subscribeOn Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, by Eric Santner
by Guy Zimmerman
The shiver of political anxiety that winds through Eric Santner’s book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald arises from the work of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose theory of the “state of exception” figured prominently in the juridical foundations of the Third Reich. Santner’s anxiety is shared by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his important work Homo Sacer, and by Jacques Derrida in his lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign, and it concerns the way Schmitt’s thesis is once again expressing itself in the world, particularly in America’s “war on terror.” Santner contextualizes Schmitt’s thinking by examining an impressive slate of German writers that includes Holderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Kafka, and also the more recent work of the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald. The Jewish “psychotheologist” Franz Rosensweig also figures prominently in the discussion. It’s a heady brew, in other words, and one of the most impressive aspects of the book is how deftly Santner manages to illuminate the nuances that differentiate these big glaciers of thought while also mapping their continuities.
While the book has no direct relationship with modern drama, Santner’s thesis sheds light on how dramatists from Beckett to Pinter, Fornes and Sarah Kane have depicted “creatureliness” on stage. Moreover, this subject matter, and also Santner’s treatment of it, can usefully be examined via complexity theory as marking the emergence of a new “structure of feeling” that connects to political, social and ecological realities confronting us as a species today. “Structure of feeling” is a term Raymond Williams defines in his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht as “the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.”[i] Writing in 1969, Williams’ language is reminiscent of how complexity theoreticians would define “network thinking” some twenty years later[ii], and that is resonant also with the “intelligent materialism” attributed to Deleuze and Guattari by eco-theorists such as Bernd Herzogenrath and Hanjo Berressen.[iii]
Those who have read Sebald’s novels The Emmigrants, Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, or his book-length poem After Nature will perhaps have been struck by how deeply embodied the experience of his writing is. A kind of exquisite melancholia arises from Sebald’s text, which drifts across the boundaries that typically separate memoir and fiction. This powerful affect is also actually the subject of Santner’s inquiry. He tracks this “structure of feeling” back through Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama to Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy and links it to a mode of being in which we internalize the alienating and oppressive weight of sovereignty by way of a “petrified unrest” typical of creatureliness. Santner calls this mode of being spectral materialism.
The intent here is to undermine the alarming analogy Schmitt makes in his political theory between the role of miracle in pre-modern theology and the power of the sovereign to suspend the force of law, and, in a unilateral fashion, reduce human beings to the extra-legal status of animals. Santner closes his book with an analysis of Rilke’s famous poem the Archaic Torso of Apollo, an analysis that posits a way out of the Oedipal dynamic that, arguably, animates Schmitt’s thinking. “Self-being-in-Otherness,” is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, a state of neighborliness one finds also in Deleuze and Guattari under the rubric of the “group-subject.” Santner’s argument about the role art plays in opening this “miraculous exception” from authoritarian domination is arguably an attempt to re-direct Schmitt’s thinking toward an anti-fascist agenda.
The continuities between the “spectral materialism” described by Santner and the “intelligent materialism” of Deleuze and Guattari underscore the tectonic cultural shift we are currently undergoing in this age of global bio-politics. The test of this new materialism is its capacity to illuminate the intricate subjectivities of art, and particularly the new(ish) structures of feeling that imbue certain works of art with a sense that they exist beyond us, in a future we are destined for. Though as a psychoanalytical work, On Creaturely Life orients itself quite differently than anything in Delueze and Guattari, I believe this only makes Santner’s work an ideal vehicle for illuminating these continuities. To even mention Deleuze and Guattari in the context of a psychoanalytic text is to suggest that there’s a baby in with the psychoanalytical bathwater we are in the process of discarding.
What is this “baby in the bathwater?” Perhaps how the creature of “bare life” conceals within himself a source of innate and irreducible freedom. As Santner puts it, “The question raised by all of Benjamin’s work pertains to the possibility of actively mobilizing the resources of remembrance in a post-Proustian world without direct or immediate recourse to the language and structures of religious life. And once again, what is at stake in such a mobilization is above all the possibility of suspending that dimension of our lives where we are delivered over to our creatureliness.” [iv]
Intriguing as it may be, one has the sense Sebald’s “spectral materialism” tells only half of an important story, and that what must still be addressed are the ways man is in no way separate from “nature.” Santner’s assumption that this split exists is itself problematic, suggesting a nostalgia for familiar psychological forms that convey a sense of being cheated, a case of Lacanian longeuers in which we pine for unattainable jouissance, and that impossible reuninon with petit object a. An intoxication is perhaps at work here, a Jones for ineffable longing. This passivity of affect tends to blunt the book’s arguments, particularly toward Part 4 where the analysis trails off like a very interesting but unfinished sentence. The psychoanalytic frame tends toward a reductive focus on the phallic function rather than an opening out in which the book’s undeniably valuable insights might contribute to an expansive discourse that includes other disciplines and the promise of transformation.
And yet, if On Creaturely Life feels a bit like a fragment, a beautiful ruin, this perhaps only serves to amplify Santner’s analysis of the feeling-tone of stunned awestruck-ness that characterizes German modernism from Holderlin through Celan, and its baleful significance for contemporary politics. In the technical jargon of complexity theory, Santner identifies an “adaptive” cultural discourse that is still in the process of emerging today, and he sheds light on hidden connections between this discourse and our fractured contemporary scene, and the potential for change it conceals. Given how forcefully On Creaturely Life reveals the linkages between the particular artistic-literary system that is its subject, and the dominant cultural and political systems that shape our experience, we can perhaps afford to cut Santner some slack on his occasional over-reliance on psychoanalytic reasoning.
NOTES
[i] Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 17
[ii] Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 233
[iii] Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 6
[iv] Eric L. Santner On Creaturely Life (London, The University of Chicago Press, 2009) 140
