Franz Kafka's The Trial (Part 2)

Рет қаралды 1,794

2 жыл бұрын

This second part of an analysis of Franz Kafka's The Trial examines the privatization of the law and its ramifications--the way that it produces shame among people in contemporary society.

Пікірлер: 13

@marialauramunoz5145 Жыл бұрын

Genial. Gracias. Saludos desde Argentina.

@Laocoon283 Жыл бұрын

This was great pls do more classic literature. "We experience shame when the private appears as public" Reminds me of the quote "hell is when other people see you for what you really are"

@IgnatiusEPJ 2 жыл бұрын

3 points: 1) It seems there is an inversion of Freud/Lacan, where prohibition creates desire. For Kafka desire (or guilt itself) creates the prohibition. Perhaps this is the necessary Hegelian Aufhebung to classic psychoanalytic dogma. The question is can we find this dialectic in St. Paul? 2) Kafka’s narratives read like dreams, where there is always something missing externally that reveals the subject’s lack. 3) The last point you make about shame makes me wonder about the role of the gaze here. The gaze and shame are intimately and intricately linked, which rejoins point 1. It is the court and the priest as gaze that reveals K.’s lack and ultimately his desire to be a non-lacking subject in the gaze of the court, which is what drives his acceptance of death (death drive connections here notwithstanding). So let’s say, perhaps, that the desire/guilt that the law meets is precisely what is caused by the gaze as objet a.

@toddmcgowan8233 2 жыл бұрын

Eric, That's excellent on shame and the gaze. I think you're exactly right. I'm less sure about desire creating the prohibition in Kafka, since in The Trial the very first line of the novel is about the police arriving and arresting K. All of his desire emerges in response to this, it seems to me.

@IgnatiusEPJ 2 жыл бұрын

@@toddmcgowan8233 Desire was probably the wrong word. I think what I was looking for was a prior enjoyment that is the precondition of guilt.

@macguffin8540 2 жыл бұрын

@@toddmcgowan8233 doesn’t the shame on encountering the gaze occur because in that moment we have seen how our desire resulting from constitutive lack has resulted in a distortion in how we engage with the world? That this unconscious ‘choice’ is in the last instant ungrounded, so we suddenly feel overexposed without recourse to a guaranteeing Other, and are left alone sticking out into the world in an obscene way, a “grimace of the real”? K fails to encounter the gaze in this way because he doesn’t follow the parable. He covers up the gaze with fascination like the covergirl image covers it up with fascination for Boothby. Yet perhaps K gets an inkling of this with his shame that will live on beyond him, if by that we take it to mean beyond his ego? That his fascination with the law is his avoidance of confronting the distortion of his gaze and the non-existance of a grounding Big Other? What are your thoughts on this reading?

@toddmcgowan8233 2 жыл бұрын

@@macguffin8540 I find that very convincing. There is a much more attitude toward the law than K.'s, which you hint at here. That would be my position as well--seeing the law as the marker of the failure in the Other, the cut in the social substance.

@Lazarus242 2 жыл бұрын

I can't help but feel like the legal apparatus is designed as a vision of the superego, if you could interact with it in human form this is how it would look. As if K is trying to find logic and knowledge to appease the superego's demands, but the demands cannot be satisfied. I'm not saying that's what Kafka intended, but that's how it made me feel.

@nlothervoicessc4286 2 жыл бұрын

Really like your interpretation of “before the law” here: the law encoding itself inside the gestures of the governed themselves. I’ve been trying to balance nietzsche and Kafka for sometime now; compare this interpretation to genealogy of morals essay 2, or even Foucault’s discussion of bio power in history of sexuality part 1.

@9999ping 2 жыл бұрын

I think the Kafka joke would be better if rather than a lower voltage the lawyer said they’d use more comfortable are rest, or rather with a guillotine and how they just sharpen the blade again or they’d place a pillow to comfort the neck(third being my favorite).

@jordandubin 2 жыл бұрын

I like the lower voltage, because even as in apparent concession to comfort, his execution will actually be longer and more painful. But your offerings are very funny in their absurdity for sure!

@jeanlamontfilms5586 2 жыл бұрын

Has anyone ever written about mise en scene as a psychoanalytic concept; to the extent that it could help describe the subject’s role in setting/reproducing the scene of fantasy?

@toddmcgowan8233 2 жыл бұрын

No, but it would be a great thing to work out. It's really an excellent line of thought. It hasn't been done because film studies is so thoroughly hostile to psychoanalysis, except at the University of Vermont, ha