A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan - Hardcover

Levine, Michael G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823255107 ISBN 13: 9780823255108

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2013

Synopsis

In his famous theses on the philosophy of history, Benjamin writes: “We have been endowed with a weak messianic power to which the past has a claim.” This claim addresses us not just from the past but from what will have belonged to it only as a missed possibility and unrealized potential. For Benajmin, as for Celan and Derrida, what has never been actualized remains with us, not as a lingering echo but as a secretly insistent appeal. Because such appeals do not pass through normal channels of communication, they require a special attunement, perhaps even a mode of unconscious receptivity. Levine examines the ways in which this attunement is cultivated in Benjamin’s philosophical, autobiographical, and photohistorical writings; Celan’s poetry and poetological addresses; and Derrida’s writings on Celan.

About this title

About the Author

Michael G. Levine is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0823255107
• ISBN 13: 9780823255108
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192