Hölderlin and the Romantics: The Paradigm of Writerly Necessity in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute

Wie, wenn ich aber reden müßte?

––Novalis

Rainer Maria Rilke’s first letter to the young poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, addresses a necessity to write (Paris, February 17, 1903). For Rilke, the poet is by definition somebody who writes because he must write. He cannot live without writing. Nobody can help him. The poet must write because his life is at stake in writing. Rilke thus says that the poet is someone who would die if he could not write: “… admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write.”¹ Moreover, the necessity to write is an imperative of life: “And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’ [‘Ich muß’], then construct your life according to this necessity.”² For Rilke, the verbs to be and to write coincide since the poet must not only live in order to be able to write, but must also write so as to live. My paper concerns this message; it is an initial step towards a historical investigation into the conditions that made “Rilke” possible, that is to say, the writer who constitutes himself as a subject who cannot not-write. Following Michel Foucault, I construe the concept of “subject” as “a particular, vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals.”³ I focus on this subject who cannot not-write literature. The inability to not-write, which I call writerly necessity, is a discursive site that produces certain possibilities and limitations for an individual who occupies this subject position.

In this paper, I am concerned with how writerly necessity functions as a paradigm within Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s The Literary Absolute (L’absolu littéraire, 1978). I here understand the paradigm to be a reconceptualization of Foucault’s “historical a priori.” In Agamben’s words, the paradigm is “an a priori condition that is inscribed within a history and that can only constitute itself a posteriori with respect to this history.”⁴ My question is how a paradigm of writerly necessity makes possible Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s identification of literature as absolute in the journal of the Early German Romantics, the Athenaeum. This is also to say that I am concerned with the relation between Hölderlin and the Romantics insofar as Hölderlin (as a subject who cannot not-write) emerges as the paradigm of what Maurice Blanchot calls “the non-romantic essence of romanticism.”⁵ Writerly necessity is, I will argue, a condition of emergence of the literary absolute, which still functions as an operative paradigm within literary-critical thought. My paper is thus not a bare study of certain writers who apparently must write; rather, it concerns the concept of “literature” itself, its enigmatic meaning as that which withdraws. As Blanchot says, in a claim that is paradigmatic, literature is the question of its own Being: “When Mallarmé asks himself, ‘Does something like Literature exist?,’ this question is literature itself.”⁶ Literature itself is the “question of literature”; however, this thought is precisely what needs to be questioned—not so as to argue against it, but to understand how literature became its own question.

In The Literary Absolute, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe undertake what they call “a properly philosophical study of romanticism.”⁷ But, for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, such a philosophical study does not entail a concern for “the ‘philosophy of the romantics’”; rather, they proclaim, “the object of our study is exclusively the question of literature” (13). What does “philosophical” then mean here? In The Literary Absolute, the philosophical focus will emerge as a concern for the question of literature, since this question indicates itself in the romantic work, but nevertheless remains unthought in romanticism (see 57). What makes Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical study philosophical is the concern for the unthought of romanticism. With this concern they adopt Heidegger’s thoughts on...