On Creaturely Life

Santner, Éric L.

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226735054.001.0001

Cited by 195 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…The ethicality of Sebald's work has often been located in how it bears witness to the past, as when Eric L. Santner writes that 'what is issue in the interplay of image and text in these writings is the task of bearing witness to what exceeds our hermeneutic grasp of historical experience'. 32 In order to do so, however, Sebald had to refuse to bear witness to the historical archive: the material record of Alberto Beck's life had to be destroyed in order for the ethical effect praised by Santner to be created. Even if one accepts that certain aspects of historical experience are beyond our understanding, whether through trauma or hermeneutic uncertainty, then Sebald's use of the historical archive in his compositional practice is more complex than simply bearing witness.…”

Section: Vertigo In Jerusalem: Barthes In the Emigrantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

W. G. Sebald’s revisions of Roland Barthes

Brazil

2017

Textual Practice

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W. G. Sebald's work has frequently been compared to that of Roland Barthes; James Wood is typical in speculating that Austerlitz is 'in deep dialogue' with Camera Lucida. Evidence from Sebald's archive both supports and complicates such claims. Sebald first read Barthes in the early 1990s, engaging with him in his art criticism, yet Sebald's compositional practice in The Emigrants, which involved erasing an image's indexical relationship to its referent, shows a rejection of the central ontological claim of Camera Lucida. Sebald returned to Barthes in the late 1990s while composing Austerlitz and revised the draft manuscript so that the published version directly references Sebald's reading of Camera Lucida. Through an extended engagement with Barthes, Sebald contested the indexical nature of photography in order to reflect upon the desires that led to the figuration of trauma and history as an indexical trace at the end of the twentieth century.

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Section: Vertigo In Jerusalem: Barthes In the Emigrantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

W. G. Sebald’s revisions of Roland Barthes

Brazil

2017

Textual Practice

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“…According to Laplanche, we are born into a ‘Copernican’ world in which our ‘centre’ originally develops only in relation to an ‘other’, like the earth circling the sun. Later we become ‘Ptolemaic’, as the ego spins narcissistic illusions of ‘centrality’, ‘wholeness’ and self‐sufficiency, defending against the ‘signifying stress’ of the other's messages (Santner 2006, p. 33). The sun once again orbits the earth!…”

Section: Laplanche and Metapsychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Laplanche 1989, pp. 44–5; Santner 2006, p. 34). For Laplanche, such enigmatic experiences lie at the core of the subject.…”

Section: Laplanche and Metapsychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The enigmatic signifier and the decentred subject

Hinton

2009

J Analytical Psychology

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War, genocide, economic upheaval and terrorism have crushed belief in endlessly 'enlightened' progress. We more and more doubt the teleological nature of psychological events, including the activity of a Self or centre that guides the development of the subject. There is a growing view of a 'decentred' subject that develops in the face of an enigmatic Otherness. Jean Laplanche has created an extensive metapsychology describing this situation, emphasizing the original helplessness of an infant who is bathed in enigmatic messages from its very beginnings. These messages from the adult other are often sexualized, and are partly or largely unconscious to the sender. Laplanche calls this situation 'primal seduction'. The immature human cannot fully metabolize such adult messages, and through 'primal repression' they remain as the unconscious core of subjectivity. They disrupt psychological life, conveying a sense of signifying something to the subject. What they signify is an enigma, like finding a hieroglyph in the desert. The story of relationships and culture is the story of our repeated attempts to translate them, to respond to them. An analytic case illustrates these concepts as they appear in the transference, first as gaps and monsters, and then in the crucial and surprising appearance of transformative laughter. The vicissitudes of the clinical situation illustrate the vital importance of the enigmatic signifier in the development of the subject.

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“…If, as Antonio Negri puts it, Marx was likely to oppose "the nonspectrality of the productive subject" to "capital's spectrality", Bellamy's late Victorian bathos seems paradoxically more capable of resonating with a postmodern "spectral materialism", one which registers "a certain real whose status is, paradoxically, virtual". 6 Within such a framework, the Marxian "ontologization of exploitation" has come to appear superannuated, and the spectralization of labor is no longer to be grasped as the distorting opposite of its true or non-alienated nature. 7 But the proliferation of narrative and representational complications is not exhausted here.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia

Balasopoulos¹

2009

tae

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On Creaturely Life

Cited by 195 publications

References 0 publications

W. G. Sebald’s revisions of Roland Barthes

W. G. Sebald’s revisions of Roland Barthes

The enigmatic signifier and the decentred subject

Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia

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