1. Wahr ist die Erkenntnistheorie, insofern sie der Unmöglichkeit des eigenen Ansatzes Rechnung trägt und in jedem ihrer Schritte von dem Ungenügen der Sache selbst sich treiben läßt. Unwahr aber ist sie durch die Prätention, es sei gelungen ...
2. Jean-François Lyotard, “Ob man ohne Körper denken kann,” in Materialität der Kommunikation, ed. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 813–29.
3. All translations from German into English are my own unless noted otherwise.
4. English translation: Walter Benjamin, The Orig in of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 30.
5. In the following, I will not explicitly distinguish between the various scholarly classifications for high literary modernism around 1900, such as “fin de siècle,” “Aestheticism,” “neo-Romanticism,” and “decadence.” In fact, I believe such classifications are both superfluous and misleading. Friedrich Gundolf, for example, regards Hofmannsthal as an “Aestheticist,” whereas Peter Szondi classifies him as the “anti-Aesthete” he believed himself to be. Käte Hamburger believes it necessary to defend the “neo-Romanticist” Rilke from the accusation of being an “Expressionist,” while Müller-Seidel emphatically argues to finally get rid of the term “Neu-Romantik” altogether: “Es ist ein gänzlich irreführender Begriff, ein Begriffsgespenst und nichts anderes!” See Walter Müller-Seidel, “Epochenver-wandtschaft. Zum Verhältnis von Moderne und Romantik im deutschen Sprachgebiet,” in Geschichtlichkeit und Aktualität. Studien zur Literatur seit der Romantik, ed. Klaus-Detlev Müller et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 370–92: 390. Unlike Müller-Seidel, I believe none of the other terms to be any better; this is why I simply use “Aestheticism” or “literary modernism” throughout this book. I want to emphasize, however, that the rejection of such labels is not to deny aesthetic differences between various authors around 1900, but to claim that one can analyze them without recourse to the confusing disarray of academic categories.
6. Cf. Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). For a comprehensive critique of Bürger’s approach, see Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–48. Murphy criticizes Bürger’s approach for failing to acknowledge the indispensability and continued relevance of aesthetic autonomy, even for the avant-garde movement.
7. Andreas Huyssen, “Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 16–43.
8. There is a tension in Jameson’s later work regarding this point. On the one hand, his own analysis of postmodernist culture clearly resists the antihermeneutic and nontheoretical discourse of its object and instead advocates a continued critique of late capitalism, while, on the other hand, Jameson seems to accept the loss of critical distance as inevitable (Postmodernism 48) since the “status of art (and also of culture) has had to be irrevocably modified in order to secure the new productivities” in late capitalism, meaning that “it cannot be changed back at will” (Postmodernism 318).
9. Cf. Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
10. For a detailed description of the first edition, see Stefan George. Bilder und Bücher aus dem Nachlass.
11. See also Heidegger, “Der Weg zur Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache, 243.
12. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. Leslie Norris and Alan Keele (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993), 55.
13. Similar passages can be found in “Das Kleine Welttheater,” vol. 1 of Gesammelte Werke, 373, 382–83.
14. Cf. Benjamin, “Motive,” vol. 1/2 of Gesammelte Schriften, 646–47; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 106; Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 340–400; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 134–35.
15. Hans-Georg Gadamer, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Werke, 250; qtd. in Kai Hammermeister, Hans Georg Gadamer (München: Beck, 1999), 117.
1. “Ich denke manchmal, es fehlt uns nicht an gelehrter Prosa, sondern an gelehrter Poesie.” Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts, ed. Peter Gente et al. (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 2000), 5.
2. Given the long and intricate development of photography and animated pictures, the origin of film proper seems irretrievably lost, or rather: has never existed to begin with. Due to personal preferences, scholars have referred to different historical events or particular moments as the “birth” of motion pictures. See Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique and Ideology,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 421–43. For a detailed description of cinema’s historic predecessors, see Georges Sadoul, vol. 1 of Histoire Générale du Cinéma (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1948).
3. Cf. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (1989): 31–45; and Dai Vaughan, “Let There Be Lumière,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 63–67: 63. I have personally checked the daily newspaper Le Figaro for the time of the first Lumière showing, but could not find any remarks lending credibility to the anecdote of the frightened spectators. Besides, it should be remembered that Lumière’s premiere showed several less threatening films before L’arrivée d’un train, and this gave spectators sufficient time to adapt to the illusory power of the cinematic apparatus.
4. Kenneth S. Calhoon adds an interesting twist to this discussion as he relates Lumière’s film to a painting by Magritte entitled “La Durée poignardée,” which depicts a locomotive emerging from a fireplace into a living room (parlor). According to Calhoon, both “pictures” portray the threatening consequences of adequate representation (i.e., the demolition of the private interior through the invasion of dangerous images that became “real”), yet they simultaneously console the spectator by exposing such representation as illusory appearance—“a reminder that art never wanted the thing itself, only an imposter.” Kenneth S. Calhoon, “Screen Memories: The Shadow of Technology in Early German Cinema,” unpublished paper, presented at the Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Los Angeles, 1991.
5. See, for example, Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
6. Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futuristica, ed. Anton Giulio Bragaglia et al. (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1970); qtd. in Bernd Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare,” New German Critique 59 (Spring/Summer 1993): 54, note 29.
7. Cf. Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Photographie,” in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 21–39.
8. Cf. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. Commenting on the psychological effect of the train ride, Wolfgang Schivelbusch alludes to the new cinematic medium as the artistic correlative to this cultural experience: “He [the traveler] perceives objects, landscape etc. through the apparatus with which he is moving through the world.” The world outside was indeed converted into a tableau, a complex of “moving pictures” (Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey 61). See also Lynne Kirby, “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,” Camera Obscura 17 (1988): 113–14; and the collection of essays called Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
9. In 1914, Kurt Pinthus publishes Das Kinobuch, a collection of several movie scripts that, alas, were never to appear on celluloid. Pinthus’s own story is called “Die verrückte Lokomotive.” It describes a train ride gone amok and literally taking off into the air—an image reminiscent of the fatal accident at Gare Montparnasse. In 1935, Walter Benjamin implicitly mobilized the train metaphor by arguing that film had finally abolished the outdated and uncritical aesthetics of contemplation: “Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling” (Illuminations 236). A similar expression can be found in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which characterizes the relationship between the modern work of art and its spectator as follows: “The relation to art was not that of its physical devouring; on the contrary, the beholder disappeared into the material: this is even more so in modern works that shoot toward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a film” (Aesthetic Theory 13) (Das Verhältnis zur Kunst war keines von Einverleibung, sondern umgekehrt verschwand der Betrachter in der Sache; erst recht ist das der Fall in modernen Gebilden, die auf jenen zufahren wie zuweilen Lokomotiven im Film) (Ästhetische Theorie, 27).
