Franz Kafka’s Labyrinths

The point of departure for our discussion is an essay by Joseph Vogl on Franz Kafka adapted from his brilliant book, ‘On Tarrying,’ published by the University of Chicago Press. Vogl's essay takes Kafka's novel fragment, ‘The Castle,’ to exemplify central features of aesthetic experience, at least in modernity. Kafka's text creates a kind of pleasurable vertigo that puts our sense of being in the world into suspended animation. 

Somewhere in the zone between dream and wakefulness we are guided through temporal, spatial, and logical labyrinths that make palpable something happening to the symbolic coordinates of life at the end of the age of the old empires. In some ways, this brilliant and original writer gave us an intimation of life under the domination of a kind of artificial intelligence uncoupled from any recognizable human purpose. And yet, as Vogl insists, Kafka's peculiar decreation of world allows us to tarry at the edges of meaning, the thresholds of new possibilities for being human. 

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Joseph Vogl was Professor of German Literature, Cultural and Media Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin (until 2023) and is Regular Visiting Professor at Princeton University. Recent monographs include On Tarrying (2011), The Specter of Capital (2014), The Ascendancy of Finance (2017), and Capital and Ressentiment (2022). 

Eric Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory and the co-authored volume, Sovereignty Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment. 

Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut Chicago