Writing of Kafka’s short stories and parables (which include all kinds of animals from mice and apes to dogs and moles), Walter Benjamin takes note of the reader’s experience as an angle for understanding them: “the reader follows these animal tales for a fair distance without even noticing that they do not deal with human […]
Does attention to detail make one a thinker? Isn’t it the attention to the whole? Robert Walser’s portrayal of the philosopher – in his prose piece “The Philosopher” – makes him into a person who is obsessed with small things. He is, as Walser says, like a child who is “groping for small things.” […]
Unlike many readers who take much of Franz Kafka’s fiction as tragic or dark (think, for instance, of “The Metamorphosis,” “The Penal Colony,” or The Trial), Philip Roth thought of Kafka as a “sit down comic.” From Max Brod we learn that Kafka used to laugh when he read his work publically, and, of course, the […]
Before the Soup (After Kafka) by Gary Barwin A gatekeeper sits before the gate. As always, it stands open. A traveller asks to be let in. “No.” “Later?” “Maybe,” the gatekeeper says. “But understand that though I am powerful, I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. Before each of the many gates, one […]
The feeling of pain (what Emmanuel Levinas calls the “little death”) and the existential onset of death are the most private experiences. It goes without saying that nobody can feel my pain or experience my death for me. Even though someone can take notice of pain and say, “I feel you.” He or she really […]
Apocalyptic disaster is and has been a preoccupation with many great writers and artists. Apocalypse is also a grave concern for prophets and prophesies that span Judaism, Christianity, and Eastern Religions. Oftentimes the apocalyptic is described as something that is not only revelatory and miraculous but also destructive. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a […]
This morning Berfrois published a piece I wrote entitled “Bewildered and Bewildering: Animal Life and Jewishness in James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Shalom Auslander” As one can see from the article it addresses “animal life” – a term borrowed from the philosopher GWF Hegel but used by Girogio Agamben and a tradition that threads its […]
Small people can be found throughout the folklore, religion, and literature of the west. But what is more interesting is not that there are small people but why or how they become small and what this becoming means. One may be made small by reality (which crushes one to a pulp), one can make oneself […]
Kafka is well known for his fictional machines. Sometimes the purpose and the meaning of the machine are clearly laid out; sometimes they are vague. The most well-known is “the Harrow” in his short story “The Penal Colony.” The purpose of the machine is to slowly write the sentence on the body of “The Condemned […]
Kafka never went to America. But he, like many Europeans, imagined what it would be like to emigrate there and how different it was from Europe. These imagined differences are not only cultural. For Kafka, they are also physical, spatial, and temporal. And through close attention to these differences, which come out in his […]
Schlemiel Theory 