Abstract
This chapter stages a confrontation between various post-structuralist materialisms of language and German Idealist naturalisms by way of two case studies into J. W. Goethe’s and F. W. J. Schelling’s textual practices and the various models for light and darkness that underpin them.
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Notes
- 1.
Barry Smith et al., “Letter to the Editor,” The Times (London), Saturday 9 May 1992.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 148.
- 4.
Reported by John Searle in Steven Postrel and Edward Feser, “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle,” Reason Magazine (February 2000), https://reason.com/2000/02/01/reality-principles-an-intervie/ (last accessed: 28/03/22).
- 5.
Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 332–45.
- 6.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Trubner, 1883), 22.
- 7.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel’s Bon Mots), trans. Céline Surprenant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 46.
- 8.
Ibid., 94, 115, 121.
- 9.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave, 1922), B295.
- 10.
Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Continuum, 1989), 6.
- 11.
Of course, poststructuralist readers are not the only ones to read German Idealists in this way—see, for example, Theodor Adorno, Three Studies, trans. S. W. Nicholsen (Boston: MIT Press, 1993), 100.
- 12.
F. W. J. Schelling, Clara or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World, trans. Fiona Steinkamp (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 63.
- 13.
F. W. J. Schelling, Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61), 4.403–4.
- 14.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9.
- 15.
F. W. J. Schelling, Bruno, or On the Natural and Divine Principle of Things, ed. and trans. Michael G. Vater (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 139.
- 16.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 31.
- 17.
For cybernetic readings of German Idealism more generally, see, e.g., Oriane Petteni, “Entre conservation, destruction et extinction. Une relecture écocritique de la Naturphilosophie en temps de crise,” L’art du comprendre vol. 26 (2022).
- 18.
Iain Hamilton Grant, “Schellingianism and Postmodernity: Towards a Materialist Naturphilosophie” (1998). Available at: www.bu.edu/wcp/papers/cult/cultgran.htm; last accessed: 01/04/2010. Compare with Grant’s criticisms of Deleuze and Badiou at the opening to Philosophies of Nature after Schelling a few years later ([London: Continuum, 2014], x-xii).
- 19.
See further Christopher Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Ingo Berensmeyer, “Reframing Deconstruction in Systems Theory: Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida and the Culture of Writing,” Studies in English Literary and Cultural History, vol. 61 (2014): 75–93.
- 20.
G. W. F Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 20.
- 21.
See Oriane Petteni, “Breaking Free from Material Terrestrial Contingency: The Path of the Hegelian Spirit towards Absolute Freedom,” Cosmos and History, vol. 17, no. 2 (2021): 224–49.
- 22.
In Georges Canguilhem’s phrase—see, e.g., his Knowledge of Life, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 114.
- 23.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, ed. Michael Inwood and trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194.
- 24.
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, “Introduction,” to The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Science of Man, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), xvi.
- 25.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 91.
- 26.
Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 39.
- 27.
For example, Derrida, Margins, 101–5.
- 28.
Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 206.
- 29.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 194.
- 30.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2, 4.
- 31.
Derrida, Margins, 118.
- 32.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 26.
- 33.
Philippe Sollers, L’Ecriture et l’expérience des limites (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 6. Implicit here and in the rest of this section is a question whether such “semantic materialism” is intended as an extension, confirmation, supplement or replacement of dialectical materialism.
- 34.
Anthony Easthorpe, British Post-Structuralism since 1968 (London: Routledge, 1988). See also David Silverman, The Material Word (London: Routledge, 1980).
- 35.
Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1977), 153.
- 36.
Ibid., 2.
- 37.
Ibid., 123.
- 38.
Ibid., 2.
- 39.
Ibid., 2–3.
- 40.
Ibid., 4.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid., 86, 146.
- 43.
Ibid., 152.
- 44.
For example, ibid., 31.
- 45.
Alain Badiou, The Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2010), 2–4.
- 46.
See Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 67.
