La vertigine della colpa. Il duello di Günther Anders con Kafka

The paper aims to explore the interpretation that, already in the mid-1930s, Günther Anders proposed of Kafka and in particular of the novel The Castle. The ‘can't-get-in-the-world’ of the land surveying K. is interpreted as a literary figuration of the state of incompleteness that, according to the perspective of philosophical anthropology, characterises man in an essential way. At the same time, however, Anders discerns in Kafka the acceptance of a state of indefinite guilt and the consequent punishment that borders on masochism and a voluptuousness of self-humiliation in which the feeling of the impending original sin is echoed. In the post-World War II Kafkaesque fashion, moreover, Anders also discerns the exaltation of an antipodean figure which, although not guilty, was nevertheless punished; in it the many Germans who, albeit not as protagonists, had participated in the Nazi regime's racial practices, could mirror themselves and feel intimately absolved. Thus, with the aesthetic and pseudo-religious deification of the Jew Kafka, the massacre of millions of other Jews was sublimated.