Logos and Pallaksch. The Loss of Madness and the Survival of Poetry in Paul Celan's “ TÜbingen, JÄnner ”

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/71988/1/j.1600-0730.1999.tb00286.x.pd

The abyss above: Poetry, philosophy, and madness in Plato, Hoelderlin, and Nietzsche

The figure of the mad poet has engaged the cultural imagination of the West for more than two millennia. Traditionally, the mad poem appeared as an articulation of essentially unique and irreproducible character in contrast to philosophy as a controllable and repeatable process that strives to be self-legitimating. Madness thus plays a decisive role in the struggle for hegemony between discursive and poetic texts. The study examines the shift from metaphysics to what one may call Nietzsche\u27s meta-physiology, leading from a central divine presence in Plato to the absence of the Gods in Holderlin and the death of God in Nietzsche. While presenting madness as an alternative route to absolute truth that may be superior to philosophy, Plato simultaneously disowns the poets of reflective authority on the very grounds of the poets\u27 madness, thus establishing the necessity for a separate critical discipline under the aegis of philosophy. Holderlin, still the quintessential mad poet to many critics, actually inverts this classical paradigm: his Sophocles translations and annotations suggest that it is philosophy which, during the absence of the gods, is threatened to be drawn into the abyss above by transcendental desire, while poetry takes over the labor of constraint and conservation that Socrates had assigned to the philosophers. Nietzsche, then, finally shatters the very premises of a rationalistic culture where philosophy and poetry exclude each other. While madness plays an important role in his genealogy of morality, his work ultimately undermines the traditional assumptions about reason and truth that sustain the status of mad speech as authentic discourse. The thesis aims to work towards a better understanding of both the rationalist and the anti-rationalist elements in Western culture at large, for the mad poet is still haunting our thought on literature at a time where psycho-analysis and related events in modern intellectual history have seemingly rendered not only the idea of authorship but the very term of madness obsolete

The abyss above: Poetry, philosophy, and madness in Plato, Hoelderlin, and Nietzsche

The figure of the mad poet has engaged the cultural imagination of the West for more than two millennia. Traditionally, the mad poem appeared as an articulation of essentially unique and irreproducible character in contrast to philosophy as a controllable and repeatable process that strives to be self-legitimating. Madness thus plays a decisive role in the struggle for hegemony between discursive and poetic texts. The study examines the shift from metaphysics to what one may call Nietzsche\u27s meta-physiology, leading from a central divine presence in Plato to the absence of the Gods in Holderlin and the death of God in Nietzsche. While presenting madness as an alternative route to absolute truth that may be superior to philosophy, Plato simultaneously disowns the poets of reflective authority on the very grounds of the poets\u27 madness, thus establishing the necessity for a separate critical discipline under the aegis of philosophy. Holderlin, still the quintessential mad poet to many critics, actually inverts this classical paradigm: his Sophocles translations and annotations suggest that it is philosophy which, during the absence of the gods, is threatened to be drawn into the abyss above by transcendental desire, while poetry takes over the labor of constraint and conservation that Socrates had assigned to the philosophers. Nietzsche, then, finally shatters the very premises of a rationalistic culture where philosophy and poetry exclude each other. While madness plays an important role in his genealogy of morality, his work ultimately undermines the traditional assumptions about reason and truth that sustain the status of mad speech as authentic discourse. The thesis aims to work towards a better understanding of both the rationalist and the anti-rationalist elements in Western culture at large, for the mad poet is still haunting our thought on literature at a time where psycho-analysis and related events in modern intellectual history have seemingly rendered not only the idea of authorship but the very term of madness obsolete

The Irony Monster:First and Last Deity

This talk postulates that religious or quasi-religious systems and practices can be read as a defense against the ever-threatening possibility of radical reversals of meaning. This threat deserves to be named ‘the Irony Monster’ since its effect evokes a cruel kind of force: the Irony Monster ceaselessly turns coincidence into the compelling appearance of significance and thus conjures an agency that stands above the gods. Irony, here, does not mean a rhetorical figure or a manner of speaking but refers to a configuration of events we have come to call ‘tragic irony’, a course of events in which the very action taken to avert catastrophe makes it happen all the more surely. Both literature and myth return to such configurations over and over again: Oedipus in Ancient Greece, the Book of Job, or Kleist’s Penthesilea may serve as examples. While Greek antiquity and Biblical monotheism developed distinct strategies to contain or tame the Irony Monster’s force, modern agnosticism has no defense against it since its fitful courtship of the metaphysical has itself become ironic and thus devolves into perpetual oscillations. The talk will demonstrate this process through a reading of Kleist’s drama Amphitryon. Silke-Maria Weineck is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She has published three books that investigate the relationship between antiquity and modernity and the persistence of religious figuration in secular systems: The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche (2002), The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West (2014), and, co-edited with Victor Caston, Our Ancient Wars: Reading War Though the Classics (2016).Silke-Maria Weineck, The Irony Monster: First and Last Deity, lecture, ICI Berlin, 20 February 2017, video recording, mp4, 39:48 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e170220