He who knows how to listen

Kafka and the figuration of horror

Abstract

In Respiración artificial, argentine writer Ricardo Piglia uses his alter-ego, Emílio Renzi, to talk about the history of his country, but he does so in such a way that the argentine dictatorship, contemporary to the writing of the novel, appears only indirectly, either through history argentine politics, whether due to the parallel with Nazi Germany. This occurs through one of the most surprising figurations made about the Jewish writer Franz Kafka, when imagining a meeting between him and Adolf Hitler, thus prefiguring, in Kafka's literature, the horror heard and assimilated in the German dictator's words.