'I am here', Abraham said: Emmanuel Levinas and anthropological science
A Philosophical Journey into the Anthropocene: Discovering Terra Incognita
Reviewed by: Fermín Paz (CIN / FFyL - UBA)
Phenomenology to the Letter. Husserl and Literature (2021), is a collection of thirteen essays that make explicit multifaceted theoretical implications between literature and Husserlian phenomenology. Volume number 7 of the collection Textologie by De Gruyter is edited by Philippe P. Haensler, Kristina Mendicino, and Rochelle Tobias.
Each of the papers making up this work present an original insight. Together they advance a common goal: a deep exploration of the immensely rich work of the father of phenomenology, tracing back what, in the words of the editors, are logical and poetological (1) implications between literature and his writing. Through the different articles that constitute it, this volume presents a broad and varied series of issues. In each essay, phenomenology and literature are presented as fields that are not a priori differentiated, but branch from diverse modes and axes of analysis.
The position the book confronts is characterized in the introduction by the editors: from the formula “to the things themselves” as key to Edmund Husserl’s proposal, phenomenology would have been accused of being “negligent” about language and other forms of mediation. Phenomenology to the Letter draws a historical line to characterize this reaction against phenomenology that has its more characteristic points in the deep oblivion of the language (abgründige Sprachvergessenheit) as proposed by Gadamer (1986, pág. 361), up to the Foucault’s accusation about the logophobie of phenomenology (1971). Moreover, this differentiation can also be read in the linguistic turn of analytic philosophy, or in the post-structuralist philosophy of Derrida. This work aggregates this accusation and highlights its incorrectness by linking Husserl with classic rhetoric, modern literature, aesthetic theory, and cultural criticism. However, the goal of the book implies a task that is not easy to solve. The response to these 20th Century accusations is not provided from a theoretical reconstruction of an exegesis of Husserlian corpus, but with a reading proposal from the collaborators of this volume that updates and explores the own limits of the phenomenologist’s task.
The logical and poetological implications of Husserlian writing are analyzed from a conjunction of literature and phenomenology. This conjunction not only revisits the inscription itself of the very same Husserlian letter as theoretical and textual corpus but also analyzes a phenomenological inscription in a wide range of literary works. Thus, this volume analyzes an implicit link between modern writers as Proust, Flaubert, Kafka, Rilke, Benjamin, Beckett, Olson, and Blanchot with certain modes of inquiry in the operations of the conscience, specifically phenomenological ones. The link between phenomenology and literature is not unilaterally constructed “outwards” from the Husserlian phenomenology towards the literary work, instead this volume draws a relation of reciprocal involvement that vindicates a literary task within the construction of phenomenology. The editors even discuss phenomenography[1], as they argue that for Husserl, “literature constitutes the medium in which the phenomenological analyses of transcendental subjectivity attain objective existence” (4). In this sense, literary language itself constitutes an immanent question to phenomenology as “both the method and existence of phenomenology depend upon a literary medium that cannot but be foreign to it” (5).
In its structure, the book is divided into four parts, each part addresses specific topics with a group of essays. In the first part, Husserlian phenomenology’s own language is thematized. Then, the second part discusses the relationship between experience and language, and the enrichment or challenges that the latter imposes upon the former. The third part focuses on the relationship between experience and literary works, fusing phenomenology and literature. Lastly, the problem of fiction is further explored as central to the methodological determination of phenomenology.
The first part of the book, Rhetoric and Thought: The Language of Phenomenology, addresses the issue of phenomenology’s own language in four essays that focus specifically on Husserl’s writing. The first part offers a series of explanations between Husserlian language and the developments of his phenomenology.
The first article is entitled Husserl’s Image Worlds and the Language of Phenomenology, by Michael McGillen. The author resumes the concepts used by Husserl to present his phenomenological method to establish that the technical language of phenomenology is built from a metaphorical language. McGillen suggests that the linguistic and pictorial aspects of images are briefly connected. To focus on this relation, the author resumes the theory of image consciousness by Husserl and proposes its applicability to literary metaphors. Thus, he links the experience of a metaphor with the experience of image-consciousness. In this point, it may be argued that the application of Husserl’s theory of image consciousness to metaphors or textual images requires further clarifications in light of the loss of frame (Bild) as a shared character between the object and the subject of the image. Nevertheless, this problematic parallel between metaphor and image, letter and experience, anticipates the theoretical position that guides the book proposal.
In Au Coeur de la Raison: la phénomenologie, Claude Romano claims that material a priori can only be conceived from a theory that fundamentally has an anthropological base for essential determination. In the essay Auch für Gott: Finitude, Phenomenology and Anthropology, Tarek R. Dika argues that Romano holds two mutually contradictory theses: firstly, that the negation of material a priori necessities is inconceivable and secondly, that these necessities, due to their anthropologic bases, are only conditional and therefore, their negation must be conceivable. If the Husserlian material a priori is postulated as a necessity for any kind of experience, it is done to disengage the sense of experience from the sense of language. Only then can phenomenology propose a prelinguistic sense. Dika’s argumentation in favor of a priori material à la Husserl is a reassurance for the cornerstone of the phenomenological experience: informed perception with a prelinguistic sense, described with pretension of universality.
The third essay, irgend etwas und irgend etwas: Husserl’s Arithmetik and The Poetics of Epistemology, is written by Susan Morrow, who reads Husserl’s first published monograph, Philosophy of Arithmetic, accused of psychologism as a poetics of epistemology. This work establishes a relationship between the concerns of a young Husserl, focusing on the analysis on the concept of multiplicity, to the ones of maturity, that focus on the historicity of geometry and science as such, revealing a certain consistency. This consistency allows Morrow to articulate her reading proposal from a key term for the book proposal as a whole: the status of a poetics of the epistemology is supported by a reading that traces poetological implications in the arithmetic’s justification of the philosopher that pursued a rigorous science.
The last work, by one of the editors, Philippe P. Haensler, is titled Fort. The Germangled Words of Edmund Husserl and Walter Benjamin. With great erudition, Haensler’s comparative reading between Husserl and Benjamin chases a twofold goal: on the one hand, to reveal Benjamin’s anticipation of certain Husserlian developments, and on the other hand, the essay establishes for Husserl’s phenomenology a deep interest in the question of literary translation. Haensler reads Husserl’s transhistorical concern for the foundation of sense and Benjamin’s messianic reconceptualization of the relationship between an original and its translation as “two pieces of the same vessel” (85). However, this essay is not limited to the historical reconstruction of mutual readings between Husserl and Benjamin. With the presence of Jaques Derrida as a key mediator between the two authors, Haensler evidences for phenomenology, translation as a trans-performative act, and the letter of the father of phenomenology as a subject for discussion in itself.
The second section, Phenomenology and Incommensurability: Beyond Experience is concerned with the issue of an experience possible through language, one that defies (and, in some cases, even exceeds) the limits of the described experience from a strictly phenomenological perspective.
This section begins with the work of Jean-Sébastien Hardy, Beyond Experience: Blanchot’s Challenge to Husserl’s Phenomenology of Time, who finds in the concept of disaster (desastre) by Maurice Blanchot a key for what the author calls a “phenomenology of anticipation”. Hardy maintains that Husserlian expectation has traces of an implicit prophetic paradigm and that the affectivity of protension may well be a product of an institution that is at the same time, original and historic. Meanwhile, the Blanchotian disaster as something that is “outside experience, outside the realm of phenomena” (Blanchot, 1986, pág. 9) does not answer to any expectation and constitutes a challenge for Husserl. Hardy wonders if the immanent consciousness of temporality is really as pure as Husserl desired or whether a radically different temporalization is possible (118). In line with Blanchot, Hardy concludes that our intern and immediate sense of time “is not so much constituted as it is instituted, when it comes to the anticipation of what is about to come” (130).
In the next essay, Absehen – Disregarding Literature (Husserl/Hofmannsthal/Benjamin), Henrik S. Wilberg reads Husserl’s famous letter to Hofmannsthal, retrieving the frequently exposed link between the phenomenological method and the purely aesthetic attitude, as both imply a deviation from the natural attitude. The artist and the phenomenologist share before the world the neutralization of the positionality of the objects of experience. What is new in this article is the incorporation of a young Benjamin into that dialogue. Wilberg affirms that “when the Young Benjamin first enters into the orbit of phenomenology, he does so accompanied by the same figure who – and the same text that – occasioned Husserl’s reflections on the relation between literature and philosophy” (139/140). The historical reconstruction of mutual readings between authors is at the service of the “poetized” as the foundation of the experience of reading. There is therefore a link between the Husserlian modification of neutralization with what Benjamin calls Gedichtete as the indecipherable, the unanalyzable, specific to a reading experience. Benjamin’s reading of Husserl goes beyond direct mentions and is in the notion of “poetized” where affinities with Husserl can be read, a notion used to characterize a new dimension of the poetic. For Wilberg, it is in this state or in the modification of the view of the reader towards the poeticized of the poem where the potentialities of the Husserlian modification of neutralization comes into play, transcending the explicit comments of Husserl himself.
This conceptualization of a reading experience shares its goal with the work of another editor, Kristina Mendicino. In Drawing a Blank – Passive voices in Beckett, Husserl and the Stoics, Mendicino links Husserl’s phenomenology with Stoicism on the basis of the theorization of the material aspect of language, finding the most extreme consequences of the position that both schools would share in The Unnamable, by Beckett. That concern that Beckett takes to the extreme is homologated with the Stoic notion of lékton, which characterizes the discursive instance as an ambivalent phenomenon. If the materiality of language offers an experience that surpasses the meaning of language, both for Husserl and for the Stoics, the link with Beckett can be read when he affirms that “the things that language speaks of may always be elsewhere, speeches may seduce with their movement, and words can take wing so as to fly from the strictures or comprehensive grasp” (150). Mendicino recognizes the links between Frege, Bolzano, Meinong and, evidently, Husserl, with the Stoics. However, the Beckettian way acquires a new sense within this volume. Beckett’s reference to the Stoics is made in poetological terms. In the Stoics, Mendicino traces back an importance to the thetic character within phenomenology and inherent to perception: “between sense and expression comes a moment of making sense that resists translation into categorial forms of predication and whose logical character cannot be rendered with a predicative syntax” (167). The author finds an “aphenomenal páthos of language” (171), being the use of the passive voice in Beckett the master expression of a poetology of the experience of language.
The link between literary works and phenomenology is more strongly established in the third part of the book. In Phenomenology of the Image and the text Corpus, literature appears as a corpus with which a wide group of theoretical developments of phenomenology is faced. At the same time, the link between the experience of the image and its description in a literary language is further analyzed.
The first work is Charles Olson: Phenomenologist, Objectivist, Particularist by Stefanie Heine exposes the poetry of Charles Olson as a complement of Husserl’s philosophy of language in Logical Investigations. The essay reconstructs in Olson a theoretical development inseparable from the practice of writing, taking as a starting point the work of unpublished manuscripts, transcribed or attached in this book. Even though Olson echoes Merleau-Ponty, this work shows Olson’s complement to Husserlian phenomenology, borne from his interest as a poet, of considering words as physical entities, and of taking the word as Leib before taking it as Körper in the specific moment of writing. On the one hand, is the sensible experience of words that comes at play in his “poeticness”. On the other hand, the Husserlian notion of “Wort-Leib” is revealing for the execution of Olson’s writing, where language is left behind to grasp the material sense of the physical word, the gap between words, and even shapes, and written lines that are not associated with specific words.
In the second work, Icon as Alter Ego? Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation and Icons of Mary in Chronicles of the Teutonic Order, Claire Taylor Jones examines two chronicles of the Teutonic Order: Chronica terrae Prussiae (1326) and Kronike von Pruzinlant (1340). These texts offer a narrative of the conversion to Christianism from an experience of acknowledging the suffering and spiritual agency in icons of the Virgin Mary. Taylor Jones finds in these chronicles, taken as literary corpus, issues for the perception of the alter ego that Husserl describes in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. From artistic cultural objects, imbued in certain “saintly presence” in this case, the distinction between Leib and cultural objects must be revisited. The author finds in these texts a challenge to the Husserlian theory that demands a new description of intersubjectivity, one that does not rest in the apperception of an animated body, but recognizes this apperception of suffering, that does not require movement in order to be perceived.
Complements to Husserlian phenomenology can also be read in the cultural critique, as Thomas Pfau illustrates in the last work of this section: Absolute Gegebenheit: Image as Aesthetic Urphänomen in Husserl and Rilke. The author reads Rilke’s texts about Rodin and Cézanne’s letters, where he finds a phenomenology of image experience that would complement Husserl’s one. If, as Pfau asserts, Husserl focuses on the noematic pole of experience, it is the noetic dimension that Rilke centers his attention on when he reflects on the aesthetic experience. In the Rilkenian comments on Cézanne’s works Pfau reads an anticipation of the idea of transcendental reduction. The point here is that the epistemological contribution to the theory of image occurs, as demonstrated again and again in the volume reviewed here, in poetological terms, intended as a supplement to phenomenological description.
