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KAFKA’S THE TRI A L
oxford studies in philosophy and literature
Richard Eldridge, Philosophy, Swarthmore College
Editorial Board
Anthony J. Cascardi, Comparative Literature, Romance, Languages, and Rhetoric,
University of California, Berkeley
David Damrosch, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Moira Gatens, Philosophy, University of Sydney
Garry Hagberg, Philosophy, Bard College
Philip Kitcher, Philosophy, Columbia University
Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Toril Moi, Literature, Romance Studies, Philosophy, and Theater Studies,
Duke University
Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophy and Law School, University of Chicago
Bernard Rhie, English, Williams College
David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee
on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Paul Woodruff, Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at Austin
Philosophical Perspectives
1
3
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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Espen Hammer
1. Kafka’s Inverse Theology 23
Peter E. Gordon
2. Before the Law 55
Fred Rush
3. On the Ethical Character of Literature 85
John Gibson
4. “A Disease of All Signification”: Kafka’s The Trial
Between Adorno and Agamben 111
Gerhard Richter
Contents
Index 285
vi
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
At least since Plato had Socrates criticize the poets and attempt to
displace Homer as the authoritative articulator and transmitter of
human experience and values, philosophy and literature have devel-
oped as partly competing, partly complementary enterprises. Both
literary writers and philosophers have frequently studied and com-
mented on each other’s texts and ideas, sometimes with approval,
sometimes with disapproval, in their efforts to become clearer about
human life and about valuable commitments—moral, artistic, polit-
ical, epistemic, metaphysical, and religious, as may be. Plato’s texts
themselves register the complexity and importance of these inter-
actions in being dialogues in which both deductive argumentation
and dramatic narration do central work in furthering a complex body
of views.
While these relations have been widely recognized, they have also
frequently been ignored or misunderstood, as academic disciplines
have gone their separate ways within their modern institutional set-
tings. Philosophy has often turned to science or mathematics as pro-
viding models of knowledge; in doing so it has often explicitly set
itself against cultural entanglements and literary devices, rejecting, at
s e r i e s e d i t o r’ s F o r e w o r d
viii
s e r i e s e d i t o r’ s F o r e w o r d
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xiv
Co n t r i b u to r s
xv
Co n t r i b u to r s
xvi
KAFKA’S THE TRI A L
Introduction
ESPEN HAMMER
Franz Kafka’s The Trial stands as one of the most influential and
emblematic novels of the twentieth century. Yet, as the overused
adjective “Kafkaesque” suggests, rather than as a work of art in its full
complexity, it has all too often been received as an expression of some
vaguely felt cultural or psychological malaise—a symbol, perhaps, of
all that we do not seem to comprehend, but that nevertheless is felt to
haunt and influence us in inexplicable ways. Its plot, however, is both
complex and completely unforgettable. A man stands accused of a
crime he appears not to have any recollection of having committed
and whose nature is never revealed to him. In what may ultimately be
described as a tragic quest-narrative, the protagonist’s search for truth
and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the system he is fac-
ing) progressively leads to increasing confusion before ending with
his execution in an abandoned quarry. Josef K., its famous anti-hero,
is an everyman faced with an anonymous, inscrutable yet seemingly
omnipotent power. For all its fundamental strangeness, the novel
seems to address defining concerns of the modern era: a sense of rad-
ical estrangement, the belittling of the individual in a bureaucratically
controlled mass society, the rise perhaps of totalitarianism, as well as
the fearful nihilism of a world apparently abandoned by God.
1
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