Abstract
This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist (Joseph K.) is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related to the modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached.
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Notes
I acknowledge my gratitude to those who have commented on this article in its various stages, and who have encouraged me throughout its development. Prominent among these are the members of the Politics, Action, and Value Reading Circle in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University where some of the ideas for this article were first formed, and to audience members when earlier versions of this paper were presented at Nottingham University and BISA (December 2006). I am especially grateful for the detailed comments of Patrick Bishop, Tony Burns, Christopher May, Adam David Morton, and Andrew W. Neal. I also acknowledge the comments made by the anonymous referees of this piece whose observations have helped me to strengthen the argument in important respects. I remain culpable for the errors that linger.
The argument cited here builds upon Derrida's thought of ‘the centre’ as presented in Writing and Difference. In this way, the rupture of Modernity itself is associated with the displacement of centre; and Derrida's point is that this location of centre is unstable, but unavoidable. As Derrida writes, ‘And even today the notion of a structure lacking any centre represents the unthinkable itself’ (Derrida and Bass, 1978, 279).
For a discussion of the dangers of doing this see Posner (1988, 186).
As might be expected there is a huge literature relating to the interpretation of Kafka. From our present perspective, two strands of that literature are especially pertinent. The first strand deals with the problems in approaching Kafka's texts. For useful discussions please consult Adorno (1967, 246), Bennett (1991, 73), Constantine (2002, 19), Wood (2003, 43). The second strand concerns those authors who defend a ‘religious’ approach to Kafka. For illustrations of such authors please consult Winkler who takes the view that Kafka's work is akin to that of Kierkegaard (Winkler, 1973, 45–46). Dyson agrees that Kafka raises basic religious problems, and that he provokes a consciousness of man cut-off from his true life (Muir, 1973, 33–34; Winkler, 1973, 46; Dyson, 1987, 57–72). It is argued here that while the religious reading is dominant it does not exclude the possibility of a political reading.
This is a theme that is also explored in Lyotard and Thébaud (1985), Derrida (1992a) and Derrida et al. (1992). This is also touched upon (from a Lacanian perspective) in (Žižek (1997).
For example, J.P. Stern and Theodor W. Adorno have found The Trial to be an expression of a ‘negative ontology’ and ‘anxiety’ found in National socialism and our own times (Adorno, 1967, 259ff.; Stern, 1976, 22–42). Here Adorno (following Bemjamin) views Kafka's work as a response to unlimited power. Others, such as Jane Bennett have argued that Kafka's novels ‘interrogate the dream of responsible agency’ (Bennett, 1991, 73–95, especially p. 80). David Bruce Suchoff provides an informative discussion of the idea of ‘boundaries’ in Kafka, linking the novels to a ‘politics of identity’ (Suchoff, 1994, 55–56, 145). Interestingly, political approaches to Kafka's work have also been developed by those working within the former Soviet Union. For examples of Marxist approaches to Kafka consult (Hughes, 1981) especially the essays by Hájek, Suchkov, Knipovich, and Zatonsky. As has been noted, Kafka presents an ambiguous legacy for the Marxist mind: the question as to whether he acquiesces in, or transcends, his bourgeois confines is the kernel of this ambiguity (cf. Posner, 1988, 180). Thus we find that while Hájek argues that in Kafka's works loneliness is ‘the greatest evil against which man vainly struggles’ in the quest for self-determination through work and live (Hájek, 1981, 115–119) others, such as Knipovick, conclude that ‘the majority of the people in Kafka's novels and novellas are “simply slaves”, suffering, humiliated, taking their degradation as the norm’ and that, at best, Kafka's acquiescence in this serves as ‘another material witness for the crimes of capitalism against human culture’ (Knipovich, 1981, 205). Finally, Delueze and Guattari see in Kafka's work a ‘study of regimes, their differences, and transformations’ (Dana Polan in Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, xxv), and in particular they argue against ‘transcendent’ readings of Kafka which fail to recognize that ‘where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, 49).
Cf. Cohen (1980, 213), Dworkin (1985, 152) and Wood (2003, 44).
However, it should be noted that at least one line of commentary takes a harder line than the pluralistic view taken here. This is identified by Réda Bensmaïa's ‘Foreword’ to Deleuze's and Guattari's Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986). Here it is argued that Deleuze and Guattari are correct to follow Walter Benjamin in rejecting the mistaken interpretations offered by the theological and psychological approaches in favour of ‘the political, ethical, and ideological dimensions that run through his work’ (1986, ix).
For examples of ways in which K. strives after this elusive and impossible integration, please consult Heller (1973, 105), Gossvogel (1987, 102), Minkkinen (1994, 350), Suchoff (1994, 145) and Goebel (2002, 44–45).
This view is reflected, although in a different way, in the work of Slavoj (Žižek in his work on the fantasy that creates a ‘primordial form of narrative’ (Žižek, 1997, 7, 10).
In similar ways both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard also reflect this sense of loss and hope: Nietzsche clinging to his aristocratic Übermensch who will both break and create new tables of Laws (Nietzsche, 1969); ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’ (Nietzsche, 1996: Essay 2, Section 2), and Kierkegaard who seeks to rescue an age devoid of passion and suffering from levelling by a reinvigoration of the spiritual through relation with the alterity of God (Kierkegaard, 1978).
Charles Taylor can also be understood to be addressing these concerns (Taylor, 1989). These problems are charted and discussed in Poole (1991).
It is in this sense that we can view K.'s struggle as being a ‘case study’ in what Foucault has called the ‘affects’ of power on those who are subject to it. Here Foucault's point is that in order to understand power we must resist trying to identify and focus on those who we believe to ‘wield’ or ‘have’ power, and look instead at the only discernable manifestation of power (Bennett, 1991, 90; Foucault et al., 2003, 28).
For a wider discussion of this relationship, see Lefort (1988) and McClelland (1996).
Derrida uses this phrase as the title of his essay of 1992. What stands in need of comment concerning this use is that Derrida takes the parable of the Priest as his ‘text’ for his discussion. Of course, this is a permissible strategy, but what this sidelines is both the interpretation of the text offered in the dialogue between Joseph K. and the Priest, and the position of the parable within the action of the novel itself. Here we might contrast Derrida's approach with that strategy of Adorno who comments that ‘The fact that Leni's fingers are connected by a web, or that the executioners resemble tenors, is more important than the Excursus on the law’ (Adorno, 1967, 248).
However, Derrida is also aware that this authority in creating Law can be seen as an act of violence (p.14). What is important here is that justice precedes the violence which precedes Law.
Indeed, Nietzsche considers Law not only to be a simple manifestation of power (and that any sense of justice follows only from the establishment of Law — a point on which Hobbes would agree), but Nietzsche goes further suggesting that ‘legal conditions may be nothing more than exceptional states of emergency, partial restrictions which the will to life in its quest for power provisionally imposes on itself in order to serve its overall goal: the creation of larger units of power.’ (Nietzsche, 1996: Essay 2, Section 13).
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Smith, G. Reading Kafka's Trial Politically: Justice–Law–Power. Contemp Polit Theory 7, 8–30 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300330
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300330