K. always wants to reach the goal before having reached it. This demand for a premature dénouement is the principle of figuration: it engenders the image, or, if you will, the idol, and the curse which attaches to it is that which attaches to idolatry. Man wants unity right away; he wants it in separation itself. He represents it to himself, and this representation, the image of unity, immediately reconstitutes the element of dispersion where he loses himself more and more. For the image as such can never be attained, and moreover it hides from him the unity of which it is the image. It separates him from unity by making itself inaccessible and by making unity inaccessible.

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We could summarize this situation as follows: it is impatience which makes the goal inaccessible by substituting for it the proximity of an intermediary figure. It is impatience that destroys the way toward the goal by preventing us from recognizing in the intermediary the figure of the immediate. (The Space of Literature)