Page 56 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
The inhumane slanders, persecutes, exiles, assassins Josef K. Behemoth is spiritual draught (40:23-24). Just as Behemoth drinks rivers, the Court drinks Job and Josef K’s spiritual rivers. At Jobel, what motif prevails? Satan’s insidious slander (1:9-10), persecution and omnipresence (1:12-19, 2:4-7), and Job’s draught as he yearns for “Sleep, darkness and a return to the womb” (3:1-22).318 At Kafkabel, what paradox endures? The insidious slander of a mysterious persona (T4), the Court’s chase and pestilence, and K’s yearnings for Job’s antithesis: life (T214, 231). The omnipresent Prosecutor in The Trial is everywhere 3⁄4 in Josef K’s bedroom, in the Bank’s Junk and Whipping Room, in Titorelli’s atelier, in Huld’s office, in Block’s room, in the attics, in the cathedral and the stone quarry.
Ambulant torture games occur not in prison, not in cells, but anywhere and everywhere arbitrarily. Satan and the Prosecutor, entrusted with a function, are not confined to a fixed time or place (8:1-11; T39). Meetings are held in random days, random hours, and random places.319 The Prosecutor is a proud legislator, and his magistrates, puffed beyond humankind’s measure, mistreat defendants, and punish both innocent and corrupt.320 In these edifices of might, the Prosecutor and its magistrates, no longer servants of the people, dwell above K and the cathedral, just as Yahweh and the Celestial Court dwell above Job. Yet worse, in the architecture of tyranny, a particular space ceases to have a single specific function. There is non-locality. Atrocities can occur anywhere, anytime in spaces that serve a multiplicity of purposes.
In Block’s lowly, and lightless bedroom, a sacred niche above his bed supplants ecclesiastical icons with his pernicious judicial process, abode of innumerable inkwells, quills, sheaf of papers, and trial documents (T182). Block’s corrupt judicial process criss-crosses the cathedral’s architecture, temple and prison of unjust verdicts in Block’s judicial niche. Block must revere it in terror, just as Yahweh, in Heaven and earth must, too, be feared. Thus, Block’s niche, once a divine shrine, turns profane beneath tyranny’s yoke. Thus, the cathedral, once a holy temple, turns corrupt beneath tyranny’s judicial and ecclesiastical yoke, proclaiming beneath the ill Magistrate’s dominion, the very corrupt verdicts that moved Dante and Milton to revolt against injustice and corruption. Thus, the cathedral forgets, once more, Milton’s impassioned argument that tyrants “were not beheld with a superstitious reverence; they were not regarded with tenderness and complacency as the vicegerents or deputies of Christ.”321
In The Trial’s architecture of twilight, there is neither sacrosanct space, nor impartial law. At the crisscross where the sacrosanct and the judicial entwine, the sacred and the profane are one and the same. Entangled, they resist boundaries, contraries or bifurcations. Entangled, the holy and the unholy, clean and unclean, cannot be differentiated. In this entangled Stage of the Infinite Absurd, Temple and Prison, Kafkabel and Jobel, Junk Room and Torture Chamber, Yahweh and Satan, Cosmos and Behemoth and Leviathan, Priest and Prison Chaplain, and the accused and the innocent, are, paradoxically, one and the same. Hierarchies, ceasing to be arboreal bifurcations, become rhizomorphous deliriums proliferating, networking everywhere in numberless stages replicated endlessly.322
318 Cox posits that this is a common sentiment in most writers of the absurd. Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 35-6
319 In the Book of Job, Yahweh asks Satan whence he comes. Satan does not specify any part of the world where he works, for in his ceaseless service to Yahweh, Satan visits all parts of the world. Peake, A.S. The Century Bible. Job. Ed. By Walter F. Adeney. Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1904. 59. In The Trial, the Court of Inquiry and the missing Prosecutor meet at imprecise locations.
320 Ironically and absurdly, the corrupt court punishes corrupt guards (T83).
321 Milton.CompletePoemsandMajorProse.Ed.ByMerrittY.Hughes.TheSecondDefenseoftheEnglishPeople.Indianapolis:HackettPublishingCompany,Inc., 1957. 818b
322 This refers to the antithesis of Deleuze’s rhizomorphous philosophy: the tree symbolizes dualism in its bifurcations. Generally, the rhizome, an anti- structure, changes in shape, accidental quality, and it rejects to form genealogical trees, dualities or deep roots or structures. Deleuze and Guattari adulate rhizomes in six principles. Rhizomes are chains of different codifications and of different biological, economic, political, or cultural systems. The first two principles, “connection” and “heterogeneity” express the proliferation of the rhizome in all dimensions of n-1, to its changes in shape, accidental quality, and to its rejection to
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