Ausgesetzte Schopfung

Else Lasker-Schüler's prose works cover the period from 1906 to 1937. Their multifarious links with central literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic works of the modern age demonstrate the degree to which they are embedded in different contemporaneous discourses. The perspective they cast on modern discourse patterns is a very original one, linking figures representing sovereignty with the categories gender and body. Royal figures and powerholders show a marked inclination to absolutize their power by eradicating all (gender) difference. The enactment of such self-creation fantasms aimed at collapsing symbol and body delineates the poetological and the historical/political dimensions of a radical crisis of representation. The study draws on discourse analysis, cultural anthropology and psycho-semiotics for its arguments, explicitly mapping its frame of reference to encompass historical and biographical aspects (First World War, Zionism, National Socialist persecution of the Jews, exile, etc.) and showing how the ethics of difference outlined in these texts relates to Jewish tradition.