There are lives that seem conditional and dispensable but which are made necessary and essential by these works. These lives and works seem to come together, under our admiring gaze, in the same danger and same wonder. But the danger and wonder in which they come together are the same as those that distinguish them. In the latter case, the expected end of life was the condition for the endless beginning of the work.

Thus, reading books by Franz Kafka is always a start to which we return at the end. When reading these Mozartesque pages made of gravitas and entertainment, we find dramma giocoso, a movement that takes us back and forth between times and spaces, forms and figures, classes and species, natures and worlds. This is why this reading is different from others and makes us different because of this difference that becomes ours.

With his invisible finger, Maurice Blanchot pointed out the dark, multiple struggle that Kafka fought with himself and the world, imagining this dialogue that was constantly taking place inside him, echoing as if on the inside of an empty temple. A voice asks: ‘How all is lost. Should I end because of this?’ Another voice answers: ‘No if you end, you’re the one who is lost.’ This is how Sisyphus found new kinds of labour and days to fail in his tireless myth.

Everyone has written about him and it is as if he wrote about everyone else in his writings. He died a century ago and it has been said that the century in which he died was his: Kafka’s Century. It was his century, because his body of work contains that far-reaching, concave shadow that the 20th century was not able to avoid or prevent, deny or refute. On the contrary, it did everything to give it that adhesive density that spreads and sticks to both life and death so that they infect each other.

But could it be that, for the 21st century, of which we have lived the first quarter, this work is still a parable (or is it an unusual, meticulous report on the future?) that speaks of present and future things? Does Kafka move past us on his way to that eternity that is granted to him because it is denied to us? Does his work continue to have a voice that identifies us, nominates us and chooses us in a bear hug, a cat’s leap or a mouse’s gnaw? (Kafka’s bestiary is infinite.)

He was born on 3 July, 1883 and died on 3 June, 1924, at the age of only forty. If he had not died of tuberculosis then, way before his time, his death might have come savagely several years later. Three sisters, a brother-in-law and three nephews of his were killed in Nazi death camps. Kafka never knew this, though it was as if he did.

Photos of Kafka, with his shy, shrewd face, show us that he was always expecting something, like the air expects the wind that stirs it. They give us a glimpse of his anguished humour and empty secrets.

In his latter days, the shadow of this man, who went into voluntary exile, faded like words written in pencil on thin paper and handled by chance or by destiny and promised to fire (Faut-il brûler Kafka? Should we burn Kafka?).

Regarding Kafka and his death, we could repeat what his contemporary Fernando Pessoa said, eight years before, in his tribute to the memory of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a poet who died very young, with whom he nurtured a friendship as rare as sunshine on a grey, overcast rainy day:

In all that Franz Kafka experienced, thought, felt, imagined, did, suffered, wrote and died, we find traces of these gods who loved him with a love that seemed to be triggered by the same fuel that ignites hate. In his (outer and inner) life and his work (done and not done), a cold, dreadful tragedy slowly spread like a large stain, which he handled with the meticulous patience and slightly playful concentration of someone trying to accurately solve an unsolvable maths problem. It is said that Kafka would read his dark, painful writings to his friends and his gales of laughter made them disturbing, comical childish chases within each one of them.

In his clear, labyrinthine voice, it is as if the world were a hideaway from another world and we were hiding in plain sight in that fake, fragile, fatal hideaway. His voice tirelessly tells us the news that life is always a trap that we can only escape if we want to be caught. He also tells us that the truth is an in-depth excavation into lies.

From A Hunger Artist to The man Who Disappeared, from Metamorphosis to A Country Doctor, from The Trial to The Castle, from Meditation to Wedding Preparations in the Country, from his letters to his diaries, in all the work of this Prague-born Jew, who made a conflict with his father metaphysical and lived with his favourite sister in a small house in Alchemist (or Gold) Street, there is an alliance between punishment and ecstasy, the same one that makes the religions of the law places where the body becomes an impossibility of the soul and the soul a failure of the body.

He makes this confession in a letter: ‘Perhaps there is another way of writing, but this is the only one I know; it’s at night, when fear keeps me awake. I only know this one. And the evil that exists in everything becomes very clear to me.’

At the end of the haunting (and haunted) Letter to his Father, he wrote:

This is written in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Kafka’s Century’, organised by the Centre Pompidou forty years ago. It was written by Jorge Luis Borges, in a style that seeks out the paradoxes and aporias that do not belie the indiscreet truth that reminds us of the best-known attribute of the universe – complexity. Borges did not add to Flaubert, Goethe and Swift the names of Gogol or Dostoyevsky, while Kafka numbered them among those that he never forgot in the movements of his memory.

