Inscription, Prescription, Ex-cription. Nancy Facing the Law

Abstract

this article confronts the readings of Kafka’s story In the Penal Colony by philosophers Jean-luc Nancy and Jean-françois lyotard. the latter has analyzed it carefully due to that story illustrates his idea of “the untreatable”, that is, the preresscription that resists law and which has to do with the body of aisthesis. the prescription would be the sacrifice suffered by aesthetics when it is subordinated to Ethics or Politics, and hence the task that art has in lyotard's work: to bear witness to the unrepresentable. Nancy opposes another aesthetics, based like lyotard’s one on a heritage of the Kantian sublime. the difference between both ideas is that for Nancy bodies –that is, aesthetics– are not prescribed by law: they are primarily excribed. Ex-cription compared to prescription, or what is the same, two different ways of thinking about the relationship between Ethics and aesthetics.