The funding relation between phenomenology and fiction insistently tematized in this volume finds greater depth in the fourth and final section of the book: Fictional Truths: Phenomenology and Narrative.
The section is inaugurated with The Virtuous Philosopher and the Chameleon Poet: Husserl and Hofmannsthal, by Nicolas De Warren. De Warren rereads Husserl’s letter to Hofmannsthal, in which the philosopher reveals the inspiration he received from the poet for his phenomenological method. However, De Warren’s reading examines how Husserl imagined this source of inspiration, and from that conception, offers an aesthetic for Hofmannsthal’s work. De Warren reconstructs the context of the encounter between Husserl and Hofmannsthal, the poet’s assistance to the reading of the phenomenologist, and the epistolary exchanges between these figures. The point that De Warren makes is that Hofmannsthal’s silence demonstrates that his aesthetic would have been a source of inspiration for the phenomenological method merely imagined by Husserl himself. The importance of this reading lies in putting the attention on fiction as a basis for Husserlian inspiration, while the letter could itself be read as literary fiction. De Warren undertakes this task, carrying out a detailed analysis that evidently could be described as literary, from Husserl’s letter to Hofmannsthal and reconstructing in that same letter the appearance of elements belonging to the philosophical method that Husserl would have arrived for his phenomenology.
The second paper of the section is A Now Not toto caelo a Not Now: the “Origin” of Difference in Husserl, from Number to Literature, by Claudia Brodsky. The paper draws a historical path in Husserlian thinking in which, through a series of “steps”, Brodsky explains that the understanding of the notion of number is achieved in relation to other concepts. For the author, this overlapping of theories, in a formal excursus of Husserl’s conscience, is quite similar to the developments made by Lukács and Proust. In their formal aspects, there would be common issues between Husserl and the literary theory.
The last essay of this volume is written by its third editor, Rochelle Tobías. In Gregor Samsa and the problem of Intersubjectivity, the author exhibits how The Metamorphosis by Kafka presents certain issues to the Husserlian perception of the alter ego. The challenge to the Husserlian theory is not found in the acknowledgment of another body as an alter ego, but in the recognition of another conscience like mine. Tobias’s paper does not focus on this difference of positions, but on the fiction as a privileged mode of representing other minds in the third person. Thus, what is thematized is a method for thinking based on fiction as proposed and shared by Kafka and Husserl.
As I have outlined thus far, Phenomenology to the Letter does not directly answer the concerns presented in its introduction. The aim of the book is achieved through a comprehensive reading that implies a work from the reader that does not demand little effort. On this point, it is important to highlight that each one of the parts neither offers a justification of the articles assembled therein nor a conclusion that determines an explicit conjoint thesis. To be able to answer the accusation put forward in the introduction, it is necessary to undertake a global reading that surpasses the questions posed by each essay. Thus, the enormous project proposed in this volume loses the strength of a joint individual answer. This is not however a limitation, but rather a demonstration of the fruitful possibilities of relating Husserlian phenomenology with literature, via a multiplicity of papers that address various goals and issues. This book clarifies that there is no oblivion of the language but rather that language, literature, writing, and fiction are present from the origin and during the development of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
Phenomenology to the Letter is not a book about literature and phenomenology in general: there is no development of the conception of language by Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger, nor is there an offering of the problems of a phenomenological aesthetic that recovers Dufrenne’s, or an ontology of literature as Ingarden thematized. This volume focuses specifically on the Husserlian work and when links are established with other authors, they do not properly belong to the phenomenological school. The rejection of the phenomenological thematization of literature following its greatest exponent, Roman Ingarden, explains the general proposal of the book. According to the editors, Ingarden starts from phenomenology, when, as read in this volume, it is all about mutual implications between phenomenology and language, to the point of claiming a philological complement for phenomenological investigation.
While the essays contained in this book are written at a sophisticated academic level, including quotations in their original languages and detailed works in a scholar register, the volume offers something beyond a series of exegetical articles about phenomenology. Still with Husserlian phenomenology as a topic, the novelty of this volume is neither a proposal of building a Husserlian literary theory, a treaty about language theory by Husserl, nor is limited to a series of examples of Husserlian theory within the literature. To my understanding, the methodological proposal that guides these essays has an interdisciplinary character; what is pursued are the theoretical constructions in fields that are traditionally separated, without abandoning the specificities of each one.
This volume offers then, an actualization of Husserlian thinking. The philosophical importance of Phenomenology to the Letter nowadays, claim its editors, lies in its proposal facing biological and psychological paradigms that dominate praxis and current thinking. It is not only a proposal of actualization of phenomenology or the determination of an aesthetic movement, but rather a path to rethink affections, experience, and language. A proposal can be read to extend the Husserlian contributions so present today in the cognitive sciences and the neurosciences, whose approach to “the mind” confront several Husserlian warnings, as the editors state. The challenge to mind studies has its weight from fantasy and fiction as the cornerstone of the phenomenological method, both for the eidetic variation from the Logical Investigations as well as the reduction from Ideas I. In sum, the starting point for this book can be read in Husserl’s affirmation in Ideas I: “‘fiction’ is the vital element of phenomenology, as all its eidetic knowledge” (Hua III/I, 148).
In thirteen essays, Phenomenology to the Letter achieves its goal where the relationship between phenomenology and literature has been at the heart of reflection and it has not been seen as a point of arrival. The specificity of the issues that each essay addresses, together with a great variety of resources and different textual corpora does not introduce a relation between Husserlian phenomenology and literature, it simply puts it into evidence. The project proposed by the book is accomplished not by the refinement of each essay in light of the objectives established separately but rather because of the reading as a whole they offer, made possible by the excellent job of the editors. The reader is offered a collection of essays that implies an astute reading exercise, an essential task whose effort can be well compared to the reading of a literary work.
References:
Blanchot, M. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Foucault, M. 1971. L’orde du discours: Leçon Inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970. Paris: Gallimard.
Gadamer, H.-G. 1986. Destruktion und Dekonstruktion. En H.-G. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke. Vol 2. (361-372). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Husserl, E. 1976. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, 2nd edn. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
[1] Following Detlef Thiel. 2003. “Husserls Phäenomenographie” in Recherches Husserliennes 19: 67 – 108.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christological Reinterpretation of Heidegger
Realität und Realismus
Reviewed by: Martijn Visser (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Introduction
What does it mean to say something is real? It is exactly this question—Was heißt ‘etwas sei wirklich’?—that serves as the epigraph of Realität und Realismus, one of the most recent publications from Hans Blumenberg’s Nachlass. The texts that are collected in this volume do not so much answer this question as they show what it implies and why we keep asking it. They address a pathos of realism that has been operative throughout the history of philosophy, manifesting itself in different conceptions of reality over time, and which ultimately appears to be rooted in the human condition: a fundamental need to distance oneself from and master reality at the same time, both in theory and praxis. In these texts, Blumenberg shows that the human relation to reality is originally not a fixed, immediate and self-evident rapport but something that must be established and maintained, changing over time depending on its functionality, and shining forth in theoretical constructs, cultural expressions and other ‘detours’ through which we have learned to deal with the demands of the real. Consequently, the titular themes of this book do not refer to the metaphysical, ontological or epistemological problems and discussions characteristic of many of today’s ‘realisms’ – whether it is speculative, new, neutral, material, scientific, phenomenological or otherwise qualified. There is no talk of a mind-independent world, of constructivist or correlationist conundrums, and the whole word idealism is conspicuously absent from these texts. As such, Blumenberg approaches the topic of reality and realism from a rather fresh and original perspective, both in a historic and systematic manner.
Realität und Realismus appeared last year on the occasion of Blumenberg’s much celebrated centennial together with a series of other books from and on Blumenberg, most importantly the long awaited publication of Blumenberg’s dissertation (Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlich-scholastischen Ontologie, originally from 1947), a voluminous Hans Blumenberg Reader with a diverse selection of his finest essays that are almost all translated for the first time into English, and two sweeping intellectual biographies that present Blumenberg in a detailed and delightful way to a broader public. Until now, Realität und Realismus has been somewhat overshadowed by this outburst of celebrations and publications, which is not very surprising since the volume looks prima facie like a rather tentative, technical and fragmented collection of texts. Indeed, this publication does not exactly present a general and accessible entry to Blumenberg’s thought, let alone a very straightforward and comprehensive account of ‘reality and realism’, despite its alluring and fashionable title. Nevertheless, as the editor Nicola Zambon writes in his afterword, Realität und Realismus certainly does not uncover terra incognita either: it expands and explicates a key-aspect of Blumenberg’s writings, which the well-versed reader could already find scattered throughout his published texts, but that is only now for the first time brought into clear view.
Indeed, within Blumenberg’s vast, meandering and increasingly available oeuvre, reality and realism are a central focus of interest, albeit not always from the same perspective or with the same intensity. As we can now very clearly see, the notion of reality is already a prominent motive in Blumenberg’s dissertation, where he takes up the theme of a historically conditioned experience and understanding of reality in a critical discussion with Heidegger’s history of Being. Most notably however, Blumenberg thematised and analysed reality throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s in a series of essays on the ‘concept of reality’ (Wirklichkeitsbegriff) in relation to art, myth, political theory and the lifeworld, some of which have been translated and included in the aforementioned Hans Blumenberg Reader. These and many other of Blumenberg’s ‘smaller’ essays are often considered marginal or premature in comparison to his major studies, but what is clearly explicated at the periphery of his work often leaves significant traces in the centre of his thinking, playing an implicit but no less important role on the operative level of his thematic analyses. The case of reality is no different in this regard. Not only Blumenberg’s famous historical works such as Legitimität der Neuzeit (1966) and Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (1975), but also his metaphorological studies and anthropological explorations in Arbeit am Mythos (1979) and Höhlenausgänge (1989) appear to have been developed against the backdrop of a particular understanding of reality that underpins many of his analyses. Although it will probably remain a matter of dispute whether there ever was one central question or concern for Blumenberg, reality is certainly a very important methodical and thematic leitmotif that accompanied his writings from the very beginning to the end.
The nine longer and shorter texts – all written between 1970 and 1984 – that make up Realität und Realismus can very roughly be divided into two categories: the first half deals with reality from a historical point of view and enters into a discussion with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Nietzsche and Husserl, among others. These texts contain an explicit and extensive treatment of the four epochal concepts of reality that we already know from Blumenberg’s earlier essays – this time however not in order to thematize socio-cultural phenomena, but to provide these concepts with a theoretical and methodical framework that was largely lacking in other writings. This already makes the volume a very valuable and insightful contribution to Blumenberg’s oeuvre. The second half of the book is more varied and fragmented, but one of the themes that stand out is an anthropological approach to reality and an investigation into the human being as a ‘realist’, most clearly in the longer texts Illusion und Realität and Zur Anthropologie des Realisten, but also in a short text on the reality of the Eigenleib. This second half also contains an intriguing and topical text on the reality of invisible threats (in casu quo: germs, war gas, and radiation), and covers other realism related themes in the domains of aesthetics, rhetoric and theology as well. In this review however, I will focus on Blumenberg’s historical and anthropological approach to reality and realism as it can be traced throughout this volume. Although much more could be discussed, these two perspectives seem to me to strike at the core of his thinking on reality and contain moreover a very interesting and fundamental tension.
Blumenberg’s Historical Approach to Reality
On the very first page of Realität und Realismus, Blumenberg explains that the notion of reality has a very pragmatic meaning for him. He emphatically distances himself from any kind of ontology or philosophy of being and does not wish to speak of reality in a traditional metaphysical manner as a comprehensive theory of everything. Instead, reality refers for Blumenberg to that instance which determines our behaviour, which binds us together and upon which we rely in our everyday speech and action: “Das Wirkliche ist das, worauf man sich beruft” (11). He understands reality as a kind of pregivenness, which we take for granted in our everyday life; a meaningful background which enables and conditions practical orientation, common sense, and theoretical reflection. Rightly so, it has been compared to Kuhn’s paradigms and Foucault’s epistemologies: a concept of reality seems to be a historical horizon of meaning and understanding – at one instance Blumenberg speaks of an “epochalen Horizont von Wirklichkeit” (34) – that determines what is noteworthy and significant and what not; what can be thought and what not, in short: what is real and what not.[i]
Characteristic of this pregivenness is that it is always already conceived in a particular manner—as a concept of reality—but this conception remains at the same time implicit and mute (Stumm) as long as it fulfils its function. A concept of reality is self-evident (Selbstverständlich) to such a high degree that it usually does not reach the threshold of explicit propositional language or thought, it is not even understood as being self-evident. Hence, reality is operative and functional as reality to the extent that it remains unnoticed, unquestioned and inconspicuous. Of course, the question then immediately arises how we are able to thematize reality if it its defining characteristic denies this very possibility. The answer lies in the historicity of our relation to and conception of reality, which cannot always uphold its implicit and self-evident nature but is subject to change. A concept of reality only comes to the fore the very moment it starts to be questioned or criticized:
Nur dadurch, daß das Verständnis von Wirklichkeit selbst Geschichte hat, daß es abgelöst werden kann durch ein neues Verhältnis zur Wirklichkeit und diese Ablösung sich gerade als Kritik am Wirklichkeitsverständnis der Vergangenheit formuliert, nur auf diese indirekte Weise gewinnen wir einen Zugang zur Geschichte des Wirklichkeitsbegriffs (11).
