Eric Santner
Office: Wieboldt 204
Email: esantner@uchicago.edu
Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies
Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies
Education:
Ph.d. University of Texas at Austin (German Literature), May 1984.
M.A. University of Texas at Austin (German Literature), May 1982.
B.A. Oberlin College (Philosophy; German), May 1977.
Background:
I started out as a student of Modern German philosophy. At a certain point I switched to German literature and went to graduate school, then got a job in Princeton. It was after finishing the book on Hölderlin that I started becoming interested, by accident, in a series of German filmmakers, recent German filmmakers on Nazi's and the Holocaust. So I began a new project and basically rethinking post-war German identity in the wake of the Holocaust. So in a certain sense looking at the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrators and the second generation; how they took on this legacy and negotiated their relationship to it and to themselves. And from there, in the course of that project, I found one of the most productive resources for thinking about German identity in the second generation after the war was Freud.
Through that work on film and the contact with Freud, I started to become very interested in Freud, still Freud more as a cultural theorist. So psychoanalysis as a cultural theorist, rather than a theory of an individual mind. And memory as collective processes rather than just personal stories. In the course of just reading more Freud, I became preoccupied with one of his case studies. I read these memoirs from this paranoid schizophrenic who had a break down and wrote up his delusions into a book, published them. Freud read them and wrote one of his most important works on paranoia based on his reading of Schreber's text. So I end up writing a book about Schreber's My Own Private Germany. In the course of that work I , because Schreber and his delusions took the form of a kind of knowledge to me, I started to becoming more interested in the boundaries between psychoanalytic cultural theory and the philosophies of religion. And in the process of kind of exploring that terrain around the time I moved from Princeton to Chicago in 1996- my first quarter here Paul Mendes-Flohr was visiting and was teaching a seminar on Rosenzweig and The Star of Redemption. I sat in on the seminar and saw that Rosenzweig was a figure I really need to work with in order to continue pushing my thinking now about psychoanalysis and religion in modernity. So I ended up spending several years just working on The Star of Redemption and brought Rosenzweig's thought together with Freudian thought so it was kind of a staged dialogue.
So I did that book. Around the same time I got around involved in working on a conference with Moshe Postone and Fishbane on the Holocaust and that produced a book Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century. So I continued my interest in Holocaust studies.
And after that Rosenzweig project I started to find my way back more towards literature...but I didn't want to just turn my back on everything I had been working on. So I found this bridge to the new material around the notion of creaturely-ness. So the new book is called On Creaturely Life. It's about Rilke, Walter Benjamin, and WG Sebald, a contemporary German writer who died in 2001. But it is about how these certain figures, figures of foreign tropes, concepts from this German Jewish modernist legacy: Rosenzweig, Cohen, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scohlem, Kafka, and others; help us think through some current things about biopolitics. The way in which political authority and power interfere with human life.
At the same time I worked on this book, On Creaturely Life, I co-authored this book called The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. The other writers are Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard. In that book we tried to use psychoanalysis to, in a sense, reanimate the concept of love of neighbor for contemporary, political situations, and globalization and culturalism. And see how a psychoanalytic take on love of neighbor might be productive in pushing our political imaginations about cross cultural encounters.
And as part of that work I also taught with Paul last year, a seminar on Love of Neighbor which focused a lot on Rosenzweig, but also on Hermann Cohen. Now I just agreed with Paul to teach a seminar next year on the messianic dimension of 20th century German Jewish Thought and Literature. It will probably be on Roszenswig, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Sholem, Hermann Cohen and maybe one or two others. It is not clear to me where I am in terms of writing. Actually, in terms of actual writing projects I might work on Rilke.
How is interdisciplinary study within the Committee beneficial:
I have mixed feelings on it actually. I am of two minds. I tend to think more that people should get their grounding in a conventional discipline and from there reach out into other disciplines at a point in which their own discipline fails to be responsive to their own object of interests.
Topics become interesting when they start to strain the resources of a discipline. In a way you can only start to feel the strain of the resources in your discipline if you begin with that discipline. So if you begin in literary studies and you find that the concepts of the available modes of analysis are too limiting to be responsive to the text in a way that you think is relevant, then you need other languages, more history, more philosophy, a better understanding of the religious background. That is when interdisciplinary becomes urgent.
So my basic feeling is that interdisciplinary is to be held in its urgency when disciplinary resources start to give out, rather than just jumping in to this interdisciplinary matrix which is I think a confusing way to begin. It's a very rich place to end up, but I don't know if it is the best place to begin. I think of the Jewish Studies faculty as being these group of people who help to shape what's developed in new modes of responsiveness to objects that are nonetheless, at least at first seem, to be located in recognized disciplines. So if somebody is doing analysis of biblical texts and they begin theologically and historically, something is emerging in their work that requires resources of literary analysis that aren't practiced in the theological tradition of biblical scholarship. Then the Jewish studies faculty is there to help guide and cultivate this extensionality. Also once you've gotten to Rosenzweig and let's say, for example, you're basically interested in rabbinics. You are going to go back and read those rabbinic texts different because of the way the tradition has been appropriated. So in a certain sense it is also about generating new perspectives and then returning.
What type of student would benefit working with you:
Let's take the seminar on Germany Jewish Messianism. I would imagine there would be students there who are interested in Modern Jewish cultural history, not necessarily the messianic aspect of it. People working on messianic strands of earlier Jewish literature would, I imagine, be interested in this 20th century modernist take on Messianism. People interested in Zionism, formation of Israel would be interested in the class.
What advice would you give students interested in your field:
My sense is that if someone comes directly into the Committee on Jewish Studies they have to be capable of piecing together their root, because it is in pieces. So if someone is very dependent on a highly structured program that provides very clear overviews of the field and very clear methodological guidance might have trouble. That is why I think getting grounded in a discipline is helpful and also thinking about jobs. So if someone is lets say interested in modern European Jewish literature- German, Italian, British- I think that they need their groundance in either comparative literature or some literary studies department. They don't have to become a member of the department, but in a certain sense make sure they become part of a disciplinary committee and get methodologically grounded. Jewish studies as such doesn't have a clear methodological profile. It is not clear where the boundaries are.
What courses will you be teaching:
Winter of 2007: On Creaturely Life.
Publications/Honors:
- On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Forthcoming: Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006. - The Neighbor. Three Inquiries in Political Theology (with Slavoj Zizek and
Kenneth Reinhard). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. - On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Hebrew translation, Tel-Aviv:
Resling, 2005. - Winner: Honorable Mention, Koret Jewish Book Award in Philosophy and Thought; Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize (MLA); Honorable Mention, René Wellek Prize (ACLA).
- My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Portuguese translation: Rio de
Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1997. - Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1990. - Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
Books and Journals Edited
- Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (with
Moishe Postone). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. - Dossier on Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony (with David Levin).
Modernism/Modernity 8.2 (April 2001). - Friedrich Hölderlin. "Hyperion" and Selected Poems. New York: Continuum,
1990.