Walking through some streets of the Palermo neighborhood.
• Starting point: The intersection of Güemes Street and Scalabrini Ortiz Avenue.Urban hiking (Urban Trek), city-trekking, and low-intensity steady-state urban walking (LISS). An active yet contemplative journey.
• Ending point: The intersection of Juan B. Justo Avenue and Santa Fe Avenue.
Wikiloc track: https://es.wikiloc.com/rutas-senderismo/walk-through-palermo-caba-the-trial-by-franz-kafka-273498579
During this walk, on the corner of a closed shutter, there were some papers, and on top of them, an open book—torn, perhaps fragments of a book. It seemed incomplete given its volume, and judging by the color and tears in the pages, it appeared to be an old edition. At that moment, I took a few photos with the intention of looking up what book it was, and then I continued my walk. Later, when looking at the photographs, there was no need to investigate anything; the title and author were written at the top of the pages. It was The Trial by Franz Kafka.
This reminded me that when I was taking criminal law, a teaching assistant for the professor recommended we read it. I went to a bookstore, bought it, and read it (Publisher: Edicomunicación). Back then, I didn't take notes, and a few ideas left floating in my mind were the "endless process" and the "inoperable bureaucracy"—inoperable for the citizen, but absolutely operational for itself; highly operational from the system's perspective. But for the protagonist, the system is the perfect definition of inoperability:
• There are no resolutions, there is no clarity, and official channels lead nowhere.Currently, that book has been resting on my bookshelf for a long time. It is a classic of world literature, and I keep it there as such.
• A lack of external purpose: The system does not seek to resolve the case, find the truth, or impart justice. K. never finds out what he is accused of.
• A labyrinth of forms: The paperwork, the offices in the attic hallways, and the infinite hierarchies of judges and lawyers produce no practical result other than wearing down the individual.
Finding that discarded fragment on the street revived the memory of my reading from many years ago—a casual, absurd, and poetic reminder of something that remained "floating" in the mind: on one hand, what the book left me with, and on the other, the memory itself of that moment. A scrap of paper on the street, an orphaned fragment, immediately connecting me to a book that has been resting on shelves for years. It was like a reminder that texts return to us at unexpected moments. It appeared without context, without me knowing what edition it came from, whose hand it fell from, why that specific piece and not another—a small trial of its own, without a clear accusation, allowing me the choice to interpret.
And what triggered it wasn't nostalgia for the plot, but a re-encounter with the idea the reading left behind, now with more tools than before to precisely name what back then I could only feel as a vague intuition. Or perhaps through a different lens—back then, maybe a more Kantian or deontological lens, and now a more skeptical one. To synthesize it: the main difference lies in their conclusions about knowledge. Skepticism asserts that we cannot know the truth, which leads to doubting everything. The Kantian view establishes strict limits on what we can know but defends that we can indeed achieve universal and certain truths within those limits.
The trigger of memory: Life as a series of fragments that resonate unexpectedly. The book rests on my bookshelf, like a dormant trial that revives with a piece of paper on the street. It speaks of memory, diffuse guilt (for not having taken notes?), and how great works mark us without us fully noticing at the time. With what eyes did I look at Josef K. then, and with what eyes would I look at him now? Not having taken notes back then prevents me from remembering and reflecting on what troubled me at that moment; perhaps now I would view Josef K. with more empathy and less trust in systems.
I didn't read The Trial out of pure literary pleasure, but due to a tangential recommendation within a context that was already bureaucratic-institutional in itself—Criminal Law, a teaching assistant, me going to buy it on my own. That is to say: the book entered my life (like so many others) through a formal institution, only to speak about the pathologies of formal institutions. And what stayed with me, without having taken notes, was neither a plot nor a character: it was a structural idea—"endless process" and "inoperable bureaucracy"—distilled and settled over years without the textual scaffolding that sustained it. To some extent, it's the idea that "something" remains after reading.
It is also true that it was a reading done "half and half," almost forced by college, even though it wasn't mandatory for the subject, along with some willpower out of personal interest and curiosity. And something else: the lack of tools, the lack of experience. AI didn't exist as a tool; the internet did exist, but the work of searching and reading was different, somewhat more tedious if you will—though I didn't face the "raw" text, since that edition I read was accompanied by a brief introductory study.
