Inconceivable Effects: Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film

223 Pages·2013·1.625 MB·English

by  Martin Blumenthal-Barby

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
h istory 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 C ornell 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 teach-
ing 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
V icissitudes 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 phi-
losopher, nor is it, strictly speaking, written for philosophers. As a matter of fact,
philosophers, especially those who professionally concern themselves with ques-
tions 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 contrib-
uting 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 eth-
ics,” 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, lit-
erary, 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