Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
Living Entirely on Me: The Emergent Reality of Communication in Kafka’s Letter to
the Father
I want to preface my talk with the remark that my argument has morphed somewhat
since I proposed this essay to this panel. My basic claim was that Kafka’s language in his
Letter to the Father exhibited a structure that, instead of absolving himself and his father from
guilt, as he claims, that language implicates both of them in an existential condition of guilt. I
proposed to show this by formalizing the structure of Kafka’s language by using formal logic
and applying a relevant theorem. This argument is still a central part of my essay. However,
while this approach may invite the conclusion to view the Letter to the Father as a piece of
literature, I realized that this formalization needs to be embedded in a frame of Luhmannian
systems theory. Such a frame prohibits viewing the Letter either as literature or as a
biographical document. Instead, systems theory invites us to view the Letter as a message that
belongs to a communicative act in a communicative interaction system between two psychic
systems. With this change of perspective, I hope to suggest productive ways out of the dead
ends that have stifled scholarship on Kafka’s Letter and prevented it from becoming a fruitful
catalyst for Kafka scholarship in general. But I shall start from the beginning.
Franz Kafka’s Letter to the Father has always sat uneasily among Kafka scholars. The
question of its genre placement – is it a piece of literature or a biographical document? – has
caused perplexity from the days of Max Brod, who insisted on the Letter’s biographic status,
yet published it in a volume of fictional writings by Kafka, until today. Scholars do not tire to
single out the Letter as a key text for understanding Kafka (be it “the person,” or his
“work”…). Yet, in his contribution to the 2010 Kafka Handbook, Daniel Weidner identifies
the Letter’s “factual-fictitious hybrid status” as the core reason that has frustrated scholarship
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
on the Letter (294). Studies and commentaries attempted biographical, psychoanalytical,
literary, sociohistorical, metaphysical, and deconstructive approaches. Each study sought to
either reduce the Letter to literature or a biographical document, or declared the two strands
irreconcilable. None of the studies could satisfy. Scholarship on the Letter to the Father has
foundered on constraining genre categories and their admissible analytical methods.
I therefore want to propose systems theory as a theoretical frame that does not
approach the Letter from any genre, or even the problem of genre. A quick crash course into
systems theory: Luhmann describes as autopoietic system anything that draws a boundary
between itself and an environment according to a guiding difference which determines how
every “input” from the environment is processed. The system is always less complex than
the “overcomplex” environment. The environment thus irritates the system with complexity,
which defends its boundary by reducing complexity. The system evolves autopoietically when
it registers a paradox that threatens to undo it, and it de-paradoxifies this paradox (it doesn’t
solve it!) by reintroducing the guiding difference between system and environment into the
system. It has then ascended onto a higher level of self-observation. Among others, there are
social systems and psychic systems, which can never coincide, as they are always in each
other’s environment. Autopoietic systems are operationally closed and environmentally
open. Social systems operate via communicative acts, psychic systems via consciousness.
While less intuitive than traditional terminologies, systems theory, with its emphasis
on communication, is apposite to take account of the Letter’s communicative structure.
Systems theory also provides tools for distinguishing different levels of observation, as well as
a non-dialectical conception of dealing with paradoxes, two salient traits of Kafka’s writing.
Most importantly, systems theory conceives of reality as emerging in a system that co-evolves with
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
its environment. It does not rely on an “inside-outside” or “life vs. literature” distinction. We
only have the Letter to work with, and everything that emerges beyond the Letter, we see
through the Letter.
Pinpointing the system in question is straightforward, although it is not trivial. The
social system in question is an interaction system between the father and Franz,1 each of whom
are psychic systems. The two psychic systems are the environment to that social interaction
system, while each psychic system recognizes the respective other as a psychic system in its
environment. As with any social system, the autopoietically closed operation of the
interaction system between father and Franz is communication, and whatever the system
recognizes as an act of communication is an element to that system. Communicative acts
consist in a unity of information, transmission via a message, and understanding, all of which
are selections by the social system. The success of a communicative act is tied to the
occurrence of all three. The Letter to the Father is (or presents itself to us as) a message.2
While there are in fact many messages contained in the 100-page “monster letter,”
functionally, the Letter presents itself as a message about the father and Franz’s
communication. The Letter opens: “Dearest Father / You asked me recently why I maintain
that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of an answer to your question” (138).
The Letter goes on to minutely dissect the structure of their communication. The Letter
makes the appeal to be understood as a message in a communicative act about the
communication in which it appears: it presents itself as an instance of the interaction system’s
Whenever I refer to “Franz” in this essay, it is not the “real Kafka,” nor any other subjectivity, but rather the
speaking voice of the Letter that identifies itself as “Franz” in the end. Brune performs a similar move.
