State of Exception: The Birthplace of Kafka’s Narrative Authority

Abstract

Across the postimperial East Central Europe, whose geopolitical space was reconfigured on the model of West European nation-states, unprocessed human residues proliferated as the collateral effects of politically guided national homogenizations. These positional outsiders, who were prevented from becoming legible within the newly established political spaces, take center stage in Kafka’s narratives, not only in the form of their characters but also their narrators and ultimate authority. They passionately attach themselves to the zones of indistinction, which the modern societies’ “egalitarian discrimination” has doomed them to, thus trying to turn their enforced dispossession into a chosen self-dispossession. I argue that Kafka’s narratives owe their elusive ultimate authority precisely to this persistent translation of the political state of exception of his agencies into their literary state of exemption. They are at constant pains to transfigure the imposed state of exception through its peculiar fictional adoption, but Kafka’s ultimate narrative authority nevertheless takes care to keep an edge over their efforts. It is precisely this never-ending gradation of subversive mimicry in Kafka’s works that his postcolonial successor J. M. Coetzee most admired.