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Mosaics of the Self: Kantian Objects and Female Subjects in the Work of Claire Goll and Paula Ludwig Rachel Jones Submitted for the degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Department of Philosophy (Philosophy and Literature) September 1997 II Contents Introduction Journeying into the Darkness 1 Fart One Subjects of Dissolution 17 Chapter One The Dissolution of Woman: Lyotard, Difference and the Postmodem Sublime 18 Chapter Two The Dissolution of Man: German Expressionism and the Post-human Sublime 63 Interlude 125 Chapter 3 Interlude: Another Expressionism 126 Fart Two Manifold Selves 166 Chapter Four Claire Aischmann/ Studei( Go!!: Acrobatic Space-Time 167 Chapter Five The Glass Garden: Mosaic Mirrorings 214 Chapter Six Bodies of Resonance: Eurydice, Music and Darkness 276 Chapter Seven Transformative Touch: The Poetry of Paula Ludwig 315 From Postmodem Patchworks to a Conclusion Mosaics of the Self 362 Appendix 1 377 Appendix 2 384 Appendix 3 388 Bibliography 390 U' Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those, family and friends, who have supported and encouraged me over the last four years. In particular, I would like to thank Valerie Bafico and Mair and Vince Jones for their continual support; my sisters, Beki and Naomi, for theft unflagging encouragement and challenging questions; Catherine Constable, Georgina Paul and Christine Battersby for providing me with endless inspiralion my mother, June Jones, without whom this would not have been written; and AdrianArmstrong, for his endless energy and enthusiasm. iv Summary Mosaics of the Seffi Kantian Objects and Female Subjects in the Work of Claire Go!! and Paula Ludwig In this thesis, I use poetic texts by two German women Expressionist authors, Claire Gull and Paula Ludwig, to examine questions of selfhood, aesthetics and sexual difference within a Kantian philosophical frame. The thesis is structured in two parts. In Part One, I situate the project via a critical examination of Lyotard's reworking of the Kanlian sublime. I argue that Lyotard closes down the gaps within Kant's system that feminist philosophy could usefully exploit and explore. I then position German Expressionism as an alternative mode of post-Kantianism. I argue that although the male Expressionist poets break down the Kantian subject-object distinction, they continue to position woman as the "other". There follows a brief bridging section, in which I outline work by some of the key women Expressionists, and argue that the theoretical frameworks used in Expressionist scholarship are inherently gendered. In Part Two of the thesis, I explore texts by both Go!! and Ludwig in detail. I argue that whilst the male Expressionists are concerned with dissolving male subjecthood, these writers can be read as subverting Kantian space-time to produce alternative modes of female selfhood and of the sublime. In chapter 4,! examine Goll's disruptive exploration of a mode of embodied selfhood generated through productive play and movements of relationality. Chapters 5 and 6 extend the theme of relationally generated selfhood by tracing the subversive use of neoplatonic and Orphic elements in a short story by Go!!. In chapter 7,! show how Ludwig radically reconfigures the limits of both body and self to produce identities no longer constructed via oppositional boundaries in the manner of the Kantian subject. I conclude by arguing that the work of these authors provides feminist philosophy with productive models for rethinking immanent transcendence and relationally generated selfhood which can incorporate both difference and change. 1 Introduction Journeying into the Darkness This thesis began because of a gap, a puzzling and troubling absence. Whilst researching for a paper on German Expressionist poetry, I realised how few women writers were included in the anthologies and literary criticism dealing with this period. Else Lasker-Schüler was the only female poet whose work was included with any regularity, with the infrequent addition of a few poems by two or three other women. As I was using the work of the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray as the frame for my research, this absence became increasingly pointed. Irigaray offers a powerful critique of woman's positioning as the "other" of man within Western metaphysics; gradually, I came to feel that women writers were the "other" of Expressionism. Turning to more recent feminist literary criticism, I was again surprised to find that - despite the important work that has already been done to reclaim many German women writers from obscurity - the women German Expressionists did not seem to have resurfaced there either. Several more names did begin to appear alongside that of Lasker-Schiiler: I found sporadic references to Claire Goll, Emmy Hennings, Berta Lask and Paula Ludwig. However, where such references