‘Jeder Mensch ist eine Menschheit’: The Subject, Grievability and Community in Navid Kermani’s Dein Name

Navid Kermani’s novel Dein Name (2011) involves the narrator’s attempt to record in writing everything that happens to him from a certain date, be it thinking about literature, doing household chores, travelling abroad as a reporter, or honouring the deaths of acquaintances. As a whole, this giant novel conveys a multifaceted sense of subjectivity so fundamentally determined by its relationality that it must remain ungraspable. However, Kermani does not merely suggest a world of incommensurable differences, atomisation and alienation, even from ourselves; he also explores forms of openness to difference beyond hierarchical ideas of tolerance and integration. In this regard, the central role that others play in the formation of the narrator’s subjectivity and how this is marked by a series of obituaries leads to the radical re-evaluation of the lives that are deemed to be grievable. The relational understanding of subjectivity that Kermani conveys and the central role of grief in the novel resonate with the thinking of Judith Butler, whose writing on these topics also tries to understand how the subject is formed through multiple relations with others and what this means for an ethical understanding of community. The link between a de-centred understanding of the subject and grievability in Dein Name has implications for our understanding of cosmopolitanism, as, through an emphasis on the imagination and on creative engagement with the world, the novel tries to reconcile the lack of any fixed ground and stable meaning on the one hand, with the need for understanding and some form of ground, however contingent and contestable, on the other.