The Law Ex-ists:

Reading Kafka with

Lacan
Published on September 20, 2016  in Ark Review/Essays  by Alexander Buk-Swienty

A reading of Kafka’s Law as a non-

existent existence.
We begin, of course, with an excerpt from “Before the Law,” Kafka’s famous
parable from his novel The Trial (1925):

“Before the law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man
from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says
that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then
asks if he will be allowed in later. ‘It is possible,’ says the doorkeeper, ‘but not at
the moment.’ Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps
to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior.
Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: ‘If you are so drawn to it, just
try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the
least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after
another, each one more powerful that the last… 1

The countryman, a fairly patient fellow, resolves to sit beside the Law and wait
for admittance; years trickle by, which turn to decades, and the man is old. With
his last breath appears a final spark of curiosity as he asks the doorkeeper:

“’Every man strives to reach the Law,’ says the man, ‘so how does it happen
that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for
admittance?’ The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end,
and to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: ‘No one else could
ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going
to shut it.’”2

The parable begs the question, what to make of Kafka’s Law? The Law is at

once within the countryman’s grasp though inaccessible, not to mention
completely incomprehensible. For what is the essence of the Law if it is but a
continuous cycle of doors and doorkeepers? Since an accurate definition of the
Law here is impossible, we must move forward in an abstract manner, and
provisionally describe the parable as the presence of lack, or more precisely the
presence of the Law as lack. It is around this Law-as-lack that the entire story is
centered. What we find in Kafka then, and to put it in more complicated Kantian
phrasing, is a certain positivization of a void.

The Law has the character of being a positive entity

that nonetheless is a negative magnitude. This is the
terrifying and fascinating aspect of Kafka: The
horrible presence of an absent Law.
Let us briefly assess the workings of the Law in two of Kafka’s novels,  The
Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926). Firstly, in The Trial, during the hero Josef
K.’s pursuit to make sense of his indictment, he finds himself allowed to
momentarily inspect one of the examining magistrates ‘Law books’:

“K. opened the first book and found an indecent picture. A man and a woman
were sitting naked on a sofa,” to which K. reasonably reacts: “‘So these are the
law books they study here,’ said K. ‘I am to be judged by people like this.’” 3

On what grounds is K. then accused? For surely the Law books should have
been some sort of testament to the nature of the Law and thereby the nature of
his charge? Here Kafka makes an incisive point, wherever the Law should
be fixed in meaning it is reduced to lewdness. This is but one of many examples
in The Trial of the Law as other than the Law, and yet still the Law.

The details concerning K.’s trial are never explained to him or to the reader. His
case remains nothing but an effect ostensibly without cause. The Law seems as
nothing but a certain will enacted from an indeterminate place. In other words,
the Law in The Trial remains intangible. An immaterial materiality. Immaterial
because in the place where the Law should be anchored, that is the texts of the
‘Law books’, there is vulgarity. Thus vulgarity is produced when an attempt to
reduce the Law to materiality is made. Material because despite the fact that the
Law is not stabilized as meaning in text, it exerts material presence through, for
example, symbolic figures. Figures such as the guards that ‘arrest’ K., the
magistrates that supervise his case, and ultimately the henchman that kill him in
the final chapter.4

In The Castle we find a similarly intangible Law. In this case, it emanates from a
castle on hill that presides over a small village. In contrast to The Trial, the Law
in The Castle does not accuse, or more accurately, it does not enact judgement
upon the hero K.. Rather its central role is precisely that of obfuscation, a
mountain of maddening bureaucracy (the amount of small departments and
paperwork described in connection to the castle is ridiculous). What then,
is The Castle about? To put it simply, The Castle depicts K.’s attempts at
entering the realm of the Law, which is the castle. This is very much in tune with
the countryman in “Before the Law”. Kafka’s protagonists are always already
barred entry to the Law at every turn.
The object-of-loss itself
Can we not flatly dismiss this as nightmarish surrealism or is there a meaning to
find in Kafka’s irrational bureaucracy? We must return to the basic premise of
the Law-as-lack in order to answer the fundamental question: what to make of
Kafka’s Law? Here, Lacanian theory can provide an, albeit, tricky answer. It is
the dimension of Lacan’s Real and the related pure-form of objet petit a (the
object-cause of desire), that can help us understand Kafka’s Law.

