Publications

HAĽÁK, Miroslav: Heterochronic Modernity in a Heterotopic Prague. In: RAKUŠANOVÁ, Marie – SAWICKI, Nicholas (ed.): Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka. Between Image and Language. Praha, Kant 2024, p. 200-216.

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Prague is indispensable as a stage for Kafka’s modernity. Without its historical background and idea-laden identity, the anonymous settings of Kafka’s stories would be mere bodies without any function. But Prague is a complex organism, a body full of folds that perfectly illustrates the post structuralist issues of an advanced understanding of space and time. With Kafka, it is possible to identify the decisive factor that makes his work so timelessly modernist within modernity—the insight it offers into the acute issues of the era in which he lived, an era in which, unfortunately, myths were mixed with facts to produce the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. The right to work with myths should be reserved for art, so that politics will never again make the fatal mistake of using made-up stories to pave the path toward inhuman totalitarianism.