Trop Full Draft August 4G
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Aesthetic Exercises and Poetic Form in the Works of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rococo Poets Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xf7m0j7 Author Trop, Gabriel Stephen Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Aesthetic Exercises and Poetic Form in the Works of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rococo Poets by Gabriel Stephen Trop A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German and Medieval Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Winfried Kudszus, Chair Professor Niklaus Largier Professor Anton Kaes Professor Leslie Kurke Fall 2010 Aesthetic Exercises and Poetic Form in the Works of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rococo Poets © 2010 by Gabriel Stephen Trop Abstract Aesthetic Exercises and Poetic Form in the Works of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rococo Poets by Gabriel Stephen Trop Doctor of Philosophy in German and Medieval Studies Professor Winfried Kudszus, Chair In the treatise Aesthetica (1750), Alexander Baumgarten describes the aesthetic exercise as a training of the senses through which innate sensual and spiritual proclivities are developed and perfected. He formulates aesthetics not merely as an epistemological theory, but as a way of life capable of generating a happy human being. Throughout the course of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic exercise functions as a model for poetic practices, both in the production and reception of poetry. For Hölderlin, the harmony of the natural and historical world is not something given, but something that one has to be trained to perceive amidst the facticity of suffering and violence. The deliberate confusion of Hölderlin’s poetry, triggered by complex syntactical structures and a dense semantic texture, challenges the human mind to find evidence of the divine in its own mental and poetic self-organization. Disjunction and chaos eventually triumph over organization, leading to a form of aesthetic exercise that undermines rather than bolsters a conception of nature and history as self-organizing, harmonious systems. Novalis rejects a philosophical conception of the absolute in favor of a "physiological absolute," redefining the absolute as an intensification of stimulation rather than a realm of undifferentiated identity. For Novalis, poetry exercises the mind by generating imaginative multiplicities and differences, continually overturning orders of representation, and creating magnetically attractive signs and permeable poetic spaces. In Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs, Novalis uses poetry to disorganize the normative structure of institutionalized regimes of bodily and mental exercise, thereby differentiating the aesthetic exercise from disciplinary forms that produce stable subjects. Following Baumgarten’s definition of the aesthetic, which fuses sense perception and artistic activity, the rhetoric of Anacreontic and Rococo poetry functions as an exercise in sensory cognition. Anacreontic poetry, in some of its manifestations, imaginatively constructs a space of unbounded play that extracts the human being from its normative anchoring points: God, bourgeois economic rationality, the use of public reason, epistemological progress, the family structure, and boundaries between life and death, among others. Such poetry develops signifying practices divested of attachments to 1! transcendent realms of meaningfulness. Instead of melancholy, trauma, and genius, it gravitates towards the pleasure of repetition, the immanence of play, and the possibility of an imaginative deviation from one's own patterns of selfhood. 2! For Talja i! Table of Contents Introduction: Attraction and Critique 1 Part I: Organization, Bifurcation, Instability Chapter 1: The Improbable Coherence of Contingent Things: Aesthetic Exercises in the Work of Alexander Baumgarten 1. The Birth of Aesthetics and Homo Exercitans 14 2. The Redemption of Fallibility: Baumgarten's Felix Aestheticus 18 Chapter 2: The Persistence of the Fragile World 1. The Self-Organization of the Poetic Mind 28 2. Retention and Oscillation as Aesthetic Exercises 31 3. On Falling Apart and Coming into Being 37 Chapter 3: Resistance to Harmony and the Limits of Order 1. Hölderlin's Poetics of Bifurcation 47 2. Hölderlin's "Der Ister" and Aporetic Consciousness 51 3. Hölderlin's "Patmos" and the Collapse of the Solid Letter 61 Conclusion: Modalities of Poetic Being 76 Part II: Imagination, Perturbation, Stimulation Chapter 1: Disequilibrium and the Movement of Poetry 1. Poetry as a Way of Life 79 2. Originary Impurity and the Fiction of Truth 83 3. The Inversion of Order and the Drive to Transcendence 88 4. The