ISSN:(O) 2320-5407, ISSN(P) 3107-4928 Int. J. Adv. Res.

13(11), November-2025, 96-100

Journal Homepage: - www.journalijar.com

Article DOI:10.21474/IJAR01/22090
DOI URL:http://dx.doi.org/10.21474/IJAR01/22090

RESEARCH ARTICLE

STILL ON TRIAL: READING KAFKA’S MODERNITY A CENTURY LATER

1. Associate Professor PG Department of English and Research Centre K M M Govt Women‟s College, Kannur
University, Kerala.
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Manuscript Info Abstract
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Manuscript History The year 2025 marks the centenary of the posthumous publication of
Received: 04 September 2025 Franz Kafka‟s The Trial (1925), a timeless work that continues to
Final Accepted: 06 October 2025 illuminate the persistent crises of law, authority and human freedom. A
Published: November 2025 hundred years after its appearance, Kafka‟s vision of an individual
caught up in a labyrinthian bureaucratic machinery remains a haunting
Key words:-
Kafkaesque, labyrinth, interpellation, metaphor for modern condition. The work invites renewed academic
necropolitics, biopolitics, precarity, bare scrutiny in an era defined by digital surveillance, algorithmic control
life, death zones, algorithmic and bureaucratic opacity. This paper re-examines the ideological
governance, ideological apparatus,
foundations of The Trial and the nuances of power and authority
surveillance, panopticon, modernism,
post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, post- through the intersecting frameworks of Michael Foucault‟s disciplinary
modernism, existentialism, surrealism power and Giorgio Agamben‟s sovereign exception. The paper also
locates the novel within a broader philosophic discourse on the
alienation and dehumanization inherent in the modern bureaucratic
system.The Trial is a profound meditation on the penal experience of a
modern subject entrapped within the machinery of law and bureaucracy
through which authority reproduces itself. The court, omnipresent and
elusive at the same time, functions as a dehumanizing bureaucratic
weapon that operates intricately to make individuals perpetually
trapped and alienated. Ultimately, the novel emerges as a prophetic
allegory of contemporary forms of governance and its administrative
logic that reduces life to a condition of perpetual accusation and
deferred justice. By placing the novel within the broader philosophical
discussions on legality, biopolitics and bureaucratic rationality, this
study explores the deadly potential of modern institutions that continue
to discipline, and define modern subjects. Commemorating this novel
on its centenary becomes a meditative engagement with its prophetic
visions on crisis of modernity.

"© 2025 by the Author(s). Published by IJAR under CC BY 4.0. Unrestricted use allowed
with credit to the author."
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Introduction:-
The year 2025 marks the centenary of Franz Kafka‟sThe Trial-a haunting literary masterpiece that continues
toshapelandscapes ofliterature, law, and philosophy while echoing the anxieties and absurdities of modern
existence.Shrouded in enigma yet timeless in its resonance, Kafka‟s workhas ceaselessly inspiredsuccessive waves

Corresponding Author:- Smitha K 96

of critical reflectionsacross the decades. The “Kafkaesque” -evokingsurreal dread, existential guilt, entrapment and
alienation within bureaucratic labyrinths – remains deeply inscribed in modern imagination and the global cultural
lexicon. Once emblematic of literary modernism, these motifsacquirerenewed urgencyin today‟s climate of
surveillance, opacity and judicial uncertainty.The Trial,as theparamount embodiment of the Kafkaesque,continues to
inviteboundlesstheoretical engagementwithin contemporaryacademia.

Within this centenary reflection,The Trialunveilsa universe of alienatedsubjects, impenetrable institutions and
dreamlike distortions, exposing the absurdity of existence, the elusiveness of truth, and the crushing opacity of
power. Through its fractured architecture– marked by sudden dislocations, recursive repetitions, and deliberate
open-endedness- the novel creates a haunting atmosphere of mystery and irresolution. The narrative traces the ordeal
of Joseph K, a bank official inexplicably arrested and prosecuted by a shadowy court that never specifies his crime.
This sparce narrative unfolds throughencounters with clerks, warders, judges, lawyers, painters and other
seeminglymarginal figures, allentangled within the tentacles of the law, revealing the pervasive menace and
dehumanizing logic of bureaucracy. Caught in this machinery of bureaucracy, the protagonist is graduallystripped
of agency, identity, and humanconnection, reduced to a state of existential paralysis that culminates in his
execution“like a dog.” As the narrative ends, the machinery of law stands exposed as a cosmic snare, yielding one of
the most chillingly refinedand enduring expressions of the Kafkaesque.

