The Door Opens onto Nothing

Excerpt from my recent paper "Opening a Virtual Space Before the Door of the Law:

The Transnational Togani Effect from Silenced to Angels Wear White", Under the second-round review at positions: asia critique

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The “inclusively excluded” status of these children and the impasse they encounter when seeking justice is uncannily reminiscent of Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” a story contained in The Trial. In the story’s brief narrative, a man from the country waits before the door of the law without access to it. At the end of his life, the doorkeeper tells him that the door was meant for him alone. In Homo Sacer, Agamben interprets Kafka’s parable as an allegory of the state of law in an age when the law is “in force without significance (Geltung ohne Bedeutung).” He draws on Massimo Cacciari’s interpretation of Kafka’s story, which emphasizes: “We can enter only there where we can open. The already-open [il gia-aperto] immobilizes. The man from the country cannot enter, because entering into what is already open is ontologically impossible” (1985:69). The “already-open” is impassable when the law is “in force without significance.” The immobility perpetuated by the already-open has hurled him into a predicament of existence that denies both access and escape. He is trapped in a place that leads to nowhere, like the sexually abused minors in Silenced as well as in Angel Wears White. The feeling of entrapment overwhelms those who are excluded in the form of inclusion. The uncanny, deviated situation is nonetheless legitimized by the state sovereignty, rationally operated in heterotopic spaces, which substantially poses unsettling questions on its mechanism and what it takes to overcome that mechanism. Therefore, in the analysis that follow, I interrogate the inherent logics of the violence of silencing under the conditions of neoliberal governance and how the film mediation manages the contested relationship between “the silenced” and justice by challenging the real-world legal failure...The door of the law was exclusively meant for the disabled children while it does not open onto justice, but the screen intervention enables alternative perspective to evoke extradiegetic sympathy in connection with, and pierce through, diegetic impasse..."