The Doppelganger

Literature's Philosophy

Dimitris Vardoulakis

• Editorial: Modern Language Initiative
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780823233007
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria europea

The Doppelgänger or Double presents literature as the "double" of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelgänger is literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as decentred. From this perspective, the Doppelgänger has a "family resemblance" to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity.
This is the first significant study on the Doppelgänger's influence on philosophical thought. The Doppelgänger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy's relation to literature. Vardoulakis demonstrates this by employing the Doppelgänger to read literature philosophically and to read philosophy as literature. The Doppelgänger then appears instrumental in the self-conception of both literature and philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE
The Critique of Loneliness
The Genesis of the Doppelgänger

I call myself the last philosopher, because I am the last man. No one speaks with me but myself, and my voice comes to me like the voice of a dying man! Let me associate for but one hour more with you, dear voice, with you, the last trace of the memory of all human happiness. With you I escape loneliness through self-delusion and lie myself into multiplicity and love. For my heart resists the belief that love is dead. It cannot bear the shudder of the loneliest loneliness, and so it forces me to speak as if I were two.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, “Oedipus:
Soliloquy of the Last Philosopher”

ISOLATION: TOWARD A POLITICAL PLACEMENT OF THE DOPPELGÄNGER

A consideration of the political has to start with a distinction between politics and the political. This distinction, here, is drawn in relation to the place of the subject. Both politics and the political require a locus in which interaction between human beings occurs. Both terms require that the subject is not isolated but that it is placed in an area where there is contact with other subjects. The subject’s isolation, as the locus that resists or counters sociality, is central in identifying the subject of both the political and of politics. Isolation puts the subject in a place devoid of other subjects. However, when subjectivity emerges as a crucial element of human interchange, then subjective identity also leads to a differentiation between the realms of politics and the political. The two questions—who is the political subject? and who is the subject of politics?—receive, then, divergent answers. For the subject of politics, the locus of human interchange is the sovereign state within which the subject exists as citizen. As such, the laws of the state define the subject of politics. Isolation occurs when the subject is firmly outside the law—the law in the narrow sense, the law as statute. In contrast, since the political subject is not confined to this or that sovereign state, its locus does not exist narrowly on a phenomenal plane. Thus, for the political, isolation is not conceivable as simple physical exclusion. Sociality is a regulative principle of the political only if it is not reduced to content. Nor can isolation, as the opposite of sociality, be equated with physical space. In relation to the political, it is better to view isolation as a topos. A topos is not merely in the service of oration (this would constrain it to politics). What is more, since Aristotle in the Topics links it to the general opinions of humans, topos brings along at least two interrelated aspects: a concern with argumentative strategy and the insistence of topicality. The former aspect is inseparable from language, whereas the latter is tied to historical actuality. The two aspects are interrelated since they presuppose an effective community. In this sense, the topos has a genuine significance for the political.¹

Isolation will be crucial in identifying the place of the political subject inasmuch as isolation—as a topos—affirms sociality even though it seeks to disavow it. (Perhaps it is more accurate to say that isolation affirms sociality by seeking to disavow it. Thus it is made clear that what isolation introduces is a distancing from an identitary logic and a move toward a differential logic.) The significance of isolation for the political is that since the place of the political cannot be defined as this or that place, it brings along with it a problem, namely the danger of its complete identification with the ideal. The spaces of politics and the political would thus be completely segregated. The contention here is that isolation, as the negativity of an ideal space, counteracts a metaphysical conception of the place of the political. Or, to put it from the perspective of the political subject: with isolation arises the question of whether the subject is completely severed from particularity. It will be argued that this threat of severance—a threat also to the very possibility of judgment and thus to the political as a site of conflict or debate—is constitutive of the political subject.

The severance from particularity along with its implications is pertinent in order to broach the doppelgänger. Not only is the doppelgänger as a conception of subjectivity in jeopardy, but the threat of isolation is also as instrumental to the doppelgänger as it is to the political subject. Paul Coates has noted that the political, place, and subjectivity interact and intersect in the doppelgänger. Further, Coates identifies the severance from particularity as ideology, which “brings forth the Double.”² With ideology, at least two important elements are introduced: a sense of community and a set of ideas held by that community. What governs both elements, for Coates, is an internalizing movement.

