Weak Messianic Power

Michael G. Levine is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival.

• List of Figures Acknowledgments 1. A Time to Come: Hunchbacked Theology, Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Historical Materialism 2. The Day the Sun Stood Still: Benjamin's Theses, Celan's Realignments, Trauma, and the Eichmann Trial 3. Pendant: Celan, Buchner, and the Terrible Voice of the Meridian 4. On the Stroke of Circumcision I: Derrida, Celan, and the Covenant of the Word 5. On the Stroke of Circumcision II: Celan, Kafka, and the Wound in the Name 6. Poetry's Demands and Abrahamic Sacrifice: Celan's Poems for Eric Notes Bibliography Index

"The readings in A Weak Messianic Power are subtle and full of unexpected turns, and many are tours de force acts of deconstruction. Levine reads over, almost over the shoulder of, great critical readers, Derrida, Celan, Benjamin, exposing in their writing a wealth of images not apparent to the naked eye. The method is almost astronomical: it brings near the distant contours of a strange temporal figure-a non-homogenous, surprising time. The book offers a strong notion of messianism outside theology, the messianism of the small alteration." -- -Paul North Yale University