Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe 9781501315022, 9781501315053, 9781501315046

Table of contents :
FC
New Directions in German Studies
Volumes in the series:
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Lyric Births: Poetic Revolution and Maieutic Technique
2 Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political
3 Ghostly Births: The Specter of Romanticism and the Maieutics of the Medium
4 “Not as in a mirror”: Wilhelm Meister and the Haunting of Sovereignty
5 Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers: Institution, Relation, Distribution
Conclusion: Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics: The Political Difference and the Future of Democracy
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN GERMAN STUDIES

Vol. 17

Series Editor:

Imke Meyer

Editorial Board: Katherine Arens, Roswitha Burwick, Richard Eldridge, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Catriona MacLeod, Stephan Schindler, Heidi Schlipphacke, Ulrich Schönherr, James A. Schultz, Silke-Maria Weineck, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke, John Zilcosky.

Volumes in the series: Vol. 1. Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf Vol. 2. The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter by Bernhard Malkmus Vol. 3. Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature by Thomas O. Beebee Vol. 4. Beyond Discontent: ‘Sublimation’ from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel Vol. 5. From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form edited by Sabine Wilke Vol. 6. Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé by Gisela Brinker-Gabler Vol. 7. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity by John B. Lyon Vol. 8. Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation by David Horton Vol. 9. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West by Silke-Maria Weineck Vol. 10. The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems by Luke Fischer Vol. 11. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Spencer Hawkins Vol. 12. Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World by Lorely French Vol. 13. Vienna’s Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State by Katherine Arens Vol. 14. Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange edited by Tobias Döring and Ewan Fernie Vol. 15. Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Vol. 16. German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno edited by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck

Figures of Natality Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe

Joseph D. O’Neil

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Joseph D. O’Neil, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1502-2 ePub: 978-1-5013-1503-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1504-6 Series: New Directions in German Studies Cover design: Andrea F. Bucsi Cover image © Alfredo Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For Cristina, Santiago, Emilio, and my parents

vi

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

viii x

Introduction 1

1 Lyric Births: Poetic Revolution and Maieutic Technique

52

2 Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political

103

3 Ghostly Births: The Specter of Romanticism and the Maieutics of the Medium

146

4 “Not as in a mirror”: Wilhelm Meister and the Haunting of Sovereignty 176 5 Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers: Institution, Relation, Distribution 225

Conclusion: Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics: The Political Difference and the Future of Democracy

268

Bibliography 295 Index 307

Acknowledgments

This book is the fruit of a long and arduous birth process that culminated in its sudden induction: typical for the male privilege of giving birth only to brainchildren. I should therefore thank first of all my spouse, Cristina Alcalde, who gave birth to one of our human children and produced a book of her own in that time while being almost infinitely patient with my own dilatory gestation. The intellectual godparents of this study are numerous. William Rasch, my dissertation advisor at Indiana University (Bloomington), contributed the model and the inspiration for “thinking the political” in his own Left-Schmittian fashion. Fritz Breithaupt provided the idea for the basic structure of this work in his seminar “The History of the Political,” which also focused on the age of Goethe and was, as I failed to realize at the time, a variant on Heidegger’s “history of Being.” What follows is intended very much in the spirit of these two teachers. I should also thank the other members of my dissertation committee, who oversaw the production of early versions of parts of this book as the monstrous tome The Impossible Birth of the Political: Language and Crisis in Gracián, Goethe, and Kleist. I thank Oscar Kenshur for introducing me to the field of eighteenth-century studies and making me aware of the big picture of early modernity and how to think about it. My interest in the issues that span centuries and bring together the parts of this work comes from his example. Gilbert D. Chaitin’s work on rhetoric in Lacan very much inspired my take on allegory and metaphor, whether in Goethe, Benjamin, or Arendt. The opportunities he provided for a Lacanian reading of Arendt allowed me to lay the groundwork for the thesis and structure of what follows. Michel Chaouli’s readings of Kleist and Schlegel are a model of exacting philological and philosophical inquiry to which I can only aspire. It is not simply a coincidence that I cite teachers and alumni/alumnae of Indiana University in what follows, including the above-mentioned as well as Christine Lehleiter, Elliott Schreiber, Christian Weber, and Wilfried Wilms.

Acknowledgments ix Many other people and occasions enabled this work to come to fruition. Among many others, Elliott Schreiber, John Lyon, and Christian Weber have been wonderfully patient interlocutors, organizers, and intellectual-professional companions on our common path. I also thank my colleagues in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky for their moral and material support of my scholarly enterprise. Events and conversations in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Ghent, Leuven, Exeter, Bonn, and Mainz, as well as countless panels at meetings of the German Studies Association, contributed to the development of this work and were made possible by that support. The Goethe Society of North America has been a constant source of intellectual sustenance and friendship and has kept me coming back to the age of Goethe in order to understand the age in which we live. Finally, I thank the editor of this series, Imke Meyer, and the editor at Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi, and especially the anonymous reviewers, whose perceptive comments and criticism made this study much stronger. The errors and shortcomings that are bound to persist in spite of the best efforts of my teachers, friends, and critical readers are entirely my own. Chapter 1 is a significantly revised and significantly expanded version of “Meistersänger als Beruf: The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in ‘Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes….’” Goethe Yearbook 20 (2013), 59–78. This piece began as an appreciation of David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment and still bears the marks of that origin. Thanks to Horst Lange, Christian Weber, and Regina Sachers for the opportunity to reflect on Goethe’s “lyric” and to Daniel Purdy for his editorial feedback on the initial version. Chapter 3 is a modified and expanded version of “Ghostly Births: The Spectre of Romanticism and the Future of Capitalism.“ Seminar 50, no. 3 (2014): 332–52. Thanks to Seminar and Andrew Piper for permission to use it here. Thanks also to Laurie Johnson and May Mergenthaler for the occasion to create it as a reflection on Romanticism today and to Laurie Johnson for her editorial work in seeing this first version to publication. Extensive quotations from Michael Hamburger’s translation of Goethe’s “Prometheus” are used in Chapter 1 by permission of Carcanet Press on behalf of Michael Hamburger’s estate.

Abbreviations

CW = Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Collected Works. 12 vols. Edited by Victor Lange, Eric Blackall, and Cyrus A. Hamlin. New York: Suhrkamp, 1983–94. FA = Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. 40 vols. Edited by Friedmar Apel, et al. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–99. GS = Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. KFSA = Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. 36 vols. Edited by Ernst Behler, et al. Munich and Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958–. SWB = Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. 4 vols. Edited by Ilse-Marie Barth, Klaus Müller-Salget, Stefan Ormanns, and Hinrich C. Seeba. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–97.

Introduction

τω̨ ̃ τόξω̨ oνομα ̓ˊ βίος εργον ̓ˊ δὲ θάνατος “The name of the bow is life; its work is death.” Heraclitus, fragment LXXIX1 The central political question of the so-called Goethezeit, the age of Goethe, is the question of birth. I think I can at least indicate this with only one, brief birth scene, perhaps the most curious of all in the texts I shall read in what follows. It comes from Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea (1808), as the Amazon queen Penthesilea has killed her foe and would-be lover Achilles and is physically overcome by her deed, of which she is not aware: Erste Amazone: Die Zweite: Die Vierte: Die Dritte:

Der Bogen stürzt’ ihr aus der Hand danieder! Seht, wie er taumelt— Klirrt, und wankt, und fällt—! Und noch einmal am Boden zuckt— und stirbt, wie er der Tanaïs geboren ward.2

First Amazon: The bow is falling, falling from her hands! Second Amazon: Look how it totters— Fourth Amazon: Clangs, and sways, and drops—! 1 Charles Kahn, ed. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 65. 2 Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 4 vols, Vol. 2, eds Ilse-Marie Barth and Hinrich C. Seeba, with Hans Rudolf Barth (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 245. Subsequent citations of Kleist in the original are by volume and page from this edition. Kleist included the reference to birth and death in this passage quite deliberately. It is omitted in one of the variora of the scene, in which the dialogue is as follows (I omit the speakers): “Klirrt--! Und wankt--! Und fällt--! / Nun liegt er still. Ihr hohes Amt ist aus. / Und nie mit Händen mehr berührt sie ihn” (I.880–1).

2  Figures of Natality Second Amazon: And shudders one more time upon the ground— Third Amazon: And dies—as it was born to Queen Tanaïs.3 Just before this moment, the Amazon queen Penthesilea and her dogs have killed and eaten parts of Achilles. As is usual for Penthesilea and Achilles in Kleist’s play, they are not entirely aware of what they do, and the chorus is called upon once more to articulate some version of what has happened. The Amazon warriors observing this scene describe the fall and death of her bow in comparison to the founding act of the Amazon state, at which Tanaïs, in shock and weak from blood loss after cutting off one breast in order to be able to wield the bow, fainted and dropped the same bow: “It dropped, the Empire’s giant, golden bow, / And landed against the marble steps three times / With a resounding drone, like a huge bell, / And lay, silent as death, before her feet.—”4 This scene links birth and death, the two ends of life, as a repetition of the same act in a simile: it “dies / as it was born.” The fall of the bow, the symbolic death of both the instrument of war and the regalia of sovereignty in a physical repetition—“clangs, and sways, and drops”—is marked by the broken, descending lines of the dialogue that here serve as the rhythmic and graphic substitute for the palace steps of the original scene, now absent as the Amazons are on the battlefield near Troy. The form of the verse lines and the spoken observations of the Amazons substitute poetically for sovereign representation and the symbolic authority of the queen. The temporal arc, a Bogen in name and form, between Tanaïs’s act of foundation and the death of the royal bow is the life of the Amazon state at least in its monarchical form. It begins with Tanaïs, the High Priestess, assuming the crown of the new state, and it ends with a divided and conflicted executive around the political-theological disagreement between Penthesilea and the High Priestess. This leaves only the High Priestess alive to enunciate the moral of the story. I shall return to this distinction and the moral enunciated by the High Priestess in reading Penthesilea again at the other end of the arc of this study, because it marks the position and the end of observations of birth in the age of Goethe, which are also observations of political births and acts of foundation, of or by institutions. The internal contrary in Kleist’s play to such observations is the involution or introversion of the subject in the situation. Penthesilea seems at first glance not to be so fortunate as her ancestor Tanaïs, as she is overcome and killed by a sublime dagger she fashions of her 3 Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, trans. Joel Agee (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 133–4. 4 Ibid., 95.

Introduction 3 own feelings. Tanaïs’s collapse owed to the concrete, physical loss of blood with which she then baptized her people of woman warriors “[t]he Amazons, that is, the Bosomless,”5 a political act of beginning or foundation. In Penthesilea’s case, the sublime circularity of the bow seems here to collapse into the acoustic tautologies that undo the distinction between self and other, mind and matter, a collapse that seems not to have the power to found a new order. The moment that began with the reproduction of sovereign representation seems to end with its demise in the sublime moment of mental suicide—one of many instances in which this play as well as other works of Kleist or Goethe are read as representing the end of representation and the beginning of something else: an era of governmentality through techniques and technologies of life, a poetics of autopoiesis, a plane of immanence or a closed circuit of cybernetic feedback.6 Although the falling of the bow is recuperated in each case by observation or commentary, the ambivalence of this repeated act, political foundation and individual introversion and failure, seems inherent in the semantics of the bow itself, which is in Greek the semantics of life as non-identity. As Heraclitus demonstrates, only the shift in accentuation separates the word for life from the name of the instrument of death. Like Penthesilea’s infamous confusion of the (near) rhyme “Küsse” and “Bisse,” bíos, “life,” is the near-homophone of biós, “bow.” The other term Heraclitus uses for the bow is toxon, from which all the acts involving the bow in Penthesilea are taken: drawing the bow, its arched shape, and so on. It is also ultimately the root of English toxic, since the toxikon was a poison or drug, a pharmakon, applied to the arrow’s point. Penthesilea as the pharmakos or scapegoat sacrificed to the rituals of the community and its institutional integrity—this could be the moral of the play.7 However, the semantics of the bow is more than a symptom of Penthesilea’s linguistic, political, and mental confusions or a sign of 5 Ibid., 94. 6 For a reading of Penthesilea’s suicide in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of affect as immanence, see Katrin Pahl, “Forging Feeling: Kleist’s Theatrical Theory of Re-layed Emotionality,” MLN 124 (2009): 666–82. 7 For the semantics of pharmakon and pharmakos, see Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 61–156. The semantic splitting of the terms pharmakos and pharmakon reflects the doubling of terms in a medium of differentiation itself: “The ‘essence’ of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance … It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced” (ibid.: 125–6)—Plato corrected by Heraclitus and Kleist, perhaps.

4  Figures of Natality the tragedy of the individual and her desires against the community, as the play is often enough read.8 If the name of the toxon is bíos, life, then the birth of the bow can be read as an intervening moment in the biopolitics of the Amazon community. Rather than undoing it permanently, this moment of death or collapse founds or reinstitutes the political community, causing it to be born and re-born. Beyond any sense of literality or literalization in Penthesilea’s failure of control— “weil ich der raschen Lippe Herr nicht bin,” “for I am not lord over the quick lip”9—that would reduce the polysemy of terms such as Bogen to a single lexical meaning, the foundational paradox of the Amazon state consists precisely in the repetition of an impossibility: the grounding of social institutions such as the “artificial masses” of the women’s army and the cult of the battle and Rosenfest not in symbolic integrity but in their opposite, the singular exception that none the less reappears. Far from remaining with the moment of caesura or “tarrying with the negative,” this moment serves as a communicable and therefore reiterable point of reference from which institutions as such are the inevitable next step in the temporality of foundation.10 The tension between birth and life, foundation and institution, inscrutability and expression, forms the figures of natality that this study traces as the pre-formations of the concept of the political in the age of Goethe.

The Birth of Natality

The idea of the pre-formation of a certain concept of the political in the age of Goethe is not evolutionary; it does not suppose that Goethe and his contemporaries stand at the beginning of a process of theorizing or representing the political that will culminate in the formalization of a 8

This reading takes place in various guises in readings of the play, from Cullens and von Mücke’s Lacanian reading to Pahl’s use of the anti-Oedipal “war machine” in reiterating Deleuze and Guattari’s and Carrière’s readings of Penthesilea (Pahl, “Forging Feeling”). See Chris Cullens and Dorothea von Mücke, “Love in Kleist’s Penthesilea and Käthchen von Heilbronn,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 63 (1989): 461–93. My own reading in Chapter 5 here takes a different approach to this relationship. 9 Kleist, SWB, 2:254; my translation. 10 See Chapter 5 below, for the conclusion of this reading of Penthesilea and the elaboration of consequences from this structure in terms of the political implications of natality. On the question of language and institutionality in Kleist, see Fritz Breithaupt, “Wie Institutionalisierungen Freiräume schaffen: Kleists Marquise von O…, Die heilige Cäcilie, und einige Anekdoten.” Kleist lesen, eds Nikolaus Müller-Schöll and Marianne Schuller (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2003), 209–42. On caesura and (or as) the Hegelian “tarrying with the negative” (“Verweilen beim Negativen”), see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, translated by Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 45.

Introduction 5 political metaphor of birth. Nor does it suppose that their use of figures of birth is part of a regular development, much less a fixed inventory of political metaphors of birth, familiar enough from revolutionary discourse circa 1776–89. The formal features of the natality with which I am concerned come from the work of Hannah Arendt, in which the term takes on a very specific meaning beyond biological processes of parturition, statistical considerations of birth rates and populations, or the phenomenology of being or having been born. It is cognate— co(g)-natus, “born with”—with other Modernist developments and crises that, as I argue, can be found in other forms in the age of Goethe. These forms are also cognate with certain twentieth-century conceptions of natality and of the political on a broken textual horizon marked perhaps more by forgetting or interruption than by genetic inheritance or emergence—another central quandary of the works I shall read in the following, including Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and Kleist’s The Marquise of O… . Rather than take Arendt’s concept as a sort of theory with which to read the age of Goethe or posit a neat genealogical process in a sort of evolutionary literary and cultural history, I think the concept of natality expresses a common set of theoretical and textual problems and a shared concern. Beyond the observation that, “as a synonym for ‘beginning,’ the word birth appears in every conceivable context in the official histories of Western thought,”11 the larger social and political question is this: what does this beginning have to do with the constitution of communities, institutions, and states? And how does the metaphor of birth describe how these entities relate to that beginning? The greatest hits of German literature around 1800 propose one set of answers to these questions, but, I argue, the more specific question they answer is best formalized in Arendt’s concept of natality, and the problems of what I will refer to as a Modernist problematic of birth as advent or incarnation. Understanding Arendt in historical and theoretical context will allow that question to be articulated in such a way that Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist appear to answer it. In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt introduces the term natality almost casually as the opposite of mortality in the context of the three elements of the vita activa: labor, work, and action. Each of these is connected to natality as the fact of being born: labor because it allows sustenance and the survival of the individual and the species; work because it creates artefacts that persist beyond the span of one life and challenge fleeting time; action because it emerges from the fact of the plurality of human beings (“men,” not “Man,” in Arendt’s consistently 11 Andrew Parker, The Theorist’s Mother (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 1.

6  Figures of Natality masculine frame of reference). All three “have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers.”12 None the less, it is clear from this threefold beginning that the third term defines a special concept of natality that quickly separates itself from the general fact of birth, sustenance, and persistence in being. Action “has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.” As a subset of natality, action connects political thought with birth, not death.13 Later in her study, Arendt turns natality toward action in terms of a “second birth” related neither to labor and necessity nor to work and utility. Natality comes of having been born, but it is not that simple fact; it elicits a response to a prompt to action by taking an initiative.14 The “startling unexpectedness” of natality appears “in the guise of a miracle,” that “[man] is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.”15 The biological improbability of emergent life corresponds to the miraculousness of freedom and the new, but as the actualization of the former by the latter; the tension is between the potential and the actual. This is however not yet the same as political life, which needs speech in order to act together with others. The term “natality” first appears in Arendt’s revision of her 1928 dissertation and its translation into English for anticipated publication in 1964–5 (which did not occur until the Scott and Stark edition of 1996). She uses the term “natality” in a sense primarily linked to the human being as having consciousness and memory, in contrast to mortality, from which perspective the human being is shaped by desire.16 Natality is a marker of Arendt’s texts of the late 1950s, in the Human Condition as well as the additions to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (also 1958). In her revised dissertation, she cites Augustine in order to distinguish between principium, as “in the beginning” of creation, and initium, the beginning of “man”: “Initium ut esset, homo creatus est, ‘that a beginning be made, man was created,’ says Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”17 This “appropriation of Augustine,” as the 12 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 Ibid., 177. 15 Ibid., 178. 16 Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 51. 17 Ibid., 55. The best-known locus of this citation is in Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 478–9; it is also in

Introduction 7 American editors and commentators of the dissertation call it,18 is also hardly genealogical; it does not trace the evolution of a concept of natality from the late Roman Empire to 1960. Nonetheless, this concept does emerge in a specific historical context in the first decades of the twentieth century before Arendt recodes it in Augustinian terms. It is a fixture of the discourse that turns late nineteenth-century vitalism—itself an outgrowth of Romantic vitalism of the kind I treat in Chapter 3—into a question of arrivals, appearing, and events. As a latter-day break with Romanticism, it is already connected to the questions of the age of Goethe, as I shall explain further below. As a symptom of its time, it offers a way of thinking about the political that challenges the scientific, progressive optimism of the nineteenth century as well as the assumption that other value spheres or social systems can substitute for the political. Interweaving the conceptual strands of three historical horizons—the time around 1800, Modernism, and later twentieth-century “post-foundational” political theory—I want to conceive a model of natality, with and beyond Arendt, that will obtain in the subsequent chapters as a matrix for reading the political in the age of Goethe.

Birth, Natality, and the Sciences of Life

The shift in the meaning of natality between the realms of labor and work on one hand and action on the other is qualitative. While labor and work are occupied with the preservation and extension of life, and work as technique is ultimately reduced in Arendt’s historiography to the biological as well, the version of natality related to action represents the political good envisaged in Arendt’s theory of the public sphere where speech, action, and memory are created. Arendt writes in this sense of “first birth” and “second birth.” “First birth” is the birth into the world as an organism, natality in the basic sense in which Arendt, Human Condition, 177. Its Augustinian origin is slightly different. In City of God, Book 12, Augustine addresses the question of the number of souls and the possibility of reincarnation (which would be recycling of the same souls, so to speak). Without claiming that the number of souls is infinite (a proposition he leaves for “the philosophers”), he claims that something new can be created and that, even if the number of souls is finite, “this number, whatever it be, did assuredly never exist before, and it cannot increase, and reach the amount it signifies, without having some beginning; and this beginning never before existed. That this beginning might be, therefore, the first man was created [Hoc ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit].” Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950), 405. Arendt takes Augustine’s two assumptions—of unique souls and a first act of creation—into her existential meditations on individual life, action, and memory. 18 Scott and Stark, “Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” 146.

8  Figures of Natality she introduces the term in The Human Condition before developing it toward the second birth: “With word and deed, we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our physical appearance.”19 Here, it is not a matter of the fact of having been born, the assumption of one’s own birth of which one was unaware at the time, but the fact of appearing in “the human world,” by which Arendt can only mean, by the same token, a social and political world, the fact that I appear for and to others. Natality therefore has to do with what appears and what others make of it. While models of gender and generation are remote from Arendt’s notion of natality as simply the new, a look at the tension in readings of Arendt between the “first birth” of the human organism and the “second birth” into public speech and the life of action (the vita activa) shows some parallels to the preoccupation with biological generation and heredity circa 1800. These two lines of differentiation shape my anachronistic consideration of natality in the Goethezeit: first, the distinction between organic birth that can be grasped or theorized scientifically and the appearance of the new as enigmatic or mysterious; and second, the critical opposition to the victory of the epigenetic model of reproduction as a symptom of Romantic periodization—and the assumption of that periodization in most subsequent criticism of the age of Goethe. The chapters that follow are concerned with one form or another of these two distinctions at every historical and critical level: in the theoretical framework coming from Arendt’s Modernist context and later post-Heideggerian versions of the political; in meta­critical examinations of established criticism of Goethezeit literature; and in close readings of the works of Goethe, Kleist, Lessing, and Friedrich Schlegel. The period around 1800 sees a proliferation of theories of birth. As the axis of the purported transition from mechanical to organic models of art, culture, and politics as well as human reproduction, this period is also the focus of theorizations of those other spheres in relation to or as a function of birth and generation, a connection of “first,” biological birth to a “second birth” of some sort. Even in Arendt scholarship, this relationship between the two births is controversial. Beginning with the debate in Arendt scholarship I will clarify how far biological notions of birth are from natality and allow for a reconsideration of the 19 Arendt, Human Condition, 176. The location of this sentence in the chapter “Action” also marks its distance from the reproductive or generative notion of birth that is part of the management of an “influx” of “newcomers” into the world (Human Condition 9). This earlier language is more comparable to what Arendt sees as the apolitical situation of the refugee (see Chapter 2 below).

Introduction 9 polemical and political dimension of theories and representations of birth. For Arendt, the two births reflect two different understandings of life, corresponding roughly to the distinction between bios and zoē, the former an articulate and praxis-related form or “autonomous and authentically human way of life,”20 the latter a “mere” animal living.21 In some feminist readings of Arendt, this first birth and the fact of maternity constitute a phenomenology that privileges the mother– child connection (a connection I shall examine critically in Chapter 5 in the context of Kleist’s mothers) and the temporality of birth. For Anne O’Byrne, this “syncopated temporality” extends to Arendt’s notion of natal action: our deeds are unpredictable to begin with and only receive a meaning or interpretation later, beyond our control.22 With Kleist, one might say then that each human being is an Achilles or a Penthesilea in so far as our almost unconscious spontaneity has to be described and given meaning by others. This is the very example Arendt uses (without Kleist) to explain the persistence of action in memory. The fact that the Homeric stories are still told or read and that the name “Achilles” is remembered and associated with heroism is an example of how the polis functions as a medium of memory and narration.23 If natality refers to the singular initium, then the political scenario guarantees the communicability of this event and its persistence in memory. While it resists the treatment of birth as “a merely mammalian phenomenon that signifies nothing,”24 this double scene of birth and action as O’Byrne stages it belabors the parallel between first and second birth a bit much, as it seems to claim that second birth can be understood only with reference to the facticity of first birth and the contingency of action, born of desire and political will, only in parallel to the raw contingency of scientific innovation whose consequences are unforeseeable. The gap between fact and action or being and meaning becomes a scientific “gap between being and knowing,”25 in which it is the knowing that is absolute and contingent at the same time. Where Arendt connected natality qua ontological factor to the new, this inversion turns the problem of action into one of knowledge about the life process, a feature of labor and production, not of what Arendt calls “the world.” Arendt identifies not a gap between being and knowing 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Arendt takes the distinction from Aristotle (Politics 1254a7; see Human Condition 97). She also refers to Aristotle’s description of different forms of life as bioi (Ibid., 12–13). 22 Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 100. 23 Arendt, Human Condition, 194. 24 O’Byrne, Natality, 91. 25 Ibid., 105.

10  Figures of Natality but the union of technology and introspection, a preoccupation not with the world but with human senses and their augmentation by homo faber, maker of telescopes and the other devices, real and virtual, that determine the conditions of knowledge in “the element of making and fabricating inherent in the experiment itself,” which “depends from the very outset on man’s productive capacities.”26 Following the threefold division of human activity into labor (which sustains life), work (here, the work of homo faber that augments life), and action, the first two, labor and work, are based on processes: the life process and the total­ization of its needs in the latter case and the invisible processes of nature that are known only through phenomena captured by instruments. The Marxian subject of labor and the scientific subject homo faber come together in the focus on the life process, on life as a matter of the “how,” not the “what.” Arendt opposes both of these, with their concentration on the self, to self-disclosing Being that inaugurates a relation to the world.27 It is therefore not that birth enters into a new relation to science as the vehicle of natality, but that, as Arendt sees it, even homo faber loses out to the maintenance of life as the greatest good: “only because this active life remained bound to life as its only point of reference could life as such, the laboring metabolism of man with nature, become active and unfold its entire fertility.”28 Even the work of the scientists in their own parallel public sphere of knowledgeorganization “lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence.”29 While O’Byrne accounts for this distinction, she multiplies “natalities” (already present in each of the three spheres Arendt describes) and “actions” as historically periodized. In considering “action” (for Arendt always in the singular, unlike the words and deeds of which it is composed), Arendt sees “the fact of natality” as its ontological basis, specifically as “[t]he miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin.”30 This takes place not through science, which is based on making, but through thinking, an activity that is solitary, not collective and “power-generating” like modern science.31 This world was ruined by the advent of modern consciousness as consciousness of the self, 26 Arendt, Human Condition, 295. 27 Ibid., 296–7. 28 Ibid., 320. Arendt contrasts life and fertility (as production) directly with action, attributing the concern with life to introspection in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Bergson; see Human Condition 313 n. 76. 29 Ibid., 324. 30 Ibid., 247. 31 Ibid., 324–5.

Introduction 11 culminating in the focus on human life processes and on one’s own first birth. While O’Byrne further conflates the power of scientific (knowledge-based) communities with the realm of public or political natality, Arendt emphasizes the distinction of the two in precisely this regard. Professional associations are for Arendt “antipolitical” because they join people who are already not just equal but alike, whereas the task of the polis is to provide a specifically political kind of equality.32 In effect, O’Byrne’s reading of Arendt takes place from the perspective of homo faber. If “Arendt did not effectively engage the material manifestations of natality,”33 it is perhaps because Arendt is preoccupied with the excess of materiality that is the result of the introspective turn into the self, my embodiment, even my being-with-others as a product not of worldliness but of my birth, of the reference to life that marks the animal laborans and not the relationship to Being as the relation to the public world before the body politic was individualized by Christianity, the relation to action as the life of the political, as truly bios and not mere zoē. Arendt’s treatment of the saying “man is the measure of all things” (“the oldest conviction of homo faber”)34 already critiques this reduction of the world to the self, to my memory, vital processes, and so on, especially to what O’Byrne calls, in her solution to the enigma of first and second birth, “the [second] event that begins the process by which that birth turns out to have been my birth.”35 The introspective turn natality takes in this personalized phenomenology runs counter to Arendt’s conception of historical memory, since the consequences of a deed—the subjective outcome of initiatory action— outlast the individual’s lifespan and are only known to the historian who reconstructs them in hindsight. 32 Ibid., 214. 33 O’Byrne, Natality, 107. Again, Arendt sees both the self-referentiality of the human subject and the focus on invisible processes as aspects of technology and science that give way to necessity. They collapse the “world” of the sphere of action in the name of homo faber, who yields ultimately to the requirements of the animal laborans. While Arendt says that action initiates processes, these are long chains bristling with consequences that reach beyond one’s own lifespan, not the recursive self-ascription of having been born (in “first birth”). 34 Arendt, Human Condition, 306. Chapter 1 will take up this reduction in the figure of homo faber and the question of poiesis, leaving it to Goethe to redefine a new opening to the world and worldly contingency in Arendt’s sense, beyond the Romantic mirroring he also evokes in his lyric poetry. 35 O’Byrne, Natality, 105. Preoccupied with a philosophical genealogy via Heidegger and Dilthey, en route to Nancy’s embodiment, O’Byrne wastes hardly a word on what Arendt calls the political or the public realm, seeing even Martin Jay’s treatment of her “political existentialism” only in terms of the question of whether Arendt proposes a strong or weak ontology (O’Byrne, Natality, 91).

12  Figures of Natality As a conceptual historian of political natality, Arendt’s concern is not simply to maintain a gap—any gap—but to rescue or revive the world connected to action, a world she defines from the beginning as that of the political. To use natural birth not only as a beginning, the material condition of the second birth to action, but as an analogy for understanding the second birth because it is a birth into a world with others, is to repeat “the unconscious substitution of the social for the political”36 and therefore to lose sight of the single, crucial distinction informing the political difference for Arendt: the role of action as public speech, as opposed to the speechless who are arrhēton or aneu logou outside the polis and the agora.37 The political is the indispensable reference point of her work, and it is crucial to distinguish it and its world from both the social world of being-with-others and the temporal phenomenology of birth. The most striking argument against the notion that the fact of being born creates a sociability with others (even if only realized after the fact) that makes it political is Arendt’s own observation that political equality is not given, that it always needs some external factor: “From the viewpoint of the world and the public realm, life and death and everything attesting to sameness are non-worldly, antipolitical, truly transcendent experiences.”38 Action is also therefore not simply consciousness, knowledge, or taking stock of the facticity of one’s own having been born. It might therefore be preferable to speak of political natality when Arendt’s “second birth” into action and public speech is meant. I shall develop this thought in the subsequent chapters and return to the biological connection to birth in the final chapter, in order to underscore the difference between Arendt’s political vision and phenomenologies of birth or the mother– child bond as a pre-political sociability and initiation into a language different from speaking as Arendt understands it. Arendt’s recourse to science in the final sections of The Human Condition belies the rhetorical basis of her phenomenology of action and selfhood, as I shall show below in examining the media of birth and judgment. Lest it seem that reading birth circa 1800 is only a question of applied natality, one should note that even the science of the age of Goethe reveals a persistent concern with the political values underlying scientific theory and method or the supposed political consequences of same. Suturing those gaps seems to be the task of Romanticism as well as neo-Romantic literary and cultural historiography, and this task indeed claims the authority of the natural sciences circa 1800. The will to keep these gaps open is key to the difference between natality and biological 36 Arendt, Human Condition, 23. 37 Ibid., 26–7. 38 Ibid., 215.

Introduction 13 forms of knowing that claim inherent political or social consequences. While this keeping open of the gap between scientific procedure and certainty of outcomes parallels the process Arendt connects to natality, the discourse of the new sciences of life circa 1800 harbors other ways of hoping for a recovery of something like the political. While a thorough look at the tensions between scientific methods, results, and sociopolitical premises is out of place here in a study of literary (re)presentations of a political idea, a brief examination of the debate between the two principal models of generation and heredity circa 1800 will illuminate exactly what this particular scientific questioning of birth might have to do with the Modernist political existentialism of Arendt and her contemporaries, and how, as a methodological prologue to the chapters that follow, this twentieth-century critical moment can be re-entered into a broader Goethezeit context. Between 1776 and 1815, the spectacles of revolution, conquest, and resistance, with their allegorical births of free subjects, states, and nations, have a vexed relationship to speculations about natural birth, generation, and genealogy, which are themselves not free of political and ideological assumptions and desiderata. Differing accounts of heredity and generation intensify into a debate that opposes the ancient persistence of preformed organic germs to the spontaneity of epigenesis and the independence of biological self-organization. At the same time, economic discourse takes a turn to the self-referentiality and self-reproduction of credit and paper money, and literary criticism secures its own philosophical foundation by making itself the mirror of the work’s internal autonomy and self-generating powers. Albeit without referring to the work of Friedrich Schlegel, Michel Foucault claims in The Order of Things that the organic model emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marks “the new relation between biology, the sciences of language, and economics” in a “general area of knowledge” consisting of “organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function,” structures which are related to one another based on analogy in “the identity of the relation between the elements […] and of the functions they perform.” Their proximity is dynamic, based on a common emergence, as they are close because “they have both been formed at the same time, and the one immediately after another in the order of successions.”39 In Foucault’s archaeology of discourses, this observation comes across as a constative statement about a discursive transformation. The danger of such claims is that they become merged with the objects they describe. In this case, the Romantic discourse of self-generation merges with 39 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1970]), 218.

14  Figures of Natality Foucault’s description of its analogues in order to validate it reflexively. This validation is itself a Romantic gesture, Potenzierung, intensification or, in mathematical terms, exponential raising. As with the triumph of life processes identified by Arendt, these analogical structures assimilate other forms of representation and other accounts of life into a model in which life is an end in itself. The expression of this shift in Germany circa 1800 comes from the life sciences in the form of an epigenetic model of reproduction and heredity. What Helmut Müller-Sievers calls the “epigenetic turn” shapes Kantian philosophy, Romantic economics and poetics, and the program of the new biological sciences on the premise that “organisms generate themselves successively under the guidance of a formative drive.”40 This biological model affects other fields by analogy, allowing “philosophical and literary discourses to account for their own origin without recourse to extraneous causes,” as “the precondition of any claim to a literary or philosophical absolute.”41 The epigenetic turn therefore reflects, at least on Müller-Sievers’s account, both Arendt’s diagnosis of a modern assimilation of all other spheres to that of life’s self-seeking circularity and Foucault’s epistemic model of analogyformation as a scientific–cultural paradigm and proof. The shakiness of epigenesis as a biological model is reflected in some of the experiments conducted on epigenetic premises, what one might call after Arendt a failure of making. As Christine Lehleiter shows in her history of heredity in the age of Goethe, preformationism does not simply turn into autopoiesis in a linear fashion. Multiple variations shape the discourse on inheritance and genetics, particularly in the debates over whether traits are inherited at all and under what conditions, and whether a critical variation over time can produce a new species. Concretely, in Koelreuter’s experiments in hybridizing tobacco, the attempt to demonstrate spontaneity and autonomous generation led only to different tobacco varieties and finally back to the original variety.42 This failure of spontaneous creation of new species gave hope to critics of Blumenbach’s epigenetic Bildungstrieb (formative drive), which located generation internally in organisms that would be self-generating and self-organizing. At least some of these early critics held fast to the previous paradigm, preformationism, according to which “all organisms were preformed at the creation of the world and … science (i.e. natural history) had to explain nothing more 40 Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3. 41 Ibid., 4. 42 Christine Lehleiter, Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 211–12.

Introduction 15 than the necessary causes for their coming into existence.”43 Whereas preformation relies on mechanical models for its sense of its own science-like character, epigenesis in all its autopoietic variations evokes self-making life, dynamism, and organism. The stark contrast between preformation and epigenesis, mechanism and organism, determination and spontaneity, itself making for an analogical translation of polemics from one field of endeavor into another, an “interdisciplinary” translation that is itself an “epigenetic ruse.”44 This translation of the epigenetic model into philosophy and literature is the shared basis of my study and Müller-Sievers’s account of the epigenetic turn circa 1800. I want to take his polemical insights a step further in the direction of the concept of political natality by elaborating upon his defense of preformationism, which is at once a mark of the sobriety of eighteenth-century thinking (for MüllerSievers, that is) and a marker of the Modernist discourse on which I shall elaborate in the next section, a discourse in which mechanical models are once more in vogue in order to explain both society and politics. As a problem in the earlier turn of the century, the epigenetic turn is a “purely textual event,” an “ideological operation” that solves a chicken-or-egg problem in Hegel’s and Schelling’s attempts to vitalize Kant’s philosophy, i.e., to turn the “transcendental” and normative character of epigenesis into a sort of positive fact, by converting Reason itself into a generative organism.45 (A similar short circuit between the transcendental noumenon and the factual or empirical is evident in the work of the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll and its reception over a century later, which will inspire a philosophical appropriation in the name of “becoming animal” in ways Arendt anticipated.46) What is wrong with epigenesis, then, is not its validity as a scientific theory, even though this cannot be demonstrated in the decades around 1800 43 Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 5. 44 Ibid., 7. 45 Ibid., 4–5. The consistency of epigenesis with a pre-Kantian approach to nature and the rise of Romantic Spinozism suggests the ideological (not just hypothetical) power of the model. Christine Lehleiter underscores this power implicitly in citing other models and Jean-Paul Richter’s unease with the implications of contrary studies of heredity for notions of the autonomy of the self and of art. See Lehleiter, Romanticism, pp. 223–5. 46 The problem of transcendental autopoiesis does not disappear with the Romantics or even the vitalist/organicist biologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young remarks the continued prevalence of this short circuit in readings of Uexküll. Winthrop-Young, “Afterword: Bubbles and Webs: A Backdoor Stroll Through the Readings of Uexküll,” in Jakob von Uexküll, Forays into the Worlds of Animals and Human Beings, with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 230–1.

16  Figures of Natality in spite of its ascendancy, but its suturing the gaps between scientific knowledge claims, still to be verified by experiment—or not—and other discourses, value spheres, social systems, or disciplines that can now only be understood, following Foucault, by analogy to selfgenerating, self-organizing, and self-sustaining organic life. This chain of auto- activities reflects the self-involvement of the modern subject that follows for Arendt from the Cartesian method’s desire to be like the Galilean science of observation, but it also echoes the features of Romantic autopoiesis, self-making, that will be the subject of Chapter 1. If, as Müller-Sievers proposes, a method of reading otherwise, non- or anti-Romantically, can show the organicism of this model to be mechanical, the assembly of a second nature in art, perhaps the layers of this Romantic reading can be peeled away from their reification in criticism as historical or aesthetic facts.47 Natality offers itself as a tool for doing so because of its emphasis not on generation and life but on birth and the new. Here, one has to distinguish the miraculous spontaneity implied in natality from the “self” and the “auto” in selfgeneration and autopoiesis. One must also bridge the apparent gap between the logic of preformation, in which everything to be made already is in some latent form and needs only mechanical processes to bring it into full existence,48 and the arbitrariness of parent and offspring or of paternal authority for which it is indicted in the name of epigenetic self-reliance and organicism. While an anti-aristocratic sensibility and “democratic staunchness of the heart” inform the epigenetic rebellion against arranged marriage,49 the organic relationship that unifies identity dynamically has its own perceived political risks. Müller-Sievers echoes the political valence of this distinction in an implicit citation in which epigenetic thought and systems theory take the place occupied in Walter Benjamin’s text by the forward march of capitalism, fascism, and aesthetic politics: “Already, systems theory manages to convince many that societies, rather than being exterior and potentially unjust formations of oppression, are in fact organic systems as innocent as the eye of a frog. Epigenesis, it seems, even if only as a form, does not stop winning.”50 Giving science this dramatic 47 Ibid., 5. 48 Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 4–5. Arendt’s assertion that political equality comes from a third factor provided in the polis, parallels the political insistence behind Müller-Sievers’s defense of preformationism and the mechanism of preformation itself, which requires a heterogeneous stimulus for generation or, in Arendt, for political equality beyond social distinction. 49 Ibid., 16. 50 Ibid., 25. He echoes Benjamin’s words as well as Benjamin’s method: “Nur dem Geschichtschreiber wohnt die Gabe bei, im Vergangenen den Funken der Hoffnung anzufachen, der davon durchdrungen ist: auch die Toten werden vor

Introduction 17 turn into the political, in which formations of oppression are still in any case only potentially unjust, and in which society is exterior, and not in some form intrinsic to the human condition, raises the question as to whether scientific and political form can be related except through the assumption that either both are arbitrary or neither is. Müller-Sievers’s critical treatment of epigenesis refers the distinction between preformation and epigenesis to a problem of symbolization, i.e., not of representation but of the internal coherence and dynamic of language. Now read under the Saussurean rubric of the arbitrary aspect of the sign, the symbolic externality of preformationism is its justification from the standpoint of an individual who judges on moral–legal criteria (the distinction just–unjust) something of which he or she is not a part but indeed potentially a victim. The rejection of immanent self-development posits this externality based on a politicalrepresentational affinity that reads in Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory the kind of useful political critique that can oppose the Romantic symbol. Franco Moretti contends that this allegory is already present in Goethe himself, who “renounced his own theoretical convictions (favouring the symbol)” because he “understood that allegory is the poetic figure of modernity. And, more precisely, of capitalist modernity.”51 To what extent the preformationist, allegorical, natal, and political readings can in fact mark a division between the Romantics and Goethe or other figures is the open question argued throughout this book. It might very well be a matter not of projects and intentions but of the distance between the intentionality of the author Goethe (and others) and what his (their) works actually perform—an awareness that the symbol and the organism only cover up the underlying disconnection that marks allegory and mechanism. Nonetheless, the terms on which one can read this discursive model are similar to those used by Müller-Sievers. The remainder of this Introduction expands and intensifies the political aspect of the forms that appear encoded in Müller-Sievers’s critique of epigenetic thinking as preformation or allegory, examining the original setting of Arendt’s initium in Modernist political existentialism and mechanical vitalism; tracing the development of a “post-foundational” political theory that dem Feind, wenn er siegt, nicht sicher sein, und dieser Feind hat zu siegen nicht aufgehört.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 695. Harry Zohn translates as follows: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 391. 51 Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (New York: Verso, 1996), 78.

18  Figures of Natality formalizes the concept of the political in terms amenable to Arendt’s political restructuring of Heidegger’s philosophy; and mapping the emergence of a language of birth in Plato, Kant, and Arendt that constitutes a medium that makes the miraculous or even impossible appearance of the new or the reappearance of the suppressed political in modern economic, social, and aesthetic discourse thinkable and representable. I want to show in the chapters that follow that the twentieth-century concept of natality and its curious interruptive, metaphorical, and anti-organic vitalism formalizes the discursive, rhetorical, and semiotic features already present in literary treatments of birth and birth metaphors in the age of Goethe, such that these refer not to ideas about organism or generation but to models of self, society, and polity—not as external and oppressive toward a subject born free, but as open to change, risky, and divided at their heart. The chapters of my study retrace the arc from homo faber to the assimilation of craft and art as organism, from creation as self-fashioning to the naturalization of the organicist episteme (what is more natural than nature?), in order to re-open the gap between the political and other spheres of knowledge and human endeavor by underscoring the failures of observation and control of the phenomena of reproduction, the collapse of analogy and similarity into tautology, and the recuperation of this collapse in a political institutionality that recovers the sense of what Arendt calls “the frailty of human affairs.”52 Institutionality is different from permanence or cyclical time insofar as it takes historical contingency into account. More than a historical transformation or the reaction to one, this arc shows that natality can be indicated or figured within and in spite of attempts to assimilate it into the symbolic–epistemological– ideological complex of epigeneticism, autopoiesis, and Romantic economics–poetics–aesthetics. I shall argue in concluding that even the systems–theoretical version of self-organization in its social, not its biological, form can only account for its own autopoiesis by an internal split that leaves it open to contingency. In this specific sense, the images and metaphors of birth circa 1800 present a more complex account of how the natal creates a medium for its own appearance than do the more axiomatic pronouncements of the twentieth century. The latter claim in various cognate forms, against boredom, routine, or inertia, that there is an outside force, and the former connect this natal quality symbolically and thematically to questions of politics and community, not just as a rebellion against routine but in ways that indicate its many institutional and representational ramifications. This Modernist current underscores the polemical and political character both of the Benjaminian defense 52 Arendt, Human Condition, 188.

Introduction 19 of preformationism and the Romantic and neo-Romantic critique that obscures the conventional, “mechanical” origins of claims for autopoiesis. It also leads to “post-foundational” political models that only intensify the question of the medium, of how political natality or its traces appear at the moment of its erasure or suturing into forms of scientific knowledge and economic circulation circa 1800.

Modernist Advents and Second Comings

That a study of the age of Goethe should appeal to the form of vitalist spontaneity of the first third of the twentieth century is more than a strange ideological–theoretical tic. Both periods are concerned with birth in ways that constitute aesthetic, philosophical, and political referentiality by thematizing the distinction between self-reference and what Niklas Luhmann calls “hetero-reference.”53 When Arendt completed her dissertation in 1928 after a lightning career as a student, the natality she expressed at first in Augustinian terms was already rooted as a figure in this Modernist discourse. From the Russian Formalists’ conception of literary estrangement that remedies boredom, and Max Weber’s steel cage of modernity waiting to be reoccupied by belief and tradition, through W. B. Yeats’s “Second Coming” and Carl Schmitt’s political vitalism to Walter Benjamin’s chess-playing automaton with religion at its heart, the culture of high Modernism mobilizes images and moments of birth to explain its own aesthetic, social, and political condition. It is no mere coincidence that Arendt’s concept of natality was born into this milieu. Natality shares the dualism of these models, in which a monster, a spirit, a sovereign, or a messiah may—or may not—arrive to redeem a situation fallen into the routines and cycles of mere labor, procedure, or ideological illusion. Like preformation, natality sees causation as an impulse that comes from outside and enters, is imposed upon, or is grafted onto the existing situation.54 Modernism’s versions of natality maintain the structure of mechanism that the ideological X-ray reveals to be at work within organic and epigenetic spontaneous organization. I want to show that this specific kind of natality creates the version of the political that is then revealed when one analyzes socio-political Romanticism in the age of Goethe. In this sense, Max Weber’s diagnosis of a “steel cage” of modernity is not just a symbol of instrumental reason, or the vacuity of the 53 Of course, this amounts to a kind of self-referentiality, as the distinction between inside and outside is processed on the inside of the system. It would still be an otiose distinction if this did not have implications for the structure and at least temporal openness of the system. See the discussions in Chapter 1 and the Conclusion below. 54 See Arendt, Human Condition, 236.

20  Figures of Natality “specialists without spirit” and “sensualists without heart” to whom Weber refers, but a space that is already temporalized in that it will come to be occupied in a way that is not predictable: “No one knows who will live in that cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.”55 W. B. Yeats’s question in “The Second Coming” (1919), “[W]hat rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”,56 shares Weber’s sense of dread, but the prewar precursors of these questions in Bergson’s élan vital or the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostranenie (estrangement) also reflect a demand for vitality and the new. Before the First World War, Viktor Shklovsky is haunted by a feeling of ennui that requires new literary means in order to summon ordinary life away from its stultifying routines and back into existence, as a remedy to the automatic and cyclical: “Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war. ‘If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been’ [--Tolstoy].”57 These contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Arendt’s formative years define the terrain on which her later critique of the reduction of political and public action to the domestic field of work and cyclical maintenance of life takes place. Whether a diagnosis or a program, this social, psychological, and aesthetic version of vitalism is never far away from politics and comes to define the political for Right and Left. In his introduction to Political Theology, Carl Schmitt writes that his notion of sovereignty belongs to a “philosophy of concrete life”, both in the exalted sense of a certain vital or existential impulse and in terms of everyday experience and necessities. The central feature of the exception (other 55 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 182. Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik, edited by Johannes Winckelmann (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1991), 189. Considering the transformations of Weber’s idea of charisma, Andreas Kalyvas sees him end up with a conception of the ordinariness of charismatic leadership that “led him to obliterate the issue of radical symbolic transformations and founding events, cancel the distinction between extraordinary and normal politics, and to endorse a particular variant of a liberal doctrine of the ordinary.” Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 78. 56 William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 187. 57 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (Champaign, IL, and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 5.

Introduction 21 than not being the rule) is that it is new life, not the repetition of the same: “In the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”58 While one can debate the idea that “all significant [prägnant] concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development, […] but also because of their systematic structure,”59 Schmitt’s “prägnant” is tied semantically and etymologically to pregnancy: the secularized concepts are the ones capable of giving birth to other conceptual offspring—among them, the concept of natality.60 This feeling is, therefore by no means original to the warrior-intellectuals who march gaily into the slaughter of the First World War or limited to the discontent in the Weimar Republic, where it informs the ideology of the Conservative Revolution in Germany and European fascism afterward. Across the political and ideological spectrum, it inspires ways of reading literature and understanding literary language as that which breaks with these social and cognitive routines. In this Modernist discourse, the political concept of sovereignty is fundamentally natal. The specific function of defamiliarization as introducing a vital force into a putatively closed order is shared not just in the general Angst or boredom or, at the other extreme, real, radical violence of the interbellum years. At least as a matter of sensibility, defamiliarization can be linked to sovereignty in Bataille’s definition of sovereignty as “the enjoyment of possibilities that utility doesn’t justify.” The opposite of suffering, sovereignty is desired as the miraculous.61 This repeats the figure of the sacrificial victim of the first part of Bataille’s The Accursed Share: “From the time it is chosen, the victim is the accursed share, given over to violent consumption. But consumption tears it out of the order of things and renders its face, which shines henceforth with intimacy, anguish, the depth of living things.” In this 58 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1922, rev. 1934), trans. George Schwab (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15. 59 Ibid., 36. 60 The primary meaning of the Latin praegnans is “pregnant” (with a child); the subsequent definition transforms gravidity into the gravity or weightiness of any content: “full of, swollen with any thing.” See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. praegnans. The Perseus Project, January 8, 2016. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dpraegnans. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon gives the meaning, with that etymology, in the latter sense as “bedeutungsvoll, inhaltsschwer, bündig.” Meyers Großes KonversationsLexikon, s.v. prägnant. January 8, 2016. http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/ WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=Meyers&lemid=IP08170 61 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 198–200.

22  Figures of Natality case among the Aztecs, but also anticipating Agamben’s account of homo sacer, the institution which sacrifices a “damned and consecrated [or sacred] victim” serves as a means of escaping “the stinginess and cold calculation of the real order.”62 Whether seen with anxiety (as in Yeats or Weber) or hope and desire (as in Schmitt), the question of the advent of a vital exception at the heart of the machine was widespread in the first half of the twentieth century. This included Walter Benjamin’s political automaton, at the heart of which was the shrunken remnant of theology, a “hunchbacked dwarf” inside the chess-playing automaton. Precisely this theological capacity is supposed to strengthen Benjamin’s version of historical materialism against its adversaries even as theology itself is no longer presentable.63 The advantage of Benjamin’s account is that it frankly confesses the relation between the mechanical character of modernity and theological values such as an orientation to the absolute. Furthermore, it takes up the rhetoric of civil war in the struggle of historical materialism (in Benjamin’s very particular sense of the term) against historicism (as a method), Social Democracy (as a theory of labor), and Fascism (as a social and political institution). In this context, Benjamin praises even the fantasies of Fourier over against the Social Democratic belief in technological progress as simplifying labor and making more goods available to the worker. Fourier’s concept of labor was in Benjamin‘s preformationist reading “a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that now lie dormant in her womb.”64 What Benjamin calls historical materialism therefore becomes a maieutic practice. This dynamic, constructive process sees nature as incomplete in itself and needing not exploitation (as if it were passive) but an act of creation. Benjamin has something similar in mind when he addresses the problem of contingency and other possible histories in a textual practice identifying latent, suppressed, or forgotten potentials and possibilities: reading the moments of the political in the signs and the fault lines of cultural artefacts. As in the dualist versions of creation as incarnation or inhabitation, in which an external element somehow comes to be where it was not at the heart of a given situation, this figure of natality reintroduces the notion 62 Georges Bataille, La part maudite (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1949). 63 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, eds Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 693. 64 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 394; in the original: “eine Arbeit, die, weit entfernt, die Natur auszubeuten, von den Schöpfungen sie zu entbinden imstande ist, die als mögliche in ihrem Schoße schlummern.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 699.

Introduction 23 of a theological factor at the heart of modernity. If one can speak of a horizon of responses to mechanization, Schmitt’s response imbues such a horizon with concrete political significance, especially in connecting it to earlier modern models such as Hobbes’s Leviathan. If the enthusiasm evident in Political Theology exemplifies the affective charge of this question, Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1933) replaces social machinery with economics and supplements a universal, positive law beyond sovereignty, the product of liberal, neo-Kantian jurisprudence, with morality. If the sovereign decision on the exception is the object of the Schmittian political theologian, the structural component of an instance of real or potential conflict, then the distinction between friend and enemy, the substance of “the political,” is the antidote to the moralization and economization of politics as law and procedure. The twentieth-century concept of the political, therefore, has at its origin and foundation the desire to break up routines and mechanical structures. It is part of an aesthetics of everyday life that sees the exception as the way out of servitude to routine, and it is transformed into a political theory that makes of exceptions, miracles, and foundationless decisions the instance which that routine needs for its coherence.

Action in Theory: Post-Foundational Natality

Throughout this study, I will contrast a poetics of birth, an act or event that intervenes in the world, with a poetics of life as a process running in the background, so to speak, whether as symbolic reproduction, underlying genetic information, processes of economic circulation, or the quasi-organic synchronicity of work and criticism. Since this poetics of life seems to take aim at the regimen of political representation and the exercise of political and social power by redefining the political in terms of the social or the economic, in particular the economy of vital forces, I want to respond in political terms, too: by joining Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality with Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political in order to develop a theoretical construct that both addresses the metaphorical and narrative level of birth and resists the subsumption of politics under other discourses such as morality or economics. My response will have implications for reading the critical discourse on the age of Goethe as well as the primary texts of that age. The two models I oppose to this moralization and economization are also different in terms of their formal or rhetorical character. Schmitt’s concept of the political refers to one value sphere among many and claims a regulative or normative status based on a primary existential decision that is not simply a function of a neoliberal calculation of costs and benefits or the execution of an a priori moral maxim. Arendt’s concept of natality, with its evident reference to birth, is itself already a metaphor. More than referring to life or birth, it transfers

24  Figures of Natality certain meanings or connotations of birth onto the metaphor of the natal as a beginning that itself has no antecedent. Where the two come together, the primary decision that cannot be grounded in, deduced or derived from another kind of rationality has the power of an absolute beginning. As I want to construct it, the curious coalition of the erstwhile Nazi Schmitt and the emigrant Jew Arendt joins the conceptual and the metaphorical in a way that makes the political character of metaphors and discourses of birth in the age of Goethe legible in terms of the problems of later twentieth-century political theory. Paired with Arendt’s metaphorical, indeed catachretic model of natality, Schmitt’s concept of the political establishes the stakes of the contrast of birth as a metaphor of the political to the other discourses of life, organicity, and reproduction that also shape German literature of the decades around 1800. As in Niklas Luhmann’s later social systems theory, itself a sequel to Max Weber’s sociology of closed value-spheres, Schmitt uses binary distinctions to separate the political from other spheres or discourses. He defines the political as the sphere based on the distinction of friend and enemy, contrary to other spheres such as economics based on profit and loss, morality on good and evil, and aesthetics on beautiful and ugly.65 For Schmitt, the hard conflict implied in the political must not be dissolved into a definition of the enemy as, for example, an economic competitor or the other party in a discussion (Diskussionsgegner). The political in this sense does not have to do with social norms and values or the pedagogical (erzieherisch) task of imagining there are no enemies, but with a primary existential reality that persists even when non-political values such as truth, goodness, freedom (of others), or profit organize the world into friends and enemies. The conceptual purity and existential force of this distinction can only be tainted by images and ideas imported from other spheres, as these “metaphors,” “symbols,” and “conceptions” (Vorstellungen) invite confusion of how we conceive of the political with the fundamental conflict in which human lives can be given and taken.66 This rigor is meant to ward off the specter of a “once and for all pacified globe”67 in which the enemy is thought out of existence through concepts such as humanity: the enemy of humanity cannot himself be human.68 In his earlier work, Political Theology, Carl Schmitt uses a similarly secularized language when he equates the political decision with the miracle, claiming, following Thomas Hobbes, that the sovereign is 65 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 27. 66 Ibid., 28–9. 67 Ibid., 35. 68 Ibid., 54–5.

Introduction 25 even in the parliamentary and legalistic systems of Western politics a kind of mortal god, who intervenes to decide on exceptions to the rules laid down by lawmakers when the polity itself is in crisis.69 Schmitt and Arendt are followed by a diverse chorus of theorists who share a common denominator: “post-foundational” political thinking that, rather than dissolving the durable moment of the political in an antifoundational relativism, sees the political, like the sovereign decision or the natal miracle, as the factor that, outside of society, founds society and is somehow indicated within it without being reduced to it. The miracle of natality is therefore a sort of birth of or into the political. As will become apparent in what follows, this political version of birth is only contingently connected either to the referential sphere of birth as the production of new human bodies as speaking animals (the zoon logon ekhon prior to the zoon politikon) or to the narrations and metaphors of birth that come to stand for modern social or poetic subjectivity. The point of this study is to explore those connections in the age of Goethe as the hinge to later modernity. Reading the texts of Goethe, Kleist, Friedrich Schlegel, and Lessing, I claim that birth qua natality is the main marker of a discourse of the political in the decades around 1800. The ubiquity of sexual desire, pregnancies, children, family ties, and, especially, the reconstitution of families on other discursive terms in the works I shall discuss is not only a discourse on society and culture, biology and gender. Rather, it reflects the basic distinction between a “pacified globe” organized around economics, natural science, aesthetics, or morality, on the one hand, and, on the other, a non-harmonious “pluriverse” (as Schmitt puts it) in which there is still an opening to conflict made possible only by the cracked foundations of the world, its inability to be explained or normativized according to any partial discourse, value sphere, or “regional ontology”—except for that of the political.70 However, the concept of the political is not a science of the political, a regional ontology of a particular discipline or field. If, for Heidegger, the “level” of a science is marked by its ability to undergo (not to resist) a crisis of its fundamental concepts,71 the political as a Grundbegriff refers to this crisis itself and thereby seems to occupy a more fundamental place than other regional ontologies. As I shall argue for the figures of natality in the age of Goethe, this fundamental place is not a broad and solid 69 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1922), trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Presss, 2005). 70 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 174–5. 71 “Das Niveau einer Wissenschaft bestimmt sich daraus, wie weit sie einer Krisis ihrer Grundbegriffe fähig ist.” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993) §3, p. 9; emphasis in original.

26  Figures of Natality foundation, but a certain distributive ubiquity. As Oliver Marchart puts it, “the political—and be it in the smallest dose—is everywhere.” If “everywhere” is a distributed difference as the “ontological moment of society’s foundation,”72 it shares this ontological quality with natality, which, like infants and children in the Goethezeit, seems to come out of nowhere and has to be distinguished as a difference, not simply as that which allows or creates the cohesion of a society, economics, or culture that obliterates—makes illegible—“the moment of the political” (Marchart). The difference between Schmitt and Arendt lies for Marchart and others in the contrast of Schmitt’s dissociative model, based on the friend–enemy distinction, and Arendt’s associative model, based on being with others in shared, public space.73 None the less, the later Arendtian and neo-Schmittian versions of the political maintain a tension between conflict and shared, public life, postulating that the political both founds or grounds and un-grounds the social. As a product of the evolution of a distinct notion of the political beginning with Machiavelli, who separated politics from morality and religion,74 this version of the political as primary and distinct from society, morality, and economy comes to influence the notion of the concept as such. As Reinhart Koselleck observes in his introduction to Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the time circa 1800 introduces a fourfold reconceptualization of the concept itself: in democratization (the meaning of concepts is debatable); temporalization (the creation of concepts that imply social movement, such as “progress” and “history”); “ideologizability,” as Marchart puts it (from Koselleck’s Ideologisierbarkeit), in the elevation of concepts to collective singulars such as history (as opposed to histories or stories), or freedom (as abstracted from particular freedoms or liberties); and their politicization in opposing pairs such as revolution and reaction.75 This development in the decades on either side of 1800 leads to the later proliferation of birth metaphors and to natality as one of the new sort of concepts that share these four traits elaborated by Koselleck. Nonetheless, natality retains its special status 72 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 174. 73 Ibid., 38–44. 74 See Arendt, Human Condition, 77–8, and Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 48–55. 75 I relate here and follow Marchart’s discussion of Koselleck and his larger historical outline for political thought (Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 53–5), which leads to the Modernist use of this semantics and therefore coincides with the language of birth in Modernism. My version here is a poor substitute for Marchart’s succinct summary in Post-Foundational Political Thought, Ch. 2, and in the German version: Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), also Ch. 2.

Introduction 27 as, conceptuality itself is something that is born or emerges onto a scene in this doubling of time: the time after which there is time. The dangerous novelty of the new emerges in what Koselleck calls the Sattelzeit, to which I am referring in a literary–cultural idiom as the Goethezeit. As Marchart also points out, the crises of the early twentieth century seem to drive home the point of a paradigmatic transformation that recalls that all concepts are themselves political and compete against other concepts.76 This goes beyond the simple observation that concepts are ungrounded and subject to historical change. It implies that the other side of the equation, the political forces that would define the concepts, is equally contingent in and through its use of language. This means in turn that historical developments, especially the crises that compel such an insight, determine the conjunction of language and political or ideological forms. Contingency is not simply the absence of necessity as a metaphysical or natural factor in favor of the random (chance and fate as fortuna or Schicksal beyond human intentionality are after all cognate concepts); it implies that things can indeed be otherwise. Oscar Kenshur makes a similar observation in an older case, observing that the relationship of method, including ideas about science and scientific method, to ideological positioning is not an inherent feature of the logical structure of either side, but is also a historically contingent relationship. In the case of Hobbes and his critics, this implies that the scientific, materialist method through which Hobbes explains his political physics of protection and obedience is not in itself necessarily conducive to a Leviathan-like state, since Hobbes’s opponents in the dissenting churches see such a method as cementing individual liberties in establishing a truth not relative to the sovereign’s fixation of meaning.77 The unmooring of meaning from ultimate guarantees is also a feature of Ernesto Laclau’s concept of populism, which, Laclau stresses, is dangerous because it is as prone to a fascist application as to one of an egalitarian and liberal democracy.78 76 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 58. 77 Oscar Kenshur, “Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 2 (1988): 335–53. Kenshur replies to the version of deconstruction that argues that it is inherently Leftist or aligned with Marxist styles of critique. There is clearly a difference here between deconstruction understood as a method and as a critical practice with its own history and collective intentionality. 78 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 250. Chantal Mouffe underscores the tension between democracy and liberalism that also makes their combination a matter of historical conjuncture: Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), 2–6. Laclau and Arendt can be made to share a similar rhetoric of the political in so far as Laclau’s evocation of

28  Figures of Natality With no necessary connection between language, logic, and political form, what remains is the figure of contingency that joins the nature of the political and the use of language. What does this conceptualization of the political mean for a thinker such as Arendt, who is concerned with language and culture, individual action and moral judgment, as well as the social sphere of representation in speech and rhetoric? The idea of natality itself would seem to confuse ideas of natural birth, biology, and embodiment with questions of personal action, on the one hand, and the fundamental existential implications of the political, on the other, as dealing with life-ordeath choices and situations. Nonetheless, both Schmitt and Arendt indicate that the primary distinction eluding representation also needs a linguistic and rhetorical medium in order to be thinkable precisely as foundationless. The three-part history I trace here, between the Goethezeit, Modernism, and recent critical discourse, so 1800–1900–2000, maps a long horizon of powerful coincidences and transformations of this non-necessary collusion between literary-critical and discourseanalytical methods and political ideas, even if in the guise of the factors that seemed before to make the two sides mutually implicating, as the science of his time and the political Leviathan seemed for Hobbes. Whether in Benjamin’s theological dwarf, Schmitt’s political theology of decision, or Arendt’s Augustinian concept of natality, “the phantom of formerly religious belief-contents”79 is always welcome back at the heart of the machine. Beyond debates about secularization, the question is how that machine and its phantom are to be read and how they are legible at all in texts where a rhetoric of birth seems to be doing work that is not at all related to these later political models. In the search for the common natal denominator, Hannah Arendt’s work stands out because she includes the eighteenth-century topics of communication and judgment, but not without a theory of metaphor and a stress on the solitary act of reading as well as the place of public appearance, speech, and action.

Maieutics, Mothers, Media

“But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it the Lacanian theory of the signifier is cognate with Arendt’s “two-in-one” of metaphor. 79 Weber refers to “das Gespenst ehemals religiöser Glaubensinhalte,” seeming to imply two removes from robust religious belief: the contents are first secularized and then made phantom-like. Weber, Protestantische Ethik, 188.

Introduction 29 is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—‘that a beginning be made, man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”80 How to begin at the beginning, if the beginning, as a “message,” is already a citation? In an odd locution, Arendt transforms the advents and returns of natality into an autotelic model of novelty: “Hence it was for the sake of novitas, in a sense, that man was created.”81 Creation happens to make creation possible; the new is for the sake of the new, breaking out of the cyclical patterns of time. Augustine’s Pauline break with tradition, institution, and the law is here intensified into a voluntaristic modernity, a break with the old. The new does not have the constitutive function for work or labor that it does for action, as work and labor are both conservative in nature, maintaining human existence in and in spite of time. Both action and speech relate to birth itself, not just to preserving the life it brings, and together they create active historical memory, remembrance. If the age of Goethe is preoccupied with birth in the literary and scientific realms as well as the political, a preoccupation exemplified by Kleist’s Penthesilea, one can perhaps see the same division that informs readings of Arendt’s concept of natality: on one hand, a concentration on the biological, the fact of the first birth and maternity; on the other, as action and the foundation of community or society. If the feminist reading of the link between “first birth” and “second birth” concentrates on the biological, critiques from the perspective of a general political and social theory disclose an unease with the chanciness and unpredictability of the second birth. Each of these approaches seeks in its own way to attenuate the novelty of the new, its dangerous self-seeking. These two tendencies in interpreting Arendt’s concept reduce this aspect of natality in two senses, making its spontaneity subordinate to communicative reason and discourse ethics or reading it as a less than metaphorical idea of birth. Disputes on the terrain of social theory have their own terms, and this is not the place to evaluate the differences between Arendt and her many readers. Nonetheless, the discomfort of some of Arendt’s critical interpreters is patent, as one of the major interpretive battles in Arendt scholarship is over the status of the moral and communicative relative to the amorality or moral undecidability of the political. If “beginning,” i.e., natality, is as foundationless and casuist, as Machiavellian and secular, as Arendt’s theory of judgment, it 80 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 479. Arendt cites Augustine, De civitate Dei, Book 12, Ch. 20. 81 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 55.

30  Figures of Natality is no surprise that both concepts should cause some outrage among the critics Scott and Stark identify as purveyors of Arendtian “orthodoxy,” who see Arendt’s work either from the point of view of Origins of Totalitarianism, or from that of The Human Condition, but never integrating the two.82 George Kateb, for instance, is shocked to find that a classically inspired idea of public, political action can be amoral and, as Kateb concludes, immoral.83 Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves goes in the other direction, claiming an error of interpretation and accusing Kateb and Martin Jay of ignoring the communicative and moral dimension of Arendt’s conception of political action in favor of its expressive aspect, which he links to the idea of beginning.84 He therefore dismisses natality or at least sees it as dangerously opposed to communication. While envisioning a sort of public conversational space in which political action can take place in language, Arendt’s “desire to think political action and judgment without grounds”85 does not propose communicative standards which would regulate this conversation through discourse ethics or communicative action on a Kantian aesthetic–ethical horizon.86 This lack of such standards is expressed in Arendt’s early and late work in the metaphor of birth as signifying the radically new. How metaphor works is evidently a rhetorical and literary question, one that links the signifying operations of literature to the post-foundational idea of the political. That idea of the political itself proposes a similar link of the natal moment of initium to the social question: an understanding of the links between natality and its medium, the political and the social, and sovereignty and institution as metaphorical. Abstracting for a moment from the polemical question of whether 82 Scott and Stark, ““Rediscovering Hannah Arendt,” 134. 83 Qtd. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 90. 84 Ibid., 90–1. 85 Dana R. Villa, Heidegger and Arendt: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 116. Villa criticizes Martin Jay’s conflation of Arendt and Carl Schmitt as an “interpretively dubious and intellectually lazy” response to this desire (115). 86 Jürgen Habermas reproaches her strong but “antiquated” distinction between knowledge and opinion, favoring instead a “cognitive foundation … for the power of common convictions.” This foundation would allow for the establishment of norms non-contractually and for appeal to factors other than opinion in the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” trans. Thomas McCarthy, Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 23. For a critique of Habermas’s idea that such cognitive appeals can be reinforced through a purportedly non-violent “gentle coercion” (“sanfte Nötigung”), see William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), 57.

Introduction 31 there is one substance or two, one might take the dualist form itself as a medium in which the new is conveyed or expressed. This is above all a paradox of communication. In order for the new to be truly new, it must not fit in the old scheme of communication, but, in order for it to be communicated about, it must be recognizable and indicated as somehow different. Hannah Arendt’s later thinking on action and subjectivity, in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind (in the first two, published sections, Thinking and Willing), addresses this problem from two perspectives. First is the question of how natal action (as opposed to merely thrashing about) can be remembered in the political context. Her answer is that the polis itself is a medium for communicating action as something memorable, which can be and is narrated. In fact, she says that the action itself—her example is always the deeds of Achilles—is more important in memory and narration than in its own original moment. This in effect multiplies the paradoxicality of action, as it confuses two senses of what “original” means: having to do with that one, punctual moment at which something begins; or the quality of a communication—not an action—as being original in the sense that it presents something that is not a copy, a derivative, or an imitation of something else. In this sense, Niklas Luhmann points out that an event has no duration.87 “What is Achilles to him, or he to Achilles?” one might ask of the story that is remembered and handed down as a traditional model for the new, as the event of Achilles’s original actions is not present, and the idea of using Achilles as an exemplar is not original. This scenario is hardly limited to Arendt, as her own discourse is historically and discursively conditioned, but, in contrast to some of her critics, she situates herself freely in this discourse and proposes that action is not simply the articulation of a preference for ethics or communication (in whatever conjugation) but must appear within and as distinct from its surroundings. Natality is therefore always a question of the medium, which reflects the historical transformation of the semantics available to communicate the new. The semantics available for this communication varies from the incarnational mode of Christian political theology, in which the deity appears as arriving where it was supposed to be always already present, to the Modernist anxiety about a society with an empty summit from which political, social, and technical mechanisms could be manipulated. But how is one to distinguish “the message” of the beginning from its surroundings, especially if these surroundings threaten to absorb it, especially if its own existence is so tenuous? 87 Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, Vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 84.

32  Figures of Natality While Arendt says that Augustine’s language of beginnings is “opaque,” as it “seems to tell us no more than that we are doomed to be free by virtue of being born, no matter whether we like freedom or abhor its arbitrariness, are ‘pleased’ with it or prefer to escape its awesome responsibility by electing some form of fatalism,” she holds out some hope in the form of “another mental faculty, no less mysterious than the faculty of beginning, the faculty of Judgment, an analysis of which at least may tell us what is involved in our pleasures and displeasures.”88 This Kantian theme of judgment that begins with the sensation or experience of pleasure (as Gefallen, the quality of being pleased) and seeks to delineate an apparatus for judging it in terms of a fundamental philosophical anthropology is perhaps the clearest link of Arendt’s discussion of natality to the age of Goethe. However, it also indicates a problem that is unresolved in Arendt’s own thinking, both philosophically and in terms of her life’s work. The first page of the third volume of The Life of the Mind, entitled Judging, was in her typewriter at the moment of Arendt’s death in 1975—hardly even a work in progress. (Her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy serve as a substitute for this volume in the canon of her work.) How judgment is supposed to work in distinguishing natal beginnings is not entirely clear: how should one faculty illuminate another that is equally mysterious? It is more apt to ask not how Arendt’s concept of natality can be used to read the age of Goethe, but how the age of Goethe can illuminate this unfinished aspect of Arendt’s work in that other mysterious faculty. Tracing the lineage of birth in terms of the philosopher’s or the critic’s art of bringing hidden truths or insights to light will connect an older strain of judging the outcome of birth, the Socratic practice of maieutics, to the use of the same allegorical process circa 1800 as a decisive transformation in the metaphors of birth, birthing, and the role of the observer or critic in the birth process. Judgment is a later act that takes the products, and not the processes or the simple fact of birth, as its object. The question of judgment is nonetheless intimately related to that of birth at least in the philosophical tradition. In Thaetetus, Plato has Socrates explain his practice of philosophical midwifery as follows: [M]y concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth … [T]he highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth. I am so far like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom, 88 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:217.

Introduction 33 and the common reproach is true, that though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me … The many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within. But the delivery is heaven’s work and mine. The proof of this is that many who have not been conscious of my assistance but have made light of me, thinking it was all their own doing, have left me sooner than they should, whether under others’ influence or of their own motion, and thenceforward suffered miscarriage of their thoughts through falling into bad company, and they have lost the children of whom I had delivered them by bringing them up badly, caring more for false phantoms than for the true.89 This Socratic practice of picking out or distinguishing, διαλέγεσθαι πραγματεία,90 as ontological divination comes to be known, principally with reference to this spot in the Thaetetus, as maieutics.91 The connection to childbirth lies in the semantics of midwifery: maia, “midwife,” and maieias, the activity or business (in the plural) of a midwife. In Theaetetus, this is a practice that has to do, at least in etymological kinship, with dialectics, the logical and historical versions of which ask about what comes to be and how it comes to be. In its first English usage, “maieutic” is something done to texts; it is synonymous with “exegetic” and, by implication, maieutics with exegesis.92 This early modern version of the Platonic vocabulary abstracts further from Socrates’s metaphorical use of the semantics of midwifery in order to create a Platonic science of maieutics. 89 Plato, Thaetetus, 150b–e, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 855. 90 I consulted the Greek text, definitions, and glosses of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, editor-in-chief Gregory R. Crane, at http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Theaet.+161e&fromdoc=Perseus% 3Atext%3A1999.01.0171 (July 9, 2012), which incorporates the text of Plato, Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903). 91 The Oxford English Dictionary defines maieutics as “the maieutic method of inquiry or education,” maieutic being defined as follows: “Relating to or designating the Socratic process, or other similar method, of assisting a person to become fully conscious of ideas previously latent in the mind.” “maieutic, adj. and n.” OED Online, June 2012, Oxford University Press. July 9, 2012. http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/112474? 92 The OED gives the oldest use of “majeutick” in 1653, where it is linked in Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy to the term “exegetick.” The OED also cites for “maieutical” (OED, s.v. “maieutical”) the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe.

34  Figures of Natality While the arc between Descartes and Kant seems to bypass or supersede the Platonic and neo-Platonic activation of latent knowledge of truth, the concept of midwifery itself passes into a sort of philosophical vernacular in Kant’s didactic maieutics: “The teacher directs the thinking of his pupil [Lehrjünger] by questioning so that he simply develops in him the potential [Anlage] for certain concepts by presenting cases (he is the midwife [Hebamme] of his thoughts).”93 Heinrich von Kleist incorporates this into his essay “On the Gradual Completion of Thoughts while Speaking” (“Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden”), referring to the “art of intellectual midwifery” (“Hebammekunst der Gedanken”).94 As John H. Smith points out about this passage in Kleist, it implies not the acuity of epistemological or psychological judgment, but “a speaker’s dependence on social discourse to express any knowledge”95—a sort of Arendtian turn toward speaking as appearing in the world with others, rather than a speechless thinking. Thinking is public and dialogic, or it is not at all. The iterations of the figure of birth in the activity of the midwife therefore, trace a path from ontology as dialectical activity through interpretation or divination of a text (as synonymous with exegesis), to an epistemology and a rhetoric in which the wellformedness of thoughts or the efficacy of words is at stake. Language, too, is a mode of appearing, and not in referential speech but in metaphor as the appearance of that which does not appear, namely thinking. For Arendt, in thinking, “the mind’s language by means of metaphor returns to the world of visibilities to illuminate and elaborate further what cannot be seen but can be said.”96 To read natality as if it simply referred to the fact of biological birth would be to mistake the entire rhetorical context in which Arendt very explicitly situates her political project. Even the self-awareness of the subject is driven by this appearing (and not just by the assumption of birth). As Jeffrey Champlin notes, the “like” in Arendt’s crucial passage distinguishing the birth into the public world as “like a second birth” is rhetorically significant; it “bridges image and referent but does so by marking the distance between the two.”97 Whether the simile contrasts with or is itself “like” a metaphor is another question, as metaphor is that which in Arendt allows for the 93 Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, in Kant, Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Vol. 8 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 618. 94 Heinrich von Kleist, “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken,” in Kleist, 3:540. 95 John H. Smith, “Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O and the Hermeneutics of Telling the Untold in Kant and Plato,” PMLA 100.2 (1985), 208. 96 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:109. 97 Jeffrey Champlin, “Born Again: Arendt’s ‘Natality’ as Figure and Concept.” The Germanic Review 88:2 (2013): 157.

Introduction 35 assumption of public appearance and even appearance to oneself. What Champlin sees as the “minimal space” between the first and second birth creates room for “an impulse that does not force, but continually allows, action.”98 Arendt’s reading of metaphor in the first volume of The Life of the Mind (Thinking) seems to anticipate her connection of natality and appearance in the second volume (Willing), which defines natality (once more for emphasis) as “the fact that human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth.”99 The first, linguistic account of appearance as metaphor follows a treatment of Homeric language as rooted in simile and Aristotelian language as based on analogy. While she deploys these figures as well, Arendt’s own account of selfhood, conscience, and action is based on the split nature and duplication of the self between conscience and appearance. The “two-in-one” of conscience refers to a capacity for self-observation that is not a separation but a form of self-inclusion in judgment. The split between consciousness and conscience, as she puts it, is the simultaneous presence of the subjectself and the reflexive object-self. This is what Arendt calls thinking, and it is an original split she finds already in Socrates: “For Socrates, this two-in-one meant simply that if you want to think you must see to it that the two who carry on the thinking dialogue are in good shape, that the partners be friends. It is better for you to suffer than to do wrong because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even a murderer.”100 The question that Kleist’s Penthesilea raises—as it seems to respond in anticipation to so many Arendtian themes—is this: How do you know you are a murderer? In spite of its plummy Socratic tones, this relationship is not based on ontological discernment of the good, but on the power of language to make thought possible. The “thinking dialogue” needs metaphor. For Arendt, the function of metaphor is to yoke together the phenomenal world and the mind: “there are not two worlds because metaphor unites them.”101 That is a somewhat odd-sounding sentence, but it reminds us of an ontological impossibility that makes the subject ethical and in the end political: they are not two, but metaphor unites them. This splitting which is not of two entities but rather inside one entity is what determines both the immersion of the human being in the world and the availability of an innerworldly and intrasubjective source of freedom. Rhetoric serves a dual function as well: as the medium of public speech, based on persuasion 98 Ibid., 158. 99 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:217; my emphasis. 100 Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 185. 101 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:110.

36  Figures of Natality not demonstration of already established truths; and as the bridge between the duality of subjectivity and the world, or givenness and creation. If conscience liberates consciousness from pure, unreflective immanence through the metaphorical bond, “friendship,” and if metaphor itself is what unites this mental unit with the world of appearances, the political according to Arendt consists not in thinking as an end in itself, but in thinking, in her version of “Socrates’s midwifery,” as purgative or destructive, clearing the way for that which “one may call, with some justification, the most political of man’s mental faculties”: judging, which is always the judging of particulars.102 Nonetheless, all of these stories told about the political suppose its conceptual origin is primary and overshadows its historical origins and destination. As Anne O’Byrne reads it, Arendt’s interest is a historical phenomenology that eschews regulative philosophical categories, in the form both of Hegelian dialectics and of Kantian historical progress.103 Like the particular generational horizons implied by concepts such as Goethezeit or Modernism, then, this phenomenology deals with tradition in the sense of inheritance or reception of ideas rather than simply adjudicating their fitness for preconceived and allegedly timeless ethical or political schemes.104 The tension between these two sets of assumptions, the formal and the historical, is also inherent to Arendt’s understanding of what a medium is. While she does not use the term, her account of public action is based not on Kantian optimism but on the central paradox of natality: the new, as new, cannot be understood. It cannot be understood at all if it indeed comes from another place outside the present situation, routine, habits, and so on, and certainly not if its language is also entirely new and it cannot find some form that allows it to communicate its novelty in familiar or legible terms. For Arendt, this problem has to do more with how a singular event becomes a history. For reasons that are not entirely clear from a reading of the Iliad, her exemplar of public speech and action is Achilles, who in Homer pouts by the ships before springing into action to avenge his dead friend, Patroclus. What makes this an all the more trenchant illustration of what Arendt would mean by a medium if she used the term at all is that it does not matter if Achilles was real or even so much what he is 102 Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 188–9. 103 Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 79–80. 104 See Ibid., 90–3, for a critical inventory of critiques of Arendt’s concept of natality.

