Die Entgegensetzung in Hölderlins Poetologie (review)

The project undertaken by Niketa Stefa in this volume unquestionably identifies a— perhaps the—major theme of Friedrich Hölderlin's poetology and poetry. As Stefa points out, "Entgegensetzung" is perceived by Hölderlin and by his Idealist contemporaries as the foundation of both language and self-consciousness; it is a leading theme and structure for Hölderlin throughout his career. Moreover, Stefa recognizes two of the most fruitful attributes of oppositional thought in Hölderlin's oeuvre: its insistence on processuality rather than finished production and its openness towards world and reader. It is therefore all the more unfortunate that the volume exhibits several serious problems. Stefa's interest in both poetry and poetology—surely a good idea in theory—leads in practice to a writing style characterized by the excessive quotation of very small snippets of poetry and poetology mixed together without regard for context or chronology rather than analytic argumentation. (In one passage, Stefa quotes from two different poems, a poetological sketch, and a novel; the texts are from post-1802, 1796, 1803, and 1794, respectively [120].) This habit exacerbates the tendency of Hölderlin scholarship in general to be merciless towards the uninitiated and forces the question of the study's intended audience: although anyone not expert in Hölderlin's oeuvre would struggle to understand it, those experts will not find much new beyond several suggestive but ultimately unsupported ideas.

The volume is divided into three sections and an "Exkurs zur Nachwirkung Hölderlins." The first section, "Quellen and Parallelismen der Idee der Entgegensetzung," rehearses scholarly conversations around the idea of "Entgegensetzung" in Jena and Homburg from roughly 1794-1800. Stefa shifts the discussion from "die bisherigen gut rekonstruierten Einflüsse der frühen Fichteschen und Schillerschen Philosophie über den Geist der Jungen [i.e. Hölderlin, Sinclair, Zwilling]" (19) to examination of reciprocal and contemporaneous influences. Stefa's discussion of the productive conflict between Fichte and Schiller in the Aesthetic Letters and the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, in particular, illuminates both thinkers. The subsequent sections on Sinclair and Zwilling are less rich, in part due to the loss of much of their correspondence with Hölderlin and in part due to the relative dearth and lower quality of their philosophical output compared with Fichte's and Schiller's. Stefa's link between Schiller and Hölderlin is strongest when she discusses Schiller's influence not in terms of poetic advice but in terms of Hölderlin's admiration for Schiller as someone who expressed Hölderlin's own "Leiden an den Existenzbedingungen des Menschen, der zwischen dem 'Zustand,' der Gebundenheit an die Widersprüchlichkeiten des Daseins, und der 'Person,' der befreienden Tätigkeit des Geistes, hin-und herschwebt" (43). The reading of this "Leiden" as exclusively tragic, however, privileges Hölderlin's interest in tragedy over his other generic reflections and experimentations without sufficient reflection upon this choice.

In the second and weakest section of the volume, "Die Genesis der Entgegensetzung in Hölderlins Poetik," Stefa undertakes to track "die Funktion der Entgegensetzung" throughout Hölderlin's career under the rubrics of nature, the divine, the human, and language. Several factual errors in the chronology of Hölderlin's poetry, however, call into question the validity of the genealogical argument presented. (Most notably, Stefa uses "Andenken" as a source of certain exemplary characteristics of Hölderlin's work that she says emerge before his travels in France; the poem was, of course, written thereafter [111ff].) That genealogical argument nevertheless has several suggestive components, in particular the idea that Hölderlin's emphasis on words as signs and the structure of "Entgegensetzung" as a cancelling out of opposing drives enables a reading of his latest poetry as emerging from the poetological stakes of the pre-breakdown works. But this suggestion introduces two risks: first, the reading of the latest poetry as partaking in an "ursprüngliche Sprache der Natur" comes perilously close to the George-school readings of Hölderlin as...