STILL ON TRIAL: READING KAFKAS MODERNITY A CENTURY LATER

The year 2025 marks the centenary of the posthumous publication of Franz Kafkas The Trial (1925), a timeless work that continues to illuminate the persistent crises of law, authority and human freedom. A hundred years after its appearance, Kafkas vision of an individual caught up in a labyrinthian bureaucratic machinery remains a haunting metaphor for modern condition. The work invites renewed academic scrutiny in an era defined by digital surveillance, algorithmic control and bureaucratic opacity. This paper re-examines the ideological foundations of The Trial and the nuances of power and authority through the intersecting frameworks of Michael Foucaults disciplinary power and Giorgio Agambens sovereign exception. The paper also locates the novel within a broader philosophic discourse on the alienation and dehumanization inherent in the modern bureaucratic system.The Trial is a profound meditation on the penal experience of a modern subject entrapped within the machinery of law and bureaucracy through which authority reproduces itself. The court, omnipresent and elusive at the same time, functions as a dehumanizing bureaucratic weapon that operates intricately to make individuals perpetually trapped and alienated. Ultimately, the novel emerges as a prophetic allegory of contemporary forms of governance and its administrative logic that reduces life to a condition of perpetual accusation and deferred justice.