Introduction: Present Progression, Always-Already, Grammars of the Nonhuman

Abstract

Kafka’s style is notoriously difficult well ahead of his expression of a deep thinking about life and its prospects. The various social structures all bodies are subjected to—even bodies are under review in Kafka—articulate strange things that cannot be called animal, human, or anything at all. Kafka anticipated Animal Studies critiques of anthropocentrism but also worked through this concept in attempts to express the nonhuman despite human forms of expression and thought. Literature has always troubled such boundaries through “strange” narrative strategies, and recent work in Animal Studies and the “Nonhuman Turn” owes much to Kafkan form. His formal ambiguities, perhaps they are even failures, work to undo the violence of the human that persists even where humanism has already been rejected.