GIORGIO AGAMBEN - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

PART TWO
History

§ 7 Tradition of the Immemorial
I
Every reflection on tradition must begin with the assertion that before transmitting anything else, human beings must first of all transmit language to themselves. Every specific tradition, every determinate cultural patrimony, presupposes the transmission of that alone through which something like a tradition is possible. But what do humans transmit in transmitting language to themselves? What is the meaning of the transmission of language, independent of what is transmitted in language? Far from being of no importance for thinking, these questions have constituted the subject of philosophy from its inception. Philosophy concerns itself with what is at issue not in this or that meaningful statement but in the very fact that human beings speak, that there is language and opening to sense, beyond, before, or, rather, in every determinate event of signification. What has always already been transmitted in every tradition, the architraditum and the primum of every tradition, is the thing of thinking.
א According to his report, you say that you have not had a sufficient demonstration of the doctrine concerning the nature of the First. I must therefore expound it to you, but in riddles, so that if this letter ends up at the bottom of the ocean or at the end of the earth, whoever reads it will not understand it. The matter stands as follows: all beings stand around the king of everything, and everything exists for his sake. And he is the cause of everything that is beautiful. The second things stand around the second; the third things stand around the third. The human soul strives to learn what all these things are, looking to things similar to them, but it is not fully satisfied with any one of them. There is nothing similar to the king and the things I have told you about. "But what," the soul then asks, "is it?" And this question, O son of Dionysius and Doris, is the cause of all troubles, of the labor pains suffered by the soul. And unless the soul frees itself of them, it will never be able to reach the truth. 1
II
What do these considerations imply for the constitutive structure of all human tradition? What must be transmitted is not a thing, however eminent it might be; nor is it a truth that could be formulated in propositions or articles of faith. It is, instead, the very unconcealment (a-lētheia), the very opening in which something like a tradition is possible. But how is it possible to transmit an unconcealment; how can there be tradition not simply of a traditum but of openness itself, transmissibility itself? It is clear that this transmissibility cannot be thematized as a First inside tradition, nor can it become the content of one or more propositions among others, in any hierarchical order. Implicit in every act of transmission, it must remain unfinished and, at the same time, unthematized.
The tradition of transmissibility is therefore immemorially contained in every specific tradition, and this immemorial legacy, this transmission of unconcealment, constitutes human language as such. It is the closed fist that, according to Kafka's image, is inscribed in the coat of arms of every tradition, announcing its fulfillment. Yet this means that the structure of language must be such that in all discourse, language can transmit--and betray, according the double sense of the Latin tradere, "to transmit"--the unconcealment that it is, leaving it concealed in what it brings to light.
א Memory: disposition of the soul, which keeps watch over the unconcealment within it. ( Plato, Definitions, 414 a 8)
III
This is why from its inception, philosophy, which seeks to give an account of this double structure of tradition and human language, has presented knowledge as caught in a dialectic of memory and oblivion, unconcealment and concealment, alētheia and lēthē. In its Platonic definition, the task of memory is not to shelter this or that truth, this or that remembrance, but to keep watch over the soul's very openness, its own unconcealment. The anamnestic structure of consciousness refers not to a chronological past or to ontic preeminence but, rather, to the very structure of truth. Being incapable of grasping itself and transmitting itself without becoming a remembered thing, this structure can preserve itself only by remaining immemorial in memory, by betraying itself, as Idea, in giving itself to sight--that is, in giving itself not as a teaching (didaskalia) but as a divine mission (theia moira). In modern terms: as historicoepochal opening.
Truth is thus not the tradition of either an esoteric or a public doctrine, as is maintained by the false determination of a tradition still dominant today. Truth is, rather, a memory that, in its very taking place, forgets itself and destines itself, as both historical opening and chronothesis. This is why anamnesis is constituted in the Meno as a memory of "the time in which man was not yet man." What must be grasped and transmitted is what is absolutely nonsubjective: oblivion as such.
א Because the full essence of truth contains the non-essence and above all holds sway as concealing, philosophy as a questioning into this truth is intrinsically discordant. Philosophical thinking is gentle releasement that does not renounce the concealment of being as a whole. Philosophical thinking is especially the stern and resolute openness that does not disrupt the concealing but entreats its unbroken essence into the open region of understanding and thus into its own truth. 2
IV
