'Kein Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf': Zur Baumetaphorik in Thomas Bernhards 'Korrektur' und Franz Kafkas 'Der Bau'

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Walter Benjamin: self-reference and religiosity

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Mesmerism

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Heinles Verklärung: Walter Benjamins esoterischer Subjektivismus in 'Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin'

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Religious dogs in Nietzsche and Kafka

Albeit grotesque, the idea of religious dogs helps us to understand and criticize the power relations inherent in religion. The first part of the present paper analyzes two notes from Nietzsche's Nachlass that envisage an analogy between the relations of dogs to humans and of humans to God. Placed in their historical context of Darwinism and naturalistic conceptions of culture, these notes shed light on Nietzsche's critique of religious attitudes to domination. The second part - a reading of Kafka's 'Forschungen eines Hundes' - situates the analogy between the dog-human and human-God relationships at the centre of the story's irony. Kafka's use of the analogy differs from Nietzsche's by emphasizing the cognitive dimension of religious aspirations and giving less weight to the subordination to a more powerful agency. In the context of Kafka's work as a whole, however, the story suggests an approach to the relations between power and religion that is incompatible with Nietzsche's understanding of life as will to power. © 2010 Maney Publishing

Das Unbehagen an der Wissenschaft: Betrachtungen zum Werk Thomas Bernhards und seiner Rezeption

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Kafka, critical theory, dialectical theology: Adorno's case against Hans-Joachim Schoeps

Theodor Adorno derived from his reading of Kafka some of the central assumptions that inform the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He opposed theological Kafka interpretations in general, and in particular rejected Hans-Joachim Schoeps's reading of Kafka in the context of Karl Barth's dialectical theology. Adorno and Schoeps thus came to exemplify the dichotomy with which we still characterise the early reception of Kafka's work as either secular (sociological or political) or theological and religious. The disintegration of religion as a comprehensive social system in twentieth-century Germany means that writers can agree with traditional theology and religion in some regards while opposing them in others. This article argues that any unqualified adoption of the dichotomy between the secular and the religious is detrimental to our understanding of both Kafka's work and its early reception. First, the article outlines some of the major discrepancies in Kafka's heterogeneous engagements with religion. Second, it places Adorno's rejection of Schoeps's interpretation in the political context of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Finally, it compares Adorno's notion of 'inverse theology' with Schoeps's inversion of salvation history. Throughout, the article aims to ascertain the differences as well as the underlying commonalities between Adorno's and Schoeps's Kafka reception

Religion, experience, politics: on Erich Unger and Walter Benjamin

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Lucinde

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