The most disquieting literary expression of the topos of the burgh I have just described is found in Kafka’s The Castle. In this work, unfinished by the premature death of the author, Kafka presents us with a modern transformation of the medieval burgh in which the castle as a center of power becomes a enormous void, an zone of indistinction, from whence all the sovereignty of the place emanates. The castle, located on high (0.28), more than an architectural structure is an undefined presence that presides over the entire village. It cannot be reached by the main road, which first approaches and then moves away from it, and can only be glimpsed as its contours blur in the twilight. For this reason it has been interpreted as a “symbolic image of the enormous complication of the administrative machine that governs the village.”¹

Like every zone of indistinction, the castle configures a very particular topology, a threshold where the categories of the legal and the vital are confused until they disappear: 

And what was it, this other life to which he was consigned? Never yet had K. seen vocation and life so interlaced as here, so interlaced that sometimes one might think that they had exchanged places.²

Certainly, a place where the vocation (bios) and life (zoē) are constantly confused has the trappings of a nightmare. The bureaucratic labyrinth (0.15) that defines the castle becomes a purgatory, a threshold between what is and what is not contemplated by the law, which can be life itself. But the most disturbing aspect of Kafka’s vision, apart from the physical and psychological inaccessibility of the castle, is the fact that, unlike medieval burghs, Kafka’s castle is a bureaucratic hypertrophy that does not house a bourgeoisie within its walls, understood as a social class of merchants and craftsmen that produce capital. All the inhabitants of the castle work and belong to it; for them there is no inside or outside, the castle’s bureaucracy is everything. The castle proposes a labor monoculture that dispenses with all jobs not related to the village administration.

On the other hand K., the main character and Kafka’s double, could give up his position as surveyor and leave the village but he is inexplicably tied, and his actions lead him to increasingly tie himself to the administrative entanglements of the castle. Kafka suggests that there is no need of any kind of enclosure to ensure the castle's influence over K. and the villagers. As Agamben would say, the castle excludes the village by including it and includes it by excluding it. As a premonition, the castle configures a paradeisos without walls that, as we will see in the second part, will shed its physical barriers and extend throughout the society mainly in the media, economic and digital spheres.

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1. From Jordi Llovet’s prologue to El castillo in Kafka’s Obras completas by DeBolsillo, 7. ↩︎
2. Kafka, The Castle, 75.  ↩︎