Literature & Theology, Vol. 29. No. 4, December 2015, pp.

400–414
doi:10.1093/litthe/frv044

VIOLENCE AND
VULNERABILITY: KAFKA AND
LEVINAS ON HUMAN

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SUFFERING
Jennifer L. Geddes

Abstract
In this article I read Franz Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’ together with
Emmanuel Levinas’ article ‘Useless Suffering’ to explore two diametrically
opposed responses to vulnerability in a particular situation: when it has found
expression in the form of extreme suffering. Drawing on the Latin roots of
‘vulnerability’, as registering one’s ‘woundability’, I look here at responses to
the suffering of one whose vulnerability has been translated from a capacity
to be wounded to the suffering that wounding inflicts. Reading these texts
together enables us to see things that might otherwise be invisible.
Specifically, Kafka’s penal colony officer presents a description of the process
of torture that provides a graphic and illustrative counter narrative to the
dense phenomenology of suffering with which Levinas opens his article, and
Levinas’ identification and critique of theodicy reveals and unravels the
officer’s fantasy of meaningful suffering.

I. INTRODUCTION

Recently, scholars have focused on the recognition of human vulnerability as

a possible basis for solidarity and a broad commitment to human rights, as well
as a necessary element of our understanding of human embodiment.1 What
has received less attention is the fact that the recognition of human vulner-
ability also suggests opportunities for oppression and violence. In recognising
the other’s vulnerability, I may connect it to my own vulnerability, acknow-
ledge our shared precariousness in the world, and draw near in solidarity. Our
shared sense of vulnerability may extend beyond the interpersonal to the social
level, building a sense of community, nation, and/or common humanity.
However, I may instead see the other’s vulnerability as contrasting with my
own sense of security and stability, highlighting the distance between us, and


University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies, PO Box 400126, Charlottesville,
VA 22904-4126. Email: jlg2u@virginia.edu
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 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY 401
reinforcing my power and superiority over him. In fact, I may see in the
other’s vulnerability an opportunity to coerce him, inflict suffering on him,
or kill him. Thus our recognition of vulnerability may lead to compassion or
to cruelty, to solidarity or to oppression.
In this article I read Franz Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’ together with
Emmanuel Levinas’ article ‘Useless Suffering’ to explore these two diametric-
ally opposed responses to vulnerability in a particular situation: when it has

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found expression in the form of extreme suffering. Drawing on the Latin roots
of ‘vulnerability’, on the idea of vulnerability as registering one’s ‘wound-
ability’, I look here at responses to the suffering of one whose vulnerability has
been translated from a capacity to be wounded to the suffering that wounding
inflicts. Reading these texts together raises questions about each that seem to
go unanswered, and even unasked, when they are read separately, and they
enable us to see things that might otherwise be invisible. Specifically, Kafka’s
penal colony officer presents a description of the process of torture that pro-
vides a graphic and illustrative counter narrative to the dense phenomenology
of suffering with which Levinas opens his article. In doing so Kafka’s story
offers an articulation of the phenomenology of suffering that helps us return to
Levinas’ text and understand more, and more deeply, what he is trying to
communicate. Moving in the other direction, Levinas’ identification and cri-
tique of theodicy in its multiple guises reveals and unravels the fantasy of
meaningful suffering woven by the officer, and points to the explorer’s, and
even the reader’s, complicity in that fantasy. Reading the officer’s narrative
with Levinas’ condemnation of theodicy fresh in our ears helps us to resist the
temptation to believe in the usefulness of suffering for either the community
or the tortured man himself, and allows us to see the critique of meaningful
suffering that the story itself may constitute.
Thus, reading Levinas and Kafka together helps us to read each better.
Implicit in this argument is a methodological point about reading theological
and philosophical works together with literature. These genres are sometimes
seen as being in opposition, and at other times as instrumentalising each other
(though more often the charge is that philosophy and theology instrumentalise
literature as either illustrative example or vehicle of dogma, rather than the
other way around). Here reading literature with philosophy and theology
happens as a complementary dialogue that illuminates and deepens our under-
standing of each. Each draws our attention to different things, and does so in
different ways, and thus offers a kind of training in attention, in seeing anew in
order to see more and differently. As we will see, this very practice of attention
is crucial in developing our capacity to respond to suffering with compassion
rather than cruelty.
I will begin by focusing on the phenomenology of suffering with which
Levinas begins his article, and then turn to the explanation of the execution
402 JENNIFER L. GEDDES
apparatus that the officer gives to the explorer, arguing that the latter illumin-
ates the former. In the second section, I turn to Levinas’ identification and
condemnation of theodicy and then read Kafka’s story with this enhanced
awareness of the ways in which we, either individually or societally, seek to
justify the pain of others. Then I look at the explorer’s response and Levinas’
idea of the interhuman order as counter models for how to respond to the
suffering of others. I conclude with some comments about how these works

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might help us think about how to move towards compassion rather than
cruelty in our recognition of vulnerability that has become suffering.

