By JEANNE MARIE GAGNEBIN*

How Franz Kafka's texts, which are often interpreted as expressions of absurdity or despair, can, on the contrary, be read by Walter Benjamin as figures of hope [hope]?

In November 2021, when we were all counting on the end of the Covid epidemic, after almost two years of “lockdown”, masks, vaccines, suffocating deaths and simulated funerals, the International Walter Benjamin Society organized its biannual colloquium in Berlin with the following theme: “hope near Walter Benjamin”. We feared the worst. To better understand this notion in Benjamin, I propose to start from two independent but closely related questions.

First of all: what is the difference between “waiting” and “waiting”?[I]”[“hope”] and “hope” [“hope”] in French? Is there another language that makes this difference? Let us note that Benjamin works with both terms in his writings in French.

Second question: how can Franz Kafka's texts, which are often interpreted as expressions of absurdity or despair, be read by Walter Benjamin as figures of hope?hope]? In fact, it was in his 1934 “tribute essay”, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death, that the word hope was used most frequently throughout Walter Benjamin's work.

As to the first question: as the second cardinal virtue, hope [hope]is one of the most cited human properties that should still be able to save us today. Its relationship with transcendence is based both on the capacity to overcome, to go beyond human limits, and on a divine or religious origin. As an athlete, artist, dancer, thinker, man can surpass himself; but does this mean that his face reflects the divine light? Only through the preponderance of a theological model, of Jewish or Christian origin, does hope [hope] acquires a positive meaning that highlights the connection between man and God.

Without this, hope [hope] (Elpis, at the bottom of Pandora's box in Hesiod) is rather an indication of the misery of humanity that prefers to delude itself rather than be guided by clear knowledge. At least in Spinoza, Marx or Freud. Thus, the well-known formula “hope [hope] is the last one to die”[ii] declares at the same time that we need hope [hope] to continue living — and also that we will certainly die soon, namely, before her.

When the German term hope is translated as “wait” [“hope”], the relationship with the future is certainly considered, but the possibility of a religious or political guarantee of this supposedly better future is much less present. “Hope” [hope] indicates a theological and/or political sense, an eschatological and/or liberating salvation. “Wait” [“hope”] is based more on the everyday, even trivial, use of the verb (for example: “I hope [j'Wait] may you be well”).

The noun “wait” [“hope”] does not so much describe the movement of the soul toward transcendence as the expectation [waiting] of an objective whose achievement depends on simple human means, “even if insufficient, or even childish”[iii], as Franz Kafka writes about Ulysses and the Sirens. Naturally, these means may not be successful, may result in failure or defeat. To stay in Kafka's universe: despite all his dedication and good will, the employee Schuwalkin (whom Benjamin mentions at the beginning of his essay on Franz Kafka) manages to extract a signature, but it is not valid.

Even recognizing the fundamentally theological intonations of Walter Benjamin's thought, in particular those linked to Jewish mysticism, we can ask ourselves whether the tendency to make this thought a variant of theology or philosophy of hope [hope] (Theologie/Philosophie der Hoffnung) is not too hasty. A bit as if Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch were in agreement, at least in their conceptions of history, and this despite Benjamin's few critical remarks on Bloch's essays (Geist der Utopie ou Be this time)[iv] that we have left.

Making Walter Benjamin one of the first “liberation theologians” may certainly sound appealing, especially in Latin America, but there is a risk of simplifying both theological thought and the conception of political struggle. Benjamin tries to think of a transformation of the profane that would be radical and, in this sense, also theological, but it is a transformation that arises from the profane and is carried out in a profane way.

In this context, it is important to note that Walter Benjamin himself, when translating the famous expression of Thesis VI into French, “the fun of the dream”, usually translated as “the spark of hope [hope]”, he uses the word “wait” [“hope”] in his French version of the “Theses”: “— only a historian like this will be able to attract [or stir up?][v] the spark of a wait [hope] in the heart of past events themselves”. “A wait” [“a hope”], wrote Walter Benjamin; “of hope” [“de hope”], translated Gandillac and Rusch[vi]. As if Benjamin were looking for the light of a concrete and modest solution, while his translators wanted to be able to count on the ontological presence of hope [hope].

