Kafka with Lacan: The Process Exists, Even Though There Is No Law

Two unknown persons, at night, take the hand of Jozef Ka, take him to a quarry and kill him like a dog. The novel, if we take only the ending, shows a terrifying universe that today, in late neoliberal capitalism, has been completely exposed: The process exists, even though there is no law!

A scene that is often overlooked, or has never been noticed, is that during the taking to the place where the crime will be committed against a person who could not invoke the Law, not a single word was spoken by the person himself! Jozef K. never once on the way to the place where he will be executed asked a question or objected to anything at all, he acted like someone who accepts his fate without taking on anything more. Basically, what is clear is that he is being killed by an administration that does not ask him a single question on what basis, because we suddenly feel that every question is completely superfluous. In this sense, the absence of questions is a signal that the order that is built of lies and in which we are thrown to live, so that shame will outlive us (which, by the way, are words Sister Kafke addressed to the family during a lunch).

Sometimes we wonder: reading this novel not as dystopian - it is understood: from the very dark architecture to the fact that Jozef Ka no longer manages his life from the first sentence onwards, all the way to the signifiers of the legal system, i.e. the lawyers who know that there is a process going on, but also all they "know" is that they cannot know anything more about it, ties this novel to what can be recognized as dystopian before that genre was established, etc. - but as detective, which could be concluded as a conclusion, except that the absence of the Law made it possible to kill an innocent person? Or, perhaps the withdrawal of the Law is the opening of a space to act instead of it through lawlessness, but with the help of the work of constant relocations, referrals to other impassable doors, the floor above or a completely different address, insofar as before Ka is in the shop someone who is condemned to search, although in advance no road leads anywhere, it soon turns out not to be closed, but open like some wrong direction. However, could Ka even be on the so-called the right path if the goal itself is a path that he does not have, is simply denied to him?

So that the title doesn't have the function of sounding empty, let's try from now on to introduce language into the text Jacques Lacan, which, roughly speaking, in a definition that seeks to summarize or 'economically' approach the subject it takes for analysis, could also read as follows: interpretation occurs between act and conclusion, as a retroactive attempt to arrive at the truth, but there always remains some surplus or deficit that opens up the possibility for new interpretations. Then his obligatory humorous addition, along the lines of: "Let's say that what I'm offering you today is a kind of mixed grill."

And that is why we choose to point out here, before proceeding any further, that Kafka is the inventor of the non-existent Other (A), which is assumed behind the “wall of language”, as that in the symbolic structure and interweaving that ceases to be a necessary stabilizer, no less a law that closes. For what Kafka’s genius reverses, and thereby makes us remain in amazement, is the following: The law is not finished!

All the more so, we wonder what Lacan's Seminar dedicated to reading Kafka's literature would look like? Would the novel The Castle be interpreted as - a subject who is presumed to know? Furthermore, would the letter K. be a designation or formula for - a desire that is not confirmed in a symbolic order, in which every villager is permanently deterministically pre-determined by his role? Although, to be clear, the writer never showed interest in the social aspect in his literature, there is no such thing in his work in the literal sense of the word.

What would happen to the Process and the Non-Existence of the Law in which the - constant production of signifiers could immediately be interpreted not as what conceals its non-existence, but explicitly reveals it? The administration covers the entire space, but in doing so does not occupy any place, but because everyone is already signified by its apparatus, which it does not reach, but is always already there, "on the spot". Having said that, do we not recognize that in endless bureaucracy we immediately discover pleasure (jouissance), since this mechanism is closed, it functions by prolonging the process, which allows it to unfold on its own, plus the scene in which K., with disgust, after finding erotic magazines in the judge's drawer instead of law books, lifts them with two fingers, high and far from his body, and with that gesture that destroys the idea of ​​a pure, transcendental Law, introduces what is recognized as - the law as the greatest imaginable transgression.

However, here we should leave that fictitious Seminar, to say that perhaps Kafka was dangerously close to Lacan, so that he is implicitly present in many places. In any case, the fact that Lacan did not engage with him in his readings could be recognized as a symptom of his theory.

Scheme L - examples

In Kafka, there are no characters in the sense that they have character or psychology. The female characters move in a phallocentric circle: Fräulein Bürstner, who is Josef K.'s neighbor, and everything indicates that she is engaged in prostitution; Leni is the girl who ends up with him in a room full of outdated documents and who we remember by the excess foreskin between the fingers of one hand; the court usher's wife, with whom K. quickly enters into something more than a casual flirtation, but then follows a very comical scene in which we see her thrown over the shoulder of one of the young men who are moving through the corridors where the laundry/courtroom is located, as a result of which she, waving her arms, explains that nothing can be done there, it is simply how things work. The same is true of the village usher from the novel The Castle.

We move on to, or take as an example, the conversation between Jozef K. and the Priest, which is not without reason considered to be perhaps the key to the novel, so we will use it to open the following four positions.

As a subject (S), Ka naturally tries to find himself in the situation that befell him one morning after three unknown officials entered his apartment and served him with a court order. The priest, being the one who represents a higher instance of the Law, is at the same time its interpreter (the Parable of the Door), but also a warning person who recognizes that Ka's behavior is nevertheless frivolous, insufficiently cautious when it comes to the process that has been initiated against him; the persistence or stubbornness that characterizes Ka, as someone who constantly makes it known that he is innocent, enter into what could be recognized as ego (a). During the conversation, we somehow see that the priest is gradually becoming what Ka recognizes his reflection in, especially since the priest warns him that he trusts people, especially women, too much. However, although Ka resents it in himself (the emergence of rivalry in the relationship of positions in the symbolic structure), he remains recognizably passive.

Where is the most obvious example of Ka confronting the big Other? It is during the first and only court hearing, given the fact that the representatives of the Law cannot exactly cover up his non-existence. It would be particularly interesting, perhaps we will do it another time, to elaborate on how the passion of the masses in the courtroom, like a kind of passive arbiter, becomes more than unstable in the decision that it constantly changes: from loudly applauding and supporting Ka and even cheering him on in his bold confrontation with the exposure of all the travesties of the Law, while quickly changing positions, in which they almost judge him. Therefore, we could recall here why Kierkegaard explicitly claimed, in the booklet Breviary, yes - “The crowd is a lie.”