ON CREATURELY LIFE

In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of beingthe openconcealed from human s by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the pr oper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundin gs. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestigeswhat Eric Santner calls the creaturelyhave a biopolitical aspect: they are linked ...[Read more]