In this quote, we find Blumenberg’s historical approach to reality in a nutshell: different historical epochs are assumed to have different ‘concepts of reality’, because our relation to reality as it is established in a particular and implicit understanding of ourselves and the world changes over time. Concepts of reality replace one another once they become dysfunctional and no longer provide the means for our practical and theoretical orientation. Blumenberg aims to trace this changing understanding and these different conceptions, but he can only do so in an indirect way, since an epoch ‘uses’ its concept of reality to the degree that it does not talk about it. A history of the concept of reality cannot be a conceptual history, Blumenberg argues, but must instead proceed via negativa: it is only when a concept of reality collapses under critical scrutiny and loses its validity – i.e. when a secure and stable sense of self and world is lost in a collective crisis of understanding – that it can be determined and reconstructed in retrospect, distilled from the traces it left in philosophical and scientific writing, literature and other documentations.
Interestingly, Blumenberg argues that these crises manifest themselves primarily in a growing unease about the use of language: the feeling that concepts, categories or claims appear increasingly empty, instable, or insubstantial; the experience that words lose their ‘substrate’ that was always taken for granted as reality and now appear frictionless spinning in the void instead. On a more general level, it is a fear of semblance and pretence, a preoccupation with the illegitimacy of prejudices and idols, and an awareness of the inadequacy and insufficiency of established theories and explanations, which can give rise to another concept of reality. The critical demand to go back to ‘the things themselves’ and not be led astray by the deceiving powers of language or time-honoured ideas is therefore a characteristic realist appeal according to Blumenberg. Plato’s suspicion of sophistry, the medieval adagio res, non verba!, the attempted rejection of all prejudices by the likes of Bacon and Descartes, Husserl’s call to return to the Sachen selbst, and the positivist critique on language are all mentioned in Realität und Realismus as examples of such an appeal. Blumenberg emphasises that these theories and philosophies do not themselves present but reflect a changing conception of reality; they are not the cause, but a consequence of an acute experience of a loss of self-evidence – an experience of unreality – which critique, thought and theory aim to remedy:
‘Kritik’ wetzt sich an dem, was schon nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist. So paradox es klingen mag: nicht Wirklichkeit wird als Wirklichkeit erfahren, sondern Unwirklichkeit als Unwirklichkeit. Das heißt: Realität ist ein implikatives Prädikat, da sie schon kein reales Prädikat mehr ist (39).
The notion of reality as an implicit or ‘implicative’ predicate is not new: one finds it also at the end of Höhlenausgänge or the text Vorbemerkungen zum Wirklichkeitsbegriff, where Blumenberg gives a similar explanation. Yet, the texts in Realität und Realismus provide these rather short and esoteric passages with some clear and substantial context that help us understand better what Blumenberg is after. To say that reality is implicative means that it is always implied in an experience – often an experience of unreality, when something turns out other than it appeared to be – without becoming explicit in this experience itself. It is for this reason Blumenberg calls reality also a ‘contrast concept’ (Kontrastbegriff) and a residue (Residuum): reality is a reticent remainder after the unreal is experienced, exposed and eliminated. Our understanding of reality is historical because the criteria for this elimination process vary, and it is indeterminate because elimination is in theory an infinite process. Thus the only formal description Blumenberg can give of reality is a seeming tautology, and appears to serve him more as a heuristic rule than a definition proper: “Wirklich ist, was nicht unwirklich ist.” Blumenberg explains this cryptic formula as follows:
Diese Formel verweist auf den Umweg über das, was jeweils unter der Schwelle nicht so sehr der Wahrnehmbarkeit als vielmehr der Wahrnehmungswürdigkeit, der Beachtbarkeit, der Einkalkulierbarkeit liegt (39).
Reading these formal and methodical characterisations, one becomes curious as to their practical application: how does Blumenberg deduce and distil a concept of reality as it is characteristic for a specific time and age? What criteria are used to delineate different epochs? What historical sources are consulted to infer and attribute a particular conception of reality to them? Unfortunately, this does not become very clear in Realität und Realismus. Much like in his large historical studies such as Legitimität der Neuzeit, Blumenberg seems to engage in a speculative hermeneutics without much methodical justification, and at times it seems he simply draws on authors and texts that allow him to write his grand historical narratives precisely the way he wants to. More specifically, it is not always clear whether Blumenberg actually reconstructs a concept of reality on the basis of his reading of history, or if he reads the history of thought already through the lens of preconceived concepts of reality. Of course, these two perspectives necessarily complement each other, but because a concept of reality cannot be found in a text but must be inferred from a text as its implicit and conditional horizon of meaning, it remains quite a speculative endeavour. As a result, Blumenberg’s concepts of reality seem to function more often than not as heuristic instruments or tools for thought that allow him to analyse historical tendencies and cultural developments, instead of accurate characterisations of epochal understanding. Nevertheless, what seems to count in the end for Blumenberg is the explanatory and descriptive potential of a concept of reality – its Leistungsfähigkeit – and the four concepts he describes certainly live up to this demand. We will now take a look at each of these concepts themselves.
Blumenberg’s Four Concepts of Reality
The first concept of reality Blumenberg describes belongs to antiquity and is defined as instantaneous evidence (Realität der momentanen Evidenz). What is implied in this concept is that reality presents itself in the very moment of its presence as undoubtedly real, as something that is final (letztgültig) and unsurpassable (unüberbietbar) in its reality. And it is instantaneous insofar as there is no temporal and intersubjective process in which reality is realized: reality is understood as something that can be perceived at once, in one look, by one person. As such, reality is quite literally self-evident: “Wirklichkeit ist etwas unmittelbar und an sich selbst Einleuchtendes, eine unwiderstehlich Zustimmung ernötigende Gegebenheit” (16). Blumenberg speaks repeatedly in this context of an “implicit assertion” (Behauptungsimplikation) of reality, a concept he admittedly borrowed from Alexander Pfänder who coined it as a ‘logical translation’ for the Greek phainesthai, but which Blumenberg understands in more a figurative manner:
Es steckt in diesem Wirklichkeitsbegriff eine Metapher: das Wirkliche stellt sich uns vor mit einer Art von impliziter Behauptung, das Vorgestellte auch wirklich zu sein, nicht von einer anderen Instanz her ins Unrecht gesetzt werden zu können (17).
Of course, this does not mean people knew nothing of deceiving appearances in antiquity, but the point is that it was never questioned that ‘real reality’ would be recognised as such once it presented itself. For Blumenberg, this is the “Kerngedanke” of Greek thought: “Wenn der Schein aufgehoben ist, kommt die Sache selbst zutage” (77). Plato’s cave allegory is taken to be the exemplary expression of this understanding: it presupposes an ‘ontological comparative’ with different ‘levels of reality’ each constituting a māllon on, a surplus of being, which ultimately culminates in a superlative of the ideas that are indeed described as a final and unsurpassable instance.
The second concept of reality comes into play once we entertain the idea of an infinite series of ‘comparatives’, the suspicion that every given reality might always be surpassed by an even higher degree of reality. From this perspective, reality is less and less understood as self-evident; its evidence needs to an increasing extent to be guaranteed by something other than itself. As Blumenberg claims: “Sobald das Sehenlassen nicht mehr das Sichsehenlassen ist, kommt eine dritte Instanz ins Spiel, die zur momentanen Evidenz nicht mehr paßt” (47). The moment reality is taken to be completely dependent on this third instance, when reality can no longer be understood and experienced as a final and definitive reality, instantaneous evidence becomes impossible and the ancient concept of reality gives way to the second concept, which Blumenberg attributes to the Middle Ages: reality as guaranteed reality (garantierte Realität), to which he also refers as the ‘scheme of the third position.’ Not surprisingly, Descartes figures here as paradigmatic thinker: he wants reality to be as it appears to be, but his radical doubt denies him any such straightforward acceptance. Consequently, he needs to revert to an absolute witness, i.e. God, which guarantees the validity of our knowledge and perception of reality (as it is given in clear and distinct ideas), and ensures that we are not living an all-encompassing yet undetectable illusion.
Blumenberg finds a third concept of reality, that of the modern age, in a critique on Descartes by Leibniz. Specificities left aside, this critique comes down to the simple observation that an all-encompassing and undetectable illusion or deception is a meaningless assumption, which, even if it is true, has no consequences whatsoever. Descartes’ need for a divine guarantee is the result of the suggestion that all aspects of reality might be simulated by an evil demon without producing that very reality itself, together with the demand that reality must really be as it appears to be. It is this belief that motivates Descartes’ doubt, but Leibniz considers this to be an excessive and misguided demand. Excessive because Descartes’ genius malignus is in principle an irrefutable hypothesis; misguided because for Leibniz, our sense of reality does not rely on a correspondence of our ideas and appearances to a transcendent ground. Appearances do not appear real because they refer to a ‘real’ reality; instead, reality and illusion only concern the immanent consistency of what is given to us:
Die Einstimmigkeit der Gegebenheiten untereinander, ihr gleichsam horizontaler Konnex, die Konstitution eines lückenlosen, sprungfreien, nicht in Enttäuschung zerbrechendes Prospektes gibt uns jene kategorische Gewißheit, mit eine Realität konfrontiert zu sein (23).
This modern concept of reality implies moreover an essential relation to time, in contrast to the other two concepts: reality is not understood as something that gives itself immediately or is guaranteed forever, but it is realized in a process – constantly adapting to new situations, correcting for irregularities, anticipating novelties or deceptions and taking into account (possibly diverging) contexts of other persons. Hence, Blumenberg often speaks of this modern concept of reality as a provisional and “open context” that is oriented towards the future, regulated by the never realizable and hence ideal limit of one coherent intersubjective totality. Any reader familiar with Husserl will recognize this as a phenomenological description of reality, and this is no coincidence: Leibniz’s change of perspective on reality – from a transcendent implication to an immanent consistency – is explicitly understood by Blumenberg as phenomenology avant la lettre (88); a figure of thought that underlies many modern idealist philosophies, with Husserl’s phenomenological idealism as its most decisive and dogmatic exponent (98).
A fourth concept of reality appears to follow in a dialectical way from the third. The idea of reality as a coherent and consistent context almost naturally invites us to think the opposite: the idea of reality as something that resists this consistency, which does not conform or comply but manifests itself as stubborn, contradictory and unyielding. This is “der Wirklichkeitsbegriff der Ungefügigkeit und Unverfügbarkeit des Widerstreits” (178). Blumenberg likes to illustrate this understanding with a Kafka quote that reoccurs in other writings as well: “Wirkliche Realität ist immer unrealistisch” (175). Unfortuntately, he says little about this concept of reality from a historical perspective in Realität und Realismus, although he does explicitly claim that it is a concept which appeared after the third concept: the notion of a resisting inconsistency makes only sense against the background of a consistent context. The two last concepts thus seem to complement each other, and Blumenberg hints occasionally at the idea that there might be more than one concept of reality at work in the modern age. In contrast with the other three concepts of reality, Blumenberg does not provide us with a paradigmatic philosophy in which this concept is expressed or reflected. This is quite surprising since there has been a long standing tradition of thinking reality in terms of resistance. To name but one significant example: it figures prominently in Scheler’s essay Idealismus-Realismus (1927) and in his lecture Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928); two influential texts with which Blumenberg was very familiar but to which he never refers in this context. Much like for Scheler, the notion of a resisting reality does play an important role in Blumenberg’s phenomenological anthropology and his description of the constitution of our consciousness of reality, a topic which is explored at greater length in the second half of Realität und Realismus.
Blumenberg’s Anthropological Approach to Reality and Realism
In the third text of the volume, which deals with the modern concept of reality, we find a surprising and insightful footnote in which Blumenberg seems to question his own historical approach of a series of successive concepts of reality:
Müssen sie [die Wirklichkeitsbegriffe – mv] überhaupt eine Reihe bilden? Ist nicht möglich, daß sich das Wirklichkeitsbewußtsein aufspaltet in zwei Spezies, Konsistenz und Kontrast? Wo bleibt die Epoche zum Wirklichkeitsbegriff IV sonst (79)?
