A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan

Acknowledgments

xi a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s Many people and institutions have helped me as I worked on this book, and I want here to express my gratitude and appreciation. I would first like to acknowledge the support of my wonderful colleagues in German at Rutgers: Nicola Behrmann, Fatima Naqvi, Nicholas Rennie, and particularly Martha Helfer. I have been fortunate to work with students like Gabriela Belorio, Christophe Koné, Barbara Natalie Nagel, Shambhavi Prakash, Christopher Powers, Chadwick Smith, Eric Trump, and Nicole Zeftel, who have consistently challenged me with their unsettling questions and startling insights. There are those luminaries whom I have read religiously over the years but have not known very well on a personal level, people whose writings have profoundly stirred and inspired me from afar. Among them I count the late Barbara Johnson and Jacques Derrida, but also Werner Hamacher, Shoshana Felman, and Judith Butler. I have been fortunate to make new friends in recent years whose company has enriched me greatly and whose ideas have found their way—directly and indirectly—into this book: Elisabeth Weber, Gabriele Schwab, Barbara Hahn, Eric Downing, Alexander Gelley, Paul North, Bertrand Badiou, and Michael Sherringham. I would not know who I was or how to orient myself intellectually without the continuing friendship of Ulrich Baer, Bella Brodzki, Cathy Caruth, Peter Demetz, Susan Derwin, Michael Holquist, Richard Klein, Elissa Marder, John Michael , Rainer Nägele, Gerald Pirog, Russell Samolsky, Samuel Weber, Sharon Willis, and especially Jared Stark. This book is also deeply indebted to conversations—both real and imagined—with Peter Demetz, Anna Glazova , Jason Groves, John Hamilton, Carol Jacobs, Dori Laub, Vivian Liska, Gerhard Richter, Avital Ronell, Thomas Schestag, and Richard Sieburth. xii Acknowledgments I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work again with my editor , Helen Tartar, who brings such dedication, vision, and integrity to her work. I would also like to thank the fine staff at Fordham University Press— particularly Thomas Lay; Eric Newman; Kem Crimmins; Kathleen Sweeney; my copy editor, Emily Williams; and the indexer, Johnna VanHoose Dinse. The book is much improved thanks to their efforts. I am also grateful to my tireless and highly enterprising research assistants Carlos Gasperi and Danica Savonick. Essential administrative support was provided by Stefanie Toye, Maria Guerroro-Reyes, and Elizabeth deWolfe. I am extremely grateful to the Camargo Foundation for generously supporting my research with a residential fellowship and especially to its co-directors Connie Higginson and Leon Selig for their many kindnesses to my family during our stay in Cassis. Finally, I would like to thank my children, Gabriel and Emmanuelle, to whom I dedicate this book, and my wife, Juliann Garey, for their amazing grace, their unconventional approach to projects big and small, and the pyrotechnics of their conversation. Earlier versions of Chapters 2–6 appeared in various journals: Chapter 2 in MLN German Issue, 126:3 (2011): 534–560; Chapter 3 in MLN German Issue, 122:3 (2007): 573–601; Chapters 4–5 in Diacritics, double issue on “Derrida and Democracy,” 38.1–2 (2008): 64–91; Chapter 6 in MLN Comparative Literature 126 (2011): 1014–48. I thank these publishers for permission to use this material. A Weak Messianic Power ...