Reading that particular story to walk away with its abstract power structure was neither accidental nor a matter of forgetting: it was exactly the kind of residue a text leaves behind when it functions as a diagnosis rather than a narrative.
Retrieval Cues
We store episodes. I didn't say, "I remembered the story." I said something like: I found a fragment lying on the street; immediately the memory of a Criminal Law teaching assistant appeared; then you remembered going to buy the book; then you remembered the specific edition; finally, I remembered the only idea that survived for many years: the endless process.
This is similar to how autobiographical memory works. We don't store books. We store episodes. The found fragment acted as a retrieval cue: an apparently insignificant object reactivated a chain of interconnected memories. It wasn't just the novel that reappeared; a phase of my life reappeared: taking Criminal Law, the assistant's recommendation, the purchase at the bookstore, and the reading. The paper on the street was the trigger for a memory network, not a simple evocation of the plot. From a skeptical viewpoint, it is even wise to distrust that memory a little. It is highly possible that today I reconstruct that past by emphasizing precisely the aspects that remained relevant to me—bureaucracy, the endless process—while other details faded away. Memory is not a recording; it is a reconstruction.
Chance and the "Anti-book"
Reactivation by chance—finding a fragment on the street was like a reminder that texts return to us at unexpected moments. There is a concept by Umberto Eco that Taleb popularized: the antilibrary. Read books have already fulfilled a function, but unread books—or those we read so long ago that only a vague conceptual haze remains—are the ones that remind us of our limitations. My Edicomunicación copy has been "resting" on my bookshelf, accumulating dust and silence. That lethargy is, in itself, an act of resistance against immediacy.
That a piece of paper discarded on the asphalt sparked the drive to search for that specific volume among thousands is a beautiful example of stochastic bricolage (piecing together loose fragments thrown in your path by chance to construct meaning). When I was taking criminal law, the book was recommended to me as a metaphor for what justice should not be or (with some important nuances) actually is in reality. Today, having walked through part of life, having seen firsthand how markets, commerce, paperwork, and legal labyrinths operate, that idea of the "endless process" is no longer an academic theory: it is an empirical truth.
Eco explained his perspective by dividing visitors to his home into two clear categories:
• The egocentric majority: Those who walked in, saw thousands of volumes, and said, "Oh, Professor Eco, what a large library! How many of these books have you read?" For them, books are a trophy or an ornament to inflate the ego.Intellectual medicine: Eco said that books function like a medicine cabinet. He argued that "it is foolish to think you have to read all the books you buy... It would be like saying you must use all the cutlery, glasses, or screwdrivers you bought before buying new ones." One accumulates books to turn to the precise volume when a specific intellectual need or wound arises.
• The mindful minority: A very small group who understood that a private library is not a status accessory, but a research tool.
Collecting the unknown: Eco took this to the extreme. He confessed to collecting texts on topics he didn't even believe in (such as magic, alchemy, or invented languages) just for the pure pleasure of exploring the lost paths of human thought.
The central idea is that unread books are far more valuable than read ones. Taleb observes that most people assume a library is a trophy or a reflection of the ego: a visual record of everything we already know. Visitors are usually surprised by a large collection and ask, "How many of these books have you read?" For Eco and Taleb, that perspective is a mistake. The logic of the antilibrary proposes the following:
• A reminder of our ignorance: The books I have already read represent consolidated knowledge. Unread books represent what I have yet to discover. The wiser you become, the more unread books you accumulate, because the awareness of the unknown expands.
• Intellectual humility: Maintaining a collection of pending texts acts as a balm against arrogance. It constantly reminds me of my limits and keeps curiosity active.
• A research tool: A personal library is not a static archive; it is a workstation. It is healthy to have potential knowledge at hand before needing it, for when uncertainty arises or chance leads you to explore a new territory.
"The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.Taleb contrasts this concept with the profile of the antischolar (who focuses on what they do not know) against the traditional scholar, who often uses accumulated knowledge as armor that leaves them vulnerable to "black swans" due to overconfidence.