2 It therefore does not matter whether or not the Letter reached the father, nor whether Kafka intended it to
reach the father, since the father’s understanding of the Letter does not concern us here. In fact, the real father
and the real Franz Kafka also matter only tangentially, namely insofar as they perturbed the interaction system,
in which the Letter then emerged. Their ontological statuses, their characteristic traits, or the “truthfulness of
their representations” in the Letter do not matter.
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
self-description. From a systems theoretical perspective, the Letter must therefore be
approached on the two levels on which it operates. First, we need to ask the question: how
does the Letter describe the interaction system between father and Franz? Second: how does this selfdescription affect the interaction system itself? The first question calls for a retracing and reenacting
of the language with which the system describes itself, the second for a stepping onto the
systems theoretical observer level to this description.
It is therefore in order to retrace the structure of the Letter’s self-referential language.
Systems theory does not prescribe a choice of method here, since this self-description occurs
within the system and is thus leaves the choice entirely up to the system. I submit that the Letter
attempts to be a rigorous, methodical proof of Franz’s innocence. In an unpublished letter
to his father, Kafka writes that he sought to refute his father’s reproaches and absolve
himself from guilt with a “system that would be fully convincing.” In letters to Milena,
Kafka exhorts her: “while reading, understand all lawyerly ruses, it is a lawyer’s letter,” and:
“the letter is too much constructed towards its goal.” It is therefore not excessive to
formalize the rigorous logical structure that frames Franz’s case for his innocence that he
makes before the court of the patriarch.
What follows in my original essay is a painstaking 9-page passage in which I
formalize Franz’s language using Kurt Gödel’s calculus of gödel numbering and show that it
fulfills the requirements for a theorem by the name of Diagonal Lemma to apply. I will skip
this laborious part and only remark that the basic move of gödel numbering consists in
taking two sets of expressions and relating them in a way that every expression in one set is
associated with exactly one expression from the other set. We thus have a set of expression
pairs, and by the gödel calculus we can find every expression if we are given its counterpart. I
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
apply this calculus to the set of the father’s propositional statements on some action x by
Franz, and to the interpretation Franz gives to those statements: with each statement the
father makes, he also says that Franz is guilty.
Gödel devised this tool to deal with the logical problems self-referential statements
such as “this statement is false.” I will cut to the punch line and say that, after showing that
Gödel’s Diagonal Lemma applies to Franz’s doubled language in the Letter and it shows that,
on the system’s formal logical level, Franz is indeed innocent. However, the Lemma also
shows that the father’s language never thematizes guilt. It is, indeed, Franz who introduces the
question of guilt, and he inexorably mires himself in a basic condition of guilt that he keeps
alive precisely in his struggle against it.
It is thus useful to shift to the systems theoretical observer’s perspective, one that
undercuts the assumptions of two integral, interacting subjects (Are they real? Or literary
creations by Kafka? Or by some fictive speaker of the Letter?) to whom the predicate “guilty”
or “innocent” can be attached via a deductive proof. It is fruitful to conceive of a
communicative interaction system in which guilt emerges as a reality.
In the opening lines, Franz characterizes the father’s statements to which he reacts as
“reproaches.” Luhmann’s analysis of communicative acts into information, transmitted
message, and understanding shows, however, that a reproach only becomes effective as a
reproach in the communication system if it is understood as such. Otherwise, it has missed its
mark and is a mere statement of fact. Even a statement such as, “You are guilty for doing
x,” would elicit a mere, “Yes, I am” from the addressee without her feeling guilty. A reproach,
like any act of communication, requires an interpretation. It does not expose a guilt that is
concentrated in, or predicatively attached to, some “subject,” but rather a notion that is
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
communicatively distributed in the system. Psychic systems can of course defend themselves
by making themselves impenetrable to reproaches by never interpreting any communicative
act as such. This might be the source of Franz’s father’s “enigmatic innocence and
inviolability” (152). Guilt emerges in communication only if the participants understand
messages as implicating them and if they respond accordingly. Thus, if Franz’s communication
partner takes up communication with Franz in the language he has set up – trying to prove
his own or someone else’s guilt or innocence by leveling or rebutting reproaches – he will
also inexorably mire himself in guilt.
It turns out that Franz attempts to do precisely that to his father. It is by making his
father mire himself in the same ineluctable basic condition of guilt that Franz sees a chance
in, if not defeating him, at least leveling the playing field of their battle. “[T]he success of this
whole letter” (182) is thus staked on one question: can Kafka get his father to engage in the
discourse of guilt? All Franz has to elicit is a response of counterattack or self-justification
from the father—after that, the communication system’s logical calculus kicks in and takes
care of the rest. The main body of the Letter – indeed, almost the entire Letter – is devoted to
achieving this response by a battery of symmetrization moves. Again, I will skip enumerating
them in detail, but even a cursory rereading reveals the extent to which Franz stages his
relationship with the father in a way that, ultimately, every statement by Franz becomes a
suggestion of the father’s guilt. One of the crasser examples is Franz’s remark that “I had to
make good the wrongs done them [the shop workers] by you in the business” (170).
