POL 409 Kafka & Foucault: Power, Resistance, and the Art of Self-Creation

Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault are two of the most important creative and intellectual figures of the 20th century. With the publication of Foucault's last essays detailing his account of the aesthetics of existence and a post-metaphysical ethics, we now have an outline for a comprehensive Foucaultian analytical framework. Foucault's analytical schema is arranged around three interdependent observations. First, subjects are formed through discursive and material force relations that Foucault calls power. Second, while individuals inescapably bear the inscription of disciplinary power, there are several sites of resistance available to them. And, third, the normative purpose of resistance and life is found in the self-conscious pursuit of aesthetic transformation and self-creation - what Foucault calls ethics. For Foucault, philosophy, critique, and writing are agonistic and creative tools in the practice and cultivation of what he calls the "art of life."

In this course we will apply Foucault's comprehensive postmodern analytic to Kafka's fiction and personal writings. In Part I, we will examine Kafka's short story, "In the Penal Colony," and the unfinished novel, The Trial, for evidence of the presence and operation of disciplinary power. In Part II, we turn from a genealogical analysis of disciplinary power and subjectivity in Kafka's fiction to an analysis of Foucault's account of resistance and the aesthetics of existence. Turning to Kafka's many letters and diary entries, we will explore the way Kafka used his own writings to live, as he often claimed, his "life as literature."