“Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars” of Newness...this theme of delivering—or of attempting but failing to deliver, finding it impossible to deliver—the paradoxically

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37.2September 2011: 51-80

“Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars”:

Breaking News, Broken Time in

Nietzsche, Kafka, Benjamin

Frank StevensonDepartment of English

Chinese Culture University, Taiwan

AbstractThis paper explores some closely-related themes in Nietzsche, Kafka, andBenjamin: a trans-temporal “bridge” that is brokenor interrupted in the middle,“breaking news” whose delivery is infinitely delayed or impossible, and the figure of a partially-constructed wall which may also serve as the fragilefoundation for a new Tower of Babel. The Benjamin passage at stake is ThesisIX of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where the angel (angelikos,messenger) of history suddenly appears, caught between immanent and eternaltime, and wants to (but cannot) “make whole” the fragments of wreckage fromhuman history that are thrown in a heap at his feet. The above themes fromNietzsche and Kafka are used to interpret the angel’s impossible project ofmaking-whole as a project, not of delivering but of reconstructing the originalmessage, now taken as the originally universal and communal human language,meaning or “name” which was fragmented by God into a “babel.”Here thisoriginal language, also seen in the context of Benjamin’s still-idealized notionof “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” remains metaphoricallytied to the figure of the Tower of Babel, a tower whose piecemeal construction,ambiguously decreed by the Emperor in Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China,”implies the virtual equivalence of (its own) construction and deconstruction orcollapse.

KeywordsNietzsche, Kafka, Benjamin, angel of history, messianic time,

reconstructed message, pure language, Tower of Babel

52 Concentric 37.2 September 2011

There is a certain theme or trope shared by Nietzsche (in Zarathustra andJoyful Wisdom), Kafka (in “The Bridge” and“The Great Wall of China”), andBenjamin (in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”). It has to do with a temporal“bridge” that is somehow broken or interrupted in the middle, a move or flightbetween past and future which is impossibly fast yet infinitely delayed. Here themidpoint expresses a sense of radical discontinuity, for this paradoxical speed-and-delay is made possible by an unthinkable break between temporal and timelessorders. A closely-related theme or trope in all three writers is that of theimpossibility of sending a message,of announcing or delivering the “news”—wherethe horizontal flight is now seen as that of the messenger and/or of the message ornews itself. The message gets infinitely delayed in Kafka; it comes—perhaps thesame thing—from extremely or infinitely far away, and yet is already “known” tothe ones receiving it, in Nietzsche; its possibility is dependent on the one deliveringit in Benjamin, whose angel of history (angelikos means “messenger”) of Thesis IXcan be interpreted as wanting not to bring or announce the message but rather toactually (re)construct it—that is, to reconstruct, though it is impossible, the original“wholeness”of humanity, the original human “name” or “meaning”from thebroken fragments of a tragically finite human history.

In Kafka and Benjamin the images of broken or fragmentary walls andfoundations (Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”) and of the accumulated “wreckage”of history (Benjamin’s Thesis IX) are closely tied to the theme of thediscontinuous bridge of time. Kafka’s Imperial Messenger in “The Great Wall ofChina” is infinitely delayed in delivering his message—he moves with infinitesimalslowness across his horizontal route—by the virtually infinite yet discontinuousseries of “walls” which, though symbolizing the vast de-centered power of thesupreme Emperor, are nonetheless but fragments of what they, and the Empire,might have beenas a “new Tower of Babel.”In Benjamin’sThesis IX the angel ofhistory, momentarily interrupted—or himself appearing as an interruption—andfrozen in his flight, wings outspread and facing backwards toward the past, wishesin vain, for the wind from Paradise will blow him toward the future, to take theaccumulated wreckage of history that has been flung at his feet and “make it whole.”

If this angel is a messenger then we might take his message to be the still-deferred wholeness of human history or rather of humanity itself, to be realized byrecreating or reconstructing its own fragments into the whole message or wholemeaning. This can also be seen in terms of Benjamin’s quest, in “The Task of theTranslator,” for a “pure language,” a quest which he implicitly sets in the

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Kafkaesque context of the Biblical Tower of Babel and the (im)possibility ofreconstructing in its pure presence, behind the echoes, the originally universalhuman language which was fragmented into a “babel” by God (the Emperor,Absolute Power) when He/it was faced with man’s attempt to build a tower thatwould reach up to heaven. For Kafka, whose metaphysical, Jewish-mysticalthinking is analyzed in two of the essays in Benjamin’sIlluminations, where “The Task of the Translator” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History” also appear,suggests that the Great Wall to keep out barbarians was originally intended as thefoundation for a New Tower of Babel but that the Emperor may have commandedits partial or piecemeal manner of construction so that it would later collapse, theconstruction becoming a deconstruction.

In this paper, then, I want to explore the theme of the trans-temporal bridge inthe three thinkers, particularly in Kafka and Benjamin, to show how it may expressthis theme of delivering—or of attempting but failing to deliver, finding itimpossible to deliver—the paradoxically “breaking news.” By looking at the variations on this theme as we get it in three philosophical thinkers—metaphysical,paradoxical, “mystical” thinkers who are at the same time highly poetic writers—Ihope to show that they might share the same fundamental insight, even if it isexpressed in different ways. In the first section I will establish the basic frameworkby looking at the trans-temporal bridge and the notion of an infinitely-delayed, yetperhaps (paradoxically) also immediate, announcement of the “news” in Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin. In the second section I will look at the “partial construction” of Kafka’s Wall, which makes it an unstable foundation for a new Tower of Babeland implies the virtual equivalence of construction and deconstruction. In the thirdsection I will pursue the interpretation of Benjamin’s angel as a human-divinemessenger who also stands at the midpoint of a trans-temporal path, caught betweentwo directions and two times and interrupting history, one who would (but cannot)make it whole by reconstructing the original “message”of humanity, its originallyunified and communal language, sense, meaning, name.

The Trans-Temporal Bridge andthe Problem of Delivering the News

Kafka has a very interesting short narrative, perhaps a parable, called “TheBridge”:


I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I spanned an abyss. . . . No touriststrayed to this trackless height; the bridge was not yet marked on themaps. And so I lay, waiting. . . . One day, toward evening—was it thefirst, was it the thousandth, I cannot tell, my thoughts were alwaysracing in confusion, always, always in circles . . . I heard the footstepof a man! . . . He came, he knocked on me all over with the iron tip ofhis cane. . . . But then . . . he jumped with both feet onto the middle ofmy body. I shuddered in wild pain, totally uncomprehending. Whowas it? A child? A gymnast? A daredevil? A suicide? A tempter? Adestroyer? And I turned to look at him [but] I had not yet turnedaround when I was already falling . . . and in a moment I was tornapart and impaled on the sharp stones [in] the raging water [below].(Kafka 108-09) 1

It seems the spatial span of this allegorical or parabolic bridge may also be atrans-temporal span, a discontinuous stretch or leap across time, as suggested by the“circularity” of the bridge’s “thoughts[that] were always racing in confusion.”2

Here one might think of Nietzsche’s “rope between beast and overman[übermensch]” in Zarathustra’s Prologue. 3 Zarathustra addresses the peoplegathered in a small town, waiting for the performance of a tightrope walker to begin:

“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over anabyss [Abgrund, Kafka’s word in “The Bridge”]. A dangerous across,a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerousshuddering and stopping.

1 The Greek paraballein means “throw beside” and thus “compare”; but, as with Christ’s

parables (Hebrew mashal, “comparisons”) in the Bible, Kafka’s parables point (discontinuously) to some unknowable or unthinkable “higher level of meaning.” If Kafka’s bridge here, broken inthe middle, is getting “thrown beside itself” and thus itself “becomes-parable,” this should not be too surprising: Kafka speaks of our own “becoming-parable” in his short parable entitled “On Parables.”

