Four years after the author's death, in a short book review, Walter Benjamin translated Kafka's horror into a metaphysical critique of graphology. Known as a perceptive reader of Kafka, Benjamin insists on the final immateriality of ethics, yet also exposes graphological practices that deduce the ethics of the writer directly from the individual's handwriting and, hence, focus on form in order to detect content. In contrast to Kafka's penal officer, Benjamin maintains that the inner truth of morality is neither revealed by gestures and immediate expressions nor could it be communicated through an iconic signifier. The ethical resides outside of language and pictorial representation and therefore also negates a transformation into an aesthetic spectacle, let alone a public writing on the body. Everything ethical is without physiognomy, something expressionless that either invisibly or blindingly leaps out of a concrete situation.
Language has a body and the body has a language.
Its inner truths, however, remain in the oblivion of symbolic representation and therefore elude any hermeneutic reading skill. Neither a gesture, a motion, nor an expression, the ethical is what constitutes the body as a nonsignifying and, hence, autonomous entity. Examining the semantic surplus value of handwriting, Benjamin's text thus alludes to elementary distinctions between the domains of expressivity and truth, materiality and meaning, and form and content, distinctions that correlate with the separation of aesthetics and ethics and are predicated upon the metaphysical category of the expressionless. Although written after the end of the period scholars tend to label Benjamin's early phase, the book review discussed here echoes theoretical gestures constitutive of Benjamin's speculative theory of literature and literary criticism, especially his treatise on Goethe's Elective Affinities and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In different ways, both works try to determine proper limits between the spheres of art and morality, between the political and the mythic, and in so doing, by identifying the specificity of the aesthetic and respective modes of criticism, both works also suggest a theory of modernity that defines the modern moment as the separation and self-legitimation of various domains of life, knowledge, and signification.