Episode 229 - Transcript

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

So Kafka didn’t just influence Camus with his work. There were several other, MAJOR thinkers from the 20th century that took these images from Kafka’s work… and then changed the world with THEIR work after having read him.

Couple of the MOST exciting were the philosophers Theodore Adorno…and Hannah Arendt. Two VERY different takes on the EXACT same work…and we’ll talk about BOTH of them today and how Kafka INSPIRED them to develop some of their biggest ideas. 

Good place to start… is PROBABLY to talk about how Adorno’s take on Kafka… differed from Camus’ that we talked about last time. And ONE way that Adorno says it as HE’S explaining it…is that Kafka’s someone whose work has to be taken LITERALLY…when you read him. 

And this can be weird to hear at first. Because you think about Kafka’s writing…you think of CRAZY stuff. Random moments coming out of nowhere, people getting whipped inside of a closet by a dude in a meat helmet…you don’t really know what’s gonna happen next. You think of nightmare fuel at times, you know children laughing, running around from tree to tree behind you— you think of things going on in these books that could never actually happen if you were in real life. 

And if this is the kind of stuff Kafka’s putting out there…then how can Adorno say anyone should be taking this stuff LITERALLY?

Well if Camus’ interpretation: is that reading Kafka… makes you feel the same way as when you confront the absurdity of existence head on…then Adorno’s gonna say that REDUCING Kafka…to JUST a guy that’s trying to depict the human condition…CRUCIALLY misses one of the big things that makes Kafka’s work so strong in the first place: that there ISN’T…a single, neat allegory…. that can EXPLAIN his work away. 

Let me give an example of he’s trying to AVOID here: Lot of people out there may have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Fun little story about some animals on a farm: pigs, chickens, cows it’s a rural extravaganza for the whole family to enjoy. And it’s common knowledge that this story about a farm…is ACTUALLY a story for George Orwell about totalitarianism. The boars represent Marx, Stalin, Trotsky and the like. The horse represents the proletariat. The sheep are the masses. The fence represents something like Stalin’s prostate issues at the time. Point is: there’s all sorts of SYMBOLISM…that someone can DECODE…while READING Animal Farm. 

And there’s nothing WRONG with this Adorno would say…but what we CAN’T do is treat Kafka's work as though its the same kind of thing as this. Because WHAT HAPPENS…when you READ Animal Farm eventually…and you figure out what all the characters were intended to BE…there always becomes a point… where someone can just be DONE with Animal Farm…put it back on the bookshelf, let it start collecting dust…because the THINKING IS: now they’ve DECODED… what the intended MEANING of the book was. Now that I know what all the characters mean…well, this one is pretty much SOLVED, now I can just be DONE with it.

The PROBLEM with this when it comes to Kafka’s work Adorno says…is that Kafka NEVER INTENDED for there to be a specific MEANING like this in his work. That there wasn’t a single time, place, or set of social conditions that he wanted to DEPICT when he was writing. 

So to Adorno: to say that this is just an allegory for the human experience…projects a bit too much of Camus’ OWN interests ONTO the work of Kafka…and MISSES something important about just how MANY situations this work has the ability to resemble. Which is part of the GENIUS of it. 

Adorno says we need to TREAT Kafka’s work… as though it’s hermetic…as in hermetically sealed. Meaning when he writes a book…think of it as a self-enclosed, more literal universe that exists ALL on its own. 

And what gets REVEALED when we get PAST the temptation of trying to have this point to some specific thing in the world OUTSIDE the book…is that Kafka’s USING his work to paint a picture of a kind of general structure of domination…a social spell that people get put under…where self-justifying power structures of ANY type or SCALE…eventually lose sight of what they began as. 

If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while…then you know this entire TIME period beginning mid twentieth century has thinkers questioning the limits of rationality. How much can we rely on rational systems to coordinate our lives for us? At what point do these systems, rationally CONSTRICT the world to a level that it becomes detrimental to being a human being?

