A Weak Messianic Power : : Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan / / Michael G. Levine.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: Levine, Michael G.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- 1. A Time to Come: Hunchbacked Theology, Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Historical Materialism -- 2. The Day the Sun Stood Still: Benjamin’s Theses, Celan’s Realignments, Trauma, and the Eichmann Trial -- 3. Pendant: Celan, Büchner, and the Terrible Voice of the Meridian -- 4. On the Stroke of Circumcision I: Derrida, Celan, and the Covenant of the Word -- 5. On the Stroke of Circumcision II: Celan, Kafka, and the Wound in the Name -- 6. Poetry’s Demands and Abrahamic Sacrifi ce: Celan’s Poems for Eric -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index