Traces of Bare Life in Kafka’s Stories, Agamben’s … · Penal Colony” (1919).iv Drawing on...
Transcript of Traces of Bare Life in Kafka’s Stories, Agamben’s … · Penal Colony” (1919).iv Drawing on...
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Traces of Bare Life in Kafka’s Stories, Agamben’s Homo
Sacer, and Guantánamo Bay
Sebastian C. Galbo
Dartmouth College
Sebastian C. Galbo grew up in Williamsville, New York where he attended Niagara University
and earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy. Currently, he is a graduate student studying
Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College, and will spend this summer working as a research intern
at Yale University's Center for Bioethics.
Abstract
This paper examines the triangular relationship between literature, philosophy and contemporary
politics. Reading Franz Kafka‟s parables as a point of access to contemporary biopolitics, this
essay discusses iterations and representations of Giorgio Agamben‟s notion of the bare life figure
in two narratives, “The Judgement” (1912) and “In the Penal Colony” (1919). Drawing on forms
the bare life figure assumes in Kafka‟s narratives -- ranging from the liminal and spectral, to the
refugee and victim of dehumanization -- this essay examines the critical intersection of bare life
and sovereign power as it is exercised in contemporary politico-military phenomena, particularly
the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Established in 2002 by the Bush Administration, the camp
maintains a critical role in both provoking global discourses of racial/religious/cultural suspicion
and the inhumane treatment of subjects captured in the American „War on Terrorism.‟ This essay
draws on contemporary reactions to Guantánamo Bay articulated in recent journalism and oral
testimony, especially the chilling accounts from the New Yorker and the 2008 Winter Soldier
Hearings. Situated within the broader frameworks of Agamben‟s theory and the „War on Terror,‟
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Kafka‟s narratives illuminate the stark realities of human life at the intersection of punitive
inequities, sovereign power and violence.
Only a few miles from the formidable chain-link fences of Guantánamo Bay detention
facility stand the signature golden arches of Cuba‟s first and only existing McDonald‟s
restaurant. Chief Warrant Officer, James Kluck, reports in an interview with BBC‟s Gordon
Corera that interrogators have brought back happy meals from the McDonald‟s to bribe detainees
to talk.i Urging inmates to talk with fast food numbers among the few nonviolent tactics
employed by prison functionaries, but, as global opposition to Guantánamo continues to grow, it
is impossible to estimate whether or not interrogative acts will become increasingly violent. As a
land leased by the Americans outside American borders, located in Cuba but not Cuban territory,
Guantánamo presents a highly-contentious judicial quandary as its geographical location renders
„prisoners‟ of the global „War on Terror‟ legally powerless and detained without foreseeable
release.
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben asserts that the hegemony of sovereign power over human existence has been
ingrained in Western political constructs since Roman antiquity.ii Both elaborating Foucault‟s
study of biopolitics and drawing on ancient Roman law, Agamben demonstrates the ideological
machinery of sovereignty to serve as the conceptual anchor for his notion of homo sacer, or the
“bare life” figure. Bare life, Agamben claims, emerges when sovereign power declares a body
unsuitable for religious sacrifice, therefore dispensable without legal accountability or
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consequence. Thus, a mode of human life is relegated outside the ambits of legal intelligibility
and indefinitely detained - or obliterated - at the will of sovereign command.iii
Agamben
reinforces his concept by locating it in contemporary biopolitical trajectories, referencing the
Nazi concentration camp and Guantánamo Bay as salient political phenomena that reflect the
ontological complexities of the bare life figure.
Remarkably, Agamben contextualizes his concept of homo sacer with Franz Kafka‟s
well-known parable, “Before the Law,” to illustrate practices of legal exclusion implicit in
political sovereignty. This reference to Kafka suggests that the latter‟s writing anticipates with
surprising prescience the post-9/11 realities of sovereign power, law and the body. Reading
Kafka‟s parables as a point of access to contemporary biopolitics, this essay discusses iterations
and representations of the bare life figure in two narratives, “The Judgement” (1912) and “In the
Penal Colony” (1919).iv
Drawing on forms the bare life figure assumes in Kafka‟s narratives --
ranging from the liminal and spectral, to the refugee and victim of dehumanization -- this essay
examines power dynamics between bare life and sovereign power as it is exercised in
contemporary politico-military phenomena, particularly the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.
Established in 2002 by the Bush Administration, the camp maintains a critical role in both
provoking global discourses of racial/religious/cultural suspicion and the inhumane treatment of
subjects captured in the American „War on Terrorism.‟ This essay draws on contemporary
reactions to Guantánamo Bay articulated in recent journalism and oral testimony, especially the
chilling accounts from the New Yorker and the 2008 Winter Soldier Hearings. Situated within the
broader frameworks of Agamben‟s theory and the „War on Terror,‟ Kafka‟s parables illuminate
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the stark realities of human life at the intersection of punitive inequities, sovereign power and
violence.
Agamben, Foucault and Biopolitics
Before parsing the intricacies of Agamben‟s philosophy, it must be noted that his
thinking stems from Foucault‟s study of biopolitics, which interrogates political sovereignty and
its “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjection of bodies and the control of
populations.”v Drawing on and elaborating Foucault‟s thinking, Agamben grounds his
philosophical notion of bare life on dichotomies that have undergirded Western politics since
Roman antiquity. Agamben states: “the fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not
that of friend / enemy but that of bare life / political existence, zoē / bios, inclusion / exclusion.”
