by Raymond Wu

I. Introduction

          In The Trial, Kafka stages Joseph K.’s nightmarish attempt to navigate a protracted trial that takes place in  a series of strange chambers. These chambers are more than the setting of his journey; they  are charged with desire and echo one another as assemblages of similar elements. Together, they suggest an immense structure that extends past the  the scale of the novel.  They anchor all possibilities of the literary space by imposing a stable, modularized mode of narrative. This mode traps Joseph K., the subject, in a structure he can never escape.

          In this work, I address how a machine of desire is constructed in Kafka’s narrative and how it conveys the plight of a subject trapped within it. I begin by examining how the subject and the chamber — the basic units of analysis — are first generated through a machinic procedure. As I do so, I introduce an analytical glossary drawn from Deleuze’s idea of indexes to clarify the function of this procedure. Together, this glossary and procedure form an analytical mode that I apply to dismantle the machinic aspect of the desire-machine. Next, I establish a corresponding analytical mode that tackles the aspect of desire. By situating the subject in a broader context, I draw on Kristeva’s concept of the “abject” and the Freudian structural model of mind to recast this context as a topography of desire — one that defines every chamber in the machine of desire. In the following phase, I examine the subject’s relation to the desire-machine by defining his possibilities and constraints within this structure. Synthesizing the two analytical modes, I discuss the interplay between index and woman in the final section, focusing on how the woman-chamber operates as both the embodiment of desire and a territorialized part of the machinic assemblage in Kafka’s narrative, capturing and conditioning the subject. The Trial presents an assemblage of modularized chambers — composed of indexes, topographies of desire, and index-women — that together form a machine of desire trapping Joseph K. in the plight of the subject, binding him with its machinic severity and psychosexual lure.

II. Subject and Index

          The narrative structure of The Trial is  a slippage along a series of chambers created through Joseph K.’s movement, which draws different assemblages of objects into connection. This does not, however, make The Trial a narrative centered on an epic subject who enters into relationwith the surrounding objects and distributes meaning through dramatic action. Nor is it a work that reveals intersubjective social relationality which, as Georg Lukács envisioned, “discovers the significant and vital aspects of social practice.” Instead, Kafka offers a grotesque experience in which objects overwhelm and stupefy the subject, leaving the it in a state of alienation and stagnation. The chambers embody the subject’s alienation through spatial confinement . The novel is also  a tale of Joseph K.’s doomed struggle against the interpellation of invincible forces of desire that act through objects and subjects around him.. Together, these objects and subjects construct each chamber and form a machine of desire that drives Joseph K. along an invisible, one-way path toward an end already designated for him.

          To dismantle this machine of desire, one must first map out the array of objects into analyzable parts. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s machinic reading of The Metamorphosis in Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature, we can distinguish between three components of assemblages in Kafka. An index-element is a trace that has no inherent significance but points to the index-object it adheres to. An index-configuration, on the other hand, is a larger ensemble of indexes. It may appear as a single chamber that contains all objects within its physical boundary, or recur throughout the narrative as a rhythmic, shifting motif: the triangle of desire is a good example. Within the machinic assemblage formed by these indexes, the subject is not clearly separated from the machine. A subject may be either more homologous to the machine or more heterogeneous to it. The court’s functionaries, including its officials and women, are far more intimate with the machine and thus more integrated into it. Joseph K. is a more heterogenous subject that moves freely and erratically through its spacesIn “Arrest,” the opening chapter, the synergy of indexes introduces K., the subject of desire, into the series of chambers and encounters which make up the machine of desire. The indexical orientation of the subject in the primal chamber is delivered in a strikingly concise line: “there was an immediate knock at the door and a man he [K.] had never seen before in these lodgings entered.” The knocking sound summons the door, which then reveals a traversing movement and creates spatial depth. A chamber appears, and at its center K., the subject of the series, comes into view. The knock gains meaning through the referents it calls forth; it sets into motion a chain of creation akin to God’s utterance in Genesis. Every door-chamber series in The Trial begins with a distinctive sound — a knock, a sudden whisper, or a bell ringing. Each sound, through its own intensity, activates the assemblage and “allows secret access to hitherto unknown feelings and relationships”. The first knock, however, carries a more important task. As a sign of the exterior and its trespass, it indicates the chamber and the position of the subject. Just as an outside hand that winds an automaton, the first knock installs Joseph K. in the machine. In the chamber series that follows, K. becomes the mainspring inside that automaton. He knocks, he peers, and he enters. His departure from the primal chamber marks the commencement of the series that follows, and each new chamber he steps into becomes a fresh segment of desire.

