Apparatus and ethics

Many have taken up the question of ‘what is an apparatus (apparat)’ since it was posed to Foucault. In the concatenating series, Agamben is one such author who has published the work, What is an Apparatus?. In order to glean a clear understanding of Agamen’s work, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony must be addressed. In adopting a literary approach, the paradigm presented by Kohlberg on moral development can be useful when determining an appropriate readership for such works as mentioned above. By an inspection of such themes found within In the Penal Colony as the guest’s dilemma and capital punishment, one may be resituated, hermeneutically, with a renewed appreciation for Kafka’s work.