Agamben’s Joyful Kafka: Finding Freedom beyond Subordination by Anke Snoek (review)

One can learn a lot about someone from what that person thinks of Kafka. In particular, one can learn a lot about someone from whether that person has an ear for Kafka’s comedy. Those who dismiss Kafka’s work for its unrelenting despair—usually with the claim that it was merely the expression of his personal miseries—are missing the joy in the work. Yet that they fail to hear it is understandable (if not excusable), because Kafka’s joy is of a very particular kind. It is not a joy that persists in spite of despair, like the clichéd “light in the darkness.” The despair in Kafka really is total and unrelenting: it casts its shadow over everything. Yet totality itself has a certain ridiculousness, indeed a certain powerlessness. If something is everywhere, we might say, then it has nowhere to go. Joy is the way out that presents itself at the moment this is recognized: it shows a way to a place that despair cannot reach. Consider how the law appears for Joseph K: it is all-pervasive, obscene, and arbitrary; yet it is also constantly exhibiting its own impotence. Kafka’s joy makes a mockery of despair. This is to say that those who cannot hear the joy in Kafka must be missing it because they refuse to acknowledge his despair. They find it to be too much, too unbearable, too total, and so they miss the joy that arises not in spite but because of despair’s very totality.

It is no accident that many of Giorgio Agamben’s readers have often made a similar mistake, critiquing (or occasionally revering) his philosophy for its “political nihilism” (Ernesto Laclau, “Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy,” in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life [2007], 22) and “gloomy and pessimistic vision” of the contemporary world (Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics [2010], 211). Like the Kafka of The Trial, Agamben appears to present a hyperbolically bleak analysis of the modern state and its institutions. But as Anke Snoek shows, like Kafka, there is a certain joy in Agamben too, and the affinities between the writings of these authors go beyond simple influence. It is not just that Kafka is important for Agamben, nor even simply that he is crucial for Agamben (though as Snoek shows convincingly, this is certainly the case). It is that Agamben’s reading of Kafka provides a singularly clear perspective on the problems of despair and joy, messianism and reversal, pessimism and hope, sacralization and profanation that—just as with Kafka—are fundamental to understanding his work (and, for that reason, are often exactly where and why it is misunderstood). As Snoek puts it: “Agamben uses Kafka not so much to support his dark political theories as to show a way out, an exit strategy from the present political situation” (2). Further, this way out opens through a kind of inversion: “a possibility or potential that lies enclosed within the current situation” (2). As the ape protagonist from Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” says: “No, it was not freedom I wanted. Just a way out; to the right, to the left, wherever; I made no other demands” (10). Snoek’s book demonstrates that this way out—which always “includes the poison it is intended to combat” (11)—is crucial to both Agamben and Kafka, yet (by its nature) turns up so unexpectedly that it is easy to miss. Thus Agamben’s Joyful Kafka is valuable both as a work of Agamben scholarship and as a work of Kafka criticism: understanding just how Agamben understands Kafka is extremely useful for finding and opening the joy in Kafka’s work, and indispensable for coming to grips with the misunderstandings that have marked Agamben’s.

Over its nine chapters, Snoek’s book opens seven perspectives on Agamben’s Kafka: the form of...