Die Frage bleibt: resistenze all’opera : Attorno a un frammento di Franz Kafka

The paper analyses Kafka’s fragment "Man darf nicht sagen" (1906) as one of the first trace of the author’s creative journey. I shall read "Man darf nicht sagen" in the complexity of Kafka’s literary work, investigating the recurrence of stylistic features such as negation, irony, uses of subjunctive and indicative verbal moods, as well as the semantic nuances of the German modal verb 'dürfen'. Nevertheless, I won’t reduce such stylistic peculiarities to a mere linguistic exercise. I argue that Franz Kafka inscribes in "Man darf nicht sagen" the seeds, the signals of a never ending subjective confrontation with the question of transmission, memory, subjectivity, and testimony in name of an Otherness: in a word, with the question of the Law.