We are here in what Philippe Muray called “the reign of positivity,” a notion borrowed from Jean Baudrillard, who had already warned us that “the negative, denying itself, has merely generated a redoubled positivity.” 5Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (New York: Verso, 1996), 65. Maybe Baudrillard was anticipating the arrival of these “denial” images when he spoke about the “virtual performance of the world which is tantamount to the elimination of all negation, that is, a pure and simple de-negation.”

Kafka was born into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today the capital of the Czech Republic.[7]