On Creaturely
Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald
by Eric Santner
University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2006
216 pp. Paper, $20.00
ISBN: 0-226-73503-6.
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication &
Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology. Atlanta,
GA 30332-0165
eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
Creatures come in many different shapes
and sizes, especially in the horror genre.
In the Cold War era, low-budget "creature-features,"
there is a whole bestiary of liminal,
monstrous beings vampires, mummies,
werewolves, witches, zombies, giant animals,
and just plain blobs. Such creatures pose
threats to the myriad boundaries that
demarcate human cultural, social, and
political activity (human-animal, natural-artificial,
civilized-primitive, domestic-foreign,
and so on). In other words, such creatures
are created, and their creation implies
a (sovereign) creator. In some cases the
creature is a by-product of "nature,"
or rather, of the "revenge of nature."
In other cases the creature is a more
explicit creation, through occult powers
(the golem), science (Frankensteins
monster), or psychiatry (mental aberration).
Creatures those beings that appear
repulsively non-human that exist in close
proximity to the animal or the beast
are at the same time always created. Perhaps
it is this strange "creativity"
specific to creatures that at once threatens
the various cultural, social, and political
boundaries, and, which ultimately contributes
to their re-fortification by the end of
such films.
But the concept of the creature, as well
as its relation to a whole set of terms
creation, creator, creativity
is not exclusive to horror film. It is,
of course, a theological concept, one
formulated at length in Medieval Christian
theology. In the theological context,
creatures are not aberrations but the
domain of all that is created and living.
This is also, it should be noted, a political-theological
issue as well, for the relation between
the creator and the created is also a
relation between a sovereign power and
subjects. If all creatures are created
by a sovereign creator-God, then what
is the relation of the creatures to God?
Answering this question meant asking whether
or not creatures and in particular
human creatures contained some
aspect of the divine within themselves.
Do creatures take part in the singular,
divine essence, or is the divine essence
in each creature in its entirety? When
laterally transposed to the political
realm, such questions have interesting
ramifications: Is sovereignty held over
citizens, divided in parts among all citizens,
or is sovereignty within each citizen?
While few Medieval philosophers posed
such questions this directly, the increasing
formalization of the concept of the creature
continued to be linked to ideas of political-theological
sovereignty. By the time of Bonaventure
and Aquinas, the derivation and dependence
of creatures on a sovereign creator enabled
a host of related concepts the
"Great Chain of Being," as well
as the introduction of quasi-medical terminology
of the "corruption," "pollution,"
and "pestilences" of the human
creature.
Eric Santners On Creaturely Life
deals with neither of these kinds of creatures.
But this omission is itself noteworthy.
The uniqueness of Santners book
is to have articulated the contours of
the space between the early modern, onto-theological
creature, and the contemporary, cultural
representations of the monstrous. To say
that Santners book identifies the
status of the "creaturely" in
modernity only begins to get at the spaces
that On Creaturely Life opens up.
In contrast to the Medieval-Christian
tradition, in which the creature is always
derived from and striving towards the
divine, Santner focuses on a modern, German-Jewish,
literary-philosophical tradition (Kafka,
Benjamin, Scholem, Rosenzweig, Celan),
in which the creature is precisely the
life that is exposed and rendered vulnerable.
"For these writers
creaturely
life the peculiar proximity of
the human to the animal at the very point
of their radical difference is
a product not simply of mans thrownness
into the (enigmatic) openness of
Being but of his exposure to a traumatic
dimension of political power and social
bonds whose structures have undergone
radical transformations in modernity."
In the opening sections of his book, Santner
pays particular attention to the work
of Rilke and Heidegger as they each engage
the question of the creature. For Rilke,
animals participate in what he famously
calls "the open," that mode
of uninhibited existence in relation to
a surround. Humans, by contrast, are blocked
from the open due to the mediations of
consciousness, representation, and subject-object
relations. Heidegger suggests that what
Rilke fails to see is the way in which
human beings are able to distinguish between
"world" and "environment"
if animals only exist in an environment,
then human beings inhabit a world in which
individuated beings come to presence in
their Being. Thus animals are, in Heideggers
inimitable formulation, "poor-in-world,"
while humans are "world-building."
