On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

"Indispensable reading for both Sebald scholars and those intrerested in contemporary critical theory." —Markus Zisselsberger, German Studies Review

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 vest...