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  • The Legacies of Friedrich Kittler
  • Carl Niekerk

Introduction

Friedrich Kittler (*June 12, 1943, Rochlitz–†October 18, 2011, Berlin) was among the best known and most discussed German culture scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. His work had, and still has, a major impact on scholarship in literary and cultural studies throughout German-speaking Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. In content and style, Kittler sought to redefine German studies.

To create a playful alternative to the single-authored review essay that readers of the German Studies Review have come to expect here, we asked a handful of scholars to reflect on the impact of Friedrich Kittler on their own work, and to speculate on his work’s future relevance.

  • The Ecstasy of the Object:Friedrich Kittler and Rudolf Heinz’ Pathognostik
  • Helmut Muller-Sievers

Friedrich Kittler started out as one of the first German readers, translators, and interpreters of Jacques Lacan. The visceral allure and the pathos of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the mid- to late 1970s are difficult to comprehend nowadays, since we have YouTube videos that show Lacan’s humorous persona, and, in Slavoj Žižek, a veritable jester of Lacanianism. But set against the background of (West) Germany’s utter political and social desolation in the late 1970s, and against the collapse by exhaustion of hermeneutic theories of interpretation, Lacan’s near impenetrable, allusive writings, and the stunning anecdotes surrounding his life and practice, exerted an extraordinary fascination.

Already in its Freudian variant, psychoanalysis was a resolutely ontological discourse: it claimed to guarantee references for its signifiers—bodily or psychic symptoms for the genealogies and narratives it invented. Inversely, it proposed to intervene in being through the curative power of language. Lacan narrowed the path of analysis further by restricting subjective expression to the machinic play of a symbolic order that was delimited by the intrusion of the imaginary, and by the abyss of the real. For West German intellectuals who had just been subjected to the first successful deployment of surveillance systems that, like Lacan, treated human language as symbolic and differential (the famous Rasterfahndung that Kittler later admired [End Page 135] so much), and who in the early 1980s were overwhelmed by images of nuclear and environmental destruction, the Lacanian sharpening provided both an explanation for their misery and the desperate hope that beyond the realm of the symbolic and the imaginary—in the interaction (not relation!) of bodies formerly known as sex—there might be a realm of unspeakable freedom.

Friedrich Kittler had published, in 1977, the first fully Lacanian analysis of a literary oeuvre, and in the process touched upon the famously disturbed life of its author, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Here, as in other early works, mental illness is understood as a consequence of, and as a silent protest against, symbolic processes that escape the grasp of the speaking subject. Mental illness indicates that formation—Bildung—is always also irreparable deformation in the service of a bourgeois society that demands of its citizens anticipatory obedience to the symbolic fixity of sexual and social roles. The success of the modern state consists in its ability to make its biological and its ideological reproduction coincide by pairing the civil servant with the nurturing mother, each supplementing the other’s lack. This interpretive paradigm dominates Kittler’s analyses of the romantic paradigm shift “around 1800,” culminating in the first part of the Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900.

In hindsight it is clear how much this position owed not only to Lacan but also to Michel Foucault, and Kittler later reflected at length on Foucault’s influence, and on what he perceived as his shortcomings. It is less clear what influence the Lacanian Left had on Kittler. Félix Guattari, most prominently, had anticipated and radicalized the diagnosis that the nuclear family is irredeemably pathogenic and a conduit of state control; his strangely worded analyses had made L’Anti-Oedipe (German 1974) such an exotic and irresistible book. But how did Guattari make it into the discourse of German Literaturwissenschaft to which Kittler still belonged?

A seminal figure in this transmission was Rudolf Heinz, a professor of philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf and a practicing psychiatrist and analyst...

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