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The influence of Franz Kafka’s literature  
on aspects of critical cultural theory
Primož Mlačnik
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, Kardeljeva ploščad 5,  
SI – 1000 Ljubljana, Primoz.mlacnik@fdv.uni-lj.si
V članku je pregledno obravnavana kritična interpretacija književnosti Franza 
Kaf ke.  Intelektualci, ki pripadajo širokemu polju kulturnih študij, ustvarjajo 
kulturne, politično-filozofske in jezikovne teorije pod (ne)posrednim vplivom 
Kafkove književnosti, s tem pa utrjujejo ugled njegove književnosti. V preseku 
modernistične književnosti in postmoderne kulturne teorije so analizirane po-
dobnosti in skupni problemi, ki se nanašajo na kritičen odnos do modernosti in 
idej napredka, na vprašanja kulturnih manjšin in identitet ter na vprašanja jezika. 
Članek poskuša izpostaviti recipročno vez med modernistično književnostjo in 
postmoderno kulturno teorijo.
In this article, we provide an overview of critical interpretations of Franz Kafka’s 
literature by authors from the field of critical cultural studies. We show that many 
intellectuals in this field have created theories under the (in)direct influence of 
Kafka’s literature and thus have consolidated Kafka as a canonical writer. We 
outline similarities and common problems in the field of cultural studies and 
Kafka studies including the relationship toward modernity, a critique of the idea 
of progress, the question of cultural minorities and identities, and the problem of 
signification. In this discussion, we attempt to show the reciprocal link between 
modernist literature and postmodernist cultural theory.
Ključne besede: Franz Kafka, kritične interpretacije, kulturne študije, moderni-
stična književnost, podobnosti in skupni problemi
Key words: Franz Kafka, critical interpretations, cultural studies, modernist lit-
erature, commonalities and problems
1 Introduction
Franz Kafka remains one of the most enigmatic representatives of literary modern-
ism. Moreover, the combination of dry bureaucratic language, grotesque atmos-
phere, liminal characters and ambivalent meaning makes his literature susceptible 
to seemingly countless interpretations. It was through cultural, theoretical, and 
ideological appropriations that Kafka’s literature became a sort of “case-in-point” 
for many streams of cultural studies that have developed alongside the cultural-
ist approach to literature, sometime simply called “theory” and defined as an 
epistemologically diversified and “/…/ eclectic mixture of linguistics, poetics, 
1.02 Pregledni znanstveni članek – 1.02 Review Article
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Primož Mlačnik
philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, history, and other sciences” 
(Juvan 2006: 41).
This article provides an overview of critical interpretations of Kafka’s novels 
and other well-known prose works in connection with the theoretical premises of 
several twentieth-century intellectuals. On the basis of this overview and analysis, 
we show the relevance of the link between modernist literature and postmodern 
cultural theory, along with their common traits and problems. We explore critiques 
of modernity, law and language, and ideas of multiculturalism and otherness in 
order to discover commonalities between modernism and postmodern cultural 
studies. In the second section, we present Kafka’s literature as both a critique 
and product of modernity in the context of the interpretations of eminent critical 
cultural theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and 
Giorgio Agamben all of whom were greatly influenced by Kafka’s work. In the 
third and fourth sections, we examine cultural aspects of political and social in-
equalities, questions of identity, minorities and otherness – elements central to the 
pursuits of cultural studies – in the context of the unnerving modern imperatives 
that influenced Kafka in both his personal life and his literature. The dialectical 
link between Kafka’s biography and literature is presented as a defence of mul-
ticulturalism. In contrast, Kafka’s personal eccentricity, reflected in his animal 
stories, is presented as the negative impact of cultural otherness as defined by 
Erving Goffman. Adorno, Arendt and Benjamin portrayed Kafka as a messenger 
of truth about the holocaust, modern bureaucracy and the atrophy of experience. 
In the final section, we show how, in a similar manner, post-structuralists theorists 
such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida portrayed Kafka as a messenger of 
truth about the nature of language.
