The Power of Analysis and the Impossibility of Understanding. Lessons from Kafka. Prague Interpretation Colloquium /12./

0485439 - FLÚ 2018 RIV eng U - Conference, Workshop Arrangement
Koblížek, Tomáš - Koťátko, Petr
The Power of Analysis and the Impossibility of Understanding. Lessons from Kafka. Prague Interpretation Colloquium /12./.
[Prague, 24.04.2017-26.04.2017, (K-WRD 16/12)]
Grant - others:AV ČR(CZ) StrategieAV21/14
Program: StrategieAV
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : Kafka * philosophy of literature * epistemology * fictional worlds
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology

Samuel Beckett attempted to show what one can do, feel, express and expect in the situation of universal chaos. At the time readers were getting acquainted with his powerful works, they had already known from Franz Kafka what chances of mutual understanding and meaningful action there are in a rigidly organized world – and the outcome was equally disquieting. On the one hand, the structure of Kafka’s world encourages an unprecedented eloquence and talkativeness in Kafka’s characters: it inspires them to detailed descriptions, obsessively pedantic analyses of actual as well as possible courses of events and sophisticated explanations, which – taken together – create an illusion of reliable orientation within the system. At the same time, the more elaborate and detached these analyses are, the more it becomes clear that the system by its very nature resists understanding and does not leave any space for an agent following his/her own aims and priorities. The conference was dedicated to this kind of issues.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0280471