Set against aworldpropelled by accusation, doubt and pervasive uncertainty,The Trialunfolds with the fractured
rhythm of an anarchic ordeal governed by a logic that defies comprehension. Thecity shadowed by an unseen
authority and inhabited by figures whose fragileidentities depend upontheir proximity to the court,becomes a vast
nightmarish trap. As Rolf J. Goebel notes, „The tribulations of K., revolve around the clash between the inaccessible
court‟s unspecified accusation and K.‟s insistence on his own innocence. … The novel stands clearlywithin the
tradition of modernist narratives, where urban space supplies the location for the disappearance of the alienated
individual in the lonely world‟ (42). Amid this oppressive order, K.- his very name reduced to a stark initial “K.”-
appears as a hollow mechanism within a system of impersonalfunctionality. Caught in perpetual suspension, he is
neither condemned nor absolvedbut held in an interminable limbo, haunted by the inscrutable operations of
power.The court, dispersed across attics and make-shift offices, epitomize the banality and omnipresence of
bureaucratic control.Beneath this bureaucratic mayhem lies the spectral memory of social tyranny and moral
corruption that haunted Kafka‟s homeland, the Republic of Czechoslovakia along with the psychic wounds of his
own alienation and paternal domination.Yet, beyond its historical and biographicalechoes, the novel asserts itself as
a defining parable of modernity, embodyinganunsettling vision of existence adrift in a godless order where logic
collapses and justice dissolves into enigma.K.‟sfutile strugglesagainst the labyrinthinelawmirrors the absurdityof
Sisyphus‟s eternaltask,affirming the existential truth that to exist is to bear guilt. His quiet, humiliating death, “like a
dog‟‟culminates this vision of the modern subject crushed beneath the absurd machinery ofpower.

Modernism in art arose from a profound skepticism towards Enlightenment‟sfaithinreason, progress, and logic.
What had once promised emancipation now appeared complicit in new forms of domination. The advent of
modernity ruptured the coherence of traditional life - its stable values, communal bonds, and familiar landscapes –
replacing them with the alienation of urban existence and the inhuman logic of bureaucratic systems.As observed by
Max Weber, „The bureaucratic order develops the more perfectly, the more it is dehumanized, the more completely
it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional
elements‟ (975).InThe Trial, Kafkaexposes the collapse of Enlightenmentrationality, revealing a world governed by
opaque authority and inscrutable laws. The novel enacts a profound epistemological break from the rationalist
paradigmof cause and effect, exposing how ideals of autonomy and liberation devolve into mechanisms of
surveillance and control. As Adorno and Horkheimer later theorized inThe Dialectic of Enlightenment,reason is
transformed into an instrument of domination, reduced to a means of controlrather than a pursuit of truth. Kafka‟s
bureaucratic world, modeled on early twentiethcentury Austro-Hungarian administration, stands as an allegory of
modernity‟s disillusionment: the pursuit of clarity and order gives way to dehumanization and existential paralysis,
where the promise of freedom collapses into its own oppressive shadow.

The cold and impersonal logic of modern bureaucracy culminates in K.‟s execution,an act stripped of emotion,
morality, or rationale, performed solely to sustain the system‟s procedural rhythm.Kafka transforms this moment
into a ritualof bureaucratic power, where responsibility is endlessly deferred and human life rendered expendable.
K.‟s fate thus transcends personal tragedy, becoming an allegory of existence within a rationalized order where
obedience replaces conscience and regulation supplants freedom. Beyond its existential and absurdist resonances,

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The Trialendures as a consummate modernist work: itsfractured structure, pared-down prose, and pervasive
detachment formally mirror the dissonance and alienation of modern life.Through its fusion of theme and technique,
Kafka‟s novel captures the essence of modernist condition- a world stripped of certainty, governed by opacity, and
haunted by the search for meaning amid the ruins of reason.

