Judith Butler: Who Owns Kafka?

source: London Review of Books (LRB)    2015年2月16日
Judith Butler's lecture looks at the conflicting claims of ownership of Kafka's original writings, and considers the way states appropriate the works of writers for nationalistic purposes. Read the full lecture here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-b...
The legal battle between the state of Israel and the German literary archive over the question of who owns Kafka’s work has prompted Israeli lawyers to argue that Kafka is an ‘asset of the Jewish people’ and hence, of Israel. At stake is Kafka’s own complex cultural formation as a Prague Jew writing in German who alternately praised and disavowed Zionism. Equally troubling is the assumption that Israel represents the Jewish people and that Kafka might be conceived as an ‘asset.’ Judith Butler proposes a reading of Kafka’s parables that quarrels with both sides of the legal case, seeking recourse to stories and fiction as a way of illuminating the limits of law and the diasporic (and messianic) alternative to Jewish nationalism.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
The lecture was delivered in the BP Lecture Theatre at the British Museum in January 2011 as part of the London Review of Books Winter Lectures series.

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