Supported by such binaries, the notion of bare life was first articulated by the second-century
C.E. Roman grammarian Pompeius Festus in what he terms, sacer mons. Agamben cites:
The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a
crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will
not be condemned for homicide; in the first tributarian law, in fact, it is
noted that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the
plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.” This is why is it
customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.vi
As a liminal figure of archaic Roman law, the homo sacer, or “the sacred man,” or “accursed
man,” is an extralegal subject that is prohibited from being sacrificed for religious purposes, but
may be killed without consequence.vii
Thus, Agamben understands the bare life figure to be
banned from the community to which it once belonged and systemically excluded from the
sphere of religious, social and political jurisdiction. But, questions Agamben, “we must [. . .] ask
why Western politics first constitutes itself through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an
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inclusion) of bare life. What is the relation between politics and life, if life presents itself as what
is included by means of exclusion?”viii
To formulate an answer, Agamben outlines four major
components characterizing the ontological status of the bare life figure.ix
First, sovereignty is the
nodal point at which archaic and modern political power converge, blurring the line demarcating
bios (“qualified life”) and zoē (“bare/naked life”): “the inclusion of bare life in the political
realm constitutes the original -- if concealed -- nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said
that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”x According
to Agamben, the production of the bare life figure is implicit in exercise of sovereign power.
This point leads to the second essential component of bare life, which states that
sovereignty exercises the volition to determine which subjects are included or excluded from
political life. Referencing the political theorist Carl Schmitt, Agamben cites: “Sovereign is he
who decides on the state of exception.”xi
The so-called sacred dimension of homo sacer is
distinguished by another body‟s sacrificial function; that is, the death of the sacrosanct body
achieves positive social recognition as it either fulfills a religious ritual or valorizes some
political cause (i.e. a military campaign). There is, differentiates Agamben, a fundamental
condition for the bare life figure: its own life cannot be sacrificed. Instead, the fate of the bare
life figure is always ostracism, obscurity and extralegal death. This comes about when sovereign
condemnation imposes guilt upon the bare life figure, and, assuming this guilt, the figure is
rendered the community‟s pariah and set aside for an inconsequential death.xii
Sovereign
volition, Agamben continues, is most forcefully expressed through its exclusionary power, which
„deems‟ whether life is fit for religious sacrifice or banished from the community where it will
perish outside the boundaries of legal intelligibility.
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As the voice of judgement, sovereignty stands, paradoxically, both “outside and inside the
juridical order.”xiii
Hovering above these two domains, sovereign authority can sanction
exception and, crucially, the exclusion of certain modes of human life. Forced to bear the status
of a nonperson, the third characteristic of the bare life figure is its expendability without
consequence. xiv
In other words, an authoritative power (i.e. institution, government, person) can
kill/torture/harm the bare life figure without being held legally accountable for its violence.
Guarding the passage to legal recognizability, sovereignty holds the power of not only locating
human life in zones of (il)legitimacy, but depriving life of human rights after that condition of
illegitimacy has been superimposed.
Moving ahead, the fourth component of bare life solidifies what Agamben previously
terms, “double exclusion.” The death of the bare life figure is occasioned by neither murder nor
ritual sacrifice. Rather, he writes:
[. . .] The political sphere of sovereignty [is] thus constituted through a double
exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious
in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice
and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to skill
without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life
-- that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed -- is the life that has been
captured in this sphere.xv
Belonging neither to the realm of the secular nor to the realm of the sacred, neither sacrificed nor
murdered, the treacherous plight of the bare life figure is as such: a body persecuted, exiled and
killed extralegally without consequence.
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Guantánamo Bay and the Quandary of Incarceration
On a remote tract of land in southeastern Cuba lies the U.S. naval base with its
Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Reviewing a brief history of the location helps to clarify
where it stands in the lager historical narrative of the United States. After Christopher Columbus
arrived on April 30, 1494, the native Taínos population was devastated by a variola epidemic,
bloodshed and enslavement. The region Columbus had renamed Puerto Grande became a highly
coveted harbor at the center of a colonial tug-of-war. During an acrimonious nine-year battle
with Spain known as the War of Jenkin‟s Ear, Britain seized the land in 1741 and renamed it
Cumberland Bay. British forces, however, were soon trounced by Spaniard-Creole guerrillas and
were forced to cede the territory to Spanish rule. Guantánamo remained a Spanish colony until
the Spanish-American war when an American naval fleet, seeking refuge from the impending
hurricane season, landed in 1898. With the aid of Cuban fighters, U.S. marines defeated Spanish
opposition, and, since then, the U.S. government has maintained control of the Guantánamo
region.
November 13, 2001, marked a significant day in George W. Bush‟s presidential career.
