Abstract

I argue that understanding cognition as enactive — that is, as constituted of physical interaction between embodied minds and the environment — can illuminate the opening of Kafka's novel Der Proceß, revealing it as cognitively realistic in this respect. I show how enactivism is relevant to this passage in several ways: in terms of enactive vision and imagination, enactive language, and enactive emotion. I also suggest that these cognitively realistic features might result in ambivalent reactions on the reader's part.