Existing outside of the law: Kafka's philosophy of law

Abstract

Variations of the idea that regardless of how bad things are in the world of man, man's tendency to protect himself by creating illusionary presentations about it is worse, exist in many places in Kafka's works. If the origin of the leading among the fatal illusions of the present is connected to the need for security, safe haven, protection - the same need that laid the foundation for the necessity to introduce laws and develop a legal system - then important pages of Kafka's literature can be read in light of a type of negative anthropology. Its premises seem as if to testify to the betrayed human urge to protect every individual via courts and laws. The author pays special attention to the question of what it means to be outside of the law, stressing that the man from the country who remains before the law metaphorically represents Jewish refugees from Galicia who remained before the gates of Prague in 1914.