What bothers Kafka is the over-presence of his father: he is too much alive, too obscenely intrusive. However, this father’s over-presence is not a direct fact: it appears as such only against the background of the suspension of the father’s symbolic function.

This father’s “too-muchness”..is ultimately the too-muchness of life itself, the humiliating quality of the father’s excess of vitality which undermines his authority. ..It is not that father’s excessive vitality undermines his symbolic authority; it is, rather, the other way round, i.e., the very fact that one is bothered by father’s excessive vitality already presupposes the failure of symbolic authority. ..Kafka’s reluctance to assume the Name-of-the-Father is the very indication of his failure to break with and off from the father. ..The true function of the Name-of-the-Father..is..to allow the subject to “symbolically kill” the father, to be able to abandon father..and freely set on one’s own path in the world.” - SLAVOJ ZIZEK on Kafka’s symptomatic claim that ‘it would have been possible for him,’ in Zizek’s words, 'to establish a non-traumatic relationship with him, if he were his friend, brother, boss, even father-in-law, just not his father’ http://ift.tt/1T6l049