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  • Zwischen Eros und Mitteilung: Die Frühromantik im Symposium der “Athenäums-Fragmente” by May Mergenthaler
  • Adrian Daub
May Mergenthaler, Zwischen Eros und Mitteilung: Die Frühromantik im Symposium der “Athenäums-Fragmente.” Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012. 344 pp.

May Mergenthaler’s fascinating book charts Friedrich Schlegel’s philosophical and poetological development around the turn of the nineteenth century as a transition from eros to Mitteilung. What seems at first glance a fairly limited intervention, turns out to be quite far-reaching in its consequences. Mergenthaler’s book is fastidious in its focus on Schlegel, but it manages to say just as much about German romanticism as a philosophical project and about its two-hundred-year reception history. In keeping with its guiding concept, the project is itself conceived as a mediation of sorts: Mergenthaler aims to sidestep two common misperceptions that threaten to consign romanticism either to the distant [End Page 289] past or else tether them too tightly to current fashions in literary scholarship.

Mergenthaler offers a more nuanced description of Friedrich Schlegel’s project as one of Mitteilung. Where scholarship that understands the Schlegels as Neoplatonists obsessed with totality and unification tends to portray romanticism’s mania for reconciliation as the first slouch toward totalitarianism, and where scholarship that emphasizes the deconstructive aspects of romanticism often fails to historicize the fact that romanticism for all its practitioners implied a kind of autocritique, Mergenthaler’s book imputes to Schlegel a project of perfect mediation that he acknowledges is ultimately impossible.

Mitteilung is the name Schlegel gives to the always already self-subverting attempt at total communication, and the term designates a fraught and partial process rather than any stable essence or state. In this respect (and as far as I can tell only in this respect), this book resembles Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert’s 2007 book on Friedrich Schlegel’s philosophy: both books insist on the processual and the unresolvable nature of the romantic project, and both suggest that at the heart of romantic theories may lie a kind of realism.

Mitteilung functions in many respects as a corrective for the fetishism of unification found in, say, Hölderlin’s and Hegel’s thought of the same period, as well as in some of Schlegel’s own writings. At the same time, Mitteilung is not (just) a matter of mediation, as in Schleiermacher’s essays from the 1790s, because Schlegel wants more: he wants “vollständige Mitteilung,” a complete unity-in-difference, and an impossible telos. Unlike the erotic model based on Plato often imputed to Schlegel, the ethic of Mitteilung Mergenthaler locates in Schlegel preserves alterity and difference. As it pushes its participants into greater identity with one another, the structure’s self-sufficiency heightens rather than negates the difference between its constituent members.

The great boon of Mergenthaler’s approach, in my opinion, lies less in radically new evidence or revolutionary points, as in its ability to connect lemmatic assumptions about Schlegel and ground them in an encompassing framework. For instance, neither the link between Schlegel’s theory of irony, nor his texts’ reliance on active readers, has escaped critical notice. Mitteilung, however, manages to connect the two quite plausibly in a single complex. Just as the text constitutes itself as an ironized attempt at “vollendete Mitteilung,” so this attempt turns the reader into more than an audience, and turns him or her into another constitutive part of the poetic text.

Since Mitteilung thus rebounds onto the terms it mediates, Mergenthaler delves into the sources of romantic thought (notably Plato’s Symposium), and into its central legacies, not as studies of inert influences or “Rezeptionsgeschichte,” but as active interlocutors in another Gespräch. When Mergenthaler’s third chapter explores early romanticism’s relationship to Plato’s Symposium, for instance, Mergenthaler is not interested in simply cataloguing a set of readings, appropriations, or misinterpretations—she aims to show how romantic appropriations of Plato’s text actually dramatically transform their source. Some of the roundtables Mergenthaler assembles in this fashion are perhaps more convincing than others, but the model allows Mergenthaler to disentangle Schlegel from the dreary embrace of influence and reception studies, and to insert...

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