Introduction 37 supposed to have done. The fact that the story is still told or read and that the name “Achilles” is remembered and associated with heroism is an example of how the polis functions as a medium of memory and narration.105 (Again, Kleist seems to have read his Arendt.) If natality refers to the singular initium, then the political scenario guarantees the communicability of this event and its persistence in memory. The fate of the political in Arendt’s account is intimately tied to the fate of the concept itself in its most literal as well as its abstract acceptations. That she sees judgment as being as mysterious as natality testifies to her distance from Kant’s preference for an “epigenesis of pure reason” and “self-birthing” (my translation of Selbstgebärung) of the understanding, albeit one that maintains the distance between transcendence and experience in a way that his successors would not.106 For Kant, concepts emerge in a maieutic process from the intellect or understanding (Verstand) in a birth process that resembles the search for genetic and generative information; his procedure is “to trace (verfolgen) the pure concepts back to their first germs and dispositions (Anlagen) in the human intellect (Verstand), in which they lie prepared, until they are finally developed by the occasion of experience and through that very intellect, freed of their attached empirical conditions, and represented in their purified state [in ihrer Lauterkeit].”107 The emphasis on the immanence of germs only waiting on a chance or occasion (Gelegenheit) to emerge indicates that Kant’s thinking is not entirely epigenetic, but this passage refers metaphorically and finally in epigenetic fashion to the concept as a product of the “spontaneity of thought,” that is still subject to the philosophical demand (not yet the scientific “fact”) that the end result be the same for the a priori reasons in the “pure” concepts that are the categories of the understanding.108 For Kant, the unity 105 Arendt, The Human Condition, 193–4. 106 See Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 48–9. A more technical translation of Selbstgebärung would be “parthenogenesis.” 107 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 108–9 (A66/B90–91). Christine Lehleiter sees the terms “Keim” and “Anlage” in Kant’s writings on race as factors that only need outside stimulus to develop in given ways as exemplary of the interplay of epigenetic and preformationist ideas circa 1800. Lehleiter, Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity, 39–43. See Stefani Engelstein, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 226–8, on the tension between preformation and epigenesis in theories of heredity and race, particularly in Kant. Jocelyn Holland also notes Kant’s treatment of epigenesis as “generic preformation” in the Critique of Judgment. Jocelyn Holland, German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (New York: Routledge, 2009), 69. 108 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 110 (A68–9/B93–4); on later sections of the first

38  Figures of Natality of thought is still a regulative function; it does not correspond to an organic order of things. The medium of thinking produces concepts in order to unify appearances; it does not describe things in themselves. As Müller-Sievers relates, Fichte will attempt to heal this split by eliminating the gap between the self (das Ich) and the nature previously barred from access as the noumenal thing-in-itself.109 This marks an important difference from Arendt’s version of thinking, which, as I hope to have shown by now, does not have recourse to biological models and indeed resists the idea of life sciences as a model. Nor is it answerable to concerns about communicative rationality. As Arendt defines thinking in her Lessing Prize speech of 1959, to which I shall return in Chapter 2, it “needs no pillars and props, no standards and traditions to move freely without crutches over unfamiliar terrain.”110 This means neither that thinking has no materials or media, nor that it is incapable of institutionality. As I shall explore in Chapter 5, institution is as much an act as it is something that exists. As she elaborates in the 1959 speech in Hamburg, “thought fragments” may even attain the status of “Urphänomene,” the fundamental building blocks and developmental kernels of—for her more than for Goethe, perhaps—a new reality. The concept of the political needs another set of assumptions about the medium in order to define the particular kind of political freedom that comes with natal spontaneity. If epigenesis accounts for the transformation of rhetoric as well as institutions, from arranged marriage to a language of love and “elective affinities,” for example, a medium can be seen (as well as that which covers up something as highly improbable) as the irrational and “free” romantic love between two people. In Goethe’s Elective Affinities, the cover-up is undone in the production of the child Otto and his death, a “catastrophe of epigenesis.”111 The lack of foundation of natal spontaneity is reflected in the groundlessness of “love as passion,” which only makes sense once a well-developed rhetoric exists with which to express it (no love without love songs, so to speak). Niklas Luhmann claims that such a medium emerges precisely in the decades around 1800 in order to make the improbable and utterly implausible not only plausible, but to institute it as the new rule of social life.112 This concept of medium and Critique, see Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 48–53. 109 Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 50. 110 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 10. 111 Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 157. This catastrophe represents the victory of allegory over the Romantic symbol and of catachresis over metaphors based on resemblance. See Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 158–63. 112 Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982).

Introduction 39 institution as bridging a gap in knowledge or logic corrects, I think, the conception that Arendt and other political existentialists do not have a sufficiently grounded idea of institutions.113 What does this have to do with the political? As the cracked foundation of the social, and as an absolute principle or beginning (an Anfangsgrund) that can be neither derived nor deduced from something else, the political occupies the place of this first irrational judgment that has to be rendered plausible by other discourses, whether scientific, social, aesthetic, or “political” in the sense of procedures, institutions, and routines. I take Marchart’s post-foundational (not anti-foundational) model of the political as the occasion for an analysis of how the literature of the age of Goethe contains traces of this cracked foundation precisely in its references to and rhetorics of birth. As Arendt’s theory of metaphor implies, language as a medium for the natal moment joins “two-in-one” catachretically, without resemblance or even analogy (the hobbyhorse of the epigenetic turn in the social sciences). If epigenesis itself is an “entirely new method of argumentation and legitimation” across discourses, albeit one that lacks empirical foundation,114 I substitute “the political” for “preformation” in asking what sort of discursive medium makes the political legible as that which reclaims a non-organic spontaneity and freedom inside texts that take the family, economics, personal growth, or other matrices and products of birth as their themes. At first glance, it might seem that these personal and private spheres are what is at stake in an expanded version of Arendt’s notion of language. Seyla Benhabib contrasts the agonal model of action in Arendt, associated with an elite civic republicanism, to the more democratic narrative model of action she associates with private and even intimate actions and calls “ubiquitous” in contrast to the singular and rare deeds of the agonal model in public space.115 Rejecting an “anti-foundational” approach to Arendt’s politics, Benhabib sees this expanded narrativity as itself foundational of a “robust private sphere” that secures the individual against a hostile society.116 As I understand and use it here, the function of a medium as “symbolically generalized medium of communication”117 is quite different from either Arendt’s concept 113 For example, Seyla Benhabib contends that Arendt’s “concept of public space [is] institutionally unanchored, floating as if it were a nostalgic chimera in the horizon of politics.” Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1996), 198. 114 Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 47. 115 Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 125–7. 116 Ibid., 197, 212–15. 117 See, for one definition among many similar ones, Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 316.

40  Figures of Natality of narrative memory or the ubiquitous storytelling that renders an account of public and private identities. This question concerns birth as a medium in several senses of the word: its material ground or condition; the form that it produces; and the kinds of text that it makes possible. Whether the metaphorical web that describes the making-visible of the invisible or the ineffable or the at least provisional bridging of gaps and overcoming of paradoxes can be led back to the phenomenology of birth is another question. A case in point is the notion that maternity is the one certain factor both in genetic inheritance and in the cultural formation of infancy and childhood. The births that take place in the chapters that follow do not refer to maternity or to one’s own birth, much less to the reversal into an imagined prior, pre-Oedipal, state—“wo ich war, soll es werden.” Socrates already distinguishes the activity of maieutics from the practice of a real midwife, who delivers children, not phantoms. This difference also distinguishes some feminist readings of Arendt, which emphasize maternity, from the innovation of the Goethezeit, which turns away from the maxim mater certissima, pater semper incertus, to agnosticism about maternity in the name of a political, not natural or familial, constitution of society. The material or matrix of birth is the mother, and she produces some thing that is real, as even Socrates admits: “It is not the way of women sometimes to bring forth real children, sometimes mere phantoms, such that it is hard to tell the one from the other.”118 However, as Andrew Parker observes, “the mother—as usual, overextended—now covers so much territory as to defeat any expectation of lexical cohesion.”119 Far from being the certain source and material ground of birth, the mother has become unstable as a biological, genealogical, and cultural point of reference, despite the insistence that “motherhood is not just a metaphor.”120 The central question of maieutics as the discernment of moments of natality is then not Plato’s ontological yes-or-no, truth-or-stillbirth judgment but the question of how the categories of maternity and paternity map onto the textual operations they come to symbolize. This is a question for the historical context of the age of Goethe, one that resists generalization into the polemical valorization of feminine over masculine gender or the projection of biological properties of the anatomy or function of the male or female sex binary onto cultural models. Given the presence of mothers and the idea of having a mother or being mothered in the literature of the age of Goethe, perhaps 118 Plato, Thaetetus, 150a–b, in Collected Dialogues, 855. 119 Andrew Parker, The Theorist’s Mother (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 12. 120 Ibid., 14–18. Parker sees this insistence critically.

Introduction 41 beginning with the infanticide dramas of the Sturm und Drang and culminating symbolically in the Amazon republic of mothers in Penthesilea, it might seem that the mother would be the crucial symbolic medium (in the sense of a representation) of the problem of birth in the chapters on Goethe, Kleist, and the Romantics that follow. In considering these literary mothers, I proceed in what follows with Judith Butler’s warning in mind: that the symbolic integration of the category “woman,” especially around motherhood and childbirth, reifies a fiction already constituted by culture, not a reality that is the cause of culture.121 Before returning to theories of maternity in Chapter 5, I will distinguish sharply between the already distinct roles of mothers and of women, for one, and, for another, between gendered maternal and paternal functions. While Kleist’s Amazons might be phallic mothers, they are so also in the sense that their reproduction, as shown in the play, is of bouncing baby bows, not live offspring—who in any case would only live another day if anatomically female—a different kind of maieutic distinction concerning reproduction of the social order, not the human organism.

The Political Economy of Natality

As Susan Gustafson has observed, mothers are largely absent in Lessing, or, in Julia Kristeva’s term, “abjected,” but there is still the marvelous passage from Laocoön in which the “gentle imagination” of the mother can produce monstrous offspring. Gustafson reads this as an “ab-jetted space that threatens the stability of the patriarchal order.”122 What one sees instead in the works I shall read is a way of negotiating the uncertainty of paternity and the symbolic instability of maternity through what Adrian Daub, in his study of marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism, calls the “birth product.”123 While questioning fathers and treating mothers questionably, works such as Nathan the Wise, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Penthesilea, Amphitryon, and The Marquise of O… do not fail to produce a product that presents itself for judgment: the adopted daughter Recha, the enigmatic child Felix, or the ambiguously gendered Mignon, the bow, Alkmene’s pregnancy and its strange product, Hercules—all three of which call for some sort of resolution

121 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999 [1990]), 3–8 (on “woman”), 115–18 (on motherhood in Kristeva). 122 Susan E. Gustafson, Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 72–3. 123 Adrian Daub, Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

42  Figures of Natality in symbolic or institutional terms—or finally the “whole series of little Russians”124 in Marquise that represents the outcome of this resolution. This symbolic concretization in particular or partial objects opposes the continuing abstraction and totalization by which Romantic readings produce what I will call a maieutics of the medium, a discursive turn Helmut Müller-Sievers describes more precisely: “[I]t is no longer the epigenetic origins of beings in the world but the epigenesis of the world as such that is at stake.”125 The reproduction not of a discrete birth product, subject or object, but of the world as such, as a whole, is the Romantic fantasy that marks the counter-pole to other Romantic notions such as irony, the fragment, and the monad. As Chapter 3 will show, it joins Romantic poetics and criticism with the economic: again, not as the production of one offspring or token but as a fantasy linking autopoietic models with global capitalism. This stands in pronounced contrast both to the model of maieutic technē underwriting Goethe’s opening of the lyric to triadic contingency, away from more conventionally romantic dyadic models, which I investigate in Chapter 1 according to Heideggerian understandings of technology and Arendt’s contrast of the French and American revolutions; and to the semiotic political economy that makes and undoes worlds in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise as I read it in Chapter 2 in terms of the Benjaminian preformationism evoked by Müller-Sievers. This study subscribes to this reading of the historical and discursive situation almost entirely, but with the emphasis on the claim that epigenesis is only mistakenly a foundation for subjective unity and freedom. The critique of epigenesis can be extended to the various iterations of that model in politics and economics, social ethics as well as literary criticism of the twentieth century. Rather than recur to the preformationist model or to allegory as the authoritative means of illuminating the mechanisms behind putatively organic conceptions of reproduction and selfhood, I propose that the defective foundation of epigenesis (or autonomy, organicism, self-organization, political Romanticism, global economy …) is a permanent condition that marks the epigenetic turn as well as its later instantiations. As competing theories of birth are not my primary interest here, I am using the terms preformation and epigenesis themselves allegorically for other discourses, which I shall explain in terms of the political. To continue in this allegorical vein: the specter of preformation accompanies epigenetic thinking across disciplines, value spheres, and systems and effectively splits the generative foundation that cannot be adequately explained in terms of self-organization, bootstrapping, or a Hegelian 124 “eine ganze Reihe von jungen Russen”; Kleist, SWB, 3:186. 125 Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 15.

Introduction 43 “positing the presuppositions.”126 “Romantic” and “Romanticism” will be used in what follows as a cipher for this “autology” (Wellbery), which persists alongside its spectral companion: allegory, indexicality, the third term, decision, the political. Romantic strategies of reading as well as Romantic politics and economics fill any crack or gap from which political natality would emerge with another sort of freedom: a self-producing and selfreproducing totality. In one way or another, postmodern theorists who follow this Romantic Spinozism rewrite the historical turning point circa 1800 as the beginning of the end of the old politics of representations of friends and enemies, whether in the Leviathan, the monarch, or the rituals of the nation, and the initiation of another sort of culture, politics, and society aimed at a total transformation and the eradication of its Other. This eradication is already rhetorically and apodictically performed in the very historiography that identifies such a turning point. It, too, echoes Romantic conceptions of time and structure, “positing the presuppositions” that make its allegation of an autopoietic turn plausible. The contrast of these later twentieth-century theories with Schmittian or Arendtian notions of political subjectivity and structure is apparent where this Romantic echo is justified in the name of “combatting evil”127 or bringing about “a new earth and a new people”128—the latter a formulation from Deleuze and Guattari found almost verbatim in Friedrich Schlegel. The opposition of the universal to the particular and the total to the partial is an economic one; it concerns scope and quantity. This economic factor becomes especially apparent in Chapters 3 and 4, but the figures of work as production and money as the offspring of economic activity pervade this study. The chapters that follow are not meant as readings that simply exemplify Arendt’s or Schmitt’s version of the political in whatever semantics they use or are made to use for it. If Arendt and Schmitt or post-foundational thinkers have good reason for rejecting economic totalization of all political, social, and personal relationships, they ignore the interpenetration of the political sphere of public action and decision and the private, cyclical, repetitive, and circulatory sphere of economics. If Arendt follows Weber and Schmitt in insisting on the normative separation of different value-spheres in a “pluriverse” of 126 See Slavoj Žižek, “Discipline between Two Freedoms – Madness and Habit in German Idealism,” in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, by Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek (London: Continuum, 2009), 95–121. 127 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 199. 128 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 101.

44  Figures of Natality some sort, her excursion into the language of natality as a medium of subjectivity points both to the hierarchization of these spheres, the primacy of the political as in Schmitt, and to their strange interaction. If this study of the Goethezeit has an original thesis in this regard, it is that the deployment of metaphors of birth textually and metaphorically close to economic concepts, figures, and moments in the literature of the age of Goethe indicates the two limits of the political and the economic. At the limit of the political, it comes up against discourses of reproduction and economics as quantitative, cyclical, and universal. At the limit of the economic, its media and forms of presentation fail to achieve the sort of totality for which the Romantics aim, showing instead how political concepts such as sovereignty, action, and contingency persist at the heart of economic discourse. These twin limits do not emerge as a logical consequence of the political distinction in one of its normative guises. There is not the clear, top-down value distinction that underwrites the polytheism of Weber’s value spheres and the return of the old gods to do battle with each other. Nor do the limits represent merely the clash of the universal and particular in Schmitt’s pluriverse, in which the political is the only sphere capable of presenting and realizing the logically and politically necessary and historically inevitable persistence or return of conflict. Rather, the metaphor of birth binds a natural and universal discourse (since everybody has a mother) to a model in which the modern quality of the political is only realizable and is already realized in an economic, i.e., distributive form. This form includes the “donation” (Wellbery) of poetic force from Muse to poet, the toil and gains of labor, the activity and media of commerce, the conception and production of children— and bows, and perhaps other objects and signs—, as well as the language and signs that are exchanged in love and family relationships, even or especially in the pre-articulate speech between mother and child. This is perhaps the solution to the paradox of the universal normativity of the command “Think the political!” that would be the prescriptive outcome of Arendt’s exaltation of thinking and Schmitt’s cognate focus on the political. It is at heart the same paradox as Brett Levinson underscores in Market and Thought, that choice in a “free” market “is no choice but a mandate” with none of the “‘mulling over the aporia’” of some deconstructive readings that turn delay and aporia into ethical principles.129 The contrary of this idea will be reflected throughout the following in ironic and pragmatic readings that seek to hover over the deep involvement of readers and actors in undecidable political and social situations that nonetheless must be 129 Brett Levinson, Market and Thought: Meditations on the Political and the Biopolitical (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 157.

Introduction 45 decided: a central moment of the political in Schmitt’s sense as well as of the maieutics of the political moment in its attempt to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of economicization and moralization, prevalent discourses of incipient bourgeois culture in Germany circa 1800. The paradox of choice therefore also emerges in the resistance to a simply natural or quantifiable notion of politics in the age of Goethe. Forms of sovereignty, of representation, of contingent identifications, and of willing not only resist reduction to the economic sphere but also emerge within and evolve from economic discourses. This could of course be the trap of liberal thinking, that it is always a matter of choice and decision, or the question of whether the epistemological position to deny the possibility of choice is itself a decision. After all, as with Wilhelm’s surveillance by the Tower in Goethe’s novel, the subject can hardly see those factors in his blind spot that would convey definitive knowledge of his freedom or enthrallment to capital, the ideological state apparatus, and other carriers of determination. Nonetheless, this is not natality as economics. Rather, this discourse emerges from that of economics only through natality. How, exactly?

Birth Plan

The connection of this later version of political modernity to the decades around 1800 is on the one hand obvious and thematic. Arendt’s own readings of Kant, her work on the French and American Revolutions, and her preoccupation with problems of judgment in her work of the 1950s and 1960s emerges from the political and existential milieu in which action was pressing but dreaded. Carl Schmitt’s or Max Weber’s preoccupations with the shape of this modernity come directly or indirectly from Goethe’s contest between monism and dualism in Faust and in the separation of symbolic and organic worlds in general. Critiques of political Romanticism in Benjamin or Schmitt, which I shall develop in some of the chapters that follow, join an implied critique of Romantic Spinozism to its political corollaries. While it is difficult to disentangle the different versions of Goethe, of Spinoza, or of Romanticism, for instance, and assign them to only one of the historical horizons I deal with in the following, I will proceed by teasing the problems out of the Goethezeit texts, formalizing them through recent critical models, and demonstrating their relevance both formally and historically to post-foundational political theory. The initial reading of Kleist’s Penthesilea adumbrated the features of such an exposition. I shall return to Penthesilea in closing in order to show that the most fundamental is also the highest sphere; that, where it refers to sovereignty or government, the political as fundamental ontology is not so much a foundation as a summit. What this means, and what it implies for reading the political in the age of Goethe, will

46  Figures of Natality hopefully become clear in what follows. If the semantic doubling of bíos and biós in Heraclitus’s aphorism can indicate some of the driving tensions of Kleist’s Penthesilea, a sort of demonstration by contrast shows that the opposite of the political in the strong sense I give above is certainly at work in the age of Goethe as well. That such connections exist between concepts of birth and the new, joining the past two centuries in references to the age of Goethe, is the occasion for my study. The features of the political are reflected in the problematic and representational complex of the works I shall read in three crucial ways: 1. reference to a foundational moment as split, a division in social, economic, aesthetic, or biological notions grounding human community; 2. the contingent and temporal aspect of such a moment, in which the split-ness of the foundation can only appear as an instance of kairos or occasio; in terms of historical and narrative memory, “appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” or “hold[ing] fast that image of the past as it positions itself [sich einstellt] to the historical subject in a moment [Augenblick] of danger”—with memory in Benjamin’s striking phrase not as an end in itself but as the storehouse of resources for action in the present;130 3. the assumption of this contingency into an unstable and non-​ sublating dialectic of narrative and thematic doubling that indicates the potential for this “moment of the political” (Marchart) and disrupts attempts to suture the foundational gap underlying the larger economic, social, sex-gender, or cosmological systems at stake even as it ultimately institutes a new order of relations in these spheres. The idea that literature could present or represent the political in this sense is problematic. What about the many texts that do not do so? Is this simply a coincidence of the potential of metaphor itself, especially as Arendt elaborates it, with the amalgam of Heideggerian ontology and political theory, the remedy or poison of “theory” itself, around a concept, the political, that only refers to itself? In the manner of Heidegger, one could also argue that a circular proof is not vicious, much less fatal, if it is an uncovering or exposure (Freilegung) of some sort of Being. For Arendt, however, Being is neither a secret to be uncovered nor a past fullness to be recuperated or unforgotten. It is produced in the awareness of natality as a capacity for self-disclosing action, and it is aimed at the future. Once more for emphasis: Arendt 130 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 391. Translation modified.

Introduction 47 defines what I am calling political natality not as a fact but as a capacity made possible by a fact. The “fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted,” is “the miracle that saves the world from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin.”131 From the nostalgia for the “sunken city” (Dolf Sternberger) of the Greek polis,132 Arendt moves to the Christian model of incarnation as a paradigm for the experience of natality: “Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs” what she calls “faith in and hope for the world.”133 In the following chapters, I address how these secularized theological sparks are present in the age of political and artistic revolutions circa 1800, couched in the idioms of that age as the medium that allows the political in its modernist sense to become legible already in the age of Goethe. The chapters that follow tell double histories of works, genres, and critical projects. The works and forms of the age of Goethe, already double in themselves, are compounded with a focus in each chapter on a critical model that itself projects the tension between Romantic and non-Romantic reading. These metacritical moments underscore the persistence of Romantic models and assumptions about form and history while attempting to undo them by taking the concept of political natality as the interpretive crux of the original works themselves. These first two chapters relate the natal political event to the problem of genre and generation: how can a literary genre be said to convey political notions and affects through its generic closure and its representation of its own productivity? Chapter 1 asks more specifically: if birthing a poem invokes the same kind of natality evident in political action, do traces of that kind of birth remain? I address this central maieutic question in order to show how this triple dynamic works and what it has to do with the political as a theme and as a form in the maternal economy present in Goethe’s early lyric and the role of technē in the broadest sense: as craftsmanship, technique, and technology. I argue that Goethe effectively doubles his early, protoRomantic version of lyric subjectivity with a persistent discord. Next to the well-known allegory of poetic self-creation in “Prometheus,” I read Goethe’s curious poem in Knittelvers on Hans Sachs’s poetic vocation as taking apart the proto-Romantic model of lyric in favor of a contingency of creation whose destination and sphere of reference is ultimately political, as it is addressed both to an uncertain future and to the idea of fame. The historical coincidence between Goethe’s 131 Arendt, Human Condition, 237. 132 Dolf Sternberger, “The Sunken City: Hannah Arendt’s Ideal of Politics,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 132–46. 133 Arendt, Human Condition, 237.

48  Figures of Natality Promethean moment of poetic vocation and the Machiavellian moment of the foundation of an American republic, a touchstone for Arendt’s political theory, reveals the paradox of novelty and institutionality that they share. Comparing the labor of the poetic Handwerker Hans Sachs and Goethe’s conception of poetic making (poiesis in the exalted sense) to the figure of Prometheus who “makes men in [his] own image” and the creation of new political institutions will show the distinction between poiesis as manual labor and poetry as public action in Arendt’s sense. In ways that can only be fully understood in the light of her own status as a post-Heideggerian political theorist, Arendt’s political maieutics aims at diagnosing this difference and explaining why only the latter version of political poiesis can flourish. Rather than disclosing a truth of Being, as technology does for Heidegger, Goethe’s poem sees the vocation of the poet as action related to an open future of fame in the public sphere, but only if the poem is first brought to life by an external and non-specular source. Arendt’s transformation of Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” into a political critique of craft and technē has in turn implications for the reading of Goethe’s poem “Prometheus” in so far as poetic activity is the action of a maker, a craftsman, not of a doer. The second chapter shows how a reading of the indexical traces of another kind of community in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise activates the paradox of the bow—called life, it brings death—in the signs of a horrible event that produces life out of death. Beyond a critique of the now dated humanist didacticism of reading Nathan as a parable of tolerance, this has as much to do with the genre of the work and of the fabular genre, according to Lessing, as it does with the clash of the ideal of tolerance and its critique. My reading focuses on the question of natural signs as cementing the genealogy that joins enemies and would-be lovers alike in the “mute embraces” with which the play closes, in the realization that they can be neither enemies nor lovers for they (all but Nathan) are kin. This genealogy based on likeness is doubled by a history of the event, the pogroms that destroy Nathan’s own family, which bring their own semiotics of indexicality, not of natural signs, with them. The two chains of signs and events—birth and destruction—destabilize each other and deconstruct the premises of both the hereditary and economic discourse that would create stability in the play. Following Benjamin’s references to preformation and the Arendtian account of political community in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the alternative sort of parable I sketch in this chapter should be taken as constructive, one adumbration of how a minimal, paradoxically natal semiotics can create political community through alternate versions of generation and genre.

Introduction 49 Whether in the orientation of birth toward poetic glory in Goethe’s poem on Sachs or the overdetermination of natural signs by the semiotics of the contingent and terrible event in Lessing’s “dramatic poem,” some version of natality and public life parallels the other history of birth that is not natal in Arendt’s particular sense. I therefore take pains in these two chapters to distinguish her version of natality and the political from poiesis, art as technē, and the progressive or infinite genealogies envisioned by Lessing and his Pauline disciple Schlegel.134 The discourses of labor and economy in the temporality of this generative work inform Chapters 3 and 4, which deal, respectively, with Romantic economics as generating a world not haunted by the specter of the political, on the one hand, and the failure of Romantic critique to grasp its own (initial, at least) ideal object, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Friedrich Schlegel’s famous review of Goethe’s novel (the subject of Chapter 4) is rooted in the idea that an autonomous and self-reproducing technē finds its reflection in an empathetic intuition with the object it contemplates, which must share that technē. This should be a chicken-and-egg problem, a hermeneutic circle, but it becomes simply a matter of mirrors. Chapter 3 examines the political economy of this problem on maieutic terms, as the reproduction of emptiness, of debt/guilt (Schuld) and care or worry (Sorge). The discursive transformation of birth objects into objects of production and circulation, properties of the oikos and not the polis, takes place in the flattening of the differences putatively produced by the new into the contours of a medium capable of universalization. This medium takes on a temporal dimension in the neoliberal economics that, according to Joseph Vogl, itself echoes features of Romantic economics in mortgaging the present against the future. However, even the Heideggerian critique of this specular temporality remains bound to a graft one might call ideological: the union of an ontological Sorge with an idea of self-care and prudence that takes for granted the very historical erasure that creates the Romantic system of economics and other epigenetic fictions. A comparison of Romantic economics as a maieutics of the medium in Chapter 3 with the birth of Wilhelm Meister’s uncannily allegorical child Felix in Chapter 4 will indicate how the instable regimen of observation and identification in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship undermines the tight temporal and logical circularity behind the supposed break, circa 1800, between an age of representation and an age of organicism. The revelation of the competing interests and conflicting agendas behind the curtain of the great and powerful Tower Society shows an 134 See Hans Eichner’s editorial commentary on Schlegel’s critical and emulative orientation toward Lessing, in Schlegel, KFSA, 2: xxx–xxxii.

50  Figures of Natality organization that is split at the top around the all-important question of pedagogy and cannot account for its own members. The fault in observation, management, and calculation—of command, communication, and control, to use the cybernetic formula employed more affirmatively by Bernhard Dotzler to replace representation135—is the political consequence of the fundamental incompleteness of observation, of the quantification of the world, the non-closure of productive and reproductive cycles, and a defective universalism and foundationalism. The notion that the subject is not simply or primarily a knower or manipulator of reality underscores both the foundationless freedom of natality and the need for some outside input in order for this moment of the political to find a medium in which subjects and communities can be stabilized, albeit contingently and provisionally. In contrast to the stark opposition of labor and the domestic foundations of economics with natal action in Arendt or Carl Schmitt’s lugubrious dread of a homogeneous planetary space (an exact correlate to the Romantic fantasy of world-birthing), these two pairs of chapters show that natality needs some kind of economic and social discourse in order to function as a reminder of that which is outside economics or society. The paradox of information strikes again: no new information can be conveyed in an utterly new and unintelligible language. This paradox culminates in Chapter 5 in a clearly gendered form in a consideration of Julia Kristeva’s version of Arendtian natality vis-à-vis Kleist’s mothers in Penthesilea and The Marquise of O… The various couples, families, and social forms of the previous chapters return to the apparently secure concept of the mother. While Kleist is sometimes read as fixated on questions of knowledge and paternity, particularly in The Marquise of O…, he also makes maternity a problematic and political concept. Rather than resolving the gender trouble of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister into an organically generative model, Kleist shows how maternity institutes not a natural order but a new kind of worldliness, the “frail institution of the world” (“die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt,” a phrase scattered through his works), which recalls the chanciness and risk of the “frailty of human affairs” (Arendt) before it is resolved into the successive reductions of selfhood to work and of work to a biopolitically inflected form of labor. In contrast to Julia Kristeva’s semiotics of the maternal chora (which she also offers as a reading of Arendt’s natality), this chapter reads The Marquise of O… as a more Machiavellian parable. Kleist’s project is for the Goethezeit the acme of post-foundational politics, one that produces the fundamental difference of the political while creating a resilient 135 Bernhard Dotzler, Papiermaschinen: Command, Communication, und Control in Literatur und Technik (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1996).

Introduction 51 version of institutionality, an echo of Arendt’s dual revolutions that also reflects her critique of the interior infinity of moral consciousness as a replacement for the political. Kleist challenges not the epistemo­ logical but the political dimension of this response, not lingering over the blank spaces and an ethical injunction not to fill them but instead making them productive of a tentative conciliation, only made definitive by its repetition. In Amphitryon as well, this Machiavellian Kleist presents a double approach to the question of political natality, reflecting the orientation toward the future seen in Goethe’s poem on Sachs in place of specularity, obliterating the signs of the particular and of identity in this play of indistinguishable doubles while doubling the received mythology with temporal and semiotic moments that enable the maintenance of political community while depriving it of theological and biological foundations. Kleist’s central problem is not of how to know but how to create lasting institutions without stable foundations. As I read it again in concluding this study, Penthesilea presents the observational, not the semiotic, version of a dual, split institutionalization. This split is also central to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and to the doubled histories of poetic vocation and didactic notions of humanity in Goethe and Lessing. It is homologous to Niklas Luhmann’s temporality of democracy, the split summit that makes the political different from other social systems or media. The discourse of natality in German letters around 1800 therefore finally produces a model of the autopoiesis neither of biological reproduction nor of reflective subjectivity nor of economic credit and debt, nor of the familial constitution of society, but of the political as inherently divided and conflictual, requiring a significant investment of goodwill and a refusal of ultimate legitimation for its survival. This is the “faith in and hope for the world” that the historicism of natality can read in the age of Goethe.

One Lyric Births: Poetic Revolution and Maieutic Technique

What does Goethe’s early poetry have in common with the American Revolution? If reading Goethe can “provide insights into the fundamental principles of American society and its shortcomings,” as Astrida Orle-Tantillo claims,1 the figure of natality as it manifests itself for Hannah Arendt in the early American republic might also inform a reading of Goethe. The assumption behind this chapter is that this happens in ways that are perhaps counterintuitive and unexpected. On the conceptual arc spanning Lothario’s exclamation “Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika!” (“America is here or it is nowhere!”) in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and the famous first line “Amerika, du hast es besser” (“America, you have it better”) from Goethe’s poem “Den Vereinigten Staaten” (“To the United States”), the proximity and distance of an idealized version of the United States play some role in Goethe’s creation. Rather than concern itself with Goethe’s Amerika-Bild or similarly picturesque themes, however, this chapter pursues the idea that the narratives of inspiration, affect, and vocation that inform Goethe’s early lyric poetry and shape its critical analysis can be understood as a matter of poetic form that reflects and anticipates political forms: the American and French revolutions and their shifting conceptions of subjectivity, freedom, and institutionality. The birth of a new nation is different in each of these cases, and this difference indicates a fundamental distinction in the implicit maieutics in which the poem and the people are produced. Confronting this difference with a crucial distinction between versions of Goethe’s lyric poetry of the 1770s will show that the political parallels the poetic circa 1776 not just in terms of the making, poiesis, of poems or bodies politic but in understandings of revolution beyond the dynamics of production. 1 Astrida Orle-Tantillo, Goethe’s Modernisms (London: Continuum, 2010), 1.

Lyric Births 53 One story about this relationship between poetry and politics might go as follows: there are two great declarations of independence in 1776, one in North America, another in Weimar. The first founds a constitutional republic whose institutions—as amended—persist to this day, in marked contrast to the history of other democratic-parliamentary regimes. The second declaration of independence circa 1776 takes place only in imagination, as Goethe’s lyric poetry initiates a new genre and marks the birth of an autonomous self that creates itself from itself. Two acts of emancipation and two moments of birth of a modern identity, personal or national, mark the beginning of the so-called age of Goethe. This beginning is itself marked by an uneasy interplay of freedom and determination, creation and labor, liberation and institution, in which some of the fundamental questions of political natality are posed and answers rehearsed on the eve of the convulsions of Europe’s old regimes. The contrast between the events in North America and those in Europe is perhaps not evident at first glance. The demand for universal rights and political equality (in spite of obvious and persistent inequality and injustice) mark both the American and French revolutions. The American colonists gathered in Philadelphia declare that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.2 Beginning with a statement of these “self-evident” truths, they move through a list of offenses perpetrated by the British Crown, Parliament, and their agents against those rights, ending in a performative statement that in itself completes the act and concludes the narrative they announce: “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” This performative conflation of “are” and “ought to be” bridges a counterfactual gap: they were not, and by no then existing standard of right ought they to have been, independent. 2 The official transcript of the Declaration is available at the National Archives: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

54  Figures of Natality The same kind of performative self-incarnation is anticipated in Europe in the work of Montaigne or Descartes and finally conceptualized as a fixed discursive and institutional factor, as a moral, social, and political agent, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The status of this moi as an object of rumination in Montaigne’s Essais or as the protégé of a benevolent God who secures the reality of its representations in Descartes’s methodical skepticism is transformed in Rousseau to the split, guilty conscience of the isolated individual and, in the Sturm und Drang of Goethe’s early work and artistic proclamations, into the exultant “Ich!” that creates inspired art “nur durch mich” (“only by me”) in “Zum Shäkspears-Tag” (On Shakespeare Day).3 The passage from this exultant and expressive self that follows Nature (“Nichts so sehr Natur als Shäkspears Menschen!”—“[there is] nothing as natural as Shakespeare’s people”) to philosophical refinement crosses what one might call the epigenetic threshold, passing from the conceptual and regulative “I” that anchors all of my representations in Kant to Fichte’s self-positing “Ich bin ich” (“I am I”). The topic of this chapter is this passage of the threshold to autonomy and its relation to two different kinds of creation: the poiesis of the maker as a craftsman and as an artist. If the two functions of making are hard to separate semantically, they are as easy to conflate in critical practice as the “are” and “ought to be” of a normative autonomy. I will attempt to disentangle them based on a distinction between a self-referential circularity and action oriented to a yet-to-be-determined future time. This orientation is Goethe’s answer to a larger question that accompanies the institution of the modern subject since Descartes: What is the relationship of the process of making to its product, and how does this relate to the question of agency? This is a fundamental form of the question of political natality, which recasts its Augustinian origins in the possibility of an original making as the possibility of action. This possibility is predicated upon a critique of homo faber, the kind of technical maker or craftsman whose work is ultimately reduced to the cyclical life of production and consumption. Contrasts in Goethe’s early conceptions of lyric poiesis parallel those between different forms of revolution, different notions of the status of technique or craft, technē, and, ultimately, different answers to the question of how natality is possible in spite of the domination of technology, on the one hand, and mimesis on the other. In this chapter, I frame these differences in terms of affect versus institution, speech and agency versus the silent transfers 3

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher, und Gespräche, 40 vols, eds Friedmar Apel, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–99), I.18:9. Henceforth abbreviated as FA.

Lyric Births 55 of energy or nourishment, and the closure of specularity versus the openness of contingency. The difference between the institutional and constitutional selfhood of the thirteen United States and the alternately manic and brooding Continental “I” might seem at first glance to parallel the difference between the American and French revolutions as Hannah Arendt conceives it in On Revolution: the former as achieving lasting institutional forms, the latter as creating the Terror through the idealization of affect, of empathy with the real or imagined oppressed. Among the mythologies of selfhood that arise circa 1800, Goethe’s conception of a lyric genius captures this contrast in a way that foregrounds the immediacy and the endlessness of affect as an imaginary form of communication with an other. However, it can only do so by pointing beyond the Ich, the genius, or the lyric subject to a realm that is not necessarily but can be that of the political. I propose to consider the political as a point of reference of Goethe’s lyric poetry by demonstrating how one obscure example, the poem “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes, darstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung” (“Explanation of an Old Woodcut, Depicting Hans Sachs’s Poetic Mission”) transforms notions of making, poiesis, and craftsmanship, technē, into activities divorced from the cyclical or technique-bound and aimed at the public and the contingent sphere of action, i.e., at the sphere Arendt conceives as that of a political natality. A consideration of “Prometheus” in terms of Arendt’s writing on homo faber will point to the moment in which natality can be disclosed in the realm of technē. The kind and meaning of this disclosure will be negotiated through Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” and Arendt’s “politicization of Heidegger’s thought,”4 which finds cognate forms in her critique of revolution and in the thematic difference between “Prometheus” and “Explanation of an Old Woodcut.” At stake in the consideration of technē between the craftsman’s vocation and modern scientific subjectivity and technology is the status of autonomy: What does it look like in the wake of the political, aesthetic, and scientific revolutions of modernity?

Homo faber and the Making of the Political

While it refers to contemporary, “circa 1800,” problems such as the generation of organisms or the advance of technology and the sciences, the evocation of poiesis and technē in political discourse must also conjure the Modernist problem of a critique of metaphysics that, in Heidegger’s thought, reinscribes categories of making into the political sphere. Arendt’s criticism of a boundless relationship to 4 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 39.

56  Figures of Natality political making as an endless revolutionary process, expressed in Paris through the Terror, refers not simply to a political preference but to her critique of homo faber and the technological turn away from the world into the subject, a turn which itself converts products into processes. Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” from 1953, claims on the other hand a virtue for a poetic making, poeisis, in language as opposed to the sort of craft, technē, involved in the positioning (Stellen), ordering (Bestellen), and enframing (Gestell) that mark the human relationship to technology. “Enframing means the gathering-together of the setting-upon that sets-upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”5 The human being is passive in this process. Not the exclusive agent of a deed, he or she is “set-upon” (or positioned) “start[ed] upon a way”6 of this uncovering through technology (“Technology is a mode of revealing”7), and the gathering beingbrought-onto-a-path (as Heidegger defines schicken) is a Geschick. As “productive uncovering,” poiesis is then a Geschick in the sense of uncovering as technology, of the “challenging” (Herausforderung) into “ordering” (Bestellen).8 However, poiesis is different from Gestell in so far as it is productive (hervorbringend) and not challenging (herausfordernd). Gestell originates in poiesis but (as one would expect with respect to Greek origins) disguises or displaces (verstellt) this origin. Heidegger’s morpho-etymological short circuits serve a larger project: the question of poetry as making and as political foundation. While one can read this problem in Heidegger’s extensive and almost mantic readings of Hölderlin on the question of German identity and nationhood,9 two moments in the concluding pages of “The Question Concerning Technology” indicate that this essay is not simply an arcane brand of ecocriticism but a project that joins politics and poetry very much in the sense of his writings of the 1930s, to which he refers 5 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” translated by William Lovitt, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 325. “Das Ge-stell ist das Versammelnde jenes Stellens, das den Menschen stellt, das Wirkliche in der Weise des Bestellens als Bestand zu entbergen.” Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 25. 6 Ibid., 329. 7 Ibid., 319. 8 Ibid., 25. 9 As Paul de Man remarks in the year after “Die Frage nach der Technik,” “Hölderlin is the only one Heidegger cites as a believer cites Holy Writ.” Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin” (1955), in Blindness and Insight Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 250.

Lyric Births 57 throughout. The first of these consists in the definition of Wesen not as essence or genus but in or as a process, the manner in which something “predominates [walten], administers itself [sich verwalten], develops [sich entfalten] and decays [verfallen].” This sonorous string of verbs in the original is reduced then to two verbs: wesen and währen. The choice of example is telling. Whereas the artwork in the earlier essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–6) is compared to the presence of the deity in the temple in terms that parallel Heidegger’s treatment of poetry in the 1930s,10 Heidegger’s examples in “The Question Concerning Technology” are economic and political: the house (oikos) and the state. The second moment that is important for the consideration of making and the political is Heidegger’s evocation of the rescuing or saving power, “das Rettende.” He connects this to the poetic (das Dichterische) as that which brings “das Rettende” and the true (das Wahre) into appearance and parallels technology (i.e., its truth) and the poetic as the two elements of the Wesende obscured by the technological and by aesthetics, respectively, a “state of emergency” (Notstand)—also a political concept like Schmitt’s “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand). Art is the scene where these two forms of being (Wesen) encounter each other. These considerations open far more complex questions for Heidegger, which are not necessarily of interest here. Nonetheless, since the uncovering of truth as an event and the question of political origins and foundations are close to the notion of political natality, I want to indicate how this version of the relationship between craft or technology and poetry parallels the concern with political foundation and institution and with the sort of lyric revolution seen in Goethe’s work in the 1770s. The crucial difference there will also be between versions of crafting and poiesis, but without Heidegger’s resolution of the technical problem through the phenomenalization of truth. This difference indicates the continuity identified by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe between language and art in Heidegger’s earlier work and technology in his postwar thought. Writing on Hölderlin in 1936, Heidegger says that poetry precedes and enables language, since poetry is “the primordial language of a historical people.” The notes sounded in the “Technology” essay are here, too: language is “dangerous” because of its relation to truth as it “gathers” people into the ground of existence.11 Lacoue-Labarthe connects the role of language 10 Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), 27–9. 11 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” trans. Jerome Veith,

58  Figures of Natality in this phase with the question of technology and enframing; he reads Gestell as producing an image of truth that neglects the paradoxicality of imitation, as in Plato’s Republic, dividing the “‘mission’ of art” into creator and guardian roles.12 Not just in this Heideggerian context, Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of Romanticism will be important in this and later chapters; I will expound it briefly here as it relates to Heidegger and language before coming back to his account of mimesis and “mimetology” later in this chapter. While Heidegger’s project “originates in the Jena of Schiller (and not Goethe), the Schlegels,” and the usual Romantic cast of characters, his discourse is “irreducible to Romanticism” because he does not engage in the “strategies of the modern,” that mark either a break with or a rebirth of the past, as strategies of making or re-making, also in the domain of poiesis.13 The rival conceptions of poetic maieutics within Goethe’s lyric poetry point to another phenomenology of political institution and judgment in the question of how something establishes or institutes itself—“richtet sich ein” (more literally, “sets itself up”), as Heidegger says of the sort of absolute velocity of technology (“das Rasende der Technik”) that is the alternative to the growth of the salvific (das Rettende) in art. At stake here is the question of a secular salvation versus the imaginary and specular infinity of making the identical. Hannah Arendt will rewrite the genealogy of this distinction and redirect it explicitly toward the political sphere in her critique of homo faber as the primordial figure of human self-involvement.

Novus ordo seclorum versus fraternité: The Problem With Prometheus

It is no surprise that Goethe asserts lyric selfhood in metaphors of birth. However, the idea of self-formation is for Goethe neither uncritical nor unmarked in reflection. While “Auf dem See” and its draft version, beginning “Ich saug an meiner Nabelschnur […]” (“I suck at my umbilical cord …”), capture the sort of birth envisioned by some of Arendt’s readers as a permanent link to the maternal, his poem “Prometheus,” composed in 1774 and included in the handwritten anthology of 1776, marks the circularity of that version of self-creation and calls its logic into question by transforming the Titan who brings in The Heidegger Reader, 125–6. Lacoue-Labarthe sees Heidegger’s relationship to Hölderlin, who stands in for “the poetic” at the end of the technology essay, as strangely blind to aspects of Hölderlin’s art and politics that contradict Heidegger’s own notions of both. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Fort (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 31. 12 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, 85–6. 13 Ibid., 57.

Lyric Births 59 fire from the gods to humankind into a craftsman who works with it in order to make people in his own likeness, in defiance of the father-god with whom he is still obsessed. The vision of a life emancipated from the gods as based on the Biblical act of creating human beings conjures the beginning of a new version of creation and, so it would seem, a new historical time, a novus ordo seclorum. “Prometheus” makes a break with the past, with derivation, tradition, and authority, based on the natural selfsufficiency of human power and intellect. Just as the Declaration of Independence of the thirteen colonies is a condemnation of British power before “the opinions of mankind,” “Prometheus” reads like an indictment.14 It begins with two rhetorical commands and an imperative addressed to Zeus: Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus, Mit Wolkendunst Und übe, dem Knaben gleich, der Disteln köpft, An Eichen dich und Bergeshöhn; Mußt mir meine Erde Doch lassen stehn Und meine Hütte, die du nicht gebaut, Und meinen Herd, um dessen Glut Du mich beneidest. Cover your heaven, Zeus, With cloudy vapors And like a boy Beheading thistles Practice on oaks and mountain peaks – Still you must leave My earth intact And my small hovel, which you did not build, And this my hearth Whose glowing heat You envy me.15 14 David Wellbery reads the speech as a judicial argument, broken into accusation, narration, and call to judgment. David Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 292. 15 Goethe, “Prometheus,” trans. Michael Hamburger, The Collected Works, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Middleton (Boston: Suhrkamp, 1983), 27. In this and subsequent chapters, I cite others’ English translations of Goethe from this edition and abbreviate it after the initial citation as Collected Works, followed by volume and page.

60  Figures of Natality Like the Declaration’s “are, and ought to be” that needs to establish performatively what is held already to be the real state of affairs, the now of lyric time appears in the midst of this process as the speech itself.16 This self-emancipating poem crowns its independence with a simple declaration: Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen Nach meinem Bilde, Ein Geschlecht das mir gleich sei, Zu leiden, weinen, Genießen und zu freuen sich Und dein nicht zu achten Wie ich!17 Here I sit, forming men in my image, A race to resemble me: To suffer, to weep, To enjoy, to be glad— And never to heed you, Like me!18 Given the historical coincidence of the poem’s composition (1774/6) and the beginnings of the American Revolution (1775–6) alone, one might be tempted to read “Prometheus” with the Declaration as two documents that culminate in a performative, embodying what they do by virtue of simply doing it.19 Another way of looking at “Prometheus” in the context of birth metaphors and discourses circa 1800 could be through the notion of the sibling rather than the father or mother. The French Revolution replaces older hierarchical and generative orders with the sibling ideal of fraternité, a move with profound symbolic implications but perhaps less resonance in the discourses dealing with gendered roles from Rousseau to Schiller and Hegel. As Stefani Engelstein observes, the 16 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 14 17 Goethe, FA 1.204. All texts by Goethe given in German are cited according to the Frankfurter Ausgabe: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols, eds Friedmar Apel, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–99). 18 Goethe, Collected Works, 1:30. 19 Derrida’s brief consideration of the Declaration emphasizes the representative and performative dimensions of signature and authorship. On the “are and ought to be,” see Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Thomas Keenan and Tom Pepper, in Derrida, Negotiations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 51–2.

Lyric Births 61 ideal of political equality symbolized by a sort of sibling parity gives way to a gender politics of inequality in which women are effaced.20 One might add that this erasure is legible in literary texts as well as historically in the examples of Abigail Adams or Olympe de Gouges, women who demand, most consistently in the latter case, inclusion in the new order. Hannah Arendt’s work On Revolution does not concern itself specifically with questions of gender. Nonetheless, its treatment of affective and institutional factors gives some clue as to the nature of how gender and other factors are subject to erasure. As several of the following chapters will show, this is on reproductive terms a question of the relationship to one’s own origins, to gendered father and mother roles. However, as this chapter wants to make clear beginning with Arendt’s account of revolutionary institutions versus affects, there are historically conditioned political parallels that demonstrate a perhaps counterintuitive connection of maternity— immediacy, abundance, transfers of energy in a pre-Oedipal, even pre-linguistic fashion—and the erasure of the productive process. The poet who “sucks at [his] umbilical cord,” and draws his nourishment directly from a formless Nature, as in Goethe’s draft of “Auf dem See,” is on this account the model subject for the infinite empathy of both the French Revolution (and the Terror) and Romantic criticism, an empathy that has the power of erasing the woman-mother as the vanishing mediator of a specular relationship even as it figures a lover-mother as a giving energy source. The gender politics of this transformation are multi-faceted. While it also reflects the sort of maternally-based gender theory I treated briefly above, the idea that “the Mother is the matrix of modern art, its inexhaustible semantic resource”21 turns the figure of the mother into a passive source of subjecthood for the poet just as empathy with the People in Arendt’s account of the Terror substitutes an immediate affective relationship with an Other as source of political legitimacy for any real consultation with that Other, or assumption of her or its subjectivity. The erasure or silencing of this third instance joins poetics and politics circa 1800, but it is not the only option. As Arendt points out, not all emancipations are created equal. For Arendt, the affective feature of a kind of infinite empathetic identification or projection distinguishes the French from the American 20 For an examination of this dynamic and the assertion that it is not studied enough, see Stefani Engelstein, “Civic Attachments & Sibling Attractions: Shadows of Fraternity,” Goethe Yearbook 18 (2011) 205–21. Engelstein argues that the available models of republican civic virtue that invoke sibling love privilege brothers, with sisters only as a catalyst or vanishing mediator for the constitution of fraternité. 21 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 183.

62  Figures of Natality Revolution. While the former propagates an ideal of potentially endless revolution, the latter takes form in durable institutions that secure a public sphere. The defiant sentiment and focus on Prometheus’s obstinate self-reproduction has more to do with the affective structure of the French Revolution, at least on Arendt’s terms, than with the institutionality of the American republic. This split in emancipatory ideals follows from Arendt’s critique of homo faber, which I outlined briefly in the Introduction. It implicates both Romantic and neo-Romantic accounts of poetry as beholden to a non-natal kind of poiesis, especially as, to invert the terms of the Nicene Creed, Prometheus’s humans are made and not begotten. If both Goethe in “Prometheus” and the American revolutionaries in the Declaration wanted to pull off a performative speech act in the same manner, then the revolutions of the eighteenth century might just have the structure of the turn away from theology, as Christian Weber sees it,22 or of what David Wellbery identifies as a sort of ideological epigenesis or bootstrapping: “The poem [i.e., “Prometheus”] itself accomplishes that process about which it speaks; as act of speech, it realizes the emancipatory program of Enlightenment.”23 Each of these acts certainly creates something that was not there before, and each also has an ideological heritage prior to its self-authorization. The common heritage of the Declaration and “Prometheus” is easy to locate in the phrase “Nature and Nature’s God,” which reflects the tradition of British Deism and the rationalist conviction that God could not will the universe to be otherwise than it is, having designed it himself according to immutable laws. Shaftesbury labels the belief that an active God intervenes in the course of nature as “Daemonism,” his codeword for what others call “theism,” a term he uses in turn for what is later known as Deism.24 If Prometheus is indeed like God, bringing fire to men or creating human beings in his own image who behave as he does (“and never to heed you, / Like me!”), then he is not the creator God who steps aside from his creation but models his own subjectivity—still—on the willful and tyrannical God, since only a voluntarist conception of deity could both imagine a God to whom prayers can be directed and scorn this God for not answering prayers. The poem unleashed a minor revolution in German philosophical circles, as it was taken by Goethe’s friend F. H. Jacobi, to whom Goethe had sent a copy, as a pantheist manifesto in Spinoza’s sense, one that neutralized the 22 Christian Weber, Die Logik der Lyrik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2013), 269–75. 23 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 293. Emphasis in the original. 24 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 2:11.

Lyric Births 63 power of God in creation. When Jacobi showed the poem to Lessing, he elicited a confession of Lessing’s own Spinozism (in part the subject of Chapter 2 below), the basis for the Pantheism controversy that shook the German Enlightenment and effectively put the old, rationalist version of Enlightenment as perfectibility of the intellect out of the running in favor of Kant’s version of moral subjectivity.25 Jacobi’s point is also relevant here: the Spinozist version of God as the one substance, Deus sive natura, effectively constructs its object of knowledge as causal chains that suppose a cause for everything without accounting for a moment of freedom one might, with Arendt’s Augustinian version of creation, call natal. This Promethean sort of autonomy seems very different from that of the American revolutionaries, who, like Prometheus, break with a king who rules by divine right and inaugurate a new order but, also following Shaftesbury’s conception of human nature, do not create spontaneously, crafting a new man of the revolution from clay in their revolutionary image. Instead, these founding fathers “institute new Government” both in balance with the ends of government in securing the rights they declare to be self-evident and in tune with a certain conception of human nature expressed in the language of rights. The focus on institutionality and separation of powers evident in the Constitution of 1787 not only reflects Montesquieu’s conception of good government (in The Spirit of the Laws); it also repeats Shaftesbury’s conception of divided and conflicted human nature that must none the less keep itself in equilibrium without reference to either the fear of punishment or the promise of reward. As Hannah Arendt points out, the word “revolution” only takes on the meaning it commonly has today, of the beginning of something new in the overthrow of the old, in the American and French revolutions. Before, it meant only a turn of history’s wheel and often a re-turn or restoration of the old, the very meaning to which revolution is opposed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic period that ushers in a Europe-wide reaction. These revolutions have different outcomes. Against the French revolutionaries, Arendt cites Herman Melville’s Captain Vere, who “disinterestedly opposed [innovative social theories] because they seemed for him incapable of embodiment in lasting institutions.”26 As opposed to the focus of the American revolutionaries on such lasting institutions in the minimal framework of the Constitution and not on absolute values such as conscience and compassion, the French revolution was doomed 25 For an account of this development, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), on the role of “Prometheus” especially pp. 65–9. 26 Herman Melville, Billy Budd (Ch. 7); qtd Arendt, On Revolution, 79.

64  Figures of Natality by its embrace of the social question as a political absolute represented by the impoverished masses. Arendt conveys this failure in maieutic terms: “When they appeared on the scene of politics, necessity appeared with them, and the result was that the power of the old regime became impotent and the new republic was stillborn.”27 The contrast between successful, permanent embodiment and stillbirth has to do for Arendt not with greater power or intensity, the sort of Kraft (power) or Trieb (drive) important to the Romantic model I shall discuss below, nor with the provision of the maternal goods to address the needs of the hungry infant People, as these are not political but economic tasks.28 The coldness of the American revolutionaries, their indifference toward the social question, presents a different sort of revolutionary discipline than the Terror, which elevates moral feeling into a content-free and insatiable standard of revolutionary purity, an “absolute” that “spells doom when it is introduced into the political realm.”29 What does this have to do even approximately with the poetics of the age of Goethe, much less with birth metaphors in that realm, which must not be conflated with just any other set of birth or maieutic figures? First of all, as I mentioned above, in contrast to the critique of rhetoric and representation of the age of Goethe, particularly in the Romantics in terms of dead letters inadequate to spiritual contents (on which more below), Arendt affirms metaphor as the vehicle of the “two-in-one,” not untrammeled conscience but that dialogue with oneself that can be transferred to the public sphere and that creates rhetorical performance and communication. Arendt’s diagnosis of the difference between Rousseau’s âme déchirée as a soul torn in two and her own “two-in-one” of thinking as an internal dialogue with oneself contrasts a division in perpetual conflict with one that is created and bridged by metaphor.30 Second, Arendt criticizes one of the beloved vehicles of poetic and personal sensibility before 1800: empathy. She writes that empathy with the poor and the suffering is a blank check authorizing revolutionary action, an action that has no goal because it can never be satisfied as long as that feeling is present. Furthermore, empathy is born of a 27 Arendt, On Revolution, 54. 28 In the context of the revolutions of her lifetime, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the November revolution of 1918 in Germany that gave rise to soldiers’, sailors’, and workers’ councils (soviets) in Germany and Russia, Arendt sees the danger that revolutionary parties focused on social need will by virtue of their structure as parties (their institutional form, that is, not their stated goals) concentrate on administration rather than on participation and action (Ibid., 277). 29 Ibid., 79. 30 Ibid., 75.

Lyric Births 65 feeling on behalf of others; it is not political identification but condescension. On this account, “the people” are distanced from the leaders, whose conscience replaces both institutions and the actual opinions of the populace. Rousseau’s general will (volonté générale) replaces the volonté de tous (the will of all), and this general will replaces “the consent of the governed,” who in the latter case would actually have to be consulted.31 The Robespierrian theater of virtue, exemplified at the other end of the age of Goethe in Büchner’s Dantons Tod, defies representation and institutionalization in favor of permanent revolution, a form of temporal infinitization broken only by the return to paternal symbolization—in Büchner’s drama, Lucile’s cry, “Es lebe der König!” (“Long live the King!”).32 If this description is beginning to sound Romantic, it is because Arendt’s version of failed, “stillborn” revolution has important aspects in common with a critique of Romantic poetics and economics in terms of a third point: her critique of the conflation of morality, economics, and nature. This conflation speaks to the distinction from the first two in the concept of the political, but it also presents a problem for the notion of artistic production as poiesis. For Arendt, the revolutionary instrumentalization of poverty and privation reduces public life and action (bios) to the level of animal life and need (zoē). She criticizes Tocqueville’s account of American egalitarian democracy as adulating historical necessity, seeing necessity instead on the side of the French revolutionary ideology, which reduces revolution to its older meaning as the cyclical form of natural processes. That the dynamic of necessity explains the irresistible movement of the revolution is the ideological counterpart to the natural necessity that “we find ourselves, as organic bodies, subject to natural and irresistible processes.”33 I offer this summary of the social question in On Revolution because it brings the premises of the Modernist critique of immanent cycles of life and habit, and Arendt’s of the category of labor, to bear upon a concrete, historical moment that marks the early stage of Goethe’s own production.34 As a poem about the act of making, poiesis, and 31 Ibid., 70–1. 32 Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod, in Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe, eds Karl Pörnbacher, Gerhard Schaub, Hans-Joachim Simm, and Edda Ziegler (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 133. Her exclamation as she is found sitting under the guillotine is the answer to the Bürger’s (citizen’s) “Who goes there?” and comes after her song that ends with the line “Viel hunderttausend ungezählt, / Was nur unter die Sichel fällt” (Many hundred thousands uncounted, / That fall under the sickle”). 33 Ibid., 110. 34 As Elliott Schreiber has shown in a study of Goethe’s occasional collaborator Karl Philipp Moritz, the American revolution gave rise to a concern with

66  Figures of Natality about a craftsman who situates that act in relation to independence from a paternal deity, “Prometheus” addresses a persistent political theology of contingently founded institutions and regimes of representation and therefore makes a fitting emblem with which to begin my series of literary readings. The tension between the infinitization of the social bond and institutionality underscores the ambivalent strategies of legitimation that mark the treatment of social, political, and economic bonds in Lessing, whom Schlegel saw as his precursor; in Goethe, who differs from the Romantics on this score; and in Kleist, who addresses the fragile yet necessary foundations of what he and Arendt both call “the world” precisely as a “frail institution” (“gebrech­ liche Einrichtung”). The question of how something institutes itself, which Heidegger asked of technology, is in this eighteenth-century context not a question about the evolution of that which defies any halting, as “das Rasende,” but about how to find permanent forms for and therefore regulate the velocity of modern processes, to answer the communicative paradox of natality by finding lasting forms for the new. Revolution, institution, and political poeisis are different acts that refer to different conceptions of political subjectivity and community. This difference is evident as well in the finely grained differences between poetic representations of poiesis. As the notion of poiesis is so fundamental to the structure of Western culture, these representations can produce versions of the political in whatever sense, even when politics is neither implicitly nor explicitly their theme. In what follows in this chapter, I want to examine a poetological difference between models of Goethe’s early lyric poetry in terms of the persistence of a Romantic model of politics that Dana R. Villa, following Arendt, refers to as the political. “In our tradition, as Arendt points out, the substitution of making for acting founds the political: politics is always already art (technē).”35 This is not the political in the specific sense I outlined in the Introduction. Nonetheless, in the discursive context Villa takes from Arendt via Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, politics is aesthetic ideology: it is the shaping of the body politic in a certain way, Prometheus crafting Leviathan. If totalitarianism is a poetics of the state, the central political question posed for the non-totalitarian version of the world is how representation and institutionality that, for Moritz, led to a modification of Rousseau’s critique of institutions. In Moritz’s version, institutions, no longer rejected out of hand, became the means of social activity and the objects of transformation. Elliott Schreiber, The Topography of Modernity: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Space of Autonomy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), Ch. 5. 35 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 252.

Lyric Births 67 this world is founded, and how those foundations become visible through their constructedness. In addressing himself to Zeus, even the autonomously self-reproducing Prometheus orients his poietic activity as immanence toward that transcendence it claims not only to negate but to obliterate. The disclosure not of an authoritarian source of legitimation but of an opening to the new beyond the cycle of poiesis as self-fabrication is the central moment of natality in Goethe’s lyric poetry. The next sections map this contrast in differing exemplars of Goethe’s poetry and different conceptions of craft or technē. These differences transform a dyadic model of specularity into a triadic model that converts reproductive poeisis into natal praxis.

Lyric Revolutions

Like Prometheus, Goethe is a quasi-mythical figure who begets his own mythologies of revolution. In a recent comprehensive study, Christian Weber reads Goethe’s early lyric, including “Prometheus,” “Ganymed,” and “Seefahrt,” as part of a process of the self-realization of poetic genius in a development that is “a voyage at the end of which genius realizes itself as an autonomous human being (Mensch) and gains a poetic-aesthetic identity.”36 This is part of a process in which Goethe revives mythological figures as simulacra in opposition to a normative and oppressive institutional and theological order.37 As I hope to show here, it is not the obstacles that are the problem as far as natality is concerned; it is the premise of aesthetic autonomy itself in these poems. This difference captures the ambivalence of the term “revolution” as meaning either another turn of a cycle or a breakthrough to something new. The other, bloodless revolution of the 1770s, Goethe’s creation of a new genre of lyric poetry, can be read as a declaration of independence from the old gods, yet it has more the shape of the revolution of 1789 than that of 1776. The idea that Goethe’s lyric is proto-Romantic places him on the terrain of a specular empathetic relation to an Other—for the revolutionary, the People; for the poet, the Muse or the Mother, 36 Christian Weber, Die Logik der Lyrik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2013), 269. 37 As this Pauline and Augustinian doctrinal emphasis on the deficiency of the human subject is concerned, Weber follows the argument of Hans-Robert Jauß, according to whom the Enlightenment converts the aesthetic experience of the divine attributes into aspects of the experience of the self, and he identifies the progressive development of autonomy to such enjoyment not yet in “Prometheus,” where Zeus is an obstacle, but in the final poems of the “genius cycle.” Ibid., 268–75. I return to mythology as such in Chapter 5 in order to read Kleist’s use of it in Amphitryon as conceptually split and anachronistic, a crucial aspect of how the non-autonomous political subject constitutes a medium for action.

68  Figures of Natality the woman from whom he receives, in David Wellbery’s persuasive model, the “specular donation.”38 As the affective relation that also facilitates the “divinatory criticism” of Friedrich Schlegel’s version of Romanticism, empathy empowers not only the indefinite continuation of Robespierre’s purges from the internal logic of the suffering of the people that justifies the permanent state of emergency, but also the economic tie to the mother that is figured in Goethe’s poems. Arendt’s account of the role of affect in the French Revolution as creating a self-sustaining and reproducing revolutionary discourse based on insatiable moral demand also has to do with the Romantic model of the lyric and the sexual and gender typology associated with it, but not in a straightforward or unambiguous way. The gendered affective or institutional politics of revolution finds parallels in the difference between “Prometheus” and “Explanation of an Old Woodcut.” As with the connection between form, medium, and political natality, the maieutics of political order that will become apparent in “Explanation” depends on one version of a maieutics of the poem that has at least three different versions: (1) the specular creation of poetic power in which the figure of the Muse or mother provides an erotic charge to the poet’s imagination, making it fertile; (2) the birth of an inert product that is later vivified by the intervention of a female figure; and (3) the reference from the amorous or intimate couple toward a third term that breaks through the romantic scene of the couple and the Romantic poetics of specularity. The questions to be adjudicated here in the discernment of that natality concern the status of specularity and duality in Goethe’s lyric poetry; the relationship of craft and technique to natality as ontological and as revolutionary; and the manner of reading this natal form in the medium of the poem. The claims for aesthetic autonomy in the age of Goethe are too vast and ramified (and well-studied) for a thorough consideration here. I shall focus instead on the form of what David Wellbery calls “the lyric” in order to distinguish a dyadic and specular model of the autonomous self from a triadic one. The former is a correlate of the Romantic and epigenetic model of subjective autonomy; the latter shares the ontological status of the natal as being unpredictable and beyond the self-observation and self-experience of the subject. This point in my study marks the first metacritical moment in my reading of figures of natality, as the model of the lyric in this specific sense needs to be examined in order to define what is at stake in these different models of the constitution of the self and what exactly Goethe’s lyric poetry and its criticism have to do with Arendtian versions of freedom, revolution, and institution. 38 Wellbery, Specular Moment, throughout.

Lyric Births 69 In his pathbreaking study The Specular Moment, Wellbery sees Goethe as presenting a recodification of intimacy in the form of “the lyric” that differs from the pastoral idyll and expressive notions of artistic creation. The key term for this break with previous genres is the prefix auto-. A few salient points in the definition of the lyric illuminate this “autology”: (1) The lyric is different from the earlier form of the idyll by virtue of its desire to grasp interiority rather than perform social or poetic codes. (2) The lyric covers an ontological void with an authentic utterance which gives rise to the “lyric phantasm.” And (3) love as the “Origin” of lyric discourse “is the Look, is the experience of absolute specularity” and “is divine knowledge and therefore, since divine knowledge is per definitionem auto-reflexive, it is knowledge, or self-knowledge, of the divine.”39 The categories of reflexive selfhood and subjectivity therefore refer finally to the theological or at least acquire the aura of the sacred. More than lyric poetry in the usual sense, the lyric is a new discourse, and its reader is held to operate differently from the reader of previous poetic discourse, by “an effort of empathetic projection” about the speaking lyric subject that amounts to the task of “grasp[ing], through an act of divination, the subjectivity that alone gives the text its coherence.”40 The crux of the revolutionary comparison is the step in the lyric-critical act from “empathetic projection” to the “act of divination.” Here, we are avowedly on Romantic terrain, from the concept of divinatory criticism, by which the reader produces identification with the interiority of the lyric subject, to the tendency of Romanticism to seek or to construct, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “a Subject that is auto-constituting, auto-mimetic, auto-ironic, or in short auto-fantastical … and that auto-imagines, auto-bildet, auto-illuminates itself: the Subject-Work.”41 As the German foundation of criticism, the whole complex evidently refers as well to Friedrich Schlegel’s review of “Goethes Meister,” in which Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship “judges itself” and “represents itself,” among other things.42 This identification of criticism with poetry or the artwork in its Romantic mode assimilates criticism to the infinity of a poetry that is always yet to be and always already exceeding itself.43 39 Ibid., 22. 40 Ibid., 12–13. 41 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 115. 42 Friedrich Schlegel, “Über Goethes Meister,” in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe (KFSA), ed. Ernst Behler (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1962), 1.2: 198–9. 43 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 92, referring to the Athenäum fragment 116. Wellbery takes over not Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s

70  Figures of Natality The autopoietic quality of Goethe’s early lyric is therefore hardly a property only of the lyric in this specific sense, but of “the poem” in the Romantic sense of that which includes and breaks down all genres in favor of a “progressive universal Poesy” that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy identify in the Romantic discourse with “Literature.”44 This is a tight speculation; the emphasis is on self-enclosure and productive selfreference. The vocational corollary to this specularity is “to show how this autological structure, the self-inclusion of the poem within its own constructed world, determines the concept of poetic vocation the text embodies.”45 In this model of the lyric, Goethe’s Promethean moment calls such a lyric subject performatively into poetic being in three steps. This is done first of all through seeing, with all the metaphors of specularity, mirroring, and regard of self and others one could imagine. The second moment, being called, is styled by Goethe not only in the poem I shall discuss as Sendung; one might just as well say, with Max Weber, that this is a Beruf. If Sendung works in a spatial register of metaphor, as an impulse moving one toward or away from something, having a Beruf works in an acoustic register; it implies being called, with the connotation, firstly, of being called by someone or something, another, generally higher instance or power, and secondly, of being called to where one belongs, not where one would be impertinent or out of place, unberufen. Finally, as the culmination of this process, the poet, self-styled as the lyric subject, often an I, receives a gift, the “specular donation” that confirms the poetic vocation. Spatial, acoustic, and economic relationships thus form the basis of poetic subjectivity. The crux of the issue of vocation here has to do with the structure of this call, the source of the donation, and the destination of the poet’s activity. The lyric subject of “Prometheus” is not just a poetic but a poietic figure, not just a first-person seer or speaker in the poem but a maker, one who engages in poiesis. This link is most evident in “Prometheus” insofar as the lyric Ich now makes people as the creator-God did: “nach meinem Bilde” (“in my image”). The moments of autonomy, creativity, and identity are joined in Promethean self-reproduction, a neat encapsulation both of the tendencies of what would become critical account but the Romantic gesture itself in order to produce a Romantic reading that explains why Goethe’s “lyric” is Romantic in nature, in so far as he describes the reader’s task as “to grasp, through an act of divination, the subjectivity that alone gives the text its coherence,” a “reactualization by the reader of a subjective mode of being articulated in the text” (Wellbery, Specular Moment, 12–13). 44 Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäum fragment 116, in KFSA, 1.2:182; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 92. 45 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 293.

Lyric Births 71 Romantic poetics and of a certain account of selfhood presented in theological terms. While the former stress the role of the mirror, the latter constitutes a set of arguments about subjectivity evidently thematized in Goethe’s poem, with its interchange of “ich” and “mein” with “du” and “dein.” This end-directed activity—making something—and the reflectively infinite production of autopoiesis are the sticking points of this account of Goethe’s lyric poetry as infinitely creative and autonomous. Even though it is cast in terms of a maieutics of poetic consciousness, the question from the point of view of natality is whether this process in fact opens to the new or to a space of action that is not repetition or reflection of homo faber, whose origins are after all in the self-regarding of the modern scientific observer who sees himself in and through his tools. A more skeptical reading might see the obliteration of marks of paternity in favor of the maternal or amorous donation in terms of an “anxiety of influence” on Goethe’s part toward his poetic forebears, an anxiety that fabricates an autonomous subject simply for the sake of poetic one-upmanship. Particularly in his relationship to Klopstock, in the rewriting of the latter’s “Zürchersee,” stripped of proper names and local attributions, in “Auf dem See,” or of “Friedensfeier” in The Sorrows of Young Werther in the “Klopstock!” scene of the letter of June 16, Goethe’s deliberate practice might not be so much the actualization of poetic autonomy in a secular theology of subjectivity as simply the innovation that erases the marks of influence. Another sort of skepticism might note the parallel effects of the erasure of the mother, wife, or sister in the undifferentiated boundlessness of revolutionary fraternité and the predominance of the mother or female lover as donor in the infinite specularity of the lyric. The critical bottom line might be in both cases the typologization of women as opposed to their agency. In either case, an open economy of empathy, revolutionary or critical, takes Woman as its enabling factor and vanishing mediatrix. The economic aspect of the privileging of the mother/lover over the father or brother also shows the limits of positing the choice of one sex-gender model over the other as a mark of revolution. My account of this lyric revolution in the context of natality and institutionalization challenges the identity of those operations as well as the Romantic paradigm that implicitly underwrites this identity. In his early Weimar period, so well after the beginning of the lyric period in 1770–1, I want to suggest, Goethe is dealing with or dealing in multiple versions of the lyric subject at the same time, the commonalities among which, however, constitute a specific poetic structure that challenges the act of divinatory criticism. Articulated in the generative question of where poems come from, the treatment of revolution and autonomy in “Prometheus” poses a challenge to Romantic poetics from

72  Figures of Natality the standpoint of natality, poetic and political, distinguishing its poetic figuration as opposed to the subjectivity that is legible in empathetic divination or projection. My questions for this drama of the birth of the poetic subject in and as the poem are as follows: To what end is this tripartite structure directed? Under what conditions do these steps unfold? How does this model of the lyric relate to potential exceptions in Goethe’s own early production? And what does this imply for the Romantic understanding of the vocation of the poet and poetic subject as maker? Is a Romantic poetics simply identical with Goethe’s own project or—here, a rhetorical question instead of a thesis—is the basis of the Romantic project not indeed the appropriation or cooptation of “the poem” as such in a self-effacing critical gesture? The answers to these questions have significant implications for the Promethean paradigm as well as for Romantic critique.

“Explanation of an Old Woodcut”46

“Prometheus” displays a discursive setting that, for all of its rebellion, remains theocentric; the poem is addressed to Zeus from the beginning (“deinen Himmel”) to the end (“dein nicht zu achten”), even if in the mode of rebellion or rejection. In “Explanation of an Old Woodcut Depicting Hans Sachs’s Poetic Mission [Sendung],”47 another model of theocentric subjectivity is at work. I read “Explanation” in terms of a basic theological question, albeit a secularized one. Are human personality and individuality constituted in purely self-referential activity, or is a thematic outside, a moment of hetero-reference, necessary to consolidate even the most obdurately self-referential (self-organizing, self-generating) system? If the latter is the case, as a theocentric world view would suggest, a second question persists: How does this outside function? The concept of vocation is the very element that emerges in early modernity in order to explain how a theocentric worldview becomes a hetero-referential phenomenology of the subject. Reading 46 Goethe, “Explanation of an Old Woodcut Depicting Hans Sachs’ Poetic Mission,” trans. Christopher Middleton, Collected Works, 1:49–57. Translations of this poem are Middleton’s or based on his, but modified mainly to convey literal meaning where necessary. I do not attempt to reproduce meter and rhyme. 47 The poem was written, according to the editors of the Frankfurter Ausgabe, in 1776 and was published in April, 1776, in Wieland’s Der Teutsche Merkur. See the facsimile at http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/aufkl/teutmerk/ teutmerk.htm   The commentary in the Frankfurter Ausgabe notes that the poem started “eine förmliche Knittelvers-Epidemie” (a regular Knittelvers epidemic) among poetic dilettantes in Weimar (FA I.1:1059).

Lyric Births 73 “Explanation of an Old Woodcut,” will illuminate the symbolic and discursive challenge that Goethe’s lyric poetry poses to Romantic poetics and will distinguish along the way, another possible reading of supposedly “pantheistic” poems such as “Prometheus” in order to illuminate the question of natality and the maieutic vocation as they relate to different accounts of poetic craft and, more generally, to different versions of poiesis and technē. Building upon the above summary of craft as vocation in “Prometheus,” my reading of “Explanation of an Old Woodcut” finds a different sort of expressive religiosity of vocation alongside the lyric language of the heart, in both the themes and the topology of the poem. The symptoms of a strong, paternal, Jovian presence seem to draw forth lyric subjectivity in a way that constitutes vocation in terms of hetero-referentiality, i.e., of reference not to an inner void around which a specular duality is organized, but by a theologically more conventional reference to a third term that triangulates this relationship. This does not imply the healing of the wounded subject, since, in modern understandings of vocation, this third term can also be ontologically empty, devoid of being, and can be figured also as interiority. One example of this would be the constant Selbstkontrolle to which Max Weber’s Calvinist businessmen subject themselves, having internalized God in the single question of election and made a reflection, indeed, but in a funhouse mirror, by which the transcendent is inverted, secularized into cash. This is the historical foundation of the concept of Beruf for Weber: the epigonal Calvinism that interprets the Pauline call to solidify one’s own calling as the demand for “vocational labor without rest,” which alone “dispels religious doubts and gives assurance of the state of grace.”48 None the less, as innerworldly asceticism, in Weber’s terminology, this is not a jubilant union with Mother Nature or any other immanent, maternal source of abundance, but a cut in the personality imposed by an outside relation, the value of which simply changes for modernity. Anticipating the dynamic of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, another craft and vocationally themed case, I read the notion of vocation in Goethe, particularly of a maieutic vocation or craft of the poem, as split between the model of immediacy over a specular hiatus, a Romantic fiction I shall explore in subsequent chapters, and maternal abundance, on the one hand, and the openness of a third term referring to an unknown beyond that intimacy. This 48 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 129. My translation. In the original, the idea is that “rastlose Berufsarbeit […] verscheuche die religiösen Zweifel und gebe die Sicherheit des Gnadenzustandes.” Talcott Parsons translates “Berufsarbeit” as “worldly activity,” which is certainly interesting but misleading in the Arendtian context. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 112.

74  Figures of Natality split suggests that “Prometheus” and its subject’s obsession with the Jovian father-god might have a parodic undercurrent, whether in its conception or from the point of view of Goethe’s later work. The combined focus on technique or technology and the powers and qualities of the subject form the dual aspect of homo faber, and Romanticism intensifies this self-focus with its specular forms and empathetic affective norm. As will become clear on thematic and implied ideological levels, “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes” resembles more closely neither the self-enclosure in the lyric of Goethe’s immediately previous phase, nor the self-enclosure or meta-genericity of the poem as apparent in Romantic criticism, which expands to include the novel as genre of genres in its Poesie. Rather, in a reversal of generic priorities, “Explanation” resembles functionally the model of the novel identified by René Girard as that which reveals the “romantic lie” in the sense of the self-enclosed amorous couple as well as the selfreferential world of narcissistic desire.49 Girard’s study of the critical function of the novel in relation to the romantic (and Romantic) model uses Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha as one of its examples of the novel’s internal reflection on the dangers of fiction and fantasy. As a model of the proto-Romantic lyric mode, Goethe’s poem “Der neue Amadis” provides a pertinent intertext for this critique: Quijote’s madness was caused by his infatuation with chivalrous romances, chief among them Amadis de Gaula. Does Goethe’s lyric poetry imply or demand a similarly critical reading? And how should this reading be done if, unlike the priest and the barber from Don Quijote, we do not want simply to consign the lyric qua Romantic to the critical pyre of aesthetic ideology?50 If we stipulate the validity of the lyric as a generic organizing concept, “Explanation of an Old Woodcut” reveals what the lyric mode conceals, changing the relationship between genius and artificer, art and craft. It challenges the immediacy of the cultural analysis of gender, sex, and birth by indicating more layers to the poem—not just to this 49 René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (n.p.: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1961). 50 Wellbery protests too much, I think, when he tries to distance the idea of vacuous fictionality from the model of the lyric in the case of “Der neue Amadis.” Although it underwrites his model so perfectly that he uses marginal pointers to key verses to indicate this in lieu of interpretation, he invokes a critical discourse of taste, noting the poem’s “reductive, banalizing tendency” and its parodic vocabulary, in order to frame it as a case of “denegation” or “Verneinung,” the poet’s making fun of and distancing himself from a truth that he does not want to admit (Specular Moment, 95–6). This only reinforces the impression that the lyric form is non-reflexive in the sense that it excludes irony or critical distance.

Lyric Births 75 poem, for it seems atypical, but also to “Prometheus” as the product of several layers of poetic imposition and erasure. It therefore allows us to take a closer look at the nature of artifice and poetic subjectivity in “Prometheus,” which can be read, with the help of “Explanation,” as a product that can thematize its origin and destiny in terms other than those of the lyric subject who is synonymous with the Romantic one.51 In “Explanation of an Old Woodcut,” the Meistersänger and shoemaker Hans Sachs is led by a series of divine and allegorical figures to the union of earthly, domestic happiness and poetic renown. The poem depicts the constant interplay of the artist’s desire and the desire of an Other in a process of lyric creation, which constitutes a maieutics thematically and symbolically. The poet gives birth to the deity only in turning away from human concerns and then, Promethean without penalty because he is in harmony with the larger, divine intention, shaping the desire of humanity by reference to transcendence. “Explanation” thus plays with the dynamics named in the paradigm of the lyric—speculation, donation, origination, vocation—in order finally to rearrange them with reference to a point outside the couple of donor-recipient, but not without configuring and reconfiguring that couple around the idea of birth. One of the transformations of this paradigm, compared with “Prometheus,” is that the poet himself is troped as divine. In an image at the beginning of the poem, the cobbler Sachs, turning to his poetry, “ruht nun auch am sieb’nten Tag …” (“rested too on the seventh day”; l.7). In a metaphor that is hardly novel, the next stanza proposes that the problem of poetic creation is one of maieutics, for Sachs is resting from his own Handwerk but not from the cosmic problem of creating a world: “Er fühlt, daß er eine kleine Welt / in seinem Gehirne brütend hält, / Daß die fängt an zu wirken und zu leben, / Daß er sie gerne möcht von sich geben” (“A little world he feels, our man, / Brewing [incubating] in his brainpan. / He feels it start to move and live, / And that he’d like it forth to give”; l.14–17)—so, Brut instead of Glut, at least at this point, at which the Muses decide to make him a Meistersänger. He is then visited by an allegorical figure, also female, of course: “Tätig Ehrbarkeit … Großmut, Rechtfertigkeit” (“[Active] Honour … or if you will, / Magnanimity, or Skill.”) who has chosen (auserlesen) him. Through her intervention, the “Natur-Genius” is to accompany Sachs. After this vision of Nature, an old woman, “Historia, / Mythologia, 51 Wellbery treats “lyric” and “Romantic” as synonymous in several places. Here are examples of this equation by implication and by apposition: “The Romantic subject is produced by culturation to the maternal voice” (196–7); and a reference to previous poetic forms as “prior to Goethe’s lyric innovation, prior, let us say, to Romanticism” (207).

76  Figures of Natality Fabula,” approaches him and shows him the progression of human history in the Biblical and didactic version as material for his work. Only the appearance of a fool can distract him from contemplation of the allegorical world and bring him to the world of what one might call mere multiplicity, of senseless image after senseless image. The poet’s only way of grasping this world is indeed through a donation or, here, the initiation by the Muse. This is indeed the moment of the Promethean gift of Glut: “Das heilig Feuer, das in dir ruht, / Schlag aus in hohe, leichte Glut” (“There burns in you a holy flame: / Exalt it into light sublime”; l.136). None the less, there is a nuanced difference. The fire is already in Sachs; he does not produce it by identification with the Muse. Indeed, the Muse remains a separate, sacred image, “heilig anzuschauen, / Wie ’n Bild unserer lieben Frauen” (“most holy to behold, / like [an image of] Our Lady”; l.129–30), i.e., the Virgin Mary. Rather than erotic unification, this is, as Middleton’s translation suggests, a sublime moment. Nonetheless, the Muse or lover-mother figure is not silent; she speaks in imperative terms: “Schlag [es] aus” (“Exalt it”). This imperative breaks a merely specular connection, as it describes the relation of the poet and inspiration in speech rather than constituting it in a “flux of feeling [that] precedes all speech.”52 The imperative Sendung here is active and vocal, truly a calling and sending-forth. Identification with the divine is further hindered by the Muse’s leading Sachs to an earthly scene and suggesting—perhaps it is simply the very early Weimar phase already coming through here—a therapy to direct “das Leben, das dich treibt” (“the life that is your spur”; l.137) in the form of an earthly woman, a real lover and companion. The maieutics of this scene, then, is not that Sachs participates in the divinity by identification, as does Prometheus at least in Goethe’s dramatic fragment, if not in the poem, in the “undifferentiated intimacy” or “unsevered unity”53 of Minerva’s donation to him. Instead, having been identified as pregnant with his art at the very beginning, Sachs is shown, at the culmination of cosmic, allegorical, and didactic temporalities that provide the matter for that art, what the vehicle of birth will be. If orality and ocularity or specularity are the crucial features of interaction in the lyric, the final scene of an encounter with the female figure who is to be Sachs’s wife combines an uncertainty of address with the dynamic of donation, implicitly by describing the woman as sitting “mit abgesenktem Haupt und Aug” (“Her head is bowed, downcast her eye”; l.148), sensorially disconnected (she “spürt die 52 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 24. 53 Ibid., 204.

