Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (German Edition)

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To include a comma in your tag, surround the tag with double quotes. Skip to content Skip to search. Home This edition , German, Book, Illustrated edition: Check copyright status Cite this Title Bildungskrisen: Physical Description p. Series Stauffenburg Colloquium, ; Bd. Notes Includes bibliographical references p. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"? These 3 locations in All: Open to the public ; The University of Melbourne Library.

This single location in New South Wales: These 2 locations in Victoria: Cotta to edit this new journal, which had as its ambition nothing less than the creation—the aesthetic shaping—of a national literary public.

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The diversity of its genres and topics was to submit to one overall restriction: Furthermore, in the variant of the myth that Schiller expounds his source is one of the Homeric Hymns to Aphrodite ,. Aesthetic judgment would thus be a harmonious state of exception, a sovereign decision taken without violence—yet just as the trickery of the artist is exposed in the text that theorizes his exemplarity, so reflective judgment, reflecting on itself, tells the story of a certain law-like force at work in the coming-to-figuration of aesthetics.

This force, furthermore, turns out to be hard to locate in the topography of these scenes: For because the artist cannot control the repetition and potential exposure in, say, a treatise on aesthetic education of a violence he imagines himself as shaping, violence-concealing artist to be controlling, the sovereignty of the artist becomes, within the terms of the text, a legible delusion. These compulsively reiterated acts of sovereignty, in other words, never know quite what they do nor why.

Of course such political allegories, which inevitably appear when aesthetic discourse reflects on its own origins and its own purchase on the world, should not be taken at face value. We are, after all, dealing here with personifications, not persons; with figures, not bodies; and why should we believe what aesthetic discourse says about itself, anyway? Who would want to trust a trickster, particularly when he or she claims to be exposing the sleight-of-hand for which, as lovers of beauty, we are also supposed to fall every time?

Yet precisely because it reflects on figuration and iterability in reflecting on itself, a text like the Aesthetic Education exposes sovereign biopolitical body-making violence to the possibility of an irreducibly erratic, non-end-directed movement of figure-making. The echo is faint; but if we strain our ears we hear murmuring within the story of Beauty submitting to law the counterplot of a law producing and gripping a body without quite knowing what it is doing. This spectral freedom or force can be represented in various ways: The tenacity of aesthetic discourse in modern life derives from its uncertainly utopian promise to display traces of a force that sovereigns commandeer, but cannot properly command.

The frame-narrative, set in , and particularly in the spring of during the siege of Mainz which Goethe had witnessed, as I shall review in a moment , tells the story of a noble German family headed by a gentle matriarch, the Baroness, displaced by the war with France and then partly restored to its Rhine holdings by the Prussian advance.

They are at home yet not quite at home; borders are shifting, the times are changing. As I hope to be able to indicate even within the limits of a brief study, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten hereinafter short-titled as Conversations is fundamentally—that is, not just in its range of topical reference, but in its dominant figurative patterns—a text preoccupied by war, revolution, and modernity.

Until Goethe wrote and published his memoirs Campagne in Frankreich and Belagerung von Mainz Siege of Mainz some thirty years after the fact they were written in and published in , the Conversations may be said to be the text in his oeuvre most obviously inspired by his grueling experiences at the beginning of the revolutionary wars. Longwy and Verdun were captured easily; but the French general Dumouriez maneuvered to confine the invaders to the inhospitable terrain of the Argonne, through which the allied army advanced slowly, hampered by unrelenting rain and insufficient supplies.

At Valmy, Brunswick found himself boxed in by a numerically inferior but tactically well-positioned enemy possessed of an outstanding gunnery corps.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Fewer than two hundred allied soldiers were killed in the bombardment itself, but during the retreat the army endured losses in the tens of thousands. The weather continued terrible, to the point that soldiers sank in mud to their waists; dysentery was pandemic; the supply train broke down, and men and horses starved. A minor battle in itself, Valmy was later recognized as a turning point in the revolutionary wars: In his memoir of the campaign, Goethe famously and somewhat improbably claimed to have achieved and expressed this insight on the night following the cannonade: Prussia retook Frankfurt in December.

On March 18, Mainz, in the control of a local Jacobin club, proclaimed itself a republic; and at the end of March an ascendant Prussian army surrounded Mainz.

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The blockade became a siege, and bombardment began on the night of June 17, Mainz burned for five weeks, and capitulated on July Tourists came from Frankfurt to watch the fireworks. The ascending and descending of the incendiary bombs was something new to us I cite these remarks because they relay a blend of voyeuristic aestheticism and unease that has certain equivalents in the text we shall be considering.

His story about watching Mainz burn is less brash, and the story he wrote some thirty years previously—twenty-odd months after Valmy, about twelve months after Mainz—is cagier still. A sense of everything solid melting into air characterizes the opening lines of the Conversations , spoken by a narrator agitated enough to hint at anal rape as he describes the French army violating both the body of the fatherland and the piety due to fathers:.

The seven stories told make up a curious bouquet. Only the final two are, strictly speaking, original to Goethe: The Conversations exemplify one of the many ways in which Goethe is a far more interesting writer than the marmoreal image of him as the mainstay of the classical German literary canon would suggest. No less than such famously difficult works as Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre , Faust II , and the late poetry, the Conversations is an experimental text, and a shrewd and disturbing one.

It is not just about liminal conditions, border crossings, and ambiguous states of warfare, homelessness and exception; it welcomes foreign bodies into itself.

