...Veronika Tuckerová This article examines Eduard Goldstücker's construction of his own vita through his complex engagement with Franz Kafka from 1963 to 1989. Archival documents about Goldstücker's trial and surveillance, found in the archives of the Secret Police in Prague, help us understand...

...Christopher Conti Walter Benjamin's great essay on Franz Kafka exemplifies his philosophical praxis, which exhumes the prehistoric substrate of modernity to expose the myth of progress in modernity's claim to epochal legitimacy. Benjamin's physiognomic thinking endows Kafka with the features of his...

...Roger Foster Foster argues that Theodor W. Adorno's interpretation of Franz Kafka makes possible an understanding of literature's critical role in society while avoiding the twin pitfalls of reducing the literary work's significance to an echo of contemporary social and political ideas...

...Brook Henkel Abstract Around 1910 trick films by Edwin S. Porter, Émile Cohl, and others fascinated writers and critics by bringing objects to life and upending the dominant roles of human actors found in drama and literature. The animated objects and thing-like humans in Franz Kafka’s writings...

..., the article proposes a fourfold typology of torture by looking at representative examples from Aeschylus's Prometheus to Franz Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” and Jean Améry's At the Mind's Limits . The article contends that the incommunicability of torture challenges not only the literary ethics...

... that interrogate modernity and its prioritization of mobility and speed: first, the moral interpretation of lateness as a stigma (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann); second, the psychic view of lateness as a condition of perception (Georg Simmel, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser); and third, the psychoanalytic...

... not address the nature theater movement or Benjamin’s interest in gestures, and he counters Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s theater rather than problematizing it. 39. Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” 801 . 40. Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s theater was informed by his work on the baroque mourning play...

.... 83 84 Kafkaʼs Files was incomplete. It was in Prague, in the same spring of 1883 when Nietzsche gave birth to his favorite son and double, Zara thustra, that his fi rst true reader (in time and rank) was born: Franz Kafka, eldest child of Julie and Hermann Kafka, the latter the head...

... with discourses on the animal by other think- ers, such as Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas.6 4. Jay Bernstein, “Mastered by Nature: Abstraction, Independence, and the Simple Concept,” in Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge...

... might say that the collector has a sense for what would have happened. In Benjamin’s writ- ings on Franz Kafka, we find a story that may help make better sense of this claim. I recount the story here in its entirety: In a Hasidic village, so the story goes, Jews were sitting together...

... of exception, an absolutizing of katarēgsis [no-longer-at-work]” (TTR, 108). 7. Vivan Liska, Giorgio Agambens leerer Messianismus: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka (Vienna: Schlebrügge.Editor, 2008), 7. My translation. 100 The Jerusalem School Historically speaking, Buber’s story...

... surprisingly novel perspectives. Benno Wagner reads Franz Kafka as the “fi rst reader” of Fried- rich Nietzsche in relation to the biopolitics of risk and insurance, danger and uninsurability. Stefanie Harris explores Rainer Maria Rilkeʼs obsession with the visual in The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge...

... correlate of late idealism’s hypertrophy of the subject (K, 112). He finds it in Franz Kafka’s inability to distinguish between the Creator and the Devil (“Portrait,” 235) and in Samuel Beckett’s supposed nihilism, which “gnostically” understands the “world as it has been created as radically evil...

... already know. The darkness of the lived moment thus becomes the bridge between kata to dynaton and dynámei ón. Where Franz Kafka saw culture and art as the ax with which to break the frozen sea within, Bloch saw it as the spark that would ignite the bright “utopian star” in us and thence...

... soul in signing a fi lm contract was also echoed in a 1913 letter by Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer. After describ- ing to his fi ancé fi lm posters from the lobby of a Prague movie theater, Kafka concludes: “B. has lent himself to something beneath him.” Kafka imagines Bassermann after the shooting...

... publication of Aus Indien, we see, in addition to Hesse (Singapore and Port Said) and Freud (Italy), Waldemar Bonsels (Bombay, 1903), Bernhard Kellermann (Tokyo, 1907), Hanns Heinz Ewers (Igatpuri, 1910), Franz Kafka and Max Brod (Milan, Paris, 1911), Hermann Keyserling (Kyoto, 1912), and Ernst...

... because they pose impossible questions. —Lisa Robertson, “Playing House” As Theodor W. Adorno once said of Franz Kafka, so we may say of W. G. Sebald: what baffles and eludes us in his work may one day provide the key to the whole. 1 Sebald’s rise to international acclaim was meteoric...

... Primo Michele Levi to translate Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial into his native Italian in 1983, only four years before his own suicide? Beyond the enervating physics of culpability that fueled Kafka’s unfinished novel, Levi found a broader kinship there—in his predecessor’s gritty, kinetic pro...

... subjectivity of Franz Kafka’s insect while pointing back to Hamlet’s sublime individuality. Adorno uses Beckett and Kafka to restore to Hamlet the monstrous underbelly of his melancholy: the sin of ace- dia described by Benjamin, transformed into the moral lethargy of bourgeois free time.68 Damaged...

..., renders their truth less effective. In Franz Kafka’s work, for instance, the “mirror writing” ( Spiegelschrift ) that somehow denounces the reification of experience does not prevent a sense of promise from manifesting itself; in fact, even in novels such as The Castle or The Trial , a “chance...