ABSTRACT
The environing world of K in Franz Kafka’s The Trial is stark, confused and pained. Self-confident as he rises from his sleep to observe the arresting officers at the doorway of his bedroom, K responds as an author of his own acts. Within seconds, though, his environing world begins to become distanced from the utterances of claimants to legal knowledge. K’s environing world had hitherto been signified through his everyday expressions as a tenant, a lover, a nephew, a banker and a citizen. He does not understand who these men are nor why they stand at his doorway. He does not understand their gestures, their utterances, their assumptions or their questions. K is a law-abiding citizen in a liberal state. He possesses a respectable job in an esteemed and powerful profession. He is a good tenant in a boarding house. He attaches meanings to the police officers’ actions from the viewpoint of such a citizen, employee and tenant. One such meaning, for example, is drawn from the privacy which K takes for granted as a citizen in a liberal state. As K is shuffled through one procedure after another, from one office to another, he strives to understand what external objects are constraining him. Self-described expert knowers of legal discourse posit those external objects. The knowers fail to respond to K’s utterances in a manner which K can understand. His meant objects fail to link with the objects which the expert knowers take for granted. The harm to the invasion of his privacy is then overtaken by a deeper pain – the pain which he experiences when his utterances remain unrecognized – and his environing world collapses. As K repeatedly fails to understand and to be understood, his experiencing body slowly deteriorates until only the remnant of a biological body remains. But that remnant reminds all expert knowers that something alien to legal discourse remains concealed within the discourse. The body, the last material evidence of an alien language, must finally be expunged. K’s execution constitutes the final remainder of the assimilationist project of the modern legal discourse.