With this remark, Blumenberg seems to suggest that our consciousness of reality might very well have a constant ahistorical structure, conditioned by the two opposing tendencies of consistency and contrast. To what extent this implies a downright contradiction with his historical approach is not immediately clear and Blumenberg does not further elaborate on this, but we see at least a very stark shift of emphasis in the following texts: whereas the concept of reality was first understood as a tacit horizon of meaning and understanding operative in the self- and world-conception of a specific epoch, Blumenberg now enquires into the conditions of the possibility of our experience and awareness of reality in general, and the question is posed where our concept and sense of reality comes from, regardless of its specific historical expression.
These questions are partly addressed in a critical discussion with Husserl’s phenomenology—one of the texts is explicitly dedicated to the Welt- und Wirklichkeitsbegriff der Phänomenologie—but most importantly, they are marked by the anthropological turn that is characteristic of many of Blumenberg’s writings from the 1970’s. The concept of reality is now understood in relation to the human condition, which Blumenberg postulates as a Mängelwesen, a creature of deficiencies. In a nutshell, the argument goes as follows: insofar as the human being lacks adaptive instincts and a specialised physiology, his relation to reality is not regulated in a fixed, immediate and automated manner—he is not naturally equipped with a ‘realism’ (168)—which leaves him particularly vulnerable to threats and uncertainties of the outside world or ‘absolutism of reality’ (127). Reality is thus understood as something over and against which the human being has to maintain and assert itself, an achievement which Blumenberg thematizes throughout his work in many different ways, but most importantly in terms of distance:
Der Mensch, so muß die These lauten, ist ein Wesen, welches nicht zwangsläufig und aus Existenznot jederzeit realistisch sein muß, weil es alle Arten und Grade von Distanz zur Realität ausgebildet hat (168).
Blumenberg describes some of the steps this distancing process must have taken in the development of the human being: from devouring and dragging along (no distance), and touching and pointing (some distance), to symbolising and negating (maximum distance), to name some of them. More generally, this distance is cultivated in all kinds of cultural manifestations, scientific theories, social institutions and technological artefacts, which create the conditions under which the human being can afford to not take reality into account. The actio per distans, as Blumenberg likes to call it, provides a shelter that wards off the burdensome demands of an uncertain and unknown reality, and which frees the human being of a constant need to readapt to his environment. Hence, our relation to reality is in principle and to a very high degree indirect, mediated and circuitous. Blumenberg defines the human being therefore as “ein Wesen, das auch als Nichtrealist existieren kann” (167). Even more, realism is considered to be an exceptional disposition (Ausnahmezustand): the appeal to get real – to act and think realistically, i.e. directly adapted to the demands of reality – always serves as a correction, it refers to a situational discrepancy or mismatch that cannot be ignored but must be dealt with (175).
From this anthropological perspective, reality manifests itself precisely in the case of such an unavoidable discrepancy: real is what resists and interrupts a seamless flow of life. As Blumenberg puts it: “Sie [die Wirklichkeit] ist ihrem Wesen nach Anpassungszwang.” (124) In a similar manner, reality is defined as: “Gegeninstanz” (111), “Versagung von Erfüllung” (113), “Rücksichtslosigkeit gegen Subjektivität” (205), or that “was zum Umweg zwingt.” (130). Occasionally, this conception is couched in more psychanalytic terms: real is anything that interferes with our wishes and desires, which causes shock, trauma and pain. Conversely, an absolute and continuous satisfaction of the pleasure principle would render our sense of reality void: “Würde der Lustanspruch vollkommen erfüllt, gäbe es kein Wirklichkeitsbewußtsein” (155). This is nicely illustrated in a description of how one experiences the reality of one’s own body, der Eigenleib (153-154). Insofar as the human body serves as a medium to get in touch with the world, it becomes less noticeable the more it succeeds in this; like any other medium, it disappears in its functionality and manifests itself only when it malfunctions. The body becomes more real when it gets hurt or sick; when somebody is not at ease or gets anxious, but less real when somebody is healthy and flawlessly immersed in an activity.
This example of the body supports Blumenberg’s claim that our consciousness and experience of reality is constituted in a reciprocal interplay between consistency and contrast, reliability and uncertainty, self-evidence and surprise (133). Exposed to a constant and overwhelming uncertainty, shock and adversary, we would not be able to make sense of reality, but neither would we in the case of an omnipresent reliability and self-evidence.[ii] Our experience of reality is constituted between these two limit situations and a concept of reality organizes this experience: it provides a relatively stable and reliable horizon of meaning that regulates our relation vis-à-vis the world. Hence, the rule which underlies and propels the history of thought on a macro level – ‘real is what is not unreal’ – reappears here as a condition of our consciousness of reality. What follows from this, and what is essential to our consciousness for Blumenberg, is our ability to negate. With reference to Kant, Blumenberg argues that our categories of reality and existence ultimately presuppose those of negation and possibility. We know of reality because we know it can turn out otherwise than it appears to be; because it often opposes our wishes and expectations or obstructs our paths and can correct for this. It is only because we can readjust in case of a misfit between us and the world, only because we can experience unreality, that reality gains relief and becomes – real.
Concluding Remarks
In Beschreibung des Menschen, the posthumous collection of Blumenberg’s anthropological manuscripts, we find the revealing remark that there is an obvious “Exklusionsverhältnis von Anthropologie und Geschichtsphilosophie.”[iii] This tension clearly applies to Blumenberg’s different approaches to reality and realism as well: on the one hand, Blumenberg historicizes reality by his series of epochal concepts of reality that underlie the history of thought and determine what is regarded to be real in a specific time and age, but on the other hand he postulates an ahistorical source for this historical development in the form of a continuous human need to furnish the world with a secure and stable sphere of self-evidence so as to keep the absolutism of reality at bay. What remains particularly ambiguous is the way Blumenberg’s last two historical concepts of reality – reality as the actualization of a consistent context on the one hand and reality as resistance on the other hand – inform this ahistorical anthropology.
More generally, this raises the question to what extent our thought is inherently bound to a concept of reality. Can we somehow transcend the concept of reality that regulates our thinking and understanding characteristic for this time and age? Like any other epistemology which radically historicises the conditions for our knowledge, Blumenberg appears to run into a self-reflexive problem: either his own theory is itself a product of a time-bound concept of reality, which would render its claims about other epochs at least doubtful if not illegitimate, or his theory can in fact transcend the historical horizon that it considers to be conditional for every other theory, thereby creating an exception that seriously affects the scope and potential of the theory itself. Blumenberg’s anthropological explanation seems to side with the latter option, and although his formal and functional account of the history of reality might be a remedy for the problems involved, it lacks in the end methodical justification and clear theoretical support.
That being said, Realität und Realismus is a very rich and interesting volume, containing much more material than we have discussed here. Although many of its topics and themes are treated in other works as well, this book is certainly invaluable for future Blumenberg research, as it clearly shows the extent and significance of Blumenberg’s thinking on reality and realism in the broader context of his oeuvre. In the end, however, it serves more than academic interest: with its many creative insights, surprising associations and keen observations Realität und Realismus is really a valuable read for any realist philosophy in need of some serious inspiration, and for anyone wondering what it implies to ask if something is real.
References
Bajohr, Hannes. 2017. “History and Metaphor: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Language.” PhD diss., Columbia University.
Bajohr, Hannes et al. (Eds.). 2020. History, Metaphor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1979. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 2020. Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlich-scholastischen Ontologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 2006. Beschreibung des Menschen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1975. Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1989. Höhlenausgänge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1986. Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1966. Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 2018. Phänomenologische Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Blumenberg, Hans. 2010. Theorie der Lebenswelt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
[i] Among others, Hannes Bajohr draws this link in his dissertation: Hannes Bajohr, “History and Metaphor: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Language” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2017), 71.
[ii] Readers familiar with Blumenberg will recognise this as his description of the lifeworld. Although this concept itself does not frequently occur in Realität und Realismus, it certainly plays a prominent role in the background of Blumenberg’s thinking on reality, both in his historical and anthropological approach. It exceeds the purpose of this review to engage in a discussion on the relation between reality and the lifeworld, but the reader is well-advised to read Realität und Realismus in combination with, among others: Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (in particular its first and last part, Das Lebensweltmißverständnis and Die Urstiftung respectively), Theorie der Lebenswelt (in particular the essay Lebenswelt und Wirklichkeitsbegriff), Beschreibung des Menschen (in particular chapter X: Leib und Wirklichkeitsbewußtsein), and Phänomenologische Schriften (for example the highly illuminative text Rückblick von der Lebenswelt auf die Reduktion).
[iii] Hans Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006), 485.
History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader
Reviewed by: Marina Marren (PhD. Department of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Reno)
The Aesthetic Dimension of Life and the Freedom of Thought: A Hans Blumenberg Reader Review
The Cornell University Press edition of the History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader is a first of its kind volume, masterfully edited and translated by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. Continuing to widen the Hans Blumenberg (1920 – 1996) readership in the English-speaking world, the wide-ranging collection includes Blumenberg’s “most important philosophical essays, many of which provide explicit discussions of what in the large tomes often remain only tacit presuppositions and often act as précis for them, as well as selections of his nonacademic writings” (5). The editors organize Blumenberg’s writings thematically, beginning in Part I with Blumenberg’s accounts of the historical significance of secularization and his assessment of the concept of the real. Part II encompasses select writings on language and rhetoric including Blumenberg’s seminal and groundbreaking conceptualization of metaphoricity (e.g., Introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology 1960 and Observations Drawn from Metaphors 1971). Unique in his thinking about the metaphorical process, Blumenberg is a contemporary of Ricoeur, whose own analyses of metaphor begin to appear in the mid-seventies in French (e.g., La Métaphore vive 1975). Moving from Blumenberg’s examination of new modes of poetic, rhetorical, and metaphoric thinking and writing (what Blumenberg refers to as “nonconceptuality”), Part III of the book offers several key compositions on the meaning of technology and nature. The volume closes with Part IV that contains Blumenberg’s literary varia and more whimsical pieces that reflect Blumenberg’s interest in playfulness and riddles as entryways to a revivified philosophical reflection that breaks free from canonical meaning and form.
There are “two criteria” that the editors of the Reader cite as determining their “selection: the centrality of the texts for Blumenberg’s oeuvre as such—the core canon, as contestable as this notion is—and their illustrative value for the genres, topics, or types of question he was engaged in but for which no such canon has yet crystallized” (20). The editors situate their selections in the historical background of Blumenberg’s intellectual development, which they discuss in the Introduction. There Bajohr, Fuchs, and Kroll remind us that Blumenberg’s father worked extensively on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and that Blumenberg’s 1950 Habilitation thesis, Ontological Distance, an Inquiry into the Crisis of Edmund Husserl‘s Phenomenology, examined Husser’s ideas at length. Being half-Jewish (Blumenberg’s mother was Jewish) just as Husserl, Blumenberg suffered during the reign of the National Socialists in Germany. This background makes Blumenberg’s criticism of Carl Schmitt’s take on law, politics, and exceptional power (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, originally published in 1966) all the more poignant.
Blumenberg’s own understanding of the task of thinking – and especially philosophical thinking – arrives early on, in one of the opening selections in Part I, entitled World Pictures and World Models (1961), where Blumenberg writes, “countless definitions that have been given for philosophy’s achievements in its history have a basic formula at their core: philosophy is the emerging consciousness of humans about themselves” (42). However, this externalizing power of philosophical reflection, which takes us out of our cultural and historical belonging in order to allow us to examine both, according to Blumenberg, results if not in utter alienation, then at least in a loosening of national and political convictions. Paradoxically, the pluralism of cultures and views, and the resultant inability “to adopt one of these worlds obviously and unquestionably as our own” (42), makes us all the more malleable when it comes to political manipulation. On Blumenberg’s view, “beneath the competing world pictures, interests stemming from rather less rarefied spheres interpose themselves imperceptibly. World pictures are becoming pretexts under which interests are advanced. This type of substitution is implied when one speaks of world pictures as ideologies” (50). Blumenberg contrasts the world picture with a more theoretical and scientific construction such as a “world model” (43), and which he defines as an “embodiment of reality through which and in which humans recognize themselves, orient their judgments and the goals of their actions” (43). The possibility of a successful substitution of a world picture for an ideology makes Blumenberg’s critique of the sort of political theory that Schmitt proposes all the more salient. For Blumenberg, “Whoever campaigns for the state as a “higher reality” and whoever identifies himself with the state thinks it as a subject of crises—and is easily inclined to think it into crises” (84), and as we know already from Plato’s Republic, which both Blumenberg and Schmitt studied at length, a tyrant, who identifies with and as the state is “always stirring up war” (567a).
