Bureaucracy

A fascinating note from Blanchot’s essay ‘The Wooden Bridge’ of Kafka’s The Castle (you can find it in The Infinite Conversation):

Incidentally, I would note that for Kafka bureaucracy is not simply a later development (as though the gods, the first forces, were pitifully ending their reign by becoming functionaries) nor simply a negative phenomenon, any more than is exegesis in relation to speech. To his friend Oskar Baum he writes the following, which demands reflection: ‘Bureaucracy, if I judge it from my own perspective, is closer to original human nature than any other social institution’. (This is in a letter of June 1922, the period of The Castle.)