Kafka's empty law : laughter and freedom in The Trial

Hannah Arendt's re-evaluation of Kafka persistently defines his works in terms of what it does not stand for-Kafka is not amenable to religion or psychoanalysis, he is neither a realist nor a surrealist, and so on. In the midst of this "negative exegetics" the following assertive statement suddenly appears: "Kafka's laughter is an immediate expression of the kind of human freedom and serenity that understands man to be more than just his failures."' The power of this claim resides in the connection between freedom and laughter. This may, at first blush, appear counter-intuitive. As even a cursory look at Kafka's work will reveal, the figure of imprisonment is paramount-from the Red Peter in "A Report to an Academy" and the "Hunger Artist" who are both confined to a literal cage, to a series of implied cages, such as Gregor Samsa's room in The Metamorphosis. However, as Kiarina Kordela and I have argued elsewhere, this need not be taken as a sign of despair and resignation but rather as a critique of the liberal democratic-and capitalist-sense of freedom that developed in Europe since the seventeenth century.' Further, as I have also shown, this critique of freedom in Kafka is presented through laughter. Comic elements become the technical means for the presentation of a revamped notion of freedom. Instead of an idealized freedom that can never be reached thereby leading to a sense of human failure, Kafka proposes a sense of mediated freedom that consists, above all, in freeing oneself from that idealized notion of freedom.3 Hannah Arendt points precisely to the same nexus between laughter and freedom in Kafka's work.