Episode #229 ... Kafka and Totalitarianism (Arendt, Adorno)

Hello everyone. I'm Steven West. This is philosophize this. patreon.com/fosifiesthis.

Also doing some philosophical writing at philosophize this on Substack if you're on there like to read. Hope you love the show today. So Kafka didn't just influence Kimu with his work. There were several other major thinkers from the 20th century that took these images from Kaka's work and then changed the world with their work after having read him.

Couple of the most exciting were the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Hana Arent. two very different takes on the exact same work and we'll talk about both of them today and how Kafka inspired them to develop some of their biggest ideas. Good place to start is probably to talk about how Adorno's take on Kafka differed from Kamu's take that we talked about last time. And one way that Adorno says it as he's explaining it is that Kafka is someone whose work has to be taken literally when you read him.

And this can be weird to hear at first. I mean, you think about Kafka's writing and and you think about crazy stuff, random moments coming out of nowhere, people getting whipped in a closet by a dude in a meat helmet. You don't really know what's going to happen next. You think of nightmare fuel at times.

You know, children laughing, running around from tree to tree behind you. You think of things going on in these books that can never actually happen if you were in real life. And if this is the kind of stuff Kofka is putting out there, then how can Adorno say anyone should be taking this stuff literally? Well, if Camu's interpretation is that reading Kafka makes you feel the same way as when you confront the absurdity of existence head-on, then Adorno is going to say that reducing Kafka to just a guy that's trying to depict the human condition crucially misses one of the big things that makes Kafka's work so strong in the first place, that there isn't a single neat allegory that can explain his work away.

Let me give an example of what he's trying to avoid here. A lot of people out there may have read George Orwell's Animal Farm at some point. fun little story about some animals on a farm, pigs, chickens, cows. It it's a rural extravaganza for the whole ...