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Aesthetics, Politics, Revolution: Concepts of Representation in Schiller, Fichte and Büchner by Samuel Heidepriem A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Germanic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2017 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Andreas Gailus, Chair Associate Professor Frederick Amrine Professor Helmut Puff Professor Silke-Maria Weineck Samuel J. Heidepriem [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1206-9086 Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Modern Politics and the French Revolution / 5 Representative Judgments / 13 Politics, Theater, History / 26 Aesthetic-Political Idealism and its Limits / 34 Chapter 1 Schiller’s Turn: Sublime Terror and the Politics of Beauty 44 Parallel Returns: Lefort and Rancière / 46 Sublime Revolution: 1793-94 / 54 Politics of the Beautiful: 1795 / 64 History and Spiel / 71 Drama as Praxis / 75 Chapter 2 Politics as Spiel: Schiller’s Late Historical Dramas 81 Three Levels of Play / 83 Schiller and European History / 86 Die Jungfrau von Orleans / 94 Maria Stuart / 104 Wallenstein / 115 Chapter 3 Sublime Politics: Fichte’s Defense of the French Revolution 129 Fichte and Aesthetics / 131 The Sublime Occasion / 134 The Purpose of the State / 140 Judgment and Universality / 145 Violence / 151 Sublime Politics / 159 Chapter 4 Büchner’s Critique of Aesthetic-Political Idealism: Der Hessische Landbote and Dantons Tod 167 Dantons Tod: Aesthetics / 171 Der hessische Landbote: Politics / 177 Dantons Tod (II): Aesthetics and Politics / 185 Conclusion 209 Bibliography 215 ii Abstract This dissertation explores the connection between aesthetic and political representation in three prominent German writers’ responses to the French Revolution. Though they present conflicting judgments of the Revolution, I argue that Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Büchner all use it as an occasion to reflect on the interpenetration of aesthetic and political processes. Each configures aesthetic and political principles differently, according to an idiosyncratic concept of representation that combines aesthetic, political, historiographic and theatrical modes. I consider each writer an aesthetic-political “type” based on how he organizes these axes and the forms of representative distance (between representative and represented) they involve. This study builds on recent discussions in political philosophy and historiography by profiling Schiller, Fichte and Büchner as influential cases of aesthetic-political fusion around 1800. Chapters one and two read Schiller’s aesthetic writings and history plays as theoretical and practical wings of a program to correct the failures of the French Revolution, understood as the collapse of representative distance. Schiller constructs a politics around the aesthetic concept of beauty in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) after rejecting its opposed concept of sublimity, which he sees behind revolutionary violence. His “politics of the beautiful” calls for gradual political change via social education through artworks that encourage viewers to critically reflect on historical processes and their own aesthetic experience. Anthropological in iii foundation, it situates modern society in the larger developmental arc of humanity. Aesthetic education corrects a malformation in internal drives that resulted in the violence of the Revolution. I argue Schiller’s “classical” history plays—Wallenstein (1798-99); Maria Stuart (1800); Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801)—attempt to implement this program. This systematic interpretation of Schiller’s late oeuvre is new in critical literature. Chapter three argues that Fichte’s defense of the Revolution in his treatise Contribution to Correcting the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution (1793) is based on an aesthetic— and specifically sublime—understanding of politics. The connection between aesthetic theory and Fichte’s political thought is absent in current scholarship. I argue Fichte’s “sublime politics” conceives of violent upheaval as an opportunity for moral transcendence. Fichte denies that humans are historically determined and advocates the French Revolution as an unprecedented break with the past. This break must be absolute: to realize their moral potential, Fichte insists people reject all embeddedness in the political past, all pleasures they currently enjoy, and any forms of representational distance that prevent them from experiencing the immediacy of revolutionary virtue. Chapter four details Büchner’s critique of idealism as it appears in both Schiller and Fichte. In his pamphlet The Hessian Courier (1834) and drama Danton’s Death (1835), Büchner rejects the notion