In other words: it is up to us to search and rummage through the past to eventually discover a small spark of hope [hope] — just as an archaeologist might come across fragments of pottery. But we have no right to presume, in order to get to work, the presence of a spark or a future sun, just as it is not the guarantee of the existence of progress that prescribes the need for resistance and the struggle for liberation. In other words: Walter Benjamin prefers to operate with various practical modes of waiting(s) [spoiler(s)], instead of betting on the metaphysical hypothesis of an essential presence of hope [hope].

This “resolutely pragmatic” interpretation is highlighted in a letter he sent to Werner Kraft in November 1934, in which he comments on his essay on Franz Kafka and says he wants to study this study in more depth one day, explaining this desire: “First of all, the experience of writing this study has brought me to a crossroads of my ideas and considerations, and the reflections I will devote to them in the future promise to be equivalent to the gesture we make when we orient ourselves, compass in hand, in a terrain where there is no traced path. (…) I think above all of that [motif][vii] of Kafka's failure. It is closely related to my resolutely pragmatic interpretation of Kafka.”[viii]

To tell the truth, being “pragmatic” is certainly not a frequent characteristic of Walter Benjamin, neither as a person, nor as a method or as a writer! The aim of this “pragmatic” interpretation is to resist the temptation of grand totalizing interpretations of Franz Kafka, be they theological or psychoanalytical or existential, first of all, Max Brod’s reading, but also, in a more discreet and friendly way, Gershom Scholem’s.

Walter Benjamin wrote to him in August of that same year, commenting on the poem that Scholem had written about The process by Franz Kafka: “This is how I would provisionally define the relationship between your poem and my work. Your starting point is ‘the nothingness of Revelation’ (…) and the perspective — which derives from the history of salvation — of the established legal procedure. My starting point is the infinitesimal waiting [hope] absurd, just like the creatures that await it [hope] animates and in which this absurdity is reflected”[ix].

Previously, when he received the poem, Benjamin, in an elegantly pragmatic manner, had already declared himself in conflict with his friend's negative theology: “Now when you write: 'Your nothingness is the only thing/ that she can experience of You', I can justly add my attempt at interpretation with the following words: I tried to show how Kafka sought in the reverse of this nothingness, in its lining if I may say so, to grope for redemption.”[X]

Thus, when Walter Benjamin states in his letter to Werner Kraft that he has reached a crossroads in his reflections, that he has indeed finished writing his essay, but that this conclusion is only provisional, since he intends to write a more important work on Kafka later, we can describe this “crossroads” as the intersection of several paradoxical, or even opposing, directions. The first direction would be that of an interpretation that should not be one—or rather, that acts in a direction contrary to the classical status of a literary or philosophical interpretation, since it does not want to produce any total and coherent image of the work in question.

The second direction, on the other hand, would lead to the opposite result, that it is precisely in this lack, in this impossibility of a classical interpretation, in this kind of failed act of the interpretative will, that it is in this “reverse side” or in this “lining” of nothingness — also a lining of the fabric of the literary text — that the signs of waiting(s) may eventually reside [spoiler(s))]. But such signs are neither bright nor attractive; they would, instead, be dull and colorless.

Thus emerges a series of strange creatures, eccentric, funny or sad buffoons, clumsy and inept helpers: angels with tied wings, a voiceless singer, messengers whose messages never arrive, even a holy patriarch who immediately obeys God and is ready to sacrifice his son, but simply cannot leave the house. All are at the crossroads, not knowing where to go.

Just like the reader, who would sincerely like to arrive at an interpretation and finally understand, but who simply stands there, motionless and confused. Adorno says this precisely in his “Notes on Kafka”: “Every sentence says: interpret me, and none of them tolerates interpretation.”[xi]

It is this impossibility, or even this prohibition of interpretation, that Walter Benjamin takes as the guiding thread of his essay.[xii] He renounces the idea of ​​producing a complete image of Franz Kafka's work, a coherence of mystical, pathological or sociological origin. This renunciation has often been noted and interpreted as the true key to Kafka's universe: a universe whose main theme would be precisely the cruel unintelligibility of the "human organization", of the legal bureaucracy (The process) or political administration (The castle), which would explain why this world is so dark. Even if Benjamin does not reject this reading key, he does not deduce from it an exclusive desolation.

