Kafka's The Trial

The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multifaceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism. Written in a relatively abstract language, it tells the story of Josef K., who is accused of a crime he has no recollection of having committed (and whose nature is never revealed to him). The novel has often been interpreted theologically, expressing a form of radical nihilism in a modern world abandoned by God. However, it has just as often been read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the anonymous system he is facing) progressively leads to greater and greater confusion, ending with his execution. In this volume, the contributors deal with a range of issues arising in this work. Theology is central, and related to that are questions of justice, law, ethics, resistance, and subjectivity. All the contributors view the novel as responding to a context of rapid modernization, and questions of metaphysics intersect with the most mundane challenges of everyday life. There is here a fundamental uncertainty, a context of skepticism, that the contributors approach from a variety of angles.

Secure Anonymous Systems and Requirements

To understand the importance of secure anonymous system technologies, this chapter introduces communication, electronic payment, cloud computing, and electronic governance systems as their applications, and discusses roles of secure anonymous system technologies in these systems. To preserve privacies of individuals and to protect secrets of organizations, communication systems must enable users to send or receive messages without disclosing their identities even to managers of communication networks and receivers or senders of their messages, and credit card systems must enable cardholders to make their purchases without disclosing their identities while ensuring card companies to collect their exact expenditure amounts. Also, service providers in cloud computing must be able to calculate various functions of data owned by their clients without knowing values of individual data. Moreover, to protect voters from coercers who are forcing the voters to choose their supporting candidates, computerized voting systems must conceal correspondences between voters and their votes even from voters themselves. Secure anonymous system technologies enable developments of systems that satisfy these requirements.