2 We often get temporal distortions and time/timelessness ambiguity or rifts in Kafka—forinstance, in “The Hunter Gracchus,” “The Country Doctor,” “The Great Wall of China.”

3 We know that Kafka read Nietzsche seriously and that Benjamin read Kafka seriously. Whileno claim of direct influence will be made here in either case, one suspects that neither Kafka norBenjamin would have denied the possibility of such influences, which could easily have beenunconscious.

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“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what canbe loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under[Untergehen, “setting”as of the sun].”(Nietzsche 126-27; emphasis inoriginal)

Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return is somehow related to his notion of thediscontinuous stretch of time, the “bridge” between the humans we now are and the Übermenschen, overmen or superhumans that we are becoming, in a sort ofevolution which is more spiritual than physical. Indeed in some sense we havealready become these overmen without knowing it, just as we have not yet heardthe news that “God is dead”even though we have brought about this great eventourselves—by no longer believing in or no longer understanding God, and/or byourselves becoming-God. In Joyful Wisdom the wandering “madman” speaks to a group of people in a small town, like Zarathustra (the wandering prophet of theoverman), announcing that “we have unknowingly killed God”:

“Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not weourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has neverbeen a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us—for the sake ofthis deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; andthey too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. . . . “I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendousevent is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the earsof man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the starsrequires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before theycan be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them thanthe most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”(Nietzsche 96; emphasis in original)

Of course, no one understands this madman’s speech—a prophesy or areminder, a “breaking” to us of news that we should already have known since weourselves created it—any more than they understand Zarathustra’s cryptic prophecies of the coming of the overman.4 Later Zarathustra, still in the same little

4 If this “messenger” is simply telling people what they should already haveknown, then this“delivering of news” really means shocking people by suddenly telling or showing them the truth,


town he was passing through, watches the actual performance of a tightrope walker,and certain elements of this scene may remind us of Kafka’s “Bridge”:

For meanwhile the tightrope walker had begun his performance: hehad stepped out of a small door and was walking over the rope,stretched between two towers and suspended over the market placeand the people. When he had reached the exact middle of his coursethe small door opened once more and a fellow in motley clothes,looking like a jester, jumped out and followed the first one with quicksteps.“Forward, lamefoot!” he shouted. . . , “. . . or I shall tickle you with

my heel! What are you doing here between towers? The tower iswhere you belong. . . . [Y]ou block the way for one better thanyourself.” And with every word he came closer and closer; but whenhe was but one step behind, the dreadful thing happened . . .: he uttereda devilish cry and jumped over the man who stood in his way. Thisman . . . lost his head and the rope, tossed away his pole, and plungedinto the depth even faster, a whirlpool of arms and legs. The marketplace became as the sea . . .: the people rushed apart and over oneanother, especially at the place where the body must hit the ground.(Nietzsche 131)

This jester or devil figure may literally become the“overman”when he jumpsover the man—“You block the way for one better than yourself.”The man mustnow stop crossing the rope/bridge and stay in a stationery tower at one end or theother.We will be tempted to compare this jester/devil with Kafka’s “man” in “The Bridge,” as opposed to his narrator (the bridge): “he jumped with both feet onto the middle of my body. I shuddered in wild pain, totally uncomprehending. Who was it?A child? A gymnast? A daredevil? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer?”

We get thesense that for both Nietzsche and Kafka this “bridge” is capable of breaking-open in the middle, that is, halfway across, and that this is the breaking-

where normally they would need more time to get accustomed to it. One may think here of EmilyDickinson’s “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant,” where her Truth is likely to be that God exists (life has meaning) or does not exist (life is meaningless). Dickinson says that we must break suchnews slowly or indirectly, as if we were explaining lightning to a child: “The truth much dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.”

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open of a discontinuous time—or the break between our immanent human historyand a “higher history,” or between finite and infinite (or trans-finite) time, orbetween time and eternity.This is arguably what we do not get in the Bible’s Book of Revelation (with its Final Judgment, the end of the world), or in Hegel or Marxinsofar as here too we somehow reach “the end of history.”It is in part to get awayfrom such “absolute” thinking that Nietzsche conceives of his eternal return, thenever-ending return of this world, this immanent time (this now) that never reachesa final state of self-transcendence. Yet while both Kafka and Benjamin, with theirmystical-Jewish backgrounds, are somehow enamored of this notion of animmanent-transcendent break or jump, Nietzsche himself is rethinking the“problem”ofit, as we see in the “higher history” of the “God is dead” passage.

In both passages, then, we get a man or superman of some sort either jumpingonto the middle of the bridge (“onto the middle of my body” in Kafka), or jumping over a merely human man in the middle of the bridge (Nietzsche), and thereby“breaking” it; in both cases the “victim” (Kafka’s bridge, Nietzsche’s man crossing it) falls to his/its death. But how can we relate this discontinuous bridge that spansan abyss, in Kafka and Nietzsche, to Nietzsche’s problem of the infinitely delayed message, the message announcing as “news” an event that should be “old” for us since it is news of us? Might thetapping of the man’s iron cane on the surface of the bridge in Kafka’s “The Bridge,” and the jester figure’s “jumping-over” in the Nietzsche passage, somehow also suggest the act of announcing news? In Nietzschewe are speaking of the news that God is dead and/or (virtually the same thing) thatthe overman has come; but in Kafka, could it be something of the same sort?

In Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”the dying emperor (probably in thepalace in Beijing’s Forbidden City) whispers something to a messenger, who thencommences to carry that message (known only to him) to “you, the reader,” waiting on the other side of the vast kingdom. Now if we take this message to be (ironically)the emperor’sannouncement of his own death—one possible interpretation of theparable—and if we furthermore dare to suggest that the Emperor could also be God,we would have a variation on Nietzsche’s virtually infinite (infinitesimal) delay ofthe delivery of a message, that of the “death of God” which the receivers (or“deliverers”?) of the message have paradoxically already brought about themselves.Kafka’s messenger is clearly meant to carry his message across a horizontal path, a


sort of bridge between emperor and reader, but he is infinitely or infinitesimallydelayed right from the start in a way that suggests one of Zeno’s paradoxes:5

The messenger began his journey at once; a strong man, a tireless man,a swimmer without equal. . . . [H]e makes his way through thecrowd. . . . But the crowd is so deep, their dwelling places are withoutend; if he could only reach open land, how he would fly. . . .Instead, . . . he is still forcing his way through the chambers of theinnermost palace; he will never get to the end of them; and if he didsucceed, nothing would have been gained; he would have to fight hisway down the stairs; and if he succeeded, nothing would have beengained . . . and after the courtyards the second, outer palace, and morestairs and courtyards, and another palace, and so on through themillennia; and if he did finally crash out of the outermost gate—butthat can never, never happen—the imperial capital would now liebefore him. . . . No one can penetrate this, let alone with the messageof a dead man addressed to a nonentity. But you sit at your windowand envision it as in a dream when evening comes. (Kafka 120)

One might think of this Zeno-like “infinitesimal delay” of the messenger, or rather of the message that (perhaps) the God/Emperor is dead or indeed has longsince already been dead, in the light of Zarathustra’s claim that the news of such a death, somehow caused by ourselves (by “you at your window” waiting to hear this message?), comes from (virtually) infinitely far away and yet it is also immediatelypresent with or in “us.” For this “through the millennia” is once again a break intime, a radical temporal discontinuity—perhaps the break between “this history” and “the higher history” that Zarathustra speaks of—and one which may make morepossible (as do other aspects of the story) the thought that the Emperor is also God.This radical break in (and break beyond) human time and history may also suggestthe sort of messianic perspective Benjamin takes in his “Theses on the Philosophyof History”(1940). These “parables,”though somehow influenced by a Marxist

5 The ancient Greek logician Zeno has paradoxes showing that “actual motion is impossible”—

which is of course not true in the physical world but might in some sense be true in the logical ormathematical world. In one paradox, you are trying to move from zero to one on a path picturedas the horizontal number scale. But before you can get to one you must get to one-half, before youcan get to one-half you must get to one-fourth . . . before you can get to .0001 you must getto .00005 . . . and so on ad infinitum, meaning that you can (virtually) never move.