Recent scholarship on The Trial moves beyond the familiar modernist-existentialist paradigm, openingnew
interpretative horizons through postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysisand critical social theory.In a
Foucauldian light,K.‟s ordeal – his arrest and persecution without disclosure of any crime- mirrors the diffuse and
invisible mechanisms of modern power.As in the carceral societies Foucault describes, control here operates not
through overt coercion but through the internalization of disciplinary norms. Power functions by seduction and
habituation, compelling subjects to become agents of their own subjection.As Foucault observes,power does not
impose itself by physical coercion, rather it relies on being voluntarily assumed byits subjects, who, seduced by it,
addicted to it, internalize the requirements for maintaining its hold (202). The court‟s omnipresence – its offices
scattered across attics and tenements, as Titorellireveals – dissolves the distinction between public and private space,
transforming the city itself into a bureaucratic panopticon.Law becomes theology displaced into administration:
divine surveillance secularized intothe routines of paperwork and procedure.K.‟s insistence on indifference to the
court only deepens his entanglement in its logic, revealing how modern power perpetuates itself through complicity
rather than violence.In this sense, The Trial exemplifies Foucault‟s power-knowledge nexus, where visibility and
normalization replace punishment, and the subject – Joseph K.- is endlessly produced, and disciplined within an
omnipresent bureaucratic gaze.

The Foucauldian paradigm, though illuminating in its account of disciplinary power, no longer exhausts the
complexity of Kafka‟s juridical universe. Recent scholarshiphas increasingly problematized this framework,
suggesting that Kafka‟s vision of law exceeds the analytics of discipline and gestures toward a more diffused and
paradoxical sovereignty. In The Trial, power does not merely circulate through surveillance or normalization; it
assumes an almost sacred opacity, a logic of domination inseparable from transcendence. As Walter Benjamin
observed, Kafka‟s world is „a code of gestures which has no goal‟ (129), exposing not a disciplinary failure but an
ontological void at the heart of legality itself. Giorgio Agamben later extends this insight, arguing that in Kafka, „the
state of exception‟ is no longer a temporary suspension of order but the very structure through which the law
maintains itself(45). The court‟s authority, then emanates not from institutional machinery but from an invisible and
self-perpetuating sovereignty that conjoins the theological, the judicial, and the bureaucratic. In this displacement
from carceral rationality to metaphysical absence, Kafka reimagines power as a haunting force- one that governs not
through the presence of law but through its ungraspable and inscrutable persistence.

If Foucault‟s vision of law exposes the metaphysical void at the heart of power, it also invites a reconsideration of
how subjectivity itself is constituted within such regimes. Both Foucault and his mentor Althusser conceive of
subject not as an autonomous self but as a product of structural determination- be it disciplinary or ideological. For
Althusser, ideology „interpellates individuals as subjects‟ (174), reducing consciousness to a function of the
ideological apparatus. Foucault, similarly, situates subject formation within the diffuse operations of discourse,
surveillance, and normalization, insisting that the individual is not external to power but one of its primary effects.
Yet it is precisely this structural closure that Psychoanalytic theorists have sought to disrupt. From a Lacanian
perspective, subjectivity is not fully produced by power but emerges through an internal division- constituted by the
lack inscribed in language itself. As Lacan observes, „the unconscious is structured like a language‟ (164), but it is
the language of the Other, implying that the subject is perpetually alienated from the source of its own meaning.
Judith Butler expands this critique by arguing that subjection is never a finished inscription within discourse; rather,
it is a performative process marked by ambivalence, repetition, and the possibility of resistance (9). Zizek radicalizes
this point, suggesting that ideology does not simply hail subjects but structures the very horizon in which they can
respond (43). Psychoanalysis thus reintroduces desire, fantasy, and the unconscious into the field of power, exposing
the instability of the subject that Foucault‟s model tends to efface. In contrast to the disciplinary subject who is
wholly produced by discourse, the psychoanalytic subject remans haunted by an irreducible remainder- an excess
that both escapes and sustains power.

Seen through this psychoanalytic lens, The Trial becomes less a narrative of external coercion than of internal
division- a drama of subjectivity caught between the demand of the law and the impossibility of fulfilling it. Joseph
K‟s relentless quest to understand his accusation mirrors the Lacanian pursuit of the „Name-of-the-Father‟ (288), the
symbolic authority that structures meaning but forever withholds satisfaction. The law in Kafka functions not as a

