Ignorance serves therefore as my starting point in the interpretation of "Before the Law" proposed in the following study. And from this position the text inspires us infinitely. In discussing ‘In the Cathedral’, the penultimate chapter of The Trial by Franz Kafka, the paper develops three central aspects of Kafka’s text: reflexivity as a form of entanglement with. Before this text, we find ourselves, exactly like the story’s protagonist, the countryman, the Mann vom Lande: ignorant. This paper presents a close encounter between the literary works of Franz Kafka and a core topic in organizational theories of power, namely the participation of subjects in their own subjectification. Before this text, as before the law, we find ourselves equally exposed, equally empty, without resources.
Equally impotent before this text, the first reading equals the last reading, because strictly speaking there is no first and no last here.
But before this text, do we not always already come too late? Has not the doorkeeper always already shut the door? The moment one realizes there is nothing to add to this text might be the very moment one realizes that, from the start, this text, though soliciting interpretation, in fact defies interpretation. Perhaps the gates of interpretation are henceforth sealed. One might skeptically wonder at the discovery of yet another interpretation of “Before the Law”: “What more can be added?” he asks himself. A mystery which we know everything depends upon.
Has everything not already been said, been written, been thought, about this text? Like a detective, the commentator searches for the key that will once and for all resolve the enigma, unveil the mystery that hides so secretively within its depths. “Before the Law” (“Vor dem Gesetz”) is one of the most if not the single most commented upon of Kafka’s texts : “Helplessness seizes one face to face with this page and a half,” notes George Steiner.
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