Welcome to Part II of What #Ö Read during the Mid-Year Break (read Part I here).
Reading KafKant at the End of “the End of History” (or Summer)
Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (F. Nicolovius 1795).
Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß (Die Schmiede 1925).
Hendrik Simon
2024 marks a special double anniversary in German philosophy and literature: both the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s birthday (22 April 1724) and the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death (3 June 1924). Kafka and Kant are, at least at first glance, two very different thinkers, especially with regard to the law and legal institutions. So, what could be more appropriate than taking some dusty classics off the shelf on the occasion of the two anniversaries – especially in a summer where hot, sticky days alternate with stormy, rainy ones (the climate crisis sends its gentler greetings…)?
First, there is the Prussian philosopher: as is well known, Kant seldom left the city of Königsberg. And still, his thinking comprised the world (and is famous as cosmopolitan, but has also been criticized in recent times due to racist elements). In his peace treatise ‘Zum ewigen Frieden’ (‘Perpetual Peace’), first published in 1795, Kant outlines a national, international and ultimately global peace through public law. Kant’s project was already being widely read by 19th-century liberal international lawyers in their aim to outlaw war. Even if so-called ‘realists’ have often described him as such: Kant was by no means naïve. In his writings, he recognized the dialectic of war and international legalization. And yet: Kant remained a believer in reason and in the progress of history through law.
And then there is Kafka: born in Prague, the ‘mother with claws’, as Kafka called the city, which he seldom left (‘Prague won’t let go. Not you, not me.’). He studied law, among other things. For Kafka, law is above all an opaque order built on power. Kafka exposes the grotesque arbitrariness of the law as becomes particularly obvious in the famous first sentence of his ‘Der Process’ (‘The Trial’), first published in 1925: ‘Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.’ K. is then confronted with the Kafkaesque randomness and mysteries of bureaucracy: ‘The world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms, is Kafka’s world,’ as Walter Benjamin wrote on the 10th anniversary of Kafka’s death in 1934.
Law as reason on the one hand, law as arbitrariness on the other. The difference between Kant and Kafka seems like day and night, like black and white, like sun and rain. And yet there is something that connects Kant and Kafka: in his Perpetual Peace of 1795, Kant famously calls early modern natural law jurists ‘leidige Tröster’ (‘tiresome comforters’) and criticizes the arbitrariness with which they use the law to justify violence. Is Kafka in his critique of lawyers and legal institutions continuing Kant’s critique and applying it to the positive law of the modern age?
And research suggests that both of them had a sense of humor: Kant, for example, not only reports on a rich merchant who loses all his wealth in a storm and whose wig, according to Kant, ‘turns grey’ as a result, but also, at the beginning of his peace treatise, on a Dutch cemetery tavern whose sign read ‘Zum ewigen Frieden’ (To Perpetual Peace). Kafka is said to have shared this ‘Kantian situation comedy’, for example when in ‘The Trial’ judges are reading pornography instead of legal texts or when an old tired lawyer denies his young colleagues entry into court and throws them down the stairs – instead of getting into a fight with him, the young lawyers now go up the stairs one after the other to be thrown down ‘with the greatest possible, albeit passive resistance’ until the ‘old man’ finally gives up exhausted. Kant and Kafka both seem to have had a sense of irony.
So what can we take away from these reading impressions for a time of multiple crises, which has also been described as ‘the end of the end of history’, in a summer in which it is unclear whether the next day will be stormy or sweltering hot? Hope for the emancipatory power of the law? Criticism of the arbitrariness of the law? Perhaps both – and a little irony and (more than often: bitter) humor to mediate between the two poles.
The Hague Syndrom
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies. Riverhead Books (2021).
Alicja Polakiewicz
Katie Kitamura’s “Intimacies” follows a young, unnamed woman as she relocates from New York to the Hague, taking up work as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. The protagonist – an uprooted overthinker, who routinely underestimates her own allure – is portrayed as struggling to either keep her professional distance or build private, meaningful connections. In this sense, “Intimacies” is a title well-chosen – especially in its plural form – with the book revolving around intimacies, actual, desired, or unwanted, between interpreter and accused, new boyfriend and his estranged wife, foreigner and city, language, memory, and truth.
What distinguishes “Intimacies” is its credibility: The protagonist’s job as an interpreter at the ICC, for instance, is not mere filler material calculatedly strewn in by the author to make the story more lifelike – it is the story, or at least a part of it. Similarly, dialogues and monologues are artfully entertaining and yet often come to no real resolution, leaving the reader wondering what they mean, just like real life so often does. The book’s captivity feeds on the sense of being left in limbo that it eerily transmits. It makes the reader feel that they too occupy a space, time, and language in between. And yet, “Intimacies” is decidedly hopeful, quirky, engaging, and clever. In other words, a perfect summer read.
Reading Race and Class into Feminism
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981).
Khaled El Mahmoud
In her work, the American author and academic bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952-2021) analyses the multifaceted forms of oppression that Black women encounter. These include those perpetuated by men and women, even by those who identify as feminist, along with those perpetuated by Black men. She begins by examining the historical experiences of Black women, tracing the trajectory back to the institution of slavery. However, Black women were not only subjugated on the grounds of race but also on those of gender, and thus exposed to both racial and sexual oppression.
The book provides a clear illustration of the manner in which the feminist movement was initially constituted, shaped, and defined, resulting in the exclusion of Black women and the consequent failure to incorporate their lived experiences into the discourse. It also elucidates the interconnection between white feminism and capitalism, which underscored the economic emancipation of women. From this, it can be seen that the most prominent figures in the feminist movement were from the middle and upper classes. Their goal was to gain the same privileges as their male counterparts. The lived reality of Black women as well as that of white women belonging to lower classes was not a concern to them. It therefore encourages a re-evaluation of the concept of feminism, proposing the incorporation of race and class into the existing framework. This is as relevant as ever and all those with an interest in international feminist discourse will find this book a valuable resource.
