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

by Michael G. Levine

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823255108
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	11/11/2013
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Michael 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.

Table of Contents

List of 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 Sacrifice: Celan's Poems for Eric

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

The readings in A Weak Messianic Power are subtle and full of unexpected turns, and many are tours de force acts of deconstruction. Levine reads over, almost over the shoulder of, great critical readers, Derrida, Celan, Benjamin, exposing in their writing a wealth of images not apparent to the naked eye. The method is almost astronomical: it brings near the distant contours of a strange temporal figure—a non-homogenous, surprising time. The book offers a strong notion of messianism outside theology, the messianism of the small alteration.

Yale University - Paul North

The readings in A Weak Messianic Power are subtle and full of unexpected turns, and many are tours de force acts of deconstruction. Levine reads over, almost over the shoulder of, great critical readers, Derrida, Celan, Benjamin, exposing in their writing a wealth of images not apparent to the naked eye. The method is almost astronomical: it brings near the distant contours of a strange temporal figure—a non-homogenous, surprising time. The book offers a strong notion of messianism outside theology, the messianism of the small alteration.”——Paul North, Yale University

From the Publisher