The Animal, the Creature, the Hunchback: Messianism and Distorted Life

In his great literary essays of the 1930s, namely those on Kraus (1931), Kafka (1934) and Leskov (1936), Benjamin intensely engaged with the limits of the human as part of his general critique of classic—and specifically Weimar—humanism. Through a reading of these three essays, this chapter analyzes Benjamin’s critique of the human and of humanism by focusing on three paradigmatic figures: the animal, the creature, and the hunchback. In these figures, the human is questioned through the recourse to distortion, which however also contains in itself a redemptive thrust to its elimination through the “little adjustment” that, as Benjamin argues in the Kafka essay, the Messiah will bring about with his coming. The argument that I propose is that the messianic elimination of the distortion means, however, not the straightening up and setting aright of what is distorted, but instead a change of perspective through which distortion will “sublate itself” and disappear as a form of discrimination.