Freedom and Confinement in Modernity Kafka's Cages

by Kordela, A. Kiarina; Vardoulakis, Dimitris

• ISBN13: 9780230113428
• ISBN10: 0230113427
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment, which traditionally have been conceptualized as an existential anguish in the face of the nothingness of human life in the fallen world of technocratic modernity. Presupposed in these interpretations is a notion of (an unattainable) freedom as the opposite of confinement. By tracing the figure of the cage on several philosophic, aesthetic, and socio-political levels, and through rich interdisciplinary methodologies, the present essays treat Kafka's cages as the very critique of a culture that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up the latter as unattainable. Such a re-conceptualization of freedom, the central concept of liberal democracy, has never been attempted before in Kafka scholarship; the proposed volume has, therefore, deep ramifications for a variety of different disciplines, from philosophy and epistemology, to literary and political theory. Given the centrality of Kafka's work in fields ranging from German, English, and Comparative Literature, to Jewish Studies, Theatre Studies, and Critical Theory, it is also envisaged that the book will become a standard prescribed course-text on Kafka.#xA0;

Author Biography

A. Kiarina Kordela is an Associate Professor at Macalester College and the author of $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan. Dimitris Vardoulakis is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of The Doppelgnger: Literature's Philosophy and the editor of Spinoza Now.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations of Kafka's Works	p. vii
Notes on Contributors	p. ix
Kafka's Cages: An Introduction	p. 1
Interpreting Kafka's Cages
Special Views on Kafka's Cages	p. 9
Delusions of Agency: Kafka, Imprisonment, and Modern Victimhood	p. 29
Kafka and Derrida Before the Laws	p. 49
Reconceptualizations of Kafka's Cages
Kafka's Cage	p. 63
ôThe Fall is the proof of our freedomö: Mediated Freedom in Kafka	p. 87
ôWorkforce without Possessionsö: Kafka, ôSocial Justice,ö and the Word Religion	p. 107
Kafkaesque: (Secular) Kabbalah and Allegory	p. 127
The Ethics and Beauty of The Trial: Kafka's Circumscription of Failure	p. 159
Performatives of Kafka's Cages
Kafka's Fatal Performatives: Between ôBad Conscienceö and Betrayed Vulnerability	p. 179
How is the Trapeze Possible?	p. 201
With Impunity	p. 213
Index	p. 239
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