Eric Santner Research Articles

Exodus into Ordinary Life

This essay focuses on Eric Santner’s psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the getting out of Egypt – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation,” weighing it down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to Hegel’s definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime,” Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger in the world. The Exodus, therefore, is to be understood not as an exit out of the world, following the call of the otherworldly God, but precisely the other way round: as an exit of the Egyptomaniac metaphysical paralysis, where “Egypt” represents an impasse of the self-negating life which cannot tolerate its finite condition and invents a sublime alibi in a false promise of immortality.

The Inertia of All Flesh

This article builds on Eric Santner’s reflections on The Weight of All Flesh and in particular his interpretation of the king’s two bodies (Royal Remains). Within the context of Protestant theology, the theopolitical consequences of the democratization of the political body described by Santner are of particular interest. In this respect, I argue for two theses: first, this process of democratization finds its parallel in the Protestant critique of the representational function of the church – and perhaps even a crucial precondition. Second, in terms of a theological critique of ideology, this observation allows us insights into some accompanying symptoms of this process. From a theological perspective the weight of all flesh can then be precisely analyzed as the inertia of the flesh – and of all flesh at that.

Till Death Do Us Part

The so-called Kulturkampf, the conflict between the German Reich and the Catholic Church in the 1870s and 1880s, is one of the most important ideological conflicts of the late nineteenth century and reveals a political theological dynamic characteristic of the modern (German) nation state. This paper analyzes the paradoxes of this conflict along the lines with Eric Santner’s analysis of political representations. During the Kulturkampf, Catholic citizens were publicly suspected of not being loyal Germans, and the Catholic Church is widely figured as an (inner) enemy in the liberal press and in modern caricatures. In these polemics, numerous political theological figures emerge: images of a gendered relation of domination of the (female) church by the (male) state, phantasies of the body politic and its precarious unity as well as of its purification respectively of the extermination of its others that continue to determine other ideological conflicts in the twentieth century.

The Vicissitudes of the Flesh and the Dreamwork of Modernism

The article explores a number of closely related concepts in Eric Santner’s wide-ranging and yet concentrated oeuvre: the concept of the flesh, which is at the center of The Royal Remains, along with two more recent additions to Santner’s lexicon, the “void of knowledge” and “surplus scarcity,” both developed in Untying Things Together. Examining the logic and correlation of these concepts, the paper seeks to highlight certain tensions in Santner’s thought but also the possibilities his analyses of human stasis offer. Alfred Döblin’s modernist classic Berlin Alexanderplatz then serves as a short test case (but also counterexample) of what we might call, taking our cues from Santner’s thinking, the “dreamwork of modernism.”

Desecularizing Santner’s Psychotheology

In this paper, Eric Santner’s theory of political flesh is appreciated in its relation to philosophy of religion and Christian theology. In the first part of the paper, Santner’s speculative concept is brought into conversation with the debate on embodiment, incarnation, and a hermeneutics of the flesh. Santner’s conception of the flesh is shown to follow a logic of excarnation, or rather disincorporation, and thus to be at odds with contemporary harmonistic theories of embodiment that attempt to think body and spirit together without rupture. In contrast, the relevance of Santner’s theory lies precisely in its antagonistic reading of the dynamics that constitute human embodied being – a dimension overlooked by most recent theories of embodiment. The second part of the article develops a reading of Protestantism as a “religion of the flesh” in line with Santner’s argument. In doing so, it is shown that the Protestant narrative of self-modernization and progress (Hegel’s “religion of freedom”) can be subverted by the conception of the flesh brought into play by Santner, revealing a much more ambivalent history of Protestantism. In a re-reading of the theologies of Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and John Calvin, it is shown that the Protestant understanding of the church can be made transparent to a figure of the undead that is virulent in it, namely the undead flesh of Jesus Christ. In the end, the question is raised whether this figure of an “undead” Christ might not be interpreted as a paradoxological intervention in the sense of Eric Santner.

Too Muchness, the Surplus of Immanence, Manatheism

This paper tries to provide some clues and red threads through the magisterial work of Eric Santner. The first part takes the point of departure in his book on Schreber (My Own Private Germany) and tries to lay down a basic narrative that subtends most of Santner’s work and can be encapsulated by “the secret history of modernity.” This narrative is briefly spelled out through the relationship of Schreber the father (the “surplus father” as the continuation of the enlightenment), Doctor Flechsig (the seminal representative of the modern university discourse), and Schreber the son, the embodiment of the symptom of the progress of modernity. The second part of the paper scrutinizes three interrelated concepts proposed by Santner, too muchness, the surplus of immanence, and manatheism, which provide conceptual tools to address the break of modernity. The three concepts are brought into relation with the historical placement of psychoanalysis in modernity, the dialectic of “what remains” and the emergence of the new, and finally with the nature of the exception pertaining to the notion of the surplus. The last part, “the punning of reason,” examines Santner’s frequent use of puns (“puncepts”) as a conceptual strategy to deal with the paradoxes of universality. Punning is taken not as an addition or embellishment but as a poignant way to propose a new status of universality, related to what Lacan named lalangue. The three different perspectives try to show the different ways by which Santner’s work addresses the core conundrums of modernity.

