Apocalyptic Futures by Russell Samolsky

Apocalyptic Futures by Russell Samolsky

chapter one
Metaleptic Machines
Kafka, Kabbalah, Shoah
We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring 
into the future.
—wa l t e r b e n j a m i n , “On the Concept of History”
The future is already here within me. The only change will be to 
make visible the hidden wounds.
—f r a n z k a f k a , in Janouch, Conversations with Kafka
kafka and shoah
Writing to his friend Gershom Scholem in June 1938, in a letter 
that would prove poignantly prophetic, Walter Benjamin claimed 
that Kafka’s world was “the exact complement of his era which 
is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a 
considerable scale. The experience which corresponds to that of 
Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become acces-

sible to the masses until such time as they are being done away 
with.”
 Although he wrestled with the temptation of granting 
Kafka a prophetic eminence, Benjamin desisted. Kafka’s “pre-

science” comes from a certain deep listening or auscultation of 
tradition and not from some farsightedness or prophetic vision:
If one says that he perceived what was to come without per-

ceiving what exists in the present, one should add that he 
perceived it essentially as an individual affected by it. His 
gestures of terror are given scope by the marvelous margin
which the catastrophe will not grant us. But his experience 
was based solely on the tradition to which Kafka surrendered; 

there was no far-sightedness or “prophetic vision.” Kafka lis-

tened to tradition, and he who listens hard does not see.
Despite Benjamin’s disavowal, Holocaust literature has conferred 
upon Kafka a prophetic power, and we may assign Benjamin’s let-

ter as an inaugural moment in the association of Kafka with the 
prophetic and apocalyptic that will obtain through the course of 
the century. George Steiner, for example, has claimed that Kafka 
“heard the name Buchenwald in the word birchwood” and that he 
“prophesied the actual forms of the disaster of Western human-

ism.”
 Similarly, Bertold Brecht, despite his predilection for practi-

cal ideology and crude thinking, echoes Steiner by arguing that:
We find in [Kafka] strange disguises prefiguring many 
things that were, at the time when his books appeared, plain 
to very few people. The fascist dictatorship was, so to speak, 
in the very bones of the bourgeois democracies, and Kafka 
described with wonderful imaginative power the future con-

centration camps, the future instability of the law, the future 
absolutism of the state apparat, the paralyzed, inadequately 
motivated, floundering lives of the many individual people; 
everything appeared as in a nightmare and with the confu-

sion and inadequacy of nightmare.
Brecht here sets up a haunting homology that links Kafka’s night-

mare vision with the nightmare world of the camps. Kafka’s 
“strange disguises,” in Brecht’s reading, now disclose the horror 
they prefigured, the surreal and atrocious nightmare into which 
the world would wake.
More circumspect than both Steiner and Brecht, Theodor 
Adorno critiques the prevailing tendency of some critics to as-

similate Kafka “into an established trend of thought while little 
attention is paid to those aspects of his work which resist such 
assimilation and which, precisely for this reason, require inter-

pretation.”
 Occupying a space somewhere between Benjamin 
and Brecht, Adorno sees Kafka’s art as unfolding a future out 
of the fragmented detritus of the present. For Adorno, Kafka 
does not

Apocalyptic Futures by Russell Samolsky