10. See, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Mitchell argues that Lessing’s notion of a spatial versus a temporal art is misconceived since the hybridization between the arts is not a marginal practice, but rather at the very heart of art. Lessing’s whole distinction relies not on differences in kind, but in degree, and is thus indicative of certain political and ideological biases.
11. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 89.
12. For a comprehensive exploration of Descartes’s dilemma, see Margaret Atherton, “How to Write the History of Vision: Understanding the Relationship between Berkeley and Descartes,” in Sites of Vision, ed. David Levin, 139–65.
13. See also Helmholtz’s essay “The Origin and Meaning of Geometric Axioms (1),” in Selected Writings, 247–65, particularly 263–65, where Helmholtz treats this point at length.
14. Helmholtz, “Recent Progress in the Theory of Vision,” 218; “Origin,” 506f.
15. See Sigmund Freud, “Hemmung, Symptom, Angst,” vol. 14 of Gesammelte Werke, 111–205; “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” vol. 13 of Gesammelte Werke, 1–69.
16. Eberhard Bauer, “Spiritismus und Okkultismus,” in Okkultismus und Avantgarde, 60–80: 77–78.
17. Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 26–61.
18. Adorno was among the first and most clear-sighted critics of this historical juncture between magic and positivism. For him, the allurement of a Dionysian flow of life is but the ideological guise of a capitalist society that ultimately serves to legitimize the reified world of commodity fetishism, as he argues in a famous letter to Benjamin in 1938: “the theological motif to call things by their name has a tendency to reverse into the wide-eyed presentation of its mere facticity” (das theologische Motiv, die Dinge beim Namen zu nennen, schlägt tendenziell um in die staunende Darstellung der bloßen Faktizität) (Benjamin, vol. 1/3 of Gesammelte Schriften, 1096).
19. Lauster points to the sonnet as a poetic form whose genesis and historical use mirrors the struggle between stasis and mobility, space and time (288–311). In contrast to Lauster, who privileges the sonnet’s formal stasis over its dynamic content, Ryan reverses the perspective and emphasizes the latter over the former (55–65). The different views literally bespeak the inherent ambivalence of the sonnet form itself.
20. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, trans. Albert Ernest Flemming (New York: Methuen, 1986), 92.
21. Cf. Rilke’s “Marginalien zu Friedrich Nietzsche,” vol. 6 of Werke, 1163–77.
22. For a comprehensive critique of the ahistorical and ontological presumptions underlying theories of the cinematic apparatus, see Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993).
23. Many of the essays in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), speak to this issue. See also Noel Burch, Life to Those Shadows (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), who distinguishes what he calls “primitive modes of representation” before 1909 from the “institutional mode of representation” and its spectator-oriented approach that controlled cinema thereafter.
24. Cf. Walter Gebhard, Der Zusammenhang der Dinge. Weltgleichnis und Naturverklärung im Totatlitätsbewußtsein des 19. Jahrhunderts; Monika Fick, Sinnenwelt und Weltseele. Der psychophysische Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende.
25. The term is coined by Donald M. Lowe in his book History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
1. All quotes by Husserl refer to the following edition and are cited in the body of the text: Edmund Husserl, Husserliana. Gesammelte Werke, ed.H.L.van Breda (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1958–). I shall use the following abbreviations: LU for Logische Untersuchungen (2 vols. Husserliana XVIII and XIX); Idee for Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen (Husserliana II); Ideen for Ideen zu einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie (2 vols. Husserliana III and IV). All translations are my own unless noted otherwise. For a historical account of Husserl’s oeuvre, see J. N. Mohanty, “The Development of Husserl’s Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45–77.
2. This distinction, of course, was the focal point for Derrida’s critique of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, which, however, shall not be repeated here.
3. Cf. Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Brentano and Husserl on Intentional Objects and Perception,” in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science, ed.HubertL.Dreyfus (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982), 31–41.
4. Cf. Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference,” in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960). Almost the entire collection of essays in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982), points to this similarity.
5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (LaSalle: Open Court, 1986).
6. See Peter Simons, “Meaning and Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 106–37: 110. Similarly Dallas Willard, “Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 138–67.
7. Cf. LU II/1, § 14, 56f.
8. Cf. LU II/1, § 21, 77.
9. See also Ideen I/1, § 19, 43, and Ideen I/2, “Beilage,” 8, 534.
10. Dreyfus rightly claims that in the LU, “there is no mention of the intuitive sense,” for Husserl did not coin such a term. Yet Dreyfus is mistaken, I believe, in claiming that Husserl at that time had “no way of generalizing his conception of a non-spatial, non-temporal, universal, abstract sense to cover a concrete form which is inseparable from the sensuous content it organizes” (Dreyfus, 106), for that is exactly how Husserl defines the “object” (Gegenstand) of inner perception, which he claims is “physically” (leibhaft) given in the act that constitutes it. Of course this object is not “really” physical, but that terminological ambiguity is precisely the foundation on which Husserl later erects his eidetic principle. The Ideen, in other words, merely continue the prioritizing of mental reflection already latent in the LU.
11. See, for example, Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 1–44; 34–37 in particular; and Dallas Willard, “Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 138–67.
12. Harrison Hall, “Was Husserl a Realist or an Idealist?”; Herman Philipse, “Transcendental Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 239–322.
13. Most essays in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science discuss this question. See also Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 1–44.
