Conic Sections, Kafka's Babel

Abstract:Before we can think building, or Kafka's buildings, we must bring a little-known Kafka into view: not the narrator of built worlds, but the theorist of the unbuilt. Kafka stakes out his theory on the construction site of the Tower of Babel, the originary unbuilt building. Yet Kafka finds that Babel is most present precisely when it is most absent—that the nothing where the Tower should stand is the source of a strangely strong faith, the sure foundation of all our politics. Producing space and time, Kafka's Babel draws us unwittingly into a regime of conic sections: ideal shapes of authority and desire that, without our laying even the first brick, build our world.