This double structure of language and tradition lay at the center of the Greek reflection on logos from its beginnings. When Plato, in the Seventh Letter, presents the plane of language as governed by the irremediable difference between on and poion, Being and quality, what he seeks to bring to light is the necessarily fractured structure of linguistic signification as a specific weakness (to tōn logōn asthenes, Epistle VII, 343 a 1) of human communication, which thought must in some way master. Human language is necessarily pre-sup-positional and thematizing in the sense that in taking place, it decomposes the thing itself (to pragma auto) that is at issue in it and in it alone into a being about which something is said and a poion, a quality or determination that is said of it. To speak of a being, human language supposes and distances what it brings to light, in the very act in which it brings it to light. Language is thus, according to Aristotle's definition ( De anima, 430 b 26, which was already implicit in Plato Sophist, 262 e 6-7), legein ti kata tinos, a "saying something about something." It is therefore always presuppositional and objectifying, in that it always supposes that the being about which it speaks is already open and has already taken place. Presupposition is, indeed, the very form of linguistic signification--speaking kat' hypokeimenou, about a subject, on the basis of a presupposition. (The principle Plato seeks is, instead, a nonpresupposed principle, an arkhē anypothetos [ Republic 511 b 6]).
א Since there are two things, Being and quality, while the soul seeks to know the essence and not quality, each of the four [i.e., name, definition, image, and knowledge] offers the soul in speech and in facts what it does not seek. 3
א Thought finds the double; it divides it until it arrives at a simple term that can no longer be analyzed. It continues as long as it can, dividing it to the bottom [bathos]. The bottom of all things is matter; this is why all matter is dark, why language is light, and why thought is language. And thought, seeing language in every thing, judges that what lies beneath is a darkness beneath the light, just as the eye, being of a luminous nature, looks toward light and luminous colors and says that what lies beneath colors is dark and material. 4
V
This double structure of signification has its correlate in the fracture between name (onoma) and defining discourse (logos) that traverses all of language and that the Greeks considered so important as to attribute its discovery to Plato himself In truth, it was Antisthenes who first insisted on the radical asymmetry between these two levels of language, stating that simple and primal substances can have names but no logos.
The plane of discourse is always already anticipated by the hermeneutics of Being implicit in names, for which language cannot give reasons (logon didonai) in propositions. According to this conception, what is unsayable is not what language does not at all bear witness to but, rather, what language can only name. Discourse cannot say what is named by the name. What is named by the name is transmitted and abandoned in discourse, as untransmittable and unsayable. The name is thus the linguistic cipher of presupposition, of what discourse cannot say but can only presuppose in signification. Names certainly enter into propositions, but what is said in propositions can be said only thanks to the presupposition of names.
א Primal elements . . . do not have logos. Each alone by itself can only be named; discourse can add nothing to it, neither that it is nor that it is not, for that would be to add to it existence or non-existence, whereas if we are to speak of it itself we must add nothing to it. . . . [Primal elements] can only be named, for they have only a name. 5
א I can only name objects. Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is. 6
VI
In Aristotle's thought, the double structure of linguistic presupposition is identified with the logico-metaphysical structure of knowledge, whose foundation it articulates. The Being that the name indeterminately grasps as one is what the logos necessarily presents according to the plurality of ti kata tinos. This is why, in Aristotle, the question of the foundation (of Being as arkhē) has the following form: "why, through what does something belong to (or is something said of) something else?" (zēteitai de to dia ti aei houtōs; dia ti allo allōi tini hyparkhei; "the foundation is always sought thus: why does something belong to [does something lie beneath as the principle of] something?" [ Metaphysics, 1041 a 10]). Truth, the originary unconcealment in which each being shows itself, is thus separated from beings and presupposed as the foundation of meaningful discourse, the foundation of the fact that something is predicated of something. As foundation, it is what always already was (to ti ēn einai) knowable and known. Knowledge of it, however, cannot in itself be formulated, either in the mind or in propositions; it can only be "touched" (thigein) by the intellect (nous) and uttered in the name. This arche-past, this ineffable Being that has already been, thus becomes the dia ti, that through the presupposing of which something can be known and said of something. In remaining ineffable, it thus guarantees that discourse has a meaning, that it is founded, and that it speaks about something (that it speaks by means of a hypokeimenon, a pre-supposition). Insofar as it is presupposed in discourse, the foundation is hypokeimenon, subject and matter, that is, the potentiality (dynamis) of logos; insofar as it is noetically known in its truth, it is, instead, telos, event and fulfillment of what always already was.