Now there’s plenty of ANSWERS we get to these questions. Some will say that when THIS much of an emphasis is placed on rationality… it demystifies something about what it is to BE a person to the point that your existence is flattened. There’s others that’ll say that this type of thinking naturally LEADS… to thinking of people and things around you in a way… where they’re just instrumental to some rational goal you have— that things like colonialism or pollution aren’t bugs of the system…but just the natural destination of this kind of thinking. 

They say that part of the thinking is that Enlightenment political thought…has produced societies where people are mostly seen as rational cogs that make up a machine. And the question for a lot of thinkers becomes: what is it like to BE someone… that’s living in the middle of this?

The term that Adorno used to describe what was going ON here…he called it: the soothing facade of repressive reason. 

And while he’d NEVER… wanna reduce Kafka’s work to ONLY talking about repressive reason…he definitely thought this was of the CLASS of things that Kafka was pointing to in his work…BEING someone that was alive at the beginning of the 20th century when all this was building. 

When Joseph K in The Trial for example that we talked about last time…when he is ragdolled through the court system…when rational procedures have turned his life into a situation where he is constantly disoriented, alienated from what’s going on and GUILTY for something where he doesn’t even know what he’s being ACCUSED of. 

For Adorno…we don’t have to THINK of this as a metaphor. Because this is LITERALLY…what people are GOING through when they’re LIVING in these rationally constrictive systems. Whenever you use rationality…to try to OVER coordinate the things in people’s lives…there is a general ARC…that you can expect to play out…and we can see examples of this arc at all different scales.

FIRST, there is a well intentioned beginning. Something BAD happens… someone gets hurt, something unjust happens because of the chaos of how reality unfolds…and well intentioned SMART people, wanna use rationality to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Okay.

Maybe they set up a RULE, or a PROCEDURE, maybe it’s a government AGENCY…doesn’t really matter the POINT is this is an effort to make the chaos a little more manageable. 

But then INEVITABLY…it FEELS GOOD to be able to simplify reality DOWN like this. And inevitably…bad stuff keeps happening because there’s no PERFECT set of protocols that can ever predict everything that’s ever gonna happen. 

So, the people in CHARGE of these rules and procedures…inevitably start adding MORE rules and procedures. Given enough time: rational systems like this produce rules, on top of rules, that eventually accomplish three things once this gets severe enough: people feel guilty all the time even when they aren’t doing anything wrong because they’re not sure if they’re breaking one of the overabundance of rules there are…they feel alienated, from the original well-intentioned purpose of whatever they started DOING the thing for…and this leads to a feeling of disorientation…where it FEELS like this rational system has removed SOMETHING about what it is to be a full person that’s living through it. 

COUPLE this with the fact that these rational systems ATTRACT the kind of person that WANTS to be the one making rules and procedures— people that often BENEFIT from there BEING a sort of gatekeeping here where they KEEP procedures opaque and away from scrutiny. Or how about the fact that it’s psychologically EASIER…for someone to follow a rulebook than to make a new set of judgments about the world each day, provisionally. How about the fact that in the interest of being as efficient as POSSIBLE in this rational world…PEOPLE, are often reduced to numbers on a page, which then goes on to GUIDE people’s behavior.

Consider ALL of this…as a general ARC that goes on in when human beings organize…but ALSO understand that it’s one that’s particularly AMPLIFIED…when we look at the world that Kafka was depicting with characters inside his books. Whenever power structures become self-justifying…the rational systems that make them UP are no longer calibrated and held accountable…and so they inevitably drift in this direction that LEADS to experiences like Joseph K’s in The Trial.

Now this may be OBVIOUS when this goes on at the level of government…like, we all know the example of a justice system, that STARTS as something truly interested in making the world a better place…but then over time transforms into just SHOW trials and procedures designed to keep people in power— we ALL know THIS one.

But now consider how this goes on JUST as much… in the career of an individual politician. They may START their career with the BEST of INTENTIONS…but as the years go on, and layer upon layer of things pile up that simplify their decision making…they DO this to the point that they DRIFT into a person that doesn’t even RESEMBLE who they started out as. 

