French Literature Reviews - 2026
W. Benjamin, On Kafka
Comparative and World Literature
On Kafka
Walter Benjamin
Christophe David (Translator), Alexandra Richter (Translator)
Publication date: 08/04/2015 Publisher: Nous (éditions) ISBN: 978-2-37084-009-7 EAN: 9782370840097 Format: Paperback No. of pages: 362 p.
This book, which has no equivalent even in Germany, brings together and translates for the first time the complete collection of texts that Walter Benjamin dedicated to Kafka: everything Benjamin published during his lifetime, alongside a comprehensive selection of private writings, letters, manuscripts, and other documents, most of which were previously unpublished in French. From 1925 until the end of his life, Benjamin worked tirelessly on Kafka's oeuvre, undertaking numerous projects around what he considered a strategic vantage point for illuminating his era.
This volume allows one to gauge the central place that the work on Kafka occupies in Benjamin's final workshop—a body of work about which he wrote: it is "destined to become the crossroads where the paths of my thought intersect." As Benjamin remarked: "Kafka could be made into the character of a legend: he would have spent his life trying to figure out what he looked like without ever knowing that mirrors exist."
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An article reviewing this work can be read on nonfiction.fr:
Walter Benjamin's engagement with the writings of Franz Kafka spanned the final years of his life, functioning as a central pivot for his broader philosophical and critical inquiries. Within twentieth-century European letters, the intersection of Benjamin's thought and Kafka's oeuvre represents a significant meeting point of modernist criticism, Jewish mysticism, and materialist critique. Critical discourse has long recognized how Benjamin approached Kafka not merely as a literary figure, but as a diagnostic lens through which to examine modernity, theology, and the crisis of tradition in the interwar period.
This volume gathers the complete collection of published essays, private correspondence, manuscripts, and related documents that chart Benjamin's sustained intellectual engagement with Kafka. Readers interested in the history of twentieth-century criticism and the reception of Kafka in French thought may find this comprehensive translated resource particularly relevant to their studies.