Endorsing a military decree entitled, “Detention, Treatment, and the Trial of Certain Non-
Citizens in the War Against Terrorism,” Bush and White House advisors ratified a judicial plan
of action authorizing that all suspected terrorists were to “be detained at an appropriate location
designated by the Secretary of Defense.”xvi
This “appropriate” location, however, is the highly
contested region known as Guantánamo Bay. Historian Jill Lepore‟s recent New Yorker
commentary, “The Dark Ages: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Law of Torment,” contends
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that the Bush administration‟s implementation of Guantánamo Bay to imprison and torture
suspect „terrorists‟ reconfigures principles of medieval torture: “In a series of memos,” writes
Lepore, “the Bush administration undid eight centuries of legal history.”xvii
According to these
memos, suspect terrorists, she continues, “were to be tried and sentenced by a military
commission. No member of the commission need be a lawyer. The ordinary rules of military law
would not apply. Nor would the laws of war. Nor, in any conventional sense, would the laws of
the United States.” If there is something peculiarly arresting about Bush‟s proposed military
tribunal it is the dubious legal rhetoric on which it is grounded: clearly stated, Bush‟s order
suspends traditional law so that “detainees” become punitive subjects outside the recognizable
parameters of international jurisdiction. Behind this objective, insists Lepore, “the White
House‟s answer to terrorism, which is an abandonment of the law of war, was the abandonment
of the rule of law.”xviii
In a press conference with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on November 14, 2001, Vice-
President Dick Cheney confidently reinforced Bush‟s ordinance: “Now, some people say, „Well,
gee, that‟s a dramatic departure from traditional jurisprudence in the United States [. . .] but
there‟s precedent for it. [. . .] We think it guarantees that we‟ll have the kind of treatment of these
individuals that we believe they deserve.”xix
Lepore reveals that Bush surreptitiously sanctioned
the proposed military tribunal without seeking counsel from the Department of Justice and his
advisors, namely Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. In fact, until national television news
aired the decision, his senior advisors had not an inkling of Bush‟s machinations to instate new
punitive measures. In this way, Bush‟s legislative “skullduggery” allowed his military order to
sidestep the ethical standards he knew it violated. Instead, Bush and his coterie of advisors
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fretted over where the suspect „terrorists‟ were to be incarcerated. Lepore reports that White
House officials considered three options: while some proposed reopening Alcatraz (closed in
1963) and Leavenworth (a federal prison in Kansas), others suggested sending the detainees to
Diego Garcia, a remote coral atoll in the Indian Ocean (British Indian Ocean Territory). The
crippling flaw of these proposals, however, was that these prisons are located within American
and British jurisdiction, which would give prisoners the opportunity to appeal to their respective
courts. For Bush, this would severely undermine the intended purposes of extrajudicial
incarceration. The matter was soon settled, and on December 29, 2001, twenty new suspect
terrorists in orange jumpers arrived at Guantánamo‟s gate -- chained, blindfolded and stripped of
human rights.
Jonathan M. Hansen‟s seminal monograph, Guantánamo: An American History,
understands Guantánamo Bay as a geopolitical anomaly. He states that Guantánamo is an
“imperial leftover, a Cold War discard, a remnant”; the territory, he appends, “isn‟t part of Cuba
and it isn‟t part of the United States. As a matter of sovereignty, it‟s one of the known world‟s
last no man‟s lands, an island out of time, a place without a state.”xx
Disguised as a U.S. naval
base, this far-flung neocolonial outpost operates a prison well beyond the domain of international
law. Its status as a terra nullius renders Guantánamo, notes a White House administrator, the
“legal equivalent of outer space.”xxi
Parenthetically, like homo sacer, terra nullius, or “land
belonging to no one,” is also a statute derived from ancient Roman law. In light of Agamben‟s
philosophy, Guantánamo Bay thus presents the judicial predicament of bare life: guilt and
condemnation are the prevailing dicta of sovereignty in times of global crisis.
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The geopolitical complexities of spatial power, particularly exemplified in the
Guantánamo penal entity, are interrogated in the chapter entitled, “The Smooth and the Striated,”
of Deleuze and Guattari‟s A Thousand Plateaus. “Space,” writes Deleuze, “is rich in its
potentiality because it gives rise to the possibility of events.”xxii
Thus, Deleuze elaborates two
categories of space: striated and smooth space. This dichotomy clarifies how sovereign power
engages space and, by extension, the bodies that occupy it. According to Deleuze, „striated‟
space denotes static territory that is rigidly defined by State-controlled laws and entrenched
political hierarchy; on the other hand, „smooth‟ space includes regions of uninhabited territory,
such as a prairie, sea or desert, which are fluid and always unfolding, not yet codified by
networks of State boundaries, institutions and jurisdictions. Of critical importance for Deleuze
and Guattari‟s thinking is how political sovereignty organizes space in a way that produces either
freedom or restriction. Isolated and eluding zones of Cuban and American jurisdiction,
Guantánamo is a territory of confinement that has been set aside by sovereignty to serve as a
space of exception, and, ultimately, exclusion. As such, this problematization of geopolitical
territory suggests smooth space has become integral to President Bush‟s tribunal for perpetrating
extrajudicial punishment.