(The duality of Grund and Bewegung by which Hegel articulates his logic of grounding is implicit in this presupposition of the foundation.)
א All assertion [phasis] is something-about-something and, as affirmation, is either true or false. But this is not so with thinking. The thinking of what is according to what was [ho tou ti esti kata to ti ēn einai] is true, and yet it is not something-about-something. 7
VII
Let us analyze the mechanism of presupposition and foundation in Aristotle more closely. In Book Gamma of the Metaphysics, it is articulated through the distinction between hen sēmainein (signifying one) and kath'henos sēmainein (signifying about one). The entire demonstration by refutation of the principle of noncontradiction rests on the assumption that there is necessarily a point at which language no longer signifies about something, but rather signifies something. For Aristotle, this limit point is the nonhypothetical principle (which we always carry with us in knowledge) on which he founds the "strongest of principles," the principle of noncontradiction and, along with it, the very possibility of meaningful discourse. Only because there is a point at which language signifiesone is it possible to signify about that one, uttering meaningful statements. The nonhypothetical principle is the foundation, that alone through the presupposing of which there can be knowledge and logos; it is possible to speak and to state propositions about a subject (kath' hypokeimenou) because what is thus presupposed is the fundamental intentionality of language, its signifying-and-touching-one. (What was the weakness of logos for Plato becomes for Aristotle the strength of logos. The Platonic constitution of truth, unlike the Aristotelian, never comes to a halt at a presupposition.)
א The foundation cannot be said on the basis of a presupposition. Otherwise there would be a foundation of the foundation. The foundation is presupposed, and it appears to be anterior to what is predicated. 8
א Every truth that is not itself a first principle must be demonstrated by means of some truth that is a first principle. Therefore, in any inquiry, it is a prerequisite to have a full understanding of the principle that, under analysis, we see to guarantee the certainty of all the other propositions that are deduced from it. 9
VIII
It is this presuppositional structure of language and reflection that Hegel develops in the duality of "ground" (Grund) and "condition" (Bedingung) in the chapter of the Science of Logic devoted to the problem of the "ground" or "foundation." The condition is the immediate, that "to which the ground refers as essential presupposition." It is thus what lanU+ 00AD guage always presupposes in the name for the sake of the relation it establishes: "the non-relational, to which relation, in which the non-relation is condition, is extrinsic." The ground, on the other hand, is "the relation or form by which the determinate existence of the condition is merely material." In the name, the pure, nonrelational, and immediate Being of something is thus presupposed; then it is assumed that this nonrelational enters into the relation of predication in the form of a subject. The task of the dialectic of grounding is to show how condition and ground are not two independent realities but, rather, "the two sides of the whole" that "each presuppose the other" and whose truth is to be found in the reciprocal overcoming constitutive of the "tautological movement of the thing to itself." This is why it is not at all possible to oppose presupposition and ground, which, in isolation, exhibit only their essential negativity. The tradition of truth has the threefold form of presupposition, ground, and their unity in the thing itself. (This unity of name [the Father], logos [the Son], and their spiritual relation is the speculative content of the doctrine of the Trinity.)
א The rose in potentiality, the rose in actuality, and the rose in potentiality and actuality are not other and different. . . . Thus I see the one and threefold rose thanks to the one and threefold principle. But I thus see the principle shining in everything, as there is no principle that is not one and threefold. . . . Hence when I see God not presupposing his principle, when I see God presupposing his principle, and when I see God emerging from both, I do not see three gods but the unity of divinity in the trinity. 10
IX
Let us now once again ask: how can there be a tradition of truth? How is it possible to transmit not a thing but an unconcealment? What do human beings transmit in transmitting language to themselves? It is certain that the mechanism of presupposition and foundation has, in our time, entered a lasting crisis. Hegel was the last thinker who, through the movement of dialectical negativity, sought to assure the historical self-movement of truth (the fulfillment of which he also announced). And it is surely not an accident that the thinker who posed the question of the ground and its nullity more forcefully than any other in our century is also the one who most vigorously posed the problem of tradition and its destruction. Today we find ourselves more and more thrown before the originary unconcealment of truth. We can neither transmit nor master this unconcealment, which, as a dark presupposition, is abandoned in the tradition to which it destines us. The absence of a foundation for truth--that is, the radical crisis of the presupposition--is itself thought according to the form of the presupposition. (This is the structure of trace and originary writing in which our age has remained imprisoned. Truth is written--that is, it always remains presupposed and, at the same time, deferred in its very taking place.)
