Verwandlung, или горнилото на човека: Мамардашвили от Маркс до Кафка и от Кафка до Лем
Miglena Nikolchina – Verwandlung, or The Human Crucible: Mamardashvili from Marx to Kafka and from Kafka to Lem

Summary/Abstract: The text explores the junction of Marx and Kafka on the one hand, and Kafka and Lem on the other, in Mamardashvili's crucial conceptualization of Verwandlung. This is an important term for Marx, but it is also the title of what is perhaps Kafka's most commented-on work. In his novella “The Mask”, Lem evokes Kafka’s Verwandlung; however, while Kafka's protagonist famously wakes up metamorphosed into a monstrous vermin (Mamardashvili calls it a “zombie”), in Lem’s story the transformation is into a robot. In the 1980s, Mamardashvili turned to Kafka in order to formulate his concern with the anthropological catastrophe which he saw coming and which today can be seen as the disappearance of the human between the zombie and the robot.

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