Table Of ContentUNTYING THINGS TOGETHER
UNTYING THINGS
TOGETHER
PhilosoPhy, literature,
and a life in theory
Eric L. Santner
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
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Names: Santner, Eric L., 1955– author.
Title: Untying things together : philosophy, literature, and a life in
theory / Eric L. Santner.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033646 | isBn 9780226816463 (cloth) |
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Subjects: lCsh: Theory (Philosophy) | Freud, Sigmund, 1856– 1939.
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
INTRODUCTION
On Some Causes for Excitement 1
CHAPTER ONE
A Life in Theory 15
CHAPTER TWO
Theory and the Jewish Question 46
CHAPTER THREE
Too Much Sad 78
CHAPTER FOUR
Caninical Theory 107
CHAPTER FIVE
The Manafold of Experience 137
CHAPTER SIX
Will Wonders Never Cease: Remarks on
Post- Thaumatic Stress Disorder 167
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Stranger Order of Things 188
EPILOGUE 221
Acknowledgments 235
Index 237
PREFACE
A number of years ago, in the discussion following a lecture I gave at the
University of California, Berkeley, someone asked me how I would charac-
terize my “method.” The question had a critical edge and seemed in part to
be asking how I identified myself in the context of university disciplines,
in part to be asking about what struck the questioner as an odd way of
working with concepts, my tendency to “distort” them by incorporating
them (or parts of them), often through a play on words, into neologisms,
each of which thereby takes on the aspect of a disjunctive Aufhebung, one
that displays the relative autonomy of its parts. This book is in many ways
an attempt to answer those questions even though it was not conceived
that way. Indeed, the title of the book, Untying Things Together, is both
an example of the “problem” and a way of addressing it. It signals my ef-
forts to bring together literary texts, works of art, philosophical arguments,
psycho analytic concepts in a way that registers their limits, their need for
supplementation and support by a “neighbor discourse” without thereby
losing their distinctiveness.
I am mindful here of the great German- Jewish thinker Franz Rosenz-
weig’s account of what he called “the new thinking” that, in his telling,
emerges when the insufficiencies and impasses of modern philosophy and
theology, their co- involvement in a legitimation crisis of knowledge, open
on to a new understanding of what is meant by thinking. In Rosenzweig’s
case, the call for a “new thinking” proved to be incompatible with the pur-
suit of what Max Weber famously elaborated under the heading of Wissen-
schaft als Beruf, “science as a calling/vocation.” The letter that Rosenzweig
wrote in 1920 to Friedrich Meinecke explaining his decision to leave aca-
demia could indeed be read as a kind of counterargument to Weber’s 1917
lecture. I will return to this “conflict of the faculties” later in the book. My
own work has been in large measure an effort to offer a “third way,” that
is, to practice something like what Rosenzweig called the new thinking
within the university. My argument will be that this third way has much
viii :: PrefaCe
to do with what, beginning in the 1960s, has been practiced in various hu-
manities disciplines— and not just at North American universities— under
the heading of “theory.”
A kind of “methodological image” that comes to mind appears in a fa-
mous prose text by Kafka that I have addressed in other work and do so
again in this book. In it a strange creature called “Odradek” causes a family
father to wonder about the integrity and future of his household in large
measure because of the questionable ontological integrity of the creature
that has intermittently taken up residence there:
At first it looks like a flat, star- shaped spool for thread, and in fact,
it does seem to be wound with thread; although these appear to be
only old, torn- off pieces of thread of the most varied kinds and col-
ors knotted together but tangled up in one another. But it is not just a
spool, for a little crossbar sticks out from the middle of the star, and
another little strut is joined to it at a right angle. With the help of the
second little strut on the one side and one of the points of the star on
the other, the whole thing can stand upright, as if on two legs. It is
tempting to think that this figure once had some sort of functional
shape and is now merely broken. But this does not seem to be the
case; at least there is no evidence for such a speculation; nowhere
can you see any other beginnings or fractures that would point to
anything of the kind; true, the whole thing seems meaningless yet
in its own way complete. In any case, it is impossible to say anything
more definite about it, since Odradek is extraordinarily mobile and
impossible to catch.1
Odradek is an entity that might be said to be untied together, if not ex-
actly into a single entity, then at least into something of one. Furthermore,
Odradek is itself a sort of punning neologism in that the “name”— if it even
is that— which in the text is said to incorporate both Slavic and Germanic
elements, has, in the hands of numerous scholars, ended up “free associ-
ating” with multiple series of words in both language families, words that
congregate around various kinds of drift and nonbelonging. My own sense
of almost familial intimacy with Odradek— at the very least, that we be-
long to the same congregation— is such that I’ve come to think of my work
as contributions to a new “science” of constitutively errant objects, call it
“Odradek studies.”
1. Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. and trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: W. W. Norton,
2007), 72.
PrefaCe :: ix
In his efforts to debunk the “myth of disenchantment” that informs so
many accounts of modernity, Jason Josephson- Storm offers his own image
of a patchwork of some of the very discourses I will be addressing here. His
claim is that, “if one were to assemble a Franco- Frankfurt- Frankenstein’s
monster out of oft- taught fragments from German critical theory, French
poststructuralism, a dash of feminism, and more than a hint of Heidegger,”
the undead creature one would end up with would vaguely resemble the
German New Age philosopher Ludwig Klages, whose esoteric teachings
appear to have influenced some of the very figures associated with the
“myth of disenchantment,” among them, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin,
and Theodor Adorno.2 As I hope to show in this volume, “Odradek” was
made of rather different stuff than Josephson- Storm’s monster, whose tes-
timony is ultimately meant to reinitiate moderns into cosmic mysteries
disavowed by modern “hermeneuts of suspicion.” Though I share the basic
thrust of Josephson- Storm’s argument, namely, that we have never been
disenchanted, I will be arguing in a more Marxist vein that the occult sci-
ences of the moderns are hidden in plain sight, indeed in the very practices
of everyday life that count as most secular and most disenchanted.
To go back to the Q&A at Berkeley, I recall that I was somewhat flustered
by the question for I had never really given a lot of thought to methodology
and have always felt a deep resistance to doing so. Some of that resistance
has to do with the contingencies of my intellectual biography, the influence
of which has become a red thread running through and “untying” together
the following chapters. Quite simply, I never fully settled into any disci-
pline, never fully embraced my departmental identity, never felt at home
in any single field, never really identified with the title “scholar,” or, as one
says in German, Literaturwissenschaftler, “scientist” of literature (thus the
lure of Odradek studies as a kind of alternative to Wissenschaft als Beruf).
Surely this is one of the things that helped me “to bond” with Rosenzweig,
who, as noted, himself left the university to undertake alternative, “undis-
ciplined” pedagogical and literary projects no longer constrained by the
discourse of the university. No doubt it also contributed to my attraction to
the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose psychotic break was precipitated
by a crisis of investiture, an inability to identify with his sociosymbolic
identity and authority as judge.
It is, however, Freud’s perspective, his way of engaging with his mate-
rials, that has perhaps had the greatest influence on my approach to things,
even though I never systematically studied his oeuvre. I never took a course
2. Jason Josephson- Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the
Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 213.
