Tournament: ceda | Round: 3 | Opponent: wake bs | Judge: koch
Before the law is a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the
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to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body.
The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has
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entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.

Franz Kafka, the parable "Before the Law," http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law-page2.html

"Before the Law" is Franz Kafka’s profound RUPTURE with the transcendent ordering of the law, which sees the law as existing but always out there, in the hands only of the gate keepers, who validate the existence of the objective Law via the act of punishment, an endless feedback loop of representations on top of representations of the law, ultimately concealing that there is just no there there.

The law is an assemblage, a social machine, whose component parts constitute only our belief in the transcendent signifier of the Law.

We affirm the potentiality of minor literature to put the law, language, and reality themselves to flight: Kafka writes escape routes that use representations of the law themselves to dismantle the assemblage of the law, to focus in on such small parts of the so-called law that the assumed existence of such a system is called into question.

Deleuze and Guattari 86. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, "Immanence and Desire," pg. 43-52

Negative theology (or the theology of absence), the transcendence of the law,
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ways that Max Brod arranged things to support his thesis of negative theology.
Two chapters are of particular concern: the brief final chapter, about K’s execution
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that entitled "The Lawyer, the Industrialist, and the Painter."1
From the point of view of a supposed transcendence of the law, there must
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the law, rather than being the necessary and derived expression of it.
The three worst themes in many interpretations of Kafka are the transcen- dence of
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, to the becoming-animal, to the machinic and collective assemblages.
So, should we support realist and social interpretations of Kafka? Certainly, since
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political and that has nothing to do with an activity of intimacy.3

Writing itself can have a radical character: translate everything into assemblages or machines of words, and then dismantle those assemblages.  This is particularly poignant in terms of how Kafka, a Czech Jew, chose to situate himself within the German language of the majority in order to force it to take flight

Deleuze and Guattari 86. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, "Immanence and Desire," pg. 43-52

Writing has a double function: to translate everything into assemblages and to dismantle the
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texts on transcendental law in short stories that he detaches from the whole).
Thus there remain machinic assemblages as objects of the novel. This time the machinic
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and this is certainly not a mental, psychical, or interior procedure.

Where one believed there was the law, there was in fact desire and desire alone: the law is written in a porno book, and we’re all fantasizing, calling its transcendent order into existence

Deleuze and Guattari 86. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, "Immanence and Desire," pg. 43-52

Here, then, are the new characteristics of the novelistic machinic assemblage in opposition
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the scene, all those microevents that express desire and its arbitrary fortunes.

Renounce the idea of the transcendence of the law.  Hold the law up to molecular, microscopic investigation: tiny affects, momentary perceptions, and quotidian interpretations contribute to a collective desiring-law which holds the whole system together.  Situate the law immanent to your own body: how do you participate in it? Lose yourself, your essence, and your sense of personhood and study the fluxes and flows of desire which made those attributes realizable in the first place.

Deleuze and Guattari 86. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, "Immanence and Desire," pg. 43-52

From this point on, it is even more important to renounce the idea of
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just the same as the ones he’s never yet passed." Justice is the
continuum of desire, with shifting limits that are always displaced.?It is this
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Oedipalization of Gregor, the platonic apple that his father throws at him.

Kafka’s "Before the Law" is minor literature insofar as it is minoritarian, it resists majoritarian deciphering.  Majorities have nothing to do with numbers, but presume a transcendent model, like common presuppositions about the existence of the law. A minority, in contrast, has no model, it is dismantling, destructive, and performs the very operation of Kafka’s parable: reading the law against itself.

Deleuze and Negri 95. Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, "Control and Becoming," Negotiations, Columbia University Press, pg. 173-6

Negri: How can minority-becoming be powerful? How can resistance become an
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the juridical paradox that con¬stitutive power can be defined only by constituted power?
Deleuze: The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may
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to take up Bergson’s notion of tabulation and give it a political meaning.
Negri: In your book on Foucault, and then again in your TV interview
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Maybe in a communication society it’s less Utopian than it used to be?
Deleuze: We’re definitely moving toward "control" societies that are no longer exactly
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create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

Like Kafka’s milieu, that of Czech Jewish exiled authors immediately before the holocaust, minority literature must emerge from within the cramped spaces of majoritarian language and spaces, effecting a dismantling, even if only momentary, of the perceived coherence of that majority.

