Arendt og Kafka

Resumé

Isak Winkel Holm: “Arendt and Kafka. The Right to Rights in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’”

Franz Kafka experienced a legal and political vacuum opening up in the middle of civilized Europe, Hannah Arendt saw it culminating in the death camps. In this sinister historical situation both authors were not so much interested in the question of specific rights as in the more fundamental question of the right to have rights – to use Arendt’s famous formula. This essay explores the intricate relationship between Kafka’s and Arendt’s analyses of the “calamity of the rightless”. On the one hand, Kafka’s literary diagnosis of rightlessness will be reconstructed through a reading of his story “The Metamorphosis”; on the other hand, Arendt’s philosophical portrait of the rightless refugee will be developed in a discussion of her early Kafka essays and, first of all, of her Origins of Totalitarianism. The contention is that Arendt’s notion of the right to have rights and, hence, her reading of Kafka function as important corrections of modern Kafka research.