Lyric Births 77 Welt rings um sich kaum”; “hardly gives the world a look”; l.150) from the outside and even spatially self-contained, “in sich selbst geneigt” (literally “inclined into herself”; l.155). This woman figure, who becomes the poet’s love-object, is more dramatically alienated from her desire than Sachs, who only needs to bring his little Minerva, metaphorically speaking, into the world as art in which that world is densely implicated. She “[w]eiß nicht, was sie sich wünschen soll” (“does not know what to desire”; l.158), but she indeed receives a “primordial maternal donation in and through which the subject receives the truth of his desire.”54 Whence does this donation come? Why is the poet’s female companion, not just the poet himself, revivified in this way? The voice in the next stanza begins with a question, “Warum ist deine Stirn so trüb?” (“Wherefore, my dear, this [clouded] brow?”; l. 161), and continues, in a fairly dramatic shift from the earlier stanzas, in a mode of direct address, addressing the woman as du even as the du is simply the bearer of generic qualities and parts useful for the poet’s comfort: “den schlanken Leib,” “[da]s liebe Ärmlein” (“your slender body”; “your [dear] arm”; ll.169, 171). The voice itself is not unequivocally of the donor. Like the earlier stanzas that offered moral and didactical allegories for Sachs’s consideration and material for the work he will bear, this voice gives instruction in a future projection of domestic life as the mutual sustenance of man and woman. He receives (drinks) “[n]eue Lebenstag und Kräfte” (“freshest life and vigor”; l.172) and must be reborn (“wiedergeboren”) through her kisses (l.167–8). She receives “neues Jugendglück” (literally, “new youthful happiness”; l. 173) and her mischievous sense of fun (“Schalkheit”; l.174) once more. While the speaker could be the Muse, who addressed Sachs directly in the initiation scene (“Sie spricht: Ich komm un dich zu weihn …”; “‘I consecrate you now,’ she says”; l.133), the fiction of address for this prediction seems to be the voice of the poet as figured in the poem, and, in the whole poem, the woman is the only person addressed in this immediate, unframed manner. The final stanza returns to the chain of third person reference and extends the temporal frame of reference to a third period. While the earlier stanzas moved from Sachs’s present to the past and back, and then to the cyclical time of the domestic scene in the address to the woman, the brief, final stanza refers to a transcendent reward “da droben in den Wolken” (literally, “up there in the clouds”). The botanical images and metaphors that distinguish these two sections mark the differences among amorous or erotic, poetic, and civic or political metaphors. The woman is clearly earthly and is 54 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 205, emphasis in the original.

78  Figures of Natality described as weaving a wreath of roses, yet the poet will be rewarded in the Nachwelt, posterity, neither with roses nor with laurels, but with an oak wreath, apparently for his humble way of living: “Wie er so heimlich glücklich lebt, / Da droben in den Wolken schwebt / Ein Eichenkranz ewig jung belaubt” (a more literal prose translation: “Since in secret he lives happily, in the clouds there is an oak wreath, evergreen, that Posterity places on his head”; l.181ff.). Where “Prometheus” seems to ridicule such moments and their oaks (“Cover your heaven, Zeus, / With cloudy vapors / And […] / Practice on oaks and mountain peaks”; l.1–5), the Sachs poem seems to embrace them in what could be an intertextual reference.55 Hans Sachs’s stature is hardly that of a Promethean benefactor to humanity who could maintain the human end of an argument with gods. Indeed, he is a riddle that must be recognized—or not—by humanity, socially defined as “das Volk,” according to the final lines of the poem: “In Froschpfuhl all das Volk verbannt, / Das seinen Meister je verkannt.”56 In other words, this humility is only apparently earthly; there is a posterity that first seems to attach to the proto-Protestant work ethic of a poetic Handwerker, not the aesthetic of genius,57 and this is attained at the price of a simple life, work, and domestic harmony. However, it is not the praise of Sachs’s virtues or the promise of intimate bliss with his new, earthly companion in good Lutheran domesticity that animates his poetry. Indeed, there is little poetic bliss in this scene. If domesticity is a spatial separation from society, the real promise of the poem is a temporal one. The reference to posterity is not a social difference of higher and lower ends, as one might take it from the production metaphors in the text or the discourse of autopoiesis, but a reference outside the frame of the poem to history and memory in the future. Self-containment and self-reference are the problems here, not the answer. The twin concerns that shape an answer to these problems are, on the one hand, the nature of birth as intentional production, as poiesis; and, on the other, the consolidation of the relationships— subject to world in the earlier sections of the poem and subject to the 55 Karl Eibl takes 12 October, 1773, as the earliest possible date for the writing of “Prometheus” (FA I.1:925). 56 Anna Christina Schütz reads the poem as a case of ekphrasis that takes Sachs as a poet of the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. This line would then call upon Goethe’s readers to accept Sachs and trigger the Sachs revival. Anna Christina Schütz, “‘Eine große Tafel in Holz geschnitten’: Goethes ‘Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes, vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung’ als Ekphrasis gelesen,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 83.3 (2014): 149–63. 57 Hans Blumenberg connects Prometheus as a workshop icon to poetic genius; see Wellbery, 330.

Lyric Births 79 subject here—that will make that birth-product memorable only in the posthumous confirmation of its well-formedness or successful creation. This development is contrary to that in “Prometheus.” Where Sachs rests from his Handwerk and is led out of his own domain into that of art and back again into a sort of fortified domesticity in Handwerkcategories (mastery, not genius, in a setting in which recognition or non-recognition of mastery creates a social distinction), Prometheus’s disconnection precisely from that which “hovers in the clouds” sends him into the sedentary position (“Hier sitze ich …”) of the Handwerker who forms people in his image, the position Sachs can leave at the beginning of the poem as he lays down his tools. Why should Prometheus be an image of liberated humanity (Prometheus is in one version, after all, a Titan) and not a figure self-isolated by repetitive work who has limited himself to the mirror of the selfsame and the task of self-reproduction? There are two different models of poiesis here. Critiquing Prometheus’s neglect of the preconditions of his creative activity, Christian Weber has pointed out that this could very well be a negative development from the poet’s point of view. Weber reads the ode as erasing the distinction between imitation and originality in favor of the former.58 Since handiwork implies social limitation (and attendant barriers to cultural and political participation) in the classical discourse not yet assimilated to nineteenth-century bourgeois distinctions,59 it is perhaps somewhat ironic that, while Sachs is shown his secularized heavenly reward of fame in human memory in the Nachwelt, Prometheus ends up sitting and making things, metaphorically, with fire. The combination of theological topology and the valuation of different kinds of work in the tension between these poems demonstrate that the nature and value of autonomy are far from unequivocal in a poetic and mythological discourse that is far from self-contained. One sees what Glut is also good for.

58 “[J]eder kreative Akt [bleibt] letztlich ein mimetischer bzw. imitativer…, wie es Prometheus eingangs selbst musterhaft demonstriert hat. Die Ode zeigt, daß zwischen der dogmatischen Nachahmungs- und der absolut imaginativen Genieästhetik im Prinzip kein Unterschied besteht.” (Every creative act is finally mimetic or imitative, … as Prometheus himself demonstrated in exemplary fashion at the outset. The ode shows that there is in principle no difference between the dogmatic imitative aesthetic and the absolutely imaginative aesthetic of genius.) Christian Weber, “Goethes Prometheus: Kritik der poetischen Einbildungskraft,” in Goethe Yearbook 16 (2009), 124. 59 Aristotle contrasts useful trades and professions supplying the necessities of life with the purpose of the state, the good it serves. See Aristotle, Politics, 1291a.

80  Figures of Natality

Autopoiesis and Critical Reproduction

Poetic models are not made to be falsified in the sense that scientific hypotheses or theorems are. Nonetheless, just as in the non-binary spectrum of preformative and epigenetic conceptions of reproduction and culture, reading the work of art in terms of origin or genesis must also make room for both the hybridity and specific variation among such models. In this sense, “Explanation of an Old Woodcut” might be re-entered, so to speak, in the Romantic model of the lyric in a sort of topographical experiment. This experiment underscores the specific differences between the location and arrangement of elements in the poem and the poetic paradigm. Prometheus’s creation of human beings as self-reproduction, “in my image,” will be different from the metaphorical birth depicted in “Explanation,” the “little world” that Sachs incubates in his brain, not just thematically but in terms of the variation from the Romantic model marked in “Explanation,” particularly in its triadic structure, its gendering of roles and speakers, and its temporal orientation, and—no surprise—these differences will bear some analogous resemblance to the paradigmatic distinctions and recombinations of preformation and epigenesis. The Romantic model of creation and reproduction postulates an “autopoiesy” that reproduces itself infinitely.60 This reproduction of the same or of homologous forms provides a sort of systematic closure and yet increases the forms within the system of poetry (here, the lyric) infinitely in a sort of mise-en-abyme, an intensified self-containment. The figure of mise-en-abyme evokes preformationism, as generations of germs have to be embedded one inside the other. However, the identity of these, their “like”-ness, makes the form specular. Abstracting from the Romantic moment and from poetics for a moment might help to illuminate the difference between such a closed and self-reproducing, self-intensifying system and one that incorporates at least a thematic hetero-reference, an other, into its self-awareness and self-presentation. Even if we find closure in each case (for lack of the ponderous references to other poets, say, in Klopstock, or the notion of a vatic poet who really is inspired by some outside force), the subtle difference in how the subject constitutes itself in relation to an Other is important to understanding what “Erklärung” has to tell about Goethe’s lyric poetry overall. The phenomenology of systematic closure in the version offered by Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory postulates a self-reproducing order, which cannot simultaneously make a distinction (unterscheiden) or indicate (bezeichnen), on the one hand, and, on the other, indicate the distinction it has made. Because, in first-order observation, the 60 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 12.

Lyric Births 81 distinction cannot be relativized with reference to alternatives, no contingency is created for the observer.61 Looking at a table is one thing; being aware that I am looking at it and that I could be looking at something else is another. (Fichte’s self-aware self-positing is the autoreferential, epigenetic version of this.) The many everyday actions we perform only need the one, first-order level, not the second-order level by which we observe someone else’s operation, for instance, of looking, or reflect later on our own, perhaps banging the table in good eighteenth-century fashion to see if it exists. The problem arises for Romanticism when latter-day critics reproduce the Romantic gesture, replicating an observation or performing a critical “like”-ness in the name of empathy rather than making explicit an act of second-order observation that would, putting it concretely, observe what Schlegel cannot observe about his own critical operation. One might then say in this language that the involution of the divinatory criticism of the Romantic model (i.e., the reiteration of divinatory criticism within the system that postulates it) is a criticism by identification with, rather than observation of, the distinction made by the observer. The model reproduces itself infinitely because nothing can be introduced that would disturb this progression. Contingency requires the introduction of a second-order observer, who can see what the first does not see and must therefore assume that the distinction could have been made otherwise. This does not imply that autopoiesis is non-existent; the second-order observer observes only the observation of the first and does not reach conclusions about what actually is. That second observer also has a self-reproducing system.62 Divinatory criticism may be necessary in some sense, as in the temptation to impute a deeper design or authorial intention in spite of all latermodern critical scruples, but it is not contingent, and this distinction has implications for the version of poetic vocation that emerges from these different models. One can criticize the approach to poetic questions through systems theory as yet another form of epigenetic Romanticism or as neglecting the question of historical and psychological origins of culture and the self that are apparent in art.63 Precisely in the relationship of the lyric 61 Niklas Luhmann, “Kontingenz als Eigenwert der modernen Gesellschaft,” in Luhmann, Beobachtungen der Moderne (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992), 99–100. 62 Luhmann, “Kontingenz,” 102. 63 For the first, see Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 25. For the second: David Wellbery, “Die Ausblendung der Genese: Grenzen der systemtheoretischen Reform der Kulturwissenschaften,” in Widerstände der Systemtheorie: Kulturtheoretische Analysen zum Werk von Niklas Luhmann. eds Albrecht Koschorke and Cornelia Vismann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 24–5.

82  Figures of Natality moment as auto-origination (and so on) to the question of a non-selforiginating and other-directed desire, the two sides of this desideratum might, however, be seen to split: the genesis of the ego, the Ich, is selfgeneration, and the genesis of culture has no part of it, since the Ich declares itself independent of and unscarred by mythological history. According to Luhmann, the work of art consolidates its own origin precisely in the refusal of imitation, operation, or evidence: “The artwork imitates nothing, performs [leistet] nothing, proves nothing. It demonstrates that and how the arbitrariness of the beginning catches up with and sublates itself, makes itself necessary.” In other words, the artwork as such presents its own activity (“that …”) as its form (“how …”), concealing the arbitrariness of its origin by presenting itself self-referentially and its origin as therefore the sole possible, necessary origin.64 A longer digression on Luhmann would clarify exactly how this relates to autopoiesis in his version of systems theory. Instead of venturing into comparative autopoietics, I want to advance an idea that is more mythologically traditional than both, since it is contained in what could be the best-known classical story of poiesis: the story of Pygmalion as recounted by Ovid. This notion of the arbitrariness of the beginning as that which is concealed to the extent that the artwork corresponds to the self-contained autonomy of art (as the aesthetic around 1800 or as the art system in a sociologically-oriented account) implicitly conjures a mythological scene of making in which the proficiency of the artist is measured in the lifelikeness of his art, not as imitation but in its ability to conceal its artifice. The Pygmalion complex conceals the sometimes banal origins of the artwork yet requires a third principle to imbue the work with life; poetic success is indeed presented as a maieutic, but one that needs a clear birth plan, complete with midwife. While the artwork may conceal its own origins (and these are the origins to which Luhmann refers, not mythical, personal, or cultural origins, but the trace of a distinction), Pygmalion offers a model that corresponds to the theistic hetero-reference invoked in “Explanation of an Old Woodcut,” a hetero-reference that, as I will show subsequently in concluding, persists as a temporalization of the spatial beyond that assumes the capacity to define the artwork. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion’s ability consists precisely in concealing the origin and therefore also the moment of creative desire in its fulfillment—a simulacrum of an auto-originating artwork with no trace of its ontogenesis visible. So perfect is the statue, according to Ovid “lovelier than any woman born,” that “it seemed to be alive … 64 Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 354.

Lyric Births 83 So cleverly did his art conceal its artfulness.”65 Instead of creating the same, “human beings in my image” (“Prometheus,” l.52–3), Pygmalion creates an other in two senses: a perfect and lifelike statue, later imbued with life by a goddess. The young Goethe’s version of the story in “Pygmalion: Eine Romanze”66 also involves Glut, but to no avail: Er war von Liebe ganz erfüllt, Und was die Liebe tut. Er geht, umarmt das kalte Bild, Umarmet es mit Glut. (l.29–32)67 This Pygmalion gets not a living statue but a real girl from a friend who had bought her (“Ich kauft’ ein schönes Mädgen mir, / Willst du, ich geb’ dir sie?” [I bought myself a pretty girl, / Do you want me to give her to you?] l.37-8). This playful, student’s version of the Pygmalion myth in which Glut produces neither identity nor vocation but unhappiness (the moral is, “Be careful what you wish for”) is but another variant of Goethe’s poetic preoccupations. Prometheus’s life-giving activity, for instance, rejects Zeus but assumes Yahweh, who in Genesis 2:7 creates a human being (ha-adam) from earth (adamah) by breathing life into his nostrils, having created man and woman once already in his image (Gen. 1:27). Helmut Schneider offers a comparison of Prometheus and Adam as representing respectively the maker of things and the recipient of things; the humble Adam hearkens back to the idyllic spectator and reminds of the “counterclaim” to Promethean autonomy in Adamitic “Gebürtigkeit,” born-ness.68 The logic of gifts and donation can be turned on its head, as the idea of receiving a donation does not answer the question, “To what end?” The Pygmalion question is then not how Glut unites two images, autonomizing one by erasing the other, but how the materiality of making is imbued with power or life. As in “Explanation,” this requires a more complex and thematically secular, gendered account befitting the distance achieved through repetition and parody.69 65 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 242. The original is “ars adeo latet arte sua” (Book 10, l. 252). 66 FA I. 1:67–9. 67 My prosaic translation: “He was entirely filled with love / And all that love does. / He goes to embrace the cold image / Embraces it with heat.” 68 Helmut Schneider, “Satan and the Adamitic Gaze: Enlightenment Autonomy and the Gift of Creation: Versions of the Genesis from Milton to Goethe,” Collegium Helveticum 34 (2003): 143–57. 69 Helmut Schneider also notes Goethe’s distance from the Prometheus and Pygmalion myths in his conception of art and collection. Helmut Schneider, “Kunstsammlung und Kunstgeselligkeit: Zu Goethes Sammlungs- und Museumskonzeption zwischen 1798 und 1817.” Goethe Yearbook 22 (2015): 228.

84  Figures of Natality While Pygmalion’s stone bride is still brought to life by a donation from a female god, Venus, and Hans Sachs’s bride, a gift of the Muse, acts as a sort of midwife for the poetry and prose he is carrying inside,70 the final stanza of the poem shifts the theological discourse away from the male–female couple (no matter how many goddesses, muses, or allegorical tutors are involved) and back toward the dimension closed in the first line of “Prometheus”: the heavens. This stanza of the poems opens to the space in the clouds where a tangible reward awaits: “Ein Eichkranz ewig jung belaubt / Den setzt die Nachwelt ihm aufs Haupt …” (l.180–2). Temporally, this is not part of the cycle of creation (Sachs’s six-day week or the cycles of birth of his poems) but a reference to poetic fame, and a secular goal. The symbol of the oak wreath illuminates how the divine is secularized, salvation becomes fame, and the political or social unit replaces the transcendent realm. One particularly rich example of this symbolism is in Alciato’s well-known Emblemata. Emblem CC (i.e., 200) of the 1621 Perugia edition, “Quercus” (“Oak”), indicates the reference to the father-god that accords with the use of the oak wreath in Goethe’s poem: Grata Iovi est quercus, qui nos servatque fovetque: Servanti civem querna corona datur. Aliud. Glande aluit veteres, sola nunc proficit umbra: Sic quoque sic arbor officiosa Iovis. The oak is pleasing to Jove who preserves and cherishes us. A crown of oak is given to one who preserves a fellow-citizen. Other [version]: The oak fed men of old with its acorns. Now it benefits us only with its shade. In this way too the tree of Jove does us service.71 As it appears among Alciato’s emblems, and in the classical sources cited in the extensive commentary in that edition, the oak has civic and political connotations, and an oak wreath is a “corona civica” (civic crown).72 The alternate gloss also has to do with a historical 70 Jens Haustein points out the difference in Goethe’s and Sachs’s versions of such female figures by comparison to Sachs’s poetic treatment of his own spouses. Jens Haustein, “Über Goethes ‘Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes vorstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 231 (1994): 7. 71 Andrea Alciato, Emblemata (Padua 1621), 852. The translation is taken from the Glasgow University Emblem Web Site where the emblem appears: http:// www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/emblem.php?id=A21a200 72 Ibid., 852–3.

Lyric Births 85 transition: whereas ancient man was nourished by its acorns, the tree now gives only shade. That the oak is a tree sacred to Jupiter, the god who does not receive Minerva, or wit, but gives birth to her from his head, seems to connect the progress of the poem from giving birth to inspiration or wit to intercourse with a mortal woman not to the poet’s interiority but to his identification not even with art or intellect but with the father of the gods who was also mother to one. The conferral of the oak wreath has therefore two implications: it marks the earthly relationship of the poet to a sort of civic virtue or order, rather than the purely artistic striving for laurels or contentment in the couple, in the eyes or voice of the beloved; and it reinstates the poet in that civic order not as singer of the Volk but as Meister, even a punishing god, and in any case a father. If there is a donation to be made, the poet makes it; he is assisted and recognized for doing so by the Muses and other entitities and potentially not recognized by the Volk. Rather than a narcissistic hiatus in reflection, another negative ontological factor is at work here: the hetero-referential connection to a third entity beyond the specular doublet. This does not imply that the symbolic is substantive or essential; the shifting meaning of what falls under the signifier “vocation” is historically transformed, as in the shift from the religious to the secular sense of vocation in Max Weber or even in the meaning of the oak as a symbol of the theological relation of civic merit in Alciato’s book: from sustenance to shade. Is the birth of the lyric the event in or for Goethe that institutes a new kind of poetic vocation? If so, what does it mean that this event is reflected thematically in the poem? Is this an internal hermeneutics of humanity? Not entirely, since the reference to some outside standard breaks the chiasmatic structure that would ensure the continuity of theme with form. Is this an aesthetics of the sort one might expect from the mirroring of poetic consciousness in the outside world? Not exactly, since the goal is not that relationship but the autotelic moment of Sendung for the sake of Sendung, with the only symbolic prize in the beyond. None the less, the series of changes rung on the theme of vocation makes the triadic structure reflective inasmuch as the hetero-orientation, so to speak, is re-entered into the logic of the poem itself, as a discourse on the gods that is directed solely to the poet’s subjectivity, hence the lack of the Promethean moment of defiance and the possible presence of a symbolic reward from Zeus/Jove for good behavior. The structure one has at the end is then autopoietic but heterodirected, and only its heteroreferential moment allows for the functioning of autopoiesis. However, to supersede a specular with a symbolic system, oriented by a third term, does not go far enough in exploring the notion of Sendung as it is explicit in Goethe’s title. This shift might be cast in psychoanalytic terms as the move from an imaginary to a symbolic

86  Figures of Natality order, or, in an affine difference with the terms of the lyric, as the replacement of a maternal order in which the child/poet has himself and his mother or, as Freud calls it, “the caregiving woman” (“das pflegende Weib”) as objects of desire,73 with an order in which the child/poet has invested outside objects with desire and therefore lacks the immediate connection to the mother or nature.74 Transposing these positions, one might say that, unlike the identification with the source (at once phallic and maternal), the latter position, the relation to the outside, is marked by occupying the place of the poet with the hiatus between the abundance of the power source and the sometimes banal or simply “banausic” aspects of human life. Art is then not the representation of the impossible desire of fusion with the origin, as in Freud’s primary narcissism,75 but the cut or the distinction between the merely worldly and the realm that is troped in genuinely theological discourse as the otherworldly but appears in secular discourse as the realm of social, political, or artistic differentiation—the realm of “innerworldly asceticism” that Max Weber sees at the theological origin and secular turning point of the concept of vocation. If the poet occupies the gap between these two realms or, in his action, distinguishes them, and God is secularized into the temporally deferred reward of fame—equally without content—, then subjectivity remains categorically outside of natural or positively aesthetic practices. Unlike Romantic messianism, which waits for a God or Ich to show up,76 the poetic Ich remains in this gap, keeping it open with 73 Sigmund Freud, “Zur Einführung des Narzißmus,” in Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1946, repr. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 154. 74 Ibid., 140. 75 Without reference to Freud, Christian Weber points out the danger of the translation of the infantile “mytho-theology” into identification with the deity. Weber, “Goethes Prometheus” 121. René Girard similarly critiques the assumption of or desire for divinity as identification with the fantasy that mediates desire. Girard, Mensonge romantique, 329. This critique could be applied to Prometheus, Zeus, or the phallic/paternal instance as such. Identification with a phallic woman or mimesis of (as opposed to reference to) the father-god is differently gendered than the account in “Erklärung,” in which the man would be the mother but is insufficient on his own, hence the subjunctive of “gerne möcht von sich geben” (l.14). Wellbery coincidentally refers his account of traces of the origin to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora, which binds the child to the mother in a primary, pre-paternal attachment (“Die Ausblendung der Genese,” 25) or makes “the Mother … the matrix of modern art.” Wellbery, Specular Moment, 183. 76 See Schlegel’s Lucinde, where a “Logis” is prepared in the form of “euren Leib oder eure Sachen” for an Ich not yet present (KFSA, 1.5:28), and the reference in the Athenäum to “der revolutionäre Wunsch, das Reich Gottes zu

Lyric Births 87 reference not to an idealized image of the Ich to come but to another realm of signification that generates not the circularity of genius but the artwork. Poetics would then be maieutics, the question not of embodying a narcissistic phantasm but of discerning, as Socrates has it, “whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth.”77 Of course, Goethe’s project is not to produce a Platonic truth. Nonetheless, the place of the poet as modeled by Hans Sachs is to make a structurally parallel distinction, bringing the artwork he carries inside to birth in the world. The origin of the artwork lies in a different sphere, not that of Being but of all of the external contents, real and allegorical, described in the previous stanzas of the poem. The criterion for a successful birth is then neither ontological nor alethic but based on reception of the artwork as art not here and now but in a future time coded as transcendent—the temporalization and humanization of the spatial distinction between this world and a beyond, “droben.” In this poem, at least, secularized, human subjectivity is no more narcissistic or specular than the theistic realm rejected by Prometheus. Combined with the reversal of gender roles, from Minerva and Prometheus to Pygmalion and his sculpture, it is therefore a question not of a fatherless and involuted text that has ensconced itself at the font of maternal abundance,78 but of a reference to an outside term as a description without which a functioning interiority would be impossible. The reverse is also true; hetero-reference is the integration of a part of the outside, through observation and description, into a system organized based on distinctions not simply taken over from, and not available in, that outside world. The difference here is between a self-referential system of distinctions that produce objects attributed to an exterior (the self observes something) and a selfempowering, originating Ich that constitutes its own sole object. The latter is not so much the fundamental matrix of art but the result, even among Goethe’s varied works, of a process by which art erases its artfulness. Far from being humanist or secular in a reductive sense, this erasure is performed by a short-circuit connecting the poet immediately to divinity in a specular fashion, as opposed to the aspirational and temporally deferred connection in “Explanation.” realisieren” (fragment 222; KFSA, 1.2:201), as well as Benjamin’s footnote in Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Romantik on “romantischen Messianismus” as a “Gesichtspunkt.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 1:12. Benjamin’s distinction of Goethe from the Romantics is noted by LacoueLabarthe and Nancy (The Literary Absolute, 147 n.15). 77 Plato, Thaetetus 150c, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, 855. 78 See Wellbery, Specular Moment, 200.

88  Figures of Natality This specular complex can be secularized only in asocial fantasy as an abstract definition of the human as replacing the divine and any secularized, alternative third term in ethics, politics, or art—the Other, the neighbor, the people, the state—with itself. This politicizes the Pygmalion problem as one among several models of creation, incarnation, and maieutics of the poem. The question especially for the last of these terms is this: on what terms is creation to be conceived of as birth? In literary historical terms, the Pygmalion model is hardly obsolete, and the autonomization of the poem as the assertion of the certainty of vocation hardly the dominant paradigm. In Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Don du poème” (Gift [donation/talent] of the Poem), the poem is a leftover of the night’s activity, shown in the light of dawn to be a monstrous birth, “horrible naissance.” In an inversion of Goethe’s maieutics of the donation in “Explanation,” Mallarmé’s poet gives birth to the poem and is immediately hostile to his creation, expressing only a “sourire ennemi” (“enemy smile”). He then takes it to a woman who will nurse it back to life—or perhaps not, as the poet must ask or wonder: “Avec le doigt fané presseras-tu le sein / Par qui coule en blancheur sibylline la femme / Pour des lèvres que l’air du vierge azure affame?”79 (Will you with your wilted finger press the breast / Through which the woman flows in sibylline whiteness / For lips famished from the air of virgin azure?) What does Mallarmé’s maieutics of the donation, in which the poet creates but the woman figure gives life, tell us about the general complex of speculation, vocation, and donation as it might relate to Goethe? The reversal of roles here changes the valence of the primordial poetic couple, yet the poem still revolves around vocation as both the donation, now from the father figure, and, in another meaning of don, as a gift in the sense of a talent, being “gifted.” Since the woman is depicted as nourishing the creature already made, the role of donor is not simply assumed by the poet as an increasingly autonomous being but is divided between the members of the couple. The artefact remains between them, the poem itself, which, as in the Pygmalion story, must be vivified. As in the second creation story, the divine moment is both the creation of the first human being from clay and the pneumatic instance of breathing life into the clay (Genesis 2:7).80 The artefact is here incarnate, in spite of having to be resuscitated, recalling both Goethe’s reference to the Virgin

79 Mallarmé, Œuvres, ed. Y.-A. Favre (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1992), 43. 80 Eibl challenges the notion that Prometheus actually vivifies his works in the poem (as contrasted with the dramatic fragment) (FA I.1:926).

Lyric Births 89 Mary81 (“wie ein Bild unsrer lieben Frauen”) and the human birth and nurturing of the infant Jesus. Even the “sibylline whiteness” is ambivalent, as the Sibyl was childless. The mythical and metaphysical resonance of the poem as a whole makes this closing a tableau in which sterility and reproduction, infancy and old age, day and night, combine to make the answer to the question far from obvious. Other than the patent reality of an infant sleeping in a crib, nothing suggests that the poem will make it through this maieutic process. Unlike Socrates’s critical self-assurance that he at least knows when others know and when they do not, while knowing nothing himself, the poetic task does not entertain negativity except as failure, stillbirth of the poem. I invoke Mallarmé here not to provide a proof text (a use to which he is put in some French theoretical texts, just as Heidegger uses Hölderlin) but to link Goethe’s poem with an avant-garde that inspires a version of hetero-reference, referring the poem to a contingent event that, unlike the emergence of specular autonomy, does not eliminate contingency. In a survey of the metaphors of birth and sexual reproduction (Zeugung), David Wellbery contrasts Mallarmé’s poem with the spirit of sexual and birth imagery in German Idealism, which (in Wellbery’s examples of Schelling and Ritter) rewrites Kant’s definition of the genius as one innately disposed to apply immediately the rules of nature to art (i.e., without following Boileau’s or Gottsched’s rulebook or any other express code) into the power of reproduction (“Zeugungskraft”) that is a “pure gift from Nature,” or to associate art with the man and real children with the women.82 Nicholas Rennie also makes this connection in terms of Faust and Mallarmé’s poem, “Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard” (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance). In Faust as in “Un coup de dés,” “the reality of chance is presented so forcefully as to subvert any promise of an overriding order.”83 Rennie further cites Blanchot’s distinction of Mallarmé (and, I would argue, therefore of the sort of poetic maieutics in “Don du poème”) from Romantic fantasy, claiming real separation and uncertainty just as in the roll of dice: speculation as economic activity, open to chance, with neither guarantee nor the fantasy of a guarantee. Play as chance, a roll of the dice, is a figure of contingency Goethe will repeat in the uncanny birth product Felix in the Apprenticeship. 81 Eibl’s interpretation of Goethe’s reference to “ein Bild unsrer lieben Frauen” (l.130) as an antiquated form of the genitive case singular referring to the Virgin Mary (FA I.1:1063) seems self-evident. It is also translated as such by Middleton. 82 Wellbery, “Kunst-Zeugung-Geburt,” 32. 83 Nicholas Rennie, Speculating on the Moment: The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi, and Nietzsche (Munich: Wallstein, 2005), 122–5.

90  Figures of Natality While any political comparison in Arendt’s sense to this thoroughly gendered and aestheticized conception of poetics might seem far-fetched, I want to venture one version of the poem that is neither self-generating nor inspired in an origin that would secure its reproduction, but contingent and bound to a temporality in which, as in Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” or “Don du poème,” its investment with vital energy, its poetic success, is an open question like that the poet asks of the woman with the infant: “Presseras-tu le sein […]?” (Will you press the breast […]?). As Wellbery reads it, “Don du poème” is an instance of the specular donation in so far as the poem requires the stream of milk from the mother figure as voice.84 Rennie compares this speculation with what he cites as Maurice Blanchot’s critique of Romantic presence, a “logical and temporal hiatus” that separates poem and author. Wellbery also incorporates such a hiatus in his theory of the lyric. This is the “hiatus of temporality and sense that is opened up by the text” in an unattainable past and an uncertain future.85 While Blanchot sees separation and distance (from presence as well as from the Romantic paradigm), the hiatus is embodied in the envoi that closes “Maifest”: “Sei ewig glücklich, / Wie du mich liebst!” (“Be forever happy, / As you love me!”). This is for the lyric the generic convention of an envoi that gives the reader hermeneutic direction, pointing to the outside while sealing the poem’s self-enclosure: “Interpret empathetically so that the text as text disappears before the phantasmatic presence of the loving soul whose flux of feeling precedes all speech. Efface the text and its time and in so far as you do this [wie du mich liebst] you will know eternal bliss.”86 This “hallucination of presence” removes all the distinctions, indeed all the specificity of the text, making this empathetic hiatus the access to the Romantic infinity of the text beyond all falsification (awareness of fiction), falsifiability (testability of other possible interpretations), or irony. The hiatus here, even though it refers formally to a future, sees its own act as enabling the reflection of reader and lyric subject, so that empathy guarantees the communication of intention in a hermeneutic circle, so tight that it is a mirror. Once more, empathy guarantees some variety of infinity. Is this the case with “Explanation”? The comparison with interpretations of Mallarmé’s poem is illuminating in this regard. If there is really an element of chance, which implies contingency, that things could be otherwise, then this is precisely what is excluded by the presumption of empathetic mirroring. On the terms of these poems, there is also 84 Wellbery, “Kunst—Zeugung—Geburt,” 33. 85 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 24. Referring to this passage, Rennie seems to equate the two kinds of hiatus. Nicholas Rennie, Speculating, 125. 86 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 25–6.

Lyric Births 91 a gender politics at work here, not just in the predictable division of sexual and reproductive roles (most tellingly exemplified in Goethe’s rape poem, “Heideröslein”), but in the distribution of speaking parts. While the specular donation and voice are later linked, the original definition of the lyric is that there is no dialogue between male and female figures: “verbal expression is the prerogative solely of the male figure.”87 In “Explanation,” however, the title already promises another standpoint, and the explanation not of the woodcut (this might be only a fantastic ekphrasis) but of the vocation itself comes from women who show Sachs things, especially from the Muse who enters his workshop: “Die tritt mit gutem Gruß herein, […] / Die spricht: ‘Ich hab dich auserlesen […]” (“Well, with fair greeting in she comes, […] / She says, ‘It’s you that I have chosen…’”).88 If these gender distributions are in fact the key to the relationship between the lyric subject and the woman figure—Muse, mother, lover—, then this disturbance of the paradigm might indicate that the hiatus to follow in the sort of envoi with which the poem concludes, the crowning of the poet and the demise of those who don’t get it, refers to a posterity that is marked by the former kind of hiatus: the refusal of a hallucinatory presence and the opening to real contingency. The different dynamic of vivifying donation in “Erklärung” allows one to see precisely how the theism of the “Erklärung” implies a different stance toward literary historiography than that of the story of Romanticism as replacing classical, pastoral, or Reason-driven poetics. In its encoded orientation toward Jove/Zeus and not so subtle alternative to the Prometheus moment in its various lyric instances, the conversion of the linear time of fantasy, invention, and birth in the “Erklärung” into the triangular space of theistic hetero-reference spatially, back in the “droben” (“up there”), not reflection, as the symbol of the Nachwelt (posterity), can and should be re-temporalized into a reflection on how the history of the lyric is written. While the artwork, on Luhmann’s terms, might try to conceal its own contingent origin—it could have become another work—, the historical genre (e.g., the lyric) is constituted when contingently created artworks all are identified in hindsight as fulfilling the criterion of an artistic event, the birth not of a particular poem or a certain kind of poetic subject (e.g., the genius) but of a genre. In the scheme Goethe proposes at the end of the “Erklärung” (the didactic purpose of which is evident from its theme and its title), the “verkannt” (“In Froschpfuhl 87 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 26. “Heideröslein” exemplifies this in the announcement of the breaking of the rose: “Knabe sprach […]” (“Boy said […]”). 88 Goethe, Collected Works, 1:48–50.

92  Figures of Natality all das Volk verbannt, / Das seinen Meister je verkannt”; “Such folks into the frog pond pitch / As gave for their master never a stitch”; l.184) presents implicitly an alternative, “erkannt,” proposing that this birth of or to the vocation is accompanied by recognition of the same event of birth on the part of others. While I thematized this above abstractly through Socrates’s self-description as a midwife who determines whether births are of real ideas or only fantasy, the mechanism of recognition alluded to in the final line of the poem also implicitly has to do with the recognition of an event, the birth of poetic mastery. Like the birth of a genre, for instance “the lyric,” this recognition takes place in a hypothetical situation which it posits, predicating fame in the Nachwelt on mastery, a mastery that can only be confirmed in that Nachwelt. This future perfect of what will have been can also be applied to the moment in which the lyric in the specific sense of Promethean poetic subjectivity is said to separate itself from earlier modes of poetic subjectivity. To take Pygmalion (or even Prometheus) as the permanent allegory of poetic art may be cliché, but it reflects the process of poiesis and ultimately the Romantic and technological focus on processes and not products, namely the elimination of the marks of intervention from making, its reduction to an apparently natural cycle in which even the craftsman is no longer represented: ars adeo latet arte sua. Heidegger’s consideration of Technik ultimately remains within this horizon, as the disclosure of Being and danger in the “Question Concerning Technology” sees poiesis not in relation to acting in the world but as the condition of dwelling on the earth.

The Problem with Poiesis

Rather than the temporal dimension of the uncertain future of possible divine punishment, which the lyric subject is trying to ward off by the opening “parodistic commands,”89 the lyric subject of “Prometheus” announces, “Here I sit,” giving spatial closure to the temporal argument, stopping time with the act that resembles God yet makes men like Prometheus: fiat Sitzfleisch. The technique or art (technē) of maieutics in Plato’s Thaetetus finds an echo here insofar as Prometheus does not bring fire or divine power to humankind but, as in Benjamin Hederich’s account in his Gründliches mythologisches Wörterbuch, works with fire at his own oven (Herd).90 His role as a craftsman with a secular, 89 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 292 90 Hesychius’s gloss of unusual Greek expressions associates banausía with a craft (technē) using fire: “βαναυσία: πᾶσα τέχνη διὰ πυρός.” See Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. and augmented by Sir Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 305, s.v. βάναυσος. German lexica after Goethe’s time continue the association of Banausie with stationary work,

Lyric Births 93 human calling makes the role of this vocation central to the poem. The self-referential productivity of this vocation contrasts with the heteroreference of the prayer directed to the ear behind the clouds even as the voice of the lyric subject persistently addresses that nebulous figure even in the final contrast around the verb “to heed”: “dein”— “achten”—“ich.” This performative self-affection is epigenetic, a sort of poetological and phenomenological bootstrapping that “autologically observes its own labor of observation.”91 The intensification of labor here as autologous—an observer observing an observer who is himself—offers an interesting register in which to read “Prometheus,” for, as a craftsman, he does not observe but produces. The lyric subject as poet is also a producer, a maker of poems, made things. Reading Goethe’s Prometheus and his “here I sit” not as a declaration of theological-political independence but as a description of poetic vocation as craft production should itself be questioned as to its implicit premises, which are more ramified than the vital, sexual restoration of “neue Lebenstag’ und Kräfte” (“a new lease on life and new [vital] powers”). Here, we have returned to the territory of homo faber on the short circuit of human-likeness as Hannah Arendt understands it. This tight cycle is part of an “anthropocentric world, where the user, that is, man himself, becomes the ultimate end which puts a stop to the unending chain of ends and means,” a world in which even the short-term goal of production of things with value has lost meaning, because it is only a means to the human end, as Kant said, an end in itself, never a means.92 Her critique is even more apposite to the problem of Prometheus’s technē when one considers that it is the source for Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s substantial critique of Romantic poetics of production as reflexivity and self-affection, which I cite above. The original sin of modern philosophy, according to Arendt, is this fall into self-observation, as Descartes’s skepticism severs the human subject as especially at an oven. See Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon (Altenburg 1857), 2:264, s.v. Banausie. The definition of sitzen in Pierer involves the same semantic constellation: “a sedentary lifestyle (especially with craftspeople; […] banausia.” (“Eine sitzende Lebensart (insbesondere bei Handwerkern Sellularische Lebensart, Banausie) …,” but as a source of concern regarding illnesses of the lower body (s.v. Sitzen, 16:149). ub-goobi-pr2.ubi.uni-greifswald.de/viewer… January 15, 2016. As in the German Banausie, Banause, and banausisch, all are associated with vulgarity, poor taste, “the habits of a mere artisan” (Liddell-Scott, Lexicon 305, s.v. βᾰναυσία). See also Eibl’s commentary on the poem, in which the image of Prometheus as a sedentary maker, like Sachs’s day job, is connected with a tradition of seeing him as a Handwerkergott (FA I.1:926)—the poet of poetic vocation as Banause. Wellbery also notes this (Specular Moment, 330). 91 Wellbery, Specular Moment, 295. 92 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 154–5.

94  Figures of Natality such from its worldliness in a sort of bad mimesis of Galileo’s observational technique. The cogito is in this sense only the self-referential version of the telescope. If this autotelic dimension of production reflects the totalization of economic life in terms of production, circulation, and acquisition, it also affects the status of the artwork. In Arendt’s classicizing model, the activity of making or poiesis applies as well to the making of statues or paintings, to arts and crafts as such. The activity of the artist consists in doing something “not for its own sake but in order to produce something else” and is therefore “banausic.”93 Her account of production sees it as part of the economic processes that move from homo faber to homo laborans, from making as an end to mere labor, activity for activity’s sake. Arendt further links this critique of fabrication to Kantian subjectivity in terms that originate with the misunderstood saying “man is the measure of all things.” She corrects this misquoted line by pointing out that Protagoras in fact said “pantōn chreˉmatōn metron estin anthrōpos,” in which chremata signifies “things used or needed or possessed by men.”94 (The term chreˉmata will return in an economic context in Chapter 3 below, where I consider “chrematistics,” in which money becomes an instrument for producing more money.) As I adumbrated it above, the fall into technē therefore coincides with the fall into modern subjectivity, from the methodological skepticism of the cogito to the categories of the understanding. The threads of the above considerations of Goethe’s lyric poetry wind around the question of technique and technology (Technik), in which the reading of figures of natality is implicated since Plato’s Socratic “maieutic craft,” maieutikeˉ technē. In the background of any Arendtian approach to this question lurks Heidegger’s thinking on making, poiesis, in “The Question Concerning Technology.” As the most insightful student of the Heidegger-Arendt relationship, Dana R. Villa, points out, Arendt’s concept of the political and action emerges where, for her, Heidegger’s critique of technology reverts to a figure of homo faber in the poet as maker. This critique also reflects Arendt’s concern to criticize modern institutions and practices while not falling into what she saw as Heidegger’s privatization of the relationship to Being, which had been forgotten, according to Heidegger, in the modern age of subject-centered, self-directed, and self-reproducing ways of life. While referring to Plato’s critique of this anthropocentrism and his evocation of a transcendental, divine measure of all things (replacing anthropos with theos), Arendt does not make the theocentric turn as such; she does not follow her erstwhile mentor’s saying that “[o]nly a 93 Ibid., 156–7. 94 Ibid., 158–9.

Lyric Births 95 god can save us.”95 Instead, she replaces this god with the public space of the agora, which, she says, is converted in Greece under tyranny to a true marketplace, with market stalls, and the citizen into a producer, a demiourgos, a worker for the demos, people. In this sense, the exchange market is the last bastion of homo faber, now become a merchant96— something to consider in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise as well as in Romantic economics in the following chapters. The corrupted destiny of the political subject is rearticulated in terms of the production and circulation of use objects, in the absence of all other standards,97 but, as the subsequent chapters will show, these objects can be usefully opposed to the sorts of in-finitude Arendt also criticizes. Dana R. Villa sees in Arendt’s critique a partial misprision of Heidegger’s version of modernity; he refers to her “pre-philosophical” understanding of action as opposed to its subsumption either under contemplation or in the technocratic language of means and ends as a continuation of Heidegger’s project of Abbau (deconstruction), meant to remedy not just the forgetting of Being but the “forgetting of the forgetting,” to remind moderns that something has been forgotten that is buried underneath layers of implicitly or overtly instrumental, technologically oriented reason.98 Both Arendt and Heidegger oppose the philosophical foundation of politics as directed to or limited by a certain end (even the “kingdom of ends” of Kantian morality, given its ludic dimension by Schiller), but their difference emerges, on Villa’s reading, where Arendt’s critique of poiesis in favor of action or praxis addresses the idea of an immanent, autotelic determination of production. This is not just art for art’s sake, but, as in the well known formulae of aesthetic politics that take their cue from Paul de Man’s reading of Schiller with Goebbels,99 it is the conception of the state as artwork, as an object of production.100 In distinction to this model and from an ancient philosophical deduction of practice from theory and subordination of means to ends (one that continues in Kant’s ethical theory, as the end-in-itself limits practice), Arendt’s conception of “non-sovereign agonistic action smashes this figure [of theory-practice, 95 “Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 326. 96 Arendt, Human Condition, 162. 97 Ibid., 166. 98 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 114 and 166–70. 99 Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 154–5. 100 See Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), for a continuation of this critique into the notion of technical practices and the “pragmatic.” See also Chapter 2 below, for a critical version of Lessing as pragmatist.

96  Figures of Natality means-ends], breaking the circuit of justification through the liberation of action from the rule of grounding principles and pregiven ends.”101 Sovereignty here is not the Hobbesian-Schmittian version, but something like Bataille’s, an enjoyment—here, a way of acting— beyond utility.102 The two moves from which the political in the critical sense withdraws are the totalization of politics and the conversion of politics into a domain of philosophy. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “the actualization or installation” and “the generalization (the globalization) of the philosophical as the political” and “the absolute reign or ‘total domination’ of the political” is the after-effect of the Greek philosophical takeover of politics in Plato’s Republic but has a new form they take from Arendt’s diagnosis, a “new totalitarianism” in which the social, economic, and other spheres take over, human beings are defined as laborers and producers, and a loss of authority accompanies a loss of freedom. Their critique of the chain of “auto-” prefixes that shape the notion of the Romantic poem (poem being the thing that is made in poiesis, the product) is an extension of Arendt’s critique of poiesis as the work of a political homo faber become a philosopher (since philosophy is goal-directed). This new totalitarianism of production and material need cancels out both transcendence and difference, rather like the anonymization of misery in the masses only represented in revolutionary empathy. Their question is not how to reinstall the transcendent, but of “wonder[ing] how the retreat [of the political] compels us to displace, re-elaborate, and replay the concept of ‘political transcendence.’”103 The answer I have indicated above lies in the critique of Romanticism and can be evoked through the Romantic model of the lyric, as it seems to produce the tight autological or autotelic coupling that only mirrors itself, and has no spatial or temporal other. Just as Arendt is concerned with “God” only in the sense of the struggle with technology and art as craft, transcendence is for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy not a metaphysical possibility, but a reference to alterity and to a possible relation to what is outside of the cycles of production, need, and economy. This is therefore a comparison of two kinds of birth: the auto-poietic that takes on flesh in a narrative of its own generation 101 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 247. 102 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 3, 198–200. 103 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Retreat of the Political,” Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), 129–30. The third point recalls Lacan’s correction to the idea that the end of the paternal name/“no” produces freedom, as the freedom of representation and mobility of meaning are only guaranteed by the availability of the symbolic order.

Lyric Births 97 from itself; and the other-oriented that does not ground or found itself philosophically, not even in appealing models in which foundation is split as gendered conception (Zeugung) with the attendant division of labor and production, but preserves in this case through temporality in the contingent futurity of the new.104 Lest this seem like a placative answer that simply takes Goethe as an Arendtian, one can also note that “Explanation of an Old Woodcut” opens the lyric genre from a closed specularity to an open-ended reference to a different kind of vocation, public and not intimate, referring once more to a symbolic and emblematic register and working with Muses who speak rather than suspending speech in intimate silences. This change points to a problem inherent to the dynamic of art as performative public speech, i.e., as action in Arendt’s sense, and art as tapping into sublime, prediscursive layers of Being. While it also reflects a different idea of vocation in contrasting Prometheus and Hans Sachs, this problem goes to the heart of the figure of homo faber, of the poietic human being. The problem emerges clearly in the distinction between Arendt’s critical conception of technology, subjectivity, and fabrication and that of Martin Heidegger. While Heidegger seeks to do away with metaphysics and categories such as the subject, his understanding of technology in “The Question Concerning Technology,” as potentially disclosive of an erased awareness of both Being and danger repeats the Romantic structure that itself erases other dimensions of poetic inspiration and legitimation. Just as the Romantic conception of Goethe’s lyric poetry was marked by the elision or erasure of its own marks of production, Heidegger closes “The Question Concerning Technology” with a meditation on a line from Hölderlin, albeit a truncated one as he cites it: “… dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde.” The full line and its surroundings in the long poem “In lieblicher Bläue” are as follows: … Ist unbekannt Gott? Ist er offenbar wie die Himmel? dieses glaub’ ich eher. Des Menschen Maaß ist’s. Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde. Doch reiner ist nicht der Schatten der Nacht mit den Sternen, wenn ich so sagen könnte, als der Mensch, der heißet ein Bild der Gottheit.105 104 Villa refers this sort of history to Walter Benjamin’s version of Messianism and to Arendt’s admiration for failed attempts and lost causes, contrasting it with structural possibility or an immanent logic of history. Villa, Heidegger and Arendt, 267. 105 The attribution of this text to Hölderlin and its definitive form are not certain. It is presented as a prose poem in Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1953), 372. “Is God unknown? / Is He visible as the sky? This / I rather believe. It’s the measure of men. / Full

98  Figures of Natality The anthropomorphic or perhaps anthropometric God is here made to the measure of man but without the implication of finitude, as the previous lines claim friendship as that which makes humans godlike in the absence of the gods. More telling is perhaps what Heidegger leaves out in immediate proximity to the innocuous, poetic dwelling: “Voll Verdienst,” an implied if slight contrast to “dichterisch,” as it is introduced by “doch,” generally the affirmation of a contrary. In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (1936), Heidegger cites the whole line, with “Verdienst,” but omits the thought of merit, which one might call theological in another sense, of earning human dignity against some other, non-human measure, a relic of the belief in salvation by works or through work. He considers only “dichterisch wohnet” (“poetically dwells”) and considers poetry as “the founding naming of Being and of the essence of all things,” as making language possible (ordinary language is a sort of paraphrase or discourse about the opening poetry makes possible), and as “the primordial language of a historical people.”106 The ties of “Mensch” and “Erde” through language are not mediated by a concept such as “world.” This is one of the objections Paul de Man raises to Heidegger’s reading: a poem itself is already mediated; it does not simply reflect or establish a relation to Being.107 The quality of the lyric or Romantic Poesie as mediated in this sense is covered up by the “romantic lie” (Girard) of intimate duality, which also makes necessary the obliteration of the marks of creation. If the poet can draw on his own umbilical cord, he has not been born. One might object to this that Arendt also writes of relation to Being and of disclosure in a Heideggerian vein. However, as Dana Villa makes clear, it is her orientation to self-disclosure in speech and to action as future-oriented that separates her from her former mentor. This also distinguishes an immediate relation to Being, expressed in language as the “founding naming of Being and the essence of all things,” from the sort of political action and founding of institutions that Arendt praises in the American revolutionaries. While it may be impossible to know what lies ahead, the destiny or destination of action is already apparent in Heidegger’s ambivalent term Geschick, which can refer to structure of profit [sic] but poetically man / Lives on this earth. But the shadow / Of night with the stars is not purer, / If I could put it like that, than / Man, who is called the image of God.” Friedrich Hölderlin, His Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger with a critical study (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 263. 106 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” translated by Jerome Veith, in The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 124–6. 107 See Sarah Pelmas, “Literary Reading: Hölderlin Through Heidegger Through De Man,” Surfaces 3 (1993): 5–25. http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/ surfaces/vol3/pelmas.html. January 16, 2016.

Lyric Births 99 as well as to fate or destiny. Like French revolutionary or German lyric empathy, the critical or philosophical identification of an immediate relationship of language and Being proceeds only by identification with the People or the poet; it gets rid of any awareness of the reader or critic as a third party. Goethe’s poem on Hans Sachs’s poetic Sendung thematizes a relationship to recipients or readers of the poem, transposing this reception to the future and, at the same time, providing a discursive and symbolic framework for such posterity. Goethe’s various iterations of the Pygmalion problem present one way of thinking poetically that circles around the always problematic relationship of nature to technē. The specular birth of poetic power from an abundance, troped as maternal and natural, short-circuits this problem in favor of a near-immediacy separated only by a hiatus. The Pygmalion scenario, from the ribald student version to the sublimated use of Glut in the “lyric” phase, presents another account of the poet’s progress, this time not from the idyll to the lyric or from Klopstock’s name-dropping “wir” in “Zürchersee” to Goethe’s “ich” and its immediate link to Nature (from “Zürchersee” to “Auf dem See”), but from a mimetic scenario based on technē, craft, to one based on physis, nature. In this scenario, nature and natural functions, such as the immediate, non-imitative contact of the genius with nature, replace even the “banausic” notion of craft labor with specularity. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe therefore puts a different value on Heidegger’s notion of enframing, seeing technē itself as the uncanny supplement to a supposedly complete nature. Fictionality is then that which disrupts the coherence of the subject where it was supposed to produce its integrity.108 This is a Heideggerian answer to a Heideggerian problem: the internal dynamic of technology as imitative poiesis undermines Heidegger’s own poetic resolution of the problem in the mystical co-evolution of danger and salvation. Heidegger cites Hölderlin: “Wo Gefahr ist, da wächst / Das Rettende auch” (“Where there is danger, there, too, grows the saving”). Precisely in this context, Arendt’s substitution of praxis for poiesis makes legible the difference between “Prometheus” and “Explanation of an Old Woodcut,” in ways that Heidegger’s critique of technology does not. Dana Villa stresses the distinctness of Arendt’s theory of action or praxis from Heidegger’s conception of poiesis. Arendt’s insistence on foundationless action and her pessimism about the possibility of a public sphere find no facile answers in parliamentary democracy, even as she champions the institutionality of the American version of revolution: “Her point … is not that everything is bad, but that

108 Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, Politics, 83–5.

100  Figures of Natality everything is dangerous.”109 This danger echoes Heidegger’s conclusion to “The Question Concerning Technology.” The crucial difference between fashioning the identical and the contingent fate of another sort of brainchild eludes the Geschick as Heidegger understands it: as the “gathering sending” (“versammelnde[s] Schicken”) that “brings the human being onto the path of unconcealing.”110 This Geschick as a kind of sending is however different from the Sendung Goethe attributes to Hans Sachs, even though both could be translated via Latin as missio. Heidegger’s seemingly Romantic evocation of the velocity of Bestellen, which endangers insight into unconcealment, produces its own solution in a sort of complementary specular duplex: the approach to the essence (Wesen) of technology (Technik) through art is grounded in the kinship of both (their being related, “verwandt”) and their alienation in the spheres, respectively, of technology as “the technical” (“das Technische”) and of aesthetics. Heidegger’s diagnosis of a withdrawal (Entzug) of being under the expansion of metaphysics from its foundations to planetary domination reflects the urge to totality that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy equate with the “withdrawal of the political” (re-trait du politique). The relationship of danger and salvation or rescue is duplex in the sense that the question itself, as “the piety of thinking,” grows in proportion to both danger and salvation, a kind of parallel that resembles in turn the Romantic version of a dynamic mirroring of a binary, particularly as it is the very quality of dynamism, of motion, that creates the parallel. Just as the growing pervasiveness of “das Rasende,” a velocity that only ever increases in the apparent fatalism of technological development, produces in the end the event of revelation of the truth of technology, so does it imply the increased visibility of paths to salvation from this fate. This tight coupling of fatality and danger seems to imply a sort of religiosity that is different from the appeal to a third term of action, of praxis in the place of the poiesis that is supposed by Heidegger to produce the thinking relationship as piety. Indeed, even an apparent linguistic confusion in Heidegger’s reference to the piety of thinking describes an archaic state of technē as a single but complex form of unconcealment in which technē was “fromm, προμος” in relation to truth.111 The Greek word promos that Heidegger seems to translate by apposition as fromm, “pious,” in fact means “the foremost man” and, in Homeric usage, one who faces the enemy in the front rank. It is also equivalent to

109 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 270. 110 Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” 25. 111 Ibid., 35.

Lyric Births 101 Latin primus or princeps.112 This martial Greek term degenerates (as Heidegger would see it) into an openly political Latin term, the origin of “prince” or “Fürst” (the “first”) and of more collegial forms of regal sovereignty as primus inter pares. Similarly, Heidegger’s text seems to slip into a political register, with the mysterious powers or being in force (walten) already meaning to exercise governmental or sovereign power (per Adelung, “regieren, herrschen”). Even Wesen threatens to become political, turning also into the exercise of power, in the city hall as Weserei. This obscure term that Heidegger cites might recall to students of German history the term Verweser, one who exercises administrative power over something or someone, a term at least occasionally in use in Goethe’s time and beyond.113 Heidegger’s tilting this unstable semantic field in his direction institutes the forgetting of the same kind of merit that Hans Sachs has earned in Goethe’s poem. More importantly, it also obliterates the marks of the political, eliding a discourse of action (praxis) in favor of an immediate, parallel relation of poetic making or dwelling and being. An account of action distinct from the question of making or poiesis embraces that danger because there is no solution in a recovery of language or a remembering of being. If the uncertain fate of the poem as such can emerge even from the autonomy of a proto-Romantic lyric model in spite of itself, if it can allow us to question the fatalist notion that, “within enframing [das Gestell], everything can appear as standing-reserve,”114 then perhaps some medium can indeed be found for the hope with which Arendt invests natality. The categories of worldly faith, hope, and love in Arendt’s secular version of the theological virtues respond to the forgetting of the political initiated by homo faber and point to the secular beyond that is represented in “Hans Sachs’s poetic mission” as the memory of action in posterity. LacoueLabarthe and Nancy offer another solution in their wordplay: re-trait 112 An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, based on Liddell and Scott, Greek–English Lexicon, 7th edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 681, s.v. προμος. 113 Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart mit beständiger Vergleichung der übrigen Mundarten, besonders aber der oberdeutschen. 2nd edition (Leipzig, 1793–1801). S.v. verwesen: Grammatischkritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart. http://www.woerterbuchnetz. de/Adelung?lemma=2_verwesen. S.v. walten: http://www.woerterbuchnetz. de/Adelung?lemma=walten. January 16, 2016. The meaning of Verweser was current as late as the mid-nineteenth century, as the title of Prince Johann of Austria in 1848–9 was Reichsverweser, the quasi-monarch of the provisional pan-German government. 114 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 268. Villa means this in the most general sense, against the premises of Habermasian or Foucauldian models that assume the totality of standing-reserve and its colonizing or disciplinary powers.

102  Figures of Natality is also re-drawing, re-tracing. The legibility of a clearing for political natality in spite of the totalization of models of political, social, or scientific order comes in the next chapter from a perhaps unexpected source: Lessing’s supposed parable of tolerance, Nathan the Wise, where one can read the re-drawing of a political distinction beyond tolerance as a mode of action precisely in conditions of greatest danger.

Two  Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political

Family as the medium of political community is the theme of G. E. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779). While the play is a literary classic in the genre of edifying tales of tolerance and humanity, the ethical truths it apparently wants to convey are on another kind of reading only secondary to its political theme. This theme is on one hand the evasion of the political as I explicated it in the previous chapter, as the play resolves political conflict among groups and individuals with different claims into the “allerseitige Umarmungen” (“embraces all around”) of its placative conclusion, upon the discovery of the blood relation between the Sultan Saladin and the crusading Knight Templar (Tempelherr) Curd von Stauffen, also known as Leu von Filneck. These embraces seem destined to show the superiority of one teacher, Nathan, the wise Jew of the title, in demonstrating the lesson of a human community that consists in the suspension of certain kinds of truth claims in favor of the higher truth of the unity of the human family (das Menschengeschlecht). This unity takes place in the ambivalent sense of the German Geschlecht as both an extended, usually noble, family that preserves its structure and continuity and as a genus in the taxonomic sense: humanum genus, humankind. This call for tolerance in the name of participation in a larger human family is a motif of Enlightenment drama.1 Helmut J. Schneider sees Lessing’s play as a “Drama der Geburt” (drama of birth)2 and as the moral securing and transformation of elementary drives and acts such 1 For a recent version of this assertion, see Helmut J. Schneider, Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2011). 2 Helmut J. Schneider, “Der Zufall der Geburt: Lessings Nathan der Weise und der imaginäre Körper der Geschichtsphilosophie,” Körper/Kultur: Kalifornische Studien zur deutschen Moderne, ed. Thomas W. Kniesche (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995), 100–24.

104  Figures of Natality as reproduction (Zeugung) and birth into a historical universalism. The embraces that close the play would then be a definitive tableau representing the family of humanity that is also the outcome of the historical process: In the play’s value system, it is this kind of compassionate action [empathischen Handelns] toward one’s fellow human being, Mitmenschlichkeit, that establishes the true fraternal or sisterly union for which the actual family relationship is but the external sign; the blood family in fact becomes the dramatic symbol for a moral brotherhood, or Geschwisterlichkeit, of mankind across the divide of race, nationality, and creed.3 So far, so simple. The convenient confluence of Nathan the Wise and Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of Humankind), with its pedagogy of human unity in history also accomplished by the Jews as tutors of humanity, underscores this noble message of progress and equality. The received version of Nathan the Wise consists in understanding the play as a fable of tolerance, an extended version of the famous parable of the rings that Nathan tells to the sultan Saladin. In more or less generalized versions, this is the Nathan that circulates as an edifying tale in the spirit of Goethezeit humanism. Even if one takes into account Lessing’s surrender of ultimate truths in favor of a non-dogmatic and perpetual searching for truth, one might read that “the drama does establish the priority of liberal, broad-minded, tolerant reason over the bare factuality of birth, the ‘Zufall der Geburt,’ representing all of the unchangeable, natural factors of gender, race, family or tradition that are merely given to us – literally, ‘fall upon us.’”4 Combined with the family as a sign or symbol, the argument for Enlightenment liberalism and tolerance opposes a conditioning and determining nature to the unconditioned and free social bond that can be reconfigured as tolerant. In what follows, I offer a different semiotics of the family and of tolerance in Nathan the Wise that challenges the simple opposition between the facticity of 3 “The Facts of Life: Kleist’s Challenge to Enlightenment Humanism (Lessing),” A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Bernd Fischer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 143–4. I interpolate the German in brackets from the same spot in Helmut J. Schneider, “Lebenstatsachen: Geburt und Adoption bei Lessing und Kleist,” Kleist-Jahrbuch 2002, 29. Schneider posits the destruction of Lessing’s model of humanity in Kleist, but leaves open how the “facts of life” can take on a new, positive model after Kleist. 4 Schneider, “Facts of Life,” 146. Schneider argues that Kleist reverses this priority, focusing on the fact of birth rather than the conventionality of adoption. I offer another version of Kleist in Chapter 5.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 105 birth and political freedom beyond natural determinations: an indexicality that undermines the natural discourse in Nathan through the economic discourse, while pointing to the event-character of political natality as that which makes the semiotic and metaphorical levels of the play cohere in spite of its evocations of natural reason as the basis of religious tolerance. The idea that Lessing’s play is a parable of tolerance has of course been challenged from various angles. Critics point to its intolerance and taboos—of positive religion, of sibling incest—or offer alternative readings that make Nathan and Nathan stand for values other than those traditionally associated with Enlightenment humanism as Schneider summarizes it. Jörg Schönert and Willi Goetschel read in the play different versions of a pragmatic sociability that uses economic language in order to represent liberal standards of negotiated interaction.5 With explicit reference to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political and the difference between the political “pluriverse” and the exclusionary deployment of universals such as “humanity,” Wilfried Wilms sees Nathan as an account of the human family in conflict with Lessing’s Ernst and Falk: Conversations for Freemasons, which on his reading defends a pluralistic social and political order.6 Michael Thomas Taylor reads the standard of family and friendship in the play as placing a taboo on the budding incestuous relationship between the Templar and Recha, neutralizing sexual passion in favor of the chaste embraces of a brother and sister. (Freedom must have limits after all.)7 Daniel Fulda reads the figure of Nathan in a way that contravenes central tenets of the history of Lessing reception in so far as he makes him into a Baroque politicus, the opposite of the bourgeois moral and economic subject. Nathan would then be a courtly operator whose language and action are cases of strategic self-presentation in the tradition of Baltasar Gracián, whose manuals of courtly conduct also inspired a good deal of Modernist political thinking and drama, evinced in the interwar theories of “cool conduct” studied by Helmut Lethen in Schmitt, Brecht, and others.8 5

Jörg Schönert, “Der Kaufmann von Jerusalem. Zum Handel mit Kapitalien und Ideen in Lessings Nathan der Weise.” Scientia poetica 12 (2008): 89–113. Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 6 Wilfried Wilms, “The Universalist Spirit of Conflict: Lessing’s Political Enlightenment.” Monatshefte 94, no. 3 (2002): 306–21. 7 Michael Thomas Taylor, “Same/Sex: Incest and Friendship in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.” Seminar 48, no. 3 (2012): 333–47. 8 Daniel Fulda, “‘Er hat Verstand, er weiß / Zu leben; spielt gut Schach’: Nathan der Weise als Politicus.” In Aufklärung und Weimarer Klassik im Dialog, eds Andre Rudolph and Ernst Stöckmann, 55–78. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2009.

106  Figures of Natality A creative rewriting of Nathan the Wise such as Georg Tabori’s Nathans Tod nach Lessing (Nathan’s Death According to / After Lessing), in which Saladin refuses to hear the parable of the rings, represents another current in reception of the play: to reconceive it in the context of the “dark times” of the twentieth century and the historical event of the Holocaust.9 In their Lessing Prize acceptance speeches, which I shall consider below, Hannah Arendt and Jan Phillip Reemtsma address different facets of Lessing’s relationship to the public sphere and history. Like the reading of Augustine from which she derived the concept of natality, Arendt’s version of Nathan makes it evidence for her larger purpose, a paean to the “interspace” between social actors that makes political action possible, while Reemtsma connects the annihilation of Nathan’s previous family to the maintenance of a salutary particular identity and prudent conduct to protect oneself as bearer of that identity. These readings mark a shift borne by history and their authors’ own agendas toward an adaptation, a hermeneutic appropriation of the play for historical needs.10 These indications of a political valence beyond tolerance to the play’s conception of humanity can be reconceived more systematically in terms of natality as referring to a kind of maieutic process in which relations are produced, not naturally given. I want to ask how Lessing and Nathan the Wise relate to the political in terms of such a maieutic process. This second iteration of the question of maieutics as conceptual midwifery can address the question of how definitively valid family relationships are established, as Nathan has first one then two adopted children and Saladin and Sittah come to accept Nathan’s adopted daughter Recha and the Templar as their niece and nephew. As it relates to the political, this question has to do with the sovereign function of Saladin but also with the constitution of political and social community. Natural accounts of genealogy and kinship extrapolated to the so-called human family exclude conflict and contingency because of an underlying belief in necessary connections and their progressive realization in consciousness and in community. More immediately and See Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, translated by Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 9 See Reinhart Meyer, “Lessing on the German-Speaking Stage, 1945–1990,” in A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 292. 10 Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” Trans. Clara and Richard Winston. In Arendt, Hannah, Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968. Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, “Die Dankrede zum Lessing-Preis: Nathan schweigt.” Die Zeit 49 (1997), 28 November, 1997. http://www.zeit.de/1997/49/lessing.txt.19971128.xml/komplettansicht. July 15, 2015.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 107 intuitively than in the Kantian linkage of autonomy, necessary moral and aesthetic judgment, and historical progress, this connection asserts its natural character in the readability of Nature as the basis for social order. At least on some readings, Lessing’s version can make room for action. Rather than asserting this categorically as an interpretation on the binary between affirmation and critique of the play from the point of view of the political, I shall examine the fault lines in Nathan the Wise in terms of Lessing’s pedagogy of the human family, his relation to Spinozist and liberal notions of tolerance and freedom, and his semiotics. These three aspects of Nathan join different conceptions of generation and genealogy to models of literary genre in shared modes and metaphors of birth. In dealing with complexities of these three angles on Nathan, I find that a temporal indexicality points to a natal moment that persists in Lessing. That is, the play’s connection to the political in the sense I am using it here, as irreducible and irrefragable conflict, is underwritten by a semiotic mode not of signs or symbols but of immediate markers of past events. Much like the work of Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist, it makes these complexities legible to the present not because of deeper meaning or symbolic concord but precisely in their material referentiality. The facticity of birth as an event, not simply as a connection to nature and biology, creates the kind of opening that the historical materialist sees in history. As it opposes a linear “universal history” to a moment in which there is a “messianic arrest of happening” or “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” in so far as the smallest historical element is a marker of all of history,11 Benjamin’s implicit rewriting of the relationship between intuition and reading, present and past, seems to revise Lessing’s Education of Humankind. It does so insofar as it posits a connection between the contingent givenness of birth, its facticity, and “the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us,” on the one hand, and, on the other, a larger human family not of genealogical ancestors but of missed connections. The debt to past generations (“gewesenen Geschlechtern”) is not the progressive constitution of the Menschengeschlecht. Rather, it comes about therefore not because “we” come from them, but because the past makes a claim to the “weak messianic power” of the current generation. This claim is legible in the “secret index” that the past carries with itself, “by which it is referred to redemption.”12 Without wanting to continue the Germanist hagiography of reducing all things to Benjamin, I shall return to this sort of

11 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 396. 12 Ibid., 390. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:693–4.

108  Figures of Natality ur-phenomenality in concluding in order to link Lessing once more to Benjamin and the Modernist tradition of natality. While this is not the same as seeing Lessing as an avatar of the political in the strong sense, it indicates how birth is represented in Lessing’s liberal fictions as the motor of a different sort of history and social arrangement than that immediately suggested in the Enlightenment humanist reading of his work. My restaging of Nathan via the current critique of tolerance will define a natal economy—by analogy to Freud’s libidinal economy or Triebhaushalt—that can be contrasted with the Romantic economics of the following chapter and that sets the stage for the reading of economic metaphors in terms of the natal in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The political as well as the natal remain in Nathan the Wise at least a subtext that imperils the coherence of the community constituted by the embraces that close the play. This subtext underscores the tensions among natural reason in its Spinozist version, liberal pragmatism, and the practices that emerge from the conflictual structure of the political.

The Lessing Controversy and the Question of Natality

If the central feature of natality is the supposition that something spontaneous and new is possible, outside of predictable channels of causation, habit, or procedure, then natality is the central question of the so-called Spinozismus- or Pantheismus-Streit, the controversy around Lessing’s alleged Spinozism that roiled German philosophical circles in the mid-1780s. This controversy embroiled Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in a debate between the liberal Enlightenment and the religious Counter-Enlightenment.13 Jacobi’s critique of Spinoza’s “nihilism” (a term Jacobi may have coined in this debate) was made vicariously through Jacobi’s disclosure of Lessing’s Spinozism, first indirectly through personal channels to Mendelssohn in 1783 and then in written form, as a description of his conversation with Lessing in Wölfenbüttel in July, 1780. This conversation on Goethe’s poem “Prometheus” led to Lessing’s affirmation of the pantheist motto hen kai pan, “one and all,” and Jacobi’s polite dissent. Jacobi expressed his belief in a personal God, free will, and providence, criticizing Spinoza’s determinism, which he saw as leading to fatalism. Instead, Jacobi defined his view of the philosopher’s task as “to disclose existence” (“Daseyn zu enthüllen”), an early version of the phenomenology that would develop from Kant’s philosophical revolution in the work of Reinhold and others and perhaps the founding 13 The details of this debate are explained masterfully in Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), Ch. 2.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 109 act of existentialism.14 The resumption of the argument between Jacobi and Mendelssohn as Lessing’s friend and philosophical executor led to the publication of Jacobi’s On the Teaching of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn in late September, 1785, and the appearance of Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden (Morning Hours) in early October. Philosophical nuance aside, the blunt force of this controversy was to associate the key figure of German literature with a philosopher whose main reputation at that point was as an atheist (a charge against which Goethe defended him to Jacobi).15 Jacobi understood Spinoza’s philosophy to be nihilistic in so far as it held that every effect has a natural cause. The critique of miracles in the Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus implied that miracles could be explained adequately through an improved understanding of natural cause and effect. As Jonathan Israel notes, Spinoza’s critique of miracles carries on his contention in the early Cogitata Metaphysica that there is no contingency, as it would be wrong to imagine that God, being perfect, could change from one state to another (as action or will supposes) or, being consistent, could change his mind or purpose.16 This is the reverse of Carl Schmitt’s observation that the political decision is the secularized form of the miracle: there is no meaningful sense to decision, since there is no place in this chain where it could intervene, and therefore no sense to a concept like natality. Jacobi’s defense of a salto mortale indicates where, for him, such a leap must go: not into action in the secular world but into faith. The contrast between Spinoza and Schmitt or Arendt on this point revolves around the distinction between birth as new creation, i.e., as natality, and life as a state of being. In his Ethics, Spinoza presents a science of life that transforms the Baroque meditatio mortis, meditation upon death, into meditatio vitae, meditation upon life. Spinoza’s understanding of life is not as a spontaneous vitality but as a connection between affect, intellect, and vital power. Spinoza’s focus on intellect as the understanding of these causal relationships, as well as his linking of affect to the growth of understanding and therefore of the subject’s intellectual power, evidently makes his philosophy crucial for the 14 Qtd in Frederick Beiser, Fate of Reason, 67. 15 In a letter to Jacobi of 9 June 1785, Goethe defends Spinoza as not “atheum” but “theissimum, eia christianissimum.” Goethe, Goethes Werke. Weimarer Ausgabe. Leipzig: Hermann Böhlau [und Nachfolger], 1887–1919), Vol. 4.7:62. Jonathan Israel says with reference to John Locke’s limited notion of toleration that “atheist” was “a broad and flexible category in contemporary parlance which embraced non-providential deists and pantheists.” Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 266. 16 Ibid., 219.

110  Figures of Natality Enlightenment project, but it also implies that he would occupy a very different position on the question of natality, since natality describes what exceeds knowledge, especially knowledge of cause and effect, refers to the new, and makes action possible. Arendt’s distinction between bios, a formed and articulate life, and zoē, mere animal life, can be helpful here. Life, especially the life that is the object of study of the “life sciences,” is different from birth qua natality, since birth in the context of zoē is simply an effect of life that can be understood in a chain of natural causes. For Spinoza, thinking relates to this chain in a “spiritual automaton,” in which “the order of thoughts” parallels “the order of things”: thought, too, follows the knowledge of biological life.17 Christian and post-Christian, secularized decisionism is evidently counter to this model of human intellectual capacity, which Jacobi saw as fatalism. Jacobi’s salto mortale into faith is one version of the decisionist alternative; Schmitt’s similarly theological equation of the sovereign decision with the divine miracle is another. But the demand to choose or decide between these two is premature if Lessing is still our concern. As Frederick Beiser points out, the problem of causality expressed in Lessing’s formulation, “the broad, ugly ditch between possibility and reality, concept and existence,”18 is handled by Mendelssohn with the methods of liberal, value-free enquiry. This style of inquiry is a circle not in its content but in its procedural assumptions, which reflect the circularity or the paradox of liberalism: the assumption that inquiry should be value-free and exclude prior, positive beliefs cannot be justified from within such an inquiry. As with Jacobi’s salto mortale, liberalism itself is a first value choice.19 This circle will appear below in Willi Goetschel’s liberal Spinozist reading of Nathan the Wise, but I think Lessing offers a different solution. Jacobi’s challenge aims at the assumptive horizon of liberalism in a way similar to the Modernist critique of purely procedural rationality and the splitting of the summit (what post-foundational politics calls the foundation) into ghost and machine, divine and mortal body, annuler and protector of the law. This is the existential joint that Lessing’s semiotics will address, as he seeks to undergird his Spinozist account of literacy as reading natural signs with a 17 Spinoza, Collected Works, 283 (Ethics III, prop. V). 18 Qtd Beiser, Fate, 96. 19 See Beiser, Fate, 98. I follow Beiser but try to couch his point in more Weberian terms. One could also point out the foundational circularity of the choice of the political. It implies that political values are not handed down from some closed sphere, and therefore it requires a first choice to think the political as opposed to reconstructing the political world in the image of one of the claimants to universal truth (economics, morality, humanitarianism), or a particularism that denies other particularisms the right to exist.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 111 theory of the function and moral purpose of art. Attempting to join the two halves through art cannot be strictly Spinozist, as this juxtaposition vitiates Spinoza’s own separation of realms of knowledge and behavior. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza separates reason and revelation entirely, assigning to faith a moral function and allowing each person to freely interpret the revealed component of faith according to current beliefs, “[f]or … faith demands piety rather than truth; faith is pious and saving only by reason of the obedience it inspires, and consequently nobody is faithful except by reason of his obedience.”20 Spinoza’s separation of theology and philosophy is based on this distinction between their respective aims: obedience to God and piety (“worship of God” as meaning “justice and charity, or love toward one’s neighbor”) as contrasted with the pursuit of truth. The two fields have different media as well. Philosophy is based on “universally valid axioms,” whereas faith rests on “history and language.”21 Lessing’s interest seems not to be philosophy in this sense. The refusal to possess a definitive truth, as he expresses it in the Duplik in the contrast of the possession of truth with its endless pursuit,22 seems to put truth on the side of religious certainty in the soteriological discourse of Christian Europe. As Recha puts it in comparing the Christian Daja’s tales of saints to her father’s teaching, “So viel tröstender war mir die Lehre, daß Ergebenheit in Gott von unserem Wähnen über Gott / So ganz und gar nicht abhängt” (I found much greater consolation in the teaching that surrender in God doesn’t depend at all upon our notions of God).23 Nonetheless, his aesthetics and semiotics will attempt to link history and language and some sort of validity in praxis, a validity that still relates to the intellective process of reading natural, not conventional, signs. In other words, it is not the status of God as creator or of the miracle as such that is at stake for Lessing, but the link between intuitive knowledge and social and political order. While Goetschel finds the Spinoza controversy irrelevant to a Spinozist reading of Lessing, he also proposes to settle the question of theory and practice, but in the direction of American pragmatism.24 Goetschel sees the lesson of Nathan as implying “freedom of religion, speech, and opinion with no restrictions whatsoever,” in a “deliberate 20 Spinoza, Complete Works, 518. 21 Ibid., 519. 22 Lessing, Werke, 8:33. 23 Ibid., 2:264. 24 On the first point, and for another summary of the controversy, see Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 12–16.

112  Figures of Natality critique of tolerance as just another exclusionary mechanism.”25 Most notable in liberal Spinozism, as opposed to the Benjaminian concept of history, is the idea that there are evolutionary stages of knowledge, from the belief in miracles based on simple and undefined perceptions, through the instrumentalization of reason in a sort of economic model, through the intuition of reality to the cleansing of the affects that leads to the fourth and final stage, the “liberated, autonomous use of reason.”26 In Nathan, the ambiguous ending, in which Nathan is the only member of the embracing group without sufficient genealogical grounds to be there, leaves the play open-ended as a lesson not of scientific or genetic grounding, but of the model of truth as negotiable exchange, for which Nathan’s form of action is the model.

