Abstract
This contribution investigates the intimate relation and the tension between legal and literary procedures of personification and subjectivation. In order to do so, the contribution turns to Kafka’s The Trial and examines the proximity of the juridical procedure depicted in the novel, intending to establish Josef K. as a (guilty) subject, to the narrative procedures of the novel itself that aims at bringing forth an accountable protagonist. The intimate relation of the legal procedures described in the novel and the narrative ones of the novel itself is rooted in a shared historical heritage that impacts both. I argue that the fundamental configuration of advocacy in the classical rhetorical procedure: speaking for someone, against someone, in front of an other, lies at the basis of both legal and literary procedures. Against this common rhetorical background I investigate developments in legal procedures and the formation of the modern novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Both developments occlude the rhetorical mechanisms of speaking-for and speaking against and turn the rhetorical procedures of personification into mechanisms of subjectivation. Kafka’s Proceß reflects these developments, yet does not affirm this transformation and ultimately does not result in a guilty subject and a ‘believable’ character. Rather, the novel embodies a gesture of resistance against certain modes of subjectivation that seem to be prevalent both in modern law and in the novel of formation.
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Notes
Such an entanglement can also be seen in the very title: ‘Der Proceß’. Malcolm Pasley and Stanley Corngold have convincingly related the process of Kafka’s Trial with the process of Kafka writing it (Corngold 2004, p. 42). What I would like to draw attention to here, is rather the relation of the narration to the procedure of producing a narrative—of becoming a novel and establishing a protagonist as a character, through speaking for and speaking against—a procedure that is not finished but rather finished off.
Cf. the way in which Lukács describes the novel generally: ‘The inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself […] The inner shape of the process and the most adequate means of shaping it – the biographical form’ (Lukács 1971, pp. 80–81).
This becomes obvious when the narrator describes, for instance, how Wilhelm dwells on his theatre enthusiasms without noticing how Marianne is suffering: ‘She had nothing that she could accomplish or resolve upon. When she looked into and searched herself, all was waste and void within her soul: her heart had no place of strength or refuge […] Wilhelm, on the other hand, soared serenely happy in higher regions […] His vocation for the theatre was now clear to him: the high goal, which he saw raised before him, seemed nearer whilst he was advancing to it with Mariana’s hand in his; and, in his comfortable prudence, he beheld in himself the embryo of a great actor,—the future founder of that national theatre, for which he heard so much and various sighing on every side’ (Goethe 1995, p. 29). The narrator’s irony in the last sentence may retroactively show signs of being somehow complicit with the Turmgesellschaft’s patronizing view on theatre as an institution that Wilhelm needs to go through, without, however, taking his enthusiasm seriously. It is articulated from the same perspective of knowing better, speaking for Wilhelm while guiding him at the same time.
With regard to the bio-graphical and bio-political nature of the Turmgesellschaft, see Vogl (2008, p. 23), who highlights the way in which the tower is solidary with the structure of the novel and dictates the poetical form.
As Friedrich Balke, Joseph Vogl and Benno Wagner write, Kafka converts ‘the classical tension between individual biography and institutional administration of life into a dynamical field of indistinguishability’ (Balke et al. 2008, p. 10).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write with regard to Kafka: ‘What is uttered does not refer to a subject who makes the utterance and would be its cause. It does not refer to a subject of the statement which would be its effect. No doubt at one time Kafka thought in these traditional categories of two subjects: author and hero, narrator and character, dreamer and dream. But he soon renounced the principle of the narrator, just as he rejected—despite his admiration for Goethe—a literature of the author or the master’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 17). With Campe (2004) I would describe this relation as more complex: there remains something like an apostrophe of a subject and gestures of narrator and character, just as Kafka’s novel of institution can be understood as a reversal of Goethe’s novel of formation.
With Blanchot the narrating instance of The Trial could be called a neutrum who is introducing through the third person a distance to K., without, on the other hand, establishing a narrator as a distinct figure in his own right (Blanchot 1993).
On the Proxies in Kafka, see (Densky 2011).
‘The form of the person is this care of the anonymous function and this desire of the person to articulate itself through this formal function; the person is this relation of domination and power, this interplay of recognition and paternalism, childishness (as Kafka once says) and search for advocates’ (Campe 2014), my translation.
K. is ‘Prokurist’ of the bank; on the figure of the procurist see Hamilton (2014).
On the implications of that change see also (Vismann 2012). ‘As the criminal process in the 19th century shifted to the maxim of oral trials, the emphasis was no longer on the lawyer as orator but rather on the interrogated subject. Since this time, the criminal process aims at taking the wrongdoer to task (den Täter zur Rede zu stellen), to hold him accountable. It is him who has to be heard, in order for him to be judged’ (Vismann 2012, p. 229), my translation.
See also the procedural change of Habeas Corpus (Haverkamp and Vismann 1997).
Agamben on ‘Being in force without significance’: ‘For life under a law that is in force without signifying resembles life in the state of exception […] And it is exactly this kind of life that Kafka describes, in which the law is all the more pervasive for its total lack of content […] The existence and the very body of Joseph K. ultimately coincide with the Trial; they become the Trial. (Agamben 1998, pp. 52–53).
As Christoph Menke has pointed out in a reading of Oedipus, it is the formal procedure that ultimately brings about subjectivation (Menke 2011, p. 40 ff).
‘Of persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor, and he that owneth his words and actions is the AUTHOR: In which case the Actor acteth by Authority. […] So that by Authority, is alwayes understood a Right of doing any act, and done by Authority, done by Commission, or Licence from him whose right it is’ (Hobbes 1996, p. 112).
For David A. Frank, among others, it is precisely this juridical tradition that allows for dispute, as he elaborates with regard to the New Rhetoric Project: ‘[I]n the tradition of the Talmud […] it is accepted that opposed positions can be equally reasonable; one of them does not have to be right […] Jewish metaphysics could host multiple and contracting truths […] Time, in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish thought, was in process’ (Frank 2003, pp. 178–179).
The German original reads: ‘Im Humor läßt man dem Objekt als solchem Gerechtigkeit widerfahren. Es ist der paradoxe Fall einer Rechtsprechung die das Recht ohne Beachtung des Wesens der Person überhaupt, gegen Personloses, wortlos vollzieht. Daher das ‘Ungeheure’ jeden Humors. Man kann auf zweierlei Weise rechtsprechen: entweder unter Wahrung der Integrität der Person oder unter ausdrücklicher Ignorierung der Person. Beides verletzt nicht ihre Integrität was rechtswidrig wäre. Friedländers Frau beklagt sich bei ihm über das Schreien ihres Säuglings. Seine Antwort: Schmeiß es doch weg, ist ein klassisches Beispiel des Humors. Es geschieht dem Kinde unter Ignorierung der Person in ihm Gerechtigkeit, es darf schreien.’ (Benjamin 2009, p. 130).
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Trüstedt, K. Execution Without Verdict: Kafka’s (Non-)Person. Law Critique 26, 135–154 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-015-9160-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-015-9160-1