A01=Eric L. Santner
academic
analysis
analytical
Author_Eric L. Santner
authority
benjamin
biopolitical
biopolitics
Category=DSBH
close reading
communal
community
consciousness
critical
critique
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethics
existence
human
interpersonal
life
literary
literature
neighbors
philosophical
philosophy
poetic
power
relationships
research
rilke
scholarly
sebald
self
theoretical
theory
Product details
- ISBN 9780226735030
- Weight: 312g
- Dimensions: 14 x 22mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2006
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In his "Duino Elegies", Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being - the open - concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence, but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges - what Eric Santner calls the creaturely - have a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald's entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person's history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors.
Eric L. Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life and coauthor of The Neighbor, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
