Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts: Vol. I: From the Enlightenment to the Turn of the Twentieth Century

382 Pages·2018·4.663 MB·English

by  Markus Winkler

SCHRIFTEN ZUR WELTLITERATUR BAND 7
Markus Winkler in collaboration with
Maria Boletsi, Jens Herlth, Christian Moser,
Julian Reidy, Melanie Rohner
Barbarian: Explorations of
a Western Concept in Theory,
Literature, and the Arts
Vol. I: From the Enlightenment
to the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Schriften zur Weltliteratur
Studies on World Literature
Herausgegeben von Dieter Lamping
in Zusammenarbeit mit Immacolata Amodeo,
David Damrosch, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis und Markus Winkler
Band 7
Markus Winkler
in collaboration with Maria Boletsi, Jens Herlth,
Christian Moser, Julian Reidy, and Melanie Rohner
Barbarian: Explorations of
a Western Concept in Theory,
Literature, and the Arts
Vol. I: From the Enlightenment to the Turn
of the Twentieth Century

J. B. Metzler Verlag
The publication of this book was realized with the financial support of the University of Geneva
and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
Die Autorinnen und Autoren
Markus Winkler (Leiter des Projektes) ist Professor für Neuere deutsche und Vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Genf.
Maria Boletsi (Co-Leiterin des Projektes) ist Stiftungsprofessorin für Neugriechische Studien
(Lehrstuhl Marilena Laskaridis) an der Universität Amsterdam und Assistenzprofessorin für
Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Universiteit Leiden.
Jens Herlth ist Professor für Slavistik an der Universität Fribourg.
Christian Moser ist Professor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Bonn.
Julian Reidy ist Privatdozent an der Universität Bern und Lehrbeauftragter für Neuere deutsche
Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Genf.
Melanie Rohner ist im Rahmen des vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds geförderten Projektes
“‘Barbarism’: History of a Fundamental European Concept” Postdoktorandin an der Universität
Genf.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
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Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über
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Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX
1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Markus Winkler
1.1. Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1. Towards the Critical History and Aesthetic Exploration of a
Fashionable Slogan and Enemy-Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.2. A Genealogical Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Genealogical Premises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.1. From bárbaros as Language- and Affect-Related
Onomatopoetic Word to barbarismus as Rhetorical Term . . . . 10
1.2.2. The Mythopoetic ‘Invention of the Barbarian’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2.3. The Conceptualization of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2.3.1. The Emergence of the Ethnocentric Enemy- and
Identity-Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2.3.2. Scholarly Approaches to the Concept and Their
Shortcomings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.2.4. The Aesthetic Exploration of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.3. Structure and Content of Volume I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2. Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1. The Concept of Barbarism in Eighteenth-Century Theories
of Culture and Sociogenesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Christian Moser
2.1.1. Concept-Historical Prerequisites. The Temporalization of the
Concept of the Barbarian and the Construction of a Relationship
between Savagery and Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1.1.1. The Changing Meaning of Barbarian in the Eighteenth
Century—as Illustrated by Dictionary Entries . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1.1.2. Savagery in Relation to Barbarism: Antiquity and the
Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.1.1.3. Savagery in Relation to Barbarism: the Early Modern
Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
VI Contents
2.1.2. Montesquieu to Ferguson: Barbarism as a Stage of Cultural and
Social Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.1.2.1. Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.1.2.2. Montesquieu: Barbarism as an Intermediate Social Force . . 64
2.1.2.3. Turgot: Barbarism as an Engine of Social Progress . . . . . . . 73
2.1.2.4. Rousseau: Barbarian Idylls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
2.1.2.5. Adam Smith: Barbarian Economies of Predation and Gifts 93
2.1.2.6. Adam Ferguson: Barbarism as Social Gambling . . . . . . . . . . 103
2.1.2.7. Barbarian Origins of Language and of Contractuality:
Smith and Rousseau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
2.1.2.8. Barbarian Art: Herder and Goethe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
2.1.2.9. Conclusion and Prospect: Anthropology; Philosophy of
History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
2.2. Case Study: Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Christian Moser
2.3. Bemoaning the Loss of ‘Vernunft’ and ‘Tugend’: On the Semantics
of Barbarism in Salomon Gessner’s Der Tod Abels (The Death of Abel,
1758) and Maler Müller’s Adams erstes Erwachen und seelige Nächte
(Adam’s First Awakening and Blissful Nights, 1777) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Julian Reidy
3. Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
3.1. The Relationship between Idyll and Barbarism in Schiller’s
Wilhelm Tell (William Tell, 1804) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Melanie Rohner
3.2. “These are the mysteries of the barbarians, my dear”: The C oncept
of Barbarism in Polish Romanticism (Zygmunt Krasiński, Adam
Mickiewicz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Jens Herlth
3.2.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
3.2.2. The Imagined Barbarian: Zygmunt Krasiński’s Letters to
Henry Reeve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
3.2.3. Krasiński’s Irydion: A Half-Barbarian’s Journey from Rome to
“the land of graves and crosses” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
3.2.4. “Let us not disdain the barbarians”: Adam Mickiewicz and the
Re-Evaluation of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
3.2.5. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Contents VII
3.3. Interfering Semantics of Barbarism and Race in Flaubert’s
Salammbô (1862) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Markus Winkler
3.3.1. Why Write a Historical Novel on a Remote War of Barbarians
against Barbarians? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
3.3.2. ‘Barbarism’ and ‘Race’ in the Historiographical Tradition of the
Mercenaries’ War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
