Knowing life before the law : Kafka, Kelsen, Derrida

Kafka interpretation is an industry without foreseeable limits: It has a trajectory of its own-proliferating, propagating in relation to originary texts, each of which anchor further dissemination of critical discourse. Different explanations for this prodigious continuation might be offered, but a common theme in the reception of Kafka has always been the capacity of his texts to instigate, in a positive, intriguing way, doubts and questions in the minds of readers about the proper sense of the texts, or the best way to constitute viable interpretations. Kafka can then be understood as at least implicitly thematizing questions of knowledge-since some part of his art was to tease out readers' desires to know, and produce affects of puzzlement and uncertainty. However, Kafka's literary texts do not suggest a doctrine or a program of delimiting knowledge from ignorance based on such affects. His experiments of writing destabilize different aspects of diegesis, narrative, character, and scene, and many appear to be fragmentary exercises testing readers' expectations for coherency. The very concept of an orderly disclosure of rules or laws of knowledge must be held in sharp contrast to the renowned scenes of Kafkaesque distortion that have made his form of literary innovation canonical in modern literature. But Kafka was very concerned with a certain epistemological perspective. This essay pursues Kafka's textual treatment of the more specific question of knowing law, since it can be shown that this is at the heart of the knot of writing and life-experience that bound his texts together. Kafka both represented the desire to understand what law is, but wanted to show that knowing law would not of itself provide justice, nor satisfy the perplexities of living together with others, before the law. Such desire for explication, for a rigorous systematization of law, for Kafka, will fail, just as a manic desire can only repeat without end or closure. This thesis begins with a contextualization of Kafka's workplace writings, since his position as a legal official can be weighed now as more significant than some critics had supposed. This then leads to a consideration of Kafka's discursive position at a time of social transformation, and how we can approach his literary writings as concordant with his work demands. Together, these lead to providing an explanatory context for his most developed treatment of law in The Trial, and the concentrated "legend" of "Before the Law." In concluding with an analysis of how these renowned texts of Kafka were in cultural discussion with very powerful and particular legal movements of his day, the essay aims to reveal a Kafka whose literary flights were also inextricably bound to a politics of knowledge.