4/28/2015 Before the Law: Reading Derrida Reading Kafka | Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization

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Before the Law: Reading Derrida M T W

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T F S S

Reading Kafka   1 2 3 4 5
by B E Z A L E L A S T E R N on J U N E 2 8 , 2 0 1 1 · L EAVE A COM M ENT 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

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by  Abraham  Rubin
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Die  Öffentlichkeit  der  Hauptwerke  der  alten  kabbalistischen  Literatur  ist  die
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wichtigste  Garantie  ihres  Geheimnisses
« May   Jul »
The  exposedness  of  the  major  works  of  Kabbalistic  literature  is  the  greatest  guarantee
AR CHI VES
of  their  secrecy
October 2014
Gershom  Scholem,  “Zehn  unhistorisch  Sätze  über    Kabbala”  (1958)
July 2014

In Franz Kafka’s renowned parable Before  the  Law,[1] a man from the country comes June 2014
before the gates of the law hoping to gain entry, but is refused by a bearded, Cossack- May 2014
looking gatekeeper, who nevertheless, does not deny the possibility that entry will be February 2014
granted at some later indefinite point. “‘It is possible,’ says the gatekeeper, ‘but not January 2014
now’.” Expecting to eventually gain access to the law, since “the law should be December 2013
accessible to all,” the man from the country spends his days outside the law, awaiting
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admission, which is never granted. The parable ends abruptly at the moment of the
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man’s death with the gatekeeper’s thundering exclamation, “this entry was meant only
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for you. I am now going to close it.”
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The sheer failure of this missed encounter should not be foreign to any reader of Kafka. July 2013
What is most striking and paradoxical about this parable, though, is the man’s liminal June 2013
position with regard to the law—the man stands before the gate of the law, which is May 2013
wide open and at the same time utterly inaccessible to him. Even more puzzling, is the
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fundamental question of the nature of this undefined law which the man seeks access
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to. What is this law? Kafka does not offer his readers any key to unlock this mystery.
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But why should he? After all, the gate to the law is wide open.
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4/28/2015 Before the Law: Reading Derrida Reading Kafka | Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization
What are we to make of this irresolvable parable, which does not offer itself to any December 2012
authoritative interpretation? The blaring contradiction of a law which is at once fully November 2012
exposed and yet completely hidden might reflect the reader’s own relation to this text October 2012
as well, which is seemingly open but ultimately hermetic. Jacques Derrida follows this
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line of thought in his astute reading of the contradictory nature of this esoteric text,
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which preserves its secrecy through its bare openness.[2] Like the man from the
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country, who comes before the law believing that it should always be open to everyone,
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we too expect the meaning of this parable to unfold before us through our reading of it.
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The man’s frustrated relationship to the law, then, is replicated in the reader’s own
interpretative expectations. January 2012
December 2011
The complementary position of the law and narrative in Derrida’s interpretation allows
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us to understand one in terms of the other. That is—the law of fiction, and the fiction of
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law. Derrida proposes the universalizing dictum of Kant’s categorical imperative as an
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example of the law’s fictional foundation. “Act as if the maxim of your action were by
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your will to turn into a universal law of nature,” says Kant. As Derrida notes, Kant’s
conditional “as if” (als  ob) introduces the fiction of a universal moral subject into legal July 2011

thought, thereby excluding all historical and empirical contingencies (190). By June 2011

imagining a universal maxim in order to categorize the law, the law itself is divested of May 2011
all singularities, and ultimately of all content whatsoever. April 2011
March 2011
The fictional foundation of the law, then, is the belief that the law is fictionless. Its
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authority rests on its categorical status as an a-historical binding universal.  This law
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has no history and no origin—hence its transparent obscurity! To bring us back to
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Kafka’s parable, the man from the country (possibly an unknowing Kantian) is certain
of the law’s universality—he believes that the law should be accessible to all people at
all times. Yet, the man does not grasp that it is precisely this law’s universality that CAT EGOR I ES

prevents him from accessing it. The status of categorical universal renders the law CJLHomepage
completely void in relation to all singularities. For the law to encompass all, it must link_roundup
contain nothing. It is this paradox that leaves the man waiting indefinitely before  the Uncategorized
law, but keeps him from accessing the law itself.

