Art is primarily the consciousness of unhappiness, not its cure. Kafka's severity, his dedication to the demand for unhappiness, prevented him from entering the paradise of myths where so many weak artists who were disappointed with life expose their self-satisfaction. The object of art is not dreams or "constructions". But art does not describe truth either: truth does not need to be known or described, it cannot even know itself or explore or represent itself. In this sense, there is no place for art: strict monism excludes all idols. However, in the same sense, art can be justified, at least for Kafka, because art is connected, just as Kafka is connected, to what is "outside" the world and expresses the depth of this without abysses and without rest outside, what emerges when we no longer have relationships of possibility with ourselves or with our own death.
Art is the consciousness of "this unhappiness". It describes the condition of the person who has lost himself, who can no longer say "I", who, with the same movement, has lost the world, the truth of the world, who belongs to exile, to those petty times where, as Hölderlin says, the gods no longer exist and do not yet exist. This does not mean that art creates another world, if it is true that its primordial origin is not in another world but in the other of every kind of world (at this point Kafka accomplishes or is preparing to accomplish the leap that art does not allow, and we see this better in the notes that reveal his religious experience than in the work itself).
