Freedom and Confinement in Modernity

DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS teaches at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.   KIARINA A. KORDELA teaches at Macalester College, USA.

'Focusing on one of Kafka's crucial problem images the cage, the prisoner, the question of imprisonment, escape, and freedom Freedom and Confinement in Modernity does away with the misleading conception of imprisonment as lack of freedom. Instead, it combines a rich variety of approaches to unfold the cage as agent of cultural productivity and of literature itself. This volume provides a shining example of collaboration between philosophy, cultural studies, and literary theory.' - Benno Wagner, Professor, Siegen University, Germany 'The essays collected in Freedom and Confinement in Modernity set out to pursue a novel approach to Kafka's world. The focus on the figure of the 'cage' is thoughtful and original, as it allows us to rethink the literary specificity of Kafka's texts in terms of broader sociopolitical concerns, and situates Kafka's challenging work at the transdisciplinary core of fields as diverse as aesthetic theory, political philosophy, literary history, and psychoanalysis. This is a marvelous and thought-provoking volume.' - Gerhard Richter, Professor of German and Director of the Graduate Program in Critical Theory, University of California, Davis 'The power to stimulate fresh questions rather than put to rest earlier ones is surely a mark of what we have come to call greatness in a writer. Few have matched Kafka in generating successive challenges to conventional wisdom not only about literature, but also about life. In Freedom and Confinement in Modernity we come to know a new Kafka, who forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about the delicate relationship between constraint and emancipation in the modern era.' - Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California Berkeley

• Kafka's Cages: An Introduction - Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis * PART 1: Interpreting Kafka's Cages * Special Views on Kafka's Cages - Stanley Corngold * Delusions of Agency: Kafka, Imprisonment, and Modern Victimhood - Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll * Kafka and Derrida Before the Laws - Howard Caygill * PART 2: Reconceptualizations of Kafka's Cages * Kafka's Cage - John Mowitt * 'The Fall is the proof of our freedom'': Mediated Freedom in Kafka - Dimitris Vardoulakis * 'Workforce without Possessions': Kafka, 'Social Justice,' and the Word Religion - Peter Fenves * Kafkaesque: (Secular) Kabbalah and Allegory - A. Kiarina Kordela * The Ethics and Beauty of The Trial: Kafka's Circumscription of Failure - Ross Shields * PART 3: Performatives of Kafka's Cages * Kafka's Fatal Performatives: Between 'Bad Conscience' and Betrayed Vulnerability - Karyn Ball * How Is the Trapeze Possible? - Christophe Bident * With Impunity - Henry Sussman