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Criticism 43.3 (2001) 352-355



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Book Review

The Hieroglyph of Tradition, Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant


The Hieroglyph of Tradition, Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant by Angel-ika Rauch. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Pp. 249. {41.50 cloth.

Building ("Bildung") a Conscious Self

The Hieroglyph of Tradition is one among many recently published books (see for instance Terry Eagleton's latest book The Idea of Culture) that struggles with a redefinition of modern identity and its context. But its originality lies in the fact that it does so by deconstructing the word tradition which Angelika Rauch rereads and reinterprets from a selection of great German thinkers. For this, she can supply a fresh perspective for the anglophone reader because of her intimate familiarity with both languages though her sentence structure is often reminiscent of German academic work. Beginning with a psychoanalytical dialectic, the author exposes tradition first as a library of received wisdom, then as a library of activities, and finally as a personal synthesis of history and [End Page 352] memory. At the end, tradition becomes the motive for each individual to construct his or her own personal archive.

It is a difficult task, and this is not an easy book. The author renders the word tradition into a signifier of doubtful intentions, a glyph whose meaning has yet to be ascertained. She proceeds to fill the space. With a decipherment in which tradition is seen as the reference to a reality that stands behind the fictional, she adds to the quality of tradition the kind of truth that fiction best conveys. In doing so, she rescues tradition from being concretely embodied in the mother, invoking unconscious forces. By becoming the signifier that effects change within us, tradition becomes a liberating force. It opens up the future because it frees us from a concrete vision of absolute history. In psychoanalytic terms, it frees us from the melancholy of our absence of connections with the original bliss.

In order to answer the question of what is tradition and how it can be more than just received wisdom, Rauch adopts in the first of her four sections the stance of a Freudian analyst. Here, she is teaching the reader to examine the experienced moment as would a psychoanalyst in therapy. All of us long to return to a lost unity with the universe, and attach ourselves momentarily and unconsciously to objects whose present images evoke pleasurable memories of the past. The links between the apparently disconnected fragmentary images can be traced by the flow of libido attachments, an inference the analyst uses to render the meaning conscious. Here tradition is treated, like the dream, as a "complex of images that have to be brought into a sensible alliance" as it is only by "creating relationships between the various enigmatic parts of the dream that manifestations of an unacknowledged past or experience can come to light" (59). Desire remains unconscious until the analyst draws attention to the underlying connections. Drawing her own meaning from fragments of the writing of several great German-language writers, including Freud, Rauch, in part two of her book, turns to the philosopher Kant.

Rauch shows how Kant fails to eliminate "the nurturent body of the mother" (84) as a source of creativity. The unconscious longing to return to the womb manifests itself as intuition, imagination and feelings that intrude upon the aesthetic experience. Suspended between our desire to experience the beautiful object, and the memories that compete for awareness, we become conscious of ourselves for the first time. It is the special task of the genius historian, the artist, to create the object that evokes this link between past and present, and to order, give meaning to, this emerging self-consciousness. By reinterpreting our relationships to our past, the genius historian induces a sense of freedom in us and creates the possibility of action: from being rigid and unresponsive, we become able to have a purpose. To be purposeful or "to become aware of purposiveness in the beautiful means to realize that meaning...

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