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3 Of Humans and Other Animals As we know, in his Letters to the Romans (VIII, 19–22), St. Paul observes that, although God’s world was made subject to corruption and decay, the whole of creation is groaning together, longing for redemption, longing for the words, the language, that could end its history of suffering. Schelling’s 1810 Stuttgart Seminars recapitulate the Pauline doctrine: The most obscure and thus the deepest aspect of human nature is that of nostalgia, longing for the impossible ideal [Sehnsucht], which is the inner gravity of the temperament of the spirit [des Gemüths], so to speak; in its most profound manifestation, it appears as melancholy [Schwermuth]. It is by means of the latter that man feels a sympathetic relation to nature. What is most profound in nature is also melancholy; for it, too, mourns a lost good, and likewise, such an indestructible melancholy inheres in all forms of life, because all life is founded upon something independent from itself; and whereas what is above it is uplifting and encouraging, that which is below is depressing, pulling it down.1 In Of Human Freedom, Schelling supplements his image of melancholy nature, introducing the question of language: The word that is fulfilled in man exists in nature as a dark, prophetic, still incompletely spoken word.2 Carrying forward his argument in the study of the German Baroque “Trauerspiel,” Benjamin elaborates Schelling’s idea, making a connection between nature’s inability to put into words the suffering we have caused and the mournful spirit that prevails in the realm of nature.3 177 178 / REDEEMING WORDS Adorno invokes, and calls for, “the remembrance [Eingedenken] of nature in the subject.” In Sebald’s stories, there is an overpowering identification with the distress of nature—and a sympathy that gives voice to the ceaseless lament. As if the remembrance of nature in the language of art could somehow break through the depths of silence that enshroud the realm of nature. As if, communicating their condition, each kind in its own way, the beings in the realm of nature could compel us to remember what we have forgotten, or perhaps, rather, what we are unwilling to acknowledge. At the very end of the eighteenth century, with mining and industrialization already destroying nature on an unprecedented scale, Novalis observed that, for our time, “reason and the divine spirit do not speak audibly or strikingly enough from within the human being—stones, trees, animals must speak in order to make the human being feel himself and make himself reflect.”4 With uncanny sympathy, Sebald opens his prose to nature’s communications : from its creatures, its plants, and even its stones, its minerals, we learn their plight. As when fish die in a toxic river, bird species vanish with the disappearance of their marshes, forests become deserts, and the earth is too dry to sustain saplings. The rings on cut trees tell with awesome communicative clarity the history of their environment: its droughts, abundance of rain, and the depletion of essential minerals in the soil. At least since Aristotle, philosophers have taken it to be axiomatic that in the use of language the human animal is differentiated in an absolutely essential way from all the other animals. Language, it is thought, establishes an unbridgeable abyss between them and us. This abyss becomes the excuse, or justification, for our exploitation of nature and for the violence and indifference to which we subject the other animals. However, in responding to the lament that creaturely life communicates regarding the suffering we human animals have caused the other animals to endure, Sebald contests and resists the conflict with nature inherent in the ancient philosophical assumption. He shows us that, and how, language bears the utopian idea of the promise of happiness, protecting, preserving and transmitting it, in a brief moment of anticipatory reconciliation, by drawing on the resources of language to express the unreserved sympathy of the witness for the plight of nature and to acknowledge guilt, taking responsibility for the diremption that precludes the possibility of universal happiness. According to Benjamin, Kafka felt that animals are “the vessels of the forgotten,” “die Behältnisse des Vergessenen.”5 What could an aesthetic redemption mean with regard to the struggle between humans and other animals that has always prevailed over peace in the history of creaturely life? For Sebald, it seems, aesthetic redemption needs here to acknowledge its limitations. One indication of the darker dimension, resistant to...

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