Ironies
• Kafka wanted to close the file. His friend Brod kept the file open forever.A very low-probability and seemingly trivial event—finding a loose leaf on the street—produced a disproportionate effect. It didn't change the content of the book, but it did change its meaning for me, because it connected it to my own history. Perhaps that is why this second encounter with The Trial turned out to be richer than the first. The first reading was guided by a law student seeking to understand an academic recommendation. The re-reading can be done by someone who, in addition to reading Kafka, has already incorporated tools of skepticism, probabilistic thinking, and institutional critique. It is possible and probable that the same text now brings back different questions than the ones it could offer you back then.
• Josef K. never knows what he is accused of. This lack of foundation is what makes the process absurd and oppressive.
• I found a piece of a book about a file that never seems to close. And that fragment opened another file: a personal one. Mine and this reading. For years, the book remained motionless on my bookshelf, almost like a shelved file. A paper found by chance was enough to put it back "in progress" within your memory.
The Hidden Extravagance: The Disordered Manuscript
The greatest curiosity about The Trial lies not in what it tells, but in how it existed. Kafka never finished the novel and, in fact, ordered his friend Max Brod to burn all his writings after his death. Brod disobeyed but encountered chaos: the manuscript consisted of loose pages stuffed into folders, without page numbers and with unfinished chapters.
The "extravagance" is that the order of the chapters I read was decided by Max Brod, not Kafka. Brod intuited the chronological sequence, but the text itself has temporal "black holes." What is brilliant and terrifying is that, due to the nature of the "endless bureaucracy," if you were to shuffle the middle chapters like poker cards and read them in any other order, the nightmare would work exactly the same way. The Trial does not have a linear logic; it is a circular labyrinth.
• Rarity: Throughout the entire novel, we practically never know: what exactly the crime was; who accuses; what law applies; who actually holds the power. For a law student, this is unsettling because it violates almost every principle of modern law: legality, defense, due process, publicity, and the natural judge. It is as if Kafka had written a novel where all legal guarantees disappear but the judicial machinery remains intact. There is no law. There is only procedure. And that explains why so many law professors recommend it.
• Temporal ambiguity: The process never advances clearly; it always seems to be in suspense, creating a sense of eternity.
• Ritual language: Officials speak in a ceremonial yet empty tone, reinforcing the idea of a power that sustains itself on form rather than content.
• Officials as specters: There are characters who are caricatures of bureaucratic futility.
• The final execution: The ending is anti-climactic and brutal. The last scene is a parody of justice: there is no drama, no speeches, no redemption. Only the mechanical failure of a system.
• Prophecy: Kafka wrote this in 1914–1915, anticipating the totalitarianisms of the 20th century (Nazism, Stalinism) and modern bureaucracy. Hannah Arendt and others saw it as a prefiguration of systems where administration replaces justice.
What would a possible view from skepticism look like regarding this text?
Critique of Institutional Dogmatism and the Lens of Radical Skepticism
In "general" (in a philosophical or cultural sense), skeptics would see in The Trial the total demolition of the rationalist myth. Skeptics view Kafkaesque absurdity as a tool to question reality. If the world is incomprehensible (like the court), the only rational attitude is permanent doubt.
A skeptic would probably distrust the popular interpretation that says: "The Trial represents exactly...". No. The skeptic would say that Kafka wrote a deliberately ambiguous work. There is no single key. It can represent: guilt, religion, bureaucracy, anxiety, power, alienation. Or all of them at the same time. Skepticism avoids turning the novel into a symbol of just one thing.
Western human beings believe that the world operates under the principle of causality (action and reaction, law and order, crime and punishment). Kafka demonstrates that human institutions are not rational, but black boxes: complex structures where you insert an input and an unpredictable result emerges, governed by bureaucrats operating out of inertia, not logic. A devastating critique of blind faith in institutions.
The Trial serves as a metaphor for the impossibility of achieving certainties. The endless trial reflects the human condition: always subjected to doubts, without access to absolute truths. There is no accessible ultimate truth; the "Law" is unreachable or arbitrary, and the search for meaning or rational justice is illusory.
