Kafka and Derrida Before the Laws

Abstract

What if the “man from the country” of Kafka’s Before the Law was not so much seeking to enter the law as to leave the country? That he was an emigrant who did not succeed in becoming an immigrant, but through some accident, of birth, of timing, was held at the border? Such a change of interpretative orientation, from an entry to an exit narrative, might shake not only the understanding of Kafka’s Before the Law and its place in his authorship, but also many of the issues surrounding the relationship of philosophy, law, and literature raised and intensified by Derrida’s reading of this text. To change the sense of Before the Law, to see it as a fable of failed exit rather than failed entrance puts at issue many of questions provoked by this text and the nature of the law that seems to be its obscure object. It makes of the text a story of accidental exodus, where the inability to surmount an aporia or blockage generates the phantasmal quest for salvation and the law.