Abstract
The lecture draws Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" as a bodyphilosophical document. In a sense, this short story takes an intermediate position in Kafka's work: between the three great novels of democratization and the short stories that otherwise refer to the symbol of the beast.
It is the story of a historical demise of a machine - a machine that exists both materially and forms the functioning of the law itself and writes in the body of the convicted person. Kafka's proto-subjects have several points of contact with the body's phenomenology.
A body-philosophical perspective can help to give support to this proto-subject, a support that always has to be changed and re-invented with its own limits, but nevertheless remains content-related.