“A Crown is Warranted With Strength”: Bosses, Fantasy, and Democracy in Elden Ring

This article examines the symbolic and discursive effects of the “final boss” trope in speculative and fantasy games. In contrast to our own world, the rulers, kings, and presidents of speculative games are often the most powerful individuals personally or physically, not just systemically. I employ political theorists Claude Lefort and Eric Santner to argue that the utilization of this trope allows audiences to safely engage with tensions and uncomfortable affects which are inherent to life in a democracy. Fighting bosses which are both monarch and the most powerful of their faction allows audiences to smooth frustrations with the symbolic and discursive chaos which often pervades democratic life. I examine one boss, Godrick the Grafted of Elden Ring, as a particularly fascinating example of this dynamic. I employ close readings of character dialogue and design to argue that such games serve a more concretized political function than scholars have identified.

Claude Lefort and Eric Santner on the Use and Abuse of the King’s Body

This article contests in detail the use that Eric Santner makes of the writings of Claude Lefort, Merleau-Ponty and Ernest Kantorowicz. Santner conceives of modernity as being haunted by, or one might almost say, poisoned by the Royal Remnants, the body of the king circulating in society as “too muchness.” He uses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh in order to orchestrate his profoundly anti-modern position. I contend that he has grossly misinterpreted the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, as well as the work of Claude Lefort, in order to elaborate a post-secular position which ends up being a form of an apology for the Trump administration. This is effected through his denegation of the categories of political philosophy and his substitution for them with concepts taken from marketing. My article ends by contesting the notion of messianism, with or without a messiah, which has become current in certain forms of contemporary philosophy and reflecting on the role of messianism in American political culture.

난민이라는 장소

This essay attempts to read Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, using as a guiding thread of analysis what Kenneth Reinhard and Eric Santner elaborate with regard to the concept of the neighbor. Reinhard argues that the politics of Carl Schmitt, which brings to the foreground the sovereign exception and the friend-enemy opposition, should be supplemented by the ethical import of the neighbor. To shed a light on the ethical dimension implied in the neighbor, Reinhard redirects our attention to what Jacques Lacan calls the logic of the not-all. Reinhard’s attempt to consider the commandment of neighbor-love in relation to the logic of the not-all takes us a step further in the direction of rethinking the concept of miracle articulated by Santner. Santner insists that a miracle happens when we are addressed by the lack within the socio-symbolic edifice and we, in some fashion, respond to this calling. For both Reinhard and Santner, the concept of the neighbor actually amounts to the interruption or suspension of the state of exception as defined by Schmitt. The topos of the neighbor, as the interruption of the state of exception, is exemplified in the character of Kee in Children of Men. Kee, as a miraculously pregnant refugee, serves as the interstitial space that remains irreducible to the very opposition of British citizen and refugee. This enables us to interpret the encounter between Kee and Theo as the situation where Theo responds to Kee’s uncanny calling. In this connection, the Human Project can be said to have already been put into practice by a series of refugees who, within the Bexhill refugee camp, are answerable to Kee.

