Brendan Moran

In Kafka's work, Benjamin detects a gesture of shame, which he characterizes as historico-philosophic (geschichtsphilosophisch). He considers Kafka's gesture of shame to be philosophic in its opposition to myth, which is closure concerning history. In its elaboration of Kafka's gesture, moreover, Benjamin's analysis itself becomes a gesture of shame and thus somehow “literary.” This does not detract from the notion that the gesture—in Kafka's work and in Benjamin's criticism—remains philosophic. Kafka's literary work is philosophic in shaming mythic interpretations of it; Benjamin's philosophic criticism continues this gesture by advancing shame about mythic tendencies either in the work or in its reception. Without pathos, Kafka presents astonished shame at mythic human order and is attentive to exceptions to, deviations from, such order. Benjamin's criticism continues the latter attentiveness, but the attentiveness, the philosophic element in Kafka's literature, is also betrayed by Benjamin in some respects.

In 1916, Walter Benjamin reportedly said to Gerhard Scholem that any "philosophy of my own … will somehow be a philosophy of Judaism."1 Scholem never accuses Benjamin of abandoning this desideratum. Benjamin's writings on Franz Kafka take on permutations, however, that very much bother Scholem.2 Benjamin's writings on Kafka undergo significant changes, but Scholem's disagreement constantly accompanies them.The German word "Missetäter," like its English counterpart "miscreant," historically refers to someone who has deviated from the true religious way.3 If there is a miscreant justice of literature for Benjamin's writings on Kafka, it is an attentiveness to—a studying of—what is otherwise denigrated...

Walter Benjamin’s writings are often read in terms of their emphasis on undecidability. This article focuses on Benjamin’s view of decision as a philosophic capacity to suspend recognizable myth. Myth is recognizable as closure. Myth becomes recognizable as myth when exceptions and extremes arise in relation to it. Without necessarily following the specific exception or extreme (which may itself be mythic), philosophy is a politics that is attuned to the capacity of an exception or extreme to perform the limit of a specific mythic form. In elaborating philosophically impelled decision as a capacity to take exception to myth, the article compares Benjamin’s works with writings by Agamben, Schmitt, Hiller, Sorel, Derrida and others. At various points in the article, and especially towards the end, the discussion of the notion of philosophic decision includes consideration of ways in which aspects of Benjamin’s enmity to myth might themselves become mythic, unphilosophic.

This book provides a critical assessment of Benjamin’s writings on Franz Kafka and of Benjamin’s related writings. Eliciting from Benjamin’s writings a conception of philosophy that is political in its dissociation from – its becoming renegade in relation to, its philosophic shame about – established laws, norms, and forms, the book compares Benjamin’s writings with relevant works by Agamben, Heidegger, Levinas, and others. In relating Benjamin’s writings on Kafka to Benjamin’s writings on politics, the study delineates a philosophic impetus in literature and argues that this impetus has potential political consequences. Finally, the book is critical of Benjamin’s messianism insofar as it is oriented by the anticipated elimination of exceptions and distractions. Exceptions and distractions are, the book argues, precisely what literature, like other arts, brings to the fore. Hence the philosophic, and the political, importance of literature.

In the past two and a half decades, Walter Benjamin's early essay 'Towards the Critique of Violence' has taken a central place in politico-philosophic debates. The complexity and perhaps even the occasional obscurity of Benjamin's text have undoubtedly contributed to the diversity, conflict, and richness of contemporary readings. Interest has heightened following the attention that philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have devoted to it. Agamben's own interest started early in his career with his 1970 essay, 'On the Limits of Violence', and Benjamin's essay continues to be a fundamental reference in Agamben's work. Written by internationally recognized scholars, Towards the Critique of Violence is the first book to explore politico-philosophic implications of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' and correlative implications of Benjamin's resonance in Agamben's writings. Topics of this collection include mythic violence, the techniques of non-violent conflict resolution, ambiguity, destiny or fate, decision and nature, and the relation between justice and thinking. The volume explores Agamben's usage of certain Benjaminian themes, such as Judaism and law, bare life, sacrifice, and Kantian experience, culminating with the English translation of Agamben's 'On the Limits of Violence'.

