Architectural history: Benjamin and Hölderlin

Boundary 2

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 143-168

  Lacour, Claudia Brodsky ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950251653     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-30-1-143     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (18)

1. Rolf Tiedemann, "Einleitung des Herausgebers," in Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk, in Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89), 1:9-41 (esp. 12-14), hereafter cited parenthetically as GS. Passages from the body of the Passagenwerk will be referred to as PW by convolute. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2. On the linguistic nature of (re)cognition in Hölderlin: "Cognition aims at an anticipation or divination of a language in which it can impart itself as remembrance" (Rainer Nägele, Echoes of Translation: Reading between Texts [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 41).
3. See also Claudia Kalász, Hölderlin: Die poetische Kritik instrumenteller Rationalität (Muenchen: text + kritik, 1988), 82: "Hölderlin [understands] poetry as the verbal form of true (re)cognition, so that by the same token the manner of proceeding of the spirit for the poem should also be taken as exemplary of (re)cognizing and producing in general." For Kalász, however, it is "the successful mediation of spirit and matter" [die gelungene Vermittlung von Geist und Stoff] that comprises the "foundation" [Grundlegung] of such poetic procedure, and thus of (re)cognition. It is precisely this traditional, Christian-Hegelian (although not Hegel's own) view of romantic poetry that both Benjamin and (Hegel's friend) Hölderlin negate through poetic procedures that render their own supposed or desired foundation appropriately impossible. As examined below, architecture and history are two images or passages in which that impossibility is recognized in their texts. Closer to Hölderlin's and Benjamin's view of (re)cognition in poetry is Lawrence Ryan, in Friedrich Hölderlin (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1962), 7: "Hölderlin understands poetry neither as subjective confession nor as immediate announcement of feeling, but as '(re)cognition' with a claim to objective validity." See also p. 54.
4. Peter Szondi, "Verstehen des dichterischen Wortes," in Hölderlin-Studien: Mit einem Traktat über philologische Erkenntnis (Frankfurt: Insel, 1967), 11; hereafter cited as HS.
5. Michael Hamburger translates these lines as follows: "Festive hall, whose floor is ocean, whose tables are mountains, / Truly, in time out of mind built for a purpose unique!" in Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 247.
6. In an important essay, to which I will return later, Roman Jakobson takes issue with Heidegger's invocation of Hölderlin (in the Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung) to equate Being and language with being "in conversation"; see Roman Jakobson, Hölderlin. Klee. Brecht. Zur Wortkunst dreier Gedichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 83.
7. While analysis of the architectonic in Hölderlin is scarce, the literature on the "places" of sensual nature spreads richly across the scholarship. See esp. Romano Guardini, Form und Sinn der Landschaft in den Dichtungen Hölderlins (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich, 1946);
8. Hans Frey, Dichtung, Denken und Sprache bei Hölderlin (Zürich: Walter Kunz, 1951);
9. Paul de Man, "Hölderlin's Riddle," in Critical Writings, 1953-1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989);
10. Wolfgang Binder, Hölderlin-Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Insel, 1970);
11. Rainer Nägele, Text, Geschichte und Subjektivität in Hölderlins Dichtung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985);
12. Dieter Henrich, Der Gang des Andenkens (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986);
13. Kalász, Hölderlin; Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen, "Das topographische Verfahren bei Hölderlin und in der Lyrik nach 1945," in Hölderlin und die Moderne, ed. Gerhard Kurz, Valérie Lawitschka, Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Attempto, 1995), 300-22;
14. Thomas Schröder, Poetik als Naturgeschichte: Hölderlins fortgesetzte Säkularisation des Schönen (Lüneberg: Klampen, 1995).
15. The many potential dualities of both place and person in this apparently direct, always immediately powerful line from "Memosyne" - intratextual and intertextual possibilities of significance that at once extend their "echo" indefinitely and render memory fictive, even before the poem, in ending, declares "mourning" a failure - have been persuasively analyzed by Anselm Haverkamp, in Laub voll Trauer: Hölderlins späte Allegorie (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1991), 49-70.
16. Beissner's commentary on the phrase is limited to a citation concerning "das Gewitter . des Himmels" from the undated letter (#240) to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff written (Beissner estimates in the second half of November 1802) following Hölderlin's return from France. Containing the phrase that has endowed his undefined experience in France with enduring hermeneutic mystery - "as one says of heroes later, I can certainly say that Apollo struck me" - the letter goes on to describe Hölderlin's attempt "to fix myself" [mich festzusetzen] in the "study" of the "nature at home" [heimatliche Natur], beginning with "Das Gewitter. ." See StA, 4:432-33;
17. "Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin," in The Solid Letter, ed. Aris Fioretos (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 201-14.
18. Jakobson, Hölderlin, 71.