Lingual Asthma: Stuttering of Language in Franz Kafkas Writings

In this article, I analyze the attacks of ‘lingual asthma’ in Franz Kafka’s writings. Using Deleuzian concept of ‘stuttering language’ as a theoretical framework for my analysis, I claim that the aim of Kafkan deformation of language is to influence the structure of non-linguistic aspects of reality, and specifically to create a new sphere of ambiguity and possibilities. The stuttering of language, according to Deleuze, consists of two phases: first one, when linguistic dispossession affects the perception of language as foreign and distant and when, in result, it becomes external to experience and expression; second one, when writer provokes language to go beyond its borders. The former is the case of stuttering of language, the latter – making the language stutter. First one, relies on finding the cracks in the lingual system, second one, on provoking ruptures. By including the stammer in his prose, Kafka moves toward the extremes of language. Exploring the silence as a state of emergency of expression, he seems to question the whole lingual system. Kafkan literature, which defies itself by the impossibility of interpretation and incorporation of silence and stutter, seems to revise the mere concept of literature as such.