Kafka offers us an astonishing reflection about the relationship between man and machine in his short story ‘In the penal colony’. We argue here that, perhaps being the most hopeful text written by the author, this piece analyses in an extreme and original way the
fantastical that surrounds us in the midst of the machinistic technological universe. The historical
register in which the text inserts itself is transcended by a poetical creation that allows us to see an original and pioneering, but not technical, point of view – what now begins to be called posthumanist thought.