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The Intermedial GestureAnthony Curtis Adler aa Underwood International College Yonsei University , 134Shinchon-dong, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 120-749, Korea E-mail:Published online: 27 Aug 2010.

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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 12 number 3 december 2007

The twentieth century, which gave to and

took from the human race so many things,

will perhaps someday also be remembered,

among its other honors and shames, wonders

and catastrophes, as the grand age, even golden

age, of literary criticism. Yet perhaps, in the rush

of excitement, once so palpable, that came with

the discovery of new theories, new master

paradigms, and with the extension of criticism

itself to so many terrae incognitae, it was difficult

to ask a question which now, in the afterglow,

becomes at once more possible and more urgent.

Namely: what is the point? What is the point of

criticism?

The urgency, difficulty, and immodesty of this

question, which must not be too readily confused

with the question of an end, goal, purpose, or

even intention, derives from its close relation to

another, necessary yet immodest, question: that

of the ‘‘point of the human.’’ It is not only that

man, among his other apparently singular

attributes, may also be named the ‘‘critical

animal,’’ or even that criticism, and above all

literary criticism, could only come into its own as

a discipline of thought when it was released from

its subordination to theological or humanistic

goals and ideals, all of which presuppose that

humanity has a certain fixed destiny, be it the

glorification of God or infinite self-improvement

and self-cultivation. More to the point is the

extraordinary, if in no way singular, capacity of

literature, regarded as an element or medium, to

allow for the preservation and proliferation of

modes of being that have been released from all

dependence on a context of human or even divine

purposes and ends. If literature is in some sense

the ‘‘unique,’’ the ‘‘most proper’’ dwelling of

humankind, it is also the site of its disorientation,

disappropriation, and the dereliction of all its

duties, goals, ideals. Literary criticism, to the

extent that it insists on interpreting literature

on its own terms, would become open to just

these dangerous, but also liberating, prospects.

As soon as we have raised the question of

the ‘‘point of criticism’’ in this way, we are

confronted with an answer which, as immodest

as the question, nevertheless seems to impose

itself of a certain necessity. Namely: gesture. This

answer, which is perhaps only the initiation into

another realm of questions, has a historical

justification. From Aristotle to Nietzsche and

Benjamin, gesture has always played a subtle role

in literary criticism. Yet this answer is also

justified a priori. If criticism has a ‘‘point’’ that is

different from the disclosure of the ‘‘intention-

ality’’ of the author, and that cannot be reduced

anthony curtis adler

THE INTERMEDIALGESTUREagamben and kommerell

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/07/030057^8� 2007 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI:10.1080/09697250802041046

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to an instance exterior to the text, then it may

perhaps consist in nothing else than pointing

towards ‘‘modes of pointing’’ – senses of sense –

immanent to literature that cannot be reduced to

conventional teleological or intentional concepts

of meaning. The point of criticism would, as it

were, be to open up the question of the point of

pointing, even perhaps to point beyond the

gesture of pointing, towards other gestures in

which meaning or, better, sense could reside.

It is perhaps in just this sense that Giorgio

Agamben, in his ‘‘Notes on Gesture,’’ speaks of

gesture as what ‘‘shows’’ the ‘‘communicability’’

of ‘‘communication,’’ what ‘‘communicates’’

‘‘communicability’’ by interrupting the circuit

of communication, of communication as means.1

It has nothing to say, since, rather than saying

anything, and indeed through the simultaneous

imposition of silence and compensation for

silence (as a ‘‘gag’’ in both senses), it commu-

nicates something that can never be put into

words or sentences: the ‘‘being-in-language’’

of humans as pure mediality. Criticism in turn,

as Agamben explains in his slightly earlier essay

‘‘Kommerell, or On Gesture,’’ is ‘‘the reduction

of works to the sphere of pure gesture’’ (80). It

opens not onto literary history or a theory of

genres but onto a stage such as the Oklahoma

theater or Calderon’s Great Theater of the

World [. . .] Consigned to their supreme

gesture, works live on, like creatures bathed

in the light of the Last Day, surviving the ruin

of their formal garment and their conceptual

meaning. (80)

Moreover, this sphere of pure means, of pure

mediality, of ‘‘the absolute and complete gestur-

ality of human beings,’’ is nothing else than

‘‘politics’’ (‘‘Notes on Gesture’’ 59).2 Thus a

gestural criticism, a criticism that would ‘‘reduce

the work to the sphere of pure gesture,’’

would itself offer an initiation into the political.

