have to believe everything to be true, you just have to think it's necessary.” (p. 160)

Nietzsche sees this in a similar way to Kafka: “It is better to know nothing than half know many things! It is better to be a fool on your own than to be a sage at someone else's will! ”³ Do not adopt the wisdom of experts, who use scientific stories to make the absurdities of modern statehood forgotten, but rather make various rhymes with the absurd themselves.

In contrast to the prevailing bureaucratic thinking, there is only one thing left for Deleuze & Guattari, namely “Make a war machine out of thinking, that is a peculiar company whose exact procedures can be studied with Nietzsche [...] . ”⁴ Because: “But the worst thing is the small thoughts. Truly better done bad than thought small! ”⁵ Nietzsche is a skeptic of modern sciences who at most interpret nature differently but cannot explain it, because explanation as such is only an illusion in that you replace an effect with something else, the cause, i.e. simply one thing with another, no matter how hard you try to find something that connects the two.

Nietzsche questions the supposed certainties and thus shakes political and social obligations. Deleuze & Guattari describe this as a war machine, which they also notice in Kafka: “Kafka deliberately destroys all metaphors, all symbolisms, every meaning and every designation.”⁶, so that the meanings that every state regularly enforces in order to be able to guide the thinking of its subjects. How does Nietzsche write in abatement: “Most people sometimes feel that they are living in a web of illusions. But few realize how far these illusions go. ”⁷

The scenario in Kafka's stories and novels shows the absurdity of bureaucratically controlled reality. What a crime is determined by law, for example still homosexuality or abortion in many countries, which even in Germany only remains exempt from punishment under certain conditions — exactly the absurd situation in trial: “Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? “(p. 165) And most people recognize that, whether as fair or as positive legislation.

The execution machine in the Penal Colony Write the verdict into the victim's skin with needles, which the victim begins to recognize on his skin as words after hours: “Sense opens to the dumbest. It starts around the eyes. It spreads from here. [...] Nothing else happens, the man just starts deciphering the writing, he sharpens his mouth as if he were listening. [...] But our man deciphers them with his wounds.” (p. 108) Nietzsche On the genealogy of morality provides the template: “You burn something so that it stays in the memory: only what doesn't stop hurting stays in the memory [...] . ”⁸ That is when morality and scientific knowledge are the result of violence.

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III. Nietzsche: “There is no such general thing! ”

Scientific knowledge is based on the fact that it represents the world linguistically adequately, similar to how a picture shows a state of affairs, with the assumption that an image does not alienate the facts or possibly make sense of it in the first place. Deleuze & Guattari disagree: “Thinking is like a vampire, it has no image to make a model or a copy of it. ”⁹ The world is not easy to describe linguistically. As is well known, vampires have no reflection. Whether with Kafka or Nietzsche, language has the ontological status of a phantom: It says what is; but in doing so it does not say what is, but only ever what should be linguistic. It always turns what is into something different, something linguistic.

For Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka himself has a vampiric character. They note: “He wakes through the nights and locks himself in his office coffin during the day [...]. Kafka-Dracula has his escape line in his room, on his bed [...] . ”¹⁰ The opening scene from The process reflects Kafka's life situation of gaining free time to write through contract work. This is how life takes place at night, but the day is a grave.

The state determines the worldview of its subjects. So Zarathustra spoke: So “[...] the state is a hypocrite; [...] it likes to talk with smoke and roar — that it makes you believe [...] it speaks from the belly of things.^“11 In this way, the state pretends to know how things are, always and even more so today. And Zarathustra continues: “For he certainly wants to be the most important animal on earth, the state; and people believe him too.” (ibid.) Kafka doesn't believe him, certainly not that the state speaks “from the gut of things.” Rather, he speaks the language of bureaucracy.

Deleuze & Guattari spell out what Nietzsche suggests aphoristically:

It may be that, whether spiritual or secular, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, it There has only ever been one state, the hypocrite state, who talks with smoke and roars. Nietzsche explains how he [...] does it: by virtue of an unprecedented terror, in contrast, the old system of cruelty, the primitive forms of training and education were child's play. [...] In the end, the earth becomes a madhouse.¹²

At the turn of 1887/88, Nietzsche describes how the state succeeds without the subjects noticing it: The state is the

Organized immorality [...]/How is it achieved that he a large quantity Do things to which the individual Would never understand each other? /— by dividing responsibility — command and execution/— by Interim the virtues of obedience, duty, patriotism and princely love [...]/The Artifices, to enable actions, measures, affects which, measured individually, are no longer “permitted” — are no longer “tasty” either [...].¹³

Since the state shares the functions of leading and executing, the executors no longer have any responsibility for what they do and commit terrible acts for which they could never be responsible for themselves. In trial It says: “Being bound even to the receipt of the law through one's service is incomparably more than living freely in the world. The man comes to the law first, the doorkeeper is already there.” (p. 160)

Kafka shows how it is possible that people do not notice this. This is how Deleuze & Guattari write:

