On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald by Eric L. Santner

Abstract

572 Reviews establishes hardly any common ground with Huch's ideas. None the less, this is a persuasively argued study of hitherto unmapped territory,and a useful contribution to the contextualization which Huch has been owed forsome time. THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD STEFFAN DAVIES On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. By ERIC L. SANTNER. Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press. 2oo6. XXii+ 2 I9pp. $20; ? I3. ISBN 978 0-226-73 503-0. Eric Santner's new book develops lines of thought pursued inhis study On thePsy chotheologyofEveryday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200I) and more recently in his contribution to The Neighbor: Three Inquiries inPolitical Theology, co-edited with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2oo6). The basic intuition at the heart of this 'psychotheology', he writes in his preface, is thatone might 'shed new lighton themessianic dimension ofmodern German-Jewish thought by bringing it into contact with the Freudian revolution in psychology' (p. xi). Santner locates this intersection in particular in the concept of the 'creaturely', takingBenjamin's interpretation ofKafka's 'cringed bodies' as em blematic of an attempt at redemption 'through and beyond the creaturely life' (p. 25). Building on Carl Schmitt's theories of the 'state of exception' as a normative political space, Santner describes creaturely life as 'lifeabandoned to the state of exception/ emergency, thatparadoxical domain inwhich law has been suspended in thename of preserving law' (p. 22). That thisbook isnot easy tocategorize should be immediately apparent. Its subtitle indicates its extremely broad range of interest: 'Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald' certainly catches the literarycritic's eye, yet the categorization of the book on its cover as 'li terarycriticism' isat times stretched tobreaking-point by the extended philosophical excurses. The book's focusmoves fromHeidegger's famous response to the 'Kreatur' inRilke's Eighth Duino Elegy, through a Benjaminian reading of 'Naturgeschichte' and melancholy, to the dimensions of 'undeadness' and sexuality in Sebald's work. Santner has many interesting things to say,and works ingeniously tobring thisbroad range of interestsunder the single umbrella of the 'creaturely': his exploration of sexu ality inSebald, forinstance, opens up awhole new approach toa familiarbody ofwork, and his analysis of the influence ofBenjamin on Sebald' s thought is the most thorough yet attempted. Indeed, thegoal of locating Sebald within thebroader German-Jewish tradition is convincingly achieved, with the help of Rosenzweig, Kafka, and Celan, among others (although curiously absent in this context is any sustained analysis of Adorno and Horkheimer's 'dialectics of enlightenment'). This study thus represents a challenging but rewarding attempt toexplore the intersection between aesthetic and ethico-political strategies inboth Sebald and twentieth-century thought ingeneral. Yet the experience of reading thebook is at times curiously disorienting, since the professed 'primarypoint of reference', Sebald, repeatedly threatens to suffocateunder theweight of existential, psychoanalytic, and ethico-politico-theological theorizing. It is sometimes hard todiscern the linkbetween theHeideggerian and psychoanalytic terminology and Sebald's prose, and indeed Santner's study flirts with the danger inherent in all such highly theorized readings of literature, namely that the literary artist Sebald (or indeed Rilke) sometimes gets reduced to the sum of his thought,not of his art, discussed as abstracted philosophy rather than constructed literature.A bibliography is also curiously absent, yet in such awide-ranging comparative study it would surely have been helpful.While On Creaturely Life is an imaginative medi tation on creaturely consciousness and the representation of the sovereign self, and a MLR, I02.2, 2007 573 significant contribution to both Sebald scholarship and critical theory, its argument is thus not always easy to follow. MARBACHAMNECKAR BEN HUTCHINSON A Companion tothe Works of ThomasMann. Ed. by HERBERT LEHNERT and EVAWES SELL. (Studies inGerman Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. xviii+345 pp. $90; ?65. ISBN 978-I-57II3-2I9-2. This collection of essays formspart of aCamden House series inwhich twenty-seven volumes have appeared since 1999 and which will eventually provide a panorama of the accepted peaks ofGerman and Austrian literature fromHartmann von Aue to Thomas Bernhard and beyond. A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann seeks to 'address scholars, teachers, students ofGerman or comparative literature' as well as 'themany readers ofMann...