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Cycling again and again over the alphabetic ground . . . the film [Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma] gradually replaces each “letter” with a fragment of landscape that . . . takes on the character of a pure emblem. . . . Indeed, the first four substitute images—reeds, smoke, flames, waves—capture a thought of the real as primordial separation: earth, air, fire, water. And behind that separation, as its very condition of being, is light. Hölderlin wrote to Ludwig Neuffer from Homburg on 4 June 1799 that he had completed his tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, except for the last act, and that he expected to publish it in the literary periodical (Iduna, named for the ancient Germanic goddess of dawn) that he was seeking to found.1 To his half-brother Karl Gok, he wrote on the same day of the “slow love and effort” he had been devoting to the work; and he laboriously copied for him most of Empedocles’ monologue from act 2, scene 4 of the Second Version.2 In September 1799, however, he wrote to Susette Gontard that his plan for the literary journal had failed, due to the complexities of professional politics, and that this failure had dashed his hopes of sustaining, in personal independence and with financial sufficiency, “the life that I live for you.” Casting professional ambition and personal hopes aside, he would now turn his full attention back to the tragedy, which he expected to complete within a few months.3 Hölderlin thus returned to The Death of Empedocles in the movement of a personal and decisive tragic turning. 29 TWO Communing with the Pure Elements: The First Two Versions of The Death of Empedocles Already in 1797, while serving as a live-in tutor to the Gontard family, Hölderlin sketched out a tragedy in five acts, focused on the figure of Empedocles . The Frankfurt Plan4 shares with the three subsequent versions, all of which remained fragmentary, a guiding fascination with the philosopher’s alleged self-immolation in the volcanic crater of Mt. Aetna.5 Hölderlin does not understand this fatal leap as just a suicide, but as a quest for a union with Nature through the radiant, all-consuming, and purifying element of fire, which is always privileged in his poetics of the elements. The imperative to seek this union does not spring from chance events, but rather from Empedocles ’ inmost nature. Both his personal disposition and his philosophy incline him, according to Hölderlin (who shows here the influence of Rousseau), to disdain “culture” or civilization, which is integral to what he will later call “Art,” and, still more fundamentally, to disdain all merely “onesided ” interests and engagements, simply because they restrict his devotion to the all, or to what he calls Nature. For this reason, even the most sensitive and beautiful of human relationships leave him dissatisfied and restless by their very singularity, or insofar as they are not experienced “in a great accord with all that lives,” and also because he remains in thrall, through them, to time’s “law of succession.”6 The temporality of experience, as well as the historicality of culture, despoil all such limited engagements in his eyes. One might indeed, on this basis, feel inclined to agree with Schürmann’s charge that Hölderlin repudiates the singular. However, Wolfgang Riedel’s erudite study of how, in the context of the history of ideas, Hölderlin came to write, around 1800, “the foundational texts of the ‘modern’ poetry [Poesie, which can also mean ‘literature’] of union” (namely Hyperion and The Death of Empedocles) facilitates a deeper understanding. Riedel outlines the Neoplatonic (originally gnostic) quest for henosis (or union with the transcendent One from which the soul has become estranged) together with the quest’s Christianization in patristic thought, and also in the mystical heritage of Pietism that formed Hölderlin’s own natal religious milieu: The salvation of union is attained by sacrifice (‘giving up’/resignatio) of the world (as well as of one’s own self as belonging to the world). Here, in Christianity ’s most intensive pragmatics of salvation, the gnostic heritage asserts itself (as for Plotinus himself) as the foundational stratum of European religious history.7 Riedel goes on, however, to discuss the supplanting of this quest by the ideal of a return to and union with infinite nature and with the all of earthly life (which, of course, are not transcendent). He asks what enabled Hölderlin, about a century in...

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