In fact, the impossibility of a classical hermeneutic approach allows us to focus on other elements: gestures, metaphors, hesitations, hypotheses that accumulate without any verification, but indicate another dimension of literature, namely, the right not to reach any conclusion. Hence the large number of well-known phrases that follow one another and relativize each other, so that the reader always remains doubtful about what is being discussed.

Franz Kafka never finished his novels, and Walter Benjamin does not want to reach any conclusion about their meaning: “We may indeed find the form of my work problematic, but there was no other possible way for me in this case: because I wanted to keep my hands free. I did not want to conclude. In historical terms, it would also be possible that it was not yet the time to conclude—at least if, like Brecht, we see Kafka as a prophetic writer. As we know, I did not use this adjective, but there would be much to say about it, and it is possible that I will do so myself.”[xiii]

The “crossroads” at which Walter Benjamin finds himself thus becomes clearer in this letter to Werner Kraft. It is a renunciation and, at the same time, a promise: the reader—and the critic—renounces his ambition to be able to at least sketch a comprehensive understanding or provide a hypothesis for a broader interpretation of the work, which, in Kafka’s case, could calm our anxiety. In doing so, however, he receives a precious but fragile guarantee, namely, as an unknown dimension (to himself and, more often than not, also to the author), indicating a possible future, whether in the form of a warning or a consolation, or even an explosion of joy.

In July 1934, when Walter Benjamin and Bertold Brecht were playing chess, listening to the radio, and discussing Franz Kafka, Benjamin mentioned Brecht’s assertion about the “prophetic dimension” of Kafka’s work. Kafka had foreseen the monstrous growth of the political and bureaucratic organization of human daily life and capitalist labor; he had clearly understood its character of alienation and exploitation, but his reaction could not have gone beyond describing—remarkably, Bertold Brecht recognized—the anguish aroused by the cruelty of such a system.

The prophetic character of Franz Kafka's work is more complex, according to Walter Benjamin. It is not only a matter of noting that Kafka would have foreseen our current miserable situation, our growing disorientation and anxiety, but consequently also, like Bertold Brecht and later Günter Anders[xiv] and even György Lukács suspected, our desire for a leader, for a “Leader” strong one who can guide and save us.

It is much more a matter of emphasizing that, in Franz Kafka, disorientation and confusion are not simply the consequence of the loss of a previous, ancient and secure order, and of the suffering caused by this loss; disorientation and confusion would undoubtedly mean the recognition of this collapse, but, in the same way, an attempt to grope in this territory described as the “reverse side of nothingness” in search of mini-events, gestures, stories, the many opportunities to practice another mode of attention and, who knows, a freer world. In other words: waiting [hope] is neither in front of us nor behind us. It is not a question of projecting it or patching it up, but of paying attention to the present.[xv]

A return to a Halakah (the sacred doctrine) rediscovered or reinvented is not possible and would be of no use. Several commentators have rightly noted that Benjamin read and recognized the importance of Chaim Biliak's essay “Halakah and Haggadah” (Haggadah is the term that describes the numerous commentaries on the doctrine), translated by Scholem. This work was published in the journal The Jude in April 1919.

Stefano Marchesoni quotes the “pathetic appeal” that closes Biliak’s essay: “Make us more inclined, in life, to act than to speak; in writing, more to Halacha than to Haggadah. We bow our heads: where is the iron yoke? Why does no strong hand come, no outstretched arm?”[xvi]. It is precisely an appeal of this kind (which Brecht and Anders read between the lines of Kafka) that Benjamin opposes. He tries to read Kafka, so to speak, in a haggadic way, attentive to the figures that allude to other forms of experimentation.

