Intellectus ex machina

The essay interprets Franz Kafka's short story “In der Strafkolonie [In the Penal Colony]” (1914) not from the perspective of literary hermeneutics, but from the perspective of criticism: intents and allusions are attributed without any consideration or identification of the author's position, without reference to the tradition of researching his legacy. The machine depicted in the story and the events related to it are situated in the context of New Age island literature and are seen as a carnival inversion of the idea of technological progress. The interpretation is based on the hypothesis that Kafka's island containing a penal colony is in fact Bacon's Bensalem, inverted in the course of historical time (New Atlantis, 1623). What is considered and discussed is the very image of the island as a place of action, the parallelisms between the House of Solomon and the penal colony, between the perfect language that removes the idols of the market and the program code of the killing machine executed in the form of ethical maxims. Most importantly, the essay considers two versions of interpretating the destruction of the machine and the suicide of the officer who serves it. The first version is conditioned by a tradition of technophobia in public consciousness during the 19th and 20th centuries and is connected with the birth of existentialist philosophy of technology; the second version is connected with the loss of a vision for the role of science and technology in Western Europe in the early 20th century – with the Decline of the West expressing itself as a nascent information machine via the rejection of scientific and technological subjectivity and historical sovereignty in favor of the ideology of Nazism. The essay concludes with the thesis that it is necessary to look at today's events through the eyes of Kafka's “visionary”: The information machine of Nazism is reviving and obviously requires an observer capable of breaking it down – if not destroying it, at least breaking it down again.