Figures of disfigurement

The little hunchback and his family circle

Abstract

"Disfigurement is the form that things take in oblivion," Walter Benjamin states in his famous essay on Franz Kafka. The world of disfigurement harbors all that, excluded from the social and linguistic order and forgotten by us, has been discarded as useless, leftover, unclassifiable. Yet, this rest survives the purposeful, goal-oriented order. This residue, precisely because it cannot be conceptualized, has always produced its own world of images in literature, music, in short, in human imagination. In this article, I rescue Walter Benjamin's idea of disfigurement as an interpretative key to this circle of figures. The inhabitants of this world of disfigurement mischievously hide in the corners of our domestic order. They are strange and alien, unsettling as something that was once ours and is now excluded. What they have in common is that they refuse to speak, that they escape the grasp of the concept, that they cannot be immobilized, that they provoce guilt and shame, and that - perhaps because they do not live but at most survive - they cannot die. As unruly, ghostly shape-shifters, they give us no respite, demand our attention and challenge our thinking, and suggest that without them a reconciled life will not be possible.