14. Cf. Jaakko Hintikka, “The Phenomenological Dimension,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 78–105.
15. Cf. LU II/2, “Beilage,” 14, 586–88.
16. In the introduction to the second volume of the LU, for example, we read: “Die in der Wesensintuition direkt erfaßten Wesen und rein in den Wesen gründenden Zusammenhänge bringt sie [die reine Phänomenologie der Erlebnisse] deskriptiv in Wesensbegriffen und gesetzlichen Wesensaussagen zu reinem Ausdruck” (LU II/1: 6). In the Idee lectures from 1907, Husserl again asserts the possibility of “nestling” language against the clarity of vision: “[S]ie [Gegebenheiten] stehen anschaulich da, wir reden über sie nicht bloß in vager Andeutung, in leerer Meinung, wir schauen sie und sie schauend können wir ihr Wesen, ihre Konstitution, ihren immanenten Charakter herausschauen und unsere Rede in reiner Anmessung an die geschaute Fülle der Klarheit anschmiegen” (Idee 31). And again, in the Ideen from 1913: “Wir haben nicht philosophische Theorien aufgestellt, wir haben nicht von einem metaphysischen Standpunkt aus doziert, sondern selbstverständliche Folgen aus einigen prinzipiellen Feststellungen gezogen. Was diese aber anbelangt, so haben wir einfach beschrieben, was wir in der Intuition als direkt gegeben vorfanden, und haben es genau in dem Sinne beschrieben, in dem es sich gab, ohne jede interpretierende Hineindeutung, ohne Hinzuziehung von solchem, was uns durch gelehrte Traditionen, durch alte und neue Vorurteile zugemutet, statt eben am Gegeben selbst zu sehen war” (Ideen I/2, “Beilage,” 15, 560). Similarly Ideen I/1, § 18, 39.
17. It is obvious that Husserl’s concept of “hyle” as the unstructured matter of a sensation is problematic since such raw data, by definition, cannot be consciously registered as such, but is immediately interpreted and hence transformed into a meaningful form by the receiving consciousness. I shall not, however, pursue this issue any further in the context of my discussion.
18. Cf. Bell, 63.
19. For a comprehensive overview, see “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 1–44.
20. The following summary of Gurwitsch’s interpretation refers to his Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966) and his essay on “Husserl’s Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness,” in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982), 59–71.
21. Cf. Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Husserl’s Notion of Noema,” in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science, 73–80; and Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Husserl’s Perceptual Noema,” in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science, 97–123.
22. Cf. Dreyfus, 108–10.
23. Jaakko Hintikka convincingly argues this point in his essay “The Phenomenological Dimension,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, 78–105: 81.
24. Cf. Føllesdal, 74.
25. For a detailed discussion of Bergson’s influence on modern art such as fauvism, cubism, and futurism, see Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
26. Similarly CE, 328,343,344f.,357,361.Also Intro, 16, 18.
27. Bergson refers to “pure” rather than “real” perception because real perception always interacts with memory, that is, the history of previous perceptions preserved in the mind. Incoming sensations emanating from the object are being mixed with the memory of previous sensations to propel the body into action. “Together, these two currents make up, at their point of confluence, the perception that is distinct and recognized” (MM, 127f.). Although a key issue throughout Matter and Memory, this aspect is less relevant in the context of this study and will not be developed further.
28. Deleuze rightly points to a development in Bergson’s thought concerning the notion of space, which “seemed to him to be less and less reducible to a fiction separating us from this psychological reality” and rather “was itself grounded in being” (Bergsonism, 34). Unlike Deleuze, however, I want to argue that these qualifying shifts are symptomatic of a terminological uncertainty located at the very center of Bergson’s philosophy.
29. It is, of course, inaccurate to speak of “parts” in this context since Bergson is at pains to avoid any term suggestive of solid states of immobility, which, in his eyes, do not exist and are a construct of the human mind. As I will argue in this chapter, however, this ambiguous terminology is difficult to avoid since it lies at the heart of Bergson’s philosophy and haunts it from within.
30. Compare to Ernst Mach’s famous formulation: “Das Ich ist nicht zu retten.”
31. Georg Lukács’s work is exemplary in this regard as he ranks among the most severe critics of such philosophical “irrationalism,” which he sees leading straight Von Nietzsche zu Hitler (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1966). In the few pages Adorno dedicated to a critique of Bergson in his Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie published in 1956, a more balanced view of Bergson is palpable, for Adorno realizes the critical potential inherent in metaphysical intuition that indeed was directed against the very reification of thought to which it itself inadvertently fell victim: “In den Intuitionen besinnt sich die Ratio auf das, was sie vergaß. . . . Die Intuition ist kein einfacher Gegensatz zur Logik; sie gehört dieser an und mahnt sie zugleich an das Moment ihrer Unwahrheit. ... In der unwillkürlichen Erinnerung versucht wie immer auch vergeblich der willkürliche Gedanke etwas von dem zu heilen, was er gleichwohl verüben muß. Das hat Bergson verkannt. Indem er die Intuitionen für die unmittelbare Stimme jenes Lebens ausgab, das doch nur als vermitteltes noch lebt, hat er sie selber zum abstrakten Prinzip verdünnt, das rasch mit der abstrakten Welt sich befreundet, gegen die er es ersann” (53f.). The brilliancy of Adorno’s thought notwithstanding, his critique of Bergson not only culminates in the, for him, typical charge that those who seek to escape the restrictions of conceptual thought by (allegedly) avoiding it altogether end up perpetuating those same restrictions—a critique that strikes me as rather generic in essence, particularly since Adorno does not present a thorough textual analysis of Bergson’s works. Moreover, Bergson presents intuition not as the “voice” of life, but as the “image” of life, an important misperception on Adorno’s part that betrays his bias regarding the priority of language over vision, which will be elaborated upon further in the final chapter of this book.
32. Cf. MM, 56,100,102,104.In Creative Evolution, he cautions his readers “to not be fooled by a metaphor” (CE, 64) because many a scientific explanation “is merely verbal,” making us “again the dupes of words” (CE, 65), because practical life often “suggest[s] to us... a way of speaking that deceives us both as to what happens in things and as to what is present to our thought” (CE, 259). Words are “pseudo-ideas” (CE, 308) or mere “mirages of ideas” (Intro, 65) that mean nothing and are potentially dangerous as they give rise to misconceptions and false ideas of all kinds. Similarly CE, 20, 203, 233, 299, 305, 317.
33. In his later works, Bergson increasingly acknowledges the relationship between language and life as central to his entire enterprise: “Whether it be intellection or intuition, thought, of course, always utilizes language; and intuition, like all thought, finally becomes lodged in concepts” (Intro, 35). The true challenge hence consisted in questioning and ultimately overcoming language: “My investigation into the true philosophical method began the moment I threw overboard verbal solutions, having found in the inner life an important field of experiment,” concludes Bergson (Intro, 89f.). Once philosophy decides “to cast aside readymade ideas and to make contact with the thing” (Intro, 83), theoretical problems hitherto deemed insoluble will disappear without a trace since they were “unreal” to begin with and owed their existence merely to our tendency to substitute words for things, concepts for matter, models for life itself.
34. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, 58–60.
35. “If metaphysics is possible,” Bergson asserts, “it is through a vision and not through a dialectic” (Intro, 139). See also Deleuze, Bergsonism, 44.