There are different types of skepticism applicable here, and it is best not to confuse them:
• Classical skeptics (like Pyrrho or Sextus Empiricus) distrust absolute truths. In The Trial, the court is an institution that claims authority without proof, just like the religious or political dogmas that skeptics reject. Kafka offers no answers; the book is a mirror of radical skepticism: if the system is opaque, no knowledge is possible, only permanent distrust.A skeptic would probably distrust another very popular interpretation, which opens the way for me to move forward with Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Trial is not infinite. In the novel, the process ends. What seems infinite is uncertainty. And human beings tend to confuse uncertainty with eternity. That is a psychological phenomenon.
• Existentialist/absurdist skepticism (Camus is the obligatory reference; Camus admired Kafka) does not read The Trial as an allegory with a key to decipher, but as the staging of the human condition: a world without an accessible causal explanation, where searching for meaning is as futile as searching for it in the death of Josef K. The early reception of the book points to this: a 1926 critic, unable to identify what kind of court it was, ended up admitting that he interpreted without ever being able to reach the end of interpretation—the text actively resists closing off meaning. This is "continental" skepticism: distrust of the grand narratives of justice and reason, not empirical distrust of data. The world has no inherent order (the illusion of order), and rebelling against it (or accepting it) generates anxiety. K. is an absurd hero: he accepts the meaninglessness but does not surrender. The existentialist sees an indifferent universe.
• Modern skepticism (like Karl Popper's), The Trial is a metaphor for totalitarian systems: bureaucracy does not need to be efficient; it only needs people to believe in its authority. The trial is an empty ritual: as in Popper's critiques of closed regimes, the system does not seek justice, but submission.
• The skeptic of the Anglo-Saxon/analytical tradition reads differently: they see no metaphysical absurdity; they see an institutional epistemic failure. Josef K.'s system is not mysterious because the universe lacks meaning—it is opaque because it was designed (or degenerated) to be opaque to the one suffering from it, while remaining perfectly functional for the one operating it.
• Nihilistic readings: Life as an endless process without purpose, where guilt is inherent or manufactured by the system. Walter Benjamin and others emphasized skepticism toward the law as a mere reflection of power, not justice. It is not optimistic: there is no redemption or clear learning. The individual remains alienated, helpless against the machine.
What would a possible view from Nassim Taleb look like from empirical-probabilistic skepticism?
(An author I am reading, who is related to skepticism, and who in some of his texts refers to Kafka and, also, specifically to The Trial)
If we bring this to the empirical-probabilistic skepticism of Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan, Antifragile), the connection is fascinating and unfolds across three axes:
1. Institutional Epistemic Failure
• The Planning Fallacy and the Illusion of Control: Taleb could see the novel as a warning against the illusion of control. The Kafkaesque judicial process is an opaque system full of uncertainty, where the probabilities of an outcome are incalculable. Josef K. is the prototype of the man who trusts the system. He is a meticulous banker, someone who believes the world is linear and predictable (what Taleb calls the "ludic fallacy"). When the arrest—a rare event, a purely negative Black Swan for him—breaks into his routine, K. tries to defend himself using logic and law. That is his fatal mistake. Against a complex and hyper-bureaucratic system, logic is the worst defense because the system is inherently asymmetric. Kafka shows how an individual caught in a bureaucratic system cannot foresee or manage the outcomes.
• Total absence of skin in the game (putting your skin on the line): The inspector, the lawyers, the low-ranking judges Josef K. crosses paths with in hallways and attics—none of them pay any cost for the duration, the arbitrariness, or the outcome of the process. The "lawyer" in the book knows about the case without knowing anything concrete about it: he enjoys the prestige of being involved without the risk of being wrong. It is the perfect portrait of what Taleb would call a caste of intermediaries who extract rent from others' uncertainty without exposing themselves to it.
• Inverted narrative fallacy: In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb attacks our need to impose a causal narrative on what is just noise. Josef K. does exactly that: he looks for an internal logic to the process ("there must be a reason, a pattern, someone slandering me") when perhaps there isn't one—and that search for meaning is what consumes him, not the process itself. Josef K. conducts this "search" in an environment where information is asymmetric and unreachable.
