Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault: Power, Resistance, and the Art of Self-Creation engages with important themes such as power, language, subjectivity and the possibility of fully developed postmodern account of the subject, resistance to power, and an aesthetic interpretation of life.

ABSTRACT: Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault, two incredibly dissimilar men, approach many of the same topics including alienation, institutional power, the phenomenon of the body, death and authorship, the limitations of literature and language. However, a review of the literature of the two figures has discovered little more than an occasional academic nod recognizing the literary relationship, but nothing offering solid exegesis. This dissertation is concerned with perhaps the most obvious parallel: the authors' characterizations of law, justice, and punishment and their corresponding relationships with discourse, knowledge, power, and the body. Kafka wrote from unique historical space, divided by dissimilar judicial discourses. This collision of competing modalities provides the impetus for much of his work, including "In the Penal Colony" and The Trial. The recognition and delineation of these formations offers a better understanding of Kafka's world and his often enigmatic texts. Thus, Foucault's understanding of discourse and his unconventional history of discipline provide a helpful methodological framework for this investigation. Whereas a plethora of Kafka scholarship favors an allegorical or metaphysical interpretation, this dissertation privileges the literal. In his own words, Kafka sought to represent the "negative aspects" of his world -- the political, social, and legal reality in which he was immersed.

In this innovative addition to the New Horizons in Leadership Studies series, Leah Tomkins explores Franz Kafka’s expertise in the exercise of power, emphasising his own work as a leader. Through extensive primary research and original translation, she combines literary and philosophical critique with analysis of contemporary figures to craft a manifesto for leadership relations.

Few twentieth-century writers remain as potent as Franz Kafka-one of the rare figures to maintain both a major presence in the academy and on the shelves of general readers. Yet, remarkably, no work has yet fully focused on his politics and anti-authoritarian sensibilities. The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority is a fascinating new look at his widely known novels and stories (including The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Amerika), portraying him as a powerful critic of authority, bureaucracy, capitalism, law, patriarchy, and prisons. Making deft use of Kafka's diaries, his friends' memoirs, and his original sketches, Costas Despiniadis addresses his active participation in Prague's anarchist circles, his wide interest in anarchist authors, his skepticism about the Russian Revolution, and his ambivalent relationship with utopian Zionism. The portrait of Kafka that emerges is striking and fresh-rife with insights and a refusal to accept the structures of power that dominated his society.

Brings Kafka’s fiction into conversation with philosophy and political theory. Many of Kafka’s narratives place their heroes in situations of confinement. Gregor Samsa is locked in his room in the Metamorphosis, and the land surveyor in The Castle is stuck in the village unable either to leave or to gain access to the castle. Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that Kafka constructs these plots of confinement in order to laugh at his heroes’ futile attempts to express their will. In this way, Kafka emerges as a critic of the free will and as a proponent of a different kind of freedom: one focused within the confines of one’s experience and mediated by one’s circumstances. Vardoulakis contends that his sense of humor is the key to understanding Kafka as a political thinker. Laughter, in this account, is the tool used to deconstruct power. By placing Kafka in dialogue with philosophy and political theory, Vardoulakis shows that Kafka can give us invaluable insights into how to be free—and how to laugh. “Vardoulakis’s original new book contributes to the fields of Kafka studies, political theory, and contemporary European philosophy by forcefully realigning our understanding of the problem of freedom and the free will as it traverses Kafka’s literary texts. Its greatest strength lies in its careful and rigorous exposition of the refractory concepts of freedom that circulate through Kafka’s most canonical works.” — Gerhard Richter, author of Inheriting Walter Benjamin “Freedom from the Free Will is at the forefront of a vibrant new development in Kafka studies that, without succumbing to old debates about Kafka’s supposed ‘religiosity,’ rigorously works out the philosophical undercurrents and theoretical consequences of his literary practices. The laughing, playful Kafka encountered in Vardoulakis’s book creates concepts of freedom that cannot be found elsewhere.” — Peter Fenves, author of The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time

Allan, who teaches philosophy in Stratford-upon-Avon, seeks a coalition of philosophy and literature in the work of Kafka (1883-1924), beginning with a grounding of his output in the philosophical context from which it emerged. He explores how the German writer's texts were influenced by the descriptive psychology of Franz Brentano and its attendant agendas of logic, Gestalt psychology, and a nascent form of phenomenology. He also identifies Kafka's aesthetic exploitation of such positions, and surveys the post-structuralist response to his work. Annotation :2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Kafka's novels and stories fascinate readers and critics of each generation. Although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. This work aims to present a point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research.

Giles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In Foucault, Deleuze presents one of the most incisive and productive analyses of the work of Michel Foucault. This is a crucial examination of the philosophical foundations and principal themes of Foucault's work, providing a rigorous engagement with Foucault's views on knowledge, punishment, power, and the nature of subjectivity. Translated by Seßn Hand. >

Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

As a Jew, Kafka received nothing in inheritance from his father. Nevertheless, throughout his œuvre, subtly, remnants of Jewish words can be deciphered. Hence, the question at the heart of this book: what remains when what’s left is a "nothing of Judaism" (Letter to the Father)? This question necessitates a philosophical and Jewish reading of his work, prompting a reconsideration of the intricate relationships between the Jew and the West and the Jew and modernity. Thus, this book proposes an examination of Kafka's oeuvre to uncover what remains Jewish therein – at the heart of Europe, amidst modernity – where nothing remains: the enigma of the Letter.