Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Less than Bodies: Cellular Knowledge and Alexander Kluge's “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945”

2010; Routledge; Volume: 85; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00168890.2010.513654

1930-6962

Cyrus Shahan,

Memory, Trauma, and Testimony

In his 1997 lectures in Zürich, later published as On the Natural History of Destruction (2003), W.G. Sebald indicted German-language literature with failure to adequately remember, represent, or reconcile the atrocities and violence of World War II. Drawing on Elaine Scarry's work on the body, Sebald locates the corporeal as crucial for his sought-after literary-historical aesthetic, and he thereby hypothesizes that Alexander Kluge's essay “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945” verges on a poetics capable of rescuing experience and cognition from the fate destined by conservative, overly simplified narratives. But the location and content of experience as Kluge theorizes it is only spelled out in his and Oskar Negt's Geschichte und Eigensinn. Only therein do the two authors outline how a matrix of the body, trauma, alienation, and temporality constitute the possibility of rescuing the ruins of the past for the present, that itself can explicate Kluge's montage in his “Halberstadt” essay.