354 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
text. ‘The gesture is the “that’s the way it is”; language, the configura-
tion of which should be truth, is, as a broken one, untruth.’^130 Adorno
insisted that the scenes and events in Kafka’s writings did not suggest
the need for a psychoanalytical interpretation, but that they were them-
selves literal applications of, i.e., transformed, psychoanalysis. Kafka
derived his materials from the ruins of reality. This explains why they
are the reflexes of social untruth which, however, must be read as
‘the negatives of truth’. To elucidate the Kafkaesque experience of the
abnormal that defines normality, Adorno referred to an incident that
had taken place when he was twenty-five. He wrote that ‘One must
have experienced an accident in a large city; countless witnesses come
forward, proclaiming themselves acquaintances, as though the entire
community had gathered to observe the moment when the powerful
bus smashed into the flimsy taxicab.’^131 Adorno placed Kafka, ‘the
parabolist of impenetrability’,^132 in a literary context in which he in-
cluded Robert Walser, Edgar Allan Poe and Ferdinand Kürnberger,
claiming that they had invented a specific sub-genre of ‘the detective
novels in which the criminals fail to be exposed’.^133
Adorno interpreted the figures in Kafka’s stories as embodiments
of the labour it must have cost the human race to achieve the process
of civilizing the individual, a process that each person must undergo in
childhood without his ever succeeding in becoming certain of his iden-
tity. This is why Kafka focuses on the instability of the self, since it is
constantly exposed to the danger of lapsing into an instinctual, animal
condition. The individual is torn hither and thither between utter
conformism and rebellion. ‘Kafka’s hermetic memoranda contain the
social genesis of schizophrenia.’^134
It often seems, quite rightly, that in such stories as The Metamor-
phosis or In the Penal Colony Kafka anticipated certain aspects of
National Socialism. Nevertheless, Adorno believes that he also went
beyond this unique catastrophe. For, as Adorno put it, following
Benjamin, in Kafka’s works the entirety of previous history has become
a hell. This inferno was created by the late bourgeoisie in a far more
real fashion than Kafka could ever have imagined. ‘In the concentration
camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated... As
in Kafka’s twisted epics what perished there was what provided the
criterion of experience – life lived out to its end.’^135
Adorno’s discussion of Kafka contains numerous echoes of Dialectic
of Enlightenment. One example is his claim that ‘Kafka reacts in the
spirit of enlightenment to the latter’s reversion to mythology.’^136 Just as
the deceptions of myth are once more brought to account, so too his
novel ‘The Trial is itself the trial of a trial.’^137 Kafka proposes the use of
cunning as an antidote to the mythic powers: ‘Kafka’s humour hopes to
reconcile myth through a kind of mimicry.’^138 Thus myth must show
itself for what it is. ‘Myth is to succumb to its own reflected image. The
heroes of The Trial and The Castle become guilty not through their guilt