"Das Nichts der Offenbarung" : Benjamin and Scholem interpreting Kafka

In the contemporary philosophical debate Kafka’s books have been interpreted in a lot of different ways. My talk will deal with the discussion found in the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem. Both these two thinkers agreed to admit that Kafka’s uniqueness had to be traced in his capacity to represent the crisis of revelation. Conserving the spirit of Jewish tradition and destroying it at a same time, Kafka seemed to introduce a new dialectical approach to understand the notion of Sacred. I would like to show how, according to Scholem’s perspective, Kafka is meant to occupy this particular position mainly because of the literary devices he used. It is in fact in the light of his refusing a philosophical systematic approach and by joining a narrative and aphoristic style, compared by Scholem to the one of Jewish Haggadah, that Kafka could end up representing an epitome of modernity.