Caygill - Kafka - in light of the accident

I have so much to do! In my four districts on top of my other work people fall off scaffoldings as if drunk, they fall into machines, all the beams topple, all the embankments subside, all the ladders slip and whatever someone passes up falls back and whatever is passed down is tripped over. And what headaches from all the girls in the porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with towers of crockery.

LETTER TO MAX BROD, SUMMER 1909

A place I have never been before: breath comes differently, a neighbouring star shining brighter than the sun.

17TH ZRAU APHORISM

Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of infinite space? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?

NIETZSCHE, THE GAY SCIENCE, 125

Your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.

BEATRIX POTTER, THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT

For Edi

For ease of reference, citations from Kafka refer first to an available English translation and then to the German edition.

Near midnight on 29 June 2009 a goods train derailed outside the station of the Italian resort of Viareggio. Its cargo of natural gas exploded causing many deaths and terrible injuries. Among the victims were people sleeping at home, a couple riding by on a motor-scooter, a man walking back from an evening with friends at a bar Id passed through the station a few hours before, but this accident was not meant for me. It provoked a furious outburst of attempts to make sense of it: a terrorist attack, an act of God, negligent maintenance of the track or rolling-stock all stories intent on explaining away the accident. Yet none could give any satisfactory reason why precisely those individuals had to be called to their singular fates on that summers night. None could convincingly point beyond harsh contingency to that semblance of necessity some hint of justice or at least responsibility that would lend meaning to the accident.

Waking the next day in a guest house in nearby Montignoso, I saw on the wall a framed photograph of a jetty on Lake Ullswater in the English Lake District. An improbable enough image to decorate a room in an Italian resort, it also had to be the scene of my earliest memory, the jetty from where I fell as a child into the lake and almost drowned. What are the chances of that reminder of a thwarted death by drowning appearing on that far away wall decades later at precisely that moment? So small that the highly improbable but evidently not-impossible chain of infinitesimal causes that brought me before this image assume the aspect of haunted necessity. And with this a portal opens onto what Kafka described as the world of insurance or that uncanny realm of predictable improbabilities governed by the law of the necessary accident.

This book locates Kafka at the junction of three ways of negotiating the modality of the accident: philosophy, fiction and insurance. It asks what happens to the received ways of making sense of the accident in philosophy and fiction when confronted with the modern world of insurance, or the regime of security and the management of chance that provides the infrastructure for the social, economic and political institutions of modernity. It suggests a difficult continuity between Kafkas writing by day as a senior official and theorist in the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague and his fictional writing by night. And it locates his ambivalent relation to philosophy not only in terms of the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry evoked by Plato in The Republic, but also with respect to the crisis of truth and fiction provoked by both the sublime thought of the death of God and the mundane management of the accident by the theory and institutions of insurance. What I hope emerges is a Kafka quite different from the twentieth centurys fabulist of the law whose writing dwells in the darkness of domination, a writer of the accident in every sense, a writer of defiant light.

My thanks are due to the audiences who responded to versions of parts of this book and to my friends, students and colleagues at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, IDSVA and to the members of the Digital Cultures Research Laboratory at the Leuphana University Lneburg who gave me the chance to finish the book and test my translations. Special and personal thanks to my editor Liza Thompson and to all at Parnithos, Molin Nuovo and Regata Run Drive. Finally, my apologies for any errors of fact and interpretation in what follows; had I known where these accidents were to happen I would surely have taken better measures to prevent them.