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historical materialism, are explicitly concerned with the temporal discontinuity ofan “historicism” which only looks back upon the past by focusing on particular“moments” and their interconnections, and which sees the (indistinguishably past orpresent) “present as a ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time” (Benjamin, Illuminations 263).

The Hebrew Messiah is of course the human-divine savior who, unlike Christ,has not yet come, who is still being awaited in a way perhapssuggestive of Kafka’s infinite/infinitesimal delay of the “message/messenger”—where now the messagewould not be that of the death of the divine being but rather that of his/her/itscontinued “absence,”which would somehow make it more possible that hismessage is also the (absent) messenger. Angelikos in Greek means “messenger,” and so we come to Benjamin’s “angel of history” of Thesis IX, who stands, as wemight picture it, at the midpoint of a trans-temporal, trans-historical bridge, facingbackwards toward the past with wings opened out:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedlycontemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings arespread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turnedtoward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees onesingle catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage andhurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken thedead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowingfrom Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence thatthe angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels himinto the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debrisbefore him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.(Benjamin, Illuminations 257-58)

Here no one is jumping onto or over the midpoint of the trans-temporal bridge,the time/eternity breaking-point where we see the angel standing.6 Instead, a pile of

6 In Kafka’s “The Bridge,” before “jumping with both feet onto the middle of my body,” the man “knocked on me all over with the iron tip of his cane [the tightrope-walker’s pole?], then helifted my coat-tails with it and folded them back on me.” This might suggest the bending back of time upon itself, and/or a Nietzschean eternal return, and/or the sudden (momentary) piling up ofthe total wreckage of the past at this spatial and temporal center-point. In his second version ofthe eternal return at the opening of Zarathustra III, Nietzsche-Zarathustra, climbing a hill with the


debris is being “hurled in front of his feet,” the accumulated wreckage of the “one single catastrophe” which, viewednow in a certain way, is human history. Thisangel would (if only he could) “awaken the dead,”and so we may see him ascoming from the dimension of trans-finite or trans-human time, an Old Testamentangel sent by God to mankind at, perhaps, the end of the world—the time of theFinal Judgment, Judgment Day—and thus sent from a “higher”messianic time, apost-historical time, back into human time/history. But while the angel’s desire to“make whole what has been smashed” includes the idea of “awakening the dead” and thus in effect reversing death, this might really be a project of “reversinghistory” in order to “overcome” it, a project of negating all of the sadness and suffering of history by restoring humanity or the human condition to some morepristine, more harmonious, more perfect state, to an original or pre-historical state.Perhaps Benjamin, who claimed that the historian looks backward and “sees the past” just as the prophet looks ahead to “see the future,” may have wanted thistrans-temporal angel not just to see the past but to go back to or before the verybeginning of history (of the world) in order to “begin (it) over again.”

Essential to Benjamin’s human-divine figure of the angel, which was greatlyinfluenced by Paul Klee’s 1920 modernist painting “Angelus Novus” (“New Angel”), is the angel’s great compassion for mankind in its present historical“condition,”combined with a sense—in the painting a facial expression—of shock,surprise, confusion. O. K. Werckmeister in “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History”tells us that “Benjamin related Klee’s watercolor . . ., which he had owned since1921, to a Jewish tradition according to which God continually creates innumerableangels in order to have them sing his praise for a short moment and then makesthem perish” (244).Thus while the angel seems to be pitying a self-destructivemankind (rather than praising God), given his own tragic fate he also becomes anobject of mourning for us; perhaps even this all-too-human angel now representsmankind.7

“spirit of gravity” in the form of a dwarf on his shoulder and weighing him down, sees the “gate of the moment” with an infinity of time reaching back into the past on one side of it and an infinity of time reaching forward into the future on the other side, a horizontal picture or model.He reflects that if the past is truly infinite, then everything that could possibly happen in the futurehas already happened in the past.

7 Werckmeister also tells us that in 1933 Benjamin wrote:

. . . the short autobiographical tale entitled “Agesilaus Santander” . . . [which] evokes a meditative viewing of the unnamed picture on the wall of [his] apartmentin Berlin.

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Kafka: Wall as Tower, Construction as Deconstruction,Delay of the Message

In a variation on the “rope between man and overman” passage in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the wandering prophet reminds the people that “man” is not really a“higher” creature into which apes have evolved: “What is the ape to man? Alaughingstock. . . . And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock. . . .You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Onceyou were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape” (Nietzsche124).This last phrase is oneKafka may have had in mind in his “Report to an Academy,” where the ape-man narrator tells the story of his rapid evolution into (a) man.Kafka’s “storm that blew at my back from my past”as driving force of this rapidevolution also reminds us of Benjamin’s “storm . . . blowing from Paradise” that “irresistibly propels him [the angel] into the future to which his back is turned. . . .”

Almost five years separate me from apedom, a span of time that isshort, perhaps, when measured on the calendar, but infinitely longwhen galloped through in the way I have done, accompanied forstretches by excellent persons, advice, applause, and orchestral musicbut basically alone. . . . This achievement would have been impossiblehad I wanted to cling obstinately to my origin, to the memories of myyouth. . . . [Thus] my memories have become more and more closedoff from me. . . . I felt more comfortable and more fully enclosed inthe human world; the storm that blew at my back from my pastsubsided; today it is only a draft that cools my heels. . . . Your apedom,gentleman, to the extent that you have something of the sort behindyou, cannot be more remote from you than mine is from me. But

[However, some] visual discrepancies remain between these descriptive

evocations and Klee’s watercolor. Klee’s figure displays neither “claws” nor “wings . . . sharp as knives” like the angel’s in “Agesilaus Santander,” and the pictorial field of the watercolor offers no suggestion of a “catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet,” as in the thesis. Thus, . . . Benjamin has invested Klee’s image with aggressive and destructivetraits absent in the original. . . . In “Agesilaus Santander” the angel is poised to move forward for an assault yet does not advance out of his own volition; in the[1940 Thesis IX] he wishes to stay put in order to redress the destruction but isblown away against his will. (245)


everyone who walks about here on earth feels a tickling in hisheels. . . . (Kafka 76-77)

This “tickling” is also the narrator’snostalgia, for he remembers his ape-pastas a time of greater freedom, greater “space,” a point driven home by the fact that when first captured by humans he (his former ape-self) was cruelly kept in a crateon a ship, a prison from which he escaped through raw physical force, seeking only“a way out.”Now, more “fully enclosed” in the human world, he is making his“report” on his human condition to a lofty “academy” of human scientists, a reportfilled with ironies and subtly pointing to the fact that “man is more ape than any ape.”8 Perhaps this narrator can also be seen as a certain sort of messenger, then, or“news reporter”(reporting on the current human condition). If the ape-man appearsto be midway across the bridge, confused as he looks forward and backward at thesame time, Benjamin’s angelstands for a moment facing the past—facing humanhistory and the Paradise which lies “behind” it,a Paradise out of which a storm isblowing which will momentarily throw him into the distant (trans-temporal, trans-human) future and to God9—and wishing he could “make whole” all of history’s (human civilization’s) accumulated debris, now being thrown in a huge pile at hisfeet. But if one were to attempt any such comparison, the key point would be thatthis human history is what came after man’s pre-human or proto-human history.

