Inconceivable Effects

Front matter

INCONCEIVABLE EFFEC Re

Ethics through Twentieth-Century

German Literature, Thought, and Film

Introduction

1. “The Odium of Doubtfulness”: Or the Vicissitudes of Arendt’s Metaphorical Thinking

2. Why Does Hannah Arendt Lie? Or the Vicissitudes of Imagination 3. “A Peculiar Apparatus”: Kafka’s Thanatopoetics

4. A Strike of Rhetoric: Benjamin’s Paradox of Justice

5. Pernicious Bastardizations: Benjamin’s Ethics of Pure Violence

6. The Return of the Human: Germany in Autumn

7. A Politics of Enmity: Miiller’s Germania Death in Berlin

Index vii

101 122 151

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 manuscript gradually turned into a book; and Stanford University, where an External Faculty Fellowship at the Humanities Center in 2011—12 allowed for its completion.

Iam grateful to Carol Jacobs, Rainer Nagele, and Henry Sussman; their inspirational 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 Wetters for contributing his analytical acumen to portions of the study. Harriet Bergmann 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 fine 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 benefited from their exceptional erudition.

* KK

An early version of chapter 1, entitled ““The Odium of Doubtfulness,’ or the Vicissitudes of Arendt’s Metaphorical Thinking,” appeared in New German Critique 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.