- Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe by Joseph O'Neil
Joseph O'Neil's Figures of Natality offers an insightful and conceptually bold rethinking of the political as it is worked through in literary texts in the age of Goethe. He uses Hannah Arendt's concept of natality to present readings that go against the insidiously all-encompassing vitalistic modes of self-identity, autopoiesis, economic growth, and literary criticism typical of romanticism in order to recuperate a notion of the political as contingent, localized, and conflict ridden. For O'Neil, natality, because it is interruptive rather than organic, uncovers aspects of "birth and birth metaphors in the age of Goethe, such that these refer not to ideas about organism or generation but to models of self, society, and polity—not as external and oppressive to a subject born free, but as open to change, risky, and divided at their heart" (18). This task is both worthwhile and timely, and the readings it produces are genuinely novel and interesting, but the study is frequently careless in its treatment of historical detail and overly obtuse in its writing style. Because of these difficulties, O'Neil's contributions [End Page 386] to all of political theory, contemporary literary criticism, and scholarship on the age of Goethe are sometimes difficult to untangle, but they are nonetheless considerable.
In his introduction, O'Neil offers an extended treatment of Arendt's notion of natality as a second birth into the political that is tied to the category of action and an "emphasis … on birth and the new" (16). Somewhat less persuasively, he also reads this category together with the eighteenth-century debates between preformation and epigenesis. While he is doubtless correct—following Helmut Müller-Sievers—that "epigenetic thought" is tied to the vitalistic models of selfhood, artistic production, morality, and economy that tend to efface the political, his mapping of natality back onto the mechanistic model of preformation is significantly less convincing because it takes little notice of the details of the eighteenth-century theory. In particular, preformationism does not jibe well with O'Neil's emphasis on natality as enabling the radically new—indeed, as Stefani Engelstein (whom O'Neil also cites at some length) has pointed out, a "major distinction between epigenesists and preformationists lay in the issue of whether life could be created, whether the newborn was actually new" (Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse [2008], 171), with newness in her reading falling on the epigenetic side. This is not to downplay the ideological currents inherent in the epigenetic turn, but the recoupling of natality and preformation is anachronistic and unnecessary to O'Neil's arguments.
This occasional historical carelessness also creates some tension between the first two chapters of the study, in which O'Neil treats Goethe's early lyric and Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779). In the former, O'Neil uses Arendt's contrast between the American Revolution as an institution-founding action and the French Revolution as dangerously relying on empathetic projection to approach "Prometheus" and "Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes, darstellend Hans Sachsens poetische Sen-dung." Against readings that emphasize the autopoietic moments in "Prometheus," O'Neil argues that Goethe's poetry exhibits "different concepts of craft or techne," which "transform a dyadic model of specularity into a triadic model that converts reproductive poeisis into natal praxis" (67). While these readings are both plausible and appealing, eighteenth-century scholars cannot help but wonder how a model that follows Arendt's critique of "one of the beloved vehicles of poetic and personal sensibility before 1800: empathy" (64) will account for Lessing's dramaturgical principles in the following chapter. The answer is that it doesn't: O'Neil treats Nathan with no mention of Lessing's poetics of drama and the tragedies, and his intervention is to shift our understanding of the play away from its overt Enlightenment-universalist didactic message and toward the shared...