Who owns kafka judith butler

I daresay he could have executed it very well. Posted in Uncategorized Tagged bookmunch , faber finds , franz kafka , judith butler , london review of books , max liu , richard t kelly Leave a Comment. Comments RSS. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address:. Sign me up! Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. The Betrayed? Wills of Kafka and Brod. Abstract The endeavor to trace the will of the deceased and respect it accordingly is the central concern of this essay.

For those who do not wish to be bothered by research? Perhaps I should be generous: Translation of a text into a second language can surely lead to a sense of discovery for readers with no access to the original. But the fact remains that these texts can be construed as lost only if popular Anglophone publishing markets control the terms of reality; that is, writings come to exist only once they become readily accessible to the English-speaking general reader.

The saga has brought up a range of issues, including whether Kafka, the German-speaking Jewish author from Prague, belongs to the State of Israel, which understands itself as representing all Jewish life, or whether his writings properly belong in Marbach.

Who owns Kafka, indeed? Given the troublesome circumstances surrounding the publication of The Lost Writings , this reviewer, at least, was left with a question: Why review it at all? In this way, Kafka seems to have anticipated the rough and profit-driven handling of his writing by future editors. Though Kafka published some of his stories during his lifetime, he famously demanded that Brod burn his trove of unfinished sketches and texts, including the manuscripts that would become The Trial and The Castle , once he was gone; perhaps he had a premonition about what the literary marketplace would do to his work after his death.

Prophetic or not, he certainly understood the rough rhythm that emerges between exaggerated claims and the moments in which reality exposes their falsehood. Indeed, his writings often explore the way the traces of the theological continue to appear in modern life, as promises of salvation invariably end in closed doors and brutal disappointments. Yet the ideal of Josephine persists, and the mouse folk gather with great anticipation to hear her sing. One can liken her to the performers in the Yiddish theater who made art out of a language not fully comprehensible to or respected by German speakers.