From Crisis to Meaning: The story of Eve and the inversion by Kafka (forthcoming)

Kafka’s story Before the Law (in German: Vor dem Gesetz, originally published in 1916) (Kafka 2009: 154-155) evokes how every attempt at finding the Law, which could give sense and direction to life, comes with a crisis and can result in failure. The secret of human existence is all about intimate personal encounters. The ‘other than myself’, which is also deeply present inside myself, is not the impersonal thing that it is oftentimes made out to be. In the first part of our study, we presented a close-reading of Kafka’s text (Anckaert & Burggraeve 2017). In this part, we read the creation narrative as a text that is structured by the same economy - the intertwinedness of the I-Thou relation with the I-It relation. But in opposition to the Kafka narrative, the crisis is overcome and results in a new perspective on the human condition: the discovery of the ultimate intersubjective meaning of life which is represented in the law.status: accepte