Abstract
When I was invited to write a short piece for the catalog of a staging of The Trial, I argued that Franz Kafka’s laughter enacts a critique of the prevalent concept of freedom as the free will of the individual, which has dominated both the political and the philosophical tradition in the Occident.1 I had not anticipated the reaction this position would provoke. Several posts on blogs as well as personal communications informed me in no uncertain terms that the idea is preposterous: Not only is Kafka’s world so overdetermined by tragedy that humor has no place in it, but Kafka’s is a world of imprisonment where freedom is totally absent. This book is not so much a direct reply to these protestations against my short piece in the theater catalog, as a response to certain ingrained presuppositions about Kafka’s work—and especially its “tragic” aspect, of which the replies to my short piece were symptomatic. I continue to maintain, and I develop here in some detail, that Kafka’s humor is a response to the Western conception of freedom, which he tirelessly presents in this narratives, and that this response implies an alternative conception of freedom.
Original language | English |
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Place of Publication | U.S. |
Publisher | State University of New York Press |
Number of pages | 190 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781438462394 |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |
Keywords
- 1883-1924
- Franz
- Kafka
- criticism and interpretation
- humor