And if this is not enough, we might also mention,

in passing (as does Agamben), that gesture could

also explain ‘‘philosophy’’: ‘‘And every great

philosophical text is the gag exhibiting language

itself, being-in-language itself as a gigantic loss

of memory, as an incurable speech defect’’

(‘‘Notes on Gesture’’ 59).

It is difficult to deny the brilliance and

elegance of this analysis. Yet its very tautological

force, even rigor, seems to have come at a price.

For it seems that, in rendering the concept of

gesture meaningful, even essential, to criticism,

Agamben subjects the multitude of gestures, and

of meanings or ‘‘points’’ of gesture, to two crucial

transformations or reductions. On the one hand,

gesture is made to point towards language. It is

rendered fundamentally linguistic. Even if

gesture can never be expressed in words,

translated into a language of words, nevertheless

the significance of gestures relates exclusively

to language – it is the exposition, the showing, of

language as pure mediality.3 On the other hand,

the point of language, exposed through gesture, is

found in absolute potentiality – a communication

of communicability.

Here, at the very least, we have to worry that

gesture, having been reduced to its essence,

and with everything accidental and contingent,

irreducible and irredeemable, squeezed out of it –

or perhaps, better, left behind (as if Agamben, like

the messiah of the rapture, had squeezed gesture

only once, providing us with a concept which is

most pure only because it is least penetrating) –

was now being offered as a universal solvent in

which all the problems of thinking (of philosophy,

of politics, of linguistics, of literature) could be

dissolved. But perhaps even this move is beyond

reproach. After all, we have, since Kant, become

better consumers of thought, and are no longer

content with a mere purism of reason. We demand

something more, something better: the extra-

virgin first pressing of a condition of possibility

from language itself that is so subtle, so mercurial

that it can elude every taint of reification,

substantialization, every confusion with the ontic.

Still, one wonders whether, in this analysis,

something has been lost – something more

important, even more essential, than the essence.

Or whether his placement of gesture at the

innermost center of criticism crucially misses

the point. Of gesture, and of criticism. And

ultimately, also, of politics.

To begin to understand what might have been

lost in the two ‘‘reductions’’ to which Agamben

subjects gesture, we should look, first of all, at

Agamben’s reading of Max Kommerell. For, on

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the surface at least, it is above all in relation to,

or indeed through, Kommerell and his gestures

that Agamben develops his own concept of a

gestural criticism.

. . .

Why Kommerell, ‘‘the greatest German critic of

the twentieth century after Benjamin,’’ and why

not Benjamin himself, who also, of course, had a

lot to say about gesture . . . and about

Kommerell?4 And why not Jacques Riviere,

Felix Feneon, and Gianfranco Contini – the

other ‘‘supreme talents’’ besides Benjamin,

whose works are all ‘‘almost wholly inscribed’’

within the field of gestural criticism

(‘‘Kommerell’’ 77). Does Kommerell even

belong among the ‘‘supreme talents’’? We will

leave aside these questions, and the uncanny

suspicion that perhaps what draws Agamben to

Kommerell is his lack of ‘‘supreme talent’’ – that

he says too much, and shows too little. Let us leave

it at this. Kommerell, and Kommerell’s gestures,

provide Agamben with the occasion for what is in

many ways the most familiar, even characteristic,

gesture of his thinking: to find something

worth saving. It is a matter, we may say only

half-ironically, of soteriology. And, above all, of

saving Kommerell from himself.

If Kommerell, for Agamben, stands in need of

salvation, it is not only on account of the obvious,

his brief membership in the Nazi Party, but

because of a certain historical or even eschato-

logical problematic that emerges at the margins

of his work, appearing with particular clarity in the

final pages of his masterful study of Jean Paul.

Jean Paul, Kommerell claims, wrote for a German

bourgeoisie that had ‘‘lost its gestures’’

(‘‘Kommerell’’ 83).5 If previously Kommerell

had presented Jean Paul as the writer of the

gesture par excellence, now it becomes clear that

all different gestures of his emphatically gestural

prose, so carefully excavated by Kommerell – the

Naturgebarde, the Seelengebarde, and the reine

Gebarde – are not really gestures at all, but merely

substitute for the true gestures (or perhaps

something slightly different from gesture, such

as dance) which no longer exists.

