An Alive and Kicking Wall: Species Fluidity and Kafka’s Zoopoetics

Kafka’s poetics, which deviates from realism and includes events that are clearly unrealistic, exposes deep social structures and therefore is perceived as a definitely realistic representation. Similarly, Kafka’s Zoopoetics, which includes fantastic elements, can be viewed as a corpus that exposes the deep structure underlying human–animal relations. This article critically examines two of Kafka’s works centering on the fluidity from the human to the animal (“The Metamorphosis”) and from the animal to the human (“A Report for an Academy”). Their protagonists, the human-vermin and the ape-human, are liminal entities that undermine one of the most fundamental oppositions in Western culture. In these two texts, the human–animal opposition —which is perceived as binary, hierarchical, and natural—undergoes radical deconstruction and is presented as a cultural construct shaped by biopolitical practices that include exclusion, incarceration, and violence. The interspecies fluidity challenges the sharp separation that the anthropocentric hegemony imposes between human experience and the experience of other animals. This sharp barrier is designed to regulate  humanity by denying the animalistic elements in humankind, and animality by denying the subjectivity of the other animals, excluding them from the social order, and neutralizing identification with them. Kafka’s Zoopoetics, which obliterates the boundary between humans and other animals, contrasts sharply with the anthropological machine in Agamben’s political theory, which repeatedly draws this boundary. Kafka’s Zoopoetics thus constitutes the fictional embodiment that preceded zoopolitical theories developed at the turn of the twenty-first century, whose reading in its light creates a postanthropocentric literary-political space that is simultaneously imaginary and real.