Consider how this might go on in a workplace. Or with faculty at a school. Consider how this might go on in romantic relationships, where you have RULES you guys set up in the relationship. Or how about with parents trying to maintain a house with rules in a house. 

Consider how we EVEN do this sort of thing to OURSELVES. Say I’m on a diet. Something that starts OUT as wanting to feel better and get healthy…with all the rational protocols I can start layering ONTO that experience…with all the tools and trackers that can reduce my experience down to…eventually it can get to a point where I’m weighing every calorie, caring far more about the number on the scale than how I actually feel. 

In a sense: in the modern world we are all people trapped in little Kafka novels of our own creation. Where things that START with the best of intentions…end up transforming into something that flattens your experience of the world. 

Consider how this might apply to something like social media…where it BEGINS as something that is well intentioned, just trying to create a space where people can come together and talk about stuff…but when people’s behavior gets reduced to metrics, when it gets to be more about layering on things that keep people ON the APP as long as possible…well it drifts into something completely DIFFERENT than what it started OUT as. And when you have these incentives set up towards posting about FEAR or RAGEBAIT…people end up BEHAVING more in these ways as they find COMPLIANCE, within the rational protocols that govern their behavior. 

Opaque, self-justifying, systems of power…PRODUCE this same result over and over again. And to Adorno: it would be a SHAME to describe Kafka…as an author that’s JUST critiquing ONE of these. By thinking of his work as a self-contained universe…it allows someone to read his work, take inspiration from it to SEE the repressive reason going on in their OWN life…and then to pick up the SAME BOOK, ten years LATER maybe…and use it to see an entirely different situation with a new set of eyes. 

This is why Adorno thinks the work of Kafka is so effective. 

See because to HIM: in a modern world where MOST people live their lives immersed in myth and authority at a level that they can’t even SEE…Kafka shows characters that passively go ALONG with their myth and authority…as an invitation for us to see our OWN compliance more clearly. He calls this the “mute battle cry” or “silent battle cry” of the main characters of Kafka’s stories. They stay quiet…just go along with the way things are…and to Adorno this then EXPOSES…JUST how RIDICULOUS the fact they’re going along with these rational systems really is. 

Kafka’s stories to Adorno…are what he calls a “demolition”...OF that soothing facade, of repressive reason. 

Maybe it’s time to give ANOTHER example of a famous story from Kafka that we can SEE this whole dynamic in. This one is called The Castle. And for whatever it’s worth: it was the last full length book that Kafka ever worked on during his lifetime. 

In fact, if you end up reading it it even cuts OFF mid sentence because he just never finished writing the ending. 

The book starts with a guy named K arriving at a village. 

And yes, the main character of THIS story is ALSO… called K by everybody in it, JUST like the main character in The Trial. This is deliberate by Kafka…where part of his goal…is to transform what it means to BE a PROTAGONIST inside of a novel—where typically: they always have a strong name, solid identity, we know exactly who they are…well Kafka starts us with an identity that’s a bit more relatable living in the modern world…let’s just go with K. 

Now K…shows up to this village…there’s a blizzard going on outside…and in the distance from this village up on a hill he sees a castle. It’s a castle he traveled ALL that way through the snow to try to get to that day. 

See, he’s a LAND surveyor by trade…meaning he takes measurements for big pieces of land…and the officials in the castle asked him to come, because they have some work they want him to do. Regardless though with the blizzard going on…when it’s dumping snow to the point you can barely even walk…anything the CASTLE wants him to do… is going to have to wait until tomorrow morning at least. 

So he goes inside the hotel tavern in this little village he’s in…and the PEOPLE there are INSTANTLY suspicious of him and his intentions. They’re like who are you? We don’t KNOW you. He says I’m a LAND surveyor for the castle. Nobody believes him. He’s like go ahead, call the castle, see what they say. They CALL the castle…and on the other end of the phone there’s not a conversation going on…but just this strange, bureaucratic white noise. A mix between dead silence, shuffling, papers, bunch of people talking…it SOUNDS kind of like an OFFICE building… that’s having a very chaotic day doing whatever it is they do. Finally somebody gets on the phone and says yes…K WAS summoned to be there, he’s okay…and then hangs up the phone. 

