“One is ashamed on account of one’s language” (Man schämt sich seiner Sprache). In the course of Hölderlin’s novel, Hyperion, or The Hermit in Greece, Hyperion’s shame of his language is responding to a love that comes to be identified with philosophy. The performance or experience of this shame is, however, expressly poetic; philosophy is urged to converge with this poetic exercise. Without such convergence, philosophy will not be philosophy, but something else, something more forced.¹

It would be misleading to identify Benjamin’s Kafka entirely with the Hyperion of Hölderlin , but Hyperion’s shame, particularly its relationship with the complementarity of philosophy and poetry, does not seem entirely removed from concerns raised in Benjamin’s writing on Kafka. Benjamin detects in Kafka’s work a convergence of philosophy and literature, a convergence in which philosophy and literature make themselves and each other less static than would otherwise be the case. This juncture of philosophy and literature happens in a “gesture” of shame. Such interpolation of the gestural into philosophy is often scorned. Ernst Cassirer distinguishes “semantic” and “magical” uses of the word, and clearly identifies philosophy, reason, and progress with the former and retrograde authoritarianism of myth with the latter.² As early as his 1916-essay on language, however, Benjamin detects in language a magical element that involves no closure or authoritarianism: this is rather a reminder of all that is not contained in the semantic and in the dubious “magic” of judgement (SW1, 64, 67, 70–72/ II:1, 142, 147, 152–54). Benjamin’s notion of the magical in language is also obviously distinct from a symbolism that would magically incorporate the unsayable.³ In Benjamin’s Kafka-writings, a shame becomes the gesture in which the philosophic impetus is registered in literature, much as it also becomes the literary impetus in philosophy. Without such gesture, the “philosophic” would not be philosophy but something more coercive, something that could occasion the very shame it is supposed to generate.

The literariness of Benjamin’s writing has led some to observe that “Benjamin’s method” is “in no way philosophic in the conventional sense.” This comment (made in the 1970s by Bernd Witte) on Benjamin’s manner of expression, and on the prevalence in it of literary and cultural analysis, is accompanied, however, by the verdict that Benjamin’s work is “historico-philosophic critique [geschichtsphilosophische Kritik]” whose “indirect method” of critique or criticism withdraws itself from “interpretative analysis” in an “esoteric,” in many respects “authoritarian,” “linguistic gesture [Sprachgestus].”⁴

Even Adorno argues that Benjamin has a tendency (reminiscent of the George-school) towards spell-binding, immobilizing “philosophic gesturing [Gestik],”⁵ a tendency that can become “authoritarian” and is in need of a more Hegelian deployment of concept.⁶ In December 1934, Adorno says that his and Benjamin’s “agreement” in the “philosophical fundamentals [Zentren]” was never so clear to him as it was upon reading Benjamin’s Kafka-essay of 1934.⁷ Yet Benjamin’s Kafka-reading points to elements of a preponderant cloudiness, whereas Adorno would prefer that Benjamin undertake not a complete explanation but at least a thoroughly “dialectical” rendering in order to let Kafka’s parables rain down somehow – gewissermaßen die Parabel regnen zu lassen. A thorough theoretical articulation is the approach favoured and proposed by Adorno.⁸

Benjamin does not expressly disagree with Adorno’s assessment. Indeed, he provides a very conciliatory response to some of Adorno’s reservations.⁹ Benjamin’s approach to the philosophic, conceived apparently as an approach of the philosophic, remains nonetheless unrenounced. There is nothing, moreover, to corroborate the claim that Benjamin’s disagreement with Adorno is not about the philosophic but rather about Benjamin’s abandonment of the philosophic.¹⁰ The above objections to Benjamin’s gesture, along with Adorno’s quasi-Hegelian criticisms of Benjamin’s Kafka-readings, may be of limited relevance to the gesture discerned by Benjamin in Kafka and to the gesture of Benjamin’s reading. Unlike some of his critics, Benjamin himself does not characterize his work as gestural, but – for reasons to be elaborated in this chapter – Adorno and others might not be wrong in referring to Benjamin’s gesture. If Benjamin’s gesture is esoteric, however, it is not esoteric in ways alleged by Adorno and others. 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 maintains secret for all. This is not secret that can be rendered, but rather secret that remains secret despite attempts to render it. Hence, the need for philosophic gesture that goes beyond thorough articulation.