[T]he essence of ideology lies in the institutionalised bipartisanship of the imperative to “see the other side of the question,” which transforms the potential for change inherent in contradiction into a steady state of balance. Ideology socialises the individual by bringing him or her to internalise the dividedness of a class society in the form of the structure of “objective, value-free judgement”—thereby enabling the system to rule the subject, by dividing it. The antithesis between the “here” of the individual and the “there” of others is translated into internal space. Perhaps its main agents are the media, which create a society that is mediation and phantasmagoria, never encountered directly.³

What the doppelgänger presents, according to Coates, is a subject that is permitted to make distinctions only internally. This inward direction of thought is underpinned by a self-identical subject. One who says “I am I,” thereby believing to be stating an objective judgment dictated by the commands of reason, is also logically impelled to grant others the same capacity. However, with regard to political praxis, such a logic of the same further impels one to grant the other “the right to be right.” This is not a premise of the political organization of a society, of a polis—it has nothing to do with the articulation of the democratic nature of the state. “The right to be right” remains internalized, granted on the conceptual realm, where reality is still not an issue. The invidiousness of such a phantasmagoria is obvious in its institutionalization, that is, when the concept becomes an imperative regardless of the specific situation. The subject is under the sway of “the system.” The most significant upshot of such a state of affairs is the disavowal of contestation. The conditions of the possibility of conflict are replaced by “a steady state of balance” as the condition of the possibility of self-identity and ideology.⁴

The origins of the doppelgänger testify to a similar concern with the internalizing performed by the subject. The word “Doppelgänger” was coined by the German Romantic author Jean Paul.⁵ In the doppelgänger’s own words, the threat of the severance from particularity is identified as loneliness.

Around me an expanse of petrified humans. In the dark, uninhabited silence glows no love, no admiration, no prayer, no hope, no aim. I, totally alone, nowhere a pulse-beat, no life; nothing around me and without me nothing other than nothing. There is consciousness in me only of my highest Not-Con-sciousness. Inside me the mute, blind, concealed and labouring demogorgon, and I am he himself. I came, then, from eternity, and head into eternity——⁶

The lonely subject is, in Nietzsche’s formulation from the epigraph, the last man, a subject trapped in the kingdom of reason and unable to reach the particular. Here, loneliness functions as the register of the complex that isolation presents as a challenge to sociality. An explication of this citation, to be carried out in this chapter, will unfold this complex under the rubric of the doppelgänger’s loneliness. After showing the way that madness figures in the matrix of loneliness, the discussion will focus on the way that the “nothing” is understood in this citation. This will disclose some of the issues that are pertinent to the political constitution of the doppelgänger. An examination of Freud’s paper on the uncanny will not only give a historical perspective of the doppelgänger as understood by psychoanalysis, but it will also capture the ontology of the subject it introduces. The final section of this chapter shows the importance of technique in relation to the subject’s ontology with reference to the “mute, blind, concealed, and labouring demogorgon” that is identified with the subject. This has implications for the reciprocal relation between philosophy and literature staged by the doppelgänger.

The passage quoted above occurs almost at the end of a letter that the doppelgänger writes. The title of the piece in which this letter appears announces an initial differentiation from Coates’s conception of the Double: the title is Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana. The key or cipher (clavis) to the thought of Fichte or Leibgeber. Leibgeber is one of the names that the doppelgänger dons as it transverses a number of Jean Paul’s works, while Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the self-avowedly Kantian philosopher who exercised an enormous influence on the formation of the Romantic movement in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. Therefore, Jean Paul does not orient his doppelgänger toward a “critique of ideology” in general; rather, Jean Paul’s doppelgänger is specifically related to subjectivity as it was conceived by Kant and by Fichte.⁷ The subject’s internalizing movement, the “I came, then, from eternity, and head into eternity,” is Jean Paul’s way of questioning the relation of reason and understanding as it is explicated by the two transcendental or “critical” philosophers. In other words, Jean Paul is arguing here against subjective autonomy (Selbstständigkeit), a defining characteristic of the Enlightenment subject.

Besides the different context, there is another difference between Jean Paul and Coates that is more pivotal in an understanding of the place of the political that the doppelgänger introduces. For Coates, the double presents a concept of experience that is regulated by a constitutive loss or deficiency. The divided self’s experiences are always lacking, since reality is “never encountered directly.” The subject is at an impasse. For Jean Paul, the doppelgänger still retains the potential for a release from this state of affairs. Jean Paul argues for a residual transcendence inherent in the autonomous self. By conducting a critique of loneliness Jean Paul shows that the space of loneliness, despite being the other of the space of communicability, is nevertheless still related to a place of sociality. The loneliness of the doppelgänger exposes a lack in the autonomous subject, but this does not mean that the subject as such is rejected. To the contrary, the lonely subject, the last man, inscribes the potential of its overcoming—the overcoming of lack and the overcoming of autonomy. Thus, the doppelgänger can be seen as an overcoming of the idealist, autonomous subject, a subject that is premised on the ability to have an immediate access to its internal functions.

