The “Blueprints” of Revolution?: A Comparative Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought and Franz Kafka’s Fiction(s)

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K.’s stubborn singleness of purpose, however, opens the eyes of some of the villagers; his behavior teaches them that human rights may be worth fighting for, that the rule of the Castle is not divine law and, consequently, can be attacked.

(Arendt, Essays 76-77)

For decades, negative theology, alienation, defeatism, shame and hopelessness have been some of the most commonly attributed literary themes to Franz Kafka’s writings (Ackerman 105-13; Block 322-26; Cohn 182-88). Although this has changed considerably since the 1990s, most political readings of Kafka’s fiction emphasize the symbolic, metonymic, spiritual, intertextual, and even the deconstructive qualities of its resistance than an overt political-will Kafka’s characters might otherwise inculcate (Nemoianu 357-71; Liska 329-34).¹ For instance, in a conversation with Scholem, despite Kafka’s “prophetic vision” of the “communal estrangement” of the modern individual, Benjamin calls Kafka “a failure” largely because his experiments with literary form (parables growing into novels) prevent him from elaborating his prophesies into fulfilling (political) visions (Benjamin 245-47). Instead, as Kafka’s close friend and biographer Max Brod has observed, both the literary form and the aesthetic predicament of Kafka’s novels could be prolonged to an “infinity” which, in its rhetorical panoply, guides the reader all the “way to God” (Brod 97). This view is also echoed by Kundera (39-45) and Borges (199-201) who conclude that Kafka’s politics are neither definite nor transparent given the “infinite sense of procrastination” exerted by their characters, and a “boundless labyrinth” (143-45) of bureaucratic structures they are destined to pass through. For Blanchot (11-20), Kafka is first and foremost a performance artist, one who combines text and action together in an almost spiritual intonation, thereby turning his texts all the more radical but politically “intangible.”

While a number of recent commentaries have drawn upon Kafka’s politics as “voicing” the resistance of the nameless, the underdogs, and the victims of political tyrannies (Bennett; Deleuze and Guattari; Hell), none comes close to Hannah Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s fables, characters, and literary devices as the “blueprints” of resistance and emancipation. Though Arendt’s interest in Kafka has been reasonably well-documented (Bernstein 46-60; Young-Ah Gottlieb 94-109; Scott 42-54; Boym 231-38), most commentaries on the subject simply reiterate what Arendt has already said about Kafka in an essay which appeared in Partisan Review in 1944. By and large, the existing comparisons give an excessive credit to Kafka’s parable “He” (Feldman 67-95; Scheppele 1377-1407; Nowak 42-47; Terada 839-866; Bethânia 294-320) which Arendt discusses at length in her introduction Between Past and Future.² Perhaps the only exceptions to this are Danoff (211-29) and Hansen (215-17), who make a strong case for political comparisons between Arendt and Kafka on the subject of totalitarian terror and violence. This essay aims to advance the scope of these comparisons by suggesting that Arendt’s interest in Kafka cannot be understood in terms of a single parable or an isolated thematic. Instead, Arendt’s entire body of political thought—from the anatomy of totalitarianism to her own hopes for revolution, freedom, and emancipation (“public life”)—bears the traces of Kafka’s fabulist imagination. In Arendt’s own words:

Kafka’s technique could best be described as the construction of models. If a man wants to build a house or if he wants to know a house well enough to be able to foretell its stability, he will get a blueprint of the building or draw one upon himself […]. Kafka’s stories are such blueprints […] expose the naked structure of events.

(Arendt, Essays 71)

Following this guiding statement, Arendt’s further commentaries gesture towards Kafka’s “uncanny” ability in uncovering the nature and function of totalitarianism at large (Arendt, Essays 71-7). And it is entirely possible that Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s narrators as the fabricator mundi of resistance and revolution is inspired by her own...