Many of the literary critics we’ve used to look at Kafka are from the post-structuralist school of philosophy, so it behooves us to look more closely at them and their ideas.
Post-structuralism, which related very closely to postmodernism, emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, predominantly in France. It is interdisciplinary, belonging to literature, philosophy, and critical theory. Important thinkers associated with this theory are Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler.
The theoretical movement is concerned with the breakdown of systems, frameworks, and definitions. Such systems are viewed as fictitious constructs, as is truth itself. As Purdue’s resource for the concept of post-structuralism explains, “[it] holds that there are many truths, that frameworks must bleed, and that structures must become unstable or decentered.” Overall, the theory was a pushback against Enlightenment notions of humans as rational and history as progressing calmly toward the better, as well as Western religious beliefs.
In 1966 Derrida delivered a seminal address entitled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” He articulated the concept of freeplay: “The concept of centered structure...is contradictorily coherent...the concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay."
Derrida and others pointed to the inability of language to convey truth, which even Nietzsche in the late 19th century was beginning to question. Nietzsche famously said, “What is truth?...truths are an illusion about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.”
When it comes to literature specifically, post-structuralist thinkers looked at the concepts of narrative and author and how they too were thrown into uncertainty. According to post-structuralists, modern literary texts may not adhere to traditional modes of narration; they may not be chronological, they may pull from multiple disciplines, and they question the whole concept of a grand narrative. For the latter, the reader takes on a new significance as interpreter while the author is displaced. Roland Barthes deemed this the “death of the author” because it is impossible for a reader to come to a text without their own biases and cultural background, and when they engage with the text it will be different than what the author intended. Thus, the latter is “dead” as a presumed authority figure.
