The memory and the customs. Nietzsche, Kafka, and the animal

Abstract

A Report to an Academy and Josephine the Singer or The Mouse Folk are two stories by Franz Kafka capable of portraying the conflict that Nietzsche describes on his On Genealogy of Morals and Dawn, between the establishment of memory and the force of forgetting, the capacity of establish customs and the build of a present. Thus, this article will analyze, first, the problem of the establishment of customs through memory in Nietzsche. And then, secondly, this problem will be analyzed in the Kafka’s stories, taking in consideration the role of forgetting and the animality. In this way, the establishment of memory through the exercise of new customs and the forgetting of animality by its characters, play a main role in thinking about the relationship between the domestication of the animal that the human is and the forms of forgetting and memory of Kafkaesque animals. Therefore, the contribution of this article lies in incorporating a philosophical reflection to literary analysis, which allows mediating Kafka's stories and Nietzsche's philosophy of customs, in a transdisciplinary way.