Page 43 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

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Courts, Prosecutors and proceedings232 that trample over rights (T49-52). They are morally impermissible as to rebellious Job (2:3) and as to Josef K (T51, 148). Man can neither maximize nor legislate that accused persons be presumed guilty until proven innocent, and that Laws or laws be attracted by Guilt (K’s case: T9) or Sin (Job’s case: 1:9-10, 13:24-28). It is equally morally impermissible to universalize the violation of Republican non-interference and non-domination ideals.
Josef K’s Universal and Natural Law Kantianism shares Milton’s universal maxims and soaring airs. Just as tyrannizing others cannot be morally universalized in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, Milton argues that, among free persons, by civil right, no one man or Magistrate is to have authority over another.233 The Trial’s Court’s inane officials, in their belittling of defendants, are the offspring of what Milton regards the temptation of absolute power, which perverts Kings, courts, magistrates to commit injustice, arbitrariness and partiality.234 Having broken their covenant to exercise justice and to protect citizens, their heinous crimes seek to make others obey and submit.235 Their arbitrary despotism and abuse of defendants crisscross in The Trial and the Book of Job. Thus, the Judge and the Prosecutor (in K’s case) and Yahweh and Satan (in Job’s case), implicitly violate their Social Contract and Divine Covenant to protect citizens (K) and servants (Job) when the Judge authorizes the Prosecutor to harm Josef K (T4-8), and Yahweh authorizes Satan to harm Job (1:12, 2:6). Thus weakened 3⁄4 Job and K must in futility submit. Job repents and submits to Yahweh’s omnipotent discourse, and Josef K, unrepentant, submits to his execution.
Just as Kant and Milton repudiate abuse of power and subjection, Nietzsche argues Yahweh engraves His mnemonic of pain236 and redemption into guilty and innocent alike to tame the indomitable human spirit to submit.237 Job knows his Redeemer lives, because he suffers in his flesh. Yahweh is “deep in my [his] skin...marked, and in my [his] flesh do I [does he] see God” (19:25-26). Josef K knows there must be a Judge, because before he is executed, he, too, suffers in his flesh and in his logic (T230-31). At the crisscross, Yahweh and Satan 3⁄4 the mise en abyme of the omnipotent Kafkaesque Judge and Prosecutor 3⁄4 permits, tests and punishes, not once, but perpetually, returning humans to their original, abysmal fallen state: the Harrow’s needle punctuating His grand alphabets, His psychosis of guilt and terror on the flesh 3⁄4 until no body part of the condemned man survives, as in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony,238 unless he obediently returns like a repentant Job to Yahweh’s all-mighty theocracy 3⁄4 to the tyranny of submission and obedience as the good, and to rebellion and hubris, as sin.
232 When Josef K claims proceedings are only proceedings if he recognizes them; he has misunderstood the gravity of affairs. The proceedings will eventually overwhelm him, and condemn him to death.
233 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure ofKings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 754
234 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure ofKings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 755
235 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. By Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure ofKings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 755
236 Nietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Douglas Smith. USA: Oxford University Press, 1996. 38
237 Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. “The Improvers of Mankind.” See Aphorism 2. Trans. By R.J. Hollingdale. USA: Penguin Books, 1990. 66-71. See also Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Aphorisms 259 and 260. Trans. By Marion Faber. USA: Oxford University Press, 1998.
238 In Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, the State’s polished and gleaming machine is repressive and infernal. It engraves and brands with its metanarrative Nietzsche’s mnemonics of pain: the State’s repression of the animal-man (Nietzsche Aphorism 22, Genealogy of Morals). The State invents torment to tame the creature, to make it obedient. Man is found guilty to the extent that he cannot atone at all against God. His punishment is never equal to his guilt: it exceeds it, as exemplified in the Fall of Man, and Job’s and Josef K’s excessive punishments and sufferings. The machine, self-sustained, works endlessly, and it is inscribed with the words “Be Just.” Invented by the Old Governor (Yahweh or the Priest), man lies on its bed, and the harrow’s needles, writing for twelve hours, engraves its sufferings. For the first six hours (half of his life), man spits until he begins to decipher its writings on his wounds. By the 12th hour, he has deciphered it. Tamed, the harrow skewers him completely and throws him into the pit, while the machine’s officer, fascinated by it, always inspects it, fixes it. The condemned man, like Job and Josef K, does not know the reason for his sentence, and has no defence, nor right to interrogation. The sentence is a metaphor for the broken law written on the condemned man. It spells honour your superior, and guilt is always beyond doubt. Job and Josef K are both: the condemned men in their punishments, and the Explorer, in their rebellions, observations and scepticism. Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. “In the Penal Colony.” Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1995. 140-67
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