The fabulous execution machine that is the center of attention Kafka's der Strafkolonie stands in [einem] tiefen, sandigen, von kahlen Abhangen ringsum abgeschlossenen Tal.' At the time represented by the narration, this natural theater is almost empty: no one is there except the principal performers themselves, the officer, the traveller, the condemned prisoner, and the soldier charge of the prisoner. But such performances as the one about to take place did not always attract so small an audience, the officer explains to the traveller: Wie war die Exekution anders friiherer Zeit! Schon einen Tag vor der Hinrichtung war das Tal von Menschen oberfullt; alle kamen nur zu sehen ... Vor hunderten Augen-alle standen auf den Ful3spitzen bis dort zu den Anhohen-wurde der Verurteilte vom Kommandanten selbst unter die Egge gelegt (p. 111). The theatrical character of the proceeding is clearly stressed, and the Zuschauer are clearly represented as the audience of a kind of performance which the death of the chief performer is the climactic--though not central-action. The central action of a proper execution as described by the officer der Strafkolonie is an act of reading. My reader may protest here that I am surely mistaken; that what is involved Kafka's story is clearly an act of writing, and that the attention of the story's reader is focused on the mechanism whereby the machine writes upon the body of the condemned prisoner. There is some justice to this objection, for the process of inscription gets more verbal space than the process of decipherment. But I will try to show that this inscription is simply the reproduction of an act of writing that had taken place long before the time of the narration and that as such it is the embodiment of the intellectual re-production which we ordinarily call 'reading.' My reader may also protest at my reformulation of Jacques Derrida's famous title. The comparison implied by my borrowing is not, I want to stress, between my essay and Derrida's but between Kafka's myth and Derrida's. The object of attention both Kafka's story and Derrida's essay is a machine involved the process of writing and reading. In and the Scene of Writing2 Derrida is particularly interested an analogy Freud had drawn between the operation of the perceptual apparatus and a device called the Mystic Writing-Pad, familiar to American