- 47.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 7. For further discussion of the antipathy between de Man and philosophy of nature, see Daniel Whistler, “Naturalism and Symbolism,” Angelaki vol. 21, no. 4 (2016): 91–109.
- 48.
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 6.
- 49.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke: Großer Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1985), 2.90–5, ll. 89–90.
- 50.
De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 196.
- 51.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press), 145. The following naturephilosophical reading of Kristeva is anticipated most obviously by Alison Stone, who has repeatedly pointed to the partial affinities between philosophy of nature and French feminism. In her words, “There is one key idea that I take from Schelling and Hegel and that runs through my work in feminist philosophy, and this is the idea that both nature and mind consist of a multiplicity of levels of development… This connects up with feminism, and especially feminism of sexual difference: our thoughts are always going to arise from and bear the traces of our bodies; take, for instance, Julia Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic.” Luca Corti et al., “Hegelian Interviews: Alison Stone,” HPD (December 2019), http://www.hegelpd.it/hegel/hpd-hegelian-interviews-alison-stone/ (last accessed: 30/03/22); see further, more generally, Alison Stone, “The Incomplete Materialism of French Materialist Feminism,” Radical Philosophy no. 145 (2007): 20–7.
- 52.
Jean-Louis Baudry et al. [including Julia Kristeva], “La Révolution ici maintenant. Paris, mai 1968,” Tel Quel vol. 34 (1968), 3–4.
- 53.
Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 31.
- 54.
Julia Kristeva, “The Subject in Process,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. and trans. Patrick Ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London: Routledge, 1998), 172.
- 55.
Kristeva, Revolution, 15.
- 56.
Julia Kristeva, “L’Expansion de la sémiotique,” in Essais de sémiotique, ed. Julia Kristeva et al. (Paris: Moulan, 1971), 34.
- 57.
Lewis, “Revolutionary Semiotics,” 30. Kristeva is not the only figure at this time to undertake a genetic turn in her treatment of language—Hélène Cixous is another obvious candidate (see Oriane Petteni, “L’Amour de l’orange aussi est politique. Genèse, vision et assimilation dans les œuvres d’Hélène Cixous et de Clarice Lispector,” in Écriture des origines, origines de l’écriture. Hélène Cixous, ed. K. Gyssels and C. Stevens [Leiden: Brill, 2019], 141–58). But we focus on Kristeva’s work because she undertakes this turn in sustained dialogue with Hegel.
- 58.
Kristeva, Revolution, 40.
- 59.
Kristeva, “Subject in Process,” 167, 172.
- 60.
Ibid., 145.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Lewis, “Revolutionary Semiotics,” 29.
- 63.
Kristeva, “Subject in Process,” 139.
- 64.
Kristeva, Revolution, 51.
- 65.
Ibid., 180.
- 66.
Kristeva, Polylogue, 414.
- 67.
Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 34.
- 68.
Grant, Philosophies of Nature, x.
- 69.
Grant, “Schellingianism and Postmodernity.”
- 70.
Iain Hamilton Grant, “‘Philosophy Become Genetic’: The Physics of the World Soul,” in The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (London: Continuum, 2004), 133; Philosophies of Nature, 11.
- 71.
Grant, Philosophies of Nature, 173.
- 72.
Ibid., 15.
- 73.
For this strategy, see Whistler, “Naturalism and Symbolism,” as well as Daniel Whistler, “Language After Philosophy of Nature: Schelling’s Geology of Divine Names,’ in After the Postmodern and the Postsecular, ed. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010): 335–59; Daniel Whistler, “Improper Names for God: Religious Language and the ‘Spinoza Effect’,” Speculations vol. 3 (2012): 99–134; Joshua Ramey and Daniel Whistler, “The Physics of Sense: Bruno, Schelling, Deleuze,” in Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics, ed. Edward Kazarian et al. (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2014), 87–109; Daniel Whistler, “Living and Dead Forms: The Factuality of Meaning in Schelling and Other Naturalists,” in Living Ideas: Dynamic Philosophies of Life and Matter, 1650–1850, ed. Peter Cheyne (forthcoming).
