Preface

This Festschrift for Rainer Nägele celebrates a teaching and reflects on the achievement that his substantial and influential body of work represents. This is not a teaching in the sense of a Lehre, doctrine or lesson, it is not an achievement in the etymological sense of a bringing to term, completion, or Vollendung—no Schrift, for Rainer Nägele, is ever fest. His mantra has instead been: immer wieder von neuem. The very opposite of an achievement in the classic sense, this “once again from the beginning” is first and foremost a gesture, a way of rehearsing one’s captivation by sticking points, moments of resistance and scenes of repetition. It is also at the same time and in the same gesture a way of approaching something that will have already been too close for comfort, something that did not have the coherence of a discrete object of study and that required multiple approaches, all of which had of necessity to be tentative, indirect, and not formalizable into a fixed and reliably reproducible “approach.”

An approach that at the same time would be a distanciation is evident in his recent book, Darstellbarkeit: Das Erscheinen des Verschwindens (2008). It is a tack that we ourselves have sought to pursue. Rainer Nägele’s preface to that volume may thus be said to stand before ours as both a model and a point of entry. In it he explains the non-linear sequence of the chapters that follow. Not only will each attempt position itself precariously and almost indefensibly before the question of Darstellung, not only will each expose itself to this question, but the chapters will do so over and over again. Immer wieder von neuem. Each time again, each time as if for the first time. In lieu of sequence, a new beginning, a new departure, a new attempt, a new essay. Each Versuch, as he calls it, will be a theatrical experiment, a new staging of the question of Darstellung. While one might translate this term as “Representability” and thereby emphasize along with the suffix a strong affinity to Walter Benjamin, whom Nägele has read with such acuity on so many different occasions, it is equally possible and equally necessary to translate it, following Lacan’s rendering of the dreamwork’s Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit (usually translated as ‘considerations of representability’), as “Mise-en-scène.” Indeed, as Nägele himself emphasizes, each chapter is conceived of as an ever-renewed attempt not so much to speak about Darstellung as to act it out as a question. “Jedes der folgenden Kapitel ist ein neuer Ansatz, ein neuer Versuch, nicht über Darstellung und Darstellbarkeit zu reden, sondern Darstell-barkeit sich darstellen zu lassen.”¹

Rainer Nägele’s pointed use of Versuch here recalls its deployment by Bertolt Brecht as the title for a series of publications that included his most radical experimentations, the Lehrstücke; their didacticism, as Nägele notes in one of his many essays on Brecht’s theater, is not one that would seek to transmit political or ideological knowledge but rather takes the form of what Brecht calls Einübung in Haltungen: experimental exercises in attitudes or postures.² The centrality of the theater for Nägele’s own Versuche is evident in his most recent book, Der andere Schauplatz (2014), a collection of essays on Büchner, Brecht, Artaud, and Heiner Müller, as well as, again, the notion of Darstellbarkeit.

The current volume celebrates the teaching of Rainer Nägele in its very incompletion, in the way that it has not only provided new impulses and posed new questions but worked repeatedly to hold those questions open. In doing so, it will have also made a place—“neither here nor there,“ as Anette Schwarz writes—for those who come and read after. Reading After Freud is of course the title of an important collection of essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud that Nägele published in 1987. In it he asks, each time in a new way, what it means to...