Ethics Through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film

Inconceivable Effects Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of im- portant German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. Inconceivable Effects Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film Martin Blumenthal-Barby A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, New York Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University, for support of the Signale series. Copyright © 2013 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2013 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blumenthal-Barby, Martin, author. Inconceivable effects : ethics through twentieth-century German literature, thought, and fi lm / Martin Blumenthal-Barby. pages cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-7812-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. German literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Ethics— Germany—History—20th century. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Ethics in motion pictures. I. Title. PT405.B5384 2013 830.9'353—dc23 2013013210 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fi bers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Prologue. Ethics and Poetics: An Uneasy Affair ix Introduction 1 1. “The Odium of Doubtfulness”: Or the Vicissitudes of Arendt’s Metaphorical Thinking 16 2. Why Does Hannah Arendt Lie? Or the Vicissitudes of Imagination 40 3. “A Peculiar Apparatus”: Kafka’s Thanatopoetics 56 4. A Strike of Rhetoric: Benjamin’s Paradox of Justice 81 5. Pernicious Bastardizations: Benjamin’s Ethics of Pure Violence 101 6. The Return of the Human: Germany in Autumn 122 7. A Politics of Enmity: Müller’s Germania Death in Berlin 151 Index 181 Acknowledgments The writing of this book was possible thanks to the support of three institutions: Yale University, where the project originated; Rice University, where the manu- script gradually turned into a book; and Stanford University, where an External Faculty Fellowship at the Humanities Center in 2011–12 allowed for its completion. I am grateful to Carol Jacobs, Rainer Nägele, and Henry Sussman; their inspira- tional teaching and highly discerning attention throughout the early development of this project were invaluable. I am beholden to my colleagues at Rice University, especially Uwe Steiner, Christian J. Emden, and Klaus Weissenberger, for their friendly encouragement, support, and understanding. My thanks to Signale’s series editor, Peter Hohendahl, to the editorial board, and to two anonymous reviewers for their unfailing and discriminating feedback. Thanks also to Kizer Walker and Marian Rogers for their help in steering the book through production. I am much indebted to Katie Trumpener for her mentorship, and I wish to thank Kirk Wet- ters for contributing his analytical acumen to portions of the study. Harriet Berg- mann and Marshall Kibbey generously gave time and helped to smooth out stylistic infelicities. Namwali Serpell and Ansgar Mohnkern offered insightful comments. A special word of thanks is owed to Jenny Blumenthal-Barby, whose philosophical attention and responsiveness provided me with a valuable perspective, and whose very presence gives me the feeling of having arrived in the New World. The teaching of Shoshana Felman and Seyla Benhabib has shaped my thinking throughout, in different ways, and I wish to thank both of them. That this book could draw on the expertise of so many fi ne scholars, whose methodological preferences are far from compatible, cannot go unmentioned. What rates more than a mere mention is how profoundly grateful I am for the opportunity to have benefi ted from their exceptional erudition. * * * An early version of chapter 1, entitled “ ‘The Odium of Doubtfulness,’ or the Vicissitudes of Arendt’s Metaphorical Thinking,” appeared in New German Cri- tique 36.1 (2009): 61–81, published by Duke University Press. An early version of chapter 2, entitled “Why Does Hannah Arendt Lie?, or the Vicissitudes of Imagination,” appeared in Germanic Review 82.4 (Fall 2007 [de facto 2008]): 369–88, published by Taylor and Francis. viii Acknowledgments An early version of chapter 5, entitled “Pernicious Bastardizations: Benjamin’s Ethics of Pure Violence,” appeared in the German issue of Modern Language Notes 124.3 (Spring 2009): 728–51, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. An early version of chapter 6, entitled “ ‘Germany in Autumn’: The Return of the Human,” appeared in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29.1 (Winter 2007 [de facto Winter 2008/2009]): 140–68, published by Wayne State University Press. The publication of this book was graciously subsidized by the Department of German Studies at Rice University. Prologue Ethics and Poetics: An Uneasy Affair A book including the word “ethics” on its cover invokes, for better or for worse, a certain professional affi liation with the fi eld of philosophy and, more specifi cally, the philosophical branch of ethics. This book, however, is neither written by a philosopher, nor is it, strictly speaking, written for philosophers. As a matter of fact, philosophers, especially those who professionally concern themselves with questions of ethics, will likely perceive this book to be a great disappointment. The book will disappoint professional philosophers because it conceives ethics in an extremely fl exible sense as it arises out of the reading of individual texts that, in their nuances and particularities, remain defi ant to philosophical conceptualization. Moreover, this book is doomed to dissatisfy philosophers, since it is not framed in terms of established philosophical ideas or positions but instead limits itself to a cursory and narrowly focused engagement with such positions, an engagement hardly contributing to the existing philosophical scholarship. Professional ethicists might, fi nally, experience this book as underwhelming insofar as it does not attend to “ethics,” as commonly understood, as the study of moral values and their justifi cation; it deals with ethics in a rather particular way, one we shall later describe as “literary ethics,” an approach that seeks to evoke interest in literary circles, but one that can, at best, hope for open-minded skepticism among philosophers. Why then—with so little hope for philosophical dividends—a book on “ethics,” and why such a book by a literary critic who lacks any certifi ed expertise on the matter and who, in fact, would not lay claim to such expertise? Precisely what sort of competency might a literary critic, trained in the art of close reading and poetic scrutiny, bring to the table that could be relevant to the issue of “ethics”? This book—in the course of seven essays—performs readings of theoretical, literary, and cinematic works that appear noteworthy for the ethical questions they raise. Via critical analysis of writers and fi lmmakers whose projects have changed our ways of viewing the modern world, these essays furnish a cultural base for contemporary discussions on totalitarian domination (chapter 1), lying and politics (chapter 2), the relation between law and body (chapter 3), the relation between law and justice (chapters 4 and 5), our ways of conceptualizing “the human” (chapter 6), and the question of violence (chapter 7). Yet if the “common denominator” is what may be described as “ethics,” then ethics is never addressed “in general.” It seems x Prologue that whatever understanding of the ethical one may have, it is always contingent on a particular mode of presentation (Darstellung), on particular aesthetic qualities and mediatic specifi cities. Whatever there is to be said about ethics, it is still bound to certain forms of saying, certain ways of telling, certain modes of narration. That modes of presentation differ across genres and media goes without saying; that such differences are intimately linked with the question of the ethical will emerge with increasing urgency. To be sure, the relationship between ethics and aesthetics has been subject to scholarly debate for some time. This debate, which could easily be traced back to Plato’s and Aristotle’s respective refl ections on the matter, fi nds—in its contemporary confi guration—perhaps its most signifi cant forerunner in early twentieth- century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In conversation with his friend Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein stated: “In ethics, one constantly tries to say something that does not concern and can never concern the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that, whatever defi nition one may give of the Good, it is always a misunderstanding to suppose that the formulation corresponds to what one really means.”1 Such skepticism regarding the possibility of grasping the essence of ethics by dint of propositional language pervades much of the late twentieth-century philosophical literature concerned with the nexus between ethics and language.

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