Animals are captivated by a generalized
exteriority to which they have no access,
an "exposure to alterity" that
remains opaque.
For Santner, the importance of the German-Jewish
tradition he discusses is that this being
"poor-in-world," this exposure
to an opaque alterity, is rendered in
an explicitly political light. Creaturely
life is not simply animal life, and neither
does it describe the dialectics of the
human-animal boundary. Creaturely life
is the (sovereign) creation of a poor-in-world
within the domain of the human and that
remains human and yet captivated
in a way that characterizes animal life.
The creature is bare life exposed before
the sovereign exception. The creature
is created by a sovereign creator, and
creaturely life is what is in fact produced
in this state of exception. If, using
Heideggers terms, human beings are
"world-building," then what
is built is this exposure to an opaque
sovereign power. "What I am calling
creaturely life is the life that is, so
to speak, called into being, ex-cited,
by exposure to the peculiar creativity
associated with this threshold of law
and nonlaw" (15). In a strange way,
then, the "poor-in-world" that
characterizes animal life is produced
created within the human,
in relation to the sovereign exception
that forever remains opaque.
This process takes many different forms,
and much of Santners literary exegeses
are directed to the elucidation of creaturely
life. In Kafka, for instance, the creature
is subjected neither to God nor to a secular
sovereign power, but to the distributed
anonymity of the law, a law that is everywhere
and nowhere at once (what Santner calls
"sovereign jouissance"). Similarly,
the contemporary German author W.C. Sebald
offers an understanding of creaturely
life as it is lived through the "spectral
materialism" of urban spaces, discarded
commodities, and media such as photography.
While Santner calls attention to the political
dimensions of the ongoing creation of
creaturely life, his project also aims
at seeking out modes of intervening in
that process a kind of counter-creativity,
"some way of uncoupling from the
mode of subjectivity/subjectivization."
It is in this context that Benjamins
notion of "natural history"
is central for Santner. Natural history
"refers, that is, not to the fact
that nature also has a history, but to
the fact that the artifacts of human history
tend to acquire an aspect of mute, natural
being at the point where they begin to
lose their place in a viable form of life
(think of the process whereby architectural
ruins are reclaimed by nature)."
Through Santners literary constellations,
creaturely life is seen also to harbor
within itself a form of resistance ("melancholic
immersion in creaturely life and
ethicopolitical intervention into that
very dimension"). But it is ultimately
tied up with the sovereign exception,
and thus the entire pair is what must
be questioned. The real dynamic in Santners
proposition, therefore, is between memory
and oblivion, and the real challenge is
the dynamis of politics, a notion
of change that is neither that of modernity
(e.g. therapy, moving on, getting over,
making progress) nor that of a critique
of or dismissal of modernity (be it through
nostalgia, immanent critique, or even
nihilism).
On Creaturely Life will likely
be read by those who have read Agambens
Homo Sacer and The State of
Exception, or Michel Foucaults
recently-published lectures at the Collège
de France, or the recent translations
of Carl Schmitts work. But I would
argue that Santners book invites
a much wider readership. The concerns
of the creature presented here open onto
other areas of interest, including the
extensive and diverse writings on "animality,"
contemporary philosophys engagement
with religion (Badiou, Taubes, Zizek),
as well as the ways in which contemporary
art engages the life sciences (including,
but not limited to, "bio-art").
On Creaturely Life does, it is
true, participates in an ongoing dialogue
concerning the state of exception, sovereign
power, "bare life," biopolitics,
and so on. But by reframing this dialogue
in terms of the creaturely, Santner asks
us to think of question of sovereignty
as inseparable from the question of animality,
and to seek ways of critically intervening
in what Agamben calls "the anthropological
machine."