36. “Poetry never substitutes one thing for another, because poetry strives feverishly to present the thing itself. . . .—So there are no comparisons? There are no symbols?—Oh no, there is rather nothing but that, nothing different” ([N]iemals setzt die Poesie eine Sache für eine andere, denn es ist gerade die Poesie, welche fieberhaft bestrebt ist, die Sache selbst zu setzen. . . .—Es gibt also keine Vergleiche? Es gibt keine Symbole?—Oh, vielmehr, es gibt nichts als das, nichts anderes) (“Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” in Erzählungen, 498f.).
37. At the end of one of his public lectures entitled “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” from 1906, Hofmannsthal acknowledges that the quasi-religious experience he advocates in the form of poetic language presupposes his listener’s belief in the existence and relevance of art: “I only address those who want to go with me, but not him who has promised himself to reject all of this. I can only speak for those who see that poetry is there. It is because of the existence of these people that poets are granted a life of their own” ([I]ch rede nur für die, die mit mir gehen wollen, und nicht für den, der sich sein Wort gegeben hat, dies alles von sich abzulehnen. Ich kann nur für die reden, für die Gedichtetes da ist. Die, durch deren Dasein die Dichter erst ein Leben bekommen) (“Dichter”; RA; GW I: 79).
38. The point is made explicit in his lecture on “Poesie und Leben,” where Hofmannsthal first demands the strict separation of art and life and then concludes: “You are surprised by what I say. You are disappointed and think that I drive life out of poetry.... But rest assured that I will give this life back to you” (Sie wundern sich über mich. Sie sind enttäuscht und finden, daß ich Ihnen das Leben aus der Poesie vertreibe.... Auch seien Sie unbesorgt: ich werde Ihnen das Leben wiedergeben) (“Poesie und Leben”; RA; GW I: 18f.).
39. See his public lecture from 1907 entitled “Vom Dichterischen Dasein” (RA; GW I: 82–87) in which he explicitly relates the time periods around 1800 and 1900 as poetic, while denouncing the nineteenth century as unpoetic.
40. See also “Nachlaß”; RA; GW III: 316, 400.
41. Jacques Derrida, Grammatologie, 30.
42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 544; qtd. in Edward Jones, Reading the Book of Nature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), 1.
1. “Narren, die den Verfall der Kritik beklagen. Denn deren Stunde ist längst abgelaufen. Die ‘Unbefangenheit,’ der ‘freie Blick’ sind Lüge...geworden.”Walter Benjamin, “Einbahnstraße,” vol. 4/1 of Gesammelte Schriften, 131.
2. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “A Farewell to Interpretation,” in Materialities of Communication, 389–402.
3. Cf. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 70–123.
4. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 52–57.
5. See, for example, G. B. Madison, “Gadamer/Derrida: The Hermeneutics of Irony and Power,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 192–98; and John D. Caputo, “Gadamer’s Closet Essentialism: A Derridian Critique,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 258–64.
6. Cf. Manfred Frank, Das Individuelle Allgemeine (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977).
7. Manfred Frank, Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare. Studien zur deutschfranzösischen Hermeneutik und Texttheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 20, 334, and throughout.
8. See Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, Schrift, 390, as well as “A Farewell to Interpretation,” 396.
9. Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik,” in vol. 5 of Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1964), 317–31: 331.
10. Cf. Gadamer, “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 119 and throughout. Similarly Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität—Reflexionen über Subjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anlaß ihrer ‘Postmodernen’ Toterklärung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). Individuality, in Frank’s view, describes a nonidentical, yet self-reflexive, mode of consciousness that is not the cause of its own being, but the locus of a “continuous transformation of different statuses pertaining to one person at a time.” Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp, eds., Individualität (München: Fink, 1988), 19.
11. Almost the same wording can be found in Jacques Derrida, for whom “[i]t deconstructs it-self.” Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 274.
12. See hisresponse in RT, 117.
13. In his recent book The End of the Poem, Giorgio Agamben appears among the most outspoken critics of the “deconstruction factory” he sees at work in literary criticism, which should not obscure the fact, however, that, in earlier years, he himself used to be on its board of directors, so to speak. More to the point, however, is the lack of a viable alternative evident in his critique as well. Charging deconstruction with a “theological foundation” that focuses on the “primacy of the signifier and the letter” in poetic works (77), he claims to detect the origins of modern European lyric poetry in twelfth-century poetry instead: “The razo, which lies at the foundation of poetry ...isthereforeneithera biographical nor a linguistic event. It is instead a zone of indifference, so to speak, between lived experience and what is poeticized [il poetato], an ‘experience of speech’ as an inexhaustible experience of love” (79). Although Agamben tries to flesh out this “zone of indifference” in several other essays, I fail to see how it differs from Heidegger’s notion of “aletheia” or unconcealment that strongly influenced French deconstruction.
14. See, for example, Hans Hauge, “De la Grammatologie und die literarische Wende,” in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, Schrift, 319–35.
15. Cf. Robert Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 43. For a more comprehensive and well-balanced critique of Kittler’s work in general, see the introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, xi–xli.
16. Clemens Heselhaus, “Das metaphorische Gedicht von Georg Trakl,” in Deutsche Lyrik der Moderne von Nietzsche bis Ivan Goll (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1961), 228–57; Walter Killy, Über Georg Trakl (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1967).
17. Cf. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970).
18. Cf. Louis Althusser, For Marx, 232. For a more comprehensive account of Althusser’s notion of ideology, see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparati: Notes towards an Investigation,” in Essays (London: Verso, 1984), 1–60.
19. Cf. Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, “Introduction,” xvi–xviii.
20. Cf. Wellbery, “Foreword,” 17ff.; David Wellbery, “The Exteriority of Writing,” Stanford Literature Review 9 (1): 11–24; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Interpreting vs. Understanding Systems,” Cardozo Law Review 13/5, special issue (March 1992): 1505–16.
21. Cf. Gumbrecht, In 1926, 411–20.
22. See Carsten Strathausen, “Althusser’s Mirror,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 24 (Winter 1994): 58–71.
23. For a comprehensive critique of Foucault’s epistemological dilemma, see Manfred Frank, Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare, 362–426.
24. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer Allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 7–15 in particular. For an excellent discussion of the broader implications of Luhmann’s work, see William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
25. Winthrop-Young and Wutz, “Introduction,” xxxvii.
26. Cf. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 110: “Was der Spruch des Parmenides ausspricht, ist eine Bestimmung des Wesens des Menschen aus dem Wesen des Seins selbst” (What Parmenides’ saying expresses is a determination of the human essence on the basis of the essence of Being itself ) (Introduction to Metaphysics 153); also Einführung in die Metaphysik, 130: “Das Menschsein bestimmt sich aus dem Bezug zum Seienden als solches im Ganzen. Das Menschenwesen zeigt sich hier als der Bezug, der dem Menschen erst das Sein eröffnet” (Being-human is determined by the relation to beings as such and as a whole. The human essence shows itself here as the relation that first opens up Being to humanity) (Introduction to Metaphysics 181).
27. Gianni Vattimo, “An-denken: Thinking and the Foundation,” in The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger, trans. Cyprian Blamires and Thomas Harrison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 110–35: 128.
28. This period concerns Heidegger’s thought after the publication of Sein und Zeit (1927), during which he increasingly shifted emphasis from the analysis of Dasein to that of “Being” proper and the “Seinsvergessenheit” of the modern age. On the notion of the turn in Heidegger’s philosophy, see James Risser, “Introduction,” in Heidegger toward the Turn, 1–16.
29. Cf. Terry Eagelton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 141; and Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 21ff.
30. For Adorno, Heidegger’s “Ursprungsphilosophie” is directly related to social domination and the rise of fascism: “Fascism sought to realize a first philosophy.... The identity of fascism and originality amounted to the notion that he who had the power should be not merely the first one, but also the original one” (Der Faschismus suchte die Ursprungsphilosophie zu verwirklichen.... Die Identität von Ursprünglichkeit und Herrschaft lief darauf hinaus, daß wer die Macht hat, nicht bloß der Erste, sondern auch der Ursprüngliche sein sollte) (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, 28). Similar comments are dispersed throughout Adorno’s work. For a comprehensive discussion of the topic, see Mörchen, 364–90.
31. This is Hermann Mörchen’s central thesis in his study on Adorno und Heidegger. Although Mörchen at times overstates the similarity between the two, he nonetheless provides ample and detailed evidence of Adorno’s often misguided critique of Heidegger’s work, particularly with regard to their shared views on language and the movement of philosophical thought. More recently, Rüdiger Safranski also comments on Adorno’s “dangerous philosophical affinity with the person he attacked,” Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil.
32. George Lukács, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler oder Der Irrationalismus und die Deutsche Politik. For a specific critique of Lukács, see Adorno’s essay “Erpreßte Versöhnung,” in Noten zur Literatur, GS 11: 251–80.
33. See Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995), 151–52 in particular, as well as Sabine Wilke and Heidi Schlipphacke, “Construction of a Gendered Subject: A Feminist Reading of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), 287–308.
34. See Richard Wolin, “Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity, 93–122.
1. Walter Müller-Seidel, “Epochenverwandtschaft. Zum Verhältnis von Moderne und Romantik im deutschen Sprachgebiet,” in Geschichtlichkeit und Aktualität. Studien zur Literatur seit der Romantik, ed. Klaus-Detlev Müller et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 370–92.
2. Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974); [English translation: Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)]. See Andreas Huyssen, “The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 160–77; Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26–48. Murphy in particular argues that Bürger’s theory needs to be revised in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of aesthetic autonomy and aura at the beginning of the twentieth century.
3. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 217–18.
4. Cf. David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
5. Georg Braungart, Leibhafter Sinn. Der andere Diskurs der Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995).
6. Safranski convincingly argues this point in Martin Heidegger, 225–306. See also Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 10–11.
1. About Borchardt: “It is as a speaking person that he becomes an organ of language. Rhetoric is concerned with its own conjuration. By imitating speech, his poetry makes itself resemble the potential of language, so that that potential can be manifested.... To Borchardt, the man who charmed language until it threatened to break into pieces with a clatter, language did not refuse its echo” (Notes II: 196, 210) (Als Redender wird er Organon der Sprache. Ihrer eigenen Beschwörung gilt die Rhetorik. Seine Dichtung macht durch Mimesis an die Rede dem Potentialsichähnlich, damit es erscheine.... Der die Sprache beschwor, bis sie klirrend zu zerspringen drohte, dem hat sie das Echo nicht versagt) (“Die beschworene Sprache”; GS 11: 539, 555). About George: “In George’s poetry the technical work ... in an individual poem is almost always work on language as such at the same time.... For George, labeled as a l’art poutl’art artist, not the individual work, but language, in and through the work of art, was the highest ideal; he wanted nothing less than to change language” (Notes II: 187) (Stets fast ist die technische Arbeit der Georgeschen Lyrik... imeinzelnen Gedicht zugleich die an der Sprache als solcher.... Dem als l’rt pour l’art-Künstler Abgestempelten war keineswegs das einzelne Kunstwerk oberstes Ideal sondern durch es hindurch die Sprache: nicht weniger wollte er, als sie verändern) (“George”; GS 11: 531). About Eichendorff: “The subject turns itself into Rauschen, the rushing, rustling, murmuring sound of nature: into language, living on only in the process of dying away, like language. The act in which the human being becomes language, the flesh becomes word, incorporates the expression of nature into language and transfigures the movement of language so that it becomes life again” (Notes I: 68–69) (Zum Rauschen macht sich das Subjekt selber: zur Sprache, überdauernd bloß im Verhallen wie diese. Der Akt der Versprachlichung des Menschen, ein Wortwerden des Fleisches, bildet der Sprache den Ausdruck von Natur ein und transfiguriert ihre Bewegung ins Leben noch einmal) (“Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs”; GS 11: 83–84).
2. In Adorno’s words: “[L]anguage itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the subject but as the subject’s own voice” (Notes I: 44) ([E]rst dann redet Sprache selber, wenn sie nicht länger als ein dem Subjekt Fremdes redet sondern als dessen eigene Stimme) (“Rede”; GS 11: 57).
3. Gianni Vattimo’s discussion of poetry provides an interesting context for this debate. See his “The Shattering of the Poetic Word,” in The End of Modernity, 65–78.
4. The Lyrical Poems of Hofmannsthal, trans. Charles Wharton Stork (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), 23–24.
