Holderlin And Blanchot On Self-Sacrifice (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures) - Hardcover

Suglia, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820472735 ISBN 13: 9780820472737

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2004

Synopsis

A scene of self-sacrifice can never be staged or secured. The work of Friedrich Hölderlin, arguably one of the most profound writers of the German Enlightenment, supports this idea in fascinating ways. Much of Hölderlin’s critical reception, however, has the poet saying the exact opposite. Joseph Suglia counters the dominant critical reception of Hölderlin’s Empedokles fragments, which would transform the tragic hero’s experience of mortality into a project that would be accomplished in the name of the transcendent reconciliation of disparate spheres.
This book also focuses on a densely detailed consideration of the work of the great French critic and literary artist, Maurice Blanchot, whose own treatment of self-sacrifice exists in closer proximity to Hölderlin’s than the former appears to recognize. For Blanchot, it is argued, self-sacrifice is «a sacrifice that is an engagement with, in, and for language, a sacrifice that is both madness and mystery».

About this title

From the Author:

"As Joseph Suglia deftly summarises in his introduction to this comparative study of the sacrificial economies of Blanchot and Hölderlin, the point of departure for his thesis conjures an ironical paradox. For what Hölderlin's modern reception, in Suglia's reading, has conspicuously neglected to address is the performative failure of sacrifice in Hölderlin's Empedokles texts, insofar as sacrifice itself, being an unstageable event, must submit to its own sacrificial logic. According to the author, this paradoxical riddle, that of sacrifice's 'possible impossibility', is what Blanchot himself, notwithstanding his theoretical proximity to Hölderlin's poetics of tragedy, ultimately failed to grasp. Hence we must rather start out, in defiance of much of what he labels 'German-nationalist' Hölderlin criticism, from 'the absence of sacrifice' (1) in order to grasp its operational role in the work of both writers. Pointing to Hölderlin's abandonment of all of what Suglia terms his 'sacrificial projects' - including The Death of Socrates, to which the poet referred in letters to friends, and a possible second abortive tragedy, Agis - he conceives this absence of the sacrificial stage as all the more striking when annexed to Hölderlin's theoretical writings on tragedy, exceeding as they did the reach of what the dramatic texts themselves enact. However, the subtlety of Suglia's position in fact constellates a double paradox, since, in regard to the latter, he considers - the double quotation marks highlighting the irony - that their '"failure"' might be 'tied in an enigmatic way' to their '"success"' (2). Though Blanchot falls misguidedly into line with an orthodox reconstruction of Empedokles as driven by a fantasy of unbridled romanticism, restoring the pre-established harmonies of 'art' and 'nature', 'heaven' and 'earth', 'self' and 'world' in an act of infinite suicide, it is the proto-modern legacy of Hölderlin's tragic fragments which Suglia reads as anticipating Blanchot's notoriously recalcitrant 1941 novel, Thomas L'Obscur, just as the latter serves retrospectively to shed upon them its dark light.

"It is thus what Suglia rather coyly evokes as 'a certain interpretive distress' (6), a hermeneutic anxiety occasioned by the absence of a definitive Empedoklean scene of self-immolation, which signals the opening chapter of his Hölderlin discussion. The classic reconstruction of the tragic hero as a shattered mediator of the hitherto irreconcilable oppositions of German idealism only displays criticism's 'hermeneutic desire' for closure (6). However, as Suglia argues, it is rather the 'appearance of reconciliation' (11) - not its consummation - which the later versions of Hölderlin's project throw into relief. To do this, Suglia takes up a philological argument advocating the inseparability of the three extant versions of Hölderlin's tragedy from the Grund zum Empedokles (1799), rather than reading the latter text as their external legislator. It is here, he suggests, that we discern 'the immediate ground of Empedokles' sacrificial decision' (15). Hölderlin here evokes 'in pure life' (im reinen Leben) the merely harmonious (nur harmonisch) opposition of 'nature' and 'art', held together in a relation of paradoxical unity and separation. In a Schellingian vein, art 'perfects' nature in fashioning her chaotic productions, through which she is mortally raised to a divine power. Nature herself conforms to Hölderlin's category of 'the aorgic', which is poetically immeasurable. This dynamic tension, however, undergoes its own estrangement, polarising itself until it can exchange its properties out of their alterity. In this drastic antithesis is effected a kind of tragic reversal, whereby each term takes on the features of the other. Out of the reconciliation of their violent opposition through exchange and inversion, an excessive intimacy (Übermass) is generated as the locus of tragedy's monstrous self-knowledge. My own 'interpretive distress' concerning Suglia's thesis here centres on Hölderlin's conception of 'pure life', the alleged obscurity of which - and hence responsibility for - Suglia appears to project onto Hölderlin himself (15).