The famous lyrics in trial (plus the stories In the penal colony, During the construction of the Great Wall of China etc.) present the law as a pure empty form, without any content and without any discernible subject matter: It only appears as a verdict, and this only becomes apparent in a penalty.¹⁴

The law only affects people through its effects. In doing so, the state claims to represent the common good. How does Nietzsche comment: “'The good of the general requires the dedication of the individual. '. But lo and behold, it giveth No such general thing! ” ¹⁵

In any case, there are no longer any substantive provisions of the general interest or the general public. Universalism can only be defined formally. Deleuze & Guattari write about this: “According to Kant [...], the law no longer originates from a pre-existing good that gives it content, but it is only pure form that determines the good as such: What the law proclaims is good, and in the same formal conditions under which it proclaims itself. ”¹⁶ Kant's legal principle is based on the general validity of laws, which is only due to their form and not to their content: Laws must apply generally. What they say in terms of content does not make them laws. In fact, you have to obey them because they are valid, which is based on force, not because they are right or just.

What Nietzsche writes about this is no longer surprising: “State is the coldest of all cold monsters. It also lies coldly; and this lie creeps out of its mouth: “I am the state, I am the people. '”¹⁷ In doing so, the state claims to represent the general good. The state determines what the people are. In doing so, he claims that the people are not a construct created and determined by him, but are natural.

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IV. “Substitution of love by a love letter”

But its mechanical engineering is responsible for state power. The bureaucracy works like a machine to which people are connected. Deleuze & Guattari write in 1975: “What makes you afraid (or happy) about Kafka is [...] the American technocracy machine and the Soviet bureaucracy machine and the fascist total machinery. ”¹⁸ The state and the machines on which it relies pose a threat to humans. In addition to bureaucracy, the focus is on law, which does not protect people but threatens them. In Anti-Oedipus It says: “No one has shown more impressively than Kafka that the law has nothing of an immanent, natural-harmonious totality, that it acts rather as an abolished formal unit, [...].” (p. 255) The rule of law also makes a Kafkaesque impression.

In fact, the individual can only withdraw from this. Nietzsche has already had a similar view: “Goes Yours Paths! And let people and peoples go their own way! — dark paths truly, on which even One Hope no longer glows! ”¹⁹ Nietzsche urges people not to participate in politics, not least because their paths only appear Kafkaesque. Deleuze & Guattari comment on this:

The established powers have occupied the earth and created popular organizations. The mass media and major popular organizations such as parties or trade unions are reproductive machines [...]. The established powers have driven us into an atomic, cosmic and galactic battle at the same time. Many artists have been aware of this situation for a long time, sometimes even before it was really there (for example Nietzsche).²⁰

In fact, Nietzsche predicts the battle for Earth rule in the coming century. And I already know what that amounts to Zarathustra: “State where the slow suicide of all — 'life. ' ” ²¹ The quick suicide takes place on the battlefields, the slow one in the office or in the family. Kafka is both attracted and repelled by women; because he is afraid of the family, marriage is the law after all, a contract that is supposed to be the basis of all love relationships in the 19th century and yet kills pleasure.

This is how Kafka flees from the institution of marriage. Deleuze & Guattari remark: “Substitution of love with a love letter? Deterritorialization of love. Substitution of the dreaded marriage contract through a Devil's Pact. ”²² Not to marry, rather to write, frees love from the shackles of the family and thus also from the compulsory state organization that involves people into the family. Why is Gregory's sister crying in The Metamorphosis? “Because he didn't get up and let the authorized signatory in, because he was in danger of losing his post and because then the boss would pursue his parents again with the old demands? ”²³

In The verdict (1913) the son obeys and commits suicide at the father's behest. In Kafka's works, the family appears as a place of submission, sacrifice, and suffering. How can you escape it? By no longer writing in a way that is socially accepted, but in such a way that the connections are difficult to understand because they are designed as intricately and absurdly as reality presents itself to a cool eye. that rhizome can be understood as a maze of linguistic signs, so that you are not understood but involves someone in a chaotic fabric of text: Kafka's lover, Kafka's reader, Kafka's enemies, namely bureaucrats and scientists. Deleuze & Guattari write: “The letters are a rhizome, a network, a spider web. [...], and its source of strength lies far away in what his letters deliver to him. He only fears two things: the cross of the family and the garlic of marriage. ”²⁴ The introduction to A thousand plateaus Has the title rhizome, a text that was also published separately.

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V. Kafka: “The court doesn't want anything from you”

Auch Zarathustra propagates people outside the state and thus also beyond the family, in which he is only ever a serving cog in the wheel that can be replaced. In The Metamorphosis It turns out that the parents are not as dependent on the son as they led him to motivate him to work hard. The superman does not arise in the state and not in the family. Nietzsche proclaims:

Where the state ends, that is where the human being begins, who is not superfluous: that is where the song of the necessary begins, the unique and irreplaceable way. Where the state ceasing“Look at me then, my brothers! Don't you see him, the rainbow and the bridges of Superman?²⁵

In the community, even if it is only that of concert-goers, people are only neighbors, not unique and not irreplaceable, but one among many.