With this disturbing work, which was written between life and death, between the reality of fiction and the fiction of reality, between the mobile and immobile (‘Spectators stop when the train goes by,’ Diary), a few years after his death, Kafka became the person about whom the great Anglo-American poet and essayist W. H. Auden wrote:

Catholic Paul Claudel said, with the imperial certainty that would not countenance holding the wavering sceptre of doubt in his hand, ‘Besides Racine, whom I regard as the greatest of writers, there is another – Franz Kafka’.

When Kafka wrote in his Diary, ‘I am just literature and I cannot and do not want to be anything else’, he was not distancing himself from the world or trying to escape to a faraway, alternative, alien world of unreality and dreams. On the contrary! Aware, as he was, that unreality and dreams, often in the form of terrible nightmares or mythical insanity, were never separated from reality and wakefulness, in a confused, even chaotic mixture, he tells us that it is literature that shows us the good and bad in the world and how to face all its chances and possibilities, threats and risks, denials and deviations.

In this work, which is both perfect and fragmented, whole and unfinished, structured and shapeless, odd and fascinating, descriptive rigour combines with narrative hallucinations in a dark, relentless, cutting splendour. Kafka’s ghosts do not come down from the heavens; they come up out of the ground. The architecture of his world is the disturbed echo or transfigured reflection of the architecture of the world itself.

In his essay to mark the 10th anniversary of Kafka’s death, which became an exemplary text, Walter Benjamin left a clear warning: ‘There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka’s works. One is to interpret them naturally; the other is a supernatural interpretation. Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points.’

He also points out:

The author of the Angel of History continues his exegesis:

For this and other reasons, the Czech Jewish historian Saul Friedländer, one of the world’s greatest specialists on the Shoah and Nazism, aptly entitled his book Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt.

This biographical essay retrieves documentary sources that had been censored or hidden by Kafka’s close friend and executor, Max Brod, so as not to call into question the myth of the writer’s sainthood and the moral purity that he had created. Friedländer noted that all the family, religious, amorous, sexual, professional, and clinical obligations, actions, dependences, contracts, ties and arrangements to which Kafka had committed, or pretended to commit, caused him shame, guilt and horror. He concluded, ‘While he fully played his role in the world, he sought to protect himself, sabotaging it mercilessly in his writings’.

Just like Harold Bloom, who considered Kafka the greatest, most indestructible and most patient representative of our age, Friedländer chose a fundamental passage from the author of The Bonfire:

George Steiner, another multilingual Jew with no religion, with a restless, Promethean erudition, wrote (‘A note on Kafka’s The Trial’ in No Passion Spent):

Steiner says on Kafka’s place in contemporary culture (K in Language and Silence):

(In his Diary, Kafka wrote: ‘Today I don’t even dare to criticise myself. My criticism would create a repugnant echo on this empty day’).

A great admirer of Franz Kafka, his fellow countryman Milan Kundera, wrote in The Art of the Novel: ‘Force is naked, as naked as in Kafka’s novels’ He asks, ‘What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight?’ He adds, ‘The slumbering imagination of the nineteenth century was abruptly awakened by Franz Kafka, who achieved what the Surrealists later called for but never themselves really accomplished: the fusion of dream and reality’.

He stresses, ‘His novels are the unerring fusion of dream and reality. At the same time, a more lucid look at the modern world and the most unbridled imagination. Above all, Kafka is an immense aesthetic revolution. An artistic miracle.’

In a maxim that became famous, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being wrote, ‘Knowledge is the novel’s only morality’. And he could have added that, in Kafka’s novels, the only moral is that of lack of knowledge. Others know about us what we do not know about ourselves. And this lack of knowledge about ourselves is what makes us who we are, without us knowing what we are. For this and other reasons, Kafka recorded a harrowing confession in his Diary: ‘Who am I then? I cried to myself.’ There was no reply to his cry, and so we find it intact when we read it.

