Page 40 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
Just as the moral and ideological battle between the Court and man unfolds, so does the objectifying battle amongst Josef K, Job and the many actors and witnesses of their trials progress. Within each of Job and Josef K’s grand trials with their Courts, there are infinite other tyrannizing trials by adversary-friends and strangers occurring in the morbid gaze-accuse-inculpate language game. Both Job and Josef K are objectified and berated a la Sartre.202 Suspicious gazes blur morning and night, sky and chasm, time and ice. Everyone watches and judges them; everyone blames and drives them to a “helpless passivity.”203 Josef K is incessantly watched, slandered and spoken about by everyone: wardens, employees, neighbors, strangers, his uncle, lawyers, children, defendants, court officers and clients. Every encounter emulates a lower court or a mini-trial 3⁄4 whether in his bedroom, in Fräulein’s room, in the Court of Inquiry, in his office, and in the cathedral. Job, too, is relentlessly scrutinized and judged by friends and Elihu, his wife and strangers, and the rabble. They subject Job, like Yahweh and Satan in Uz and the ash heap, to endless, cruel mini-trials.204 Treated like ‘maggots,’ ‘vermin,’ or ‘dogs,’ everyone willingly participates in the vile art of dehumanizing Job and Josef K by enacting Kafka’s hound-ism, his ‘universal metaphor.’205 If to Job, man “is maggot, dirty and impure” (25:4-6), to Kafka, man is “vermin” and “dog.” Kafka’s fundamental premise is that “a man can be vermin not only in the eyes of society...and his nearest and dearest in particular, but even in his own eyes.”206 Thus, Gregor Samsa awakes as a giant insect,207 and Kafka’s world is filled with canines.208 In the objectification game, contrary to Jesus’ anti-judgment principles (Matt. 7:1; Luke 6:37), man is accused, yet he also accuses; man is objectified, yet he also objectifies; man is victim, yet he also victimizes, thus he is condemned, as he condemns.209 In the gaze-accuse-inculpate language game, the protagonists are objectified, accused and tyrannized by others. Thus, they must defend themselves or unjustly suffer.
Job and Josef K suffer because they are powerless against objectification.210 Vulnerable to the scrutiny of Yahweh and the Judge, Satan and the Prosecutor and everyone else, they are misjudged. Innocent Job is wrongly judged by Satan and Job’s adversaries, and flawed Josef K, by the Prosecutor and K’s opponents. Whereas Job refuses to internalize the values of others (19:5, 23:11-12, 27:3-6), Josef K internalizes their judgements (T29).211 In the objectification game, Jobel and Kafkabel have the obnoxious fumes of a Theatre of Twilight, of Plato’s den, of Bentham’s panopticon.212 There 3⁄4 one is never sure how humans stand. Are they humans, maggot, vermin, or
202 Sartre posits that an objectification process named ‘othering’ occurs among multiple people. In this mutual ‘othering,’ everyone gazes at each other as if objects experiencing alterity: something strange and shameful. In this sense, Josef K’s and Job’s friends objectify K and Job while in turn, Josef K and Job respond to their objectifications. Job’s Yahweh and Satan, and K’s mysterious slandered, too, objectify Job and K, respectively. Yahweh praises Job while Satan aims to test Job’s genuine disinterested piety as posited in his insidious claim, “does Job fear God for nothing?” (1:6-12). A mysterious slanderer explicitly aims to injure Josef K (T1). The Trial shows many instances of objectification. Countless mysterious spectators objectify Josef K and many of its protagonists. Sartre. Being and Nothingness. “The Keyhole.” Tr. Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1943. 402-03
203 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 29
204 Please see Job 9-15, 18:5-21, 22:5-7, 22:9-10, 30:1.
205 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 21
206 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 21
207 Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. By Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 89-139
208 Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. “Investigations of a Dog.” Trans. By Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 89-139
209 Job, coerced to defend himself, must condemn Yahweh, his friends’ and the rabble’ accusations, just as Josef K is forced to condemn the tyrannous and
corrupt Court and the defendants for tolerating to be humiliated by its legal drones and inept officials. Thus, Josef K rages against Block’s subjection (T133-34). 210 Dodd says, “Since his arrest, he is aware ‘he has become an object of curiosity:’ everyone is watching him (as the group of neighbors do repeatedly during his arrest), and discussing him, in his presence, in the third person. Leni treats Block and K as if they were absent parties (T155). During his arrest the warders discuss him (T7-10). At the Mock Court, he is discussed as if a helpless child. It emphasizes K’s sense of powerlessness. Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland:
University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 31
211 Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 21
212 The panopticon’s fame arose in 1975 in Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison and Jacques-Alain Miller’s excellent article “Le Despotisme
de l’Utile: la machine panoptique de Jeremy Bentham,” and the rediscovery of Bentham’s Theory of Fictions in 1932 by C.K. Ogden. The panopticon is “‘a simple idea in architecture,’ never realized, describing ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’ 3⁄4 the possessor of this power is ‘the inspector’ with his invisible omnipresence, ‘an utterly dark spot’ in the all-transparent, light-flooded universe of the panopticon.” In Bentham,
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