Economies of Truth

The economic metaphors that undergird this approach to truth take over the stage in the bourgeois theater. Although Nathan the Wise is a “dramatic poem,” not a bourgeois tragedy, actions of state on the tragic level have been replaced by “the staging and playing out of the question ‘What constitutes truth?’”27 No longer a substance but a function, negotiable truth participates in another aspect of modern (or postmodern) liberal tolerance: the free exchange of markers of identity previously held to be given at birth. The emphasis on the how and not the what of truth makes the “sign of truth … contingent, arbitrary, and subject to coincidence,” as in a kind of philosophical pragmatism avant la lettre, whose origin is Spinoza and whose outcome is American pragmatism, Richard Rorty’s liberal conception of irony.28 Whether this presents a Lessingian escape from liberal premises of tolerance into the abstraction of methodology is another question. The key to Rorty’s conception of irony is the inability or unwillingness to see one’s own conceptual framework (one’s vocabulary, as Rorty calls it) as the final frame of reference or as otherwise legitimized through some metavocabulary. Rorty’s ironists realize “that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” and are “always aware of the contingency of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves.” The ironist’s awareness of this state of affairs begins in her admiration for the different vocabularies of those who are not ironic, who see their 25 Ibid., 232. Goetschel refers to Mendelssohn’s political critique of tolerance (esp. 144–6) and cites Kant’s letter to Mendelssohn as illustrating the opposite, the belief in Glaubensvereinigung or the eventual unification of all religions into one, against which he reiterates Cassirer’s understanding of Lessing’s version of tolerance as based on modesty (312). 26 Ibid., 245. 27 Ibid., 232. 28 Ibid., 233.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 113 own vocabularies as final.29 So, one way of staging truth is to see it in terms of how these discursive regimens or vocabularies are established, and the ironist is an apt tutor whose own message, however, is prone to coming across, in the words of Lessing’s Templar to Nathan, as that of a “tolerant chatterbox.”30 While this stress on tolerance in terms of religious freedom may be an unsophisticated approach to the play,31 one that, in Lessing’s context, need invoke neither the full force of Spinoza’s philosophy nor the distant horizons of pragmatism, another, more complex view of tolerance itself sees it as intimately connected to this ironic commerce in truths. This account of the relationship between pedagogy and political community as a history of increasing tolerance on pragmatic grounds shares some of the key features that Wendy Brown finds in the discourse of tolerance as an expression not of freedom but of the factual exercise of social, discursive, and political power. Brown’s polemical study Regulating Aversion also criticizes liberal tolerance from the point of view of its account of a separation of the universalization of reason from the cultural claims of the particular: “What, according to liberal theory, makes multiculturalism a political problem that tolerance is summoned to solve? And from what non-cultural, non-ethnic, or secular place is tolerance imagined to emanate for this work?”32 Before and in contrast to Kant’s version of equality as the universally possible yet autonomous apprehension of the moral law and the subjective power to act accordingly, Lessing’s answer to this question envisions a concrete, historically and culturally situated medium that short-circuits the “Cartesian splitting of mind from embodied, historicized, cultured being” that Brown identifies with the “Lockean, Kantian, Millsian, Rawlsian, and Habermasian perspectives.” Brown reiterates a critique that inverts the terms of Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which opposes universal to local reason. Instead of seeing the claims of non-universals such as the body, culture, and so on, as inadequate or illusory, as simply incidental to and not constitutive of subjectivity, Brown opposes a liberal, voluntarist conception of culture as “food, dress, music, lifestyle, and contingent values,” i.e., “mere way of life” or “a source of comfort and pleasure for the individual,” to the persistent claims of “culture as power and especially as rule.”33 In other 29 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73–4. 30 Lessing, Werke, 2:307. 31 Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 231. 32 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 152. 33 Ibid., 152–3. See J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 1995), 172–6, for an account

114  Figures of Natality words, precisely the making-contingent of different regimens of truth in the individualist and “lucky, rich, literate democracies” (Rorty)34 constitutes the contemporary form of tolerance, which happens to coincide with economies in which consumption, information, and the self-reproducing power of financial instruments have replaced industrial or agricultural production as the source of wealth. Rorty’s pragmatist arena, like Lessing’s stage, is a scene of free exchange of largely intangible goods. At the same time, the reduction of freedom to the idea of lifestyle choices both trivializes freedom and overlooks the power and persistence of the “facts of life” and their traces because they are inconvenient for that dominant discursive regimen. I will return below to the finer aspects of Brown’s critique in order to connect them to a different kind of materialism in Lessing. This liberal economization of identity markers is clearly related to the problem of nominalism as Marchart diagnosed it in relation to the concept of the political in the fungibility of concepts themselves beginning circa 1800, but it also seems close to the shopping model of liberal identity as Brown explains it: culture is something that one possesses, not something that possesses one. Truths are not taken seriously except as the tokens in cultural commerce. The ironist, while “admiring” those who see their own vocabularies non-ironically, occupies a different position vis-à-vis her own, making it difficult to stake claims for the goods or beliefs embodied in that vocabulary except in the name of its irony. The asymmetry here parallels that of the liberal to those who hold firm, positive convictions; the “negative liberty”35 implied in the liberal view is, in irony, a final conviction that there are no legitimate final convictions. It also implies a depoliticization, since Spinoza’s attitudinal and affective therapy, now in the form of healthy irony, replaces any positive cultural difference on the part of the liberal subject. Is liberalism a master argument that dissolves all other political, cultural, and affective bonds with irony? Or is it itself a value that exercises power and serves a specific political purpose? Chantal Mouffe relates this to two wings of liberal thought that she calls, with Hans Blumenberg, “self-assertion” and “self-foundation.” The problem lies in either wanting an adequate foundation for liberalism, a rationality of Habermas’s killing off of local reason in favor of the norms of procedural argumentation. 34 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, xv. 35 This is the term used by Isaiah Berlin in “Two Concepts of Liberty” (a speech delivered in 1959) to describe freedom from constraint as opposed to a right or entitlement to something. This lecture is reprinted in Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 115 which would exclude other sorts of rationality, or simply asserting liberalism as a highest value without such a foundation: liberalism as political decision, salto mortale. Mouffe criticizes Rorty’s liberalism as conflating free market capitalism, the institutions of the “rich North Atlantic democracies” (Rorty again), and political pluralism when genuine pluralism would have to entertain other economic, institutional, and cultural options as well.36 These postmodern critiques of liberalism address the knotty problem of which the economic discourse in Nathan is one manifestation: What is the relationship of economic theories and models, rhetoric and semiotics, to the problem of the political? Jacobi’s answer to Mendelssohn adumbrates one answer that privileges decision as a leap of faith, but the aesthetics and semiotics of this problem are considerably more complex when the problem is embodied in literary works of art. Political theory can help address this embodiment by formalizing the question to which literary representations provide an answer. However, the individualism Brown criticizes as the root of the liberal ideology of tolerance is not the motive factor of Lessing’s version of tolerance, except insofar as he makes universality legible on the bodies of the personae dramatis. Even if the parable of the rings in Nathan sees tolerance in the common origin and substantial indistinctness of the three Abrahamic religions, this indistinctness is organically embodied in Nathan in a distinguishing feature or set of features, including the Templar’s physiognomy that confuses Saladin at the outset, leading the Sultan to pardon his mortal enemy, and the handwriting that leads to the uncovering of the familial relations among the principal parties to the political and religious conflict: Saladin, the Templar, and Recha, Nathan’s adopted, Christian daughter. The liberal exclusion of the illiberal, the intolerance of the intolerant, therefore has its roots not in a normative doctrine taking human reason as its object but in the material reality of nature. It is not a matter of belief but of blood expressed in natural signs, the most natural and local one can imagine because it is a feature of the body. The unchanging metal medium of the rings, at least two of which are fakes (it seems just as dogmatic to try to figure out whether they can be copied, whether one is real, etc.), yields to the fleshy medium of the body and its genetic codes, which cannot be faked even if, as modern science knows, the link between genotype and phenotype is hardly as definite as it seems in Nathan the Wise. This is undoubtedly an outcome of Lessing’s Spinozist heritage, in which God and Nature are two modalities of the same, immanent substance in monist ontology, but it also refers to a temporal paradox. 36 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 9–10.

116  Figures of Natality Assuming that nature is always the same, that its signs remain inheritable and legible through generations—the premise of the play’s conflict and resolution—, why is nature more legible now than it was before? The liberal answer is the narrative of cosmopolitanism according to which progress separates modern, liberal and enlightened societies from ones in which people still cling to communitarian distinctions and rationalities. Kant’s philosophy of historical progress holds that increasing freedom brings prosperity and peace in subtle ways that cannot be intuited from the moral goodness of individuals or nations, ways that would work even for a “people of devils” (“ein Volk von Teufeln”).37 This does not entirely correspond to the liberal model described critically by Brown, in which willpower is narcissistic, focused on the individual’s choices. Kant’s idea of progress is a subliminal, not to say sublime, process, but one that will in time and through the transparency of treaties and the liberalization of trade among nations produce “perpetual peace.” Once more, Lessing shares this model but with a crucial difference. As Wendy Brown points out, liberal modernization perceives “transnational forces and formations” in this and the two previous centuries (Judaism, communism, and Islam in that chronological order) as a threat to its premises, because they link an organicist order to a threat to Western (gentile, not to say Christian) civilization.38 The premises of the drive for emancipation and assimilation of Jews in the nineteenth century’s version of the Jewish question, Marx and Engels’s elevation of a particular class to the role of the bringer of human emancipation, or the simultaneous ubiquity and particularity of the members of the vast Muslim umma all challenge the boundary between the general and the particular, in so far as they refuse to be placed on the side of a multicultural multiplicity that would reduce their claims to shareable cultural behaviors, one could simply choose to have—or not. When Nathan refers to differences “an Farb’, an Kleidung, an Gestalt” (in color, in dress, in looks) as trivial, the Templar counters that the Jews as the chosen people of God introduced the notion of privileged particularity.39 Both the trivialization of difference on Nathan’s part and the uneasy relationship of cultural privilege and the status of a persecuted people in the distinction made by the Christian reflect the two facets of hegemonic liberal tolerance: the particular is defective or dangerous, but never more so than when it tries to assume the mantle of the general, concealing the nefarious intentions it must have, as in 37 Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, in Werkasugabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 12 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 11:224. 38 Brown, Regulating Aversion, 93–5. 39 Lessing, Werke, 2:253.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 117 the Templar’s calling Nathan a “Jewish wolf in philosophical sheep’s clothing.”40 My premise in considering Brown’s critique of tolerance in reading Lessing is that the difference between a political theory that looks for normative components by which to describe and judge political ideas and actors and the literary manifestation of a social or political idea does not lie in aestheticization or conversion from the real world of politics to the literary fantasy. Instead, the literary version has the potential to answer the theoretical questions left over in political theory, to provide a medium in which the seemingly arbitrary demand for an account of culture as power and as effective rule (why can’t we all just get along, after all?) can be problematized and given some necessary nuances. For Brown (as in Herder’s critique of imperialism, one might add), the culture of the other challenges liberalism’s pretensions to liberality by showing up the lopsided nature of the imposition of those values. In Carl Schmitt’s terms, the “seinsmäßige Art von Leben” (existential kind of life) of the national unit challenges the formalization of universal and purely procedural norms.41 In the hands of the liberal subject of postmodern democracy, these procedures become the voluntarist and individualist traffic in cultural traits, one manifestation of which is cultural appropriation, the use of perhaps stereotyped traits of another culture. However, Schmitt’s and other versions of national and cultural positivity also have an abstract, normative function: the fundamentally fixed character of the nation or people, its being-thus (not just Dasein but Sosein) must be the case in order to prevent the ills of imperialism, the imposition of moral and economic universalism, or the extinction of meaningful alterity in multicultural consumerism. One needs the intransigent nationalist, Jew, Muslim, Christian (such as Daja, excluded from the closing embrace), and so on, in order to assert the power of cultural and ideological markers. The work of literature performs these tensions and contradictions without resorting to the normative a priori either of the liberal paradox—intolerance of the intolerant—or of reciprocal respect for the alterity of other cultures on the assumption that one has knowledge of what features make up this alterity. Schmitt’s treatment of alterity as potential enmity is more honest in this regard, as it recognizes without condescension the geopolitical agency of cultural difference as more than simply a fact to be respected by Rorty’s affluent North Atlantic pragmatists. The positivity of culture itself is not the enemy. Nonetheless, to assume that power means that other cultures or nations may in contingent, 40 Ibid., 2:307. 41 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 27. My translation.

118  Figures of Natality circumstantial conditions become an enemy, not of humankind itself, but simply of another particular group. How the idea of humankind is constituted in the first place is central to the questions that link Nathan and the recent critiques of tolerance. These three questions—of causality and will, of intellectual progress and pragmatic community, and of the features through which participation and inclusion are negotiated—arise in Lessing in terms of a pedagogical task. Where this education leads, who metes it out, and what sort of model of community and history that implies are the central questions of Lessing’s models of the human family. Examining pedagogical questions will lead back to maieutic ones, for Socrates, like Nathan, was the only one who had no offspring of his own, no brainchildren as knowledge, but his non-participation in that sort of family made him a more effective midwife for others’ ideas. (As a substitute for the loss of his own family, Nathan accepts Recha, whose own ancestry he later demonstrates.) What sort of midwife Nathan is remains to be seen, but it will have to do with an alternative to the determinist (“fatalist” or “nihilist,” in Jacobi’s language) and liberal, diffusely voluntarist, nominalist, or consumerist models of constituting political community. His trade in traits works differently from either of these models, even to the point of upsetting Lessing’s own liberal–progressive philosophy of history as progress toward that single human family.

An Impossible Education of Humankind?

Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of Humankind) is an account of the progressive history of the human race in one hundred theses that describe an evolution from the particular to the general and from revelation to reason, an evolution that ultimately yields a single human family just as in the closing scene of Nathan the Wise. It shares several features with the modern liberal tolerance critiqued by Wendy Brown, inasmuch as it constitutes the universal human family by supposing that cultural particularity is a feature to be shed in the course of history, and that only a temporal differential in enlightenment can explain that some groups retain this identity. Exclusion from the human family is not what Lessing envisions, but he does replace the spatial model of inclusion/exclusion with the temporal one of intellectual and cultural maturity. The Education of Humankind is a closed historical teleology with a tight, pre-existing set of features first made legible through revelation and then made communicable through reason. The temporality of this development is such that the Jew as tutor of humanity functions as the explicator of revelation and at the same time makes that revelation to a particular national community or people obsolete.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 119 Referring to the Babylonian exile, Lessing writes that Persian religion showed the Jewish people the virtue of its own monotheism as a religion of reason: “Revelation had guided its reason, and now reason illuminated at a stroke its revelation” (“Die Offenbarung hatte seine Vernunft geleitet, und nun erhellte die Vernunft auf einmal seine Offenbarung”).42 Yet the exposure of “immediately revealed truths” (“unmittelbar geoffenbarte Wahrheiten”) is only a medium of dissemination which spreads reason more quickly than “mere truths of reason” (“bloße Vernunftwahrheiten”) could be spread, a more effective vehicle that does not transform its content.43 Lessing then proceeds to explain the rational versions of the Trinity, original sin, and the Incarnation in terms of a linear teleology, passing through three ages of the collective life of humankind: Old Testament, New Testament, and then “the time of completion” or fulfillment (“die Zeit der Vollendung”)44 which aims at the goal of perfection. One can infer from Lessing’s formulations that perfectibility is the goal of the Erziehung (education, upbringing) of the human race as a whole, a common telos for all regardless of other differences: “What is brought up [reared, educated] is brought up to be something” (“Was erzogen wird, wird zu Etwas erzogen”).45 In the course of the education of humankind (the text as well as the idea), human groups are only differentiated by how quickly or slowly they go through these three stages of development, i.e., by a temporal differential, not by a spatial one, much less by irreducible cultural or ideological factors. While this is certainly not “essentialist,” its consequence is that especially Jews are destined teleologically to overcome their Jewishness and assume the position of general Enlightenment, remaining no longer a “kindisches Volk” (“childish people,” not kindlich, “childlike”)46 as the third and

42 Lessing, Werke, 8:498. The friendship of Nathan and the Sufi dervish al-Hafi is emblematic of this connection, as the dervishes are linked geographically and ideologically to other groups such as Jains and Zoroastrians. Zoroaster/ Zarathustra is an emblematic figure of monotheism. Al-Hafi’s wish to return to the Ganges with others of his group refers to the Indian connection as well. 43 Ibid., 8:504. 44 Ibid., 8:508. 45 Ibid., 8:507. 46 Ibid., 8:501. The difference in the two terms implies childish behavior, perhaps stubbornness or obstinacy, on the part of the Jews, whose Biblical “stiff-necked” character became a mark of opprobrium for anti-Semites for other reasons. That Spinoza also eliminates any possibility of a specifically Jewish character (Goethe called him “christianissimum” for some reason) might be noted in Lessing’s view, in a letter to Michaelis, of Moses Mendelssohn as becoming a new and better Spinoza, “provided his coreligionists permit him to mature.” Qtd Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 187.

120  Figures of Natality final age of the world is the time of the realization of the “plan of the general education [Erziehung] of humankind”47 beyond all particularity. The scope of Lessing’s argument here is that of humanity as a generic or genealogical unit, das Menschengeschlecht, and proposes a parallel development of the individual and the collective. At the beginning of Lessing’s argument, the agents of this development are revelation as the education of the collective and education as revelation for the individual. Toward the end of these 100 articles, art is the vehicle of individual, human education, and nature the vehicle of collective, divine (göttlich) education. These proceed in parallel, like the other mutually convertible terms in his text, but, rather than the reincarnation necessary for the progress of any mortal individual to the point of perfection, art condenses this temporality into a lifetime. Education parallels the assumption that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the path of the individual repeats the stages of the evolution of the group, as a human embryo seems to pass through different stages of the phylum Chordata before taking on its species characteristics. Yet Lessing practices a historical inversion: the individual develops from more specific into more general, taking on the characteristics common to the species and shaking off the shackles of culture, credo, and nation. This text historicizes and collectivizes the notion of individual development in Spinoza, which was a question of personal purification of negative affects. While theology and politics are necessarily separate spheres for Spinoza, with ethical conduct being taught by theology in the media of history and language and perfected by reason in nature, Spinoza’s political philosophy imagines the constitution of political community without the contractual model advanced by Hobbes and Rousseau, as those who are freed of negative affects can make trust the basis of sociability and political community.48 Having attained this state, like the integration of a particular family and its Jewish tutor at the close of Nathan, citizens no longer articulate differences but lose their particular selves in embraces all around. While Spinozist political theory since the 1970s has focused on the figure of popular sovereignty in the multitude (including recently Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s

47 Ibid., 8:509. 48 Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 74–5. Edwin Curley is less sanguine, noting that Spinoza’s political theory, like his epistemological ethics, sees the increase of the subject’s vital power as the outcome of shedding the passions that inhibit his development. This is connected to the notion of divine sovereignty and the derivation of right from power. See Edwin Curley, “Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 315–43.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 121 Multitude),49 the shift to popular legitimation should not obscure the fact that the basis of this legitimation is still a broad consensus on what is natural and the according adjustment of consciousness to eliminate factors that trouble the self-sufficient and self-consultative power of this multitude. Continuing the heuristic fiction of Lessing as Spinozist, one might read the freedom from “normative impositions”50 in his work in a way that underscores the problem of applying Spinoza’s spiritual automaton to social and political order. Against Etienne Balibar’s emphasis on the aporetic nature and technical impossibility of such a model of democracy, Willi Goetschel frames the lesson of Spinoza’s Political Treatise in the same way he reads Nathan, as the “realization of a practice of reason” that he finds in the pragmatic reading of truth functions in Nathan.51 The ambiguous language of right and power in Spinoza becomes no clearer when it is cast in terms of rights of masses prior to civil society or an “interrelation” of potentia and reason when the right of the individual, like the functioning of the state, is coextensive with its potentia. This is nonetheless, as in Education, a historical teleology, not the spontaneous and indeterminate power of the multitude but a theory of progress in the manner of Habermas’s theory of communicative action: while the “what” of truth is open-ended, only the realization of a practice of the right kind of procedural reason and the status of the truth-function, an agreement on the “how” of truth, can institutionalize both freedom and equality. As the justification of the present with reference to the future, teleology seems to imply sacrifice. However, one might well understand the unification of reason in the present as doing good for the sake of the good (and not for a future goal) as a normatively directed teleology, a final state of humanity to be realized only because it is already the latent truth of humanity. This still supposes the healing of the rift between thought and action in history rather than in theory, as the telos of a forward moving temporal orientation, even if toward attaining a perennial truth. I want to look at the notion of education in this sort of reason as an impossible vocation, one that is realized in Nathan only under conditions that seem to reverse the arrow of historical time in explaining how natural features are legible for the purpose of founding political community. If the Education of Humankind is an attempt to resolve the political questions raised by Spinoza’s own attempt to found politics in natural reason, it still needs a figure who is a sort of philosophical 49 Goetschel cites the significant body of Spinozist political theory that for reasons of space and relevance I omit here. Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 289–91. 50 Ibid., 80. 51 Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 79–81.

122  Figures of Natality sovereign, as he is both included in the set “humanity” and excluded from it. This is evidently the figure of the Jewish tutor, who in Education loses his own, monotheist identity that made his tutelage possible while remaining a part of the group (unlike al-Hafi in Nathan, who chooses to leave the community and return to the Persian and Indian fountainhead of monotheist religion after his job for the Sultan is done).52 While friendship in Arendt means continued, voluntary (not naturally founded) political association, the concept of friendship in Nathan designates the adoption of the non-natural relative by the state. The gift of an adopted daughter to replace the natural family becomes the means by which another natural family binds Nathan. As a reading of the language of traits (Züge) in the play will show, Nathan’s pedagogical task is not entirely a successful maieutics, much less one that points forward to greater unity in historical progress. Intentionally or not, this notion of pedagogy in Nathan offers a different version of education, release from negative affects, and therefore also of political power than that advanced by Spinoza.

History after Truth

Hannah Arendt’s reading of Lessing and Nathan the Wise refers to another kind of history, a later modern one in which the eternal verities are no longer available. How Lessing negotiates this world and how we must do so is the theme of Arendt’s 1959 speech upon accepting the Lessing Prize of the city of Hamburg. Arendt’s reading of Lessing and Nathan is rooted in her refusal, following Machiavelli, of the Christian injunction not to resist evil, on the grounds that it allows those who do wrong free rein.53 Her Lessing Prize speech emphasizes the apolitical character of victimhood, in the form of the “worldlessness” of “pariah peoples.” Contrasting the discursive “interspace” of living with others in the political sense to the pre-discursive warmth of those huddled together for protection, whether as outcasts from political spaces or in the revolutionary evocation of human “fraternity” that she addressed subsequently in On Revolution (1963) as the social question, Arendt sees this loss of the medium of “world,” as a deprivation that is “alas, … always a form of barbarism.”54 In Lessing, she sees a “partisanship 52 Silke-Maria Weineck points out that Nathan’s paternal function becomes “illegal” as an ethical position beyond the law, in which the “paternal position… can no longer be inhabited.” Silke-Maria Weineck, The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 136, 143. 53 Arendt, Human Condition, 78. 54 Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” trans. Clara and Richard Winston, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 13.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 123 for the world” that, as such, “admits of logical contradictions,” since “world” is a medium of speech and action, not a logically or causally rule-bound space.55 Arendt here follows the same method as she did with Augustine, interpreting Lessing’s suspension of a definitive truth in her own way, in terms of a modernity that has put paid to the notion of eternal truths. At the same time, she alters Lessing’s imagined answer to God, from the Duplik, in which he favors the search for truth to its attainment: “Wenn Gott in seiner Rechten alle Wahrheit und in seiner Linken den einzigen immer regen Trieb nach Wahrheit, obschon mit dem Zusatze, mich immer und ewig zu irren, verschlossen hielte, und spräche zu mir, wähle! Ich fiele ihm mit Demut in seine Linke, und sagte, Vater gib! die reine Wahrheit ist ja doch nur für dich allein.”56 (If God held all truth clenched in his right hand and in his left the always active desire for truth, though with the condition that I always and forever am mistaken, and said to me, “Choose!”, I would take his left hand humbly and say, “Father, give me this! the pure truth is for you alone.”) In Arendt’s version, even the search for truth is relativized in the terms of her political concept of worldliness, in which, after the “failed French Revolution,” the problem of foundation is raised anew as the impossible alternative to the failed restoration of previous truths.57 Arendt sees the contemporary world as one in which only the medium of worldliness that makes action possible persists. This version of worldliness, having-world as distance between persons, not biological need or natural relation, leaves the field open to forms of relationship not reducible to our common humanity in the sense of mere beingalike. She sees in Nathan an echo of the Roman political situation in which humanitas simply referred to the participation of different kinds of people, not just citizens born to the Greek polis, in public life and political discourse. For Arendt, this is not an economic relationship, since the agora she envisions is not the decadent form of the public square as marketplace (not even the marketplace of ideas). Of course, she can hardly avoid using a kinship metaphor in this context, finding “kindred features” in Nathan and the classical notion that “humaneness should be sober and cool rather than sentimental; that humanity is exemplified not in fraternity but in friendship; that friendship is not intimately personal but makes political demands and preserves reference to the world.” As the “classical drama of friendship,”58 Nathan defines friendship as political, not familial, belonging to the public space that, for Arendt, abruptly cancels the love relationship 55 Ibid., 8. 56 Lessing, Werke, 8:33. 57 Arendt, “Humanity,” 11. 58 Ibid., 25.

124  Figures of Natality between the Templar and Recha. As foundationless, existing only in the medium of speech and action, it is necessarily polemical, not intimate. To Arendt’s reflections on this political medium, one can therefore add that it necessarily preserves the possibility of conflict. In Arendt’s version of Augustine with the Greeks, in which unprecedented spontaneity informs public life, this foundationless public space is also the medium of natality. One can imagine at least three objections to Arendt’s appropriation of Lessing for such a public space. The first is that Lessing, in Nathan, seems to replace the medium of the political sphere and the complicated political, economic, military, and personal negotiations among Nathan, Saladin, the Templar, the Patriarch, and the dervish al-Hafi, now become “ein Kerl im Staat” (a fellow in the state),59 with the reading of natural and genetic signs, especially on the part of Saladin, who recognizes his brother’s features in the Templar’s face and his brother’s handwriting in the breviary that Nathan hands him in order to close the family circle and resolve the conflicts and misunderstandings into the embraces on which the curtain falls. In a Spinozist mode, the one nature, like the one God valid for all equally, neutralizes theological and political questions, establishing a mode of relationship that only needs to be read or intuited properly. The second possible objection lies in the deployment of modal verbs to underscore how knowledge makes choice, decision, and will obsolete, in the substitution of “müssen” (must) for “wollen” (want), a verb of obligation for one of volition. This transformation is apparent at several points, but most prominently as an outcome of the definitive establishment of the family relation based on the sign reading performed by the sovereign. Because of the choice of reader in Saladin, to whom Nathan simply presents the breviary as evidence of what Saladin already intuits from the first, one might also call this a substitution of natural reality or necessity for the sovereign mode of command—“you must because I say so”—a kind of force (Gewalt) Saladin refuses at the beginning of the play, perhaps in favor of the more strategic means suggested by Sittah, who has a plan of attack (“Anschlag”) that seems to lead to Saladin’s asking Nathan the question to which the parable of the rings is the answer.60 As Saladin announces to the Templar after he is revealed to be the Templar’s uncle, “Nun mußt du doch wohl, Trotzkopf, mich lieben!” (“Now you with your obstinate temper really must love me!”) and then, “Nun bin ich doch, wozu ich mich erbot? / Magst wollen, oder nicht!” (“Am I now not what I claimed to be? Whether you want or not!”; 2: 346–7). This is not a sovereign or performative Machtwort; it is an ontological predication, “ich bin … ,” 59 Lessing, Werke, 2:220. 60 Ibid., 2:246–7

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 125 with imperative consequences that go beyond volition: “mußt du … ; magst wollen oder nicht!” Clear-sighted apprehension of reality takes the place of the will, as the assumption of a family relation where before there existed only the dynamic of enmity and sovereign mercy. The reading of kinship here is a sort of performance of the tutelage toward actions that make truly individual action obsolete.61 The third objection is more complicated, but the previous two are implicated in it, as it concerns neither the proper reading of nature, nor the ethical consequences of that reading, but the origin of the signs that are read here. In his Lessing Prize speech of 1994, Jan Philipp Reemtsma takes Arendt’s speech of thirty-five years prior as an occasion to defend the space of politics against the private realm of emotion, as well as against its own totalization: where everything is political, nothing is, he argues, because our appearance in public spaces is not the same as our behavior in private.62 Contrary to the expectations perhaps created by the Education of Humankind for the Jewish teacher of humanity, Reemtsma sees Nathan not as “good in the ordinary sense of the word” but as crafty, i.e., as political. Nathan’s own passions, his intentions, and his moral character remain unavailable to the reader (although one imagines that they could be indicated in the visual semiotics of theater for a spectator). According to Reemtsma, the play presents the political situation par excellence, a situation in which language is performance and self-presentation, not simply the presentation of the signs that convince Saladin and prove to the others, willy-nilly, that they are part of one family, whether this particular family or the human family. This reading turns the model of tolerance on its head, as it requires Nathan, the victim of the Christians and the tolerated subject of the Sultan— who tries to get a loan out of him by making him pronounce on the status of the three religions—to engage in the sort of maneuvering that has him buying off his servant and engaging in other rhetorical games. The parable of the rings, the answer to Saladin’s question about the best religion, is one of these. For Reemtsma, politics and humanity are mutually exclusive: 61 Nathan’s words here seem to contradict his earlier question to al-Hafi: “Kein Mensch muß müssen, und ein Derwisch müsste?” Roughly translated: “No human being must be obligated [or: is obligated to be obligated], and a dervish would have to be?” Lessing, Werke, 2:219. 62 “Dort, wo alles politisch ist, ist darum nichts mehr politisch, weil Politik voraussetzt, daß wir einander nicht so begegnen, wie wir uns privat geben, sondern so, wie wir im öffentlichen Raum auftreten wollen.” Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, “Die Dankrede zum Lessing-Preis: Nathan schweigt,” Die Zeit 49 (1997), 28 November, 1997. http://www.zeit.de/1997/49/lessing.txt.19971128.xml/ komplettansicht. July 15, 2015. Jacques Rancière makes this point in almost the same (translated) words. See Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 169.

126  Figures of Natality “Humanity [Menschsein] is not a political category, but a private one. As human beings, we are unequal; as political agents, we can demand equalities. When we desire ‘only to be human,’ we have already lost.”63 Taking Arendt’s and Reemtsma’s readings as connecting the embrace of a human family with the closure of public space and the impossibility of action, this reading of Nathan comes to a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of Giorgio Agamben’s simultaneous abjection and exaltation of “bare life” as the condition of humanity after the Holocaust. Even though Reemtsma and Agamben are working along the same historical lines, as Reemtsma reads Nathan through the trauma of the pogrom avant la lettre that kills Nathan’s wife and their seven sons, Reemtsma understands Nathan’s rejection of personal intimacy as a product of this trauma, an event that creates an internal distance between being and speech or appearance and allows Nathan to negotiate the conflicts of his surroundings successfully, and not, as Agamben does, in the exposed position of homo sacer, the “bare life” of the consecrated victim.64 Three threads come together here: 1. the idea that (as Arendt and Reemtsma contend) Nathan is a play about the political as a break with intimacy, immediacy, and the bareness of vital need; 2. the historiality of this break in a previous, traumatic event;65 and 3. the economy of representation in the medium that conveys the spatial and temporal tensions of a political “interspace” born of an event. These points invert the logic of reading Lessing, deconstructing the explicit premises of the play in its conventional interpretations in favor of the indexes of difference and conflict contained therein. If the first point is still shaky, especially given the appeal of the didactic function of the play for the pedagogy of tolerance, the second is still not considered sufficiently as constituting a medium of exchange and overwriting, even in Reemtsma’s defense of the political. The 63 Ibid., n.p. My translation. For a thorough-going reading of Nathan as a representative of the courtly culture of representation and its foundationless ethos of prudent conduct, see Daniel Fulda, “‘Er hat Verstand, er weiß / Zu leben; spielt gut Schach’: Nathan der Weise als Politicus,” Aufklärung und Weimarer Klassik im Dialog (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2009), 55–78. 64 Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 65 I use the term historiality in a sense derived from Martin Heidegger’s conception of the event. Heidegger defines historiality as an “appropriating eventuation,” i.e., a “dispensation of beyng” that “begins in the beginning.” See Heidegger, “The Event,” in The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). I would appropriate and abbreviate this Heideggerese here as referring to a natal moment, the beginning which Oliver Marchart, following Heidegger’s theory of the event, also calls the moment of the political.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 127 third will be the basis for my further reading of the play. Contrary to what one might expect of the bourgeois age and against the tendency of a rigorous separation of economics and politics in Arendt’s own critique of economics in terms of the domestic sphere (oikonomia) and the cyclical life of labor and production, the medium of money and the economic system become the focus of a meditation upon the political, a metaphorical vehicle for the paradoxical ontology of post-foundational political thinking. On this reading, Nathan can only give The Education of Humankind any coherence in a temporal inversion, one that reads the features that circulate in the play’s semiotic economy in terms of the past event they make legible and the persistent particularity that implies. This inversion will serve to allow Lessing (or my version of him) to answer Wendy Brown’s open question, which she poses in Freudian terms of group traits (Züge) and collective identification, about how collective particularity, the Sosein that underwrites political Dasein, is produced and maintained: how the political is born.

The Political Trait

The critical attempt to separate liberal economics from liberal politics in the name of the political seems frustrated by Nathan in so far as the answer to the question of his vocation evokes a homonymy that joins action and business. When asked what Nathan does, Saladin replies, “Er handelt”: “He trades” or “does business,” but also, “he acts.”66 At least Saladin manages to take truth for a medium of exchange in this sense, as Nathan puts it: “[…] Ich bin / Auf Geld gefasst; und er will – Wahrheit. Wahrheit! / Und will sie so – so bar, so blank, -- als ob / Die Wahrheit Münze wäre.” (I was concerned with money, and he wants truth. Truth! And wants it so cold and hard as if truth were coin.)67 If Goetschel says that Nathan’s business is to deal in truth, Jörg Schönert sees Nathan as a tale about social and economic liberalism instead of religious tolerance.68 Even Lessing’s answer from the Duplik seems to take some of the qualities of the market subject—always desiring, never being satisfied, but never finding the right thing one was actually looking for—as those of the eternal searcher for truth. Whether truth is the best name for its objects or not, there is evidently a semiotic economy in Nathan that can lead one to mistake truth for cold, hard cash, as Nathan thinks Saladin does. In her critique of liberal tolerance 66 Lessing, Werke, 2:246–7. Goetschel notes this polysemy. Spinoza’s Modernity, 238. 67 Lessing, Werke, 2:274–5. 68 Jörg Schönert, “Der Kaufmann von Jerusalem. Zum Handel mit Kapitalien und Ideen in Lessings Nathan der Weise.” Scientia poetica 12 (2008): 89–113.

128  Figures of Natality as a subtly neoliberal economic discourse, Wendy Brown points to the exchange of characteristics as if they were consumer goods one could possess and share or get rid of. The problem of market liberalism also appears in Nathan as economic activity, but in the eighteenth-century context in which this activity was seen as the basis for freedom, organizing in exchange a non-dogmatic spontaneity that could lead to the consolidation of the group. Brown’s critique has something important in common with Lessing’s discourse in Nathan: the language of the trait or feature as that which circulates among the members of a group. Brown reads Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse) as maintaining a technically predicated ambivalence toward tolerance. While Freud argues that human culture is complex and conflictual, based as it is on repression, a “horde” and not a “herd,” Brown sees Freud’s distinction as between the primacy of the group, in so-called primitive peoples, and that of the individual in advanced, Western society. The herd versus horde distinction is helpful here as the herd would be that familial or intimate closeness that obviates the need for a medium of social interaction, since there are no conflicts or other relations to be negotiated. By contrast, the horde and its animal subject are “constituted by an external organizing principle that brokers a complex need for, rivalry with, endangerment by, and aggression toward others.”69 Brown’s point is that the hegemonic liberal culture has its own culturally particular character exposed when it deals with particular others, who do not share or express the same values.70 Like Spinoza, Freud sees groups as organized by affect, but equality in the form of affective equilibrium is never attained. This is evidently one response to Spinoza’s multitude: the passive equality of all members cannot be attained because discord is permanent. Tolerance as a technique of “identity production and identity management” that disavows its political origins in favor of supposedly transcendent ethical or humanitarian norms covers up this discord.71 Brown sees in Freud a theory of cultural and psychological maturation in which Western, “civilized” cultures are highly individuated and therefore more advanced than “primitive” cultures, in which the group is primary (therefore fitting the pattern of Education) but in which there is also the same model of group formation that emphasizes its contingency and common affective basis. I think that the ambivalence in Freud’s account of identification has to do as well with the tricky question of what relates the “advanced,” liberal model, in which traits are exchanged and 69 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion, 157. 70 Ibid., 173. 71 Ibid., 14.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 129 enjoyed in the multicultural marketplace, to the assumption that those traits are fixed in “intolerant” and intransigent groups. In Group Psychology, Freud is concerned primarily neither with liberal nor with primitive societies but with large “artificial masses,” the Church and the armed forces, and with the production of a complex mass out of the affective moments that mark family life and serve as the common origin of neuroses in the individual and in society. In other words, modern individuals are not liberal, ironic subjects who can distance themselves from their group participation, even while admiring those still stuck in groupthink and cultural norms. Rather, their neuroses come from the father and mother, and larger units originate within this smallest unit. On the heterosexual model, identification takes place with the parent of the same sex, who becomes an ego ideal to be imitated. Freud promotes the single, isolated trait to decisive significance in his discussion of the difference between object choice and identification. Object choice marks the male child’s relationship to the mother, while he identifies with the father, an identification that later enables the Oedipus complex. The distinction Freud makes here is exactly that made by Brown, where she distinguishes being of a certain, particular culture from having the traits that make liberal, pluralistic society so colorful and so non-commital. The child wants to have the parent of the opposite sex, but identifies with and wants to be the parent of the same sex.72 Freud’s story concerns leadership and sees the leader (Führer) as taking the place of the ego ideal in all the individuals of the horde. Identification is displaced in empathy to the symptom, which comes to be a sign (Anzeichen) for the overlap of the two egos that must be kept repressed. (Repression produces symptoms as displacements of primordial desires.) This sort of uniformity is transferred from the dynamic of identification in the family that in fact precedes object choice. Attachments are also temporally conditioned. The primary identification is with the “unloved” person; the son wants to be like his rival, the father, and possess the mother. In the second instance, it is with the beloved parent, the mother, as a regression from the original object choice, but in both cases identification is partial, very limited, and only takes one single trait, “einen einzigen Zug,” of the other person. This trait is also susceptible to introjection, as the subject takes it into himself.73 When the Templar addresses the absent Saladin, saying, “Wie? die Natur hätt’ auch nur Einen Zug / Von mir in deines Bruders Form 72 Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940, repr. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 13:115–18. 73 Ibid., 13:117–18.

130  Figures of Natality gebildet: / Und dem entspräche nichts in meiner Seele? / Was dem entspräche, könnt ich unterdrücken, / Um einem Patriarchen zu gefallen?” (What? Had Nature shaped even just one trait / Of mine in your brother’s form, / Would that correspond to nothing in my soul? Should I be able to suppress that correspondence / in order to please a Patriarch?),74 he links this “nur Einen Zug” (only one trait) with an image internalized in his soul, but it also refers to Saladin’s soul or at least his memory, as that was the source of the recognition and the pardon. As Helmut Müller-Sievers explains, this is not the preformationist language of the heart that causes a sentimental but vague intuition of kinship, but the reading of expressive signs and similarities that also makes the would-be lovers Recha and the Templar realize their link because of evidence, in spite of their hearts’ feelings— as Recha says, “Sein Herz weiß nichts davon!” (His heart knows nothing of it!).75 The centrality of the Zug to Lessing’s play could be explained as a reading of natural signs in the historicized Spinozist sense, as securing the development of a single human family genealogically, whether in the mass of those who need to be taught how to read first, or in the adoptive relationship to the particular agents who teach humanity how to read. However, Lessing’s evocation in the words of the Templar of the “Einen Zug” that must correspond to something in his soul and therefore in nature joins the reading of natural and genetically expressive signs to the dynamics of identification as Freud understands it, particularly because the Templar is not delivering a constative statement but a performative one: a vow of loyalty to Saladin. In Nathan’s case, relationship is also a supplement, a voluntary identification in assumed parentage where natural bonds fail or do not obtain. The supplementary relationship of the particular group to the all-inclusive category appears in the embraces that close the play precisely because Nathan is included even though he is not part of that particular family. In the same sense, but with inverted value, the natural sign as Zug would seem to cover all signs, but this adoptive relationship points to another kind of mark as its model. This semiotics is intimately connected not with genealogy or descent but with birth, gender, and sexuation and redefines the notion of a proper maieutics of the sign, of morality, and of community.

74 Lessing, Werke, 2:231. 75 Helmut Müller-Sievers, “Ahnen ahnen: Formen der Generationenerkennung in der Literatur um 1800.” Generation: Zur Genealogie des Konzepts–Konzepte von Genealogie. Eds Ohad Parnes, Ulrike Vedder, Sigrid Weigel, and Stefan Willer. Munich: Fink, 2005. 157–69.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 131

The Maieutics of the Trait

As Reemtsma suggests, one can find the end only in the beginning. Nathan gives the pedagogy of the Education of Humankind coherence only by a temporal inversion, reading origins in outcomes. In Lessing’s meditations on literature and art, genre has to do with generation, with a proper theory of production. A look at where edifying (and therefore teachable) texts are supposed to come from will illuminate the maieutic and moral questions that join a historical teleology of reason to the backward-looking “dramatic poem.” If Nathan is indeed taken as a fable in Lessing’s definition of that genre, it must meet certain requirements. The fable is for one unambiguous. It has a moral that, even if it is to be reconstructed by a “hermeneutically active reader,” still appeals to the reader or recipient along the lines of the idea of the genius, who simply matches internal, unspoken criteria with what he finds in the object.76 However, in keeping with the ubiquity of the metaphors of birth and reproduction circa 1800, one might reconceive of this unmediated matching in the fable as a version of what Lessing, in Anti-Goeze, sees as conceptual copulation: “Der Begriff ist der Mann; das sinnliche Bild des Begriffs ist das Weib; und die Worte sind die Kinder, die beide hervorbringen.” (“The concept is the man; the sensuous image of the concept is the woman; and the words are the children that both produce.”)77 In this sense, David Wellbery develops an intricate reading of this copulation in Lessing’s aesthetics and poetics, in particular tracing the “pregnant moment” (“der prägnante Augenblick”) back to the semantic register of pregnancy, in which prägnant is for Lessing a synonym of fruchtbar (fruitful). This reading is based on the premise that knowledge (Erkenntnis) must be supplemented by aesthetic representation or imagination (“ästhetische Vorstellung”) so that the will might be affected. Otherwise, knowledge remains a version of the dead letter, inanimate and morally irrelevant. This is therefore true of the fable as well.78 This reading is markedly different from the interpretive tendency to take the didactic moment of fabular truth in the play as the Ring story, sometimes referred to as the “parable of the rings” and called by Nathan himself a “Märchen”: “Nicht die Kinder bloß, speist man mit Märchen ab!” (Fairy tales aren’t just for satisfying the curiosity 76 John Pizer, “Lessing and the Fable.” A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, eds Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox (Rochester: Camden House, 2005): 89–103. 77 Quoted in David E. Wellbery, “Das Gesetz der Schönheit: Lessings Ästhetik der Repräsentation,” in Was heißt “Darstellen”? ed. Christian L. Hart-Nibbrig (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 175. 78 Wellbery, “Das Gesetz der Schönheit,” 181.

132  Figures of Natality of children!)79 If the story of the rings is a fable in Lessing’s sense, as a story through which a general proposition is recognizable in a particular intuition,80 it might be apt to read the whole play as such a fable. It would be one that facilitates not the knowledge of a proposition about tolerance or freedom, but awareness of the even more general relations that undergird such propositions, the genealogical truth process as Lessing reads it in The Education of Humanity, as a more tightly copular story about heredity and the birth process. This fable stages the felicitous recognition (reading of the offspring) of family relations, joining the expressive traits of people with the record of their genealogy in memory and in text. This would lead to a sort of mise en abyme: the features of the fable within the play are those of the play’s theme, which are further conveyed by the play as a genre—a fable about fables containing a fable. The recognition of the features of Assad-Wolf in the Templar by both Nathan and Saladin conforms to Lessing’s description of the position of the reader of the fable. The fable is the exemplification of a general principle in a particular case that is given a poetic reality in a story (Geschichte) in which one can recognize the general principle intuitively. The same condition is remediable for Lessing only in a strict “functional economy,” in which rhetorical ornament is eliminated, and linguistic, illustrative, and narrative elements are minimized in order to avoid a dangerous supplementarity, introduced by the ornate or entertaining elements of the French fable, and threatening the tight and unique coupling of signifier and signified.81 While aesthetic (re)presentation might remedy this excess in the fable through fiction, the thematic premise of Nathan is that these signs are natural, and that the natural signs are connected to the larger truth of kinship that breaks through the ideological fictions that separate its protagonists, responding to their own better intentions that they are powerless to realize before the recognition of those signs—with the exception of the one nascent sexual relationship, of course.82 Wellbery’s 79 Lessing, Werke, 2:276. 80 Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 243. 81 Ibid., 185–6. 82 Following Michael Thomas Taylor’s argument, one could read this qua fable as moralizing the sexual relationship by excluding it. Taylor, “Same/Sex,” 333–47. Sexual choice is trumped by natural signs that make it incest, but, not just a cultural taboo, it would seem to be excluded as well by genre, in so far as the groundless sexual choice of amour passion that allows a Crusader to fall for a Jewish girl is not representable (unlike kinship) by natural signs in which the relationship could be intuitively recognized as a good match. Another medium would have to evolve—and does around 1800. See Niklas Luhmann, Die Liebe als Passion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982).

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 133 closing remark on the fable is especially pertinent here, as he treats Lessing’s refusal of ornament and his ultimately Platonic appeal to the moral (and political) value of the Aesopian fable as a fear of unsocialized, youthful desire. This is exactly the spring that drives the plot of Nathan. Beyond its moralizing yet ambivalent humanism, the play begins with a report of Recha’s rescue by the Templar—the hapless Christian servant reports it to the absent Jewish father—and concludes with the realization that Recha and the Templar cannot be together sexually because they are siblings. The incest prohibition identified by Taylor as the limit of tolerance is, following this line of analysis, a condition of the fabular genre that extends to the play. Genre and generation are the same here, as Lessing’s check on the passions of the body or of the letter is a conceptual prophylaxis, a contraception in a different sense, of anything that would exceed the tight semiotic coupling that links reproduction to morality: an anti-disseminative semiotics. As Wellbery points out in linking this complex to the discussion of the limits of painting in Laokoon, the maternal moment of reproduction is suppressed or omitted here. He gives as an example the final scene of Emilia Galotti, where Odoardo and Emilia, father and daughter, are staged in a scene that resembles father–daughter incest, as much as it does the sacrifice of the daughter against the moral temptation of the flesh. One could also apply this lesson to Nathan, a play about genealogy and family in which there are no mothers onstage at all.83 Wellbery reads this absence as Lessing’s continuation of a traditional model of sexuate cultural reproduction, in which precisely the adoptive father is responsible for the transfer of non-natural values, language, religion, or in Recha’s case Vernunft, reason itself.84 Indeed, it is the functionally maternal side of Recha’s adoptive family, the Christian servant Daja, who introduces both the sectarian and rhetorically, aesthetically excessive media of stories about Christian saints in an effort to arouse in Recha the admiratio that Lessing sees as one of the dangers of painting itself. A good Spinozist, Recha prefers that “Ergebenheit in Gott” (submission/surrender in God) that Spinoza sees as the political–theological virtue to the excesses of imagination in “unserem Wähnen über Gott”—our entertaining fantastic or subjective notions about God.85 In Laokoon, the aesthetic sensation of disgust (Ekel) is connected to this process of fantasy, where the graphic and plastic arts exceed their legitimate bounds: the effect of the indentation (Vertiefung) that Laocoön’s screaming mouth would become, had the 83 For an account of this tendency in Lessing, see Susan E. Gustafson, Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers. 84 Wellbery, “Kunst-Zeugung-Geburt,” 20–1. 85 Lessing, Werke, 2:264.

134  Figures of Natality artist of the Laocoön group not chosen discretion and the representation of that “pregnant moment” before the good father’s suffering becomes extreme. This prohibition of medial excess is also a symptom of horror at natural birth, the formless indentation being that which decisively weakens art’s power to represent the link of morality and aesthetics.86

“Da brennts”: From Trait to Index

As Nathan makes clear, it is not the mother but the interaction of a father and a sovereign in acts of reading that can produce and sustain this connection of morality and aesthetics in the form of genealogy. What interrupts this generic reproduction in Nathan is the graphic equivalent of the indentation or Vertiefung that would have ruined the Laocöon statue: as in painting, a spot or stain (“Fleck”), an element that undermines the beauty of the artwork through its formlessness, its failure to represent. If proper artistic midwifery for Lessing is of an immaculate conception, the very maculate register of origins asserts itself in Nathan through the Fleck that Nathan and the Templar share. A comparative look at the Templar and Nathan reveals that what at first seems to be a contrast becomes a similarity produced not by sovereign physiognomic recognition but by a semiotic consistency. The contrast of Nathan and the Templar becomes a theme in the dialogue between the two in Act III, Scene 9, where they discuss the possibility that the Templar is the son of Conrad von Stauffen. (This dialogue precedes immediately the Templar’s meditation on love in III.10: “Lieb’ ich denn zum erstenmale? – Oder war, was ich / Als Liebe kenne, Liebe nicht? – Ist Liebe / Nur was ich itzt empfinde?”)87 The temperamental Templar answers Nathan’s objection that Conrad, another Templar, could not, as a member of a religious order, have fathered a child: […] Was wärs Denn nun? So was von Bastard oder Bankert! Der Schlag ist auch nicht zu verachten. – Doch Entlaßt mich immer meiner Ahnenprobe. Ich will Euch Eurer wiederum entlassen. Nicht zwar, als ob ich den geringsten Zweifel In Euern Stammbaum setzte. Gott behüte! Ihr könnt ihn Blatt vor Blatt bis Abraham Hinauf belegen. Und von da so weiter,

86 Wellbery, “Das Gesetz der Schönheit,” 194. 87 Lessing, 2:287. “Am I in love for the first time? Or was what I / Knew as love not love? Is love / Only what I now feel?”

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 135 Weiß ich ihn selbst; will ich ihn selbst beschwören.88 What would that mean then? Some kind of bastard! The race [Schlag] is not to be despised. But release me from the test of my ancestry, and I will release you in turn from yours. Not as though I would doubt your family tree in the least. God forbid! You can attest it leaf for leaf all the way back to Abraham. And from there onward, I know it and would recite it myself. The difference between legitimate conception and birth and bastardy is the difference between knowledge of one’s family tree and doubt. Doubt is eliminated and certainty of the Templar’s ancestry is ultimately produced. So it would seem that the developments in the play swing Nathan’s way, completely in keeping with the Spinozist, knowledge-oriented premises of the Education of Humankind. Ancestry becomes legible following the organic metaphor of the tree: an unbroken chain of stable, natural signs embodied in the exemplary figure of the Jew and attained as well by the gentiles. Like cultural particularity, illegitimate conception is a specter that haunts the play just as it haunts metaphorically the production of the fable. As one can see negatively from the passage above, it would undermine the continuity of history and the legibility of human nature and character as well as the metaphorical register that sustains the functional economy of the fable as a vehicle of moral lessons. If the story of Education of Humankind follows those premises in presenting the evolution of media in a progress from revelation to reason, Nathan indulges another medium, one that is not historically goal-directed but backward-looking, and this register makes space for particularity as well as a history, that does not move but meditates upon the event. In this medium of temporal indexicality, Nathan and the Templar share an experience that is neither generative nor genealogically derived, but traumatic. The sign of improper or excessive procreation, the spot or stain, functions here as an immediate semiotic reference for which Lessing seems to belabor the conventional example: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Uncovering this event in its reiterated indexes refers the reader or spectator to the element of untamed energy that is destructive as well as redemptive and ultimately to the unrepresentable moment of the political that underwrites the historical tension of the play’s familial constitution. At the abrupt conclusion of their dialogue on ancestry, Nathan tells the Templar to come with him, but the Templar refuses: “Wohin? / Nein! – Mit in Euer Haus? – Das nicht! das nicht! – / Da brennts!” 88 Ibid., 2:286.

136  Figures of Natality (“Where to? No! With you to your house? Not that! Not that! It’s burning there.”)89 Following Reemtsma, this is a reference not just to the incident in which the Templar rescued Recha, but to the condition of the place “Nathan’s house” as such. Although the Templar does not know it, this is not the first time Nathan’s house has burned. From the more recent fire, the Templar came away with a spot (Fleck) on his cloak. The semiotic and temporal complications that history creates in the play, in terms of both real events and their impressions in the mind, in memory, connects signs to events outside of either the simple reading of the traits of nature or the historical teleology of the improvement of that reading. In Nathan, the apparent expressive relationship between inside and outside also produces the capacity for the autonomous use of reason. It is the effect of the “seed of reason” (“Samen der Vernunft”) at least in the voice of Recha as she refuses Daja’s attempts to influence her toward Christianity. The dynamic of birth is present in her conversation, not just in the image of the seed but also in terms of an image in the soul. While the difference between the image in Daja’s soul of her family and ancestors in Europe and that of Recha’s family (as she knows it at that point) in Palestine is a geographic and cultural one, it is also temporal. Daja’s people are neither present nor necessarily living. The image in her soul, “not yet extinguished,” represents the absent, while Recha prefers her family that is present: those “whom I can see and hold and hear, / my people” (“die ich sehen und greifen kann, und hören, / Die Meinen”).90 This distinction constitutes difference based on a rejection of the fading images of faraway relations. However, it contradicts the later dynamic of the image as a primordial fact, that shapes the present when it is a matter of the “deeply imprinted [tiefgeprägt] images […] that can sleep in us for a time, until a word, a sound awakens them,” as Nathan comments on the Templar’s resemblance to Wolf-Assad, whom he knew, or Saladin’s more speculative remark that the sound of Assad’s voice must still be sleeping in his soul (“[…] Assads Ton / Schläft auch wohl wo in meiner Seele noch”).91 The seeds of memory as well as of reason lie dormant and wait to be awakened by some outside factor. The dialogues in these scenes at the end of the second and the beginning of the third acts are meditations on the senses and memory. The former are passive channels that connect to the latter, causing equally involuntary effects. The expressive relationship between inside and outside seems for the same reason to be determined by natural signs, with the usual evocations of kernel and shell, soul and voice, 89 Ibid., 2:286. 90 Ibid., 2:263. 91 Ibid., 2:257; 2:302.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 137 and the blooming of what must be a rather plain meadow from the “seed of reason,” as it contrasts with the colorful Christian flowers that Daja would sow in Recha’s mind. These flowers’ demands for nutrition would exhaust the soil, and their scent makes Recha dizzy.92 On the other hand, this apparently expressive relationship that conforms as well to Lessing’s critique of the French fable with its rhetorical ornament and flowery, verblümt mode of expression has to submit to the objection raised by Saladin when he denies wanting religious homogeneity: “Did I demand that the same bark grow on all trees?”93 This contrast of superficiality and essence makes the particular into the false and the general into the true, the opposite of the Templar’s calling Nathan in the same scene a “tolerant chatterbox” (“toleranter Schwätzer”), a “Jewish wolf in philosophical sheep’s clothing.”94 The expressive relationship that seemed to parallel the austere moral genre of the fable runs up against the Sultan’s demand for expressive diversity. This inconsistent mixture of metaphors contrasts with a highly consistent use of a kind of indexical semiotics to which it already alludes. The small, otherwise insignificant resemblances noted by Nathan between the Templar and Wolf-Assad hardly provide the intelligibility that the handwriting does or that a more broadly based physiognomy should. (While the picture in Act 4, scene 3, allows Saladin to note the resemblance between his brother and the Templar once more, it is not the same as the spontaneous judgment that caused his act of mercy.) They only point to a fact that they do not express consistently or coherently (unlike the biographies with which Nathan is familiar) and form a loose collection of traits that activate rather than expressing or imprinting images. If the “seed of reason” itself is read in this figurative register as a question of metaphors for media (voice, gesture, image), the question of what constitutes the human family far exceeds the simple pedagogy of reading or even the recognition that persists in Nathan’s handing the breviary to Saladin, rather than simply informing him of his relationship to Recha and the Templar. Again, however, these opposite or inverted figures, inside and outside, true and false, give way to the immediacy not of recognition but of action. Like Saladin’s act of mercy based on a vague intuition, the Templar’s saving Recha is an immediate reflex; his own action is foundationless: “Did I inquire or stop to think when she was screaming in the fire?” or “What I did for him [i.e., Nathan], I did—because I did

92 Ibid., 2:263. 93 Ibid., 2:304. 94 Ibid., 2:307.

138  Figures of Natality it.”95 If Recha sees it as a miracle, it is, at least in the sense of the miracle as an action that has no sufficient cause in nature. As a metaphor for the secular figure of sovereign decision, the miracle refers to the same paradoxically simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of the sovereign as one who decides without an adequate foundation in law, procedure, or institutions. The Templar’s spontaneity is in this sense a natal act, “post-foundational,” and it produces effects that, while they are coopted for the reunification of a natural family, join Nathan as well to this union not thematically but in terms of the semiotic discourse that underwrites his own action, whether pedagogical, paternal, or acquisitive. Like the traits that spontaneously evoke a memory long buried in the soul, this semiotic discourse is indexical and functions temporally. The American pragmatist tradition to which Rortyan notions of tolerant irony (or ironic tolerance) are beholden also has room for indexicality, which is not the outcome of a process or a deferral of truth claims but that kind of sign that refers immediately and inexorably to reality. In the language of another American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, an index has three distinguishing properties. It has no significant resemblance to its object; it refers to “individuals, single units, single collections of units, or single continua”; and it directs attention to its object “by blind compulsion.”96 In other words, it does not represent or symbolize; it indicates immediately by contiguity. The curious chain of resemblances and the mimetic language of Lessing’s play come to rest not at the sole or single trait (einziger Zug) of Freud’s identificatory model but in indexes (as Peirce writes the plural) that evoke the classical example: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” These indexes are the vehicles of memory that connect the two times of the narration: the past in which Nathan’s house burned for the first time, and the present in which the Templar’s cloak exhibits evidence of the repetition of this event. As an index, referring to the Templar’s deed in an ontologically immediate way as its effect, the spot on his cloak also involves him symbolically in two other registers of the play: Nathan’s business, as he will have to ask for credit for a new cloak when it is all torn or worn; and Nathan’s history of burning houses, danger, and death. Like the immediacy of his action, the “nasty spot” (“garst’ger Fleck”) evokes an event that is communicable or reiterable only through that index, not via a metaphor or a symbol. This moment shares with the theory of the fable the immediacy of cognition. The moral lesson of the fable is perceived immediately 95 Ibid., 2:306; 2:305. 96 C. S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1955), 108.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 139 by the reader whose moral sensibility, like the genius for art, already contains the rules unconsciously. However, the spot as an index does not provide the immediate perception of an abstract lesson; it only refers to a past event that cannot be explained in terms of moral imperatives. It is also not the “form of reflection” Kant sees in §59 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment as accounting for the “symbol of the morally good,”97 now because of both its intuitive immediacy and its temporal immediacy. There is no third element that would account for similarity in reflecting on the concrete sign and the abstract meaning because the Templar takes no time to reflect. It is much more like the non-reflective aesthetic judgment made immediately and without symbolic accounting, the judgment whose enigmatic quality Arendt compared with natality. That the “nasty spot” is indexical and not symbolic implies in the context of the play a different sort of temporality, one that is not historical but, in Heidegger’s sense, historial. As I stressed in the Introduction, Arendt’s version of action as natality bears a decisive resemblance to the Heideggerian contribution to post-foundational notions of the political. The question of the medium I raised there as the historical memory of great deeds appears here in Lessing in two forms: as genetic memory conveyed in natural signs and understood as genealogy; and as an index that recalls not a noble, political deed but a trauma, the second fire that burns Nathan’s house and threatens the child he received, as if in exchange for his natural children. Rather than engage or indulge the abundant literature on trauma, I want to read this second event and its index, the burnt spot on the cloak, as organizing the play in a manner that disrupts the tree-like linearity of the birth order in which the sovereign, Saladin, recognizes his own natural kin.

Index as Ent-zug

Odd as his reappearance at this point may seem, F. H. Jacobi still has something to say about Lessing’s Nathan. Beyond his Christian convictions, his version of God as the immediate knowledge not of natural facts but of the break in causality resulted in his reformulation of the task of philosophy—against the philosophers—as the disclosure or unveiling of existence, in his spelling “Daseyn.” The foregoing considerations of Lessing and Nathan as well as the version of Spinoza that surfaces in each of these Goethezeit debates point to how a reversed temporality of the event, counter to a historical teleology of nature, can make Jacobi’s three-word statement of his own vocation, “Daseyn zu enthüllen,” useful for a consideration of Lessing and natality. 97 Kant, Werkausgabe, 10:294–5.

140  Figures of Natality While Lessing’s aesthetics indeed makes birth a normative question, a maieutics of the properly pregnant moment versus the abuse of language and image that produces monsters, his performance in Nathan of a semiotics in which the traumatic past (and not the aesthetically deferred future) is represented by a Fleck (stain, spot) points to another solution to the question of normativity and tolerance or inclusion. As that which is not included even in the immanent, pragmatic circuit of meaning that regulates the liberal notion of tolerance and the circulation, exchange, and reading of traits or Züge, the decidedly non-ironic Fleck refers to the past—to borrow Walter Benjamin’s language—as a historical index. Whether this index points to redemption as Erlösung, in Benjamin’s terms, or simply as the Lösung, the resolution, of the enigma of filiation and friendship in Nathan the Wise, it presents a moment at which the semiotics of the play no longer represents an idea, expresses a genetic fact, or joins art and morality in representational decorum but gives voice immediately to a past event. Like the Fleck that would be the screaming mouth of the painted Agamemnon in Laokoon, it violates the codes of representation in order to compass an affect that does not fit into the representational scheme, much less into the Spinozist order of thoughts and things that requires purification from such feelings. It therefore signals a withdrawal or Entzug, a re-treat or -trait, from that order even as it founds it, reproducing not the moral copulation of the fable but the foundation of the social, economic, and here even the human in a political moment prior to all those spheres it founds. This moment has to do with Dasein, not simply in Jacobi’s trumping of all causal connection with the salto mortale of decision (and of the Augustinian voluntarist God who creates souls anew), but in the difference between the ontological and the ontic in Heidegger’s sense. If we live in a world of “beings” at the ontic level, and different social systems negotiate this being-stuff (“Seiendes”) according to different norms, what underwrites the openness and foundational incompleteness of these systems is “beyng,” Heidegger’s term for the event that differentiates between the ontic and the ontological.98 The indexicality of the Fleck in Nathan and, one might say, of disgust generally (at the “nasty spot”), is the moment that refers to that which is outside the semiotic system in which fables of generation and genealogy join the signified and the signifier in well-ordered fashion or models of commerce in truths and traits relativize all distinctions, founding none. On another level more apposite to aesthetics, disgust is that which exceeds the ability of aesthetics as a science or technique to capture experience.99 98 See Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 172. 99 Heidegger’s account of a true version of technē as art precedes the era in which

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 141 Reading Lessing’s play in this vein connects the Modernist notion of natality and its cognate forms to the Goethezeit as a question of the medium and the forms within it. None of the philosophical media Lessing chooses quite work out: natural signs do not deliver political order (much less an inclusive, “tolerant” one); money in its generalized symbolic form, like the smooth stones Saladin imagines, does not provide a consistent interpretant for the social; and the fable is a construction meant to satisfy a demand, not the communication of a moral to be heard by those with ears for it. In its immediacy, the index presents a connection to the ontological level of the political. It is therefore not entirely accurate to speak of indexicality because these are, as Lessing would point out, arbitrary signs like “Fleck” and highly structured narratives that convey the indexicality and immediacy of signs and actions. Nonetheless, the index can be read here as Walter Benjamin does in the artwork, as the product of an act of reading that identifies such immediate moments in the text in terms of a “constellation of danger.” Benjamin’s understanding of this relates it to the work of the reader or the “historical materialist” in the present; the crisis of the current age sharpens the critical eye for the index in the text or image that points to historical crisis. One can perhaps take Nathan as a tale of the critical pedagogy of such reading, as it shows the Jew as tutor of reading and understanding in a text organized not just by Züge but also, most crucially and immediately for Nathan, as the indexes of burning: the burning of the house in the first pogrom, its apparently accidental burning just before the beginning of the play, and the threat of burning that Nathan avoids. Socrates’s maieutic practice is literally a dialectical practice, but the dialectic at work here is different. Like Walter Benjamin’s dialectician, Nathan can see history “as nothing other than a constellation of dangers that he, following their development in thought, is always poised to avert.”100 This constellation evokes for Benjamin a reading practice that can offer a compelling non-answer to the questions at the outset of this chapter. Whether in the form of the Mendelssohn–Jacobi polemic, the question of liberalism’s fusion of epistemological foundation and political assertion, or the hybrid maieutic discourse of representation, this is a sort of ideological montage, a union of two disparate elements that, like an index, works simply by contiguity. Far from privileging the natural sign or the progressive text of history that supersedes the past “artworks were enjoyed aesthetically.” In other words, aesthetics becomes a term both for systematization in a science of taste and for consumption. Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” 35. 100 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 5:587; my translation from the Passagen-Werk.

142  Figures of Natality while waiting for those caught in it to catch up, this kind of reading is also produced by the dangerous Augenblick. There is no complicated ut pictura poeisis here, but rather, as Benjamin has it in the Passagen-Werk, only the “now of knowability” (“Erkennbarkeit”), a “readability” (“Lesbarkeit”) of the historical image or, on terms more amenable to Nathan, “recognizability,” “Erkennbarkeit,” as “every now is a now of recognizability.” Benjamin’s definition of the “dialectical image” contains this moment as the “stamp of the critical, dangerous moment on which all reading is based.” Benjamin also distinguishes this rigorously from the categories of Heideggerian historicity and the historicist basis of the Geisteswissenschaften (“humanities” is a poor translation) as a “secret index” in the image, not an abstract notion about the image.101 The immediacy of the index according to Peirce, its reference by “blind compulsion,” bears some functional and formal similarity to the immediate intuition in Lessing’s aesthetics. As in Mendelssohn’s model of Enlightenment, however, Lessing’s normative moment refers to knowledge of something, that which Kant would deny in his critique of intellectual intuition that also spelled the end of the previous, Leibniz-Wolffian Enlightenment of which Mendelssohn was perhaps the final protagonist. Nonetheless, this index also refers to something that has an ontological status. Since it does not fit into the aesthetic categories that enable judgment and reflection even for Kant, its way of presenting being is immediate and intuitive even if what it presents is not knowledge in the same sense as reading the genetic code or a set of Züge.102 Since the question in Lessing as well as in Spinoza’s politics is how community is constituted and maintained, the index as einziger Zug refers in this case not to a positive feature—the community of people with red hair or white skin—but to that hinge moment in the Spinozism debate as in Lessing’s aesthetics where something is to be born or come into the world. Like Benjamin’s historical materialist, Nathan’s reading of the index belongs to a contingency theory that fits Oliver Marchart’s definition of the common aspects of postfoundational theories of the political: “they share a strong notion of the event, they grant a crucial role to division and antagonism; of course, they all deny the possibility of a final ground of the social, and still are ‘grounded’ on their own variants of something like the ontological difference.”103 The reduction of ontological difference from some sort of positive cultural predicate to a minimal index that takes its meaning 101 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:577–8. 102 Compare Walter Benjamin’s reentry of Platonism into Kantianism using indexicality in “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2:157–71. 103 Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 61.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 143 from an event-oriented reading of history changes the relationship of Dasein and Sosein, being and “being-such.” Benjamin’s reading of the dialectical image as a montage of past and present in which the past becomes legible only as frozen in time also echoes the action that defines natality, reinterpreting it as a kind of reading that is similarly foundationless but not without ontological reference, as it creates an intervention in the world out of the world’s own fabric, reading not the “book of nature” but the “book of past events” (“das Buch des Geschehenen”). In this sense, the event on which Heidegger grounds the historial can be integrated into a new, maieutic notion of reading that sees the “moment of knowability” as the death of intentionality (Benjamin: “Tod der Intentio”) and the birth of “real historical time, the time of truth,”104 but only in the form of the dialectical act of a thinking reader. To belabor this birth metaphor just a bit more, one can add in terms of the later eighteenth-century contrast of preformation and epigenesis that Nathan would in this case perform not a neat transition to epigenesis, but the parallel of the two: the epigenetic explanation of the expressive and unfelt resemblances to be seen in natural sign reading (the “book of nature”) and the “Präformation” Benjamin finds in the historical index. He reads this as an omen of the Marxist last stage of history (like the “filled” messianic time) but finds it not with reference to that final stage (for Lessing, the family of humankind) but in past ages, as a self-sufficient mark (not just a reference to the next stage of development) that refers to the telos of history.105 As Ansgar Hillach points out in terms that seem to repeat Lessing’s from the Duplik, dialectics is the “art of dialoguing in arguments,” a development in time that can have only a provisional conclusion, as “further points of view [Standpunkte] can always be taken into account in the name of the truth to be captured.”106 Benjamin’s version of the Socratic dialectic creates presence only in that now between past and future, in the state of hermeneutic emergency or exception. The question is perhaps who made Nathan the sovereign who decides on this state of exception. This danger is ultimately what produces the parable of the rings in Nathan. While the parable is potentially not the heart of the play as fable but a provisional construct, part of Nathan’s strategic maneuvering in a tricky social context, as Daniel Fulda observes,107 it also comes of the disentangling of political and 104 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5:578. 105 Ibid., 5:582. 106 Ansgar Hillach, “Dialektisches Bild,” in Benjamins Begriffe, eds Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 186. 107 See Fulda, “‘Er hat Verstand.’”

144  Figures of Natality economic discourse, the cut made by the political between sovereignty and commerce. While Nathan signals this change in the truth/coin analogy, Saladin makes a vocational distinction: “Schachern wird mit dir schon meine Schwester. […] / Ich habe mit dem Kaufmann nichts zu tun.” (“My sister will haggle with you. […] I have nothing to do with businessmen.”) With whom does Saladin think he is dealing, then? What is the source of Nathan’s legitimation as an interlocutor and a teacher? “Nathan the Wise” is a rumor, a product of “des Volkes Stimme,” the voice of the people. Vox populi, vox dei: Nathan’s knowledge of God is supposed to come not from the intuition of nature but from acclaim, as something that requires and produces belief: “Du glaubst doch nicht, daß ich verächtlich von des Volkes Stimme denke?” (You don’t believe that I look scornfully on the voice of the people?), Saladin asks. Belief and credit are here focused around a moment of sovereign legitimation that also underwrites the lesson Nathan will provide—whatever lesson that turns out to be, as he has to invent it in an “Augenblick” afforded him by the sovereign: “So rede doch! / Sprich! – Oder willst du einen Augenblick, / Dich zu bedenken?” (So talk then! Speak! – Or do you want a moment to think about it?). Left alone, Nathan arrives at an answer—“Das wars! Das kann mich retten! – Nicht die Kinder bloß, speist man mit Märchen ab!” (“That’s it! That can save me! – Fairy tales aren’t just for satisfying the curiosity of children!”)—that describes the genre of the Märchen as an emergency response when faced, one assumes, with an existential threat in the context of sovereignty.108 The Märchen as a genre of action and contingency makes connections between undifferentiated signs; the rings are like the smooth chess pieces that signify nothing. Their lack of signification in this later context seems puzzling, since in the first scene in which Saladin plays against Sittah they have functions: queen, rook, knight, etc. However, even in that scene, Saladin’s ignoring his own chance to win (which al-Hafi points out insistently) and decision to grant his sister’s wish, as the stakes of the game, is a sovereign act that undermines the wager in a moment of decision. Still, it is important not to confuse the answer with the question, in which Nathan is caught between political Scylla and Charybdis: the voice of the people and the demands of the sovereign. If the notion of the birth of the political as I read it throughout the Goethezeit is itself a genre, then this predicament points to natality as action that exceeds a given signifying regimen and responds to a 108 Lessing, Werke, 274–6. Compare Wellbery’s observation on the illocutionary act of the first stanza of Goethe’s “Prometheus” (see Chapter 1, above) that the parodistic commands the lyric subject gives are meant to anticipate and ward off danger, here divine punishment. Wellbery, Specular Moment, 296.

Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political 145 moment of emergency. That this works in Nathan’s favor and that events conspire to make the reading of traits into his own permanent integration into the family of the sovereign as adoptive patron of them all, is still the outcome of chance and fate. I will return to this question in the concluding chapter, where the subject will be the metaphor of birth and natal moments in Kleist, but not before considering how economic concepts intersect with, challenge, and represent a maieutics of natality in Schlegel and Goethe.

Three Ghostly Births: The Specter of Romanticism and the Maieutics of the Medium

Welche Götter werden uns von allen diesen Ironien erretten können? das einzige wäre, wenn sich eine Ironie fände, welche die Eigenschaft hätte, alle jene großen und kleinen Ironien zu verschlucken und zu verschlingen, daß nichts mehr davon zu sehen wäre, und ich muß gestehen, daß ich eben dazu in der meinigen eine merkliche Disposition fühle. Aber auch das würde nur auf kurze Zeit helfen können. Ich fürchte, wenn ich anders, was das Schicksal in Winken zu sagen scheint, richtig verstehe, es würde bald eine neue Generation von kleinen Ironien entstehn: denn wahrlich die Gestirne deuten auf fantastisch. What gods will save us from all these ironies? The only thing would be if an irony could be found that had the property of swallowing and digesting all those great and small ironies so that nothing more could be seen of them, and I have to confess that I feel in my own [irony] a marked disposition to do so. But that would only be able to help a short time. I fear on the other hand, if I understand correctly what fate seems to be hinting at, that a new generation of little ironies would arise: for truly the stars are pointing to fantastic. Friedrich Schlegel, “Über die Unverständlichkeit” (“On Incomprehensibility”)1 1 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe (KFSA), eds Ernst Behler, et al., Vol. 2, ed. Hans Eichner (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), 369–70. All citations from Friedrich Schlegel are from this edition. I cite by volume (from the first division of the edition only) and page number. This is my translation. Others are noted below.

Ghostly Births 147 Schlegel’s remarks on irony point to a diagnosis of the modern situation that should sound familiar to creatures of the twentieth century. The postmodern proliferation of irony and “ironies” in the form of the appropriation and consumption of symbols and lifestyles, the Heideggerian idea that “only a god can save us,” and the doubt that this will come to pass, are not simply considerations of an abstract notion. They constitute a cultural horizon that determines how we read the current situation and explains how we arrived at the point where we find ourselves today. We can probably sympathize deeply with Schlegel’s sense of fate as well. While holistic processes such as global warming are subtle and destructive at once, the visible social, economic, and political events present a confusing welter of symptoms: ideas and projects, claims and counterclaims, with no central point from which to oversee or manage them all, assuming they are comprehensible and manageable at all. Schlegel’s brand of Romanticism seems prescient in foregoing the notion of progress and growth that would mark the nineteenth century, in order to define the modern or postmodern condition as ironic and then, as if that were not enough, to neutralize the term in a comparison of scope: what is at stake is not irony, for it is not a choice, but the resolution of all the confusing ironies into one big one. This sounds like an apocalyptic salvation religion, but it matters little, since the stars are “pointing to fantastic.” On this eschatological horizon, Schlegel’s cultural diagnosis seems made to order for the economic situation of late capitalism: massive financial crisis, banks collapsing and being bailed out, individual debtors at the mercy of these same failed institutions, entire nation states with massive debt (so-called sovereign debt) and deficits at the mercy of international organizations that wield a financial carrot or stick – one big bailout or lots of little ones. Not surprisingly, Romantic economics, largely the brainchild of Adam Müller, but with help from Schlegel and Novalis, anticipates and provides a model for reflection on this situation. In this chapter, I shall examine how the connection between Romantic economics and Romantic critique functions. This chapter serves then to consider the sort of creature who considers himor herself in these terms, as a sort of ironic homo œconomicus. This kind of self-consideration presents a test case for the post-Romantic subject who attempts to get beyond the horizon of specularity. As Chapter 1 claimed to show, this attempt can seek out forms that inscribe its particular relation to the new in different maieutic processes. Even in the critique of Romantic economics, the openness to contingency can be translated into a theoretical move that repeats the Romantic gesture of ironic tension with the prospect of totality: a critique that organizes itself with reference only to this prospect and not to another kind of institutional or political form. This is the danger inherent in the

148  Figures of Natality critique of capitalism: that its critical statements about finance capital are themselves part of the recursive loop that constitutes the Romantic form underlying the totality of capital in the first place. Romantic economics and Romantic reading share the key feature of being organized around a spatial and temporal hiatus that is not an opening of contingency, but a reflection of the other side of this hiatus. In Romantic critique as in Romantic economics, this appears in the form of a chiasmus in which potential contraries are joined by reflecting their juxtaposition. If “a” has nothing necessarily to do with “b,” the critic can at least observe a pattern in “a-b-b-a” that seems to create a coherent unit of meaning. The mirror that creates the opposite wing of the chiasmus has the same function as the hiatus in the specular moment of Romantic lyric poetics: it is the vehicle of identity as empathetic projection that excludes any third term between the two wings or any contingency in their connection with each other or in the connection of their parts. One can see this as reflection, empathetic projection, or parodic repetition. These points of view imply different attitudes toward a historical thesis, the idea that Romanticism is itself a symptom of a change in understanding the human sciences, including literary language, which implies the end of representation in various senses.2 Its correlation with other phenomena, including the rise of the life sciences and the biological notion of autopoiesis in the “bootstrapping” of a cell that produces itself the elements that separate it from the outside world and enable its reproduction,3 is not my concern here, but “life” is a key term in this discussion because of the dual Spinozist and post-Kantian heritage of that term. While it might seem part of a continuum with birth, its function in this discourse excludes birth qua natality, the event of the new as alterity. The militarization of the concept of life covers a spatial totality and proposes to transform it totally. Although it helps to initiate the autopoietic turn circa 1800, the problem with Romantic critique on this score is not only that it obliterates any other or beyond of this immanent reproduction. Unlike Niklas Luhmann’s observers who make distinctions and recode others’ distinctions from an outside position, as second-order observers in the latter case, Romantic critique sees itself as the object and the object as 2

See Martha Helfer, The Retreat of Representation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) for a history of Darstellung circa 1800 that takes Heidegger’s retreat from representation as its conceptual starting point. 3 See Slavoj Žižek, “Discipline between Two Freedoms – Madness and Habit in German Idealism,” in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, by Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek (London: Continuum, 2009), 95–121.

Ghostly Births 149 itself. This is evident in Schlegel’s review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which will in the next chapter offer solutions to the Romantic economic problems sketched in this one. The Romantic relation to the object of critique or scientific observation (scientific in the broadest sense of the German term wissenschaftlich) is overdetermined by a parody—in the strictly formal sense, as repetition with a difference—of Spinoza’s philosophy. It bears that trace of its own genesis even as it substitutes the contingent origin of birth with an account of life as an ontological and essential distinction, a distinction made within “life” itself (for where else is there?). Examining Romantic critique through Romantic economics will explore the ramifications of this distinction in social terms, and another metacritical consideration will underscore how tricky it can be for recent, systematic critique to escape this political economy of life, whether in the critique of capitalism or in reading Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, as I shall do in the next chapter. For now, I observe how Romantic and recent critique, even where the latter seeks the political in a non-Romantic sense, desires or requires a maieutics of the medium, generalizing the economic offspring of money as a parallel to the new philosophy of life circa 1800. Ironically or not, this dynamic ends up at the eschatological level of Romantic politics: “The revolutionary desire to realize the Kingdom of God on earth is the elastic point of progressive civilization and the beginning of modern history. Whatever has no relation to the Kingdom of God is of strictly secondary importance in it.”4

The Spectrology of Capital

At stake in the critique of late or post-modern finance capitalism (which in German has the generic name Kapitalismuskritik) as the practice of organizations and individuals including Attac, Naomi Klein, Thomas Piketty, and Robert Reich, is the state of homo œconomicus no longer as the triumphant burgher of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto but as the plaything of the forces he has unleashed: the monetization of all social relations become the play of capital with its own fictions. This is certainly a more radical version of economics than Hannah Arendt had in mind, since in her thinking about homo faber in the industrial 1950s there is still a kind of production that has at least the marginal dignity of serving the cycles of life in the basic and apolitical world of natality as birth into biological need. One might observe instead about critiques of later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century capitalism that the question of the political is increasingly framed not in terms 4 Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments (fragment 222), in Philosophical Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 48.

150  Figures of Natality of different kinds of polity or of possibilities for change, but in critical terms that refer to a debased economic world. This is perhaps not so far off from the visions of loss in Arendt’s or Heidegger’s critiques of technē, except that the political or ontological points of reference in their versions remain external to the status quo, not simply probing for its weak spots, naming its internal contradictions, or decrying its real excesses. Important though the critique of inequality is for the very real privation and suffering faced by many, it still casts human nature and community as economic in nature, building a better homo œconomicus while dispensing with homo politicus. As I want to show in what follows, this vision of economic factors as either positive or negative in value, predictable or not, lawlike or contingent, grounded in reality or fantastic, reiterates the logic of life that underlies the Romantic transition to self-organization and organism. Flogging the term “epigenetic” again, one might say that the birth of one great irony as Schlegel imagines it is the same Romantic gesture, albeit an unfulfilled one, as the epigenetic ambition identified by Helmut Müller-Sievers: “[I]t is no longer the epigenetic origins of beings in the world but the epigenesis of the world as such that is at stake.”5 The logic of life in this case is a matter of scope and scale that vitiates the value question. Ironic or not, the vision that opposes a homogeneous totality as a self-organizing medium called “world” to the “buzzing, booming chaos” of the fantastic only deals with selforganizing versus unorganized versions of totality. A non-Romantic critic is left to ask whether there might not be other laws in play or ones that can be made that localize and limit contingency in order to preserve it while giving necessity its due. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida reads competing totalitarianisms as reactions to the “ghost” of Communism haunting Europe in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto, “the terror [Communism] inspired in its adversaries but that it turned inside out and felt sufficiently within itself to precipitate the monstrous realization … of an emancipatory eschatology … which could not have been a simple ideological phantasm since the critique of ideology was inspired by nothing else.”6 The ghost-driven eschatology in Derrida’s extended reading of Marx (and Freud) with Hamlet assumes the totalization of life as that which makes a decisive break with death, as in the injunction to “let the dead bury their dead” (Luke 9:60, Matt. 4:23). This “absolute life” is however “absolute evil,” as it is “fully present life, the one that does not know

5 Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, 15. 6 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 131.

Ghostly Births 151 death and does not want to hear about it.”7 The “hauntology” with which Derrida replaces political ontologies and economies offers one way of seeing a capitalism haunted by its own uncertainties even as it tries to insure itself against these. While Goethe will offer a different version of spectral economies and natal goods in Wilhelm Meister, it will be helpful to consider first the Romantic critical economies that drive both late capitalism on one account and the understanding of the Apprenticeship as a case of Romantic Poesie, an assumption I address in the next chapter in comparison with Goethe’s text itself. In his magisterial conceptual history of the development of finance capitalism, The Specter of Capital, Joseph Vogl sees a Romantic ideology as defining the nature of financial speculation. This involves a putatively secular and market-oriented way of dealing with current and future risk by intensifying or amplifying (in Romantic jargon, potenzieren) speculation, attempting, in Vogl’s rather charitable view of capitalist intentions, to shield the present from risk by dispersing risk and transposing it to the future. In a brilliant stretto that interweaves present and future, actuality and contingency, Vogl sees the possibilities of the future mortgaged to the speculations of the present, and present time consumed by pressures emanating from that future that has already been parcelled out in economic terms. The risk that has been postponed to the future returns to the present in the form of current financial operations that refer now only to themselves and the possible effects of their operations. The inversion of first and last, present and future, the hysteron proteron of capital, is its distinguishing feature, against which all others are irrelevant, and it transforms capital into a pure phantom (Spuk).8 No longer communism but capitalism is the ghost, Gespenst, that haunts all nations and institutions. The endless, formless, and content-free time of economics claims the real, experienced, determinate, and finite time of the present as the collateral of its operations: “In [Don] DeLillo’s words, ‘the future becomes urgent’; it weighs upon the present and makes its presence felt by mortgaging lived and livable time periods.”9 This inversion of historical time is, as Vogl sees it, an effect of Romantic economics, a shift circa 1800 to a “Romantic commercial profile” that depends on the “paradox of ‘self-guaranteeing money’” 7 Ibid., 220. 8 Joseph Vogl, Das Gespenst des Kapitals (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012 [2010]), 171. Vogl, The Specter of Capital, translated by Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 125. 9 Vogl, Specter, 127. “[Die Zukunft] wird dringlich, sie insistiert in der Gegenwart und macht sich bemerkbar als Verpfändung gelebter und lebbarer Fristen.” Vogl, Gespenst, 173–4.

