Il corpo della scrittura e l'utopia dell'"ebreo" : Franz Kafka e Johannes I. Auerbach

The question of a Jewish utopia forms a complex and ambivalent matrix. In the first half of the 20th century, as Europe was preparing the most terrifying of all “utopias” – a non-lieu where the other is not only exiled, but also annihilated – two very different authors wrote works which allow now a new, retrospective study of the question of utopia. Analysing Franz Kafka’s An Hunger Artist and Johannes Ilmari Auerbach’s The Suicide Competition, this paper investigates the question of utopia from the cultural context of European German speaking Jewry. Exploring the representational strategies that Kafka and Auerbach develop in their writing, this contribution highlights how the poetic (H. Meschonnic) articulated by the two authors offers a new critical approach to reconsider the complex question of utopia from the perspective of its failure. The failure of utopia becomes for Kafka and Auerbach the starting point of a deflection from utopia itself, towards something which goes beyond it: the work of sublimation. Kafka and Auerbach, I suggest, were thus able to translate by means of writing that evenement négatif that, according to André Green, does make “nothing” happen in real life, yet makes of that “nothing” the indefinitely repeated event of the life of writing.