When Neoplatonism, at the end of the ancient world, undertook its summation of pagan philosophy in the form of a synthesis between Platonism and Aristotelianism, it was forced to rethink the problem of the foundation as an absolutization of the presupposition and its transcendence. Plato's arkhē anypothetos, his nonpresupposed and nonpresupposable principle, thus assumed the status of the ineffability and incomprehensibility of the Neoplatonic One, which gives itself only in an infinite flight from itself to itself. In the words of the last diadoch of pagan philosophy, it is a pure, incomprehensible plane, or in the words of Proclus, the Unparticipated at the foundation of all participation:
א All that is unparticipated constitutes the participated out of itself. All hypostases are linked by an upward tension to existences not participated. The unparticipated, having the logos of unity (being, that is, its own and not another's, and being separated from the participated) generates what can be participated. For either it must remain fixed in sterility and isolation, and so must lack a place of honour; or else it will give something of itself, such that the receiver becomes a participant and the given subsists by participation. Everything that is participated, becoming a property of that by which it is participated, is secondary to that which in all is equally present and has filled them all out of its own being. That which is in one is not in the others; that which is present to all alike, that it may illuminate all, is not in any one, but is prior to them. For either it is in all, or in one out of all, or prior to all. But a principle which was in all would be divided amongst all, and would itself require a further principle to unify the divided; and further, all the particulars would no longer participate in the same principle, but this in one and that in another, through the diremption of its unity. And if it be in one out of all, it will be a property no longer of all but of one. If, then, it is both common to all that can participate and identical for all, it must be prior to all: such is the Unparticipated. 11
א Perhaps the absolutely ineffable is so ineffable that one cannot even say of it that it is ineffable. As to the One, it is ineffable in the sense that it cannot be grasped by a definition and a name, or a distinction such as that between the knowable and the knowing. It must be conceived as a kind of threshing floor, a light, smooth glowing in which no point can be distinguished from any other. 12
X
Have we moved even one step beyond this unparticipated threshing floor, where "no point can be distinguished from any other" and in which we nevertheless find both destiny and sending? Do we experience the principle of all things as anything other than an Unparticipated that destines and historically produces us as parts, im-parting us in its incessant participation? Are we truly capable of conceiving the generic and universal essence of human being and its community without presuppositions? Are we capable of thinking of the tradition of truth and language as anything other than an unfounded and yet destining presupposition?
The historico-social experience of our time is that of an original partition, an Ur-teilung, that has no appropriation to accomplish, a sending that has no message, a destiny that does not originate in any foundation. Of the three categories by which Carl Schmitt articulates the political-"taking" (Nehmen), "dividing" (Teilen), and "pastoring" (Weiden)--Teilen is the one that is fundamental here. We are united only through our common participation in an Unparticipated; we are anticipated by a presupposition, but one without an origin; we are divided, without any inheritance. This is why everything we can take is always already divided, and why the community that binds us--or, rather, the community into which we are thrown--cannot be a community of something into which we are appropriated and from which we are subsequently separated. Community is from the beginning a community of parts and parties. (The domination and simultaneous devastation of the form of the party, its destitution of every foundation, has its root in this epochal situation.)
It is this epochal situation that has been most rigorously considered in France by Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot as "inoperative community" and "unavowable community," and it is the constitution of this very figure of presupposition that, in Italy, Massimo Cacciari has sought in the mystical tradition. Our time thus registers the demand for a community without presuppositions; yet without realizing it, it simultaneously maintains the empty form of presupposition beyond all foundations--presupposition of nothing, pure destination. Damascius's "light and smootn" threshing floor, or Proclus's Unparticipated principle. This is the root of our discomfort and, at the same time, our only hope.
א Sie sich nicht fassen können Einander, die zusammenlebten Im Gediichnis.
(They cannot grasp one another who lived together in remembrance.) 13
א It is not enough to say that there is an undecidable in discourse. It does not suffice to decide the fate, structure, or power of discourse. Today the undecidable is to be found everywhere as an answer, one which one would like to substitute for the old answers to this or that truth, or to Truth. . . . The signs of the decomposition, dislocation, and dismemberment of the system--that is, of the entire architectonics and history of the West--which, for example, are called . . . "text," "signifier," "lack," "derivation," "trace," etc., have been converted into values; they have thus been erected as truths and hypostatized as substances. 14
