ABSTRACT
❧ The self-questioning question “What is literature?” is taken up again in this extended reading of Kafka’s short parable Before the Law, which appears as part of The Trial but was published as a separate text in Kafka’s lifetime. Derrida focuses on the institutional, ethical, and juridical implications of any such question: what is the law according to which a text can be classified as “literary” or “nonliterary,” and who is entitled (and by what legal authority) to make such a decision? Literature, that is, is seen as a historical (and relatively recent) institution, brought into being and governed by laws; but the texts which come under its aegis have the peculiar attribute of being able to stage and suspend all the presuppositions upon which any such institution rests—among them the operation of laws, the property of belonging to a category, the function of proper names. Crucial to the literary text are such features as its external boundaries, its uniqueness, its authorship, its title, and its acts of reference, yet equally crucial is the way in which these features are put into question as stable properties or concepts. Kafka’s text stages this simultaneous assertion and undermining of the institution of literature in a remarkably condensed and striking fashion, and Derrida is as interested in its unique qualities as a literary act as he is in the more general issues it raises. Indeed, it is this problematic relation between the singular and the general (the basis of Kafka’s story) which provides one of the main motifs of Derrida’s essay, and which could be reapplied to the essay itself as a unique intervention in the debate about literature and law.
