Hegel on Kafka's Metamorphosis

The reader of Kafka's story is immediately struck not so much by the bizarre transformation of the protagonist into an enormous insect - surely not the most bizarre in the history of literature - as with the indifferent response the transformation is met with. Gregor Samsa at first feels no discomfort with his new shape, which leads us to reject the interpretation that his transformation is in itself a punishment. Indeed he finds pleasure in new habits that come with the new form: eating rotten food, crawling on the ceiling etc. The interpretation that the transformation is actually fulfilling a latent desire might seem far fetched at first, but let us see if it can help us make sense of the story. Gregor is working at a job he distinctly dislikes (that are his first thoughts upon waking) but to which he is bound by debts his father had incurred. The fantasy is not a positive one, a desire to become an insect, but a negative one, a desire to escape inescapable social obligations.

The insect can be read as a metonymy of nature (that Kafka declared a Bilderverbot regarding the insect in a letter to Kurt Wolff would indicate that the insect is a place holder for a more abstract idea), nature not as a positive idea, but as a purely abstract negation of human sociality, a wishing-away of the mediatedness of the subject through social institutions, a fantasy of pure immediacy in the midst of universal mediation. The tragedy of the insect testifies to the impossibility of an abstract negation. As Adorno noted in one of the most orthodoxly Hegelian parts of Minima Moralia, the bourgeois demand for purely spontaneous love functions as an alibi for the untrue society - it is not as pure spontaneity that love can offer resistance to the existing, only as specific negation, as "stubborn opposition" as Adorno put it. Note that the motive of family love (especially that of Gregor to his sister) is central to Kafka's story.

The answer to the question what the nature of mediation is, of what Gregor is running from, takes us beyond Hegel to Marx. On all the central parts of the story money is of paramount importance. The debt of the father is forcing Gregor to stick to a job he dislikes. Georg only finds displeasure in his new form when he realizes it will cause him to miss work. Gregor's family start neglecting him because of the jobs they in turn have to take to compensate for his missing pay check and they completely reject him after he has scared away the tenants inhabiting a spare room of their apartment. Gregor's sister put it most succinctly: "When one has to work so hard as we do it is impossible to put up with this incessant torture at home." Brecht's Good person of Szechwan immediately comes to mind, where Shen Te is confronted with an analogous dilemma: "How can I be good, when everything is so expensive?"

The transformation can then be read as a parable, the moral of which is that "there is no right life in the wrong."