Benjamin’s Kafkan anxiety wants to refrain from identification with myth. This anxiety is about nothing – the force determinatively effective in things but not entirely manifest in them. Benjamin’s Kafka is thereby Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian. Benjamin’s Kafka is unKierkegaardian and unHeideggerian, however, in offering only little prospect of freedom beyond anxiety. Benjamin’s messianism does, of course, reserve a distinctly redemptive potential for the human. Benjamin’s Kafka also involves, nonetheless, anxiety that cannot presume the possibility of entirely transcending itself or of entirely transcending the fears that interfere with it. Humans are so embroiled in mythic attachments that prospects for Levinasian ethical transcendence are also hindered. Anxiety is, moreover, inhumanly physical – so immanently beyond humans and humanity that it is not amenable to Levinasian ethical transcendence.

Agamben recurrently works a somewhat Benjaminian conception of shame into his writings and especially into Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1999). This chapter is concerned quite specifically with shame as a gesture of philosophy. The shame is a gesture, for it recalls a force that dissociates from historical incarnations. The gesture of philosophic shame is not quite the discharge that is advocated by Deleuze and Guattari or the internalized community of sentiment that is formulated as shame by Bernard Williams. Benjamin’s Kafka-writings and Agamben’s relevant texts (with distinct nuances) concern shame that includes constant preparedness to dissociate from notions of discharge and from the conclusions of community sentiment. This dissociation is integral to the philosophic gesture of both Benjamin and Agamben.

Not to fear distraction by (what Levinas dismisses as) “underground passages” is an overhuman pressure placed by Benjamin on the philosophic. The philosophic removes us as much as possible not only from mythic reassurances but also from mythic fears. Wisdom involves “friendliness” that is provided at times and places that are most difficult. Agamben defines philosophy as “nonpredicative” friendship. For Benjamin’s Kafka, philosophy as friendliness is no escape from representation and conceptualization but is an attempt to consider representation and conceptualization as emerging from distracting and distorting physicality that does not entirely manifest itself. Philosophy as friendliness must be willing to lend attention to anything, for everything belongs to the unincorporable physicality on behalf of which this friendliness is anxious to offset mythic constraint.

For Benjamin’s Kafka, humans have no direct access to experience outside appropriative guilt contexts. There is simply our distorted awareness of experience unabsorbed by such contexts, such myth. The epic life, the most determinant shared life, we remember as “forgotten,” as otherwise not conscious for us. No message, moral, or key frees us entirely from this condition that myth does not adequately address or admit. Scholem, as well as Adorno and Horkheimer, has more emphatic notions of wisdom. Benjamin does try to liberate Kafka’s texts from fatalistic tendencies in them. It is without counsel, however, that wisdom enters the “world theater.” Such is the philosophic gesture. The proximity of the theatrical and the “Kafkan” philosophic is one basis of Benjamin’s disagreements with Adorno.

For Benjamin, Kafka’s Vorwelt (pre-world) precedes the world constituted by myth. According to some, Benjamin portrays this prehistory as itself a mythic – unduly constrictive – force to be remembered so that it is no longer determinant. Another tendency in Benjamin’s Kafka-writings is, however, to present the Vorwelt as a pre-mythic residue that defies attempts to constrict it or be entirely conscious of it. Whereas Franz Rosenzweig focusses on the potential of humans to overcome the Vorwelt, Benjamin often uses the term “Vorwelt” to refer to an irrevocably shared experience – our epic Vorwelt. Insofar as Benjamin presumes an overcoming of the Vorwelt, he disregards Kafka’s literary accentuation of our distortedly particular relationship with all and everything, including ourselves. Benjamin thereby diminishes the philosophic character of his criticism.

This chapter elucidates further Benjamin’s notion of Kafkan attention, a notion for which the ultimately inhuman physicality is so intrusive that it does not abide Heidegger’s view of the human as unique ontologically oriented being. Levinas considers Heidegger’s ontologically oriented human to be inattentive to human relations. Although the aspects of Benjamin’s work on Kafka most emphasized here do not conceive of the human as ontologically privileged, they do conceive of attentiveness as a level of distraction and physically impelled waywardness that Levinas might indeed consider irresponsible towards humans. This waywardness is so great that it strains Benjamin’s messianism insofar as the latter is informed by a conception of a uniquely salvatory human, a conception that might itself undermine attention to distraction.