Let us begin simply by understanding how Lacan recognizes existence. For

Lacan, we are born too early. We are never quite ready to leave that ultimate
experience of being that is being in the womb. Thus to be born is to be barred,
divided from mother and into ‘reality’. This is an experience of horrendous loss.
This analogy is a basic description of what it is to be in Lacanian thought: To
be is to be a being that is always already lacking and divided. What is the
subject lacking? The objet petit a of course, that elusive and perfect object that
will satiate the subject’s feeling of lack.

How then, does the world look for this being? The Lacanian ontological model is
divided into three orders: The Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, (RSI)
commonly illustrated by a Borromean knot where each order has its own
‘circle’.5 The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s illustration of Lacan’s three
orders is strikingly relevant here. He writes:

“[The three orders] can be nicely illustrated by the game of chess. The rules
one has to follow in order to play it are its symbolic dimension: from the purely
symbolic standpoint, ‘knight’ is defined only by the moves this figure can make.
This level is clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way in which
different pieces are shaped and characterized by their names […] Finally, [the]
real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances that affect the course
of the game: the intelligence of the players, the unpredictable intrusions that
may disconcert one player or directly cut the game short.” 6

It is primarily the dimension of the Real that we are interested in, for
Kafka’s Law lies in the Real. To expatiate on Žižek’s description of the Real in
his chess analogy, the Real is that which is unsymbolisable in the game of
chess. That which has no ‘piece’, nor follows any rules, and yet exists as a
dimension of contingent circumstances that affect the game. Whereas the
Symbolic and Imaginary exist in the field of the chess game as the pieces and
their images, the Real, as Lacan notes, ex-ists.7 It is ex-centric, outside the field
of representation. It is all that can never be represented within the Symbolic-
Imaginary orders and yet it is the Real that underpins reality. As Žižek writes
in Looking Awry (1995) the role of the Lacanian Real is “radically ambiguous:
[…] it erupts in the form of a traumatic return, derailing the balance of our daily
lives, but it serves at the same time as a support of this very balance.” 8 Death
for example, is something that belongs in the Real, as it precisely embodies the
Real’s traumatic derailing nature as something that also provides as a balance
for reality and life. Death is completely incomprehensible (unsymbolisable)
because it is absolute non-being and yet non-being enforces being.
If we follow the Hegelian logic that contends that for something to exist its
inverse must exist as well, we might say that the Real is a necessary antinomy
to the Symbolic-Imaginary orders, that which certifies the existence of the
Symbolic-Imaginary by underpinning their existence by being their inverse.

Placing Kafka’s Law in the realm of the Real then, is a claim that the Law is a
void that nonetheless frames reality, or, as Žižek would have it, curves the
symbolic space, as he writes in The Parallax View:

”the ultimate secret of [Kafka’s] Law is that it does not exist […] This
nonexistence, of course, does not simply reduce the Law to an empty imaginary
chimera; rather, it makes it into an impossible Real, a void which nonetheless
functions, exerts influence, causes effects, curves the symbolic space.” 9

Consider then, the following illustration of the Kafka’s Law:

The Law is that bit of reality (the small white square) in Kafka’s universe (the
large white square) that is ex-centric to it, outside of the Symbolic-Imaginary
reality, and yet the void, the Law-void seen as the object-of-loss itself (the
empty gray square where the Law should be),
essentially frames and curves this reality. Thus the Law operates in a twofold
manner: Firstly, the Law is what the Kafka’s world is lacking and its subtraction
in turn structures reality. This reality, we might say, lending Žižek’s words:
“obtains its consistency only by means of the [gray hole] in its
center”.10 Secondly, the Law also operates as the object-cause of desire (objet
petit a – the small white square), that which would satiate “reality” or make it
“whole” again. A closer look at the representation of the Law in The Castle can
perhaps provide a sketch of the relationship between the Law and objet petit
a in Kafka.

The object-cause of desire

Our hero in The Castle K. is ostensibly drawn to the village because he is
offered a job as land surveyor. Yet, as K. quickly finds out, the village does not
need a land surveyor. The village superintendent (a minor official of the castle)
explains to K. how the mistake of K.’s employment was due to a long
complicated bureaucratic mishap. Papers were filed, then lost and found, then
incorrectly filed again and so on. Despite being officially unemployed, K.
decides to stay and seek the counseling of the most official of the village-castle
officials, the famous Herr Klamm, whom, despite vigorous efforts, he never
meets.

