English: This paper attempts an alternative reading of the temporal structure of Kafka’s last
novella, The burrow, which was analysed by J M Coetzee in his essay ‘Time, tense and
aspect in Kafka’s The burrow’. While Coetzee’s analysis has lost none of its cognitive value
a quarter of a century after its first publication in 1981, a psychoanalytical reading
of verbal aspect as a symptom of paranoia will be attempted here. I wish to suggest,
further, that this paranoid structure is potentially to be found at the heart of all language
and subjectification.