The Flesh of All Words

Abstract

Scrutinising Santner’s comments on his own method in his recent book Untying Things Together, the paper argues that at the heart of Santner’s theoretical endeavour lies something that might be called “the flesh of all words.” To elaborate this thesis, I begin, following a corresponding hint by Santner himself, with a description of Freud’s peculiar “way of working with concepts” in his The Interpretation of Dreams. From there I move on to the analysis of an author who has been one of Santner’s main points of reference at least since his Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Franz Rosenzweig. The paper outlines Rosenzweig’s self-interpretation in his essay “‘The New Thinking’” and compares the specific methodology explained and developed in this text with the main work of Ferdinand Ebner, whose closeness to his own work Rosenzweig himself emphasised. Finally, against the background of these theoretical conceptions, I will borrow one of Santner’s own neologisms and use it to describe his work as the “encystance” on/of this flesh of all words.