“Investigations of a Dog” is a story by Franz Kafka, simultaneously funny and deeply philosophical, centered on a solitary, maladjusted canine protagonist. Defying established scientific norms within his dog world, this unconventional investigator embarks on a unique research journey. His primary goal is to unravel the profound mysteries surrounding his own existence and the nature of the reality he inhabits. This tale is a fascinating exploration of knowledge, authority, and the very essence of being from a distinctly non-human perspective.
Albrecht Dürer drawing of a greyhound relevant to Kafka’s investigations of a dog story
Written late in Franz Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” stands as one of his less widely known yet most enigmatic works. Kafka himself never titled the piece, writing it in the autumn of 1922 and leaving it both unpublished and unfinished. Its eventual publication occurred posthumously in 1931, included in a collection edited by his friend and biographer, Max Brod. Brod bestowed the title Forschungen eines Hundes upon it, a name that could also be translated as “Researches of a Dog,” lending it a slightly more academic resonance, fitting for an English audience interested in the analytical depth of investigations of a dog kafka.
While Kafka’s name is popularly associated with the terrifying absurdity of impenetrable bureaucratic or legal systems, another significant dimension of his work focuses on the nature of knowledge itself. “Investigations of a Dog” offers a brilliant and often humorous parody of the processes by which knowledge is produced and disseminated – what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed “the university discourse.” Indeed, the contemporary academic world might easily be described as Kafkaesque, characterized by its often nonsensical ranking systems, evaluation metrics, market-driven pressures, and ever-expanding administrative layers.
Book cover of How to Research Like a Dog by Aaron Schuster, related to Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog analysis
However, Lacan’s concept extended beyond merely critiquing the mismanagement of the modern university. It aimed to illuminate a broader structural shift in authority, where knowledge and power coalesce to establish administrative systems operating under the banner of reason and technical advancement. This is precisely where Kafka’s dog steps in. The canine investigator questions this new order, excavating the concealed aspects of its purported neutrality and proposing alternative modes of thought – perhaps even hinting at a way to escape its pervasive influence.
Narrated entirely by the dog himself, the story chronicles his various theoretical escapades. He recounts how his innate curiosity and investigative drive were first ignited by a peculiar, almost psychedelic event: a concert featuring musical dogs performing a song and dance routine. Subsequently, he tackles what he perceives as the most profound mystery of the canine world – the origin of food. To solve this, he devises a series of eccentric and unconventional experiments to test potential food sources. He also speculates about a legendary breed of dogs rumored to possess the ability to float effortlessly in the air. The dog relentlessly poses questions but finds himself receiving no satisfactory answers from his fellow canines. He speaks of his earnest search for collaborators to join him in his quest, but everywhere he turns, he confronts what appears to be an insurmountable barrier to his research: the pervasive silence of the dogs. He laments the apparent absence of the singular word or insight that could fundamentally transform dogdom.
Later in the narrative, the dog undertakes a truly radical experiment: in a desperate attempt to penetrate the enigma of nourishment, he decides to fast. This bold investigation takes a dangerous turn, with the protagonist nearly succumbing to starvation. He awakens from this ordeal to a kind of visionary experience, seeing a beautiful hunting dog who appears to be singing to him. Or perhaps, the melody seems to exist independently, simply floating in the air. The story concludes with a summation of the dog’s philosophical insights, which, not without a touch of irony, could be considered Kafka’s own “System of Science.” The pinnacle of this system, and the very last word of the story, is the science of freedom. For those interested in the nuances of Kafka’s exploration of freedom and knowledge through this story, further analysis of investigations of a dog kafka reveals deeper layers.
In Gustave Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas,” the entry for “dog” reads: “Especially created to save its master’s life. Man’s best friend.” Kafka, a keen reader of Flaubert, masterfully subverts this conventional cliché of canine loyalty and subservience to authority. Kafka’s dog is not depicted as man’s best friend; rather, he is portrayed as the truth’s best friend. And he does not save his master’s life. Instead, he risks his own in a relentless pursuit to liberate himself from domination and expose the hidden forces that govern his world. Along this perilous journey, the questions the dog grapples with are fundamental: Is true friendship with truth possible? What form might a truly dissident science, built around this pursuit of truth, take? And, crucially, who are his potential allies in this profound struggle?
