A Weak Messianic Power - by Michael G Levine (Paperback)

About the Book

The notion of a weak Messianic power serves as the focal point for this study of theological, materialist, poetic, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to time and the historical unconscious in the work of Benjamin, Celan and Derrida.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The readings in A Weak Messianic Power are subtle and full of unexpected turns, and many are tours de force acts of deconstruction. Levine reads over, almost over the shoulder of, great critical readers, Derrida, Celan, Benjamin, exposing in their writing a wealth of images not apparent to the naked eye. The method is almost astronomical: it brings near the distant contours of a strange temporal figure--a non-homogenous, surprising time. The book offers a strong notion of messianism outside theology, the messianism of the small alteration."-----Paul North, Yale University

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.