Franz Kafka: In His Times and Ours
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4976
Date Written:  2017-05-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21594

Book review of Michael Lowy's Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In seven chapters as compact and elegant as they are erudite and engrossing, the French-Brazilian Marxist Michael Löwy delivers a crystalline appraisal of an imagination in rebellion. His thesis is that Kafka's oeuvre expresses a coming together of double insurgency: a revolt against paternal authority and a libertarian socialist challenge to the despotic institutions of the modern state.

While Kafka supplies no diagram of solutions, his art enables us to appreciate more lucidly the foundations of our contemporary political predicament, illusions in certain aspects of Enlightenment progress, and the necessity of taking action.

This is a unique but credible interpretation, achievable because Löwy's cast of mind, like Kafka's, is continuously wide-ranging, endlessly curious in an interdisciplinary fashion, and unafraid of heresy and heterodoxy.