The Foreignness of Power: Alterity and Subversion in Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and Beyond

When is power foreign? Is it only so in colonies, penal or otherwise, or is it always somehow the case? Do we accept authority more readily when its foundations evade our comprehension, when something other than reason encourages us to submit? And if, indeed, it is the Law's startling senselessness that compels us to accept official meanings, does not this dimension also open the way to unexpected appropriations? The failure of sense may well lead to the making of sense--and yet, could this failure not provide a point of convergence that would lead not to subjection but to the reproduction of alternative social worlds?

Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" invites such speculation. A traveler, an explorer from a distant land, visits a penal colony where he is invited to witness an execution. The officer in charge of the maintenance and enforcement of judicial matters shows him the lethal apparatus, which inscribes the violated commandment on the condemned man's flesh. A soldier, the only other person in attendance, straps the condemned man to the apparatus. The execution is about to begin, when the condemned man vomits, sickened perhaps by the sweets fed to him by the new commander's ladies, perhaps by the repulsive felt stump placed in his mouth to prevent him from screaming. The mishap drives the officer to a tirade in which he begs the traveler to help him defend this system of justice. The traveler refuses; although he is touched by the officer's devotion, he finds the procedure inhumane; if anything, the officer's appeal persuades him that he has the influence to intervene. The traveler's unwillingness to defend the apparatus compels the officer to make a fateful decision. Having freed the prisoner and readjusted the machine to inscribe his own judgment--"Be just"--the officer removes his clothing; the condemned man and the soldier strap him down; and the machine silently starts working. But then, quite literally, things fall apart, and the exquisite torture the officer desired is reduced to "full-blown murder." ¹ After burying the officer and visiting the Old Commandant's grave, the traveler leaves.

The story suggests--even insists upon--the foreign character of power. Agents of justice are recognized as possessing qualities that place them at a remove from local politics, from the realm of comprehensible meanings, from conscious thought, from life itself. Take the protagonist, "a great researcher of Western Civilization" (at least to some) whose refusal to endorse the officer's position leads directly to the latter's self-righteous self-condemnation. He is a foreigner of a classically anthropological, even imperial sort: he visits, he observes, he refrains from intervening. Assuming neutrality gives him all the more authority to transform local practices. He is not unlike the high colonial reformers of the period, who stood in judgment of the humanity of native customs that their predecessors had preserved or, more commonly, invented. ² Even the most soft-spoken commentary will provide ammunition for those who wish to defend the traditional system or consign it to the past.

Then there is the system itself and the apparatus that instantiates it, the work of the dead commander. Where the traveler is foreign in relation to the penal colony as a whole, the judicial system is foreign in relation to the condemned. The condemned man has not had a chance to defend himself; he does not even know that he has been accused. The officer explains the procedure in French, a language the condemned man "presumably" does not understand ("IPC" 194). An encounter with a foreign tongue always foregrounds the problematically material character of social discourse--the qualities that make language something more (and less) than a vehicle for communicating ideas. The apparatus that is used to carry out the sentence also brings these material qualities to the fore. The...