ABSTRACT
Behind Michel Foucault’s vision of modernity lie the shadowy images of two castles. The first is de Sade’s castle in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, a space in which the complete freedom of unrestrained, sadistic, male desire is acted out on the bodies of women and children with impunity (1990). The second is Kafka’s Castle, although it could also be the labyrinthine space of the law courts in The Trial. In either case, it is a space of the absolute irreproachable power of bureaucracy and the law. Both are obligatory points of passage in which freedom and control extend beyond their own limits and mingle with one another. Both spaces are examples of heterotopia.
