Vice Versa : Human and Ape in Kafka.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/2i.7276Keywords:
Kafka, Animality, Anthropogenesis, Liminality, Mimesis, WoundAbstract
This article reads Kafka’s Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (1917) [A Report to an Academy] as an exemplary threshold narrative in which anthropogenesis coincides with captivity, training, and the internalization of surveillance. Through the motifs of the wound, the gaze, and liminal spaces (doors, bars, cracks), Red Peter’s self-narration stages a ‘way out’ that is not freedom but a strategic passage into a second nature. Kafka thereby destabilizes the human/animal border: becoming-human appears as an artifice, while animality persists as an irreducible remainder that returns in memory, body, and intimacy.
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