Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval
2019; Temple University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/702586
ISSN2640-7310
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Philosophy and Science
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeMythological Indifference in Schelling and NervalGabriel TropGabriel TropUniversity of North Carolina Chapel Hill Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhat are the movements of thought? The question is not a self-evident one. It is possible to examine thought, or the conditions that give rise to thought, from the perspective of immobility rather than mobility. The mutual implication of movement, thought, and signification with one another—or the force that binds the movement of minds, the movement of bodies, and the movement of signs in discourse—has nevertheless had a distinctively generative power in the intellectual currents that run throughout Romantic philosophy and aesthetic production. Already in Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, the promenade is a privileged site of ontological disclosure. A revelatory “feeling of existence” permeates the consciousness of Rousseau’s walker: “Nothing external to oneself, nothing but oneself and one’s own existence—as long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient, like God” (1047). Paul de Man singled out Rousseau’s “feeling of existence” as a primordial scene for the emergence of Romantic subjectivity, one that reveals “the ontological priority of consciousness over the sensuous object” (45). While it is possible to discern a prioritization of consciousness in acts of recollection or reflection, in the sentiment of existence itself there can be no ontological prioritization, neither of consciousness nor of the object. Here, there is nothing exterior to the self: consciousness is submerged in and fully absorbed by exteriority. In this instant, the walker has entered into a zone in which the boundaries between interior and exterior, subject and nature, have been suspended: an ambulatory absolute. Rousseau’s fifth promenade can be regarded from another angle than that of Romantic subjectivity, namely, as a primordial scene for the genealogy of Romantic indifference.What is Romantic indifference? One must carefully distinguish this concept of indifference—or the indifferentiating functions of Romantic thought—from the everyday notions of indifference as a lack of sympathy, feeling, or interest. The exploration of zones of suspended differentiation comprises a pervasive pattern of Romantic art and philosophy, above all in the German tradition. Authors such as Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, and Friedrich Schelling repeatedly turn to the figure of the “indifference point” (Indifferenzpunkt) as a material, conceptual, and aesthetic operation, akin to that point in a magnet at which two polarities neutralize one another and yet nevertheless remain operative, commingling seemingly exclusive domains. Schelling, in his lectures on the philosophy of art, would come to equate this precise operation—the indifference of chaotic, unconscious matter and organized, conscious ideality—with the dynamics of the absolute that surface in the work of art.The risks, rewards, and generative potentiality of this state—one in which the boundaries of mind and matter become porous and the thinking subject enters into a zone of indifferentiation with the world that surrounds him or her—surfaces in a concentrated form in the works of Gérard de Nerval. In his work, such a state is distinctly associated with a mobility of mind and body, or the incessant wandering, movement, erring of a subject in a state of perpetual revolutions, devolutions, involutions. Promenades et Souvenirs—walks and recollections—movement and thought: such is the horizon within which a certain form of absolute signification unfolds in Nerval’s work. This mode of signification is absolute in the German Romantic sense of the term—a tradition with which Nerval was deeply acquainted—because it is constantly moving from one framework of order and disorder to the next, conditioning and unconditioning itself in and through the movements of matter, thought, and language: an ambulatory absolute rather than one confined to a specific discursive domain (the literary, the philosophical, or the scientific, for example).In the forms taken by Nerval’s ambulatory absolute, one may discern the contours of an idiosyncratic and erudite mythopoiesis characterized by an oscillation between binding functions that unite the entire field of beings and particularizing functions that individuate and grant to a singular being or community a powerful sense of consequence. This mythopoetic practice is, however, anything but a stabilizing, grounded essentialism that could constitute a collective body—for example, a nation—as a privileged and exclusive grouping based on a substantive normativity that would pervade all forms of cultural production. Rather, Nerval’s specific form of mythopoiesis exhibits affinities with attempts in German-language literature and philosophy—as one finds in Goethe, Schlegel, and Schelling, among others—to articulate a new mythology that has its source in transformation, metamorphosis, flows of becoming rather than a plenitude of being.I approach Nerval’s specific form of ambulatory absolute through the construction of a mythological matrix derived from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. From a purely philological perspective, the pairing of Schelling and Nerval appears to be suspect; to my knowledge, there is no evidence that Nerval ever engaged directly with Schelling’s works. However, Nerval did immerse himself in literary worlds that exhibit affinities with Schelling’s thought and, in some cases, that had been directly influenced by Schelling, as is the case in the mythological phantasmagoria of the Classical Walpurgis Night in Goethe’s Faust II. Nerval