La macchia rossa: filosofia dell’animalità e letteratura dell’animalità nella “Relazione per un’accademia” di Franz Kafka

Aim of this paper is to investigate Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (1917) with and after the most interesting analysis of the same story by Felice Cimatti in his book Filosofia dell’animalità (Philosophy of the animality, 2014). In his talk to an academic audience the narrator describes his fore-life as an ape in the open jungle, his capture by some men of the “Hagenbeck company” and his entrance into the human world as an escape from his cage and as an act of (self) violence. The ape’s decision to be a man requires renouncing freedom: compared with the cage where it is imprisoned after the capture, human life means for the ape just another kind of prison. Even if the ape-man learned without problems to speak (through imitation), its being goes on to be a hybrid one. Focus of the paper is to underscore the Kafkian motif of “assault on the border”, insofar as the border is to be intended in Kafka as a mobile one (see the tales “Wish to be a red Indian” [1913], and “An old Manuscript” [1919]). Compared with the ape-figures in E.T.A. Hoffmann, in Robert Musil and in Thomas Bernhard’s short stories, the ape of Kafka is really a kind of monster, i.e. a figure that represents the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the unthinkable. It happens because Kafka tries in his tales to assume the point of view of the animals, to enter in the no-man’s land of the animals’ life. It does not mean simply to explore the world of the other, but also to approach the other in his self. Not just another one, the other as itself, but the other in the self, not just the animal being but the human being. In this way the monsters of Kafka are we ourselves.