Offenbarung und Gewalt: Literarische Aspekte kultureller Krisen um 1800 (review)

Since the invocation of the muse in the opening verse of Western literature’s founding song, the authority of the divine has underwritten literary voice. Long after the cultural setting of the Iliad has passed into oblivion, poetic creativity maintains its reference to the divine. Indeed, even the historical moment commonly identified with a radical attack on divine authority—the Enlightenment—cannot do without such a legitimating instance. The foremost medium of divine inspiration in the eighteenth century, meanwhile, is not the dance of the muses, but the word of a transcendent God, who reveals himself in speech and in scripture. The literary ramifications of divine intervention form the subject of Bernd Hamacher’s Offenbarung und Gewalt: Literarische Aspekte kultureller Krisen um 1800. In this study, Hamacher cuts a swath through the Age of Goethe, investigating the particular valence the act of revelation assumes in literary and philosophical texts.

Hamacher’s interest does not pertain to explicitly theological or religious debates, but to attitudes toward violence in the literary depiction of revelation. This study investigates a broad spectrum of canonical authors who articulate differing views toward the potential for violence intrinsic to revelation. In the course of the investigation, Hamacher shows how the semantic range of the concept itself was expanded beyond the act of supermundane intervention to include human modes of creativity and education. For authors from Lessing and Kant to Kleist and Goethe, revelation entails a rupture within ordinary modes of intelligibility—a rupture whose violence can either be subdued or embraced. Literature serves as a particularly apposite medium for reflection on the relationship between revelation and violence insofar as it is able to render the cosmos a world of signs and thus to relate the anodyne or destructive effects of revelation.

Working with this rather capacious notion of revelation allows Hamacher to treat the entire canon of thinkers and writers around 1800. Such an ambition leads to chapters that vary radically in length and detail. The volume opens with a presentation of the analytic concepts foundational to Hamacher’s study. In addition to a critical discussion of the recent work of the eminent Egyptologist Jan Assmann, Hamacher presents his argument for considering violence and revelation as disruptions within a given semiotic order, as rifts in the fabric of social communication. As the ensuing in-depth treatment of Lessing demonstrates, the nexus of revelation and violence enters the purview of this analysis primarily insofar as they become the subject of literature. Indeed, Hamacher aims in this chapter to demonstrate that Lessing’s mature thought makes literature into the medium of revelation, thereby quelling any potential for violence. The location of revelation within the immanent sphere of human affairs also characterizes the developments that preoccupy the subsequent chapters. Brief treatments of such figures as Hamann and Herder are placed alongside lengthy engagements with Hölderlin, Kant, and Fichte. Given that the chapters and sections are organized by name more so than by theme, the reader is left with the impression that the author’s foremost ambition is to track the vicissitudes of his two organizing terms, rather than to reconstruct internal continuities or discontinuities within this discursive situation. Nevertheless, the overarching unity of the analysis comes into view: the latter half of the eighteenth century locates the act of revelation within the human subject, thereby mitigating the potential for violence of a divine intrusion or of an exclusive claim to truth. Throughout his analyses of central texts of the eighteenth century such as Lessing’s “Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts” (1778) and “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” (1797), Hamacher identifies the ambition to recast revelation as a collective human enterprise exercised in and by the individual.

The final two and most ambitious chapters are respectively devoted to Kleist and Goethe. The former constitutes the major exception to the Enlightenment view outlined in the preceding chapters. In a survey of Kleist’s narrative and dramatic works, Hamacher shows that those figures that invoke the divine or regard themselves...