To describe Franz Kafka as a self-hating Jew (an epithet later mobilized against Hannah Arendt, Mihai Sebastian, Walter Benjamin, and various members of the Frankfurt School) is an attempt to discredit his thoughts on the basis of attacking his selfhood. It is—of course—a charge of disloyalty that carves the person outside of the group.

I was thinking about this when reading Kafka’s diaries—in entry written in 1922, less than two years before he died of tuberculosis—because it shows him reflecting on forms of non-arrival. To quote:

I have not shown the faintest firmness of resolve in the conduct of my life. It was as if I, like everyone else, had been given a point from which to prolong the radius of a circle, and had then, like everyone else, to describe my perfect circle round this point. Instead, I was forever starting my radius only constantly to be forced at once to break it off. (Examples: piano, violin, languages, Germanics, anti-Zionism, Zionism, Hebrew, gardening, carpentering, writing, marriage attempts, an apartment of my own.)

How does the poetics of non-arrival intersect with Kafka's final requests about his own posthumous body? 

When dying, Kafka passes an insoluble riddle—a story—to his best friend, in the form of a letter, a will, an epistle.

Dearest Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me … to be burned unread.

Kafka’s will is a message but it depends on how Max Brod translates it—or, in a sense, how interpretation inflects what Brod, himself, wills for the Kafka’s posthumous past. As we know, Brod’s will literally refuses Kafka’s will—though one could argue it obeys it figuratively.

Why didn’t Kafka ask for all the writings back so that he could burn them himself? Was it loyalty to his own words, or a fear of burning them, that kept him from doing the deed? Or did he know that Brod would not?

When we ask someone else to be responsible for our destruction, is that an act of trust or punishment?

Others have mentioned this paradox—the letter becomes part of Kafka’s corpus which is also preserved, but the letter also makes the demand to destroy the corpus, which would involve destroying the letter itself.

I’m interested in the questions Judith Butler has posed in “Who Owns Kafka?”:

So is this command a clear directive, or is it a gesture in the sense that Benjamin and Adorno described? Does he expect his message to reach its destination, or does he write the request knowing that messages and commands fail to reach those to whom they areaddressed, knowing that they will be subject to the same non-arrival about which he wrote? 

I’m interested in Kafka's own words on the epistolary, and perhaps the epistle, itself:

How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold – all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait.

Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing.

The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.

The letter is tied to living, or to the sense in which the writer is alive. The writer wonders if they should continue to exist after dying. At what point do we cease? And if one has a bone to pick with eternity or religious resurrection, why not erase one’s words and insist that they be buried with you?

"If one is not to romanticize, and permanently divide nations into the good ones and the bad ones, and thus perpetrate chauvinism, all these stories have to be told,” Yugoslavian-American writer Josip Novakovich has written.

But how can we tell an unromantic story about longing? Who is the speaker? Who is the nation? To whom do we owe the privilege of belonging?