The people at the bar are a LITTLE more tolerant of him being there after that…but they don’t give him a room or anything…they just tell him he can sleep in the taproom where people drink, on a pile of straw. Like some kind of livestock. That’s his first NIGHT that he spends in the book sleeping on a pile of straw.

He wakes up the next day…and all of a sudden two dudes show up named Artur and Jeremias…who are apparently supposed to be his own personal helpers that have been assigned to him by the castle. Except here’s the thing…they’re not that HELPFUL. They don’t DO anything. They crawl around on the floor sometimes, spy on him, sometimes they’ll just vanish into nowhere for days at a time. Really all they do is CONFUSE K more than anything, not really that HELPFUL.

Eventually K finds out indirectly through the mayor of the town….that apparently there’s been a mistake. That they don’t NEED any land surveyed at this castle, sorry. And that yeah he was summoned…but that it must have been some kind of clerical error or a scheduling mistake. Either way it’s really no one’s FAULT if you think about it, not even really something worth telling him directly….so have the mayor tell him…and I guess he can just be on his way. 

But K says no. He’s gonna get to the BOTTOM…of the REAL reason why he’s there! He knows there’s GOTTA be a better explanation…it CAN’T just be some random mistake! He tries to walk up to the castle, but the paths that GO to the castle just loop back in on themselves in really confusing ways, or it seems like the second he starts to get CLOSE to the castle…the castle just recedes and he can never get to it. He tries to get in contact with one of the officials, but they’re always unavailable and JUST out of reach. That strange kind of hope we talked about last time. 

K realizes he’s gonna BE there a while as he’s waiting to find out the answers…so he gets a job as a janitor at a school. He LIVES in one of the CLASSROOMS of the school with a woman he met in a bar. And as they’re living in this classroom…in the story it’s like being in their bedroom at home, they’ll be having arguments like they’re in a relationship, cuddling, sleeping, right in FRONT of all the kids that are all watching them in the classroom. Then when school starts they gotta move their bedding out of the way so that the teacher can start teaching the class. It truly is like Kafka GOT this scene…out of a DREAM that he had one night. 

There’s a sense in which IN this story The Castle…the more and more that K tries to find meaning to the absurdity of his situation, the MORE he’s trying to make SENSE of things WITHIN the arbitrariness of the system…the more entrenched into the bureaucracy he becomes— he starts to have a job he doesn’t like, a girlfriend he’s not too sure about, he EVEN gets himself trapped in an uncomfortable living situation. Does any of this sound FAMILIAR to anyone out there?

So Kafka’s writing at the beginning of the 20th century right around the year 1915…and the philosopher Hannah Arendt is writing her work right around the year 1950. 

Now a LOT CHANGES…over the course of that 35 years in terms of what it’s like to BE a person. Stuff Hannah Arendt thinks is crucial…if you wanted to understand what Kafka was DOING as he was writing these stories. 

See to her…there’s no reason to think ANY of this we’re reading is an allegory for the human condition. There’s no reason to assume this is about self-justifying power and how it gets out of hand. People will EVEN say sometimes… that Kafka was something like a “prophet” for the events that went down during the 20th century…but Hannah Arendt says okay, fine, but why do we even gotta call it that? To her, we don’t need to be looking ANY FURTHER…than what is CLEARLY going on in this writing that’s about the actual world he’s living in. What Kafka’s DOING in his work, she says…is giving a REAL analysis… of the underlying structures of modern life, and where the lives of people are headed if it keeps GOING this way.

Now KAFKA’S living during a time where these things he’s writing about are still a bit under the surface…but Hannah Arendt is living during a time where these things have been brought RIGHT out into the open, and have essentially become pieces of what a normal LIFE is for a modern person. 