          Deleuze and Guattari note that “already in the animal stories, Kafka was drawing lines of escape; but he didn’t ‘flee the world.’ Rather, it was the world and its representation that he made take flight and that he made follow these lines of escape”. The Trial is no less a Quixotic odyssey told from the perspective of a troubled subject than it is a fatalistic vision of his preordained future. Its dream-like narration turns the series into an experience of alienation, where hope and fate pierce through yet remain strangely out of reach. The tension of the novel lies in this interplay: the subject’s relative freedom and the fate that constantly threatens to descend. To understand this tension, we must further qualify the assemblage that situates the subject, identifying its components and the power dynamics between them.

III. Subject and Desire

          The first chamber’s bringing-forth constitutes the subject not only by placing him at the end of an indexical chain of creation, but also because the primal chamber itself figures the emergence of a subject and the topography in which he identifies himself. As a crude architectural ambit that precedes any domestic purpose, a chamber is a space of enclosure whose border marks an inside and an outside. Yet this enclosure is incomplete until a door is installed. Through that door, the inhabitant identifies himself and decides what to admit or exclude. At this stage, however, the division between inside and outside remains formal rather than substantial. To understand this, we can consider its parallel with primal repression in Julia Kristeva’s account of the abject in the formation of the subject. In Powers of Horror, primal repression is the foundational process “effected prior to the springing forth of the ego, of its objects and representations”. Working with secondary repression, it sets the category of the unconscious before that category gains specific content. Only through the later accumulation of material does a subject begin to identify itself. Primal repression functions for the subject much as a door functions for a chamber: each allows “a defensive position to be established — one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration”. In this process, the abject — cast out from the proto-subject’s chamber — helps generate the subject by acting as its formal and constitutive outside. It fixes the proto-subject, with its chamber, within a larger architecture. Although the abject “provides it with someone or something else as support, allowing [it] to be more or less detached and autonomous”, it is not a counterpart to the subject; it stands opposed to it. While the subject constructs its ego and seeks sublimation, the abject gathers force from the repressed material in the unconscious. It aims to challenge the subject at every turn, seeking “a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out”. At this point, we may understand the abject and the proto-subject through the Freudian topography of desire: the abject lurks and waits to break into the ego-chamber of the subject, much like the id’s persistent pressure against the ego.

          In The Trial, the porous borders of the ego-chambers never secure the subject’s position; instead, they make him highly vulnerable to forces of desire that intrude from the outside. Titorelli’s studio has the characteristic of such an ego-chamber.  The stairway leading to the painter’s studio is“[particularly narrow, extremely long, without a turn, visible along the entire length, and ending directly at Titorelli’s door.” The stairway’s depth and linear movement recall the symbolic association between stairways and sexual intercourse, as Freud’s reading of the staircase dream-symbol also suggests. In contrast to the stairway’s id-laden symbolism, Titorelli’s studio, positioned at the end of the straight passage behind a padlocked door, is a womb-like space. As a space of enclosed, generative interiority, the studio resembles the primal chamber of the ego. As Joseph K. approaches the building, climbs the stairs, and enters the studio, we witness a movement from id into ego. Yet we cannot ignore the “retinue” that accompanies him. This group of little girls “belonging to the court” includes one hunchbacked girl who stands out as particularly unsettling. “Deformed” and “corrupted,” she displays a depravity at odds with the childishness expected of someone “thirteen at most”.Kafka’s characterization of these girls matches Freud’s conception of the “unorganized group” represented by savages and children, through which we could arguably interpret both as representing regression toward an early stage — likely the id-based jouissance. Although the girls are initially barred from entering the ego-chamber when it admits Joseph K., they remain an unchecked force pressing at its boundaries. They turn the key in the lock; push straw through the cracks; peer through the keyhole; shriek; rattle the door; and attempt to force their way inside. Each action marks them as embodiments of id-driven, animalistic, and sexual desire — or, in Kristevan terms, embodiments of the abject.