2. The Prophecy of Blind Systems
In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb highlights that The Trial is prophetic. Kafka wrote it before the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century existed. He saw before anyone else how "scientific" or hyper-organized systems end up dehumanizing and crushing the individual through abstract committees where no one is to blame and no one takes charge.
• Opacity by design, not as a mystery: Where the existentialist sees cosmic absurdity, Taleb would see a deliberate or structural information asymmetry: the system does not need to explain itself because no one with power within it needs Josef K. to understand. Opacity is the control mechanism (invisible oppression), not a narrative accident. Officials detached from the consequences of their actions create endless processes that protect the system at the expense of the individual.3. Kafka's Strategy (The "Barbell" Method)
• The bureaucratic IYI (Intellectual Yet Idiot): The mid-level officials of the court—whom Kafka paints with the most irony—fulfill form without substance: they process, but they cannot (nor do they need to) justify. It is the purest literary version of "opining/deciding without consequences" that Taleb criticizes in technocrats and commentators.
In Antifragile, Taleb uses Franz Kafka himself as an example of how to bulletproof a career against uncertainty. Kafka did not try to make a living from literature (a fragile domain exposed to randomness). He kept a gray, boring, and secure job at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague (extreme safety) to have absolute freedom to write whatever he pleased at night, free from commercial pressures (extreme risk/freedom). He made a clever use of bureaucracy to protect his art.
Empirically: Complex systems (like courts or administrations) accumulate errors and become inoperable. It is better to rely on simple heuristics and controlled exposure to randomness than on large "rational" machineries.
The problem with large "rational" machineries is overfitting, fragility, and blindness to the unexpected. They provide a false sense of security that exposes people to catastrophic risks.
The power of simple heuristics:
• Rules of thumb: Simple rules (like "invest only in what you understand" or the gaze heuristic in sports) ignore irrelevant information. This makes them fast and adaptable.In short: Taleb would see an incentive architecture where the system's indifference toward Josef K. is functional for those who administer it.
• Robustness: By not relying on milimetric calculations, they tolerate human error and drastic environmental changes much better.
• Less is more: In high-uncertainty environments, reducing analyzed data decreases "noise" and improves decision-making.
Historical Parallelisms: Kafka and Solzhenitsyn
Taleb appreciates The Trial (and The Metamorphosis) as prophetic books. In Fooled by Randomness (2001), he mentions how they describe the arbitrariness and methods of "scientific" totalitarian regimes, where opacity and unpredictability destroy the individual. Kafka described with surgical precision the pathologies of the modern world before the great totalitarian systems and corporate mega-structures of the 20th century even existed.
One of the most extreme and terrible cases was communism-socialism in the USSR. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago describes passages that directly evoke the Kafkaesque atmosphere of The Trial: arbitrary arrests, secret trials, and incomprehensible accusations reminiscent of Josef K.'s fate.
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a book based on real events. It is not a fictional novel like Kafka's The Trial, but a historical and literary testimony about the forced labor camp system in the Soviet Union.
• Historical testimony: Solzhenitsyn drew from his own experience as a political prisoner and on hundreds of interviews and letters from other survivors.
• Documentation of the system: It describes how the network of labor camps (the "archipelago") functioned, with its rules, punishments, and the daily life of prisoners.
• Political denunciation: The work exposes Stalinist repression and the use of terror as a tool for social control.
Paralelisms between the texts:
• Arbitrary arrests: Solzhenitsyn describes how citizens were arrested without clear explanation, often at night, and led to endless interrogations. This recalls the beginning of The Trial, where Josef K. is detained without knowing what he is accused of.Concrete example in The Gulag Archipelago: An iconic passage narrates how a man is sentenced to 10 years of forced labor for having read a foreign newspaper. He is not allowed to defend himself, and the court acts as if the sentence were inevitable. This type of absurd accusation and the impossibility of appealing reflect the essence of the "Kafkaesque process": Total arbitrariness. Impossibility of defense. A closed and opaque system.
• Secret trials: In the Gulag, trials were shams: the accused did not know the evidence nor could they defend themselves. Kafka shows the same: an invisible, inaccessible court where the accused never understands the logic of the process.