did exist, they gave no sense of these writers as part of the Expressionist movement, but presented them as disconnected voices within modernity. Indeed, alongside the absence of any adequate representation of individual women Expressionists, I became intensely aware of the detail with 2 which literary criticism has traced the networks and patterns of influence between the male writers - and how these accounts persistently lack any sense either of the participation of women authors in these networks, or of the links that existed between the women themselves. However, these links did exist, and they slowly began to emerge as I gathered material on and by these women writers over the next few years. Using Raabe's Index-Expressionismus as a starting-point, I discovered there were almost three hundred women who had published in Expressionist journals, and at least eighteen who had also had individual works published that Raabe classed as Expressionist. 1 Chapter three below gives an overview of some of these women authors, and indicates just some of the connections between them. Out of what had at first seemed a dark absence at the centre of German modernity, some powerful and imaginative female voices finally began to emerge. My own work has focused on the women poets in Expressionism. Though I began by narrowing the field to some five authors (including Lasker- Schuler) whose work was especially striking and/or innovative, the project became focused on texts by two poets who are both far less well-known than Lasker-Schuler: Claire Goll and Paula Ludwig. Not only did the richness and originality of their work seem to demand a detailed engagement, but their texts - despite their extremely different writing styles - also seemed to overlap in interesting and productive ways. Biographical and bibliographical information on both these writers and their texts will be offered in chapter three. However, for the time being, it is worth noting that Ludwig's work has almost entirely 1 Paul Raabe, Index - Expressionismus: Bibliographie der Beitrdge in den Zeitschriften und Jalirbilehern des literarischen Expressionisnzus 1910-25, 18 vols (Liechtenstein: Kraus Thomson Organisation, 1972), I-IV: Alphabefische' Index. For a full list of the women contributors to the Expressionist journals, see Appendix 1, below. 3 disappeared from the history of modernity; there are no major critical studies of her poetry, and her remarkable early collection, Die Selige Spur (1920), on which I will focus here, has been unjustly forgotten. Goll, on the other hand, has remained within the literary imagination, but primarily as the wife of her more famous spouse Yvan Goll, the Expressionist and surrealist. In particular, her early collections of poetry (Milwelt (1918); Lyrische FilmI (1922)) have been largely neglected, as has the short story (Der Gli7serne Garten; 1918) which I have decided to include here because of the way it extends the exploration of selfhood undertaken in the poetic texts. Over recent years, however, two studies have appeared which begin to challenge this reductive view of Goll and to reclaim her own place within the history of modernity. Margaret Littler's article, "Madness, Misogyny and the Feminine in Aesthetic Modernism: Unica Zurn and Claire Goll", uses Irigaray to show how Goll becomes trapped by a contradictory logic: as a writer, she has to situate herself within a tradition where genius is inherently male, yet, simultaneously, she wants to insist on her own femaleness. 2 I wifi return to this persuasive essay later in this study. The only book length study of Goll's work is Verena Mahiow's "Die Liebe, die uns mimer zur Hemmung wurde. ": Weibliche ldent-itätsproblematik zwischen Expressionismus und Neuer Sachlichkeit am Beispiel der Prosa Claire Go/is. (1996). 3 This text goes a long way towards situating Goll within the literary context of both Expressionism and the "Neue Sachlichkeit" of 2 Margaret Littler, "Madness, Misogyny and the Feminine in Aesthetic Modernism: Unica Zurn and Claire Goll", in Yvan Go/i - Claire Goil: Texts and Contexts, ed.s Eric Robertson and Robert Vilain, IFAVL XXIII (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 153-173. Verena Mahiow, "Die Liebe, die uns imnier zur Heinmung wurde. ": Weibliche Identitafsprobleniatik zzvischen Expressionismus und Neuer Sachlichkeit am Beispiel der Prosa Claire Go/Is, Studien zur Deutschen und Europäischen Liferatur des 79. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 31 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996). 4 1920s Germany; Mahiow focuses on Goll's early short stories written throughout this period. However, though I will refer to Mahiow in Part Two of this thesis, I will not engage with her study in detail for two reasons. Firstly, neither the early poetry, nor, interestingly, the particular short story with which I am concerned, are among the texts Mahiow examines.