II. COUNTER PHENOMENOLOGIES OF SUFFERING

Levinas begins his article ‘Useless Suffering’ with a dense phenomenology of

extreme suffering; the writing is opaque and difficult, as if in the very process
of writing it Levinas is himself struggling with the relationship between lan-
guage and suffering. Part of what he seeks to show us is the ways that extreme
physical suffering is experienced as the very inability to process the sensorial
content being thrust upon one. He writes that suffering is ‘of course, a datum
in consciousness’, but the taken-for-grantedness implied by the term ‘of
course’ is undercut in the very next sentence, which tells us that ‘in this
very ‘‘content’’ it is an in-spite-of-consciousness, the unassumable’. The ‘con-
tent’ of suffering is unassumable not because the sensations of suffering are too
intense or exceed our capacities to process them; suffering is not merely being
overwhelmed by intense sensory data, as one might experience colour that is
excessively vibrant, or noise that is excessively loud, to such an extent that one
is unable to process that data. There is, instead, something qualitatively dif-
ferent about the ‘content’ of suffering. Rather than the word ‘excessive’
serving as an adjective to describe the intensity of the sensation of suffering,
the word ‘excess’ becomes almost a synonym for suffering itself, for its very
structure. Suffering is, Levinas writes, ‘an excess, an unwelcome superfluity,
that is inscribed in a sensorial content, penetrating, as suffering, the dimensions
of meaning that seem to open themselves to it, or become grafted onto it’.2
Suffering, then, for Levinas, is not only about the inability to process the
sensations that are being thrust upon and within one; it is also an imposed state
of passivity and vulnerability, of the experience of the incapacity to process
what one is undergoing. Again, this passivity is qualitatively different from
what we usually think of as passivity. It is not mere receptivity; he explains that
‘the passivity of suffering is more profoundly passive than the receptivity of
our senses, which is already active reception, immediately becoming percep-
tion. In suffering, sensibility is a vulnerability, more passive than receptivity’.3
Receptivity suggests an agency still intact enough to be able to receive sen-
sations. Vulnerability in suffering, by contrast, suggests a passivity unable to
 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY 403
receive what is being thrust on it. Because suffering is experienced as the
overwhelming of one’s agency by sensations that one cannot process, suffering
is also experienced as the destruction of language and the impossibility of
meaning. Levinas describes suffering as ‘the way in which the refusal, opposing
the assemblage of data into a meaningful whole, rejects it; at once what dis-
turbs order and this disturbance itself’.4 The individual in extreme pain cannot
speak or interpret; she can utter only a cry or moan of pain.

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The phenomenology of suffering Levinas offers is difficult to understand in
part because of the density and abstraction of his style of prose and in part
because it is difficult to understand the complexities of a situation characterised
by the very impossibility of understanding. However, if we turn to Kafka’s ‘In
the Penal Colony’ and the officer’s account of the execution apparatus, we
find a counter phenomenology that, by its diametrical opposition, and by the
graphic embodiment of the process of inflicting and enduring suffering, helps
us to understand the aspects of suffering that Levinas seeks to express.
Kafka’s story opens with an officer explaining the workings of an execution
machine to an explorer who is visiting the penal colony and has been invited
to watch the execution that is about to begin. Because of the complexity of
the process, the officer wants the explorer to understand what will happen
before he sets the machine in motion. The way it works, the officer tells the
explorer, is that the condemned man is placed within the machine and needles
inscribe the law he has broken into his skin with added embellishments and
flourishes to the script. In fact the script is so embellished that the explorer
cannot read it when the officer shows it to him on a piece of paper. However,
while the explorer cannot decipher it, the condemned man, according to the
officer, can—he does so through his wounds. The officer explains to the
explorer:

The first six hours the condemned man stays alive almost as before, he suffers only
pain. After two hours the felt gag is taken away, for he has no longer strength to
scream . . . . But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment
comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.
A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more
happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription.5

The process of execution the officer describes involves an extreme use of

human vulnerability: the bodily vulnerability of the condemned man is
used quite literally as the opportunity and space for torture, as the man ex-
periences twelve hours of needles piercing and writing into his skin and flesh.
In the officer’s description, the pain the machine inflicts is a mere side aspect
of the ‘hard task’ taking place. The officer gives indications of the excruciating
nature of the pain the victim experiences through details such as the fact that
404 JENNIFER L. GEDDES
the man screams for two hours and then has no strength left to scream. But for
the officer, the pain itself is a mere side effect of, precursor to, and even
decoration of the crucial point of the process: the condemned man’s act of
deciphering, through his wounds, the law that is being inscribed into his skin
and coming to an enlightened understanding of it before his death. The officer
finds little difference between the state of the condemned man before and
after six hours of torture, as if the experience of torture were merely prepara-

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tory. The presence of the word ‘only’ in the comment ‘he suffers only pain’ is
telling. Whereas Heinz Politzer argues that this line underscores that pain is
unimportant to Kafka—‘Kafka is true to his masochistic view of life when he
minimizes the importance of physical suffering’6—I read the line as under-
scoring the reverse, because of the contrast between the officer’s perspective
and the reader’s. There is for the reader a strong disjunction between the
content of what the officer is saying, that is, the detailed description of the
infliction of pain, on the one hand, and his attitude towards it, his complete
indifference to it as suffering, and his fascination with it as ‘enlightenment’, on
the other. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry points out that ‘the most crucial
fact about torture is that it is happening’7 (or in this case about to happen),
whereas for the officer the most crucial fact about the process he describes is
that it is the means to the supposed enlightenment of the victim.
For the officer, the pain is merely part of the performance of punishment
and justice. He laments the fact that he is no longer permitted to use an acid
that increases the pain: ‘nowadays the machine can no longer wring from
anyone a sigh louder than the felt gag can stifle; but in those days the writing
needles let drop an acid fluid, which we’re no longer permitted to use’.8 In
other words, the prisoner’s performance is not as spectacular as it once was
because his expressions of pain are no longer loud enough for those present to
hear. In former days, ‘it was impossible to grant all the requests to be allowed
to watch it from nearby’.9 Such was the spectacle of the machine and its
torture. In all of this, the condemned man’s pain was of little importance
and garnered no attention as suffering, even as the process through which
the pain was inflicted served as a spectacle for the community to watch and
enjoy, as recounted by the officer in his memories of the good old days, when
the procedure garnered more support and was widely attended.
Several contrasts between Levinas’ phenomenology and the officer’s ac-
count bear comment. First, whereas for Levinas, extreme physical pain is
characterised by the inability to process the sensations causing the pain; for
the officer, pain is part of the preparatory process for the enlightenment that
will soon begin to take place. Whereas Levinas highlights the eradication of
agency in the extreme vulnerability and passivity of suffering, the officer
highlights the enhancement of agency in the condemned man in his ability
to decipher a script with his wounds that he could not understand before and
 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY 405
that others cannot decipher even with their eyes. In fact, the officer tells the
explorer, the condemned man achieves such a heightened understanding of
the law that one witnessing his experience is almost tempted to get in the
machine oneself to achieve it.
For Levinas, suffering is the furthest thing from enlightenment; it is ‘a pure
undergoing’.10 For in suffering, the individual’s freedom is not merely limited,
but the very capacity for freedom is destroyed. Levinas writes that the suf-

