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Untimely Beggar Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin Patrick Greaney Table of Contents		$25.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-4951-8 ISBN-10: 0-8166-4951-0 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-4950-1 ISBN-10: 0-8166-4950-2
Locating literary and socioeconomic poverty at the heart of European modernity. This highly original book takes as its starting point a central question for nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy: how to represent the poor? Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin’s final texts in the 1930s, Untimely Beggar investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature’s relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws from representing objects and registers the existence of power. By reducing itself to the indication of its own potential, by impoverishing itself, literary language attempts to engage and participate in the power of the poor. This focus on impoverished language offers new perspectives on major French and German authors, including Marx, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Rilke, and Brecht; and makes significant contributions to recent debates about power and potential in thinkers such as Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri. In doing so, Greaney offers significant insights into modernity’s intense philosophical and literary interest in socioeconomic poverty. “Greaney’s readings are for the most part attentive, sensitive, and even creative. He brings his interpretive acumen to the table, offering detailed analyses of the prosodic elements and finer nuances of poetry. His book ultimately makes for a pleasurable read; its prose is lucid and engaging while its argument advances steadily and convincingly. Overall, the most admirable quality of Untimely Beggar is its consistent combination of traditional scholarship and newer critical approaches. Greaney mindfully attends to his predecessors, but simultaneously forges ahead in his own productive encounter with a host of diverse texts that exemplify his concept of impoverished writing.” —German Studies Review “Greaney’s study is a bold initiative, scholarly and informative, and it brings together familiar themes, and familiar writers and theorists, in a constellation that generations significant new light.” —French Studies Patrick Greaney is assistant professor of German studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 240 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | 2007   TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Beggar and the Promised Land of Cannibalism             Poverty and Power—Hannah Arendt and the Language of Compassion—Impoverished Language—The Poor and the Worker—Relating to the Poor—The Untimely Beggar—A New Kind of Power—A Modern Tradition 1. Impoverished Power             The Marginality of the Poor—Heidegger Defines Power—Amputated Power—Logos and the Work—Marx and the Accumulation of Misery—Pauperism—The Disabled Worker—The Unnamable Proletariat—Disciplinary Power—Biopower 2. Let’s Get Beat Up by the Poor!             Infamy—The Crowd’s Uncanny Presence—Bored Community in The Flowers of Evil—“This Crazy Energy”—Baudelaire’s Question: “What to Do?”—Baudelaire’s Answer: “Let’s Beat Up the Poor!”—Augury and Creation—Beggarly Authority—Submitting to the Poor 3. Poetic Rebellion in Mallarmé             An Ascetic Poet—Communication and Currency—Privative Concepts—Giving Alms—The End of the Poem and a New Form of Poetry—The Rhyming Cutlass—A Virtual Renegade—The Impoverished Throw of the Dice 4. The Transvaluation of Poverty             Asceticism and Art—Difference and Language—Zarathustra’s Shame—The Voluntary Beggar—The Richest Poverty in the Dionysus Dithyrambs—The Will to Deceive 5. Rilke and the Aestheticization of Poverty             Rilke as Reader—“The Book of Poverty and Death”—Without Qualities—From Metaphor to Simile—A Great LIKE-Poet—Losing Mastery—Critiques of Asceticism—Poverty’s Luster 6. An Outcast Community                         Malte’s Calm, Malte’s Vehemence—A Sign Only Outcasts Would Recognize—Being-in-the-World—Being-With—Being-Written—There Is No Choice, No Refusal—Love—Facelessness and Whatever Being—St. Francis—Malte’s Indifferent Writing—Rilke’s Untimely Modernity 7. Exposed Interiors and the Poverty of Experience             Barbarians—Aura’s Last Refuge—Glass Architecture—Habit Production in Scheerbart and Brecht—Used and Useable Man—Quotable Poetry for City Dwellers—Brecht and Benveniste—Hooligans and a New Humanity—In Transit—James Ensor, the Destructive Character, and the Obstinate Beggar Acknowledgments Notes Index

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