Romanticism and Philosophy

Thinking with Literature

Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, Thomas Constantinesco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780367870768
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317617952
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume brings together a wide range of scholars to offer new perspectives on the relationship between Romanticism and philosophy. The entanglement of Romantic literature with philosophy is increasingly recognized, just as Romanticism is increasingly viewed as European and Transatlantic, yet few studies combine these coordinates and consider the philosophical significance of distinctly literary questions in British and American Romantic writings. The essays in this book are concerned with literary writing as a form of thinking, investigating the many ways in which Romantic literature across the Atlantic engages with European thought, from 18th- and 19th-century philosophy to contemporary theory. The contributors read Romantic texts both as critical responses to the major debates that have shaped the history of philosophy, and as thought experiments in their own right. This volume thus examines anew the poetic philosophy of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley and Clare, also extending beyond poetry to consider other literary genres as philosophically significant, such as Jane Austen's novels, De Quincey's autofiction, Edgar Allan Poe's tales, or Emerson's essays. Grounded in complementary theoretical backgrounds and reading practices, the various contributions draw on an impressive array of writers and thinkers and challenge our understanding not only of Romanticism, but also of what we have come to think of as "literature" and "philosophy."

Part I Romantic Confrontations

1 Absolut Jena A Second Look at Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's Representation of the Literary Theory of Frühromantik

Christoph Bode

DOI: 10.4324/9781315752372-2

Setting the Scene

When Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’absolu littéraire was published in 1978, it served an obvious purpose: to make accessible, for the first time, to a larger French reading public, twelve key texts of German Frühromantik, or early Romanticism—for, oddly enough, the twelve key texts selected by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (henceforth, without any disparaging intent, L₂N) had never before been translated into French. As L₂N make clear in their Preface, to fill that startling lacuna, to undo that conspicuous absence by “presenting” what one had hitherto only read or heard about (the French original actually says, on its title page, “présentée par Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy”; emphasis added) is their primary purpose:

Although the names of the Schlegel brothers, and that of their journal—the Athenaeum—are not unknown, and although one encounters a certain number of citations from their texts (most often from their “fragments,” in which case the detached citation reinforces the equivocity of this neglect), it is nonetheless true that the absence, in France, of translations of the most important texts of “early romanticism” is one of the most startling of the lacunae that almost traditionally make up the singular bequest of the nation’s cultural and editorial institutions. (LA 2) ¹

As jacket copies will do, the original French jacket copy only amplifies this declaration:

All this was played out around 1800, in Jena, around a journal (the Athenaeum) and a group (that of the Schlegels). But although nearly two hundred years have passed since this moment took place, virtually none of the major texts in which such an operation was effected have been translated into French. The book’s primary ambition is consequently to allow certain of these texts to be read. (LA xxii, emphasis added)

Though this seems as clear as can be, it pays not to lose sight of this context of origin, because it renders obsolete, I think, such criticism as, after the publication of the English language edition in 1988, that L₂N should have taken English Romanticism into account (Jean-Pierre Mileur in Rajan and Clark 338).² One should think that, as Henry James once stated categorically, one must grant the artist his donnée ³—and L₂N’s donnée is German Frühromantik, after all.

But since not all reviewers of the American edition were able to correctly summarize the table of contents of the original anthology (cf. Pfau 309) and one even spoke of “Lena’s Athenaeum” (Sheffy 892—really, one would love to hear more about that Lena), it might be helpful, just as a reminder, to specify once more what the original corpus actually was: L’absolu littéraire—but not The Literary Absolute, from which all primary texts were discarded—contains seven texts by Friedrich Schlegel, namely the Critical Fragments of the Lyceum, the Athenaeum Fragments (mostly attributable to him, though his elder brother August Wilhelm, their wives Caroline and Dorothea, and Novalis and Schleiermacher also contributed some, see AL 178), further Ideas, On Philosophy (a.k.a. “Letter to Dorothea”), Dialogue on Poetry, “On the Essence of Criticism” and his sonnet “Athenaeum.” These seven texts are complemented by one of August Wilhelm Schlegel (Lecture on Art and Literature, 1801), by three of F. W. J. Schelling (namely, the introduction to his 1802–1803 lectures Philosophy of Art, his satirical poem “Heinz Widerporst’s Epicurean Confession of Faith” and the amazing Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism—a manuscript in Hegel’s hand, but most probably authored by Schelling, under the influence of Hölderlin), and, finally, by “one” text of Novalis, the first two Dialogues (of five) written for, but never published by the Athenaeum.

