Abstract
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy here consider the Romantics’ conception of the relationship between philosophy and literature by looking at the exemplary case of their conception of the fragment. They begin their contribution with some general remarks about how the Romantics conceived the relationship between philosophy and literature, in which they in particular emphasize that the Romantics’ conception of this relationship was neither reductive nor exclusive in spirit. They then turn to the Romantic fragment itself. They explain the historical background of this genre, especially in the work of Nicolas Chamfort. They also carefully distinguish it from various other sorts of “fragment” that are to be found either in the Romantics themselves or in other sources and with which it can easily be confused—for example, the Romantics’ own rough notes and sketches of projects or the “fragments” of lost works of the ancients. In contrast with these, the Romantic fragment is characterized by being deliberate rather than accidental, standing in a certain ambiguous relation to systematicity, representing incompletability in a complete way, being essentially plural (part of a collection of fragments), and being essentially a collective achievement (a product of “symphilosophy” or “sympoetry”).
There is so much poetry and yet there is nothing more rare than a poem! This is due to the vast quantity of poetical sketches, studies, fragments, tendencies, ruins, and raw materials.
—Friedrich Schlegel , Critical Fragment 4
This chapter is reprinted by permission from The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, the State University of New York Press, © 1988, State University of New York. All Rights Reserved.
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Notes
- 1.
Without forgetting the difference which separates Hölderlin from all of Jena. But as will become apparent, this chapter is concerned, rather, with the initial proximity of the Romantics and Hölderlin.
- 2.
August Schlegel did not share his brother’s ideal of the fragment and even seems, in a certain manner, to have practiced the genre in its traditional eighteenth-century form. Even within the group there was opposition to the “fragment,” for example, on the part of Caroline Schlegel. The practice of the fragment was even more short-lived than the Athenaeum and thus figures as a sort of “avant garde” of the “avant garde.”
- 3.
See Ayrault (3:111ff.) for the history of Friedrich Schlegel’s relations to the text of Chamfort, for the evolution of his conception and practice of the fragment, as well as for an entire analysis of the “genre,” which we do not pretend to supersede here.
- 4.
At least to the extent, which we cannot analyze here, that the Discourse itself does not belong, in its provenance and even its “genre,” to what was established by the Essays. The simplified opposition that imposes itself here should not obscure the degree to which the Romantic “crisis” remains profoundly indebted to the Cartesian operation. This should become apparent often in what follows.
- 5.
Epigraph: “Friends, the ground is poor; we must sow/Richly to reap even a modest harvest” (2413). We will cite the last fragment further on in the text. Faith and Love appeared in 1798, in another journal.
- 6.
See the chapter “The Idea: Religion within the Limits of Art” in this book [L’absolu littéraire].
- 7.
On this point also, see Ayrault (3:111ff.).
- 8.
And the doubtful cases are indeed doubtful each time; that is, they encourage a double reading of the text, for example, in the fragment we have cited as an epigraph (CF 4) or in Athenaeum fragment 24: “Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written.” Ayrault sees in this statement only the pejorative value of the term (3:120), but the irony here may well be accompanied by an awareness of the necessity of the fragment and, as we shall see, of “chaos” in modern poetry. Also, in conjunction with the theme of the fragment-project, see Szondi’s interpretation of this fragment (64–5).
- 9.
See also A 305.
- 10.
To take only two examples, the Physiognomical Fragments of Lavater (who was, in fact, Swiss and not German) and Lessing’s Fragments of an Anonymous Person.
- 11.
On the motif of the “project,” see the conclusion of the letter On Philosophy to Dorothea.
- 12.
See Ayrault 3:119.
- 13.
To borrow this term from Gérard Genette. We will refer to his Mimologiques in connection with the Romantic conception of the language.
- 14.
Before the collective anonymity of the Fragments, the Grains of Pollen signed by Novalis already contained several fragments by Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher, which Schlegel had added. At the same time, Friedrich Schlegel had also withdrawn certain fragments from Novalis’ manuscript for later use in the collective publication. This practice of collective writing should therefore be approached with caution: it momentarily represented an ideal only for Friedrich Schlegel, essentially, and for Novalis. It seems, although this does not prevent one from analyzing its ideal as such, also to have corresponded to a somewhat dictatorial practice on Friedrich Schlegel’s part.
- 15.
See also A 37.
- 16.
But for the Romantics, the (creative) potential and the meaning (in public) of genuine drama—ancient, then Shakespearean—are also what is most assuredly lost.
- 17.
We refer here to the entirety of Heidegger’s crucial analysis of the aims of system and of Absolute Knowledge in his Schelling (48ff.). Our remarks will continually assume Heidegger’s analysis.
Works Cited
Ayrault, Roger. La Genèse du romantisme allemand. 4 vols. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1961–1976.
Genette, Gérard. Mimologiques. Paris: Seuil, 1976.
Heidegger, Martin. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985.
Novalis. Glaube und Liebe [Faith and Love]. Schriften. Edited by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. 3 vols. 1935. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960.
Schlegel, Friedrich. “Lucinde” and the Fragments. [Also includes “On Incomprehensibility.”] Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
Szondi, Peter. On Textual Understanding and Other Essays. Translated by Harvey Mendelsohn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
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Lacoue-Labarthe, P., Nancy, JL. (2020). The Fragment: The Fragmentary Exigency. In: Forster, M., Steiner, L. (eds) Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40874-9_9
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