Deleuze and Guattari 86. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, "What is Minor Literature?" pg. 17-18

So far we have dealt with little more than contents and their forms: bent
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what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language.)
The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. In
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absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life and death."2
The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective
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individual would be separable from the collective and would lead its own life).

Before the law, we are unresolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase statutory and/or judicial restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United States in one or more of the following areas: targeted killing; indefinite detention; offensive cyber operations; or introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities.

Tournament: ceda | Round: 6 | Opponent: whitman bm | Judge: autry
Before the law, we are indefinitely detained and against indefinite detention, therefore—the United States federal government should substantially increase statutory and/or judicial restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United States in the area of indefinite detention.

Tournament: ceda | Round: 2 | Opponent: augustana rt | Judge: hiland
Honored members of the Academy!
You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape.
I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire.
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tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.
But to a lesser extent I can perhaps meet your demand, and indeed I
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the great variety stages of the civilized world had not become quite unassailable.
I belong to the Gold Coast. For the story of my capture I must
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the only one that was hit; I was hit in two places.
Once in the cheek; a slight wound; but it left a large, naked, red scar which earned me the name of Red Peter, a horrible name, utterly inappropriate, which only some ape could have thought of, as if the only difference between me and the performing ape Peter, who died not so long ago and had some small local reputation, were the red mark on my cheek. This by the way.
The second shot hit me below the hip. It was a severe wound,
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it. In return, let him leave me alone with his delicacy21
After these two shots I came to myself—and this is where my own
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deny that from the human point of view this is really the case.
But that did not occur to me then. For the first time in my
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tail through and not all the strength of an ape could enlarge it.
I am supposed to have made uncommonly little noise, as I was later informed
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is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated.
Until then I had had so many ways out of everything, and now I
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have constructed somehow with my belly, since apes think with their bellies.
I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by "way
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a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.
No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out21 Only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall.
Today I can see it clearly; without the most profound inward calm I could never have found my way out. And indeed perhaps I owe all that I have become to the calm that settled within me after my first few days in the ship. And again for that calmness it was the ship’s crew I had to thank.
They were good creatures, in spite of everything. I find it still pleasant
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the memories I could recall between its decks would not all be hateful.
The calmness I acquired among these people kept me above all from trying to escape
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influence of my surroundings I acted as if I had thought it out.
I did not think things out; but I observed everything quietly. I watched
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the mass weight of my observations that impelled me in the right direction.
It was so easy to imitate these people. I learned to spit in the
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time to understand the difference between a full pipe and an empty one.
My worst trouble came from the schnapps bottle. The smell of it revolted me
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, while he ended his theoretical exposition by rubbing his belly and grinning.
After theory came practice. Was I not already quite exhausted by my theoretical instruction
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away the bottle, to rub my belly most admirably and to grin.
Far too often my lesson ended in that way. And to the credit of
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against the nature of apes and that I had the more difficult task.
What a triumph it was then both for him and for me, when one
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21" like a caress over the whole of my sweat-drenched body.
I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I
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was to follow had in any case been decided, once for all.
When I was handed over to my first trainer in Hamburg I soon realized that there were two alternatives before me: the Zoological Gardens or the variety stage. I did not hesitate. I said to myself: do your utmost to get onto the variety stage; the Zoological Gardens means only a new cage; once there, you are done for.
And so I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one has
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away to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon let out again.
But I used up many teachers, indeed, several teachers at once. As I became more confident of my abilities, as the public took an interest in my progress and my future began to look bright, I engaged teachers for myself, established them in five communicating rooms, and took lessons from them all at once by dint of leaping from one room to the other.
That progress of mine21 How the rays of knowledge penetrated from all sides into
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to do, provided always that freedom was not to be my choice.
As I look back over my development and survey what I have achieved so far
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, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report.

(Franz Kafka, A Report to the Academy)

Deleuze and Guattari elaborate in 1980
Deleuze and Guattari ’80. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction: Rhizome

It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning
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the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings"3
?