XI
In 1795, Hölderlin composed a brief note in which it seemed to him that he had "made a step beyond the Kantian borders." The text, which bears the name "Judgment and Being," poses the problem of "absolute Being" (Sein schlechthin), which cannot in any way be the presupposition of a division. Being that is expressed reflectively in identity (A = A or, in Hölderlin's terms, Ich bin Ich) is not absolute Being but, according to Hölderlin, Being as the necessary presupposition of the division of subject and object. This division, which is judgment (Urtheil) as originary partition (Ur-theilung), contains a presupposition of a whole, of which subject and object are parts. ("In the concept of separation, there already lies the concept of the reciprocity of object and subject and the necessary presupposition of a whole of which object and subject form the parts. 'I am I' is the most fitting example of this concept of originary division [Urtheilung].") 15
Absolute Being-one is therefore not to be mistaken for the self-identical Being of reflection, which, as the form of self-consciousness, always already implies the possibility of division. ("How can I say: 'I!' Without self-consciousness? Yet how is self-consciousness possible? In opposing myself to myself, separating myself from myself, yet in recognizing myself as the same in the opposed regardless of this separation.") 16
Hölderlin's attempt to grasp undivided Being, which cannot be presupposed in division, is very close here to the central concern of the Philosophical Notes of his friend Isaak von Sinclair, which seeks to consider precisely "the unposited" (athesis) without falling into the form of presuppositional reflection:
א As soon as one wants to know and posit theos (athetic unity, essence), it is transformed into an "I" (into Fichte's absolute "I"). Insofar as one reflects on its highest essence and posits it, one separates it and, after separating it, gives it back its character of non-separation by means of unification, such that Being is so to speak presupposed in separation: id est the imperfect concept. Hen kai pan. 17
א Reflection has made nature manifold through the "I," for it opposed it to the unity of the "I." But reflection said only that if a manifold was outside the "I," originary division [Urteilung] was possible. It was certainly outside the "I"; but it was not outside reflection. For if we supposed it to be outside reflection, we would simply have deferred, and not explained, the problem of its genesis, which led us thus far. For one would always ask how the manifold in reflection derives from the manifold outside reflection. By hypothesizing this reality of the manifold, we would have only paid attention to a transcendental demand of reflection, which always requires grounding, even outside its limits. Transcendental reflection imagines there to be, beyond the reciprocal acts of subject and object, an activity of the subject that is independent of it, the "I" as substance--yet here there is an impossibility of thinking [Denkunmöglichkeit]. 18
VII
It may be that modern thought has not truly reckoned with the "impossibility of thinking" implicit in Sinclair's text. What, indeed, does it mean to think the One in language without presupposing its destining partition? To think, in other words, a principle not presupposed in becoming, the nonlinguistic not presupposed in the linguistic, the name not presupposed in discourse? To think the groundlessness and emptiness of language and its representations without any negativity? At issue here is whether the form of representation and reflection can still be maintained beyond representation and reflection, as contemporary thought, in its somnambulant nihilism, seems determined to maintain; or whether a realm is not instead opened here for a task and a decision of an entirely different kind. The fulfillment of the form of presupposition and the decline of the power of representation imply a poetic task and an ethical decision.
Only on the basis of this decision and this task is it possible to understand the sense in which the "Oldest Program for a System of German Idealism" founds the possibility of an overcoming of the State on the appearance of an ethics that would abandon the "philosophy of the letter" for the sake of an art of poetry (Dichtkunst)--an ars dictaminis, literally an "art of dictation," restored to its original dignity.
Are we capable today of no longer being philosophers of the letter (Buchstabenphilosophen), without thereby becoming either philosophers of the voice or mere enthusiasts? Are we capable of reckoning with the poetic presentation of the vocation that, as a nonpresupposed principle, emerges only where no voice calls us? Only then would tradition cease to be the remission and betrayal of an unsayable transmission, affirming itself truly as Über-lieferung, self-liberation and self-offering: hen diapheron heautōi, "one transporting itself," without vocation and without destiny. Tradition would then have truly for-given what cannot, in any sense, be presupposed.
א Among men, one has to make sure with every thing that it is some thing, that is, that it is recognizable in the medium [moyen] of its appearance, that the way in which it is delimited can be determined and thought. 19
א La poésie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose.
(Poetry no longer imposes itself; it exposes itself.) 20

