In The Trial Kafka presents two imaginary paintings that express the modern ideas of law and sovereignty to perfection. The first appears in the office of the lawyer K. meets through his uncle:

Since he had already grown accustomed to the darkness of the room, he could make out various details of the furnishings. He noticed in particular a large painting hanging to the right of the door and leaned forward to see it better. It showed a man in a judge’s robe; he was sitting on a throne, its golden highlights gleaming forth from the painting in several places. The strange thing was that this judge wasn’t sitting in calm dignity, but instead had his left arm braced against the back and arm of the chair, while his right arm was completely free, his hand alone clutching the arm of the chair, as if he were about to spring up any moment in a violent and perhaps wrathful outburst to say something decisive or even pass judgment. The defendant was probably to be thought of as at the foot of the stairs, the upper steps of which, covered with a yellow carpet, could be seen in the picture.¹

A sovereign who is ready to jump down from his throne, to lower himself to go into action is, in the end, a glorified executioner. And as Kafka well knew, “a single hangman could replace the whole court.” Giorgio Agamben addresses the relationship between the sovereign and the executioner by highlighting the interchangeability between violence and law (0.10). In this regard he offers as an example an encounter that took place in June 1418 in the streets of Paris when “the Duke of Burgundy had just entered the city as a conqueror at the head of his troops… he came across the executioner Coqueluche, who had been working very hard for him during those days. According to the story, the executioner, who was covered in blood, approached the sovereign and, while reaching for his hand, shouted: ‘Mon Beau frère!’ [my dear brother].”²

When K. wonders aloud if the man in the picture is perhaps the judge who will preside in his case Leni, the lawyer’s maid, tells him that he actually is a tiny and vain man who had himself portrayed so formidably in his youth. When divinity does not openly apply to sovereignty, its pantheon becomes bureaucracy. After losing his imperial dignity the sovereign, embodied in a lowly examining judge, reappears as a simple man: cowardly, fragile and, above all, petty and sadistic. Lacking any connection with the divine, this new type of sovereign cannot exercise power except by force.

The second painting described by Kafka appears in the studio of the painter who works for the obscure court that has taken his case. 

Of course this was a completely different judge, a fat man with a black bushy beard that hung far down the sides of his cheeks, and that had been an oil painting, while this was faintly and indistinctly sketched in pastel. But everything else was similar, for here too the judge was about to rise up threateningly from his throne, gripping its arms… He was unable to interpret a large figure centered atop the back of the throne and asked the painter about it...³

The figure in question, the painter answers is Justice, but a very particular Justice, for it is not only blindfolded and carrying a scale but also has wings on her heels. “‘That is not a good combination,’ said K. with a smile. ‘Justice needs to remain still, otherwise the scales will move about and it won’t be possible to make a just verdict.’”⁴ Far from the dignity offered by the divine, justice and sovereignty can only strive to efficiency. Without a proper ground they are like the image that appears in a dream to King Nebuchadnezzar and which the prophet Daniel interprets thus:

You, O king, were watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose splendor was excellent, stood before you; and its form was awesome. This image’s head was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces.⁵

Power separated from its divine substrate—gold, silver and bronze—reveals its transient and vulnerable side, its humanity. This collapse allows us to understand the innate fragility of the mask of sovereignty. Since he found an empty throne (1.5), the sovereign has always had feet of clay.

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1. Franz Kafka, The Trial, 105. ↩︎
2. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, 105. ↩︎
3. Kafka, The Trial, 145. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 147. ↩︎
5. Daniel, 2: 31-34. ↩︎