Ein Platz zum Landen

Kafkas Semiotik der Diaspora

Abstract

This paper departs from Bruno Latour’s diagnosis of a ‘postdiasporic’ global population that has been collectively forced into migration, in order to reevaluate Franz Kafka’s poetic response to the problem of diaspora. In critical contrast to Philipp Theisohn’s concept of a ‘Zionist poetic’ based on ‘urbareZeichen’ (arable signs) that would enable a transition from text to territory and nation building this paper demonstrates how Kafka’s essentially transtextual mode of writing dodges the draft into any nationally defined cultural project. A contemporary witness of emerging ‘diaspora diaspora’ (R. Brubaker), Kafka’s calculated cultivation of transtextual space seems to anticipate today’s postdiasporic challenge, as it offers literature, or rather: the act of reading itself, as a place to land for a global population following their loss of a homeland.