The parable of the Imperial Messenger occurs within Kafka’s story “TheGreat Wall of China,”and what actually seems to infinitely delay the messenger isthe discontinuous and fragmented series of “walls”—the various walls within theChinese-box-like palace, with the same pattern repeated in the larger city and soforth. In the story Kafka uses “China” to represent the concept of a vast empire

8 Nietzsche’s “menschlich, allzumenschlich (human, all-too-human)” also comes to mind here.

From the beginning of the story the ape-man narrator has been suggesting that his ape-life was insome ways better, that the ape “culture” or “civilization” is in some ways preferable to the human one, so that where he had once sought a “way out” he now dreams of a “way back.” His situation is the reverse of the Imperial Messenger’s: rather than moving forward with infinite (infinitesimal)slowness he has rushed forward too quickly and now can’t reverse his direction. We also get the temporal paradox here: “a span of time that is short, perhaps, when measured on the calendar, but infinitely long when galloped through in the way I have done . . .” (Kafka 76).

9 This God in or of the remote “future”might mean either a true socialism (communism) or anover-developed high-tech capitalism, where the latter interpretation could make the remote pastseem preferable. Perhaps this might be the past of early human communities whose acts of“producing and reproducing life” become, in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology (1845), the“first moments of history.”

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whose hierarchical-vertical power structure is necessarily “horizontally de-centered”by both the spatial extent of the empire itself (which can only be boundedand thus defined by an incomprehensibly long, discontinuous, fragmented wall) andthe incomprehensibly vast stretch of time that is this empire’s history.10 These twodimensions are combined in the author’s observation that people living far from the capital may not know who the present emperor is, and may think one who livedcenturies ago is still the emperor—hence the problem of long-delayed“news.”

This, then, is how the people . . . mingle the current [emperors] withthe dead ones. . . . [One man wonders why an imperial official] isspeaking about a dead man like someone who is alive, his emperordied a long time ago, the dynasty was wiped out. . . . And behind thesedan chair of the official, as it races off, some figure who had beenarbitrarily elevated climbs out of his crumbling urn and stamps his footas master of the village. . . . [The problem is that] every piece of news,even if it were to reach us, would come much too late, would be longobsolete.” (Kafka 121, 119)

Even the ancient news that a Wall was being built, or was going to be built,was not heard by the narrator (then a young man) until thirty years later, and herethe theme of delaying-the-message works not only as an “external” device (like the“Imperial Messenger,” a parable used as exampleas in the Bible) but as an internalplot-event, one which forms the story’s ending:11

Into this world news of the building of the Wall now penetrated. It, too,was delayed by some thirty years since its proclamation. It was on asummer evening. I, ten years old, was standing with my father on theriverbank. . . . Father was holding me by the hand. . . . His long, sparse,stiff beard was raised into the air. . . . At that moment a sailboat cameto a halt before us; the boatman signaled to my father to come downthe embankment; he himself climbed up. . . . [The] boatman whispered

10 Such “horizontally de-centered” power invites both Foucauldian and Deleuze-Guattarian

readings. Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature engage in a horizontal,rhizomic reading of Kafka’s world of self-embedded bureaucratic spaces and desiring-machines,a world with no vertical-transcendent.

11 Nietzsche combines these two functions in the parable of the tightrope walker in Zarathustra.


in my father’s ear. . . . I could not understand what they were saying,saw only that my father did not seem to believe it. . . . [Then] myfather became quieter and the boatman leaped . . . into the boat andsailed away. [Later, back in the house] my father began to report whathe had heard. (Kafka 123)

In this story, Kafka uses the figure of the “piecemeal construction” of the Great Wall to catch this idea of a “China” that has been greatly (infinitely)stretched-out over both space and time,so that gaps appear within or “between” it.12

His use of this figure is, perhaps like the concept of a “culture” or “nation” or “imperial power” itself, extremely complex and even paradoxical. On the one hand,it is associated with the unity of the people, who themselves want to build this wallas a communal project or rather as many separate communal projects, extendedover a vast stretch of time and history:

. . . like eternally hopeful children they left their homeland, the desireto labor once again at this national mission became uncontrollable; . . .never before had they seen how great and rich and beautiful andlovable their country was; every fellow countryman was a brother forwhom they were building a protective wall . . . unity! unity! Breast onbreast, round dance of the people, blood no longer confined in themeager circulatory system of the body but rolling on sweetly and yetreturning to its source through the infinity of China. And in this waythe system of partial construction makes sense. (115)

On the other hand, the emperors throughout history have “chosen” this systembut apparently more hesitantly, or more ambiguously. Perhaps this is because it isafter all the (successive generations of) people who want or need this discontinuityand while the rulers must be“above” the peoplethey also feel they must follow the

12 In fact, of course, to keep out the invading barbarians from the north, which history tells us

was the main purpose of the wall, one would want a solid wall with no gaps in it. “Now, one would think that it would have been more advantageous in every way to build continuously. . . .After all . . . the Wall was conceived of as a defense against people of the north. But how can awall that is not a continuous structure offer protection?” (Kafka 113). Whereas the actual fragmentary nature of the wall as we see it today, for example near Beijing, was obviously notintended by the successive emperors and the builders (along with other factors, it simply neverwas finished), we might say it is Kafka’s complicated joke that this was an intentional “design.”

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people’s will; and/or because (is it the same thing?) this discontinuous wallrepresents the very boundary or totality of the land they rule and represent throughtime and history.13The Chin and later emperors’ “command” that such a wall bebuilt is thus paradoxical:“And therefore to any unprejudiced observer the idea will be unacceptable that the leaders . . . could not have overcome the difficulties thatstood in the way of a continuous Wall construction. And so the remainingconclusion is that the leaders purposely chose partial construction. But partialconstruction was only a makeshift and unsuited to its purpose. The conclusion thatremains is that the leaders wanted something unsuited to their purpose” (Kafka 117).

The author goes on to say here, “An odd conclusion, certainly. And yet inanother respect there is a good deal of justification for it” (Kafka 117). Thejustification he now gives is basically the idea that absolute rulers must remain“inscrutable” to their subjects, thus seeming godlike and all-powerful in their ownincomprehensibility. But earlier in the story Kafka has hinted at another (andclosely-related) justification, namely, that from the very beginning this Wall mayreally have been intended as the foundation for a “New Tower of Babel.”

[In certain ways] the system of partial construction makes sense, butthere may have been additional reasons. . . . [A] scholar . . . sought toprove that it was not for the generally stated reasons that constructionof the Tower of Babel failed to accomplish its goal . . . [but rather thatits] construction foundered, and was destined to founder, on theweakness of its foundations. [This scholar] maintained that the GreatWall would create, for the first time in human history, a solidfoundation for a new Tower of Babel. Ergo: first the Wall and then theTower. . . . I admit that even today I do not really know how hethought this tower would be built. The Wall, which did not evendescribe a circle but only a sort of quarter- or semi-circle, wassupposed to provide the foundation for a tower? Plainly, that statementcould only have been meant in a spiritual sense. But then, what wasthe use of the Wall, something that was a tangible fact . . . ? (Kafka115-16)

13 Kafka seldom mentions that the original purpose of the Wall was to keep the northern

barbarians from invading, perhaps as this is also its function as national boundary, yet the wall’s “discontinuity” may crucially depend on the idea that “every fellow countryman was a brother for whom they were building a protective wall.”