Voices from Guantánamo
To further illustrate these converging lines of inquiry concerning Guantánamo and the
bare life figure, it is useful to examine the oral testimonies articulated at the Winter Soldier
Hearings, a tribunal organized by the advocacy coalition, Iraq Veterans Against the War. The
hearing‟s intention was to provide a forum for memory that would expose and discuss the
atrocities and injustices of the war. From March 13 to March 16, 2008, 200 American soldiers,
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and Afghan and Iraqi civilians convened to share eyewitness accounts of their wartime
experiences. Among the many chilling testimonies, 23 year-old Chris Arendt provided a
particularly striking account, especially in the context of Agamben‟s philosophy.xxiii
A soldier in
the 119th Field Artillery of the U.S. Army National Guard, Arendt was deployed to Guantánamo
as a prison guard in January 2004. Leading up to the time of deployment, Arendt offers a
powerful reflection on his training experience:
In our mobilization process, which lasted the period of one month in Fort Dixon, New Jersey, we were taught how to put shackles on other people. I remember: it feels so ridiculous when you are practicing how to put shackles on another human being. You realize how absurd it is. You are putting them on somebody's hands and it's just awkward. It's just an awkward thing. And it hurts, it's uncomfortable, it feels dehumanizing. This is just practice. This is just to warm up for the big game. It just felt so silly. The whole thing.
xxiv
Arendt‟s account captures the acute discomfort with “practicing,” or rehearsing the techniques of
securing incriminated subjects who would be detained at Guantánamo. Practicing for the „real‟
moment of disciplinary force is from where, to some degree, Arendt‟s embarrassment stems. He
cannot help but feel that rather than being a loyal adherent of military orders, he is the violator of
some deeper, unwritten code of human dignity. This aversion, though, allows Arendt to reflect
critically on his role in the perpetration of sovereign command, and, as his account progresses,
serves as the defining experience that would later prompt him to censure the dehumanizing
interrogative tactics he observed in the prison.
Arendt‟s poignant testimony also provides a rare glance into the confidential torture
procedures implemented by Guantánamo functionaries. “An interrogation room,” recalls Arendt,
“[. . .] was anywhere from maybe 10, 20 degrees in temperature, with loud music playing, and
that detainee had been there for an indeterminate amount of time.” Continuing, he discloses:
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“[. . .] sometimes detainees would stay there for my entire 12 to 14 hour shifts. Shackled to the
floor by his hands and his feet. With nothing to sit on. With loud music playing in the freezing
cold.” Incarcerated in this hellish cube of deafening music and bone-chilling temperatures, the
isolated detainees experience the pains of both physical and psychological anguish. Deep in
recollection, Arendt concludes: “[. . .] and I guess that's torture too.”
Additionally, Arendt‟s account expresses a nagging frustration with the bureaucratic
rhetoric White House and military advisors employ to parry external opposition to the treatment
of inmates. As Arendt points out, the term serving as the axis of this rhetorical conundrum is
“detainee”:
The usage of the term “detainee,” as we were told when we were deployed, had to
be “detainee.” It had to be “detainee.” If it‟s “prisoner,” then they would have to
be prisoners of war, and they‟re subject to entirely different laws. If they‟re
detainees, then they are subject to no law whatsoever, because there aren‟t laws
for detainees.
Significantly, Arendt‟s semantic quarrel with military newspeak evokes the central role the bare
life figure currently plays in American political life; that is, a subject deprived of citizenry and
human rights outside jurisdiction and therefore expendable without consequence. In a similar
vein, Butler elaborates on the detainee‟s state of legal exception: “The state produces, through an
act of withdrawal, a law that is no law, a court that is no court, a process that is no process.”xxv
In
light of Agamben‟s thinking, says Butler, the political perils of this slippery term, „detainee,‟
produce “[. . .] rules that are not binding by virtue of established law or modes of legitimation,
but fully discretionary, even arbitrary, wielded by officials who interpret them unilaterally and
decide the condition and form of their invocation.”xxvi
Furthermore, Bush‟s disarticulation of
traditional judiciary rights empowers sovereignty to declare states of exception, leading to what
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Butler has aptly termed, “indefinite detention,” namely an “illegitimate exercise of power [. . .
that ] is part of a broader tactic to neutralize the rule of law in the name of security.”xxvii
In an
effort to quash any threats to national security, the American government has declared that
global „others‟ who have been officially „deemed‟ suspect terrorists are an exception to
international law.
Kafka and the War on Terror’s Bare Life Figure
Bruises, cuts and wounds serve as recurring motifs in Kafka‟s fiction. Often depicting the
human body moments before (or after) undergoing some excruciating torture, his narratives push
the body up against the horizon of transmogrification and death. For Kafka, occasions of
corporeal pain are typically expressed in narratives focused on punitive law exercised by an
anonymous, omnipotent bureaucracy. Such moments, however, reveal that Kafka refuses to see
law as merely a heap of codified norms and practices; rather, at the center of this preoccupation
is the human body as it experiences law as a discursive force in social life. Figuring prominently
in the stories, “In the Penal Colony” and “The Judgement,” the body is not simply the subject of
sovereign law, but the site, or tabula rasa whereupon sovereignty is performed, experienced and,
ultimately, (literally) inscribed. On this reading of Kafka, the mysterious apparatus of sovereign
law opens up a space wherein the bare life figure emerges, throwing light on contemporary
discourses of political illegitimacy, exclusion and extralegal death.
The first parable that traces iterations of the bare life figure is “The Judgment” (1912), a
narrative interrogating the complex dynamics of a family feud that results in condemnation and
tragedy. In the context of Guantánamo, Kafka depicts a condemnation of human life without a
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trial, or any semblance of legal context; thus, the critical point of departure for this parable is
understanding the paternal voice as it functions as a kind of domestic sovereign. Exercising an
immense discursive power, the paternal figure‟s utterances supersede traditional legal judgement
and forcefully underscore the far-reaching consequences of senseless condemnation.
