Kafka’s Animal Machines

Becoming-animal in Franz Kafka has functioned as a conceptual inkblot test, read in practically opposite ways by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the one hand and animal studies on the other. The concept is introduced in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, a text with no particular interest in displacing anthropocentrism. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari saw Kafka as an affirmatively anthropocentric writer who needed to have done with animals in order complete his anti-fascist accelerationist project. Yet ecocritical readers of Deleuze and Guattari have nevertheless found in becoming-animal a weapon against anthropocentrism. While Deleuze and Guattari attempt to purify Kafka of animality, animal studies for its part purifies both Kafka and Kafka of anti-fascism. The roots of this strange conceptual chiasmus lie in the manner in which the opposition nature-techne is thought and a certain shared Heidegerrian inheritance. A reading of Kafka’s The Castle focusing on a horse-drawn sleigh provides resources for a concept of animal machine that would ruin the opposition between becoming-animal and machinic assemblage (nature-techne) that governs Kafka and blocks access to crucial resources for countering fascism and anthropocentrism.