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.
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