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Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung (review)
- Goethe Yearbook
- North American Goethe Society
- Volume 11, 2002
- pp. 403-404
- 10.1353/gyr.2011.0034
- Review
- Additional Information
Goethe Yearbook 403 Fritz Breithaupt, Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung. Freiburg/Breisgau: Rombach, 2000. 221 pp. Even a casual perusal leaves little doubt of the importance of the visual in every genre of Goethe's writings. From the intertwining of "Blick" and "Glück" in the early poem "Es schlug mein Herz ... ," the ekphrastic studies of the Straßburg Cathedral or the Laocoön group, the aesthetic-autobiographical observations recorded in Italy by "Filippo Miller, Tedesco, Pittore" (Goethe's incognito ) to the extended analysis of color and vision in the Farbenlehre or the climactic hymn to the schöner Augenblick sung by a blind Faust—these and other patterns of visual experience in Goethe's oeuvre have struck his readers since these texts were first published. However, while critics long accepted the role of images in Goethe's writings as evidence of an achieved (or at least naively sought) plenitude of signification—what Goethe himself and the Romantics theorized as a "symbolic" rather than "allegorical" stmcture of meaning—more recent approaches have belatedly taken up and developed insights (such as Walter Benjamin's) into the problematic status in Goethe's work of image and sign. Fritz Breithaupt's elegant excursion "beyond" the image in Goethe argues that beginning with his travels in Italy and especially in his work on Iphigenie, Goethe becomes increasingly convinced of the divide between sensory perception and any transcendent reality. Apart from following Kant in this "Copernican " revolution (11), however, a step by which the subject simultaneously relinquishes any presumed access to "things-in-themselves," and by this very act finds a new freedom as god-like self-creator (or "genius," in Weimar Classicism's revision of this Sturm und Drang category [35-36]), Goethe also seeks to "correct " Kant (115-16). Epistemologically, Kant ens in clinging despite himself to the theoretical possibility of a transcendent reality (121); at the same time, he reproduces what Breithaupt describes as a negative "political" consequence of his theory of subjectivity, imposing an individual model (or image) of the real as universally binding: "Kant, so Goethes Vorwurf, will der letzte Philosoph sein ..." (118). For Goethe, the real "crisis" initiated by Kant at the end of the eighteenth century is not so much a crisis of understanding (the destabilizing insight into the impossibility of grasping the Ding an sich), but rather the threat of a hegemonic Kantian subject that would bring interpretation to an end. As Breithaupt argues, thinking beyond images thus means not only recognizing reality as a product (rather than determinant) of perception, but also disrupting established (and therefore restrictive) patterns of thinking, or ideologies. In a set of perceptive and stimulating readings that focus on Iphigenie, on several smaller texts written between 1788 and 1800, on the Märchen and the Wahlverwandtschaften, and finally on Faust II, Breithaupt works out the terms of Goethe's phenomenology in light of Plato, Kant, Schelling, and Heidegger. As he proposes, Schönheit designates for Goethe the ability of phenomena to appear—their phenomenality—and thus also implies any given culture's prevailing mode of perception. Inasmuch as genuine community depends on the ability to resist the power of ideology, the task of politics becomes not the endorsement of the beautiful and its patterns of communication, but rather their inter- 404 Book Reviews ruption. It becomes an act "gegen die polis" (48): In this reading, one can say that Goethe's politics is anti-Habermasian, informed as it is by rupture and "incommunicability " (10, 15). As may be clear from these observations, Breithaupt's focus is not on "images" as a thematic presence in Goethe's work, for instance, in descriptions of works of art (although such passages are discussed as well); nor is Breithaupt primarily interested in Goethe's remarks about politics, but rather on the political as a matter of textual practice in Goethe's literary writing ("die in den literarischen Schriften praktizierte Politik," 13). His is a rhetorical analysis that examines those operations of Goethe's texts that offer a mode of escape "aus der Übermacht des Ästhetischen" (9), meaning that they demystify objects of perception as being in fact the products of language itself. Bilder are...