Let us recall here his famous letter of June 12, 1938 to Scholem: “Kafka’s work shows that tradition is sick. Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the narrative aspect of truth. Wisdom is thus marked as a heritage of tradition; it is truth in its haggadic consistency. It is this consistency of truth that has been lost. Kafka was far from being the first to confront this fact. Many have adapted to it by clinging to the truth or to what they considered to be it in each case; with a heavy or lighter heart, renouncing its transmissibility. The real genius in Kafka was that he tried something completely new: he renounced truth in order to cling to transmissibility, to the haggadic element. His creations are, by their very nature, parables. Their misery and beauty, however, had to become more than parables. They do not simply lie down at the feet of doctrine, like the Haggadah at the feet of Halacha. Once they lie down, they inadvertently raise a heavy paw against it.”[xvii]

“More than parables (parables)”, observes Walter Benjamin, these stories establish a comparison with an elusive, inaccessible term and, for this very reason, they also become experimental attempts independent of any original paradigm. It is a bit like the vertigo that takes hold of the librarian in his search for the first book, or the book that would comprise all books, in the infinite library of Babel according to Jorge Luis Borges.

These haggadic narratives, similar to small animals apparently lying docilely at their owner's feet, but which give him powerful blows with their paws and run the risk of knocking him down, are surprisingly similar to “experimental prescriptions” or “attempts at ordering” or even “experimental devices” — I am trying to translate Benjamin's term Downloads — who improvise, without adult guidance, the members of a proletarian children's theater or the anonymous actors of a street theater, perhaps similar to Franz Kafka's Oklahoma Theater. Theodor Dorno emphasized the term “experimental device” in Walter Benjamin's essay and criticized him for wanting to restrict its use to Brecht's epic theater.[xviii]

However, we could defend the hypothesis that this concept of Walter Benjamin, which was in fact decisive for his reading of Bertold Brecht's theater, points to a broader domain of research: namely, a definition that is both aesthetic and political of what Benjamin calls scope, play space, living space, action space[xx]. A space in which new experiments and experiences are possible, as it is a space empty enough to allow its inhabitants to engage in a variety of different activities, in particular the multiple use of different objects, as in the sober houses of the fishermen and peasants of Ibiza, as Walter Benjamin describes them, as opposed to the bourgeois apartments crammed with furniture, souvenirs, lace tablecloths and trinkets.[xx]

Naturally, we must also mention the reflections on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction,” which Benjamin and Klossovsky translated together in 1936. And we can ask ourselves whether the various versions of the essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” rewritten four times by Walter Benjamin after criticism, not to mention censorship, by Theodor Adorno, are not only related to a political prudence that was indispensable at that time, but also to a disagreement that was simultaneously aesthetic and political about the art of the future.

In the second German version of this text, from 1935/36, a version that was thought to have disappeared but was rediscovered in Max Horkheimer's archives in the 1980s, Walter Benjamin develops a theory of mimesis as a fundamental anthropological behavior that could not fail to displease Theodor Adorno, always suspicious of “anthropological materialism”[xxx] of his interlocutor. But this anthropological materialism is subject to history. Thus, says Walter Benjamin, “the two facets of art: appearance and play, are as if dormant in mimesis, tightly folded into each other, like the two membranes of the plant germ.”[xxiii]

With the decline of appearance and aura or, we could say, with the decline of an aesthetic of beautiful appearance and totality, of beautiful scheme, of illusion and truth, the second facet of mimesis, that of play and experimentation, manifests itself and grows: “In other words: in works of art, what is driven by the withering away of appearance, by the decline of the aura, is a formidable gain for the space of play (Game Room). "[xxiii]

Walter Benjamin's dialectical hypothesis consists in betting that the process of destruction of the beautiful appearance, the end of the aura, not only makes the world disenchanted and given over to the endless consumption of the same, but allows, on the contrary, the emergence of a process of playful (and serious) experimentation of other possibilities of reality. Children and artists begin to invent other arrangements of reality because they do not take it as definitive.

These experimental and playful activities presuppose a notion of political action that does not aim at transforming the world according to predetermined norms, but rather based on exercises and attempts in which human experience, sensitive and spiritual, intelligible and corporeal, dares to invent other spaces and other times. In this sense, and as Benjamin and Klossovski translated into French, the space of play, the scope, is the “immense and unsuspected field of action”[xxv] both art and politics.

