Speaking stones

material agency and interaction in Christian Enzensberger's geschichte der natur

Caroline Schaumann

pp. 165-182

in: Caroline Schaumann (ed), German ecocriticism in the anthropocene, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter investigates the agentic dimensions of pebbles in Christian Enzensberger's Nicht Eins und Doch: Geschichte der Natur. While stone is a material usually scorned for its inanimateness and has been infamously denounced as "worldless' by Martin Heidegger, Enzensberger lends stone a voice, thus defying a longstanding hierarchy that since the Middle Ages has placed lithic matter at the very bottom of worldly existence. Yet Enzensberger's novel can be read as a continuation and expansion of Heidegger's essay "Der Feldweg." In an experimental, multilingual, and imaginative narrative about sensual encounters with the nonhuman world, Enzensberger's text elucidates a greater range of human experience that emerges when humans give up their claim to exclusive agency to explore, in reversed manner, their entanglement with the earth.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Enzensberger Christian