On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

By A. Faber. 2007

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[1] In a book co-authored by Eric L. Santner, Slavoj Žižek and Kenneth Reinhard, the authors introduce their project as follows: ‘it might well seem to be a fool’s undertaking to attempt to make psychoanalysis a key resource in the project of reanimating the ethical urgency and significance of neighbour-love in contemporary society and culture.’1 Yet this is precisely the ‘fool’s undertaking’ that the book takes on. In his most recent book, On Creaturely Life, Santner continues this project with an intricate exploration of ‘creaturely life’ or ‘creaturely expressivity,’ an important concept for 20th century German authors (many of whom are Jewish), including Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger. These authors, along with Sigmund Freud and contemporary interpreters of psychoanalysis (including Jacques Lacan, Jonathan Lear, Jean Laplanche), and other poets, literary critics and philosophers, are drawn upon to elaborate Santner’s contention that ethical and political life cannot be adequately assessed without attentiveness to ‘creaturely life.’ Santner’s careful reading of the semi-documentary literary work of Winfried Georg Maximillian Sebald (deceased 2001), has two aims: to explore Sebald’s work as ‘an archive of creaturely life’ (xiii) and so as a practice of neighbour-love, and to introduce a new way of interpreting literature. Both aims develop aspects of Santner’s other recent book, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (2001). [2] Chapter 1 introduces the primary concept of the book, ‘creaturely life,’ and clarifies that Santner locates this term not in any opposition (or merging) of human and nonhuman, but rather as a persistent feature of human political life. Chapter 2 examines the ‘mood’ of Sebald’s fiction as a manic sort of melancholy with reference to Walter Benjamin’s sense that melancholy expresses an immersion in creaturely life. Santner asks how a melancholic gaze on human social arrangements relates to redemption, or, in other words, to ethical and political thought and action. Chapter 3 begins a close analysis of Sebald’s work, illuminating how creaturely life features in his writing in the form of excess agitation, or ‘undeadness’ (Santner) along with a Pauline understanding of hope, as the possibility of intervention into ‘undeadness’ through its ‘deanimation’ (thus giving a different

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Philosophy

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