Overview

"This book is not a biography of Kafka. It focuses on the thinker Kafka, not the artist. It emphasizes that part of the work where thought is expressed most directly, most in line with the major objective. There are two Kafka. There's Kafka the artist-writer, the man with a passion for literature and writing, the man who, during his lifetime, published a body of work that could be classed as ""minor literature"". And then there's Kafka the seeker, the thinker, the man obsessed with finding the right soil in himself to be born and to live in, the man who considers that he has not yet been born, that he has died in this world, that he is the survivor, that he can be a beginning, that he can be the one who is authentically born. There is a relationship and a tension between the artist and the thinker. In the work he published or planned to publish (his great unfinished novels), the artist did not want this relationship to be clear and direct. The artist Kafka, in his published work and in the great unfinished novels, took precedence over the thinker. The thinker remained in the background to obey artistic imperatives, but also because he did not feel ready to openly declare his pure and simple truth to the world; he didn't want to burn himself. He'll never be ready. Kafka stepped forward masked. The thinker reveals himself in his diaries. Description of a fight (including Contemplation), his early work, and Investigations of a Dog, his mature work, are, from this point of view, to be set apart. In these two works, which have so far received little commentary, the major themes of his struggle and research are clearly present, albeit masked by formal artifice. Kafka's thought is close to that of the future Heidegger. The difference between the two thinkers is one of philosophical and artistic culture. Heidegger is the erudite thinker, the professor of philosophy whose aim is to unveil the truth of being. Kafka is the artistic thinker, whose aim is to live, and to make the world live, according to the same truth of being that he wants to bring to light - it is in his flesh and without concession to the world that he came into contact with Being. The thinking is the same, the questioning is the same. The meaning that Kafka gives to the word ""beginning"" or ""birth"" is the same as that which Heidegger will give to them, a little later and independently."

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