From Odysseus to Rotpeter: Adorno and Kafka, mimicry and happiness

This essay considers Adorno and Horkheimer's ideas of happiness from Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno's writing on Kafka to consider Kafka's own short story A Report to an Academy. I formulate a notion of mimicry that breaks away from Nietzschean or even Benjaminian ideas - for Kafka, mimicry is an uncanny mirror that can be critical, that gives back more than one bargained for.