that the French Revolution must be signified or interpreted, instead exploring the Revolution’s rhetorical character and addressing its practical and discursive consequences for subsequent European politics. His innovative practice of literary citation in Danton’s Death represents history without overly conceptualizing it. Similarly, Büchner does not idealize “the people” in the manner of Schiller, Fichte and antecedent political thought, but focuses on the concrete realities of political subjects’ lives in the 1790s and 1830s. This original conception of iv the polity as a “concrete multiplicity” contributes to ongoing debates regarding the status of Büchner’s materialism. Likewise, the dissertation clarifies Schiller and Fichte’s positions as “idealists” in contemporary intellectual history of the Goethezeit. v Introduction “Aesthetics and politics,” a conjunction now very familiar in academic discourse, has its origins around the time of the French Revolution. Such at least is the claim of Nikolas Kompridis in his recent edited volume The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (2014). In describing the near ubiquity of aesthetics in contemporary political theory, Kompridis allows he is charting less a “turn” than a return to the late eighteenth century, “when one could already speak of an aesthetic turn in political thought,” and the two categories first became “overtly implicated and entangled with each other” (xv). This study is part of that return. Like any area of sustained scholarly attention, aesthetics and politics has gravitated toward certain central figures. As concerns its beginnings in revolutionary Europe, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant loom largest of all: Burke, of course, decried the French Revolution as an aestheticized orgy of violence, “bloody theater”1; and Kant, though not as explicit as Burke in using aesthetic categories to frame events in France, nonetheless developed a philosophical- historical interpretation of the Revolution drawing heavily on his conception of aesthetic judgment in Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). Kant’s position on the Revolution and its relationship to aesthetics found its most famous votary in Hannah Arendt, whose Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982) attempts to integrate Kant’s concept of judgment into an overall theory of politics. A glance inside Kompridis’ Aesthetic Turn confirms how enormous an influence Arendt 1 Burke quoted in Jason Frank, “Delightful Horror: Edmund Burke and the aesthetics of democratic revolution,” in The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 15. 1 and her reading of Kant continue to have. In fact, to the extent that contemporary discourse on aesthetics and politics draws on figures from German-speaking Europe, Kant and Arendt (or Kant via Arendt) tend to dominate. That trajectory is an important one, to be sure, but it is only one: German thought and literature, especially around 1800, is rich in unexplored (or misapprehended) territory for thinking through the connection of aesthetics and politics. My contribution on this count is to offer alternative readings of works by Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Georg Büchner, figures that, if approached in the right light, can deepen and enhance contemporary discussions of aesthetics and politics. Or so I hope to show. I begin with Schiller and Fichte, contemporaries who respond directly to the French Revolution and are writing as it unfolds. Schiller’s aesthetic-political work, though famous and widely discussed since the 1790s, has fallen largely into cliché. The familiar reproach of escapist aestheticism has dogged Schiller’s revolutionary writing—especially Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1795; hereafter Ästhetische Erziehung) and the late history plays—at least since Lukács.2 In this portrayal, Schiller’s sensitive idealism, though initially stoked by the French Revolution, is so grievously injured by the Reign of Terror (1793-94) that Schiller constructs an alternative vision of politics governed by aesthetic principles—it is “aesthetic education” versus political reality. Everything he writes after 1795 is part of that contentedly disengaged world of Erziehung, or so the story goes. Fichte, for his part, is conspicuously the only major German Idealist philosopher not to devote a treatise to aesthetics, and his theoretical enterprise has steadily developed a reputation as anti-aesthetic, as 2 The relevant text is Lukács’s “Zur Ästhetik Schillers” (1954). Lesley Sharpe: “After an early period of revolutionary fervor, Schiller, in Lukács’s view, turned away in horror from the degeneration into barbarism he saw in Revolutionary France. His solution in the Ästhetische Briefe is the construction of a utopia,