Žižek's Jews

Žižek's Jews Adam Komisaruk In memory of Dennis W. Allen Jews are everywhere in Slavoj Žižek. Jewish jokes are among his most vibrant textual examples; anti-Semitism is one of his most insistent themes, not to mention a tendency of which he himself is sometimes accused. His passionate engagement with theorists both Jewish (Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Levinas, Arendt, Eric Santner) and Jewish-agonistic (Hegel, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger) places identitarian issues front and center. From his earliest English writings onward, the figure of "the Jew" epitomizes for Žižek the convergence of capitalist ideology and psychical fantasy in the modern European imagination. More recently, and in dialogue with thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Zahi Zalloua, and the filmmaker Udi Aloni, Žižek has brought his analytic of violence and neighborliness to bear on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What has received somewhat less attention, however, is the fact that Žižek does not merely instrumentalize Jewishness in the service of an ontological critique, but seems interested in it as such, even if that "as such" demands continual interrogation. His inquiries into the very structure of Jewish belief and subjectivity remain somewhat independent of the gentile construction of Jews on the one hand, and of the Zionist identifications or non-identifications of Jews on the other. Although Žižek is far from endorsing the notion of an "inaccessible X, 'Jewishness' … the trans-phenomenal 'hard kernel of being,'" he recognizes that there is not one but a multiplicity of "Jewish questions," some of which are often posed by as well as about Jews (Tarrying 152). Žižek is a recursive rather than linear thinker, and rarely stays in one place for long. Nevertheless, I organize the following discussion according to what I would very roughly characterize as three phases of his "Jewish" commentaries. In the first, he elaborates the mechanics of anti-Semitism in terms of the Lacanian symptom, an external screen onto which Europe has historically projected its internal anxieties and thereby sustained its illusions of self-completion. The second phase corresponds to Žižek's theological turn; examining Judaism from the inside out rather than the outside in, it takes stock of such matters as the Jewish relation to the law, the status of Jewish guilt, and the supposed supersession of both by Christian love. Žižek's signal argument is that the Jewish law represses not only the parricidal break with paganism that Freud posited, but the vortex of the Che vuoi? that not even the [End Page 156] divine can answer. In the third phase, Žižek trains his eyes on the Middle East as a field where the contradictions of cultural identity play out. While his analysis does not readily translate into practical advice, he urges us to think in terms of intensifying rather than resolving these contradictions—even to the point of acknowledging the "monstrosity" of the national other and (mutually, though irreconcilably) the national self. Across this varied terrain, Žižek consistently attempts to think Jewishness as a dialectic of universality and particularity. That is, in the different roles that interest him—as the victims of centuries-long abuse, as worshipers navigating the injunctions of monotheism, as parties to a violent contestation of political borders—Jews simultaneously represent instantiations of a recurring pattern and an exceptional case. Anti-Semites stereotype Jews as both rootless cosmopolitans and as hopelessly "stuck" in esoteric practices; Jews separate themselves from people of other faiths in order to achieve what is true of people of all faiths, as in their own way do Christians; those who support the Israeli occupation claim to be defending a homeland in the face of atrocities, as in their own way do those who oppose it; and Žižek himself invokes Jews to dramatize the dialectical process where other examples both could and could not possibly suffice. Žižek stubbornly resists any irenic reductions of these paradoxes, because what is common to them—a trauma at the core of the Real that must be both recognized and disavowed—is by definition not generalizable. To deal with identity authentically means to cultivate a plural sense of "universal singularity" or the "concrete universal...

Biopolitical Animation

An obligatory entry on lists of ‘essential pandemic reading’, Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) may have proved especially attractive to locked-down theatre-lovers because it reassures us that the show will ultimately go on. While film, TV and the Internet disappear from the post-pandemic world that Mandel depicts (along with electricity and working technology), an itinerant group called the Travelling Symphony brings Shakespeare from settlement to recovering settlement, working with nothing but human bodies and the props and costumes they gather from abandoned homes. But this article argues that what makes Mandel’s novel especially apt reading amidst COVID-19 is its pervasive concern with conditions of work, or more specifically, with finding work that you really love. While presenting a virtual utopia of what Nicholas Ridout calls ‘passionate amateurs’, the novel provokes a reconsideration of enjoyment and fantasy in our professional and amateur attachments at a time when the conditions of work are susceptible to both transformation and new oppressions. Drawing on Eric Santner, the article suggests that Station Eleven accentuates a biopolitical irony. Perhaps what we need liberation from, most of all, is neither the discipline and numbness of a regimenting working world nor the stifling physical and social restraints of lockdown, but rather the undeadening dynamics of what Santner calls ‘biopolitical animation’.

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Archiwa martwego bliźniego. Żydzi, muzułmanie i dwa ciała wroga

The article analyses recent works by Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner, who have interpreted Carl Schmitt’s ideas in the context of left-wing political theology. The article traces how the figure of the undead Muslim recurs in the various philosophers and theologians referred to by these two authors. In this way, it shows how contemporary messianic thinkers unknowingly mourned their ‘dead neighbours’, traumatic irritants from which a messianic pearl was born. In order for this pearl to glow with a miraculous light (as Agamben and Santner would wish it to), modern thinking must engage in an act of neighbour-love, whereby it embraces the untimely, undead excarnations (disembodiments) of a history of typological damage. Otherwise, these traumatised and traumatising neighbours remain undead, driven by critical theories of sovereignty.