Benjamin does indeed enact philosophy in a manner quite distinct from much going by that name. Such enactment might even suggest that more conventional “philosophy” is somehow unphilosophic.¹¹ It is unphilosophic in its lack of any literary gesture, its lack of any gesture to the non-denotative. Hannah Arendt characterizes Benjamin as poetic rather than as a philosopher.¹² Notwithstanding all his occasional misgivings about Benjamin’s work, Adorno insists to Arendt that Benjamin’s significance for him has always been that “the essence [Wesen] of Benjamin’s thinking” is “a philosophic thinking.” He adds: “I was never able to see his things under another point of view.” Adorno cannot but think that Benjamin’s writings “thereby alone find their entire weight.” Adorno concedes that Benjamin’s approach to philosophy is removed from “all traditional conceptions of philosophy,” and he acknowledges “that Benjamin does not make it easy for one to adhere” to this view of his work as philosophic.¹³ It is not easy to adhere to the view that Benjamin is working in philosophy, for the relevant works by him violate parameters set by so much that usually passes for philosophy. Benjamin did, of course, write poems and stories, but the debate between Arendt and Adorno concerns the writings usually regarded as exercises in philosophy and criticism. Adorno dismisses Arendt’s view that Benjamin is poetic and not a philosopher.¹⁴ Scholem similarly expresses shock to Adorno at Arendt’s implication that Benjamin is not a philosopher.¹⁵

In a way, both Adorno and Arendt are right and wrong. Benjamin does identify with philosophy as a discipline based on very explicit concern with various philosophemes – such as ethics, logic, and aesthetics.¹⁶ In this respect, Adorno is right and Arendt is wrong. Something distinctly literary enters much of Benjamin’s work, however, at least partly as a very concrete attempt to disturb any expectations of a discursively comprehensive system.¹⁷ In this sense, Arendt touches on something of relevance in Benjamin’s work. It might even be said that this literary aspect of Benjamin’s work – its gestural quality of recalling the preponderantly non-denotative – is partly what provokes quasi-Hegelian objections from Adorno . The debate about Benjamin as someone doing philosophy continues today when there are, on the one hand, attempts to weave Benjamin into the western tradition of philosophy as articulation and, on the other hand, an insistence that Benjamin abandons philosophy because it is confined to the posing of questions.¹⁸ Although he does exercise the philosophic in a manner almost entirely heterodox in relation to much, if not all, of the tradition known as western philosophy, Benjamin does not consider the emphasis on the preponderantly non-denotative to be an abandonment of philosophy. It is rather integral to the philosophic.¹⁹

Quite conceivably adapting aspects of Benjamin’s 1916-essay on language and the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel-book (1925–28), Giorgio Agamben elaborates “the proximity between gesture and philosophy” by referring to “the silence of philosophy …: pure gesturality.”²⁰ Such silence is perhaps also evoked in Benjamin’s reference to “sound film” as a “limit for the world of Kafka and Chaplin” (II:3, 1256).²¹ In consideration of these statements by Benjamin and Agamben , it might be proposed that philosophy and art meet in the gesture of silence. (With regard to Benjamin’s early works, this has been argued elsewhere.²²) Such gesture might be said to invoke what Benjamin – in “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933) – characterizes as a “mimetic” medium that is not subordinate to sense (SW2, 722/ II:1, 213). This exercise is – in the words of “ Doctrine of the Similar” (1933) – “a critical moment” whereby no meaning can credibly be fixed to the “magic” element in the mimesis (697–98/ 209–10). In a note towards his 1934-essay on Kafka , Benjamin associates the “primacy of the gesture” with “its incomprehen-sibility [Unverständlichkeit]” (II:3, 1206).²³ Agamben’s short text “Kafka Defended Against His Interpreters,” which seems to be a reworking of Kafka’s account of Prometheus , also stresses a priority of the inexplicable.²⁴ After remarks elsewhere on Benjamin’s reading of the gestural in Kafka , moreover, Agamben a...