- 74.
An important model for our work in this regard is Gabriel Trop’s “The Aesthetics of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie,” Symposium vol. 19, no. 1 (2015): 140–153.
- 75.
See further Daniel Whistler, “The Production of Transparency: Hölderlinian Practices,” Studies in Romanticism vol. 23, no. 2 (2016): 155–74.
- 76.
Anselm Haverkamp, Leaves of Mourning: Hölderlin’s Late Work, trans. Vernon Chadwick (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 6.
- 77.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. D. E. Sattler (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1999), 9.175.
- 78.
David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 310.
- 79.
Dominique Janicaud, Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Paris: Eclat, 2001), 243.
- 80.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. S. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 51.
- 81.
Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science (Edinburgh: Floris, 1996), 79.
- 82.
J. W. Goethe, Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe, ed. S. von Sachsen et al. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), I/27.382. See, e.g., Werner Keller, “Variationen zum Thema: ‘Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft…’,” in Peter-André Alt et al. (eds), Prägnanter Moment (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 439–57.
- 83.
J. W. Goethe, Theory of Colors, trans. C. L. Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), xxxix; translation modified in accordance with J. W. Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 164.
- 84.
Ibid.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Ibid., §752.
- 87.
Maurice Marache, Le Symbole dans la pensée et l’oeuvre de Goethe (Paris: Nizat, 1960), 218.
- 88.
J. W. Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), ll. 3451–7
- 89.
Goethe, Scientific Studies, 26–7.
- 90.
Goethe, Maxims and Reflection, ed. Peter Hutchinson, trans. Elisabeth Stopp (London: Penguin, 1998), §675.
- 91.
Goethe, Theory of Colors, §242.
- 92.
R. L. Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 63; Andrew O. Jaszi, “Symbolism and the Linguistic Paradox: Reflections on Goethe’s World View,” in Helmut Rehder (ed.), Literary Symbolism: A Symposium (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 82.
- 93.
Marache, Le Symbole, 218.
- 94.
Marianne Henn, “‘Individuum est ineffabile’: Goethe and the Tradition of Silence,” in M. Henn and C. Lorey (eds), Analogon Rationis (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1994), 252.
- 95.
J. W. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants, ed. Jane K. Brown and trans. Krishna Winston (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), 420.
- 96.
See, e.g., Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De Près et de Loin (Paris, Odile Jacob, 1988), 158–9; Jean Petitot, “La généalogie morphologique du structuralisme,” Critique, no. 620–1 (1999), 97–122; Thomas Vercruysse, De Goethe à Piaget: le versant biologique du structuralisme (Madrid: Estudos Semanticos, 2017).
- 97.
Petitot, “La généalogie morphologique,” 97–8. See Oriane Petteni, “The Contemporary Legacy of Goethean Morphology: From Anschauende Urteilskraft to Algorithmic Pattern Recognition, Generation and Exploration,” Goethe Yearbook no. 29 (2022).
- 98.
Goethe, Scientific Studies, 149.
- 99.
Goethe, Theory of Colors, §158.
- 100.
J. W. Goethe, Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, ed. D. Kuhn et al. (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1970), 11.266.
- 101.
Goethe, Theory of Colors, xxxix; translation modified in accordance with Goethe, Scientific Studies, 164.
- 102.
On the role of linear perspective, see Hubert Damisch, L’origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).
- 103.
Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 87.
- 104.
Ibid., 83–4.
- 105.
On this topic, see—as well as Lyotard—Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
- 106.
Goethe, Theory of Colors, §868 (see also §178).
- 107.
Ibid., §§33, 38.
- 108.
Goethe, Werke, II/4.295–6.
- 109.
J. W. Goethe, Briefe, ed. K. R. Mandelkow (Hamburg: Wegner, 1968), 2.528.
- 110.