World-Craving: Rahel Varnhagen, Daniel Paul Schreber, and the Strange Promise of Paranoia

This essay reads Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen (1957) alongside Sigmund Freud’s case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case (1911), two texts about 18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented in Varnhagen’s and Schreber’s memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib’s and Eric Santner’s readings of these two texts as political, not psychological, documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib’s too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner’s too tragic approach. The result is a new reading of Varnhagen’s story and an approach to paranoia as a potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for world-withdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with Arendt’s own treatment of her subject’s persecution fantasies not only as a “verdict against the world” but also as a desire for a world.

Creaturely Life in “We Come as Friends”

In this article we focus on the analysis of a 2014 Austrian–French documentary We come as friends (110 min), written, directed, and produced by Hubert Sauper. We come as friends is a documentary about a corporate, polycentric, contemporary colonization of South Sudan. It is described by Sauper as “a modern odyssey, a dizzying, science fiction-like journey into the heart of Africa”. It is about Sudan, the continent’s biggest country, at the moment when it was divided into two nations in a 2011 referendum. It documents, according to Sauper, much more than the separation of the predominantly Christian south from the mostly “Muslim Arabs” of the rest of the Sudan; it shows how “an old ‘civilizing’ pathology reemerges—that of colonialism, clash of empires, and yet new episodes of bloody (and holy) wars over land and resources”. Inspired by Eric Santner’s concept of “creaturely life” we analyze a natural history of the present and creaturely expressions in We come as friends.

Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler's Prose: Five Psycho-Sociological Readings by Marie Kolkenbrock

Reviewed by: Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler's Prose: Five Psycho-Sociological Readings by Marie Kolkenbrock Helga Schreckenberger Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler's Prose: Five Psycho-Sociological Readings. By Marie Kolkenbrock. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Pp. 268. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1501330964. In her rich, nuanced reading of Arthur Schnitzler's prose works Der Weg ins Freie (1908), Flucht in die Finsternis, (completed 1913, published 1931), Traumnovelle (1925–1926), and the novellas of Dämmerseelen (1907), Marie Kolkenbrock focuses on the interrelation between stereotypes and destiny as a reflection of the difficult relationship between individual and society in the modernist era. Her clearly articulated framework for her analysis is presented in the introduction. Drawing on theories on identity, subjectivity, and power by Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, and Eric Santner, she argues that destiny and stereotype provide a coping mechanism for Schnitzler's protagonists against a threatening loss of legitimacy in a social order that has begun to disintegrate. While stereotypes function as an ordering tool that stabilizes the position of the self within the norm by marking the different "other," destiny provides the reassurance of individualized existence. Kolkenbrock differentiates between "social destiny" enforced by stereotypes, which "enclose the typecast person within the limits of the social position defined and legitimized by them" (16) and individual metaphysical destiny as a force of individualization. She points out that for Schnitzler's protagonists, metaphysical destiny gains importance when their social destiny and, thus, the legitimacy of the social order is threatened. These moments, which expose the constructedness of the cultural narratives that form social reality provoke a recurring sensation of "Grauen" in the protagonists. For Kolkenbrock, this links Schnitzler's works to the Schauerroman of German Romanticism and its aim to unsettle "naturalized" boundaries. However, as Kolkenbrock is quick to point out, Schnitzler's works do not promote any kind of mysticism. The protagonists' invocation of individual destiny fails to provide a lasting alternative to the normative order and often proves fatal. [End Page 379] In the following chapters of her book, Kolkenbrock analyzes the various interplays of stereotypes and destiny in Schnitzler's texts. Chapter 1, "Stereotypes and Physiognomy in Der Weg ins Freie," explores the link between stereotype and physiognomy with regard to both racial and gender stereotyping. However, as Kolkenbrock shows, the text presents a number of examples where the stereotype does not fit the individual revealing both its constructedness and its relativity. Moreover, the text also reveals that even those individuals within the norm are not exempt from being determined by cultural narratives. Identification with the "other" represented by the Jews seems to offer an alternative destiny from the one within the social norm. This voluntary identification, however, contains the idea of individuality and singularity of an individual destiny that is absent from the social destiny of the Jews for whom Jewishness is no longer a choice but unchangeable fate. In the second chapter, "Madness and Investiture in Flucht in die Finsternis," Kolkenbrock reads the mental crisis of the protagonist as a reaction to the perceived loss of his social status. As mental illness marks the diagnosed subject as "other" excluded from the social norm, it can be seen as a way to escape from the bourgeois order. While the protagonist's half-conscious enactment of stereotypes of madness suggests a yearning for a meaningful destiny, his flirt with the social position of the "other" ultimately proves overwhelming. The protagonist's madness is not a cure for but a symptom of the instable post-Enlightenment bourgeois order, which, for Kolkenbrock, links it to Romantic madness. The next chapter, "Race and Destiny in Die Weissagung and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief," analyzes the connection between both novella protagonists' social destiny and their use of racial stereotypes about Jewishness in the case of the former and blackness in the latter. The protagonists employ racial stereotypes to defend their legitimate position within the norm; the failure to do so leads to their death reiterating the inescapability of social destiny. As in her first chapter, Kolkenbrock shows how Schnitzler's texts undermine the stereotypes of otherness by revealing their constructedness. Kolkenbrock's fourth chapter focuses on the cliché of love...

