Abstract:

Kafka’s short story foregrounds an essential relationship between punishment and language: punishment presupposes language and the mediation of discursive meaning through pain. The story prompts the realization that justice, punishment, and painful inscription are interlinked to some degree by all philosophical theories of punishment, thus detracting from the humane and progressive guise they don (relative to traditional forms of punishment). Kafka’s fable thus embodies the disturbing recognition that even liberal theories of punishment are implicated in chilling forms of instrumentalization (whilst occluding this process). Kafka’s story informs our own understanding of justice by offering an uncanny caricature that ought to be confronted by any comprehensive theory of justice. Relating to the story as a literal enactment of the abstract structure of punishment exposes startling links between punishment and components such as ritual, technology, and the attribution of "humane" conduct to those who punish. More specifically, Kafka draws unsettling links between ritualistic aspects of punishment and communitarian bonding by reaffirmation of shared values. He also delicately touches on the role of technology within punishment by exposing how deploying technology as a part of punishment forms a mode of laudatory self-shaping.

Notes:

Cover Date: OCT 2006.Source Info: 55, 381-398. Language: Hebrew. Journal Announcement: 41-3. Subject: JUSTICE; PENAL COLONY; POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. Subject Person: KAFKA, FRANZ. Update Code: 20150211.