The Vicissitudes of the Flesh and the Dreamwork of Modernism

The article explores a number of closely related concepts in Eric Santner's wide-ranging and yet concentrated oeuvre: the concept of the flesh, which is at the center of The Royal Remains, along with two more recent additions to Santner's lexicon, the "void of knowledge" and "surplus scarcity," both developed in Untying Things Together. Examining the logic and correlation of these concepts, the paper seeks to highlight certain tensions in Santner's thought but also the possibilities his analyses of human stasis offer. Alfred Döblin's modernist classic Berlin Alexanderplatz then serves as a short test case (but also counterexample) of what we might call, taking our cues from Santner's thinking, the "dreamwork of modernism."