Book Review: The Creature and the Sovereign: On Eric Santner’s New Science of the Flesh, by Eric Santner

• Published date: 01 December 2014
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591714549506
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Author: Diego Rossello
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2014, Vol. 42(6) 739 –752

© 2014 SAGE Publications

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Book Reviews

The Creature and the

Sovereign: On Eric

Santner’s New Science

of the Flesh

On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, by Eric Santner. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2006.

The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, by Eric

Santner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Reviewed by: Diego Rossello, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

DOI: 10.1177/0090591714549506

Although amply discussed in the fields of literary, Jewish, and German stud-

ies, the work of Eric Santner, Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern

Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, continues to be relatively

unknown to political theorists. In two of his prior books, My Own Private

Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (1996) and

On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and

Rosenzweig (2001), Santner blends political theology, critical theory, literary

criticism and psychoanalysis in ways that political theorists may find unusual,

even idiosyncratic. The two books under review not only bring Santner’s

project to fruition but also invite political theorists to question our canonical

ways. Hence, political theorists working in the analytic tradition and the his-

tory of political thought will perhaps find it harder to engage with Santner’s

work than, say, critical political theorists. The latter will be more predisposed

to appreciate in Santner’s corpus novel resources for thinking democracy and

its limits in a post-secular world.

On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald [OCL] focuses on a life

turned creaturely by the traumatic exposure to the pressures of law. Influenced

by Walter Benjamin, Santner calls into question the mythical captivation of

life by law and embraces the melancholic gaze that ensues, not as mere acqui-

escence to oppression but as a resource for cultivating neighborly love. The

result is a spectral materialism attuned to ruins: to the transient nature of

empires, nation-states and commodities, but also to the miraculous chance of

uncoupling life from its captivation by theologico-politically infused earthly

549506PTXXXX10.1177/0090591714549506Political The

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