          Joseph K. dodges the savage girls through a door behind the painter’s bed — another opening at the edge of the ego chamber — and finds himself in the midst of a cluster of law court offices.  . An opening that seemed not to exist — as if it and the space behind it had no prior reality — suddenly emerges as though from a daydream. Each opening that  K. finds reveals a space he never expected to encounter. These spaces, disclosed to him through his own ignorance, are sites where the presence of law is unmistakable yet grotesquely rendered: an over-eroticized punishment hidden in a random storage room; a nearly vacant court where fresh air streams through the windows. The flogging scene contrasts with the wild debauchery of the girls as a kind of reprimand that aligns with the function superego The extreme punishment inflicted on Franz and Wilhelm resembles the harsh, self-observing severity the superego imposes on the ego — a “poor creature” harassed by the superego no less than by the id. K. is exposed to the law as a traumatizing and violent spectacle of eroticism. In the Titorelli segment, however, Joseph K. intentionally turns toward this superego space in search of refuge from the id-driven disturbance, but finds nothing in the empty court. The judges — who supposedly enter Titorelli’s room through the door behind the bed — never appear. This absence suggests that the door is created primarily for entry from the side of the superego, and not for access from the side of the ego. The implication is clear: the superego can easily reach the ego, while the ego cannot locate the superego. This echoes the novel’s recurring insight that law is attracted to the guilty subject yet refuses to let the subject locate either his guilt or the law’s whereabouts. 

IV. Possibility inside the Machine of Desire

          The hidden door in Titorelli’s studio is the key to understanding the subject’s possibility within the machine of desire The peculiarity of such a door is observed by Rahmani in his “Restless Doors,” where he notes that the door is not predetermined by author or readerand as such represents a product of pure imagination : it shows how Joseph K. challenges and finally transcends the physical confinement of the ego-chamber through conjuring an opening on it. Indeed, Joseph K.’s experience demonstrates how Deleuze’s escape without fleeing the world could be possible. The spontaneous appearance of a door, though irrational, brings forth as a possibility of flight in Kafka’s literary imagination. He fiddles with the boundary between real and fantasy, creating a state of daydreaming that allows Joseph K. to break free. “Flight is challenged when it is useless movement in space, a movement of false liberty,” Deleuze and Guattari write, yet “flight is affirmed when it is a stationary flight, a flight of intensity.” Kafka’s literary imagination creates a  hypnotic alterreality through its daydreams, onethat embodies the hope of a stationary flight. It is through the intensity of the index-elements — the scream from the junk room that “rose steady and unchanging” and the freshness of the air that drifted through the long corridor of the court-atelier — that Kafka amplifies the authenticity of the hypnotic alterreality. It is when we see Joseph K. yet bewildered and shocked again by the complete resemblance of the junk room as he found it the previous night and his exiting the court through the corridor that we realize the daydreaming, so intense an alterreality, has merged with reality. In this case, it is not through Joseph K.’s movement in space that we see the possibility of the escape-without-flight, but the very fact that he could live an experience of hypnotic alterreality even in the restraint of reality, or, I should say, alter the reality without departing from it. 