However, the observation that Blumenberg fails to make is that his own take on the meaning of the Republic makes this dialogue out to be, precisely, the kind of tool of ideological manipulation against which he warns us to start, i.e., in his remarks on the world picture. Blumenberg reads the dialogue literally, which is clear from his own gloss on the supposed function of the Kallipolis. He writes, “Plato had derived his Republic from the three-tiered structure of the human soul; at the center of the work stood the theory of ideas, and the famous cave allegory illustrated the necessity of binding the state to the knowledge of absolute reality” (87). Blumenberg directly attributes to Plato those images and ideas that are a part of the city in speech that is a construct and a product of the dialogical exchanges between the interlocutors. Any product of the discussions among the dialogical characters cannot be directly identified with what Plato may have thought or believed. If Plato wanted us to think that a surface and literal reading was the correct one, he would have written in the first person, and straightforwardly recommended his ideas as being correct and true. Instead, Plato writes dialogues and there is not a single dialogue of Plato’s where we have him address us in the first person. Blumenberg’s claim about Plato’s alleged prescription of the “necessity of binding the state to the knowledge of absolute reality” (87) allows Blumenberg to set Plato up as a subject of Machiavelli’s discontent and attacks, but it makes Plato’s thought out to be much too simplistic and brings it in the vicinity of ideology. Another problematic set of connections that Blumenberg makes has to do with his swift excursus through the history of ideas – from Aristotle to Husserl. Blumenberg’s take on this tradition in The Concept of Reality and the Theory of the State chapter is set in the epistemological key. In other words, Blumenberg omits the ontological register. This omission allows him to establish a clean and clear-cut, but mistaken view of the conceptual continuities between ancient philosophy, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and then also late 19th Century German thought. Blumenberg thinks that
Aristotle’s dictum that, in a way, the soul is everything, was the maximally reduced formula that was still prevalent in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. To this formula corresponds the expectation that experience is, in principle, finite and can be reduced to a catalog of distinct Gestalten, each of which communicates its reality in the instantaneous self-evidence of a confirmed ought-to-be. The Platonic theory of ideas and the notion of anamnesis [recollection] are merely consistent interpretations of the basic fact that such instantaneous self-evidence, such confirmation in propria persona [Leibhaftigkeit], might exist. Even Husserl tried to rediscover this self-evidence in his phenomenology by choosing the metaphor of an experience in propria persona for the original impression. (122)
Blumenberg misses the fact that, for Aristotle, psyche ta onta pos esti panta (Peri Psyche 431b20) – the “soul somehow is all beings” – is a hard ontological claim. In Aristotle, the soul is not a totality of knowledge in terms of a faculty of the mind, but in terms of the very reality and being of things. This oversight skews Blumenberg’s interpretation in the direction of an epistemic clarity, rather than in the direction of thinking about a nascent possibility. In other words, Blumenberg thinks of the soul as something that both undergirds and grants access to the always already existing and knowable noetic reality. Given Blumenberg’s direct attribution to Plato of the “Theory of Ideas,” he then establishes a simple continuity between the reality and the world-forming status of the “Ideas”; the epistemic status of the soul in Aristotle; the hypostatization of divine and noetic reality in the human world (the Middle Ages and Renaissance); and lastly, Husserl’s philosophy. The last, being an epistemologist, misunderstands Aristotle in his own right. Husserl treats psychology as phenomenology, i.e., as a mode akin to Wesensschau. It is Heidegger, who in a sense, offers a corrective to Husserl’s program and sounds out the ontological significances of the Greek language and, in particular, of Aristotle’s thought. Blumenberg’s interest in establishing philosophical continuities that inform the history of the Western world from antiquity to the modern era is a leitmotif of The Concept of Reality and the Theory of State (1968/69), which along with the Preliminary Remarks on the Concept of Reality (1974) concludes Part I.
Part II, which is entitled Metaphors, Rhetoric, Nonconceptuality, showcases Blumenberg’s interest in rethinking the traditional notion of concept-based philosophy through the lens of poetry, rhetoric, and the power of metaphor. It opens with a chapter on Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation (1957). In this essay, Blumenberg takes the Schellingian idea of mutually belonging, but opposing tendencies or states, i.e., light and darkness, as being at the heart and at the beginning of the all. Following Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Blumenberg claims that “despite an abundance of gods of nature, Greek religion did not have a deity of light” (129). The intimation is that this designation is saved for the monotheistic god and especially of a Christian religion. However, this is an oversight, because the ancient Greeks not only had Apollo Phanaios or Apollo of Light, but also in the Orphic cosmogonies we have an androgynous god, Phanes – a deity of light. In any case, Blumenberg’s consequent analysis of the way in which light, as a metaphor, operates in the history of Western thought is fascinating. For example, turning to modern thought, Blumenberg sees that
in the idea of “method,” which originates with Bacon and Descartes, “light” is thought of as being at man’s disposal. Phenomena no longer stand in the light; rather, they are subjected to the lights of an examination from a particular perspective. The result then depends on the angle from which light falls on the object and the angle from which it is seen. It is the conditionality of perspective and the awareness of it, even the free selection of it, that now defines the concept of “seeing.” (156)
This is Blumenberg’s conclusion, i.e., that with the onset of modern thought we experience a reversal in the dynamic of revelation. Heretofore, things revealed and presented themselves to human beings, but now we engage in the kind of experimental and scientific examination whereby human beings control the revealing potency of light and use this power at will. The next step, as Blumenberg sees it, is the pervasive and subjugating power of technology, which speeds up our work, extends our work-day well into the night, and depends – largely – on “artificial light” (156). Technology subjugates us and permeates our lives through and through. Blumenberg wonders whether we can find an opposing power to counterbalance this advance of technicization. He sees this opposing force in metaphors. According to Blumenberg, they can loosen the hold of technocracy on our thinking and on our lives. The Reader offers Blumenberg’s ideas on this theme in the chapter entitled, Introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960).
Blumenberg seeks to uncover the “the conditions under which metaphors can claim legitimacy in philosophical language” (173). In the first place, he wants us to note that “Metaphors can first of all be leftover elements, rudiments on the path from mythos to logos; as such, they indicate the Cartesian provisionality of the historical situation in which philosophy finds itself at any given time” (173). In other words, just as Descartes’ Discourse on Method offers provisional Maxims of Morality, likewise Blumenberg wants metaphors to fulfill a similar function. Metaphors would serve as a temporary measure of thought or as a passage from the already by-gone to the not-yet established way of philosophizing and living. It is questionable whether Descartes means for us to take his Maxims of Morality – of which the thinker famous for his discoveries in geometry and algebra tells us there are “three or four” (Discourse on Method Part 3) – as provisional. An alternative reading of Descartes, which does not undermine Blumenberg’s comparison, is that morality and its maxims are always only provisional; subject to re-examination and re-valuation depending on the place and time we find ourselves in. Descartes’ insistence that we continuously seek to rejuvenate our ethical outlook and relations agrees with Blumenberg’s interest in finding a surreptitious element that would allow us to undermine, undo, and then recast outmoded ways of thought. “Metaphorology,” he writes, “would here be a critical reflection charged with unmasking and counteracting the inauthenticity of figurative speech. But metaphors can also—hypothetically, for the time being—be foundational elements of philosophical language, ‘translations’ that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality” (173). It is this “resistance” to the structure of accepted, logically-sound language and presentation that attracts Blumenberg to the metaphorical process.
Blumenberg probes and pivots our understanding of the philosophical value of poetic, metaphoric, and rhetorical expression in the consequent selection that the Reader offers, which is entitled An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric (1971). Blumenberg’s claim about rhetoric is that its “modern difficulties with reality consist, in good part, in the fact that this reality no longer has value as something to appeal to, because it is in its turn a product of artificial processes” (202). There is a need, in other words, to get to the underlying truth-structure of reality, which moves past the artificiality of social engineering, the technocratic state, or simply the sedimentation of interpretive layers that dictate what reality is supposed to be for us. However, this need in the guise of an imperative (and here Blumenberg again recalls Husserl and his “Zur Sache und zu den Sachen!” 202) and issued as “an exhortatory cry” (202) itself becomes rhetorical. The latter is a technology in its own right, i.e., that of language, of shaping opinions, and influencing emotions. In this estimation, Blumenberg comes close to a Derridean position, which offers us both the elemental and complex nexuses of the world, including the world of nature, in terms of the techniques, expressions, and formations that can only be reached because of and by means of language. Thus, both for Derrida and for Blumenberg (at least on this presentation in An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric), as central as the logos is, it must be displaced to give way to a possibility of re-interpreting our relation to our thinking and to our world. This insight, along with his thinking about metaphors, allows Blumenberg to proceed to a discussion of “nonconceptuality.” This discussion, which concludes the selections in Part II of the Reader is preceded by two other pieces: Observations Drawn from Metaphors (1971) and Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality (1979).
In the very last essay in Part II, which is an excerpt from the 1975 Theory of Nonconceptuality, Blumenberg outlines his program. Prior to giving us this outline, he entertains the meaning and pitfalls of theoretical reflection in the context of ancient Greek theoria. Blumenberg’s take on theoria, which equates it with motionless and stilling contemplation of eternal reality written in the starry sky, misses the important sense that the Greeks themselves attributed to theorein (at least prior to the arrival of Pythagorean thought). This term, theorein—to contemplate or to spectate—includes spectatorship of various religious, theatrical, and athletic events. As such, it is much more immersive and emotionally engaged than the purified, rarified sense of theorein, which comes into play after Pythagorean beliefs and practices take hold. The self-possessed, reserved, and calm theoretic practice (although we have allusions to it made by various characters in Plato’s dialogues, e.g., Timaeus, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Phaedo) is not a good representation of the originary meaning of theorein. Nonetheless, Blumenberg takes the meaning of theoria, which is already purified of its sensual alloys, to be representative of the Greek understanding of this practice. He writes, “for the Greeks, contemplating the sky meant not only contemplating a special and divine object of the highest dignity, but the paradigmatic case of what theory ought to be, what is at stake for it. The ideal of theory is the contemplation of the sky as an object that cannot be handled” (260). Blumenberg then takes this sense of theory as what has been handed down through the history of Western thought and what must be counteracted by a new engagement with the non-conceptual, emotional, sensible, sensitive, and intuitive dimension of life. It is this latter recommendation that we must heed in order to follow Blumenberg’s intimations on the point of nonceptual philosophizing.
To state the key moments of his program briefly, 1) “The turn away from intuition is wholly at the service of a return to intuition. This is, of course, not the recurrence of the same, the return to the starting point, and certainly not anything at all to do with romanticism” (262). This interest in re-inscribing thinking by retracing the intuitive dimension – a retracing, which is not a simple repetition, but a deepening of our reckoning with it – is the first postulate. Then comes a key aesthetic and emotional attunement 2) “Pleasure [which] requires the return to full sensibility [Sinnlichkeit]” (262). This call to pleasure hearkens us back to the Greek beginnings of contemplation as both a mental and an emotional immersion in and an attunement to the world – the kind of activity that pleasure properly completes (e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, esp. Bk. X). And finally, a medium or passage that must go between the noetic and the aesthetic, for Blumenberg just as for Riceouer, is 3) “Metaphor [which] is also an aesthetic medium precisely because it is both native to the original sphere of concepts and because it is continually liable and has to vouch for the deficiency of concepts and the limits of what they can achieve” (262). This, then, is the basic outline of Blumenberg’s program in the excerpt from Theory of Nonconceptuality with which Part II of the Reader ends.
Part III, entitled Nature, Technology, and Aesthetics, begins with Blumenberg’s The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem (1951), and proceeds historically to show how a distinction between nature and being insinuates itself in philosophical reflection. Blumenberg then traces out a further divide between nature and divinity in Christian thought. A short section on enjoyment in this essay is reminiscent of Hegel’s analyses in the Phenomenology of Spirit (VI. B. II. b. § 581 – Spirit, Culture, Truth of Enlightenment). In Hegel, this section on the totalizing function of “utility” leads to a situation in which “heaven is transplanted to earth below” (§ 581), which are the last words of the section that precedes Hegel’s discussion of “Absolute Freedom and Terror” – a discussion that is informed by Hegel’s reflections on the French Revolution. Blumenberg’s analyses, too, lead up to a revolution, but of a different kind, i.e., to the revolutionazing, but also totalizing, and not altogether salubrious power of technology.
In part 7. Of The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem, entitled “The ‘Second Nature’ of the Machine World as a Consequence of the Technical Will,” Blumenberg speculates about the way in which the displacing effect of technology or the “technical ‘out-of-itself’” (302) can be understood as “second nature” (302) for us. Blumenberg frames his reflections on this possibility in terms of Heidegger’s thinking and poses them in the form of a question. He asks:
does the concept of a “second nature” really carry the implications of the modern age’s understanding of nature to their conclusion, to the end of all its possible consequences? Is the claim to “unconditioned production,” as Heidegger has called the technical will, enacted in the “second nature” of a perfected machine-world? Or does such unconditionality imply that it will suffer nothing else alongside it—which is to say that not only has “second nature” provided the potency for the nullification of the first nature but that the former’s essence also pushes toward the latter’s realization? Man’s experience of this ultimate stage of possible technical fulfillment is only just beginning. (302)
This prescient formulation and the possible danger it expresses is all the more worth exploring in our world – today – permeated, navigated, run, and shaped by a heretofore unseen proliferation of virtual communication and technology. Blumenberg, having offered for us this portentous problem, then goes on to lay out its roots in the relationship between nature, divinity, and creative power – both divine and human, the latter of which is largely a power to imitate. These reflections appear in the essay that follows in the Reader next and which is entitled Imitation of Nature: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being (1957).