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ferer’s humanity is ‘overwhelmed by the evil that rends it, otherwise than by
non-freedom: violently and cruelly, more irremissibly than the negation that
dominates or paralyzes the act in non-freedom’.11 Thus, Levinas’ cryptic de-
scription of suffering as ‘inscribed in a sensorial content, penetrating, as suf-
fering, the dimensions of meaning that seem to open themselves to it, or
become grafted onto it’, might be rewritten by the officer in a description
of the machine as: ‘the law inscribed in the skin, penetrating, as enlighten-
ment, the dimensions of meaning that are grafted into the body of the con-
demned man’. While, according to the officer, the machine’s inscription finds
its obverse in the reading work of the prisoner, resulting in his enlightenment,
according to Levinas, the inscription of excess into the senses is experienced by
the sufferer as the reversal of meaning. Levinas describes a ‘backward con-
sciousness . . . revulsion’.12 Levinas’ dense phenomenology of suffering finds a
visceral mirror contrast in the officer’s description of the experience of the
condemned man in the machine.
By reading Levinas’s phenomenology alongside the officer’s account of the
machine, we are able to understand more deeply just what Levinas is trying
to communicate about the suffering of extreme pain as involving an inability
to process the sensations attacking one and the extreme passivity that reaches
the point of seeming to obliterate agency. In this instance, the literary text
enables us to understand something that the philosophical text struggles to
communicate. But we will also see that Levinas’ article causes us to scrutinise
the officer’s claims concerning enhanced agency, enlightenment, and the abil-
ity to read through one’s wounds, particularly when we draw on Levinas’
identification and condemnation of theodicy, to which we now turn.

III. THEODICY AND USELESS SUFFERING

Levinas describes the ways in which individuals and communities make sense
of suffering, find meaning in it, or justify it. He fits all of these under the term
‘theodicy’, including both religious theodicies in which God has a reason for
suffering or sufferers reap some reward for it in the afterlife, and secular
theodicies, that justify the suffering of others on the basis of a good that
comes out of it, for example, the reform that is said to result from punishment.
Levinas argues that these are all forms of justifying others’ suffering, and he
406 JENNIFER L. GEDDES
offers a powerful critique of such moves: ‘the justification of the neighbor’s
pain is certainly the source of all immorality’.13 Further, he declares that after
the Holocaust, as well as other atrocities of the twentieth century, we have
witnessed the end of theodicy because there is no possible justification for the
suffering inflicted during the Holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth
century; all explanations pale and crumble in view of the extent and forms that
suffering has taken.

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Levinas argues that the moment I begin to find meaning in the other’s
suffering, to suggest that it has a purpose, whether communal or individual, I
have crossed an ethical line. Any ascription of meaning to another’s pain is,
according to Levinas, a further violence against her. To avoid this immorality,
I must instead see the other’s suffering as useless, unjustifiable, and unforgive-
able to me. But there is more. Rather than simply acknowledging the use-
lessness of the other’s suffering, Levinas describes what he calls the interhuman
order, which involves my attention to the suffering of the other, my suffering
in response to it, and my responsibility to alleviate and eradicate the other’s
suffering. Here we see a different possibility for the recognition of vulnerabil-
ity. In the interhuman order, the other’s vulnerability in her suffering calls for
and constitutes my responsibility to come to her aid—a responsibility which is
also a vulnerability.
Thus, perhaps the starkest contrast between Levinas’ and the penal colony
officer’s accounts of suffering lies in the uses to which suffering is put and the
meanings it is given. For, in the officer’s narrative, the condemned man’s pain
is part of a public spectacle that performs justice for the community and
reforms (through ‘education’), punishes, and enlightens the prisoner at the
same time. He tells the explorer, ‘many did not care to watch it but lay with
closed eyes in the sand; they all knew: Now Justice is being done. . . . How we
all absorbed the look of transfiguration on the face of the sufferer, how we
bathed our cheeks in the radiance of that justice, achieved at last and fading so
quickly’.14 The officer describes a kind of communal ecstasy in response to the
purported ‘transfiguration’ of the condemned man. His suffering is useful,
meaningful, and justified in the officer’s narrative of it. While Levinas declares
that I must suffer in response to an other’s suffering and work to alleviate it,
the officer describes a public spectacle in which the condemned man suffers
for the community in a public performance.
Related is the fact that the attention paid to the suffering of pain is dia-
metrically opposed in each account: for Levinas the very fact that the other is
in pain is of central importance; for the officer, it is merely an embellishment
of the important process of enlightenment. For Levinas, the other’s suffering
of extreme pain must draw one’s full attention; his intense focus on it draws
his readers’ attention away from all else to a concentration on what the
experience of suffering is for the sufferer and how to alleviate that suffering.
 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY 407
For the officer, suffering pain is merely the initial, preparatory stage for the real
work, and the real spectacle, that will take place. Finally, while for Levinas the
only response to the other who is suffering in pain is to suffer for her suffering
and to seek to alleviate and end that suffering, for the officer the only response
to that suffering is to eagerly await the spectacle of justice that will bring a kind
of vicarious ecstasy to those in attendance. Whereas for Levinas the other who
suffers calls me into responsibility for the alleviation of that suffering, for the

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officer the other who suffers bears the responsibility to alleviate the worries of
the community about the state of justice in their midst. This attention to the
suffering of the other—attention of the kind that commits to ending or
alleviating it, or what Levinas calls ‘the suffering of suffering, the suffering
for the useless suffering of the other, the just suffering in me for the unjusti-
fiable suffering of the other’—can be seen as the ‘supreme ethical principle—
the only one it is impossible to question’.15 It is precisely this sort of attention
that is strikingly absent in Kafka’s story.