The story‟s linear plot introduces Georg Bendemann, a young merchant who has just
finished writing a letter to a distant friend in St. Petersburg, Russia, announcing his recent
engagement to a “well-to-do” woman, Frieda Brandenfeld. Georg decides to apprise the news of
the letter to his aging father.xxviii
The narrator mentions that Georg had several reservations that
made him balk from composing the letter sooner. First, Georg is now the proprietor of a
successful business, while his friend‟s “[. . .] flourished to begin with but had long been going
downhill [. . .];” he has not seen this anonymous friend in three years, and recalls that he
appeared to be suffering from jaundice, or some “latent disease” during his last visit. Since his
friend‟s last visit, Georg‟s mother died and he and his father have since “shared the household
together.” Sensitive to his friend‟s hapless situation abroad, Georg hesitated in previous letters to
disclose the details of his engagement and prospering business, therefore filling the letters with
inconsequential gossip: “What could one write to such a man, who had obviously run off the
rails, a man one could be sorry for but could not help.”xxix
The salient differences that have
spoiled the men‟s correspondence cast the friend as Georg‟s doppelgänger: the dour and sickly
man with pitiful prospects sharply contrasts Georg‟s success and nuptial happiness.
But telling his father about the letter provokes the old man to fulminate Georg for not
mourning his mother‟s death: “The death of our dear mother hit me harder than it did you.”xxx
In
the midst of his rage, Georg notes that his father has grown sickly and decrepit, and carries “his
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father to bed in his arms [. . .] tucked the blankets closely around him.” In another surge of rage,
his father throws “the blankets off with a strength that sent them all flying in a moment,” stands
and balances himself by “one hand lightly touched the ceiling to steady” and calls Georg a
“devilish” son.xxxi
Georg‟s father reveals that he has maintained a surreptitious correspondence
with his friend: “Do you think I haven‟t been sorry for him? [. . .] But your friend hasn‟t been
betrayed after all! [. . .] I‟ve been representing him here in the spot.”xxxii
Criticizing Georg for
neglecting the needs of his friend, his father claims “[. . .] your friend is going to pieces in
Russia, even three years ago he was yellow enough to be thrown away, and as for me, you see
what condition I‟m in. You have eyes in your head for that!”xxxiii
The size and power of Georg‟s
father vacillates between feeble and forceful, from apparent dotage to cruel rage. In the final
moments of the parable, the father‟s castigations culminate in a condemnation to “death by
drowning.” Overpowered by the force of the paternal command, Georg “felt himself urged from
the room,” and, clutching the railings of the bridge, declares his love for his parents before
dropping to his apparent death, thus fulfilling the judgment.
This baffling scene of cruel paternal condemnation and filial suicide prompts several
questions concerning the father‟s role as „judge,‟ namely why does his father demand violence;
how does paternal judgement differ from institutionalized judgement; and does Georg‟s father
have the right to make an extralegal pronouncement of who must perish? Indeed, their highly
quarrelsome relationship exposes the powerful impact of judgement and its subsequent tragedy.
In light of Kafka‟s parable, Judith Butler interrogates discourses of condemnation as they
function in social life, particularly in the moments leading up to Georg‟s suicide. She states: “[. .
.] condemnation is very often an act that not only „gives up on‟ the one condemned but seeks to
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inflict a violence [. . .] Condemnation, denunciation, and excoriation work as quick ways to posit
an ontological difference between judge and judged, even to purge oneself of the other.”xxxiv
Butler appends: “Condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the other as
unrecognizable.”xxxv
Butler‟s seminal insights suggest that utterances of condemnation disavow
autonomy and deteriorate modes of social recognition that are necessary for preserving the other
in social life. Like the bare life figure who is slain outside the domain of law, Georg‟s fatal leap
occurs outside the zones of ritual sacrifice and murder. Moreover, the law cannot hold Georg‟s
cruel father accountable (for the paternal utterance demanding death cannot be crystallized as
evidence); nor does Georg‟s death satisfy any kind of religious ritual, for Georg executes the
paternal command through his own actions.
The paternal utterance allegorizes sovereignty and its authoritative power to declare
exclusion of the other. The discursive thrust of sovereign judgement is captured at its height
when Georg “[. . .] felt himself urged from the room [. . .] rushed down the steps [. . . like] an
inclined plane, [. . .] Out the front door he rushed, across the roadway, driven toward the
water.”xxxvi
What force seizes Georg and propels him to fulfill his father‟s demand? Under the
spell of paternal command, Georg must fulfill the judgement of self-execution, for there is no
possibility for dissent that would exempt him from doing so. From Butler‟s point of view,
utterances of condemnation extricate the judge from the life of the „judged‟ other, one which
essentially serves to vanquish the other in punishment and death. If we situate the paternal
figure‟s demand for death within the context of Guantánamo, we find that the persecutory
utterance serves only as a hasty remedy for harnessing political conflict and temporarily
restoring global order. The production of zones of indistinction and exclusion that give rise to the
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construction of bare life seems more likely to emerge if a government panics when confronted
with a violent catastrophe that threatens national security. Thus, we recognize the Bush
administration‟s swift condemnation of terrorist „subversives‟ following the calamitous events of
9/11, which also appears to have been underpinned by discourses of racial and religious
suspicion that incriminated certain Middle Eastern ethnicities.
