The devil’s part

The devil’s part is the unforeseen reverse side of a situation as it exists for another person. When the Other appears, an aspect of the world emerges that the acting subject did not intend and cannot master—not merely an overlooked consequence, but a real dimension constituted for another freedom. The phrase captures how one’s acts and circumstances can escape one’s own account of them.

The Situation Beyond the Agent’s Control

In solitude, an unintended outcome may still be explained by facts the agent could have noticed. A person gently draws a small platform toward himself; it tips a bronze statuette, which breaks a fragile vase into a thousand pieces. Greater care or closer observation could have disclosed the arrangement of the objects. The mishap remains within the horizon of what the agent might have foreseen.

The Other’s appearance changes that structure. The situation is surpassed and organized into a world for someone else, so that it acquires an aspect the agent did not wish and, in principle, cannot control. The agent may remain master of the situation in one sense, but unforeseen reversals make it otherwise than it appears from his own standpoint. The devil’s part is that independently real reverse side: what is there for the Other, and therefore escapes the agent’s grasp.

Kafka’s Unknowable Meaning

The discussion identifies this unpredictability as what Franz Kafka’s art attempts to describe in The Trial and The Castle. K. and the Surveyor act in their own right, and their actions upon the world succeed according to their anticipations. Yet the truth of those acts continually escapes them: each has a meaning that neither character will ever know.

The passage interprets Kafka’s divine perspective as the Other taken to its limit. God is not introduced as an independent explanation of the characters’ predicament; rather, the concept of God marks the position for which human action is constituted in its full truth. The atmosphere of The Trial—gloomy and evanescent, marked by ignorance that is nevertheless lived as ignorance—makes this condition palpable. Its total opacity is felt only as a presentiment across total translucency, an image of being in the midst of the world for others.

The Look and the World for Others

The same structure reaches beyond actions to perception itself. When people are speaking and being watched, the bond the observer establishes with them is suddenly given outside him as an unknowable basis for that bond. His look, which had connected him to them without distance and fixed them as objects, is itself stripped of its transcendence when it becomes a look that is looked at.

If another person sees both the observer and the people he watches, the observer’s look can no longer make them objects for that Other: they are already objects of the Other’s look. The observer’s gaze becomes a relation among things in the world, and his own position appears as an object-position within it. Thus the devil’s part is not simply a surprising mishap or hidden intention. It is the loss of exclusive authority over what an action, a relation, or a situation means once another freedom is present.