In the Law’s Hands: S/M Pleasure in The Trial, a Queer Reading (original) (raw)

Abstract

"Franz Kafka is famous as an author of bureaucratic oppression and human hopelessness. However, it is possible to read his work in another way. This essay makes the argument for reading Kafka’s best-known work, Der Proceß (The Trial), as a text about pleasure: albeit not a conventionally “pleasurable” pleasure. In particular it highlights the tactile experiences that Kafka’s protagonist Josef K. enjoys in the novel, part of an odd encounter in which K. seems to be seduced into bringing about his own downfall at the hands of Kafka’s mysterious court. Hands have a special role in this counterintuitive dynamic, working as they do between poles of sovereign self-possession and powerlessness. In the text hands make incomprehensible gestures; they are clothed in tight gloves and enticing excesses of skin; they also caress K. even as they punish him, giving rise thereby to sadomasochistic pleasures, especially between K. and Kafka’s other masculine characters. Drawing on psychoanalytic and queer theories, the essay sets out a critical framework to decipher the textual and fleshly complexities of K.’s case, and to consider the literary and material legacies of Kafka’s writing into the present day."

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