Common Scents: Poetry, Modernity, and a Revolution of the Senses

The sense of smell has long been the most neglected of the human senses in literature. Common Scents sets out to undo this forgetting of olfactory sense-making by tracing the appearance of odors in modern German and French poetry. Jonas Rosenbrück argues that smell's persistence undermines modernity's self-image as an ocular age and shows how scents index a veritable "revolution of the senses." Such a revolution, as a redistribution of the senses, would make the common and shared character of our existence in scented atmospheres perceptible. Bringing contemporary ecocritical interest in atmospheres, air, and the senses into dialogue with literary criticism, theories of modernity, and political philosophy, Common Scents provides novel interpretations of figures such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertolt Brecht. These readings demonstrate how all terrestrial life is interlinked in the aerial commons that escapes the privatizing grasp of what Karl Marx called the "sense of having." Reformulating Bruno Latour, Rosenbrück argues that we have never been deodorized. In attending to this fact, Common Scents reconfigures subjectivity, corporeality, and politics. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Redistributing the Senses World of Prose Distributing the Senses We Have Never Been Deodorized Emancipation, a Revolution of the Senses Smell and the Expropriation of the “Sense of Having” Tracking Down the Argument—In Medias Res Chapter 1: Hölderlin’s Air Anthology: Reading, Hölderlin The Aerial Sphere, Modulated From Philosophy to Poetry, from Anschauung to Smell Sinnlicher Lateness A Geopoetics of Smell The Smell of Lemons Breathing the Future Latestness: Tending toward Deodorization Chapter 2: Baudelaire’s Perfumes Revolt, Baudelaire’s Dream Perfumes: Poetry like Lazarus A Woman’s Hemisphere “Star without Atmosphere” Addictive Time, Adorable Eternity Revolutionary Anesthetic Chapter 3: Nietzsche’s Chaos Why I Have Such Flair (and Socrates Does Not) Nietzsche contra Theory Compromising Smell Distance, Perspective, Chaos New Smells Smell of the Earth Loyalty, Freedom Smell of Eternity Chapter 4: Brecht’s Stench The Body of the Revolution “Virtual Revolutionaries” Poetological Excursus: Against Aromatic Words Hollywood Non Olet Smelly Angels of History The Glücksgott and His Students Epilogue: Cleanup Poetry’s Common Place From Pebble to Soap: The Character of Resistance Vulgar Scent: Of Pilate Purity Otherwise Notes Bibliography Index