152  Figures of Natality and a temporalization that projects debt or puts off its repayment into the infinite future.10 The “insubstantial essence” of credit transactions with unbacked “monetary surrogates” and the trade in credit itself (for instance the packages of sub-prime mortgages bought and sold by banks, one of the causes of the recent crisis) are haunting or afflicting (heimsuchen) the market – or at least the earlier conception of a balanced market.11 Romantic economics is therefore not limited to the Romantic period, which begins for these purposes with the monetary policies of the Bank of England and the French Revolutionary state just before 1800, but is a form of economic thought that has a certain structure and, so it would seem from the spectral metaphor, a certain actantial character: it follows, it haunts, it plagues the traditional conceptions of economics that depend on producing and exchanging things and constitute social, political, and affective bonds around the marketplace. It seems that Romantic economy’s haunting of liberal “oikodicy,” the notion that (by analogy to theodicy) the market takes care of itself while producing optimal outcomes and stable relations and processes, would on Derrida’s “hauntological” model produce a corresponding reaction. How these two hauntings—of capital by its critics and of liberal market optimism by the Romantic “fantastic” of credit upon credit—interact is, like the competing totalitarianisms of Derrida’s eschatological dread, a function of the Romantic model. As I shall explain below, this chiasmic figure of the future mortgaged to the present and the present consumed by the future is a figure of Romanticism even when used critically in order to identify the problem with Romantic economics, and it inhabits the very critical discourse that distinguishes between the “liveable” and “lived,” on one hand, and the phantasmatic, on the other. As a remedy, at least a conceptual one, for this bad virtual infinity, Joseph Vogl calls for a realism in which finance capitalism is no longer seen as the acme of an economic theory it makes impossible. Finance should no longer be taken as a synecdoche for economics as such, since it does not reflect marketor exchange-oriented processes and goals, and it should be read not as an “oikodicy” that produces the best of all possible economic worlds, but is or should be open to “the impact of contingent events, historical ages, and periods [Fristen].”12 This distinction amounts to a demystification or secularization of economics, which in turn implies the identification of its pretensions to exercise social and political power as a metaphysical claim. As “the political” is concerned, its function in a quasi-Schmittian sense consists not in state intervention, 10 Vogl, Specter, 56; Gespenst, 81. 11 Vogl, Specter, 57; Gespenst, 82. 12 Vogl, Specter, 113; Gespenst, 152–4.

Ghostly Births 153 but in “the reduction of the eschatological rudiments” of political economy and a mistrust of the “realization of practical reason through market forces.”13 The elimination of the soteriological basis of liberal capitalism and free-market ethics would seem to provide the “lived” and “liveable,” “contingent” and “historical” experiences of time and finitude promised in the liberation of the present from the economic terror of the future. In what follows, I want to understand how this critical model relates to the discourse of Romanticism in broader outline, particularly to the symbolic medium of money and the other ideas that circulate in Romanticism’s constitution of an autopoietic medium of communication. I also want to trace connections between Romantic economics and the theoretical formations from which much of Vogl’s critical diagnosis and implicit or explicit prescriptions emanate as an attempt to critique autopoiesis from within a discourse of life on the disciplinary boundary where this critique meets pressing public concerns. It is therefore a test case for an attempt to defend that space against the depredations of economic discourse especially on the tightest of circuits, the specularity of Romantic economics. By way of an assessment of this linkage of Romanticism to the critique of capitalism, I shall look at three well-enough-known phenomena surrounding the birth moment of Romanticism: the construction of Romanticism as a historical fiction, the creation of a new Spinoza—symbol of an immanent epistemology and ontology—purpose-built for Romantic subjectivity and historicity, and the entrapment of Romanticism in its own horizon precisely because of its desire to exceed that horizon, moving from a humanity that has “no object other than the Earth” (“keinen anderen Gegenstand als […] die Erde”) in order to begin, in religion, a “new humanity” (“neue Menschheit”).14 I argue that even this critique of capitalism shares a crucial idea of the Romantic critique: the temporalizing premise that representation, in various senses, comes to an end circa 1800. This idea is sustained by Romantic economics in exemplary fashion, but it also recurs in neo-Romantic critical theory, which, in spite of its desire to identify the transition from representation to functional self-reproduction in a critical vein, shares the periodizing premise that such a transition took place and implicitly limits the possibility of critique to that already defined by Romanticism even as it stresses contingency and non-totality. The critique of Romanticism in both senses of that genitive, repeats the Romantic fiction of temporality. This creates a maieutics of the medium, whether money or Poesie, that erases 13 Vogl, Specter, 129; Gespenst, 177. 14 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:285, 257.

154  Figures of Natality the original, contingent, historical difference – and the fact that this difference is also produced contingently by an observer of history – in favor of an ontological judgment of totality, creating transcendence out of the most rigorous immanence.

Broken Syntaxes: Form and Romantic Medium

The historiography behind this account is largely that of Michel Foucault, who sees a transition circa 1800 from a “classical,” encyclopedic culture of knowledge to one of sciences built around organic structures linked by functional relations among their elements.15 In this version, the organic model ends a previous era of representation because it presents functionally homologous spheres, expressed in the new sciences of biology, linguistics, and economics that derive their validity not from reference or adequation to the things they represent, but from their closed, self-referential or autopoietic, self-producing nature. Even Adam Smith’s conception of time, according to Foucault, is driven by an internal clock in an “organic structure which grows in accordance with its own necessity and develops in accordance with autochthonous laws – the time of capital and production.”16 The transformation identified by Foucault resembles that named by Vogl in the transition from the representational regimen of absolutism to the establishment of an “operational self-reference,” meaning that new fields are autonomous in so far as they distinguish themselves from their environments and operate independently of those environments, reproducing themselves based on that distinction.17 In this context, self-reference not only has the appeal of modernity, replacing an obsolete order; it also allows one to imagine that the distinct spheres do not overlap or override each other, much less that they could all be managed from some central point. From this angle, the “Romanticization of the political” is the attempt to bring the segmented and functionally differentiated sectors of government on this new, decentralized, and post-absolutist model together into a single state-form and mark the point where “sovereign representation, policing [polizeiliche Steuerung] and self-regulation” 15 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), 218. Benjamin Bennett notes that the before and the after of this moment have features in common that reflect more a common avoidance of Kant than a watershed moment. See Bennett, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Politics of Irony (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 2–7. The form of this historical elision is another chiasmus, but with Kant as its vanishing mediator. 16 Foucault, The Order of Things, 226. 17 This is Niklas Luhmann’s definition of autopoiesis. See Joseph Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen (Zürich: diaphanes, 2011 [2002]), 260.

Ghostly Births 155 meet.18 This kind of policing joins the broader sense of population management and order (the basic sense of French police or German Polizei) with the epigenetic turn, costumed with the older forms of state power. The combination of previous regimes of knowledge and political economy in the encyclopedic and statistical pursuits of the previous economic model becomes, circa 1800, one that culminates, at least in the case of Novalis, in the “consistent hypotyposis of a semiotic economy [Zeichen-Ökonomie]: a language whose name is Nature, whose subject is Capital, whose object is, however, an objectless desiring.”19 This implies the empty sort of autopoiesis that will become the economy of finance capitalism in the course of the twentieth century, in the institution of a subject, homo œconomicus, that embodies the “concept of a fundamental lack.”20 A sharpening of Arendt’s dread of the cyclical, the work of this homo economicus is a struggle for scarce goods and the reflection of an existential worry (Sorge) about the maintenance of his own life. This seems to imply that the error is to symbolize the economy, to represent capital as a subject in the grammar of nature. This grammar seems to belong to Romanticism as its own particular instrument of discourse production and judgment. Not just a form of temporality for finance capitalism, Romanticism’s typical syntactical form is chiasmus, the a-b-b-a figure in which one side mirrors the other with no third term between them. A political example is Novalis’s casual reformulation of the doctrine of the king’s two bodies as the mirroring of sovereign and realm: “Der echte König wird Republik, die echte Republik König sein” (“The true king will be a republic, the true republic a king”). He claims at roughly the same spot, “Der König gehört zur Menschheit, aber nicht zum Staate” (The king belongs to humanity, but not to the state)—either a dry assertion that the king is human but not part of the body politic or, as Schlegel’s evocation of humanity (Menschheit) cited above suggests, that the point of reference of chiasmus is totality.21 The best known philosophical example of such 18 Ibid., 256. 19 Ibid., 266. 20 Ibid., 342. 21 Novalis, Werke, 359 and 358, respectively. I do not think I am putting too fine a point on it when I say that this shows the leverage of the universal term— “life” or “Menschheit”—as it pries the chiasmus out of balance and transforms it into an echo of a Schmittian political theology, in which the sovereign is both included and excluded, identical with “Republik” or res publica as a mirror of himself and as the fountainhead of legitimacy (like “Volk,” since the republic is king), while standing outside the apparatus of the state and wielding the power of decision over it, the real machinery of government, in the name of the higher power that is “echt,” whatever form it takes, republic or monarchy, as res publica in the classical sense.

156  Figures of Natality a chiasmus is Hegel’s similar insistence on the reality or authenticity of the link between mind and nature: “Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; / Und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig” (usually translated “the rational is real, and the real is rational”).22 The syntax of Romantic economics in the case of Novalis echoes Carl Schmitt’s diagnosis in Politische Romantik. Beyond fundamental problems with Romanticism’s political claims – or with any claim that Romanticism is political – Schmitt criticizes Romanticism’s structural inability to stake a claim or make an argument, its fascination with the subject’s feelings and its belief in natural innocence, and, following from the first two, its “subjective occasionalism,” in which no moment need follow any other moment since the outside world is only the space of projection of the subject’s feelings. Only the first problem concerns me here, but it is fundamental to the complex I want to identify. This notion of a boundless space of affectively charged fantasy echoes Arendt’s critique of the French Revolution as containing the logic of the Terror within it. It also reflects the Romanticization of the political identified by Vogl, in which Nature is the subject of an objectless desire. Schmitt also understands this point in a primarily syntactic sense. Romantic/romantisch is always a predicate: “That is romantic.” It is never a subject that could itself receive a predicate that would define it: “Romanticism is …”23 While the weight might seem to be on the predicate romantic, Schmitt’s analysis of Romantic discourse argues that the use of romantic or Romanticism as a predicate defines nothing except the full powers of its subject to evade definition. A syntactic or stylistic maneuver becomes a polemical strategy precisely in order to avoid polemic. Even if Romanticism is not an object to be defined, it is a medium in which these vacuous sentences can emerge, even as it takes itself, in its conception of Poesie, as its own object. Objectifying the medium rather than the determinate forms that emerge within it is the main tendency I want to identify here. As John H. Smith has shown, the Romantic medium is shaped by the transformation of Spinoza’s concept of immanence, in which God and nature are two modalities of the same substance, via Friedrich Schleiermacher’s account of religion. It now becomes a Naturphilosophie that joins immanence and totality in a vitalism that makes Spinoza’s two-faced substance, deus sive natura, into an organism. But this transformation is remarkable not simply because it gets us into the territory of Friedrich Schelling’s “world-soul” and its immediate spiritualization 22 G. W. F. von Hegel, Werke, eds Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 7:24. 23 Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik [1925] (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1998), 10.

Ghostly Births 157 of immanence in a chiasmic figure—“Die Natur soll der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur sein” (“Nature should be invisible Spirit, Spirit be invisible Nature”)24—but because it evokes a moment of judgment that haunts the figure of autopoiesis in its vitalist incarnation. At stake in this judgment is whether something is living or dead. It should be unnecessary here to list all the variations on the Pauline dictum “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). Immanuel Kant’s explanation of hypotyposis in §59 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft sets the contemporary tone in understanding the difference between an absolutist and a constitutional monarchy in the difference yielded in reflection between a machine and an animate body. Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s manipulation of Geist and Buchstabe for the jump from a formal to a dynamic phenomenology seems to rely on this figure.25 Finally, in Schelling’s treatment of Spinoza as one who recognized the “Geist der Welt” rather than building a system that changed Geist into “a dead mirror of things” (“einen toten Spiegel der Dinge”),26 this binary marks Romanticism’s need to carry out a selection in the singular substance of the world, deciding which of two possibilities in this one substance is imbued with the necessary qualities to reproduce itself, or which shares the premise of the medium in which Romanticism communicates, the medium of life. This medium is born around 1800 in the self-explanatory concept of autopoiesis. It is self-explanatory not because it is simple, but because it exists by virtue of positing its own presuppositions, as Hegel says.27 It retroactively posits the conditions necessary for itself to exist or to have come into being in the first place, and this performative maieutics is its essence. Vogl continues this tradition of distinction between the living and the dead, but with regard to autopoiesis, seeming to distinguish between a good autopoiesis that has the virtue of remaining within a modern, anti-foundational epistemology and a bad autopoiesis that, “unlike cybernetic and self-regulating systems,”28 reproduces an empty form at a dizzying speed and destabilizes itself in the very pursuit of stability. This moment is apparent in Vogl’s critique of Romantic economics as “a game of exponentially raised expectations of expectations,”29 24 Schelling, Werke, 1:151. 25 For Kant’s possible influence on Fichte’s account of productive imagination, see Loock, 186 n. 310. 26 Schelling, Werke, 1:114–15. 27 Slavoj Žižek sees Hegel’s “positing the presuppositions” as analogous to the biological and systems-theoretical version of autopoiesis. See Žižek, “Discipline between Two Freedoms.” 28 Vogl, Specter, 119; Gespenst, 162. 29 Vogl, Specter, 114; “ein Spiel potenzierter Ertwartungserwartungen,” Gespenst, 155.

158  Figures of Natality a specular mise en abyme and temporalization of the sort of chiasmic figure Schelling uses to join mind and nature in an immediate and mutual connection. The reflective game of expectations of expectations is a feature of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of communication, where it goes under the heading of “double contingency”: the notion that one party formulates his or her communications based on expectations of what the other party expects him or her to say. Double contingency is the means by which social systems reproduce themselves, also with regard to the symbolically generalized media of communication, such as money. For Vogl, financial processes do not function “according to the model of a self-correcting, self-optimizing system,” but “[i]nstead, the very systematicity of the system is called into question.”30 There are, then, two kinds of self-referentiality: passive speculation (looking plus reflection) and its self-intensifying and accelerating effects; and autopoiesis, the self-governing and self-reproduction of a system by analogy to an organism. A salient point of this critique of capitalism is that it is not in fact systematic as it should be, like a self-organizing life process. In sum, capitalism for Vogl seems to extrapolate the model of communication as double contingency to society as a whole, but as Schelling’s “dead mirror” rather than as a natural process. This Pauline life–death distinction organizes the critique of capitalism here in favor of a different eschatological horizon with a similar form and still on Romantic premises. Romanticism seems furthermore to underwrite that “opaque and unstable fault zone into which our societies have financed themselves”31 while projecting the resolution of this chaos onto a distant and still dubious eschatological horizon, as Schlegel indicates. The fault line through this discourse is the positivism of its method. It wants to understand how things hang together, but it also sees that knowledge as the basis for a normative judgment. For a theory of the autopoiesis of communication such as Luhmann’s, based on self-referential closure, this fault zone—in the original, Überraschungsraum, “space of surprises”—is simply the outside of the processes that convert chaos into autopoietic systems and the source of new information that is integrated into those systems.32 For Vogl, the Überraschungsraum is not a fact of the limitations of a system, but another figure of sovereignty with its own arcana imperii, the secrecy that allows for the exercise of power. The environment is programmed by finance capitalism and not subject to the ordering of a good system or to a personal ethos of 30 Vogl, Specter, 113; Gespenst, 154. 31 Vogl, Specter, 130. “Fault zone” is the translation of “Überraschungsraum,” “space of surprises.” See Vogl, Gespenst, 178. 32 See Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, Ch. 5.

Ghostly Births 159 prudence and moderation that would supplement the chiasmus of infinite self-reflection.33 The status of this object is also questionable, split between a natural, descriptive and a normative aspect. It is either the expression of a naturally occurring chaos that generates its own structure,34 or the outcome of a process that falls away from a good order. Either political or ethical action should be oriented toward a moral norm that distinguishes between good and bad systems and institutions, or it should be content with demystifying the illusions created when chaos is used as the mask of another kind of order. These are the ambiguities of the mathematical model Vogl shares with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This model incorporates chaos theory in the form of Benoît Mandelbrot’s observations on fractal geometry, which take as their premise the idea that nature organizes itself spontaneously into patterns that are self-reproducing and similar, and that repeat the pattern at least approximately even at the largest or most minute levels of examination. As Vogl says, Mandelbrot’s approach also provides a mathematical analysis of finance that concludes that it, too, is chaotic, seemingly analogous to the physical world. On the level of scientific knowledge at least, the capitalist theory of rational choice and market equilibrium optimized by deregulation is met with a perspective that can observe the world created by finance capitalism as a quasi-natural “fractally structured, organized chaos.”35 This analysis seems to respond to the criterion of immanence and secularity in so far as it joins nature, mathematical order, and observation in structural repetition and spontaneous self-organization. What remains unclear is how or whether the natural world and the market, both representable in fractal geometry as chaotic states, are two expressions of the same natural fact, or how one could be weighted positively, as the model of “a form of nomadizing knowledge” (“nomadisierende Wissensform”)36 that rejects the old, representative, sovereign order, and the other negatively, as dead or empty. Gillian Howie’s remark about the Deleuzian origin of this model should be tested for the Romantic 33 For a critical assessment of how concerns of economy and security overlap with visibility and invisibility in Foucault, see Ute Tellmann, “Foucault and the Invisible Economy.” Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 5–24. http://rauli.cbs.dk/index. php/foucault-studies/article/view/2487. April, 15, 2014. 34 Vogl, Gespenst, 146. 35 Vogl, Specter, 107; Gespenst, 146. 36 Vogl, Specter, 109; Gespenst, 148. This is a reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in which nomads are opposed to city-dwellers, standing armies, and “royal” science, these three being attached to the old school of the symbol, representation, and centralization. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Ch. 12.

160  Figures of Natality problem and the demystifying or naturalizing solution offered by Vogl: Could it be the case that “[i]dealism, posing as materialism, sustains thought’s claims to be total, which, then, manages to sanction the actual force of the object world”?37 Whether that world is known as orderly or as chaotic, knowledge still accounts for a total world view and is the form of action: to do is to know more. Before demystifying the capitalist “reterritorialization” of this dynamic, autopoietic version of Spinoza’s dictum, “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things,”38 as the work of sovereignty and representation, perhaps one should ask whether that ontological and epistemological premise is plausible in the first place or whether it does not constitute, by virtue of its spatial totality and moral absolutism, the claim of economics to legitimacy in the first place.

Goethe (Schlegel), Müller, and the End of Representation

The charge that capital has seized all power over these immanent, vital social processes and exercises outdated sovereign functions is a curious one, first of all because it involves two fictions—sovereignty and a vitalized society—that are in an asymmetrical relationship. Sovereignty is coded as obsolete and negative because it is an instance of decision-making belonging to an outdated representative order. Yet the very innovation that allows for the understanding of society in terms of vital processes is what allows capital to mask its operations not in the pomp of conspicuous consumption—pace Thorsten Veblen— or Rockfellerian building projects, but in an autology like that of the lyrical short circuit between self and nature. Indeed, the market itself is the historical instrument of the “self-institution of society.”39 Perhaps the ill to be combatted here is not the instance of decision-making, but the fact that it has been subtilized and immanentized in the belief, presented by Foucault as a historical fact, that autopoietic models have made sovereignty and representation obsolete, or at best (and worst) an out-of-place attempt to manipulate life, and, in the coding of that obsolescence as morally negative, a threat to life in a discourse that is adamantly pro-life in the most general sense. The logical and historical circularity of this figure is hard to overlook in Romantic economic theory. In Adam Müller’s Versuch einer neuen Theorie des Geldes (1816), for instance, life is what creates higher orders of unity to the point where representation effectively fades away. Müller’s theory of credit is a form of belief in the unseen. (He calls it 37 Gillian Howie, Deleuze or Spinoza? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 206. 38 Spinoza, Collected Works, ed. Michael Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 247. (Ethics 2.7.) 39 Vogl, Gespenst, 54; my translation.

Ghostly Births 161 Glauben at least as often as he does Credit, a now archaic reminder of the link between religion and finance in both the Latinate and Germanic forms.) Both the optimistic and pessimistic liberal perspectives on this notion stop short of this final step into a global Welthaushaltung (world economy, preserving the original sense of household, oikos), whether at the individual and social or state level. Richard T. Gray focuses on the power of paper money in Müller’s theory to bring about a “natural sociability” and a “solicitous codependence among human beings,” as a “progressive and radical” alternative to the widely shared skepticism about paper money even on the part of the British.40 Müller’s image of economics also sees the activity of private households as directed toward the enrichment of the state.41 While these semiotic and political reflections certainly find support in his theory, Müller finds that the mystical central point of the economic cosmos is the factor undoing Repräsentation—the figuration of authority, as in its personification in the sovereign—for lack of sufficient evidence. Müller contrasts the already somehow defective forms of represented authority in the family and the state with the divine stage of a global credit-based economy: “There is no further representation; here, belief [Glaube] in the central point [Mittelpunkt], in endless mediation, or in the mediator, must become the central point itself. Here, God himself must come to the aid of His humankind immediately, for the earthly means of aid by representation are no longer sufficient here.”42 The political and public valences of the term representation are important here, and they do not quite overlap with the semantics of Darstellung, since the stress in repräsentieren is on public appearance and display, not a presentation of some other thing or idea.43 Müller has other ways of supplementing vacuous Romantic syntax, providing it not with names or persons as its objects but with life, a “great collective life” (“große[s] Gesammtleben”) in which conflicts among sub-units are solved by mediation: “All warlike and consuming elements, and all peaceful, producing [erzeugende] ones of this great collective life, world-production and world-consumption 40 Richard T. Gray, “Hypersign, Hypermoney, Hypermarket: Adam Müller’s Theory of Money and Romantic Semiotics,” New Literary History 31 (2000), 300. 41 Fritz Breithaupt refers to this as an “obsessive crusade against individual enrichment, in order to raise the collective to a dictatorial norm.” Fritz Breithaupt, Das Ich-Effekt des Geldes (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008), 108. 42 Adam Müller, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des Geldes (Leipzig and Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1816), 95. 43 Schlegel was more pragmatically minded about Repräsentazion, writing in the Athenäum that the personation (as Thomas Hobbes calls it) of the sovereign softens and legitimates “legal despotism” (“rechtlicher Despotismus”). KFSA, 2:233–4.

162  Figures of Natality [Weltconsumtion], can join themselves through the mediation of that revealed [truth] into a higher life that is above the appearance of life as of death [über den Schein … erhaben] and includes both.”44 This is not only a third party; it is one of the two poles, life and death, raised to the status of a third, life, which joins them. To apply Novalis’s language, the “true transubstantiation” (“wahre Transsubstantion”)45 that occurs here is that of the mirror into the organism, here the world-organism, and of the organism generalized as nature into God, the object of love. The Romanticized state, recipient of the wealth of all the individual households, is to integrate itself into a union of states (Staatenverein) and a total world market or household (Weltmarkt, Welthaushaltung), not practically but on a utopian or eschatological horizon, around a central point of the world which is not constructed but known “through real revelation” (“durch wirkliche Offenbarung”).46 Religion, secularized as “credit,” becomes in this version a positive economic force that removes conflict from the world – a first medial step if it is to assume total sovereignty, but one that discursively eliminates the possibility of talking about sovereignty. Is the end of representation a trick with mirrors? At stake here is the choice of which third term should or could supplement this vacuous Romantic syntax. For Schmitt’s critique of Romantic politics, it is the normative and existential commitment of political decision. For Schlegel and Müller, it is an eschatology that projects the restoration of harmony or uniformity, even an ironic uniformity, to a medium that is universal, in so far as it creates that medium as one pole of a binary and then exalts it to the level of the general.47 That this is done with a term such as life should not obscure the difference between the truism that life lives and the rhetorical use of life as a protected category: e.g., “damaged life” (Adorno) or “bare life” (Agamben). In his review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Schlegel treats the novel as a living thing that evolves as an autopoietic world unto itself. It begins “softly,” “unfolding” itself as an emergent world,48 and it goes on to represent and even judge itself. It serves Schlegel as the occasion for deploying a theological language opposing the dead to the living, and it tropes the critic as passive in a conception of the literary work as analogous to nature both on the immediate terms of Schlegel’s critique, 44 Müller, Versuch, 95. 45 Novalis, Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz. 2nd rev. edn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), 367. 46 Müller, Versuch, 95. 47 This is a deconstructive premise, but it is also a feature of Luhmann’s systems theory, in which communicative aporias are broken through by “asymmetrization.” 48 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:126.

Ghostly Births 163 in a “Nature that intuits itself” (“sich selbst anschauende Natur”)49 and in terms of Spinoza’s philosophy. The latter is Schlegel’s source for the language of the essay in many respects, but especially as it concerns the dual role of nature as created (naturata) and actively self-reproducing (naturans). This distinction remits to Spinoza’s identification of God and nature as two modalities of the same substance. Natura naturans means the “attributes of substance that express eternal and infinite essence […], or God insofar as he is considered a free cause,” whereas natura naturata means “that which follows from the necessity of God’s nature, that is, from the necessity of each one of God’s attributes.”50 While Spinoza maintains that the intellect can perceive only the latter, natura naturata, Schlegel seems to want to capture natura naturans in placing the critical subject as mediator between the two aspects of God/nature, examining the process and not the product—yet another echo of Arendt’s diagnosis of the complex of homo faber. The “drive of the thoroughly organized and organizing work to form itself into a whole” (“der Trieb des durchaus organisierten und organisierenden Werks, sich zum ganzen zu bilden”) is the object of the critic’s attention.51 It is then not even the process of self-organizing but the very vital force driving this process that is the object of the Romantic critical phrase. Schlegel’s “drive” (Trieb) potentially undoes itself in the passivity of the mirror in Athenäum fragment 116, in which it is the task of romantic Poesie to become “a mirror of the whole surrounding world” by positioning itself in the speculative hiatus between the two wings of the chiasmus: “it can hover in the middle between the portrayed [Dargestellten] and the portrayer [Darstellenden] … on the wings of poetic reflection and then raise that reflection again and again, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.”52 In the essay on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the same process, a “poetic physics of poetry [Poesie],” is depicted as organic, and the critic’s activity as identifying the organic qualities of the work as “not by any means the dead framework of a didactic structure, but stage after stage [die lebendige Stufenleiter] of every natural history and educational theory [Bildungslehre] in living progression.”53 Schlegel’s use of the letter–spirit 49 Ibid., 2:143. 50 Spinoza, Collected Works, 234; Ethics, 1.29. 51 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:131. 52 Ibid., 2:182–3. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 32. 53 Friedrich Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” translated by Peter Firchow, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 274. Schlegel, KFSA, 2:132. The 1825 edition of Schlegel’s

164  Figures of Natality distinction with organic metaphors in this context of present and past participles, processes and modalities, combines empty reflection and vitality in so far as his mirror shows life as a set of functional relationships, to be appreciated precisely in their organic and autopoietic unity. However, this appreciation is still specular, that is, unless the critic wants to thematize his own position. In Schlegel’s review, Goethe’s novel is the very model of the selforganizing and self-contained artwork. His chain of reflexive “sich selbst” phrases is well known and seems to make the task of the critic in the pre-Schlegelian world obsolete. The novel contains its own judgment within it, and spares the critic his labor. Indeed, not only does it judge itself; it also describes itself.”54 The book unfolds itself from its own core and takes care of its own presentations and representations. This totally included view does not need to distinguish observer from observed, from the operation of observation itself. Following the same train of thought, the proof of Goethe’s ability is the novel’s “presentation of a nature constantly intuiting itself [selbst anschauend] to infinity.”55 Reflexivity, intuition, and construction are conflated in the leitmotif that informs the whole essay: the creation and representation of a nature which needs neither because it creates and presents itself as an object, which can be perceived and represented as it is in its wholeness, a representation which it does not require, and so on ad infinitum. This is worth mentioning here not because Schlegel’s review is taken as a good interpretation of Goethe’s novel when that question is asked at all.56 The critical moment represented by the essay not only parallels the move to post-representation but anticipates the periodizing gesture of creating that new epoch at all. In this sense, it is a question of whether Schlegel’s readers are observing his critical system on its own as a model of the potential autopoietic form of literary works, or are not observing at all but rather imitating Schlegel’s critical reflex. The first would be a candidate for observing a self-organizing system. The second would be speculation in the sense of mirroring and, in the repetition of a critical gesture now acquired from Schlegel as the founder of a certain kind of criticism, a mimetic and not an observing moment at all. Is this the essay brings the text even closer to the language of Athenäum fragment 116, calling the method a “poetically portrayed and portraying natural theory of poesy and poetizing art” (“dichterisch dargestellt[e] und darstellendend[e] Naturlehre der Poesie und dichtenden Kunst”). Schlegel, KFSA, 2:132, n.1. 54 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 275. Schlegel, KFSA, 2:133–34. 55 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 283. Translation modified. KFSA, 2:143. 56 For example, Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert finds it perfectly adequate. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 151.

Ghostly Births 165 mise en abyme of infinite reflection of critique that has taken leave of any possible textual basis? Is it the self-organizing activity of making a claim to observe the literary text as a quasi-natural phenomenon in keeping with organic, post-representational premises? Or is it simply the canonization of the elision of a situated standpoint (other than one as idealized as a Mittelpunkt)? The philosopher Thomas Nagel describes the “view from nowhere” as a premise of “the pursuit of objective knowledge, whose aim is naturally described in terms that, taken literally, are unintelligible: we must get outside of ourselves and view the world from nowhere within it.”57 The view from nowhere seems hardwired into Romantic discourse and intimately linked to religion. Schleiermacher canonizes the lack of subjective standpoint in his Speeches on Religion, rejecting situated observation—in tellingly economic terms—as an attribute of a “subservient lackey of the spot on which one happens to be standing.”58 Schlegel’s review of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship reflects the premises of the self-contained observation also championed by Schleiermacher as a means of appropriating the object from within; as Schleiermacher puts it in the Speeches on Religion, “One must have seen every matter [jede Sache] not from some point outside of it, but from its own center [von ihrem eigenen Mittelpunkt aus].”59 This is for Schleiermacher a theological insight that does not remain only theological. As John H. Smith observes, Schleiermacher’s conception of religion is itself a developmental Mittelpunkt of Romanticism, a “vanishing mediator” between the reception of the philosophy of Spinoza as a rational or intellectual contemplation of the universe, an “intellectual love of God” (amor intellectualis Dei), and the vitalism of Schelling, which turns this universe into an organism, making Spinoza’s mechanistic causality into a theory of dynamic efficacy.60 As Smith also explains, the Romantic theology of Schleiermacher creates the bridge between this vitalism and Hegel’s resurrection of totality, yet another transformation of the Spinozism evoked by Goethe and the early Romantics. Schleiermacher’s version rests on an intuition (Anschauung) of a living universe that is still identical with a not yet secularized God under the aegis of Spinoza’s deus sive natura. For Vogl, the spectral 57 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 67. 58 In the original: “handlangender Leibeigener des Fleks […] auf dem man eben von Ohngefähr steht.” Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst. Über die Religion, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 12, ed. Günter Meckenstock (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 162. 59 Schleiermacher, Über die Religion, 162. My translation. 60 John H. Smith, “Living Religion as Vanishing Mediator: Schleiermacher, Early Romanticism, and Idealism,” German Quarterly 84.2 (2010), 141–2.

166  Figures of Natality effects of capitalism, its lack of substance, come from this intervention, since it is a societas societans (sic) that gives rise to society as an organism.61 The encounter with Spinoza and the placement of the mirror as implicitly reflecting the dynamic and not the institutional part of that society are therefore crucial for understanding Romantic economics as it can relate to the critique of capitalism: as a religion and a generative system that, in its co-optation of vitalist language or, to follow Smith, in the religious invention of vitalism, founds its claim to immanence in transcendence.

The Maieutics of the Political

If the image that informs both Romantic economics and political Romanticism is the aspiration to see and understand the universe or the cosmos as a whole, the vision that haunts Romantic economics and politics is that the universe so perceived might be false, or that there might be what Schlegel, even after equating Poesie (poetry in the strict Romantic sense, “poesy”), Wissenschaft (science, after Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre), and nature, has Ludoviko, one of the figures in the Dialogue on Poesy (Gespräch über die Poesie), call a “system of false poesy” (“System der falschen Poesie”). According to Ludoviko, “who liked to practice annihilation on a grand scale [das Vernichten gern im Großen trieb] with his revolutionary philosophy,” this “system of false poesy” is prevalent in contemporary French and British literature. It is a coherent universe in itself, albeit one made of “false tendencies [Tendenzen] that agree with each other so beautifully, complete each other, and kindly meet each other halfway,” a system that is “as remarkable and edifying as it is entertaining and grotesque.”62 In Schlegel’s non-dialogic dialogue, in which figures characterized differently present essentially similar or complementary positions, Ludoviko’s destructive criticism is prepared by Antonio’s remark that the English derive their literary criticism from Adam Smith’s ideas on the wealth of nations: “They would be proud of making the best scissors and the best poetry in the same way and for the same reasons,” since they can put both in their national, cultural–economic exchequer.63 This splitting of the concept of Poesie into true and false systematicity, organic self-representation, and autopoietic self-development versus the false economic ideas of Adam Smith and the grotesque 61 Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft, 285. 62 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:290. My translation. For Schlegel, the really important “tendencies of the age” are the French Revolution, Goethe’s Meister, and Fichte’s theory of knowledge/science (Wissenschaftslehre). 63 Ibid., 2:289. My translation.

Ghostly Births 167 novels of Henry Fielding—Tom Jones versus Wilhelm Meister—recalls the distinction drawn by Vogl between good and bad systems as having to do with the deficient systematicity of the latter. It also recalls the basic money phobia at the heart of the Western discourse on economics, codified in Aristotle’s distinction of oikonomia, reasonable and sound economic activity, household management, from chrematistike, financial activity that results in the multiplication of money from money, transforming the means of exchange into an end in itself. This sounds like (and shares a common origin with) the conceptions of moral nature which resulted in medieval condemnations of usury and are indeed alien to the whole early modern valuation of commerce. For this production of money from money, Vogl uses the Schlegelian term Parekbase, or parabasis, “a digression from the right and natural path.”64 This deviation removes the telos of earning money to satisfy needs or fulfill a vision of the good life and, therefore, affects particularly the bonds holding together the common (koinónía) and the polis, to which economic activity to meet real need had been subordinated.65 From its use in Plato and Aristotle, as Marc Shell notes, chrematistics is as much a figure of thought as an economic one. The “child” or “interest” that usury produces is for Socrates a metaphor for the offspring of thought, and in Socrates’s philosophical maieutics, the “midwifery” of telling true ideas from fantasies, is a matter not of producing or not producing such thoughts but of what one does with them, as Socrates’s examples and tales are “tokoi of the Good” that is in itself inaccessible.66 In other words, Plato claims that, in so far as production and reproduction reflect the good, they are necessary; this is borne out by the mythology of the Tale of Er in book 10 of the Republic. It seems that critique of Romantic economics is the offspring of the same phenomenon, haunted by its own origins both in “real” value and in the narrative or rhetorical, mythological expression of that value. Chrematistics is itself the offspring of oikonomia, since the chreˉmata are originally the goods necessary to preserve life,67 as Arendt also notes in her correction of the saying, “Man is the measure of all things,” but their conversion into futures and derivatives seems to be another sort of miscarriage, producing what Plato calls “miscarriage of […] thoughts” and “false phantoms.”68 If parabasis 64 Vogl, Specter, 87; Gespenst, 120. 65 Vogl refers in Heideggerian terms to “das politische Geschick” (“the fate of politics”) and the dissolution of the political bond in the triumph of economics as moneymaking in the polis. Vogl, Gespenst, 120–1; Specter, 87–8. 66 Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 45–8. 67 Vogl, Gespenst, 120–1. Specter, 88–9. 68 Plato, Thaetetus, 150e. While Vogl links the money economy even in its reasonable mode of facilitating exchange with the seeds of finance economics,

168  Figures of Natality denotes the wrong purpose of money, this process of hollow generation is caught up in a temporality that threatens always to collapse, broken up by the instability that created its proliferating success. The danger of Schlegel’s “permanent parabasis” (“permanente Parekbase”) is that it is a constant interruption or interruptibility, as Paul de Man emphasizes.69 If organic units such as the fragment, the poem, and nature are the domain of the Genie, the primary historical phenomena of the “chemical age” are revolutions, which are “universal chemical and not organic movements.”70 This sentence is striking because of the emphasis on organism and organicity in Schlegel’s review of Goethe’s novel, one of the founding documents of cultural epigeneticism. Following Arendt’s critique of the French Revolution, one of Schlegel’s authentic “tendencies of the age,” one can perhaps conclude here that, if an empathetic or divinatory understanding of the self-generating and self-contained work is necessary (for there is no other access to it), then the “chemical” infinity of revolutionary feeling necessarily follows this affect-based intuitive critique. Feeling for the other replaces an interaction with the other or a construction of the other, or, perhaps more accurately, feeling for the other without interaction (of whatever sort) effaces the knowledge that the other has already been constructed, as Schlegel reconstructs Goethe’s novel, in order to enable that infinite feeling. Chemistry is the model of sociability and politics for Schlegel precisely because it is arbitrary. Even friendship is a conversation that can be interrupted at any moment, a chemical bond that, as Michel Chaouli observes, “can be held only at the expense of its radical inconstancy; it can be produced, but its half-life approaches zero.”71 Paul Hamilton’s remark that Schlegel’s irony “socializ[es] the infinity present at each moment”72 does not seem helpful here, as infinity would then have to present some social form or sociability to be infinite. As a collective parabasis, modelled on choral commentary, this would end in paranoia – the chorus is always lurking, waiting to interrupt – and he implies that there is an ethical difference. The economics that takes money as an autopoietically self-birthing medium is bad or false, whereas that which comes of a fair exchange, in a process marked by measure or moderation (Maß), to satisfy the needs of a self-sufficient or modest (selbstgenügsam) life is the right kind. Vogl, Gespenst, 118. 69 Schlegel, KFSA, 18:85; De Man, Blindness and Insight, 120. 70 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:248. My translation. 71 Michel Chaouli, “Critical Mass, Fission, Fusion: Friedrich Schlegel’s Volatile System,” Rereading Romanticism, ed. Martha B. Helfer. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 147. 72 Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20.

Ghostly Births 169 would be in any case, dialogical or collective, as Chaouli notes, “not far from the most extreme form of social psychosis” since the “indissolvable bonds” of Poesie are in this instance hardly analogous to the social bond.73 It seems beyond Romanticism’s power to restore these bonds severed by capitalism, as Romanticism itself introduces at every level, from intersubjectivity to collectivity, the destructive modernity Goethe called “veloziferisch.”74 Parabasis as a chemical deviation from the organic norm takes the place of the mirror between natura naturans and natura naturata. Reflection of the spontaneity of the world as organic yields chemistry and refers to the other kind of bad autopoiesis, the infinitely selfreproducing chimera of unbacked money or credit and a medium of money that gives birth to itself.75 The objectless or definitionless medium of Poesie thus becomes an object of birth in the “selfperpetuation [Fortzeugung] of the capitalist form,”76 in a metaphor one should not underestimate, of a birth process and of judgment upon that birth: Is it living, or is it a phantasm? If parabasis is the movement that can entertain the latter option, then it is evidently a way of thematizing the observer’s standpoint that is unavailable to the critic when he stages himself in the naive and immediate intuition of deus sive natura. In this sense, irony is not so much the corrosive figure of interruption or parabasis as it is a figure that varies in scope from the fragment to the totality, from the household to the Welthaushaltung, or from the nation to the globe. It also signifies the homology of all of these, whether hedgehogs or poems, novels or states. The fact that this is a permanent condition with a “curious disposition” to “swallow and engulf all those great and small ironies”77 points again to its self-intensifying temporality, but this does not imply that it succeeds, since the process of birth continues, producing ever more 73 Chaouli, “Critical Mass,” 148; Schlegel, KFSA, 2:284. 74 Goethe, FA 10:563. This citation refers to Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Book 2, Chapter 11, “Betrachtungen im Sinne der Wanderer.” See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), for the systematic application of Goethe’s term via Marx as a model of modernity. Adam Müller’s attachment to the state also sees money as that which holds the citizen-subjects of the state together. Money and the law are two expressive modalities of the same need for the state. Müller, Theorie des Geldes, 172. Schmitt is more cynical, calling Romanticism as such “psychologically and historically a product of bourgeois security.” Schmitt, Politische Romantik, 106. My translation. 75 In the original: “sich selbst gebärendes Geldmittel.” Vogl, Gespenst, 123. 76 Vogl, Specter, 97; Gespenst, 133. 77 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:369–70.

170  Figures of Natality little ironies and undermining the access to the holism and balance of the organic. Nonetheless, if the form of self-referential closure itself can be the object of an ontological judgment—organism or mirror?—and a functional one—self-regulating or self-intensifying?—the Platonic science of judging birth might be called for here. Following the parentage of Vogl’s call for measure, continence, and reciprocity to its Foucauldian formal origin and classical roots puts this maieutics into modern perspective. If Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the primal scene of Romantic critique, the primal scene of capital seems to be the political crisis of fourthcentury BCE Athens. Vogl’s contrast of the intensity of capitalist Potenzierung and its destructive effects with the ideals of fair exchange, moderation (Maß), and a self-sufficient life,78 reflects not just a demand in the present but an implicit, mythical past, the prelapsarian state that bore the seed of its destruction in itself as money.79 This return is associated with the transition from the land-based form of human community, the polis, to the sea and trade, and the introduction of coinage as its instrument, a state of affairs reflected in the crisis of the Athenian polis. Maieutics as a discipline of discernment recalls one answer to the political and economic crisis: the ideal of sophrosyne or prudence that is present in Plato and Aristotle and marks a culture of “care of the self.” Having marked the shift around 1800 from representative to organic discourses, Foucault returns to the classical world in order to find this ideal in evoking the Platonic or Aristotelian standard that places a certain kind of non-ironic subject within the polis, but prior to it. In Vogl’s account of capital, this subject must cultivate wisdom and prudence in order to be able to judge between true thoughts and false phantoms. The “good systematicity” of the self-regulating and selfreproducing market is in this sense opposed to the “good system” of prudent laws, institutions, and so on,80 an echo of the classical doctrines of prudence, in a turn away from the “knowledge of intellectual knowledge” and toward “knowledge of spirituality” that marks Foucault’s interest in the care of the self.81 Virtue is therefore necessary prior to political life, and, if one follows recent critics of Platonic politics, this implies that the bonds of community produced by this 78 Vogl, Gespenst, 118. 79 Vogl seems to allude here to Foucault’s study of Greek practices and norms including sophrosyne (“moderation,” but in some contexts “harmony” or “obedience”) in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2. 80 Vogl, Gespenst, 44–5. Specter, 27. 81 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 309.

Ghostly Births 171 virtue stifle political dissent and public action, since the end of politics is for Plato harmony. The return in Foucault to this culture, or Vogl’s focus on demystification and secularization seem to take the place of an active political response in favor of some alternative that would have to emerge in this chaos. These substitutes for the political are not Platonic per se, but they do seem to share the orientation toward knowledge and contemplation as prior to action, an orientation that makes politics everything but contingent, since the intellectual moves of this political maieutics are the same in every case.

Medium as Eschaton

The deferral of life or its alienation in economic systems perhaps has to do more with the temporalization of totality than with the wrecking of the present day through parabasis. As Schlegel puts it, the world is full of little ironies, and only the one big irony can save us. More than the tokoi, the offspring of economics or thinking or sex, and more than the simple contemplation of the universe, it is the expectation that the medium itself will be totally transformed in scope that haunts us. If this lesson is applied from the other end, the consequences of joining politics and economics as Naturphilosophie create a vital medium for the political that makes it possible to transform the medium itself into an object of near-apocalyptic desire. In a curious allegory, Schlegel compares Spinoza to Saturn, the Titan who devoured his children before being overthrown by Zeus. “The new gods” of Kant’s critical philosophy, as it seems, have dethroned Spinoza, casting him down from “the high throne of science [Wissenschaft],” whence he withdrew into “the sacred dark of fantasy” with the other Titans. Schlegel calls on his readers, “Keep him here!”— on the condition that Spinoza gives up “the martial ornament of his system” and shares his new dwelling “in the temple of the new poesy” with Homer, Dante, and every “god-enthused” (“gottbegeistert”) poet.82 While one might reduce this to the enthusiasm that for Schlegel informs Poesie as such, the return of Spinoza from his exile constitutes not the new beginning but an end: achieving a complete view of the totality of the universe by analogy to Spinoza’s amor intellectualis Dei. This particularly Romantic move is similar to Spinoza, but with a different affective valence. For Spinoza, this is an affective disposition marked by striving, conatus. While conatus is a desire to continue to exist (in Spinoza’s 82 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:317. Novalis famously characterized Spinoza as “ein gotttrunkener Mensch,” drunk on God. Again, feeling is short-circuited to the infinite or incomprehensible against a “false” system that would assign it specific predicates, like Romanticism itself.

172  Figures of Natality formula, sese esse conservare),83 Schlegel recodes this self-preservation into Sehnsucht, longing for the unattained or unattainable, and makes this a condition of Spinoza’s asylum in the newer modernity of Poesie. This distinction between the starting point in the subject’s identity, moving outward, and the longing for something yet to come is central to the conception of identity in Romanticism, for the self is precisely that which is not there yet, at least if we are to believe the Satanisken in Schlegel’s Lucinde: “You err in that you believe you have a self [ein Ich; “an I”]; but if you hold your body and name or your things to be one, you are at least preparing a lodging, just in case a self should arrive.”84 Fritz Breithaupt distinguishes this Ich from the earlier Sturm und Drang version as a postponement of commitment to a solid identity here and now, calling it instead a “loan to the future” made by the individual who claims that which he has yet to acquire.85 This deficitary self seems to split the difference between obsessive risk management (given large debts and unsecured credit) in finance economics and Schlegel’s adolescent-with-credit-card model of selfhood. Both of these moments have in common that they long not for transcendence but for immanence. One imagines the Titans devouring all the ironic offspring of the money economy and settling scores with the Olympians of Max Weber’s polytheistic world, whose dualist, pluralist, “ghost in the machine” (G. Ryle) world view they abhor, preferring the simplicity of the one-substance global economy that has liquidated all the steel cages. While Schlegel makes allowances for the excesses of this return precisely in his irony, which can dissolve the warmth of the medium of life with caustic chemicals, he still sees this as a difference of scale, transforming totally a medium (whether “Earth” or “irony”) that has been identified as inauthentic or worse. This is no surprise and not atypical for Spinoza’s philosophy, since Spinoza sees or proclaims a shift from meditatio mortis to meditatio vitae, with attendant gentle censorship of the bad passions that might recall death or frustrate the aims of life.86 The search for a medium that resists entropy and grants its forms “the power to persist in its being,” Spinoza’s definition of life, becomes in the discourse of Romanticism not just vitalist, in the sense of autopoiesis or the conception of energy in Romantic science, but total; it embraces the cosmos and is an “intuition of the universe” (Schleiermacher) or the “world economy” (“Welthaushaltung”) (Müller) beyond all representation. It becomes the medium itself. 83 Spinoza, Collected Works, 283 (Ethics 3.7). 84 Schlegel, KFSA, 5:28. “… so wird doch wenigstens ein Logis bereitet, wenn etwa ja noch ein Ich kommen sollte.” 85 Breithaupt, Ich-Effekt, 86. 86 Spinoza, Collected Works, 355 (Ethics 4.69).

Ghostly Births 173 This experience also unleashes a torrent of affect; Schleiermacher’s reference to “intuition of the universe” (“Anschauung des Universums”) in the fifth speech on religion begins not with the universe but with the feelings aroused at the sight of one engaged in its contemplation— not an observation, but an affective mirroring of the observer. This shower of affect is the empowering act of totalization, like Schlegel’s imitation of Goethe’s novel’s putative performance of immanent selfunfolding. Rather than Schmitt’s occasionalism, this is an attachment to the whole, not to a selection from a shifting panoply of things, ideas, or institutions. In more recent theorizing, the larger irony unreflected in the demand for a return to moderation or spirituality is that the object of this history is the very plane of immanence that authorizes the demystifying description of capitalism: in this case, the chaotic and self-organizing, self-generating forms of fractal geometry. Capital’s pretensions to order are to be met by this knowledge about immanence, that it is just immanent, not by counterclaims on social or political hegemony, rival interests, or unwanted feedback from other spheres. In other words, chaos, on the one hand, and conflict, dissent, and resistance, on the other, are very different kinds of disorganization. This certainly does not imply that identifying a Romantic complex or citing the Romantics’ self-identification and description of a consistent theory structure is the same as sharing those premises. Nonetheless, the supplement of positivity, citing the Romantic discourse formation as a historical fact, a sign of historical transformation after which one cannot speak of representation, much less of other synchronic alternatives to this model, only of the self-reference of the Romantic text, is a logical fallacy that parallels the temporality of finance capitalism: hysteron proteron in its rhetorical form as question-begging. As it seems from neo-Romantic approaches, it is not autopoiesis or organicism that drives the theoretical construct, but an unlimited moral economy in which not desire for knowledge or self-preservation, Spinoza’s ethical conatus, is necessary, but desire for the transformation of the whole— understandably so, since this is the only permanent object remaining. Action regarding this medium therefore seems to be divided between skeptical–critical contemplation and the introduction of another drastic historical change. In referring to the “smooth spaces” represented mathematically by Mandelbrot’s fractal numbers, Deleuze and Guattari write, “Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries.”87 The introduction of the concept of life into this mixture recodes it as a biological discourse, not simply a functionally organic one. 87 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 500.

174  Figures of Natality The changeability of Romantic vitalism is not Spinozist in this regard; it is not one subject’s striving for perfection, the increase of intellect unhindered by the base passions. Rather, its impetus, like that of Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of fractal geometry for a social and political project, is to homogenize this globe—not because it is so, but because it should be so. Smooth space, as the medium of life, not only knows obstacles but has adversaries (and not enemies?). What is in Schlegel or Novalis the pleasant-sounding task of romantisieren is here a combat against “transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State, […] religion” by Philosophy, i.e., immanence.88 Formerly the task of the bourgeoisie and liberalism, at least in relative terms, this nomadic demystification and secularization heark back to this clearing of “idols” and the notion of sovereignty as the internal enemy of immanence— or of life.89 But if it is truly immanent, it also includes us and cannot simply be replaced by a “new earth, a new people,” as Deleuze and Guattari claim, much less by the earth (Erde) and the “new humanity” (“neue Menschheit”) evoked by Schlegel.90 This question of making a new world in the name of one pole of a basically moral distinction (it is not a natural one, since nature qua “smooth,” indistinct immanence is all there is) comes down finally to a Romantic question, the question of the “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism” (“Das älteste Systemfragment”), which begins with the words “An ethics.”: “How must a world be constituted [beschaffen] for a moral being?”91 Morality, like life or nature, is a brand of universalism in so far as it includes the observer in making prescriptive statements true of every subject.92 Like the immanent and anti-representational critique of capitalism, it cannot deliver a political idea since it can only refer to other universals, even where those actually perform exclusion. If Schlegel’s references to Spinoza are couched in the Speech on Mythology, which outlines the relationship between fantasy and nature, affect and the senses, the choice of the “Systemprogramm,” on which it founds its mythology of Reason (Vernunft), is of a spiritual humanity that immediately incurs the basic paradox of sovereignty and representation. Like “life,” it designates its enemies from its own set—humanity (“Menschheit”) is good, but not the “works of man” (“Menschenwerk”) of culture, especially not “the whole miserable 88 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 43. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 101; Schlegel, KFSA, 2:257. My account of this asymmetry largely follows William Rasch’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari via Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (cf. Rasch, Sovereignty and its Discontents, 107). 91 Hegel, Werke, 1:234. 92 Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, Vol. 4. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998 [1995]), 29.

Ghostly Births 175 apparatus of state, constitution, government, and legislation.” This kind of regulative idea of freedom from such non-vital impositions mixes freely with Geist when it is a matter of criticizing “philosophers of the letter” (“Buchstabenphilosophen”) or when a “higher spirit” is called on to found a new religion as the last and greatest work of humanity.”93 Even where the author of the Systemfragment explains his project as “a history of humanity,” the historian here still has an eschatological aim that recalls Schlegel’s calling the historian a “prophet facing backwards”:94 to restore the past status of poetry as tutor of humanity. Immanence creates an internal transcendence more reliably, than the structures it attacks, not as the instrumentalization or reterritorialization of its elusive nature, but as the price of its own struggle. Its attempts to defer or temporalize that paradox only make the solution more radical in a figure of “political messianism” meant to save it from the philistines.95 The critique of capitalism that sticks with a Romantic formalization of its problems will have to face the same paradox in so far as it must disentangle its descriptive and prescriptive moments and make distinctions among its methods and claims. If one solution to paradox doesn’t work, one simply has to “reparadoxify” and try again.96 Maybe this time a non-total and imperfect solution, one that takes contingent and temporary representation and observation (sovereignty, identification, hegemony) into account, will help, rather than a simple good/bad, living/dead binary that finally wants to abolish those contingent forms. The solution offered in the age of Goethe to these Romantic problems is also a kind of hysteron proteron, a writing of the future that invokes ghosts, phantoms, and revenants. The Hamlet problem evoked in the “spectrological” critique of political economy—a time out of joint, a dangerous future that imperils the present, the return of repressed risks as the suppressed political content of economic discourse, finally the “mortgaging” (“Verpfändung”) that reflects this temporal dynamic, with its echo of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translation of the “Pfand” (in Shakespeare, a “moiety competent … gaged by our king”), that is the spoils of the war between old Hamlet and old Fortinbras and the cause of young Fortinbras’s invasion (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1)—finds its answer in another, non-Romantic version of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which confounds and parodies the certainty of futures present and perfect while substituting the uncanny child for the paternal ghost. 93 “Oldest Systematic Programme,” 4–5. Hegel, Werke, 1:234–7 94 Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments (fragment 80), 27. 95 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:12 n. 96 Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur, 30.

Four  “Not as in a mirror”: Wilhelm Meister and the Haunting of Sovereignty

The extension and the intensity of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship are daunting, and the task of reducing the complexity of the novel to something like the symbolic condensation of his Elective Affinities seems impossible. Even the one-word summary, “Bildungsroman,” problematic though it is, still requires thorough elaboration especially in the face of ideologies of development and growth both organic and poetic. Marc Redfield sums up the problems with the term Bildungsroman using Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s The Literary Absolute as a foil. He explains the Bildungsroman in terms of an “aesthetic humanism” that aspires to join “pedagogy and aesthetics, the education of a subject and the figuration of a text.” As “a simultaneously self-reflexive and universalizing structure,” this union presents the genre as a “humanist, and thus fully ideological version” of the Romantic literary absolute.1 In the first chapter, I summarized the features of the artwork according to this absolute, which LacoueLabarthe and Nancy read out of Schlegel’s concept of Poesie, with its proliferating reflexives, “sich selbst” and “auto-.” The cranky aspects of my reading of Romanticism in the preceding chapters perhaps owe to a not so latent desire to distinguish between the “humanist,” “ideological,” and the ironic, particularly as irony challenges the philosophical attempts to understand or appropriate the Bildungsroman for a normative and non-ironic program. The organicist language of Bildung always assumes a surplus value, from Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb to Schlegel’s seeing Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as a “divine organism”—here, a “göttliches Gewächs.”2 1 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 39. 2 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 275; KFSA, 2:133.

“Not as in a mirror” 177 After all, the concept of natality, unlike its literary figurations, is only an is in so far as it is an ought. Politics should be like this, in which case one calls it “the political,” or more accurately perhaps, the political is the should without positive foundation or ideal or end, the vacuity of the new as Arendt’s critics fear, hence the need for action that seems to come from nowhere but to be situated within a subject who is always somewhere, not that unsituated, universal subject of Romantic critique. In the previous chapter, I addressed this as a term of scope, the desire for an infinite extension of the featurelessness and self-reproduction of credit and debt, and compared it to a vitalist critique that shared that scope, only with a different—non-ironic?—emphasis. In that model, it is also a syntactic form that universalizes itself: the union of process and data, the present and past participles that, so Schlegel claims, can be intuited at once. The aim of this form is to achieve totality, as in Adam Müller’s world economy, but Schlegel’s irony about irony (even that is reflexive) has him doubt that irony has this totalizing capacity. The fantastic, Schlegel says, is a more realistic expectation. Georg Lukács wrote in Theory of the Novel that the “fantastic apparatus” of the Tower Society (the secret society that records and manipulates Wilhelm’s life in the Apprenticeship) shapes the novel such that “the miraculous becomes a mystification without real importance, a playful ornament without decorative grace.”3 If indeed “the Lehrjahre offers itself as a literary absolute, and consequently as an ironic text in Lukács’s sense,” the refusal of self-production in favor of self-knowledge as selfreflexive foregrounds the fictionality of self-knowledge by sacrificing aesthetic autonomy to the autonomy of kitsch.4 However, this critique still plays with a good–bad, true–false polarity: substance versus ornament, art versus kitsch, an ironic attitude versus a sincere one. The question of ideology is thereby reduced to the Platonic distinction between a true birth and a miscarriage, now in favor of the latter. As the previous chapter and the critique of epigenesis demonstrate, however, the question of birth circa 1800 deals not with the what of true and false, being and not-being, but with the implications of how different models claim to ground or found knowledge, society, and politics—a morally and ontologically neutral account of the construction and function of particular ideologies that does not simplify the concept of ideology to mean simply an illusion with pragmatic effects. In reading the Apprenticeship in this chapter, I want (1) to examine the Romantic critique of the Apprenticeship from the point of view of gender and economic discourse against the assertion of the end of 3 Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 142; qtd Redfield, Phantom Formations, 77. 4 Redfield, Phantom Formations, 79.

178  Figures of Natality representation circa 1800; (2) distinguish in the novel’s fantasia the thematic elements that do not conform to models of totalization and harmony as well as those that create the sort of presence and immediacy to which Redfield ascribes the character of Bildung as bourgeois ideology, ironically presented; and (3) indicate how the speculative, ludic, and representational processes in the novel conspire to create the birth product Felix as a partial economic object who is a supplement or internal exception to the absolutization of the novel. This supplemental status does not come about because Felix or his origin is exempt from irony but because of his singularity, resistance to an aesthetic (visual) co-optation, and most importantly, because his uncanny features indicate the paradox of natality that joins the discourse of paternity to the discourse of sovereignty that frames the novel. I will neither survey the voluminous scholarship on the Apprenticeship, considering multiple models of the Bildungsroman, nor attempt to deliver another, better interpretation of the work. In fact, I want to resist the parallel Friedrich Schlegel draws between the structure of this novel, the genius of its creator, and the requirement of the critic that he, too, intuit that this genius is at work in the critic’s “sense for the highest things,” the critic “who can tell at once without art or science what he should worship, whom the right thing [das Rechte] strikes like lightning,” particularly in the understanding of what is “new and unique.”5 This juxtaposition of the new and peculiar with the sudden presence of insight goes to the root of the problem of finding a medium for natality, as it claims to bypass the more laborious and paradoxical work of communication, in which the new and heretofore unknown can only be presented in the language of the known and accustomed. Work on the medium or the discourse from which this critical language emerges and on which it also works shows more of a discursive continuity in Schlegel and Romanticism than a sudden insight or intuition. If the previous chapter cast this in terms of economic discourse, this chapter reads it in the discourse of Kritik itself. As in the foregoing chapters, I want to explore the structure and implications of a literary-critical and theoretical model in comparison with other, cognate models, philosophies, or ideologies; and examine how natality as a political, aesthetic, and rhetorical form can read the literary artwork differently with a view to challenging the formal and thematic features of those models and creating a conceptual space for the emergence of the new. Perhaps this is why the concept of irony is so difficult to deal with in normative terms, even if natality does not refer to something, but only to the fact of being new, the novitas of action. This novitas is spontaneous and punctual, but it also has to do with the 5 Schlegel, KFSA, 2:133–5. “On Goethe’s Meister,” 276–7. Translation modified.

“Not as in a mirror” 179 poetics of foundation, even if this foundation is ironically couched in literature, or in that fiction of literature-as-such or literary language that emerges from the structuralist project. That this project begins with the Russian Formalists’ notion of ostranenie, estrangement, as one of the cognate forms of natality after 1900 should not be surprising. However, Schlegel’s apocalyptic wish for a great irony to swallow up the little, “fantastic” ones illustrates this point: if everything is strange or fantastic, nothing is. If everything in Goethe’s novel is marked “ironic,” then irony is a difference that makes no difference. Schlegel could be thinking of an ironic reading of the Apprenticeship when he describes the function of irony in Athenäum fragment 121 as the completion or perfection of a concept in the synthesis of two absolute antitheses—the concept and the concept under the sign of irony, one assumes—and an ideal as the idea paired with a fact that gives speculation an object. In the development of scholarly (wissenschaftlich) Witz, the higher criticism, and spiritual/mental (geistig) Bildung, the high point of accomplishment is “a mind … that contains within itself simultaneously a plurality of minds and a whole system of persons, and in whose inner being the universe which, as they say, should germinate in every monad, has grown to fullness and maturity.”6 Paired with his review, this internalization of Bildung as the development of a spiritual universe populated by worlds and genres (Gattungen)is made possible only by that initial irony that pairs opposites and makes the evolution of this individuated yet predestined and harmonious world possible. Since each individual and each Gattung follows the law of its own kind, these monads are homologous and, implicitly, following Leibniz, synchronized. The historiography I discussed in the previous chapter posits this condition as new, part of a historical transformation beginning with the reconfiguration of knowledge by Spinoza and Leibniz and culminating circa 1800 in the transition to a dynamic, autopoietic model of self-reproducing entities. Schlegel makes clear in his review that the Apprenticeship is an example of this transformation, a medial conversion from representation and theatricality to the domain of “auto-.” As Jochen Hörisch points out, these conversions from one medium into another involve loss and forgetting.7 This was my secondary 6 Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow: 33. “[E]in Geist, der gleichsam eine Mehrheit von Geistern, und ein ganzes System von Personen in sich enthält, und in dessen Innerm das Universum, welches, wie man sagt, in der Monade keimen soll, ausgewachsen und reif geworden ist.” Friedrich Schlegel, KFSA, 2:184. 7 Jochen Hörisch, Eine Geschichte der Medien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 404–23.

180  Figures of Natality theme in the chapter on Goethe’s lyric, where the extraordinarily productive empathetic critique of the lyric elided marks of other interpretations in transforming lyric poetry into Romantic Poesie. I ask, as well if reading the genre of the Apprenticeship as a literary absolute in the sense of self-reflexive and ironic kitsch represents only a change in ontological marker. Schlegel’s presentation of the mind as containing in itself an ensemble of characters whose smallest composite parts are fused by irony seems to describe the founding moment of the literary absolute as specular since, in spite of their differences, these monads are homologous in structure. (As this is “wissenschaftlicher Witz,” Schlegel seems to follow Fichte’s logic of Wissenschaft, but in ironic non-identity.) My question for this model of the total irony of the conversion of the self, the “Geist,” into a sort of Bildungsroman without plot, a synchronously evolving “system of persons” who do not communicate with each other (see “monad”) and have already incorporated conflict with irony, is this: whether one considers it ironic or “ideological” (i.e., lending itself to social and political application as in Schiller’s projection of the Aesthetic State), whether it is indeed the unruly Apprenticeship as literary absolute or this well-ordered internal universe, is there any indication within this structure that an asymmetry, or perhaps too much symmetry, can throw this system off from within and convert this uniform and total irony into conflict rather than just ironic tension or colorful chaos? The transition in literary and cultural historiography inspired by the Apprenticeship seems to indicate to the contrary that the laws of literature reflect the triumph of a smoothly self-actualizing and selfreproducing monadology, even where this form as the expression of social or governmental institutions is a vehicle of power, or where the contact between experience and inner disposition is contingent. Joseph Vogl sees the novel as embodying the historical transition of its time from representative and theatrical models of the political to systems of governmentality in Foucault’s sense, as control over life in terms of “material, mental, libidinous and economic movements.”8 He relies for this description on Bernhard Dotzler, who sees the mysterious Tower Society of the novel as the mise en abyme of the novel’s structure itself: the Tower “acts on the same principles as the attraction that the puppet play once exercised on Wilhelm—as the art of pulling the strings and being a spectator at the same time […] For this reason, the Tower is in solidarity with the novel’s structure as such.”9 Again, the two levels of diagnosis and assertion are troubling 8 Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft, 37–8. 9 Bernhard Dotzler, Papiermaschinen (Berlin: Akademie, 1996), 596. My translation.

“Not as in a mirror” 181 here, as immanence is both a statement about historical change and the identification of concealed powers that also happen to be able to manipulate the cybernetic functions of closed, self-sustaining systems on the model of “life”—the epigenetic production of an epigenetic system. As in political rhetoric, social demonstrations, and fundraising campaigns, “solidarity” refers to the uneasy graft of intention, of the exercise of sovereignty, upon the autopoietic model that would exclude it, just as in the fractal and nomadic model that emerged from Romantic economics. The Tower is “in solidarity” with the novel itself; the novel is a network of closed references, and the hermeneutic key is found within, in the monadic structure of the novel’s system. Is there any inner mark of the idea that this construct is not simply a fact of the closure of an observing system, a distinction that reproduces itself by creating an internal—and fictional—world of information, a system as opposed to an environment? If so, then one still has to ask why the reader, a second-order observer, would feel the same solidarity with the novel, unless of course the reader’s reading is already conditioned by these premises and here apodictically limited to them. Rather than plead for the openness of reception, I want to look at this structure of distinctions and ask where in this system its manipulation becomes most obvious on the thematic level.

Marriage: The Virtualization of Birth

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship concludes with a series of marriages, part of what accounts for its reception as an “economic novel” (“oeconomischer Roman”), in which Wilhelm finds his “economic family,” as Novalis put it.10 Far from being an achievement of bourgeois Bildung, completion or holism, however, theories of marriage at this time are attempts to account for where offspring come from in more than a strictly biological or genealogical sense. If historically recent theories of culture are based on the assumption of a gap in structure or signification around which meaning is created—like the contingent foundation of the social on the political, for instance—, then, as Stefan Willer indicates, the discourse of birth circa 1800 already works with such an empty spot consciously and overtly where scientists attempt to observe the moment of conception or fertilization but cite notions such as shame or modesty in order to explain the scientific difficulty in moral terms. This leads to “the paradox that reproduction [Zeugung] in the course of its investigation is reinforced as being the inscrutable par excellence. […] In this light, the discourse of a generative power [Kraft] or property [Vermögen] (faculté) is a strategy of virtualization that very intentionally introduces a locus of indeterminacy into the understanding of the 10 Novalis, Schriften, 3:639.

182  Figures of Natality act of reproduction.”11 In this sense, marriage serves as a medium to bridge this gap or at least cover up its shame at realizing that the gap is indeed a gap. It indicates a realm beyond cultural–scientific theories of biological reproduction such as epigenesis or preformation; it refers to the realm of cultural reproduction, of habits, customs, and institutions, to that which would come to redefine the concept of literary language and the various modernisms that break with Romantic self-generation and self-organization. As a symbolic medium, the early science of reproduction is constructed around this spot in order to account for the inability to observe it. As one would expect, this indeterminacy is modulated by the Romantics into a specular relationship, as Novalis refers to it in a note: “Conception, birth, and rearing of one’s own kind. Only to the degree that the human person has a happy marriage with himself—and constitutes a beautiful family—is he at all capable of marriage and a family. Act of self-embracing.”12 Novalis’s requirement of a happy marriage with oneself in order to have marriage and a family in the ordinary sense sees likeness, the embrace of oneself and one’s own (seines Gleichen), as the foundation for the inclusion of others. This is the poetic counterpart to the biological and social notion of generation and genealogy. Like Fichte’s concern with a qualitas occulta that would enable the I (das Ich) to avoid vicious circularity by presenting the will as intuitive, even though its existence is initially only a hypothesis,13 the power that enables this self-embrace is a positive, vital energy, like Prometheus’s fire that allows him to make people in his image. In his study of marriage circa 1800, Adrian Daub finds this qualitas occulta in Fichte as the kind of love that specifically enables and is restricted to marriage. Daub cites a notion of marital love that has some of the properties of natality: the concern for independence from customary, traditional, and parental determination; and the ability to set new norms in an autonomous, institutional structure. Where Fichte is more concerned with the negative liberty of marital love, the Romantics will affirm the revolutionary gains of the

11 Stefan Willer, “‘Eine sonderbare Generation’: Zur Poetik der Zeugung um 1800,” in Sigrid Weigel, et al., eds Generation: Zur Genealogie des Konzepts— Konzepte von Genealogie. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005, 125–56, 129. 12 “Zeugung, Gebährung, und Erziehung seines Gleichen. Nur insofern der Mensch mit sich selbst eine glückliche Ehe führt—und eine schöne Familie ausmacht, ist er überhaupt Ehe und Familienfähig. Act der Selbstumarmung.” Novalis, Werke, 2:329; qtd Willer, 133. Willer takes genius on Novalis’s account as a support and countermeasure to the concept of generation (134). 13 See Yolanda Estes, “Intellectual Intuition: Reconsidering Continuity in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling,” in Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, eds, Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 172.

“Not as in a mirror” 183 French Revolution and ask what such a reconceptualization of marriage is capable of bringing about in the larger society.14 Following Arendt’s skepticism about that revolution based on its infinitization of feeling in place of the duality of thinking, one might take that quality of the will without judgment or decision to be the sort of empathetic projection that empowers Schlegel’s reading of the Apprenticeship as a novel that manages to give birth to itself. Arendt’s version of living with oneself is a sort of marriage, but not a specular, self-affirming one, as it already incorporates the cut of representation: my private self in conversation with my social self. This explains her extension of the two-in-one as a marriage made not by mirrors but by metaphor. In the case of Schlegel’s divinatory criticism, Novalis’s conditions of marriage seem to obtain: he reads the novel and indeed conjures it into being in an embrace of his own critical premises. Schlegel postulates a similar genesis for the Apprenticeship: “With no presumption, noiselessly, as the growth of a striving mind unfolds itself in silence, and as the becoming world softly arises from its interior, so the clear story begins.”15 This work is marked by a drive to holism and generality, a “drive … to form itself into a whole.”16 Schlegel describes this whole without wanting to cut into it analytically, contending that the Lehrjahre is a book that can hardly be critiqued but produces and “critiques itself” and “represents itself.” The critic is led by his “sense for the universe” and “anticipatory sensibility of the whole world.”17 The book unfolds itself from its own core, and takes care of its own presentations and representations. This totally included view does not need to distinguish observer from observed from the operation of observation itself. This internal staging in the reader’s imagination is shared, oddly enough, by the schöne Seele, as a negative model of introverted Bildung, so that “her interior forms the stage on which she is at once actor and spectator and even provides the behind-the-scenes intrigues,” and the uncle, der Oheim, who is materially and symbolically the patron of the whole enterprise.18 14 Adrian Daub, Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 68–9. 15 “Ohne Anmaßung und ohne Geräusch, wie die Bildung eines strebenden Geistes sich still entfaltet, und wie die werdende Welt aus seinem Innern leise emporsteigt, beginnt die klare Geschichte.” Friedrich Schlegel, “Über Goethes Meister,” KFSA, 2.1:126. In part in order to convey the participial and reflexive forms, my more literal translation takes some of the “sound and fury” out of the version in Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 269. 16 “Trieb …, sich zum Ganzen zu bilden” (ibid., 131). 17 “Sinn fürs Universum” and “Vorempfindung der ganzen Welt” (ibid., 134). 18 “… ihr Inneres die Bühne bildet, auf der sie Schauspieler und Zuschauer zugleich ist und auch noch die Intrigen in der Coulisse besorgt” (ibid., 142).

184  Figures of Natality He succeeds not simply in writing diaries (like the schöne Seele) but in bild-ing the natural world into a classical image. Reflexivity, intuition, and construction are conflated in the leitmotif which informs the whole essay: the creation and representation of a nature which needs neither creation nor representation because it creates and presents itself as an object which can be perceived and represented as it is in its wholeness, a representation which it does not require, and so on ad infinitum. The radical immanence attributed to the Apprenticeship in Schlegel’s review might at first seem at odds with terms such as transcendence or metaphysics; these terms are certainly not strictly equivalent to the metaliterary phenomena Schlegel identifies in the novel based on an insightful reading of its characters. Nonetheless, Schlegel’s goal in claiming that the novel represents itself is the union of subject and object, firstly in postulating a capacity for a thing (albeit a literary one) to be one with its representations, and secondly in eliding the role of the critic in this representation of the novel, eliminating the place of critical judgment in claiming to take his verdicts on the novel from the way things are in the novel itself: an ontological predication and identification of artistic production with criticism rather than an interpretive, ethical, or political choice. In this context, Goethe’s novel is relegated to the status of a sort of esoteric object, symbol of the unity of the Romantic subject with Nature and history. For Schlegel, then, resignation is the acceptance of this passive harmony: “He gives up on the idea of having his own will; and now his apprentice years are truly complete, and Nathalie becomes the supplement of the novel.”19 While Schlegel’s “Supplement” reinforces his critical-mimetic premise by echoing Natalie’s claim that “our principles are only a supplement to our existences” and that we adduce reasons especially for our mistakes,20 the idea of Natalie herself as a supplement comes from Friedrich, whose job is to interrupt and disrupt social, logical, and natural harmony: “I don’t believe you will marry until some bride or other is missing, and you, with your customary generosity will provide yourself as a supplement to someone’s existence.”21 In Rousseau, however, the question of the supplement is a fundamental anthropological problem: if Nature is indeed perfect and whole, 19 “Er [Wilhelm] resigniert förmlich darauf, einen eigenen Willen zu haben; und nun sind seine Lehrjahre wirklich vollendet, und Nathalie wird Supplement des Romans.” KFSA, 2.1:144. My translation. The translation in Bernstein (2002), p. 284, interpolates after “supplement” incorrectly, “as she has it (Book 8, Chapter 7) …,” which does not appear in the KFSA. Natalie does not believe in supplements, but this shows the extent to which Schlegel’s reading is mistaken for the novel itself. 20 Goethe, FA, 1.9:946. Translation modified from Goethe, CW, 9:346. 21 Ibid., FA, 1.9:946; CW, 9:346.

“Not as in a mirror” 185 to what purpose are education and childrearing? Rousseau asks the question in Émile, recommending that the return to Nature begin with mothers in order to eliminate the deleterious effects of artifice on children. Culture consists in this case in delaying any pedagogical intervention because, as Jacques Derrida glosses it, “[c]hildhood is the first manifestation of the deficiency which, in Nature, calls for substitution [suppléance]. Pedagogy illuminates perhaps more crudely the paradoxes of the supplement. How is a natural weakness possible? How can Nature ask for forces that it does not furnish? How is a child possible in general?”22 If Natalie is the “supplement of the novel,” the maternal non-mother responsible for the pedagogical cultivation of her charges, as opposed to their mere training,23 this would be consistent with Rousseau’s emphasis on the reform of maternity. However, Derrida’s question, “How is a child possible in general?”, returns to the question of the birth product as the factor from the outside that either completes or undermines the logic of presence, authenticity, and completion. Following the familiar deconstructive move that takes the supposed supplement, here education, instrumentality, writing, as the primary category, one might read Felix as such a supplement, as children for Rousseau embody an “active principle” in that, like women, they learn to use others as tools to “supplement” their natural weakness. Following the cue in Natalie’s name that indicates the natal also points to the centrality of the uncanny or unnatural—Felix the assumed son and Natalie the “beautiful Amazon” who first appears in masculine riding garb, along with Mariane and Mignon—in the novel that supposedly, like Nature itself, is complete and self-sufficient. Looking at where this clue points will account for Felix’s interruptive power as a supplement in the deconstructive, not the Schlegelian sense. Without the specific value of the Arendtian concept, Hans-Jürgen Schings takes Natalie as an onomastic reference to birth in the semantics of dies natalis (birthday) and so forth.24 Interpreting the novel as a covert Spinozist manifesto, Schings reads it as an intricate series of allusions to Spinozist themes and concepts and as a law-like network, a sort of second nature built up against chance and randomness. In this sense, following Spinoza’s transformation of the Baroque meditatio mortis 22 Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), 146. The French terms supplément, suppléance, and suppléer all refer to providing or “supplying” something not there originally, as “supplement” or “substitution.” 23 “Theresa trains her pupils, whereas Natalie cultivates hers.” Goethe, CW, 9:326. “Therese dressiert ihre Zöglinge, Natalie bildet sie.” FA, 1.9:912. 24 Hans-Jürgen Schings, “Natalie und die Lehre des †††. Zur Rezeption Spinozas in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” Jahrbuch des Wiener Goethe-Vereins 89 (1985): 37–88.

186  Figures of Natality to meditatio vitae, practical reason also emerges from the concept of life as it is known via the understanding. Rational activity is morally good as such, and all ethical considerations arise from the desire of the enjoyment of reason: Whatsoever in nature we deem evil, that is, hindering us from being able to exist and to enjoy a rational life, it is permissible for us to remove in whatever seems the safer way. On the other hand, whatever we deem good, that is, advantageous for preserving our being and enjoying a rational life, it is permissible for us to take for our use and to use it as we please. And as an absolute rule, it is permissible by the highest natural right for everyone to do what he judges to be to his own natural advantage.25 “Interest” is here a rational interest in line with the requirements of nature, and not just of “external causes” (as in Kantian Neigung or Interesse, bound to the existence of external objects), which create confused ideas about human nature. The blessed person is in love with God, Nature, and Reason. Yet here, one stumbles again on the paradox of an all-inclusive category such as Nature or Humanity. In order to explain the origin of confused ideas and of negative emotions, Spinoza must assume the existence, in an all-determining nature, of elements contrary to that nature. The good of Reason is purely good; all else is a lack of Reason and therefore of goodness. Aspects of Nature can be evil inasmuch as they distract from the exercise of Reason, i.e., from the subject’s freedom, which is purely intellectual freedom. Therefore, not all human beings are equally free, nor are all aspects of what appears to be nature equally natural. Marked by a lack of general goods, these deficiencies can only be remedied by being expunged. The general “sovereign right of nature” itself authorizes the elimination of any apparent exceptions to its sovereignty. While Spinoza prefers kind, gentle remedies, his text authorizes “whatever” means necessary to eliminate exceptions to the self-authorizing dominion of Reason, freedom, and love. This policing of living things by life itself resembles the exclusionary logic some read in the Apprenticeship. The most telling example is the fate of Mignon, as the offspring of the incestuous couple Augustin and Sperata.26 The idea of like paired with like, as in Novalis’s definition 25 Spinoza, Complete Works, 359 (Ethics IV, appendix 8). 26 See John Blair, Tracing Subversive Currents in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997). Blair considers that “[i]n the Lehrjahre, culturally dominant principles attempt to overpower alternative voices.” The spokespersons of the former include the Abbé, Therese and

“Not as in a mirror” 187 of marriage with oneself, intersects here with the more concrete theme of sexual love between siblings, as an example of that attraction of the same to itself. The political model of republicanism also depends on a sort of sibling metaphor, as in the French revolutionary goal of fraternité or Schiller’s “alle Menschen werden Brüder.” As Stefani Engelstein observes in readings of Schiller and others, the role of women in this order is thematized in terms of sisterly love. As the supplement to the text of revolution, however, the incestuous passion of the sister is “excised” in various forms, whether in Rousseau or Schiller, as a threat to the civic order. Perhaps more a catalyst or a vanishing mediator, it enables the new order without being visible in it.27 Schings sees a more strictly logical version of exclusion here: the law of the excluded middle, or the principle of non-contradiction. In Spinoza’s terms, no attribute and another attribute which might destroy it can be present in the same subject: “Things are of a contrary nature, that is, unable to subsist in the same subject, to the extent that one can destroy the other. Proof: If they were able to be in agreement with one another, or to coexist in the same subject, there could be something in the said subject which could destroy it, which is absurd […].”28 From this proposition, Spinoza posits the first two axioms of Ethics V, that contrary actions in the same subject must change “until they cease to be contrary” and that “the power of an effect is defined by the power of the cause insofar as its essence is explicated or defined through the essence of its cause.”29 Spinoza conceives the soul “as acting according to fixed laws, a sort of spiritual automaton,”30 and so this evening out of the subject’s temperament corresponds to nature, as, moreover, “the order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas.”31 The mind reflects the order of things in the world and is disposed to be in balance with that order—except, Lothario, and even Wilhelm, in his excurses on art which reflect “traditional aesthetic precepts” (163). The dynamic laid out by Blair makes the Apprenticeship into a polyphonic work (in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense) which includes the voices of women (Ch. 5), and the lower class (181). 27 Stefani Engelstein, “Civic Attachments & Sibling Attractions: The Shadows of Fraternity,” Goethe Yearbook 18 (2011): 216–17. Barbara Becker-Cantarino advanced a more general critique of Enlightenment’s patriarchal models of marriage and the family, in which in the Apprenticehip women as mothers are “written out of the patriarchal text.” Becker-Cantarino, “Patriarchy,” 61. 28 Spinoza, Collected Works, 283 (Ethics III, prop. V), qtd Schings, “Natalie,” 71. Horst Lange criticizes the notion that Goethe is in any thoroughgoing sense a Spinozist. Horst Lange, “Goethe and Spinoza: A Reconsideration,” Goethe Yearbook 18 (2011): 11–33. 29 Spinoza, Collected Works, 365 (Ethics V, axioms). 30 Ibid., 24 (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, para. 85). 31 Ibid., 365 (Ethics V, prop. 1).

188  Figures of Natality of course, when it errs into the contemplation of death rather than life, the meditatio mortis that deprives reason of its always negative freedom from limitation by negative affect. On this account, whether in Spinoza’s text or in the text of Romanticism, life is all. But life is an infinite chain of causes, which has no place for death or for any other gap in its continuity, and no place for birth except as the effect of a known cause that already contains the essence of that effect in itself. This would be an utterly uninteresting way to read Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship were it not for Schlegel’s review, which, even if it is a strong misreading, in any case uses the Spinozist syntax in which natura naturans begets natura naturata, as even the monad is for Schlegel a still-growing organism, not a clockwork. Now, I want to turn to the points where this selfreflecting and self-intuiting, self-reproducing system come together and ask how the novel represents this allegorically and socially, and where the cracks in this reflection—in the mirror or between the image and the mirror—might be. This will imply a transition from Spinoza’s natural reason to the idea, expressed above by Vogl and Dotzler, that such immanent schemes of intellection and information (in the case of Leibniz) have the capacity to be guided from some summit, as if a cunning human intelligence were operating behind the artifical or cybernetic intelligence of the self-reproducing system and using it as a technology for some end—in this case, that of Bildung.