The great Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who was said, along with Joyce and Kafka, to be one of the most original voices of 20th century literature (not only original but also provocative), wrote in his diary, and he spoke of Kafka, but could also be referring to his own work:

As if responding to Gombrowicz, the Swiss literary critic and historian of ideas Jean Starobinski, to whom Electra 7 devoted a ‘Register’, wrote this about Kafka’s work (Regard sur l’image):

With this profound understanding, interrupting the trend of a persistent mystic, theological tradition created by Max Brod to ‘interpret’ and ‘sanctify’ Kafka and his oeuvre, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their well-known essay ‘Kafka – For a Minor Literature’, see in this work of many entries and diverse deviations, the introduction of a new literature that takes itself and its language to an animal future. These French writers claim that, contrary to popular belief, the books of the young man from Prague, who was unfailingly alone even when accompanied, do not ask us for hermeneutics of their allegorical, metaphorical or symbolic meanings.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s oeuvre, which was more incomplete than unlimited, does not ask us to perform a Talmudic decoding of a latent allegory, a continuous metaphor (constantly passing from a literal to a figurative sense) or initiatory, clandestine symbols.

Kafka’s work is a laborious, strategic, painstaking assembly of a literary machine of strange metonyms where reality comes through the writing, invades it, floods it and smothers it to make us think, feel, imagine, laugh and desire differently – a non-anthropological way of thinking, feeling, imagining, laughing and desiring. This is what creates a new language, taking it to its farthest, extraterritorial limits.

While it is assembling itself, this machine dismantles the large contemporary or developing social machines and can detect with satanic efficacy and anticipate with an infernal instinct the ‘diabolical powers’ of the present and the future.

These two authors, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, believe that the work does not provide us with the privileged pleasures of repetitive, ordinary interpretation of codes and signs, as it turns them into a weapon of war and gives us an experience to which politics must be able to give body and soul, even in the vampire-style love letters, and that makes us other in the confrontation with itself and with the world.

Coming from elsewhere on the literary and philosophical map, the Italian biographer, essayist, critic and novelist Pietro Citati, a well-known apostle of ‘major literature’, in the book Kafka, goes in a different direction to Benjamin, and Deleuze and Guattari, making evil and its negative theology the currency we can use to get what he feels in this work is, was and will be, foundational and fundamental.

In the chapter in his book on The Trial, he wrote:

What is lying and what are its effects and consequences in all fields, domains and planes (philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, literary, artistic, scientific, political, social, economic, financial, ecological, deontological) in which lies are told?

In this edition of Electra, we devote a set of three essays to Kafka to mark the centenary of his death and celebrate the renewed, constant, incandescent contemporaneity of his work.

If we bear in mind what is said and quoted here about the author of ‘The Great Wall of China’, we see that Kafka’s writings can also serve as a good guide to this edition’s dossier, which we have devoted to such a topical subject as, ‘Lies’ (the title of our ‘Subject’ could be the title of a Kafka short story). An exclamation in one of his books says: ‘It is a lie raised to a law of the universe’.

The gods in Kafka’s The Trial lie, and by doing so, turn into devils; and that is why the author created them so. In Western religious tradition, God is the truth and the devil is the lie.

St John’s Gospel recounts, ‘For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world – to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice’. Then Pilate asks Jesus, ‘What is the truth?’

In another passage, Jesus says, ‘I am the way and the truth and the light’.

Jesus says in the same Gospel, ‘You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies’.

It is in the name of these proclamations that the church presents itself as the sole faithful custodian of the truth. In line with this, it condemns relativism, thereby asserting the dogmatic absolutism that protects its ontological status.

Some regard this tautological identification of the God of monotheisms and their ministers and priests with the truth, expelling disagreements, divergences and dissidences to the hell of lies, ruled by the devil, as the matrix of all the aggressive inquisitorial forms of religious tyranny, philosophical intolerance, political despotism and persecution of free thought undertaken over the centuries and still in force in so many parts of the world. The whole philosophy of the Enlightenment, which inspired the American and French revolutions, fights this absolutist drive and the religious and dogmatic conception of the truth-lie duo.

It has already been said that man is an animal that lies and we know from our own and others’ experience that this is true. Marcel Proust said:

The history of humanity is inseparable from the history of lies, and records its forms and metamorphoses over the centuries, in accordance with the paradigms and episteme of each age and its social, economic, cultural and religious practices.

Lying, as a concept, as a word and as an act has permeated the history of philosophy in all its pure and applied forms: ontological, ethical, epistemological, logical, legal, artistic, political.

