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On Creaturely Life

By Santner, Eric L.

On Creaturely Life

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Description
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. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, "On Creaturely Life" is also a significant contribution to critical theory.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
216
Release Date:
2006-06-01
Publication Date:
2006-04-01
Publisher:
The University of Chicago Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0226735036
ISBN13:
9780226735030
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
318 g
Height:
142 cm
Width:
217 cm
Thickness:
19 cm
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