Lessons from Kafka: Philosophical Readings of Franz Kafka’s World

0548853 - FLÚ 2022 RIV CZ eng M - Část monografie knihy
Koťátko, Petr
The Power of Analysis and the Impossibility of Understanding: Kafkaesque Remarks.
Lessons from Kafka: Philosophical Readings of Franz Kafka’s World. Praha: Filosofia, 2021 - (Koblížek, T.; Koťátko, P.), s. 141-161. ISBN 978-80-7007-681-1
Institucionální podpora: RVO:67985955
Klíčová slova: Kafka * literal meaning and implicatures versus hidden sense * explanation versus understanding * Kafkaesque situations * radical realism * guilt in Kafka’s world
Obor OECD: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology

Our competence as Kafka’s readers does not consist in our ability to discover encoded messages or hidden links with the author’s biography, but in our sensitivity for the situations in which Kafka’s protagonists find themselves. This cannot have any other source than (and should not be separated from) our sensitivity for the situations we experience in our everyday lives. The author focuses on a few selected parameters of these situations, in particular: their ineliminable strangeness and the corresponding inability of Kafka’s protagonists to find a course of action which would fit into these situations. The way in which thorough analyses and explanations provided by „experts“ among Kafka’s characters multiply the impossibility of understanding. The corresponding readers’ inability to comprehend, in ordinary pragmatic terms, what’s going on in Kafkaesque situations. The latter does not amount to inability to understand Kafka’s text and to get access to its literary functions (which should be compensated by discovering its „hidden sense“), neither it undermines our ability to relate these functions to our own everyday experience. On the contrary, the key function of the text consists precisely in this: the failures of our attempts to make sense of the Kafkaesque situations should remind us about the incomprehensibility of our own world – precisely like the collapses of our attempts at continuous reading of late Beckett’s texts are supposed to let us experience various sides of the universal mess (the literary work being part and product of this mess). The incomprehensibility of Kafkaesque situations and of the world they are anchored in implies the “inextricability of the guilt” – in that sense that it is impossible to identify those elements of the protagonist’s biography which constitute his guilt and separate them from the „innocent“ rest. The paper overlaps, to a large extent, with the author’s Czech article „Nesrozumitelnost světa a nevymezitelnost viny: kafkovské poznámky“, Svět literatury XXXI, 63, 2021, p. 26-40.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0324898