Page 57 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
In this complex network of absurd stages, Justice is paradoxically volatile and Just Ice: it congeals. If a congealed justice betrays Josef K, Job’s brothers betray him and grow dark with ice (6:14-15). Injustice, paralyzing justice, and the unholy stagnating the holy, are simultaneous acts. Punishment and trials can occur anywhere, anytime. Job’s household, The Trial’s niches, quarries and offices, junk and boarding rooms, and its dim cathedral crisscross volatility and ice. A winged, blindfolded law whose gaze is ice to K, just as Yahweh’s justice is ice to Job of Jobel.323 A blindfolded law whose volatile, yet congealed, tipped scales, ceasing to serve beings, mutilates vowels in her attic corridors of infamy. In this sombre juncture of warped ladders, ambulant games of cruelty crisscross, and weave themselves everywhere.
The Court is not only an allegory of Behemoth, but also of Leviathan. If Behemoth’s beams of bronze and iron bars oppress and inhibit defendants (T73), Leviathan indisposes them (T73). Nauseated and indisposed Josef K is paralyzed in the Court attics, allegories of Behemoth and of Leviathan’s majestic cruelty (T73). There 3⁄4 the inhumane, as the infinitely grotesque, the infinitely malevolent, assaults. There 3⁄4 the inhumane, as a vertebra of Leviathan’s spine.
If Behemoth symbolizes the Court’s spiritual draught in its mighty body politick, Leviathan emblemizes the Court’s inaccessibility and its terrifying power. Just as defendants and defense lawyers cannot access writ of indictments and records, or follow up or take part in Court proceedings and trials (T114-22), no one can strip off Leviathan’s outer garment, no one can penetrate its double coat of mail, no one can force open the doors of his mouth whose teeth terrify (41:5-6). Just as Leviathan’s monstrous jaw terrifies, so does The Trial’s hound motif terrifies, oppresses and shames defendants (T52, 133, 162, 231). The Court’s lowly architecture 3⁄4 its shabby and long attic corridors, replete with ill-fitting doors and no direct light (T68) contrasts the majestic grace of Leviathan’s form (41:4). Made of layers of shields, Leviathan’s spine is tightly sealed together. Unlike the Court’s ill-fitting doors, each scale, so close to the other, cannot be parted, and no air can pass between them (41:7-9). If the Court’s doors are poorly fit, each frightful badge of a bearded Court official (T52) symbolizes a perfectly fit scale in Leviathan’s spine. Joined together, the Court officials cling together, forming a tightly joined body, firm and immovable (41:15; T52) and cannot be separated (41:9; T52).
In both instances, once inside Leviathan, the mighty Court, Josef K feels panic and asphyxia. If no air can pass between Leviathan’s scales (41:7), Josef K feels the air thick, stifling inside the Court’s blazing body. The sun’s heat beats down in the Court’s attic beams so harshly that laundry is hang out to dry (T74) just as, implicitly, justice is hung out to dry. Leviathan’s flames and smoke (41:11) recall the Court’s infernal attic heats (T73-4). If smoke pours out of Leviathan like a boiling pot burning reeds (41:12), the Court too burns the defendants’ rights, their reeds of liberty. They lay humiliated, insecure, apologetic, and desolate (T70, 78, 183).
form genealogical trees, dualities or deep structures. The third principle, “multiplicity,” is the absence of an object and a subject, one can only apprehend a rhizome through determination, quantity, and dimension. Symbolically, a rhizome is a simultaneous network. Rhizomorphous lines of discourse, poetry, and text are unique and simple, since they cover the dimension of the rhizome and need no further additions. The fourth principle, “non-signifying rupture,” shows the possibility of interrupting or destroying a rhizome and the impossibility of having dualities. Rhizomes “deterritorialize” prominent cultural things and “reterritorialize” them within the rhizomorphous system. For example, the crocodile does not adopt the shape of a tree trunk and the chameleon does not take the colour of its skin from its environment. These animals do not imitate or reproduce; rather, they paint the world in their colours. They produce rhizomes; they produce worlds. The last two principles, “cartography” and “decalcomania,” signal to the absence of axis, to deep structures and objective units. The rhizome is a card of many entries, not a “copy of.” Deleuze and Guattari. Rizoma. Introducción. Traducida por José Vázquez Pérez y Umbelina Larraceleta. España: Pre-textos, 2000. 9-57. Originally published by Éditions de Minuit, 1976. These definitions have been extracted from this text and personally translated into English.
323 See Yahweh’s theophany in the Book of Job (38:1-42:6).
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