Mimetic Abjection and Animal Metamorphosis: A Benjaminian Reading of Canetti on Kafka

The text suggests a Benjaminian reading of Elias Canetti on Kafka’s relationship with mimetic abjection and animal metamorphosis. From theoretical perspectives that are not coincidental and by way of the natural theatre of Benjaminian gestures, we are brought back to the final outcome of creatural metamorphosis between mole and dog, to Kafka’s chin dug or “grown into” his “chest” from which this paradoxical reconstruction of “anthropology of the individual” that Canetti proposed in his research on Kafka has begun. A reconstruction in which, when dealing with human beings’ total ignorance of their selves – although “anthropos” is even “considered measure of all things” – he rejects the abstract plane of theories, confiding only in “unimpeded concrete inquiry into particular human beings”, in this case, into the “tenacious attempt on the part of a man who was lacking in power, to withdraw from power in whatever form it might appear”. As Canetti demonstrated, beyond the battle on whose description he based his research, Kafka also had “good moments” that bore stories associated with a sense of spaciousness, movement, and transformation, in the event, “no longer into something small” – although, as Benjamin sees, the oblivion of guilt of the hunter Gracchus morphs him into a butterfly. And so, beyond the margins of the work that Canetti took into account, Kafka continued to deal with animal.