Goethe, Theory of Colors, §123ss.
- 111.
Ibid., §140.
- 112.
Ibid., §§1, 3.
- 113.
Ibid., §54.
- 114.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, ed. and trans. Michael J. Petry (London: Routledge, 1970), §220.
- 115.
See, e.g., Goethe, Theory of Colors, §810.
- 116.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Letters, ed. and trans. Clark Buttler and Christian Seiler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 701.
- 117.
Goethe, Theory of Colors, §815.
- 118.
Ibid., xxxviii; translation modified in accordance with Goethe, Scientific Studies, 163–4.
- 119.
Loisa Nygaard, “‘Bild’ and ‘Sinnbild’: The Problem of the Symbol in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,” Germanic Review vol. 63, no. 2 (1988), 63–4.
- 120.
See F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 13–14.
- 121.
Schelling, Bruno, 176.
- 122.
Schelling, Werke, 2.378.
- 123.
Wolfram Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). See also Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), 91–126; Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 2006).
- 124.
F. W. J. Schelling, On University Studies, ed. Norbert Guterman, trans. E.S. Morgan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 40.
- 125.
Schelling, Werke, 8.453.
- 126.
F. W. J. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Marcus Zisselsberger (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 18.
- 127.
Ibid., 162.
- 128.
Ibid., 39.
- 129.
F. W. J. Schelling, The Deities of Samothrace, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977), 34, 37.
- 130.
Schelling, Werke, 8.454.
- 131.
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (La Salle: Open Court, 1936), 74.
- 132.
Ibid., 36.
- 133.
Ibid., 92.
- 134.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9.
- 135.
Schelling, Werke, 6.362–3.
- 136.
Ibid., 6.429.
- 137.
Ibid., 7.172, 6.441.
- 138.
Xavier Tilliette Schelling: Biographie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999), 147; Marc Maesschalck, Philosophie et révélation dans l’itinéraire de Schelling (Louvain: Peeters, 1989), 83.
- 139.
See, e.g., Schelling, Werke, 4.336–58.
- 140.
Ibid., 4.405.
- 141.
F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (1811 version), trans. Joseph P. Lawrence (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), 111, 198.
- 142.
Ibid., 83.
- 143.
F. W. J. Schelling and Slavoj Žižek, Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (1813 version) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 143.
- 144.
Schelling, Ages (1811), 201.
- 145.
Schelling, Ages (1813), 170.
- 146.
Schelling, Ages (1811), 91.
- 147.
Ibid., 100–1.
- 148.
Ibid., 174.
- 149.
On this mixture, see further F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (1815 version), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 18.
- 150.
Schelling, Ages (1811), 203.
- 151.
Ibid., 192.
- 152.
Schelling, Ages (1815), 71, 77.
- 153.
Schelling, Ages (1813), 151.
- 154.
Ibid.
- 155.
Schelling, Ages (1815), 51.
- 156.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberto Galeta (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 18. The language of a “book of light” we have been using in this section is itself, in part, an adaptation and application of Deleuze’s claim that Spinoza’s Ethics, Part V, is “an aerial book of light.” (“Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’,” in W. Montag and T. Stolze (eds), The New Spinoza [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 30)
- 157.
Ibid., 50.
- 158.
Schelling, Ages (1811), 70.
- 159.
Deleuze, Cinema II, 121, 124.
- 160.
Ibid., 129, 57.
- 161.
Ibid., 282.
- 162.
Schelling does certainly write in this way—e.g., “In the very moment when the Highest is supposed to express itself, it becomes the inexpressible.” (Ages [1813], 170). According to Žižek, Schelling here articulates “a primordial, radical, and irreducible alienation… a constitutive ‘out-of-jointedness’.” (Abyss of Freedom, 41)
- 163.
Schelling, Ages (1813), 177.
- 164.
Ibid., 170.
- 165.
Ibid., 178.
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Petteni, O., Whistler, D. (2023). Language. 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_14
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