'Soltanto una relazione'. La scimmia di Kafka e le frontiere della primatologia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Una via di scampo. La scimmia di Kafka
2011
La stampa del volume è stata realizzata con il contributo del MIUR pervenuto al Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio e della Cultura-Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia nell'ambito del Progetto PRIN 2007-L'immagine degli animali e l'immagine dell'uomo fra fi losofi a e scienze della vita.
La "macchia rossa". La scimmia di Kafka tra filosofia dell'animalità e letteratura dell'animalità
Aim of this paper is to investigate Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (1917) with and after the most interesting analysis of the same story by Felice Cimatti in his book “Filosofia dell’animalità” (2014). In his talk to an academic audience the narrator describes his fore-life as an ape in the open jungle, his capture by some men of the “Hagenbeck company” and his entrance into the human world as an escape from his cage and as an act of (self) violence. The ape’s decision to be a man requires renouncing freedom: compared with the cage where it is imprisoned after the capture, human life means for the ape just another kind of prison. Even if the ape-man learned without problems to speak (through imitation), its being goes on to be a hybrid one. Focus of the paper is to underscore the Kafkian motif of “assault on the border”, insofar as the border is to be intended in Kafka as a mobile one (see the tales “Wish to be a red Indian” (1913), and “An old Manuscript” (1919)). Compared with the ape-figures in E.T.A. Hoffmann, in Robert Musil and in Thomas Bernhard’s short stories, the ape of Kafka is really a kind of monster, i.e. a figure that represents the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the unthinkable. It happens because Kafka tries in his tales to assume the point of view of the animals, to enter in the no-man’s land of the animals’ life. It does not mean simply to explore the world of the other, but also to approach the other in his self. Not just another one, the other as itself, but the other in the self, not just the animal being but the human being. In this way the monsters of Kafka are we ourselves.
Liberazioni - Rivista di critica antispecista, 2019
Nel dibattito contemporaneo il termine “creatura” ha guadagnato importanza in una serie di discorsi: da un lato è stato usato per mettere in questione la barriera che separa l’umano dall’animale e per immaginare forme di solidarietà interspecifica sulla base di una comune vulnerabilità e precarietà “creaturale”; dall’altro è stato usato per analizzare la soggezione della vita specificamente umana a forme sovrane di potere, come nell’uso che Eric Santner fa dell’espressione “creaturely life”. Quest’articolo analizza le creature di Kafka per mostrare che i due usi del termine sono legati e inseparabili: “vita creaturale” significa, in tutte le sue declinazioni (tanto per gli animali umani che per quelli non umani), essere soggetti a un potere sovrano, essere un “animale davanti alla legge”, dove la soggezione dell’animale al sovrano umano (all’umano in quanto sovrano) esemplifica il paradigma biopolitico. In conclusione, una lettura del racconto kafkiano “Il nuovo avvocato” mira a mostrare come il messianismo di Kafka faccia segno verso una via d’uscita da quest’impasse biopolitica.
La solitudine tra colpa e destino: il caso Kafka
Kafka created loneliness, on one hand, to support the need of his work and, on the other hand, as an exclusion of the rule of Law. As such loneliness is a troubled and ambivalent existential phenomenon lived at times as sheltering and threatening, as a salvation and a damnation. It’s a destiny, for which Kafka feels hopelessly guilty.
Sopra un frammento del giovane Kafka. Modi della Vorstellung
As the title suggests the Brod-Kafka controversy demonstrates how difficult it is to distinguish wishful perceptions from reality-testing. The contribution investigates therefore what is here being called ways of the Vorstellung in relation to a Freudian theory of representation. In particular Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of the presentation) denounces the problematic functioning of representational processes where language is involved. Dealing with ethical questions, Kafka's early production illuminates the paradox of subjectivity involved in writing. In this in-Between space (Dazwischen) language and Vorstellung (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) are not intended to guarantee communication. This hinges upon Kafka's narrative strategies which consider living bodies as generating a dialectic of accommodation and excess not to be exhausted by ideas and schematas. Kafka's early prose Description of A Struggle as well as the strange devices he conceives while lying in bed, at rest or sleepless illustrate the point. In terms borrowed from Lacans' Seminar VII Kafka's answers along with the prose of this period denounce the limits and the deceptive origin of apperception as related to consciousness and the ego. The aesthetical dimension, intertwined with the psychogenesis of the body proper, leads to unprecedented ethical challenges. Representation does not only mediate the knowledge we consume (" ästhetische Freude " – " Apperception "), it also affects knowledge so that we assume with Kafka that representation constructs knowledge. This is also why the Bionian grid as filtering transformational device is compared to Kafka's description of himself as a lattice-workman , a trellis. The will we are willing to investigate and cope with in Kafka's semi-oneiric productions is a poetic will defying figuration. Emerging by means of stylistic and rhetorical strategies this will disconfirms any systematized mental connection aimed at classifying, explaining, understanding. The idea of Vorstellung Kafka maintains challenges our assumptions; it shows how the external world, which is generally understood as the mediation of the perceptual, is overdetermined by our emotions, unconscious desires, affections. KEYWORDS: Unconscious representation as unavailable vs apperception; “in-Between” space; the grid (Bion); “having enough of something”; pleasure principle vs aestethic enjoyment; writing process as working through of experience vs deceptive representational mechanisms Es gibt im gleichen Menschen Erkenntnisse, die bei völliger Verschiedenheit doch das gleiche Objekt haben, so daß wieder nur auf verschiedene Subjekte im gleichen Menschen rückgeschlossen werden kann Franz Kafka 1 1 «Si danno nello stesso uomo conoscimenti che, nella più compiuta dissimiglianza, hanno pur sempre l'identico oggetto sicché si può solo risalire alla presenza di diversi soggetti nel medesimo essere umano» (F. Kafka, Kritische Ausgabe. Nachgelassene Schriften und
Il cane in Kafka. Tra addomesticamento e diserzione
K. Revue, 2018
Abstract: This article, starting from Konrad Lorenz’s thesis that links human being and dog inside the common destiny og domestication, dwells on the figure of the dog in Kafka. The dog appears to be an ambiguous figure, on the border between animal and humanity, characterized by shame dependence and submission, but that in its silence and in its strength og instincts, is able to pratice desertion and resistance’s from towards huaman domestication.
2015
Aim of this paper is to investigate Kafka's short story "A Report to an Academy" (1917) with and after the most interesting analysis of the same story by Felice Cimatti in his book Filosofia dell'animalità (Philosophy of the animality, 2014). In his talk to an academic audience the narrator describes his fore-life as an ape in the open jungle, his capture by some men of the "Hagenbeck company" and his entrance into the human world as an escape from his cage and as an act of (self) violence. The ape's decision to be a man requires renouncing freedom: compared with the cage where it is imprisoned after the capture, human life means for the ape just another kind of prison. Even if the ape-man learned without problems to speak (through imitation), its being goes on to be a hybrid one. Focus of the paper is to underscore the Kafkian motif of "assault on the border", insofar as the border is to be intended in Kafka as a mobile one (see the tales "Wish to be a red Indian" [1913], and "An old Manuscript" [1919]). Compared with the ape-figures in E.T.A. Hoffmann, in Robert Musil and in Thomas Bernhard's short stories, the ape of Kafka is really a kind of monster, i.e. a figure that represents the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the unthinkable. It happens because Kafka tries in his tales to assume the point of view of the animals, to enter in the no-man's land of the animals' life. It does not mean simply to explore the world of the other, but also to approach the other in his self. Not just another one, the other as itself, but the other in the self, not just the animal being but the human being. In this way the monsters of Kafka are we ourselves.