The Split Summit of the Tower Society

The assumption that something like the Romantic idea of an autopoietic system can be guided to some end not given in its systematicity evidently challenges the notion that this autopoiesis is in fact closed. Schiller sees this in terms of a higher hand that somehow both leads Wilhelm to a goal (so, meeting the non-Heideggerian criterion of technē as goal-oriented) and constitutes an experiment, not the “blind” operation of nature (another one of those evaluative statements that covers up functional homology). According to Schiller, the novel has machines […] that represent in it in a certain sense the gods or governing fate […]. Meister’s apprentice years are no mere blind operation [Wirkung] of nature; they are a sort of experiment. A higher intellect that works in hidden ways, the powers of the Tower accompany him with their attention, and observe, without disturbing nature in her free course, and lead him from afar and to a goal [Zweck] of which he himself has no idea, nor is he allowed to have any.32 32 Schiller to Goethe, July 8, 1796; in Eberhard Lämmert, ed., Romantheorie:

“Not as in a mirror” 189 The tension between the Tower, nature, and the divine or fate is impossible to disentangle. This version of the experiment, which can observe the freedom of nature (freedom in Spinoza’s sense) without incorporating itself as a limit on that observation, creates a version of the Turm which, however accurate in terms of the plot of the novel, neglects the fact that the narration itself (for the novel is not narrated by the members of the Turm) casts critical doubt upon this very same ability to observe (“beobachten”), which Schiller sees as exemplary for the novel’s structure. In this sense, the novel can apply critically to current fantasies of surveillance and control, both those that affirm it as security and those that fear it as total oppression. The question of freedom to do other than obey is the same in each case. The surveillance and security society into which Wilhelm is inducted, which has indeed been following him and recording his activities for many years, is not a chain without gaps or a neatly symmetrical reflection of Wilhelm’s deeds. The three equivalencies that could be drawn in the novel, the use of a Spinozist coordination of thoughts, feelings, and things; the exclusion of that which does not fit this paradigm; and the self-production of the novel’s meaning and structure, are accordingly difficult to exemplify in the text itself. What would be that specular or intellective hiatus in the Tower, a microcosm of the novel itself, that makes the correspondence of thoughts and things or the empathetic projection of meaning possible? In the Tower Society, there is a real split, a discord at the summit between its chief members, the Abbé and Jarno, who coordinate the surveillance activity. In one of the Abbé’s speeches, cited by Natalie, he speaks of education, Erziehung, as having to do with the particular nature of each individual. The Abbé stages this conflict as one of drives and fantastic desires: “Our ambiguous, scattered education arouses desires rather than animating drives, and rather than encouraging the real predispositions [Anlagen], it directs its striving toward objects that are so often not in accordance with the nature that is working toward them. A child, a young person who go astray on their own path I prefer to many who walk straight on a path not their own.”33 According to Jarno, on the other hand, external direction is necessary: “… I have to call out to one who is going astray, even if it is a sleepwalker … I always had trouble on this score with

Dokumentation ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland (Köln and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1971), 182. My translation. 33 “[S]ie [die Erziehung] erregt Wünsche, statt Triebe zu beleben … Ein Kind, ein junger Mensch, die auf ihrem eigenen Wege irregehen, sind mir lieber als manche, die auf fremdem Wege recht wandeln.” Goethe, FA 1.9:900. Translation modified from CW, 9:319.

190  Figures of Natality the Abbé, who asserts that error can only be healed by erring.”34 This difference is well known to readers and critics of the novel; it marks thematically a split in the pedagogical project of the Tower, not just in tactics of intervention but in the fundamental assumption about what education is. This is not just a disagreement on the conditions of the experiment identified by Schiller; it involves and includes the paradox of the selfincluded observer and, by implication, the “view from nowhere” in Spinoza, which postulates the harmony of thinking (qua intellection) with nature and will. These paradoxes are developed in Book 8 of the Lehrjahre through reflection from perspectives outside the leadership of the Tower Society, including the perspective of the narrator, but the text has no Mittelpunkt that could resolve the problem, only, as Thomas Pfau points out, a deeply ingrained “structural irony” that casts doubt on any teleological accomplishment in the novel.35 Whether this structural irony can be unfolded or embodied as well in the pre-established harmony envisioned by Schlegel is another question. It seems to be a faulty machine that needs to cover up its own defect with elaborate programs and rituals. This change in perspective gives rise to paradoxes as well around the concept of Bildung. Wilhelm’s own feeling of his Bildung is incomplete at best. The question of the relationship of external law to internal virtue, of pedagogy to natural development, is reflected in the fact that Wilhelm now has an apparently free and easy relationship to bourgeois ideals, yet only by rejecting the mores of bourgeois society: “His apprenticeship was therefore completed in one sense, for along with the feeling of a father [mit dem Gefühl des Vaters], he had acquired the virtues of a solid citizen [eines Bürgers],” yet he laments, “All moralizing is unnecessarily strict … Nature turns us, in her own pleasant way, into what we should be. Strange indeed are those demands of 34 “[E]inem Irrenden muß ich gleich zurufen, und wenn es ein Nachtwandler wäre … Darüber hatte ich immer meine Not mit dem Abbé, der behauptet, der Irrtum könne nur mit dem Irren geheilt werden,” Goethe, FA, 9:931. Translation modified from CW, 9:337. Thomas Pfau points out the implications of the verb irren as an error or going astray, that can only be corrected by the subject who is on the wrong path, which he compares to Heidegger’s Holzweg. See Pfau, “Bildungsspiele: Vicissitudes of Socialization in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” European Romantic Review 21 (2010): 580. 35 Pfau, “Bildungsspiele,” 580–1. Schlipphacke contrasts this kind of ironic distance toward the bourgeois family with what she sees as Goethe’s reactionary stance that longs for earlier, simpler conditions. Heidi Schlipphacke, “‘Die Vaterschaft beruht nur überhaupt auf der Überzeugung’: The Displaced Family in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 102.3 (2003): 390–412.

“Not as in a mirror” 191 middle-class society [der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft] that confuse and mislead us, finally demanding from us more than Nature herself.”36 Society demands more than nature and keeps him on the false path, which follows from his having entered that society by virtue of becoming a father. This apparent contradiction is symptomatic of the fact that his becoming a father was an effect of his obsession with the theater, a performative, public life to which he is never quite equal and a private duty with which he is still unfamiliar. That the category of Bürger and bürgerlich in its political and social versions (“citizen” and “middle-class”) acts as a supplement to Nature only intensifies the self-conscious artificiality of the novel’s final chapters. Wilhelm’s difficulties reflect not the decline of a public, representative sphere in the sense of performance and appearance but the public–private split within the new order, exemplified in the split between correction and sympathetic therapy in the Society itself. Natalie raises the most serious questions about the harmony of the subject with the world of nature and society. She goes so far as to criticize the Abbé’s assumption that all human capacities are inborn, saying that she and Lothario are good examples of the theory while the Countess and Friedrich (who has some of the most penetrating insights into the workings of the Turm) are examples of the inadequacy of the pedagogical experiments of which, she fears, Friedrich may become a victim.37 This is not an example of ruthless suppression of the “other” but the failure of a social experiment to serve its would-be clients, particularly in this case of an experiment which, as in Wilhelm’s lament, poses as natural. If the question of Verstand, understanding as intellection, is one of observation, then it would seem that there is, in the plurality of voices in the novel, no completely unified observerposition of such a Nature, only attempts in this case to make it show itself as natural.38 The experiment fails because the premise of Verstand is faulty; it does not recognize the role of contingency within nature and does not account for the observer position that is simultaneously inside and, by virtue of its observations, outside of the world observed. The postulated unification of this order on the scientific or economic plane (of immanence) in recent critical readings of the novel also fails for the 36 Goethe, CW, 9:307. FA, 9:881. 37 Goethe, CW, 9:319. FA, 9:901. 38 This is not to regress to the ethico-political polyphony of Bakhtinian criticism, which made such a polyphony primary for understanding the Lehrjahre. The operational/observational model still allows one to conclude that there are other voices, just not that these voices are primarily somehow subversive of a prior, completely constituted and unified oppressive order.

192  Figures of Natality very reasons mentioned by Schiller. Is the guiding entity operational, a machine after all, or is it an observer? Are the observers themselves the god-machines who are this Schicksal, or do they observe this Schicksal at work? If the “Maschinen” in this experiment cannot rely on a unified observer position, then it would seem that this problem must be referred to the paradox identified by Luhmann: the operation of observing produces a product, the observation, yet is itself not observable in a first-person, reflexive fashion. That is, the observer has a blind spot at the locus of his or her own operation, which can only be observed by another, second-order observer. In the cases above, Wilhelm and the narrator seem to be mutually implicated in a sort of self-involved naiveté, while Jarno and Natalie maintain outsider positions, observing the Abbé’s observations and commenting upon the discrepancies in the Abbé’s operational premises. There is therefore a sort of round-robin of observation here, with no one instance (in the sense of Instanz) able to demonstrate or effect a God-like perspective, much less that there is a self-identical, observational-operational subject–object responsible for raising others (bild-ing them) to its own level. If Goethe stages this last version in asserting through Jarno that “Therese [the practical, household-minded woman] trains her pupils, whereas Natalie cultivates [bildet] hers,”39 Natalie’s observation of the observational fault of the Turm must bring this Bildung into some sort of ironic light but not a holistic one.40 The perspective is ironic precisely because it is partial, a challenge to the coherence of the whole and the juncture, to put it in Foucauldian terms, of knowledge and power. The question remains: If the pretensions of this sort of total perspective fail even to integrate an ironic whole, what model then prevails in Goethe’s novel?

Drives and Fantasies: Observing Gender Trouble

Critical readings of gender and the construction of the family in the Apprenticeship often focus on the model of Wilhelm’s socialization to the bourgeois nuclear family, in which women as mothers are considered, as in Schlegel’s review, a “supplement” to the already complete patriarchal order in which Wilhelm receives a son from a secret society of men. To cite one of many gender critiques, the novel uses a father–son dyad with no mother in order to “depic[t] a (mostly) conciliatory, orderly, at times repressive, yet productive, in short a benign image of enlightened patriarchy as the natural order.”41 39 Goethe, CW, 9:326. FA, 1.9:912. 40 Goethe, CW, 319, 322–3. FA, 1.9:900, 907. 41 Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Patriarchy and German Enlightenment Discourse: From Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of

“Not as in a mirror” 193 While the ladies’ auxiliary of Natalie and Therese might be more central than such a blanket dismissal implies, this is at first glance an accurate description that coincides with emphases on changing models of marriage and family and Wilhelm’s socialization into them.42 However, the critical notion of supplementarity takes up what is supposed to be unnecessary—in Rousseau, education, childrearing, culture itself—as in fact central, particularly around “the substitution [suppléance] of the mother,” as Rousseau sees the Fall into supplementarity as remedied by “restor[ing] of all men to their primal duties, begin[ning] with the mothers.”43 From Judith Butler’s critique of the focus on maternity as natural, one might take a warning that the term “absent mother” does not conclusively state what is not there, and that the unnatural mothers and accidental fathers of the Apprenticeship emerge from networks not of univocal gender signification but of crossed, polyvalent, and entangled identifications and desires—definitely not just homosociosexual or hetero-patriarchal. The gender trouble performed throughout the Apprenticeship further troubles dyadic, specular, and strictly hetero- or homosexed roles. My interest is not in providing yet another critical reading of gender in the novel but in showing how the category of action central to natality is disrupted in Wilhelm’s deeds as well as in his words and how this disruption is driven by observations of gender. Multiple and hybrid gender categories disrupt neat and tidy observations of the social reality supposedly constituted by the end of the novel according to a single and monolithic disciplinary regimen called patriarchy. However, this disruption makes gender categories only more strongly constitutive of the insufficiently founded or grounded category of natal action, which can after all be reduced to no single natural or social model or ideology. The central question once more, now asked of these second, third, fourth (…) natures and the multiple disciplinary regimens they subject themselves to or are subjected to, is indeed that of the supplement: “How is a child possible?” From the first book of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, we see how Wilhelm’s own account of his childhood anticipates the typology of the novel around the theme of repetition and sexuality. One sketch of a possible model would have to take into account that this is not a Enlightenment,” in Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, edited by W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 48. 42 Compare Friedrich Kittler, “Über die Sozialisation Wilhelm Meisters,” in Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978), 13–124. 43 Derrida, Grammatology, 146.

194  Figures of Natality novel just about birth and paternity, but also about the genetic logic of sex, about couplings and pairings. This implies a relationship of past to present and cause to effect that would have to observe the moment that might emerge in the lyric figuratively as phallic or umbilical connection but in the kinship narratives of Nathan the Wise or now in the Apprenticeship remains hidden from view. The evidence Goethe produces in order to channel desire and explain paternity is rather different from Lessing’s, as it repeats the functions identified in Wellbery’s model of the lyric as dyadic intimacy, only in a state of temporal and gendered confusion that makes the moment of union a matter of careful and seemingly impossible reconstruction. If Goethe’s novel indeed represents itself, as Schlegel claimed, it might be in this special sense, that it thematizes a certain role of art, in the metatheatrical terms of Wilhelm’s fascination with Hamlet and the theater as well as in its thematization of a temporality of a beginning or origin which is unknown and uncertain and is only given a determinate role in the plot in retrospect. This role can only be secured from its own beginnings, wrapped in the fictions of Wilhelm’s fantasy, by a set of rituals, reflections, and a practice of writing and reading, which, paradoxically, are only interesting inasmuch as they refer to this spontaneous beginning. One might therefore say that the novel does not represent itself but, rather, presents, on a metaliterary level (and not as a purely immanent process), not a spatial but a temporal model of the artwork within the artwork, as in the lyric, as that which removes or erases its own traces: ars latet arte sua. Wilhelm is just sloppier at it than Goethe’s lyric subjects. This model is centered around the product of this birth, Wilhelm’s putative child Felix. The sort of drive structure Wilhelm outlines in his own voice early in the novel will shape later events around three aspects: (1) the recurrence of sex/gender ambiguity in Wilhelm’s love objects; (2) the idea that, from an initial moment, Wilhelm is somehow guilty toward these love objects; and (3) the recurrent refusal of Bildung or Entwicklung. In Book One, this dynamic of repetition, guilt, and failure to develop is figured according to two intertexts which are obvious for Goethe: the Bible and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. The theme “you always hurt the ones you love” begins with Tasso and is developed through Biblical allusions into the idea that previous deeds, unknown or simply unexamined, have unexpected consequences and that, therefore, the subjective point of view that would judge the subject’s own status in a supposed process of development must be incorrect. Here, it is not just rhetoric that undoes phenomenalism (as in Paul de Man’s project), but the dynamics of knowledge, time, and observation as Goethe thematizes them in relation to development.

“Not as in a mirror” 195 The interaction of these three factors and the reproductive result, Felix, is modulated in the Apprenticeship by Wilhelm’s persistent gender trouble. One can see this, as Robert Tobin does, as evidence of homosexual and gender-crossing currents in Goethe’s work; it is certainly true that Wilhelm “learns how to become a husband and a father from a series of cross-dressed women.”44 An even longer series of homosexual and otherwise queer references, images, and possibilities crosses Goethe’s work, casting doubt even on the successful socialization of Wilhelm to the bourgeois, heterosexual nuclear family.45 I read the queer motifs and potentials of the novel as marking a deeper uncertainty, not just about sexual objects but about the process of sexual reproduction, a sort of queer maieutics that obscures the moments of conception and birth to the point where it can only reason backward from the given object, in this case Felix. However, in contrast to studies that rightly seek to bring the age of Goethe or Goethe himself out of the closet, I read the gender trouble of the Apprenticeship, most significantly for the discourse on reproduction, making, and the political, as referring as well, and to the ways in which this birth product indicates a point beyond the affective, specular, or circular structures of debt, kinship, or other forms of organic identity and totality. In any case, Wilhelm is perhaps more fool than queer, as his observations, inclinations, and reflections seem to indicate that his most consistent behavior, sexual or otherwise, consists in having no idea what he is doing. In his long recounting of his childhood to a drowsy and then sleeping Mariane, he speaks as though he has already reached the acme of his powers and is about to come into his inheritance. The first-time reader of the novel should wonder at this point what is going to happen in the next 550 pages; in hindsight, one knows that he does not get his inheritance until Book 7, and then only to begin his journeyman period, the Wanderjahre. With all its ups and downs, Wilhelm’s desire becomes productive almost in spite of itself, resulting in hindsight in the creation of a child with his lover Mariane. This creation is strongly mediated by theatrical references and indeed by the social situation of the theater for both characters. It is also marked thematically by the same backward-looking temporality that shapes and frames the novel; the break between time and observation implied in Luhmann’s theory is exemplified by Wilhelm’s premature desire 44 Robert Tobin, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 124. 45 While Tobin follows Friedrich Kittler in speaking of Wilhelm’s socialization to the bourgeois model (ibid., 112), Heidi Schlipphacke finds ironic distance to this model and a disruption of the nuclear family, albeit one that moves backward as a counter-Enlightenment. See Schlipphacke, “Vaterschaft.”

196  Figures of Natality to conclude his own story. After recounting the puppet shows he saw, and before telling Mariane of those in which he performs, which represent his Fall into the theatrical world (he sneaks the Büchlein out of the Puppenkiste stored in the pantry, after secretly eating the prunes and dried apples stored there), Wilhelm casts his narration as an epic looking-backward in the name of a looking-forward. He is Moses on Mount Nebo: It is a beautiful feeling, dear Mariane, to remember old times and old, harmless mistakes, especially when it occurs at a moment [in einem Augenblicke] when we have fortunately reached a high point from which we can now look about and survey the path we have put behind us. It is so pleasant to recall contentedly many obstacles we were embarrassed to think were insurmountable and to compare what we are now, in our developed state [entwickelt], with what we were before, undeveloped. But I feel unspeakably happy now that I can talk with you in this moment about the past, since I am also looking ahead to the enticing country that we can walk through hand in hand.46 However, this is an odd sort of Moses, a memorious Moses whose sensibility also anticipates Lucretius, if not Kant. While Moses is forbidden from entering the Promised Land in this classic image of disappointment (“and [the Lord] buried [Moses] in the land of Moab” [Deut. 34:6]), Lucretius’s observer at the beginning of the second book of De rerum natura is not an actor at the end of his powers but an observer, one who takes pleasure (“iucunda voluptas”) at his distance from the traumatic, or dangerous, or confusing events and a certain Schadenfreude in seeing others struggle and wander astray,47 the “shipwreck with spectator” that, according to Hans Blumenberg, is the “paradigm of a metaphor for existence.”48 In short, Wilhelm believes himself to be in a secure place from which to watch, as if in the mirror of his memory, not others but himself. The illusion of this perspective affords him a panoramic view of his identity as linked to the theater, an identity that he is beginning 46 FA, 1.9:367. My translation. 47 Lucretius, De rerum natura, Liber II: 1–13. In Lucretius, the observer possesses a teaching (doctrina) which fortifies him against the distress of the shipwrecked person. Compare Wilhelm’s contemplation of the engravings in the house at the beginning of Book Seven in a sequence that links the Ghost, the warning to flee, and the engraved shipwreck scene with a father and two daughters, one like Natalie (whom he has not yet re-encountered). Goethe, CW, 9:260. 48 Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

“Not as in a mirror” 197 to question. If he no longer desires the world of the theater (and no longer desires this sort of theater of the past, upon which he looks back with theoretical detachment), then he desires another sort of object, a specific, carnal one: Mariane. He stops attending the theater every evening not because of his father’s command, but because he wants to see Mariane. The object, as this particular woman, involves Wilhelm in a potential enjoyment that is no longer panoramic and distanced, but tied to specific objects, almost fetishes, and effects, namely the potential for a productive affect, the passage from love to sex to fatherhood. This shift from panoramic spectatorship to a very carnal attachment to a real and present woman is, however, only the next stage in Wilhelm’s confusion. He is not now “developed” for the same reasons as before; his poetic impulses and the manner of his enjoyment have only taken a new direction: His youth let him enjoy rich pleasures that were heightened and maintained by a lively poetry [Dichtung]. Also, the condition of his beloved gave her conduct a tone that very much aided his feelings. The fear that her beloved might discover her condition [Verhältnisse] prematurely [vor der Zeit: “before the (right) time”] gave her the most lovely appearance [Anschein] of worry and modesty, her passion for him was lively, and even her unease increased her tenderness. In his arms she was the most adorable creature.49 As we learn in Book 7, Wilhelm has apparently fathered a child in his encounters with Mariane. The reference to “Verhältnisse” may refer to Mariane’s being courted by the wealthy Norberg—a secret which becomes important later—, but when would be a good time for Wilhelm to discover these? On the contrary, it is from Norberg that Wilhelm’s role should be concealed “vor der Zeit” when Norberg and Mariane are to be married. In this way, Mariane reflects the temporality of Wilhelm’s observer position: he imagines looking into a past that is not really past (again, his confusion never quite goes away), so he is not really at the separate present where he imagines his standpoint to be. Mariane has certain knowledge of her present and future, which she conceals lest it come out prematurely—one assumes, with time enough before the birth to allow Wilhelm to leave her upon finding out about Norberg. Wilhelm is subjectively deceived by his own standpoint, but Mariane deceives Wilhelm, in disguise not just in the uniform, her condition hidden by its straps, but beneath her own blushing, partly from the anxiety of her dissembling her real condition and partly 49 Goethe, FA, 1.9:365. Translation modified from CW, 9:4.

198  Figures of Natality because of that condition itself. “She was the sweetest creature in his arms”: this affection is the sum total of his and her deceit. However, the reference to her “Zustand,” “condition, circumstances,” and possibly also the concealment of her “Verhältnisse” on a determinate timeline, seems to be the first indication in the text that Mariane is pregnant. In this passage, the language of Anschein and scheinen resolves the clash between modesty and tenderness (Scham, Zärtlichkeit) on the one hand and sexual/genital passion and the consequent worry or unease (Unruhe) on the other. These episodes could be ascribed to what Marc Redfield sees as the “Bildung of the knowledge of the impossibility of Bildung,”50 the achievement of a position on the work’s own fictionality, the same logic Derrida attributes to the supplement. Indeed, the discourse of art carries the plot along and, like the Tower, presents no coherent, non-ironic account of the social value or efficacy of art. I want to look more closely at the role of intellect (Verstand) as a form that shapes Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, perhaps as Goethe’s response to the Spinozism debate, a response that in any case reads like an anticipation of Schlegel’s critique-by-appropriation of the novel.

“Miscarriages of the Intellect”

If the trajectory of the Lehrjahre is the bringing together of a not entirely natural family, then this Zustand is the underlying tension which structures the repetitions in the text. These tensions are also figured as Wilhelm’s involvement with various women who are somehow coded as androgynous: Aurelie, Mignon, Natalie “die schöne Amazone” (at least until she removes her long riding coat, exposing her figure). Mariane first appears as a “little female officer” (“weibliche[s] Offizierchen”)51 and does not want to remove her sleeve bands (part of the uniform, coded masculine) in spite of the wishes of her maid Barbara, who wants to refeminize her. Mariane is waiting for Wilhelm in the uniform, while Barbara is thinking ahead to Norberg’s visit: “‘I’ll have to see to it,” [Barbara] cried out, ‘that she gets back into long dresses.’”52 When Wilhelm arrives, Mariane as love object is apostrophized as the uniform: “With what delight did he embrace the red uniform and press the white satin vest to his chest! Who would dare, who is fit to describe the bliss of two lovers!”53 The retreat of enunication is accompanied by a retreat of observation; Barbara and the narrator—as “wir,” including the reader—leave the happy ones, “die Glücklichen,” at this point to activities hinted at earlier by Mariane, who wished to show her love 50 Redfield, Phantom Formations, 81. 51 FA, 1.9:359. 52 Ibid., 1.9:360. 53 Ibid., 1.9:361. Translation modified from Goethe, CW, 9:2.

“Not as in a mirror” 199 to Wilhelm and “enjoy all of his”—perhaps a contingent knowing in another sense that will make it seem in retrospect that Wilhelm fathered a child.54 Events still require interpretation, but any interpretation is on shaky ground here. In the scene with Mariane, the condition (Zustand) that will produce Felix (if we trust the Tower’s paternity testing) creates the illusion from the inferred perspective of Wilhelm that Mariane is interested in him and his story. Felix’s presence here (as Zustand) already serves to convert one thing into the appearance of its opposite. In this sense, even in the womb, he contributes to the separation of Sein and Schein. Another case of this separation is the deadly encounter of the lovers Tancred and Chlorinde in Tasso’s Gerusalemma liberata, Jerusalem Delivered. Wilhelm relates his performance of the role of the Christian Tancred, who encounters his “heathen” (i.e., Muslim/Arab) lover Clorinda, not in love but in combat, as Clorinda attempts by night to set fire to the Christian siege tower: And when at night Tancred came upon the supposed warrior, the combat began under cover of darkness and they fought so fiercely, I would never, without tears coming to my eyes, utter the words: But now the measure of Clorinda’s days is full The hour draws near, the hour when she must die. My tears flowed freely as the unhappy lover plunged his sword into her breast, loosened her helmet, recognized who it was, and, trembling, fetched water to baptize her.55 Sex and repetition are conditioned by illusion in this other embrace of a uniform that reflects Wilhelm and Natalie’s relation, as Clorinda, in uniform, is killed when her lover takes the uniform at face value. Death and conception are the same act, as what one believes one is knowing or doing is more important than what one actually does. Tancred’s finding his lover after this scene everywhere his sword strikes (into a tree that then bleeds, on Wilhelm’s telling) conveys the outcome of this gender trouble: “that he was destined unwittingly to harm everything he ever loved!”56 As Wilhelm affectively overinvests in each of these situations, the story of Tancred and Clorinda is a sort of emblem for the damage done by the lover of uniforms and masks. The problem of masks, theatrical actors, and personae inherited from Baroque schema of representation 54 Ibid., 1.9:360. 55 Goethe, CW, 9:12. FA, 1.9:378. 56 Goethe, CW, 9:12.

200  Figures of Natality and courtly conduct becomes acute in Goethe in his transformation of the same problematic: the lover who is not deceived, i.e., who loves not the mask, but what is under the mask. Or, since Wilhelm does indeed embrace the uniform, perhaps he is the lover who sees authenticity in the theater—here, in Tancred’s love of the woman beneath the armor— and copies it, translating love-for-woman into love-for-costume as a second-order sort of love which sees not what the first-order lover sees and loves, but how the first-order lover loves, i.e., on stage, and learns from him how to love along the lines of the saying that we would not know how to love without love songs. This is at least suggested as Mariane’s deception, the appearance of amorous interest, becomes his truth, and this pragmatic distinction creates or seems to create (is later made to have created) a child. On the terms of the fable, this excess of signs over signification creates a medium that makes personal love possible—an option that Lessing’s fabular economy excludes, but one that is present in the French fabulists he critiques. As a succinct summary of this medial creation, Niklas Luhmann cites La Rochefoucauld: “Il y a des gens qui n’auraient jamais été amoureux s’ils n’avaient entendu parler de l’amour” (There are people who would never have been in love had they not heard [people] talking about love.)57 The excessive reproduction (Über-Zeugung in another sense) of this amorous discourse is an autopoiesis that arises not from symmetry or intuition but only from semantics. Wilhelm’s problem of theatrical Bildung is exacerbated by the fact that his love object is an ambivalently gendered one. The inability to conclude from the outside what is on the inside of a costume or a performative positionality is exacerbated in the narrative not by shame but by guilt, as Wilhelm has abandoned the cross-dressing, pregnant Mariane, believing her to have spent the night with Norberg, and has thus, according to Barbara’s reproachful speech in Book 7, made himself guilty of her death. While Mariane, Mignon, and Natalie indicate the vicissitudes of Wilhelm’s drives and the first two seem to bring about in him an almost fatal repetition compulsion, the women have in common with the child Felix, the product of Wilhelm’s union with the “little female officer” and his embrace of the red uniform, that they are ambivalent in their appearance. As is the case with Mignon, the women as well cannot be identified definitively by such gendered markers. In the case of Mignon, this turns out to be the result of incest. However, in other terms, the autopoietic process by which Wilhelm comes to love 57 Luhmann cites La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions, no. 136 (Liebe als Passion 23). Luhmann contends that such media (like all media in this sense) move from being externally directed structures to being autonomous, self-reproducing, and evolving systems (Liebe als Passion, Ch. 2).

“Not as in a mirror” 201 is the result of a theatrical (self-) education which directs him away from vision, first, with the women, from a vision of the whole, and then with Felix, who cannot be tested intuitively, by his appearance, to determine his paternity. If intuition cannot solve the questions of love, birth, and paternity, a symbolic system, semantics, or medium will have to arise in order to cover over the gap in appearance and in plausibility by creating the relationships among these concepts anew, a novel re-production of reproduction. The translation of this medium of conception to a medium of birth bearing the marks of natality requires addressing what kind of sign, symbol, or medium is presented in the child Felix, who exhibits the epistemological and ontological uncertainty of a “reizende, ungewisse Erscheinung” (“attractive, uncertain phenomenon”).58 If, as Redfield claims, the sacrifice of the aesthetic is necessary for the ironic self-reflection of Bildung, then Felix remains a liminal figure. The subject more of Wilhelm’s doubt than his obsession (or he is obsessively skeptical, perhaps), the uncertainty of Felix’s origins and appearance is none the less attractive or stimulating, reizend. If the specular hiatus or syntactical chiasmus is here represented by the twin configurations Wilhelm–Mariane: Chlorinde–Tancred or lover–uniform: uniform–lover, the wings of this “V” are not a neat reflective chiasmus but an asymmetrical distortion. The factor at the center is not the mirror but the encounter or the event, one resulting in death, the other in new life. However, the opposite of the truthproducing or potential-realizing encounter obtains here: while the Crusader story idealizes the truth behind social appearances (as in Lessing: friends all along, in spite of the uniform, but without the pardon), Wilhelm’s actual encounter with his lover is an event interpreted only in retrospect as having produced Felix, who appears only later in the same sort of broken temporality that marks Wilhelm’s observation and Mariane’s deception. The fate of the androgynous figures such as Mignon, the product of incest, the Harper, and Aurelie (characterized by androgyny, Mannweiblichkeit) in these encounters has perhaps more to do with a theory of artistic production than it does with what Schiller sees as monstrosity counter to nature. For Schiller, this novel and the novel as such “is simply not poetic … [it] lies only in the domain of intellect [des Verstandes], is subject to all its demands and takes part in all its limitations.” Nonetheless, the novel oscillates for Schiller between poetry and prose because of Goethe’s own “poetic spirit.”59 In a letter to Goethe of July 2, 1796, 58 HA, 7:490. 59 “Wie schön gedacht ist es, daß Sie das praktisch Ungeheure, das furchtbar Pathetische im Schicksal Mignons und des Harfenspielers von dem theoretisch

202  Figures of Natality Schiller writes, “How beautifully conceived it is that you derive the practically monstrous and the terribly pathetic aspects of the fate of Mignon and the Harpist from the miscarriages of the intellect, so that nothing is imposed upon pure and healthy Nature thereby.”60 The contrast implied here between healthy birth and a monstrous birth (however not a Fehlgeburt or miscarriage) echoes the relationship between thoughts and things, in the sense that the “practically” or morally monstrous (as “practical” philosophy concerns morality) is not attributed to the nature that produced it (in fact), only to the failures of the intellect. As in Spinoza’s consideration of reason, affect, and the ethical, this Nature makes a claim to ontological totality—it is all that is—, yet there are unfortunate interruptions to its harmonious activity in the unprepared mind, the presence of those attributes that contradict other attributes also present there. According to Adrian Daub in his magisterial study of the idea of marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism, the Romantic vision in Schlegel echoes that of Aristophanes, cited in Plato’s Symposium, at least in part: there is a primordial split of humanity into men and women, a rift that must be healed.61 The Romantic critique of sexual identity as reification implies a “sexual homelessness” indexed by gender identity, a diremption that produces shame “because sex is the sentimental nostalgia for androgynous naïveté.”62 While this androgyny in the sense of a masculine–feminine ambivalence or exchange leads Elisabeth Krimmer to claim that “homosociality in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is a sublimated form of homosexuality in which the desire for other men is symbolically mediated through the female body,”63 a notion that recalls the primacy of homoerotic love in Greek culture, Romantic notions of sexuality are based on gender complementarity. Of the split couples in Aristophanes’s story, the male–female couple becomes paradigmatic for Romantic sexual longings. This indicates a tension in the texts of the Ungeheuren, von den Mißgeburten des Verstandes ableiten, so daß der reinen und gesunden Natur nichts dadurch aufgebürdet wird.” Schiller to Goethe, October 20, 1797; in Eberhard Lämmert, ed., Romantheorie: Dokumentation ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland (Köln and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1971), 184. 60 Hannelore Schlaffer, Wilhelm Meister: das Ende der Kunst und die Wiederkehr des Mythos (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), 42. 61 The original beings in Aristophanes’s tale were male–male, male–female, and female–female combinations. See Plato, Symposium 189e–191d, in Collected Dialogues of Plato 542–4. Longing for reintegration explains homo- and heterosexual couplings, and it is the male–male coupling that is proper to “the most hopeful of the nation’s youth, for theirs is the most virile constitution” (191e– 192a, 544). 62 Daub, Uncivil Unions, 99. 63 Elisabeth Krimmer, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: Paternity and Bildung in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.” German Quarterly 77.3 (2004): 268.

“Not as in a mirror” 203 age of Goethe, as well as in the critical literature between a homosocial and homosexual model that excludes women and a hetero-normative model that excludes the homo- or queer factor.64 However, there are more fundamentally philosophical reasons for the Romantic version of sexuation that indicate both hetero-normative and mimetic grounds for a totalization of Nature and a parallel critique of this ideal avant la lettre in Goethe’s Apprenticeship. Daub points out that androgyny extends to philosophical terms in Schlegel that Daub associates with Fichte (who saw the sexes as complementary) but which fit just as plausibly in their grammar with Spinoza: masculinity is “that which determines [das Bestimmende],” and femininity is “that which is determined [das Bestimmte].”65 From the point of view of Schlegel’s programmatic nostalgia for androgyny or at least less markedly defined gender roles, this is not the usual gender stereotyping but a call for greater equivalency. In other words, it fits perfectly with Schlegel’s modification of Spinoza’s natura naturans and natura naturata into objects for the critical subject who can observe both the data and the operation. The “drive” of the Apprenticeship, as Schlegel sees it, “to form itself into a whole” is based on the dynamic union of these properties in the work that is “organized and organizing throughout.”66 Goethe’s manner of presenting androgyny in the Apprenticeship does not allow for simple answers, but it suggests that the place occupied by this critical subject is not accessible simply through a reflective model that performs the union for which it wishes. The moment of birth and the product it creates will disrupt this harmony not by reifying older sexual and gender categories but by undermining the intimate complementarity of the gender spectrum and the attempt to create a philosophical foundation for gender in knowledge and the appearance of resemblance. While Schiller seems to want to allegorize the fiction as only about failures of the powers of the intellective subject (and therefore of ethics in Spinoza’s sense), the thematic pattern in Goethe’s novel seems to imply that moments of dubious ontological status might in fact arise from the idealization of the parallelism, similarity, and harmony of nature and the intellect. As in the belatedly offered origin story of Mignon and the Harpist, these moments arise from sins against nature, in their case incest. The ambivalently gendered Mignon is a 64 See Robert Tobin’s discussion of Goethe’s essay, “Female Roles Played by Men in the Roman Theater.” Tobin, Warm Brothers, 118–19. 65 Adrian Daub cites the section “Eine Reflexion” in Schlegel’s Lucinde. Daub, Uncivil Unions, 101. 66 He refers to the “Trieb des durchaus organisierten und organisierenden Werks, sich zum ganzen zu bilden” (Schlegel, KFSA, 2:131).

204  Figures of Natality Zwitter, neither clearly male nor clearly female.67 This failure to sexuate means a destiny that can only be an early death. In other words, this is another paradox: the duality of sexual and gender particularity asserts the oneness and uniformity of nature; where it is threatened with ambivalence, Nature reasserts its oneness. Sexual difference is subsumed under the rubric “Nature” as the realm of the One. Split into two sexes, it is by that same virtue constituted by totality and knowledge, not lack and desire. This is at least the sort of assertion raised in the critical literature, in which the novel is seen in terms of a central narrative perspective that polices identities and suppresses alterity. Catriona MacLeod asserts that the novel suppresses androgyny in this way, punishing the figures such as Mignon for crimes against nature.68 However, there are several problems when this point of view is compared in detail to the novel’s text. As with the failures of the narration, of Wilhelm’s own remarks, and of the overall conception of the Tower to consolidate a single observer position which could reliably predicate univocal, unambiguous qualities of a natural object, even the statements of the figures critically staged as subaltern are involved in the conflict of the observation of nature and the predication of identity. The parable of the lily reasserts this position paradoxically as well, and it must be noted that this parable is framed by its own origin in the words of Augustin, the Harpist, whose interest in the laws of Nature serves as a justification, not as a challenge to his incestuous union with Sperata, which produces Mignon. His address to his monastic brethren appeals to Nature, as opposed to convention, in order to justify the incest: Don’t listen to the echoes of your cloisters, don’t consult your musty parchments, your crotchety and quirky regulations: ask Nature and your hearts. Nature will tell you what you have to tremble at: she will solemnly point to what she has irrevocably 67 His/her name is in the masculine form, mignon, not mignonne. The mignons were courtiers of French King Henri III (1551–1589) and resented for their influence on the king as well as their supposedly deviant sexual inclinations. Tobin points out that Mignon was also an eighteenth-century term for a “male homosexual prostitute.” Tobin, Warm Brothers, 110. 68 Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 124–6. MacLeod sees patterns of expression, appreciation, and suppression of different androgynous and gender-crossing moments in the figures of Goethe’s novel, not just complementarity or binarity in the androgyne. She relates Mignon’s self-absorption to the first phase of Aristophanes’s androgyne, an asexual figure (124).

“Not as in a mirror” 205 laid her lasting curse upon. Consider the lilies: Do not husband and wife grow on one and the same stem? Does not the blossom they bear unite them? And is not the lily the image of innocence? Is not its sibling union fruitful? Nature clearly indicates what it abhors: a creature that should not be, cannot become; the creature that lives wrongly is soon destroyed. Infertility, stunted growth, premature decay—those are her curses, the marks of her severity.69 In this passage, the contradiction as to the position of a judging observer and a third instance which would set these utterances in social, political, or ideological order is apparent, as Augustin introduces the very law of nature which operates by resemblance and therefore also judges its own creations (since otherwise there would be nothing to condemn), in order not to condemn but to justify, by natural resemblance, his incest. The same law of identity that Müller-Sievers stages as a “catastrophe” of epigenesis in the context of Elective Affinities drives incest as the pairing of like and like, without the authority (associated with the external interventions of preformationist ideology) of the “musty parchments” or the ecclesiastical institutions represented as the repositories of this putatively superior knowledge. Augustin’s argument is first of all that Sperata is not his sister, and, second, that even if she were, Nature would sanction their union. As Goethe stages it, this is not so much a critique of incest as of a certain hermeneutic practice. Reading the book of nature without other guidance as a sort of universal analogy, like the organic models of society, economy, and language of the epigenetic turn, leads to the denial of the relations that do, in fact, exist. Goethe’s phenomenal politics is therefore related to the figure of the hermaphrodite, but is not entirely dependent on it. As related above and discussed at greater length by MacLeod and others, Goethe’s phenomenology of gender can be ambivalent whether it is focused on a whole Gestalt, as in the gender trouble with Mignon—“So lass mich scheinen, bis ich werde …”—or on the fetishes70 which appear as objects of desire and confusion even when men are coded male by them (as in Friedrich’s wearing the red uniform similar to Mariane’s costume). Even if such figures are eventually “socialized,” as in Natalie’s feminization in proximity to the all-socializing Turmgesellschaft, also observed by MacLeod, the Mannweiblichkeit attributed to Aurelie, whether it is the figure of the Männin (woman coded man, desired as woman) or Winckelmannian homoerotics (a man as object of desire for another 69 Goethe, FA, 1.9:965. Translation modified from CW, 9:357. 70 These are also enumerated in MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity, 101.

206  Figures of Natality man), compels not just an interpellation or Erfassung as man or woman, one or the other, by some other agency, but a decision on the part of the subject as to the nature of (in this case) his desire, which would be a subjective correlate to the omipresent social forces of control and sexual normalization. However, such a decision is categorically avoided in Wilhelm’s case. With his unapparent, non-phenomenally established son by another Männin, Wilhelm resigns himself, makes the decision not to decide, and then, in the Wanderjahre, explores some of the dimensions of his own homosexual desire, as MacLeod notes, in the vision of the youthful fisher and the symbol of the wilted hyacinth blooms.71 Wilhelm performs this antiperformative (in the sense of speech act theory) lack of decision, the substitution of Entsagung or Resignation, in the Lehrjahre; it then becomes, personified, the subtitle of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (die Entsagenden). Whether this can be read as suppression of androgynous or hermaphroditic figures is an open question, as the issue of repression here in getting rid of Augustin, Mignon, and Aurelie coincides with what could be a tacit critique of the idea of an unmediated union or an unproblematic production of offspring that mirror the features of their two parents.72 Andreas Gailus reads the Apprenticeship in an analogous vein as being about the “cut” between organic life, on the one hand, and reflection and representation, on the other. Goethe’s “bio-aesthetics,” as he calls it, implies “that it is in art alone that the incorporation of artifice, power, and nature proper to individuals shaped by community and symbol can be apprehended.”73 In this case, however, art works to foreground and give symbolic form to these necessary interventions of artifice and power with and in nature, not to suppress signs of its own constructedness. This critical vector can be extended in a more systematic vein to later, Romantic theories of androgyny. Adrian Daub constrasts Friedrich 71 MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity, 136. MacLeod notes this as a symbol of homosexuality without giving its specific origin in the strongly erotic friendship (“eine Art der Liebe […], die wider die Natur ist” [Hederich, Lexikon, s.v. Hyacinthus, col. 1296]) of Apollo with Hyacinthus, a mortal youth killed by Zephyrus, Apollo’s rival for his affections, who blew the disc thrown by Apollo into Hyacinthus’s skull (see also Tobin, Warm Brothers, 114). The flower is a homonymic memorial to an illicit love, just as the narcissus is, and is similar to the fetish objects of the Lehrjahre studied by MacLeod, which are metonymic memorials: pearl necklaces, scarves, uniforms, and so on. Is Wilhelm’s Tancred complex then really a case of hyacinthism, but from the standpoint of the Sun God? 72 See again Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation, for an analysis of such resemblances. 73 Andreas Gailus, “Forms of Life: Nature, Culture, and Art in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” Germanic Review 87 (2012): 152–3.

“Not as in a mirror” 207 Schlegel’s production of an androgynous birth product in Lucinde (Lucinde’s child Wilhelmine—how aptly named?) with Dorothea Schlegel’s presentation in her novel Florentin (1801) of a “parodic allegory of male fantasies of self-making through art,” specifically the Romantic autopoiesis that underlies philosophical androgyny. While Engelstein is optimistic about the production of “third terms” through a Fichtean–Schlegelian reproductive drive and sexual complementarity, which implies that “the semiotics of love proved fundamental to the generation and continuance of modern civic structures,”74 the theory of complementarity (or any theory of coupling) does not seem to have implications for that third product produced. This is where theories of marriage and accounts of birth diverge, and where the many understandings of civic and communal existence—the point of reference as well in Goethe’s “Explanation of an Old Woodcut” that got beyond the Nature-breast of the earlier lyric poetry—have to be narrowed down to a third term that reflects natality in that it is miraculous, new, and not simply reproductive. This might be located in Dorothea Schlegel’s insistence, as Daub reads it, that “both birth and love union, if they are to generate something real and new, produce something that is distinct from those who produced it, something that has a life of its own, something that may be hostile, uncomfortable and uncanny.”75 In Goethe’s novel, this is the child Felix, whom I want to re-enter into the Romantic model of specularity at the place where subject and image or signifier come together, as the sign of that real, new, and uncanny feature that will propel my reading of aesthetic ideology in terms of natality into the economic and representational paradigm of debts and promises, toward the dimension of this particular case of natality as a sign of the political. The model of reflection or of complementarity supposes that there is no third term intervening between the subject and the mirror. While this reflection may be empowered or intensified (as in Romantic Potenzierung) or affectively informed by the agency of the Muse/Woman/Mother, the visual relationship is dual. This is even true for the propositional syntax of Romantic descriptions of this form, and their appeal lies perhaps in this lack of mediation. As concerns to the notion that relatives are similar in appearance and that there can be signs of paternity, however uncertain, one aspect of Felix’s uncanniness is Wilhelm’s inability to find any visual cues linking himself to his putative child. Before the climactic experience in the Tower, Wilhelm “seemed to be afraid of a gift bestowed on 74 Stefani Engelstein, “The Allure of Wholeness: The Eighteenth-Century Organism and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 766. 75 Adrian Daub, Uncivil Unions, 176.

208  Figures of Natality him by some evil demon.” The German of the original makes a clear connection to Cartesian skepticism: “[E]r schien sich vor einem Geschenke zu fürchten, das ihm ein böser Genius darreichte.”76 This “böser Genius,” like the malin génie of Descartes’s thought experiment, is the hypothetical spirit who could be deceiving him even though his ideas are clear and distinct—a spirit creating an elaborate simulacrum that the subject only thinks is reality. When Barbara reproaches his “compulsive doubting” (“Zweifelsucht”) and urges him to look more closely—because accepting another man’s child would only be a failure of visual recognition—,77 Wilhelm goes to the mirror to try to recognize signs of his paternity in Felix. The child might be a “gift from heaven,” but he is not a specular one: Felix liked to be lifted up to the mirror, and Wilhelm, without admitting it, gladly carried him to the mirror and tried to espy resemblances therein between himself and the child. If these seemed for a moment likely [wahrscheinlich], he would press the child to his bosom, but then, suddenly frightened by the thought that he could be deceiving himself, he would set the child down and let it run off.78 The evil spirit is not yet exorcised—for Descartes, by the stipulation that God is good and would not deceive; for Wilhelm, the assumption of his child as a gift from the Tower. The acceptance of the child involves the refusal of visibility and specularity or even what is wahrscheinlich—probable, but literally, and certainly in this context, what has the appearance of truth.79 Felix’s “uncertain” or “indeterminate” appearance is uncanny not because Wilhelm cannot discover marks of kinship there (for the banal reason that Norberg could in fact be the father) but because Felix is described as inherently uncertain and indeterminate in appearance. Unlike Descartes, Wilhelm does not have recourse to a God who would guarantee these appearances—the one way out of Arendt’s charge that it is Cartesian doubt that creates the introverted and self-observing homo faber. While Wilhelm will also appeal to other Organe—organs but also tools or instruments (from Greek organon)—, only acts of speech and authority will indicate 76 Goethe, FA, 9:866. Translation modified from “evil fate” in CW, 9:298. 77 Ibid., 9:866. A translation of “Zweifelsucht” is omitted in the Collected Works, which effaces the Cartesian language of the passage entirely. 78 Ibid., 9:868. Translation modified from CW, 9:299. 79 For a detailed history of the development of probability and the difference between these two ideas, see Rüdiger Campe, Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit: Literatur und Berechnung zwischen Pascal und Kleist (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002).

“Not as in a mirror” 209 exactly how this “attractive, uncertain appearance” can cement a version of the political beyond aesthetic ideology.

Credit, Debt, and Guilt

After his travails pretending to be doing his bourgeois job collecting debts for his father, amidst the intrigues of the theater group especially with aristocrats, and the robbery from which he is rescued by Natalie, in which Philine, the figure of hollow but seductive beauty, plays a very ambivalent role, Wilhelm encounters his son and an extensive and detailed narrative from Barbara claiming to show his paternity (and not that of his rival Norberg). As he takes leave of the theater group for the last time, Wilhelm’s conversation with Madame Melina is marked by a double materiality. Its topic is the assault and robbery of the group and Wilhelm’s feeling of guilt (Schuld), in the most concrete sense for the loss of the group’s funds. (He had promised to replace everyone’s losses several times over “until they had all exchanged their present state […] for a happier one,” but no one took his proffered hand to seal the agreement. The others were themselves “put to shame, but not consoled” by the offer.80) His farewell to Madame Melina is marked by the repetition of the prefix ver-, which can indicate a process or movement or a privation or an error. I cite the passage here in the original and gloss it in the following paragraphs: Wenn doch der Mensch sich nicht vermessen wollte, irgend etwas für die Zukunft zu versprechen! das Geringste vermag er nicht zu halten, geschweige wenn sein Vorsatz von Bedeutung ist. Wie schäme ich mich wenn ich denke, was ich Ihnen allen zusammen in jener unglücklichen Nacht versprach, da wir beraubt, krank, verletzt and verwundet in eine elende Schenke zusammengedrängt waren! Wie erhöhte damals das Unglück meinen Mut, und welchen Schatz glaubte ich in meinem guten Willen zu finden! […] Ich verlasse Sie als Ihr Schuldner, und mein Glück ist, daß man mein Versprechen nicht mehr achtete, als es wert war, und daß niemand mich jemals gemahnt hat.81 As a glance at the predominant prefixes in the passage shows, Wilhelm is suffering a crisis of “ver-.” The internal repetition of the prefix verseems to speak for itself as an undermining of the speech act, an idea in which the repeated ver- culminate. The series of ver- verbs connect the concepts of promising (versprechen) and a hybristic failure of measure 80 FA, 9:597 81 Ibid., 1.9:868.

210  Figures of Natality or an incommensurability (vermessen) with each other and with the wounds and other material harm inflicted on Wilhelm and the company (verwunden, verletzen), with Wilhelm’s departure (verlassen) from his friends. Following this passage, Madame Melina replies (versetzte) that she would never mistake or fail to recognize (verkennen) Wilhelm’s service to the group, even though the others might not recognize it, as intentions themselves are hardly recognizable (“sehen sich gar nicht mehr ähnlich”: no longer resemble themselves at all) once carried out. Her temporalization that denies recognition as similarity authorizes it as an act of personal will or expression. She assures him that, if he is in her debt, it is only because his very presence inspires confidence (Vertrauen) and affection, not because his promises or his positive acts have placed him contractually in her debt through “a promise … given by word of mouth” (“ein Versprechen, […] das wir mit dem Munde getan haben”).82 Wilhelm’s crisis of “ver-” marks the difference in German between a Versprecher and a Versprechen: between a slip of the tongue and a promise. However, this Versprecher is necessary in order for Wilhelm to come into his paternal inheritance; it does not frustrate but makes possible the at least provisional conclusion of the story. Identity and resemblance destroy, non-identity and error create family ties. For Goethe, this obligation also cannot be proven and redeemed by guarantees; it must be freely assumed not only through the renunciation of binding speech acts, the sort of Entsagen evident at least in this passage, but also through the surrender of the desire for visual evidence quite literally in reflection. If the visual uncertainty of the child’s paternity demonstrated the problem with a philosophy in which perception and intellection are the primary activities and its Romantic recoding as infinite reflection, Wilhelm’s conversation with Madame Melina shows that this also affects Kantian ethics, as economic metaphors treat the frailty of ethical consistency as the “Schatz” found in good will, in the verbal deposit itself. The Tower Society manages to produce two moments of immediate presence for Wilhelm, and, in spite of his declaration upon receiving Felix, “Ja, ich fühl’ es” (“Yes, I feel it!”), that moment is not quite one of them. His affirmation of his paternity only comes about because he asks the Abbé “Is Felix my son?” and the Abbé answers “yes.” It is still an act of authority, credit backed by the Tower, which, as Krimmer puts it, “works together to uphold the institution of fatherhood in the absence of transcendental systems of legitimation and in spite of the lack of biological proof.”83

82 Goethe, CW, 9:300. FA, I.9:869. 83 Krimmer, “Mama’s Baby,” 269.

“Not as in a mirror” 211 Wilhelm’s final release comes with his release by the Nature for which the Society claims to speak: “Nature has given you your freedom.”84 However, “die Natur” here in the collective mouth of the Tower Society is no longer deus sive natura, nor is it the development of some inner potential in an orderly fashion. If nature is there to be understood, and the understanding of nature only begets self-identical monsters, then the operative (naturans) version of this nature, the master hermeneutic monad, the “machines” and machinations of the Tower, are broken. Since their own ventures—beyond receiving an inheritance—do not seem to be going so well, one wonders what their esoteric knowledge can produce except what Wilhelm seems to have already managed on his own: the child he must now accept. As a gift (Gabe), Felix exceeds the discourse of credit and debt or guilt, and so his appearance might be a release, but of a debt that was never contracted (as the other members of the company did not accept Wilhelm’s promise). What can this Lossprechen (literally, “speakingloose,” i.e., releasing from an obligation) mean then if it is associated with this unnatural natural child who comes from somewhere about which Wilhelm should not ask, and comes through a “machine” that has processed him in the system of foster caretakers and institutionalization since his mother’s death? Felix is the solution to Wilhelm’s crisis of ver- in so far as he represents the unification of unlike and incompatible opposites, the catachretic property Arendt ascribed to natality and, in terms of his inscrutable paternity, the same lack of transcendental and immanent legitimation that is the hallmark of the political since Machiavelli.

Felix – Phallus – Fallax

Felix’s role in marking time even before he was born, by motivating those symptoms of shame that Wilhelm misread as affection, becomes evident when he reappears. While this reappearance is itself an event, and therefore punctual, it is an effect of birth as a symbolic medium that motivates the plot of the novel and makes Wilhelm’s final leap into the “economic family” (as Novalis called it) of the Tower possible. Were Felix only a symbol, say, of happiness, then the moment of accepting happiness in this sense would be fulfilling. Were birth allegorical, the novel would be understood not thematically but indirectly as mirroring the pattern of gestation, birth, infancy, and so on, but its temporality hardly suggests this kind of Bildung. Instead, echoing the model of subjectivity from the lyric poetry, Felix is the donation that connects the various overlapping and conflicting temporal strands of the narrative, while resembling or being caused by none of them. 84 Goethe, CW, 9:304. FA, 1.9:876.

212  Figures of Natality The deconstructive logic of supplementarity also articulated in the Apprenticeship as the superfluous but somehow present and necessary completion of nature or existence, like Felix inside but still somehow outside, should be distinguished from the act or function of replacement in a network, of filling in gaps. This is Natalie’s role according to the dilettantish interloper Friedrich: to be in marriage “the supplement of somebody’s existence.”85 That the child Felix also plays this kind of supplementary role is evident in his function as filling in a gap, at least to Wilhelm (who is seldom correct about anything): “You were given to me in place of your dear mother, you shall replace that second mother I had intended for you; now you have a larger gap to fill.”86 Rather than a theoretical decision between autopoiesis and complementarity in sexual coupling and reproduction, as Stefani Engelstein stages the choice between Kant and Fichte/Schlegel,87 there is a logic of replacement in which whatever version of dynamic biological nature (still the sine qua non of Fichte’s love-based marriage) is challenged by the gap, Lücke, only filled here by the child. In David Wellbery’s theory of the lyric, in which he includes the Bildungsroman, the specular encounter and empathetic projection produce the de-castration of the subject. This certainly happens to Wilhelm, suitably enough in a tower, as he receives a child. He also receives a spouse, counter to all his expectations, as his memory traces of the beautiful horsewoman are finally confirmed to refer to Natalie. The restoration of the subject through female companionship, like that of Goethe’s lyric poems, including the “Explanation of an Old Woodcut,” is for Schlegel secondary, a Supplement. This pairing and receipt of comfort is also doubled, whether in the mischievous character (“Schalkheit”) of Sachs’s companion, which he restores to her in an external doubling of mutual exchange, or in Natalie’s “naughty eyes” (“Schelmenaugen”) that carry the poison and its antidote, in an echo of chivalrous romance, the love that wounds and heals, parallel to the semantic transformation of passion from passive suffering to active desire.88 I read the figure of Felix as the phallic moment here in a different sense, not as that which restores wholeness or missing parts, but, in the sense of the suspension of imaginary desires in 85 Ibid., CW, 9:346. FA, 1.9:346. 86 Ibid., CW, 9:349. FA, 1.9:950. See Jochen Hörisch, Gott, Geld, Glück, for a thorough consideration of the relationship between chance, contingency, happiness, and gaps (Glück and Lücke). 87 Engelstein, “Allure of Wholeness,” 754–76. Müller-Sievers points out how Fichte short-circuits Kant’s still rhetorical use of autopoiesis. 88 Tobin uses the Derridean concept of the pharmakon throughout his readings of Goethe analogous to the supplement to explain this homeopathic effect. For his explanation of the analogy, see Tobin, Warm Brothers, 100.

“Not as in a mirror” 213 mirroring or mimesis, as that which makes castration the initiation into the symbolic order. Even in rehearsing the tropes of the lyric as an ideology of Bildung, Goethe makes Wilhelm’s playful child-companion into a spontaneous, non-ironic vehicle for reintroducing a moment of representation that exceeds the control and surveillance structures of the Tower Society even as it is produced performatively (if not biologically) by them as the means to complete Wilhelm’s apprenticeship (but not his Bildung). Felix can be read here as well as the product of the economic discourse in the novel, as that tokos which then becomes the object of judgment. As I noted in the previous chapter, on Marc Shell’s account, the tokos is the offspring of the self-reproduction of money. (The word is also evidently the source of “token” as a medium of exchange.) Felix as tokos is subject not to a sharp ontological distinction between living and dead reproduction—Felix challenges this difference, too, even as the hermaphrodites and androgynes have miraculous powers beyond death—but to the question of causality and relation that is also central to the conceptual figure of natality. On Schlegel’s terms, he is the ideal (Ideal) that connects this concept with the fact of characteristic particularity. At the same time, he is not a stand-in for the castrating, repressive father-figure but, as in the ceremony in the Tower, the father’s gift to his son: “Here, you can have it back now!” Does this gift really imply release from guilt or shame? It at least changes the directionality of the symbolic function of the phallus from the paternal prohibition to an affirmative event that is tied to no idea or ideology but gives Wilhelm an external and undefined goal beyond the Vater-Imago as ego-ideal. By that right, I think one can read Felix, under the usual constraints of thematic presentation, as the internal mark in the novel that points outside the network of the information (secret) society and its networks of control or the internally harmonious coordination of monadic units. The production of harmonious kinship is mediated externally through images and stories, but, as in Lessing’s tale of proper relationships reestablished, the parallel story proceeds through a different kind of sign with a different function. In this sense, Felix is the supplementary figure that makes the network cohere while not being entirely of that network. If, among the various evocations of figures of order—secret societies, networks of command and control, kinship structures, theatrical and business enterprises, reflective, ironic, or monadic textual, visual, and ideological architectures—, the figure of specularity stands out in its verbal form the chiasmus, then the Apprenticeship is the story of how that lyric figure becomes epically messy, to the point where Wilhelm, confused as he is even in the final marriage arrangement, has the fool Friedrich on his heels: “It is a crazy

214  Figures of Natality trick that I should finally have to accept being the father.”89 His often cited line about paternity follows his airing his doubts as to whether the child is his or could in fact be Wilhelm’s: “Fatherhood rests only on conviction. I am convinced; therefore I am the father.”90 Friedrich’s parody of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum mocks the status of the evidence— no monks to bring revealing breviaries, no wise tutors to read facial features, in spite of all the archives—and recalls his ludicrous imitation of Wilhelm, which announces and produces Wilhelm’s commitment to Natalie even as Wilhelm, tired of Friedrich’s manipulations, wants to leave. As Redfield puts it, summing up the legal and performative status of fatherhood in general, “[f]atherhood is thus a privileged metaphor for the subject of Bildung but also a site of anxiety, since, figured as paternity, the self-positing subject becomes more overtly rhetorical in its constitution, more legibly dependent on the power of a performative to impose a meaning.”91 The basis of self-positing, though, is Fichte’s “ich bin ich,” and its power comes precisely from its symmetry. Beyond the subject’s subjection to or in language, evidenced by Wilhelm’s failed promises (or at least his belief that he promised and failed to deliver), his dropped lines—except in the first encounter with the ghost—and the attendant guilt or Schuld as moral-economic figure, it is questionable whether any performative really works here. To top it all off, there is Goethe’s figure of Entsagen or Resignation. Compounding the necessarily public and performative character of fatherhood and its failure with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s idea of re-treat, Ent-zug, taken from Heidegger, one might speak of the re-treat of paternity: the father is the last person who has any say in things, yet he must, if he is to be father, act as the point of ascription. As Friedrich, who always “know[s] how to use logic in the right place” puts it, “if one can’t accept something like that, one doesn’t have to love at all”— amour passion, first version.92 As the book’s ludic logic expert, Friedrich models a syntax meant to parody not the copula but the couplings and the copulation going on, here as he replies to Jarno’s declaration of his betrothal to Lydie: “Old man … you are playing a prank which, as a noun, could take various adjectives, and therefore, if one views it as a subject, various predicates.”93 This commentary on the sexual version of musical chairs 89 Goethe, CW, 9:342. FA, 1.9:940. 90 Ibid., CW, 9:342. “Die Vaterschaft beruht überhaupt nur auf der Überzeugung, ich bin überzeugt und also bin ich Vater.” Goethe, FA 9.940. Überzeugung is of course a polyvalent term, as it can mean “over-reproduction.” 91 Redfield, Phantom Formations, 71. 92 “… wenn man sich so etwas nicht gefallen lassen kann, so muß man gar nicht lieben.” Goethe, FA, 1.9.940. Translation modified from Goethe, CW, 9:342. 93 Ibid., FA, 1.9:947. Translation modified from Goethe, CW, 9:347.

“Not as in a mirror” 215 played by the characters makes grammatical meaning also “eine Frage der Überzeugung” (a question of conviction—or, punningly, overreproduction), requiring a subject who is not simply a reader of signs or of grammar, but one who is affectively invested in the constitutive uncertainty of this text. If the novel indeed represents itself, as Schlegel said, it does so not through neat self-containment or scenic mise-enabyme but because it portrays such readers as well as demanding them. This the sense of the allegorical, symbolic, or mediative masking which, in each of these performative, rhetorical forms, bridges uncertainty and implausibility in connecting labile entities. The role of Felix as a supplement here replaces a lost or unknown origin with a product that is clearly uncanny: he appears out of nowhere and is simply ascribed to Wilhelm, who accepts him and attains the “feeling of a father” (“Gefühl des Vaters”),94 a grammatically awkard phrase: Which father, since it was the presence of his own dead father that led him to that acceptance? Wilhelm then lives his incurious youth over again through Felix, observing nature through a new organ, and the child’s curiosity and desire to learn made him aware how feeble his interest had been in the things outside himself and how little he knew … [H]is own education seemed also to be beginning anew.95 … [He] now understood human nature through the eyes of the child [so schien ihm doch die menschliche Natur erst durch die Beobachtung des Kindes deutlich zu werden].96 Thomas Pfau sees this as an outcome of play, in the sense that Wilhelm’s finding the child is contingent and as a testament to Wilhelm’s “essential instability,” as only this event allows Wilhelm to develop a potential that would otherwise have gone unactivated and unknown. Knowledge is therefore not the reading or recollection of truth, as Pfau points out in a critique of Gadamer, but a “knowledge event” as recognition, anagnorisis, that can be temporally deferred even until it is too late.97 This “Beobachtung des Kindes” is another phrase with curious grammatical properties. It can mean that Wilhelm 94 95 96 97

Goethe, CW, 9:307; FA, 1.9:881. Ibid., 9:305. FA, 9:877. Ibid., 9:308. FA, 1.9:881. Pfau, “Bildungsspiele,” 582–3. Pfau’s reading reconciles the idea of internal potentials with their contingent realization without reifying that realization as the only possible evolution. As in Luhmann’s account of the artwork, cited above, this model holds that development only appears necessary in hindsight. Pfau advocates a version of the event as realizing latent potentials in the subject,

216  Figures of Natality learned about human nature “through the child’s observation” (Felix says, “Hey dad, aren’t people odd?”), or it can mean that he learned about human nature by observing the child. While the latter seems more plausible, the former is suggested in so far as the child is his new method or tool (Organ) for making observations, not the object to be observed. (One could contrast this filtering of knowledge through the child as a medium with the affective charge of Schleiermacher’s image of observing the person caught up in “intellectual intuition of the universe.”98) In terms of the multiple allusions to Cartesian skepticism, the “evil genius” and the parodic “I am convinced; therefore, I am a father,” one can take Felix as such a tool in the context of homo faber’s self-observation. In this case, however, the organon of observation has an uncanny life of its own rather than cementing the autotelic introspection for which Arendt blames Descartes. In addition to constituting the moment of a gift beyond guilt or debt and disrupting the Romantic aesthetics of specularity, Felix also represents the disruption of technological humanism, of taking the human as the measure of all things and the end of all activity. What does Felix bring in fact, and what does he represent? What kind of a donation is this? Like any child, he plays, but this is not Schiller’s ludic reconciliation of aesthetics and morality. If this is an intellectual scandal for the Enlightenment, it is most so in Kant’s replacing knowledge of causality in the world with awareness of and respect for the moral law as the ultimate universal principle. Promising is also sacred for Kant, and the ability to promise is the cornerstone of morality. However, in order to secure this promising, Kant needs to suspend Interesse, the desire to accomplish some end, and Neigung, the attachment to the empirical, concrete things of the world. Arendt rejects the former suspension as it undermines contingent worldliness in favor of universal law as a test for action. For the theory of natality, this implies a crack in the foundational intervention in the world. When Felix comes to Wilhelm in the initiation scene, Wilhelm asks him, “Where have you come from at this moment, my child?” and the Abbé interrupts: “Don’t ask!”99 As an allegory of origins, this might be on a naïve reading an indication of the irrefragable provenance of the child, but more important is perhaps what we know about where he comes from. Whether Wilhelm is the father or not, he is provided by the Tower Society, has been shuttled around among mothers and caregivers

a contingent Bildung that happens or is frustrated, not a performative bridging of skeptical worries. 98 See Chapter 2 above. 99 Goethe, CW, 9:304. FA, 9:876.

“Not as in a mirror” 217 (Aurelie, Barbara, Therese), and his provenance at this moment refers more to this network than anything else. As I suggest above, one might also read this as a parody of the specular donation. The absent mother bequeaths the child to the father (the lyric subject, or the subject of Bildung in this case), and the child remains the phallic substitute for the original connection—but not to the subject’s (i.e., Wilhelm’s) mother, instead to the child’s own mother. As an object that can be intuited, i.e., perceived in its particularity, Felix meets the criterion of the symbol; he is natural, yet represents something more general, as his allegorical name would indicate. This is not, as in one of Goethe’s definitions of the symbol, a thing that has an intuitive connection to some other particular thing,100 but play as contingency where something is at stake and can be lost, as with the episode where Felix is only saved from death accidentally, by his bad manners in drinking from the improper container. The role of chance is exemplified in what the narrator says of Wilhelm immediately after the above-cited passage on the “Beobachtung des Kindes”: The theater, like the world as a whole, had appeared to him like so many thrown dice [eine Menge ausgeschütteter Würfel], each of which counted sometimes more, sometimes less on its face, but which in any case made a sum when they were counted together. But here in the child was, one could say, a single die, on whose several faces the worth and worthlessness of human nature were clearly marked.101 He both represents and is that thing for Wilhelm, who, far from being concerned about Bildung and development, wants simply to take to the road with his child (and does in the sequel): “Come, son! Come, my brother! Let’s play on in the world with no goal, as well as we can!” (“Komm, mein Bruder! Lass uns in der Welt zwecklos hinspielen, so gut wir können!”)102 In this sense, Felix plays the role attributed to language as filling or covering a gap, at least if metaphor is the paradigm of language,103 yet he does not allow for total referential 100 See Tzvetan Todorov’s discussions of Goethe’s various approaches to defining the symbol, in Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 199–209. Both Müller-Sievers (see the Introduction above) and Fritz Breithaupt question whether symbol can be so defined and whether it finally vanquishes or is inferior to allegory in Goethe. See Fritz Breithaupt, Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2000). 101 Goethe, FA, 1.9:881. Translation modified from Goethe, CW, 9:308. 102 Ibid., 1.9:950. Translation modified from Goethe, CW, 9:349. 103 Hörisch quotes Eugenio Donato: “Language is the metaphor of an absence” (Gott, Geld, Glück, 67).

218  Figures of Natality clarity, as he condenses Wilhelm’s feeling of the world with a symbol of contingency. In the wake of Friedrich’s ingenious verbal pranks and outrageous performances, which double Wilhelm on the side of deconstruction the way the ghost matches him on the side of haunting presence, Felix as supplement makes acceptance of fatherhood possible as the arbitrary stopping of doubt. Like the temporalized moment of outwardly and future directed poetic intentionality in “Explanation,” the moral of the fable here is not irony, which for Schlegel has the world-constituting function of joining a concept to its opposite, but contingency.

Media of the Political: Aesthetic Ideology and the Return of Rhetoric

In an essay contrasting grammar and rhetoric around the question of semiotics, Paul de Man observes that Charles Sanders Peirce insists […] on the necessary presence of a third element called the interpretant, within any relationship the sign entertains with its object. […] The interpretation of the sign is not, for Peirce, a meaning but another sign; it is a reading, not a decodage, and this reading has, in its turn, to be interpreted by another sign, and so on ad infinitum. Peirce calls this process by means of which ‘one sign gives birth to another’ pure rhetoric, as distinguished from pure grammar, which postulates the possibility of unproblematic, dyadic meaning, and pure logic, which postulates the possibility of the universal truth of meanings. Only if the sign engendered meaning in the same way that the object engenders the sign, that is, by representation, would there be no need to distinguish between grammar and rhetoric.104 For de Man, then, in the absence of neatly identical, non-parodic (one might say for Friedrich) repetitions, there is an infinite chain not of reflections of the same pattern but of unpredictable, figurative interpretants of the sign, figures that determine how it is connected to the thing it represents. Of course, this undoes the unity of the fable as it would obtain in Lessing, but it also undoes the irony that is a solvent posing as glue. I cite de Man at such length also because he emphasizes the language of birth in Peirce’s description. This is a maieutics of the sign that stresses precisely the natal aspect of joining the two halves of the sign: it gives birth but in ways that are unpredictable, because they are always at another remove from the previous stage

104 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, 9.

“Not as in a mirror” 219 and invisible to it, existing in the blind spot that makes this birth present new meaning. Applying this briefly to the spectral aspect of the Apprenticeship, one could say that the only spot where Bildung takes place in the sense of aesthetic ideology, as an efficacious pedagogy of subjectivity, is a repetition as second-order representation, not interpretation, i.e., as the “engendering” of the interpretant by representing the sign. If Bildung as non-ironic is the production of presence, it occurs in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship with the two ghosts. Indistinguishable doubles, supposedly the Abbé and his twin—but never identified so clearly—, the hooded figures who show up to the performance are already two, and Wilhelm has the same experience of presence in the theater as in the initiation scene. Where the intiation scene is private, however, the initial theater scene is public. The ghost is played, as it were, by an unknown person whose arrival is unplanned. Indeed, the troupe does not know that he will be there at all and has to ask later how he got into the theater—through a door left open by accident, it seems. The effect of his surprise appearance is all the more compelling to Wilhelm as the ghost’s light movements in the seemingly heavy armor “made such a strong effect on him that he stood there as if petrified” and, for all his shock, manages inadvertently to deliver a terrifically realistic performance, “that the greatest art could not have expressed it so aptly.”105 In Hamlet’s demand to the Ghost to answer him, no matter whether the Ghost is “a spirit of health or a goblin damned,” and so on, Wilhelm interjects, “sei Gutes oder Böses dein Beginnen” (“whether your beginning is good or evil”), transforming the question of otherworldly origin and moral intention into one of a personal beginning.106 But the content of Hamlet’s question to the Ghost is irrelevant, as affirmation and naming—“I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane”—is immediate and compelling. This moment of contingency in the unexpected advent of the ghost, “Horatio’s” announcement that causes Wilhelm a genuinely violent (heftig) reaction, his half-muted stammering of his lines, produces authenticity not because of an inner Anlage in Wilhelm, but because of an upswell of affect that one might call the feeling of the real. This feeling is not private but shared and public, produced not just for Wilhelm but for the audience as well. This Ghost speaks with a voice that seems familiar to all (and still seems to Wilhelm to belong to his father), while Wilhelm fails to establish the ghost’s identity visually because his visor is down. The ghost leaves behind a veil with the embroidered warning that Wilhelm should 105 Goethe, FA, 9:690. My translation. 106 Ibid.

220  Figures of Natality flee, seeming to echo the Countess’s earlier insistence, “If you love me, run away from me!” This echo links the outcome of that instance of reflection that shocks the eccentric Count and the later refusal of reflection that precedes Wilhelm’s initiation, which ends the ghostly encounter not with “Flee!” but with the ghost’s leavetaking: “ich scheide getrost …” (“I depart in peace …”).107 This punctual instance of the real dissipates Wilhelm’s doubts where reflection and rational guidance could not, and it resuscitates not just theatricality but sovereignty as the medium of a successful performance. The affective immediacy of this experience raises another problem that is not easily answered: that of the difference in response to the first ghost and the second. The two ghosts have different messages. The first plays the father in Hamlet as a theatrical and a political performance by which the audience is enraptured and terrified at the words “I am thy father’s spirit”: “Wilhelm stepped back shuddering, and the whole audience shuddered.”108 The second enunciation of this line is followed by the announcement of Wilhelm’s inheritance in the intiation scene. The difference between the two reflects the difference between the terror of the ghost’s demand for revenge, in the first case, and the symbolism of dynastic succession in the figure of the dying voice in the second. This inheritance is summed up by master interpretant Friedrich as Wilhelm’s accidental sovereignty, as he attains at least in Friedrich’s words the similarity to the Old Testament kings he could never achieve in his childhood plays—and the release from the painful memory of those failures in a parallel of the riskiness of performative failure and the contingency of birth: “Don’t remind me of those days at this happiest of all moments,” Wilhelm replied. “But you should be no more ashamed of those days than you should be of your parentage. Those times were good times, and I must laugh when I look at you now. You seem to me like Saul, the son of Kish, who went in search of his father’s asses, and found a kingdom.”109 Wilhelm may not be an actor, but he does play, aimlessly in the world. Play as acting and as chance opens up a tantalizing space in which free and non-teleological action can take place. However, to focus on it mainly or solely would be to neglect the thematic framing of the novel and its many references to kingship, paternity, marriage, and 107 Ibid., FA, 1.9:874; CW, 9:303. 108 Goethe, CW, 9:195. Compare FA, 1.9.691. 109 Ibid., CW, 373. FA, 1.9:992.

“Not as in a mirror” 221 other figures of sovereignty and community formation. What does this sovereign framing of the novel, which proceeds from failures of memory and mimesis in the puppet shows to this figure of contingency, have to do with the seemingly sovereignty-free readings of the Apprenticeship even as anti-aesthetic ideology? If one answer is that sovereignty does not go away, that it only changes guise from aesthetics and rhetoric to chance and control, this still needs to be explained in terms of the games the novel plays, language games that rely on non-explicit understandings both of context and of reference, if only to other fantasies, ironic or otherwise. The presence of Felix indicates that sovereignty in this sense is not the triumph of the will or the struggle of will and counter-will, the sovereignty that Arendt’s political thought rejects (as Wilhelm “gave up on the idea of having his own will”), but the exceptionality of this uncanny third term that frustrates other attempts at subsumption or harmony. What is the point of uncoupling this or any other work from the domain of aesthetic ideology or aesthetic humanism? The novel clearly does not have a coherent pedagogical project, nor does it articulate what is conventionally seen as a Schillerian aesthetics—but that, too, can be ironized. Is the surplus value of presence as thorough social organization in the Aesthetic State clearly an instance of aesthetic ideology—as just another name for the projection of wholeness, whether in a social program or a theory of art? Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy see in the model of withdrawal (as re-trait, re- or withdrawing) one way of dealing with these ambivalences. For them, the literary absolute is an instrument of aesthetic ideology, as it reduces the artwork, regardless of its properties, to the genre of the poem, and the poem is infinitely productive, exemplary of a technē of the political whether ironically decoupled from a political program or not. It is therefore not the referentiality or sincerity of the literary artwork that is at stake, but the notion of craft as fashioning of the same. The technē of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is productive, but the machines fail to create “man in my image,” that is, a political subject who is a microcosm of the political order and in sync, even if bound ironically in that order.110 Irony or lack of reference is no retreat from politics or the political. Like “the political” itself in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s usage, it is both dominant and in re-treat. This complex is none the less productive. It creates the child Felix, who exceeds his role as a replacement and becomes the tokos, the “token,” coin, or offspring, not of a single Welthaushaltung, a 110 Marc Redfield’s Phantom Formations brings together such questions of technology, craft, and politics masterfully around the Lehrjahre and the Wanderjahre in a way I can only indicate here for reasons of space and focus.

222  Figures of Natality global oikonomia, but of the temporally and ideologically disjointed attempts at community, pedagogy, and mastery in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship that cannot be grasped by the various tools and organs that assume their own superfluity in the novel’s discourse of nature and education. In all the moments of natural Bildung and other pedagogical discourse, the most concise moment of this form is when the novel’s “supplement,” Natalie, announces a kind of supplementarity that is in my reading central: to intervene at the opportune or needful moment, “im Augenblick,” but as a result of a fundamental problem: “My observation of human beings tells me that there is always some gap in their natures which can only be filled by a principle expressly communicated to them.” This expressly communicated principle is in the original an “entschieden ausgesprochenes Gesetz,” “decisively enunciated law,” one that describes communication in terms of the necessary decision where there is a lack in nature, the very kind of action that emanates from the political as the consequence of the imperfect or paradoxical foundation of society, especially the Tower Society. Unlike the similarly uncanny quality of the political, politics can take over and politicize everything, leaving nothing other than itself, or it can withdraw and leave the field to economic, moral, sociological and other discourses, obliterating the figure of authority and public spaces as entirely as does their replacement with technē, in the guise of infinitely reproduced irony. As with Schlegel’s irony, it is a matter of scope and scale. The totalization of irony, whether in a coordinated “universe” of monads or as one big irony, cannot be falsified, to put it in scientific terms; it cannot be tested, because there is no conceivable other present now or happening in the future. However, in terms of the internal dynamics Goethe presents in the Apprenticeship, there are local differences not just in the moments of presence produced by the ghosts, for instance, but in the standpoints presented on an aesthetic humanist ideology that is never finally affirmed. These differences are internal to representation in the novel; it ironizes itself, perhaps, but not all its parts are ironic. It de-absolutizes itself from within. This auto-deconstruction takes place through a single figure of natality. In Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, it is the index that referred to the prehistory structuring the culture of tolerance and filiation, and in Wilhelm Meister it is the uncanny child Felix, who is presented, to borrow Adrian Daub’s word once more, as an uncanny birth product. As a figure of natality, also an uncanny beginning uncoupled even from the Kantian ethical kingdom of ends, Felix emerges from a complex of guilt or debt and belief, credo, credit, as a singular factor that troubles these connections. The theological–economic language condensed in the final books of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship revolves around Felix as the promise of happiness, as well as the object of belief or doubt.

“Not as in a mirror” 223 Like old Hamlet’s ghost, his ontological status is uncertain, but his function is clear as a call to action, to a change of state. Freud’s conception of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) is based in the proximity of that which is most familiar and “homey” (heimlich) to that which is most strange. This proximity produces the effect of a haunting or return of the repressed in the midst of ordinary life. One might define the family in Wilhelm Meister not as the solid bourgeois entity in more historicist readings, consistent with the logic of nineteenthcentury domesticity, but as the heimlich space in which the unheimlich can appear. In this rhetoric of hauntings, promises, and births, Goethe seems to anticipate the uncanny features of what Derrida reads as a haunting by the archi-ghost, the Hauptgespenst, that represents the uncanny aspect of the humanist credo, the faith in a “general essence of Man” and, at the same time, the belief that such an essence is dead, extinct with the past with which the real revolution makes a decisive break. To convert the haunting into a birth, the revenant into an arrivant, is for Derrida the task of justice “beyond right and law” in fidelity to a promise or hospitable memory that welcomes such arrivants. Counter to the discourse of life as absolute, haunting is in this discourse primary, before the dichotomy of life and death, and the “thing of justice” (a reference to Freud’s das Ding) that haunts can neither be dispensed with nor believed in entirely.111 Nonetheless, this particular discourse on justice as a kind of hospitable discoursing with ghosts or a haunting by a spectrally instantiated justice can also be taken as a Romantic short-circuit of the problems both of thingliness and of arrival, being an arrivant, not a revenant. As Schlegel implies in Lucinde, Romantic messianism is not just a total eschatological horizon but a similar kind of hospitality, albeit one that waits not for justice but for the self, preparing its thingly habitation. Heinrich von Kleist will offer a more classically political version of what it means to make space for an arrivant in the form of an uncanny or even impossible child, but on the premise that institutional conditions, not ethical attitudes, are prior to any such justice. If Felix could be read as the internal reference point for the framing of the novel in the discourse of sovereignty, its princes and kings are still hardly accidental, in spite of the charades of the petty aristocrats. This chapter has left these thematic and political implications of the Apprenticeship undeveloped in order to explicate the rhetoric of natality and speech and the critique of aesthetics in contrast to the Romantic model. The next chapter takes a more expansive approach, incorporating the features of speech, birth, and sovereignty, but also focusing very narrowly on the acts of promise and guarantee. Linking 111 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 219–21.

224  Figures of Natality the economic and performative, promising aspects of the narrative in the Apprenticeship with Kleist’s strange pregnancies and slips of the tongue, the next chapter will show how the minimal units and differences with which the preceding chapters have been playing sustain the natal difference within both aesthetic and linguistic representation and the political theology of sovereignty. If Goethe answers skeptical crises of paternity with an unachieved community that none the less functions in the form of a patchwork family, Kleist will organize the polity around singular and exceptional births, such as that of the bow to the Amazons, in repetitions, the initial instance of which only seems miraculous, and in curiously split conceptions that point the way for the future of democracy—which is not necessarily the future of freedom.

Five Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers: Institution, Relation, Distribution

The salient problem of a theory of natality sensitive to cultural and linguistic artifice seems to be locating the mother except as absent, dead, or somehow taboo. Psychoanalytic readings in the Oedipal vein privilege the role of the father in instituting a positive law and see the devolution of that power onto the brothers—and the resultant access to the women of the kinship group—as the mythical origin of a distributive democracy.1 This democratic premise takes woman as the object of economic circulation, her emancipation from the father as the project of Enlightenment. In this sense, Kant’s concern for the members of the fair sex in “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” only reflects the idea of economic control of women’s bodies and their circulation.2 The Romantic answer is more generous, particularly on the model of specular donation; the mother-lover is the dual figure of birth and nourishment and sexual satisfaction, the source of fulfillment of the male poet’s needs. As another brand of economic explanation, this seems to be only a radicalization of the model of complementarity that still locates women as providers of objects, substance, or energy in relation to a man’s needs as subject. In a classic feminist position, the notion of woman as a source of nurturing that is less articulate and well-defined than the world created by men is taken up in terms of the idea that women are seen as closer to nature in their physical, social, and psychic being.3 While this seems like a strongly negative position 1

See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Ch. 2 (GW, 9:26–92), as well as “Dostojewski und die Vatertötung.” Freud, GW, 14:399–418. 2 Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was heißt Aufklärung?” in Kant, Werkausgabe, 12:53–61. 3 See the discussion of Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in the context of the development of connections between gender and property since Bachofen and Engels in Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 21–9.

