Kafka’s Immanent Utopias: The Cage, the Axe, and Prague School Theatre Theory

Abstract: The essay mobilizes the old Prague School concept of the “stage figure” for a counter-intuitively political reading of Franz Kafka as an author of hope for hopeless times. While the context is literary, the concept itself reflects a fundamental aspect of theatre practice that encapsulates an important social or political potential therein: The stage as a laboratory for the production of human beings—the performance not only of illusions and anxieties, but of hopes and potentials as well. With an arguably political edge beyond either text or theatre, the stage figure emerges as a cluster of bodies, objects, and settings that tends to feed static assumptions (of identity, process, debt, and transcendence), but may also break into its loose components for a more liberatory dynamic.