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The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism

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Abstract

This chapter explores the importance of writing by early nineteenth-century women for post-structuralist accounts of philosophy of art in German Idealism and Romanticism. Work by Romantic writers Karoline von Günderrode and Bettina Brentano-von Arnim is related to post-structuralist analyses of the sublime, the fragment, the work of art, and the artist/genius.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, Anna Ezekiel, “Women, Women Writers, and Early German Romanticism,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy, ed. Elizabeth Millán (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 475–509; Lorely French, “‘Meine beiden Ichs’: Confrontations with Language and Self in Letters by Early Nineteenth-Century Women,” Women in German Yearbook 5 (1989): 73–89; Dalia Nassar, “The Human Vocation and the Question of the Earth: Karoline von Günderrode’s Reading of Fichte,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (2021).

  2. 2.

    For example, Catherine Villaneuva Gardner, Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000); Sarah Tyson, Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

  3. 3.

    Ezekiel, “Women, Women Writers,” 488–489.

  4. 4.

    For example, Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960–), 1.311–2; Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn et al.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958ff.; hereafter “KFSA”), 5.1–82.

  5. 5.

    KFSA, 8.41–62. See Martha B. Helfer, “The Male Muses of Romanticism: The Poetics of Gender in Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Eichendorff,” The German Quarterly 78.3 (2008): 300; Lisa C. Roetzel, “Feminizing Philosophy,” in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Haynes Horne, and Andreas Michel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 370.

  6. 6.

    Martha B. Helfer, “Gender Studies and Romanticism,” in The Literature of German Romanticism, ed. Dennis Mahoney (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 33; Elena Pnevmonidou, “Die Absage an das romantische Ich. Dorothea Schlegels Florentin als Umschrift von Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde,” German Life and Letters 58.3 (2005): 273–275; Roetzel, “Feminizing Philosophy,” 370.

  7. 7.

    Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007), 133.

  8. 8.

    Helfer, “Gender Studies and Romanticism,” 142.

  9. 9.

    Alan Corkhill, “Female Language Theory in the Age of Goethe: Three Case Studies,” The Modern Language Review 94.4 (1999): 1048; French, “Meine beiden Ichs,” 74 n4; Kay Goodman, “Poesis and Praxis in Rahel Varnhagen’s Letters,” New German Critique 27 (1982): 132.

  10. 10.

    Corkhill, “Female Language Theory”; Goodman, “Poesis and Praxis.” See also French, “Meine beiden Ichs”; Elke Frederiksen, “Die Frau als Autorin zur Zeit der Romantik. Anfänge einer weiblichen literarischen Tradition,” Gestaltet und Gestaltend. Frauen in der deutschen Literatur, ed. Marianne Burkhard, Amsterdamer Beiträge der Germanistik, vol. 10 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), 83–108; Renata Fuchs, “Dann ist und bleibt eine Korrespondenz lebendig”: Romantic Dialogue in the Letters and Works of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Bettina Brentano von Arnim, and Karoline von Günderrode (Diss. 2015).

  11. 11.

    Goodman, “Poesis and Praxis,” 132. See also Corkhill, “Female Language Theory,” 1048.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 133–134.

  13. 13.

    Corkhill, “Female Language Theory,” 1042.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 1048.

  15. 15.

    See, e.g., Günderrode, Letter to Clemens Brentano, 10 June 1804, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Anna Ezekiel (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

  16. 16.

    See Anna Ezekiel, Introduction to “Piedro,” “The Pilgrims,” and “The Kiss in the Dream,” in Günderrode, Poetic Fragments (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 87–105; Ezekiel, “Earth, Spirit, Humanity: Community and the Nonhuman in Karoline von Günderrode’s ‘Idea of the Earth,’” in Romanticism and Political Ecology, ed. Kir Kuiken (Romantic Circles Praxis: forthcoming).

  17. 17.

    Battersby, Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 129.

  18. 18.

    Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2–3.

  19. 19.

    Patricia Yaeger, “Toward a Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory, ed. Linda Kauffman (Blackwell, 1989), 191.

  20. 20.

    Battersby notes especially the association of the feminine with the “slime” or “mud” left behind by alchemical sublimation. She argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the sublime, including Kant’s, were informed by alchemical concepts of “sublimation” and the escape of “vapours or spirits” from base matter (notwithstanding the different etymology of these concepts in German) (Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 105–107, 110).

  21. 21.

    Battersby, Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 110. See also Freeman, The Feminine Sublime, 3; see also Yaeger, “Toward a Feminine Sublime,” 191, 198.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 105.

  23. 23.

    See Battersby, “Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality, and the Gendered Sublime,” in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, ed. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 96–97.

  24. 24.

    Battersby, Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 113.

  25. 25.

