The three faces of irony in the myth of the “end” of a myth. Hans Blumenberg as a reader of Kafka’s Prometheus

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to show how the reading of Kafka’s Prometheus offered by Hans Blumenberg in Arbeit am Mythos authorizes a re-understanding of this short story as a device within which the meta-representative moment and the questioning moment are configured as two indissolubly linked aspects. In this perspective, starting from the recognition of the key role played by the mechanism of irony in the construction of the Kafkaesque short story, the article aims to highlight the three different levels of articulation of such a mechanism, with particular reference to its ability to exhibit – at the same time – the transcendibility of the datum and the need to think the sense as «infinite deferral».

Keywords

• Kafka
• Prometheus
• Nexus “metarepresentation-interrogation
• myth
• irony