Kafka Shared Between Blanchot and Sartre

Aukje Van Rooden

doi:10.1515/arcadia-2020-2010

Abstract

AbstractEver since their translation in the course of the 20thcentury, the works of Kafka have been widely appreciated by French intellectuals. Kafka’s greatest admirers include Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Paul Sartre, both of whom consider his work an exemplary illustration of their own poetical-philosophical views. This is remarkable, because Blanchot’s and Sartre’s respective views are generally conceived of as opposites. Apparently, then, these two authors who are so divergent in their philosophical views and literary criticism, as well as in their own literary works, find themselves on the same page in their appreciation of Kafka. I will argue that this shared appreciation not only reveals some unexpected points of agreement between them, but also facilitates an interesting intellectual encounter between Blanchot and Sartre in the late 1940 s. It is, we will see, only on the basis of an agreement with regards to Kafka’s work that their ways can part.

Highlights

What does it mean to say that Franz Kafka is appreciated by two authors as disparate as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot, that is, that he is shared between them? Obviously, it makes sense to claim that a notoriously ungraspable oeuvre like Kafka’s lends itself to being appreciated in different and possibly even opposite ways
By drawing attention to the specific working of the imagination, Kafka brings Blanchot and Sartre closer together than one might expect on the basis of their
Unravelling the genesis of their programmatic encounter in the 1940s has revealed that their ultimate disagreement is more subtle and more complex than is commonly thought

Summary

Introduction

What does it mean to say that Franz Kafka is appreciated by two authors as disparate as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot, that is, that he is shared between them? Obviously, it makes sense to claim that a notoriously ungraspable oeuvre like Kafka’s lends itself to being appreciated in different and possibly even opposite ways. I will claim that Kafka’s work has opened a stage, a dynamic realm, where Blanchot and Sartre, despite their obvious disagreements, could meet The sedimentation of this dynamic encounter is to be found in two essays conceived almost simultaneously and in close dialogue with each other: Sartre’s “What is Literature?” (written in 1947) and Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” (written in 1947–1948).. Sartre had already shown his indebtedness to Kafka in Being and Nothingness (1943), and in “What is Literature?” he continues to stress the “precious encouragement” (186) to be taken from Kafka’s work Blanchot, for his part, had already devoted an essay to Kafka – “Reading Kafka” ( from 1943) – before recurring to his work in “Literature and the Right to Death.”. If Kafka’s work is of particular relevance to both Sartre and Blanchot, it seems to be because of its capacity to irrealize” (as they both term it) reality through the power of imagination – a power both Sartre and Blanchot recognize and wish to account for

Sartre’s Kafka

Blanchot’s Kafka

Conclusion