It reveals that conversation Unterhaltung destroys itself in becoming a form of socio-aesthetic support Unterhalt. And in doing so, the text stages and deconstructs the sovereign violence entwined with the biopolitics of an aesthetic education. Newly politicized and imbued with revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, conversation must now undergo a new process of de-politicization.

Her new maternal, aesthetic state will unite law and freedom. The law is that of conversation as good tone: In and through this aesthetico-politico-linguistic law, a newly aesthetic community is to emerge: Goethe exacerbates those instabilities in the Conversations in several ways, and perhaps above all by extending, elaborating, and exploding the figure of the law of aesthetic conversation and community, guter Ton. This new community of refugees—refugees restored to their property, but forever exposed to future deracinations and displacements—is built on aesthetic citizenship as the right to speak and to be listened to without fundamental political consequence a right that unfolds in and as the dialectical tension between, on the one hand, high aesthetic disinterestedness—the right of literature or art to say anything —and on the other hand, that great modern aggressively passive middle-class prerogative: Predictably, guter Ton , a figure that etymologically reiterates the French invasion that it sets out to cure, generates echoes of war, revolution, and sovereign or pseudo-sovereign violence.

The opening sentence, with the French army breaking in, sets the tone; and a page or two later, when the refugees return to their right-bank estate, their ontological vulnerability becomes encoded as a tonal disturbance: At one point the old family priest der Geistliche , der Alte: Lingering in ears and limbs, it threatens to disarticulate the body.

Benjamin offers various examples of the shock experience: The nobleman conquers this figurative irruption of female sexuality and revolutionary violence by threatening a simpler and more terrible violence: After the first two stories noises and knockings become less prominent in the text of the Conversations , but not before migrating from the embedded stories to the frame narrative itself. Perhaps the writing-desk has split in sympathy with its burning twin. Later, near the end of the frame narrative—right before the "Fairy Tale," which breaks the frame and ends the text—with the Baroness in attendance, the problem of the split writing desk returns: The ravaging of family property is as nothing compared to the satisfaction of establishing motivated connections among events and signs.

He has also, of course, written into the frame narrative a surrogate for the siege of Mainz. The desk contains money that the father is in the habit of grabbing without counting to satisfy his pleasures; Ferdinand, in a domestic parody of revolution, steals from his father to support his own impulsive passions. The parody is sharply drawn: And how did they get this right [ Und wie sind sie zu diesem Rechte gelangt ]? Should it depend on chance alone, and can there be a right [ Recht ] where chance is at work?

After stealing for awhile, Ferdinand repents and secretly pays back the money unlike his father, who never notices the thefts, Ferdinand knows how to count and has kept track of what he owes ; alas, his mother, stepping in to supplement the paternal role, has found out his crime, and suspects him of taking gold ducats that in fact he did not take. Ferdinand, having thoroughly submitted to paternal law by acceding to a guilt that outstrips his literal transgression, goes on to found a business and a family of his own in a different part of Germany most of the characters in the Conversations , unsurprisingly, are exiles or emigrant of some sort.

Anyone who imagines that Goethe is incapable of subjecting his great theme of renunciation Entsagung to astringent parody has not read this story to the end:. We may take this story as a little allegory about the degradation and dispersal of sovereign power within a biopolitical regime, or which is perhaps not so very different as a little allegory about the violence of aesthetic politics. Either way, it is also a story about the unruly critical force of aesthetic discourse, which exposes the violence and incoherence it is supposed at all costs to conceal.

Let me close with a small clutch of images drawn from near the end of the "Fairy Tale" the appendix-text that ruptures the body of the Conversations. This strange, intriguing text does indeed often give one the sense of a world controlled by slightly mad laws that proliferate unpredictably and dizzyingly: Over the course of the story we meet four living statues of kings as distinct from the human king: What remains of the sovereign? A certain residue, to be sure. Ghostly to begin with, sovereignty disperses, degrades, and returns as its own attenuated figure. In a quasi-fairy-tale spirit, let us conclude with the observation that this king has no clothes.

"Aesthetics, Sovereignty, Biopower"

At best he is a chastened, post-revolutionary king, scurrying to his secure location; but we might just as well think of him simply as a minor celebrity, pursued by paparazzi and running for cover—a sliver of pseudo-sovereignty within a biopolitical order or, indeed, within a debased aesthetic state turned entertainment center. The temple-exploring Volk resembles a fan base or a tour group here far more than it does a people subject to a monarch. And indeed, in the final sentences of the text, government becomes sheer population control, and the fairy kingdom a theme park, the cynosure of a world-wide tourist industry:.

The people would never have tired of looking and marveling, and the pressing crowd would have crushed itself inside the temple, had its attention not again been drawn back to the great court. Unexpectedly gold coins were falling, as if from the air, ringing on the marble pavement, the closest travelers rushed to seize them.

This miracle was repeated intermittently, now here, now there. Greedily people continued to run about for awhile, jostling and fretting even when the gold coins stopped falling. At last they gradually dispersed, set out on their journeys, and to this day the bridge teems with travelers, and the temple is the most frequented in the entire world. That disruptive aesthetic movement underwrites yet also exceeds the discourse of aesthetic education as biopower. Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

The Origins of Totalitarianism. Balfour, Ian and Eduardo Cadava, eds. And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. The Powers of Mourning and Violence.

Unterhaltungen Deutscher Ausgewanderten by Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

U of Chicago P, An Interview with Jacques Derrida. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Romanticism and Improvisation,

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