writes in the introduction to his translation and analyses of Goethe’s Faust about the “modern pantheism” of Goethe (1.502), which he understands as the articulation of a cosmos that differs substantially from Dante’s Catholicism and the world of antiquity. Nerval’s description of this “modern pantheism” postulates a cosmological form in which the expansive movements of mind and matter confront a void, one that is both an outer limit of perception as well as the condition for a propulsive drive: “beyond the brilliant regions of [Dante’s] Catholic paradise … there is yet further and further the void [le vide] whose end even the eye of God cannot perceive. It seems that creation goes ever onward, flourishing in that inexhaustible space, and that the immortality of supreme intelligence continually labors to conquer this empire of nothingness and night” (1.503). In Goethe’s Faust, Nerval confronts an absolute of movement rather than of Being, one in which all entities, including a supposedly all-powerful deity, brush up against an unconditioned, inexhaustible void that is simultaneously a threat and the condition of possibility for a generative flourishing. Goethe’s Faust, as a text structured by the disequilibrium of agonistic forces (e.g., expansion and contraction, light and gravity, attraction and repulsion, affirmation and negation), presents Nerval with a model of mythological signification whose grammar is informed by the operations of Naturphilosophie.Following this thread, I uncover a generative mythological matrix in the operations of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, largely drawn from a foundational text written shortly before the Philosophy of Art (1802–3): The First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799). The ontology of Naturphilosophie brings to light philosophical and imaginative operations that are more provocative than what can be found explicitly in Schelling’s own lectures on the philosophy of art. Such operations depend upon the following elements: the unconditioning power of an agonistic play of forces; models of individuation that imbue forms with a potential for deviation and transgression; and zones of indifference that render differences inoperative and disrupt processes of attribution and logics of subjectification (e.g., the difference between the living and the dead, the blessed and the damned).I initially suggest the way in which a nature-philosophical conceptual matrix—consisting of force, individuation, and indifference—can reframe mythological projects of Romanticism. The new mythology of German Romanticism has often been interpreted as an attempt to rehumanize a world that seems evacuated of transcendence, to construct a new religious sentiment that would be capable of uniting human beings into an organic whole. Mythological thought that coheres with the symbolic operations of Naturphilosophie, however, exceeds the sacred, the humanistic, and the organic, and is inflected by contact with the chaotic, the inhuman, and the inorganic. Romantic mythology, seen from this perspective, consists in aesthetic-existential translations of key operations of material-physical dynamics.Then I turn to an examination of works by Gérard de Nerval, with a focus on Aurélia, through the lens of this mythological matrix. The works of Nerval and Schelling resonate with one another inasmuch as their nature-philosophical and mythological projects harbor a simultaneously normalizing and a denormalizing potential. Nerval explores these often contradictory normalizing and denormalizing tendencies in aesthetic contexts through the establishment of zones of indifference in which oppositions are suspended: between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, redemption and damnation. Nerval’s work is saturated with the potential risks and rewards that can emerge from a mythology dynamized by operations of indifference. The risk is that such a mythology can catapult subjects in and out of normative frameworks, thereby embedding them in the retributive semantics of law, transgression, and punishment; the potential reward of mythological indifference consists in the positing of an equally possible zone of nonattribution in which subjects might counteract the very terms through which power marks their bodies and minds. To this end, Nerval develops a mythological idiolect that catapults the imagination out of the normalizing forms of biopower by lingering within zones of mythological indifference between the living and the dead. However, unlike a thinker such as Agamben, who often seeks the possibility of redemption in a contemplative suspension of differentiation as such, Nerval’s work seeks a redemptive power by actively wandering among differences; only in the constant attentiveness to the often microscopic movements of the world can there be a sense of hope for the world. Uncovering the nature-philosophical currents in the Romantic discourse of mythology can help illuminate the presence of these operations in the works of Nerval.Schelling, in his Philosophy of Art, writes: “Mythology is the necessary condition and first content of all art” (45). While the primary operation of art is to express an “indifference” between the universal and the particular—as well as between the material and the ideal—mythology expresses this indifference within the particular itself, that is, in a sensuous, material object. One may therefore construe mythology as a second-order particularization (the particular embodiment of an indifference between universal and particular). Only through this second-order particularization can operations of indifference—for example, between the organic and the inorganic—enter into concrete sensuous reality and thereby become capable of reconfiguring the web of human relations. In Friedrich Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry, for example, poesy (Poesie) belongs primordially to a representational drive that can be found in both