    See also Ezekiel, “Metamorphosis, Personhood, and Power in Karoline von Günderrode,” European Romantic Review 25.6 (2014): 773–791; Ezekiel, “Narrative and Fragment: The Social Self in Karoline von Günderrode,” Symphilosophie: International Journal of European Romanticism 2 (2020).

  26. 26.

    Battersby, Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 118–119.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 119, 124.

  28. 28.

    Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments.

  29. 29.

    Battersby, Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 127.

  30. 30.

    Freeman, The Feminine Sublime, 3, 11, 10.

  31. 31.

    Yaeger, “Toward a Feminine Sublime,” 191.

  32. 32.

    Battersby, Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, 129.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 130.

  34. 34.

    Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 124.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 128.

  37. 37.

    Günderrode’s monism is underpinned by her metaphysics, in which individual beings emerge temporarily from changing constellations of eternal “elements” that constitute the universe. For details, see Ezekiel, “Earth, Spirit, Humanity”; Nassar, “The Human Vocation.”

  38. 38.

    Jean-François, Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 89.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 92.

  40. 40.

    “Thought works over what is received, it seeks to reflect on it and overcome it.… We know this process well, it is our daily bread. It is the bread of war” (ibid., 91).

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 92.

  42. 42.

    Ibid.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 91.

  44. 44.

    Karoline von Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walter Morgenthaler (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1990–1991), 1.383.

  45. 45.

    Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” 454.

  46. 46.

    See, e.g., KFSA, 2.159, nr 103; 2.182, nr 116; 2.200, nr 200; Novalis, Schriften, 2.672–673.

  47. 47.

    Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 43.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 62; see also 12, 36–37, 62. See also KFSA, 2.183, nr 116.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 30.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 30.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 62.

  52. 52.

    I can find only six references to fragments in Günderrode’s writing, and in some cases her use of the term seems to be conventional, rather than reflecting philosophical commitments. For example, Günderrode reveals in a letter that she subtitled her play Muhammad “A Dramatic Fragment” in response to criticism from a friend, who wanted her to follow the fashion of pointing out the shortcomings of one’s own work (Günderrode, Letter to Karl v. Savigny, June 1804, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3: 134).

  53. 53.

    Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Identität als Selbstverlust. Zum romantischen Subjektbegriff,” Merkur 38.4 (1984): 367–379; Ezekiel, “Narrative and Fragment.”

  54. 54.

    See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der romantische Brief. Die Entstehung ästhetischer Subjektivität (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 78–79, 119–120; Ezekiel, “Narrative and Fragment.”

  55. 55.

    Günderrode, Letter to Carl Friedrich von Savigny, 26 February 1804, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments.

  56. 56.

    Günderrode, Letter to Kunigunde Brentano, 11 August 1801, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments. See Ezekiel, “Writing with the Body.”

  57. 57.

    Günderrode, Letter to Clemens Brentano, 19 May 1803, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments.

  58. 58.

    Günderrode, Letter to Clemens Brentano, 1803, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments.

  59. 59.

    Ezekiel, “Narrative and Fragment.”

  60. 60.

    See, e.g., Novalis, Schriften, 2: 580 nr 242; KFSA 2: 182 nr 116; 185 nr 121; 200 nr 220; 205 nr 242; 236 nr 383.

  61. 61.

    Günderrode, Letter to Bettina Brentano, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments.

  62. 62.

    Bohrer, Der romantische Brief, 119.

  63. 63.

    Ezekiel, “Narrative and Fragment.”

  64. 64.

    Günderrode, Letter to Kunigunde Brentano, 11 August 1801; Letter to Kunigunde Brentano, 4 September 1801; and Letter to Carl Friedrich von Savigny, 3 August 1804, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments.

  65. 65.

    Günderrode, Letter to Kunigunde Brentano, 4 September 1801, in Günderrode, Philosophical Fragments.

  66. 66.

    Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 46, 47.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 48.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 59; see also 35, 52.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 48, 51.

  70. 70.

    Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft (Berlin and New York: Georg Reimer, 1913; hereafter “KU, AA”), 5.314.

  71. 71.

    Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” trans. R. Klein, Diacritics 11.2 (1981): 5.

  72. 72.

    Kant, KU, AA 5.312.

  73. 73.

    Derrida, “Economimesis,” 22.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., 21; see also 22–25.

  75. 75.

    “A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing” or “what is abject,… the jettisoned object” (Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” trans. Leon S. Roudiez, in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 230).

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 229.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 239; see also 235–240; see also Kristeva, “From Filth to Defilement,” trans. Leon S. Roudiez, in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 [1980]), 255.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., 232.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 231; see also 230.

  80. 80.

    See also Kristeva, “From Filth to Defilement,” 252–254.

  81. 81.

    Derrida, “Economimesis,” 25.

  82. 82.

    Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Indiana University Press, 1990), 3.

  83. 83.