In the 1950’s Hannah Arendt’s writing what would become one of her most FAMOUS books called The Origins of Totalitarianism. Where IN it…she talks NOT ONLY about the mechanics of HOW a totalitarian situation emerges in the world…but also about how those movements SUSTAIN themselves, by DOMINATING the experience of the individual. 

And to her: Kafka’s books are BLUEPRINTS, that STRIP our reality down to its CORE STRUCTURE…in a way that REVEALS the patterns we start to accept as normal…when living in one of these totalitarian setups. 

I’ll give a FEW examples here today; let’s start with one of her BIG ones from The Origins of Totalitarianism: the way BUREAUCRACY is used to control people in the modern world.

See, it’s easy to think of bureaucracy…as something that’s just an unfortunate, but NECESSARY thing about the modern world. I mean sure, you gotta wait in line at the DMV sometimes…gotta let the fine people at TSA take their childhood out on you every once in a while…but GENERALLY SPEAKING…look, bureaucracy is a necessary evil: modern society is very complex…and bureaucracy’s the price we gotta PAY sometimes for all the benefits.

But this whole thing we’re doing there where we’re justifying it…is part of the game that gets PLAYED with bureaucracy to Hannah Arendt. 

Bureaucracy often gets THOUGHT of as though it’s a civil service that’s just trying to help people, keep things EQUAL…but what it ACTUALLY does sometimes she says… is become a place that bad actors… can enforce what she calls a kind of “rule by nobody”...or “tyranny without a tyrant”. She has a FEW phrases she uses here.

To understand what she means: consider what it’s like to be K in one of Kafka’s novels. He exists in a world…where government bureaucrats have total control over MAJOR aspects of his life. In the Castle he gets summoned to do some land surveying…and then COMPLETELY lives at the mercy of these people that he can’t even get in contact with. In the Trial, THAT K just gets sent from procedure to procedure, showing up EXPLAINING himself to yet ANOTHER group of unelected officials that never explain anything to HIM…where they EVENTUALLY have the power to put him to death.

Hannah Arendt says in the Origins of Totalitarianism, “in governments by bureaucracy, decrees appear in their naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but were the incarnation of power itself, the administrator only its accidental agent.”

Because consider the two AGENTS… from the beginning of his book The Trial…these agents tell Joseph K that he’s under arrest…. and THEN make him start to feel BAD for asking QUESTIONS. Look, it’s not our JOB to explain to you what’s going on here…you’ll find out at your hearing. But then the hearing comes a bit LATER…and then he’s told he’ll find out more at his actual trial. At the trial it’s then deferred to some time in the future and then this goes on and repeats itself until one day he’s just… dead. 

At NO POINT…does Joseph K ever know exactly what’s HAPPENING to him. A situation that Hannah Arendt says totalitarian systems… purposefully generate in people to control them. Because if you can FLOOD people with new decrees every day and a landscape that they can never really predict…then you can KEEP people in a kind of paranoia—and uncertainty, that’s great if you want people to never be able to organize against the PRESENT state of things. 

See it’d be ONE thing…if there was somebody Joseph K could get in contact with…SOME person who’s handling his case that could then be held responsible if they made a mistake. 

But in a bureaucracy…responsibility is so spread out, and there are so many “agents” that are carrying things out that are unelected…when it’s SET UP this way you’ll often hear things SAID like: well this bad thing that happened to you…but it really wasn’t ANYONE’S fault individually. Just unfortunate…had to be done…but how can we really go AFTER anyone for what went wrong?

In other words for a would be totalitarian setup…for Hannah Arendt this becomes a PERFECT tool…for administering control over people…while NEVER needing to have anyone that looks “in charge”. 

It becomes a sort of “rule by nobody”. Where no matter how DEEP you go INTO the labyrinth of bureaucracy…you can NEVER quite find the person responsible. 

In her section on Imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism…Hannah Arendt points out how this tactic was used by European governments…IN their different attempts at colonial administration. 

