Literature and the Sense of Possibility: A Brief Introduction

“[ . . . ] oh, just think of all that could happen.”¹ The researcher animal of Kafka’s Nachlass utters this exclamatio of concern about the safety of the structure, an utterance which not only marks the alliance between thinking of possibilities (Möglichkeitsdenken) and suspicion as is characteristic of modern knowledge production, but also raises the question of the epistemic status of literature. With the constellation of literature and possibility, the animal of Der Bau finds himself in not altogether unprestigious company: Aristotle’s as well as Bodmer’s and Breitinger’s poetics define poetry in relation to the possible—as the poet’s task of conveying what could happen, as “imitation of nature in its possibilities”²—thereby aligning thinking of the possible with the poetic process. The relationship between literature and possibility is articulated fully into a literary epistemology of the possible in the first third of the twentieth century, but not only in the context of knowledge formations of modernity; it is also the effect of a long history of mutual reflection of philosophy, literature and poetics of the possible.

When Leibniz elaborates his theory of possible worlds in a baroque narration at the end of the Theodizee, when Wolff characterizes the novel as “a story of something which in a different world can come to pass,”³ both are clearly connecting cogitability and poetic narration. Subsequent poetics accordingly take up the theory of possible worlds concentrating on the fictionality of knowledge rather than limiting the possible to regulated forms of the fictive: Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst repeatedly thematizes the question of “desire for knowledge (Wissens-Begierde).”⁴ Not only does the possible as compared to the real seem here to be the desired field of knowledge, the accompanying pleasure as medium of the “enhancement of our awareness”⁵; in its imitation of nature/creation in potentiality, poetry furthermore develops specific procedures of knowledge production: the establishment of other connections, alliances, contexts. In contrast to the claim to universality of scientific knowledge and by bringing in philological methods, poetry comes into its own as a field of knowledge, articulating the inextricable connection of knowledge to representation. Thus poetry’s power of inventio lies in its interventions on the level of representation, an agency which Wolff defines as “the capability of bringing out unknown truth from other known ones.”⁶ The subtitle of the first volume of Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst reads: “In which poetic painting is thoroughly investigated regarding its invention (worinnen die Poetische Mahlerey in Absicht auf die Erfindung im Grunde untersuchet [ . . . ] wird).” Breitinger can thus describe poetry as “the richest source of the new,”⁷ because the “novelty [ . . . ] does not lie in the things but in the words,”⁸ with which “the power of fabrication (Erdichtungs-Kraft)”⁹ always already collaborates.

If, as Cassirer points out,¹⁰ Bodmer and Breitinger were not yet able to negotiate the relationship of cognitive faculty and poetic imagination as a problem of aesthetic form (as Baumgarten’s aesthetics later does), this relationship is requisite of Kierkegaard’s conception of thinking. Kierkegaard intervenes in the domain of a literary epistemology of the possible in two ways: by connecting thinking of possibilities and indirect communication as well as in the exhaustion of poetological proceedings of the possible to the point of a poetics of the impossible. Kierkegaard’s subjective thinking is primarily a form of representation, a style: “The subjective thinker’s form, the form of his communication, is his style.”¹¹ Where the reality of existence is not communicable, as is the case with Kierkegaard, the form of possibility is called upon to transform representation into an appeal: “In the form of possibility the presentation becomes a demand.”¹² Kierkegaard formulates the conclusion of representation arising from the incommunicability of existence as “communication of capability (Kunnens)”¹³—that paradoxical double movement of simultaneous communication and retraction of communication, as can be seen, for example, in irony. “All communication of capability is more or less indirect communication.”¹⁴ Decidedly critical of “communication of knowledge,” which separates subject matter and representation, Kierkegaard’s communication of capability...