IV. THE TEMPTATIONS OF THEODICY

While the officer is the most glaring example of the failure to pay attention to
suffering qua suffering paired with an elaborate justification of it, the explorer
may be the most surprising and more important example—particularly be-
cause of his proximity to the situational perspective of the reader. On first
glance, the explorer might strike the reader as merely an observer, the role in
which the explorer likes to think of himself, or even as someone who disap-
proves of the officer’s whole system, rather than as someone who follows the
officer’s path of justifying suffering. However, a closer examination of two
moments in the story reveals that the explorer is more of an accomplice to,
and advocate for, the justification of suffering than it seems.16
When the officer asks the explorer to voice his support for the execution
process with the new commandant of the colony, the explorer offers a rather
minimal withholding of approval, rather than outright condemnation. His
initial response to the officer’s request is a simple ‘no’ and then ‘I do not
approve of your procedure’.17 But this refusal does not come from his concern
about torture; it is, rather, the lack of an adequate judicial process before the
execution that concerns him. He has procedural rather than ethical concerns.
It is his rational commitment to a certain idea of justice, in which the accused
is given the opportunity to prove his innocence, that prevents him from
offering his support to the officer and his system. While he asks numerous
questions about the legal procedure leading up to the execution, he asks
nothing about the operation of the machine itself. Though he thinks to him-
self that ‘the injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution
were undeniable’,18 the explorer never exhibits a sense of outrage at the
408 JENNIFER L. GEDDES
senseless infliction of inordinate pain. To stand before a machine of torture,
and the human being on which it is about to be used, and to think that its
inhumanity is merely undeniable, that is, not something one could convin-
cingly declare humane, displays a lack of anything but an intellectual engage-
ment in the process. The explorer himself underscores the
compartmentalisation of his ethical geography when he tells the officer,
‘your sincere conviction has touched me, even though it cannot influence

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my judgment’.19
The explorer has no compassion for the condemned man who is to be its
victim, and in fact finds him repulsive at several points. According to the story,
he knew ‘from the very beginning . . . what answer he must give’20 in response
to the officer’s request for his support for the machine, but the sight of the
soldier and the condemned man makes him hesitate to give it. This hesitation
is significant because it comes from the fact that he is touched by the ‘sincere
conviction’ of the officer and repulsed by the actions of the other two. The
explorer is tempted, though only for ‘as long as it took to draw one breath’, to
side with the officer.21
That he is more concerned with the legality of the proceedings than with
the inhumanity of the punishment and the suffering it inflicts is underscored
by the fact that he does nothing to stop the officer’s death. In fact, the reader
learns that the explorer approves of the officer’s decision to put himself under
the apparatus: ‘If the judicial procedure . . . were really so near its end—pos-
sibly as a result of his own intervention, as to which he felt himself pledged—
then the officer was doing the right thing; in his place the explorer would not
have acted otherwise.’22 Not only does he approve of the officer’s decision, he
decides that were he the officer, he would do the same thing! Interestingly,
this is the one moment in the story in which the explorer makes a moral
judgment, and from that moment on, he is no longer merely an observer. But
his judgment raises numerous questions. Why is the officer’s putting himself in
the machine ‘doing the right thing’? How is it that the explorer can approve of
the officer’s decision even though he claims to consider the process of exe-
cution inhumane? And further, how is it possible that the explorer can go so
far as to say that he would do the same thing in the officer’s place?
The explorer reads the officer as a tragic hero, as the captain going down
with his ship. Like the officer who translates torture into justice and suffering
into interpretation, the explorer translates the officer’s suicide into a noble
gesture of loyalty. Once again things are being read as performances without
any explicit recognition of their real costs. What is important is the symbolic
nature of the officer’s actions, their coherence with the narrative of the exe-
cution process to which he has committed himself, as if the officer is playing
the lead role in a public drama, not the man responsible for the excruciating
deaths of many and for an unjust system. Both the officer and the explorer
 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY 409
engage in a metaphorical interpretation of torture that obscures from vision
the realities of the suffering it inflicts—a mode of interpretation common to
torturers and the official discourse of torture.
Perhaps the most chilling line of the whole story occurs as the machine
begins to kill the officer: ‘because it was working so silently the machine
simply escaped one’s attention’.23 While the officer’s description of past
crowds gorging on the spectacle of the condemned prisoner’s experience of

