This article shows how the social criticism that unfolds in Kafka’s The Trial and then The Castle was able to guess the majority of the political ills of the contemporary West as they developed mainly from the 20th century onwards. Not restricting oneself to the usual analysis of oppression by the gigantic structures of justice and administration, it focuses more on concrete examples of mistreatment of the individual and underlines the major role of the complicity of admiring people of the (...) totalitarian system. The servile citizens complete the aggression of the State by reducing the private sphere to a minimum. Certain more recent excesses of social networks, notably the growing confusion between the public sphere and the private sphere, are also announced by Kafka’s satire, which depicts the modern Westerner as denied his fundamental freedoms. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to revisit the theme of paradise and animality in the work of Kafka, whilst at the same time elucidate Agamben's complex understanding of these notions with the help of the literary imagery of Kafka. In a world where many find themselves crushed by the anthropological machine, Agamben outlines an intuition Kafka had about animals, that can help humans to reconcile with their animal nature, and let them guide us back to paradise. If animals have (...) never left paradise, and the human realm is not substantially different for the animal realm, then like the animals we have never truly left paradise but only think we did. It is only in trying to uphold a higher, human sphere, through self-subjection and exclusion, that we leave the paradisical realm. Kafka's creatures show us the ridiculousness of these divisions between human and animals. (shrink)

This article will explore how configurations of the student in Kafka's literature represent a specific relation to knowledge. The central argument will be that their attitude represents a form of rendering knowledge inoperative, therefore representing a disruption of power structures. The emblematic figure of this posture will be the worst student in Kafka's Abraham. This disruptive posture will be denoted as a form of stupidity. The interest in stupidity comes from its abundant presence as a motif in contemporary social and (...) political issues. Stupidity is a form of otherness and belongs always to the other: the accusation of stupidity is always directed at the alternative position. The text will use the student in Abraham to challenge the common-sense framing of stupidity as constituting an unwarranted invasion, deemed inconsistent with the age of enlightenment and political progress, and that must therefore be eradicated. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconsider Max Scheler's philosophy of values in the light of the renewed discussion of axiological issues in contemporary emotion research. In this context, connections are drawn with Ronald de Sousa, who, like Scheler, seeks to demonstrate the relationship between emotions and values. While Scheler assumes an immediate feeling of value, De Sousa conceptualizes value perception as the apprehension of value properties in analogy to sensory perception. Based on De Sousa's concept of key scenarios (...) and Scheler's assumption of a historically evolved ethos, this paper further analyzes the social and cultural aspects of value perception and the possibility of an objective hierarchy of values. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the relevance of Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology to literary criticism and translation studies, with a focus on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven and its French translations. It demonstrates how hauntology—emphasizing the spectral interplay between presence and absence, origin and trace, and meaning and deferral—reframes texts as sites of revenance: haunted spaces of fragmented meanings and deferred interpretations. By analyzing the challenges of translating The Raven's rhythmic complexity, phonetic resonance, and iconic refrain, (...) "nevermore," this study highlights the text's spectral nature and resistance to closure. Additionally, the paper seeks to provide a new perspective on the dispersion of meaning in translation. It shows how French translations by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and others exemplify Derrida's notion of dissemination, contributing to contemporary discussions in literary studies, translation theory, and philosophical criticism. (shrink)

Franz Kafka's "Before the Law" distills his longer works, like The Trial and The Castle, into a single theme: Access. In "Before the Law," the main character seeks entrance into the law. The doorkeeper apathetically refuses while instigating the man's need. Often, in Kafka's works, the main character seeks access to some part of his life, but is prohibited, sometimes in a material way and, at other times, in an epistemic way. This paper will explore this access problem using Martin (...) Heidegger's Being and Time. It will phenomenologically interrogate the concept of "access" within Kafka, using an early Heideggerian distinction between ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, the former marked by thoughtless availability (thereness) and the latter by a sustained and thoughtful suspension, the result of a break from the regular availability of life's tools (the lack of thereness), forcing Kafka's main characters to dwell in the negation of access. (shrink)

In this editorial for the special issue on Franz Kafka, Yvanka B. Raynova examines Kafka's relationship to Nietzsche as well as the very different and often contradictory interpretations of Kafka's work by philosophers and literary critics. She argues that although Kafka's novels cannot be directly "translated into a philosophical, theological, sociological, or psychoanalytical discourse" (Jürgen Born), they should not be interpreted and evaluated solely from a literary perspective, as they raise institutional questions that have led to socio-critical and political associations (...) that are just as urgent for us today. In this context, she refers to the controversies surrounding Kafka's work in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, to his current socio-political reception in art, and to the Kafkaesque in the contemporary world. (shrink)

What is the political significance of literature? How, if at all, can fictional narratives interact with issues of social and legal justice? This paper addresses these questions and proposes four models of literature's intervention in political reality based on Walter Benjamin’s and Günther Anders’ readings of Kafka. According to Benjamin’s 1930s Kafka essays, fictional narratives have the power to unsettle hitherto established legal decisions and thus partake in the exercise of justice. Anders, in his 1951 book Kafka: Pro und Contra, (...) criticises Kafka for authoring narratives that—complacent with existing power—lend themselves to being used to morally absolve acts of oppression. Taken together, the four models—two of which are based on Benjamin's Kafka reading and two on Anders'—offer a complex view of the role of literature as a political actor, recognising its positive value while warning against its potential abuse. (shrink)

This essay aims to delineate the structure shared between Kafka’s three novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, using ideas from Spinoza and Nietzsche, with whom Kafka had familiarity since his youth, namely, Spinoza’s idea that the true essence of religion is justice and charity and Nietzsche’s idea that justice is born from magnanimity, in order to grasp Kafka’s critique of certain unnecessary realities of broadly administered justice. All three novels are structured around an institution - America, the justice system, (...) the castle - as the characters they are composed of operate either as cogs of this institution or demonstrate some function outside of this institution, usually offering some kind of help to the protagonist. However, despite these cogs, the institution never serves its purpose in the same way that, despite these helpers, the protagonist is never helped, precisely because of a schism between the realms of justice and charity. (shrink)