Before the Law: Jacques Derrida and Kafka

Jacques Derrida‘s “Before the Law” was first given as a lecture to the Royal Philosophical Society in London in 1982. An English translation by Avital Ronell was published as “Devant la Loi” in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings. Ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). The following text is from Derek Attridge (ed.) Acts of Literature, Jacques Derrida, N.Y, London, Routledge, 1992.

The importance of Derrida’s essay lies not just in his `deconstructive’ questioning of the autonomous status of the literary and the legal discourses, but also because of his autobiographical asides regarding his own recent Kafkaesques experiences of arrest and interrogation in Prague on the charges of drug trafficking.

The discursive categories of the `literature’ and the `law’, here, conceived as broadly as possible, are usually perceived to be distinct and autonomous domains of discourses. Often the literary is conceived as being fictitious, while the legal domain is seen to more `secular’, `pragmatic’ and having `truth-value’. In fact, they can even be seen conventionally as `binaries’.

Derrida reads Kafka’s parable of “Before the Law” to put into question the conventional distinction between the literary discourse and the legal discourse by pointing at the problematic interrelationship between the two. What is identified and classified as `literary’, often depends on the legal discourse of authorship and `legal’ category of `literature’. At the same time, Derrida also demonstrates the dependence of legal discourses on narratives which are usually classified as `the literary’ like the myth, fable and fiction.

Derrida, in a typical deconstructive mode, reads Kafka’s literary parable (or allegory) AS the parable (or allegory) of literature and about the relationship between law and literature. As in Paul de Man, ` the act of reading of an allegory” becomes an “allegory of the act of reading.”The Kafka’s parable also becomes the parable of undecidable aspects of literature. 

In a typical Derridian gesture, Derrida DRAMATIZES the parable (“Stages the parable”) and discusses the multiple ( often contradictory) implications of his deconstructive reading for the literary theory and legal theory.

Strategically,he focuses on the topology or the metaphor of place as well as the metaphor of space in the parable.

The Law becomes a place which the man from countryside wants to enter but is prevented from entering by the door keeper. The doorkeeper does not prevent the man directly.

This place where the Law which is supposed to exist is believed to be open for all but is actually guarded by a series of doors and doorkeepers (each more powerful than the first one). This means that the Law can never be accessed- it is promised but at the same time deferred.

The accused is summoned `before’ the law and by extension of the topological metaphor, the metaphor of place, the accused is `outside’ (and hence outlaw) of the space of law but then so is the doorkeeper. The guardians (the judges, the state, the police, and the doorkeepers) have their backs turned to the Law and consequently have no more access to the Law as the countryman or the accused.  By implication, the guardians of the `law of literature’, the people who decides what is literature and who should judge it (critics, publishers, teachers, reviewers etc) too have no access to the very law by which they determine what is literature and who judges it and by what `laws’ can the judge it.

Derrida also notes that the word `before’, also means PRIOR, something that comes before something else in a temporal sequence.  So `before the law’ also implies something which comes into existence PRIOR to the Law. In Derrida’s view what comes `prior’ to the Law is `difference’: the structure of differences and deferrals, which postpones the presence of the law indefinitely at the same times is the condition for its existence. It is this structure of `differance’, which constitutes and at the same time postpones the existence of the Law.  It is this structure of differance which creates the deconstructive aporiartic existence the heart of both leagal and the literary discourses.

The Resistance to Theory

I first posted this article on wikipedia, but I thought it would be a better idea for me to start blog so that I am more in control of the article. This becomes the first entry for the blog. Sachin

The Resistance to Theory is an essay by Paul de Man (1919-83), a renowned literary critic and theorist belonging to the Yale School of Deconstruction which appeared in Yale French Studies, 63(1982) and is widely anthologized. The essay later became part of the book by the same name.The essay remains a key statement in poststructuralist approaches to literary studies.

Paul de Man says that the essay was written at the request of the Committee on the Research Activities of the Modern Language Association as a contribution to a colleictive volume entitled Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. However, the essay was not accepted as it argued that "the main theoretical interest of literary theory consists in the impossibility of its definition."

But keeping in view with the proposal the essay discusses the rise of literary theory in America in the twentieth century and the challenges it faces. He points out, " literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic considerations." This introduction of linguistic and semiotic terminology into literary studies, according to Paul de Man, gives the language, ` considerable freedom from referential restraint' and makes it ` epistemologically highly suspect and volatile.' Drawing on the ideas of Saussure and Nietzsche,Paul de Man points out that the rhetorical and tropological dimension of language makes it an unreliable medium for communication of truths. Literary language is predominantly rhetorical and figurative. Therefore, to take for granted that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but itself would be a great mistake.

This gives rise to a particular crises in literary studies because `literariness' is no longer seen either as an aesthetic quality or as mimetic mode. Aesthetic effect, according to Paul de Man, takes place because we tend to mistake the materiality of signifier from the materiality of signified by considering language as an intuitive and transparent medium instead of material and conventional medium that it is. Mimesis, like the aesthetic quality, is also an effect of rhetorical and figurative aspects of language. The assumption of ideological and historical `contexts' or backgrounds to literary texts becomes a problematic if language is no longer seen as transparent and intuitive guide from the textual material to the historical situation. Consequently, the theorists who uphold aesthetic approach to literary studies and those who uphold historical approach both find `theory' inconvenient and challenging.They are the polemical opponents of theory.

As theory is as much a verbal construct as literature, it falls prey to the same problematics of literary language. Paul de Man says that the resistance may be `a built-in constituent of its discourse' and the real debate of literary theory is `not with its polemical opponents but rather with its own methodological assumptions and possibilities.'(p. 358) This is because `the resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language'.The resistance to theory is, according to Paul de Man, a resistance to reading. He says, `Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.'

Yet, Paul de Man concludes, literary theory is not in danger of `going under; it cannot help but flourish, and the more it is resisted, the more it flourishes, since the language it speaks is the language of self resistance.' (p. 365)

[edit]

• Paul de Man. `The Resistance To Theory', in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader,ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 2005, pp 349–365
• Paul de Man. Resistance to Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 1986, ISBN 978-0-8166-1294-9
• David Lodge and Nigel Wood. ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (1988), New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2005