“Investigations of a Dog” has never attained the widespread popularity of some of Kafka’s other works, and despite receiving critical attention, it remains a piece that, arguably, is still awaiting full discovery and interpretation. Critical judgment has been varied, sometimes reserved; it has even been described as “one of the longest, most rambling, and least directed of Kafka’s short stories.” Consequently, it has consistently presented a complex puzzle for interpreters seeking to fully grasp its meaning and significance.
One significant puzzle presented by the story is its unique brand of comedy. “Investigations of a Dog” is perhaps the most overtly humorous of all of Kafka’s fictional works; indeed, the entire narrative functions essentially as one extended joke. Much like a classic shaggy-dog story – the narrator even describes himself as belonging to a “woolly” breed – the tale strings the reader along through a series of misadventures, moving from one peculiar episode to the next without building towards a clear climax or resolution, eventually just trailing off. Yet, while the underlying punchline is never explicitly stated, it becomes evident everywhere once one perceives it, illuminating the dog’s strange encounters, the mysteries he confronts, and the entirety of his convoluted research program.
And the punchline, in essence, is this: the dogs in the story do not perceive human beings. Humans are the colossal, unacknowledged presence, the invisible masters of this canine universe – they are, as it were, the elephants in the room. This massive, fundamental gap in canine perception is what, from the reader’s (presumably human) perspective, leads the dog into all manner of comical predicaments and what appear to him as profound pseudoproblems. The dog’s own self-reflection, “Recently I have taken more and more to casting up my life, looking for the decisive, the fundamental error that I must surely have made; and I cannot find it,” underscores this blindness. This inability to perceive humans constitutes the fundamental error upon which all of the dog’s elaborate investigations are built. This central irony provides a core aspect of the story’s humor and philosophical depth for anyone studying investigations of a dog kafka.
Thus, the mystery of the fantastical concert is easily solved once one realizes that the dog has merely stumbled upon a performance of trained circus dogs. Their ability to stand upright, which so scandalizes the young puppy, is simply part of their act. The loud music is not produced by the dogs themselves but by an organ grinder or other human performers. And the seemingly impenetrable labyrinth of wooden bars in which the dog gets caught are, from a human perspective, merely chair legs that, when viewed from ground level by a dog, appear as an intricate, baffling maze. Similarly, the enigma of nourishment is effortlessly resolved when one understands that the dogs are being fed by an invisible hand – that of humans throwing scraps to hungry hounds. Likewise, the Lufthunde, or air dogs, are not miraculous levitating creatures but rather the pampered lapdogs of the bourgeoisie, carried around in the arms of well-to-do ladies, or nowadays, perhaps, transported in designer dog carriers. And in the episode featuring the hunting dog, it is as if Tolstoy’s character Laska has wandered into Kafka’s narrative from “Anna Karenina,” subtly warning Kafka’s dog to vacate the field because Levin and his shotgun are approaching. (“Anna Karenina” famously includes daring passages where the point of view shifts into the stream of consciousness of a hunting dog).
The entire narrative structure is remarkably well-crafted, but it raises a crucial question: how should we interpret this central joke? Is “Investigations” merely an extended intellectual gag? Is the story fundamentally a satire on philosophy, playfully mocking the perceived follies of metaphysical speculation? Would an analyst risk appearing ridiculous by treating the dog’s philosophical quest with excessive seriousness? The story is a brilliant exercise in what Viktor Shklovsky termed estrangement or defamiliarization (ostranenie), but what exactly is being defamiliarized here? In a sense, the story throws into sharp relief the underlying structure and setup of Kafka’s own unique fictional world. Exploring this perspective is key to understanding investigations of a dog kafka.
In a letter to Milena Jesenská, Kafka outlined what could be considered the fundamental formula underlying his fiction, describing it as “3 circles: an innermost circle A, then B, then C.” In this schema, C represents the subject, whose life is rendered impossible by an incomprehensible injunction emanating from A. This impossibility is navigated through the various intermediaries, gatekeepers, managers, and messengers that constitute circle B – the “little others” who operate on behalf of the remote and inaccessible A, le grand Autre (Andere in German) or big Other.