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torture is certainly a disturbing image, the image of the explorer standing next
to the machine as it starts its gruesome work and paying it no attention is
perhaps even more disturbing. The explorer pays no attention to the suffering
human being before him. While the officer is being jabbed with needles, the
explorer is focused on the annoying antics of the prisoner. The explorer’s
annoyance and disgust with the prisoner and soldier, rather than horror at the
deadly process going on right in front of him, reveals a striking displacement of
attention and psychic engagement.
The explorer is not troubled when he thinks the officer will be in the
machine for twelve hours and then killed; he is troubled only when he realises
that the ‘machine [is] obviously going to pieces’.24 It is precisely because the
machine turns out not to be torturing the officer that the explorer is troubled.
We see that he has believed the officer’s narrative of enlightenment because he
distinguishes between the officer’s present experience of the machine and the
experience other victims have had of it: ‘this was no exquisite torture such as
the officer desired, this was plain murder’.25
What is particularly disturbing about the explorer’s response is its implicit
depiction of torture as something acceptable, even ‘exquisite’, while swift
death is ‘plain murder’. When the explorer believes that the machine will
put the officer through a process of torture that will contain a climactic point
of enlightenment, the explorer thinks the officer has made the right choice in
placing himself in the machine. When the machine is simply and swiftly
killing the officer, the explorer feels compelled to stop it. The inscription of
meaning into the process of torture through the interpretation of pain as the
process of interpretation is revealed to be a fantasy seeking to obscure the
violence of the machine. And it is a fantasy that the explorer has come to
believe and even desire for the officer.
The explorer, who started out as an indifferent observer, has become
implicated in the death of the officer through his belief in the officer’s fantasy
of meaningful and exquisite torture. While the officer moves from the role of
judge to condemned man, from the machine’s advocate to its victim, from the
one who explains the machine to the one who is unable to ‘read’ its ‘writing’,
the explorer moves from observer to judge to accomplice, from one who
cannot read the ornate script the machine will write to one who is deeply
troubled by the meaningless jabbing of the machine.
410 JENNIFER L. GEDDES
Thus, four details reveal the explorer’s alliance with the officer, despite his
verbal statement to the contrary: his approval of the officer’s decision to put
himself in the machine, his failure to try in any way to stop him, his indif-
ference to the initial workings of the machine, and his deep upset at the
realisation that the machine is merely jabbing the officer to death, rather
than putting him through the long and agonising process of inscribing his
skin with the words ‘Be Just!’. Had he been opposed to the workings of the

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machine, had he really considered it inhumane, he would have tried to pre-
vent the officer’s torture and death. The fact that he only comes to the offi-
cer’s aid when it turns out he is not being tortured reveals that he has fully
imbibed the officer’s fantasy of meaningful and useful suffering. Further his
pilgrimage to the old commandant’s grave at the end of the story, his refusal to
meet the mocking smiles of the men standing around it, and his respectfully
remaining in place until the table has been pushed back over the grave, also
indicate his shift in allegiance. He has joined the party of the fantasy of mean-
ingful torture and useful suffering.
I use the word ‘fantasy’ because there is no good reason to believe that the
account the officer gives of the workings of the machine accurately describes
the actual experience of a condemned man placed into it, and there are very
good reasons to read it instead as a fantasy of meaningful torture. The officer’s
description of the enlightenment that comes to the condemned man can be
seen as a deliberate misinterpretation of the extreme pain the man endures—
an interpretive narrative that the explorer is being asked to buy into (as is the
reader). In fact, the officer’s description of the workings of the machine and its
effects is itself another violent inscription of a ‘text’ onto the condemned
man’s experience. The officer interprets the signs of pain on the victim’s
face as signs of his engagement in the enlightening process of interpretation,
but are they not instead the signs of excruciating pain? While the machine
inscribes the law onto the victim’s body through a painful process, the officer
inscribes meaning onto the victim’s suffering by reinterpreting it as the process
of enlightenment, not torture.
The insidious nature of theodicy is underscored by a crucial fact overlooked
by most if not all readers of Kafka’s story: the execution was scheduled before
the crime even took place. We know from the story that the new
Commandant invited the explorer to attend the execution the previous day
(‘yesterday’), that the crime took place the previous night (‘last night’), and
that it was reported only that morning (‘this morning’). The machinery of
torture was scheduled but in need of a criminal—a criminal who had to be
secured for the show to go on. The performance of justice, here, is fueled by
the production of victims who are masqueraded as criminals condemned to
die for crimes they have not committed or have been made to commit.
 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY 411
Reading ‘In the Penal Colony’ together with ‘Useless Suffering’ sheds light
on the role and perspective of the explorer, who sits in closest proximity to the
position of the reader, and on the temptation of theodicy presented to him
and the reader by the officer’s narrative. While the explorer presents and sees
himself as a detached observer, by the end of the story, he has aligned himself
with the officer and the fantasy of meaningful suffering. He has succumbed to
the temptation of theodicy and, in so doing, serves as a counter example of