Franz spins a suggestive web of guilt that is almost ineluctable for the father. The
Letter is a message in a communicative interaction system in which the recipient can hardly
avoid a self-justificatory response. It thus might seem odd that Kafka (the person) never sent
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
the Letter to his father (the person). A communicative act can only be operative as such if the
message is transmitted from one psychic system to another to be understood. Such a
transmission, however, would have been a risky move for Kafka. Regardless of how salient
the provocation of a self-justification in the Letter is, the response from the receiving psychic
system, qua interaction system’s environment, cannot be predicted. No matter what the Letter
attempts to transmit, it could miss its mark.
Contrary to the real Kafka, Franz (of the Letter) can choose a foolproof strategy, one
whose success rests precisely on the real father not reading the Letter. A communicative act in
an interaction system connects to other communicative acts. Franz therefore performs the
ingenious move of including the father’s response message in his own message: he thus skips
the transactions across the system’s boundary and can control what the father says. Franz
has the father justify himself in a fierce and convoluted verbal defense:
“you are … trying … to acquit me too of all blame. Of course, in this latter
you only apparently succeed (and you do not want more, either), and what
appears between the lines … is that actually I have been the aggressor” (194).
The father asserts his innocence and is now drawn into the mire of guilt. The fact that the
real father does not level this response does not matter. The communicative system has
registered a response from the father, and its “origin” is determined by the system.3
As expected in a Kafka text, the Letter does not end here. Instead, Franz has his
father overshoot the mark by exposing the entire strategy of the Letter and turning the guilt
back on Franz (check the handout for the quote):
[SKIP] “And so for the time being, by means of your insincerity, you would
have achieved enough, for you have proved three things, first that you are
Indeed, we could go so far as to say that the real father did perturb the communicative system from his
position in the environment without doing anything: the system felt the father’s presence and registered a
message from him. To ask what the father “objectively did or did not do” cannot be meaningfully asked in
systems theory: it depends on the system.
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
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MLA Presentation Script
blameless, secondly that I am to blame, and thirdly that out of sheer
magnanimity are not only prepared to forgive me but … also to prove …
that I, contrary to the truth, am also blameless. … but it is still not enough.
What you are, in fact, set upon is living entirely on me. … [you engage in] the
fighting of the vermin, which not only sting but at the same time suck the
blood too to sustain their own life” (194-5).
The father calls his son a “vermin” that feeds off of him. Franz, thus exposed, has no real
response to his father except that he – Franz – had made him speak in the first place. Be that
as it may, the Letter’s nefarious strategy is exposed and the father reinstated in his powerful
position.
Far from toppling the Letter, however, the reinstatement of the powerful father is
crucial for the system’s autopoietic survival. If the father had merely asserted his innocence,
Franz would have been fully successful with his Letter. He would then no longer have a
battle to fight against his father, he would no longer be the “eternal son,”—and his writing,
impelled by their unequal relationship, would come to a sudden end. Leveling the playing
field once and for all would end the communicative system, whose guiding difference is that
of their asymmetric father-son relationship.
Thus, for his writing (and the communicative system) to continue, he inserts a
paradox yet again by having the father expose the system’s structure by entering the scene as
a second-order observer. Franz is thus forced to perform a move of de-paradoxification (in
the systems theoretical sense of not solving it, but of verbalizing it in making himself the
origin of the father’s quotation), and the fight continues on a level on which he has to assert
himself again. Yet, with the increased awareness into the structure of their struggle as
determined by the ineluctable guiding difference of overpowering lawgiving father vs. meek
guilty son, the two can continue the struggle with the calmness that is proper to the distance
of view they have achieved. They do in fact feed off of each other in their struggle, but they
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Tobias Kuehne
Yale University, Ph.D. 2018, Germanic Languages and Literatures
MLA Presentation Script
now do it in an atmosphere in which “something has yet been achieved that is so closely
approximate to the truth that it may be able to reassure us both a little and make our living
and our dying easier.”
Harnessing systems theoretical thinking in approaching the Letter to the Father has
achieved several things. By shedding the distinction of literary vs. biographical, systems
theory also avoids the double pitfall of dialectically synthesizing the two or deconstructively
leaving the two in an unreconciled paradox. Instead, systems theory shifts our focus to the
communication system in which the Letter is involved. The Letter contributes to the
emergence of a system that co-evolves with its environment (father and Franz). In this coevolution, reality emerges: guilt as an all-pervasive condition in that system becomes an
irrefutable given, while life and literature are neither merged nor separate.
Kafka claimed that his relationship to his father was the generative principle of his
writing. The Letter shows most purely how this guiding difference engenders writingproducing paradoxes, and it is in this way that I see the Letter as a model for understanding
Kafka’s writing as a whole. By the same token, I see systems theory as a fruitful frame for
analyzing letters, whether “fictional” or “real.”
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