Publication details
Kafka Reconfigured: Law, Literature, Politics
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Workshop |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This roundtable is an encouragement to think through Kafka’s legacy in jurisprudence. Try as we might, we could hardly think of an author with a more profound impact on legal thought than Franz Kafka. What made Kafka more-than-canonical and privileged author in the eyes of legal scholars was his double situatedness in law as a social phenomenon and as a profession. Though a lawyer, Kafka maintained ironic and the same time affirmative stance towards law, accepting its authority as something structurally necessary and all the more grotesque. This highly productive tension between internal position of a practicing lawyer and a staunch critique of the juridical mechanism gave rise to a distinct aesthetic of legal power reified in the epithet of “Kafkaesque”. Working hypotheses of this roundtable is that Kafka (more often than not, rather, “kafkaesque aesthetic”) is frequently read ahistorically and merely allegorically. Our aim is to re-read Kafka as an author embedded in the age of modernity, who nonetheless sheds critical light on today’s politico-legal predicaments. This serves us as a stepping stone in reconfiguring Kafka’s place in the heterodoxy of legal movements, be it critical legal studies or law and literature. We welcome interventions into the contemporary configuration – which focuses more on the productive potential of different representations, as opposed to the system with its emphasis on design and function – of Kafka’s contribution. The reconfiguration is thus a deliberate modification in the face of new challenges that force us to read Kafka anew, more politically and historically. |
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