Herr Klamm is of particular interest here since he represents that immaterial

materiality, the Law as lack in The Castle. As Olga, a member of an ostracized
family with whom K. becomes close, describes Herr Klamm to K.:

“but we do often speak about Klamm, whom I’ve never seen; […] still his
appearance is well known in the village, some people have seen him,
everybody has heard of him, and out of glimpses and rumours and through
various distorting factors an image of Klamm has been constructed which is
certainly true in fundamentals. But only in fundamentals. In detail it fluctuates,
and yet perhaps not so much as Klamm’s real appearance. For he’s reported
as having one appearance when he comes into the village and another on
leaving it; after having his beer he looks different from what he does before
it…”11

Herr Klamm’s role in The Castle is precisely that of the function of objet petit
a which supplements reality as a positive representation of a void – Klamm as
an immaterial materiality of the Law-as-void. In ‘reality’, objet petit a is nothing
at all, just a pure form or placeholder that (mis)represents a void. As Herr
Klamm is in ‘reality’ nothing at all but a figure of the law posited by the multitude
of (mis)perceptions that the law-abiding citizens have of Klamm.

Returning briefly to our schema of Kafka’s Law above, Klamm can be placed in
the small white square that is outside reality. He ex-ists, but because Klamm is
subtracted from reality, he frames reality, or structures the Law.

The logic of Klamm-as-lack is the logic that structures the Law, just as the logic
of objet petit a structures desire. How does objet petit a structure desire
then? Objet petit a is a certain je ne sais quoi (a pleasant quality that is hard to
describe) an unfathomable X, and is something that we seek since it is the
perfect object and will fill our lack, though we can never can obtain since it is
subtracted from reality. If, for example, we all had our objet petit a, there would
be no reason to write this essay nor read it, nor use language, nor do
anything at all; we would be sated. In this manner the unobtainable objet petit
a is that which structures our desire, precisely because we lack it. Remember
the Polish Coca-Cola commercial from 1982 (because who doesn’t?): This is it!
It is the objet petit a. Of course the it is not it, the objet petit a, since that would
mean Coca Cola, after a spike in sales, would never have sold another bottle.

The same logic, as mentioned, applies to Klamm. This is Klamm! No,

this is Klamm! And so Klamm structures K.’s search for authority, his search for
the Law, a search that will ultimately never end. While Klamm is seen as the
Law’s objet petit a, that is a representation of nothing, we must remember, that
 the Law itself is like the Kantian Ding an sich. The Law in Kafka is the object of
loss itself. In this sense, we can only know Kafka’s Law in the sense that it
somehow ex-ists. It can therefore only be present as elusiveness itself, as
an objet petit a like Klamm or as the endless doors and doorkeepers in “Before
the Law”. What Kafka, when read with Lacan, actually shows us then, is not
merely bureaucracy gone mad, but rather how Kafka accurately pinpoints the
feebleness of the consistency of reality as it is posited via a dimension which is
outside reality.

Bibliography:

 Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England:

Penguin, 1963.
 Kafka, Franz. Collected Stories. London: Everyman’s Library, 1993.
 Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Ware: Wordsworth, 2008.
 Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta, 2006.
 Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991.
 Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.
 Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
2008.

Notes:

1. Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993),

173-74 ↩
2. Ibid., 175. ↩
3. Franz Kafka, The Trial, (Ware: Wordsworth, 2008), 40. ↩
4. Deleuze and Guattari rightly point out in their book Kafka: Towards a
Minor Literature, that the final chapter where K. is killed by the anonymous
henchmen, a fragment Kafka wrote, though never himself implemented as an
ending for The Trial, was mistakenly placed there by Max Brod; should Josef K.
not simply have died a natural death as the countryman and never alleviated
from the pressure of guilt before the Law? ↩
5. In 1975 Lacan actually introduces a fourth ‘order’ to the RSI model called
the Sinthome ↩
6. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan, (London: Granta, 2006), 8-9. ↩
7. To further complicate things, the Real is extime, that is Lacanian for
being both inside and outside at once, in this case within the coordinates of the
chess game and outside of it. The topology of extime can be briefly explain via
topology of the möbius band which Alenka Zupančič in The Odd One
In succinctly describes it: ”it {the möbius band} has, at every point two sides
(the surface and its other side), yet there is only one surface.” ↩
8.  Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture, (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), 29. ↩
9.  Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), 39. ↩
10. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry, 19. ↩
11.  Franz Kafka, The Castle, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 167. ↩