For Agamben’s transformative interpretation

of Kommerell, this loss of gesture is not only the

predicament of the German middle class at the

beginning of the nineteenth century but is also

the foundational experience of ‘‘modern human-

ity’’ (‘‘Kommerell’’ 83). Indeed, as Agamben

asserts bluntly in his ‘‘Notes on Gesture’’:

‘‘By the end of the nineteenth century, the

Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its

gestures’’ (48). Thus Jean Paul’s literary work

would exemplify a reactive, and perhaps even

restorative, project, that with ever-increasing

force comes to characterize modernity as a

whole. For, as Agamben explains,

an epoch that has lost its gestures is, by the

same token, obsessed by them; for men from

whom all authenticity has been taken, gesture

becomes destiny. And the more gestures lost

their ease under the pressure of unknown

powers, the more life became indecipherable.

And once the simplest and most everyday

gestures had become as foreign as the

gesticulations of marionettes, humanity –

whose very bodily existence had already

become sacred to the degree that it had

made itself impenetrable – was ready for the

massacre. (‘‘Kommerell’’ 83)

The gesture of modernism, found already in

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (the ballet

of a humanity that has lost its gestures), then in

‘‘Isadora and Diaghilev’s ballets, Proust’s novel,

Rilke and Pascoli’s great Jugendstil poetry, and,

finally, in the most exemplary fashion, [in] silent

film,’’ traces ‘‘the magic circle in which humanity

tried to evoke for the last time what it was

soon to lose irretrievably’’ (‘‘Kommerell’’ 83).

The modern gestures, as it were, trace out the

decaying traces of the past, before these are lost

without a trace.

The danger then is that Kommerell’s gestural

criticism, at the same time that it identifies the

problem of the loss of gesture, would interpret

this loss as a failure, as a tragedy, perhaps as the

impossibility of something like literature or art,

and perhaps even respond to it, in turn, through

a totalitarian politics that would attempt,

through a mass choreographing of every aspect

of public and private life and ultimately even

a political ‘‘cult of the body,’’ to restore the

possibility of an authentically gestural existence.

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It is the danger, in other words, of that

aestheticization of politics which found its

esoteric expression in the circle gathered

around the poet Stephan George. For

Agamben, the essence of the Georgekreis, to

which Kommerell himself belonged until 1930,

consists in ‘‘the anguished attempt to speak at

the point at which a word (and hence a thing)

is no longer possible’’ precisely through

establishing a ‘‘ritual of imminence’’

(‘‘Kommerell’’ 81). Thus the ‘‘sense of

George’s ‘secret Germany’ is precisely that of

preparing the way for what, nevertheless, was

bound to happen: the regeneration of the

German people’’ (81).

If Agamben argues that Kommerell under-

stood gesture as a ‘‘gag’’ which communicates

pure communicability, or even constitutes the

‘‘wholly profane’’ political community of

the merely living, in which ‘‘human beings,

liberating themselves from all sacredness,

communicate to each other their lack of secrets

as their most proper gesture,’’ it is above all

to save him from the ‘‘false gestures’’ of the

Georgekreis by finding in his gestures a radically

different relation to their own failure and loss.

Precisely this failure and loss becomes revelatory

(‘‘Kommerell’’ 85).

Nor, of course, is it just a question of saving

Kommerell, or even also the Georgekreis

(Agamben speaks of the ‘‘prophetic lucidity of

his [namely George’s] diagnosis of his own

time’’), but an entire epoch with all its often

indigestible gestures, whose experience of crisis

and loss is no longer just the preparation for

massacre, but points the way towards a truly

gestural politics (‘‘Kommerell’’ 81). What

is salvaged from an epoch which is perhaps

only defined by the failure of its own gestures to

hold back catastrophe – whose hexis or habitus is

only failure or Versagung – is danger’s own

saving grace.

. . .

If we now take issue with Agamben’s interpreta-

tion of Kommerell, it is not only because of its

obvious violence but also because, precisely in

saving Kommerell in this way, so much of the

nuance and complexity of his thought is lost, and

indeed so much that might point towards a very

different understanding of the relation of gesture

and criticism.

What is lost?