226  Figures of Natality to be rejected because it reifies the category of woman and hardens the sex–gender binary man–woman, it has served as the basis for feminist readings of gender difference too numerous to discuss here. Most salient for a culture of natality that takes women and mothers into account as political agents in some sense is the political theology Julia Kristeva derives from Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality. Kristeva wishes to bring Arendt’s praise of the “miracle of birth”4 into a specific relation with what Kristeva defines elsewhere as the maternal chora, “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.”5 The chora comes from Plato’s Timaeus and means there is a space from which created things emerge, which Plato calls not a mother but “the receptacle and in a manner the nurse of all generation.”6 The maternal chora in Kristeva comes before the formation of the subject by family or society. It is a prelinguistic state consisting of semantically, grammatically unintelligible “baby talk.” The next, “thetic” phase is that of propositions and symbols, in which the child experiences some sort of rupture from its mother or its surroundings.7 “As a result, the ‘symbol’ is any joining, any bringing together that is a contract – one that either follows hostilities or presupposes them – and, finally, any exchange, including an exchange of hostility.”8 In other words, the symbol is necessary for the political distinction in its most basic form, since this presupposes (1) the constitution of an identity (as in Lacan’s “mirror stage”) and (2) the juxtaposition of that identity with an outside world with which it can be in conflict, if only potentially. The ethical, and therefore pre-political, nature of the chora and similar states (“primary narcissism” for Freud, for instance) is thematized in the Arendt study in terms not of desire for an object (which she explicitly rejects) but of “love for another [un autre]”: “Maternal love is perhaps the dawning of the bond [lien] with the Other, […] of which the mother […] would be the primordial explorer.” The other qua child is not chosen, but “any old one [un quelconque]” with whom we (i.e., the mother) share the experience of life and death.9 Kristeva sees this experience of love in suitably Arendtian terms as the tension 4 Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 82. 5 Julia Kristeva, The Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. 6 Plato, Timaeus 49a–b, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues, 1176. 7 I follow here the summary and discussion in Noëlle McAfee, Julia Kristeva (New York: Routledge, 2004), 18–23. 8 Kristeva, Revolution, 49. 9 Kristeva, Arendt, 46. Translation modified based on Kristeva, Le génie féminin: la vie, la folie, les mots, Vol. 1 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 84.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 227 between zoē (“mere” animal life) and bios (a definite form of life) and explains it through a set of differences which she organizes according to the opposition of nature and spirit, physiology and biography, in which is found the Judeo-Christian legacy of the homo religiosus, a maternal gift of the sacred to the homo laborans, “who has not consumed [dévoré] it entirely,” a position consistent with Arendt’s evocation of the theological virtue of hope for a restoration of the public sphere.10 The passage from inarticulate, biological life to articulate, thinking zoē is therefore a matter of a maternal transmission of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “that is, if women manage to live it and to think it through.”11 The question is finally that of the maternal chora as a medium for producing a child, but more important is the persistence of the medium and its quality of continuing to produce itself in the articulation of the qualities of zoē as bios in religion, not its abandonment to the political in the form of the nation.12 The latter is an intensely political phenomenon that refuses the immediacy of the divine maternal oikonomia Kristeva reads in the proliferation of signs in the chora and nonetheless produces signs and indexes, albeit sparingly, that mark the discourse of maternity, not just male artistic creation or the inscrutability of paternity, as a medium of natality. In this chapter, I want to use Kristeva’s economicpolitical theology as a foil for articulating the difference between this medium of maternity and the role of maternity and birth in Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Marquise von O…, Amphitryon, and Penthesilea. In the story of political natality circa 1800, the living, present, and active mothers seem to have taken refuge in Kleist’s work, where women both confront the enigmas of conception (in The Marquise of O…) and (in Penthesilea) organize their own reproduction politically. Women are of course also seduced and raped in a discourse not entirely redeemable by the lavish praise Kleist receives, especially in the discourse of French theory, for practicing an anti-phallic “feminine writing” in Achilles’s shedding his armor in Penthesilea or creating an anti-Oedipal “nomadic war machine” around Penthesilea herself.13 The Marquise of O… is apparently raped by a Russian officer in the heat 10 Kristeva, Le génie féminin, 85. My translation. 11 Kristeva, Arendt, 47–8. This sort of life is gendered feminine but can be assumed in psychological bisexuality by men. 12 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, 126–35 (and in Chapter 1, above). Kristeva follows Agamben both in this distinction and in the desire for the creation or transformation of a community in which this exposure of bare life to the state would no longer be the case. 13 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly-Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 113–18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), respectively.

228  Figures of Natality of battle, and Alkmene, who also figures here, is seduced by Jupiter, king of the gods and symbol of paternal sovereignty (in Amphitryon). While Alkmene’s final “Ach!” seems to symbolize powerlessness, the Marquise takes her situation in hand and resolves it. These moments are not simply epistemological gaps—Who is the father? How can one tell a god from one’s husband? Nor are they instances that can be read in terms of women’s experience of violence as it relates to language. The latter is simply the flip side of a feminist reading of Kleist that values such powerlessness and lack of articulation. The argument of this chapter is that Kleist’s grotesque depictions of the mysteries of conception and birth present an uncomfortable version of natality that is none the less, in the contexts in which it is presented, a paradigm for a Machiavellian conception of political modernity both thematically and formally. Kleist represents this political modernity in terms of the paradoxes of information and communication or of novelty and institutionality, and he concludes with a concept of mythological intimacy that locates the original division and conflict of the political in conception and birth. The use of a woman’s body as a symbol of conflict in these texts published in late 1807 and early 1808 (not yet as the grotesquely dismembered Hally in Hermann’s Battle) includes these moments of violence and poses the question as to how this moment can be incorporated into a narrative that resolves conflict without supposing reconciliation in harmony, truth, or sublation in the name of a higher principle. The violence of these encounters that create mothers calls for a distinct notion of natality as political, since this first conflict that leads to birth has to become communicable or representable without necessarily being knowable. That war is the setting or the backdrop for these conceptions underscores the centrality of conflict and its at least temporary resolution in a natal act or object that none the less institutes the potential for conflict that is the source of the political in Carl Schmitt’s sense. The lack of a higher morality or reason as a foundation or telos for a political or social project is the Machiavellian foundation of the political, and, like the parallelism of genealogy and historical indexicality in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, it constitutes a medium of memory. Machiavelli’s The Prince is also the classic locus for the gendered discourse of political modernity. This sort of subtlety is not so apparent in Machiavelli’s text, where contingency and the chancy coincidence of opportunity and action—the sort of occasio or kairos that appears in several of the foregoing chapters—are embodied in the figure of the man who overcomes the allegorical figure of Fortuna by daring and violence. The statesman’s virtù, his manly fortitude, is the best way of mastering variable, unpredictable Fortune, since “Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 229 her and force her down. It is clear that she more often allows herself to be won over by impetuous men than by those who proceed coldly. And so, like a woman, Fortune is always the friend of young men, for they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity.”14 Fortuna is for Machiavelli a figure similar and sometimes equivalent to occasione, opportunity, also presented allegorically as a woman, one “with a forelock by which she can be seized from before but tonsured so that she cannot be taken by the short hairs behind, and the language addressed to either daemon [Fortuna or Occasione] could be appropriately used to the other.”15 In his sweeping study of the origins of modern political thought, The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock traces the evolution of the “toughly and secularly civic minds” of the political thinkers of the Italian Renaissance through the “politicization of grace,” the “decision to abandon both the traditional and the timeless modes of politics and to attempt the realization of the universal values of the polis in the particular, finite, and historical form of the republic.”16 The submission of fortuna to virtú is part of this attempt, but it remains only an attempt, bound to the contingency of the twin figures of fortuna and occasione. Virtù is also an agent of natality. For Machiavelli, it is not only an innovative force that resists fortuna but, in Pocock’s words, it is also a force “by which men innovate and so delegitimize their worlds,” and “it may even be that which imposes legitimacy on a world which has never known it.”17 Pocock defines this innovative action as the imposition of form on matter or of order upon chaos, of politeia on the formless politeuma, the material of the body politic, but one might just as well see it as the distinction between medium and form in Niklas Luhmann’s sense: not a binary but a question of the level and focus of observation. Closer to the period and the ideological currents with which I have been concerned in the preceding chapters, Pocock traces the evolution of fortuna through the entropic tendencies of its moralized form, corruption, and notes, following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the emergence of a neo-Machiavellian political economy in this “era in which political thought became engrossed with the conscious recognition of change in the economic and social foundations of politics and the political personality, so that the zoon politikon took on his 14 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87. 15 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 169. For a recent study of these figures in Goethe’s Elective Affinities and its historical context, see Peter J. Schwartz, After Jena (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2010). 16 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 80. 17 Ibid., 166–7.

230  Figures of Natality modern character of participant observer in processes of material and historical change fundamentally affecting his nature.”18 The connection of observation with political economy and the rise of new commercial and administrative structures in Britain, itself a new creation out of the historical circumstance of James I’s accession to the English throne nearly a century earlier, creates a new kind of political subject, one who observes and critiques. As a critic of corruption, this subject is reactionary, railing against the ill effects of trade and commerce—not entirely unlike critics of capitalism today who seek a more holistic or inward version of the personality and social interactions as a remedy for the proliferation of economic discourse and objects. This historical turn in Britain is also decisive for Germans’ understandings of political life and activity where it translates into aesthetic and psychological subjectivity, particularly in terms of this participant observation, as Elliott Schreiber has shown in a recent study of Karl Philipp Moritz.19 As the preceding chapters have shown, the rise of new understandings of economy and their critique shapes the culture of the age of Goethe in ways that intersect with later economies, be they affective, semiotic, financial, or paternal. One question for this chapter is the following: How does the maternal economy as Kristeva understands it relate to Kleist’s Machiavellian mothers? Can one speak of a neo-Machiavellian economy of natality? Situating Heinrich von Kleist in this tradition in any thoroughgoing way would be a complex task, combining the movement to reform in Prussia with Kleist’s own administrative training in Kameralistik (public accounting) and the figures of law and administration in his texts: the corrupt Judge Adam in The Broken Jug or the Imperial and regional bureaucracies in Michael Kohlhaas, for instance. At the risk of too schematic a bridge between the metaphorical and the political, I want to make the argument that Kleist’s representations of the new as birth, especially (or at least) in Die Marquise von O…, Amphitryon, and Penthesilea, are instances not just of a neo-Machiavellian critique of corruption (which he delivers in Hermann’s Battle, for instance) but of a Machiavellian account of fortuna and foundation that transforms the gendering of the political without falling into the apolitical or prepolitical realm of private attachments and economies. As an advance on the conclusion to my study, where I return to Kleist’s Penthesilea, this is more of a thought experiment: What happens when the Machiavellian dynamic of action, contingency, and external determination becomes 18 Ibid., 423. 19 Elliott Schreiber, The Topography of Modernity: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Space of Autonomy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); see especially Ch. 5, on political spaces and observation in Moritz’s account of British politics.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 231 the interpretant for Kleist’s protagonists as they face the different instances of chance—victory and defeat, collapse and liberation—and the overwhelming “institution of the world”? Rather than looking for echoes of the broad historical sweep of political discourse, I think the answer can be found in the temporal, semiotic, and grammatical details of the three texts by Kleist. These details define the parameters of representation and relation that arise around the Machiavellian moment of chance, opportunity, and action, parameters that are in Kleist also largely defined by the category of the participant observer. These details themselves function as indicators of birth, like the uncanny birth product that refers back to its own uncertain origin. They require observation and integration into a reproductive cycle, a reminder of the particularity in Arendt’s pointing out that Protagoras’s saying is “man is the measure of all (concrete, particular) things [chremata],” not “of everything [panton].”20 Like the tokoi that are the objects of economic reproduction, these objects represent an ontic level of particularity, not the singular, self-withdrawing and forgettable Being of the ontological register. Nonetheless, the ontic is precisely that to which the theory of the political returns, on Marchart’s account, and it is for Walter Benjamin the feature, as trait, trace, or index, that is the point of access to the universal. In both cases, however, it is not a matter of a pre-established harmony that produces theory only as its empathetic reflection but a decision or an act that must be performed. In another sort of chrematistics than the infinite reproduction of the specularity that mortgages the future to credit and debt, this repetition of particular objects, marks, or indexes joins moments of textual detail to the Machiavellian moment in so far as chremata are linked to kairos, the momentary or fleeting opportunity (occasio, Machiavelli’s occasione). Janet Atwill compares chremata and pragmata as parallel to kairos and chronos: where the latter term of each pair is abstract and assumes some sort of distanced or decontextualized position, the former terms are embedded in the experienced reality of a particular subject and situation. In this sense, the particularity of chremata as regards particular objects of use or exchange is like the particularity of kairos that sees time as contingent and bound to the happening of events.21 If the foregoing chapters have been concerned with the production of an object in an event, the critical question for Kleist is the matrix from which these events emerge. This would at least seem to be the case given the critical and theoretical reception of Kleist that makes

20 Arendt, The Human Condition, 59; see Chapter 2, above. 21 Janet Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 138.

232  Figures of Natality his texts into case studies supporting femininity and maternity—albeit in fairly stereotyped forms—and other cognate maternal formations. In her study of natality, Anne O’Byrne observes that the temporality of birth is such that no one remembers the moment of his or her own birth.22 Applying this lesson to the births in Kleist, one notes the curious transposition, in The Marquise of O… as well as in Amphitryon, of the phenomenology of birth onto that of conception, i.e., of sex. If the Marquise cannot remember the moment of her rape, much less the identity of her supposed assailant, and Alkmene is overwhelmed by the knowledge that she has been making love with a god, these moments are represented in the text by perfectly meaningless marks: the long dash of the “Hier—” where the narrative of the Count’s rescue and embrace of the Marquise breaks off; and Alkmene’s “Ach!”, the last word of Amphitryon, after Jupiter reveals himself and Amphitryon exacts the promise that Alkmene will bear a heroic demigod of a child, to be named Hercules. The Marquise of O… seems to address this very problem in its central character, a woman who is pregnant with a child apparently conceived in conflict but cannot recall the act that led to that condition and does not know by what means or with what man that act might have taken place. One of the most notorious punctuation marks in German literature is the long dash in the description not of an act of violence but of the deeds of the “Russian officer” who saves the Marquise from a sexual assault by common soldiers, addresses her courteously in French, and takes her to a part of her father’s palace away from the fire started by the Russian bombardment. She is speechless from all the appearances of these men and, upon being brought to safety, “sank unconscious to the ground” (“völlig bewußtlos niedersank”). “Hier— traf er, da bald darauf ihre erschrockenen Frauen erschienen, Anstalten, einen Arzt zu rufen; versicherte, indem er sich den Hut aufsetzte, daß sie sich bald erholen würde; und kehrte in den Kampf zurück.” (Here— he made arrangements, as her terrified maids appeared soon after, to call a doctor; assured them, as he put his hat on, that she would recover soon; and returned to the battle.) In the next scenes, he both captures and saves the Marquise’s father, the fortress’s commander, offering him quarter after anonymous others (“man”) had denied it to him, and saves the rest of the palace from destruction by directing and taking over himself the extinguishing of the fire and the removal of explosives from the arsenal. Having appeared to the Marquise in the first moment as an angel (“Der Marquise schien er ein Engel des Himmels zu sein”), his “miracles of effort” (“Wunder der Anstrengung”) preserve intact 22 Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 13.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 233 the structures, physical and familial, surrounding the Marquise.23 His conversion from one of the “leaders of the assault” (“Anführer des Sturms”) to the savior of the family and its home seems to owe to this moment of kairos, or at least to the appearance of the moment as such: he “appeared” (“erschien”) and “seemed to her” (“schien ihr”) to be an angel, a figure of providence. This “Hier—” is framed in the story with the language of angels and devils as an act forgotten to the Marquise even as it seems to be the moment of the quasi-divine conception of her child. As was evident in Goethe and Lessing, knowledge has specific and limited roles that cannot account for the totality of a social situation that is ruptured by the political. That is, the fundamental problem is not of the intellect and information but might still, contrary to Étienne Balibar’s version of Spinozist politics, be one of institution and foundation.24 The problem with the attempt to solve or offer a new solution to the question of paternity in The Marquise of O… is not just that a welter of interpretations arises that calls for critical adjudication, making criticism the act of judging interpretive claims about knowledge, but, more importantly, that even a skeptical approach such as that of Michel Chaouli, which finds the lesson of the story in the undecidability of knowledge claims,25 keeps that void in knowledge at the center when the rhetorical and semantic structures lead the reader to develop a sort of scaffolding around and in spite of that fascinating hole. Since this story has been read and interpreted so many times, I want to attempt a fresh start here that will involve the interpretive horizon against which this tale has been read both as a tacit backdrop and in explicit interventions. The path I trace against this horizon is that of a problematic genesis that can only be conserved with an appeal to what Kleist calls here and elsewhere “die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt” (“the frail institution of the world”). The problem of birth shows what is at stake in institutionality, why this institution of the world, this cosmic order, is necessary, and how it functions, ultimately, not as a sociological fiction or symbolic medium, but in terms of the political ontology that will indicate the fate of the political in Kleist. This fate is not tragic; it sustains hope for the kind of worldliness that Arendt sees 23 Kleist, SWB, 3:144–5. 24 Compare Etienne Balibar’s characterization of the goal of Spinozist political thought as the “democratization of knowledge.” Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics (London: Verso, 2008 [1985]), 124. 25 “In the beginning is not plenitude of thought and meaning, subsequently translated into speech; in the beginning, rather, is the interruption, the gap, the dash, that speech, gripped by a kind of horror vacui, rushes to fill” (69–70). Michel Chaouli, “Irresistible Rape: The Lure of Closure in Die Marquise von O…,” Yale Journal of Criticism 17.1 (2004): 51–81.

234  Figures of Natality in the awareness of “the frailty of human affairs,”26 as opposed to the solidity and inexorability of economic, productive, and reproductive cycles. The wondrous, even miraculous moments in Kleist, whether of chance or effort, are in this sense versions of “[t]he miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin.”27 The crucial difference between epistemological and political readings has to do with the temporality of institution that marks its frailty and its power. Chaouli’s essay exemplifies critical rigor and interpellates the reader as a potential rapist, imposing his interpretive desire on the text, practically as one of the Marquise’s potential lovers. But the question of the text is not “Who is the lover?” who could be just about any man who appears, who could have been a lover at any point—witness the incest scene, in which the Marquise and her father exchange passionate kisses—but “Who is the father?” Accepting Chaouli’s analogy of reading and intercourse, the reader who finds himself in this situation is accountable not just for interpretive closure qua rape and not just for an act of violence that lies in the past, a decision, but also for the paternity of a child who, for most of the story, is yet to be born. What sort of child this is, and what secures its status, is a more complex question than a punctual act of violence. The reader—who cannot escape being male in this situation—is first of all, like Wilhelm Meister, the putative father who has to deal with an outcome that is in doubt, not with an original event of which the lover or rapist would be certain. Indeed, if the reader knows anything, it is that the Russian officer, Count F…, seems certain that he could be the child’s father. One enigma solved, in the Count’s various references to his own feelings of guilt and his insistent appearances at the house of the Commandant, another has yet to be defined. This is made clear by two more dashes in the text where it is a matter of paternity and speech. First, as the Count enters the Marquise’s garden secretly and embraces her, she asks him whence he has come, and he answers, “From M…,” the house of the Marquise’s parents, “through a rear door that I found open. I believed I could count on your pardon, and so I entered.” The Marquise has just heard from the midwife and the doctor that she is pregnant: “‘Did no one in M… tell you—?’ she asked. ‘Everything,’ replied the Count, ‘but [I am] thoroughly convinced of your innocence.’ ‘What?’ cried the Marquise […].” The count’s determination to see her as innocent, “in spite of the world, […] and in spite of her family, and even in spite of this tender appearance,” results not in a second instance of violent intercourse (supposing a first) but in the violence of rejection: “the Marquise tore 26 Arendt, The Human Condition, 188. 27 Ibid., 247.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 235 herself violently from his arms and ran away.”28 Whether this rejection is sparked simply by the count’s passionate insistence, specifically by his rejection of the world, the family (to which the Marquise seems more than passionately attached), or perhaps ultimately by his observation of “this tender appearance” (“dieser lieblichen Erscheinung”)—her pregnant body, as he follows the remark by planting a kiss on her chest—is not clear, but each of these three elements is an aspect not of confirming his paternity, which has to do indirectly with his being convinced, überzeugt, of her innocence, but of the connection between gestation, birth, and the symbolic and social power of institutions. The first dash—“Did no one … tell you—?”—covers not the essential enigma, but irrelevant information. The second in this passage marks not a past event, but the way forward indicated in the count’s marriage proposal: “‘A single, secretly whispered—!’ the Count said, and he grasped at her smooth arm as it slipped away from him. ‘I want to know nothing,’ replied the Marquise, pushed him back hard in the chest [vor die Brust], hastened to the ramp, and vanished.”29 While this passage is commonly read in the epistemological vein, its anatomical language suggests that a genital gap is not at stake here. As is also apparent in Penthesilea, the genitals are not necessarily Kleist’s preferred partial object. The breast or chest, where the count plants his kiss, the locus of the Marquise’s violent rejection of his coupled embrace and repeated marriage proposal, the practical and symbolic site of Amazon identity in the cut-off breast, and the site of Achilles’s vulnerability (not his legendary heel), the spot at which, finally, Kleist’s bullet enters his lover Henriette Vogel, is connected to knowledge and to Überzeugung: the count is so convinced (“überzeugt”) of her innocence, he tells the Marquise, “as if I were all-knowing, as if my soul lived in your breast.”30 Yet this rejection “vor die Brust” is perhaps a mistake on the part of the Marquise, not because the Count might very well be the father of her child, but because she confuses information with action, the first dash, representing what the Count could have heard from her family, with the second, a performative act of consent to a new arrangement, the Jawort replaced here by the dash. This difference reflects the problem of knowledge of paternity such as Goethe’s Wilhelm could only resolve by joining his own decision to the epistemological authoritarianism of the Tower Society, but it makes the sort of knowledge fetishized today in ubiquitous DNA testing, for example, only a hypothetical correlate to the institutional arrangements

28 Kleist SWB, 3:170–1. My translation. 29 Ibid., 3:171. 30 Ibid., 3:170.

236  Figures of Natality that concretize prior acts of will: “as if I were all-knowing …”31 In assuming the status of the as if, knowledge about guilt, innocence, or paternity replaces positive knowledge, data, with its own conditions a priori and makes the act of judgment central, not as an arbitrary hermeneutic desire, a “lure of closure” (Chaouli), but as the necessary act, given those a priori conditions. The Count’s attempt to elicit this closure in a Jawort through embraces and hot and heavy professions of devotion therefore demonstrates the error on his side: he demands a decision in spite of all the factors that surround and structure that decision, a radical act of freedom that is simply the polar opposite of determination or overdetermination by knowledge. Both of these are sense of the term that follows and is equivalent to belief, Glauben, in Kleist’s text: Überzeugung. Either too much knowledge or too much willpower is born, and the maieutic act of judging is only epistemological or only ethical, not political. The connection of the breast with the tender or sweet (lieblich) feelings that shelter life is a political matter in Kleist, so much so that it seems to be an anticipatory response to Kristeva’s maternal political theology. The obvious example is the baptism of the Amazon state by Tanaïs with the blood of her severed breast, a true partial object that names the state and leads to her collapse, as she drops the bow in the event that is, for Amazon memory, the paradoxical birth of their state. In the absence of any other proclamation, the bow falls “mit dem Gedröhn der Glocken” (“as with the pealing of bells”) and then lies “stumm wie der Tod” (“mute as death”) at Tanaïs’s feet. The breast as “seat of the tender young feelings,” as Achilles calls it, becomes the sacred instrument by which the polity is called into life, and then only by the repetition of the anatomical sacrifice.32 (“Bare life” would have to be the male children that the state abandons.) The “tender appearance” noted by the Count in the Marquise’s pregnant state also has to do with the breast as the locus of truth or sincerity, another quality that is denied in the dashes that sever the communication of that truth, so much speech that ends in silence. Reading these moments as indexes of natality whether in the rape that seems to initiate the plot of The Marquise of O… or in the other long dashes that mark gaps in communication, does not imply that speech “rushes to fill”33 these gaps. Rather, the function of the gaps in their polyvalent significance for conflict, communication, and information is assumed into the structure of the institution and makes appearances within its space possible that seem to be miraculous, Machiavellian, or simply natal moments. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 2:215–16. 33 Chaouli, “Irresistible Rape,” 70.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 237 As a re-troping of the “secularization of grace,” the figure of the institution can be reread in the context of The Marquise of O… as a transformation of the figure of virtù in the politeia/politeuma distinction advanced by Pocock. Rather than a primal semiotic maternity giving off signs and tokens of love and always already there, and instead of the male power conferring form on the female body, the maternal body (and not just the body of any woman or woman as such) can be read here as that which frames natality and makes it possible. This might seem an overdetermined figure in the psychoanalytical discourse of castration, in which all subjects, men included, are lacking and organize meaning around this constitutive gap. As Chaouli shows, and as one can read in the work of Slavoj Žižek over and over again, this is the gateway to endless interpretations, a sort of Oedipal proliferation of meanings that rivals the pre-Oedipal of the semiotic. As an economic principle, this proliferation invites a distribution that can indeed be read in Kleist in Amphitryon, Penthesilea and elsewhere. However, this distribution is not of meaning but of the gap itself. This is not a wound on the whole body politic that could somehow be restored, but rather, the politeia as res publica exists for this gap, in order to enable it and shelter it. Not the distribution of abundance but the distribution of lack, even of violence and terror,34 provides the experience of the res publica at the most intimate level. Adriana Cavarero treats this problem on terms that are familiar by now: the mechanical models of the Greeks or Hobbes versus an implied organic model that never quite comes to be born. The Greek model opposes mind or soul to body, seeing the body as formed and directed only by the mind, whereas the medieval “organological” metaphors move from a more integrated head dependent on the body to a more sovereign and commanding head, albeit one still tainted by the semantic ambiguity of the term “body” as sometimes including the head and sometimes not. The organic metaphor falls short of the natural condition of the “autonomous and sufficient” real body, in its “full organic meaning”; the “vital autonomy needed to substantialize the organicological metaphor” is lacking. Instead, although the female body with its intransigent corporeality is expelled from the polis, the body still haunts the logocentric model in language and as the obsessive object of order.35 “The risk,” Cavarero writes, “foiled for two thousand years, is that the female might decide to make itself a 34 As Jacques Lezra puts it: Lezra, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 35 Adriana Cavarero, Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender, translated by Robert de Lucca and Deanna Shemek (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 99–106.

238  Figures of Natality sign, breaking in on the scene with the thought of an incarnate subject content to exist in its sexed materiality.”36 For Cavarero, the “subversive power” of the “mother-material” realized in the chora that subtends the logos threatens to bring about this female subjectivity.37 (In the dialogue Timaeus, the chora is the origin of the four elements of the material universe.) On this account, Machiavelli is but one more male fantasist of order, seeing the head as the prince who seizes an always female and fickle Fortuna and dominates her. But Kleist’s Machiavellian mothers are different. This is so first of all for historical reasons. The shift to an organism that is autonomous, selfordering, and also imbued with all the powers of a dynamic Nature comes of the shift between Hobbesian conceptions of representative sovereignty in the head, as personation, and the later reception of Spinoza in which, as Chapters 3 and 4 showed, the organism triumphs not as raw materiality, but as the self-organizing entity that the mechanical models of the state fail to be. By 1800, then, the “phallogocentric” model needs other supports than the soul that informs the body from outside, or the head that is only sometimes connected to its sustenance. In the age of Goethe, it is therefore not the body or the organic that lurks in or haunts the dualist language of ghosts and machines. Rather, the organic model of the state with its tendentious sexuation (exemplified by Novalis) has excluded the new and, as in the model of the specular donation from Nature or the Muse, it is the imagined woman who informs and shapes language rather than being a substrate for male action. Goethe’s lyric poetry celebrates the intimacy of the chora—“ich saug’ an meiner Nabelschnur”—and Schlegel’s critique, for all its gendered shortcomings, exalts Spinozist monism to the status of a religion of art, making the organism the model of the poem. Although the place of woman is still not clear, what is excluded from this system is neither the body nor the organism as a vital and self-organizing whole, but its mechanical other. As MüllerSievers argues, and Cavarero demonstrates for one kind of feminist reading, the arguments against preformationist intervention in the immanent body waiting to be activated are of a political, not a scientific nature. Tellingly for this ideological entanglement, the fundamental model of exclusion and haunting does not change. The Platonic fiction of ordering the material of the polis is haunted by the body, just as Hobbes’s fiction of the tight natural connections of the absolutist state is pursued by the monstrosity of terror in Leviathan, “a corporeal and monstrous terror, completely civilized and human, rather than the 36 Ibid., 84. 37 Ibid.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 239 product of a residual animality.”38 In considering “unpolitical female bodies” that are associated with this animality,39 with laughter, not terror, and with love and the revelation of truth, Cavarero’s argument sees the monstrous corporeality and terror of Leviathan only as the other side of the male polis, its “internal flesh.”40 The topology of the revealed truth in female corporeality, however, has the same structure: a sublime inside that is the source of revealed truth, darkness brought to light, and a “terror of disembodiment … that tears the flesh itself.”41 The intimacy of terror and order, terror and life, recalls the Heraclitean semantic paradox informing Penthesilea’s maternal and political logic: “The name of the bow is life; its work is death.” The ambivalent encoding of the female or feminine as suppressed carnality in Cavarero’s account of the body politic should be understood through this very Kleistian paradox, without its Romantic supplement that would distinguish good and bad versions of identical forms. The curious thing about Kleist’s mothers in this regard is that problems of birth and reproduction, as well as the creation of durable political institutions are referred to a similarly mythological doubling of flesh that also resists moral or metaphysical predicates of good and bad, true and false. Against the moral valuation of women’s bodies as vehicles of a higher sort of experience or embodiment, Kleist’s mothers attain subjectivity by internalizing moments of negativity and even terror and converting these moments into a birth beyond the binary of truth and falsehood or good and evil. In this regard, too, they are Machiavellian. More importantly, this political birth product is neither total nor absolutely secure. It is instead an institution that recalls Arendt’s primordial political condition, not the Platonic polis, already alienated from the political as a product of the craftsman who makes it in an image of Truth, but the state of things that makes politics necessary in the first place: the frailty of human affairs.

“The Frail Institution of the World”

Kleist’s moments of terror are well known and catalogued; he is perhaps the most important writer of political terror in the German tradition. For this very reason, the figure of the institution emerges as one of Kleist’s discursive constants where terror needs to be made visible yet contained. “Die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt” (“the frail institution of the world”), or some similar form, recurs in Kleist’s work at key spots and seems to indicate a power that cannot be resisted, yet is 38 39 40 41

Ibid., 187. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 195.

240  Figures of Natality hardly perfect or solid in itself. This institution signifies grace, mercy, or forgiveness, for example, when the narrator of Michael Kohlhaas speaks of Kohlhaas’s “richtiges, mit der gebrechlichen Einrichtung der Welt schon bekanntes Gefühl” (correct feeling [that was] already familiar with the frail institution of the world), that leads him at first to desire a conciliatory solution to the matter of his stolen and neglected horses (if at that spot only under the assumption that his own groom was at fault).42 The same is true in Käthchen of Heilbronn of the Archbishop’s asking the Emperor “um den Wunderbau der Welt”43 (for the [sake of the] miraculous structure of the world) not to punish Count Wetter von Strahl because of his assertion that the Emperor is Käthchen’s father. (Indeed, a series of coincidences around appearances of Jupiter—the god and the star—organizes the elements of what really is a Wunderbau in that play as it is in Amphitryon.) A version of the expression appears as well in the context of repro duction, as the fatherly counsel of a painter to his son on how, as a result of the fact that “[d]ie Welt ist eine wunderliche Einrichtung” (the world is a wondrous institution), enthusiasm and intention often produce only “ein ärmliches und gebrechliches Wesen” (a poor, frail being) while vital passion produces “einen Jungen, […] der nachher, auf rüstige Weise, zwischen Erde und Himmel klettert und den Philosophen zu schaffen gibt” (a boy who will later in robust fashion climb between the heavens and the earth and give philosophers something to do).44 Helmut J. Schneider understands this as the production of the new in an image that sees art through sexual reproduction as born of inner spontaneity and desire,45 but is perhaps also an example of the importance of maintaining “world” as a medium that can explain first of all the counterintuitive effect in which imitation fails and artistic enthusiasm expressed in religious terms is not productive. Second, the difference between the natural spontaneity of finding a girl on a warm summer night, as the father expresses it, and the birth of a child who will “give the philosophers something to do” is also counterintuitive, as 42 43 44 45

Kleist, SWB, 3:27. Ibid., 2:418. Kleist, “Brief eines Malers an seinen Sohn,” SWB, 3:544–5. Helmut J. Schneider, “Der Sohn als Erzeuger: Zum Zusammenhang politischer Genealogie und ästhetischer Kreativität bei Heinrich von Kleist,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2003), 54. In comparing this with another call to spontaneous creation, from a young poet to a young painter, as similar, Schneider also elides the difference in medium as well as the generational difference. Familiarity with the “institution of the world” in whatever sense seems to suppose experience and a certain painfully acquired wisdom, and taking this institution as a medium explains, at least in the letter from the painter to his son how the (typically Kleistian) radically improbable or counterintuitive outcomes emerge.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 241 the child, climbing “between the heavens and the earth,” is not merely natural or earthly, but an enigma or a scandal for reason. This follows as a condensation of Kleist’s Amphitryon or Käthchen of Heilbronn as well, where the divine term intervenes to arrange scandalous unions in spite of natural, social, or moral impediments. In Die Marquise von O…, the idea of worldliness as institution also forms the ends of the narrative arc, from the Marquise’s acceptance of her mysterious pregnancy, in spite of her “consciousness free of guilt,” to the final scenes in which the Marquise accepts Count F… as the father of her child and of subsequent children, a “whole series of little Russians” that followed the first.46 This moment is worth citing at length, as the narrator invokes the mastery of fate, the suppression of inner turmoil or rebellion (Aufruhr), and the subordination of the demands of the intellect: Durch diese schöne Anstrengung mit sich selbst bekannt gemacht, hob sie sich plötzlich, wie an ihrer eigenen Hand, aus der ganzen Tiefe, in welche das Schicksal sie herabgestürzt hatte, empor. Der Aufruhr, der ihre Brust zerriss, legte sich, als sie im Freien war, sie küßte häufig die Kinder, diese ihre liebe Beute, und mit großer Selbstzufriedenheit gedachte sie, welch einen Sieg sie, durch die Kraft ihres schuldfreien Bewußtseins, über ihren Bruder davon getragen hatte. Ihr Verstand, stark genug, in ihrer sonderbaren Lage nicht zu reißen, gab sich ganz unter der großen, heiligen, und unerklärlichen Einrichtung der Welt gefangen.47 As she came to know herself through this beautiful effort, she raised herself suddenly, as with her own hand, up from the entire depth into which fate had plunged her. The uproar that tore her breast in two settled down as soon as she was in the open; she kissed her children, her dear booty, and with great self-satisfaction she thought about what a victory she had won over her brother through the power of her consciousness, [which was] free of guilt. Her intellect, strong enough not to tear in her peculiar situation, surrended itself entirely to the great, holy, and inexplicable institution of the world. The “schöne Anstrengung” (beautiful effort) seems to echo the “Wunder der Anstrengung” (miracles of effort) of the Count in preserving the palace, itself the shelter where his own supposed act of violation took place and created this child, while preserving the innocence of the 46 Kleist, SWB, 3:186. 47 Ibid., 3.167.

242  Figures of Natality Marquise, now captive (“gefangen”) in that structure. That the institution is central to Kleist’s world view is evident in his version of the “silent repetition of embraces all around” that ends Nathan the Wise, in the closing of “Die Marquise von O…,” a scene in which the Russian officer, presumed to be the father of the Marquise’s child, is finally welcomed sincerely into the family: “[S]ein Gefühl [sagte] ihm …, daß ihm von allen Seiten, um der gebrechlichen Einrichtung der Welt willen, endlich verziehen worden sei.”48 (His feeling told him […] that he was finally pardoned from all sides for the sake of the frail institution of the world.) What begins with the intellect’s submission to a mystery ends in a secularized grace for the sake of the world. In The Marquise of O…, this is a double institutionalization. First of all, it is the response to what Gerhard Neumann calls the casus perplexus of the beginning, the natal quandary of origins in the unknown and—on the terms of any other than a banal reading that obviates the problems driving the narrative—unknowable circumstances of her child’s conception. This is for Neumann a test case for beginnings, in the sense that it tests the transference of bodily states and desires into the social world of marriage and legitimacy and tests the links between sexuality and violence, the power of taboos, and gender roles.49 Second, it is not a social but a political question. How is a world constituted that can contain these questions without an ultimate, philosophical reconciliation (in the Hegelian or post-Hegelian sense) while effecting a provisional order that leaves open the possibility of conflict? This has been the central question of my study, whether in considering the parallel of genealogy and historiality in Lessing’s “embraces all around,” the various attempts to foreclose the political in aesthetically unifying or economically totalizing solutions, or the reintroduction of an uncanny symbol of contingency into these schemes. The political refers after all neither to a state of permanent war nor simply to the ideological interpellation of a subject by a third party, but to the immanent possibility of conflict and the need or the possibility to negotiate and renegotiate social and political relations, without suturing the gap between the social and the political or producing a simulacrum that would erase this gap. Hannah Arendt’s imagining a worldliness that needs the distance between the subject and the social made possible by metaphor (itself a transfer or transport) and representation makes “world” a question of the political and not of the social 48 Ibid., 3.186. 49 Gerhard Neumann, “Skandalon: Geschlechterrolle und soziale Identität in Kleist’s Marquise von O… und Cervantes’ Novelle La fuerza de la sangre,” Heinrich von Kleist: Kriegsfall – Rechtsfall – Sündenfall, ed. Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1994), 162–5, 178–9.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 243 or the economic. In its various iterations, Kleist’s notion of “the frail institution of the world” is itself a sign of the context-dependent and negotiable character of world conceived as institution. The frail or faulty character of the world (gebrechlich means frail or infirm and is most commonly related to old age) is an Einrichtung, a structure or an institution, fragile because, in this case, it has at its center a figure whose misdeed (the rape of the Marquise during a battle) or lack thereof is carefully concealed by the narrator. The paternity of her child remains uncertain, and the Einrichtung is not so much an instance that structures by inclusion or judgment as it is a construct that communicates no knowledge, even of a paternal relationship. Its functions in Marquise are those of formerly sovereign political–theological prerogatives: the ability to command obedience and the right to pardon, to make an exception to the law. For this reason, it is important to separate institution from law. Helga Gallas confuses the two when she describes Kleist (also as figured through the Marquise) as not rejecting but seeking the law (das Gesetz) in affirming the institution on the grounds that “a frail institution is not an evil [böse] one!”50 While the Prince Elector in Kleist’s Prince Friedrich of Homburg demands not an accidental victory that, “a child of chance,” “falls from the bench [Bank]”—as a bastard, Bankert—but “the law, / The mother of my crown […] / Who gives me a race [Geschlecht] of victories,”51 he in fact obtains victories not by the rigorous execution of the law, but by a repetition of the scene in which Homburg is hypnotized. The objects that engineer this hypnosis—a glove, a golden chain, a laurel wreath—are images of love, power, and glory that direct Homburg’s desire beyond the law. His transgression 50 Helga Gallas, Kleist: Gesetz, Begehren, Sexualität: Zwischen symbolischer und imaginärer Identifizierung (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Nexus, 2005), 82. Her binary contrast of the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Kleist’s work is a fruitful one, but it reifies the existence of a third term as law rather than as the representation that also makes the opening to contingency and freedom possible beyond law (Gallas, Kleist, 79). This “beyond” is a spatial figure; it does not mean “without,” but refers to the limit that needs to be marked in order to have a “love without limits” that is impossible without the coordination through the symbolic and the mobility of the subject in a metaphorical chain, which Lacan describes in suitably natal terms as a “mobility from which revolutions emerge, the joint between truth and knowledge […],” a knowledge which, in terms of the analyst’s desire to know, “does not confer the least knowledge [of something],” i.e., a Wissen that is no Erkenntnis. Jacques Lacan, “La subversion du sujet et la dialectique du désir,” Écrits, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 2:162–3. Lessing’s desire for and refusal of the knowledge of truth can be reread here in post-Spinozist terms, as the incorporation of critical subjectivity that loosens the coupling of mind and universe. 51 Kleist, SWB, 2:632.

244  Figures of Natality only intensifies the feelings of national loyalty attached neither to the person of the Prince Elector nor to positive law, as it refers not to the union of the two, but to a conventional set of symbols outside either, symbols that require neither consciousness nor intention to be efficacious.52 The mother-machine that produces victories is in this sense an effect of the inability to unify sovereign authority and positive law, whose relationship is determined, in Kleist as for Carl Schmitt, by paradox. In this respect, the “whole series of little Russians” is different from the “race of victories” because the former is fortuitous and the latter is, in the Prince Elector’s imagination, at least, guaranteed by the law. Nonetheless, each reproductive series begins with an act that represents—almost literally in the case of the Marquise—the grasping of a moment of emergency or exception for a precipitous intervention that is observed and re-entered into the institution. Kleist’s use of institution elaborates the double bind in subjectivity: its dual nature as being subject to something and occupying the actantial or grammatical place of the agent. The institution is for Kleist also the kind of institutionality specific to the Prussian state, especially the military. As Fritz Breithaupt argues, the properties of the institution act even against the stated purposes or intentions of the institution and do so largely because of the insistence of language—or at least of the subject’s propensity to read signs or sounds as speech. He underscores this duality in Kleist’s anecdote “The Drunkard and the Bells of Berlin” (“Der Branntweinsäufer und die Berliner Glocken”), in which an alcoholic soldier cannot resist having a drink—and thereby disobeying orders—because of the same institutional mechanism, the military drill of obedience to commands, that enjoined him not to drink. Language, sound, or at least imagined sound, plays a role because the soldier hears the bells of Berlin calling out the names of alcoholic spirits and associates the strokes (Schläge) of the bells with the blows (Schläge) he received in the military to cure him of his drunkenness. (Interpretation itself repeats the drunkard’s action by the deliberate semantic confusion of homonyms.)53 This is for Breithaupt a model of how modern institutions form structures that guarantee the identity and repeatability of human acts.54 One might just as well see the institution here as 52 See Helmut Schneider, “Der Sohn als Erzeuger,” 52. Schneider sees an interpenetration of law and charisma, but this is only possible without the third term. 53 See also Michel Chaouli’s analysis of the semantics of Bogen and reissen in Penthesilea: Michel Chaouli, “Devouring Metaphor: Taste and Disgust in Kleist’s Penthesilea.” German Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1996): 125–43. 54 Fritz Breithaupt, “Wie Institutionalisierungen Freiräume schaffen: Kleists Marquise von O…, Die heilige Cäcilie, und einige Anekdoten,” in Kleist Lesen, edited by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll and Marianne Schuller (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2003), 210–11, 219.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 245 one version of the medium-form difference, in which the medium confers the objective possibility of different forms, which become the salient communications in that medium. Supposing a subject who is not so strongly coupled to that medium, the free spaces it creates can resemble more the Marquise’s “making her own acquaintance,” a very Arendtian-sounding term that connotes, in Arendt’s case, both agency and the acceptance of the medium of rhetoric for action. What allows actions to be repeatable and recognizable is also that which produces the captivity of the new under the institutional regime that recodes public action, making it memorable precisely by appropriating it. While this structure appears in other of Kleist’s plays and stories, such as the repetition-with-a-difference of the original scene of sleepwalking and obsession with love and glory in Prince Friedrich of Homburg, the case in Homburg is rather that substitutions, conditioned by circumstances, can be mastered by the sovereign, in this case the Prince Elector whose implanting hypnotic cues is only intensified by the circumstances of the battle.55 That this takes place, as in Goethe and Lessing, in a case in which the father figure is an uncle (as Schneider underscores) shows that this connection must first be produced, and this takes place in Kleist as in Lessing through the reading and misreading of signs. Where Schneider reads genealogical connections as specular or substitutive doubling, for instance in the Elector’s saying that he “knows what moves this young fool’s breast,”56 the Elector might very well know it simply because, like the Prussian drill sergeant, he has programmed his subordinate. Masterful semiotic programming and the manipulation of experience in order to reinforce that programming might fail the ultimate test, but the point is to recuperate or re-enter failure in the language of the institution. The question is: What agency carries out this recuperation? There are two answers to this question. The first has to do with the medium, the second with the political agency of observation. The first answer lies in the difference between sovereign subjectivity in Penthesilea and Amphitryon, the second in Penthesilea itself. Like Prince Friedrich or Käthchen, Penthesilea and Achilles seem to be sleepwalking, as Wolf Kittler observes, absorbed into the conditioning that

55 In Wolf Kittler’s magisterial study, this is the creation of the partisan: the fabrication of an autonomous fighting subject who none the less follows the program. See Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege (Rombach: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1987). There is unfortunately no space here to delve into Kittler’s readings and their relation to my version of Kleist, particularly in the notion of war guilt, language games, and indexicality. 56 Schneider, “Der Sohn als Erzeuger,” 52, and n. 8.

246  Figures of Natality turns them into political-military partisans of a total war.57 However, like the recuperation of Prince Friedrich for the national cause and the earth of Brandenburg, other observers are necessary who take his unconsciousness as an object lesson in how to structure otherwise inchoate and irrational passions. The language of passionate love as a medium is as irrational as patriotism here. It constitutes the abject end of a two-ended structure of political redemption powered by institutionality. This end of the structure represents the fall or collapse into an absolute identity that presents not a split subject but a consistent one, like the drunken soldier, consistent with a medium taken to be that of the law. Penthesilea’s collapse into cannibalistic, homicidal mania exemplifies this state of immediate relation to signs read as both real and imperative, a normative ontology effected not by a lexical literalization but in the union of sound and power to command.

Amphitryon: Conceiving Signs, Birthing Myth

It is tempting to reconstruct Kleist’s plays as staging a conflict between the interiority of feeling or intention and the exteriority of the letter. Penthesilea’s undoing is caused largely by an amorous infatuation, the fixation on a name, “Achilles,” that leads her to ignore the difference between other, common nouns or names because of their sensuous proximity: “Küsse, Bisse, das reimt sich, und wer recht vom Herzen liebt, kann das eine für das andere nehmen”58 (“A kiss, a bite, / The two should rhyme, for one who truly loves / With all her heart can easily mistake them.”)59 Jochen Hörisch reads Amphitryon on this basis as a “semantic comedy” in which, for example, the letters “A” for Amphitryon and “J” for Jupiter are switched (by Jupiter’s intervention) on the diadem Amphitryon sends to his spouse, the queen Alkmene, after his victory in battle. “Kleist has the spirit of ego philosophy founder on letters with many meanings.”60 The token of military prowess becomes the gift that indicates that Alkmene has been seduced by the king of the gods, who has taken on the form of her husband while the latter was away at war. Beyond the failure of Fichte’s philosophy of the intact ego, the logical principle of non-contradiction A=A, “all A is A,” as the existential principle “Ich bin ich,” the key aspect of this comedy of letters is that only inconsistency can represent the sort of political theology that preserves the polity symbolically. This split is legible in the transformation of the A into J on the diadem 57 Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen. 58 Kleist, SWB, 2:254. 59 Kleist, Penthesilea, 145. 60 Jochen Hörisch, Die andere Goethezeit: Poetische Mobilmachung des Subjekts um 1800 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992), 102.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 247 as a first version of the uncanny birth object. The language of the heart is inadequate to read the “wunderlicher Zug” (“marvelous trait”), the “fremdes Zeichen” (“foreign sign”) that she received or conceived, “empfing”: “Bin ich wohl sicher, sprich, daß ich auch gestern / Das Zeichen, das hier steht, von ihm empfing?”61 (Am I quite sure, tell me, that I received the sign that appears here from him yesterday?) As if to answer this question, Jupiter appears to her in the form of her husband again and gives her an answer that gingerly avoids naming the god or claiming directly that he is Amphitryon. This kind of language that avoids the lie and lies by avoiding it preserves the representation of difference in so far as Jupiter invokes the identity of the husband and lover as one by virtue of their relationship to Alkmene, via the marks or traits (Züge) in the jewel and Amphitryon’s features in her mind’s eye: “Wer nahet dir, o du, vor deren Seele / Nur stets des Ein- und Ein’gen Züge stehn? […] Was sich dir nahet, ist Amphitryon.” (Who approaches you, o you, before whose soul / Only the features of the one and only stand? […] What approaches you is Amphitryon.) The semantics of the “einziger Zug” (sole/unique/only feature) are repeated here even if in a way not immediately recognizable in later modern German: Adelung’s dictionary (1793–1801) gives as the first definition of “einig” “etwas, welches nur das Eine seiner Art ist” (something that is the only one of its kind), a definition still more common in the German Bible: “Es ist nur ein einiger Gott” (There is only one God). Adelung also lists einzig as a more commonly used synonym for “einig” in this sense,62 and even older, juridical uses collected in the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch confirm both its synonymity with einzig and the attribute of unity in other uses.63 Kleist’s Jupiter casts these two ideas as one in his address to Alkmene by confusing particular personal identity with the unity of the divine: “Was du gesehen, gefühlt, gedacht, empfunden, / War ich: wer wäre, außer mir, Geliebte?” (What you saw, sensed, thought, felt, / Was me: who would be, but me, my love?)64 Rather than ask of him, “Are you Amphitryon?” Alkmene asks whether he is the one who has been with her: “Warst du’s, warst du es nicht?” (Was it you? Was it not you?) to which he answers, “Ich war’s. Sei’s wer es wolle.” (It was me. Let it be whoever.).65 Grammar, semiotics, and rhetoric converge here insofar as Jupiter’s evasion needs all three aspects of language: 61 Kleist, SWB, 1:421–3. 62 Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “einig,” col. 1710–11. 63 Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch, s.v. “einig,” Vol. 2, col. 1402–1403. http://drw-www. adw.uni-heidelberg.de/drw-cgi/zeige?index=lemmata&term=einig, January 15, 2016. 64 Kleist, SWB, 1:424. 65 Ibid.

248  Figures of Natality semiotics in the invocation of Alkmene’s reading only the traits of her one true spouse, no matter what the sign actually is; rhetoric in the functional aspect of this as simultaneous evasion and persuasion addressed to a “du”; and grammar in so far as the “es,” the pronoun “it,” signifies or refers to nothing in this usage and is only a syntactic placeholder after the copula, except in that it signals the asymmetry of the “ich war es,” “it was me.” (Contrary to the pseudogrammatical hypercorrection that turns “It is I” into a correct sentence, both German and English preserve an “it” somewhere as an object that does not reflect the case of the subject after the copula, like the French “c’est moi,” in a form contrary to the logical “A=A” or “ich bin ich,” that becomes for Fichte the form of science as Wissenschaft.) Even the critical or phenomenological replacement of “dogmatic,” pre-Kantian Verstand falters here, as Kleist signals in this comedy of pronouns that relationality, even to oneself, is not symmetrical, not even for gods. The collapse of the Ich is staged neither as the common constant that underlies the categories of the understanding, nor as that which is most mine, nor as that which, after the encounter with the concept, embodies proper subjectivity. The fate of the Ich in Amphitryon is evident in Sosias’s first-personal skeptical crisis: Was ich getan, da ich ganz einsam war, Was Niemand hat gesehen, kann Niemand wissen, Falls er nicht wirklich Ich ist, so wie ich. What I did when I was completely alone, What no one saw, no one can know, In the case that he is not really I, like me. The simple reference to the game Sosias is playing with Merkur, testing Merkur’s knowledge of even Sosias’s most private deeds, turns into a reflexive play with nothingness—“Was Niemand hat gesehen, kann Niemand wissen”—and another grammatical error, if it is taken out of the context of the Ich as a substantive thing: “er … Ich ist, so wie ich.” The capitalized Ich is furthermore a noun, no longer a pronoun: das Ich or ein Ich. A more interpretive translation would be this: “What no one saw, no one can know, / In the case that he is not really an I, such as I am.” Assuming that his divine knowledge is not the same as sense perception, then Merkur does know what he has not seen. At the same time, Sosias is certain that he knows what he did, but he did not see in the same sense, since it is his own action he recalls. He presumably does not see himself acting in the same sense as a spectator would, but rather, he has a memory based on embodied cognition, and it is just this from which he is alienated in the dispute with Merkur, in

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 249 which he is estranged from himself also through reflection: “Zwar wenn ich mich betaste, wollt’ ich schwören, daß dieser Leib Sosias ist.” (When I feel myself, I wanted to swear that this body is Sosias.).66 Beyond the notion that embodied cognition is different from mirror reflection or thematizing the self, the oddness of this reflection is evident in so far as the body provides motives for action; his ordinary needs, mainly eating and drinking, are not reflexive. His Ich is only the first-personal lowercase “ich”, his body only his body and not him, much less his name, and his own embodied deeds are not something he sees as an image, much less a virtual film providing him knowledge of his Ich. Finally, after being beaten viciously by his divine double Mercury, Sosias accepts loss of the name through withdrawing, zurücktreten.67 This does not reduce Sosias to the status of a thing; the end of representation is not the immanence of “becoming-animal.” Rather, Sosias’s question, “[S]age mir, / da ich Sosias nicht bin, wer ich bin? / Denn etwas, gibst du zu, muß ich doch sein” (Tell me, / Since I am not Sosias, who am I? / For you admit that something I must be; l.374–6), is met not with being—“wer ich bin”—but with time, as Merkur has it: “Wenn ich nicht mehr Sosias werde sein, / Sei du’s, es ist mir recht, ich will’ge drein” (When I shall no longer be Sosias, / You be him, it’s all right by me, I give my assent; l.377–8). The loss of representation—the Rücktritt from identity even in the first-personal “ich” that no longer has a predicate—does not produce a becoming of something else, much less a “becoming-immanent,” but the loss, too, of embodiment, since the body is beaten and disoriented, itself condemned to retreat. There is no “desiring machine” that would eat, drink, and copulate, unhindered by alienation in the signifier, because there is nothing after the copula.68 There are two things to note about the fate of the self on Kleist’s end of the arc spanning this history. On the most evident thematic level, the Ich in Amphitryon is that very thing that is permanently woundable, vulnerable, but, like representation and sovereignty on the premises of the discourse of the political, the Ich does not cease to exist. The language of Kleist’s play revives, in the context of this study, the terms 66 Ibid., 1:394. The proper name Sosias can here be in nominative or dative case: the body is or is (belongs) to Sosias. 67 Ibid. 68 Christian Moser points out that Kleist articulates the paradox of the Fall into knowledge even more sharply than Rousseau does: Even if we were capable of total amnesia and a return to the state of innocence, the human Aufklärungstrieb would bring us out of that original state not by perversion, but because of the necessity of survival. Surviving means not conserving an intact self, but persisting in “Depravation und Selbstentfremdung.” Christian Moser, “Angewandte Kontingenz: Fallgeschichten bei Kleist und Montaigne,” Kleist Jahrbuch 2000, 8.

250  Figures of Natality of Lessing’s Nathan: the Zug is what is at stake. Yet, its very mutability guarantees that it evades the epistemological positivity that, in Lessing, challenged the political both structurally and historically. The Zug is no longer taken into the embrace as the feature uniting the human family—with notable exceptions—but becomes the fungible currency of shifting identities that can be appropriated and stolen. Second is the role of fear as an affect of divine sovereignty. Added then to the epistemological paradigm is the political–theological one, in which the god’s interference causes an act of conception that has the structure of the diadem itself: ambiguous in its magical substitution, the “sign” that Alkmene receives or conceives is split between the divine progenitor and the earthly one. The neverending conversations that mark the play, between mortals and their divine imitators, between mortals confused as to how they could have been involved in these other conversations if or when one party was not present, form exchanges that are as contrary to the idea of conversation as Amphitryon’s reaction upon seeing his divine double: Amphitryon: Tod! Teufel! Wut und keine Rache! Vernichtung! Er fällt dem Sosias in den Arm. Jupiter: Tor, der du bist, laß dir zwei Worte sagen. Sosias: Mein Seel! Er wird schlecht hören. Er ist tot.69 Amphitryon: Death! Devil! Anger and no revenge! Annihilation! He falls into Sosias’s arm. Jupiter: Fool that you are, listen to what I’ve got to say (lit. “let yourself be told two words”). Sosias: By my soul! He won’t hear well. He’s dead. Like Penthesilea’s “vernichtendes Gefühl” (annihilating feeling), which has a similar borderline or frontier function, annihilation here is the sovereign’s reaction to the failure of his own devices to produce the moment of coincidence of cognitive and performative recognition that sovereignty requires. The prior doubling of the sovereign excludes even that appearance of political theology—even though the sovereign here has been replaced both in the eyes of the people and in his own domestic relationship with the supreme deity. However, as in Goethe’s play with subjectivity and development, Kleist’s examination of sovereignty and divinity here challenges phenomenality 69 Kleist, SWB, 1:455.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 251 not in order to replace sovereignty with something else, but in order to explore the mechanisms by which sovereignty is produced and maintained, transforming those, as Kleist will in Penthesilea as well, into the vehicle of popular sentiment, the only affective condition that can be maintained as a condition of the possibility of sovereignty in the Schmittian or neo-Schmittian sense: as the permanent possibility of conflict within the polity, and the existential finitude and contingency of the polity. Hearing poorly is a disadvantage here because Jupiter/Amphitryon has promised the people “ein entscheidend Wort” (a decisive/deciding word).70 This functions contrary to the real Amphitryon’s reliance on sight and phenomenality, which is apparent in three moments of this scene of decision. Upon encountering the assembled people, summoned by Jupiter/Amphitryon, Amphitryon calls upon them to “collect their senses,” although it is only a matter of one sense: Therefore collect your senses now, and if you Were thousand-eyed, each an Argus, […] so open up [aufreißen] your eyes, like moles, When they look for the sun at noontime, Cast all these glances into a glass [Spiegel] And turn the entire full ray [den ganzen vollen Strahl] onto me, Moving it up and down, from head to toe, And proclaim to me and speak and face me: Who am I?71 The sovereign here poses the question of his own identity to the people, who are given the task and, indeed, by sovereign order, the obligation to respond by naming. Of course, the people answer, “Wer du bist? Amphitryon!” (Who you are? Amphitryon!),72 but they are less certain in the next scene, as Jupiter/Amphitryon appears: “[Das Volk:] Kann sich ein menschlich Auge hier entscheiden?” (Can a human eye decide here?).73 The three phases of visuality, in which the Volk must decide based on focusing its visual energy (den vollen Strahl) and deciding based on this phenomenality, as it is commanded to do by Amphitryon, fail to resolve the issue for one simple reason: the solar presentation of distinguishing features in the optical semantics of their being

70 71 72 73

Ibid., 1:452. Ibid., 1:452–3. Ibid., 1:453. Ibid., 1:455.

252  Figures of Natality consolidated through a glass is once more insufficient as a judgment of identity, as Amphitryon learns quickly.74 While Jupiter demands whole-body recognition, as opposed to the taking of pieces, literally or figuratively, from the body, Amphitryon is savvier than the king of the gods: the giving and receiving of a “Wort” is not just of a name (“Wer bin ich?” “Wer bist du?”), but the reading of an index. Even following his solar command, Amphitryon implements this kind of reading as a backup strategy. Forewarned by Sosias about their doubles’ tactics, he breaks a feather on his helmet in two and tells the people that they may recognize him by the broken feather when confronted by his double.75 In this instance, recognition proceeds not by the total apprehension of an image, but by the reading of a sign. Seán Allan reads this scene as being about Amphitryon’s authority in a negative sense; he opposes power and authority to the claims of reason, avoiding the facts that would reveal “the wholly conventional and arbitrary nature of his position in the world.”76 As Allan observes, his officers, here the erster Oberster Argatiphontidas, are all too willing to serve those claims to authority through the immediate application of power: --ich für mein Teil, bin für die kürzesten Prozesse stets; in solchen Fällen fängt man damit an, dem Widersacher, ohne Federlesens, den Degen querhin durch den Leib zu jagen.77 However, as in so many of Kleist’s dramas, one needs to take the speakers at their word.78 Here, the word is “Federlesens.” Argatiphontidas does 74 The kind of Spiegel described by Amphitryon, which concentrates light into one beam, seems to be a Brennspiegel or burning glass, used in the eighteenth century in chemistry to produce combustion in closed glass containers. 75 Seán Allan, The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist, 110. Allan interprets the broken feather as a sign of impotence. 76 Ibid., 110. 77 Kleist, SWB, 1:454. A loose translation: “I, for my part, am always for making short work of it; in such cases, one begins by running one’s sword right through the enemy’s guts without further ado.” 78 Lazlo Földenyi notes in the entry “Gott” that God’s writing with lightning in Kleist’s anecdote “Der Griffel Gottes,” marks the failure of hermeneutics in that it does not value dialogue. Lazlo Földenyi, Heinrich von Kleist: Im Netz der Wörter (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1999), 164. The punctuality of the Blitz has the function of writing, but it also indexes the being of God. The singularity of the index, like that of natality, also subtracts it from a dialogue with the situation in which it appears and indicates the ontological at least in its formal opposition to the ontic.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 253 not serve Amphitryon by his willingness to dispense with formalities. Instead, he frustrates Amphitryon’s desire to establish a modest semiotic backup, the broken feather, for his radiant and specular identity, requiring a moment of reading the index as a support for the popular imagination. “Ohne Federlesens” signals here also that this “kurze[r] Prozeß” (literally “short process” or quick trial) is a short circuit that has the contrary effect. Ignoring the broken feather, the people and the army turn on Amphitryon, calling him a traitor, and even Amphitryon’s calling his previously willing executioner Argatiphontidas by name does not save him.79 Amphitryon refuses the standard invoked by Argatiphontidas, who appeals not to the vox but to the oculos populi, once Alkmene has appeared with Amphitryon-Jupiter: “Meinst du des Volkes Urteil zu verwirren / Wo es mit eigenen Augen sieht?” (Do you mean to confuse the people’s judgment / Where it sees with its own eyes?).80 At the same time, he allows for the standard of erkennen not as recognition in the simply cognitive-epistemological sense, but in the legal and political sense as well, a judgment not rendered but demanded from Alkmene by the people. For Amphitryon, even revelation in Jupiter’s own voice or words, written as through a miraculous presence, “mit Blitzen in [die] Nacht Geschriebnes” (written with lightning in the night),81 cannot be more authentic than his wife’s voice. Kleist first produces the acclamation of a solar identity, focusing the eyes of the “tausendäugig Argos” (thousand-eyed Argos) through the mirror or lens, and then he shows its lack of efficacy as only one in a procession of mirror images (Spiegel as reflector) that create the problem of identity for the belly of the people, Sosias, as well as for the sovereign, Amphitryon. Jacques Lacan’s reading of Amphitryon in Seminar II makes the mirror stage in this case not the “jubilant assumption” of the wholeness of identity, as he has it in his Écrits, but the frustration of control over one’s identity: “the fate of the moi [the ego], by its very nature, is always to find its reflection before it, which dispossesses him of all that he wants to attain.”82 While this fits the 79 As Prinz Friedrich von Homburg makes clear, the manipulation of indexes, in that case the glove, can also be too effective, creating the sort of loyalty that does not have the desired strategic effect. The index might guide action, but does not guarantee the desired sort of efficacy; it is contingent. In Homburg, the debate over responsibility for the index as a transgression of the law divides the general staff and the Prince Elector. 80 Kleist, SWB, 1:456. 81 Ibid., 1:459. 82 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 308; qtd Janet Lungstrum, “A Transcendental Infidelity: Kleist, Lacan, and “Amphitryon’,” Modern Language Studies, 22.4 (1992), 70. Dispossession of all that one wants to attain

254  Figures of Natality castration scenario down to the detail of Amphitryon’s addressing Jupiter as “Vater Zeus,” the Lacanian framework plus the voluntarist Romantic (Schlegelian) paradigm does not account for the negotiation and the play of signs here. It might be more accurate to say that, living in a world in which regal sovereignty is trumped only by divine sovereignty, Amphitryon attempts to renegotiate the boundaries of his own subjection. However, Kleist’s transformation of the moment of acclaim into one of negotiation also transforms the mechanism by which something like the Lacanian Symbolic would be attained here. The short circuit between the people and the divine—in the guise of the sovereign—has two aspects. First of all, its immediacy bypasses a moment of representation that is no longer that of a symbolic investment but of reading an index, the broken feather that, non-symbolically, points to Amphitryon in his being, not in his appearing. Second, while Jupiter, who is indeed the king of the gods, does appear as Amphitryon, the real sovereign of a particular polity, this does not produce the equation of “the king’s two bodies” between a real and a mystical kingship. In fact, it does not have the property of the Lacanian symbolic at all because it figures no break of the subject with itself in order to acquire representation. The Symbolic order for Lacan is the assumption of a split subject, invested not in its own, intact mirror image, but in an order that allows for intersubjectivity only through representation, as the subject takes on a Symbolic role, such as a name, which is a “signifier that represents the subject for another signifier.”83 Kleist seems to make Jupiter the only Spinozist here: he not only appears as, but he is Amphitryon, Mount Cadmos, and everything else: deus sive natura or God as world—“what would there be, other than me?” The king and the people do not know totality; they must content themselves with the indexes of sovereignty. The upshot of this difference is the promised production of the people, at least provisionally and as practically invisible here. The reaction to Jupiter’s assumption of the indexes of his own totality is Amphitryon’s self-dispossession: “Anbetung dir / In Staub. Du bist der große Donnerer!/ Und dein ist Alles, was ich habe” (Obeisance to you / In dust. You are the great thunderer! / And yours is all that I have). The people reply, “In Staub! In Staub das Antlitz hin!” (In dust! Put your face [i.e., their faces] in the dust!).84 Staub, dust, could also be the specular completion that saps desire, the wanting to attain something one does not have. 83 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 207. 84 Kleist, SWB, 1: 460.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 255 refers to the crude materiality of death: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But the link between Amphitryon and Prinz Friedrich is precisely in the totalization of this materiality. The only reaction to Jupiter, who is everything at once, including the people who worship him, is abjection and loss of identity: one’s face bites the dust. Totality is also the elimination of enmity. Sending the enemy into the dust means the elimination of that enemy, the thing Friedrich of Homburg fails to do on his first sally against the Swedes. Through the elimination of their power to decide—by what marks? in what image?—and their subjection en masse to the God-totality, the people in Amphitryon seem to suffer the same fate as the Swedes will apparently suffer in the time following the events in Prinz Friedrich: the elimination of their power to resist. As if taking Jupiter up on the prospect of mirroring, the only mortal left standing in this encounter is Amphitryon himself. He engages in a negotiation with the god which he can undertake only because of his position at the head of this otherwise now faceless and voiceless mass, and this negotiation leads not just to a great prize for Amphitryon—his son will be Hercules—but to a renegotiation of the relationship between the general and the particular, the totality of the universe and its parts. That this conflict should happen at all is amazing, as Jupiter claims for himself—evidently a particular and personalized deity—the status of the totality of the cosmos. However, Jupiter’s lesson is no pantheism for the human subject. Indeed, the Spinozan structure of the consciousness that, through intellectual love of God, comes to know the whole and experience positive affect (laetitia) is here inverted. Amphitryon secures what I have called the birth-product only through subjection or subjectivation as a double move of partialization. First, he transfers his own negotiating power from Jupiter’s offer of fame to his offspring, who will be Jupiter’s from the night of passion with Alkmene, thus giving up his attachment to the continuity of natural or biological reproduction. Second, his conatus, so deflected from his own image in the mirror of posterity to this partial object, is itself partialized and, like Freud’s partial drive, it is deflected from its object. In order to make up for this abrupt dual loss in the face of Jupiter’s ontological totality (“Ich bin …”), Amphitryon demands a sign that is as particular as the signs of Jupiter’s authority, the eagle and the thunderbolt: a natal sign in the form of a son. Jupiter’s way of granting this wish merits closer attention, for it addresses the issue of partiality and totality directly. His first pledge to Amphitryon is this: Was du, in mir, dir selbst getan, wird dir Bei mir, dem, was ich ewig bin, nicht schaden.

256  Figures of Natality Willst du in meiner Schuld den Lohn dir finden, Wohlan, so grüß’ ich freundlich dich, und scheide.85 The interplay of part and whole here cannot help but be assimilated to the totality of the Godhead, who can none the less withdraw from this scene having assumed the debt or guilt (Schuld) as a reward for humanity.86 Jupiter announces Amphitryon’s recompense for Jupiter’s one-night-stand in the guise of Amphitryon with Alkmene: “Dir wird ein Sohn geboren werden, / Dess’ Name Herkules: es wird an Ruhm / Kein Heros sich, der Vorwelt, mit ihm messen, / auch meine ew’gen Dioskuren nicht.”87 This prize will turn out to be cursed in ways that reveal the constantly dual nature of the political at work here, not only the paradoxical indication of this duality in the “einziger Zug,” which comes to refer to the contamination of the personal sphere, of identity and reproduction, autopoiesis, with the political as radically other. How this totality takes leave of or separates (scheiden) itself from that which he also is (“in mir, dir …”) is a paradox just as Alkmene’s pregnancy paradoxically represents her innocence.88 The inability to distinguish between innocence and guilt, god and man, husband and other man, is summed up, so much criticism of the play has it, in Alkmene’s final “Ach!”89 However, this “Ach!” marks not just Alkmene’s inner state, 85 Ibid. “What you, in me, did to yourself, will harm you with me, that which I am eternally, not. If you want to find in my guilt/debt your reward, Very well, I greet you cordially, and take my leave.” 86 In his review of scholarship on Amphitryon, Jeffrey L. Sammons cites the various permutations of this seemingly paradoxical or even absurd position across Kleist scholarship, concluding that it is “a mistake to force Kleist into congruence with the Classical-Romantic position.” Jeffrey Sammons, “Jupiterists and Alkmenists: Amphitryon as an Example of How Kleist’s Texts Read Intepreters,” in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Bernd Fischer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 28. However, this position is hardly unique to Kleist. As I have indicated above, it is an aspect of the difference between knowledge and will, whether in the theological discourse of the seventeenth century (the Augustinian voluntarist versus the rationalist clockmaker God), or in Arendt’s curious hybrid of Aristotle and Augustine. The central question remains how an active principle different from God’s knowledge or another will outside of his can exist in the world, and it involves the questions—in the orthodox theological discourse—of why God created the world, gave human beings free will, incarnated himself as human, and so on. This is therefore a cultural constant in the Christian West, to which Spinoza offers one of many possible answers, and not a Kleistian peculiarity. 87 Kleist, SWB, 1:460. “A son shall be born to you, whose name shall be Hercules. No hero who came before will compare to him, not even my eternal Dioscuri.” 88 Or so the editors and commentators of the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition have it (Ibid., 1.987). 89 See again the commentary in the DKV edition (1:989–90), which cites Max Kommerell and Hans-Georg Gadamer to this effect.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 257 however one interprets it, but also, much more overtly, it sums up the preceding exchanges that take place as she is unconscious. If it presents the paradoxical union of opposites, it does so with reference to her divine, if not immaculate, conception of Hercules as the sign given to her husband.90 It also illuminates the metonymic function of this name, Hercules, as referring to the event of conception and the matrix from which it emerges. While this act of conception is also one of divine intervention (or divine intromission), its birth product, Hercules, is not a gift from the god. Jupiter’s offer is generous: Es wird dein Ruhm fortan, wie meine Welt, In den Gestirnen seine Grenze haben. Bist du mit deinem Dank zufrieden nicht, Auch gut: Dein liebster Wunsch soll sich erfüllen, Und eine Zunge geb’ ich ihm vor mir.91 Your fame shall henceforth, like my world, Have its limits in the stars. If you are not content with my thanks, Good enough: I shall fulfill your dearest wish, And I give it a tongue before me. Amphitryon’s answer to Jupiter’s generous offer rejects its central premise: that a just reward means being taken up into the god’s world, which is total and permanent, and that the god is in a position to give voice (or “a tongue”) to the desires of his subjects. Amphitryon’s answer is unequivocal: Nein, Vater Zeus, zufrieden bin ich nicht! Und meines Herzens Wunsche wächs’t die Zunge. Was du dem Tyndarus getan, tust du Auch dem Amphitryon: Schenk’ einen Sohn Groß, wie die Tyndariden, ihm. No, Father Zeus, I am not content! And a tongue grows from my heart’s desire. What you did for Tyndarus, do you Also for Amphitryon: Give him a son, Great, like the Tyndarides. 90 Again, the commentary in the DKV edition does not neglect the echoes of the Bible, from the parallelism of “dess’ Name Hercules” and “dess’ Name Jesus” to Joseph’s behavior after the annunciation (Kleist, SWB, 1:988). 91 Ibid., 1:460.

258  Figures of Natality His tongue grows from his desires; it is not sent from above. It expresses his demands rather than simply praising the god. The grammar of this linguistic production, however, reflects one of the central aspects and perhaps the most important linguistic aspect of the play: the way in which the dative case in German produces the sort of conditional relations that resist absolutes. There is always a “to him,” “for her,” or reflexive “himself,” “itself,” in play in these lines, most crucially in Amphitryon’s breakthrough of the deadlock of identity, identification, and naming, when he speaks of his “unerschütterlich erfaßten Glaubens, / Daß er Amphitryon ihr ist”92 (unshakably held/grasped belief / That he is Amphitryon to her; my emphasis). Janet Lungstrum sees this as an absolute defeat mitigated only by Amphitryon’s being a “Romantic ironist”: “Amphitryon officially loses his identity to Jupiter when he trusts Alkmene’s deciding judgment before the people in the final scene, and he must admit, at her wrong choice of man, that the Other is indeed ‘Amphitryon to her.’”93 His object of belief is not an ontological state, but a relation and a point of view. This relationality is far from an idle perspectivism. Its theological– political force is evident again in the promise of a son. The transition from the reflexive or passive, “Dein liebster Wunsch soll sich erfüllen” (l. 2328), to the dative, in “meines Herzens Wunsche wächst die Zunge” (the tongue grows to/for my heart’s desire) (l. 2331), or “Dir wird ein Sohn geboren werden” (A son shall be born to you) (l. 2335), presents grammatically the separation internal to totality. No longer the “sich” (oneself) of self-reference that is the privilege of the god who does things for himself—“Zeus hat in deinem Hause sich gefallen” (Zeus pleased himself in your house) (l. 2316)—, the partialization of desire, in the tongue to/for the desire, being someone to/for someone else, or the repeated “dir” and “mir,” “to/for you,” “me,” in which desire and belonging are personalized in the final exchange between Jupiter and Amphitryon, emphasizes the relation among parts as an act of linguistic performance that, while it takes place within a whole, no longer takes that whole as its reference: “diese hier, nicht raubst du mir?” (you are not taking this one here from me?) (l. 2345; my emphasis); “Sie wird dir bleiben; / Doch laß sie ruhn, wenn sie dir bleiben soll!” (She will remain to you;/ But let her rest, if she is to remain to you) (l. 2347–8). The hero of the play is in this sense not Amphitryon, who conquers no one, but the dative case. This process of creating relations among parts that are then foregrounded relative to the whole runs counter to that Romantic totality in which the “sich,” the reflexive, self-repeating, self-representing feature of the whole, predominates. Functionally, 92 Ibid., 1:459. 93 Lungstrum, “Transcendental Infidelity,” 72

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 259 then, as the birth product Felix did representationally in Goethe’s novels, Kleist’s “dir” and “mir” challenge the idea that the whole is self-representing and self-reproducing. Perspectives are important here epistemologically because they challenge that “sense of the universe” (Schleiermacher) or “view from nowhere” (Nagel) that informed Romantic criticism. This is a complexification of Goethe’s still simple, Promethean paradox of the Titan who rebels against the Father-God in order to become the fabricator of humanity, but, rather than the de-organification of nature as in Goethe’s poem (the ear behind the clouds as the object of naïve, childish belief), organs grow on Amphitryon’s heart (as well as other parts on Kleist’s, which famously has knees94) in order to give articulate voice to desire. The grammaticalization of this desire produces a set of relations that are here not simply given and legible in the book of nature as a genealogy of Züge, as was the case with one of the tracks of history in Lessing’s Nathan. For Kleist, these relations imply an at least metaphorical political theology in which relations are negotiable—coincidentally, also one of the aspects of the “retreat of the political,” for which the question of relation is “perhaps the question of the essence of the political.”95 That Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy follow this evocation of “desertion” (a military concept) and “dissociation” with “the question of the mother” echoes the theme of missing mothers, but, in Amphitryon, the mother is very present and is indeed the vehicle of the incarnation of a promised birth. In terms of political theology and the post-foundational ontology that appears in its stead in post-Heideggerian political theory, Amphitryon challenges Romantic politics on similar terms, making the production of a political and human future a matter of a singular product, whatever its divine origins, born of desire, not simply of knowledge or being. Although addressed to the all-powerful totality, this desire can only encode itself as a partial and independent demand, the tongue that grows organically from the fact of desiring and not simply accepting the given. This is both the central aspect and the undoing of the “typically Kleistian play around and about the locus of identity,”96 as this locus itself turns out to be split. The trait or feature (Zug) is in this case “an inherently shifting term” in which “agency, action, the 94 As in his letter to Goethe of 24 January, 1808, in a turn of phrase with Biblical origins that he repeats in Penthesilea: “Es ist auf den ‘Knieen meines Herzens’ daß ich damit vor Ihnen erscheine.” Kleist, SWB, 4:407. 95 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “The Retreat of the Political,” 133. 96 Andrew Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 217.

260  Figures of Natality narration of personal experience, the body and the name—that is, the fundamental predicates of selfhood—are marked out as mutable.”97 As one of Kleist’s many myths, the promise of the birth of Hercules marks a twofold movement in Kleist’s particular concept of the political. As a sign, like the broken feather, it produces an affective investment in sovereignty precisely by the surrender of that sovereignty: in the first case, in an appeal to the people, which can no longer simply be commanded; and in the second, a demand to the God-Father-Totality that he externalize and autonomize a part of his power, giving it over to the paternity of a human being. In both aspects, appeals and demands make the exercise of power dependent on its being derivative, not full or authentic. If one wants to consider these signs indexes of sovereign power, the second aspect of this moment as political is the “Ach!” that has given rise to so much critical speculation, laying bare a sort of ontological desire for experience to which Sammons gives in by comparing Alkmene’s condition to that of a survivor of the Holocaust, or simply serving as “the consummate empty trace […] carrying traces of the violence done to identity both personal and discursive.”98 If we understand the discursive phenomenon that marks the experience of horror as the failure of narrative, articulate, or referential language, we are left with a symptom or an index, inarticulate in itself, that only points to the intimate union of things that cannot be said to belong together logically or discursively. As Richard Weißenfels notes, Kleist’s “ohne Federlesens” (without delay, literally, without feather-reading), replaces Molière’s “sans autre mystère” (with no other mystery).99 The “Ach!” does not echo the Trinitarian and Christological articulation of mysterious unions and becomings (a virgin birth, God become man, and so on), but returns to a mythical level at which the narrative mythos surrounds the event without subsuming it in the theological register. The index takes the place of the sacred in this modern political theology. There is a certain symmetry in this intertextual adaptation of the sign from mystery or miracle, as in the language of The Marquise of O… that covered up the natural act indicated by the “—” to an index that replaces mystery. While The Marquise of O… is a search for origins, the primal event that is marked in the situations that follow by the child, the ontological by the ontic, the event or advent of the new, the single trait or index, the birth of a token (tokos, the child and coin) is here 97 Ibid., 219. 98 Ibid., 229. 99 Richard Weißenfels, “Über französische und antike Elemente im Stil Heinrich v. Kleists,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 79–80 (1887), 274.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 261 the incarnation of a split subject, split between god and man (not fully both, as the language of the Credo has it), but also between power and guilt, or heroism and transgression. Nonetheless, in order to have this particular power, the Zug has to be made singular, einig or einzig. It is not simply the object of a choice in outfitting the self with properties; it is the fundamental split or division that makes post-foundational political thought an ontological field, albeit one that privileges the ontic, not simply a scientific or ethical one. In this sense, Kristeva’s version of motherhood and the mother–child bond has to be reconsidered where it claims to be a theory of society (not to say, of the political). The signs that emerge from the semiotic chora in this case have to be considered in view of the Byzantine political theology of the icon as a very loose accumulation of signs and images. For the common people, the “multitude,” these images provide something for everybody, “a way to participate in the sacred and imitate the divine,” an aesthetic representation which “served as the vehicle for some kind of political representation.”100 Hardt and Negri equate this kind of sovereignty with the Asian despotism identified by political philosophers and critics of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Smith). Hardt and Negri must return to the idea of representation in order, at this point at least, to save some sort of particular, partial representation as the medium of the multitude’s imagination, in their paraphrase of John of Damascus’s On Divine Images, “the icons that open the imagination to the love of freedom.”101 The question for Kristeva’s version of maternity is here twofold. As elaborated above, she sees a kind of short circuit in religion as the mediator that does not so much vanish as it guarantees the immediacy and the shelter of the relationship between labor and life. Second, she understands the maternal relationship in the semiotic as furnishing a plenitude of partial objects. What is born here is the Zug or trait. However, Kleist’s birth product is not one among many choices in the plenitude of goods provided in primary narcissism. That is at least not the sense of the “whole series of little Russians” who repeat and affirm the first, making birth in that case a more tightly coupled and therefore more successful medium. If something like a political economy of Benjaminian historical materialism unfolds between Nathan and Amphitryon, it is in the dynamic of the “einziger Zug” to which Wendy Brown also tied political and cultural identity.102 The violence of this singular identification shows that it is not simply elective, in spite of its diversity. 100 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2005), 325. 101 Ibid., 327. 102 See above, Chapter 2.

