33 “The Return of the East,” 484–492: “In late 1914 Selbstwehr carried a statement by the Relief Action Committee of the Jewish that said, ‘we implore everyone with human compassion to help.’ But by the time just half of the needed donations had been collected, the number of newcomers had doubled again, and the community had no choice but to report to the Bohemian governor that their funds were depleted. Shelley Frisch (Orlando Harcourt Inc, 2005), ch. See Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Metzler, 1993), for some of the details of its publishing history. I am indebted to Hartmut Binder’s “Vor Dem GesetzEinführung in Kafkas Welt (Stuttgart-Weimar: Verlag J.B. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 184.

Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,”, Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature, ed. Jacques Derrida, “Prejuges: Devant la Loi,” in Jacques Derrida et al., La faculté de juger, (Paris: Les editions de minuit, 1985), 87–139. Michael Muller (Stuttgart, Reclam: 2003), 146. Hansen-Love, Vor dem Gesetz, in Franz Kafka: Romane und Erzählungen, ed. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Īage A. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors.

It makes of the text a story of accidental exodus, where the inability to surmount an aporia or blockage generates the phantasmal quest for salvation and the law. To change the sense of Before the Law, to see it as a fable of failed exit rather than failed entrance puts at issue many of questions provoked by this text and the nature of the law that seems to be its obscure object. What if the “man from the country” of Kafka’s Before the Law was not so much seeking to enter the law as to leave the country? That he was an emigrant who did not succeed in becoming an immigrant, but through some accident, of birth, of timing, was held at the border? Such a change of interpretative orientation, from an entry to an exit narrative, might shake not only the understanding of Kafka’s Before the Law and its place in his authorship, but also many of the issues surrounding the relationship of philosophy, law, and literature raised and intensified by Derrida’s reading of this text.

Kafka's before the law