Abstract

This dissertation describes the role of voice, writing, and the body in Kafka's works within three philosophical frameworks: Derrida's deconstruction of the primacy of voice over writing, Foucault's history of punishment, and Kittler's work on the technologization of literary texts in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. ;Taking Derrida's thesis that writing was repressed in the history of metaphysics as a point of departure, the chapter on the history and theory of voice and writing situates Kafka's texts in respect to logo-phonocentrism: the Kafkan text is informed by a struggle between voice and writing which prevents it from being identical with itself. Texts such as Der Prozes, "Vor dem Gesetz," "Ein Traum," and "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" are ruled by differance, a "writing before the letter" which simultaneously writes Kafka's texts and renders them unreadable. ;In the chapter on " 'Physiotext': Der Korper als Schauplatz der Schrift," then, such a malfunctioning of the literary text is shown to be the malfunctioning of the body as well as of the writing machine in "In der Strafkolonie." First, Freud's "Notiz uber den Wunderblock" serves as the model for the text's impossible attempt to inscribe the law as origin onto a body, then Foucault's Discipline and Punish provides the historical bedding for this impossibility: while the old law's literality had turned the body into a simulacrum of the law as signifier, the new law, which treats the body as a circulating sign and thus informs it with the phenomenology of the voice, destroys the writing machine as well as the body. ;The final chapter, then, on the role of the telephone in "Der Nachbar" and Das Schlos, shows that this technical medium is Kafka's quintessential writing machine: its fusion of presence and absence makes it a phantasmatic supplement of his malfunctioning writing machines, a machine which writes without writing, which produces a writing outside of a meaning informed by the structure of the voice