In light of these converging concerns for condemnation and extralegal punishment,
Georg‟s suicide may be read as a cautionary tale on the perils of condemnation without and
outside legal context. That Georg‟s death will yield no accountability or remorse from his judge
(the paternal figure) points to the senselessness of condemnation, for its extralegal articulations
abandon all responsibility for the life of the other. Moreover, Kafka suggests that human society
should abhor the senseless execution of an order without considering the full implications of its
utterance (e.g. death, unjust imprisonment). This is reinforced by Hannah Arendt‟s post-Shoah
maxim expressed in her The Human Condition (1958): “What I propose, therefore, is very
simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”xxxvii
The second parable that interrogates the power dynamics between sovereign power and
the bare life figure is “In the Penal Colony.” Kafka‟s nightmarish narrative details the encounter
of four men at the center of which stands a mysterious torture apparatus known as “the Harrow.”
Four anonymous characters populate the narrative and are identified based on their function: The
Explorer, the Officer, the Condemned and the Soldier. The Explorer is the parable‟s central
figure and he encounters the strange machine, it appears, by mistake. The action occurs in a
“small sandy valley, a deep hollow surrounded on all sides by naked crags.”xxxviii
The officer
expresses his admiration for the machine to the explorer: “It‟s a remarkable piece of apparatus.”
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The officer continues to provide for the explorer a detailed analysis of the Harrow‟s mechanical
function: “This apparatus [. . .] was invented by our former Commandant. [. . .] Whatever
commandment the prisoner has disobeyed,‟” continues the officer, “is written upon his body by
the Harrow.”xxxix
Once the subject is strapped down, the apparatus carries out the execution by
inscribing the victim‟s sentence into his or her skin: “As it quivers, its points pierce the skin of
the body which is itself quivering from the vibration of the Bed. The long needle does the
writing, and the short needle sprays a jet of water to wash away the blood and keep the
inscription clear.”xl
For twelve hours, explains the officer, the Harrow “keeps on writing deeper
and deeper,” until the condemned subject can “decipher the script” not with his eyes, but “with
his wounds.”
But the explorer is “indifferent” to the officer‟s explanations and focuses rather on the
condemned man he describes as a “submissive dog,” “a stupid-looking wide-mouthed creature
with bewildered hair [. . .]” who is shackled in chains. The explorer finds that the man is
condemned to execution for a petty infraction: as a result of falling asleep while on duty, he has
quarreled with his captain. The officer provides a feeble excuse for the severe punishment: “If I
had first called the man before me and interrogated him, things would have got into a confused
tangle. He would have told lies [. . .].” As such, continues the officer, “this prisoner [. . .] will
have written on his body: HONOR THY SUPERIORS!‟”xli
The explorer is surprised to find that the
condemned man remains unaware of his crime and the fatal punishment he will momentarily
encounter. He questions the officer, “He doesn‟t know the sentence passed on him?‟ [. . .] „No,‟
said the officer. [. . .] „There would be no point in telling him. He‟ll learn it upon his body.‟”xlii
Indeed, nor does the condemned man know “whether his defense was effective,” for he was
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deprived of a fair trial. The explorer at once realizes the injustice of the proceeding and
challenges the officer: “But he must have had some chance in defending himself.”xliii
According
to the officer, only after the machine‟s many vibrating needles have finished the inscription will
the condemned man finally know his transgression. Crucially, the “Old Commandment” has
been superseded by a new democratic Commandment. This recent political transition is implied
by the officer‟s commentary:
For I was the former Commandant‟s assistant. [. . .] My guiding principal is this:
Guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle, for they
consist of several opinions and have higher courts to scrutinize them. That is not
the case here, or at least, it was not the case in the former Commandant‟s
time.xliv
(emphasis mine)
According to the officer, the old Commandant instated a justice system that immediately
punished the accused subject without a fair trial. “Never to be doubted,” guilt as it was
understood in former jurisprudence was never questioned or challenged: once the accusation had
been uttered, the accused -- whether or not guilty -- would suffer the legal consequences.
Referring back to Agamben, the sovereign‟s imposition of guilt is one of the essential
components of bare life, for the figure is then expelled from the legal realm without the chance to
appeal to a court of law. But for the old Commandant‟s regime, there appears to have been no
demarcation of the legal and extralegal sphere because „guilt‟ served as the defining principle of
all punitive measures. To be clear, it is not the apparatus itself that produces states of bare life,
but the ideology of infallible guilt that has abolished legal intelligibility, which turns the accused
subjects over to fatal inscription.
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Sharply contrasting the old regime‟s unbridled power to punish subjects based alone on
guilt, the officer‟s reference to “other courts” alludes to the democratic courts of law that have
superseded the old Commandant‟s system. In the current system, the accused, guided by
democratic court proceedings, may defend him or herself.
What brings these two parables together is how discourses of guilt are activated by a
sovereign, or authoritative power to effect the punishment and even death of its subjects. Just as
Georg remains defenseless (voiceless) against the cruel pronouncements of his tyrannical father,
the condemned man has no opportunity to challenge the punitive methodologies of the old
regime. The glaring difference between Georg and the condemned man, however, is that the
former knows why his father has sentenced him to death, for when he fulfills the judgement his
father‟s condemnation “rings in his ears.” On the other hand, the condemned man must wait until
he can “learn it on his body,” that is, when he can trace the transgression that the machine has
inscribed upon his living flesh.xlv
Thus, the infallibility of guilt served as the animating force behind accusation,
punishment and penance in the old regime. The old Commandant‟s government practiced similar
disciplinary methods implemented in the Dark Ages, particularly the elimination of the trial by
ordeal in thirteenth-century Latin Christendom. According to Lepore, we can trace similar
regressions to medieval jurisdiction in Guantánamo: “The Church‟s sanction for trial by ordeal
was withdrawn in 1215, by order of the Fourth Lateran Council,” and the likeness of those
proceedings have been, in a sense, resuscitated by American officials who are “interrogating
suspected terrorists [and are] not answerable to any rules, except those made, ad hoc, by the
Bush Administration.”xlvi
The officer, then, is not only the lone, fanatic caretaker of the antique
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torture device, but an impassioned proponent of the outlawed ideology that the machine
represents.