According to the parable of the Tower of Babel near the beginning of Genesis,all the people (in that area of the Middle East) spoke a common language and sothey were a single community. As one they wished to assert their communal will,assert the full meaning of their humanity, of their “name” as members of a particular race and culture—we might think here of Kafka’s“unity! unity! Breaston breast, round dance of the people . . .”—by building a city with a tower thatreached up to heaven, thus affirming their own Godlike divinity and power.However, in the parable God, seeing this as a human transgression on his divineauthority, “scatters” the people’ssingle language into a “babel,” a multiplicity of tongues, so that, unable to communicate, they could not finish building the city andtower. While Kafka clearly associates the fragmentation of a universal humanlanguage with the destruction of the tower, this association, though it offers itself asone interpretation, is not explicit in the original parable (where God does notactually destroy the tower).

And it is all the earth: a single lip, one speech. . . .They say:“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower.Its head: in the heavens.Let us make ourselves a name,that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth.”

YHWH [Jehovah, God] descends to see the city and the towerthat the sons of man have built.YHWH says:“Yes! A single people, a single lip for all:that is what they begin to do! . . .Come! Let us descend! Let us confound their lips,man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbor.”. . .YHWH disperses them from here over the face of all the earth.They cease to build the city.14 (Derrida 247-48)

Thus Kafka’s subtle point, his “other justification” in “The Great Wall of China,”may be that, if this Wall was to be the foundation of just such a Tower, and

14 Cited from Derrida’s “Les Tours de Babel,” in the most literal translation from the Hebrew

that he could find.

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if the Emperor(s) identified with God over against the people down below, theEmperor would want the foundation to be piecemeal and weak so that later it wouldcollapse “of itself.”

With this Tower whose “construction foundered, and was destined to founder, on the weakness of its foundations” Kafkamay be giving us a kind of “dynamic.” We might look at a certain sort of building or structure and not be sure whether it isnow under construction (not yet finished), or now being taken apart (deconstructed),or perhaps itself a “ruin,” a building that has already collapsed. This ambiguity,which also brings into play the notion of reverse-time or temporal reversibility—more explicit in “Report to an Academy” than in the parable of the Imperial Messenger—has clear relevance to the idea that an Emperor desiring absolutepower might perhaps first allow his people to begin building a tower which wouldmake them equal to him in power—for in building it they would feel unified, drivenby a clear national purpose—but to begin building it in such a way that, unknown tothem, later on it would surely collapse of its own accord.

To construct a structure precisely so that, after some period of time, it will bedeconstructed (or deconstruct itself) means in effect “self-destruction,” which is clearer if we see the processes or events of construction and deconstruction ashappening simultaneously. Here then we are speaking of the sort of “absolute delay” that alsosignifies “impossibility.”Perhaps this is a variation on the“impossibility” of the situation of the Imperial Messenger, who is infinitely delayedin carrying the message that “I, the Emperor, am dying” (or “I am long since dead”) to “you, the reader.” The latter is in any case a variation on Nietzsche’s parable of the infinite delay of the news that “God is dead”—where this news is alreadyknown to the listeners (who have brought about the deed themselves), so that it is ineffect also delivered instantaneously, or rather it does not need to be delivered at all.

But very likely we will also seecommunal mankind’s building ofthe originalTower of Babel as simultaneously an act of sending a message to God, the messagethat “we are united” or “we are, or will become, your equal.”If we take mankind’s construction of the tower as being at the same time its construction of this message,God’s scattering or deconstructing of the universal human language into a “babel”would also be His destroying of this message and/or of the possibility ofcommunicating or delivering this message. In Kafka’s variation on this idea, (onewhich may be implicit in the original Bible story), where we have an Emperor whois more overtly devious than the Yahweh of Genesis, we might then also take theEmperor’s predetermined collapse of the toweras the predetermined deconstructionof the people’s own construction of their meaning as a people, that is, of their


“Name” in this sense. The more standard reading of the Genesis story is of coursesimply that now, lacking a common language, the human builders could no longercommunicate with one another and thus could not finish building the tower, but this“lack” also means they no longer have their single meaning (word, “name”) as “mankind” or as a particular human community, their unity or unified meaning inthis sense,their “round dance of the people.”

Benjamin: Angel as Messenger,Reconstructing the Message, Pure Language

Some of the various possible interpretations of Benjamin’s “Theses on thePhilosophy of History”will naturally bring into play Marx and Engels’ point in TheGerman Ideology (1845) that history can be neither an empirical list of facts or, atthe other extreme, an Hegelian idealism according to which history is really thehistory of Ideas, and “the philosophy of history is the history of philosophy.”15

There are also various interpretations of the Benjaminian angel of Thesis IX and ofthe Paul Klee painting (“Angelus Novus”) that inspired it; while Benjamin in hisearlier writing may give a more “violent” reading of the painting, the angel of Thesis IX seems more compassionate, uncertain, hopeless, and perhaps himselfdoomed (see note 7). In the famous passage picturing this angel standing and facingbackward toward the past—in the painting he is facing us—we are clearly notwithin a strictly historical or philosophical discourse but rather within the realm ofmetaphor, allegory, parable, the realm in which not only Kafka but also Nietzscheoften seem to find themselves at home. We also cannot forget the mystical-Jewishroots shared by Kafka and Benjamin and, more generally, the dominant role playedby paradoxical and darkly ironic folktales (parables) in the Jewish religioustradition; we are reminded of both of these points by the frequency of Benjamin’s references to just such folktales in the longer of his two essays on Kafka inIlluminations, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death.”

Here I am assuming thatwith this “angel of history” we are really on the level of a parabolic discourse which does not just “throw beside itself” (the literal meaning of paraballein) but also “throws beyond itself,” that as with all figurativeor poetic language there can be no single, determinate interpretation. The

15 This directly follows their announcement, contra Hegel, that material existence precedes and

gives rise to Bewusstsein, consciousness, just as productive forces precede and give rise to cultureand ideology.

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interpretation I want to suggest here must obviously be seen in this light. I amsuggesting then that this angel is a sort of messenger (angelikos) who has suddenlyappeared within human time and history, not to bring a message from God (thetraditional angelic role but in some sense to “reconstruct” a very old message,essentially that which the builders of the Tower of Babel were trying to send to Godby constructing their tower. This is the message of their own communal identity as(one part or one name of) “mankind,”their “divine humanness” which they would assert by reaching up to heaven itself, to God Himself, with their tower.

We assume that this angel has just arrived from the remote future (it may beone reason the angel is facing toward the past), or rather from out of a trans-temporal dimension that we might, thinking of Messianic time, associate with theremote future; it is now about to be blown back into this remote future by a stormblowing from Paradise, which as “Eden” is located by the Bible in the remote past. If we also assume that God is now in or associated with this (trans-temporal) remotefuture, then Benjamin might be associating Him—it’s one possible interpretation ofthe passage—with a rapidly progressing and ever more repressive capitalism. Theangel’s longing to “make whole” all the pieces of wreckage now accumulated at his feet could imply his longing to get back to that distant Paradise in order to somehowrenew or regenerate human civilization, human history.

But if the storm blowing out of Paradise toward the future might itselfrepresent this somehow mistaken or tragic “force” of history, the driving force toward increasing accumulation and also toward self-destruction, fragmentation,chaos, perhaps we could also locate God back in this Paradise or associate Him withit, a view which of course also fits numerous passages in the Bible including thenarrative of the Tower of Babel. We do also know that Benjamin associated Klee’s “Angelus Novus” painting with “a Jewish tradition according to which God continually creates innumerable angels in order to have them sing his praise for ashort moment and then makes them perish” (Werckmeister 244, see note 7), so thatit is also possible that the angel himself is now being destroyed (“blown away”) but this fierce storm blowing out of paradise. But is the Thesis IX angel then a“rebellious” one insofar as he wishes in vain (for he gets blown away first) that hecould “undo” his Creator’s work by starting human history all over again from the beginning? In any case, our uncertainty about where the angel has just come fromechoes his own confusion about his future direction: he wants to fly “back” but isblown “forward,” he is facing in two directions at the same time like Kafka’s too-rapidly-evolved ape-man and, more subtly perhaps, his Imperial Messenger.