5. Adorno: “Images which express the true impulse of poems such as ‘Frühlingswind’ or those about the ice landscapes in [George’s] ‘Jahr der Seele’ are taboo.... What is being misrecognized is nothing less than the formal principles that govern their own poetry” (Tabuisiert sind die Bilder, in denen die wahren Impulse des Gedichts vom Frühlingswind oder der Eislandschaften des ‘Jahres der Seele’ sich verwirklichen ....Verkannt wird nichts Geringeres als das Formgesetz, dem die eigene Dichtung untersteht) (“George und Hofmannsthal,” 231). See also Klaus Weissenberger, “Rhythmische Grenzziehungen in Hofmannsthal’s Lyrik,” in Wir sind aus solchem Zeug wie das zu träumen.... Kritische Beiträge zu Hofmannsthal’s Werk, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (Bern: Lang, 1992), 49–80: 78–80.
6. Blätter für die Kunst, dritte Folge, 3. Bd.
7. Cf. “Ad me ipsum” (1917) as well as “Ein Brief” (1902) and “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (1907). Concerning the poetic function of the Augenblick in Hofmannsthal’s work, see Karl Pestalozzi, “Wandlungen des erhöhten Augenblicks bei Hofmannsthal,” and Wiethölter, 23–46.
8. A recent study, aptly entitled Leiblichkeit der Sprache, Sprachlichkeit des Leibes, is among the first to explicitly oppose this dualism between verbal and physical language that allegedly characterizes Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre: “The particular quality of Hofmannsthal’s understanding of language, which the secondary literature so far has not yet sufficiently acknowledged, lies in his retreat to (or advancing toward) the psychic-physical origin of language as the place that unites body and word, world and language” (Vielmehr liegt der besondere, bisher von der Forschung noch kaum in ihrer Tragweite erkannte und gewürdigte Qualität der Sprachauffassung Hofmannsthals in seinem Rückgang (oder Vorstoß) zum psychisch-physischen Ausgangs- und Angelpunkt der Sprache als dem Ort einer Ursprungseinheit von Leib und Wort, und das heißt schließlich von Welt und Sprache) (Rutsch, 4–5). For a comprehensive overview of the critical literature, see Rutsch, 13–43.
9. Cf. Braungart, 230–35.
10. For a detailed discussion of Hofmannsthal’s projects, see Oksiloff, 70ff.; and Elke C. Furthman-Durden, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Alfred Döblin: The Confluence of Film and Literature,” Monatshefte 78/4 (1986).
11. The similarity between both texts spanning almost two decades further undermines the traditional view of a rupture in Hofmannsthal’s life and work allegedly evident in the Chandos Letter. On the contrary, the language-crisis emerges as a literary theme open to readjustments and modifications over the time.
12. Cf. Oksiloff, 75–76; Steiner, 171–74.
13. Cf. Oksiloff, 80.
14. Similarly Christian Metz, who reformulates Baudry’s thesis with regard to the dominance of the plot in narrative films: “The rule of the ‘story’ is so powerful that the image, which is said to be the major constituent of film, vanished behind the plot it has woven . . . so that the cinema is only in theory the art of images. ... The sequence does not string the individual shots; it suppresses them” (Film Language, 45).
15. Rudolf Borchardt’s view is paradigmatic: “Since Goethe, he [Hofmannsthal]... is the first poet able to elevate his personal suffering to a status of general validity and total aesthetic value...”(Er[Hofmannsthal]... ist seit Goethe der erste Dichter, der einem selbstdurchlittenen problematischen Zustande durch den Ernst der Vertiefung, die Gewalt der Vision und die Verbindung mit allem höheren Dasein seiner Zeit Allgemeingültigkeit und völligen Kunstwert zu geben gewußt hat) (Borchardt, qtd. in Adorno, “George und Hofmannsthal,” 210). More skeptical in this regard is Karl Pestalozzi, Sprachskepsis und Sprachmagie, 116–17. For a comprehensive summary of academic perspectives of the postwar generation up to the 1980s, see Koch, 131–34.
16. Donald G. Daviau, for example, reverses the commonly held belief about Hofmannsthal’s “language-crisis” and concludes that “Hofmannsthal’s view of language remains consistently positive throughout his life and contains no inconsistencies. His relationship to language was never negative and was by no means the problematic issue that the scholarship to date would have us believe” (Daviau, 302). Similarly, Jacques le Rider insists on disassociating Hofmannsthal himself from his fictional hero in “Ein Brief.” He argues that Hofmannsthal’s early work is characterized not by a “language-crisis,” but by playful reference to normative historical traditions whose validity is continuously being challenged and redefined within the text. With regard to the “Chandos Letter,” le Rider’s reading is supported by a personal letter Hofmannsthal wrote to his friend Leopold von Andrian in 1902, which indicates that Hofmannsthal used the historical framework in the “Letter” mainly as a way to approach a particular linguistic tradition, while any personal reference to his own life was of secondary importance. On the basis of this letter—which contradicts another, more often quoted letter to Andrian a couple of months earlier, emphasizing the personal character of the “Chandos Letter”—le Rider rejects the commonly held belief that Hofmannsthal’s “Letter” thematizes his own personal language-crisis. See also Riedel, 3.
17. See also Hofmannsthal’s brief essay “Die Sprache” from 1896 (“Nachlaß”; RA; GW III: 413f.).
18. In many of Hofmannsthal’s lyrical plays, nature looks back at the beholder. For example in “Das kleine Welttheater” when the poet contemplates nature: “Nun setz ich mich am Rand des Waldes hin, / Wo kleine Weiher lange noch den Glanz / Des Tages halten und mit feuchtem Funkeln / Die offnen Augen dieser Landschaft scheinen” (“Das kleine Welttheater”; GW I: 373). This gaze possesses the quality of touch: “Mit den Augen, den beseelten Fingern / Rührt ers an und nimmt sich ein Geheimnis...”(GW I: 382). Under the auspices of this gaze, being and meaning are revealed to be one, as Hofmannsthal notes in 1894: “Sein und Bedeuten. Die Seele der Dinge, etwas das aus den Dingen uns mit Liebesblick anschaut, mit einem Ausdruck über allen Worten” (“Nachlaß”; RA; GW III: 387).
19. Cf. Wunberg, Der Frühe Hofmannsthal, 106–9.
20. That is Georg Braungart’s perspective, 220–21.
21. The same metaphor also appears in other contexts such as “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (Gespräche 560–61) and the drama “Der Turm” (Dramen; GW III: 245).
