English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India
With Posthumanism as a broader area, I aim to read hybridized and nonhuman animal creatures in Kafka’s select texts. Such a reading disintegrates the normative meanings and taxonomies and therefore paves ways for a more inclusive, caring and unpredictable future where human exceptionalism is questioned and power dynamics are exhausted. I further try to read Kafkaesque beyond the human sphere therefore trying to relay it to the larger corpus of his animal centred texts. Posthuman care, interspecies ethics and Kinesthetic empathy also remain the cornerstone of my analysis of Kafka’s body of works. Jaques Derrida’s investigations on non-human animals that relies on “thickening the difference instead of falling back into homogeneity” (Polan 10) facilitates imagining possible futures where subjectivity extends beyond the humanist realm and realities. Reading non-human animals in Kafka’s select works beyond allegories and metaphors aids in justifying the presence of these creatures and allowing them their much denied subjectivity.