If we analyze “Investigations of a Dog” through the lens of this formula, two aspects immediately stand out. First, the story radicalizes the distance and withdrawal of the central authority A to the point where it has virtually disappeared. There is no mysterious Castle, no inaccessible Law, no unreachable Emperor figure. A has effectively vanished from the dog’s perceived reality. Simultaneously, B is flourishing, represented by the relentless progress of scientific knowledge that dominates dogdom – essentially, the Dog University. However, this realm of knowledge has taken on some of the opacity previously associated with A, largely due to its own success: a sprawling, unmanageable accumulation of information. And what becomes of C, the subject, in this altered landscape?
Here, Kafka introduces another significant twist. It seems that the more intractable and invisible domination becomes, the more urgent and imperative the striving for freedom appears. In the original formula, C suffers from an obscure command that makes life inherently unlivable. The dog, too, experiences his investigative calling as an obscure injunction, perhaps even a monstrous, seemingly unachievable task. However, he is notably less beholden to an external agency or power than most of Kafka’s tormented heroes. Instead of seeking official permission or status, he is the one who authorizes his own investigations. And he actively seeks out others to join him in his philosophical quest to fundamentally transform dogdom. Indeed, one could see the dog as a bringer of a new perspective, perhaps like how Freud reportedly described himself to Carl Jung on their voyage to America – bringing a kind of intellectual “plague.” Or more fittingly, he is the quintessential Kafkian agent who attempts to introduce a sense of the Kafkaesque into a world that would much rather remain ignorant of it. Kafka’s dog is the intrepid researcher who relentlessly interrogates the inherent gaps in the edifice of knowledge – gaps that point towards the unbearable, unspeakable secret of the dogs’ domestication.
We might need a new phrase to adequately capture Kafka’s particular brand of dark humor: a screwball tragedy. “Investigations of a Dog” embodies this concept. It is a theoretical burlesque where the pursuit of knowledge involves unconventional methods like singing into a hole, attempting to dance with the earth, engaging in wild conjectures about flying dogs, and enduring a prolonged period of food deprivation. It is, in a sense, a literalization of what Hans Blumenberg described as “theory as exotic behavior,” a concept he explored in his study of the oldest joke about philosophy – the story of Thales and the Thracian maid.
Philosophy, from its very origins, appeared as an eccentric, often “exotic” practice, seemingly detached from everyday life and its pragmatic, grounded concerns. The story of Thales, the supposed first philosopher, who was so absorbed in gazing at the stars that he fell into a well and was consequently mocked by a servant girl from Thrace, serves as a foundational joke about philosophy itself. It’s a joke told by and at the expense of philosophy, encapsulating its inherent strangeness and distance from ordinary life. In Blumenberg’s words, “The interaction between the protophilosopher and the Thracian maidservant … became the most enduring prefiguration of all the tensions and misunderstandings between the lifeworld and theory.” As Blumenberg illustrates, the history of this joke, with its numerous variations and interpretations – some retellers siding with Thales, others with the maidservant – is intimately connected with the history of philosophy itself. Kafka’s tale can also be seen as part of this long history, constituting another retelling of this ancient joke. But while the dog’s peculiar investigations literalize the exoticism of theory and its perceived remoteness from daily life, Kafka’s story also literalizes Socrates’s profound reply to the joke, as presented in Plato’s Theaetetus.
Socrates recounts the story: “They say Thales was studying the stars, Theodorus, and gazing aloft, when he fell into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of him because, she said, he was wild to know about what was up in the sky but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet. The same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy. It really is true that the philosopher fails to see his next-door neighbor; he not only doesn’t notice what he is doing; he scarcely knows whether he is a man or some other kind of creature.” The implied question, perhaps, is: who knows, maybe the philosopher isn’t a man at all, but some other kind of creature – perhaps even a dog.