With the line, “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of hisfeet” we also get the sort of time-warp or discontinuous time we are familiar withfrom Nietzsche and Kafka. The angel sees as compressed into a single moment theentire course, the single and total “catastrophe” of a history which is equivalent tothe pile of wreckage it has produced—the accumulated fragments of humancivilization, the ruins left by war (Benjamin wrote this between the two world wars),the pieces remaining from the inevitable falling-apart of everything made by humantechnology. Or perhaps not only a single moment: there is a slight ambiguity here, atemporal rupture orparadox of sorts, since this “one single catastrophe keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”Moreover, we might see this wreckage that is piled(almost instantaneously) piece-by-piece as a sort of strange “construction,”see thisheap as a sort of tower. The scene gives us a variation on Kafka’s construction-as-destruction (deconstruction), the virtual equivalence and even simultaneity ofconstruction-and-destruction, and it could even imply a (new or old) Tower ofBabel that has been built and then torn down—or built precisely so that it wouldcollapse of itself—though in the Biblical story God (not human history)“collapses” it metaphorically through the fragmentation of a single human language or human“name” into many pieces, into a multiplicity of tongues.

Perhaps then we could interpret this messenger-angel’s potential butimpossible project as being one of “reconstructing the original message” byreturning to Paradise, to the original human society, and putting back together thosefragments of mankind’sarch-language, first language. This praxis of restoringmankind’sinitial common language or common name, restoring the humancommunity’s original unity, harmony, freedom would then be metaphoricallyassociated with that of putting the pieces of the broken tower back together. Nowone might try to pursue this in terms of Benjamin’snotion of a “pure language”in“The Task of the Translator”(1923), the Introduction to his translation ofBaudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens. Here he says that “all suprahistorical kinship oflanguages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole—an intention,however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only bythe totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language. . .” (Benjamin, Illuminations 72).

[The] task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect[Intention] upon the language into which he is translating whichproduces in it the echo of the original. . . . Unlike a work of literature,

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translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest buton the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering,aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its ownlanguage, the reverberation of the work in the alien one. (74, 76)16

But now it seems we are dealing only with echoes, that pure language is only“present in its absence,” as a Derridean might say. We are always on the outsidelooking in, never really in the center. This could be one way to explain why theangel’s task is (always already) an impossible one, an impossible dream, just asKafka is always somehow dealing with impossibility—the infinite delay, theinevitable collapse of what is constructed. That other French symbolist poet,Mallarmé,speaks of the “immortal word” but only in the context of silence and lack.

The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supremeone is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories or evenwhispering, the immortal word still remains silent [mais tacite encorel'immortelle parole]; the diversity of idioms on earth preventseverybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one singlestroke, would materialize as truth. (Mallarmé 166)

Benjamin quotes this passage at the center of “The Task of the Translator”(Illuminations 77), and Hannah Arendt comments on Benjamin’s appropriation ofMallarmé in her Editor’sIntroduction to Illuminations:

. . . the spoken languages in their multiplicity and diversity suffocate,as it were, by virtue of their Babel-like tumult, the “immortelle

16 Here Benjamin obliquely refers to Baudelaire’s “Correspondences”:

Nature is a temple where living pillarsSometimes allow confused words to escape;Man passes there through forests of symbolsThat watch him with familiar glances

Like long drawn-out echoes mingled far awayInto a deep and shadowy unity,Vast as darkness and light,Scents, colors and sounds answer one another. (Baudelaire 1361)


parole,”which cannot even be thought . . . and thus prevent the voiceof truth from being heard on earth with the force of material, tangibleevidence. . . . [Benjamin’s] basic approach . . . remained unchanged:not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions oflinguistic creations, but to understand them in their crystallized andthus ultimately fragmentary form as intentionless andnoncommunicative utterances of a “world essence.”What else doesthis mean than that he understood language as an essentially poeticphenomenon? (50)

Here we get the fragmentation and concealment of a pure language, word,name, truth or (human) meaning, and the main thrust of the passage could also fitthe angel of history’s impossible project in Thesis IX. The immortal word, “which cannot even be thought,” is “suffocated” by or beneath the “Babel-like tumult” ofthe multiple languages into which God fragmented the original universal language.The image of “linguistic creations . . . in their crystallized and thus ultimatelyfragmentary form,” that form in which they become “intentionless andnoncommunicative utterances of a ‘world essence,’”also recalls the implicitlyfragmentary nature of a Wall or Tower that is being simultaneously constructed anddeconstructed, one whose essential nature is therefore discontinuous, filled withgaps, “fragmentary.”These images of crystallization and fragmentation may alsodescribe the break between finite time-history and a higher time-history, the breakwe get in the problematic transmission of Nietzsche’s death-of-God message andKafka’s death-of-Emperor message and also in Benjamin’s Thesis XVIII A, where the historian “grasps the constellation which hisown age has formed with a definiteearlier one” and thus “establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time” (Benjamin, Illuminations263).17

If we think of this “time of the now shot through with chips of Messianic time” in relation to the (Babelian, post-Babelian) fragmentary nature of language,

17 Compare this with Thesis XVII: “Materialistic historiography . . . is based on a constructive

principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Wherethinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration ashock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historicalsubject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of aMessianic cessation of happening . . . , a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (Benjamin, Illuminations 262).

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then, we must assume that any potential “pure language” existing in the trans-temporal, messianic future and/or in a true, pre-Babelian Paradise could not exist(intact, in totalized form, “pure”) in our present merely-human time-history. But itis the (inevitably indefinitely delayed or deferred) possibility of such a languagethat Benjamin may be often thinking of, even, I am suggesting, in Thesis IX. Forhere he may be correlating the notion of a pure language, meaning, (human) namewith that of a true (unified, universal) “humanity.” And yet this remains an “impossible possibility,” one that cannot be realized in this world, even with the aid of angels suddenly blown in from another one. ThusBenjamin’s view in “The Taskof the Translator,” more obviously in “On Language as Such and on the Languageof Man”18 and possibly even in Thesis IX may allow for a pure human languagewhich, while lost, is still present in its absence and is perhaps even associated (in itsunknowability) with God, with God’s own (original andunspoken) “language.”