Jean Paul’s critique of loneliness will be conducted, first, as a critique of the function of place in Kant and in Fichte. Kantian epistemology approaches experience and ethics by the division between the faculties of cognition and reason. The subject that cognizes does not find itself in a particular space, but rather in a space coordinated by the separation of reason and understanding—what will be called a limit spacing. Fichte intensifies Kant’s lesson, arguing for the autonomy of reason that in turn underwrites the autonomy of the subject. Thus, the absolute I is placed firmly within reason—in what will be called the unlimited limit spacing. Friedrich Jacobi, a close friend of Jean Paul’s, attacked transcendental epistemology in his open letter to Fichte, which, as it will be shown, exercised a decisive influence on the composition of Jean Paul’s Clavis and thus the conception of the doppelgänger. Departing from a similar rejection of epistemology, it will be demonstrated that Jean Paul’s second aspect of his critique of loneliness shows that loneliness can be become the basis of critique, that is, loneliness opens up the possibility of the subject to make decisions and thus to become part of the polis. The critique of loneliness is now the critique as the possibility of meaning and judgment that loneliness enacts. The transfiguration of loneliness from what leads to isolation to that which makes it possible for the subject to return from isolation is essentially an attempt to give a place back to the subject. This is a place that is no longer severed from particularity, no longer the eternity of reason—rather, what will be called a limiting space.⁸ Jean Paul arrives at this alternative conception of place by emphasizing the priority of art over epistemology. Artistic expression is always related to specific linguistic use, and as such specificity is ineliminable in it. The political significance of place is, then, linked to the political significance of art to the extent that the critique of loneliness as it is carried out by the doppelgänger returns to the subject not only its argumentative power but also its positioning in historical particularity.

However, as the discussion of the ontology introduced by Freud’s uncanny will show, the placement of the subject is liminal. Neither the finite nor the infinite is privileged, and neither the particular nor the universal. Rather, what matters is the type of relation established between them. A relation that is not amenable to absolutism but ceaselessly endeavors to retain openness. Further, as it will be argued in the final section of this chapter, this relation has a transformative effect. Thus, the critique of loneliness does not seek an overcoming as dialectical negation or sublation. Rather, what is introduced is a kind of denial that is also an affirmation. This is crucial to the definition of the doppelgänger.

HARRINGTON’S “FLIES”: KANT’S MADNESS

A presentation of Jean Paul’s critique of the space that loneliness opens up in Kantian philosophy will be an explication of the doppelgänger’s expression of its own loneliness: “I, totally alone, not even a pulse-beat, no life; nothing around me and without me nothing other than nothing…. I came, then, from eternity, and head into eternity.” What this passage initially introduces is the problematic relation between reason and madness. The confinement of the subject in a desolate place was a standard metaphor for the state of the madman. As Foucault has argued, the connection between the place of exclusion of madness and the eternal but empty space of reason had been established at least since the Renaissance: “The ultimate language of madness is that of reason.”⁹ A well-known example from the time of the genesis of the doppelgänger in Germany attests to the use of loneliness as a metaphor for madness.¹⁰ It comes from book 7, chapter 4 of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. The doctor reports the Harper’s own description of his mental ailment: “‘I see nothing before me, and nothing behind me,’ he [the Harper] would say, ‘nothing but the endless night of loneliness in which I find myself. I have no feeling left…. There is no height or depth, no forwards or backwards, nothing to describe this continual sameness.’”¹¹ Loneliness is the main characteristic that the madman uses to describe his condition. Although madness runs implicitly through the whole of the Lehrjahre, its most explicit articulation is in relation to the figure of the Harper. Similarly, the doppelgänger’s behavior in Siebenkäs is always regarded as transgressing beyond the standards of “normal” behavior, and, indeed, in Titan it ends up confined in a lunatic asylum.¹²

The evocation of loneliness is not made in the name of a phenomenal description of human nature; nor is loneliness construed by either Goethe or Jean Paul as an existential condition. In addition, it should not be forgotten that, as literary texts, they are not concerned with a symptomatology or aetiology of madness. Rather, extreme loneliness is a tropological description of the madman, in the first person, of his own self-consciousness. Man soliloquizes, just like Oedipus the last man. As such, what emerges as an issue is narration itself. Now, the nexus of confinement, internalization, and expression should not be seen to subsist as a mere trope. The loneliness that madness demands is not just a turn of phrase, but rather, it has a dual significance. First, internalization is forced on the subject by contingency itself, or as Blanchot puts it in his review of Foucault’s book: “The demand to shut up the outside, that is, to constitute it as an interiority of anticipation or exception, is the exigency that leads society—or momentary reason—to make madness exist, that is, to make it possible.” Second, the linguistic manifestations of this “exigency” do not allow themselves to be neatly distinguished from works of art. Thus the work of art, instead of a demarcation, rather “designates the point where there would be an exchange between aberration and creation, where … all language would still hesitate.”¹³ Not only is, then, this internalization linked to the cognitive urgency. In addition, the wavering between “aberration and creation” installs art at the fault line between madness and cognition. This fault line will be crucial for an understanding of the space of madness in Kant.

Apropos of the subject’s loneliness, Kant’s own definition of madness in the Anthropology is crucial. This definition leads to an interpretati...