What is remarkable about Plato’s presentation is how Socrates, faced with this ridicule, escalates the stakes. He does not attempt to defend philosophy by highlighting its practical value or usefulness. (This pragmatic defense begins later with Aristotle, who recounts how Thales successfully used his astronomical observations to predict olive harvest yields and profit from it, a lineage that continues to our present day with the promotion of philosophy based on its commercially exploitable “critical thinking skills.”) Instead, Socrates radicalizes the implications of Thales’s fall. It is not merely the physical ground beneath his feet that the philosopher loses; he loses the metaphysical ground of being and thought itself. He no longer knows who he is or even what kind of creature he is. What if, in Kafka’s formulation, the fundamental cogito (I think, therefore I am) were actually a dogito (I dog, therefore I am)?
This perspective brings us closer to the core of Kafka’s distinctive humor. The “screwy” aspect of the dog’s investigations – and what is encapsulated by the term “screwball tragedy” – lies in their faltering trajectory, their character of being persistently thwarted yet endlessly revitalized. It’s the quintessential Kafkian blend of necessity and impossibility, of indispensability and hopelessness, of perseverance stripped down to its pure, almost empty form. Throughout his strange theoretical adventures, the dog constantly trips over himself, propelled forward and simultaneously stymied by an insurmountable inner — what exactly? The idea of screwball tragedy is perhaps most purely illustrated by one of Kafka’s own variations on the Don Quixote story.
Kafka writes: “One of the most important quixotic acts, more obtrusive than fighting the windmill, is: suicide. The dead Don Quixote wants to kill the dead Don Quixote; in order to kill, however, he needs a place that is alive, and this he searches for with his sword, both ceaselessly and in vain. Engaged in this occupation the two dead men, inextricably interlocked and positively bouncing with life, go somersaulting away down the ages.” Here, Kafka presents a strikingly original philosophy of life conceived as a continually failed suicide. In this quixotic act, the subject, who is already dead symbolically or existentially, paradoxically comes bouncing to life through his futile attempts to find that last shred of vitality to extinguish. This repeated, perpetual failure is the missing “place that is alive” – the unexpected source of an exuberant, uncanny vitality. The somersaulting vivaciousness of a split Don Quixote, sword drawn yet forever missing his nonexistent target, takes the form of a double negation, or more accurately, a continually failed negation. This failed negation is the Kafkian expression of positivity and life, the wellspring of a twisted metaphysical humor. As Kafka put it later in his notebooks, “One cannot not-live, after all.” Unlike the straightforward logic of logicians, this “cannot not” is not simply equivalent to “can.” It implies that the possibility (“can”) can only assert itself by way of a detour through a more primordial impossibility that both drives and simultaneously undermines it. Kafka’s Don Quixote can only live by constantly failing to kill himself; the flipside is that Quixote is fundamentally unkillable precisely because he is already dead, and thus he keeps “somersaulting away down the ages.” This eternally failed negation is, for Kafka, “more obtrusive than fighting the windmill.”
Tilting at windmills is, of course, Cervantes’s famous image for fighting imaginary enemies, and this well-known episode epitomizes Don Quixote’s self-created literary existence – the life he lives through the imitation of faded, almost “dead” chivalric literature. Kafka’s concept of quixotic suicide takes this idea of a simulated or lived existence a step further. In Kafka’s framework, virtual or symbolic life becomes its own delirious enemy: the Kafkian Don Quixote is tilting, in essence, at himself.
Kafka’s characters, in various ways, are victims of themselves; they are their own worst “imaginary” adversaries. Yet, paradoxically, they also find their vitality precisely through their inability to cancel themselves out. They come alive by perpetually spinning around – or tumbling over – their own inherent impossibility, by failing to not-live. If animals, hybrids, and uncanny nonhuman figures appear with such frequency in Kafka’s body of work – if, indeed, a dog is chosen to embody the figure of the thinker – it is because they serve as the most fitting spokescreatures for this internally divided state of being. It is a state that fundamentally misrecognizes itself by perceiving itself as a superior, masterful creature, as “human.”