2 Kafka’s Literature as a Critique and Product of Modernity
For the aforementioned authors of critical cultural theory, Kafka’s literature ap-
peared to contain a profound critique of modernity and the notion of progress as 
a whole. They discerned pessimistic accounts of society and history as the golden 
age in the story “The Investigations of a Dog”, the portrayal of a world in which 
communication among people is disturbed by time-space compression in “A Mes-
sage to the Emperor”, a cynical articulation of the poor socio-economic condition 
of the modern artist whose main act is metaphorically starvation in “The Hunger 
Artist”, a depiction of a world beyond redemption in “The Coming of the Messiah”, 
dispossessed people that find the promise of a happy future in the dramaturgical 
environment of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma in the novel Amerika. Many of 
Kafka’s protagonists are bereft of hope, literary characters that possess almost no 
narrative past and aspire for little in the future.
Josef K. and K. are the two main protagonists of Kafka’s novels The Trial and 
The Castle. Together, the novels represent the great literary abstractions of bu-
reaucracy in the Weberian sense of the “iron cage”. Like Weber, Kafka is critical 
of the dehumanising effects of the modern, depersonalised and reified system of 
bureaucracy. One could even argue that Kafka depicts something that resembles 
the postmodern crisis of knowledge and political engagement, since in a sense these 
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The influence of Franz Kafka’s literature on aspects of critical cultural theory
issues are the focus of these two monumental novels. The main protagonists of 
the novels lack knowledge both of themselves and of social relations. As a result, 
they are politically inhibited and this condition results in their gradual demise.
Theodor Adorno argued that Kafka’s prose articulates the irrationality of hy-
perrationality and the mythical side of domination (Adorno 1997: 256), and that 
by recognising the deformations of the modern age, Kafka depicted everything 
historical as condemned (Adorno 1997: 259). On the basis of stories such as “In 
the Penal Colony” and the portrayal of the inhumane and alienating bureaucracy 
in the novels The Trial and The Castle, Adorno inaugurated Kafka the prophet of 
the Holocaust (Adorno 1997: 258). Hannah Arendt argued that Kafka was a ruth-
less critic of bureaucracy and that his “/…/ so-called prophecies were but a sober 
analysis of underlying structures which today come into the open” (Arendt 2005: 
74). Arendt claimed that it was Kafka’s dislike of the modern world that distanced 
him most from his contemporaries (Arendt 2005: 80). Walter Benjamin placed 
Kafka’s work in between the mystical experience of tradition and the experience 
of the modern inhabitant of the large city who is at the mercy of the vast machin-
ery of officialdom (Benjamin 2007: 141). Benjamin concluded that Kafka’s work 
presented the sickness of tradition (Benjamin 2007: 143), but also urban purity and 
the beauty of failure (Benjamin 2007: 145).
All of the philosophers mentioned above discerned a critique of modernity and 
progress in Kafka’s work. One could argue that Adorno, Benjamin and Arendt 
made use of Kafka’s literature as a screen onto which they projected nuances of 
their own thought. In this sense, their theories bear the imprint of Kafka’s literary 
influence. Because he built his defence of high art against more vulgar Marxist 
readings of Kafka’s prose, Adorno’s views of modernist literature as a shield against 
fascism would perhaps be different without Kafka, also because Adorno was not 
always sympathetic to complex art forms. For example, he condemned jazz for be-
ing linked to Oedipal infantility (Adorno 1977: 13) and pseudo-individualisation, 
regarding it as a misconceived avantgarde that was limited by the culture industry 
and conformism (Adorno 1977: 33–34).
Similarly, in the absence of Kafka, would there have been another writer, 
inclined towards Jewish tradition, to fuel Benjamin’s melancholy and also his 
revolutionary philosophy and theology? Arendt was one of the first “American” 
editors of Kafka diaries and wrote two influential essays about Kafka that were 
crucial for “/…/ the formulation of central categories of her political philosophy 
in the 1950s and 1960s” (Caygill 2011: 2). Arendt read Kafka’s novels while 
writing The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (Danoff 2000: 211). It seems a 
valid argument that some of the best known and most paradigmatic Arendtian 
flagships are symbolically related to Kafka – the uncanny resemblance between 
Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) and Kafka’s 
The Trial, between Arendt’s Kafkaesque portrayal of a Nazi sycophant and 
Kafka’s depiction of the characterless Josef K. Both characters are paradoxically 
innocent and irrefutably guilty. Both faced a corrupt court, their trials infused 
with irregularities, abnormalities and legal complexity (Arendt 1963: 253), and 
finally both struggled to understand their verdict and ended up “dying like dogs” 
(Kafka 2009: 165).
