KAFKA Y NOSOTROS [KAFKA AND US] (1977) BY ROSER BRU. PORTRAITURE, LITERATURE AND LAW IN DIALOGUE WITH KAFKA

Abstract

This article analyzes the condition of the state of exception in which Franz Kafka deploys the workings of the law in the short story “Before the Law” and the novel The Trial. This analysis is carried out in dialogue with the ways in which philosophers Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben think about the relationship between law and history and aims to interpret the work of Chilean painter Roser Bru, particularly in the exhibition Kafka y nosotros [Kafka and Us], 1977. Why does Bru use the figure of Kafka in this exhibition? What does Kafka tell us, through Bru, in the years immediately following the 1973 coup d’état in Chile? What is the value of returning to this exhibition in the present? We propose to interpret Bru’s work as a proposal that, in-between writing, and portraiture, highlights the role of art as an enabler of an expression that tensions the normalization of the exceptional condition of the norm.