Zwischen Eros und Mitteilung. Die Frühromantik im Symposion der „Athenaeums-Fragmente“ by May Mergenthaler (review)

May Mergenthaler’s Zwischen Eros und Mitteilung offers original insights into Friedrich Schlegel’s eminent works on philosophy and aesthetics. The contributions of this enquiry—achieved very much thanks to the author’s scholarly and philological erudition—lie in its unfolding of an examination that assesses and scrutinizes Schlegel’s reception among his many critics and commentators. Schlegel’s interpretation theory, according to this compelling outlook, anticipates, responds to, and engages with its present and future critics.

Mergenthaler supplies a well-informed exposition of prominent approaches to the early Romantics, detecting the presuppositions that stand at their core. Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of irony advocates a dialogical model which is consistently reflected in his writings. The overview of the various approaches to Schlegel centers on their examination of his project through the prism of their particular agendas. Many of these interpretations “stabilize” the inherent contradictions and tensions that are often perceived as characteristic to the early Romantics, by looking to tie Schlegel’s enterprise to their philosophical or theoretical standpoints. Several major critics thus overlook Schlegel’s insistence on the irreconcilability of a statement—and of the ideological independence of his philosophical project as a whole.

Mergenthaler’s alternative approach to Schlegel unfolds in a three-part structure. She first delineates those principles of Schlegel’s philosophy that guide his perception of language, dialogue, and philosophical enquiry. The concept of Mitteilung, “sharing,” but also “message,” is presented as a key with which to understand the constant shifts and dialogical tensions not only as characteristic of Schlegel’s thought, but rather, as the philosophical notion that guides his entire enterprise. Stressing the role of irony and of fragment in Schlegel’s work (principally via an original and attentive analysis of his essay “Über die Unverständlichkeit”), Mergenthaler defines the Schlegelian dialogue as the aspiration for transmission. This notion embodies a desire that cannot, in effect, ever be achieved. This may be seen as the principle that should guide the dialogue with Schlegel, i.e, an interpretive approach that does not aim at presenting his theories with insistence on “conclusions” or closure. Acknowledging the presence of irony in utterances is here a key notion: irony continually eliminates or puts in question the statement in which it is contained, at the same time that it also reproduces a new meaning to which it references. The enquiry points out this dual tension as essential to Schlegel’s view of communication and as a reflection of two streams of thought that are strongly encompassed in his definition of irony: Fichte’s idea of the self-creation of the self, and the classic, to a large extent, Socratic, view of irony. Examining Schlegel’s notion of vollendete Mitteilung, Mergenthaler insists that according to Schlegel, irony can never reach a stage of full materialization, thereby dispelling certain idealized views of Romantic irony and of the tensions in Romantic writings.

Second, the book depicts three main streams in literature on Schlegel: 1) critique that is influenced by the rise of deconstruction (such as the works of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Blanchot, and Hamacher); 2) works that make use of tenets of system theory (principally Luhmann and his followers); and 3) interpretations influenced by performance theory, which opts to find in the early Romantics awareness to speech acts (primarily the work of Angela Esterhammer). The book closes this survey (and classification) of secondary literature with a consideration of some other critics, primarily Friedrich Kittler, Marianne Schuller and Ethel Matala de Mazza. Whereas this classification is not obvious (for instance, with the affiliation it depicts between French and German works on deconstruction), it serves well the author’s treatment of the “blind spots” of these respective streams in their reference to Schlegelian dialogism. It does not suffice to apply political or ethical agenda to Schlegel’s theories, thereby ignoring his emphasis on functional and pragmatic view of language, as is the case with readings of Schlegel via deconstruction...