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Giorgio Agamben, a widely studied figure in cultural studies, was yet another 
avid reader of Kafka’s literature. Although Agamben’s political philosophy is 
theoretically grounded in the study of Roman law as well as the work of Arendt, 
Benjamin, and Foucault, it seems that the most unique and valuable segments of 
Agamben’s theory are ideatically and eideitically indebted to Kafka’s prose, which 
he analysed in a number of his works.1 If one wants to understand Agamben one 
reads Kafka, and once one understands Agamben, it is impossible not to reread 
certain segments of Kafka’s prose in a different light. Kafka’s well-known parable 
“Before the Law” is an example of a piece of literature that has been thoroughly 
distorted by theory. In the story, a man from the countryside dies as he waits in 
front of an open door, a literary symbol of the modern law, interpreted by Agamben 
as “being in force without significance” (Agamben 1998: 169).
On the one hand, we could pose a daringly retroactive question: how much of the 
Western cultural theory that we know would exist were it not for Max Brod saving 
Kafka’s literature from the flames? On the other hand, we could argue that all of 
these more or less striking literary-theoretical resonances might not be attributed 
to Kafka’s ideatic and eidetic influence but rather to the inherent characteristics 
of modernity that have marked modernist literature and postmodern theory, both 
of which inevitably address the social antagonisms of modernity.
3 Struggling with Modern Imperatives in Kafka’s Life and Cultural 
Studies
Kafka, a German and Czech-speaking Jewish resident of multicultural Prague in 
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was educated as a lawyer and worked as an insur-
ance officer. He spent most of his life in the Jewish Quarter of Prague, living in 
the midst of an increasingly anti-Semitic society. As a writer, he occasionally 
embodied this unwanted identity by transforming himself into an animal, into a 
dog among others.
Zygmunt Bauman convincingly argued that the project of modernity attempts 
to eradicate differences and create total order and pure categories through endless 
and rigorous acts of classification, quantification, labelling, segregation, division, 
allocation, and numbering, which in fact only produces greater ambivalence and 
disorder. Modernity strives to achieve a totality of the social universe, and yet since 
each inclusion presupposes exclusion, modernity necessarily functions through the 
use of oppressive means (Bauman 1993). In this sense, we could argue that Kafka’s 
life and literature were a product of the ambivalence that modernity produces 
while at the same time an attempt to eradicate them. The Castle is a case in point, 
presenting how the difference between the village and the castle is progressively 
 1 Agamben either vaguely addressed or extensively analysed Kafka in Infancy and History: 
The Destruction of Experience (1993), Idea of Prose (1995), Remnants of Auschwitz: The 
Witness and the Archive (1999), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (1999), The 
Man without Content (1999), Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, Theory out of Bounds 
(2000), State of Exception (2005), The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to 
the Romans (2005) and Profanations (2007).
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The influence of Franz Kafka’s literature on aspects of critical cultural theory
lost the more the land surveyor K. tries to delineate it. Another case in point is the 
already mentioned indifference between guilt and innocence in The Trial.
Franz Kafka’s literature and cultural studies both provide a political defence 
of the idea of multiculturalism: illuminating on the one hand the fruitfulness of 
the coexistence of cultures and languages, and, on the other, the increasing impos-
sibility of such an existence. Kafka also had some knowledge of Yiddish, Hebrew, 
English, Italian, Spanish, French, Latin and Greek (Nekula 2016: 71–107). Certain 
authors, including Marthe Robert, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Marek 
Nekula, attribute Kafka’s highly enigmatic and aphoristic literary language to these 
biographical characteristics. The argument these authors make is that had Kafka 
not been divided between different cultures and languages, he could not have cre-
ated either such unique literature or such unique literary language.
And yet there is also a dark shadow, the negative side of the spectrum of am-
bivalence attached to Kafka’s life (Robert 1982; Deleuze and Guattari 1986; Nekula 
2016). As much as the split between different cultures was productive, it was also 
suffocating and produced a level of anxiety that resulted in a crisis of identity. 
