Adorno e Kafka: La storia naturale dell'umano

Abstract

This essay reconstructs Theodor W. Adorno's interpretation of Franz Kafka as the articulation of a natural history of the human. Rather than treating Kafka's work as a symbolic or existential allegory of modern alienation, Adorno insists on a rigorously literal mode of interpretation, according to which Kafka's images must be taken at face value. This methodological stance, grounded in a critique of symbolic hermeneutics and informed by Benjamin's theory of allegory and Freud's concept of psychic reality, allows Kafka's prose to function as a site where historical processes sediment in material, non-human forms. The essay argues that Kafka's literary universe stages a genetic conception of the human, in which humanity emerges precisely through its deformation, degradation, and proximity to the non-human. Figures such as Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis exemplify this dialectical entanglement of human and non-human, revealing the social origin of individuality and the collapse of the boundary between subject and thing. Kafka's fragmented narrative form thus crystallizes a conception of history as nature and nature as history, offering a paradigmatic instance of art as natural history and preserving, within its bleak imagery, a negative utopian residue of human emancipation.