The Subject before the Law: A Kafkaesque Reading and the Phenomenon of Social Media

Abstract

This study reflects on the relationship between the subject, Law, and judgment based on Franz Kafka’s The Trial, in dialogue with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and the contemporary phenomena of social media and digital cancel culture. It aims to examine, from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the representation of the Big Other in Kafka’s narrative, establishing connections with forms of surveillance, exposure, judgment, and sanction in digital environments. This is a theoretical-reflective study grounded in the dialogue between literature, psychoanalysis, and studies on digital culture. The analysis understands Kafkaesque Law as an opaque and seemingly omnipresent symbolic instance, bringing it into dialogue with the Lacanian concept of the Big Other. It is argued that social media may reproduce certain dynamics of judgment by constituting spaces in which discourses, norms, and collective sanctions act upon subjects, particularly through the contemporary phenomenon of digital cancel culture.