The cruelty of waking: ahypnotic experience in the world of Franz Kafka

Abstract

The study interprets two novels by Kafka (Metamorphosis and Disciplinary Camp), and shows that one of the motives both novels share is the “ahypnotic experience”, i.e., the state in which the character of the story is frightened by sleep, since in sleep he loses control over himself, and is given up to the forces which rid him of of his human form (Metamorphosis). Based on the analysis of the apparatus of torture, interpreted here as “apparatus for producing justice”, the paper argues that for Kafka, the law means not freedom, but inhumanity (Disciplinary Camp). The following part of the paper explains that a similar process is uncovered in Donnarumma’s Amygdala art installation, and poses the question as to whether the increasing autonomy of modern technology intensifies Kafka’s fears of dehumanisation of the world. The final part of the paper offers an alternative conclusion to the problem building on Nietzsche’s understanding of the sense of the sublime.

Keywords

• kafka
• ahypnotic experience
• sublime
• inhumanity
• sleep
• metamorphosis
• nietzsche
• untimely meditations
• historicity
• machinicity
• donnarumma
• calyx