Social Death, Literary Disorder

Josef K, Jesus Christ, and Dehumanizing Rhetoric

Abstract

This article examines how the Gospel of Mark and Franz Kafka’s The Trial display structural and thematic affinities concerning social death, dehumanisation, and literary disorder. Employing Orlando Patterson’s theory of social death as the analytical framework, the study demonstrates how Jesus Christ and Josef K undergo a gradual loss of identity, rights, and social recognition in relation to the adjudicating instances of the Law. Their shame-laden deaths—Christ’s slave-like crucifixion and K.’s execution “like a dog”—are presented as expressions of a narrative movement toward nothingness, in which the protagonists are reduced to non-persons. The article argues that this dehumanisation is mirrored on the formal level through the works’ fragmentary and episodic composition, which reflects the disorder and marginalisation structuring the protagonists’ existence. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s conception of intertextuality, the study contends that the relation between the texts should not be understood in reception-historical terms but as a non-identical mimesis, in which analogous structures and motifs emerge without historical dependence. The analysis demonstrates that this parallel illuminates central theological questions concerning kenosis, messianic shame, and the Law’s dehumanising logic, and concludes with a call to reintroduce biblical theology as a methodological problem and critical tool within contemporary exegesis.