I mean these governments, that had REAL accountability going on when it comes to the homefront… when it came to the satellite governments that they set up in an area that were colonizing…these were not administrations that were HELD to the same level of scrutiny. 

The colonized people were often treated HORRIBLY…and it was justified by the governments at HOME by saying well look: these people are non-citizens. These people aren’t entitled to the same legal PROTECTIONS as people that are living back in France for example. 

So what they GOT to Hannah Arendt…was a very Joseph K like LIVING experience… where they don’t get clearly defined laws for living their life… they just get decrees handed down to them in a moment that change from week to week. 

They don’t get good INFORMATION to live their life with…no, they flood them with BAD information so that they’re in a spot where they REALLY never know what exactly’s happening to them, or who to even appeal to… if they WANTED to make it go away. 

In a sense… their life becomes just at the mercy…of a group of bureaucrats that are constantly FUNNELING them into the next procedure they have to comply with or else face horrible consequences. Then they’re left to face the inevitable ABUSE that comes…when people that HAVE power, AREN’T held accountable, and can more or less treat them however they want. 

Consider ANOTHER similarity…between the life of K and the lives of people immersed in totalitarianism…ALL of these COMMANDS …that are coming down from on HIGH that they have to go ALONG with…are FRAMED in terms of them being “necessary and automatic”...as Hannah Arendt calls them. What does she mean by that?

Well see it would be ONE thing…if a group in power came along…and said look: we’re in charge now. We believe in an ideology where THIS is how the world needs to be set up, this is what we’re gonna do. And if you don’t like it, well we may not LISTEN to you…but you can ALWAYS disagree with us. In other words: in CERTAIN ways things are setup there’s at least ROOM for people to disagree and for SOME kind of conversation to be HAD. 

But what totalitarian regimes do she says…is they often FRAME the stuff that they’re DOING…as though this ISN’T a matter of preference, or political ideology…what we’re doing HERE… is just the reality of the universe. 

It is NECESSARILY TRUE they will say. It should be automatic they say…in fact it’s really all the people caught up in their own political ideology…those are the only people that would ever DENY the obvious reality that’s going on here.

Stalin did this she says by claiming the historical necessity of the classless society emerging. They said this isn’t a political move…this is just the end of history: to DENY this is to deny HISTORY. The Nazi’s did this she says with the divine providence of the German PEOPLE, and how it was their DESTINY…to ASCEND to their rightful place as the PINNACLE of human civilization. 

Either way the move is the SAME here for Hannah Arendt: this is MASKING political domination…and PRETENDING it’s just a REALITY that nobody has control over. 

Something the character K in Kafka’s novels knows all too well in his experience. In the book The Trial…the priest that he talks to before he gets put to death tells him… don’t worry so much about accepting all of this as TRUE…the REAL thing to focus on here… is accepting this all as being NECESSARY. 

Hannah Arendt says in the REAL world… when this is put into practice in a totalitarian situation…the way this often shows up is through what she calls “Technical Administration”. 

Think of a person that’s given a position of POWER within a government…but they’re not someone who’s elected…they’re someone who’s APPOINTED, because they possess SOME kind of EXPERT opinion that gives them immense power over other people for a period of time. 

And they’re NOT marketed in the media as someone that’s USING this power in a political way…no, they’re just someone who’s just an EXPERT…about SOME aspect of REALITY…and that anything that they DO with this position of power, well THAT’S just them calibrating SOCIETY to the reality of the world. Their job is REALLY just a matter of efficiency…NOTHING to DO with POLITICS, THAT’S for sure. 

To Hannah Arendt: when technical administration gets away with claiming to be “neutral” or “a political”...when you play into the hands of bad actors and ACCEPT their claims that things are just NECESSARY like this…then it ROBS people of the ability…to ask questions or to RESIST anything that’s being done. This is why the experience of someone like Joseph K…is EXACTLY the kind of experience that a totalitarian setup wants their citizens to HAVE. 

