A glance at the summer issue of Critical Inquiry: Kafka and the Florida election debacle
The fiction of Franz Kafka may appear to transport us to other, alien worlds. But, in fact, Kafka’s power often lies in the way he put into sharp focus the potential strangeness and even horror of the familiar, writes James Conant, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
“What confers upon our apprehension of Kafka’s world its peculiar undertow of terror is that our lives are not without moments in which our world can suddenly seem to be trying awfully hard to imitate his,” Mr. Conant writes. “Kafka’s genius lies in his ability to depict ... the ways in which making sense can sometimes seem to be the one thing that the things of our world are unable to do.”
A case in point, Mr. Conant says, is the Florida vote in last year’s presidential election, and he compares elements of Kafka’s fiction to the events that unfolded there. What happened “might be a précis of a Kafka story,” he says. He expounds at length on the similarities and ramifications, using Kafka’s work and a Kafkaesque “parable of Florida.”
In one instance, Mr. Conant compares the system of determining guilt or innocence encountered in Kafka’s The Trial to the attempt to count ballots in Florida. In Kafka, the “guilt of a guilty defendant is never decisively established,” Mr. Conant writes, and “the innocence of an innocent defendant always stands open to question.”
What seems intelligible -- because of familiar words like court, evidence, plea, and verdict -- is, in fact, meaningless. Mr. Conant draws a parallel with the events in Florida: “As the conditions for the meaningful employment of the relevant electoral concepts (‘election,’ ‘ballot,’ ‘vote,’ ‘to count’ ... ‘loser,’ ‘winner,’ and so on) gradually erode, all that is left for the citizens to do is to traffic in forms of words that can no longer mean what the citizens of Florida want to mean when they call upon them.” Mr. Conant uses such comparisons to bolster his observation that Kafka’s protagonist is “burdened by questions” that he can neither answer nor ignore.
An excerpt of the article, as well as information about the journal, is available online at http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/