But is the man from the country really outside the law? In the story, the law seems to be CENT ER F OR J EW I SH L AW AND
CONT EM POR AR Y CI VI L I Z AT I ON
spatially constituted through its boundaries: One can either be inside or outside of the
law. However, on a closer reading, it is in fact the collapse of this division that becomes Lecture by Yair Lorberbaum on “Transcending
the law’s constitutive trait. Besides the gatekeeper’s verbal prohibition, there is no the Rationales of the Commandments
(Ta’amei Ha-Mitzvot)” at Cardozo Law School
physical barrier that might stop the man from the country from entering into the law.
Standing before the law, the man thereby already submits to its authority. He awaits
admission on its threshold. His relation to the law is that of suspended expectation:  
“not now,” as the gatekeeper tells him.

The unconsummated relationship of “not now” or “not yet” determines the law’s
structural dynamic as one of indeterminate postponement, which is, in fact, its only
quality. The law’s ever-suspended state, its utter negativity, renders it completely void
while simultaneously rife with meaning. Absolute, yet ambiguous, it is present, but only
through its absence—thus relating to the man only in its non-relation to him.

Derrida describes the self-contradictory dynamic of the law thus:

The law is prohibited. But this contradictory self-prohibition allows man the
freedom of self-determination, even though this freedom cancels itself through the
self-prohibition of entering the law. Before the law, the man is a subject of the law
in appearing before it. This is obvious, but since he is before  it because he cannot
enter it, he is also outside  the  law  (an outlaw). He is neither under the law nor in
the law. He is both a subject of the law and an outlaw. (205)
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4/28/2015 Before the Law: Reading Derrida Reading Kafka | Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization
The law, as Derrida shows, has dissolved its own defining boundaries. It is no longer
clear what is internal or external to it. Consequently, what gets lost is any clear
demarcation between law and lawlessness. If the law’s only apparent quality is its
forbidden threshold, and if its only discernable essence is the prohibition of its own
presentation, then it contains nothing but its prohibitive exteriority.

Interestingly, the parable maintains a metonymic relation to the law it narrates. It is

relayed to K. by a priest in the ninth chapter of The  Trial, situated in a perplexing
relationship to the novel in which it appears. Is the parable merely a segment of this
greater work, or can it be read independently? To complicate the matter, “Before the
Law” appeared in Kafka’s collection of short stories  A  Country  Doctor, one of the few
works published in his lifetime, whereas The  Trial was only published posthumously
and against Kafka’s wishes, a year after his death.

Like the fuzziness of the law it narrates, the parable’s ambiguity precludes its
instructive role, leaving it open to any number of allegorical interpretations. If the
parable’s rhetorical function is to convey a moral or spiritual principle by rule of
analogy, it seems that this parable fails—it does not transmit any clear illustrative
principle. This uncommunicative parable transmits nothing but itself to the reader.
Much like its unrepresentable law, which appears solely as prohibition to the man.

In The  Trial, K. hopes to find answers to his inexplicable and convoluted experiences
with the court and its elaborate bureaucratic structure (as a side note, I might add that
no trial ever takes place in this novel). In response to K.’s puzzlement, the priest cites
this parable from “the introduction to the Law.” He then proceeds to interpret the
parable for K., but repeatedly inverts each one of his interpretations with the facility of
a Talmudic sophist. This rabbi-priest provides K. with an extensive exegesis of the
parable’s intricacies, only to overturn every judgment he presents. The exegetical
debate between K. and the priest remains inconclusive at best, because every time they
progress forward in their understanding of the parable, they upend their previous
interpretative assumptions. The infinitely regressive character of this debate proceeds,
among other things, from the peculiar nature of the parable’s unspecified law.

If the man from the country seeks a way into the law, K.’s problem is that of finding a
way out of the parable (a difficulty which might also be extended to reader). This law
operates, or dysfunctions under the same rule as the parable—it refers to nothing
outside itself. Does the parable of the law’s indeterminate suspension impart any
lesson? Might it be that of its own rhetorical failure? An illustration of its own thwarted
appeal? Is it a theological metaphor for the inaccessible transcendent, as Max Brod
proposed, or an allegory for the threatening obscurity of modern bureaucracies? The
inexhaustible readings of this non-parable frustrate any possibility of interpretative
closure, leaving us, like the man from the country, suspended indefinitely.

Abraham  Rubin,  a  second  year  CJL  Graduate  Fellow,  is  a  doctoral  candidate  in  the
Department  of  Comparative  Literature  at  the  CUNY  Graduate  Center  and  a  graduate
teaching  fellow  in  the  English  Department  of  City  College.

[1] The parable can be found in in Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation in The  Complete
Stories  of  Franz  Kafka. Ed. Nahum Norbert Glatzer. London, England: Vintage, 2005.
For an online English translation of this text, see
http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/beforethelaw.htm

[2] Jacques Derrida. “Before the Law” in Acts  of  Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New
York: Routledge, 1992. (pp. 181-220)

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