Kafka was an assimilated Jew who interpreted his position as somehow inferior or 
inauthentic in comparison with Eastern European Jews. He felt he belonged to no 
specific culture or people. In his posthumously published diaries, he addressed his 
loneliness and anxious existence as the product of the loss of community. Perhaps 
it is because of this that Kafka has come to be regarded as a universal author and 
also the reason why many scholars regard him as the epitome of modern man split 
between different authorities, between tradition and innovation, collectivism and 
individualism. However, his difference and his inability to identify was specific 
in terms of it having clear social and cultural causes.
In late nineteenth and early twentieth century Prague, as the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire began its slow collapse, intercultural conflicts arose as a result of Czech 
nationalism and anti-Semitism directed against Germans and Jews. Though a 
Jew, Kafka did not fully identify with either Jews, Zionists, Czechs or Germans 
(Robert 1982: 27), and as someone who was born into a Czech family that spoke 
predominantly German at his father’s insistence, Kafka was the Other in his own 
environment, included in the symbolic order through his exclusion, to use Agam-
ben’s description of bare life (Agamben 2000: 43).
4 Kafka as an Outcast between Multiculturalism and Stigmatisation
To this day, Kafka serves as a prime example of and inspiration for several im-
portant arguments made by cultural studies scholars to better understand minority 
cultures and identities in a multicultural world. Many of the minority cultures in 
our common environment seem to be self-destructive and even destructive, but 
the character of nihilism, apathy and conflict that is often attributed to cultural 
minorities is not something primordially essential to people’s language or culture. 
Conflict and destructive tendencies are not of an inherent or centralised nature. 
They are produced through social relations, social change and the power relations 
that cause social change. From the standpoint of the majority, minorities, such 
as Kafka’s Jews, are often understood as anonymous, potentially dangerous, and 
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undesirable, and thus incite fear and resentment (Powell 2008). Minorities are 
without a doubt different, but their difference is stigmatised as unwanted Other-
ness by the cultural majority.
In this regard, Erving Goffman, often compared to Kafka, explored an ex-
tremely important aspect. In his seminal work Stigma: Notes on the Management of 
Spoiled Identity (1982), Goffman presents the logic of the production of stigmatised 
identities. Minorities become stigmatised because of their acceptance of their own 
otherness. If the cultural majority continuously applies pressure on minorities, the 
minorities internalise the image of the Other imposed upon them by the cultural 
majority. If the cultural majority deems a minority worthless or dangerous, the mi-
nority will enact the negativity projected on them by the majority (Goffman 1982).
Kafka’s otherness and stigma manifest themselves through his literature, in 
particular in his animal stories that evolve around liminal, bestial or schizoid 
protagonists: a fearful, solitary, excommunicated dog in “Investigations of a Dog”; 
Gregor, a traveling salesman who turns into a giant insect during his sleep in the 
novella The Metamorphosis; Red Peter, a speaking monkey who is tired of per-
forming humanness, in “A Report to the Academy”; Josephine, a singing mouse, 
in “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (Kafka, Essential). Furthermore, 
Kafka’s unfinished novels also portray otherness, especially his novel The Trial, 
in which the protagonist cannot learn what crime he allegedly committed or what 
charges led to his arrest.
Kafka’s contemporary significance lies in what Adorno was the first to express: 
Kafka sides with outcasts (Adorno 1997: 245). Deleuze and Guattari gave this state-
ment a rich theoretical background by merging literary studies and psychoanalysis. 
In their work, they developed, on the basis of Kafka’s literature, the theory of 
minor literature as an original literary genre. Minor literature is literature whose 
language is not fixed in any particular time or space and is therefore deterritori-
alised. It is literature written by the members of a minority in the language of a 
majority (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16–23), and literature that is by definition 
highly political and collective. Deleuze and Guattari labelled Kafka’s work as a 
precedential case of revolutionary literature precisely because it portrays the strug-
gles of the minority and opposes the monopoly of power. Although their account 
was not the first attempt to universalise Kafka as a humanist author – that was 
already accomplished by the French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre in 
the 1960s (Nekula 2016: 18) – it was certainly the most convincing.