Benjamin’s approach to Kafka is a convergence of prophecy and criticism. Kafka’s writings prepare themselves for continually being read as a twofold prophesy: of a future of myth, and of a potential philosophic capacity for shame about myth. Benjamin’s philosophic criticism responds to this impetus in Kafka’s writings and thereby continues the prophecy. Under mythic constraints, it is possible that all are victims of questionable imperatives. Shame about those imperatives is a possibility that may be prophesied. The basis for such shame is the inhuman, which may always be critically juxtaposed with human presumptions to dominate it. Whereas Agamben considers it certain that shame about the human will continue as long as the inhuman is witnessed, Benjamin’s Kafka prophesies this shame as simply a possibility.

The historico-philosophic shame about myth (closure) might even facilitate Benjamin’s interest in those who are deemed foolish by mythic standards. This interest might be, above all, commendation of a wisdom that elicits, gives prominence to, or even somehow promotes, such fools or foolishness. This wisdom would arise both from receptive attention to the tension that the fools represent in relation to discernible closure, and from the previously discussed underlying and correlative shame about closure. In this way, the philosophic in Kafka’s works and in Benjamin’s criticism is itself foolish. It has departed from the demands of recognizable myths.

For Benjamin, Kafkan study is concerned with the interaction of nothing and something, whereby the nothing permeates all somethings and thereby renders uncertain and incomplete whatever is recognized or done by the studier. The inhuman physicality of the nothing intrudes so wrenchingly that Kafkan particulars place great strain on possibilities of regarding the human as a unique conduit of wisdom. There is little or no scope for Heidegger’s fundamental ontology or even his conception of the poetic. Benjamin’s Kafkan wariness about mythifying art or mythifying human space is quite relentless. Study material – including the studier – become so charged with intrusive physicality that there remains little, if anything, amenable to Heideggerian world-opening. The intrusion of bizarre physicality is simply a perpetual invitation to, or of, study.

Philosophic criticism provides a persistence of truth-oriented discourse against any ostensibly concluded gesture of an artwork. Such persistence continues the exercise – initiated by the artwork – of breaking recognizable myth. The artwork performatively eludes discursive rendering and thereby helps to keep philosophy philosophic: such unyielding is the philosophic element in the artwork. Attentiveness to this philosophic element of the artwork is integral to criticism itself being philosophy. The literary element in philosophy is the gesture enacting an inextinguishably mysterious particularity of any expression, including philosophy itself. “Kafkan” politics requires this gesture. Philosophy is thereby renegade in relation to myth, which attempts to subsume experience. Insofar as Benjamin disregards the pressure of inextricable particularity as accentuated in Kafka’s literature, the philosophical character of his criticism is diminished.

Many objections to Benjamin’s gesture, along with Adorno’s quasi-Hegelian criticisms of Benjamin’s Kafka-readings, are of limited relevance to the gesture discerned by Benjamin in Kafka and to the correlative gesture of Benjamin’s writing. Unlike some of his critics, Benjamin himself does not characterize his work as gestural, but Adorno might not be wrong in referring to Benjamin’s gesture. The gesture is esoteric not in the sense of binding itself with a secret that only adepts can access; neither authoritarian nor immobilizing, it offers nothing as authority and thereby recognizes secret for all. This is not secret that can be rendered, but rather secret that remains despite attempts to render it. Hence, the need for philosophic gesture that goes beyond thorough articulation.

Although some claim Benjamin’s works refuse decision, Benjamin outlines philosophic decision as taking exception to closures. Exceptions and extremes in relation to closures can highlight the limitedness of the closures themselves. While exceptions and extremes do not necessarily set standards for philosophic decision, they might make evident the myths from which they deviate. Contrary to deconstructive criticisms of Benjamin, philosophic decision, like Benjaminian-Kafkan attentiveness, does not presume to expunge its own contingency. It does dissociate itself from recognizable efforts simply to control or eliminate exceptions and extremes. Benjamin’s philosophic decision is thus distinct from the decision criticized in François Laruelle’s rejection of philosophy. To the slight extent that Benjamin does succumb to the project of eliminating exceptions, however, he betrays his own philosophic politics.