Andersheit um 1800: Figuren—Theorien—Darstellungsformen (review)

This collection of essays is the product of a graduate student conference in the Doktorandenschule Laboratorium Aufklärung at the Friedrich Schiller Universität, Jena. The editors are all doctoral students in this program. The primary goal of this edited volume is to explore literature’s and philosophy’s engagement with alterity (Andersheit) around 1800—a theme certainly deserving great attention in the study of eighteenth-century German culture in its European and global contexts. As the editors state in their introduction, the essays all share the same premise: to call into question a common belief that in German intellectual culture around 1800 literature is considered capable of incorporating and reflecting upon the concept and phenomenon of alterity, while philosophy is criticized for a systematic approach that grasps the world through normativity, rather than describing it in its variety and with its differences. Accordingly, literature offers the opportunity to say the unspeakable and explore the irrational, whereas philosophy, in particular German idealism, is trapped in its pursuit of uniformity, normativity, and rationality.

Challenging this conventional wisdom, the essays in this collection argue that both literature and philosophy around 1800 are actively engaged with alterity in life and thinking. Instead of approaching alterity within disciplinary boundaries, the essays conceptualize intellectual culture around 1800 in German and European contexts as a laboratory of problems, which paves the way for a problem-driven and interdisciplinary investigation. The editors divide their discussions into three sections: Figuren, Theorien, and Darstellungsformen, to explore alterity beyond the boundaries set between literature and philosophy. In the section Figuren, the five essays are concerned with types or figures of alterity versus figures of normativity such as the dilettante/the genius, the ghost/the rationalist, Jews/Germans, the monstrosity of birth defects/“normal” babies, and the impartial spectator/the sympathetic participant. The essays in the section Theorien endeavor to identify the role of alterity in the constitution of subjectivity and (un)consciousness in the works of canonical German thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and Hölderlin. The section entitled Darstellungsformen deals with the representation of otherness through the media of language and image. One example is Silke Förschler’s original essay on anthropoids, which insightfully identifies apes as the deviant connector or the in-between creature between human and animal in anthropological discourses in Europe around 1800. The anthropoid represents the boundary between human and beast.

It is perceptive to devote this collection to alterity in German literature and philosophy around 1800. The essays cover a wide range of topics related to alterity and offer in-depth discussions of specific works and key concepts. This volume thus contains interesting findings and will appeal to readers interested in German literature and philosophy around 1800. The general outcome of the essays, however, does not entirely meet the editors’ goals of transcending disciplinary boundaries and envisioning a laboratory of Enlightenment, which as a long-term goal has great potential for further research. While literature and philosophy retain their irreplaceable status in German intellectual culture around 1800, the topic of alterity itself demands a broader scope. The sociohistorical realm and world-historical events around 1800 such as European colonialism, the slave trade, scientific expeditions, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Asian economy, to name just a few, are barely present in the essays, with the exception of Burkhard Liebsch’s accurate but brief discussion of the philosophy of history and its relationship to non-European cultures. Indeed, here the poststructuralist discussion of difference and alterity, which informs and nurtures the essays in this collection, is directly related to the sociohistorical problematics of European colonialism and the non-European world. If this collection could also have included discussions of which examples can be found in Susan Buck-Morss’s essay Hegel and Haiti or in Suzanne Zantop’s book Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany 1770–1870...