Stench of Law: How Law Makes Itself "Real" by Transfer of Material Properties (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Insurgent Imaginaries

Abstract

In Kafka’s the Trial, K., the hapless protagonist almost passes out when he enters what turns out to be a court of law. He is high up in the eaves of an attic in a hot room filled with people and the stench from the old wood, mildew and people almost knocks him out. He is told by someone that everyone has that reaction when they first come to a court of law but that he will get used to it in time. This idea that the courts have an intense sensory effect on us speaks to the ways that it conveys its authority more generally. The law itself, as Benjamin tells us, has no objectivity of its own. It must, in effect, borrow that objectivity from the material world and so the law’s own “reality” must be introduced to us via our senses. In becoming legal objects, actual material objects give off whatever sights, smells and sounds that they do but these become in service to “proving” the reality of the law itself. If the law has a strong stench, in the case of Kafka’s Trial, so much the better. The overwhelming aspect of its olfactory production becomes evidence of the way that the law itself is overwhelming and powerful. In this paper, I will examine this phenomenon, describing it as a form of transfer from the material to the ideological. This transfer is a complicated negotiation: it can never be so absolute that one loses the sense of the material (so that the proof of the law’s existence becomes itself an abstraction) nor can it be so ephemeral that the disguise of the transfer is too evident. At the end of the paper, I will discuss Mariátegui’s notion of material rights as a counterweight to the ephemerality of the law, suggesting that a different—and anarchist—relationship to materiality is both possible and deeply undermining to legal and liberal forms of epistemology.

Author

• James R. Martel, San Francisco State University