Could Franz Kafka's work also fit into this search for a new aesthetic and political space? This would explain why Walter Benjamin insists on Kafka's humor, in his “Hilarity "[xxiv], the author's persistent joy or serenity, despite his failures. Benjamin thus proposes a reading of Kafka that does not emphasize the mourning of an outdated order, but the search for new experimentation, to find possible ways out, a bit like what Gilles Deleuze would call “lines of flight.”

In particular, Walter Benjamin refuses to reduce Franz Kafka's novels, especially The process, to the well-known triad Law-Guilt-Punishment. He makes this quite clear in his letter to Scholem of August 11, 1934: “I have the impression that Kafka’s permanent insistence on the law is the dead point of the work. What I mean by this is simply that the work will not move if the interpretation is based on this dead point. It is also true that I do not want to embark on an explicit face-to-face with this concept.”[xxv]

We must venture the following hypothesis here: the 1934 essay in homage to Franz Kafka deepens Walter Benjamin's famous assertion in his youthful essay, “Critique of Violence,” namely that the order of Law (and therefore also of the law) is a continuation, albeit disguised and even purified, of the mythical order, and therefore an order that does not allow for the realization of either freedom or true justice — which would belong only to God; an order that, in fact, declares guilt and punishes in order to violently maintain the current configurations of power.

According to Stefano Marchesoni, Franz Kafka's prophetic facet would be a “messianic allusion to an anarchic destitution of law.”[xxviii] Walter Benjamin reads Kafka's texts as a lucid and often ironic illustration of this fatal embarrassment in the order of law, a confusion represented by the labyrinthine corridors evoked by the work and by the recalcitrant syntax of Kafka's prose.

Em The process, K. confuses the intricacies of legality with the pursuit of justice — in fact, perhaps this confusion is his secret guilt, this guilt that always sets the mechanism of law and punishment in motion. We could even dare to say that only with the abolition of this mythical order, an order that reappears under the deceptive appearance of law, would K. finally be able to refuse to believe in such rules and, according to conventions, to always want to obey them; only then could he finally be innocent and lead a free and generous life.[xxviii], as Sancho Panza did alongside his “devil”, Don Quixote, according to Franz Kafka quoted by Sancho Panza Benjamin at the end of his essay.

In Kafka's texts, only those who have no power whatsoever are free, and therefore do not need any system of law to maintain them; their lightness certainly leads to their weakness and, in this sense, to their failure, but it also opposes all the bent, inert and obedient officials.

Furthermore, these vulnerable but free figures escape the power of the father, a power that Sancho Pansa Benjamin evokes according to a more political than psychoanalytic reading, the power of the patriarchy against the “maternal” (“of the Mother”), a concept that Benjamin borrows from Bachofen and which qualifies the strange independent coil Odradek: “The concern of the father of the family is the maternal one, which will survive him”[xxix], he writes, as if the maternal indicated a power that escapes the paternal and domestic order of house. Despite the temptation, I dare not outline any feminist analysis here!

“Odradek is the form things take in oblivion”[xxx], Benjamin also writes in his essay on Kafka. Oblivion that distorts, but also allows creatures to live under stairs, in attics or in a corner, to have no “fixed abode”, to disappear and then return, in short, to escape the control of house. About the inattentive helpers and the messengers of the Production, Benjamin says they resemble the “gandharvas [of the Indian tradition][xxxii], unfinished beings, in a still nebulous state”, and adds: “The wait [hope] exists for them and for those like them, the unfinished, the clumsy”[xxxi]. Because they are “unfinished,” without a definitive identity, they can still transform themselves and dare to become others. And if they manage to escape the reign of parents and judges, they will not become monstrous insects, but they will run the risk of inventing different figures of freedom. It is a waiting [hope] tenuous and difficult, but present and possible.

*Jeanne Marie Gagnebin She is a philosophy professor at PUC-SP and Unicamp. She is the author, among other books, of History and narration in Walter Benjamin (Perspectiva).  [https://amzn.to/4aHAfMz]

Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.

