Husserl, the Differend and Kafka's the Trial

Abstract

Kafka’s The Trial is remarkable, amongst other reasons, for the description of the dissolution of K’s confused and painful life-world.1 Not unlike Elaine Scarry’s account of the phenomenon of torture in The Body in Pain,2 K slowly loses his familiar language through which he speaks and writes in his daily social relations with others. K still speaks the words which represent the concepts with which he is familiar. And yet, his relationships with others become monologic. There seems to be no other who, unlike in his past private and professional life, can respond to his words in a manner with which K can understand. The others do respond. But they respond by emplanting meanings into K’s words, meanings which only possess value within the discourses of self-styled legal experts and officials who act in K’s name. The experts and officials take their own meanings as authoritative. K fails to gain access to their meanings. The question, posed by Husserl’s phenomenology of language, is “why?”.