Odradek: Kafka’s Name for the Nameless

The protagonist of Kafka’s short story “The Cares of a Family Man” is Odradek, a strange creature that presents a riddle about its identity: Is it a signifier or a signified? Inanimate or animate? Is it merely alive, or is it also a living being who speaks (_zoon logon_)? Odradek is all of these and none of them. Just as it wanders throughout the house, so it vacillates between these categorical distinctions. As such, it poses a threat to the consistency of the economies that constitute the house and are regulated by the law of the father. Chief among these is the economy of language, which is subverted by Odradek in various ways. Odradek could thus be seen as severing the bondage between the signifier and the signified, and opens up a rift within the hermetic array of signifiers. In this way, it allows for the hospitality of the nameless.