Kafka’s literature is not only inextricably connected with the contemporary 
understanding of (not only multicultural) identities as non-essential and relational, 
but also with power relations – social, economic, and political forces that influence 
the production of identities that are often beyond individual choice. Sometimes it 
is legal power, an implementation of a certain law, in other cases, practices that 
otherwise delegate meaning and legitimacy to the production of identities. Such 
a struggle was demonstrated in a Kafkaesque manner relatively recently during 
the legal battle over Kafka’s manuscripts, which should have been destroyed by 
Max Brod as requested by Kafka. Brod preserved them and upon his death left 
the original manuscripts to his lover Dora Diamant. Kafka had revealed his am-
bivalence about his Jewish identity in his diaries, writing that he both admired and 
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The influence of Franz Kafka’s literature on aspects of critical cultural theory
was nauseated by Zionism (Kafka, Letters 423), and yet, despite this ambivalence, 
Dora Diamant gave the manuscripts to the National Library of Israel, a Zionist 
state. Thus, although Kafka was clearly not a Zionist, he may, because of the legal 
battle over his literary legacy (Balint 2019), end up being considered an exclusively 
Jewish author and his legacy subordinated to the political project of Israel.
Kafka’s identity was defined by national and local political structures that are 
now obsolete. Judith Butler argued that the legal appropriation of Kafka’s legacy by 
Israel, a state that many consider an illegal occupying force is scandalous precisely 
because Kafka, whose work “/…/ charts the vicissitudes of non-belonging” (Butler 
2011), not only never having set foot in Palestine or written in Hebrew, continuing 
to write in German even after the First Czechoslovak Republic was founded in 
1918, but also treating Zionism irreverently and satirically, a stance illustrated in 
his short story “Jackals and Arabs”.
As argued by Hansen (2012: 169), Kafka adopted this stance precisely because 
of Israel’s colonial turn. Kafka, for better or for worse, symbolically belongs not 
to any nationalist political project, but rather to the history of the rich, lost and 
unfulfilled European tradition of multilingualism and multiculturalism. This state-
ment can also be applied to cultural studies.
5 The Ambivalence of Poststructuralist Readings and Theories
Kafka’s literature also became the subject of a number of post-structuralist, pre-
dominantly French, readings. His work has been situated among other European 
literary modernists, such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, whose literature 
serve as an example of the problem of signification, meaning and interpretation. 
Jacques Derrida used the Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” as a template to create 
and elaborate his concept of différance, which became the core of his method of 
deconstruction. Derrida argued that any literary creation resembles Kafka’s law: its 
meaning is arbitrary, without essence, always and perpetually différing and running 
late. In contrast, the reader functions as the man from the countryside. Only the 
reader has the power to attribute meaning to the law of a literary text, although, 
as is the case with Kafkologists, there is frequently a set of gatekeepers provid-
ing “correct interpretation” (Derrida 1991). Roland Barthes agreed with Derrida, 
concluding that the essence of Kafka’s literature lies in the literary technique of 
allusion “/…/ that authorizes a thousand equally plausible keys – which is to say, 
it validates none” (Barthes 1972: 136).
Sanja Bahun elaborated her thoughts on Kafka’s literary technique or more 
precisely what she called his “melancholy semantics” (Bahun 2014: 147). She ob-
served that Kafka’s sentences are “replete with concessionary words and phrases 
such as ‘indeed – yet’ (‘zwar – aber’), ‘though’ (‘allerdings’), and ‘it must be 
confessed’/’indeed’” (Bahun 2014: 145). Bahun concludes that these phrases are 
the medium of meaning and emotions that are predominantly ambivalent, a point 
that has also been made in other academic theoretical works. When studied closely, 
it becomes clear that Kafka’s works, in particular his novels, contain many “self-
contradictory assertions and conclusions reached previously” (Bahun 2014: 143) 
and these inevitably lead to relativising conclusions. In contrast, in cultural studies, 
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the Kafka effect elaborated by Bahun (Bahun 2014: 67) is more often understood 
as part of the nuanced and non-partisan view that the intellectual subject estab-
lishes towards the object of research. We find one obvious case of Kafka’s cultural 
relativism in the institution of the court in The Trial. The court employs a vast 
number of people, even painters and priests, and its legal power is omnipresent and 
all-encompassing. Nevertheless: “the court wants nothing from you. It accepts you 
when you come and it releases you when you go” (Kafka 2014: 167).
