One of the astonishing disclosures in Jacques Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis concerns the crucial desire of man, which the analyst views as an insatiable craving for privation. The troubadour of medieval epics, who must submit to debilitating protocols of desire in his courtship of the Lady, is, for Lacan, exemplary of a persistent pursuit of forms of self-denial. As it turns out, literature would remain faithful, long after Malory, to the splendor of negative cravings. Perhaps the principal exponent of the self-mutilating drive in the realm of fiction was Franz Kafka. Kafka threw us mortals