... this blog is an ongoing investigation into modes of suspension that started as a research project in Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College in 2011 ...

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Form-of-Law (on potentiality #2)

A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through a doorway. The doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that is possible. The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it." ("Before the Law" by Kafka)

Nothing - and certainly not the refusal of the doorkeeper - prevents the man from passing through the door of the Law if not the fact that this door is already open and that the Law prescribes nothing. "The Law", Derrida writes, "keeps itself without keeping itself, kept by a doorkeeper who keeps nothing, the door remaining open and open onto nothing." The power of Law lies precisely where one already is. How can we open if the door is already open? The already open immobilises. It includes in excluding, and excludes in including.

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