On Creaturely Life

In hisDuino Elegies,Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of beingthe openconcealed 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 vestigeswhat Eric Santner calls thecreaturelyhave 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 Lifeis also a significant contribution to critical theory.

Eric L. Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life and coauthor of The Neighbor, both published by the University of Chicago Press.