Eine andere Klarheit: Hölderlin, Philology, and the Idea of Rigor in Literary Study

Summary

Abstract: Throughout the twentieth century Friedrich Hölderlin's work has served as a lodestar for avant-garde reading practices that brought a scientific meticulousness to revelatory and disruptive intentions. A general appreciation of Hölderlin's peculiar intensity begins with Norbert von Hellingrath and his philological project of textual reconstruction. It is this project that supports the readings that Stefan George and his circle and Walter Benjamin produce after the First World War, as well as Martin Heidegger's during the Second. In its fragmentary character, Hölderlin's archive demands to an unusual extent the procedures of scientific philology, which encounters, for its part, a work, in its intimacy with young Hegel and Schelling, that is uniquely proximate to dialectical speculation. In the postwar years, the methodological conflicts between Friedrich Beissner's Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe and D. E. Sattler's Frankfurter Ausgabe implicate the continuing relevance of philology to newer critical readings by Theodor Adorno, Peter Szondi, and later deconstructive expositions of Hölderlin's writing. In his meteoric trajectory along a philosophical parabola from lyric expressive traditions into what Maurice Blanchot has called “madness par excellence,” Hölderlin presents an absolute intensification of the question of reading. His paradoxical incomparability flashes forth at the intersection of anonymous science, universal philosophy, and impersonal pathology, where the literary and the literal touch and repel each other.

Keywords: philology, madness, philosophy, science, Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Peter Szondi, Theodor Adorno, Andrzej Warminski

Man kann auch in die Höhe fallen, so wie in die Tiefe.

(One can also fall to the heights, just as into the depths.)

—Friedrich Hölderlin

THE EXPERIENCE OF reading Hölderlin is baffling and breathtaking, an encounter with an edge of language that seems to exceed the human without collapsing into the divine. Hölderlin's text challenges the act of reading in a way quite different from the difficulties that other writers present their readers. Particularly in what are known as his late writings, meaning the hymns in free rhythm, translations, and poetological speculations that precede his ultimate schizophrenic collapse in 1806, the challenge is not simply the obscurity of Hölderlin's diction and thought, a difficulty that might be common to many other serious poets and philosophers.