On creaturely life Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald / [electronic resource] :
Eric L. Santner.
- University of Chicago Press, c2006.
- 1 online resource (xxii, 219 p.)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
On creaturely life -- The vicissitudes of melancholy -- Toward a natural history of the present -- On the sexual life of creatures and other matters.
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 an.