Kafka’s Animals speak back. Zoopoetics, alterity, and the limits of the Human

Interview with Naama Harel

Abstract

This interview with Naama Harel explores a posthumanist rereading of Franz Kafka’s animal narratives through the lens of zoopoetics, human–animal studies and critical theory. Departing from entrenched allegorical and anthropocentric interpretations, Harel argues that Kafka’s animals should be read not as symbolic stand-ins for human concerns but as agents that actively destabilize the human–animal binary. Central to the discussion is the concept of the “humanimal,” a fluid, liminal space in which species boundaries are rendered mutable and hierarchical distinctions between humans and nonhumans are undermined. Drawing on thinkers such as Horkheimer and Adorno, Cary Wolfe, and Donna Haraway, Harel situates Kafka’s work as both anticipating and contributing to posthumanist critiques of biopolitics, anthropocentrism, and human exceptionalism. The interview addresses key texts including The Metamorphosis, A Report to an Academy, The Burrow, and Investigations of a Dog, highlighting how Kafka’s narrative strategies (hybridity, bodily estrangement, nonhuman voice, and linguistic subversion) challenge dominant assumptions about agency, speech, and ethical consideration. The conversation also reflects on the methodological implications of deallegorizing Kafka’s animal stories, the interdisciplinary reception of Harel’s work, and the relevance of Kafka’s zoopoetic imagination to contemporary debates on ecology, animal ethics, and posthuman thought. Ultimately, the interview positions Kafka’s animal writing as a crucial site for rethinking identity, alterity, and interspecies relations in both literary studies and the humanities more broadly.