Files
Abstract
In one of her many efforts to think about the modern, Hannah Arendt turned to a parable of Franz Kafka’s. It begins, “He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way, the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so.”1 She presents this as “the only exact description” of an essentially modern predicament: finding oneself in a world with “no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change.”2 In Kafka’s parable the protagonist is literally caught between past and future. Such a world, as Arendt said elsewhere, requires “thinking without a banister.”3 This thinking without a banister, without a sense of where one is going or where one has come from, is not reserved for political theorists or philosophers. It concerns all of us who have happened to live through or in the wake of countless revolutions and upheavals since at least the eighteenth century—from the social and political to the scientific and technological. Like Arendt, Isaac Reed puzzles over the hazards and hopes that attend such dysphoria. These aren’t mere abstractions but rather genuine crises that we experience in our often ordinary, sometimes extraordinary lives. It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that Power in Modernity, Reed’s vertiginously thoughtful project to reformulate the modern, begins with not one but two parables from Kafka.4 The first, “Before the Law,” depicts a man who spends his life begging a doorkeeper’s permission to gain admittance to “the Law,” only to watch listlessly as the door, which he learns was meant for him alone, is closed in his face. But this melancholy quietism sends Reed off in search of another parable, one that might illuminate the practical puzzle at the heart of his inspiring and intimidating project to revivify the modern as an organizing concept for our world as well as the human sciences that seek to make sense of it.