In On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Eric Santner puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in the service of reimagining ethical and political life. By exploring the theological dimensions of Freud's writings and revealing unexpected psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy of Rosenzweig's masterwork, The Star of Redemption, Santner makes an original argument for understanding religions of revelation in therapeutic terms, and offers a penetrating look at how this understanding suggests fruitful ways of reconceiving political...
In On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Eric Santner puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in the service of...
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...
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 workin...
In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In...
In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and en...
"The king is dead. Long live the king " In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In "The Royal Remains," Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location the life of the people where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic...
"The king is dead. Long live the king " In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign and the right to rule was immediately trans...
"The king is dead. Long live the king " In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In "The Royal Remains," Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location the life of the people where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic...
"The king is dead. Long live the king " In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign and the right to rule was immediately trans...
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable--but all the more urgent now--than Freud imagined. In The...
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus ...