The (non-exhaustive) list of philosophers, theologians, thinkers and essayists who have addressed lies (and the truth) is very long and is worthy of note, as it speaks for itself: Plato (The Republic, The Sophist, Cratylus), Aristotle (Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics), Stoics, Cicero (Pro Lucius Valerius Flaccus, De Oratore), the Old Testament, Saint Paul (Epistle to the Corinthians), Saint Augustine (De Dialectica, De Mendacio), St Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae), Machiavelli (The Prince), Thomas More (Utopia), Tommaso Campanella (The City of the Sun), Luther (On the Jews and Their Lies), Montaigne (Essays), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), Descartes (Letters), Espinosa (Ethics), Montesquieu (In Praise of Sincerity), Kant (The Metaphysics of Morals), John Stuart Mill (Utilitarianism), Arthur Schopenhauer (On the Basis of Morality), Nietzsche (On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense), Oscar Wilde (The Decay of Lying – An Observation), Husserl (Cartesian Meditations), Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, Two Lies Told by Children), Heidegger (Being and Time), Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations), Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Conjectures and Refutations), Hannah Arendt (Lying in Politics), Sartre (Being and Nothingness), Alexandre Koyré (Reflections about Lying), Michel Foucault (Subjectivité et vérité), René Girard (Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque), Derrida (Histoire du mensonge: Prolégomènes), Richard Rorty (Objectivity, Relativism and Truth), and Fernando Gil (Mimesis e Negação).

In literature, among so many others, Homer, Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Corneille, Jonathan Swift, La Fontaine, Molière, Goldoni, Casanova, Stendhal, Lewis Carroll, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Émile Zola (the Dreyfus case), Henry James, Georges Feydeau, Proust, Cocteau editorial Previous pages: Emil Nolde, House on the Heath, 1900 (‘The poet is a liar who always tells the truth’), Orwell, Anaïs Nin, Graham Greene, Simenon, Borges, Yourcenar, Júlio Cortázar, Czesław Miłosz, Kundera, Patricia Highsmith, Philip Roth (‘We live in a world where lying reigns supreme’), Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante, Ian McEwan, Javier Marías, and Emmanuel Carrère adopted lies as a source of creation or subject of reflection. Also Gil Vicente (‘The whole world is a liar and no-one tells the truth’), Fernão Mendes Pinto, Padre António Vieira, Almeida Garrett, Camilo Castelo Branco, Eça de Queirós, Machado de Assis, Fernando Pessoa, Raúl Brandão, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Jorge Amado, José Saramago, and Mário de Carvalho.

The history of the visual arts is full of lies and liars. Orson Welles’ film F for Fake is a patent example of this.

Of all the liars conceived by the imagination, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, with his extendable nose, is still the great symbol of the eternal liar.

Artificial Intelligence, with all its promise and threats, has also laid down the issues of truth and lies for our troubled consideration with growing acuity. We also offer you a highly opportune and enlightening essay on the subject AI.

Of the lies that our age has invented in order to become what it is today, to invade our everyday lives and shake our naïve trust in others and in the world, everyone is talking about the alliance of politics with journalism and social media to produce fake news. This pact of political populism with the spectacle provided by the media believes that it makes lies the engine of instant success and, out of self-interest, ignorance or bad faith, is unaware of its deadly effect on individual and communal lives.

The temptation of a deliberate lie and sensationalist falsification has existed for as long as journalism and politics. However, today it has found means, tools and resources for massification and manipulation never before known or tried.

We have reached media frenzy, hysteria and hyperbole that, in the name of fake transparency, serve the most opaque designs and are destroying politics and ruining democracy, constituting a ferocious attack on culture as education for the world’s conscience. In this constant voicing, we seem to be in a Beckettian situation of mouths that copiously, emphatically spew useless, empty, insignificant words that say nothing.

In 1943, the year of her death, the French philosopher Simone Weil, expressed her indignation (The Need for Roots):

Let each of us read these passionate words and find in them the moral and intellectual impulse to look at what is happening around us without concessions or complacencies.

As this Editorial draws to a close, let us go back to the beginning with Franz Kafka and Fernando Pessoa. In one of his terrible Aphorisms, the Jewish Czech writer who wrote in German said, ‘The leopards entered the temple and spilled the liquid offerings. This event was repeated time and again and eventually became predictable. It was later made part of the ceremonial ritual’.

There is no better portrayal of our ‘great age’ than this aphorism, as it seems that ‘at first you find it strange and then you can’t get enough’ (Pessoa).

We can talk about our present, and talk about lies and what lying is, represents, achieves and affects. Kafka was also a herald of these times. In his work, he was able to capture the archaic forces that continued on their way to us and show their faceless mask and bodiless clothes.

Surrounded by Kafka’s abusive leopards making lies the useful, convenient or lucrative truth, our times make the world the temple in which life’s ritual keeps accepting and adopting the unacceptable, thereby providing reason, opportunity and triumph to those who have nothing to lose, because the intelligence with which they win and dominate is made of the stupidity of others.