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what Levinas claims we are called to do in response to suffering. Reading
Kafka’s story with Levinas’ article in mind enables us to recognise and resist the
seductions of the officer’s narrative and to see the ways in which Kafka’s story
offers a critique similar to Levinas’ of the temptation and immorality of
inscribing meaning into the other’s suffering.

V. CONCLUSION

By reading these two texts together, I argue, we read each more attentively
and more deeply. Levinas’ dense language becomes easier to unpack, and we
are able to understand more of what Levinas is trying to articulate about
the unassumability, passivity, and uselessness of suffering. This is due in part
to the officer’s counter emphasis on the assumability, or readability, of the law
for the condemned man; his enhanced agency of being able to read through his
wounds; and the usefulness of this process of torture both in the condemned
man’s enlightenment and the community’s assurance that justice is being
done. Kafka’s story does not merely illustrate Levinas’ ideas, it articulates
them in a form that enables us to understand them better.
Just as important is how Levinas helps us to read Kafka: reading Kafka’s
story with Levinas’ emphasis on attention to suffering in mind highlights the
failure of any character in Kafka’s story to attend to suffering, respond with
empathy, or try to alleviate it in any way. Though the story moves almost as a
series of reports on what each character is paying attention to, none pays
attention to suffering. Further, reading the officer’s narrative with Levinas’
condemnation of theodicy in mind helps us to resist the temptation of the
officer’s narrative—the temptation to believe in the usefulness of torture for
the community and for the tortured man himself. It is a temptation that the
visiting explorer who is listening to the officer is unable to resist, but whether
the reader succumbs to that temptation remains open.
The reader of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ could read the machine and its
workings metaphorically, as representing something other than a machine of
torture—and here there is a whole host of candidates for what the machine
represents: writing itself, bureaucracy, the trial of writing The Trial, Kafka’s
excruciating struggles with Felice, ‘Old Testament’ law, Christian sacrifice,
and the list goes on. But interpreting the machine in that way might miss
412 JENNIFER L. GEDDES
something the story is trying to teach us about the dangers of interpreting in
such a way that we translate torture and suffering into less troublesome and
more justified events. Interpreting the machine as, say, a metaphorical repre-
sentation of writing, requires setting aside the bodily details of the torture
described—‘the blood and vomit and sputum and muck and oil’, what Stanley
Corngold describes as the excreta of the story.26 Might such a reading also fail
to pay attention to the obsessive attention the story itself pays to what the