Kafka’s protagonists are characterized by an exceeding drivenness, and “Investigations of a Dog” is fundamentally the story of the drive to philosophize – the theory drive. It adds the critical twist that the philosopher should become reflexively aware of the very structure of this drivenness, which is why the story offers valuable clues for understanding Kafka’s other narratives and the general form of his fiction. Kafka’s dog cannot not-think. Despite his earnest and concerted efforts, the canine philosopher fails to think through himself and his world completely; he fails to breach the pervasive wall of silence (this is the tragic element of the story). Yet, crucially, he also cannot not-think these fundamental questions (this is the screwball element). Thus, he persists, pushing forward with his idiosyncratic inquiries and iconoclastic methods, steadfastly pursuing what he terms his “hopeless but indispensable little investigations.”
The dog presses forward, behaving as if the true path is less a clear route to be followed than an obstacle intentionally placed to cause stumbling. One of Kafka’s striking aphorisms states: “The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.” This can be read as a direct rejoinder to the Thales joke: instead of gazing skyward at the heavens, the theorist focuses intently on the ground, but finds that the ground itself has become treacherous, a deliberate tripwire for the thinking process. Here, we might once again recall Sigmund Freud. Freud’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle explores the self-destructive and self-sabotaging tendencies inherent in psychic life – is not the concept of the death drive Freud’s term for this idea of quixotic suicide? The essay famously concludes with the quotation: “What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping… The Book tells us it is no sin to limp.” “Investigations of a Dog” contains several images of flying and levitation, representing a dreamed-of transcendence, but it is this internally inhibited or arrested movement – the limping, the stumbling, or the more acrobatic “somersaulting away down the ages” – that best captures the halting, precarious course of the dog’s investigations. These are physical metaphors for thought grappling with its own inherent impossibility, a word that carries particular weight and valence for Kafka.
“According to ancient lore, dogs are supposed to recognize angelic presences before humans can see them,” writes Alberto Manguel in a notable essay on Dante’s dogs. But this is emphatically not the case for Kafka’s dogs. They are depicted as being deprived of this gift of extrasensory perception; they possess no special intuitive sense for the transcendent or the beyond. Indeed, they fail to apprehend the fundamental reality that is directly before their eyes – the presence and actions of humans. Manguel draws a compelling comparison between the mystery of God for human beings and how humans must appear to dogs: “To this framing orthodoxy belong the savage examples of God’s judgment, the gratuitous demonstrations of God’s mercy, the divine hierarchies of bliss, and the infernal gradations of punishment: all beyond human understanding, much as our erratic behavior must be beyond the understanding of dogs.” In this analogy, God is to man as man is to dog. (As early as the 17th century, Francis Bacon observed: “For take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a god.”) Yet, for Kafka’s dogs, there is no man-God figure they perceive. His dogs operate as if they are the top dogs, the masters of their own realm where canine knowledge reigns supreme. Max Brod, Kafka’s editor, summarized the story intriguingly as a “melancholy travesty of atheism.”
However, there is another perspective to consider. Kafka seems to invert Manguel’s idea about dogs possessing a special sense for the angelic. His dog possesses a keen nose, not for emissaries from another world, but for the inherent fractures and inconsistencies within this one. While outwardly submitting to the perceived progress of canine science and the established canon of dog knowledge, the philosopher dog ceaselessly sniffs out the trails left by their inconsistencies, distortions, fissures, and gaps. The dog explicitly states, “I bow before their knowledge … but content myself with wriggling out through the gaps, for which I have a particularly good nose.” Following the logic of the shaggy-dog joke structure, these perceived gaps would be the telltale signs of an “other world” – the hidden masters, the invisible human owners, the unnoticed gods of the dogs. But what if this very idea of hidden masters is itself a comical ruse, and the deeper truth is not that invisible outside forces are in control, but rather that we ourselves are inflicting this condition upon ourselves?
Perhaps we, as human beings, are fundamentally self-domesticating animals, the wild and endlessly resourceful architects of our own cages. And – in a profound paradox – it is the very wildness and ingenuity of this self-domestication process that points towards a form of freedom that remains inherently untamed and unconquered. This is why our deepest investigations into the nature of freedom, much like those of Kafka’s dog, are simultaneously both indispensable and, perhaps, ultimately hopeless.
Aaron Schuster is a philosopher and writer who lives in Amsterdam. He is the author of “The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis” and “How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science,” from which this article is adapted.