Physiological Absolute 90 Chapter 2: Stimulation and Disorganization in Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht 1. Infinite Gaps and the Intensification of Making Present 98 2. The Disruption of the Aesthetico-Physiological Economy of Balance 103 3. Inverted Orders and Points of Indifference 112 Chapter 3: Chaotic Receptivity in Novalis' Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs 1. Pedagogical Discipline and Monotheistic Obedience 127 2. The Tyranny of Order 131 3. Education into Chaos 136 4. The End of Mastery 143 Conclusion: Incited Speech 145 ii! Part III: Pleasure, Immanence, Novelty Chapter 1: Pleasure, Utility, and Transcendental Saturation 1. The Contingent Coupling of Utility and Pleasure 148 2. Novelty and the Possibility of Other Worlds 152 Chapter 2: The Depth of the Surface and Anacreontic Reflexivity 1. Unbounded Play 164 2. Transcendentalizing the Senses: Brockes' Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott 174 3. The Alignment of Pleasure and Virtue 184 4. Hagedorn and the Origin of Detranscendentalizing Art 190 5. Goethe's Annette and the Opposing Attractions of Rococo Poetry 197 Chapter 3: Anacreontic Play and the Disorganization of Transcendental Orders 1. Johann Ludwig Gleim's Versuch in Scherzhaften Liedern 201 2. The Anacreontic Question and the Implosion of the Public Sphere 201 3. Anacreontic Impiety 204 4. The Copernican Revolution and the Anacreontic Eye 207 5. The Discipline of the Family and the Law of the Muß 211 6. The Non-Melancholic Sign: The Attraction to Death Approaches Zero 215 7. Absolute Poetry 222 Conclusion: The Death of Anacreon 225 Afterword: World Regeneration 227 References 237 iii! Acknowledgements There are words that, when spoken, simply fall from the lips, dying almost as soon as they are born; perhaps registered and acknowledged by others in the world at the moment of their enunciation, they cause a minor vibration, a temporary provocation, a small but significant excitement of the mind or movement between souls, and then they are gone, they have already passed into the inaudible and imperceptible totality of irretrievable worlds. No extended or tangible trace remains that they ever entered the space of the living. And then there are words that, when spoken, they remain, they become extended things, they curl about the brain, drawing thought into their magnetic sphere of influence. Some trace of these words will remain at least as long as the mind keeps coming back to them, if not longer through the works and deeds into whose essential fabric they might one day be woven. These words too one day will die, but they have an extensive and intensive property that, for whatever reason, has endowed them with duration, expansion, and power. Their physical presence disappears, but they continually enter into reality vicariously, through a thought, an impulse, a spontaneous or subterranean pattern of the body, the mind, the person. Words do not exercise a monopoly over this power of infiltration, which may travel along any sensual channel in any medium, but it is chiefly to words, and more specifically to those words that seem to be endowed with the magical property of attraction, to which this dissertation owes its existence. Such words have been spoken between myself and my dissertation advisor, Winfried Kudszus, often in his office, where the sun would flood space with such an intensity that it stung the eyes, where everything that was uttered seemed to partake in an ongoing process of condensation and to acquire weight and depth. Soon enough I knew that these words would eventually wind their vicarious way into reality. And here they are, a large number of them incarnate in this work, and I can only hope that the work reflects the intensity of the affect that generated it. If these words have missed the mark or if they are otherwise deficient, the failure lies in my own limitations, inclinations, and flaws. I am incapable of mentioning all of the other people who have guided me, helped me, and encouraged me in the process of producing this study. I would nevertheless like to express my particular gratitude to the other members of my dissertation committee. Tony Kaes, who was one of the main reasons I came to Berkeley, has been an unwavering source of intellectual stimulation and personal support since my arrival in California. Likewise, for those who are familiar with the work of Niklaus Largier, the signs of his influence will be noticeable throughout this dissertation; in particular, I owe to him an awareness of the importance of spiritual exercises for aesthetics when, in a seminar on Baroque literature, we read together the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Finally, I was lucky enough to attend Leslie Kurke's seminar on Archaic Greek Poetry, an experience