Common Scents

""Common Scents makes a very original contribution to the field of modern European letters. Picking up on Walter Benjamin's (and Marx's) hypothesis of the historicity of the senses, Rosenbrück claims the revolutionary potential of (the figure of) smell, pointing to the possibility of an 'emancipation of the senses' in a coming revolution. The book goes beyond any sort of thematics of smell and argues instead for a real politics of smell—not just an 'olfactory turn,' but a re-ordering of the senses that would be a dis-ordering revolution."" — Susan Bernstein, author of The Other Synaesthesia ""Common Scents offers a penetrating analysis of how smells, rendered in their ephemerality in poetic language, point the way out of the prosaic strictures in which capitalist modernity emplaces us by intimating insurrectionary, revolutionary other ways of relating to ourselves and to the world in and around us. Its revisions of influential readings of four major poet-thinkers discover in them new figures—from a 'latest' Hölderlin and 'exhaustive' Baudelaire to Nietzsche's 'olfactory genius' and Brecht's odorous body—for whom olfaction is both fundamental and transformative. As Common Scents shows, smell can therefore no longer be relegated to the margins or subordinated to any of the other senses; rather, its poetic inscriptions are timely reminders that the deodorization modernity seeks to impose on us can barely, if at all, inure us to the sense of a different order to come, one that is, as it were, right beneath our noses."" — Julia Ng, coeditor of Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, by Walter Benjamin