In the immediately following essay, entitled Phenomenological Aspects on Life-World and Technization (1963), Blumenberg traces out the transformation of the intuition of life into a totalization of world-horizon and the consequent objectification of the life-world. This transformation sets the stage for the thoroughgoing displacement of nature by the “second nature.” The displacement that Blumbenberg outlined in The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem. Concretely, Blumenberg explains that “the intentionality of consciousness is fulfilled in the most comprehensive horizon of horizons—in the ‘world’ as the regulative pole-idea of all possible experience, the system that keeps all possibilities of experience in a final harmony, and in which alone what is given to experience can prove itself to be real” (356). This unification and fulfilment of intentionality as and in the world prepares the stage for the transformation of the world into an object. This happens because of the identification that takes place between the world-totality “in which alone what is given to experience can prove itself to be real” (356) and the fact that, for Husserl, according the Blumenberg, it is “in the ‘world’ as the horizon of all horizons [that] objecthood is likewise isolated and stressed” (356). Not only that, but also “’Nature,’ [which] is essential for our topic—is the result of such emphasis. It is thus not equiprimordial to world but a derivative, already constricted objective horizon. Nature, so much can already be seen, cannot be the counterconcept to technology, for already in the concept of nature itself we find a deformation—an emphasis—of the original world-structure” (356). Since the latter is object-skewed, also nature is not free from objectification and is already prepared for being worked over and substituted with or nullified through the “second nature,” i.e., through the all-encompassing technological transformation. However, Blumenberg does not assign to Husserl the blame for this transformation, instead Blumenberg’s “Husserl is only concerned with making visible in exemplary fashion how disastrous in the broadest sense human action can be where it no longer knows what it is doing, and with exposing what one might call active ignorance as the root of all those disoriented activities that have produced human helplessness in the technical world” (367). The counterpoint and a saving force to this onslaught of “active ignorance” and in the face of a thoroughgoing technicization, has to do with our reorientation toward the intuitive, sensible, and aesthetic dimension of life.
The remaining essays in Part III, as well as Blumenberg’s engagement with various literary and philosophical figures and thinkers such as Socrates, Valéry, Kafka, Freud, Faulkner, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Aesop (among others) point the way to this aesthetic reorientation. For example, in Socrates and the Object Ambigu: Paul Valéry’s Discussion of the Ontology of the Aesthetic Object and Its Tradition, Blumenberg engages with Valéry’s Eupalinos or the Architect and the accounts of noetic construction and the role of necessity in the Timaeus; Aristotle’s unmoved mover; as well as reflections on beauty and finitude from the point of view of the Phaedrus. Blumenberg concludes that “the Socrates of Valéry’s dialogue does not arrive at an aesthetic attitude toward the objet ambigu because he insists on the question, definition, and classification of the object—thereby deciding to become a philosopher. The aesthetic attitude,” Blumenberg continues as he contrasts it to the Socrates of Valéry, “lets the indeterminacy stand, it achieves the pleasure specific to it by relinquishing theoretical curiosity, which in the end demands and must demand univocity in the determination of its objects. The aesthetic attitude,” in the final analysis, “accomplishes less because it tolerates more and lets the object be strong on its own rather than letting it be absorbed by the questions posed to it in its objectivation” (434). The attitude for which Blumenberg argues, then, is a kind of intuitive, aesthetic, deeply pleasurable – and having offered a reconstruction of theoria, I can also say – an originary contemplative attitude that immerses us into the world and thereby allows the world to show itself to us anew.
The closing set of selections in Part IV of the Reader offers Blumenberg’s analyses of philosophically significant literature, which I see as a kind of propaedeutic to the aesthetic, metaphoric, nonconceptual, but originarily theoretical thinking and being in the world. Thus, in The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel (1964) essay, Blumenberg examines the relationship between truth, poetry, nature, and imitation in its literary and historical unfolding. This multi-disciplinary and cross-historical examination is characteristic of Blumenberg’s style of analysis. He moves through Plato, Aristotle, Scholasticism, the Renaissance, and on to the emergence of the concept of the absurd. In the final analysis, Blumenberg claims about the novel that it does not need to take on the guise of the absurd or be guided by it as a concept (502). The sphere of possibilities that the novel encompasses and iterates surpasses the straightforward mimetic schema where culture seeks to imitate nature. Because of this, the novel does not run aground once this schema shatters against the absurdity of life where nature has become infused with culture through and through; subtended in the conceptual delimitation of its object within a world-horizon; or displaced by means of technological dissolution of the natural being of the world. These latter eventualities call for a break-through and an overcoming by means of the absurd, but the novel circumvents this need, because the novel serves as “the extension of the sphere of the humanly [and not naturally] possible” (502). What does this mean concretely in terms of the philosophical mode of reflection and thought? Blumenberg’s answer is forthcoming in the essay entitled Pensiveness (1980), which is both a prelude to the more whimsical selections in this Reader and also offers Blumenberg’s estimation of the task and value of philosophy. Blumenberg first lets us know that “pensiveness is … a respite from the banal results that thought provides for us as soon as we ask about life and death, meaning and meaninglessness, being and nothingness” (517). In this formulation, pensiveness evokes both Descartes’ resolve to waver and to be of a wandering, instead of a weak mind (Discourse on Method Part 3) and also Heidegger’s call to authentic openness in anticipatory resoluteness or Entschlossenheit (Being and Time Sect. 54). Blumenberg goes on to offer us his “conclusion—since I must present one because of my profession—is that philosophy has something to preserve, if not revive, from its life-world origin in pensiveness” (517). This is both lyrical and evocative, as well as a methodologically rigorous a conclusion.
Although the Reader does not end here, I would like to close my review with the following quotation that expresses both a recommendation and a challenge that Blumenberg issues to us. “Philosophy must not be bound, therefore, to particular expectations about the nature of its product. The connection back to the life-world would be destroyed if philosophy’s right to question were limited through the normalization of answers, or even through the obligation of disciplining the questions by beginning with the question of their answerability” (517).
Gilles Deleuze: Letters and Other Texts
Reviewed by: Ralf Gisinger (University of Vienna)
“Don’t think I am a compulsive letter writer or that I have a sense of dialogue. I hate it.”/ „Denken Sie nicht, ich sei ein gewissenhafter Briefeschreiber oder dass ich einen Sinn für Dialog habe. Ich hasse es.“ (72, an Gherasim Luca; Übers. RG)[1]
Die lange erwartete englische Übersetzung des 2015 im französischen Original erschienen Buchs Letters and Other Texts ist der dritte und letzte von David Lapoujade zusammengestellte bzw. herausgegebene Band mit posthum erschienen Sammlungen von Deleuze-Texten nach Die einsame Insel (2002) und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft (2003).[2] Daneben existieren noch die zu Lebzeiten Deleuzes (1925-1995) von ihm selbst arrangierten Textkompilationen Unterhandlungen (1990) sowie Kritik und Klinik (1993).
Zum 20. Todesjahr Deleuzes publiziert, bietet der Band neben den Briefen vor allem schwer erhältliche sowie einzelne noch nicht erschienene Texte, aber auch ein längeres Interview (zusammen mit Félix Guattari) und 5 Zeichnungen von Deleuze. Während die beiden vorhergehenden Anthologien chronologisch und zeitbezogen strukturiert sind, kommt dem vorliegenden Band mehr die Rolle eines „Restbestands“ von noch unveröffentlichten (oder lange nicht verfügbaren) Schriften zu, wenngleich dies die Lektüre abwechslungsreich und immer wieder spannend gestaltet. Trotz der ausführlichen und gelehrsamen Einordnungen von Lapoujade (besonders in den Briefen) ist eine Kenntnis der Werkgeschichte von Deleuze eine Voraussetzung, um die tour de force an Zeitsprüngen und Textgenrewechseln inhaltlich mitzuvollziehen. Und doch liegen die Vorteile der kurzen Texte, wie schon in Die einsame Insel sowie Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft auf der Hand: in Briefen, Interviews oder Essays wird den schwierig verständlichen philosophischen Konzepten manchmal mehr Leben eingehaucht indem beispielhaft erklärt, pointiert zusammengefasst oder fast schon entstellend verkürzt wird. Sollten Die einsame Insel und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft (aber auch Unterhandlungen), die damit schon seit über 15 Jahren fester Bestandteil des Forschungskorpus rund um Deleuze (und Guattari) sind, demensprechende Erwartungen an Letters and Other Texts geweckt haben, lässt sich dieser Anspruch natürlich nicht gänzlich erfüllen. Jedoch gibt es, neben tatsächlich eher belanglosen Briefen, immer wieder interessante Korrespondenzen (vor allem mit Guattari, Villani, Klossowski, Foucault oder Voeffray), die sowohl philosophische als auch allgemeine Einblicke in die Lebenswelt von Deleuze und seinen Adressaten über eine Zeitspanne von nahezu vier Jahrzehnten geben. Das Highlight des Buches ist sicher ein erstmals publiziertes gemeinsames Interview mit Guattari (geführt von Raymond Bellour im Frühjahr 1973) über den Anti-Ödipus (1972), aber auch die Unterlagen für einen „Course on Hume (1957-1958)“, der Einblicke in Deleuzes pädagogische Herangehensweise in Bezug auf Hume erlaubt, oder das zwar schon länger kursierende, aber erstmals seit 1946 wieder abgedruckte „From Christ to the Bourgeoisie“ empfehlen sich für eine durchaus lohnende Lektüre.
Der Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit der Edition von Deleuzes Schriften sowie die damit einhergehende Nachvollziehbarkeit, Auffindbarkeit und Übersetzung ist ein hoch zu schätzender Verdienst Lapoujades. Aus diesem Grund wird das „Patchwork“ bzw. der mangelnde rote Faden des Buchs nicht nur in Kauf genommen, sondern bildet sogar dessen notwendiges Grundgerüst, wird es eben als Ergänzung zu den bisher erschienenen Sammelbänden verstanden. Gleichzeitig muss konzediert werden, dass viele dieser Texte ohne den starken Aufschwung und die zunehmende Popularität von Deleuze in den letzten Jahren – insbesondere im englischsprachigen Raum – sonst wohl nicht nochmal abgedruckt worden wären
So reicht Letters in Bezug auf die Erschließung des Gesamtwerks (sowohl für die Deleuze-Forschung als auch zur allgemeinen Verständlichkeit von Deleuze und Guattari) nicht an die vorhergehenden Sammelsurien heran, die deutlich reichhaltigere Quellen an kurzen Texten in der Form von zumeist autorisierten Interviews, Zeitschriftenartikel, Gesprächen und Briefen, beinhalten, welche sich vor allem um zusätzliche Erläuterungen, konzise Zuspitzungen, konkrete Anwendungen oder Verteidigungen der eigenen Theorien drehen. Damit sind sie von herausragender Bedeutung, um die Intentionen, Abläufe und Prozesse von Deleuzes Denken und Schaffen nachzuvollziehen. Dafür wird mit dem Fokus auf Briefe eine persönlichere, ja geradezu private Ebene erschlossen (wobei stets in einem professionellen Rahmen verbleibend), die eine gewisse theoretische Kraft entfalten kann, auch wenn dies kritisch betrachtet werden sollte.
Das Buch ist in drei Teile gegliedert:
Der erste Teil beinhaltet Briefe an Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, François Châtelet, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Clet Martin, aber auch an außerhalb Frankreichs weniger bekannte Personen wie Jean Piel, Arnaud Villani, Alain Vinson, Clément Rosset, Elias Sanbar, André Bernold, Joseph Emmanuel Voeffray und Gherasim Luca. Dabei wurden einzig einige der Briefe an Arnaud Villani und Gherasim Luca sowie der erste an Alain Vinson vorher schon veröffentlicht.
Wie schon in den vorangegangen Textsammlungen bettet Lapoujade zu Beginn jeden der chronologisch geordneten Briefe in die jeweilige Zeit ein und gibt anderweitigen Kontext zu den Adressaten sowie zu Ereignissen, Umständen, Texten oder Personen, auf die in den Zuschriften referiert wird. Auch ein Namensindex am Ende des Buches leistet Hilfe bei Einordnung und Recherche. Leider befinden sich in der vorliegenden auf Englisch übersetzten Ausgabe in den Fußnoten einige kleine Fehler (z.B. 27; 29; 69 oder 97), die im französischen Original so nicht vorkommen.
