ABSTRACT
Ágnes Heller offers a distinctive notion of existential choice, which both relates her to and distinguishes her from the major thinkers of the existentialist tradition. She appreciates, in a genre she calls existential comedy, the most humane and some of the most accurate considerations of existential choice. Existential comedy’s dramatisation of existential choice offers a constructive focal point for taking in her wide-ranging oeuvre. Yet as Heller shows, existential comedies usually stage the failure, rather than the success, of existential choice. Especially in its superlative form in the stories of Franz Kafka, existential comedy detours the reflective process that seems inseparable from existential choice. Kafka’s stories often portray the absurdity of reflection in a world too accidental for rational mastery or anything more than a perverted universality. In them, Heller locates how issues of control and dependency cut to the core of both everyday life and of our attempts – reasonable, mystical, doomed, or hopeful – to understand and remake it. Where the Kantian presentation of reflective judgment locates human freedom with the unity of reason, and the Kierkegaardian critique of reflection suggests a leap of faith into the relational condition of reflection, Heller wagers that human possibility can be developed in the regulative sphere between alternatives. She suggests that Kafka’s existential comedies stage an imaginative possibility beneath even the ‘equilibrium of hope and despair’, granting us the opportunity to reflect upon this regulative sphere and the promise it holds.