How do you get to where you are human? Through an experimental philosophy, like that of Nietzsche, and by transforming yourself with Kafka, i.e. becoming an animal. Being a person or being a subject is not beneficial. Deleuze & Guattari write:

We just think that Kafka experiments Logs that it only Experiences reportedwithout interpreting them, without exploring their meaning [...]. A person who writes is never “just a writer”: he is a political person, and he is a machine person, and he is an experimental person (who stops being human in order to become an ape, or a beetle, dog, mouse, any animal [...]).²⁶

Gregor evades family and work by turning himself into a beetle. He makes of himself something different from what the state requires of him. He exceeds himself by spreading chaos, as Nietzsche demands:

Woe! The time is coming when man no longer throws the arrow of his longing beyond the person and has forgotten the tendon of his bow how to whizz! I tell you: You still have to have chaos in yourself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.²⁷

Kafka still has chaos in that he is not a critic of the state, but simply a reporter who soberly states how he affects people, what thoughts K. has in trial or Gregor in the Metamorphosis does. For Deleuze & Guattari, transformation, becoming an animal is an escape from social conditions, a political act when politics only has the purpose of asserting the interests of the state, but when it has no meaning for humans. Deleuze & Guattari see Kafka's writings as a political answer: “For Kafka, the essential thing about animals is the way out, the escape line, even without moving from the spot, even if you remain in a cage. Not freedom, but a way out. Not an attack, but a living escape line. ”²⁸

Nietzsche anticipated this situation: “Oh my brothers, is now Not everything in Rivers? Didn't all railings and walkways fall into the water? who held Still thinking of “good” and “bad”? ”²⁹ There are no longer any supreme ethical values, only those enacted by the state and the law, creating a situation for people from which they can only flee, and that by turning into animals, because people under the direction of the state are not people who would still be essential with Nietzsche. They are irrelevant, so you have to be different from them.

Becoming an animal is an ideal means of escape. Deleuze & Guattari write:

Becoming an animal is a motionless migration on the spot, which can only be experienced and understood in intensity [...]. There is nothing metaphorical about becoming an animal. It is not symbolism or allegory.³⁰

In this respect, it has neither a bureaucratic nor a scientific truth. No, there has never been anything like that! Or Kafka describes what is the case every day when people either get sick or go crazy, as Deleuze & Guattari did in their project Capitalism and Schizophrenia Show off. Going crazy appears as a similar escape line as becoming an animal.

It was the time when the second women's movement picked up steam. Instead of becoming an animal, there is the option of becoming a woman, which for Kafka in The castle develops a different perspective. Deleuze & Guattari write:

All together testify in their desire — in that which they themselves fulfill and in that which they awaken in others — the deep identity of justice, desire, and young woman or girl. The young girl is like the court: It is unprincipled, pure coincidence. “It picks you up when you come and it releases you when you leave”^[31]. In the village under the castle, the saying goes: “Official decisions are as shy as young girls.”³²

The judiciary is as unpredictable as capricious young women who notoriously evade their admirers and constantly cause them difficulties.

But Deleuze & Guattari recognize this as an escape line for men, becoming women, even during the time of the bourgeois women's movement. They attest to the most masculine writers such as D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller just such an inclination. Politics is then no longer party politics, not even citizen protest, but lines of escape from such organizations and transformation to create confusion: become a woman! Or does that mean becoming human when, from a feminist perspective, humanity is embodied by women rather than by men? Beyond criticism of patriarchy, the fact that women give birth to children speaks for this. If women are more lovable than men, should the latter therefore emulate the former? Would that transform men?

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sources

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 1 (1972). Frankfurt am Main 1979.

This. : Kafka. For a little literature (1975). Frankfurt am Main 2019.

This. : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A thousand plateaus (1980). Berlin 1992.

Kafka, Franz: The castle (1926). Berlin 2010.

Ders. : The process (1925). Frankfurt am Main 1960.

Ders. : The Metamorphosis (1915). All stories, Frankfurt am Main 1970.

Ders. : In the penal colony (1919). In: All stories. Frankfurt am Main 1970.

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footnotes

1: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 291.

2: Kafka, The process, P. 11.

3: So Zarathustra spoke, The leech.

4: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus. P. 518.

5: So Zarathustra spoke, From the compassionate.

6: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 32.

7: Subsequent fragments 1870 5 [33].

8: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph II, 3.

9: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 519.

10: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 42.

11: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the big events.

12: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 247.

13: Subsequent fragments 1887 11 [407].

14: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 60.

15: Subsequent fragments 1887 11 [99].

16: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 60.

17: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

18: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 18.

19: So Zarathustra spoke, Boards, 21.

20: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus. P. 471.

21: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

22: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 41.

23: Kafka, The Metamorphosis, P. 62.

24: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 42.

25: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

26: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 12.

27: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

28: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 49.

29: So Zarathustra spoke, Boards, 8.

30: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka. P. 50.

31: Kafka, The process, P. 161.

32: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 88.