‘The object of power is power’: tautology, paranoia, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

ABSTRACTBuilding on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim that paranoid modes of reading are ‘strongly tautological,’ this essay begins its exploration of the relationship between tautology and paranoia by suggesting that tautological forms of expression can be read as symptomatic of paranoia. Following a comparison of Lacan's description of the paranoiac's linguistic dysfunction with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Roland Barthes's, and Immanuel Kant's analyses of tautology, the relationship between tautology and paranoia is then developed through a reading of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). While in Orwell's novel tautology appears symptomatic of paranoia insofar as the Party's rejection of old systems of meaning – produces new systems that are tautological, the fact that Winston Smith's specific form of paranoia burgeons following a refusal to accept the tautological irrationality of the new symbolic order suggests that tautology might also operate in the precipitation of paranoia. Turning finally to a comparison of Winston's psychosis with Eric Santner's reading of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's paranoia, which, similarly to Winston's, also results from a confrontation with tautological symbolic lack, this essay reveals such lack as an unnerving point of convergence between the totalitarian state envisioned by Orwell and the modern democratic social structures Santner studies—a claim that I exemplify by examining British Prime Minister Theresa May’s tautology ‘Brexit means Brexit.'

The Creaturely Life of Carol Reed's Cities: Eric Santner and Walter Benjamin

In the years following the end of the Second World War Carol Reed directed three films, Odd Man Out (1947), The Third Man (1949), and The Man Between (1953), that all dealt with individuals somehow cast alone into post-war urban environments that shared certain characteristics of division and violence. This article argues that they can be usefully analysed through the lens of Walter Benjamin's notion of the creaturely, especially through Eric Santner's explication of the concept. It considers the films from three aspects of Santner's creaturely life: natural history, the state of exception, and undeadness. These qualities of the creaturely as an analysis of the human condition help to encompass some of the strangeness of Reed's apparently conventional film narratives. The films' characters can be seen as overtly modelling a kind of Benjaminian natural history, the history of the brutal twentieth century, in which the vulnerable, mortal, dying human beings at the centre of these tales stumble around in real cities manifesting in real broken stones and brick, the allegorical ruins of a past order. They are victims of an arbitrary law experiencing life in a permanent now as the endless liminality of death, and are therefore, as examples of our creaturely state, terminally undead.

Beauty That Must Die: Station Eleven, Climate Change Fiction, and the Life of Form

While most discussions of climate change fiction tend to focus on genres and objects, this essay foregrounds the importance of the notion of form. Starting from an understanding of the Anthropocene as marked by the entanglement of particular (social, cultural, symbolic) forms of life and (biological) life forms, the essay argues that literature’s “life of form” can productively engage the complexities of those interactions. Indeed, if philosophical discussions of Anthropocene life such as Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife and Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene suffer from a confusion of life forms and forms of life, a novel like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is more canny about their multifarious interactions. Ultimately, and in contrast to most post-catastrophe fiction, Mandel’s novel is less interested in the specter of the end of the human species than in the fundamental contingency of all human forms of life. The essay draws on Eric Santner’s work in political theology and on Station Eleven ’s intertextual usage of the work of William Shakespeare and Herman Melville to present an account of the multifarious interactions between life and form that are at stake in climate change fiction.

Eric Santner, “flesh”, soberania e arte: Dois corpos do povo ao sul do Equador?

This article analyzes two contemporary Brazilian artists – painter Rosana Paulino from Sao Paulo and writer Conceicao Evaristo from Minas Gerais – whose works strongly reflect the difficult space occupied by black Brazilian women, in light of Eric Santner’s book The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. By means of clues left by the art produced in the period shaping modernity, Santner theorizes on the way in which post-monarchical societies confront the process of substituting monarchical sovereignty with popular sovereignty, established as they are in a context of scientistic reason, secularization, the eruption of capitalism, and the idea of the autonomy of subjects, and marked by the disciplinary power of biopolitics. Under the Eurocentric perspective (adopted by Santner) and based on the gaze of the Other, Rosana Paulino and Conceicao Evaristo’s artistic production effectively reveals that the question of popular sovereignty and the space people occupy in it still lacks a decolonial shift, raising new gazes and reflections.