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this is the archive of a discussion on the franz kafka discussion list. one person posted questions about the story (message 1), some else replied (message 2), and then went back and forth for a fewmore messages. this is the chronological account of their dialoge (just follow the "next" and "previous" buttons to navigate), and the messages have not been edited or altered in any way. on a similar note, though, because of this discussion, i wrote my own interpretation of "before the law". check it out if you like.
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I don't intend to make of the word "there" a problem. I can forsake it, if it turns out to complicate more what is already difficult. My question, as I think it is yours, is how can we interpret the image of the "Law" in the parable, and its "unattainability". But before giving it up, since apparently it is not revealing itself as a means to help us understanding each other and understanding what we both try to understand, I'll give some more paraphrases:
1) What is being "there"? A chair is there, when I use it to sit, or when I just see it. I am not going to make the full list of things, objects, which are, like chairs, there, in the world I usually live in.
2) I, myself, tend to understand myself as beeing merely there, as everything and everybody I see around me. To be there, for me, is to function, to be absorbed in what I have to do here and now, to be practical. Is to be in the world, where we all are, me and you.
3) The totality of what is there, in turn, is not there.
4) The oppsoite of being there is... being not there. The diffrence is one of ontological level, a diffrence in the "scale" of being.
5) That by which one comes into existence is not there, as that that comes into existence. The Law, just to give it a name - is not there.
6) If the totality of what exists becomes in itself a problem, if each and all the things usually merely there become enigmatic, the Law, just to give it a name, manifests itself in its absence. Things "come out of joints".
7) I, myself, become The Problem. I am nowhere.
8) The time is come for the "reversal of all values". Or for the leap. Or for staying sat down on a stool, just peering into the Law, always outside it, always there, taking the Law to be merely there, as the stool on which one sits, waiting for permission to go in.
I think that you will agree with me that, if the way into the Law was the one the man from the countryside was assuming it to be, it would be senseless to follow the indication given by that assumption, since he would never reach the end. The entrance was there, but not the Law. The Law was not there.
As for the "works" I have in mind when I use the word "there" I could indicate those of Martin Heidegger. But I am not sure that I am using it in the same way he uses it, in "Being and Time", and I don't think either that it is very important. I can drop the word, if it is only noise.
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