On Kafka’s side of the Tower of Babel, the heavens, the imperial palace, and the highest court still transmit the Old Testament double injuction whereby “the Law” invites entry or transgression and then renders itself inaccessible, as, by law, it must. Kafka’s response, however, as Deleuze has argued, was to marshal a “nomadic war machine,”, a “battering ram directed against itself,” and not to construct another “ivory tower.” As demonstrated by “The Great Wall of China”, any attempt to erect a “new Tower of Babel” yields a potentially endless series of isometric segments linked and separated by gaps such that the entire construction finds a kind of cohesion only through the delayed messages conveyed by persons traveling along its expanse.

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