On the aesthetics of (dis)illusion
On the aesthetics of (dis)illusion

Summary/Abstract: The following article translates Kafka’s aesthetics of (dis)illusion into an artistic vision and devised performance of the post-war state of skepticism, moral disillusionment (to free or be freed from illusion), decline, illusory freedom and the truth that the modern world can no longer be represented by Kafka’s ‘sacrificed’ truth of an illusory world peace; it can instead be represented by his artistic delusion of a fetishized reality indifferent to the ideological background. Since the integrity of the self is illusory, Kafka’s psychoanalytical novel of an unfair trial in a totalitarian regime becomes a distressingly realistic alternative world ruled by oppression and bitterness. This approach decodes a political reading of his fictional efforts to devise the artistic world of The Trial in an attempt to recreate the universal conflict between man’s maze of elaborated, fraudulent illusions and the inevitable lure of human disillusions that finally leads to a gradual lapse into a state of illusion-clad confusion, defamiliarization, disappointment, regression and dissolution. To soothe the pain of disillusionment, life is thus transformed into an on-going, exhausting trial where authority cannot be evaded.

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