In Before the Law, a parable that Franz Kafka included in The Trial, a man from the country arrives at the gates of the Law, which are guarded by a fearsome keeper. The guardian keeps the man from entering, but it becomes clear that the doors are always wide open. The gates of the Law, like those of Avernus, are open night and day (0.8).

When the guardian steps aside, the peasant leans in to peer inside.

If you’re so drawn to it, go ahead and try to enter, even though I’ve forbidden it. But bear this in mind: I’m powerful. And I’m only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, however, stand doorkeepers each more powerful than the one before. The mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear.¹

Although the peasant thinks that the law should be for everyone, he doubts himself and does not cross the threshold of the open door. The guard gives him a stool and the man spends days and years waiting to be let in. Aged and already on the verge of death, with weakened eyes and ears, it occurs to him to ask the guardian:

"Everyone strives to reach the law,” says the man, “how does it happen, then, that in all these years no one bu me has requested admittance?"²

The guard replies that the open gate was only for him and now that he is about to die, it will be permanently closed. 

Regarding this parable the philosopher and politician Massimo Cacciari asks: 

How can we hope to ‘open’ if the door is already open? How can we hope to enter-the-open [entrare-l’aperto]? In the open, there is, things are there, one does not enter there […] We can enter only there where we can open. The already-open [il ghà-aperto] immobilizes. The man from the country cannot enter, because entering into what is already open is ontologically impossible.³

Just as that the peasant can not “enter” into the Law, in to that which is already open, we can not “get out” of the locus terribilis, for how could we leave a place where, by definition, we cannot “stay”? Both, the open door of the Law and the terrible place, are zones of indistinction between two states. The peasant of the parable and us remain paralyzed on a threshold. Our current locus terribilis is, in general terms, a variation of the Kafkaesque nightmare.

According to Giorgio Agamben, the open door that is only destined for the peasant, the entrance to the Law, “includes him in excluding him and excludes him in including him. And this is precisely the summit and the root of every law.”⁴ The law, according to Agamben, is first and foremost a state of exception, a perpetual threshold.

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1. Franz Kafka, The Trial, 215. ↩︎
2. Ibíd., 217. ↩︎
3. Massimo Cacciari, Icone della legge, 69. Quoted by Giorgio Agamben in Homo sacer. ↩︎
4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 12. ↩︎