Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self: Violence and Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century German Literature (review)

In one of his notebooks, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) reformulates the eighteenth-century thought experiment posed by the Irish physician Molyneux to John Locke in 1693, according to which a blind man is made to see and then tested as to whether he can see distinctions that he could heretofore only touch. Novalis asks:

If we were blind, mute, and without feeling, our soul in contrast completely open, our mind the present outer world, the inner world would stand in relation to us, like the outer world now, and who knows whether we would notice a difference—if we could compare both states. [ . . . ] Who knows whether we could not shortly thereafter through various efforts produce eyes, ears etc., because then our body would stand so much in our power, would make up such a part of our inner world, as our soul does now. Our body may then not be so senseless, just as little, as our soul now. Who knows whether it would only appear senseless, because it made up a part of our self and the inner self-distinction, through which the body would first see, hear, and feel for our self-consciousness [ . . . ].

—(Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. 6 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960–1988, 2:547. Translation by Ch. W.)

In this imaginative and perhaps cryptic passage, Novalis confuses dichotomies that have come to distinguish a post-Cartesian modernity: mind–body, inner–outer. He conceptualizes mind and body as inexplicably intertwined and related, so much so that he wonders if we might one day grow organs or feel our own self-consciousness. As much recent literature on eighteenth-century anthropology has argued, the mind-body relationship was a central point of debate and reason itself was increasingly seen as tied up with somatic and affective processes (see, for example, Jutta Heinz's Wissen von Menschen und Erzählen vom Einzelfall: Untersuchungen zum anthropologischen Roman der Spätaufklärung [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996]). These anthropological debates offer up a different kind of enlightenment reason. They consider perhaps a less pure reason, which rather than simply subordinating the body, is bound up with it.

John Lyon's Crafting Flesh picks up on these concerns and discerns in the early nineteenth century a move toward a philosophy of embodiment, which, as he claims in the words of Merleau-Ponty, "reminds us of the concrete, the here-and-now presence of people to one another, and the full complement of senses and feelings through which they communicate with one another" (218). In a lucidly argued and attentive study, Lyon traces what he considers a "move away from reason and toward the body" in early nineteenth-century conceptions of the self. In his study of the body in cultural and philosophical texts after 1800, Lyon demonstrates how various authors resist what he claims is the paradigm of the "rational, intangible self" perpetuated by the transcendental idealist arguments of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.

In chapters on Hölderlin's model of a reflective self, Brentano's model of a traumatic self, Kleist's model of a political self, and Büchner's model of a psychologically ruptured self, Lyon explores how these various notions eclipse rationalist abstractions. Lyon argues that the image of the wounded body captures especially well the vicissitudes and limitations of the self as figured in the early nineteenth century. He sees in the wound a figuration that lends "empirical credibility" to more abstract concepts of the self. In Hölderlin's Hyperion, for example, the wound figures the fragmentation of a self that can never be absolutely present or complete unto itself. Hyperion expresses his sense of loss, notes Lyon, through metaphors of the wound. "Wie ein blutender Hirsch," Hyperion mourns the loss, in this instance, of Adamas. The perhaps more metaphysical claims of fragmentation and loss found in Hölderlin's theoretical reflections...