Modernist literary forms and techniques produce a plurality of meaning and 
interpretation. If form dominates content, it distorts and mystifies reality. As a 
result, bourgeois ideology and the hegemonic social order remain unreflected and 
are reproduced. This was also Georg Lukacs’s interpretation of Kafka’s literature: 
namely, that it is alienating, decadent and nihilistic (Lukacs 1963: 47–91). Marxist 
critique placed Kafka’s literature between “larpurlartism” (art-for-art-sake) and 
socially engaged, but in a totalising way that recognised neither difference and 
ambivalence.
Kafka’s modernist literature and cultural studies, under the influence of the 
French philosophers and linguists of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and both in-
creasingly fragmentary, share the following predisposition: “The cultural studies 
project has, from its inception, been premised on the critique of the idea of totality 
which is enacted in our socio-political life” (Zylinska 2005: 15). As suggested in 
the previous sections of this paper, cultural studies – from the founding fathers of 
British cultural studies, including Raymond Williams, to the Frankfurt school and 
postcolonial studies – have focused on demystifying the project of modernity. All 
put forward a critique of the dogma of progress and rationality (Calinescu 1987: 
265). However, exposing the positivist, repressive repercussions of modernity can 
also backfire: “While science and ‘proper literary studies’ are undoubtedly both 
hard and wonderful, cultural studies, masquerading in ‘the meaningless wordplays 
of modish francophone savants’, seems to have no other function than to ‘impress 
the gullible’” (Dawkings 1998 in Zylinska 2005: 26).
It could be argued that common features – for example, ambivalence, “unde-
cidability”, and “saturation of meaning” – are present in both Kafka’s literature 
and Western postmodern cultural studies. In addition to the critique of the idea of 
totality, both give voice to people who exist in-between before the law, included 
only through exclusion, living the bare life to use Agamben’s term once again 
(Agamben 1998). Cultural studies attempt to understand the world by deconstruct-
ing the binary oppositions that organise the social universe, but, as suggested by 
Stuart Hall (Hall 1996 in Zylinska 2005: 44–45), are only successful to the extent 
they avoid the impulse of relativisation and offer dialectical resolutions. 
Like Kafka’s literature, cultural studies have been criticised because of their 
openness to otherness and the inability to achieve final meaning. In addition, many 
critics believe the negative effect of Deridda’s deconstruction to be a methodologi-
cal condition of cultural studies. Juliana Schiesari argues that postmodern cultural 
studies are based on the melancholy “rhetorics of loss” (Schiesari 1992: 1). In any 
case, we must admit that modernist art, such as Kafka’s literature, along with 
Western, and in particular post-structuralist, cultural theories both seem to “/…/ 
voraciously feed on the lack of closure” (Bahun 2014: 14).
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The influence of Franz Kafka’s literature on aspects of critical cultural theory
Kafka’s literature and postmodern cultural studies have both been reproached 
for their supposedly lost criteria for moral judgement (Zylinska 2005: 30). Practi-
tioners in the field of cultural studies have been accused of blind celebrations of 
difference and the oppressed, biased toward victimhood, unable to act politically, 
their work deemed as “meaningless wordplays” (Dawkings 1998 in Zylinska 2005: 
20). But what is true of the orthodox Marxist criticism in Czechoslovakia that 
falsely condemned Kafka’s literature during the reign of Communism (Nekula 13) 
is also true of the allegations against cultural studies: they are often unjust and 
unfounded (Zylinska 2005: 26).
6 Conclusion
Although it is impossible to evaluate all aspects of Kafka’s influence on the theo-
retical writings of twentieth century intellectuals, this paper highlights Kafka’s 
influence on postmodern critical thought and emphasises well-known interpreta-
tions of Kafka’s prose as well as commonalities between and problems with Kafka’s 
modernist literature and cultural studies.