Interestingly, the officer interrupts his tour and appeals to the explorer to undertake the
future preservation and implementation of the apparatus:
I am its sole advocate, and at the same time the advocate of the old
Commandant‟s tradition. I can no longer reckon on any further extension
of the method, it takes all my energy to maintain it as it is. [. . .] And now I
ask you: [. . .] is such a piece of work, the work of a lifetime [. . .] to perish?
Even if one has come as a stranger to our island for a few days? [. . .] Do
you realize the shame of it? But there‟s no time to lose [. . .]xlvii
The machine itself exercises a considerable power over its loyal mechanic, for it is both a
demanding piece of equipment requiring laborious maintenance and a painful madeleine of the
past. The officer‟s pleas transition into a nostalgic lament for the old regime and the apparatus‟
central role in the ritual public executions:
How different an execution was in the old days! A whole day before the
ceremony the valley was packed with people [. . .] this pile of cane chairs is
a miserable survival from that epoch [. . .] The machine was freshly
cleaned and glittering. [. . .] What times these were, my comrade!xlviii
The officer bemoans a bygone age when public spectacles of execution rallied the empire‟s
people together to marvel and celebrate punishment; these public spectacles also apotheosized
the elaborate machinery that perpetrated the torture and ultimate death of the state‟s victims.
“Cleaned and glittering,” the machine symbolized the paragon of technological achievement that,
in turn, enabled thousands of spectators to undergo a kind of spiritual experience: “Many did not
care to watch [the execution] but lay with closed eyes in the sand; they all knew: Now Justice is
being done. [. . .] How we all absorbed the look of transfiguration on the face of the sufferer,
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how we bathed in the cheeks in the radiance of that justice [. . .].”xlix
After listening to the
officer‟s emotive pleas, the explorer said “No,” declining his request to assist in the reinstallation
of the torture apparatus.
Here, it is worth pausing to speculate where former Guantánamo Bay prison guard, Chris
Arendt, may fit in the trajectory of Kafka‟s story. Based on his participation in the 2008 Winter
Soldier Hearings, Chris Arendt‟s testimony reflects similar objections to those Kafka‟s explorer
raises in the final moments of the parable. Explaining his refusal to sustain the tradition of the
apparatus, the explorer says: “I do not approve of your procedure. [. . .] I was already wondering
whether it would be my duty to intervene and whether my intervention would have the slightest
chance of success. I realized to whom I ought to turn: to the Commandant.”l Like Chris Arendt,
the explorer assumes the responsibility to expose the inner workings of an unjust politico-legal
system. The unjust condition of the condemned man that compels the explorer to notify the new
Commandment reflects Chris Arendt‟s decision to publicly expose the corruption of
Guantánamo Bay:
Because [Guantánamo inmates] are called “detainees” they don‟t get trials,
there is no pending code for how they‟re treated. It‟s semantics, and we need to
pay attention. They are important. It‟s the difference between calling
something “a detention facility” and “a concentration camp.” Even if they are
the same thing.li The explorer and Chris Arendt share a similar cause in
testifying against political systems that judge and condemn human life outside
the framework of democratic legal proceedings.
Like Guantánamo, it is especially symbolic that the officer maintains the apparatus at the
fringes of the new Commandment‟s empire. We know, however, that this location is not
necessarily outside the Commandant‟s jurisdiction because it once served as the public grounds
for the historic executions. Although the new Commandant has outlawed the machine, the officer
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inhabits a remote valley where he may continue working on the apparatus surreptitiously. As a
space of exclusion, the penal colony resembles Guantánamo as it exists at the outermost
boundaries of law. After the explorer refuses to join in the effort to reinstate the apparatus, the
officer orders the release of the condemned man. In the one decisive gesture, the officer resolves
to turn his own body over to the elegant, but fatal calligraphy of the harrow, which will inscribe:
“BE JUST!” The explorer does not intervene, hoping the death of the apparatus‟ last devotee will
obliterate the entire enterprise: “If the judicial procedure which the officer cherished were really
so near its end -- possibly as a result of his own intervention, so as to which he himself felt
pledged - then the officer was doing the right thing [. . .].”lii
Early in the narrative, the officer has
several premonitions of mechanical malfunction: “Things sometimes go wrong, of course; I hope
that nothing goes wrong today [. . .].”liii
Within moments, the apparatus begins to fall apart: “The
Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the bed” brought the body up “against the
quivering needles.” Soon, “blood was flowing in a hundred streams” and “through the forehead
went the point of the great iron spike.”liv
In a rather hopeful ending, the officer‟s death suggests
that similar unstable judicial systems cannot be sustained; eventually the system will undermine
itself, falter, and collapse into a heap of “tumbling cogs.”
