Modern Dramas: Transcendence and Immanence in Power in Modernity

I n one of her many efforts to think about the modern, Hannah Arendt turned to a parable of Franz Kafka ’ s. It begins, “ He has two antagonists: the fi rst presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the fi rst supports him in his fi ght with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way, the second supports him in his fi ght with the fi rst, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. ” 1 She presents this as “ the only exact description ” of an essentially modern predicament: fi nding oneself in a world with “ no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change. ” 2 In Kafka ’ s parable the protagonist is literally caught between past and future. Such a world, as Arendt said elsewhere, requires “ thinking without a banister. ” 3 This thinking without a banister, without a sense of where one is going or where one has come from, is not reserved for political theorists or philosophers. It concerns all of us who have happened to live through or in the wake of countlessrevolutions and upheavals since at leastthe eighteenth century — from the social and political to the scienti fi c and technological. Like Arendt, Isaac Reed puzzles over the hazards and hopes that attend such dys-phoria. These aren ’ t mere abstractions but rather genuine crises that we experience in our often ordinary, sometimes extraordinary lives. It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that Power in Modernity , Reed ’ s vertiginously thoughtful project to reformulate the modern, begins with not one but two parables from Kafka. 4 The fi rst, “ Before