The opening scene to Orson Welles’ 1962 film adaptation of The Trial
Kafka’s parable Before the Law is about a man from the country who comes to the city to gain entrance to the law but he is denied entry by various gatekeepers that keep watch over the entrance. The man is told in a rather passive aggressive way that ‘it is possible’ that he might enter but ‘not at the moment’. This denial and rejection goes on for his entire life. At one point he is invited to look in past the entrance to the gate and what he sees captivates him enough to continue to try.
The gatekeepers reject the man but they have no clear reason for their rejection other than a seemingly blind adherence to the other gatekeepers. We can thus envision the gate to the inside of the law as a snake encircling the city, similar to the image of Nietzsche’s eternal return of the snake eating its own tail. Around the body of this snake are littered gatekeepers who themselves are unaware of their own pecking order; the gatekeepers are aligned in a horizontal relationship to the law. The gatekeepers are siblings to one another, they are not regimented in a clear ranking. The gatekeepers are pre-Oedipal. They have not become to a point that they know how to challenge the law themselves. All they do is uphold it. At one point in the parable the gatekeeper confesses to the man that he does not know exactly why he is preventing his entrance.
The gatekeepers are following orders and they are obedient in doing so, but like the man who wants entrance to the law, they know nothing. “That’s above my pay grade” is the mantra of the gatekeepers. The parable is about what happens when power does not possess reason for its maintenance. All of the gatekeepers are not empowered. They operate on an insidious and perverse idea of equality before the law. Perhaps they have been granted access to the law at one point but they are now forced to prevent others access. This is why the gatekeeper wishes the man good luck at one point and he does not suggest to the man to give up. The gatekeeper thus keeps the desire for the law in circulation. The philosophy of the gatekeepers is bound up with possibility, with becoming. One could see rather clearly that what makes the man a tragic figure and not a heroic one is based in the fact that he does not give it all up and go back home. So persistent is the man’s desire for the law that he waits his entire life to possibly get a change of heart from the gatekeeper. The maddening fact is that no one knows where any change or approval would come from.
The gatekeepers keep the subject tethered to a desire for the law. They reveal the tyranny of the possible. We must ask, how does the man not grow bored waiting? If boredom is what—as Heidegger argued—makes us riveted to all things that are present but in a way that we refuse their totality, it is boredom that makes our desire purged of an object. The man does not seem to get bored because the law (as object) has governed his desire, it has crippled his desire under the pretense of a possibility that never becomes activated. In a Heideggerian sense, the man does not ever become man not because he does not gain entry to the law but rather because the man never experiences what Heidegger calls “the open.” To put it in a more general albeit precise way: if the law functions on potentiality as the basis of subjective becoming, the tragedy of the parable, and hence of the man’s entire life is that he never experiences the possibility of potentiality itself. Ask yourself this: why does the man not feel shame upon being rejected? Or what about boredom? If he were to feel these affects they would reveal the hollowness of the law as such, and importantly, it is these affects that the gatekeepers prevent the man from experiencing.
Kafka is melodramatic in the parable. It can and often does go much worse. Many gatekeepers are sado-masochsits for the law; they relish in the shame and failure of those that seek entry; for those that challenge them and the very status of the law, who do not desire the law and who are disobedient to it; they have nothing but contempt. The problem with the gatekeepers is that they act as if they don’t know why they act for the law. It’s true that they are lost in its spiral of horizontal power relations to other gatekeepers. This is why so much has been written on the origins of the law, the gatekeepers have lost any sense of causality regarding the origin of their chain of command. Derrida says there is a non-event at the origin of the law.
Today, in times when the law has grown undesirable to those not granted immediate access to it by virtue of their class or proximity to the law at birth, the gatekeepers become perverts for the law. Today it would be more accurate to revise Kafka’s parable and make it about how the man journeys to the city where the law resides finds that he is being fucked with and decides to go back home. Or what if instead the man finally realizes that the law is embodied in the gatekeeper themselves despite the fact that they disavow any power? That disavowal is the truth of the power is it not. To realize this is to realize that the law is in the gatekeeper and therefore it is the gatekeeper that needs to be sublated. And this realization means that the gatekeepers are a class that is superfluous.
The gatekeeper is the OG petty bourgeois. Their function is to eliminate the possibility of direct confrontation with the law. Many of them are perverts and at times some of them will be cruel and sado-masochistic, but not all of them. For if all of them were that way no order or policing could transpire at all. There must be a few good cops. It will not bother an other gatekeeper if a given gatekeeper happens to be cruel to those that want access to the law. The other gatekeepers will laugh at this. Gatekeepers relish in humiliation. All they must do is what they are required to do: prevent access. Should they not know this and do it anyways, all the better from the standpoint of the law. But gatekeepers are cunning, for they are trained by the law to keep those that are curious, or that question the law in a state of impossibility; their answer is never yes or no, it is maybe. The best gatekeepers do not even acknowledge that they are gatekeeping for the best ones have turned gatekeeping into the universal class function, the new middle strata. The success of the gatekeepers is the erasure of the legibility of class itself. The gatekeeper has internalized the belief that to be bound to the law is “incomparably better than living freely in the world.”
Derrida makes it clear that the law’s greatest prohibition is that of not facing itself. This is why gatekeepers block and even ridicule those they deem outside the law, but they do so without clarifying what they have accused them of. This is because all that is needed is the accusation, that is enough. Derrida clings to a naive idea that we can discover the origin of the law as if discovering it would put an end to the bottomed out master slave dialectic the gatekeepers act out. The truth is the gatekeepers are paralyzed before the law, they are lost in its bureaucratic stranglehold, and what they aim to control is desire itself. They control the desire for an object that represses them and anyone that would challenge the law. The gatekeepers can keep your desire in restless agitation for an eternity, and there is nothing they love more than the eternal return of the same.