Derrida, on the other hand, in “Les Tours de Babel” (“tours” can mean “twists” and “turns” and “tropes” as well as “towers”) deconstructs any such notionof a pure language by pointing out that in the original Tower of Babel parable,God’s own name is also “Babel”: “YHWH disperses them from here over the face of all the earth. / They cease to build the city. / Over which he proclaims his name:Bavel [sic], Confusion, / for there, YHWH confounds the lip of all the earth, / andfrom there [He] disperses them over the face of all the earth”(Derrida 248-49). Ineffect deconstructing the Hebrew text itself, Derrida points out a slippage betweenthe propername “Bavel” (“Father-God”) and the common noun “bavel” (nonsense, a mixture or chaos of languages), both senses having been present in the Hebrewlanguage of that time. If, then, as it seems we are allowed to do, we take God’s name as “Bavel” in the sense of “Confusion,” our whole concept of God or divinity in any traditional sense gets “deconstructed”—or perhaps just “confused.” Derrida

18 In “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916) Benjamin says: “[T]he

linguistic being of man is his language. . . . Naming . . . is the innermost nature of languageitself . . . in which language itself communicates itself absolutely. . . . The Bible expresses thissymbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath [legein, Logos, the divine Word] intoman . . .” (Benjamin, Reflections 317-21). Benjamin distinguishes the lower ontological plane,which can “be expressed” (named) but cannot “express,” from humans and finally God, who can name/express but become decreasingly expressible. God is the inexpressible force of pureexpression, who however did not create man by naming him: “He did not wish to subject him to language, but in man God set language, which had served Him as medium of creation, free.God . . . left his creative power to itself in man. . . . Man is the knower in the same language inwhich God is creator. . . . All human language is only reflection of the word in name” (323; emphasis in original).


is thus also deconstructing Benjamin’s still-logocentric assumption of a “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator” by problematizing the concept of “translation”: he does this by showing the break, the aporia between the inter-translatability of the plethora of human languages (even if together they constitute,are heard as, a “babel”) and the untranslatability of any proper name, and especiallywhen it is God’s name and it is the name “Babel” (“Confusion,”“Chaos”) asopposed to the name “Humanity”(Derrida 251-53).19

Arguably, then, Kafka (not to mention Nietzsche) is still more skeptical thanBenjamin in the latter’sessays on language and translation, but with Thesis IX thecase is not so clear. If “God’s name as Confusion” may be one way to read theambiguous and self-negating role of the Emperor in “The Great Wall of China,” “God’s name as impossibility” (the Emperor is always absent) may be another. In Thesis IX both“Confusion” and “Impossibility” might describethe angel—perhapshis name is Babel?—while God may be Impossible here in His absence (rather thanin the futility of His project). God as Impossibility, a notion which may have echoesin certain forms of esoteric, hermetic or mystical Judaism and Christianity, doeseasily fit Kafka’swell-known parable “Before the Law” (Vor dem Gesetzt)—whereLaw could also mean God, Heaven, Truth, Justice—from the end of The Trial. Herethe man from the country, who wants to know what crime he has been accused of,waits his whole life outside the gateway to the Law—actually the first and furthestout of many gateways in a Chinese-box structure, suggesting the infinitely-delayingseries of walls in the Imperial Messenger parable, the “true” Law being in the center—and just before finally dying he asks the powerful gatekeeper why he hasnever been allowed to enter even this outermost gate. The gatekeeper replies that“This gate is for you alone, and now that you are dying it will be closed.”20

19 See Stevenson’s discussion of this, Benjamin, and Serres in “Configurations of Babel.”20 Benjamin in “Franz Kafka” describes a conversation he had with Kafka’s good friend Max Brod, in which the latter said: “I remember a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. ‘We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,’ Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. ‘Oh no,’ said Kafka, ‘our world is only a bad mood ofGod, a bad day of his.’ ‘Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us’” (Illuminations 116).

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Conclusion: Angel as Interruption

Angels are traditionally messengers carrying messages from God to man, butin Benjamin’s parable the angel wants to reconstruct the original message by “making whole” the fragments of history that are suddenly thrown in a growing heap at its feet. We also could see this angel as a sudden “interruption,” like that of the man in Kafka’s “The Bridge” and the overman in Zarathustra’s parable of the tightrope walker. The angel’s sense as interruption is clear not only from his sudden appearance but from the fact that he seems torn between two realities and two times(immanent and transcendent, finite and eternal), between two kinds of being orsubjectivity (human-divine) and also between two directions: he is facing backtoward the past, wanting to go this way, but is blown backwards into the future. Heis himself the very point of disruption or discontinuity at the middle of the bridge.

Interestingly enough, according to non-linear dynamics (or chaos theory) andinformation theory an “interruption of the signal” can itself restore order.21 Thebasic idea is that all order is generated through the self-ordering of chaos (disorder),while excessive order (hyper-repetition, redundancy) may become again disorder. Itis as if order and disorder, construction and deconstruction were two sides of thesame coin, reversed or Gestalt-switched, although the chaos of hyper-order, whichFrench mathematician and chaos-theorist Michel Serres in Genesis calls “blank chaos,” must be distinguished from the original disorder or “dark chaos.”22 Disorder

21 In “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” (1934) Benjamin speaks of Kafka’s temporal dynamics in the context of moving heavy weights. For example: “Georg Lukacs once said that in order to make a decent table nowadays, a man must have the architectural geniusof a Michelangelo. If Lukacs thinks in terms of ages, Kafka thinks in terms of cosmic epochs. Theman who whitewashes has epochs to move, even in his most insignificant movement. On manyoccasions and often for strange reasons Kafka’s figures clap their hands. Once thecasual remarkis made that these hands are ‘really steam hammers’” (Illuminations 112). (The impossibly heavyproject of “moving epochs” suggests the angel’s situation.) Kafka thus dreams of escaping into absolute speed, as in “The Wish to Be a Red Indian,” where it seems Heaven/Earth or eternity/death (thinking of earth as ground, that is, as under-ground) get collapsed into a purehorizon, pure horizontality. Benjamin also quotes from this story in his 1934 essay: “[This] ardent ‘wish . . .’ may have consumed this great sadness at some point. ‘If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering briefly over thequivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there were no spurs, threw away the reins, forthere were no reins, and barely saw the land before one as a smoothly mown heath, with thehorse’s neck and head already gone’” (Illuminations 119).

22 A related theory, bearing some relation to Einsteinian and contemporary physics and alsodiscussed by Serres, is that while in the realm of “order” time is obviously linear (moving only from past to future) and irreversible, in the realm of pure “disorder” time may be reversible,


can also be correlated with noise, and order with (e.g., linguistic) sound and sense.While too much background noise will drown out a signal or message, we still needa minimum amount of noise or silence between individual signals (which consist ofmeaningful sounds) in order to distinguish them and thus make meaning possible.The latter kind of noise is said to “restore” meaning, sense, order when we are in a state of blank-chaotic noise, that is, in a state of hyper-order or hyper-repetition (aswith the signals“areyouhowareyouhoware. . .,” “A=A=A=A=A”).Thus “meaning” and “communication” exist in a middle-realm between a surrounding backgroundnoise (and/or silence) and the noisy (or silent) spaces-between individual signals;the background noise or static (the sound we get between stations/channels on aradio/TV) that “leaks down” to come-between individual signals is needed torestore order, sound, meaning, sense. Thus the noise that drowns out the signal orthe communication is one kind of interruption, while the noise-between-signals thatrestores meaning is another kind.

Therefore it might also be possible to see Benjamin’s “angel of interruption”—marking as he does the breaking-point or point of discontinuity atthe midpoint of the trans-temporal bridge—as being it/her/himself “noise” but the good sort of noise, the meaning/order-restoring noise. 23 After all, “to restore

meaning that moving past-to-future and future-to-past are both possible. And at the beginning of“Some Reflections on Kafka” (contained in a letter to Gerhard Scholem dated June 12, 1938),Benjamin reveals his own interest in quantum mechanics, the other side of relativity theory, byway of describing Kafka’s sense of being “a modern big-city dweller”:

If one reads the following passage from Eddington’s The Nature of the PhysicalWorld, one can virtually hear Kafka speak: “I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove againstan atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch ofmy body. I must make sure of landing on a plank traveling at twenty miles asecond round the sun. . . . I must do so while hanging from a round planet headingoutward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at nobody knows howmany miles a second through every interstice of my body. . . . The plank has nosolidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I notslip through? . . . I may hope that the net result will be that I remain aboutsteady . . . Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle thanfor a scientific man to pass through a door . . .”

