Brains (Benn)

This chapter explores modernist figurations of life in Gottfried Benn who developed his poetics through an engagement with and rejection of earlier models of vitalism. Benn's avant-garde Ronne novellas, written during World War I, deconstruct the Kantian belief in the mind's capacity to unify sensory data, replacing the latter's emphasis on formal unity with an emphasis on linguistic and bodily disarticulation. Himself a medical doctor, Benn writes literature in part as a pathology report, finding in the focus on disintegrating bodies and subjectivities an opening toward a new prose and therefore a new way of conceptualizing the human bios.