Vladimir Biti Bücher

Focusing on the traumatic aftermath of the dissolution of East-Central European and West European empires, the book explores transnational literary alliances through the works of Franz Kafka and J.M. Coetzee. It analyzes how Kafka represents the transition from sovereign to disciplinary governance, while Coetzee reflects the shift from colonial assimilation to regeneration. Through close readings, the text reveals how both authors respond to the reconfiguration of power relations in their narratives, highlighting the instability of post-imperial literature and the loss of transcendental guarantees in human experience.

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode. The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i. e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.