On Creaturely Life , Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being--the open--concealed 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 vestiges--what Eric Santner calls the creaturely--have a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power an.
Abstract: In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being--the open--concealed 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 vestiges--what Eric Santner calls the creaturely--have a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power an