Abstract

Chapter 6 shows how the contradiction between style and conceptual content in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's The Lord Chandos Letter, which the secondary literature has frequently pointed to, must in fact be viewed as a constitutive moment in a structure akin to the aesthetics of dependency. From this perspective, not only does the elusive relation of parts to whole in the text become apparent, but The Lord Chandos Letter also shows itself to contain a previously unrecognized critique of modernity's scientific turn. This critique is embedded in a mediation that inscribes the condition of contradiction in a positive evaluation of the sequence of past, present, and future on the basis of its relation to a transcendent telos.

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