Thursday, March 6, 2008

Orson Welles' The Trial - my favorite Zizek quotes 2


In his movie version of Kafka’s The Trial, Orson Welles accomplished an exemplary anti-obscuranist operation by way of reinterpreting the place and the function of the famous parable on ‘the door of the law’.
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In the Welles version, the reason K. is killed is therefore the exact opposite of the reason implied in the novel – he presents a threat to power the moment he unmasks, ‘see through’, the fiction upon which the social link of the existing power structure is founded.
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Welles’ reading of The Trial thus differs from both predominant approaches to Kafka, the obscurantist-religious as well as the naïve, enlightened humanist.
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Although it may seem that Welles aligns himself with the second reading, things are by no means so unequivocal: he as it were adds another turn of the screw by raising ‘conspiracy’ to the power of two – as K. puts it in the Welles version of his final outburst, the true conspiracy of Power resides in the very notion of conspiracy, in the notion of some mysterious Agency that ‘pulls the strings’ and effectively runs the show, that is to say, in the notion that, behind the visible, public Power, there is another obscene, invisible, ‘crazy’ power structure. This other, hidden Law acts the part of the ‘Other of the Other’ in the Lacanian sense, the part of the mega-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life).
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K.’s lawyer offers him, as a desperate last resort, this role of the martyr-victim of a hidden conspiracy; K., however, turns it down, being well aware that by accepting it he would walk into the most perfidious trap of Power.

- Slavoj Zizek, Interrogating the Real, p229-231






2 comments:

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