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Reviewed by:
  • Robert Musil and the NonModern by Mark M. Freed
  • Andrew Erwin
Robert Musil and the NonModern. By Mark M. Freed. New York: Continuum, 2011. Pp. 177. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-1441122513.

Criticism on Robert Musil and his major novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften has frequently centered on the concept of essayism. A term Musil used in his own writings, essayism has come to signify primarily an aesthetic and ethical strategy Musil employed to mediate between incommensurable spheres of experience and discourse. Scholars have mobilized this understanding of essayism to explain the unconventional style, philosophical concerns, and unfinished form of Musil’s major novel. A problem long plaguing this discussion has been a general insularity that has obscured the relevance of Musil’s essayism beyond his own writings. Mark Freed’s new book shifts the conversation from the sometimes hermetic concerns of Musil scholarship to the center of debates about modernity that have shaped literary and cultural studies for the past forty years. Bringing Musil into conversation with thinkers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Lyotard and Latour, Freed demonstrates convincingly that Musil is too often overlooked as an intellectual resource for grappling with issues raised by the “philosophical discourse of Modernity” (11).

The book’s main thesis is that Musil’s “Essayismus” constitutes a discursive strategy of nonmodernism (á la Latour) undertaken at the margins of philosophy (á la Derrida), which overcomes a harmful dualism that persists in both modernism and postmodernism. Considering the dangers of terminological ambiguity, Freed does an admirable job of bringing clarity to traditionally muddied waters. With Latour as his guide, Freed defines modernism as an episteme that divides or “purifies” the world into distinct ontological spheres of human and nonhuman, Nature and Culture. In broad terms, such “purification” is the cause of the schism between various forms of “realism” and “constructivism” that have divided the sciences and the humanities over the past half century. More specifically, “purification” creates a problem for modernism’s aim of establishing “normativity out of itself” (13; Freed is citing Habermas), because the sphere assigned with prescribing norms, Culture, cannot adjudicate questions in the descriptive sphere of science, assigned to Nature. In their respective responses, modernists and postmodernists alike perpetuate the dualism. [End Page 206] On Freed’s account, Musil’s Essayismus is a philosophic mode of engagement that avoids the dualism by dereifying the discursive strategies that divide the world into ontological categories of human and nonhuman. This thesis sets the stage for more focused analyses of Musil’s relation to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and a range of other “continental” or “postmodern” philosophers.

Much work has been done on Musil’s relation to Nietzsche. It is not clear that Freed breaks much new ground here, though a comparison of Ulrich’s development as a Möglichkeitsmensch to the stages through which Nietzsche’s “free spirit” goes offers some novel insights. As Freed undertakes a dizzying array of other comparisons, the book builds nicely toward an interpretation of Musil’s essayism as a form of Kantian reflective judgment, which answers Lyotard’s call for a politics of “judgment without criteria” (143). Compelling in its own right, this final chapter would have benefited from an engagement with Patrizia McBride’s important work on Musil’s debt to Kantian aesthetics. One of the book’s highlights is a chapter on Heidegger’s analysis of Being in Sein und Zeit and Musil’s exploration of Eigenschaftslosigkeit. A number of interesting parallels emerge. Seinesgleichen geschieht is analogous to the inauthentic Gerede of Heidegger’s Man. In the “publicness” of this “fallen” world, potentialities for authentic Being are concealed. Only a Möglichkeitsmensch who does not regard Eigenschaften as belonging to an essential or substantive self can disclose authentic potentialities for Being. Though Ulrich’s quest for authentic Being founders on the Other Condition’s disregard for human being’s “heritage” (82), Musil develops a successful “discursive method for disclosing authentic Being,” namely Essayismus (84). A strength of Freed’s analysis is that he distinguishes between a false authenticity—in which one attributes Eigenschaften to an essential self—and a more meaningful authenticity—in which one regards Eigenschaften merely as potentialities for Being. Heidegger is instructive here...

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