          Although we are shown the possibility of a stationary flight enabled by the state of daydreaming conjured through literary imagination, we can also observe its limitation: this flight remains thoroughly embedded within the topography of desire. It does not disassociate K. from the machine of desire; it merely directs him along a predetermined trajectory within the segment of Titorelli’s chamber. From the moment Joseph K. enters the building, his movement is already constrained. He climbs a stairway rather than a stairwell — moving linearly, not circularly. He does not know how to find the painter and must be led by girls he neither trusts nor respects. His conversation with Titorelli yields nothing, repeatedly derailed or cut short by the girls’ intrusions. And when he finally tries to retrace his steps and leave, he discovers that the very door through which he entered is being held shut from the outside. Backtracking is impossible. With every earlier path blocked, K. is compelled to move forward, even if “forward” means literally breaking a hole through the wall. If we align this spatial trajectory with the psychoanalytic topography, K.’s movement sketches a one-way passage— a flight from the realm of the id, through the ego-chamber, and ultimately into the domain of the superego. But K.’s movement toward the superego — as shown by his professed desire for justice and his hope of confronting guilt — does not entail a renunciation of his id-based drives. His distaste for the girls should not be mistaken for a rejection of sexual desire; rather, it marks the repression of that instinct. By projecting his desire outward onto them, he debases it without directly threatening his ego. Just as Titorelli’s studio excludes the girls, K. tries to shut his id-based impulses out of his ego-chamber — yet repression only guarantees the stronger return of the repressed. If we understand the tendencies toward the id and toward the superego as two distinct modes of deterritorialization — each offering K. a temporary escape from the besieged ego — then his behavior across the novel becomes legible. In the Bürstner segment and the Leni segment, we witness K.’s regression toward the id, directly contrasting his tendency toward the superego in the Titorelli segment. He never follows either mode consistently, certainly not for longer than a single segment. He oscillates, vacillating between two incompatible lines of flight. In Deleuze’s terms, he never fully deterritorializes but always ends by reterritorializing. A stationary flight within a single segment may momentarily lift K. beyond the ego-chamber, but it cannot deliver him from the topography of desire that ultimately seals his fate.

          Throughout The Trial, desire proliferates and reproduces structurally similar segments. These repetitions yield a larger, modular assemblage — a machine of desire. Although the restriction of the subject’s movement within the Titorelli segment — as shown in its spatial constraint and one-way pattern of escape — in some way speaks to the mechanical reproduction of desire. A more comprehensive view of it can be discerned by looking towards its parallel, namely the repetition of indexes and the subject’s tendency in the psychoanalytic topography in other chamber series of the novel
 

V. Subject, Index and Woman

          As the reader progresses through the series of chambers that constitute the novel, one is recurrently faced by the omnipresent women. They usually emerge at the very start of each chamber series and often are the last to part ways with Joseph K. as he moves through the machine of desire. , They are the figures who open the doors, invitingK. in, interrupting, seducing, deviating him from his plan, and even offering their help at certain points. There is not a chamber that is not simultaneously a chamber of woman — we see the young girls have profound influence on K. in the Titorelli segment — just as there is not a chamber that is not a chamber of desire. Indeed, every chamber in The Trial could be read as a woman-chamber, or in the Freudian term a woman’s room [Frauenzimmer], not simply because of the women’s presence; much beyond that, it is because these women are very much homologous to desire itself for Kafka. While the Titorelli girls’ belonging to the court suggests their connection to the realm of law and thus the super-ego, they are equally the embodiment of id-based desires, whose animalistic characters render them repulsive to Joseph K. Besides that, the women’s chamber is a space full of tension and contradiction. In other words, despite K.’s motivations for a desire for justice, he is equally subject to the sway of his erotic desire. These two drives eventually converge upon women, to whom K. is constantly attracted just as they are constantly attracted to K. To understand how women work for the desire machine, we have to turn to the cases of Bürstner and Leni.

