Poetics of the Neighbour: Narrative, Ethics, and Vicinity

Neighbours – both real and imaginary ones – have left their mark in our historical, political, and literary annals as long as anyone can remember. In their 2005 book ‘The Neighbor’, S. Žižek, K. Reinhard and E. Santner discuss the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself as an enigma that calls us to rethink the very nature of responsibility and community. But are we indeed supposed to love our neighbour, even if he is a perfect stranger? Or, as Freud puts it in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’: “Why would we do it?” And, to begin with, what is a neighbour? The Greek plesion which means ‘neighbour’ or simply ‘fellow man’ is someone who is so close that he concerns and affects us beyond every spontaneous contiguity. Hence, in neighbour-love both spatial proximity and the readiness for practiced charity are mutually dependent. This unfolds the ethical relation that is at the very core of our living together, even more so in a pluralistic society. Many of these aspects fundamentally inform today’s political debates on globalisation, increasing social and geographical mobility, the ongoing refugee crisis, as well as the alarming re-building of borders all over Europe. But why resort to literary narratives and fictions when tracing the challenges of being neighbours? Why not simply reconstruct it as a territorial term, a geopolitical concept, or a strictly sociological category? This opens up the epistemological dimension of my inquiry: Contemporary fictions do not simply document but creatively respond to some of today’s most challenging questions by raising significant issues in an often more compelling manner than other forms of discourse. Given the fact that there is little pre-existing terminology for much of what will be discussed in my monograph, the methodological framework takes an explicitly transdisciplinary approach which understands literature as embedded in a multitude of other discourses, thus combining more traditional methods from poetics and classical rhetoric with critical approaches from fields like psychoanalysis (Anzieu’s concept of ‘skin memory’), traumatology (Caruth’s and Scarry’s meditation on the neighbour’s pain), and jurisprudence (Rössler’s investigations in the ‘right to privacy’), all of which are brought to bear on analyses of contemporary literary texts by Marlene Streeruwitz, Herta Müller, Terézia Mora, Sabine Gruber, Peter Handke, and Valerie Fritsch. All of these texts challenge the cultural construction of being neighbours by presenting us with contradictory versions of vicinity and also with different fictitious versions of what to make of the fundamental Christian love commandment. The project will be carried out at the University of Vienna’s German Department under the mentorship of Professor Eva Horn (co-applicant), a renowned expert in the fields of German-language literature, crisis, and political theory – and in close cooperation with Professor Elisabeth Herrmann (University of Warwick).