Auch für langjährige Deleuze-Leser:innen dürften die 5 Zeichnungen überraschend anmuten (101ff.), die von Karl Flinker 1973 in einem Heft zu Foucault und Deleuze unter dem Titel „Faces et Surfaces“ [Seiten/Gesichter und Oberflächen] veröffentlicht wurden. Diesen Illustrationen folgen im zweiten Teil des Buches die „Other Texts“, diverse Texte, die entweder lange nicht verfügbar waren, zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten in Zeitungen beziehungsweise als Rezensionen oder noch gar nicht erschienen sind, was auf den „Course on Hume (1957-58)“ (119ff.) sowie ein Interview von Deleuze und Guattari mit Raymond Bellour (auf Vorschlag Foucaults) über den Anti-Ödipus (195ff.) zutrifft.
Des Weiteren sind im dritten Teil des Bandes fünf als „Jugendwerke“ deklarierte Schriften enthalten, die Deleuze zwischen seinem 20. und 22. Lebensjahr verfasst, allerdings später wieder zurückgezogen hat.
Wie im Titel programmatisch angekündigt, liegt das Hauptaugenmerk von Letters and Other Texts auf von Deleuze gesendeten Briefen, die zwar nach Personen chronologisch angeordnet sind, jedoch keine Antworten inkludieren, weshalb auch nicht von vollständigen Briefwechseln gesprochen werden kann. Dementsprechend erscheinen die Briefe trotz der ausgezeichneten Kontextualisierung Lapoujades teilweise zusammenhangslos beziehungsweise mit vielen Jahren Abstand. Gemäß dem Titel werde ich mich auch in folgender Rezension primär auf die Briefe konzentrieren.
Dass die im Buch versammelten Briefe keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit erheben können, ist zwar evident, wird aber auch nicht explizit erwähnt. Lapoujade gesteht in der Einführung zu, dass die Briefe im Œuvre Deleuzes keine zentrale Rolle einnehmen, da Deleuze diesen keine Wichtigkeit einräumte und sie nicht als Teil oder Erläuterung seines Werks ansah (7). In dem Band sind ausschließlich von Deleuze geschriebene Briefe, nicht aber von den jeweiligen Adressaten enthalten – begründet wird dies damit, dass er keine Korrespondenzen aufbewahrte, wobei nicht ganz klar wird, ob vom Herausgeber eine solche Rekonstruktion von Briefwechseln überhaupt angestrebt wurde.
Es ist davon auszugehen, dass Deleuze außerdem die vollständige Veröffentlichung seiner Briefe nicht vorsah und wahrscheinlich auch nicht erwartet hätte, da er bei der Autorisierung (so etwa bei der auszugsweisen Publikation seines Briefs über Kant an Alain Vinson (17f.)) äußerste Zurückhaltung an den Tag legte. Die Diskussion um Deleuzes Verhältnis zu Briefen flammte posthum schon mit dem Nachruf Clameur de l’être (1997; Geschrei des Seins) von Alain Badiou (*1937) auf, in dem dieser nicht nur seine eigenwillige Interpretation von Deleuze niederschrieb („Metaphysik des Einen“), sondern freimütig sein (Nicht-)Verhältnis zu Deleuze aus seiner Sicht schildert, welches sich jedoch ausschließlich anhand des Narrativs von Badiou nachvollziehen und einschätzen lässt. Nach einer jahrzehntelangen Distanz und offenen (vornehmlich politisch induzierten) Kontroversen begannen die beiden Anfang der 1990er-Jahre einen kurzen, aber intensiven Briefwechsel über ihre theoretischen Divergenzen. Nach Badious Darstellung brach Deleuze, schon in seinen letzten Lebensjahren und durch Krankheit geschwächt, die Korrespondenz 1994 abrupt ab, teilte Badiou die Vernichtung der Briefe mit und verbat sich eine Veröffentlichung ebendieser (Badiou 2003, 14).
So interessant dieser Austausch für Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit wäre, wird Deleuzes Wunsch natürlich entsprochen und es finden sich keine Briefe an Badiou in Letters and Other Texts. Die beschriebene Episode wirft allerdings die Frage auf, nach welchen Kriterien die Briefe in Letters zusammengestellt wurden, was in dem Buch leider nicht ausgeführt wird: anhand der Verfügbarkeit und Zugänglichkeit oder des Ausbleibens eines dezidierten Veröffentlichungsverbot? Das editorische Problem, über keine Antworten der Empfänger zu verfügen, wird zwar in der Einleitung angesprochen, das moralische Problem der Veröffentlichung jedoch nur auf Deleuzes Frühwerke bezogen. Wenn Lapoujade in der Vorbemerkung Deleuzes allgemeines Verhältnis zu Briefen thematisiert, erkennt er zwar eine Ambivalenz an, lässt die Leser:innen aber nicht an weiteren Überlegungen zu diesem grundsätzlichen Dilemma teilhaben.
Ein ähnlich gelagertes Problem wie die Briefe betrifft die frühen Texte „Description of Women“ (1945), „From Christ to the Bourgeoisie“ (1946), „Words and Profiles“ (1946), „Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy“ (1946) sowie „Introduction to Diderot’s La Religieuse“ (1946), die vor 1953 erschienen sind, von Deleuze allerdings wie schon erwähnt später zurückgezogen wurden. Argumentiert wird dies durchaus überzeugend damit, dass diese (teilweise in veränderter/verfälschter Form) schon in Deleuze-Zirkeln kursiert seien und deshalb auf dieses Faktum nur mehr mit der Edition reagiert werden könne. Somit geht es Lapoujade und den Rechteinhaber:innen Fanny, Émilie Deleuze sowie Irène Lindon darum, eine autorisierte sowie originale Form dieser Texte zu gewährleisten. Die vorangestellte provisorische Bibliographie (11ff.) – von Deleuze wahrscheinlich 1989 erstellt – beginnt mit Empirismus und Subjektivität, seinem Hume-Buch 1953, was nicht einer gewissen Ironie entbehrt, wird somit die in Letters and Other Texts vollzogene Unterminierung der bewussten Auslassung seiner Frühschriften gleich von Anfang an ins Werk gesetzt.
Die Warnung, die Deleuze an Arnaud Villani 1981 ausspricht – „Don’t let me become an object of fascination or headache for you.” (80) – kann jedenfalls für die akademische Auseinandersetzung schon lange (zurecht) als überholt gelten. Mit dem vorliegenden Band dringt die Faszination in noch deutlich weitere Bereiche vor, die Deleuze selbst wahrscheinlich besagte Kopfschmerzen bereitet hätten. Obwohl Deleuze jungen Doktoranden in einer Mischung aus Bescheidenheit und Sorge um ihre universitäre Karriere rät, den Fokus ihrer Thesis nicht hauptsächlich auf ihn zu richten (an Villani, 80; an Voeffray, 91; an Martin, 94), nimmt er spätestens mit diesem Band einen Platz im historisierten Kanon ein, wo jedes jemals geschriebene (sowie gesprochene) Wort seziert und akademisch verwertet wird, was selbstredend auch auf den Autor dieser Zeilen zutrifft. Gerade die (immer auch, aber nicht nur) privaten Briefwechsel legen Zeugnis davon ab, wie sich die Deleuze-Rezeption diesbezüglich intensiviert und auch historisiert hat, sodass Letters nicht nur inhaltlich, sondern auch in der Form über die vorhergehenden Die einsame Insel und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft hinausgeht. Deleuze formuliert in diesem Sinne an Joseph Emmanuel Voeffray reuevoll: “I should never have read a book on me at all.” (91).
Wie bereits ausgeführt, sah Deleuze das Medium „Brief“ einerseits nicht als übermäßig bedeutsam an, weshalb auch keine seiner empfangenen Zuschriften erhalten sind (denken wir an die vorher geschilderte Episode mit Badiou), andererseits auch nicht als eine Erweiterung seiner im Entstehen begriffenen Arbeiten, sondern entkoppelt von seinen Publikationen. Direkte, wenn auch kokettierende Verweise auf sein Verhältnis zu Briefen aus Letters and Other Texts sind etwa das eingangs zitierte: “Don’t think I am a compulsive letter writer or that I have a sense of dialogue. I hate it.” (72, an Gherasim Luca) oder an Pierre Klossowski: “I can no longer write a letter, it’s terrible. Effect of the solitude I nonetheless love.” (66)
Dies spiegelt sich zum Großteil auch in den Briefen selbst wider, die zwar spannende Einblicke in das Leben von Deleuze geben, so etwa in seine Lektüren, Aufenthaltsorte oder auch seinen Gesundheitszustand – dabei stets mehr beruflich als privat. Allerdings geht Deleuze in den Schreiben kaum philosophisch in die Tiefe oder gibt Erläuterungen für sein Werk bzw. seine Konzepte – mit faszinierenden Ausnahmen, auf die ich zurückkommen werde. Nur folgerichtig, wenn man bedenkt, was er Clément Rosset 1981 als Entschuldigung, Villani nicht in Paris getroffen zu haben, mitteilt: „[…] philosophical conversations are a pain” (23).
Begeben wir uns jedoch auf die Ebene der Entstehungskontexte, so ergeben sich interessante Zusammenhänge, von denen wiederum Rückschlüsse für andere Werke gezogen werden können.
So schreibt er im April 1968 an Jean Piel, dass ein Artikel zu Lewis Carroll derart den Rahmen von Umfang und Fragestellung sprenge, so dass es sich zu einem Buch entwickle (33). Betrachtet man das daraus entstandene Logik des Sinns (1969) unter dieser Voraussetzung als aus einem Text zu Carroll entstanden, lädt dies zu einer dementsprechend gewichteten Re-Lektüre durch diese Brille ein.
Der allgemeine Duktus der Schriften orientiert sich an einem Vorsatz, den er an François Châtelet im Jahr 1966 so formulierte: man benötige eine gewisse Wertschätzung um über etwas zu schreiben. So sei es ihm (Deleuze) lieber, gar nicht zu schreiben anstatt eines Verrisses (27). Diese Haltung scheint über weite Strecken auch in den Briefen durch, die geprägt von Höflichkeit, Anerkennung, Wertschätzung und Zuneigung sind, auch wenn dies sicherlich einer stilistischen Komponente geschuldet ist.
In den vorhergehenden Textsammlungen erschienen bereits Briefe, die in Letters nicht mehr aufgenommen wurden, so etwa an Jean-Clet Martin, Kuniichi Uno, Dionys Mascolo (Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft) sowie der „Brief an einen strengen Kritiker“/Michel Cressole (Unterhandlungen), wobei insbesondere der Brief an Cressole (aber auch an Martin) durchaus eine Öffentlichkeit über den eigentlichen Empfänger hinaus adressiert – siehe auch den Verweis auf Cressole im Schreiben an Villani (77). Die Briefe ermöglichen einerseits die Erläuterung von schwer zu fassenden Begriffen [concepts] seiner Philosophie in einem einfacheren Stil, andererseits geben sie Innenansichten über Enstehungskontexte, Arbeitsweisen oder Methoden. In der Polemik gegen Cressole findet sich neben den Hinweisen auf seine philosophische Evolution etwa die berühmte Stelle über Deleuzes eigenes philosophisches Lesen und Produzieren, nämlich klassische Philosophen „von hinten zu nehmen“ und ihnen ein monströses Kind zu machen, das trotzdem ihres sei (Deleuze 1993, 15f.). Aber auch die Darstellung der ödipalen und repressiven Funktion der Philosophiegeschichte für das Denken stammt aus dem Schreiben an Cressole. Dagegen beleuchtet Deleuze in der Korrespondenz mit Uno besonders das Kennenlernen sowie die Zusammenarbeit mit Guattari in einer detaillierten Ausführlichkeit, wie sie sonst nicht bekannt wäre (Deleuze 2005, 223ff.). Und in dem Brief an Martin beschreibt er konzise die philosophische Operation der Begriffsschaffung [création], die sich stets am Konkreten zu orientieren habe, um erst von diesem zu Abstrakta vorzudringen (Deleuze 2005, 345).