          The segment of the Bürstner chamber is prefaced by K.’s conversation with Frau Grubach, who is an embodiment of old wisdom but certainly a busybody to K. talking to K. about her concern about the duality of Bürstner, Frau Grubach first acclaims that the latter is “a fine and dear young woman,” yet she almost immediately pivoted to give a backhanded remark, implying that the young lady was likely a libertine that could certainly use more “pride” and “reserve.” Completely unconvinced, K. rushes to defend his neighbor, claiming that he knows her very well and insisting that Frau Grubach’s worry is completely nonsensical. That said, we later find out that K., without hesitation defending Bürstner’s honor not long ago, is brought away by his own eroticizing association about the lady. Shortly after Bürstner indicated her relevance to the court as she will “start next month as a secretary in the law firm”, she, all of a sudden, has become a temptation to K. Unable to think any more because he is “totally engrossed by the sight of Fräulein Bürstner” and sees she “slowly stroked her hip with the other”, K. is almost convinced of the lady’s promiscuity, for he read all these inventories of postures as blatant seduction of him.

          The minute that K. became sexually aroused, the assemblage in which the desire machine produces through indexes, is consolidate. Invited into Bürstner’s chamber and playing a parody of his initial inquiry in “Arrest,” he imitates the inspector’s cry: “Joseph K.!” He drew it out slowly, and the sound spread gradually throughout the room. As an index-element, K.’s cry, a sound of bewildering intensity, marked the start of a chain of creation. It first drew out the knock — “a brief, loud series of blows” — another index-element that in turn drew out the door — an index-object — and the living room — an index-configuration — it led up to. It soon turned out that there was an unknown third that hid in the living room. Frau Grubach’s nephew, a captain and a stand-in for the landlady, was eavesdropping outside the door and amusing himself over the affair in the room. At this point, a triangle of desire is completed between K., Bürstner, and the Lanz, whose presence is felt in his absence through the strip of light emerging beneath the door. All of a sudden, we see an escalation of K.’s erotic desire. First through seizing her hand and then her wrist, he subjugates the lady. Pulling her “tightly drawn reddish hair” closer, K. kissed her all over her face,neck, and throat for a long time, completely losing himself in the intensity of eros, like an animal.

          From a Freudian perspective, K.’s burst of desire could be read as the ego’s turning away from its ego-ideal in order to evade anxiety. Namely, Captain Lanz presents secure yet invisible authority of masculinity, in which he lacks as a timid man unsettled by his recent arrest. By cathecting all his libido energy on Bürstner, a sexual object, K., the subject of desire, tends toward the id. It is by pursuing the id-based sexual instinct that he not only averts the anxiety imposed by a more powerful subject but also attains satisfaction from the conquest, which appears to him as a fulfillment of that masculinity demanded by his ego-ideal. All is proven by K.’s satisfaction as he reflected on his conduct — pleased, and surprised he didn’t feel more pleased, he quickly fell asleep.

          The segment of Huld’s study, namely the Leni chamber, demonstrates the same machine of desire at work. Visiting the lawyer to further consult his case, K. is accompanied by his uncle — an ill-tempered man who nonetheless represented the same old wisdom as Frau Grubach. He is perhaps more serious about K.’s case than K. really is, since he is always anxious about talking to the lawyer. It’s because of this that he was very prejudiced against Leni, whose intimacy with the lawyer is regarded as an impediment to the consultation. “This little maid of yours doesn’t seem very jolly, or else she’s hiding it,” the suspicion gradually reached its peak: he first could hardly refrain from pulling the maid from the bed, then he suspected her of eavesdropping outside the door. Indifferent to his uncle’s unrest, or even slightly detested by it, Joseph K., on the contrary, found Leni somehow adorable, since he was apparently attracted by her sad eye and her round, doll-like face. However, his appreciation of Leni is soon redirected upon seeing at close distance the intimacy between this maid and the bedridden lawyer. Much similar to the notorious “sight” in the Bürstner segment, he was again brought away by the maid’s “vague gaze”, which is later confirmed as a sexual invitation by Leni.

