This paper examines the complex, paradoxical and tortuous relationship between human, nonhuman and inhuman in the fiction of Franz Kafka and the philosophy of Hannah Arendt in connection with the issues of the ethical importance of being human and the political processes that produces the ideological concept of “the human.” Whereas Arendt, as a philosopher, is especially concerned with the legal or quasi-legal norms that should entitle every subject, even a stateless refugee, to appear as a member in a political community, Kafka, as a literary writer, analyzes the social norms of “imagination” that determine whether a human being appears to fellow human beings as a member of the human community at all.