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Thursday, June 6, 2013

Kafka the Anarcho-Conformist

Externally, he adapted: to the family surroundings that he left for good less than a year before dying; to the externals of dating and pretending he wished to marry; to steady rise as an exemplary official in a state insurance company. These were all facets of an adaptation he hated to various degrees. And while he acted his part in the world, he defended himself by fiercely subverting that same world in his writings. In his fiction he demolished the very norms to which he submitted in his everyday life: Authority, Justice, the Rule of Law, the very logic of human communication. - Saul Friedländer