"The limping angel". Figures and Perspectives of the Posthuman in Hans Magnus Enzensberger's more recent and recent poetry

Abstract

Threatened or threatening nature as the resistant, often also indifferent, sublime other of technical-civilisational progress has always been a motif in H.M. Enzensberger’s poetry, also in his earlier work, and consequently a much-discussed topic in Enzensberger scholarship of the later twentieth century, not least in the context of the growing environmental problem and the debates on nuclear energy. More recent ecocritical tendencies in cultural and literary studies have revisited this discussion, but for the most part remain wedded to a somewhat obsolete Enlightenment-critical binary logic of man & technology vs. nature or environment. – In this essay, I would like to deal with Enzensberger’s more recent (and most recent) poetry, which (like Enzensberger’s lyrical work after about 1990 as a whole, by the way) remains conspicuously underlit in more recent studies. An attempt will be made to read this lyric poetry with more recent cultural-critical and -scientific or literary discourses, which see themselves as posthumanist critique in the age of the so-called Anthropocene, and to critically examine Enzensberger’s literary appropriation of such discourses. On the foil of these posthumanist reflections, it becomes apparent how in Enzensberger’s recent and latest poetry the old binary oppositions of man and nature, nature and technology, man and animal, consciousness and corporeality or materiality etc. are deconstructed as anthropocentric schemes and other more complex and hybrid forms of life or networks and creaturely figures are brought into view, albeit in Enzensberger’s familiar ironic tone. this discussion, but for the most part remain wedded to a somewhat obsolete Enlightenment-critical binary logic of man & technology vs. nature or environment. – In this essay, I would like to deal with Enzensberger’s more recent (and most recent) poetry, which (like Enzensberger’s lyrical work after about 1990 as a whole, by the way) remains conspicuously underlit in more recent studies. An attempt will be made to read this lyric poetry with more recent cultural-critical and -scientific or literary discourses, which see themselves as posthumanist critique in the age of the so-called Anthropocene, and to critically examine Enzensberger’s literary appropriation of such discourses. On the foil of these posthumanist reflections, it becomes apparent how in Enzensberger’s recent and latest poetry the old binary oppositions of man and nature, nature and technology, man and animal, consciousness and corporeality or materiality etc. are deconstructed as anthropocentric schemes and other more complex and hybrid forms of life or networks and creaturely figures are brought into view, albeit in Enzensberger’s familiar ironic tone.