In Pinter’s screenplay, The Trial, Josef K is trying to search for and hope to restore something compulsively before the Law. K’s compulsive act comes from the fact that he only exists as a blank, not as a citizen, as he believes, in a legally constituted state when arrested. But his response to ‘the status qua’(as it is) is to dare to question its legal framework and not to hesitate to go under the surface of ‘the status qua’. In the light of Lacan and Slavoj ?i?ek who provide us the profound insight of the Law and the subject’s ontological lack, this article examines the fundamental relationship between the Law and the subject and its act striving beyond the reality principle and ideology.
It is fantasy that gives K the answer about the law, because ‘his’ desire realized in fantasy is not K’s own, that is, subject’s desire is nothing but the Other’s, the Law’s desire. K in fantasy is not only decentered but also a part of a network, the omnipotent and obscene machine of Jouissance whose meaning is out of his control both in the court and in the bank. However, what he saw there turns out to be nothing but filth in the empty spaces as K finds them again next time. Surely it is the moment that K comes to know that there is nothing in the Law and at the same time that the Law itself, in his view, is almighty. That’s why K can’t give up people’s help including women’s the more. In short, K’s resistance in symbolic order is just the act of unconsciously delaying his death governed by the pleasure principle dependent on the law. After long struggle, however, K finally reaches civil disobedience, which is clearly manifested in his not responding to the police’s gaze, in his troubling the command system in the symbolic order, and in his having the executors run because of him. His civil disobedience moves toward a dimension beyond interpellation after gaining the distance toward the phantasmatic frame. K’s gesture as in this disobedience is much more radically performative because he suspends and annihilates the symbolic order instantly for a moment. The effacement of the signifying network itself is the death drive. K’s desire for death in actualizing his lack is a drastic subversion and an ethical act. What K and Pinter hope to restore through this act is the legal ownership of a human being or the dignity of man. In the respect that he refuses the interpellation through civil disobedience, K is closer to a Lacanian psychoanalytic subject rather than Althusserians’s.