Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century by Gabriel Trop (review)

This book is an ode to poetry in more than just one respect. First, poetry is its subject matter. For the author, each poetic text represents an "experiment in thought and language" that should be regarded "not as an object of investigation whose essence might one day be found, nor as a set of formal properties or generic qualities that one day might be defined, but rather, as a way of life endowed with its own patterns and tendencies, rewards and risks, ecstasies and anxieties" (4). Engagement with poetry and art in general amounts to an openended process of aesthetic exercise, "a form of askesis" (4), in the sense that the artwork challenges the subject to continually modify his or her preformed attitudes toward reality and to improve patterns of perception, cognition, and being in general. This notion of "aesthetic exercise" had already been of central importance in Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750) and continued to be so for the likes of Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling, whose aesthetic theories Trop touches on at various points. Trop also finds the same attitude reflected in the poetry of the era, from the Anacreontics Hagedorn and Gleim to the Romantics Novalis and Hölderlin. In meticulous close readings, Trop "probes, analyzes, gathers, and associates in order to uncover the latent and potential exercise value harbored in each work, a tentative and provisional response to the question: what sort of self does this text call into being, what practices of life does it invoke?" (11). As its journal-like cover reflects, the book also presents a personal account of the author's poetic way of life—that is, the story of his aesthetic experiences and hermeneutic exercises with poems and other forms of literature.

Trop views Foucault, Hadot, and Sloterdijk as prominent predecessors for a humanistic reevaluation of aesthetic, spiritual, even athletic exercises. Sloterdijk's reading of Rilke's poem "Archaischer Torso Apollos" in Du mußt dein Leben ändern (Suhrkamp, 2009), in particular, serves as a model for Trop's book. However, Trop's project differs from these predecessors in that it is entirely Romantic. His concluding remark in the section on Novalis formulates the general theme and ethos of his book that he repeatedly incants throughout:

One cannot stress enough that art—the particular cognitive exercise that it performs—does not merely present its own absolute as merely unrepresentable or incomprehensible. To reduce the romantic absolute to unrepresentable Being lures readers into divesting themselves of the need to interpret the work, to move in its rhythms and concepts, to produce something in its light, to cease to be wholly other to it: to live with the work, in the work. One might be misled to believe that interpreting a poem always misses the point, because after all, the meaning of the poem ultimately remains ineffable. However, in the world of poetry, it is quite the contrary: missing the point is the point. The ineffability of art cannot live in a world of silence. On the contrary, what Novalis shows is that this ineffability, if it is functioning correctly, generates fictions, multiplies differences, produces interpretations, incites speech. The sphere of art does not represent the unrepresentable as much as make present the unrepresentable as an intensity in the mind, a fever for thought, a contraction of the skin, a tension of the muscles, an organism in a state of maximum attraction.

(207–8)

I render this passage in its entirety because it illustrates the overall poetic tone as the second feature of this ode to poetry. Literary verve has become rather uncommon in academic writing and may incite criticism, but I do not feel that this style compromises the clarity of discourse in any way. On the contrary, there are many passages in which the use of poetic language facilitates and enhances the lucidity of complex issues and arguments. My only stylistic criticisms are that...