<P>Since the middle of the eighteenth century, political thinkers of all kinds--radicaland reactionary, professional and amateur--have been complaining about "bureaucracy." Butwhat, exactly, are they complaining about?</P><P>In <I>The Demon ofWriting</I>, Ben Kafka offers a critical history and theory of one of the most ubiquitous,least understood forms of media: paperwork. States rely on records to tax and spend, protect andserve, discipline and punish. But time and again, this paperwork proves to be unreliable. Examiningepisodes that range from the story of a clerk who lost his job and then his mind in the FrenchRevolution to an account of Roland Barthes's brief stint as a university administrator, Kafkareveals the powers, the failures, and even the pleasures of paperwork. Many of its complexities, heargues, have been obscured by the comic-paranoid style that characterizes much of our criticism ofbureaucracy. Kafka proposes a new theory of what Karl Marx called the "bureaucraticmedium." Moving from Marx to Freud, he argues that this theory of paperwork must include both atheory of praxis and of parapraxis.</P>