Creaturely Apotheosis: Posthumanist Vulnerability in Hans Henny Jahnn’s Perrudja

Abstract

The creature in pain, exposed to the world, was the driving force of one of the interwar period’s most radical, yet rarely discussed, German novels, Perrudja (1929), by Hans Henny Jahnn, perhaps the author of the period who most insistently placed animal life at the center of his literary endeavors. For Walter Benjamin, Perrudja marked the very “apotheosis of the creature.” Exposed to violence yet unable to retreat into boundedness, the creature is the living form characteristic of the interwar period. In this essay, I consider how narrative form and Perrudja’s participation in the formative incident of killing animals become inextricable from characterology and the relation of animals and politics. The question I shall try to answer is this: Can the ambivalent open-endedness of creaturely life be sufficiently accounted for when interpreted exclusively as the construction or deconstruction of the human–animal distinction, a distinction that is about language and human subjectivity? If not, how could we read the role and function of vulnerability in a novel such as Perrudja? In dialogue with the recent advent of both the creature and vulnerability as critical concepts, I propose a literary zoopolitics that shifts how we think about form in favor of an approach attentive to how fiction constitutes living forms.