    Margaretmary Daley, “The Loving Self: Bettina von Arnim,” in Women of Letters: A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim (Columbia: Camden House, 1998), 82; Lisa C. Roetzel, “Acting Out: Bettine as Performer of Feminine Genius,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 14.1 (1998): 113.

  84. 84.

    Among other things, Brentano-von Arnim had to abandon publication of her work on the living conditions of weavers in Silesia after she was linked with the 1844 Weaver’s Revolt. There is not space here to consider Brentano-von Arnim and her work in relation to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concerns with the sublime, femininity, and revolution; for some general remarks on the latter topic see Paul Mattick, “Beautiful and Sublime: ‘Gender Totemism’ and the Constitution of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48.4 (1990): 293–303.

  85. 85.

    Elke P. Frederiksen and Katherine R. Goodman, “Locating Bettina Brentano-von Arnim, A Nineteenth Century Woman Writer,” in Bettina Brentano-von Arnim: Gender and Politics, ed. Elke P. Frederiksen and Katharine R. Goodman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 18; Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), 74.

  86. 86.

    Daley, “The Loving Self,” 84.

  87. 87.

    See Frederiksen and Goodman, “Locating Bettina Brentano-von Arnim,” 24; Ingrid E. Fry, “Elective Androgyny: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim and Margaret Fuller’s Reception of Goethe,” Goethe Yearbook 10 (2001): 247.

  88. 88.

    Fry, “Elective Androgyny,” 255–256; see also Daley, “The Loving Self,” 84.

  89. 89.

    Frederiksen and Goodman, “Locating Bettina Brentano-von Arnim,” 18–19; see also Claire Baldwin, “Questioning the ‘Jewish Question’: Poetic Philosophy and Politics in Conversations with Demons,” in Bettina Brentano-von Arnim: Gender and Politics, ed. Elke P. Frederiksen and Katharine R. Goodman (Wayne State University Press, 1995), 222.

  90. 90.

    Renata Fuchs, “‘I Drink Love to Get Strong’: Bettina Brentano von Arnim’s Romantic Philosophy and Dialogue in Die Günderode,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 32 (2016): 17; Edith Waldstein, “Goethe and Beyond: Bettine von Arnim’s Correspondence with a Child and Günderode,” in In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers Around 1800, ed. Katherine R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 96–97, 107.

  91. 91.

    The characters in Günderode use their first names; it is not clear to what extent they are intended to be literary characters as opposed to genuine representations of Günderrode and Brentano-von Arnim.

  92. 92.

    For example, Bettina Brentano-von Arnim, “Selections from Günderode,” trans. Anna Ezekiel, in Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition, ed. Dalia Nassar and Kristin Gjesdal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 102, 103, 118–119, 121.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., 103; see also 101, 102.

  94. 94.

    Roetzel, “Acting Out,” 109.

  95. 95.

    Ibid., 118; see also 113.

  96. 96.

    Ibid., 116.

  97. 97.

    Ibid., 120–121.

  98. 98.

    Bettina Brentano-von Arnim, “Die Günderode,” in Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Walter Schmitz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 1986), 626–630. My translation. See also Brentano-von Arnim’s invectives against philosophers (Brentano-von Arnim, “Selections from Günderode,” 114–115).

  99. 99.

    See, e.g., Brentano-von Arnim, “Selections from Günderode,” 95, 114–115.

  100. 100.

    Baldwin, “Questioning the ‘Jewish Question,’” 224; see also Frederiksen and Goodman, “Locating Bettina Brentano-von Arnim,” 28; Janson, “The Path Not (Yet) Taken,” 14; Waldstein, “Goethe and Beyond,” 102.

  101. 101.

    Brentano-von Arnim, “Selections from Günderode,” 110. Cf. Luce Irigaray, “Quand nos lèvres se parlent,” in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris, Les Éditions de minuit, 1977), 203–217.

  102. 102.

    See, e.g., Brentano-von Arnim’s description of music in ibid., 106–107.

  103. 103.

    Fuchs, “I Drink Love,” 14.

  104. 104.

    Kundera, Immortality, 45.

  105. 105.

    Ibid., 46.

  106. 106.

    Ibid., 60.

  107. 107.

    Ibid., 68.

  108. 108.

    Ibid., 60.

  109. 109.

    Ibid., 69.

  110. 110.

    See esp. “Letters of Two Friends” and the poems “Love and Beauty,” and “Tendency of the Artist.”

  111. 111.

    See especially “The Realm of Tones,” “Music,” “Music for Me,” “The Nightingale,” “The Cathedral in Cologne.”

  112. 112.

    Especially in Günderode.

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  1. University of York, York, UK

    Anna Ezekiel

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  1. Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Tilottama Rajan

  2. Department of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK

    Daniel Whistler

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Ezekiel, A. (2023). Art. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_12

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