Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages (Studies in European Culture and History)

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Kafka’s Cages: An Introduction....Pages 1-6 Front Matter....Pages 7-7 Special Views on Kafka’s Cages....Pages 9-28 Delusions of Agency: Kafka, Imprisonment, and Modern Victimhood....Pages 29-48 Kafka and Derrida Before the Laws ....Pages 49-59 Front Matter....Pages 61-61 Kafka’s Cage....Pages 63-86 “The Fall is the Proof of our Freedom”: Mediated Freedom in Kafka....Pages 87-106 “Workforce without Possessions”: Kafka, “Social Justice,” and the Word Religion....Pages 107-126 Kafkaesque: (Secular) Kabbalah and Allegory....Pages 127-158 The Ethics and Beauty of The Trial: Kafka’s Circumscription of Failure....Pages 159-175 Front Matter....Pages 177-177 Kafka’s Fatal Performatives: Between “Bad Conscience” and Betrayed Vulnerability....Pages 179-200 How is the Trapeze Possible?....Pages 201-211 With Impunity....Pages 213-237 Back Matter....Pages 239-244 Franz Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up freedom as an ideal which, conceived in such absolute terms, is by definition unattainable By tracing the imprisoned figure on several philosophic, aesthetic and socio-political levels, this collection treats Kafka's cages as the very critique of a culture that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up the latter as unattainable