First: a sense for the multiplicity of gestures,

or better, the irreducible multitude of singular

gestures. Telling, in this regard, is a certain

equivocation and slippage in Agamben’s invoca-

tion of Kommerell’s concept of the ‘‘pure

gesture.’’ In Kommerell, the sphere of pure

gesture is mentioned principally in relation to

Jean Paul, and in extremely elusive terms, which

Agamben quotes in part: ‘‘Its temporality is the

eternity of Jean Paul’s dreams. These dreams,

dreamt in a superhuman sleep of the brightest

wakefulness, are fragments of an other world in

the soul of Jean Paul’’ (qtd in ‘‘Kommerell’’ 79).6

Precisely this sphere of pure gestures, however,

becomes for Agamben the destination, the

ad quem, of all gestural criticism. Moreover,

though, at just this moment, it seems to change

places with the Urgebarde, the original gesture,

which Agamben also identifies with the ‘‘gag’’

(‘‘Kommerell’’ 78).

It might seem innocent to conflate the pure

and original gesture. Yet there is this most

crucial difference between them: they belong to

different elements or media – the one to

language, the other to the soul. Whereas the

Urgebarde is speech itself, the ‘‘pure gestures’’

are the ‘‘pure possibility of speaking’’

that resides outside of speech, in the soul

(Jean Paul 47).

Second: a historical dimension to

Kommerell’s thought that is quite different

from Agamben. Whereas Agamben represents

gesture as the exposition of a communicability

which belongs to language as the condition of its

possibility, and thus stands outside of history

and temporality, an attentive reading of

Jean Paul and Kommerell’s other writings

suggests that, with the possible exception of

the Urgebarde, his gestures are always the

gestures of a certain writer or epoch. They

never exist as such, but always belong within

a certain ontological and theological horizon.

They issue from a commitment, manifest in

the style of a writer or epoch, to experience the

truth of being in a certain way.

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In the case of Jean Paul, this horizon is

Christian and Platonic. His is the prose of a

human soul that has been created by a transcen-

dent God and exists in absolute separation from

nature, relating to nature only as the divine

inscription into an exterior reality of the truths

that it already finds written into itself, with

knowledge and experience, accordingly, merely

recollection, and all relation merely self-relation;

the intimacy of nature being only the soul’s own

intimacy with itself. Whereas the romantic

symbol presupposes a radical monism, for Jean

Paul the soul and the body are originally distinct

and isolated from one another. This explains not

only his peculiar mode of figural language,

a bildlicher Witz which alternately embodies

the soul and ensouls the body, but also

the extraordinary musicality of his prose

(Jean Paul 21). Imprisoned in its interiority,

incapable of truly speaking or addressing a

world outside itself, the soul learns to sing.

Language renounces the task of designating and

representing objects in the world and becomes

pure ‘‘expressive gesture’’ (Ausdrucksgebarde):

it ‘‘turns itself towards the soul and becomes soul,

rejoices or cries, imparts its movements, and

makes music with the force of its sound’’

(Jean Paul 31). Music, indeed, is the most

elemental language of a soul that is isolated from

all true exteriority: it is the ‘‘great betrayer of the

secrets of the soul,’’ in which its interiority is

expressed while remaining interior. It is, as it

were, the solitary and silent self-conversation of

a soul that cannot escape itself. The essence of

this music, in turn, is gesture (Gebarde)

conceived as Ausdruck: the exterioration of

inwardness, the ‘‘language of the interior in the

body’’ (Jean Paul 23). Yet because the soul,

bound in a relation only to itself, is infinite in its

interiority, this ‘‘singing’’ language of musical

gestures must prove measureless and unrhythmic.

All equal measure (Gleichmaß), after all, could

only come through an exterior measure that it

cannot find within itself.

All Jean Paul’s gestures, arising as they do

from the isolation of the soul, are Christian

and Platonic. Yet this is, above all, true of the

reine Gebarden. While they involve the ‘‘pure

possibility of speaking,’’ the possibility that

they institute seems to have validity, or even

sense, only within the sphere invoked by Jean

Paul’s literature. They are ‘‘the self-invented

signs for Jean Paul’s Platonic myth’’

(Jean Paul 47). Not so much the pure possibility

of language, but rather the pure possibility of

Platonism. But what is more: precisely this

Platonism is itself fundamentally impure, since

it is not conceived as the revelation, within

historical time, of a transcendental, absolute and

timeless truth, but is thoroughly entangled in the

contingency of the historical. Its unreality and

surreality, its estrangement from the real and

uberwirkliche Herkunft (surreal origin), the

purity through which it presents the ‘‘pure

possibility of speaking,’’ are themselves func-

tions of double fiction. For not only is the

Platonism of the pure gestures a mythos rather

than a logos, but these are themselves merely

‘‘self-invented signs’’: a fictional repetition of

Plato’s fiction.