Notes:
1.
Plato, Epistle II, 312 d 5-313 e 7; the Greek text is in Plato, with an English Translation, vol. 7: Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 410.

2.
Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell ( New York: Harper San Francisco, 1977), p. 138; the original is in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9: Wegmarken ( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), p. 94.

3.
Plato, Epistle VII, 343 b 9-c 3; the Greek text is in Plato, with an English Translation, 7: 536.

4.
Plotinus, Ennead II, 4, 5; the Greek text is in Plotinus, with an English Translation, vol. 2: Ennead II, 1-9, trans. A. H. Armstrong ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 112-14.

5.
Plato, Theatetus, 201 e-202 b, in Plato, with an English Translation, vol. 2, trans. Harold North Fowler ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 222-24.

6.
The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny ( London: Blackwell, 1994), p. 8; the original is in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, prop. 3.221, in his Werkausgabe, vol. 1 ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 19.

7.
Aristotle, De anima, 430 b 26-29; the Greek text is in Aristotle in TwentyThree Volumes, vol. 8: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 174.

8.
Aristotle, Physics, 189 a 30-31; the Greek text is in Aristotle. The Physics, trans. Francis M. Cornford ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 62.

9.
Dante Alighieri, De monarchia, I, 2, in Monarchy and Three Political Letters, trans. Donald Nicholl ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954), pp. 4-5.

10.
Nicholas Cusanus, "Trialogus de possest," in Philosophisch-theologische Schriften, ed. Leo Gabriel, trans. Wilhelm Dupré ( Vienna: Herder, 1966), 2: 324-28.

11.
Proclus, The Elements of Theology: A Revised Text, trans. E. R. Dodds ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), prop. 23, pp. 27-29.

12.
Damascius, Aporiai kai lyseis, I, 5, in Traité des premiers principes, vol. 1: De l'ineffable et de l'un, ed. Leendert Gerrit Westernink, trans. Joseph Combès ( Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986), pp. 10-11. [My translation from the Greek.-Ed.]

13.
Friedrich Hölderlin, "Patmos," strophe 10, in Hölderlin: Selected Verse, ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger ( London: Anvil, 1986), p. 199.

14.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Le discours de la syncope ( Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976), pp. 1-7.
15.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 37.

16.
Ibid., p. 38.


17.
Isaak von Sinclair, Philosophical Notes, published in Hannelore Hegel, Isaak von Sinclair zwischen Fichte, Hölderlin und Hegel ( Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1971), pp. 268-69.

18.
Ibid., pp. 273-74.


19.
Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, p. 101.

20.
Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichard with Rolf Bücher ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 3: 181.