“The Right Despair”: Kafka’s Nihilist Technique

Abstract

Kafka’s drawing style, like his writing one, is abstemious in the extreme; the question is how to characterize his criterion of subtraction. Studying the diary drawings alongside the text in which they are embedded points toward a general dynamic of deactivation—an aesthetics of disillusion in the baroque tradition of desengaño—that can be seen more clearly than read. Kafka repeatedly draws and writes about thresholds. But while his diary writing tends to thematize a perceived failure to pass from one side to another, the accompanying drawings systematically eliminate this register, and with it, all sense of directional movement or striving. The drawings operate as emblems of a passage, and so also of metapherein, in all its most iconic shapes—ladders, gates, permeable walls—but of a passage suspended at the very apex of its arc, where failure is impossible to distinguish from success. The nihilistic thrust of an aestheticized despair is here in turn negated, and the result, like Wittgenstein’s duck rabbit example, is in principle ambiguous. The essay argues that such structural ambiguity becomes a crucial feature of the literary works, which are constructed, as the diary entries themselves usually are not, in accordance with a similarly emblematic technique of double negation or “right despair.”