Violence and Vulnerability: Kafka and Levinas On Human Suffering
In this article I read Franz Kafka's story 'In the Penal Colony' together with Emmanuel Levinas' article 'Useless Suffering' to explore two diametrically opposed responses to vulnerability in a particular situation: when it has found expression in the form of extreme su...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2015]
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2015, Volume: 29, Issue: 4, Pages: 400-414 |
| RelBib Classification: | NBC Doctrine of God NCA Ethics VA Philosophy |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | In this article I read Franz Kafka's story 'In the Penal Colony' together with Emmanuel Levinas' article 'Useless Suffering' to explore two diametrically opposed responses to vulnerability in a particular situation: when it has found expression in the form of extreme suffering. Drawing on the Latin roots of 'vulnerability', as registering one's 'woundability', I look here at responses to the suffering of one whose vulnerability has been translated from a capacity to be wounded to the suffering that wounding inflicts. Reading these texts together enables us to see things that might otherwise be invisible. Specifically, Kafka's penal colony officer presents a description of the process of torture that provides a graphic and illustrative counter narrative to the dense phenomenology of suffering with which Levinas opens his article, and Levinas' identification and critique of theodicy reveals and unravels the officer's fantasy of meaningful suffering. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frv044 |