All this is to say that, for Kommerell,

Platonism, and the entire institution of a

transcendent order of philosophy, is a historical

event not only in the weak and banal sense that

Plato happened ‘‘in history’’ but also in a strong

sense that challenges the claim of Platonism, and

every sort of philosophical transcendentalism,

to have discovered (even in a realm that eludes

propositional language, even as what could only

be shown and never said) a ‘‘ground’’ that stands

above and outside history and the becoming of

the contingent order of things. History, in turn,

for Kommerell is dance-history. History begins,

or, better, takes off – its tendency first becomes

manifest – with the loss of the capacity to dance,

where dance is understood as ‘‘the action in

which all life perfects itself,’’ the mystery of a

body which is soul, for which the soul remains

‘‘leibeigene’’ (in a twist on the original meaning:

property or servant of the body) (Jean Paul 65).

This perfection is perhaps not the teleological

realization of the destiny of life but the moment

in which life becomes open to life, feels the

vitality of life, even contemplates life, without,

in this contemplation, being enraptured by itself,

by its own forever selfsame capacity for

contemplation. For what destroys the mystery

of the body is nothing other than the ‘‘mystery of

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the soul’’ (Jean Paul 65). In Christianity, but

indeed already in Plato, the soul is no longer the

‘‘life of the body,’’ but has become for itself

‘‘Abgrund und Himmel’’ (abyss and heaven)

(Jean Paul 65).7 Begeisterung (perhaps an

overflowing exuberance of life) becomes

Vergeistigung, not only ‘‘spiritualization,’’ a

transformation into something more spiritual,

but almost, as it were, the Verstauung, the

blockage or constipation, of a spirit which

becomes stuck in itself precisely because it

stands forever under the impulse to render itself

even more spiritual (Jean Paul 66). The poet,

in contrast, ‘‘who knows the old things’’ saves the

‘‘secret of dance’’ in ‘‘his rhythmically moved

soul’’ (Jean Paul 66). Yet even the poet can save

the dance not as dance but only in a ‘‘spiritualized

[vergeistigte] form.’’ Through rhythm, the poet

attaches what is most spiritual, namely language,

back onto the body, or indeed onto the unity

of all life in dance.

While this dance-history involves, at first

glance, a dialectics of loss and recovery, it is, as

must already be clear, more Nietzschean than

Schillerian. There is, first of all, no return, no

higher unity, but only a skewed, digressive

movement which brings us (or, better, life)

further and further away from the completion

of life in a perfect synthesis of body and soul.

Even if it is possible to save the secret of this

unity, the secret of dance, what is saved is

always transformed, spiritualized, estranged

from what it once was, or, in a word, translated

into other media. Moreover, though, it is not in

the least clear that the original unity ever

existed, save as an ‘‘action,’’ as the gestural

positing of its existence. Even dance begins

with a feeling which, while prior to the ‘‘word,’’

is in no way prior to the soul, but which,

precisely as the ‘‘wish to dance’’ as a wish for

unity, presupposes the very difference that it

seeks to overcome. Life, as ‘‘will to dance’’

rather than ‘‘will to power,’’ seeks to make of

the body just what it could never be, a unity

with the soul; it seeks to make the body, in its

imminent conjunction with soul, its own first

falsehood.

Ultimately, it would be possible to show that,

for Kommerell, every order of gestures is, in

a sense, a response to a loss, a recovery

operation.8 Even Jean Paul, whose gestures are,

in a sense, un-gestures, since they no longer

resonate with the possibility of a worldly life, of

a social and political existence, nevertheless saves

something of the fullness if not of the world,

nevertheless of nature. ‘‘For him,’’ Kommerell

writes, ‘‘nature was patent (open) as music turned

into matter [[I]hm war die Natur offen als die

Stoff gewordene Musik]’’ – in other words, as

a purely spiritual, purely inward, dance (Jean

Paul 419). Thus there can be no moment in

which humanity lost its gesture. Humanity is

always already lost. And indeed, it only ever

found itself after the loss. Kommerell, in other

words, could indict George not only as a false

messiah but also as a false prophet. If history,

in its irreducible multitude of singular epochs,

still has some sort of transcendental ground, it is

only the ‘‘always already’’ of this loss. Of course,

this thought again draws very close to Agamben.