"Be that as it may, the unifying moment of the tragic struggle - in a passage that anticipates Baudrillard's 'fractal' writings on the extermination of the real - is what Hölderlin will name the 'simulacrum' (Trugbild), whose resolution, personified in the tragic hero's sacrificial death, is brought about through its necessary generalisation. Hölderlin's use of the phrase 'like a simulation' (wie ein Trugbild) is dismissed by Suglia as suggesting that it is 'used only as a metaphor' and hence 'not to be taken seriously'(20). Leaving aside this perplexing denigration of the metaphorical life, I would suggest that it implies in Hölderlin a kind of double irony, a simulation of illusion, rather than a figure of speech perversely written off in advance. In suffering his virtual duality as an individualisation of tragedy's 'riddle' (Räthsel), Empedokles submitted himself to a sacrifice demanded, in Hölderlin's eyes, by the spirit of his time. Paradoxically, however, 'Empedokles never appears to die, but suffers the indefinite postponement of dying' (28).

"Emerging from the historical contexts of an assessment of Hölderlin's prophetic importance for the circle of Stefan George and the pivotal significance of Hellingrath's editorship, a transition which reinterpreted Hölderlin's theophany of sacrifice as implicating the crisis of poetic language and canonising Hölderlin as its 'willing sacrificial victim' (37), Suglia construes Blanchot as having initially reduplicated 'the reconciliation hypothesis' in its general form, wherein Empedokles 'represents the will to burst into the world of the Invisible Ones by death' (64). Blanchot reads Hölderlin's variant texts as enacting this illimitable drive, arguing, moreover, that the later Hölderlin broke with the original figure of Empedokles, superseding the image of the tragic intermediary through his recognition that nature's 'lure of the immediate', in drawing the human being out of nature, must be resisted in order that he can incline again to the earth (66). Since Suglia sees this 'break' as latent within Hölderlin's earliest drafts, he rejects Blanchot's position as untenable...

"In conjunction with Blanchot's sublime essay, 'Le regard d'Orphée', Suglia concludes that he 'invites one to think the relation of the author to the work as a relation of sacrifice' (114) in response to this impossible figure. Eurydice, as the approach of the 'other night' of poetic death, stands as the mythic counterpart of Anne's catastrophic immolation. Marking 'the appearance of disappearance' (115), the silent opacity that returns language to its essence, her name opens the schizographic tragedy of dissimulation, whereby 'the work is sacrificed for the sake of its simulacrum' (116) and the signature of the author is submitted to an infinitude of imitations. This fascinated passion for the image and its deformations, the echoing shell of Eurydice's withdrawal, is what both underwrites and exterminates the writer's existence in advance. The fate of Orpheus, his Maenadic dismemberment, evokes the poet's metamorphosis - what Suglia calls his hetero-sacrifice' (125) - in which language 'speaks in the name of an "I" that does not bear an authorial signature and is bereft of consciousness and speech' (134). It is in this '"strange, impersonal light'" that both Blanchot and Suglia ask us to read the tragic poet as standing, irradiated by the dark noumenon that shatters the phenomenal light of the day."

---Thomas Simon, Comparative Critical Studies, 3:3 (2006).

About the Author:

Joseph Suglia earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University.  He is a novelist, a literary critic, and a screenwriter and is best known as the author of the novel Watch Out.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0820472735
• ISBN 13: 9780820472737
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144