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visible disciplinary institution but as the Other‟s discourse- an opaque and unlocatable force that speaks through
empty procedures and deferred judgements. K.‟s repeated attempts to locate the court, the officials, and the origin of
his guilt dramatizes the subject‟s futile search for coherence within a structure that guarantees its very lack. In this
sense, Kafka‟s law embodies what Zizek describes as „the obscene underside of the symbolic order‟ (Thacker 15),
where authority persists not through rational legitimacy but through the compulsive reiteration of its own enigma.
Butler‟s notion of subjection as ambivalent performance also resonates here: K.‟s compliance and protest are
inseparable, his resistance already inscribed within the script of his submission. The novel thus enacts the
psychoanalytic truth that the subject‟s relation to power is never external or transparent but profoundly libidinal- a
relation sustained by desire, anxiety, and the impossibility of closure. Through this, The Trial transforms the
Foucauldian figure of the disciplined subject into a psychoanalytic one- fractured, desiring, and perpetually deferred
within the labyrinth of the law‟s unspoken command.

In the final analysis, Kafka‟s The Trial resists confinement within any single theoretical apparatus- whether the
Foucauldian, the Agambenian, or the Lacanian. What the novel exposes is the intersection where these regimes of
thought converge and unravel: the point at which power becomes indistinguishable from desire and law, from
language itself. Foucault‟s disciplinary mechanisms, Agamben‟s sovereign exception, and Lacanian symbolic order
each seek to articulate the structures that hold the subject captive; yet Kafka‟s narrative reveals that such structures
are sustained as much by absence as by presence. The law in The Trial is neither the visible machinery of
surveillance nor the theological remnant of divine command- it is a void that compels obedience precisely through
its unintelligibility. In this sense, Kafka anticipates the postmodern understanding of power as a dispersed and self-
replicating system, one that operates through the very impossibility of transcendence. The subject, like K. remains
suspended between subjection and resistance. Between the call of the law and the silence that follows it. In
articulating this paradox, Kafka does not simply dramatize the crisis of modernity; he writes its ontology- an
ontology in which power, language, and desire form the endlessly recursive trial of being itself.

When viewed through Achille Mbembe‟s theory of necropolitics, Kafka‟s The Trial emerges as an uncannily
prophetic exploration of modern systems of power that determine not merely how life is managed, but whose lives
are rendered expendable. Building upon Foucault‟s notion of biopolitics, Mbembe argues that sovereignty is most
decisively expressed through the capacity to dictate death- to decide who may live and who must die (11). Within
this framework, the court in The Trial functions as a necropolitical apparatus that reduces individuals to objects of
procedure rather than agents of resistance. Joseph K. experiences what may be called social and existential death
long before his execution; he becomes a living corpse within a bureaucratic order that annihilates subjectivity
through administrative ritual. The violence here is not spectacular but banal- embedded in the impersonal
mechanisms of paperwork, hearings, and endless deferrals.Necropolitics in this sense manifests not only through
welfare or enslavement but through the silent violence of institutions that transform human beings into „bare life,‟
deprived of agency, recognition, or recourse. Kafka‟s labyrinthine court thus anticipates the „death worlds‟ Mbembe
describes – zones of abandonment where law is suspended, rights evaporate, and individuals persist in a liminal state
between life and death.

In this light The Trial transcends its early twentieth-century context to speak directly to the moral and political crises
of the present. Its portrayal of bureaucratic domination and invisible sovereignty mirrors the structures of
contemporary governance, where the power operates through systems of rather than sovereign figures, and where
human worth is continually negotiated within regimes of compliance, surveillance, and exclusion. The novel
exposes the mechanisms by which modern institutions administer symbolic death- stripping individuals of voice and
dignity under the guise of legality. In our age of global precarity, migration, and algorithmic governance, Kafka‟s
vision acquires renewed urgency: it illuminates the lives of those who exist at borders of social protection, those
rendered invisible by administrative indifference. Written while Kafka himself served as an insurance official, The
Trial foresees the rise of the modern death machine- legal, bureaucratic, and procedural- that would later define
totalitarian regimes and still shadows contemporary democracies. To read The Trial today therefore is to confront
the persistence of necropolitical power in our own time, and to recognize in K.‟s fate the quiet catastrophe of
countless lives caught in the machinery of law without justice.

Declaration of Originality:-
I hereby declare that this paper is my own original work and that all sources and references used have been properly
cited. I affirm that this work is free from plagiarism and has not been copied, in whole or in part, from any other
source without proper acknowledgement.

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8. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated by Breon Mitchell, Schocken Books,1998.
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13. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1981.

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