          The machine of desire's indexical creation of space could be observed as seen in K. and Leni withdrawal from the bedroom to the lawyer’s study. It starts with the sound of breaking china as an index-element — one with very specific acoustic quality — immediately brought forth towards the space outside the bedroom: a hall with no light. The minute that K. enters the hall he is met by the maid hiding in the dark, who confesses that  she had thrown the  plate to draw him out. Both did not stay long in this interim space and returned promptly to the lawyer’s study. Adorned with old and heavy furniture, a dark bench chest with a carved wooden back, and a massive desk, the lawyer’s study, an index-configuration grandiose yet insulated, undoubtedly resembles the realm of the super-ego. It is in a similar darkness to the hall that a large painting is brought forth: this index-object immediately catches K.’s attention as he starts to fathom the identity of the man in the portrait, and quickly arrives figures  the portrayed man is the examining magistrate. At this moment, we see the proliferation of the triangle of desire: yet again, the third that forms the triangle with K. and Leni is present in his absence — this time through a portrait.

          Seemingly, the absence of the examining magistrate lends K. the chance to debase and deny the former’s superiority. Irritated by the fact that the magistrate is not the higher judge he was searching for, K. almost accepted Leni’s gossipy denigration of the magistrate with alacrity, convincing himself that the latter is “ridiculously vain” and that his awe-striking appearance is nothing but an invention. Indeed, Leni’s ceaseless debasement of the absent third ends up conjuring more desire from K. as the latter becomes more and more tolerant of her sexual boldness. While we see Leni “lean[s] her head quietly against [K.’s] shoulder” when the conversation takes off, we then see K. examining her “thick, dark, tightly rolled hair” and praising the beauty of her claw. By the end, both are completely absorbed into an animalistic sexual entanglement, in which he reached out to catch her and let her — with the exciting, bitter odor of pepper — bite and kiss his neck and hair. K.’s denial of the magistrate’s authority can be read as the ego’s evasion of its anxiety of being dominated through the denial of the over-reigning super-ego. This denial, on the other hand, was facilitated by the ego’s cathexis on the sexual object as we see K. gradually divest his libido energy from his anxiety towards his case upon the ongoing affair with Leni, ending up losing himself in the satisfaction of id-based sexual desire.

          “‘I recruit women helpers,’ he thought, somehow amazed.” Indeed, K. was conscious of his dependence, or perhaps overdependence, upon the women. On one hand, he got in touch with women to seek their help in order to navigate his own case; however, he never seems to gain any progress through these affairs. For most of the cases, K. submits himself to and constantly seeks after these figures of sexual pleasure. He didn’t manage to “make use” of the women, having these women delay and derail his endeavor. In every chamber, he was captured and incorporated into the topography of desire that those women had prepared for him: in the Titorelli segment, he was forced into a flight towards the super-ego, while in the case of Bürstner and Leni, he was seduced to tend towards the realm of the id.

          As the scale of the desire-machine becomes more evident by considering together — and comparing — the woman-chamber series that structure the novel as modularized assemblages, the function of the women within this larger totality becomes clear. Without exception, these women are territorialized; each precipitates her own segment, within which she captures K., lures him into a specific topography of desire, and eventually releases him. They never pursue K. beyond their segments, that is, beyond their allotted territories, since structurally the next segment must be facilitated by another woman. Each chamber is therefore a relatively autonomous component within a machine that captures and processes K. According to a kind of automated procedure, these women affect Joseph K. in remarkably similar ways: they temporarily incorporate him into the assemblage they serve, consume his strength in the process, and then convey him to an adjoining part. As connector-characters, the women not only receive their object-function from the desire-machine but, more fundamentally, constitute a genre of machinic index that assumes the form of a subject. The desire-machine is an assemblage composed of index-women and other indexical devices — the sounds (index-elements), the doors (index-objects), and the chambers (index-configurations). Structurally, the machine is compartmentalized into distinct units —  of chambers in terms of content and segments in terms of structure — each composed of and operated by these indexes. Across the different chamber-series, the synergy among the indexes consistently generates an abstract yet recurrent topography of desire, which is then concretized through nuanced and explicitly staged motifs, such as the triangle of desire. Through the strict modularization of these functional and structural patterns, the desire-machine is able not only to fix the subject of desire in a prescribed position within each part but also to control his movement between parts. This reveals that different sets of indexes operate not merely within the boundaries of their segments but also form a continuum through their structural similarity. That continuum sustains the sense of an inevitable fate — one that forecloses the possibility of escape and propels the subject toward the dead end designated by the desire-machine.