In conclusion, although cultural studies and Kafka’s literature are not identical 
to each other, they remain an important source of identification of the authentic 
universalities of human experience (that is, the experience of minorities and the 
self as the Other, as well as the more economically-based shared conditions that 
torment the homeless, the rightless, and other dubious people without luggage, 
who – like those who travel by train to the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma – are 
in search of an inclusive, albeit non-theatrical, participatory life) because they 
enable polysemic identification. Both fields provide a defence of the idea of mul-
ticulturalism through the rethinking of questions of minor identities and cultural 
otherness. Both Kafka’s modernist literature and cultural studies also draw on 
structural semantic deficiencies that have immense interpretive power in terms of 
addressing the shortcomings of modern social structures. Finally, we established 
that both fields address the negative side of modernity and specifically the gap 
between its promises and reality
As demonstrated, Kafka’s literature was used as an inspirational template to 
develop some tendencies of postmodern theory to an elusive, even Kafkaeqsue ex-
tent. It almost seems as if the discussed authors of related academic theory gathered 
their ideas from the interpretative originality of Kafka’s prose, which presents a 
possible case against the Platonic treatment of literature as secondary to philoso-
phy. Kafka’s literature was able to depict the substance and truth of the modern 
world, which were later articulated in philosophy, linguistics or cultural studies.
The relation between Kafka’s literature and cultural studies could be understood 
through an old Marxist analogy – as the relation between the modernist literary 
base and the postmodernist theoretical superstructure, meaning that modernist 
techniques of literary production ended up influence the development of cultural 
theory that, in return, legitimised the power of literature. On the basis of Kafka’s 
literature, we provided an overview of the strong mutual link between literary and 
intellectual currents during the history of the twentieth century, a link that today 
seems to be more dispersed, non-reciprocal and possibly lost.
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VPLIV KNJIŽEVNOSTI FRANZA KAFKE NA NEKATERE VIDIKE KRITIČNE 
KULTURNE TEORIJE
V članku je pregledno obravnavana kritična interpretacija književnosti Franza Kafke s po-
dročja kulturne, politično-filozofske in jezikovne teorije, ki je danes uvrščena med kulturne 
študije. Gre za povezavo med modernistično književnostjo in postmoderno teo rijo, za njune 
podobnosti in nekatere skupne probleme. V prvem delu so obravnavani protagonisti in mo-
tivi iz Kafkovih romanov in nekaterih kratkih zgodb, kot so jih predstavili Kafkovi klasični 
razlagalci: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt in Giorgio Agamben. Kafkovo 
književnost so interpretirali kot proizvod in kritiko modernosti, kot napoved holokavsta, 
reprezentacijo birokratskega nasilja, osiromašenja izkušnje in pravnega zakona.
V nadaljevanju so predstavljeni kulturni vidiki političnih in družbenih neenakosti v Kafko-
vem biografskem kontekstu dvojezičnega Juda, živečega v večkulturni Pragi, ki sta jo v prvih 
dvaj setih letih 20. stoletja zaznamovala antisemitizem, porojen iz imperativov modernosti, 
in razpad Avstro-Ogrske. Raziskana so vprašanja identitete, manjšin in kulturne drugosti, 
ki so skupna Kafkovi modernistični književnosti in kulturnim študijam. Dialektična vez 
med Kafkovo biografijo in književnostjo je predstavljena kot zagovor večkulturnosti, ki pa 
ji vseeno nasprotuje izgubljeni pravni boj glede Kafkovih osebnih zvezkov in rokopisov, ki 
zdaj pripadajo Izraelu. Po drugi strani pa je Kafkova ekscentričnost, ki se odraža v njegovih 
t. i. živalskih zgodbah, predstavljena kot negativen učinek kulturne drugosti v kontekstu 
izsledkov o stigmi Ervinga Goffmana.
Podobno kot so Adorno, Arendt in Benjamin obravnavali Kafkovo književnost kot znanilko 
resnice o modernosti, sta jo Jacques Derrida in Roland Barthes obravnavala kot znanilko 
resnice o jeziku. V zadnjem delu so prek ambivalentnega jezika in strukturne nedoločenosti, 
ki proizvajata pomensko raznovrstnost in nezmožnost dokončne interpretacije, predstavljene 
nekatere kritike, ki so skupne modernistični književnosti in kulturnim študijam. Gre za tezo 
o njihovi neutemeljenosti. Prav primer vezi med modernistično književnostjo in postmoderno 
teorijo nakazuje, da morda književnost ni nujno vedno sekundarna filozofiji.