Kafka, Constancy, and Dread

Kafka is an emblematic figure of anxiety at confronting a metamorphic universe. Consciousness discovers itself, at its beginning, disoriented, estranged. The pleasure of dreams arrives from something that is never present in Kafka—that forgetful metamorphosis which, as if directed by an ecstatic force, leads toward the self's desire, presenting to the self what is lost, hoped for, or impossible in the waking world. Constancy is the necessary dream of sanity. The Judeo-Christian tradition gives us the figure of Eden, perfect and timeless and unchanging. Metamorphosis enters Eden only through the serpent, hence linking metamorphosis forever to evil. Anxiety, rather than being formless and ambivalent, has a specific provocation; it is the radical fatedness and seductive power of that fall. In a fallen universe, the pose of innocence yields only a lack of depth, a superficiality which is absurd, obsessed, self-involved, and impotent. In Kafka, the terror of metamorphosis is always the devolving terror of a past judgment or guilt. This moral order, as imagined by Kafka, lies outside of human consciousness. For Kafka it is not the drive itself which is unconscious, but the drive's impossibility, which suggests an indeterminate, inexhaustible dimension to the drive, and that the drive is incommensurate to its object.