Where Kommerell differs is perhaps in this: for

him, even language (which is the most spiritual)

cannot come before the loss, but is only instituted

through it. If language (Sprache) is still ‘‘original

gesture,’’ it is perhaps only in the sense that

all other possible media – for example, the body,

nature, the soul – are also originally gesture. This

original gesturality, moreover, is not only

fictional, but it can never allow for purity, since

it evinces itself (becomes open or patent) through

a movement towards other media – in an

intermediality.

If there is nevertheless still a sense for

Kommerell in which modern (neuzeitlich) man

has lost his gestures, it must be understood

precisely in terms of this intermediality. Here we

might recall the words that conclude Jean Paul:

Jean Paul wanted to rouse the gods to laughter

over the fairgrounds of life, but, instead, he

aroused the shudder over the rift in his spirit,

which is a rift in modern man: the man

who has lost the path of spirit into life,

[who has lost] gestures. Thus ends, in the

image-writing of a man as poetic as he

was wise, the adventure of the isolated

philosophical consciousness. Will it find, in a

second adventure, its eternal object, nature?

(Jean Paul 419)9

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What has been lost by ‘‘modern man,’’ in

other words, is the possibility of translating from

the medium of the soul into other media.

In transforming the ‘‘pure gestures,’’ transfigured

into the pure possibility of language, into the

sphere of an authentically gestural politics,

Agamben ends up making this solitude, this

internment, more ineluctable. He seeks to salvage

a gestural criticism from Kommerell. But, by

insisting on a certain purity of gesture, Agamben

reinforces the loss of gestures. For what has

been lost, in the modern age, is perhaps nothing

other than the capacity to experience gestures

in an impurity that, paradoxical as such a

formulation must be, is of the essence of gesture.

In a sense, Agamben misses the point: of

criticism, and of gesture. The point of criticism is

not to wager everything on the impossible

communication of the pure mediality, commu-

nicability and potentiality of language as such,

but perhaps just to communicate. The gag, which

in the end is always the same gag, is too easy. The

danger and excitement of communication is to

cross over between media – to cross over between

crossings-over – and not forever to return to the

bare fact of this crossing. Gesture, in this sense, is

the point of criticism, but only because criticism

allows the reduction of the work not to ‘‘pure

gestures’’ but to gestures in their impurity.

It opens up the work to a possible sense, a

point, not by reducing one medium (pure

language, physical motions), or even a mixed

medium, to something else (the intentionality

of the author; a formalist or structuralist

metalanguage; a hermeneutic act of understand-

ing; a system of purely physical gestures), even to

the pure abstraction of its mediality, but by

showing how every gesture is already intermedial.

Precisely for this reason gestural criticism

must not be conceived as a new method of

criticism to replace the old, a new master

paradigm to guide the critical enterprise, lest it

lose itself, as evermore seems to be the case, in

eclecticism. Rather, to read a text through its

gestures is to show the multitude of transitions at

work in it. For philosophy, eclecticism has

traditionally marked a loss of rigor and potency.

The transcendental inquiry, above all, seems

to require a singlemindedness of purpose

and means. But perhaps for literary criticism

the opposite is required: perhaps

criticism’s truth is eclectic, with

the point of criticism being

nothing other than the eclectic

multitude of points.

notes1 Agamben,‘‘Notes on Gesture’’ in Means withoutEnd: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti andCesare Casarino (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P,2000) 49^60. Cf. Agamben, ‘‘Kommerell, or OnGesture’’ in Potentialities: Collected Essays inPhilosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen(Stanford: Stanford UP,1999) 77^85.

It goes without saying that Agamben’s analysisdraws heavily on Heidegger’s discussion of the‘‘context of equipment’’ (Zeugzusammenhang) inBeing and Time (trans. John Macquarrie andEdward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row,1962) x16) and on Wittgenstein’s distinctionbetween saying and showing.

Of course, perhaps the most vital pointof reference is Walter Benjamin’s conceptof communicability (Mitteilbarkeit), and of themedial (Mediale), developed in his early essay‘‘On Language as Such and on the Language ofMan’’ in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. MichaelW. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996)62^74.

2 Cf.‘‘Kommerell’’ 85: ‘‘For Politics is the sphere ofthe full, absolute gesturality of human beings,and it has no other name other than its Greekpseudonym, which is barely uttered here:philosophy.’’