This selection is most puzzling. Not because it contains no English Romantics. Not because of the centrality it accords to Friedrich Schlegel—he has long been recognized as the central theoretician of Frühromantik. ⁴ Not because the inclusion of any of these texts would seem dubious or debatable—it isn’t. Rather, the selection is most puzzling for its exclusions. For L₂N do not only follow their predecessor Madame de Staël (who famously asked, “Pourquoi les Français ne rendent-ils pas justice à la literature allemande?” [LA 130, fn. 2]) in their ambition to “fill in” (LA 3) a French lacuna, they also follow her with regard to her idiosyncratic selectiveness: in her attempt to sell German Romanticism to France and to Europe at large, de Staël notoriously included Goethe, Schiller, and Bürger as “Romantic poets of the North” in her De l’Allemagne (1819), but paradoxically bypassed large sections of German Romanticism in silence—for example, she made no mention of Friedrich Schlegel’s scandalous novel Lucinde, of Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, or of Novalis’ only novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (cf. Bode, “Europe” 128–30). Considering that the subtitle of L’absolu littéraire, Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand, suggests a book that deals with the literary theory of German Romanticism in its entirety, the number and gravity of omissions is ominous and staggering—e.g. Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann. But even if one shrugs this claim off as sheer publicity hype and acknowledges that L’absolu littéraire, in its text and compilation, is unambiguously and unmistakably about Frühromantik only, the absences of Wackenroder and Tieck, of Klingemann, Jean Paul, and Hölderlin are conspicuous. What L₂N present is an extremely narrow focus on a very brief period of time, on one specific place, one journal, one group of “ten persons at most” (LA 8),⁵ or, to quote from the blurb once more: “around 1800, in Jena, around a journal (the Athenaeum) and a group (that of the Schlegels)” (LA xxii).

While this selectiveness (though not the exaggerated claim) is, of course, perfectly legitimate, it does, however, raise the question of how representative (of Frühromantik) this material really is—a question that would have loomed less prominently, if the publication had been based upon a much broader and more heterogeneous corpus in the first place. But such concerns can easily be countered by an argument of expediency, namely that the obvious purpose of L’absolu littéraire was to acquaint the French with hitherto untranslated documents of German early Romanticism, not with the entirety of its manifestations, let alone its contributories or contiguous contemporaries, like Fichte, Schiller, and Hegel.

But whereas this question of representativeness is by no means laid to rest by such an argument of expediency (which, by the way, loses all its power in an English or German language context), this essay here—granting the authors their donnée—is concerned with a different, though related problem. It has to do with a second purpose pursued with the publication of L’absolu littéraire as well as with the publication of The Literary Absolute, a purpose that is no less obvious than the first, so that one hesitates to call it secondary or even hidden—for it is anything but.

That second purpose is what I would call the appropriation of certain theorems of German Frühromantik for twentieth-century French and American critical theory. Correctly appropriated, the literary theory of Frühromantik obviously satisfies a need, a yearning—and it is this need or yearning, this desire, so my hypothesis, that in turn motivates and informs the specific mode of appropriation. To avoid any misunderstanding: I do not believe that such a thing as a totally disinterested appropriation is even a possibility. Quite the contrary, I believe that all appropriations are necessarily driven by interests and needs. What I am interested in is the exact nature of this particular appropriation and what it tells us about the late twentieth-century “Western” critical scene, about its contents and discontents. I am interested in the drift of appropriation (which is based upon, but not identical with a previous selectiveness), in the concrete ratio of theoretical grasp and reach, on the one hand, and literary practice on the other—in short, I am interested in the discernible relationship (which can be seen as a power relationship) of philosophy and (Romantic) literature.

L₂N are quite open about their strategy (if the jacket copy has their authorization): having said that the book’s primary ambition is to allow these texts to be read, they point out not only the possibility, but the absolute necessity that such readings, to prevent evil, would have to be guided readings—the guidance, of course, being provided by them. Like the texts, readers will be accompanied—it is for their own good, it is a safety measure, for we are dealing with an imminent danger:

But because the constraints that romanticism exerts upon us are pro-portionate to the misconceptions that surround it, we have deemed it necessary to provide each of these texts with an accompaniment, and to gauge for ourselves their theoretical import. This is quite simply a matter of vigilance: for in the end, is it not this “literary absolute” that continues, even today, to haunt our theoretical semisomnolence and our reveries of writing? (LA xxii) ⁶

It is, of course, true that what L₂N contribute to L’absolu littéraire is much, much more (not only in quantitative terms) than merely a commentary— after all, it could be published separately, without all the weighty primary texts, as a book in its own right, as The Literary Absolute. What they contribute is meant to be, as Ian Balfour says, an Ergänzung or “completion” (727), though by no means, Balfour maintains, “a mere recasting of the Romantic corpus as some poststructuralist gospel avant la lettre” (728), although both “mere” and the use of “completion” make you wonder: is it a recasting of the Romantic corpus as some poststructuralist gospel avant la lettre and something more? Has the literary theory of Frühromantik been waiting for this? Was there a need on the part of the Jena group that L₂N could satisfy almost two hundred years later in an act of almost eschatological dimensions?

