Abstract

The inexistent process. Kafka «In the Penal Colony» and elsewhere. «In the Penal Colony», as well as in other works, space and time are beyond the facts and the reality of facts. Not Aristotle, with his transcendent concepts, nor Kant, with his transcendental concepts. But Kafka, with his concepts gathered from a mighty literary imagination and from a life lived in solitude also when he had tenderness for Felice and Milena. In Kafka, it’s a literary and political dream to imagine that the judges make always a process before condemning. A dream of democracy, against the absence of law and law-court. A dream and a moral obligation: to escape from the anti-democracy in the name of the legal warranty.