Keats's phrase “Negative capability” is by far his best-known literary concept. It is often associated with his feeling for sentient life and his dislike of poetry with didactic designs on the reader—his preference for the fluidity of Shakespearian identity, as opposed to Wordsworth's egotistical sublime. Over time, the concept has proved both fruitful and resistant. Fruitful, for instance, in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, where it designates not just the avoidance of premature closure, but the capacity to bear the anxiety of not knowing. Resistant, because the phrase has proved difficult to recuperate for Hegelian dialectics (“tarrying with the negative”), especially—but not only—in light of Keats's stated mistrust of German idealism.” Rather than striving to reconcile contradictions, Keats opts for openness to what could not yet be thought or put into words: “things … tease us out of thought.” We are left with Keats's own definition of the quality he viewed as central to literary achievement, in his letter of December 1817: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—” (Letters, 1:193).

Taking my cue from Samuel Weber's critical study, Benjamin's -abilities (2008), I want to propose a “wild” a-historical reading, on the analogy of a “wild surmise.” Weber seizes on a recurrent formula in Walter Benjamin's critical lexicon: his use of the suffix -ability (or -ibility); in German, -barkeit. The suffix adds open-endedness to the abstract nouns to which it is attached. Benjamin's list includes determin-ability, recogniz-ability communic-ability, citability, and (above all) translat-ability; not to mention know-ability, read-ability, and “iter-ability” (Jacques Derrida's coinage). The suffix, -ability, suggests possibility or potential.