Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages

Franz Kafkas literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity that first posits a clear-cut opposition between confinement and freedom, and then sets up freedom as an ideal which, conceived in such absolute terms, is by definition unattainable.

this compelling literary artist well into the 21st century." - Choice

"Focusing on one of Kafka's crucial problem images - the cage, the prisoner, the question of imprisonment, escape, and freedom - Freedom and Confinement in Modernity does away with the misleading conception of imprisonment as lack of freedom. Instead, it combines a rich variety of approaches to unfold the cage as agent of cultural productivity and of literature itself. This volume provides a shining example of collaboration between philosophy, cultural studies, and literary theory." - Benno Wagner, Professor, Siegen University

"The essays collected in Freedom and Confinement in Modernity set out to pursue a novel approach to Kafka's world. The focus on the figure of the "cage" is thoughtful and original, as it allows us to rethink the literary specificity of Kafka's texts in terms of broader sociopolitical concerns, and situates Kafka's challenging work at the transdisciplinary core of fields as diverse as aesthetic theory, political philosophy, literary history, and psychoanalysis. This is a marvelous and thought-provoking volume." - Gerhard Richter, Professor of German and Director of the Graduate Program in Critical Theory, University of California, Davis

"The power to stimulate fresh questions rather than put to rest earlier ones is surely a mark of what we have come to call greatness in a writer. Few have matched Kafka in generating successive challenges to conventional wisdom not only about literature, but also about life. In Freedom and Confinement in Modernity we come to know a new Kafka, who forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about the delicate relationship between constraint and emancipation in the modern era." - Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California Berkeley

A. Kiarina Kordela is an Associate Professor at Macalester College and the author of $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan.

Dimitris Vardoulakis is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literatures Philosophy and the editor of Spinoza Now.

Kafkas Cages: An Introduction--Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis * PART 1: Interpreting Kafkas Cages * Special Views on Kafkas Cages--Stanley Corngold * Delusions of Agency: Kafka, Imprisonment, and Modern Victimhood--Chris Fleming and John OCarroll * Kafka and Derrida Before the Laws--Howard Caygill * PART 2: Reconceptualizations of Kafkas Cages * Kafkas Cage--John Mowitt * “The Fall is the proof of our freedom”: Mediated Freedom in Kafka--Dimitris Vardoulakis * “Workforce without Possessions”: Kafka, “Social Justice,” and the Word Religion--Peter Fenves * Kafkaesque: (Secular) Kabbalah and Allegory--A. Kiarina Kordela * The Ethics and Beauty of The Trial: Kafkas Circumscription of Failure--Ross Shields * PART 3: Performatives of Kafkas Cages * Kafkas Fatal Performatives: Between “Bad Conscience” and Betrayed Vulnerability--Karyn Ball * How Is the Trapeze Possible?--Christophe Bident * With Impunity--Henry Sussman