Now one of the BIGGEST things…that Hannah Arendt thinks Kafka’s work gives a voice to…is something that would become a fundamental condition of the lives of modern people. It gives voice to a DEEP sense…of loneliness…or feeling placeless, or STATELESSNESS as she says at other points in her work, being a Jewish refugee living in the United States herself. 

Because think of how K feels… when he arrives at the village at the beginning of the Castle. He’s a stranger to everyone there…lonely, uprooted…his whole existence is “superfluous” she says to everything that’s going on around him. His whole LIFE becomes a struggle…to PROVE to the people around him, his legitimacy for even BEING there…to FIND his rightful PLACE in the world. 

But he never FINDS it. Throughout the WHOLE STORY…he just always lives with this constant, dull undercurrent of being lonely…and superfluous— of being a kind of person where he is NEVER capable of fully feeling at HOME.  

Hannah Arendt says that totalitarian setups…absolutely THRIVE…when there are tons of people in society that FEEL this way. It serves them in a NUMBER of different ways she says: when people feel utterly abandoned…they’re MUCH more likely to take on some ideology…that gives them at least SOME kind of feeling of COMMUNITY that they can feel a PART of. I mean in a world where you’re being FLOODED with bad information…there’s a feeling like: well at least if I go along with the people in POWER, not ONLY am I on the winning TEAM, but at LEAST there’s some sort of TANGIBLE reality for me to believe in now. 

MORE than that, for the UNDERCLASS of people that are often treated POORLY by totalitarians…having people that feel isolated, like they can’t ask for help from anyone around them or else they’ll be TURNED IN to the bureaucracy…this is a PERFECT place to KEEP people if you ALWAYS wanted them living in a sort of Kafkaesque HAZE that makes their life miserable. 

Hannah Arendt compares K to the stateless person fighting for recognition in the world. As SHE says K, “demands no more than the essentials of life, but those essentials are bestowed only at the arbitrary whim of bureaucrats. K.’s struggle… is a struggle for the inalienable rights of man”

In a sense what he's missing: as well as MANY of the refugees Hannah Arendt is talking about during her OWN time: what he’s missing is “the right to HAVE rights”. 

See, it’s popular to think of refugees… as people that just need CHARITY from the locals around them or something. These people just need a little help getting some food…maybe a place to STAY for a while…but to Hannah Arendt…much like K in Kafka’s novels what refugees REALLY lack… is not charity…it’s the basic right to belong to a political community… that guarantees ANY rights at ALL. And Kafka CAPTURES this feeling for her…DECADES BEFORE this became such a widespread crisis. 

So bureaucracy and a “rule by nobody”...necessity and “technical administration”...and a deep feeling of loneliness that cripples what it means to be a person: all THREE of these…are things that Hannah Arendt develops STRONGLY in her LATER work…after being inspired by the BLUEPRINT laid out by Kafka…in the images he produced in his. 

And consider how all THREE of these things…can seem from ONE perspective…like it’s just the ENDGAME, of the Enlightenment and classical liberal thinking. We’d EXPECT a certain amount of bureaucracy if we’re aiming for individual freedom. We’d EXPECT our world to be governed by scientific REALITY, when we place so much more emphasis on it. And of COURSE a bit of LONELINESS is to be expected…if individual identity is seen as so much more important than GROUP identity. But notice how all THREE of these…can become WEAPONIZED from within a political movement.

Hope it’s clear by this point: that there doesn’t seem to be a single way to READ Kafka if you were gonna pick him up. And honestly I think he probably would’ve LIKED that that’s how his work was received. You know Kafka…died in relative obscurity after having WRITTEN all this work…he had SOME people that knew him but essentially, this is a guy that died not even KNOWING the impact his work would go on to have on the world after he was gone. 

But anyway let me know what you think about bananas down in the comments. If you’ve READ Kafka…which one of these three takes resonates with you the most? Is there maybe a DIFFERENT take you have…that you think is MISSING from these three? Selfishly, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks for all the interesting messages on Patreon too by the way it’s been really fun replying to them lately. 

Anyway thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.