          Besides the machinic functions that restrict and condition the subject’s movement on the larger scale, we should not overlook that the subject is also bound to the machine by his own desire on a more nuanced level. While K. can break away from the women at the end of every chamber-series, it is not because he renounces his desire, but because the women are territorialized in their own segments. Neither should we conflate K.’s escape from woman-chambers with deterritorialization, for as long as the desire persists — whether it be for sex or justice — K. will remain dependent on women. In other words, K. is always entrenched in the topography of desire, since each flight he attempts never frees him from the desire-machine but always ends up reterritorializing him in another chamber-series. In light of this, we may argue that the territorialization of women indeed perpetuates K.’s desire. Despite the fact that K. consistently gains sexual satisfaction from women, he cannot obtain it repetitively from a single woman, because he cannot possess her beyond her zone of territoriality, repeatedly coming to head with his desire for justice. Index-women are always rooted in their segments and therefore remain assets belonging to no one but the segments themselves. Given the addictive nature of id-based sexual desire, it isn’t difficult to understand why K. must continually seek out another female companion: no woman can guarantee sustained satisfaction, but each can provide a temporary one. Beyond catering to K.’s sexual desire, the women also present themselves as potential means toward his wish-fulfillment at the superego level, by displaying their immanence to the court and promising assistance in his trial. Yet, unlike their ability to satisfy K.’s sexual desire, these women make promises that never materialize into any positive result: we never learn how, or even whether, they actually influence K.’s case. These empty promises, working together with the tangible gratifications of sexual desire, operate in tandem with the court’s systematic delay of justice. While the women continually offer sex to divert K.’s anxiety about the case, they simultaneously nourish in him a false belief in his procedural progress, a belief that never corresponds to reality. Each woman brings K. closer to the legal authority suggestively in charge of his case — presumably the chief clerk — yet none can fulfill  their false promises. This dynamic mirrors the conduct of the law professionals, who present K. with a spectrum of empty solutions — from the ideal actual acquittal, to the less satisfying apparent acquittal, and finally to the still-favorable protraction. Both sets of promises function as tactics of postponement, perpetually deferring justice while continually sustaining the subject’s desire for it.

VI. Conclusion

          The Trial is not merely a portrait of a man hunted and overwhelmed by the invisible authority of the court; it follows the unfolding of a machine of desire that encloses Joseph K. from all sides. Each series of chambers —created through the multiplication of indexes, animated by the topography of desire, and operated by territorialized women — reproduces a modular pattern, through which they tune with one another to generate and capture the subject. Joseph K. 's movement — whether he tries to escape into the superego, the id, or into the stationary flight of daydreaming — never deterritorializes him from the topography that grounds him; w,.  Through the functions of the machine, they reterritorialize every attempt of his escape into another segment and thus diminish his possibility of breaking away. It is not his weakness vis-à-vis desires that traps K. in his plight, but the machinery of desire itself. Kafka’s novel opens up a world overdetermined, formularized, and synced by desire, which in many ways speaks to the subjective experience of modernity. In this world, fate is not directly imposed from a traceable source  but gradually revealed in retrospect within the mechanism that drives forward the subject’s every step. 

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Works Cited

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Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge. Routledge, 1992.

Freud, Sigmund. “On Dreams.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 5,                   Translated and Edited by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1952, pp. 629-86.

———. “Beyond Pleasure Principle.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.               18, Translated and Edited by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1950, pp. 1-64.

———. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, Translated and Edited by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1950, pp. 65-144.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated by Breon Mitchell. Schocken, 1998.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982.

Lukács, Georg. Writer & Critics and Other Essays. Translated Arthur D. Kahn. The Merlin Press, 1970.

Rahmani, Ayad B.. Kafka’s Architectures: Doors, Rooms, Stairs and Windows of an Intricate Literary Edifice. McFarland           & Company, 2015.