262  Figures of Natality

Fate, Character, and Myth

Count F…’s “einziges, heimlich geflüstertes—” (singular, secretly whispered—) as the truth that is supposed to come of its locus in the body, the breast, as the final word on the mystery, is one sort of trait or index in the sense of the “einziger Zug.” In his reading of tragic guilt and comic character in the essay Schicksal und Charakter, Walter Benjamin refers to Molière’s plays—curiously, not his Amphitryon—as indicating the lack of personality traits as the collection of features or characteristics in favor of the one trait, the character (Charakter) unfolding “in the splendor [Glanz] of its sole trait [seines einzigen Zuges].” This character in the comedy is by virtue of this radiance not the human, which remains anonymous, but the freedom of the individual, a “vision of the natural innocence of the human being,” versus the primordial sin (Urschuld) of human life. In Machiavellian terms, this character “has as little to do with ethics or morality as fate has to do with religion.” This figure possessed of the one character trait is called the genius (Genius), who is born of the “moral speechlessness” of tragedy and whose trait becomes legible, like the traits of fate, in this singularity that is then indicated in practices linking it not to a network of guilt, but to “a few morally indifferent fundamental concepts,” such as the doctrine of the humors.103 As the power that overcomes fate, character also effects the transformation of the political economy of guilt. Jupiter’s conversion of his own Schuld (guilt/debt) into mortal Lohn (reward/payment) resembles Benjamin’s comments in the fragment “Kapitalismus als Religion,” where Benjamin sees a hopelessly guilty—or, in the context of the critique of Romantic economics above, indebted—humanity attempt to involve God in their guilt/debt, such that the infinitization of debt/guilt in a neverending worship ritual (Kultus) and its becoming universal comes to include God as well in this guilt “in order to interest [God] himself in absolution.”104 As Webber suggests, the dynamic of this Zug is an action itself, the beatings that Sosias’s body takes. His being “entsosiasiert” after repeated bludgeonings from Merkur (Mercury/Hermes) suggests that the body is an indispensable fact, not just for homo sacer, but for the conservation of an immediate first-personal reference, one that is not subject to externalization in an Ich that can be trafficked as a commodity, possessed or not. This latter version is Schlegel’s vision in Lucinde, as I referred to it above: one holds one’s body or things to be an Ich, but the Ich is not there yet; it will arrive potentially in this material nest, as in the political messianism Benjamin finds in the 103 Benjamin, GS, 2.1:176–9. 104 Ibid., 6:100–1

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 263 Romantics.105 Benjamin’s account of the difference between fate and character finds in fate a total lack of presence; “bare life” is always referred both to the indeterminacy of the subject—“der Mensch” is not the same as “bare life,” a seeming reiteration of Arendt’s bios/ zoē distinction—and to a future time on which the present time has a parasitic existence—a situation homologous to the view of speculative capitalism as mortgaging the present for future security and undoing both. The appearance of natural life in this sense has to do with fate, as the fortuneteller deals with only the “Mensch” who has abdicated humanity in favor of being-in-debt (Verschuldetsein), and the fortuneteller’s objects, cards, astrological signs, tea leaves, and so on, are “things that are unchastely impregnated with certainty.”106 Benjamin suggests then that chiromancy and other such practices are a maieutics of the unfree subject in terms of these things, inverting the polarity of the market-freedom connection in so far as freedom to choose appearances, the Züge-shopping that Wendy Brown criticizes, is bondage. The mythological postscript to Kleist’s comedy treats flesh as a different kind of doubling: not one that first exists or could be redeemed later, but as the permanent and intimate condition in which Jupiter’s divine condescension to the particular and his own involvement as the double of a mortal gives rise not to the singular hero, with the “einziger Zug” of character that turns it into comedy, but to an always already dual human subject. This more traditional version of mythology that stresses duplicity is distinct from the new mythology of the self in the “Oldest System Fragment of German Idealism,” and it is certainly not the same as the Romantic “new mythology” described by Friedrich Schlegel, which seems to come from the mouth of Kleist’s Jupiter. Rather than an unstable association of fantasy with sense-impressions, as in ancient mythology, Schlegel says, “the new mythology must be formed from the deepest depth of the spirit” as a unitary and superlative product, “the most artificial of all artworks, […] a new bed and vessel for the ancient, eternal wellspring of poesy and even the infinite poem that enshrouds the seeds of all other poems.” This image of receptivity indicates no new creation, however, but an identity that was always there, as “mythology and poesy are one and inseparable,” and “ancient poesy is a single, indivisible, completed poem.” Schlegel only asks, “Why should it not become again as it once was?”107 As with Romantic economics, this model tries to assure a smooth translation 105 See above, Chapter 3. 106 Benajmin, GS, 2.1:175–6. 107 Friedrich Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy,” trans. Andreas Michel and Asenka Oksiloff, in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic

264  Figures of Natality between ancient and modern, past and future, through a hysteron proteron: since things really are as they once and truly were, why should they not be that way again? Kleist’s mythology reflects both a non-Spinozist political and theological structure and a different concept of mythology, in which it does not have the features of the “work” of Romantic poesy as hen kai pan (“one and all”),108 but disrupts that figure of organic unity by putting time out of joint and creating an intimate conflict, what Cavarero termed an “inner flesh” in the body of sovereignty. This intimate disturbance is the product of the temporal disjunction that refuses the hysteron proteron that joins monadic harmony, developmental dynamism as Bildung, and appeals to Nature as the nature of things. The simile behind Amphitryon’s desire to have a son “great like the Tyndarides” is not a singular intention but an invocation of doubling, a two-in-one, since the Tyndarides are the twins Castor and Pollux. This introduces a further complication into Kleist’s already kinky political theology, as the promised son, Hercules, is at least according to Hederich’s mythological lexicon a contemporary of Tyndareus, the father of Castor and Pollux, and the story of their conception seems to double that of Hercules, not just by echoing it but by splitting it. According to Hederich, Jupiter “ging [Tyndareus] ins Gehäge” (Jupiter “poached on his preserve”) at the conception of Castor and Pollux, such that, according to one version, Leda conceived two eggs, one by Jupiter, containing Pollux and Helena, and the other by Tyndareus, containing Castor and Clytemnaestra.109 These twins are of course the same “ew’gen Dioskuren” to whom Zeus refers in the Annunciation scene cited above. This moment of conception is a temporal paradox, a proleptic repetition that anticipates and calls into existence what is already a precursor in the mythological text for this moment. The expression used by Hederich to describe this act of ambiguous and doubled conception, jemandem ins Gehege gehen, to poach on someone’s preserve, combines spatiality with the notion of protection, a Gehege as a safe space, a “preserve” that hedges about and shelters. The crossing of the border of this sheltering space is therefore also a sort of political violence, particularly as Kleist stages it. Jupiter’s act of doubling means that Amphitryon fails to be recognizable as a sovereign; he can produce no signs or tokens of his legitimate authority until Jupiter gives up. Kleist stages the mythological events not just Writings, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 183. See also KFSA, 2:312–13. 108 See Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poesy,” 191. 109 See Hederich, Großes mythologisches Lexikon, s.v. Tyndareus; and s.v. Dioscéri (sic).

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 265 as the typical divine dalliance with fatal effects, but as a promise and a reward. This is some kind of reward. In the mythological future, Hercules betrays Deianeira, and Deianeira gives him a tunic, poisoned with the blood of the centaur Nessus, which ultimately causes his death. In a subtle and compelling reading of this story in connection with allusions to it in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lezra links the unshakable net of this second skin to the concept of ethical responsibility in Levinas and advances a concept of the republic that requires this experience of intimate terror that makes identities insecure. Like the “internal flesh” of Cavarero’s reading of Leviathan, the distribution of terror is a mythological haunting of a logocentric order. This spatial haunting doubles the temporal disjunction in Kleist’s adaptation of the story of Castor and Pollux. While one reading might assert that this prolepsis is, like the time of finance capitalism, a symptom of the very “time out of joint” that indicates the rotting of the state, Lezra’s premise is that “the quality of anteriority and cultural sanction that the myth provides […] stands precisely in the place of a norm, the defective cultural universalism provided by [fictions, stories, myths], also the dissemination of guilt, the movement beyond responsibility for one another: res publica.”110 So, beyond both explicit or positive law and ethical considerations, there is—hardly a surprise by now—the political, the public world of human affairs, that does not follow simple ascriptions of roles and responsibilities. This res publica is a “radical republic” based on the “capacity to interfere” and the “right to arbitrariness (that is, to understand mute or immanent capacity in the form of a claim or an interest),” as the “defining condition of political subjectivity.”111 The development and implications of his study are too rich to follow here.112 I want only to point to the handy coincidence of the myth of Hercules and to two more important factors that come into play if one applies the normative priority of myth as “defective cultural universalism” to Kleist: first, that this second skin of guilt involves the two bodies of the sovereign and the problem of relating them; and second, that this second body or second skin, like the poisoned skin that Hercules cannot remove, reiterates the pattern of inextricable doubling now confused by the temporal mythological mashup Kleist produces. It refers to the cultural priority of the myth as if to refer to the body of the mother, in which the gap in totality 110 Jacques Lezra, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 23. 111 Ibid., 19. 112 The role of skin in political theory in Merleau-Ponty or Nancy is accentuated by Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 93.

266  Figures of Natality is sheltered not as lack of the phallus/penis, but as the space of emergence of the new, before any connection, semiotic or otherwise, to a newborn is established. However, this new, even though it might be newsworthy, still reproduces the basic structure of myth, which alone makes this novelty legible. The switch between natural acts and sacred language, sacred acts and natural language, underscores the paradoxical nature of Kleist’s political theology. In the linear progression of Kleist’s drama, the outcome of temporal and identity confusion is the play’s final sign, Alkmene’s “Ach!” Jeffrey Sammons sees this “Ach!” not as a sign of fulfillment or gratification, much less of a religious ecstasy or desire for unity, but as a sign of the radical disintegration of the self, concluding that the genre of the play might be neither tragedy nor comedy but, citing Karl Guthke, a literary form that in its very horror produces, finally, a comic effect.113 Like the horrific effects of many of Kleist’s other works, Alkmene’s awakening to the world in which she, raped by a god, must bear her husband a son—a son who will go on to suffer terribly because of his own adultery—arguably goes beyond the tragic to embrace the power of horror. In this case, affects such as horror or terror unsettle the subject even in its capacity to produce or negotiate relations, an inconsistent or indeterminate moment of conception. If one takes Amphitryon and Zeus at their words, this similarity implies that the “Ach!”, like the famous dash in The Marquise of O…, marks not just the real suffering or terror, but the absent ground of certainty that would secure the origin, the genealogy, and the future of her child. “Ach!” is the response to the exclamations of the generals, “Such a triumph— / Such great fame—,” that reflect the promise made by Jupiter, who revealed himself as “der Schreckliche,” “the terrible.”114 That Alkmene sets little store by this promise indicates that she knows (and sensed before in the game of Züge) the difference between totality and particularity or specification. Jupiter’s withdrawal from the scene also indicates the end of the Spinozist paradigm in favor of the split and confused mythology that begins, on the chronology of the play, with the anticipated birth of Hercules. In this case, unlike that of Goethe’s “Prometheus,” the withdrawal of Jupiter behind the clouds makes room for birth (not banausic making of identity) as well as for particular identities that cannot be subsumed in the features of the “I” as nature or human family. His Ent-zug removes the ambiguous trait (Zug) and also takes the economic burden of guilt, Schuld, away, allowing for a really new, unanticipated, and uncanny birth product. This figuration implies 113 Sammons, “Jupiterists and Alkmenists,” 36 114 Kleist, SWB, 1.460–1.

Kleist’s Machiavellian Mothers 267 that only the death of God, his withdrawal from the world, and the loss of secure moorings in truth or certainty can redeem humankind, since it is Jupiter’s nature itself, as the totality of existence including all of nature and human creation, the Spinozist hen kai pan itself that is guilty. Only the sacrifice of that guilty totality by the god himself can allow for the mythological split in subjectivity that enables the institution and the narration of the polis or the res publica, the intimate alterity in the womb where Hercules replaces Castor and Pollux, and the intimate alterity of the political subject in the res publica, the two-inone linked to and alienated from itself in speech and action. If indeed all “pregnant concepts of modern political theory are secularized theological concepts,”115 then the media of this split bear the future of the political, a future indicated not just in political theory or theology, but in the formal and mythological, fabular and parabolic structure of Kleist’s Penthesilea, a play about the future of democracy.

115 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. See above, Chapter 2.

Conclusion Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics: The Political Difference and the Future of Democracy

“Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.”1 It is hard to get around this sentence from Carl Schmitt, problematic though it becomes in looking at what the foregoing trajectory does to this sovereign figure. In Walter Benjamin’s study of the German Baroque Trauerspiel (a “mourning play” that Benjamin contrasts with tragedies such as Hamlet), this sovereign becomes “der Gipfel der Kreatur, ausbrechend in der Raserei wie ein Vulkan und mit allem umliegenden Hofstaat sich selber vernichtend” (the summit of creatureliness, breaking out in madness like a volcano and annihilating itself with all its court around it)2—more a berserker than a decider. The course of the period between Lessing’s drama and Schlegel’s Universalpoesie seems to turn that sovereign into a comic or an absurd figure, a Hamlet who only has to say no, to resign, in order to break the deadlock of indecision and submit to the urgings of history, of reason, and of reflection. These discourses effectively substitute a complete or predictably selfproducing, self-perpetuating discourse for the uncertain, contingent, or conflictual field of the political. In the foregoing chapters, I have attempted to show that this field is a product not of a higher-order union or transcendental sphere of reference, but of a medium that holds the indeterminate or even implausible aspects of the political in tension with each other, founding a version of society that can live on with no explanation for its existence other than that of the political. Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein puts it moralistically, in a Christian adaptation of Machiavelli’s virtù and fortuna in which the former 1 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 2 Walter Benjamin, GS I.1:250.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 269 provides a foundation that separates the virtuous individual from the worldliness of the latter: Wer auf das leichte Rad des blinden Glückes traut / Auf seiner Tugend Grund nicht schlechte Thürme baut / Die Fürsten dieser Welt der Erde Götter nennet / Wer viel weiß ausser sich / sich in sich selbst nicht kennet / Wer sich aufs Zepters Glas / des Thrones Grund-Eiß stützt; Der komm und lern allhier / wie der so schwanckend sitzt / Der auf dem Gipffel steht.3 He who trusts the light wheel of blind luck / Who does not build simple towers on the foundation of his virtue / who calls the princes of this earthly world gods / who knows much outside himself / but not himself within / who supports himself on the scepter’s glass, / the throne’s thin ice / let him come and learn here how he sits so precariously / who stands on the summit. This tragic moral from the Baroque exemplifies two tendencies, one that the writing I have examined to this point abjures and one that it maintains. The former has to do with the parable as critiqued by Lessing. As an exemplar of the older school, Lohenstein underscores the lesson learned in the tragic fate of the queen Cleopatra with the explicit political moral: “how he sits so precariously, / who stands at the summit.” Lessing’s smoothing over of this moment in favor of a theory of representation that requires readerly moral intution (see Chapter 2, above) elides the explicit moral lesson in favor of a connection that rests on the functions the eighteenth-century discourse of taste assigns to the genius and the connoisseur, the figure the Romantics later exalt as the divinatory critic who, not entirely differently from David Hume’s connoisseur of wines in the essay “The Standard of Taste,” intuits and empathizes with what is.4 The latter is the theme of the Grund, here by contrast “seiner Tugend Grund,” “the foundation of his virtue” and the “schlechte Türme,” “simple towers.”5 This is a Christian response to Machiavelli’s notion of virtú. Whereas Lohenstein uncouples the private, moral, Christian virtue in the 3 Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, Cleopatra: Trauer-Spiel [1661] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1957), 125–6. 4 See Douglas Lane Patey, “The Institution of Criticism in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, eds H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–31. 5 As in the saying “schlecht und recht,” schlecht is an older spelling of schlicht, simple, humble.

270  Figures of Natality preservation of the inner fortress of its integrity from the world that threatens to pull it under, Machiavelli’s virtù is both worldly and gendered. The force of the vir (man) constitutes the subject’s power to engage with the world, represented by Fortuna and her wheel, “the light wheel of blind luck,” even if this engagement does not usually end well for the subject. The uncanny property of this Machiavellian discourse, the first discourse of the political in the sense I understand it here, is that it cannot resist the temptation to produce doubles. Rather than engage in debates on secularization, modernity, or progress, one might simply read the discourse of the political—impossible to pin down to or simply to pin on difficult figures such as Schmitt or Heidegger—as the same sort of uncanny object that Goethe presents in the child Felix, also a modern birth product with an allegorical Baroque name. This doubling could of course be understood as allegory and my task in the foregoing chapters as a political allegorization of the literature of the Goethezeit. If so, this allegorization runs counter to the foundation of the symbol in proper intuition or reflection, as Kant understands it in §59 of the Critique of Judgment, an idea that still depends on a proper moral intuition in reflection of the similarity between political and non-political notions: the absolutist state as machine, the liberal state as organism. Whether the symbol–allegory distinction is productive of organic units—another of the Goethezeit’s attempts at moral–aesthetic reconciliation—or critically useful in undermining that reconciliation and showing what it elides, it makes a distinction that might now be fruitlessly divisive. The patent duplication of the form of the political does not double an abstraction with a concrete reality, but reproduces the same form, splitting drama, narrative, and theory in an internal doubling that is not just that of reflection. As with the division at the top of Goethe’s Tower Society, this split is not symbolically reconciled but embodied in a birth object of uncertain parentage. The uncanny nature of this object is the product not of a genetically traceable hybridity or even a grafting, but the outcome of its non-unitary origin. The literary works that present such an object in terms of genealogy, parentage, or birth exemplify this double origin in so far as they maintain a double agenda: Lessing’s histories of the evental, indexical trace and the legible, natural trait; Goethe’s domestic, maternal, and public, paternal lyric poetry; the split in Wilhelm’s socialization between knowledge and error, totalization and representation, or its personification in Jarno and the Abbé; even Schlegel’s little ironies that cannot quite manage to reflect an ironic totality—the fantastic versus pre-established harmony; and the doubling of myth that seems to guarantee its power and self-reproducing capacity, precisely in its lack of an autopoietic organic unity in Kleist’s version of

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 271 maternity. In this concluding chapter, I read this doubling in the work of Kleist as exemplifying the split at the foundation and heart of society that post-foundational political thought calls “the political.” As with Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in which the split at the top constituted a sort of natal apparatus that produced Wilhelm’s acceptance of Felix, the maieutic moment comes in the question of how this reproduction works: how does a fixed, yet non-identical, non-reflective, and non-complementary doubling produce any sort of offspring? One answer is that older forms, genres, and world views become infertile with the advent of Enlightenment. The meaning necessary for reproduction is produced now internally, by the genius, and not with reference to external guidelines and laws, or in the imitation of nature as an explicit aesthetic rulebook. Bernhard J. Dotzler reads the difference from the Baroque as the failure of older modes of self-description, which demonstrate the absence of self-directed control (observing oneself acting, adaptive behavior) in the sense of cybernetics.6 If there is indeed a historical difference between the “trivial machines” of the Baroque and the figures of autonomy and autopoiesis circa 1800, however, it is not in self-reproduction of the same but in the reference to an outside as a space of contingency that impinges upon the constitution of the autonomous subject, a cybernetic analogy to Machiavellian fortuna. The answer to the Entzug of sovereignty and of the political into this space will only be the establishment of an institution that both captures and maintains contingency. Amphitryon sets up Penthesilea by thematizing the doubling that produces the crisis of sovereign representation and the binding of the subject to the signs of its identity. This doubling was already present in the uncanny mirrorings and delayed re-presentations of the self in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, where the source of moral and social authority and personal identity was constitutively split and thereby uncertain. If Goethe resolves this at least temporarily and at the level of Wilhelm’s always false self-assurance in the appearance of a single child with an allegorical name, Kleist needs not just one, but one, two, three, and then “a whole series” of children to indicate the institutionalization of the political self. This institutionalization, I claim, reflects the Machiavellian foundation of the political in a paradoxically necessary contingency that acknowledges and preserves both its temporal contingency—it could be or occur otherwise—and its irrefragability, that the 6 Dotzler, Papiermaschinen, 79–82. Dotzler’s parallel of changes in computing technologies and the development of literary representation is an important foil here. These exclusively technological readings, based on the re-entry of a simple distinction within which information then proliferates, ignore the constitutive split of the political, even as Niklas Luhmann accentuates it.

272  Figures of Natality political cannot be reduced to other discourses or standards, whether philosophical or ethical.7 This irrefragability and necessary contingency can also be explained in the systems-theoretical terms of autopoiesis, but it is a different autopoiesis than the reproduction of the same in reflection and empathetic identification (the Romantic solution), or even the production of a system based on a single distinction and the processing of all inputs in terms of the outputs of that distinction. In the context of Max Weber’s sociological theory, which raises questions and envisions ills to which natality is a threatening answer and a potentially toxic remedy, the question of politics and political legitimacy is not a ritual of transfer of power but the distribution of charisma in an apparatus. Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory is based on a similar division into autopoietic systems that reproduce only their own distinctions: credit and debit for economics, for instance. In this context, politics is only one among many systems. It would run counter to Luhmann’s systems theory to assert that politics is somehow a metasystem that can regulate other systems, and the bottom line of Vogl’s reading of Romantic economics in terms of a basically apolitical solution perhaps reflects the frustration of not being able simply to promote politics to the place of pride in this “polytheistic” welter of systems. For Carl Schmitt, however, it remains inconceivable that the political is simply a function of society as one system among many, first because of the fundamental existential import of political decisions, for which he invokes the natal figure of an irruption of vitality. It would be tempting here to focus on the sovereign, represented as the crowned head or the colorful procession of successions, coups, translationes imperii and “dying voices” that, as in Hamlet—“the succession lights on Fortinbras; he has my dying voice” (Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2)—legitimize the kind of inheritance that falls inscrutably to Wilhelm in his unexpected kingdom. However, as William Rasch points out for the sociology of the political in later modern times, “there are no coronations here, for this modern form of ‘sovereignty’ cannot be represented; it can only be reproduced as a distinction, as the ‘threat of the differend,’ inasmuch as each system reproduces its own autonomy.”8 This is to say that the political is itself the condition of pluralistic differentiation, the conception of society as contingently founded and non-total, the competition or antagonism of systems that are themselves irreconcilable with one another. Rather than a metasystem that organizes the others, the political is divided in itself, organized, 7 Marchart sets out the elements of this kind of contingency with reference to Pocock and Luhmann. See Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 25–31. 8 Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents, 45. My summary of Luhmann here follows Rasch’s discussion in Sovereignty, 38-46.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 273 according to Niklas Luhmann, not around the unity of a single distinction, but as a system with a split summit. There is no location at which there would be some other unity capable of subsuming conflict, only local units that refer for their antagonistic co-existence to the principle according to which society is composed of multiple systems and polity is constituted by both a structural and temporal difference: the alternation or possibility of alternation of how it is governed. Unlike the systems of economics or morality, then, politics (here, in Luhmann’s understanding, the operations of government) only has this distinction; it is governed by no superior rationality that would convey a transcendent notion of proper order (as in Leo Strauss, for instance), much less by one borrowed from economics, morality, or aesthetics. The present of democracy, in which government and opposition co-exist and refer to each other, is only made possible by the future in which their alternation is possible.9 As Luhmann also points out, simply governing “in the name of the people” does not suppose the existence of an opposition, much less a peaceful transition of government. Chantal Mouffe sees this as the conflict of liberalism and democracy. If the former presupposes a modern world view in which certainty is not available as a guide for politics, but instead pluralism, liberty, and the separation of political and metaphysical questions obtain, the latter is based on twin standards of popular sovereignty and equality, which by no means suppose the institutional framework and cannot produce the a priori freedoms and distinctions of the former.10 Accounts of the tension between the two necessarily involve contests for power. For Mouffe, the fact of pluralism underscores the axiom that society as such is plural and that “no social agent should be able to claim any mastery of

9 Niklas Luhmann, “The Future of Democracy,” trans. David Roberts, Thesis Eleven, 26.1 (1990), 46–53; Luhmann, “Die Zukunft der Demokratie,” Soziologische Aufklärung, Vol. 4, 4th edn (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009), 131–8. This may seem to be an impoverished view of political life, and it fulfills only the minimal criterion of the political, insofar as conflict is contained in institutions, ritualized, and temporally displaced in democratic procedures. The larger view of challenges articulated by social movements rather than parties is left by Luhmann as an open question: Does political sociology not suppose the internal formalization and closure of a political class, and does the procedural reduction to elections and so on not exclude the thorny questions surrounding particular policy issues and the intersection of other systems (science producing atomic weapons, for instance)? The institutional achievement of co-existence of opposition and government and the potential for change raise enough questions; however, Luhmann is only too willing to concede the difficulty of a formal capturing of these other issues. 10 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), 2.

274  Figures of Natality the foundation of society”11—implicitly, not even the liberal ironist who knowingly tolerates illiberal particularisms from a higher standpoint. That Kleist splits and particularizes this foundation itself is evident enough in his making the world “gebrechlich,” frail. In the work of Kleist, automation does not create pure self-reference but refers the self-referential entity (Prince Friedrich, Achilles, Käthchen, Penthesilea) to moments in which the outside world appears not as a source of meaning but of existential peril. The self-referential and autopoietic process, however precisely defined, still shares with the moral tautologies of the Baroque its exposure to an outside from which, because of the tightness of its own self-referential operations, it cannot master all risks. As Niklas Luhmann points out, such machines are fragile constructs. Greater systematic closure means greater propensity to fail in a “nontrivial machine, structurally determined by its own output and therefore unreliable.”12 Walter Benjamin’s political automaton, “which takes religion into its service,” also cannot master those risks and runs the intellectual risk of political superstition, the ideological fixation on an axiom that no longer serves its purpose, if it ever did; this is what Max Weber calls Gesinnungsethik, an ethic of convictions.13 However, as I have also argued above, political theology provides a means of indexing the incompleteness of the cybernetic model, both epistemologically and existentially. The union of the theological figure of the third and the historical index with the discourse of birth and the new underscores how underdetermined or even radically chancy the birth process is. The uncanny object to which this process gives birth undermines guarantees of success even as it makes action possible. This model of natality that emerges in the age of Goethe finds a provisionally summative bundling of its attributes in Kleist’s work. Kleist models this autopoiesis of the split summit in the recurrence of the curious figures of the Kleistian physical universe: the summit of the oak, the arch that stands because its parts want to fall, the “frail institution of the world,” and so on, but it emerges in Penthesilea in a rewriting of the summit as a dangerous place that cannot help but be split by the moment of lightning, contingency, that is, the moment of the political. 11 Ibid., 21. 12 Niklas Luhmann, “The Paradox of Observing Systems,” Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. William Rasch (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 84. Luhmann uses the cybernetic terminology of Heinz von Förster here. 13 Benjamin, GS 1:693. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” in Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 1:17, eds Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter with Birgitt Morgenbrod (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1984).

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 275

Penthesilea: A Parable of the Political?

Kleist’s Penthesilea concludes with a parabolic moral similar to that of Lohenstein’s Cleopatra, a lesson on sovereignty delivered in a similar tone. The Amazon queen Penthesilea, her name and provenance an echo of exotic kindred in the Orientalizing dramas of the Baroque, also annihilates herself, but with a “vernichtendes Gefühl” (annihilating feeling) that she fashions into a mental dagger from the ore she mines in her Gemüt (mind, or mood).14 This is however only the denouement, not the spectacular climax in which she devours her enemy and would-be lover, Achilles, and reeling, drops the bow that, as the Amazons observe aloud, “[…] taumelt— Klirrt, und wankt, und fällt—! / Und noch einmal am Boden zuckt—und stirbt, / wie er der Tanaïs geboren ward.”15 (“[…] totters— Clangs and sways and drops—! / And shudders one more time upon the ground— And dies, as it was born to Queen Tanaïs.”)16 The paradoxical union of life and death in the Greek name of the bow, bios, is temporalized here as a moment of foundation and, at first glance, of the undoing of the Amazon state. I began this study of figures of natality with this moment of birth, which is paradoxical at least by analogy to the origin of the Amazon state. Natality expresses the paradox of such origins as an intervention from the new that can transform institutions. That Penthesilea’s dropping the bow and even her second and final collapse do not end the Amazon state has not escaped critics. Nonetheless, a recurring figure in criticism is the polarity between a transgressive act that points to a different order entirely and the evolutionary development of the Amazon state as more humane.17 The opposition of a progressive and transgressive mentality assumes that a state must either fade away or improve; other options seem excluded. However, Penthesilea’s act of excess allows for the refoundation of the state just as the voice of the state’s enemies, in the mouth of one of the Amazons and spoken just 14 Kleist, SWB, 2:256. 15 Ibid., 2:245. See the Introduction, above, for more on this passage. 16 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Joel Agee, 133–4. 17 This is how Gérard Raulet sets up the contrast. He favors the first option, by which Penthesilea is responsible for indicating a new order in view of which the Amazon state must fail (“zugrundegehen”) even as he sees the play is foregrounding the “opaque point of the political” in the interaction of subject and society or emotion and the state. I find the opposition falsely tragic and also predictable, as it defines the political in a Hegelian clash of interests between the individual and the collective that leads to sublation or removal, not the preservation of the political in the institution created for that purpose. Raulet, “Der opake Punkt des Politischen,” in Penthesileas Versprechen: Exemplarische Studien über die literarische Referenz, edited by Rüdiger Campe (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2008), 374.

276  Figures of Natality at the moment at which the High Priestess hands Tanaïs the “great, golden bow,” provoked the original act of Tanaïs’s removing her breast: “Den Spott der Männer werd’ er reizen nur, / Ein Staat, wie der, und gleich dem ersten Anfall des Nachbarvolks erliegen: / Weil doch die Kraft des Bogens nimmermehr / Von schwachen Frau’n beengt durch volle Brüste, / Leicht, wie von Männern, sich regieren würde.” (That kind of state would only provoke the mockery of men and fall to the first attack of a neighboring people, since the power of the bow would never be governed by weak women limited by full breasts as easily as it would be by men.)18 In response, after a pause to this challenge to government, regieren, Tanaïs cuts off one of her breasts, drops the bow, and the state is formed in the act and the memory of the act of institution. As Rüdiger Campe points out, the symbolism of this act of institution sullies the purity of the state’s self-founding as giving, obeying, and defending its own laws.19 Third parties and instances external to this self-generation account for the enigmas of foundation in Penthesilea. Even the denouement, Penthesilea’s killing herself with an imaginary dagger, is accounted for as foundational not by Penthesilea’s autological function but by its symbolic recovery in observation, as her adjutant Prothoe and the High Priestess provide a dual commentary on her demise: Hohe Priesterin: Ach wie gebrechlich ist der Mensch, ihr Götter! Wie stolz, die hier geknickt liegt, noch vor kurzem Hoch, auf des Lebens Gipfeln, rauschte sie! Prothoe: Sie sank, weil sie zu stolz und kräftig blühte! Die abgestorbene Eiche steht im Sturm, Doch die gesunde stürzt er schmetternd nieder, Weil er in ihre Krone greifen kann.20 High Priestess: Oh gods! How fragile is this humankind! How proudly she, who now lies snapped, stood rooted High on the peaks of life just hours ago! Prothoe: Because she flowered with too much pride and spirit, She fell. The dead oak stands against the storm, The healthy one he topples with a crash Because his grasp can reach into its crown.21 18 Kleist, SWB, 2:215. 19 Rüdiger Campe, “Zweierlei Gesetz in Kleists Penthesilea: Naturrecht und Biopolitik,” in Penthesileas Versprechen: Exemplarische Studien über die literarische Referenz (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2006), 330–1. 20 Kleist, SWB, 2:256. 21 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Joel Agee, 148.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 277 In her madness as well, Penthesilea seems like the sovereign described by Walter Benjamin. Allying herself with her dogs in devouring Achilles, she seems to fit the model of “the acme of the creature,” the Gipfel (also: summit, peak, apogee) that is cast down by the storm of fate. But it is not a matter of trees versus rhizomes, nor quite one of humanity versus a becoming-animal22—the step which the High Priestess and Prothoe here identify with that very same arborescent vitality and the attributes “stolz,” “hoch,” “kräftig,” and “gesund” that are punished as pride. Instead, the conflict here is neither between the peaks of pride and the valleys of humility nor between high and low at all, but between the living and the dead. “Sie sank, weil sie zu stolz und kräftig blühte.” Blühen, blooming, that is, Penthesilea’s vitality (especially in love, in which her blushing suits her fixation on a single, named lover) is the first explanation for her fall, the general principle of which is given in the next lines. The conclusion of the play is startling because it seems to counsel death rather than life, death instead of humility, and, paradoxically, death as a means of survival. Blühen, Leben, and rauschen are associated with being frail and then broken (gebrechlich, geknickt). The broken, split summits here are of life, “des Lebens Gipfeln,” and the survivors are implicitly represented by the dead organism, “die abgestorbene Eiche,” which nonetheless “stands,” and is therefore higher in the end than the living one, “topple[d] with a crash.” Death, not dying (sterben) but being dead, abgestorben, is a means of avoiding the punishment meted out to the proudly vital. If one chooses this option, one becomes unreachable or ungraspable by the storm, the gods, or the Furies; one also becomes, it is implied, somehow less than human, since the vital humanity, “der Mensch,” that occupies the summit is exposed to an inevitable humiliation. It seems that the valedictory speakers at the conclusion of the play have made such a choice and are therefore entitled to announce this moral lesson. This sovereign is no volcano but a cannibal. Penthesilea as the summit of creatureliness indeed experiences Raserei, wildness out of control, and abjects herself correspondingly, but this transgression is understood in classical, i.e., tragic terms as pride, i.e., as hybris, superbia, going beyond or going too high, up to “the summits of life”. There are then two inviting ways to read this passage as the moral of a tragedy. One is that the summit of life, where the fragile human being is wont to transport him- or herself, is precisely where this human being does not belong. Or perhaps, on another reading, the lesson is that the summit itself, along with its occupant, is apt to be levelled by the storm. This is an anodyne conclusion to a tale about pride and a fall, or several 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 268.

278  Figures of Natality falls. Even if one overlooks the fact that falling and recuperation are serialized movements in the play’s physics, this predictable rising and falling motion is powered here by a paradox: the oak that has died off survives, while the one full of vital energy dies. However, this juxtaposition of the summit with life signals a semantic transformation along the lines of the evocation of life as a standard and a constant in the immanent vitalism to which I referred in Chapter 3: a life without death that somehow manages to claim totality while distinguishing opposites, obstacles, even enemies within that vital whole. This internal distinction takes the same form as the discourse of neoliberal economics—it’s all economic, and what’s not gets absorbed by economics—or of the moralization of the human: all those humans who are enemies of humanity, hostes generis humani (internal enemies of the Menschengeschlecht, one might say), are in- or sub-human.23 A general ontology of a single and undivided substance strives for its own perfection, whether this substance is energy, money, the flesh, or immanence itself. (“Immanence” must be some substance in order not to be an abstraction, but therein lies its problem, perhaps, since, as Deleuze and Guattari have it, it also has enemies.) The very consistency of reflective identity and its attachment to vital passion are its undoing. In this sense, the result is a splitting that is anticipated already in Prothoe’s exhorting Penthesilea to resist defeat: Stand, stand as does the vaulted arch stand firm Because each of its blocks inclines to fall! Present your head, the keystone, to the gods And all their gathered lightning, and cry: Strike! And let yourself be split from head to toe, But do not waver in yourself again So long as one breath still has power to bind The stones and mortar in its youthful breast.24 The temporal irony behind this exhortation is that Penthesilea indeed stands fast and, like the oak, is hit by the storm. However, not she is split—she sinks back into herself and comes to a sublime end as her 23 For the development of Schmitt’s concept of the political in this regard, see William Rasch, “A Just War, or Just a War?,” in Sovereignty and Its Discontents, 49–63. 24 Kleist, Penthesilea, trans. Joel Agee, 62. Note especially in the first and second lines of the original, “wie das Gewölbe steht, / Weil seiner Blöcke jeder stürzen will!” Kleist, SWB, 2:191. This passage repeats once more Kleist’s well-known physical observation that the arch stands because its blocks want to fall.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 279 Gemüt is her own undoing—but the Amazon state. The controversial institution of queenship falters on Otrere’s transgression in naming not the tribe or people but a personal foe for Penthesilea, but it was divided from the start in the first fall of the bow, in the debate between the High Priestess (of that earlier time) and Tanaïs over whether women were not indeed too weak to wield it. The bloody act of gender splitting, severing one breast for a man-like functionality, produces the event of birth that Penthesilea will repeat. This foundation of the state in division—of the now political body that makes the friend– enemy distinction and institutes a novus ordo saeclorum, a new order of world-ages, saeculum—creates a suprapersonal medium in which any message communicated becomes or is read as a political one, regardless of intention, consciousness, or inherent meaning: “as much as we enact the political, we are enacted by the political.”25 One might then say that Kleist establishes the conditions of hermeneutic possibility for the foregoing chapters of my study, which began with the fall of the bow. Emblematic for the foundational and re-foundational power of this splitting is the dual nature of the valediction offered by Prothoe and the High Priestess. The words of the anonymous “First Amazon,” “Second Amazon,” and so on as a figure of the people already produce the foundation moment in the singular event and prop of the falling bow. The two commentators ratify this foundation no longer in the debate that marked its origin—priestly or military government—but in making observation of the same founding act double, splitting the summit of the state between them.26 Understanding this splitting in the tragic drama as political implies that it gets beyond the pitfalls of identity that Kleist demonstrates in Amphitryon, but also that it produces a permanent, institutional figure in which the political difference can be preserved. The self-fixation of Penthesilea and her attempt to produce an identity beyond traits or Züge (no matter how few or how many) undermines this process, but it is also the vehicle for producing the political difference beyond the consistency of the law or the integrity of the sovereign persona, in so far as it can be taken up again in tragic failure as a paradoxical public act not of destruction but of institution.

25 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Theory, 175. 26 Ulrich Port notes that this conclusion does not exactly resist the sublime affects associated with tragedy and that Penthesilea is perhaps more conventional in this respect than many recent critics think. He emphasizes the difference between the High Priestess’s reading and Prothoe’s, seeing them as competing captions for the same image, and finds a classic case of affect here. See Ulrich Port, “‘In unbegriffner Leidenschaft empört’? Zur Diskursivierung der tragischen Affekte in Kleists Penthesilea,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2002): 94–108.

280  Figures of Natality

Pitfalls of Identity

Penthesilea is not simply a luminous heroine living out her single determination; she is also, still alive, the plaything of imperatives including receiving the name of Achilles from her mother in a transgressive personalization of the law (according to which the queen announced the name of the other people from whom the men would be culled), and seeming to live out the exhortations of her adjutant Prothoe to stand fast and—at the same time—to want to fall. This is not just a physical paradox that works; it is also a moral one that, after its inevitable collapse, has to be reintegrated into the political. In Kant’s philosophy, promising is the central moment of the integral, ethical self. Only the ability to make and keep a promise guarantees the consistency of the moral law, for which the subject’s identity stands in. The promise is the prime example of a personal act that reflects a universal law. It is also crucial for Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the self-constitution of the public subject, as the metaphorical bond of the “two-in-one” is preserved, at least in one facet of her version of action. Arendt still insists that the promise and the contract are essential to the narratability of the subject and therefore to public life. However, promises are for Arendt only contingent acts, “isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty,” and the faculty of promising is not to be “misused to cover the whole ground of the future and to map out a path secured in all directions”; if it is so misused, then promises “lose their binding power and the whole enterprise becomes self-defeating.”27 For Arendt, this is not a universalizable maxim, but only the creation of a consistent public persona attached to a particular yet public will. In Kant, this consistency refuses all finite and particular feelings and inclinations (Neigung) in favor of absolute duty, “the necessity of an act out of respect [Achtung] for the law.”28 Unlike Spinoza, who identifies the philosopher with transcendent divine love, above the negative affects of human desire and aversion, Kant provides, as Jacques Lacan reads it, “a specification of the moral law which […] is nothing other than desire in its pure state, the very one that ends in the sacrifice […] of all that is the object of love in its human tenderness—[…] not just the rejection of the pathological object, but indeed its sacrifice and murder.”29 Kleist’s Penthesilea is largely an illustration of this point, in terms not of the surrender of

27 Arendt, The Human Condition, 244 28 Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe, Vol. 7, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 26 29 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Vol. 11: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 305–6. My translation.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 281 contingent attachments, but of the medium of the moral law itself, the universalizable act of promising. Penthesilea is fatally true to her own desire and captive not to the law of others, but to the logic of her identity. Like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Kleist’s Penthesilea presents the moment of being dutybound to one’s own word in terms of a network of words beginning in ver-. Penthesilea’s explanation for the act of killing and eating Achilles is that it is a “Versehen” (“oversight”) that has nothing to do with sight but with the acoustic and the tactile: “Küsse, Bisse, / Das reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt, / Kann schon das Eine für das Andre greifen.” “A kiss, a bite / The two should rhyme, for one who truly loves / With all her heart can easily mistake them.”30 Penthesilea explains her carnal appetites and deeds as a parapraxis or slip of the tongue, a Versprecher: “Ich habe mich, bei Diana, bloß versprochen, / Weil ich der raschen Lippe Herr nicht bin.” “By Artemis, my tongue pronounced one word / For sheer unbridled haste to say another.”31 The speech act is however perfectly consistent, precisely because it introduces the counterintuitive moment of language, ratifying the Versehen with a Versprecher. Her explanation then turns to a third aspect of this unintentional speech act, the notion that her acting out the figurative expression of a lover, “sie lieb’ ihn, o so sehr, / Daß sie vor Liebe gleich ihn essen könnte,” “I love you oh so much, / That if I could, I’d eat you up right here” is not a figure of speech, the literal version of which one should abstain from—“so verfuhr ich nicht” (I didn’t proceed that way)32—but an imperative, the fulfillment of which, precisely because it is not paradoxical, means that, in her words, “ich war nicht so verrückt, als es wohl schien” (I was not quite so made as it might have seemed)33: versehen, versprechen, verfahren— verrückt. The transition between interiority and language trumps appearance in favor of an empowered command in another parodic version of Kant’s imperative, according to which nothing should keep us from fulfilling a Versprechen. Anything else would clearly be madness. Wolf Kittler maps this de-differentiation onto the moment of collapse in the play, as the annulment of metaphorical relations of meaning and a fall back into the “pre-linguistic hell that Melanie Klein described.” He continues: “Identificatorily absolute love and blind hate are the effects […]. There are […] no positive laws any

30 Kleist, SWB, 2:254. Kleist, Penthesilea, 145. 31 Ibid. 32 Kleist, SWB, 2:254. Translation modified from Kleist, Penthesilea, 146. 33 Ibid., 2:254–55. Kleist, Penthesilea, 146. (Agee writes, “as it seems.”)

282  Figures of Natality more, but only total love and its obverse, total war.”34 On several similar readings, Kleist’s play can be seen as fitting into a generalized model of collapse, following from the referential confusion induced by mixed orders of metaphor. Deconstructive readings of Penthesilea emphasize the metaphorical dimension of the text, but, beholden as they are to the play of rhetoric and referentiality, and as marked by the idea that language is always already collapsing around this instability, they take collapse for granted as a law of language and not as a particular operation among others reflecting transformations and creativity rather than a built-in mechanism for falling. For example, Carol Jacobs’s de Manian reading gives literary language a political impetus only in the dismantling of the myths and illusions underlying political institutions based on the instability of metaphors of love and war as “a language that disintegrates the order of metaphor and literality”35 and of Penthesilea as “the unnameable embodiment of metaphor and literality.”36 Interesting here is that the one metaphorical register (love) or the other (war) must be made into a register of literality prior to the deconstruction of that distinction in order to sustain the binary, whereas it might also seem that both are metaphorical terms for opposite (positive/negative) states of relationship to another or an Other as part of the referential system of the play, that which is represented or reported as action. Michel Chaouli proposes that the semantics of the play performs a literalization of metaphor which, at the same time, preserves metaphor in so far as it maintains the paradox of writing and representing disgust as that which challenges the verbal, representational, and figural character of writing and naming, ergo of metaphor, itself, in a “desire … precisely for a word.”37 This chain of metaphorical substitutions grazes the literal register of language in confusing names and referents in Penthesilea’s actual hunting and eating of her quarry, Achilles. This indicates an important feature of the play: not the word as name, i.e., not as semiotic marker of the referent, applied to something naturally or arbitrarily, but as sound. Desire is created, expressed, and borne along inexorably not just by metaphorical substitutions or literal reference, but by the sound of language. Marianne Schuller understands this as psychosis. Penthesilea lives in a world of fantasy unbound by 34 Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geiste der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1987), 204; my translation. 35 Carol Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 106. 36 Ibid., 101. 37 Michel Chaouli, “Devouring Metaphor: Taste and Disgust in Kleist’s Penthesilea.” German Quarterly, 69.2 (1996): 138–40.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 283 the Symbolic order instituted by the Oedipal ban. In this personal fantasmagoria lacking an Other or others, she is overwhelmed by the “semiotic-acoustic [klanglich]” dimension of language—a reference to Kristeva’s maternal chora and the Kleinian state to which Kittler refers—and so goes mad.38 If Penthesilea’s Versprecher is a parody of Kant’s insistence on subjective consistency in the medium of the promise—and perhaps an echo of Wilhelm’s “promise … , made with the mouth,” as Penthesilea has other uses for her mouth in this state—, more than a literalization is at stake here. It is a question of interiority as the failed vehicle of an identity that, in order to survive, has to join opposites in itself, a question of moral identity versus political difference. Kleist’s neutralization of conscience is for Christian Moser more Hobbesian than Machiavellian: an individual’s moral sense has no standing because it is always already part of a disciplinary system based on externalities such as police and military power over bodies.39 Katrin Pahl offers a conceptually similar reading, according to which feeling and materiality are inextricably alloyed, mixing or “re-layering” metaphor, material, and emotion40 and neutralizing the bourgeois cult of sentimental interiority in favor of the self as an “assemblage” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. This assemblage is not a network of external influences or discourses inscribed upon the subject, but a self-undoing and self-fashioning from available elements,41 a very voluntaristic-sounding subjection. This voluntaristic evocation of autopoiesis in reverse in fact intensifies the problem of identity by presenting a pure will freed of all empirical or external determinations and a fantasy unmarked by external signs, 38 Marianne Schuller, “Den ‘Übersichtigkeiten’ das Wort geredet. Oder: ‘Verrückte Rede’? Zu Kleists Penthesilea,” in Theorie-Geschlecht-Fiktion, eds Nathalie Amstutz and Martha Kuoni (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: Stroemfeld, 1994), 63. Schuller criticizes the argument of Chris Cullens and Dorothea von Mücke, according to which Penthesilea seeks in Achilles the big Other in person, that which would guarantee the consistency of her own personhood, desire, and identity. Achilles is on their reading, as in the play, a solar figure, and the sun is a god-like place in this topology of desire, one that would provide entry to the Symbolic. Cullens and von Mücke, “Love in Kleist’s Penthesilea and Käthchen von Heilbronn,” 467. 39 Christian Moser, Verfehlte Gefühle: Wissen-Begehren-Darstellen bei Kleist und Rousseau (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1993), 186. 40 Katrin Pahl, “Forging Feeling: Kleist’s Theatrical Theory of Re-layed Emotionality,” MLN 124 (2009), 680. Pahl’s account of Penthesilea’s demise follows Deleuze and Guattari closely. That both depend on willpower to steer affects, refers perhaps to the contradiction in taking ontology as normative (see Chapter 3 above): one must will things to be as they are and level the plane of immanence oneself. 41 Ibid., 681–2.

284  Figures of Natality traces of accident or determination. Here, these would be the features or Züge that are markers of identity. To Achilles’s question of how his own soul will recognize to whom it belongs, Penthesilea gives Jupiter’s answer: “so nenne diese Züge …” (“name [your soul] these features …”) as tokens of love. However, these are inadequate and insecure: “[E]in Ring vermiss’t sich, Namen schwinden; / Wenn dir der Nam’ entschwänd, der Ring sich mißte: Fändst du mein Bild in dir wieder aus?” (“A ring is sometimes lost, a name forgotten. / If you forgot the name, or lost the ring: Would you still find my image in yourself?”)42 The privatization of such tokens (tokoi, acts or products of birth) and their disappearance in the collapse of appearance, language, and all the media of personal and political difference leads to what I think is Kleist’s central political question: If this immediate and intuitive, ontologically primary connection fades, how are both social order and its contingent foundation in the political to be conserved and represented? Penthesilea’s act of autopoiesis, critical though it may be of bourgeois sentimentality, evokes the constellation of Promethean fabrication as that of a voluntary and rebellious craft that fails precisely because of the intensity of its self-reference. The absence of all traces that create a relation leaves only a reflection of the Ich, now in grammatical form. Kleist’s text stages this subjective freedom as a Promethean moment of identity, in which Penthesilea’s Ich assumes the role of blacksmith: “For now I shall descend into my breast, / … and quarry out the cold / Ore of a feeling that annihilates. / This ore I purify in fire of grief / To hardest steel; in poison then … /… / Now carry it toward Hope’s eternal anvil, / And grind and sharpen it into a dagger; / And to this dagger now I yield my breast: So! So! So! So! Again! – Now it is done.”43 The Promethean moment seems to find a fitting conclusion here, in the labor of the craftswoman over the fire, a labor that, unlike the public birth of the tokens and signs of polity and conflict, is isolated, invisible, and only underscores the intensification of self-reference in the conflation of emotion and making, an infinite feeling that is never satisfied and never subject to the ambivalence of asking about the difference that marks Penthesilea on both sides: the personal loves and

42 Kleist, SWB, 2:210. Kleist, Penthesilea, 89. 43 Ibid., 148. “Denn jetzt steig’ ich in meinen Busen nieder / … und grabe … mir ein vernichtendes Gefühl hervor. / Dies Erz, dies läutre ich in der Glut des Jammers, / Hart mir zu Stahl; tränk es mit Gift sodann, / … / Trag es der Hoffnung ew’gem Amboß zu, / Und schärf und spitz es mir zu einem Dolch; Und diesem Dolch jetzt reich’ ich meine Brust; So! So! So! So! Und wieder!— nun ist’s gut.” Kleist, SWB, 2:256.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 285 inclinations of the luminous heroes versus Greek reason and Amazon political–theological institutionality. While Moser explicitly describes the politicization of the former space of morality, and Bettine Menke finds a clash between enunciation and embodiment in the “So! So! So! So! Und wieder!,” Katrin Pahl seems to see some degree of subjective freedom in these acts of making, even if, as in Penthesilea, the dagger is fashioned in order to undo the subject who fashions it.44 Anti-Promethean though this gesture may seem as an un-making, it remains in the same solipsistic frame of reference Arendt attributes to homo faber. After this act of self-destruction, which Deleuze and Guattari call “learning to undo things and to undo oneself,”45 the predicate of divine creation is pronounced: “nun ist’s gut.” Penthesilea cannot escape the self-intensification that has been her self-referential mark throughout the play. “Ich” is the subject, and “mir” (to/for me) the gratuitous object that only intensifies the verb, not a mark of relation to another. The focus on undoing oneself is not so much undoing things as it is taking the idea of the thing as metaphor or allegory here (“der Hoffnung ew’gem Amboß”; “hope’s eternal anvil”) into the self: the stone and mortar of the self as arch, or the steel of the self as its own craftsman in mortal self-making. In either case, the reduction of this fashioning to the feeling of identity in the tight circularity of affect in the “ich”–“mich”–“mir” replaces a paradox that works—the arch or the dead tree, for instance—with an identity, A=A, “ich bin ich,” that does not. What Amphitryon avoids in his externalization of relations to others (“dir,” not just “mir”), Penthesilea cannot. The nature of this abject immanence as political demand is evident in the discourse of Romantic economics. Whether it can be remedied by moderation or a prudent “care of the self,” the possibilities Foucault seems to advance (see Chapter 3 above), is another question. A moral or personal (not political) response seems to waver between ontological predicates of a medium—here, a question of what identity is, true or false, authentic or inauthentic, not how it is produced. Even so, the pitfall of identity is in either case one of consistency: moral or ontological union, not the division at the heart of the subject between private and public that requires a split into representation and action.

Co-optation and the Fate of Reason

Penthesilea questions her own motivations for fighting: “Denk ich bloß mich, sinds meine Wünsche bloß, / Die mich zurück aufs Feld der Schlachten rufen? / Ist es das Volk, ists das Verderben nicht, / Das 44 Bettine Menke, “Die Intertextualität, die Darstellung, und die Formen der Passion,” in Penthesileas Versprechen, 250. 45 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 400; qtd Pahl, “Forging,” 682.

286  Figures of Natality in des Siegs wahnsinniger Berauschung, / Hörbaren Flügelschlags, von fern ihm [dem Volk] naht?” “Am I so selfish, is it my desires / Alone that call me back into the field, / And not my people, not that sound I hear / Through the mad clamor of delirious triumph, / The far-off wingbeats of disaster nearing?”46 The conflict here is between Penthesilea’s own infatuation and the fortuna-like Verderben (ruination, perdition) that approaches the political unit, the people. This internal difference in the Amazon state implies two kinds of self-reproduction: the personal versus the political. While Rüdiger Campe sees this as an “institutional” love on Penthesilea’s part, one that allows the collective and the individual to co-exist simultaneously, “institutional” is here not an outcome of the dynamic that actually defines co-existence, but only a product of Penthesilea’s confusion of one with the other, a reading that ignores the presence of the Amazons. When, later, an Amazon girl reports that Achilles shines as if the earth were “ein dunkler Grund nur, eine Folie, die Funkelpracht des Einzigen zu heben” “a ground, a dusky foil, / To set off this lone jewel’s magnificence”, the High Priestess puts the question more trenchantly and politically: “Was geht dem Volke der Pelide an?” “Of what concern’s the Peleid to our people?”47 Later, the High Priestess orders that Penthesilea be contained in a similar fashion to that which Antilochus and Diomedes propose for Achilles in the previous scene (21), in which Odysseus says once more, “Laßt uns ihn knebeln, binden” “Let’s tie him, gag him!”: “Schafft Stricke her, […] / Reißt sie zu Boden nieder! Bindet sie!” “[… Q]uickly with a rope, … lay out a snare … pull the rope tight … bind her!)48 This order responds to Penthesilea’s anger as directed against her own people and the high priestess, who has to lose herself in the mass of the people in order to escape Penthesilea: “verloren war ich, / Wenn ich im Haufen nicht des Volks verschwand” “I would have been destroyed / Had I not taken refuge in the crowd”.49 The Amazons are more sophisticated than the Greeks in approaching this situation because they replace reason (Vernunft) with the people (das Volk). After failed attempts, they obtain not a tactical edge but permanent institutional change, which is also accomplished through descriptions of Penthesilea’s states of unconsciousness and powerlessness, descriptions of which the play is made. Kleist’s critique of heroism and its fate here goes beyond Adorno and Horkheimer’s noting the co-optation of the hero for the nationstate and implicitly for the Enlightenment, represented in Penthesilea as 46 47 48 49

Kleist, SWB, 2:167–68. Kleist, Penthesilea, 33. Kleist, SWB, 2:180. Kleist, Penthesilea, 46. Kleist SWB, 2:238. Kleist, Penthesilea, 122, 124. Kleist, SWB, 2:237. Kleist, Penthesilea, 123.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 287 in The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Odysseus, as “the intertwinement of history and prehistory,” reflected in “[t]he anger of the mythical son of a goddess against the rational army-king and organizer; the hero’s undisciplined activity; finally the enlistment [Erfassung] of the victorious, doomed hero in a cause which is national, Hellenic, and no longer an allegiance mediated by mythic loyalty to his dead comrade.”50 In Penthesilea, not Achilles and the Greeks but Penthesilea and the Amazons become the embodiment of a new instititution, not one produced not by reason, the same sort of Enlightened reason that led to Penthesilea’s collapse in the first place, and not one created—pace Arendt—by the memory of Achilles’s or another’s great deeds. The presentation of the hero as the solar and luminous Einziger against the dark backdrop of the people recalls Amphitryon in the king’s remaining standing as the people abase themselves “in dust,” but it also anticipates Walter Benjamin’s description of the hero and his unique or sole trait, einziger Zug, as “the character trait” is “the sun of the individual in the colorless (anonymous) sky of the human being, which casts the shadow of the comedy.”51 However, while the political might, like comedy, be beyond guilt and law, and while natality breaks with the determinism of bare life in its appearance, the public sphere is constituted here by the shadows cast by Penthesilea and Achilles as objects of observation for the Amazons. Where the Greeks had the violence of Reason, the Amazons have a sort of bureaucracy independent of the sovereign, which challenges her authority and finally takes over the role of judge as well, deciding on the semiotics of physical and gestural objects. These descriptions or attributions of meaning exploit the openings offered by another undecidable point: not the ambivalence of Reason or violence, but that of the individual or the people, the State or the leader. In other words, for the Amazons at least, the matter of binding, Binden, of the runaway heroes becomes a matter of birthing, Entbinden, of a bouncing baby bow in the refoundation of the state. This dynamic of reinstitutionalization saves Penthesilea’s collapse into a desiring machine through an act of observation “beyond good and evil,” the basis of the political since Machiavelli. This means that the theme of Penthesilea is 50 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 37–8. Translation slightly modified based on Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), 53. The “cause” here is in the original “die Not”: the need or even emergency, the military crisis before Troy in the war that produced “ancient Greece” in the first place, not just loyalty to a cause. Deleuze and Guattari seem to take up this vein of critique in A Thousand Plateaus, 355. 51 Benjamin, GS, 2.1:178.

288  Figures of Natality not deterritorialization but reterritorialization or reinstitutionalization. Weak institutionality is in this case like the dead oak, which persists in spite of its apparent frailty. It is a matter of what Kleist describes in an earlier version of the tree image, in which strong resistance leads to downfall: “nicht weil sie keinen sondern weil sie starken Widerstand leistet” (not because it offers no resistance but because it offers strong resistance).52

Territory and Medium: Another Kind of Parable

The figure of the split summit and the idea of social antagonism that is both real and axiological or formal are hardly new notions, even though poststructural theoretical innovations have developed models that both describe the postmodern condition and produce an awareness of its descriptive limits, a self-awareness of the instrumentarium that includes the idea that there is something it does not include. The eighteenth century introduces innovations in which public opinion becomes a central factor in politics, replacing the standard of correct opinion or orthodoxy for those who governed, and politics becomes an unstable system buffeted by the other systems of a functionally differentiated society. For Luhmann, democracy is an imprecise term “on account of its inner impossibility: as the illusory component of all future constitutions, as concept of the future,” one not realized in the present. It is neither the rule of the people by itself, nor is it the “teledemobureau­ cratization” of participatory democracy.53 This leads to the well-known paradoxes of how this entity, “the people,” polices itself, a paradox for which Rousseau had the answer in civic religion, a set of values transcending the particular desires of the general will.54 Kleist’s account of affectivity as Gemüt in figures such as Penthesilea is useful for the conception of nomadology, a “minor science” of loosely organized groups (nomads) that carry on the conflict I referred to above in the context of Romantic economics: the struggle of the plane of immanence, as all there is, against those parts of itself that insist on maintaining vertical, striated, territorial structures within that immanence. Kleist presents an occasion to return to that figure of the world as immanent globe, but his own language does not yield as readily to the sort of immanentization that the nomads want. Both of these moments are produced not by paradox, but by the short circuit of taking affect and materiality as supports of the identity 52 Letter to Adolfine von Werdeck, July 29, 1801. Kleist, SWB, 4:256. 53 Luhmann, “Democracy,” 47. 54 See Steven Howe, Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Violence, Identity, Nation (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012).

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 289 of the moral decision maker. This moralization of materiality happens as well in the parable that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari construct around Penthesilea, defining the oppositions they read in the play by seeing one term as good and the other as morally or politically negative. Following the work of Deleuze’s student Mathieu Carrière, they also claim Penthesilea—and all of Kleist’s work—as an exemplary model of a war machine opposed to the “State apparatus,” against which Kleist’s war machine, incarnated in Penthesilea, has “lost from the start.” They characterize what Kleist repeatedly calls a Staat as a stateless group; the Amazons are “a stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode.”55 The triumph of the Greeks signifies the triumph of the State over the Amazon’s nomadic war machine and therefore, consistently with the model of representation versus immanence, of the model of the modern State, based as it is on a doubling in language, over the models of immanent unfolding of social units in the triumph of immanent economic and archival forms over the “catachretic prosopopeia” of sovereignty.56 It never occurs in this discourse that war might not be the preferable or more authentic form of being, and that states might, as even in Schmitt’s theory of the political, serve to dam, hedge, or limit war in favor of more civil forms of interaction—without of course ever being able to eliminate conflict.57 This parabolic reading of Penthesilea has the same problems I pointed out in the conflation of the factual and the normative in Chapter 3 above, as the Amazons represent what is immanent materiality against the fictions of public and political life: the whole that rebels against its parts. If Kleist’s themes can be taken in such a way, then one might attend to the fact that the Amazon polity is repeatedly called a “state” and has the same political–theological institutions— the cult of the divine patron, priestly authority, the army that serves an institutional, historical, and cultic aim—and also simply that the Amazons are not defeated by the Greeks, at least not in the sense of being destroyed. That Penthesilea hunted Achilles, shooting him 55 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 355. 56 See again Dotzler, Papiermaschinen, and Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft. 57 The alternative, of course, is that this discourse is itself simply metaphorical, in which case the moral genius as Lessing’s fable-reader or the judge of ideas in reflection of the Critique of Judgment §59, would have to adjudicate exactly what the “becoming-woman of Achilles,” the “becoming-dog of Penthesilea,” and the “becoming-bear” of Kleist himself mean. In the end, the opposition of rhizomes to trees, nomads to the state, and so on, seems to call for such a judgment in reflection in the name of something of universal scope, free even of the particular objects that emanate from Kristeva’s semiotic chora, with their function of securing the relationship to the pre-symbolic mother.

290  Figures of Natality through the neck before eating him, also indicates that the Greeks are at least not in complete control of the field, a field the Amazons would have left anyway as “nomadic” warriors—or at least itinerant ones. A defeat for the Amazons means returning without prisoners to their home, Themiscyra, and this seems to be the case. Yet the Amazon state still stands; it has not been vanquished by the Greek model. The final words of the play are spoken by the High Priestess and Prothoe, and they reflect a situation in which the Amazons are able to refound their state in the same gestural economy as that which produced it in the first place. Perhaps the nature of this state should be considered as tending in the other direction, not toward inevitable deterritorializations (which seems to be the guarantee of its moral-political-ontological superiority), but always toward maintaining a territory. Carrière treats this tension in terms of the “weak institutional milieu” of the Amazon state, which only barely resists dissolution.58 The state is still weak, labile, and insufficiently codified (or coded, also in the sense of systems theory: the different codes such as family, religion, etc., that make up the social fabric). Against it, the nomadic war machine, the threat on the edges of Amazon war-making, religion, and ritual, is a kind of “pre-phallic sexuality in which nothing is conceived [gezeugt] but desire itself.”59 Desire in its pure state is then the birth product, the utopian object to be desired, but, as with Romantic economics, this libidinal economy supposes that it has enemies, Oedipal bars on enjoyment that must be eliminated, in a militarization of the Kleinian, pre-linguistic political theology (at least in Kristeva’s version) that leads to “total love and its obverse [Kehrseite], total war.”60 The oxymoron of the survival of the dead tree, or the union of Küsse and Bisse, make sense at this level, not as opposites, but as reversals of value, positive or negative, that express an equivalent proposition. Indeed, this is also the relationship between Kittler’s reading and Carrière’s, as both approaches attribute the same programmatic point to Kleist, but expressed differently according to whether each critic affirms or denies its moral value.

Retreating and Re-tracing Myth

Like the “innovative social theories” opposed by Melville’s Captain Vere “because they seemed for him incapable of embodiment in

58 Mathieu Carrière, Kleist: Für eine Literatur des Krieges (Berlin: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1981), 86, 93. 59 Ibid., 91–2; my translation. 60 Kittler, Geburt, 204.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 291 lasting institutions,”61 the constantly accelerating tool of making and unmaking on the plane of immanence is the concept. It brooks no delay and knows no obstacles.62 To this concept, one might oppose the memory of the autopoietic system, most evident in the repetition of the birth of the bow and its fall, the natal death of the old and its beginning again in that description not by the leader but by the people. This re-description reflects the condition of natality as a maieutics of the political, linking the form of description to its social and political origin in the Volk as the observer of sovereign representations: in order to be seen as new, the event must be seen, unlike the sublime dagger, the “annihilating feeling” with which Penthesilea kills herself. As Arendt points out, for the feeling of empathy in fraternity, whether in the French Revolution or in the language of the human family, affect is both subtle and infinite, hardly suitable even for that institution that would allow it to be represented publicly, a condition only given in Penthesilea because of the presence of the chorus of Amazons, the High Priestess, and Prothoe. Their descriptions recode the new in terms of the known and mark a forward movement that reflects the inertia of the past. While marking a break, this movement requires no ethics of caesura,63 a minding of moral gaps or (as Brett Levinson puts it) mulling over the aporia.64 Not total war but “contingent violence,” the basis of a different version of state formation and structure, is the founding moment of the polis, in the fortuitous facticity of the storm or the occasio, the moment of opportunity. In the context of Kleist’s letters, Christian Moser points to an implicit critique of the desire for a rational universe, contrasted with Kleist’s stress on the local and the immediate. Kleist’s conversion of the physical laws of gravity (the arch that stands because each block wants to fall) into a self-generating and regulating moral universe is not an identity or a seamless translation, only an outcome of this external force.65 Kleist’s Allerneuester Erziehungsplan, which produces effects from intuitively opposed methods, would then be a case of a “fundamental anthropological principle of agonism [Agonalität]” referring, in the examples of Kleist’s narrator, to the moments of foundation both of Britain’s Botany Bay penal colony and of Rome, where a “space

61 Herman Melville, Billy Budd [Ch. 7]; qtd Arendt, On Revolution, 79. 62 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 21. 63 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative.” Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 208–35. 64 Levinson, Market and Thought, 157. 65 Christian Moser, “Angewandte Kontingenz: Fallgeschichten bei Kleist und Montaigne,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2000): 3–32.

292  Figures of Natality free of law” allowed for the survival and growth of the city’s institutions.66 That this is still an act of foundation or institution that balances otherwise conflicting effects demonstrates both the contingency of the political and its capacity for structural permanence with a difference in emphasis from Arendt’s version of revolution, but with the same fundamental observation: institution is not something spontaneously produced by revolutionary virtue. Laws must at some point be given or have been given, and the narratives of these foundations constitute the genre in which the political can be thought. A description of the state itself or of the political community in terms of vertical and horizontal structures, machine or organic metaphors, or its spatial distribution does not capture this autopoietic moment, as even Schmitt’s image of the sovereign who is like God both inside and outside creation (or like Kleist’s Jupiter, who is Spinoza’s deus sive natura, but can both appear within it and withdraw himself from it) depends on a spatial paradox. Other readings of Kleist in these terms emphasize spatiality, but, here in Penthesilea, the vehicle of space is time, and the element that is timed—as it falls one-two-three—is the bow. Like the prop in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, which can be the representation of an affect but also belongs to the “profane world of things,” not to the sublime character of the classic drama,67 the bow is the ontic component that does not so much represent as perform the political. Both living and dead, it re-treats itself, withdrawing and reinscribing itself in producing and reproducing the state because it, not the protagonist, has “a fate in itself, to which the courtier as its augurer is the first to subordinate himself.”68 This is the fate of the birth objects in the preceding chapters, no matter what their respective forms: poems, coins, children, bows, traits, and other nasty spots. They represent, refer to, or indicate the incompletion of the social, the biological, the familial, and even of the mythological, as its doubling still requires this trace in order to maintain its cruel intimacy with the subject, whether this is the polis or the citizen. In Kleist, this process recapitulates the development of the figure of birth as one of political natality circa 1800. The foregoing chapters treated this development in terms of questions of trauma, guilt, and debt, on the negative side, and the emergence of a different kind of subjectivity, on the positive side. The early Romantic version of doubling as reflection in the production of poetic and political 66 Christian Moser, “Recht als Krieg. Moderne Staatlichkeit und die Aporien legalistischer Herrschaft bei Heinrich von Kleist,” in Kleist and Modernity, eds Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2011), 71–92. 67 Benjamin, GS, 1:311–12. 68 Ibid., 1:333.

Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics 293 offspring confronted the reference to a third term as determining its fate only in a contingent future (in the case of Goethe’s lyric genre) or through the production of an uncanny birth product beyond genealogy. These two strands came themselves from Lessing’s doubling of legible genealogy with a traumatic history of violence, placing the political community of friendship alongside a compact version of the human family and seeming to suggest that association is more compelling and more legible when it bridges the medial gap between the one and the other. Like Arendt’s two-in-one, Lessing seemed to perform, in spite of his larger program, the institution of family and friendship as a split entity, divided between two kinds of sign: the index of past violence and the natural sign of biological relationship. I claimed in introducing this study that this implied a bifurcated maieutics of the political, divided between the spontaneity of the concept and its legibility in terms of existing structures, semantics, and figures, as what Oliver Marchart calls “the moment of the political, when society is confronted with its own absent grounds and the necessity to institute contingent grounds.”69 Penthesilea demonstrates how this bifurcated maieutics functions as a defective birth-science of objects and tokens of the political. These tokoi, offspring, decomplete social, epistemological, and economic totality. They found and disrupt the less-than-total institutions through which the natal objects are sheltered and made legible in their natality. In the Modernist discourse from which emerges Heidegger’s distinction between the ontological, the realm proper to Being and its event or advent, and the ontic, the realm of Seiendes, of particular things that are, this institution has to do with a relation to Being. In the deconstructive mode of postHeideggerian philosophy, this relation is one of infinite difference and deferral, but one that still holds Being to be a standard—increasingly, an ethical and not an ontological one—by which particulars can be evaluated. After examining the evolution of this distinction in post-foundational political thought, Oliver Marchart concludes that a content-free emphasis on difference as an ontological factor (in Heidegger’s sense) is a “philosophism” that parallels the “ethicism” of the intense focus on the subject’s position and attitude. Pure difference is not a basis for political difference, as political difference is a specific field, a “regional ontology” that none the less underscores the impossibility of a central, all-governing, general ontology and emphasizes the political character of this assertion, promoting itself into the status of a first philosophy (prima philosophia), “an intervention from the ontic side of politics into the depoliticized field of philosophy.”70 “Difference 69 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 174. 70 Ibid., 170–1.

294  Figures of Natality will have to work itself out on a particular ontic terrain, and therefore will always be less than ‘pure’ difference.”71 Difference cannot exist or work without particular ontic markers; it is not a divine factor, as a fleeting and illegible natality would be, but only appears ontically or semiotically within structures and institutions whose performative foundation and “frail” existence alone give those signs meaning. If economics threatens to be an empty traffic in tokens without determination, chreˉmata divorced from human use or need, biology threatens to go in the opposite direction, as a supposedly inexorable cycle of reproduction of which we have only to become mindful. As I have argued throughout, one can read this bifurcated maieutics in the literature of the age of Goethe if one takes the concept of natality as it originates for Hannah Arendt in the inscrutable and irrefragable nature of divine creation and culminates in the hope for the public realm and the concept of worldliness that refers not to material or biological immanance but to the frailty of human affairs. This fragile worldliness is evident in Goethe’s maieutics of poetic vocation, as well as in his narrative pedagogy of birth and nature, in the model of community that subtends and undermines Lessing’s enlightened optimism, and in Kleist’s Machiavellian women, who develop canny strategies for dealing with uncanny contingencies. Through the figure of natality and the forms that underlie the political, the age of Goethe treats the medium of literary signs, narratives, figures, and themes as capable of presenting the tension between action, representation, and polity, finding lasting forms to represent the new.

71 Ibid., 171.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W. 162, 192 n.41, 286–7 Arendt, Hannah 5–16, 19–20, 23–6, 27 n.78, 28–52, 55–6, 58, 61–8, 93–9, 101, 106, 109–10, 122–7, 139, 149–50, 155–6, 163, 167–8, 177, 183, 208, 211, 216, 221, 226–7, 231, 233–4, 239, 242, 245, 263, 280, 285, 287, 291–4 Aristotle 9 n.21, 79 n.59, 167, 170 Augustine of Hippo (Saint) 6–7, 6 n.17, 19, 28–9, 32, 54, 63, 67, 106, 123–4, 140, 256 n.86 autopoiesis 3, 14–19, 51, 71, 78, 80–5, 148, 153–8, 154 n.17, 157 n.27, 169, 172–3, 188, 200, 207, 212, 212 n.87, 256, 271–4, 283–4 Bataille, Georges 21–2, 96 Beiser, Frederick 63 n.25, 108 n.13, 110, 111 n.19 Benhabib, Seyla 39, 39 n.113, 40 Benjamin, Walter 16–19, 16 n.50, 22, 28, 42, 45–6, 48, 86–7 n.76, 97 n.104, 107–8, 112, 140–3, 154, 175, 231, 261–3, 267, 274, 277, 287, 292 birth product 41–2, 79, 89, 178, 185, 195, 207, 222, 231, 239, 255, 257–9, 261, 266, 270, 290, 293

Brown, Wendy, 113–18, 127–9, 261, 263 Butler, Judith, 41, 193 Carrière, Mathieu 4 n.8, 289–90 Cavarero, Adriana 237–9, 264–5 chora 50, 86 n.75, 226–7, 238, 261, 283, 289 n.57 Cixous, Hélène (and Catherine Clément) 227 Cooper, Anthony Ashley see Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 3 n.6, 4 n.8, 43, 159–60, 159 n.36, 173–4, 174 n.90, 277–8, 283, 283 n.40, 285, 286 n.50, 289–91 Derrida, Jacques 3 n.7, 60 n.19 on hauntology 150–2, 223 on the supplement 185, 193, 198 Descartes, René 34, 54, 93, 208, 214, 216 Dotzler, Bernhard 50, 180, 188, 271, 271 n.6, 289 n.56 epigenesis 8, 13–19, 15 n.45, 37–9, 37 n.107, 42, 49, 54, 62, 68, 80–2, 93, 143, 150, 155, 168, 177, 181–2, 205 father, fatherhood, paternal 40–1,

308 Index 50, 59–66, 71–4, 84–5, 86 n.75, 87–8, 96 n.103, 122 n.52, 129, 133–4, 178, 190–9, 201, 207–25, 233–6, 240–3, 259–60 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 38, 54, 81, 157, 166, 166 n.62, 180, 182, 203, 207, 212, 212 n.87, 214, 246, 248 Foucault, Michel 13–14, 16, 154, 159 n.33, 160, 170–1, 170 n.77, 180, 285 Freud, Sigmund 86, 108, 127–30, 138, 223, 225 n.1, 226, 255

Heraclitus 1, 3, 3 n.7, 46 Hölderlin, Friedrich 5–7, 56 n.9, 57 n.10, 89, 97–9, 97 n.105 homo faber 10–11, 18, 54–8, 62, 71, 74, 93–7, 101, 149, 163, 208, 216, 285 Horkheimer, Max 286–7

Girard, René 74, 86 n.75, 98 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 11 n.34, 17, 38, 42, 45, 47–51, 109 n.15, 119 n.46, 145, 169, 233, 250, 259, 259 n.94 lyric poetry of 47–8, 52–5, 58–94, 97, 99, 101, 108, 144 n.108, 238, 266, 293 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 49–50, 89, 108, 149, 151, 162–4, 168, 173, 176–224, 234–5, 245, 270–1, 281 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari

Jacobi, Friedrich H. 62–3, 108–10, 109 n.15, 115, 118, 139–41 Jay, Martin 11 n.35, 30, 30 n.85

Habermas, Jürgen 30 n.86, 101 n.114, 113, 113 n.33, 121 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich von 4 n.10, 15, 36, 42, 60, 156–7, 157 n.27, 165, 242, 275 n.17 Oldest Systematic Program … (attributed to) 174–5 Heidegger, Martin 11 n.35, 18, 25, 42, 46, 48–9, 55–8, 66, 89, 92, 94–5, 97–101, 126 n.65, 139–40, 140 n.99, 142–3, 147, 148 n.2, 150, 167 n.65, 188, 190 n.34, 214, 270, 293

index, indexicality (semiotics) 43, 48, 105, 107, 126, 135, 137–43, 222, 227–8, 231, 236, 245 n.55, 252–4, 252 n.78, 253 n.79, 260–2, 270, 274, 293

Kant, Immanuel 14–15, 18, 30, 32, 34, 36–7, 37 n.107, 54, 63, 89, 93–5, 107–8, 112 n.25, 113, 116, 139, 142, 148, 154 n.15, 157, 157 n.25, 171, 186, 196, 210, 212, 212 n.87, 216, 222, 226, 248, 270, 280–1, 283 Kittler, Friedrich 195 n.45 Kittler, Wolf 245 n.55, 246, 281, 283, 290 Kleist, Heinrich von 1–4, 9, 25, 29, 34–5, 37, 41–2, 45–6, 50–1, 66, 67 n.37, 104 nn.3–4, 223–4, 227–67, 270–94, 275 n.17, 278 n.24, 279 n.26 Kristeva, Julia 41, 50, 86 n.75, 226–7, 230, 236, 261, 283, 289 n.57, 290 Lacan, Jacques 4 n.8, 27 n.78, 96 n.103, 226, 243 n.50, 253–4, 280 Laclau, Ernesto 27, 27 n.78 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 4 n.10, 57–8, 57–8 n.11, 66, 93, 96, 99

Index 309 and Jean-Luc Nancy 48, 69, 69 n.43, 70, 80 n.60, 86–7 n.76, 96, 96 n.103, 100–1, 177, 214, 221, 259 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 5, 41–2, 48–9, 49 n.134, 51, 63, 66, 95, 95 n.100, 102–45, 194, 200–1, 213, 218, 222, 228, 233, 242, 243 n.50, 245, 250, 259, 268–70, 289 n.57, 293–4 Lezra, Jacques 237 n.34, 265 Luhmann, Niklas 19, 24, 31, 38, 39 n.117, 51, 80, 82, 91, 132 n.82, 148, 154 n.17, 158, 162 n.47, 175, 192, 195, 200, 200 n.57, 215 n.97, 229, 271 n.6, 272–3, 272 n.7, 273 n.9, 274, 288 Machiavelli, Niccolò 26, 29, 48, 50–1, 122, 211, 228–31, 236, 238–9, 262, 268–71, 287, 294 maieutics 32–4, 40, 42, 45, 48–9, 52, 58, 68, 71, 75–6, 87–9, 92, 94, 106, 122, 130, 140, 145, 149, 153, 157, 166–71, 195, 218, 263, 291–4 definition of 33, 33 n.91 Mallarmé, Stéphane 88–90 Man, Paul de 56 n.9, 95, 98, 168, 194, 218, 282 Marchart, Oliver 25–7, 26 n.75, 39, 46, 114, 126 n.65, 139, 142, 231, 267 n.112, 272 n.7, 293 mother, motherhood, maternal 9, 12, 29, 40–1, 41 n.121, 44, 47, 50, 58, 61, 64, 67–8, 71, 73, 75 n.51, 76–7, 85–7, 86 n.75, 90–1, 99, 129, 133–4, 185, 187 n.27, 192–3, 207, 211–12, 216–17, 225–39, 241, 244, 256, 259, 261, 265–7, 270–1, 280, 283, 289 n.57 Mouffe, Chantal 27 n.78, 114–15, 273–4

Müller, Adam 147, 160–2, 169 n.74, 172, 177 Müller-Sievers, Helmut 14–17, 37–9, 38 n.111, 42, 81 n.63, 130, 150, 205, 206 n.72, 212 n.87, 217 n.100, 238 Nagel, Thomas 165, 259 Nancy, Jean-Luc 11 n.35, 265 n.112 and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe 48, 69, 69 n.43, 70, 80 n.60, 86–7 n.76, 96, 96 n.103, 100–1, 177, 214, 221, 259 natality 4–32 definition of in Arendt 5–7 and notes 34–7, 40, 43–55, 66–8, 71–3, 94, 101–2, 105–10, 124, 139–41, 143–5, 148–9, 177–9, 182, 193, 201, 207, 211, 213, 216, 222–3, 225–30, 232, 236–7, 252 n.78, 272, 274–5, 287, 291–4 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) 147, 155–6, 155 n.21, 162, 171 n.82, 174, 181–3, 182 n.12, 186, 211, 238 O’Byrne, Anne 9–11, 11 n.35, 36, 232 paternity see father, fatherhood, paternal Peirce, Charles Sanders 138, 142, 218 see also indexicality Plato, Platonism 3 n.7, 18, 32–4, 40, 58, 87, 92, 94, 96, 133, 142 n.102, 167–8, 170–1, 177, 202, 202 n.61, 226, 238–9 Pocock, J. G. A. 229–30, 237, 272 n.7 preformation 14–17, 16 n.48, 19, 22, 37 n.107, 39, 42, 48, 80, 130, 143, 182, 205 pregnancy see mother, motherhood, maternal

310 Index Rasch, William 30 n.86, 174 n.90, 272, 278 n.23 Redfield, Marc 95 n.100, 176, 178, 198, 201, 214, 221 n.110 Reemstma, Jan Phillip 106, 125–6, 131, 136 Rorty, Richard 114–17, 138 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 54, 60, 64–5, 65–6 n.34, 120, 184–5, 187, 193, 249 n.68, 288 Ryle, Gilbert 172 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 15, 89, 156–8 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 175 Schlegel, Friedrich 8, 13, 25, 43, 49, 58, 66, 68–70, 81, 145–7, 149 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 156, 165, 172–3, 216, 259 Schmitt, Carl 19–26, 28, 30 n.85, 43–5, 50, 57, 96, 105, 109–10, 117, 152, 155 n.21, 156, 162, 169, 173, 228, 244, 251, 268, 270, 272, 278 n.23, 289, 292 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 63–4 Shakespeare, William 54, 175 Hamlet 175, 194, 219–20, 223, 268, 272 Shklovsky, Viktor 20 Smith, Adam 154, 166–7, 261 sovereignty 2–3, 19–25, 27, 30, 44–5, 95–6, 101, 106, 110, 120–2, 120 n.48, 124–6, 134,

138–9, 143–5, 147, 154–5, 155 n.21, 158–62, 161 n.43, 174–5, 178, 181, 186, 220–4, 228, 237–8, 243–5, 249–54, 260–1, 264–5, 268, 271–9, 287–92 Spinoza, Baruch 45, 62, 108–14, 109 n.15, 119 n.46, 120–2, 128, 133, 139, 142, 149, 153, 156–7, 160, 163, 165–6, 172–4, 179, 185–90, 202–3, 233 n.24, 238, 255, 256 n.86, 280, 292 Todorov, Tzvetan 217 n.100 Villa, Dana R. 30, 30 n.85, 66, 94–101, 97 n.104, 101 n.114 Vogl, Joseph 49, 151–60, 165–7, 167–8 n.68, 170–1, 180, 188, 272 Weber, Max 19–20, 22, 24, 28 n.79, 43–5, 70, 73, 73 n.48, 85–6, 110 n.19, 172, 272, 274 Wellbery, David 43–4, 59 n.14, 60, 62, 68–70, 69 n.43, 74 n.50, 75–7, 81 n.63, 86 n.75, 89–93, 92 n.90, 131–4, 144 n.108, 194, 212 Yeats, William Butler 19–20, 22 Žižek, Slavoj 43 n.126, 148 n.3, 157 n.27, 237