(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PRESENCE OF THE BAROQUE
69
37
Michael Kahl, “Der Begriff der Allegorie in Benjamins Trauerspielbuch und im
Werk Paul de Mans,” in Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem van Reijen (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 293.
38
Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1984), 92.
39
See Deleuze, Proust and Signs (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004).
40
Deleuze, The Fold, 23.
41
Andreas Gryphius, Vorrede zum Leo Armenius oder der Fürsten-Mord, ed.
Peter Rusterholz (Stuttgart: Reclam 1996), 4.
42
Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie, 115–17. See also
Harald Steinhagen, “Zu Walter Benjamins Begriff der Allegorie,” in Form und
Funktionen der Allegorie, ed. Walter Haug (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), 666–85.
43
Kahl, “Der Begriff der Allegorie,” 299.
44
“Sie [die Leichen] gehören als Schaustücke tatsächlich zur Bühnenausstattung
und geben das Theater als [ . . . ] Schauplatz der Sterblichkeit zu erkennen.”
Albrecht Schöne, Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock (Munich: Beck,
1968), 217–18.
45
Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf, and probably many other authors of the former
German Democratic Republic, could also be mentioned. Curiously, Benjamin
left no imprint on the works of West German author Peter Weiss, as might have
been expected.
46
See Dominik Finkelde, “Wunderkammer und Apokalypse: Zu W. G. Sebalds
Poetik des Sammelns zwischen Barock und Moderne,” German Life and Letters
60.4 (2007), 554–68.
47
Eric Santner applies Benjamin’s conceptualization of Baroque melancholy to
the poetics of Sebald. See his Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 2006).
48
Santner, Creaturely Life, 19.
49
Thomas Frank, Albrecht Koschorke, Susanne Lüdemann, and Ethel Matala
de Mazza, Des Kaisers neue Kleider: Über das Imaginäre politischer Herrschaft
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 133.
50
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957).
51
Schmitt develops this theory in his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept
of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
52
See also Samuel Weber on Benjamin’s Schmitt lecture. Samuel Weber, “Taking
Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” Diacritics 22.3/4
(1992): 5–18.
53
Giorgio Agamben emphasizes that while for Schmitt the decision of the sovereign
is the binding link between sovereignty and the state of exception, for Benjamin
it is not so. Benjamin disconnects sovereign power ironically from its exercise
and shows that for the baroque sovereign the incapacity to decide becomes constitutive.
Giorgio Agamben, Ausnahmezustand (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2004), 67–68. See also the essay by Vivian Liska in this volume.