Traces of Bare Life in Kafka’s Stories, Agamben’s … · Penal Colony” (1919).iv Drawing on...

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New Zealand Online Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Volume 1. Issue 2.

Traces of Bare Life in Kafka’s Stories, Agamben’s Homo

Sacer, and Guantánamo Bay

Sebastian C. Galbo

Dartmouth College

[email protected]

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,‟

mailto:[email protected]

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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

Galbo 19


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.

Galbo 20


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

Galbo 21


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,

Galbo 22


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

Galbo 23


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

Galbo 24


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.

Galbo 25


Work Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ.,

1998. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Ed. Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago,

1998. Print.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.

....................... Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.

Print.

Cheney, Dick. “Vice President Addresses U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” Address. U.S. Chamber

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

Secretary, 11 Nov. 2001. Web. 17 May 2013.

Chiles, Nick. “Obama Says He Agrees With Hunger Strikers at Guantanamo Bay.” Atlanta Black

Star. N.p., 1 May 2013. Web. 1 May 2013. <http://atlantablackstar.com/ 2013/05/01/

obama-says-he-supports-hunger-strikers-at-gitmo-will-try-again- to- close- it/>.

Corera, Gordon. “Guantanamo Inmates Languish.” BBC News. BBC, 23 Aug. 2003. Web. 5 May

2013. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3175501.stm>.

Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Print.

Fisher, Max. “Why Hasn't Obama Closed Guantanamo Bay?” Washington Post (blog). N.p., 30

Apr. 2013. Web. 1 May 2013. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ worldviews/

wp/ 2013/04/30/obama-just-gave-a-powerful-speech-about-the- need- to-close-

gitmo-so-why-hasnt-he/

Hafetz, Jonathan. Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America's New Global Detention

System. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print.

Hansen, Jonathan M. Guantánamo: An American History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Print.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories. New York: Schocken

Books, 1995. Print.

..................... Franz Kafka: The Writings and Diaries. London: Heinemann Octopus, 1976. Print.

http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/05/01/obama-says-he-supports-hunger-strikers-at-gitmo-will-try-again-to-close-it/

http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/05/01/obama-says-he-supports-hunger-strikers-at-gitmo-will-try-again-to-close-it/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3175501.stm

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Galbo 26


Lepore, Jill. “The Dark Ages: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Law of Torment.” The New

Yorker 18 Mar. 2013: 28-32. Print.

Scherer, Michael. "President Obama Sides With His Guantanamo Bay Protesters." Swampland

President Obama Sides With His Guantanamo Bay Protesters Comments. TIME

Magazine, 01 May 2013. Web. 01 May 2013. <http://swampland.time.com/

2013/05/01/ president-obama-sides-with-his-guantanamo-bay-protesters/>.

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.

http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/01/president-obama-sides-with-his-guantanamo-bay-protesters/



http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimonies-of-military-guards/testimony-of-chris-arendt/testimony-of-chris-arendt

http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimonies-of-military-guards/testimony-of-chris-arendt/testimony-of-chris-arendt

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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.

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