22. Georg Braungart similarly distinguishes between what he calls the first and the third phase in Chandos’s life: “Das Subjekt dieses ersten Zustandes glaubt, in einem Rausch der Sprachsouveränität sich der Welt bemächtigen zu können, und scheitert. Das Subjekt des dritten Zustandes, jener unverfügbaren Momente der Epiphanie und des mythischen Einsseins mit aller Kreatur, gibt sich selbst auf, geht einfühlend über in die einfachsten, niedrigsten Dinge: eine bei aller scheinbaren Parallelität genaue Kontrafaktur zu dem Drang des früheren Lords nach den letzten, höchsten Wahrheiten” (Braungart, 221). And Wolfgang Riedel summarizes his reading as follows: “Stellte sich ihm [Chandos] damals ‘das Ich als Universum’ dar, so heute das Universum als Ich. Oder zugespitzt: Legte er damals das im Selbstbewußtsein, als Geist, gegebene Ich in die Welt und das Leben hinaus, so gewahrt er die Welt und das Leben jetzt in sich selbst, freilich nicht im Bewußtsein, sondern in der Naturalität seines Leibes” (Riedel, 37–38). Riedel’s comment echoes Adorno’s formulation about Aestheticist poetry: “Anstatt daß Dinge als Symbole der Subjektivität nachgäben, gibt Subjektivität nach als Symbol der Dinge, bereit, in sich selber schließlich zu dem Ding zu erstarren, zu dem sie von der Gesellschaft ohnehin gemacht wird” (“George und Hofmannsthal,” 234).
23. Gerhard Austin’s Phänomenologie der Gebärde is typical in this regard. Austin juxtaposes bodily gestures and verbal forms of expression, claiming that the former cannot possibly be fully appreciated through language and must be physically enacted instead. Once he has postulated the “principle difference between immediate sensual and verbal experience” (47), he prioritizes the authentic “expression” of the former over the latter without recognizing the fundamental petitio principi of his approach, namely that a gesture expresses nothing at all outside its specific operative code, that is, its own “language.”
24. Fick, 345–47; Georg Braungart, 219–29; Kittler, Discourse Networks, 217–18.
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, qtd. in Käte Hamburger, 86.
2. All Rilke quotes given in the body of the text refer to the following edition: Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols., ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke (Frankfurt: Insel, 1987).
3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from The Book of Hours, trans. Babette Deutsch (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), 11.
4. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Edward Snow (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991), 5.
5. “. . . nur für die Arbeit eingerichtet, zwingen sie [Rodins Werkstätten] ihn [den Besucher], das Schauen als Arbeit auf sich zu nehmen.”
6. Peter Por’s recent analysis of the New Poems is haunted by the same dilemma. In contrast to Judith Ryan, Por argues that although his poems fail to rescue the real “outside” within the realm of poetic language, they are themselves conscious of this failure to become what they proclaim to be. Yet, for Por, it is precisely this failure that guarantees the poem’s success: “The divine figure of art, which ultimately is nothing but the new poem itself, realizes and completes itself in the extreme transcendence of its own nonbeing” (Die göttliche Gestalt der Kunst, gemeint ist letztendlich das neue Gedicht selbst, verwirklicht und vollbringt sich in der äußersten Transzendenz ihres eigenen Nicht-Seins) (127). Although an adequate description of Rilke’s poetic ideals, this practice of negative transcendence hardly warrants the predicate “realization” Por bestows upon it. For a more comprehensive overview regarding this debate, see Köhnen, 254–60.
7. “Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Kunstwerke ist die objektive Auflösung des Rätsels eines jeden einzelnen. Indem es die Lösung verlangt, verweist es auf den Wahrheitsgehalt. Der ist allein durch philosophische Reflexion zu gewinnen. Das, nichts anderes rechtfertigt Ästhetik” (Ästhetische Theorie 193) (The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth content. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justification of aesthetics) (Aesthetic Theory 127f.).
8. This verdict notwithstanding, Adorno, in a typical dialectical move, at times salvages Rilke’s aesthetic failure for a critique of the sociopolitical reality he claims responsible for it. Because of its involuntary revelation of the power of commodification in modern society, Rilke’s reified poetry is said to “still stand on the verge” between simple irrationalism and the protest against it (“Jargon” 469): “The aesthetic weakness of this cult of the thing, its obscurantist demeanor and its blending of religion with arts and crafts, reveals the real power of reification, which can no longer be gilded with a lyrical halo and brought back within the sphere of meaning” (Adorno, Notes I, 40) ([D]ie ästhetische Schwäche dieses Dingkults, der geheimnistuerische Gestus, die Vermischung von Religion und Kunstgewerbe, verrät zugleich die reale Gewalt der Verdinglichung, die von keiner lyrischen Aura mehr sich vergolden, in den Sinn einholen läßt) (“Rede” 52).
9. “Ein jedes Ding kann der liebe Gott sein. Man muß es ihm nur sagen” (Werke IV: 355).
10. “. . . daß man leise begann, statt von den Dingen, mit den Dingen zu sprechen, also: ‘subjektiv’ zu werden” (“Moderne Lyrik”; Werke V: 370).
11. Ultimately, Hamburger’s approach yields its own premise as the conclusion: Rilke wrote poetry in lieu of philosophy, and his oeuvre describes—in fact, it is—phenomenology at work, leading Hamburger to muse how much Husserl might have “envied” Rilke’s philosophical insights (132) had he only known how to read poetry (97). Such aberrations aside, her analysis is problematic in several aspects. First, she implies that Rilke’s poems fully transcend the metaphorical nature of language; at one point, she reads his reference to a tree not as literary image anymore, but “as the object itself” (143). Second, her attempt to “demonstrate” the central ideas of Husserl’s philosophy (99) via Rilke leads to the simplification of some of Husserl’s key terms such as “phenomenon,” which Hamburger simply identifies with the perceptual appearance of things. For Husserl, however, phenomena originally referred to the “real immanence” of mental acts and only in his later works became identified with the intended object of such acts (the noema). Moreover, it remains unclear how exactly to envision the “phenomenological structure” that Hamburger sees realized in Rilke’s poetry. For Husserl, phenomenology served as a basis for modern science. As Hamburger herself notes, it is characterized and employed as a method, a particular approach toward examining the structure of human consciousness and its relationship to the transcendental world. Hence, phenomenology itself is anything but a “structure,” and Hamburger’s entire essay culminates in the coerced effort to equate Rilke’s poetic form with phenomenology’s very own essence, as if the latter were but yet another of the many “things” the former seeks to describe. Another example of Hamburger’s problematic reading of Husserl is her understanding of “intentionality,” which she sees exemplified in the “Ich-Du” chiasm that structures Rilke’s Stundenbuch. Husserl, however, did not face the philosophical problem of the “other” until the very end of his career, meaning that intentionality, for him, precisely did not denote the relationship between two subjects, but rather described the internal structure of intentional acts taking place in human consciousness. To regard the polar structure of the Stundenbuch as evidence or even the embodiment of “the problem of intentionality” is as misguided as the entire attempt to find direct correspondences between Husserl’s philosophy and Rilke’s poetry. This is not to deny the striking similarities between them, many of which are made evident in Hamburger’s analysis, but to call for the critical investigation of both Husserl’s and Rilke’s vision of the world and the different means they sought to express it linguistically.