In all of literature I know no passage which has the Kafka stamp to the sameextent. (Illuminations 141-42)

23 But what would it mean for the messenger to bring, or himself embody, the interruptingmessage or signal that would be the “bad” sort of noise, the dark-chaotic noise that drowns out allmeaning and sense? One might think here of terrorism and of messenger-as-suicide-bomber.

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meaning” could also mean “to reconstruct the original message” (or “original signal”), and thus might fit the above interpretation of the angel’s impossible goal of “making it whole” by reconstructing mankind’s original, pre-Babelian language,sense, meaning. Now we would be taking the angel as background noise and/orsilence—perhaps as a dark-chaotic background noise/silence which, “coming-between,” would restore the pre-Babelian pure language, or (the same thing viewedin another way) a background noise/silence out of which the “order” of humanity’s common language was formed—which also raises the question of where to locateBenjamin’s pure language, seemingly lying behind or between the “echoes,” inrelation to this “difference” between background noise/silence and ordered (meaningful) language.

This may seem to be getting rather far away from the ostensible context ofBenjamin’s “angel of history” passage, but it is an interpretation that Serres would like. In his book The Parasite—in French “parasite” has the English sense but also means “static”—and also in several interviews in recent years, Serres, referringfreely to traditional Judaic and Christian texts (especially the Bible, both Old andNew Testaments), has often spoken of “angels”—those “messengers” who traditionally “come-between” man and God—as “points of light” and “explosive noises” which restore meaning and order.

“News” has always been a function of information, of transmittingsignals.But today’s increased speed and efficiency of transmission means an ever-increasing number of signals needing spaces-between and an ever-increasingrepetition of signals (as in advertising),leaving less and less “space” to go-between;thus the noise may actually be getting “louder.”This increasing compression ordensity is seen in the fact that all forms of media that are not already website- andtwitter-based also expand (along with their advertisements of themselves) into thesenewest channels. We also have the self-reflection of social networking which hasnow reached the point, with twitter, where people lead virtual lives by followingevery move of another person (perhaps a celebrity), and the self-embedment ofHBO’s advertisements of its advertisements of a film which itself advertises the car you want to buy and promotes the actor you have been following on twitter, and soforth. This increasing density of “information” may be tied to the Baudrillardian notion of hyper-reality, the becoming-virtual of the “real” world.24

24 Arguably, given that the planet is becoming increasingly “twitterized,” with human bird-

tweets chirping uninterruptedly in an increasingly interlocked, horizontal or rhizomic network, theparadigm is changing away from that of a single announcer and single receiver on a linear path,


Yet it is also true that during the uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011, New York Times reporter Bill Kristoff was able to warn manyprotesters in the crowd, with a single twitter message, that a “government thug” wielding a nail-studded club was now walking into their midst: the sending of thisvital, perhaps life-saving message, received by people on the immediate “scene” and also by many, many more around the world who were simultaneously (and alsolater) reading it“on twitter,” was of course later described (repeated) by Kristoff in a news article and also in an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN—which is howthis author “heard the news.”We also saw this very ancient, very primitive functionof breaking news to warn us with the Haiti and Japan earthquakes and theiraftermath, but in the Tahrir Square case and others like it across North Africaduring the North African Spring, information technology made a quantum leap indemonstrating its radically localized, instantaneous power to spark and spread apotentially revolutionary political“wave,” a noisy political “interruption.”

But even with such vital breaking-news stories we see something like anindefinite (if not quite infinite) “delay.” New(s) stories are continuous to varyingdegrees and in different ways. Some have no clear beginning-point (e.g., thetelevised July 2011 Casey Anthony trial and government debt-default crisis in theUSA)—but did Nietzsche’s madman’s message refer to an event with a clear beginning-point?—though they may have an endpoint of sorts (the surprising not-guilty verdict, perhaps Obama’s August 2 speech to the “nation,”both broadcastsimultaneously and then later, again and again); others begin from a single breaking“event”like Japan’s earthquake-and-tsunami but still have no clear ending in sight.Such catastrophicevents can only “break” once, that is, when we first hear/see/readthe news, though this may be some time after others have heard it, and on the otherhand they keep breaking again and again every time we hear the newest (latest)developments regarding a particular news story or news event. (How clearly can wedistinguish between the event and the story?) But for those who directly experiencea given event, it was the event itself which broke the news to them; the gianttsunami as it came crashing in, breaking down all the walls, in effect broke its own

bridge or “line.” Given the increasing density of all the single (individual) one-to-one messagesbeing sent and received with less and less “space-between,” it may begin to seem that not the interrupted/interrupting message and/or messenger but the global population itself becomes anoisy and expanding explosion . . . one which tends to draw our attention to what is “above” or “outside” the earth, listening to it/us—an orbiting satellite perhaps or puzzled angel.

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news, and perhaps Nietzsche’s madman represents this radically immanent sense of “news breaking itself .”25

There is also an eerie sense in which we already know certain things willhappen—not just the spread of the North African Spring to still another country,perhaps another continent, but (sooner or later, somewhere or other) elections,earthquakes, new wars breaking out. In this sense, even though the news may havetraveled to us from very far away (North Africa, Japan), if not quite from a place“still further than the furthest stars”—and while today’s electronic media have cut the time of delivery down to almost zero, this time would quickly increase thefurther the “announcer” is from earth, especially for the medium of sound but, further out still, even for that of light—it is as if we “already knew it,” perhaps almost as if we had “brought it about ourselves.”

Works CitedArendt, Hannah. Introduction. Illuminations. By Walter Benjamin. Ed. Hannah

Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. 1-56.Baudelaire, Charles. “Correspondences.” The Norton Anthology of World

Masterpieces Ed. Maynard Mack et al. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton,1992. 1361.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.

—. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz.Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. DanaPolan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques.“Les Tours de Babel.”A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed.Peggy Kamuf. Trans. Joseph F. Graham. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 243-53.

Eddington, Arthur Stanley. The Nature of the Physical World. New York:Macmillan, 1929.

25 The whole issue of an unthinkable “event”—one that will either end the world (as in the

predicted 2012 catastrophe) or radically disrupt, break, change history (much more recent thanNietzsche’s and Benjamin’s, Žižek’s and Badiou’s ideas might come to mind here, particularly in the context of an unpredictable political upheaval or change)—is also a part of the larger contextof how such an event might be (or could not possibly be) interpreted, reported, understood.


Kafka, Franz.Kafka’s Selected Stories. Trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold. New York:Norton, 2007.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. Mallarmé. Ed. A. Hartley. Baltimore: Penguin, 1965.Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International,

1970.Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann.

New York: Viking, 1954.Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. L. R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,

1982.—. Genesis. Trans. G. James and J. Nielson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Stevenson, Frank W. “Configurations of Babel: Benjamin, Derrida, Serres.”Studies

in English Language and Literature 26 (2000): 1-24.Werckmeister, O. K. “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, orthe Transfiguration

of the Revolutionary into the Historian.” Critical Inquiry 22.2 (1996): 239-67.

About the AuthorFrank Stevenson has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College; he teaches westernliterature and literary theory at Chinese Culture University and part-time at NTNU. He haspublished essays on Chinese-Western comparative philosophy in journals—Philosophy Eastand West, the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Soziale Systeme, Dao: A Journal ofComparative Philosophy, and Tamkang Review—and in two books, Buddhisms andDeconstructions and China/West Interculture; essays on Virginia Woolf in Journal of theShort Story in English and on Nietzsche, Deleuze, Kafka and others in Concentric; andbooks on Poe and the works of Madison Morrison.

[Received 16 April 2011; accepted 3 June 2011]

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“Still More Distant Than the Most Distant Stars” of Newness...this theme of delivering—or of attempting but failing to deliver, finding it impossible to deliver—the paradoxically