Notes

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[I] We have chosen this term whenever the aforementioned semantic distinction in French and its use by Walter Benjamin are the subject of consideration in the text, given that, in Portuguese, the word “esperança” has both meanings in question. (See Dictionary Houaiss of the Portuguese Language: hope: 1. feeling of someone who sees that what they want can be achieved; trust in something good; faith. 3. expectation, wait, I await). [NT]

[ii] In German: “Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt".

[iii] "unzulängliche, already kindische Mittel”, writes Benjamin, Fixed-size files II-2, p. 415, quoting Kafka. French translation by Christophe David and Alexandra Richter in the volume entitled About Kafka by W. Benjamin, Ed. Nous, 2015, p. 45. Most of the French citations of Benjamin’s texts on Kafka refer to this extremely useful volume.

[iv] The chapter on the similarities and differences between Benjamin and Bloch has not yet been written… Having begun to write it is the merit of Stefano Marchesoni in his work Walter Benjamins Konzept des Eingedenkens, Kadmos Publishing, 1916.

[v] Author's consideration. [NT]

[vi] Respectively: W. Benjamin, French translation of the “Theses”, in the critical apparatus of the Fixed-size files I-3, thesis VI, p. 1262; and French translation by Maurice de Gandillac, revised by Pierre Rusch, in W. Benjamin, Artworks, Ed. Gallimard, Folio Essais, 2000, Vol. III, p. 431.

[vii] Complementation by the author. [NT]

[viii] “An die erster Stelle [kam] die Erfahrung, dass diese Studie mich an einen carrefour meiner Gedanken und Überlegungen gebracht hat und gerade die ihr gewidmeten weiteren Betrachtungen für mich den Wert zu haben versprechen, den auf weglosem Gelände eine Ausrichtung am Kompass hat. (…)

Ich denke vor allem an das Motiv des Gescheitertseins von Kafka”. Dieses hängt auf engste mit meiner entschlossen pragmatischen Interpretation Kafkas zusammen Walter Benjamin, General Brief IV, p. 524/25. French translation by Christophe David and Alexandra Richter in the volume entitled About Kafka by W. Benjamin, Ed. Nous, 2015, p. 141/142.

[ix] General Brief IV, p.478. “Das Verhältnis meiner Arbeit zu Deinem Gedicht möchte ich versuchsweise so fassen: Du gehst vom 'Nichts der Offenbarung' aus (…), von der heilsgeschichtlichen Perspektive des anberaumten Prozessverfahrens. Ich gehe von der kleinen widersinnigen Hoffnung sowie den Kreaturen, denen einerseits diese Hoffnung gilt, in welchen andererseits dieser Widersinn sich spiegelt, aus”. French translation, About Kafka, op. cit., p. 126.

[X] General Brief IV, p. 460. French translation, About Kafka, op. cit., p.119/120.

[xi] “Jeder Satz spricht: deute mich und keiner will es dulden” (Adorno, “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka”, Gesammelte Schriften, Suhrkamp, ​​Volume 10-I, p. 255. Trans. JM G.

[xii] See in this regard the preface by Christophe David and the afterword by Alexandra Richter in their edition of Benjamin's texts, About Kafka, on. cit.

[xiii] “In der Tat kann man die Form meiner Arbeit als problematisch empfinden. Aber eine andere gab es für Mich in dem Falle nicht; denn ich wollte mir brake Hand lassen; ich wollte nicht abschließen. Es dürfte auch, geschichtlich gesprochen, noch nicht an der Zeit sein, abzuschließen – am wenigstens dann, wenn man , wie Brecht, Kafka als einen prophetischen Schriftsteller ansieht. Wie Sie wissen, habe ich das Wort nicht gebraucht, aber es lässt sich viel dafür sagen, und das wird von meiner Seite vielleicht noch geschehen”. W. Benjamin, General Brief, IV, p. 525. My emphasis… (JM G.). French translation, About Kafka, op. cit., p. 142.

[xiv] in your work Kafka for and against, 1951.

[xv] “If Kafka did not pray – which we do not know – he nevertheless appropriated, to the highest degree, what Malebranche called 'the natural prayer of the soul', that is, attention”, writes Benjamin in his essay (About Kafka, op.cit, p.66, GS IV-2, p. 432).