1. Blätter für die Kunst, erste Folge, erstes Heft (1892).
2. Georges “Wille zur Form, dieses neue Formgefühl, das ist nicht Ästhetizismus, nicht Intellektualismus, nicht Formalismus, sondern höchster Glaube.”
3. Even Thomas Mann characterized George’s poetry as the “incarnation of spirit and the spiritualization of flesh” (Verleiblichung des Geistes und die Vergeistigung des Fleisches) (qtd. in Breuer, 227).
4. Blätter für die Kunst, dritte Folge, viertes Heft (1896); Landmann, 18f.
5. Blätter für die Kunst, dritte Folge, 5. Bd.
6. Numerous critics have echoed this verdict. In the eyes of Gottfried Benn, George’s poetry is characterized by the “merciless harshness of formality” (unerbittliche Härte des Formalen) (Benn, “Stefan George,” 1038), and Gundolf praises George’s “infinite control over language” (schrankenlose Gewalt über die Sprache) (Gundolf, 78). This poetic “control” or “violence,” however, cannot but kill the life it claims to have captured. The world as seen through George’s poetry shrinks to a faint reflection or a mere shadow of the original “Urbild” it cannot represent. Benjamin rightly claimed that George’s Aestheticist stance “removed life itself from the world” (“Rückblick”; GS III: 396). Claude David’s reading of George’s inaugural poem for the Hymnen, entitled “Die Weihe,” gives a more explicit account of this poetic violence: “Die hier beschriebene Landschaft, . . . wird dermaßen stilisiert, man möchte sagen inszeniert, daß sie jede Realität verliert. Alle Sinneseindrücke sind abgestumpft oder werden verschwiegen; . . . Statt der freudigen Fülle eines impressionistischen Bildes, statt der malerischen Wirkung wird nur noch der Stil verlangt. Nur das Sinnvolle, das Symbolische wird beibehalten” (David, 216ff.).
7. See Stefan George im Bildnis, ed. Walther Greischel and Michael Stettler (Düsseldorf: Küpper, 1976).
8. Cf. Blätter für die Kunst, neunte Folge (1910); Landmann, 52.
9. According to Bertolt Brecht, George was “openly counterrevolutionary underneath his mask of despising politics, meaning he was not only reactionary, but was actually working for the counterrevolution” (unter der Maske der Verachtung der Politik ganz offen konterrevolutionär, d.h. nicht nur reaktionär sondern wirkend für die Konterrevolution) (qtd. in Kluncker 27). Similarly Georg Lukács, Schriften zur Literatursoziologie, ed. Peter Christian Lutz (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963), 474–75. A comprehensive overview regarding the prewar debate about George’s relationship to National Socialism can be found in Martin A. Siemoneit, Politische Interpretationen von Stefan Georges Dichtung (Frankfurt: Lang, 1978), 13–19. Needless to say, the entire debate concerning George’s relationship to German history was, and still is, mostly static, resembling a kind of trench warfare characterized by both sides continuously reiterating their own ideological concerns and personal beliefs without advancing new insights into either George’s work or the aesthetics of fascism.
10. Volker Kapp, “Vom Bild als Übergegenwärtigung zum Bild als Simulation und Verrätzelung der Welt,” in Bilderwelten als Vergegenwärtigung und Verrätzelung der Welt, ed. Volker Kapp et al. (Berlin: Duncker, 1997), 9–30; Klaus Schuhmacher, “Brüder der Schmerzen,” in Bilderwelten als Vergegenwärtigung und Verrätzelung der Welt, 195–216: 195f.
11. Heidegger’s description of art is reminiscent of Benjamin’s understanding of aura since they both discuss the essence of art in a series of paradoxical formulations in which the furthest distance is revealed as the closest proximity. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Andenken,” in vol. 4 of GA, 147. See also McNeill’s The Glance of the Eye, 292.
12. Similarly in Jargon of Authenticity: “The jargon is neither able nor willing to render concrete what it condemns to abstraction. . . . The unsalvageability of what this kind of thinking aims to rescue is being declared as its most unique element. It rejects any content against which one could argue at all” (Weder ist der Jargon fähig noch gesonnen, zu konkretisieren, was er zur Abstraktheit verdammt.... Die Unrettbarkeit dessen, was dies Denken retten will, wird weltklug zu dessen eigenem Element gemacht. Es weist jeden Inhalt von sich, gegen den zu argumentieren wäre) (“Jargon,” 475).
13. Cf. Adorno’s critique of the coppola “ist” in Negative Dialektik, 107–11.
14. Borrowing Benjamin’s concept of “constellation,” Adorno emphasizes the friction of colliding and interconnecting words: “There remains no other hope for him [the philosopher] but to arrange the words around the new truth such that their mere configuration engenders the new truth” (Es bleibt ihm [dem Philosophen] keine Hoffnung als die, die Worte so um die neue Wahrheit zu stellen, daß deren bloße Konfiguration die neue Wahrheit ergibt) (“Thesen,” 369). The task of philosophy consists in “[liquefying] the reified movement of thought” rather than declaring it authentic or essential to language.
15. Heidegger, in some remarks on Greek philosophy and Hölderlin’s poetry, indeed speaks of the “stove of being”: “The stove, the place in the home that is homey [die Heimstatt des Heimischen], is being itself. In its light and sparkle, glow and warmth, all beings have always already gathered themselves” (Heidegger, qtd. in Krell, 5).
16. Although Adorno himself cites the exact passage in his essay on George and Hofmannsthal, he skips over some lines, including this particular sentence, and then continues the quote right after it. The omission “almost” speaks for itself. Cf. “George und Hofmannsthal,” 234.
17. For an excellent discussion of Heidegger’s various concepts of vision, see McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, 1–13.
18. For a comprehensive overview of relevant passages, see Mörchen, 543–60.
19. See Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 43–59.
20. Cf. Unterwegs zur Sprache, 193.