“This World Actually Has Come to Pass”: Franz Kafka’s Artistic Universe in the Theoretical Studies of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of Franz Kafka’s creativity in the interpretation of the German-American philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. Throughout her life, Arendt frequently referenced the writings of the great modernist, as seen in her books “A Hidden Tradition,” “Between Past and Future,” “Men in Dark Times.” Arendt sees Kafka as an author whose writings are able to bring us closer to understanding the modern era, since they reveal the inner structure of the world hidden from the eyes by artistic means. The construction of Kafka’s works is compared in the article with the plot of an ancient tragedy, in the center of which is the collision of the protagonist with the omnipotence of rock. From this point of view, the conflict between the atomized individual and the social order is considered as the leitmotif of Kafka’s writings and analyzed by the examples of the novel The Trial and the short stories The Judgment and The Metamorphosis. A parallel is drawn between the description of total social machinery in Kafka’s works and Arendt’s concept of the New European “expansion of society,” understood as “no-man rule,” which is asserted under both authoritarian and liberal political regimes. The article demonstrates that Kafka’s artistic texts can be understood as the starting point of Arendt’s theoretical reflections on the genesis and characteristic features of modern mass society.

Keywords

• kafka
• arendt
• the trial
• the judgment
• the metamorphosis
• social order
• publicity
• loneliness
• fate
• reality
• anonymity