[xvi] Quoted by Stefano Marchesoni, op. cit., p. 208, note 36.

[xvii] Letter of June 12, 1938 to G. Scholem, General Brief V, p. 112/113: “Kafkas Werk stellt eine Erkrankung der Tradition dar. Man hat die Weisheit gelegentlich als die epische Seite der Wahrheit definieren wollen. Damit ist die Wahrheit als ein Traditionsgut gekennzeichnet; sie ist die Wahrheit in ihrer hagadischen Konsistenz.

Diese Konsistenz der Wahrheit ist es, die verloren gegangen ist. Kafka war weitentfernt, der erste zu sein, der sich dieser Tatsache gegenüber sah. Viele hatten sich mit ihr eingerichtet, festhaltend an der Wahrheit oder an dem, was sie jeweils dafür gehalten haben; schweren oder auch leichteren Herzens verzichtleistend auf ihre Tradierbarkeit. Das eigentliche Geniale an Kafka war, dass er etwas ganz neues ausprobiert hat: er gab die Wahrheit preis, um an der Tradierbarkeit. An dem haggadischen Element festzuhalten. Kafkas Dichtungen sind von Hause aus Gleichnisse. Aber das ist ihr Elend und ihre Schönheit, dass sie More als Gleichnisse werden mussten. Sie legen sich der Lehre nicht schlicht zu Füssen wie sich die Hagada der Halacha zu Füssen legt. Wenn sie sich gekuscht haben, heben sie unversehens eine gewichtige Pranke gegen sie.” Trans. by Modesto Carone, Cebrap Notebooks

[xviii] “In Kafka’s gestures, the creature who has been deprived of words by things. The gesture opens itself, as you say, to deep reflection or study when it is a question of prayer – but it could not be understood, it seems to me, as an ‘experimental device’. The only element of this work that seems foreign to the material is the integration of the categories of epic theater.” Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, December 17, 1934, Adorno/Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928-1940, Suhrkamp, ​​1994, p. 94. Trans. French, About Kafka, op. cit., p.150.

[xx] In this regard, see the research of Nelio Conceição, especially in the magazine Itinera, Milan, 2017, n. 14 and in volume Aesthetic concepts/ aesthetic concepts, Conceptual Figures of Fragmentation and Reconfiguration, Lisbon, 2021.

[xx] See the text “Raum für Kostbare”, in image, Walter Benjamin, Fixed-size maps IV-1, Suhrkamp, ​​1972 p. 403/404. I do not have the French translation available.

[xxx] Adorno's critical expression regarding Benjamin's essay on “The Narrator” in his letter to Benjamin of September 6, 1936, Brief change, Adorno and Benjamin, Suhrkamp, ​​1994, p. 193.

[xxiii] I quote here a note in French written by Benjamin himself and published in the Benjamin's French writings, edited by JM Monnoyer, Gallimard, 1991, from the volumes of Gesammelte Schriften at Suhrkamp, ​​p. 188/89.

[xxiii] Same, p. 188/89.

[xxv] Translated by Benjamin and Klossovski, W. Benjamin, Generalized Letters I-2, p. 730.

[xxiv] At the end of his long letter to Scholem, cited in note 14.

[xxv] General Brief IV, op. cit. p. 479. Trans. French, About Kafka, op. Cit., p.127.

[xxviii] "eine messianische Anspielung auf eine anarchische Entsetzung des Rechts". Stefano Marchesoni, op. cit., p. 209.

[xxviii] Let's not jump to conclusions, as even Victor Hugo seems to enact this freedom at the beginning of The miserable, when the holy bishop lies to the gendarmes, declaring that he gave the stolen silver to Jean Valjean.

[xxix] "Die Sorge des Hausvaters ist das Mütterliche, das ihn überleben wird”, in the notes written for his essay (Fixed-size files II-3, p. 1215).

[xxx] About Kafka, op. cit., p. 64, Single-sided printing II-2, P. 431.

[xxxii] Author's explanation. [NT]

[xxxi] About Kafka, op. cit., p. 44. Totally loaded -2, p. 414/415.

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