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203 Absolute Failures: Hegel’s Bildung and the “Earliest System-Program of German Idealism”  Rebecca Gagan Unprogrammed In his discussion of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Ernest Rubinstein declares that the difference between Romanticism and Idealism is not “minute,” but rather “infinitesimal.”1 To be sure, it is not new to suggest the complex interrelations between Romanticism and Idealism or to point out that the dividing line between the two is obscured. Yet Rubinstein’s use of the term infinitesimal suggests a relatedness that is not simply obscured, but rather supplemental. Idealism’s project, he argues, does not end with Romanticism but is rather supplemented by it and so continues to be expressed in and as Romanticism. To think of Romanticism as the supplement to Idealism is to return to Jacques Derrida’s now famous discussion of Rousseau and supplementarity in his book Of Grammatology. If, as Derrida remarks, “there has never been anything but supplements”2 and if we understand the supplement of Romanticism as that which was always inside Idealism, then it is not only that the separation between the two is “infinitesimal,” but perhaps there is indeed no separation at all. The notion of a supplement signals the always already unfinished nature of a project. But, as Rubinstein points out, the supplement of Romanticism is also unfinished, incomplete. How then, does 204 Rebecca Gagan one discern which episteme is being supplemented? Does Romanticism supplement Idealism or vice versa? Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy suggest that “within the landscape of idealism in general” we can find the “horizon proper of romanticism . . . [t]he philosophical horizon of romanticism.”3 But of course, as anyone would know who had ever looked out at the horizon and wondered where exactly the land meets the sky, there is simply no way of knowing for certain. Rubinstein explains that “the true completion of the idealist movement is the romantic’s infinitely hovering postponement of completion” (LA12). Put simply, then, if Romanticism has a supplemental relationship with Idealism—a relationship in which Romanticism’s interest in incompletion and the incompletion of Romanticism itself “completes” Idealism—then, at the very heart of Idealism, there must be, too, only incompletion. Thus Idealism, it might be said, begins again in Romanticism, forever to be beginning. In their discussion of Rosenzweig’s discovery of the “Earliest SystemProgram of German Idealism,” and of the relevance of this “fragment” to German Idealism, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy note the importance of this fragment as a “founding” text for Romanticism: a project dedicated to a programmatic systematizing of German Idealism that remains incomplete, and that serves not only as a symbol but as the theme or “exergue” for Romanticism and its embracement of ruin and incompletion (LA 29). For Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and others, the “Program” is unfinished and fragmentary both in its articulation on paper, and as a “Program” or system of German Idealism. That is, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy make clear in The Literary Absolute, the “System-Program” as a “Program” was never in fact completed by any of its potential authors (Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin).4 Simon Critchley suggests that the “System-Program” is “utterly improbable”—a failure precisely because of its utopian goals, its incompletion.5 But what if, following Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, we read this incompletion, this failure of the “System-Program” to be completed, as the founding moment of Idealism? That is, as a moment that is entirely un-Programmed, a moment not of the Absolute, of finitude, and completion but rather a moment of loss, of failure even? The System-Program would then serve as a frame through which idealism itself could be viewed in all of its ruinous glory. For example, that the authorship of the “System-Program” remains undetermined—letters from Schelling (apparently overwhelmingly similar to the fragment) suggest his authorship while graphology reports suggest the fragment is in Hegel’s handwriting —is important not only as a sign of how this “System” of Idealism remains open, vulnerable, and the property of no single thinker, but also as a performance of the very “ethics,” of the “New Mythology” to which the authors hoped to give birth through their System-Program.6 As a philosophical text that is unhinged both by its quasi-anonymous status and by its status as a “youthful” text, the System-Program always remains new, is always [18.216.123.120] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 16:10...

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