• Absurd accusations: Solzhenitsyn recounts cases where someone was condemned based on "suspicion" or for having spoken to a foreigner. In Kafka, Josef K. never knows what his crime is, but the system treats him as guilty from the start.
Against a complex and hyper-bureaucratic system, logic is the worst defense because the system is inherently asymmetric. Complex systems accumulate errors and become inoperable. Better to trust simple heuristics and controlled exposure to randomness than large "rational" machineries.
Solzhenitsyn provides a real-world example of the "invest only in what you understand" rule. In The Gulag Archipelago (published in 1973), Solzhenitsyn compiles more than 250 testimonies from prisoners in addition to his own experience. Among them, he describes absurd situations like the following:
The case appears in the first volume, Part I ("The Arrest"), where Solzhenitsyn describes arrest methods. There he mentions: "Sometimes it was enough not to be at home. Fate could be decided by a matter of minutes." Solzhenitsyn recounts episodes where arrests were so routine and absurd that sometimes a circumstantial detail was enough for someone to be saved.
In one of the testimonies, it is told that agents went to look for a man to arrest him, but he was not home. He had stepped out momentarily, and when he returned later, they no longer arrested him because the warrant had expired or the agents had moved on to another target. The system was so arbitrary that the difference between spending years in a labor camp or remaining free could depend on minutes or a bureaucratic fluke.
The account corresponds to a man who was not at his residence when the police arrived to detain him. Upon returning later, he was no longer arrested because the warrant had lost validity or the agents had received another instruction. Solzhenitsyn mentions him by name, as an example of how chance could decide between years of forced labor or immediate freedom.
In this case, we have the arbitrariness of power (there was no logic or justice, only capricious decisions) and the invisible process (the accused never knew what rules governed him or why he was wanted). And there is something else: a destiny marked by chance. Life or condemnation depended on being present or not at the exact moment (and on so many other factors).
The case of the man saved by chance should not be interpreted as a generalizable freedom. Most could not "do the same" because the system was designed so that the exception was a product of chance, not a conscious choice. That is the difference between Kafka and Solzhenitsyn: in Kafka, it is a metaphor for alienation; in Solzhenitsyn, it is the confirmation that life and death depended on a bureaucratic detail.
But the analysis is not easy; that is why they are called complex systems. Taleb, in Skin in the Game, uses the brain metaphor to illustrate the impossibility of understanding complex systems by analyzing each isolated part: understanding the brain "neuron by neuron" is as useless as trying to understand social or economic phenomena from fragmented data without considering the whole.
Both Kafka and Solzhenitsyn show the individual trapped in a bureaucratic and judicial apparatus that crushes them without logic or justice. The difference is that Kafka does so from allegorical fiction, while Solzhenitsyn documents it as the historical reality of the Soviet system.
*Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is the original English title. In Spanish, it was published as Engañados por el azar: El papel oculto de la suerte en la vida y en los negocios. It also appears with the subtitle ¿Existe la suerte? in some editions.
Links:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_proceso
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
https://www.topia.com.ar/articulos/enigma-proceso-franz-kafka
https://elgabo.com/libro/el-proceso-franz-kafka-resumen-analisis-capitulos/
https://hub.edubirdie.com/examples/the-issue-of-bureaucracy-in-franz-kafkas-the-trial/
https://medium.com/@kaczanowski.tomek/on-decisions-and-consequences-1c22881553d0
https://isidorarevistadeestudiosgaldosianos.es/el-proceso-de-franz-kafka-contexto-estructura-interpretacion-y-legado/ensayos/isidorafundaciongmail-com/
https://www.lectura-abierta.com/el-proceso-de-kafka-y-los-otros-procesos/
https://agendapublica.es/noticia/20373/cien-anos-proceso-contra-mentira-arbitrariedad
https://recommentions.com/nassim-taleb/books/the-trial-and-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka/
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9104212-bureaucracy-is-a-construction-by-which-a-person-is-conveniently
https://universoabierto.org/2025/01/02/la-antibiblioteca-de-umberto-eco-el-valor-de-los-libros-no-leidos/
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/
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