Idealism without absolutes : philosophy and romantic culture

271 Pages·2004·0.79 MB·English

by  Plotnitsky

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Idealism without Absolutes
SUNY series, Intersections:
Philosophy and Critical Theory
Rodolphe Gasché, editor
Idealism without Absolutes
(cid:1)
Philosophy and Romantic Culture
Edited by
Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2004 State University of New York
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Idealism without absolutes : philosophy and romantic culture / edited by Tilottama
Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, intersections—philosophy and critical theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-6001-0 (alk. paper).
1. Idealism, German. 2. Romanticism—Germany. 3. Absolute, The—
History. I. Rajan, Tilottama. II. Plotnitsky, Arkady. III. Intersections
(Albany, N.Y.)
B2745.I34 2004
141'.0943—dc21 2003050602
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
(cid:1)
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
Tilottama Rajan 1
Romanticism and the Invention of Literature
Jan Plug 15
Allegories of Symbol: On Hegel’s Aesthetics
Andrzej Warminski 39
Toward a Cultural Idealism: Negativity and Freedom in
Hegel and Kant
Tilottama Rajan 51
Mediality in Hegel: From Work to Text in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
Jochen Schulte-Sasse 73
Beyond Beginnings: Schlegel and Romantic Historiography
Gary Handwerk 93
Curvatures: Hegel and the Baroque
Arkady Plotnitsky 113
Three Ends of the Absolute: Schelling, Hölderlin, Novalis
David Farrell Krell 135
v
vi Contents
Schopenhauer’s Telling Body of Philosophy
Joel Faflak 161
Sacrificial and Erotic Materialism in Kierkegaard and Adorno
John Smyth 181
Absolute Failures: Hegel’s Bildung and the “Earliest
System-Program of German Idealism”
Rebecca Gagan 203
Futures of Spirit: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Beyond
Richard Beardsworth 219
Conclusion: Without Absolutes
Arkady Plotnitsky 241
Contributors 253
Index 257
Acknowledgments
(cid:1)
The editors would like to acknowledge the support of their respective insti-
tutions, The University of Western Ontario and Purdue University, for support
that has made possible the completion of their research for this volume.
Tilottama Rajan would also like to acknowledge the aid of the Social Sci-
ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a grant from which,
among other things, paid for research assistance for the editing, indexation,
and preparation of the manuscript. We owe a great debt to our contributors,
some of whom waited with great patience for this project to come to fruition.
An earlier version of chapter 10 was published as “Hegel Beside Him-
self: Unworking the Intellectual Community,” European Romantic Review 13,
no. 2 (2002): 139–45.
vii

Introduction
(cid:1)
Tilottama Rajan
In the past decade the philosophical tradition of German Idealism has come
to be recognized as a rich and complex part of “Theory,” while this field itself
has been associated with a fundamentally interdisciplinary way of thinking
and range of practices. Yet there has been little intensive consideration of
either the disciplinary or interdisciplinary nature of Idealism itself. Nor has
much attention been given to the ways in which philosophy—the discipline
in which Idealism is anchored—is itself hybridized and de-idealized by its
connections with other fields. This volume attempts to rethink the conceptuality
and disciplinarity of post-Kantian philosophy across the full range of the long
romantic period, from Immanuel Kant and the Schlegels at one end, through
the post-Kantian Idealists, to Friedrich Nietzsche.
The volume is thus organized by three interconnected concerns. First,
the essays share a sense that it is possible to have an idealism without the
totalizing formulas often associated with post-Kantian philosophy, as repre-
sented by such concepts (conventionally interpreted) as G. W. F. Hegel’s
Absolute Knowledge or J. G. Fichte’s Absolute Ego. The space for this ide-
alism is created by a particular symbiosis between ideality and materiality.
Second, this symbiosis often occurs through the contamination or extension
of philosophy into other, more “material” disciplines such as psychology,
history, or literature. At stake, then, is the very identity of philosophy as the
host for a variety of other parasitic discourses that reciprocally reconfigure
philosophy itself. In such circumstances it would be easy to read the intellec-
tual tradition studied here through twentieth-century lenses. And indeed the
essays all draw on contemporary theory: notably the work of Gilles Deleuze,
1