In the concluding section of the story, the explorer visits a teahouse where he studies the
obscure crypt of the once powerful sovereign known as the “last Commander.” The soldier
informs him that “the old man‟s buried here [. . . because] the priest wouldn‟t let him lie in the
churchyard.”lv
That the former sovereign was banished from the churchyard suggests he was the
perpetrator of unfathomable crimes. The puzzling inscription on the tombstone reads: “There is a
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prophecy that after a certain number of years, the [old] Commander will rise again and lead his
adherents from this house to recover the colony. Have faith and wait!”lvi
The fine print functions
as a kind of sovereign command, or voice that has survived the old Commandment. Its
threatening Messianic message seems to promise not everlasting life and justice, but the return of
despotism and a ruthless jurisprudence. In the final moment, the explorer prepares to leave by
boat and threatens the soldier and condemned man with a “heavy knotted rope” to prevent them
from boarding. We might read this last violent gesture as the explorer‟s desperate effort to
contain these outmoded judicial ideologies in an obscure corner of the globe where they cannot
reach his own civilization.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this essay has illuminated several connections between Agamben‟s
philosophy and Kafka‟s fiction in an effort to interrogate contemporary military institutions and
sovereign power. While the condemned man of the “Penal Colony” escapes death, Georg fulfills
the paternal command of self-execution. In the context of Agamben‟s philosophy, both parables
articulate an awareness of the dangers of a sovereign power that operates outside the legal
context, and, whether sovereignty is represented by a paternal voice or the judicial traditions of a
nearly forgotten age, Kafka is attuned to its presence in the public and legal sphere. Despite the
tragedy of “The Judgement,” “In the Penal Colony” leaves readers with the hope that a more
humane, just civilization is on the horizon.
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1998. Print.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Ed. Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago,
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Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.
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of Commerce. The White House, Washington, D.C. 17 May 2013. Http:// georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011114-6.html. Office of the Press
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Chiles, Nick. “Obama Says He Agrees With Hunger Strikers at Guantanamo Bay.” Atlanta Black
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Corera, Gordon. “Guantanamo Inmates Languish.” BBC News. BBC, 23 Aug. 2003. Web. 5 May
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Fisher, Max. “Why Hasn't Obama Closed Guantanamo Bay?” Washington Post (blog). N.p., 30
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System. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print.
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Lepore, Jill. “The Dark Ages: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Law of Torment.” The New
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Endnotes
i Gordon Corera, “Guantanamo inmates languish,” (BBC News: BBC, 23 Aug. 2003) Web.
ii Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (California: University of Stanford Press, 1998).
iii See Chapter 3, “Indefinite Detention,” of Judith Butler‟s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(New York: Verso, 2004), 50-100. iv Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).
v Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (trans. R. Hurley; New York: Vintage
Books, 1978), 140. vi Agamben, 71.
vii Agamben Homo Sacer, 72.
viii Ibid 7.
ix Amy Meverden, “Daughter Zion as Homo Sacer: The Relationship of Exile, Lamentations, and Giorgio
Agamben‟s Bare Life Figure from Interpreting Exile (Eds. Brad E. Kelle, et al. Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2011), 395-407. x Agamben, 6.
xi Agamben State of Exception (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008), 1.
xii Meverden, 399.
xiii Agamben, 15
xiv Meverden, 400.
xv Agamben Homo Sacer, 83.
xvi Jill Lepore, “The Dark Ages: Terrorism, counterterrorism, and the law of torment.” (The New Yorker. 18 March
2013), 28-32. xvii
Lepore, 29. xviii
Ibid 30. xix
Dick Cheney, “Vice President Addresses U.S. Chamber of Commerce Address.” (U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
The White House, Washington, D.C. 17 May 2013). Office of the Press Secretary, 11 Nov. 2001. Print. xx
Jonathan M. Hansen, Guantánamo: An American History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011). xxi
Lepore, 29. xxii
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 523-552. xxiii
Due to the limited space and scope of this current paper, I will only discuss Chris Arendt‟s testimony. xxiv
All references to Chris Arendt‟s Winter Soldier Hearing testimony can be found in the digital archives at the
Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (UC Davis), The Guantánamo Testimonials Project.
<http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimonies-of-military-
guards>. xxv
Butler Precarious Life, 61-62. xxvi
Ibid 62. xxvii
Ibid 67. xxviii
All references from Franz Kafka‟s “The Judgement” can be found in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony
and Other Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) 49-63. xxix
Kafka, 50.
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xxx
Ibid 60. xxxi
Ibid 59. xxxii
Ibid 60. xxxiii
Ibid 62. xxxiv
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 46. xxxv
Ibid 46. xxxvi
Kafka, 63. xxxvii
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago,1998), 5. xxxviii
All references from Franz Kafka‟s “In the Penal Colony” can be found in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal
Colony and Other Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) 191-227. xxxix
Kafka 197. xl
Ibid 200. xli
Ibid 197. xlii
Ibid 197. xliii Ibid 198. xliv
Ibid 198. xlv
Ibid 197. xlvi
Lepore, 30. xlvii
Kafka 210. xlviii
Ibid 208. xlix
Ibid 209. l Ibid 217.
li Ibid Chris Arendt‟s Winter Soldier Hearing, 2008.
lii Ibid, Winter Soldier Hearing.
liii Ibid 192.
liv Ibid 224.
lv Ibid 225.
lvi Ibid 226.