3 Thus: ‘‘Gesture is not an absolutely linguisticelement but, rather, something closely tied tolanguage. It is first of all a forceful presencein language itself, one that is older and moreoriginary than conceptual expression’’(‘‘Kommerell’’ 77).

4 Benjamin wrote reviews of Kommerell’s workon two occasions, and also developed the conceptof gesture in his essays on Brecht and Kafka.

5 Cf. Max Kommerell, Jean Paul (Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1933) 418. All translationsfrom Jean Paul aremine.

6 Cf. Kommerell, Jean Paul 47. The Germanreads: ‘‘Diese Tra« ume, getra« umt in einem

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u« bermenschlichen Schlaf hellster Wachheit, sindBruchstu« cke einer U« berwelt in Jean Pauls Seele.’’Significantly, Heller-Roazen translates U« berweltas other world, obscuring the connection withu« bermenschlich, and also, as we will see, thePlatonic implication.

7 It is curious to note, and indeed of the greatestimportance for determining his own relationtowards National Socialism, that, for Kommerell,when it comes to dancing, the Germans are nobetter than the Christians:

Denn nicht weniger als das Christentumha�t das Germanentum den Reigen. SeinVers, der Stabreim kennt nicht dieausgleichende allverschmelzende Geba« rdedes Tanzes, sondern die Starre derSelbstbehauptung. Er stellt Einzelnes hartgegen Einzelnes. Der gro�e Vorgang, da�die germanischen Sta« mme den Gedankendes Kreuzes am inbru« nstigsten auf sichnahmen, hat ein Nachspiel in Jean PaulsDichtung, die er gegen den Rhythmusdichtete: als Nur-Seele und alsNur-Deutscher, der allein von den Dichterngro� wurde ohne die Schule der Griechen[For Germanity, no less than Christianity,hates the choral dance. Its alliterative versi-fication knows nothing of the gesture ofdance, which equalizes andmelts everythingtogether, but only knows the rigidity ofself-assertion. It harshly opposes what isindividual to what is individual. The greatprocess whereby the Germanic tribes tookthe thought of the cross upon themselves inthemost fervent way finds its encore in JeanPaul’s poetry, which he composed againstrhythm: as only-soul and only-German,who alone among the poets becamegreat without the school of the Greeks].(Jean Paul 66)

8 Kommerell’s Lessing und Aristoteles, firstpublished in 1940, is perhaps of the greatestsignificance in this regard, and also gives theclearest hints of an emerging humanisticstrain in his thought. For Kommerell,Lessing’s life-work represents the attempt toprovide German poetry with a poetic law(ultimately rooted in the immanentism ofAristotle, and, we might add, Spinoza) thatwould allow for a progressive developmentof literary genre. This project, of course,failed: beginning with Herder, every gifted

German author started from the beginning,and indeed ultimately:

was man bei uns Literatur nennt, diechronologisch geordneten Taten auf sichselbst angewiesener Individuen sind, undsich selten in sicherer Folge, sondern meistin Spru« ngen, Durchbru« chen, Revolutionenvollzieht [what we call literature is thechronologically ordered deeds of individualsleft to their own devices, and is rarelyaccomplished in a secure series of stages,but mostly in leaps, breakthroughs, andrevolutions]. (Lessing und Aristoteles(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1940) 13;my trans.)

It might not be wrong to identify the gestures ofthe German bourgeoisie with precisely this‘‘poetic law’’ instituted by Lessing; nor can we failto read in these lines a devastating, if subtly articu-lated, critique of National Socialism.

9 Kommerell, Jean Paul 419.The German reads:

Jean Paul wollte das Gela« chter der Go« tteru« ber den Lebensjahrmarkt erregen underregte statt dessen den Schauder u« ber denRi� in seinem Geist, der ein Ri� im neuzeitli-chen Menschen ist: dem Menschen, der denWeg des Geistes ins Leben, der die Geba« rdeverloren hat. Damit endet, in derBilderschrift des so dichterischen als weisenMannes, das Abenteuer des vereinsamtenphilosophischen Bewu�tseins. Wird es ineinem zweiten Abenteur seinen ewigenGegenstandwiderfinden, die Natur?

Anthony Curtis Adler

Underwood International College

Yonsei University

134 Shinchon-dong, Seodaemun-gu

Seoul 120-749

Korea

E-mail: anthony.adler@gmail.com

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