How well does this betreutes Lesen, this “guided reading” succeed anyway? Everyone seems to be agreed on what AL/LA is about. Here is Ian Balfour in his review of 1989:

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy see the German Romantic project as epoch-making (of what is still in many respects “our” epoch) for the way literature becomes the object of an infinitizing theory, which in turn recognizes itself as literary. Literature as well as the theoretical claim for literature—all of a sudden—become “absolute.” … It is the absolute of irony, of the parecbasis, the function of the relentless play of language and thought scrutinizing, among, other things, their own staging. (728)

Compare this with Thomas Pfau’s summary of 1990:

As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy state with provocative though compelling generality, “romanticism does not lead us to anything that one might imitate or that one might be ‘inspired by’ … [but] it ‘leads’ us first of all to ourselves” (2). Thus “we still belong to the era that [romanticism] opened up,” and it is the presence of “a veritable romantic unconscious … in most of the central motifs of our ‘modernity’” (15) that, according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, causes contemporary thinkers to be “repeating Jena today—because they have not been able to read it” (13). (310)

Or with Tilottama Rajan’s and David Clark’s succinct summary in 1995:

It is here … that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy locate the inception of theory in the syncretizing of literature and philosophy within texts that contain their own self-doubling commentary. … Regardless of which form it takes, Jena romanticism responds to the Kantian challenge to reconcile the Idea with its sensible presentation by replacing the philosophical or theological absolute with a literary absolute: a philosophy-in-practice whose conjoining of speculation and textuality has strong affinities with what we now call “theory.” By writing itself as an allegory of its reading, Jena romanticism paradoxically achieves the absolute as the (im)possibility of reconciling Idea with presentation. It thus grasps the Idea not as something transcendent, but as the very process of its self-reflexive production. (27–28)

Or with Marc Redfield’s of 1998:

Building on the work of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot,⁷ Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy analyze the philosophical structure of the idea of the literary text as a “self-conscious” text, an idea now commonplace but which emerged fully for the first time in the work of Romantic writers, as an aspect of the Romantic development or elaboration of modern aesthetics. Conceptualized with more precision, the self-conscious text unfolds into the model of a text that generates its own theory: “theory itself as literature,” as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy put it, “or, in other words, literature producing itself as it produces its own theory” (12). The literary text becomes what it is— literary—in reflecting on its own constitution and thereby inscribing within itself the infinite task of criticism, hollowing out a space for readers who, in engaging the text, repeat the production of the text as it generates its own self-understanding. (43)

There is much overlap here and little disagreement. Of course, all these summaries are based not only on extensive readings of The Literary Absolute, but are evidently, and understandably so, relying on the same key passages of L₂N’s œuvre—to quickly run the parcours again: Frühromantik can also be called “theoretical romanticism” (LA 2), because Frühromantik is the “theoretical institutionalization of the literary genre (or, if you like, of literature itself, of literature as absolute[.]” (LA 3)

[R]omantic thought involves not only the absolute of literature, but literature as the absolute. Romanticism is the inauguration of the literary absolute. … What this amounts to saying … is that romanticism is neither mere “literature” (they invent the concept [CB: yes, so what?]) nor simply “theory of literature” (ancient and modern). Rather, it is theory itself as literature or, in other words, literature producing itself as it produces its own theory. The literary absolute is also, and perhaps above all, this absolute literary operation. (LA 12)

In Critical Fragment 115 L₂N see “the entire program of the Athenaeum” [sic]: “The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following [CB: “following” is an interpretive interpolation] brief philosophical text: all art should become science [orig.: Wissenschaft], and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one” (AL 13). Or, to quote the condensed reader’s digest of the blurb:

[R]omanticism is first of all a theory. And the invention of literature. More precisely, it constitutes the inaugural moment of literature as production of its own theory—and of theory that thinks itself as literature. With this gesture, it opens the critical age to which we still belong.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Thinking with Literature
• PART I Romantic Confrontations
• PART II The Poetics of Thought
• PART III Romantic Selves
• PART IV Romantic Confrontations
• List of Contributors
• Index