Field Notes

“Is it true that politics … is instituted only at the price of forgetting the absolute condition of morals, namely cruelty?” (Lyotard, 1991, 31)

Notes on empathy and law (and time) in the age of machines

1. I noticed that much de Grouchy discusses or references law, whether penal law or so-called natural law. In particular, the final letter is focused on penal law entirely, and how humans might behave more fairly if they were treated so. She writes that violence only begets more violence. We can think about physical violence but also more widely, linguistic violence, which is also prominent nowadays – social media is an example but there are others – and the ‘law’ as in the supposed correct way one is meant to behave or be seen to behave.
2. Strangely, in another reading group, not the one in which I am working on empathy, we are discussing Kafka’s Penal Colony and Lyotard’s essay on that story, and the connections, which were not obvious to me at first, suddenly seem many and pertinent.
3. Lyotard brings into the discussion, amongst a great deal more, time and the time of law and how this is formulated (where did I read that every time someone is born they are literally making time? I must remember… ) For Lyotard, if I understand him correctly, and applying from Arendt, there is the time of law, which as he describes it is a constant that cannot be inscribed nor got hold of, but is always present (it is understood in the body rather than intellectually), and within that, there is a moment when fundamental law which is emergent and dynamic becomes fixed (albeit in the story in old law?) Arendt discusses two other temporalities, linear mortal and cyclical immortal, so there are at least three temporalities in the attached diagram. 
4. Kafka’s Penal Colony shows a violent, deterministic machine which inscribes old law onto the body, but in doing so kills it, the body, off. 
5. The machine that does the printing is called a HARROW i.e. harrowing;
6. A harrow is used to prepare the land for planting in farming
7. Consider this planting and Deleuze/Guattari’s recording surface _ Kafka’s prisoner’s body is the recording surface
   If harrow is typically used to prepare the ground for planting and here the harrow prints on the body; in the process of inscribing, is the body the ground being prepared for the future law?
8. Is the body the ground being readied for planting? The Officer ends up being mulched because the machine breaks –, the ‘old law harrowing machine’ disintegrates, and the body is tipped into the ditch, out of which new law might grow/emerge? (See Arendt  – Between Past and Future – a categorical break with the past in the 16th / 17th century…when doubt became a thing:
   Delueze and Guttari’s surface: … the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface. Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent  objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface (D&G, 208??; 10)
   Lyotard asks: “Or was that only a delirium, the anti-modern, reactionary delirium, as we put it (or as it has been put to us; a delirium with fascist tendencies)?” (31)
9. When I first started studying, we were asked to read Otto Fenichel’s description of the eye which is essentially and organ focusing on devouring, destroying, fucking, but that’s it; while I did not want to dismiss what he said, I thought there is an AND worth thinking about – because it also nourishes as it is nourished; when I looked at my infants, I recall incredible empathy (which is of course mixed up with violence – I love you so much, I want to eat you up). And they looked up at me – and we nourished each other through our looking and being looked at. But Fenichel’s reading seemed not to connect this pleasure – maybe he did. At the time, I saw none of that. Interesting to note, he uses reading as an example of the eye devouring, and the body being nourished while reading; and here the line between metaphor and literality blurs, the body feeds on text and in his example, people often read on the loo to counter the loss of something from the body by imbibing on text; and Kafka’s text is so much about the inscription, writing on the body, law imprint.
10. Remaining wary of essentialism – and this is a very key fact- the fact that that Sophie de Grouchy speaks about empathy and the law from the point of view of a mother / a woman in the 18th century which cannot be ignored because that voice is not given much room to speak at that time – even now, it’ s battle because the deeply inscribed assumptions about women and their voices, so the battle is internalised as well as external; (also recalling some argue she misreads Adam Smith… )

Arendt, H. (2006) Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought. New York: Penguin Books (Penguin classics).

Kafka, F. (1919) In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka Online. Translated by I. Johnson. Available at: https://www.kafka-online.info/in-the-penal-colony.html (Accessed: 4 October 2024).

Lyotard, J.-F. and Fynsk, C. (1991) ‘Prescription’, L’Esprit Créateur, 31(1), pp. 15–32.