3.3.3. The Narrative Staging of ‘Barbarism’ and ‘Race’ in Flaubert’s
Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
3.3.4. The Contribution of Flaubert’s Novel to the History of ‘Barbarism’
and ‘Race’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
3.4. Nietzsche’s Concept of Barbarism: From Rhetoric to Genealogy . . . . 258
Markus Winkler
3.4.1. Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
3.4.2. Variations on the Opposition of Barbarism and ‘Culture’ (Bildung) 259
3.4.3. The Ambivalence of the Genealogical Approach to the Concept
of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
4. On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century: History, Crisis, and
Intersecting Figures of Barbarians in C. P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the
Barbarians” (“Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους,” 1898/1904) . . . . . . . . 285
Maria Boletsi
4.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
4.2. Between History, Myth, and Allegory: The Barbarians As Symbols . 292
4.3. The Intertextual Nexus of Cavafy’s Barbarians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
4.3.1. Cavafy and Gibbon on Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
4.3.2. Cavafy’s and Renan’s Barbarians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
4.3.3. The Barbarian in Decadent Literature and in the Intellectual
Climate of the Late Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
4.3.4. “Waiting for the Barbarians” As an Anti-Decadent Poem . . . . 321
4.4. Barbarians, Crisis, and Historical Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
About the authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Acknowledgements
The present study is part of a collaborative international research project funded
from 2013 to 2017 by the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS). The project was
initiated and led by Markus Winkler (University of Geneva). Co-applicant for its
funding was Jens Herlth (University of Fribourg). We are very grateful to the FNS for
its generous support, which included the three-year employment of a postdoctoral
and a doctoral researcher.
This first volume of the study and the preparatory meetings of the international
research team were also realized with the financial support of the Netherlands Or-
ganization for Scientific Research (NWO). The NWO co-funded the research project
through an “Internationalisation in the Humanities” grant (2013–2016) obtained by
Maria Boletsi (University of Leiden). Additional funds were provided by the Uni-
versity of Bonn/Chair for Comparative Literature as well as by the University of
Geneva’s Comparative Literature Program.
We are grateful to the student research assistants at the University of Geneva who
over the past years have conducted extensive bibliographical research on the topic
of the present study. They are Céline Bischofberger, Guillaume Broillet, Jasmin Gut,
César Jaquier, Laura Scharff, and Jeanne Wagner. Céline Bischofberger and Jasmin
Gut also carefully copy-edited several chapters of the present volume, and Guillaume
Broillet performed the laborious final copy-editing of the volume’s entire manu-
script. In addition, Margaret Kehoe, Daniele Leo, Jil Runia, and Lukas Hermann
helped with the copy-editing of selected chapters.
Finally, we extend our thanks to the publisher J. B. Metzler and in particular to
Oliver Schütze, as well as to Dieter Lamping, the main editor of the “Studies on
World Literature” series.
Parts of chapters 2.1 and 2.2 were originally written in German and then translat-
ed into English with the assistance of Alex Skinner. Chapters 2.1.2.7 and 2.1.2.8 draw
on material published in Moser 2018a and 2018b.
As for chapters 3.1 and 3.3, they were originally written in German as well and
then translated into English with the assistance of Katherine Sotejeff-Wilson.
Geneva, spring 2018
M. W.
1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction 1
1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction
Markus Winkler
1.1. Preliminary Remarks
1.1.1. T owards the Critical History and Aesthetic Exploration
of a Fashionable Slogan and Enemy-Concept
In the current political rhetoric shared by a large number of Western politicians,
political scientists, journalists, and essayists, the lexeme barbar- is being used as a
fashionable slogan to designate and denounce crimes against humanity, in particu-
lar those committed by Islamist fundamentalists.1 The lexeme functions here as a
concept enabling those who use it to apprehend, verbalize, and objectify the heavily
mediatized experience of terror and horror related to those crimes. In France, this
use of the concept is supported by its presence in the current Code pénal (paragraph
222–1), which speaks of “acts of barbarity”—“actes de barbarie”—as a particular
category of crimes.2
The Code pénal provides no further definition or illustration of the “acts of bar-
barity” as a category of crimes. In this legislative context, like in today’s political
rhetoric, the lexeme barbar- is being used as a self-evident concept that fits incom-
prehensible, heinous acts whose perpetrators, to whom it is applied as well, are to be
considered as excluded from the civil society and even from the human species. We
may infer that inversely, the concept plays an important role in defining that very
society and species; it turns out to be a counter-concept of national, but mostly of
European and—ever since Europe colonized overseas territories—Western identity.
Given that it goes back to the ancient Greek adjective and noun bárbaros and its
ethnocentric coding in the fifth century BC, we may even surmise that it is a basic
or founding concept, a European and Western Grundbegriff. However, it has not yet
been acknowledged as such. Accordingly, there is still no comprehensive conceptual
history of barbarism ranging from classical Antiquity to the present day, despite the
extensive and firm groundwork laid by scholars in classics.3 In the major encyclope-
1 See the examples quoted below, in section 1.2.3.1 of this Introduction.
2 Extended reference included in the Works Cited list, with a link to the English translation.
The current wording, adopted in 1992 and valid since 1994, goes back to paragraph 303 of
the 1810 original version of the Code pénal: “Seront punis comme coupables d’assassinat,
tous malfaiteurs, quelle que soit leur dénomination, qui, pour l’exécution de leurs crimes,
emploient des tortures ou commettent des actes de barbarie.” (“Criminals who, for the per-
petration of their crimes, have inflicted torture or committed acts of barbarism, will be
punished for murder, regardless of their denomination,” my translation, M. W.) In both
versions of the code, there is no further definition of the term actes de barbarie.
3 See, e. g., Jüthner 1923; Bacon 1961; Dauge 1981; Hall 1989; Opelt and Speyer 2001; Mitchell
2007. Droit (2007) is rather a large essay than a comprehensive scholarly investigation in
the concept’s history.