THE COMPONENTS OF EXPRESSION D 35 at the same time that he begins the correspondence with Felice, either to give an image of the danger or to exorcise it-better to have finished and mortal sto- ries than the infinite flux of letters. The letters are perhaps the motor force that, by the blood they collect, start the whole machine working. Nonetheless, for Kafka, it is a question of writing something other than letters—a question, then, of creating. This something other is presaged by the letters (the animal nature of the victim, that is, of Felice, vampirish utilization of the letters themselves) but can only be realized in an autonomous writing even if it remains perpetually unachieved. What Kafka does in his room is to become animal and this is the essential object of the stories. The first sort of creation is the metamorphosis. A wife's eyes shouldn't see that above all else, nor should the eyes of a father or mother. We would say that for Kafka, the animal essence is the way out, the line of escape, even if it takes place in place, or in a cage. A line of escape, and not freedom. A vital escape and not an attack. In "The Jackals and the Arabs," the jackals say, "We're not proposing to kill them. . . . Why, the mere sight of their living flesh makes us turn tail and flee into cleaner air, into the desert, which for that very reason is our home." If Bachelard is unfair to Kafka when he compares him to Lautreamont, this is because he assumes above all else that the dynamic essence of the animal lies in freedom and aggression: Madoror's becomings-animal are attacks that are all the more cruel in being free and gratui- tous. It is not like this in Kafka; it is the exact opposite, and we could even say that his concept is the more correct one from the point of view of Nature itself. Bachelard's postulate leads him to oppose Lautreamont's speed and Kafka's slow- ness. ! ' Let us remind ourselves, however, of several elements of the animalistic stories: (1) there is no possibility of distinguishing those cases where the animal is treated as an animal and those where it is part of a metamorphosis; everthing in the animal is a metamorphosis, and the metamorphosis is part of a single cir- cuit of the becoming-human of the animal and the becoming-animal of the hu- man; (2) the metamorphosis is a sort of conjunction of two deterritorializations, that which the human imposes on the animal by forcing it to flee or to serve the human, but also that which the animal proposes to the human by indicating ways-out or means of escape that the human would never have thought of by himself (schizo-escape); each of these two deterritorializations is immanent to the other and makes it cross a threshold; (3) thus, what matters is not at all the relative slowness of the becoming-animal; because no matter how slow it is, and even the more slow it is, it constitutes no less an absolute deterritorialization