Slow Down and Look: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Slowness in Handke

Abstract: This paper reviews certain affinities between Peter Handke and Martin Heidegger and then Francis Ponge during the "long 1980s," an important period for Handke as he developed his peculiar aesthetics/ethics of Langsamkeit. With reference to work by Hartmut Rosa and Byung-Chul Han, the article assesses Handke's (un)timely decelerating vision, which connects him to Rilke, Cézanne, and others in what Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei has explored as a modernist "Ecstatic Quotidian." The article then reads Handke into this tradition (related to various Modernist theories of epiphany) in order to draw out the ethical and even political consequences of his slow, quasi-phenomenological approach to the things and landscapes of this world (contemporary Europe, not some late-Romantic, imagined pristine natural world or Black Forest). It suggests that a re-reading of the work of the "long 1980s," above all Langsame Heimkehr and Noch einmal für Thukydides , can be a tonic, particularly in this time of increasingly intense techno-capitalism and encroaching ecological crisis.