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characters themselves are and are not paying attention to? Might it be a
reading that does not learn from the story’s own enactments of reading and
interpretation? Margot Norris suggests that ‘critics too often see in Kafka’s
evocation of a golden age of penal severity . . . a nostalgia for apotheosized
pain. Rather, his ‘‘history’’, like Nietzsche’s ironic genealogy, exposes the
falsehoods and deceptions that constitute the civilizing process . . . [the]
Officer [is] robbed of a transcendence that was always fraudulent’.27 In re-
sponse to the temptation readers have to erase both torture and the physical
suffering it inflicts, we would do well to echo Michael Wood when he de-
clares that ‘we can and must say that the condemned man doesn’t read any-
thing, he is just cruelly tortured in the name of a fastidious, verbally infatuated
legality’.28
Kafka writes in such a way as to call our attention to suffering—to the
physical, painful, excruciating suffering that the machine, were it to function
as narrated, inflicts—and to the indifference to suffering displayed by the
characters in the story. To believe the officer’s description of the workings
of the machine as an accurate interpretation of what happens to the con-
demned man placed within it is to follow in the explorer’s footsteps, to fall
prey to the temptation of meaningful suffering. For, as Corngold astutely
points out, ‘this is not a story about true sentencing but about its disappearance
in the intricacies and hollows of fiction. What we have had throughout is the
narration of the reception on the part of the explorer, of a narrative produced
by a fanatic of a ceremony’.29
As Levinas teaches us, and as Scarry has shown, ‘physical pain does not
simply resist language but actively destroys it’.30 Torture does not produce
enlightenment; the infliction of extreme pain does not educate. And yet, we
seem to be able to spin elaborate narratives about its usefulness. Kafka’s text
calls us to resist the temptation to inscribe meaning into the machine’s in-
scription of pain. He offers a graphic depiction of the horrors of justifying
another’s suffering on personal, social, and political grounds, enabling us to
envision what Levinas’ dense prose may leave opaque. Levinas’ urging about
the crucial role that attention to the suffering of the other should play in our
efforts to live together, build a just society, and prevent or lessen oppression of
all sorts, on the one hand, and his condemnation of the ways in which
 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY 413
suffering is instead often justified and used, may offer us a way to read Kafka’s
story.
In our efforts to move the recognition of vulnerability towards compassion,
rather than cruelty, these texts, read together, urge us to examine where we
are placing our attention and what we are obscuring from view, and to
scrutinise the stories that we and others tell about the suffering of
others and whether those stories justify that suffering or call for our efforts

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to alleviate it.

NOTE

For further elaboration of the ideas presented here, please see my forthcoming
book, Kafka’s Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2016).

REFERENCES
1 6
See, for example, C. Mackenzie, W. H. Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and
Rogers and S. Dodds (eds.), Paradox, rev. edn. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and University Press, 1966), p. 100.
7
Feminist Philosophy, Gender in Law, E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making
Culture and Society Series (New York: and Unmaking of the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013); M.A. Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 9.
8
Fineman and A. Grear (eds.), Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, p. 154.
9
Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Ibid.
10
Foundation for Law and Politics (Farnham: Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, p. 92.
11
Ashgate, 2014); J.W. Schofer, Confronting Ibid.
12
Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Ibid., p. 91.
13
Rabbinic Ethics (Chicago, IL: The Ibid., p. 99.
14
University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, p. 154.
15
B.S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, p. 94.
16
Rights (University Park, PA: Because of this, I would redirect Michael
Pennsylvania State University Press, Wood in his searching self-criticism when
2006). he writes, ‘I find I am so troubled by the
2
E. Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, Entre Nous: traveller’s sympathy for the officer, and by
Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M.B. Smith Kafka’s meticulous attention to the offi-
and B. Harshav (New York: Columbia cer’s smile, that I risk underrating the trav-
University Press, 1998), all quotations in eller’s action in opposing the procedure’—
this paragraph are from p. 91. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge
3
Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, p. 92. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
4
Ibid, p. 91. 2005), p. 86. Instead I would suggest that
5
F. Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, The Wood risks underrating the explorer’s
Complete Stories, in N.N. Glatzer (ed.), complicity with the procedure by over-
(New York: Schocken Books, 1971), looking the ways he, in fact, becomes its
p. 149–150. supporter.
414 JENNIFER L. GEDDES
17
Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, p. 159. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
18
Ibid., p. 151. Press, 2004), p. 68.
19 27
Ibid., p. 160. M. Norris, ‘Sadism and Masochism in ‘‘In
20
Ibid., p. 159. the Penal Colony’’ and ‘‘A Hunger
21
Ibid. Artist’’’, Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics
22
Ibid., p. 163. and the Fin de Siècle, in M.M. Anderson
23
Ibid., p. 164. (ed.), (New York: Schocken Books,
24
Ibid., p. 165. 1989), p. 172.
25 28

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Ibid. Wood, Literature, p. 89.
26 29
S. Corngold, ‘Allotria and Excreta in ‘‘In Corngold, ‘Allotria and Excreta’, p. 80.
30
the Penal Colony’’’, Lambent Traces Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 4.