Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references and index
On creaturely life -- The vicissitudes of melancholy -- Toward a natural history of the present -- On the sexual life of creatures and other matters
In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being--the open--concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges--what Eric Santner calls the creaturely--have a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power an