Death and the Foundations of Law in the Penal Colony.pdf

Ethics & Bioethics

When we read The Trial and In the Penal Colony together, we read about the logic of law, crime, punishment, and guilt. Of course, we cannot know the law, or, as Kafka writes, we cannot enter the law. I interpret the idea in this way: the law opens a gate to the truth. Alas, no one can enter the law, or come to know the truth, as Kafka says. The consequences are devastating: one cannot know the name of one’s own crime, which is to say guilt is eternal and permanent; nothing can absolve us. Only one solution exists. Josef K. in The Trial should have committed suicide like the Officer in “Penal Colony.” That is to say, perhaps, that you always are your own judge and executioner. Guilt cannot be doubted and thus, you are doomed. Both narratives are cruel and ruthless in their own way in their moral pessimism.

Modernism/modernity, 2001

This article focuses on the complexity of sovereign power and its effects on the human body. Kafka's story, In the penal colony, seems to illustrate the relationship between body and power, or, more generally, the relation between human body and the discursive practices listed on it. As a result, in a kind of apocalyptic aesthetics, the human body turns into an object that can be written upon, an object subjected to different types of processing and manipulations, emphasizing the idea that human being is shaped by power from the time of his birth.

Radical History Review, 2006

PSU McNair Scholars Journal , 2020

Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” has been widely, even exhaustively studied. However, there is a dearth of analysis which stresses the centrality of the colony as a site, and race as a structure, in this text in a sustained and appropriately nuanced manner. Kafka’s work has a tendency to be read under the sign of the universal, as representing ubiquitous systems of domination and alienation which may even be accorded metaphysical significance. This paper argues that “In the Penal Colony,” on the contrary, illustrates specific political processes and relations which belong to colonial and racialized orders of power. Reading Kafka’s text alongside theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and Saidiya Hartman, this paper offers an inroad towards the jarring energy of the penal colony, which remains ill-defined when the structures of colonialism and the category of race are not foregrounded.

Naharaim: Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte (Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History), 2021

This article offers a close reading of Kafka's In the Penal Colony, exploring the text as a radical reflection on the nature of modernity in general, and Jewish modernity in particular. The article posits that In the Penal Colony is a meditation on the relation between suffering, transgression and law. For Kafka, where modernity is understood as the incapacity of linking suffering and transgression (sin), the old order is one where the relationship between suffering and transgression is understood as fundamental, and functions as a principle of readability of reality. For the ancients, it is this readability that endows the law with meaning and validity. By integrating parts of Foucault's thesis' on modernity as elaborated in Discipline and Punish with this analysis of In the Penal Colony, this article situates Kafka's text in the context of his literature in general, positing that it is the key text to understanding his oeuvre. In addition, this article offers an original reflection on one of the hidden themes of Kafka's work: the crisis of the modern Jew.

The Germanic Review, 2015

Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism, ed. Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Straub, 2018

In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional” (79). Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, and he cites data and specific cases to support this point, but he does not develop a critical analysis of race or racism in the lecture series. Drawing on the work of incarcerated intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal, critical race theorists Cheryl Harris and Angela Davis, and contemporary prison abolitionists, I argue that racism is an issue, not only in the particular context of the United States, but also for the logic of the death penalty that Derrida proposes to deconstruct. Derrida’s own account of indemnity, interest, and condemnation in the Tenth Session is incomplete without a supplementary analysis of black civil death and the construction of whiteness as property. In conclusion, I argue that an abolitionism worthy of the name would have to move beyond the death penalty, towards the (im)possible project of prison abolition and the abolition of white supremacy.

TOA-MAGAZIN, 2018

This is the English and German translation of the article published in the German Restorative Justice Journal TOA-MAGAZIN on 3rd December 2018. The paper provides a friendly but critical account of Geoffroy De Lagasnerie (2018) Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial from an abolitionist perspective.