Years pass and the man still waits, growing old and increasingly blind. As he is
approaching death, the man eventually asks the doorkeeper a question he has yet to ask.
Why has no one else attempted to gain admittance through the door? The door-keeper
answers, ‘No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.
I am now going to shut it.’^20
The parable of the door before the law has provoked numerous interpretations. Hélène
Cixous, for example, presents it as an allegory for female exclusion under patriarchy.^21
The man remains convinced of his own exclusion, even though the door has been left
open only for him, just as women have remained convinced of their own exclusion under
the law of patriarchy. Exclusion, then, may merely be a question of perceived exclusion.
This allegory may be reread within the context of the demarcation of architecture. The
door is the door to the other. Architecture has likewise remained convinced of its own
exclusion from other discourses. Architecture has not dared to cross the threshold of the
door, even though that door has remained open.
In a further story, ‘The Great Wall of China’, Kafka tells the tale of a wall.^22 It is a
wall that is built on mythical foundations. Not only is its effectiveness as a wall
debatable, in that—amongst other considerations—it is rumoured to have gaps, but its
very justification could also be called into question. The wall is justified as protection
against the ‘other’, in this case the supposedly barbarian hordes to the north, who are
depicted in popular imagery as savages ‘with great pointed teeth’. In fact the peoples to
the south have no real understanding of those to the north. Furthermore, if these supposed
savages had been intent on invasion, the vast distance separating the two peoples would
have been defence in itself. The wall, then, in Kafka’s terms, is a wall built on suspicion,
whose role, while purportedly being to keep out the ‘other’, is in fact to bond those
‘protected’ by it, and to fan allegiance to the emperor. Indeed the very building of the
wall unites the people into ‘a ring of brothers, a current of blood no longer confined
within the narrow circulation of one body, but sweetly rolling and yet ever returning
throughout the endless leagues of China’.^23
The wall, then, may act as a physical manifestation of a social order, serving to
reinforce that condition. The wall may lend a sense of identity to what is enclosed within
its boundaries, while engendering a sense of alterity towards what is outside. The wall
creates a sense of exclusion that is both social and physical. While Kafka’s tale of the
door might be taken as a parable about perceived exclusion, his tale about the wall might
be taken as one about perceived alterity.
The door, by breaching the wall, and by opening up to the ‘other’, can expose the wall
for what it is, and reveal the underlying social constructs on which it is founded. The act
of breaching is in effect the moment of transgression. The opening of the door reveals the
wall as wall, just as, in illuminating the limit, transgression exposes the limit as limit. The
door, therefore, serves as the key for understanding the whole question of limit and
transgression, of openness and exclusion.
The theme of openness and exclusion is pursued in several essays in this volume.
Georg Simmel uses the bridge and the door in his discussion of these two conceptual
categories. ‘The bridge’, he observes, ‘indicates how humankind unifies the
separatedness of merely natural being, and the door how it separates the uniform,
continuous unity of natural being.’^24 Of the two, according to Simmel, the door has ‘the
richer and livelier significance’. Not only does it not dictate direction and movement, but
axel boer
(Axel Boer)
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