Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
Agamben, “The Friend,” What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, 25. In a somewhat similar vein, Derrida remarks: “The question ‘What is friendship?’, but also ‘Who is the friend (masculine or feminine)?’, is nothing other than the question ‘What is philosophy?’” (Politics of Friendship, 240/ Politiqes de l’amitié, 269).
- 2.
Jullien, 157.
- 3.
Agamben, “The Friend,” What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, 29–31.
- 4.
Agamben, “The Friend,” What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, 33–37.
- 5.
Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. I, 315–16, 325–349/ Séminaire. La bête et le souverain, vol. I, 419–21, 432–463.
- 6.
Agamben, The Open, 81–84.
- 7.
Agamben , The Open, 83.
- 8.
For elaboration, see SW2, 477–79/ VI, 432–34 and SW2, 496/ II:2, 678.
- 9.
Heidegger, Pathways, 279/ Wegmarken, 367. See too: 280–82/ 368–72.
- 10.
Gasché, The Honor of Thinking, 348, 350–55, 360.
- 11.
This extension of the gesture to Benjamin’s writing on Kafka is being suggested in divergence from readings concentrating on aspects of such writing that might provide a temporal, messianic, corrective to the spatio-temporal distortions in Kafka’s gestures (e.g. Eli Friedlander, 220).
- 12.
See another (earlier) version of the essay-manuscript for slightly different formulations (II:3, 1267).
- 13.
See again Dostoevsky, 257.
- 14.
In this letter to his niece, Eva Samuel, in November 1935, Friedlaender adds that he is not familiar with Kafka’s “‘Castle.’” Many thanks to Detlef Thiel for sharing excerpts from Friedlaender’s unpublished letters.
- 15.
These comments give almost verbatim some comments that Benjamin records in his diary from conversations with Brecht, who evidently makes some of the comments critically (SW2, 477–78/ II:3, 1203–4/ VI, 432–34).
- 16.
On myth prevailing in law-positing, see Benjamin’s “Towards the Critique of Violence,” SW1, 248/ II:1, 197–98. For an attempt to draw on Carl Schmitt’s decisionism to offset Benjamin’s relatively strict wariness of complacency about law-positing, see Pan. As will be indicated in Chap. 10 below, there may be philosophic reasons not to follow the attempt to integrate Benjamin’s work into Schmitt’s notion of “decision that is used in the state of exception to establish the system of norms” (Pan, 54; see too: 56–57). Schmitt provides an answer precisely where Benjamin continues to question.
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Moran, B. (2018). Anxious Friendliness as Physical Attentiveness. In: Politics of Benjamin’s Kafka: Philosophy as Renegade. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72011-1_9
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