The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority by Costas Despiniadis (original) (raw)
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“Don’t Trust Anybody, Not Even Us”: Kafka’s Realism as Anarchist Modernism
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2011
Franz Kafka's personal interest in and contact with the anarchist movement have been fairly well documented, and many have pointed to affinities between his work and anarchist ideas. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship has documented the influence of anarchist politics on modernist aesthetics per se, primarily in terms of a shared resistance to representation-a project that Kafka appears not to share, or at least one he pursues in a very different way. This essay redescribes the strategies of representation found at work in novels such as The Trial and stories such as "The Refusal" in relation to anarchism, and thereby to contribute to a better understanding both of Kafka's political engagements and his unique form of narrative realism.
The drive and its vicinities: Kafka as a theorist of social organization
2015
I would like to propose here a reading that goes against the commonplace description of Kafka as the writer to best capture the “absurdity” of bureaucracy and of totalitarianism. Instead, I would like to present a somewhat different claim: Franz Kafka as the theorist of a form of life capable of accommodating the reversals between means and ends, future and present satisfaction, that Marx recognized in the French workmen organizations - reversals which still today are mostly understood only as signs of how the autonomy of the whole over the parts leads to corruption, betrayal and, ultimately, totalitarianism.
This article focuses on the complexity of sovereign power and its effects on the human body. Kafka's story, In the penal colony, seems to illustrate the relationship between body and power, or, more generally, the relation between human body and the discursive practices listed on it. As a result, in a kind of apocalyptic aesthetics, the human body turns into an object that can be written upon, an object subjected to different types of processing and manipulations, emphasizing the idea that human being is shaped by power from the time of his birth.
Justice for Josef K.: Bringing Myth to an End in Kafka’s Trial
New German Critique, 2015
Walter Benjamin’s great essay on Franz Kafka is a key example of his philosophical praxis, which exhumes the prehistoric substrate of modernity in order to expose the myth of progress in modernity’s claim to epochal legitimacy. Benjamin’s physiognomic thinking endows Kafka with the features of his own thought, an intellectual messianism or revolutionary nihilism that frames Kafka’s legal world with a radical critique of law. The verdict against modernity Benjamin finds in Kafka is couched in a series of theologically tinted figures. The obscurity of Kafka’s “parables,” the fruit of an aesthetics of “failure” that observes “das Bilderverbot,” veils a messianic vision of justice. Benjamin’s Gnostic picture of modernity as a bureaucratic prison house reflects Josef K.’s victimised view of his situation in The Trial. Hans Blumenberg’s therapeutic account of myth suggests a view of Kafka’s work at odds with Benjamin’s idea of the normless, “mythic” quality of law and politics in modernity.
Kafka: Alienation through Bureaucratic Proceduralism
This paper examines the works of Franz Kafka from a historical materialist perspective in order to explore how the state becomes alienated from society. Kafka creates a society in his novels in which the totality of social relationships comes into conflict with bureaucratic proceduralism. Through Kafka's example, this paper will argue that an alien will of the state inherently emerges from bureaucracy, itself a social system common to all class societies. This paper seeks to illustrate how Kafka's aesthetics of redistribution of the sensible conveys a connection between political and existential alienation of the individual confronting the state machinery, while also describing the psychological effects of state mystification.
Franz Kafkas Roman Das Schloß: Der moderne Mythos des Bewusstseins by Halina Nitropisch
Journal of Austrian Studies
Reviews | 141 Zürau and the later ones from Prague, side by side in chapter eight, he gives much more weight to the negative connotations of the latt er, which bring "Skepsis, Selbstkritik und Verzweifl ung zum Ausdruck" (205). Th is despite the fact that the Zürau aphorisms are that form of prayer, "denn sie verweisen auf das Unzerstörbare, das Gött liche im Menschen, trotz der ungeheuren Schwierigkeit von dessen Befreiung" (205). Th ough Nakazawa did not venture with Kafk a too far into these "fi nal things," he calls the aphorisms "eine unvollendete Statue, die uns aber mit ihren Rätseln und tiefsinnigen Überlegungen zur Meditation über 'die letzten Dinge' immer noch einladen" (205). Th us, he also leaves some breadcrumbs for the next brave soul to follow.