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

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.

Author: Michael G. Levine
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 11/11/2013
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780823255115

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.