Starting from the short story In the Penal Colony, the article sets out to investigate the idea of power and law in Kafka and its implications with the device of violence and guilt. It deals with a power that distances itself as much from the theories of legal and political self-representation delivered to us by the modern tradition as from the deconstructive theories of power and gov ernment that have been widely affirmed in the last century. However, alongside the features of discontinuity, lines of continuity with formalist theory are also evident, especially in relation to its repressive and sanctioning aspects, centered on people's lives and bodies.
