Kafka’s parable on parables turns on whether inside and outside are relevant categories

Evidence

The interpretation of the parable thus pivots on the possibility of distinguishing between inside and outside, or more precisely, of distinguishing whether inside and outside are relevant categories of interpretation. … Whereas one reading locates eternity on the outskirts of life, the second includes this figure of exteriority (the player vis-a-vis the instrument) in a space of interiority within which there is no exteriority-the attic. This no doubt would confirm that “another world and another time” have made “themselves present in this world and time.” Life, as and “in daily life,” would indeed be “the only life we have,” as Kafka puts it in “On Parables.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 750

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the hermeneutic question in Kafka’s ‘On Parables’ — the interpretive pivot between exteriority and interiority.