The Anatomist of Power

Reviewed by: The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority by Costas Despiniadis Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Costas Despiniadis, The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority. Translated by Stelios Kapsomenos. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2019. 165 pp. In this compelling study Costas Despiniadis focuses on Kafka's affinity with anarchist concepts and thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Max Stirner, and he documents the author's contacts with anarchists in Prague. An important aspect of the study is Kafka's deep-seated aversion to power and authority in his life and his works. Emphasizing Kafka's critique of power and its representative institutions, Despiniadis identifies reflections of anarchist theory in The Castle, The Trial, Amerika, The Metamorphosis, "In the Penal Colony," and "The Burrow," and he makes evident correlations between Kafka's imagination process and the views held by anarchist authors such as Arthur Holitscher (Amerika heute und morgen), Otto Gross, Martin Buber, and Max Stirner. In disagreement with mainstream Kafka research and psychoanalytical and metaphysical approaches in particular, Despiniadis applies the lens of critical anarchism to show the social and political aspects of Kafka's work and interests. Scholars, he notes, tend to minimize or obscure these dimensions. Even after Canetti's and Theweleit's seminal studies on Kafka's attitude toward power and authority, Kafka's preoccupation with systemic power in different guises continues to be ignored. As a case in point, Despiniadis mentions the opposition to Klaus Wagenbach, who in his critical studies takes Kafka's anarchist propensities seriously and examines them in depth. The Anatomist of Power, tightly structured and thoroughly researched, [End Page 99] identifies anarchist patterns in conjunction with the anticapitalist and anti-authoritarian agenda that informs Kafka's narratives. Despiniadis highlights relevant statements in Kafka's writings and draws on Gustav Janouch's controversial Conversations with Kafka, among others, to document Kafka's attitude toward anarchism. In this and other cases Despiniadis engages with scholarly debates and makes transparent his reasons for relying on specific references and sources. The study's theoretical parameters are set in the preface, followed by critical readings of Kafka's major prose works in light of early twentieth century society and politics. With his multidisciplinary approach Despiniadis uncovers ways in which Kafka positioned himself toward the constraints of power structures as a writer, a son, a citizen, and a lawyer. Despiniadis argues that Kafka envisioned coping mechanisms to resist and escape from the oppression and cooptation that threaten to crush the individual. Kafka, he maintains, illustrates the ultimate inescapability of the existing regimes of power and authority, but his featured protagonists attempt to safeguard their integrity by following their own reasoning and insights. By doing so, they come into conflict with systemic power, which, according to Despiniadis, Kafka configures in a dual manner as "not only structured pyramid-fashion, in a vertical hierarchy, but also linearly, in a segmentary way" (17). Chapter 1 explores seen and unseen dimensions of power within the totalitarian regimes of The Castle and The Trial. The former enacts power through administrative, the latter through judicial structures. Chapter 2 highlights the anticapitalist subtext of Amerika. The novel fragment culminates in an ambivalent utopia, the Naturtheater, that combines Kafka's dream of a peaceful collectivist life in Palestine and his pessimism derived from his realistic assessment of power politics. In his reading of The Metamorphosis in Chapter 3, Despiniadis explores Kafka's critique of patriarchy and the father as the ultimate authority within oppressive family structures. By including Friedrich Engels's seminal treatise The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) Despiniadis might have strengthened this analysis since the authors he references were influenced by Engels's findings. The perceptive analyses of In the Penal Colony in Chapter 4 and The Burrow interpreted as a deepening of the subversive Castle narrative in Chapter 5 include historical and biographical information and lead seamlessly into Chapter 6 and the discussion of Kafka's anarchist connections. Chapter 7 reviews earlier findings in the context of a wider historical panorama, [End Page 100] including fascism and National Socialism. The death of Milena Jesenská in

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