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Taking inspiration from a yet unpublished chapter by Franz Kaltenbeck about the written dimension of the symptom and traces thereof in literary texts, this essay aims more specifically to introduce a new reading of Kafka. Kaltenbeck shows how Kafka uses Freudian analysis of wit to present his theories about the outsider in melancholia. Furthermore, he discloses that the symptom can lead to the discovery of a death drive within life. Kaltenbeck makes a close reading of “The Judgement,” a short story in which the survival of writing requires a passage through a death drive. The apologue about a chained Prometheus, gradually forgotten by all, gives a new turn of the screw to the dialectic relation between closure and disclosure and to a paradoxical hermeneutic opposing explanation and the inexplicable.