Transfusions of Sovereignty: Büchner's Danton's Tod, Political Theology, and the Afterlife of LanguageI would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms, and also Márton Dornbach for his extensive commentary on an early draft of this paper.

Publisher： John Wiley & Sons Inc

E-ISSN： 1756-1183|91|1|34-48

ISSN： 0016-8831

Source： THE GERMAN QUARTERLY, Vol.91, Iss.1, 2018-01, pp. : 34-48

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the nexus between language, history, and the body in Büchner's Danton's Tod. Büchner's play marks a transitional, and internally fractured, stage in the history of political theology in which the language, rites, and ideology of the past continue to haunt the present. The paper is organized around the idea of transfusion, a model that indicates the dependency of the present on the past while also marking the site of this relation as a physical one. Transfusions taint the present with a politico‐theological remnant that marks the bodies of the revolutionary leaders. The resolution to the circularity of transfusion takes place linguistically, through quotation. Quotation transforms language into a repository for historical memory while imbuing it with a power for action. The circulation of language via quotation is the literary analogue to the model of transfusion above, but whereas transfusion is marked by an inescapable dependency on the past, quotation introduces a possibility of change and action even as it takes this power out of human intentionality.

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