Abstract

This takes a little-known reading of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” by Lyotard as the starting point for an examination of the relation between body and law. Lyotard’s late notion of the intractable serves as a frame for this examination: explicitly claimed to be an absolute condition of morals, I argue it also has political implications, which are here drawn out through the link between the intractable and the body. In Lyotard’s later writings, the body is usually associated with an originary affectivity, which is sometimes equated with sexual difference but sometimes appears to come “before” and exceed this law of bodily differences. It is the latter case, I argue, that allows for a path to be opened beyond the bodily violence of the law to be found in Kafka, especially if this is framed in terms of a certain “politics of incommensurability.”