Es ließe sich jedoch vermuten, dass die schon publizierten Briefe (in Unterhandlungen und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft) inhaltlich begründet, d.h. aufgrund ihrer theoretischen Relevanz bereits in diesen Bänden erschienen sind, weshalb Letters and Other Texts ein wenig wie ein Residuum anmutet, wenngleich auch daraus wichtige und interessante Passagen für die Deleuze-Forschung zu extrahieren sind. Neben den bereits erwähnten Exzerpten sind dies vor allem:
Besonders hervorzuheben ist ferner der Austausch mit Félix Guattari (1930-1992), Deleuzes langjährigem Freund („I also feel that we were friends before meeting“, 35) und Ko-Autor: „Es gibt nur ein Rhizom zwischen Félix und mir.“ (78; Übers. RG) Die beiden lernten sich im Frühjahr 1969 in der Region Limousin kennen und kurze Zeit später begann der erste Briefwechsel, welcher recht schnell den Beginn der Zusammenarbeit für den Anti-Ödipus (1972) einleitete. Die Briefe geben Einblicke in die erste Phase des Entstehungsprozesses des Anti-Ödipus, allerdings maximal als Ergänzung zu dem bereits 2006 erschienen, hauptsächlich auf Guattaris Beiträge fokussierten Buch The Anti-Œdipus Papers (hg. von Stéphane Nadaud), wo vornehmlich die Textentwicklung des Anti-Ödipus aufbereitet und dargestellt wird. Die in Letters gesammelten Briefe an Guattari (sicher nur ein Bruchteil der tatsächlichen Korrespondenz) zeigen jedoch darüber hinaus den Duktus und Ton der Kommunikation von Deleuze gegenüber Guattari – wie genau er dessen Texte ab ihrer ersten Begegnung 1969 liest und dessen Thesen (zum Beispiel den Maschinenbegriff) aufnimmt bzw. verarbeitet. Auch zwei Briefe im Rahmen der Vorbereitung für Tausend Plateaus sind im Buch enthalten, wozu bislang im Vergleich zum Anti-Ödipus deutlich weniger Quellenmaterial veröffentlicht wurde. Grenzwertig private Aufschlüsse ergeben sich aus einem dieser Briefe außerdem über die Art und Weise, wie bzw. über welches Medium die Auseinandersetzung mit den so genannten „Neuen Philosophen“ um Bernard-Henri Lévy Ende der 1970er Jahre am besten stattzufinden habe (51ff.).
Auch in anderen Briefen wird Guattari natürlich immer wieder Thema, so etwa im wiederholten Insistieren von Deleuze gegenüber Villani (immerhin im Abstand von drei Jahren), in dessen Texten bzw. Buch über Deleuze der Rolle von Guattari für die gemeinsamen Schriften zu seinem Recht zu verhelfen und diesem eine größere Relevanz für ihre gemeinsam erarbeiteten Konzepte einzuräumen (82; 84ff.). Deleuze stößt sich insbesondere an Villanis (verfehlter) Interpretation, Tausend Plateaus beruhe vornehmlich auf seiner Philosophie bzw. sei hauptsächlich von Deleuze verfasst.
Dies ist selbstredend eine der zentralen Fragen, die sich für die Deleuze&Guattari-Forschung in Bezug auf das rhizomatisch verflochtene Tandem stellt und die nach wie vor extensiv untersucht wird. Diesbezüglich ist wiederum eine Stelle aus dem Villani-Fragebogen von Interesse, in dem Deleuze bemerkt, dass die Mikro-Makro-Unterscheidung in Tausend Plateaus mehr von Guattari komme, wobei Deleuze die Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Typen von Mannigfaltigkeiten (die sich von seinem Bergson-Buch bis zu Tausend Plateaus mehr oder weniger durchzieht) dieser vorgelagert sieht und den Begriff der Mannigfaltigkeit [multiplicité] für wichtiger als die Mikrophysik (mehr ein Konzept Foucaults als Guattaris im Gegensatz zur Mikropolitik, Anm.) erachtet (79). Tausend Plateaus zeigt, wie diese verschiedenen Aspekte nebeneinander als Plateaus ko-existieren können, da einerseits die Mikro-Makro-Unterscheidung in diesem Werk ihre höchste Wichtigkeit erlangt (vor allem im 9. und 10. Plateau: „1933 — Mikropolitik und Segmentarität“ sowie „1730 — Intensiv-Werden, Tier-Werden, Unwahrnehmbar-Werden…“) und andererseits Deleuze/Guattari das gesamte Buch als „Theorie der Mannigfaltigkeiten“ (Deleuze/Guattari 1992, II) zusammenfassen.
Daran anschließend passt dazu das (neben den Briefen) meiner Ansicht nach zentrale Element des Buches – ein sehr ausführliches, aber auch aufschlussreiches Interview über den Anti-Ödipus mit Raymond Bellour, welches aber nie publiziert wurde, da es in der eigentlich angedachten Zeitschrift Les Temps modernes auf Intervention Guattaris aus politischen Gründen (wahrscheinlich die maoistische Prägung der Zeitschrift Anfang der 1970er) nicht erschien. Das Interview ist aus mehreren Gründen lesenswert sowie lehrreich:
1. Die Atmosphäre des Interviews schwankt zwischen locker-belustigt und angespannt. Besonders Guattari scheint von Bellours Fragen eher genervt zu sein („your question is lousy“, 200; „he’s going to say something stupid”, 205), was allerdings sowohl Guattari als auch Deleuze viele Erklärungen, Umschreibungen und Beispiele ihrer Thesen entlockt, die insbesondere für das Verständnis von Strömen [flux] oder ihrer Kritik an der familialen, reduktionistischen, ödipalen Psychoanalyse zugunsten eines sozialen und politischen Feldes gewinnbringend sind.
2. Wirft es ein Schlaglicht auf das Verhältnis von Deleuze und Guattari, ihrer (humorvollen) Kommunikation, gegenseitigen Vorlieben, aber auch Differenzen. So betritt Deleuze nach einem Telefongespräch wieder den Raum, worauf Guattari ihm mitteilt: „I said the opposite of what you said.“ Deleuze antwortet lapidar: “Good. Very good.” (231) Im Speziellen sticht der Fokus auf die politische Dimension hervor, die insbesondere Guattari immer wieder einbringt. Eine oft vorgetragene These, dass Guattari das Politische, wenn er es doch nicht in Deleuze hineintrage, so doch mehr zum Vorschein bringe und einfordere, zeigt sich in diesem Interview paradigmatisch.
3. Die starke bzw. umfassende Beschäftigung und Auseinandersetzung mit der Psychoanalyse, die Ende der 1960er/Anfang der 1970er noch eine viel breitere gesellschaftliche Rolle spielte. Noch vor dem Erscheinen über den Anti-Ödipus richtete Deleuze an Klossowski die Prognose: „either silence or war with psychoanalysts” (61) Auch in besagtem Interview vertreten Deleuze/Guattari ihre zentralen Thesen, wie etwa, dass das Begehren/der Wunsch [désir] nicht auf die Erfüllung eines Mangels zu reduzieren, sondern Produktion sei. Durch die beharrlichen Nachfragen Bellours entstehen bemerkenswerte (aber auch zugängliche) Passagen, beispielsweise die Forderung (sowie auch praktische Anwendung), konsequent in Strömen [flux], Intensitäten und Mannigfaltigkeiten zu denken und nicht einfach von präexistenten Fixpunkten (Subjekt/Objekt) auszugehen (200f.).
Zu guter Letzt geht es mir passenderweise um die Frage nach der Wirkung eines Buchs. Beklagt Deleuze im Interview 1973 noch den akademischen Aspekt des Anti-Ödipus als Ärgernis, wenn auch damit kokettierend (Guattari: „Exactly, it’s Gilles‘ fault.“ (208)), so klingt dies im Brief an Villani 1986, also 13 Jahre später, deutlich anders, man möchte sagen (wieder) deutlich akademischer. Deleuze nennt dem jungen Freund drei Aspekte, die ein existierenswertes Buch ausmachen sollten: In bisherigen Studien zum jeweiligen Thema 1. einen Fehler zu korrigieren (polemische Funktion), 2. etwas Übersehenes zum Vorschein bringen (erfinderische Funktion) sowie 3. einen Begriff [concept] zu schaffen (schöpferische Funktion). Interessanterweise steht dies in einem Spannungsverhältnis dazu, was Deleuze und Guattari im Anschluss an den Anti-Ödipus nicht müde werden zu betonen und auch im in Letters enthaltenen Interview immer wieder ansprechen (198f.; 207f.). So werden sie nicht müde zu betonen, das Buch nicht als Buch zu verstehen, sondern vornehmlich auf die (politischen) Effekte außerhalb und transversale Verbindungslinien abzuzielen sowie Äußerungsgefüge und Gefüge des Begehrens zu schaffen. Funktion des Buches sei dabei, nicht zu überzeugen, sondern abzuholen, wer die Psychoanalyse, aber auch das Subjekt, das Ego satthabe (207). Dass sich diese Hoffnung nicht erfüllen sollte, zeigt sich insbesondere in der Einschätzung im Vorwort zur italienischen Ausgabe von Tausend Plateaus. In einer seltenen Rückschau über die unterschiedliche Rezeption der zwei Bände ihres Opus magnum zu Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie ziehen sie Jahre später (1987) ein gänzlich anderes Fazit noch im Interview 1973, weshalb ich ausführlicher zitiere: „Tausend Plateaus (1980) war die Fortsetzung des Anti-Ödipus (1972). Aber beide Bücher hatten objektiv ganz verschiedene Schicksale. Das lag sicherlich an den Umständen: die bewegte Zeit des einen, die noch unter dem Einfluß von 68 stand, und die Zeit der seichten flaute, der Gleichgültigkeit, in der das andere erschien. Tausend Plateaus ist von all unseren Büchern am schlechtesten aufgenommen worden. Wenn wir es dennoch besonders mögen, dann nicht so, wie eine Mutter ihr mißratenes Kind liebt. Der Anti-Ödipus war sehr erfolgreich, aber dieser Erfolg wurde von einem noch größeren Scheitern begleitet. Der Anti-Ödipus wollte auf die Verwüstungen Hinweisen, die Ödipus, das ‚Mama-Papa‘, in der Psychoanalyse, in der Psychiatrie und selbst in der Anti-Psychiatrie, in der Literaturkritik und im allgemeinen Bild, das man sich vom Denken macht, anrichtet. Wir haben davon geträumt, Ödipus den Garaus zu machen. Aber diese Aufgabe war zu groß für uns. Die Reaktion auf 68 hat gezeigt, wie stark Ödipus noch in der Familie war und wie er weiterhin in der Psychoanalyse, in der Literatur und überall im Denken sein Regime der kindlichen Weinerlichkeit ausübte. So blieb Ödipus für uns eine schwere Belastung. Tausend Plateaus hat uns dagegen, zumindest uns, trotz seines scheinbaren Mißerfolgs, einen Schritt weitergebracht und uns unbekannte und von Ödipus unberührte Gebiete entdecken lassen, die der Anti-Ödipus nur von ferne sehen konnte, ohne in sie vorzudringen.“ (Deleuze/Guattari 1992, I)
Auch in Letters reflektiert und resümiert Deleuze in einzelnen Passagen über intendierte, aber auch unerwünschte Effekte seiner Bücher. So bemerkt er in einem Brief an Voeffray (1983), dass die Schriften über Proust und Kafka keine Wirkung in seinem Sinne entfalteten (im Gegensatz zu dem Buch über Masoch). Indes waren Konzepte wie „Tier-Werden“ oder „Rhizom“ umgekehrt so erfolgreich, dass sie in einer Weise bar jeder Logik (!) verwendet wurden, die Guattari und ihn abstoße: „I sometimes feel like I’m being roasted by idiotic parasites.“ (91) – eine im Vergleich zum allgemeinen Duktus der Briefe seltene sprachliche Schärfe. Bei aller Kritik am vorliegenden Band könnte die nun vollständig vorliegende Edition der Schriften und Briefe im besten Falle einen Beitrag zum Schutz gegen idiotische Instrumentalisierungen von Deleuze liefern.
Wer darauf hofft, in Letters and Other Texts neue Theoriebausteine oder Verbindungslinien zu finden, welche fundamental andersartige Perspektiven auf und in Deleuzes Philosophie erschließen, muss enttäuscht werden. Das Buch beinhaltet jedoch wertvolle neu publizierte Texte und eröffnet in seiner Gesamtheit neue Ebenen, auf denen die Mannigfaltigkeit an deleuzianischen Strömen [flux] ineinander übergehen und sich verknüpfen lassen.
Bibliographie:
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Deleuze, Gilles. 2020. Letters and Other Texts, hg. von David Lapoujade. Semiotext(e): South Pasadena [Lettres et autres textes, 2015].
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Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix. 1992. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Tausend Plateaus. Merve Verlag: Berlin [Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1980].
Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Logik des Sinns. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main [Logique du sens, 1969].
Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Unterhandlungen 1972-1990. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main [Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990].
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. David Hume. Campus Verlag: Frankfurt am Main/New York [Empirisme et Subjectivité. Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume, 1953].
Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Die einsame Insel. Texte und Gespräche von 1953 bis 1974, hg. von David Lapoujade. Frankfurt am Main [L’ile déserte et autres textes. Textes et entretiens 1953-1974, 2002].
Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft. Texte und Gespräche von 1975 bis 1995, hg. von David Lapoujade. Frankfurt am Main [Deux régimes de fous et autres textes (1975-1995), 2003].
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[1] Seitenzahlen ohne weitere Angabe referieren auf Letters and Other Texts (Deleuze 2020).
[2] Ich verwende in dieser Rezension, wenn vorhanden, die deutschen Übersetzungen, allerdings das jeweilige Ersterscheinungsjahr im Original.