organic life and inorganic matter; poesy, as an all-encompassing mode of expression that includes the inorganic and the inhuman within its scope, takes precedence over the more limited generic figuration of the poem. Schlegel asks, “what are [poems] compared to the formless and unconscious poesy that stirs in the plant, shines in the light, smiles in the child, shimmers in the blossom of youth, glows in the loving breast of women?” (285). Poems and works of art—for both Schlegel and Schelling—nevertheless occupy a privileged position in the domain of mythology, as they establish signifying practices through which the inhuman and nonconscious dimensions of natural poesy flow into and reconfigure the realm of the human.Following Schelling and Schlegel, I define a mythological matrix as a set of operations through which material dynamics beyond the human enter into human practices of signification. In Philosophy of Art, Schelling goes so far as to postulate “the possibility of a future mythology and symbolism” that “might be found in higher speculative physics” (77). Schelling’s speculative physics, unlike empirical physics, views physical forces (of attraction and repulsion, contraction and expansion, gravity and light) as manifestations of an unconditioned absolute. A mythology based on speculative physics would thus channel these material or physical forces into aesthetic form and produce ways of being in the world that would crystallize around the infinite operations of such an absolute. A speculative mythology of Naturphilosophie thereby necessitates asking the questions: What would it mean to translate Naturphilosophie into a practice or a way of life? In what way could a mythological matrix organized around the movements of Naturphilosophie become personally, socially, or politically effective, and what might that entail? A Romantic mythology of this sort would begin with localized operations within Naturphilosophie in order to construct an inventorium of imaginary and discursive movements. Three such operations become significant in the construction of the mythological matrix of Naturphilosophie: force as attraction, repulsion, and the second-order force that disjunctively binds them, thereby conditioning and unconditioning the real; individuation as the positing of a discrete difference; and indifferentiation as the suspension of a difference.As Christoph Menke has shown, the concept of force has played a constitutive role in the history of aesthetics, and specifically in the positing of a form-generating force of the soul distinct from the biological, the mechanical, or the psychological: a force thus outside normativity, predictability, and causality. According to this notion of the aesthetic elaborated by Herder, the obscurity of force, although impersonal and nonsubjective, is nevertheless located within the human.1 The notion of force itself, however, cuts laterally across discursive fields: when surfacing in aesthetic discourses, in mystical discourses (e.g., in that of Böhme), in scientific discourses, or in nature-philosophical discourses, the concept performs different imaginative and epistemological functions, some of which overlap and resonate, some of which do not.2 The discourse of Schellingian Naturphilosophie and speculative physics, for example, thematizes force as the material (as opposed to merely logical) condition of possibility of all matter, both organic and inorganic. Developing an aesthetics of force through Naturphilosophie locates the unconditioning power of art at least partly outside the organic, and thus outside the self-organization of life.For the purposes of the new Romantic mythology, force carries with it a representational problem that makes it particularly apt as a proxy for the absolute. Strictly speaking, force can never appear as that which it is; it can only ever be indexed by appearances. For Schelling’s early Naturphilosophie, force thus comes to stand in for the material-transcendental as such. Force enacts a modal condensation, simultaneously designating the possible, the necessary, and the real: it constitutes a field that makes appearances possible; it has the necessary structure of a perturbed disequilibrium that always seeks and always fails to restore itself; and force is itself coextensive with the real, as Schelling will say that forces are not “behind” matter, but matter itself is nothing but forces.3 When attending to force as part of a mythological matrix, certain details become significant, for example, the relation of force to counterforce, zones of equilibrium or disequilibrium, the generative and destructive nature of agonistic forces, degrees of order and instability, or the postulating of non-agonistic forces that are merely differential. Forces can be expansive, contractive, or, as in the case of gravity in Schelling’s First Outline, a disjunctive synthesis that holds these expansive and contractive forces together by maintaining their agonism.One of the foundational insights of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie consists in the idea that no force can be operative by itself, just as no individuated thing or condition can claim sovereignty or totality from the perspective of the absolute; every force conditions and is unconditioned by another. By considering the generative and destructive force of nature through movements of attraction and repulsion—or analogically of contraction and expansion, gravity and light—Schelling thus lays the groundwork for an aesthetics of force that seeks to bring processes of unconditioning out of their latency. In the first division of the First Outline, Schelling explains precisely what is entailed by understanding nature as the unconditioned:1. Since Nature gives itself its sphere of activity, no foreign power can interfere with it; all of its laws are immanent, or Nature is its own legislator (autonomy of Nature).2. Whatever happens in Nature must also be explained from the active and motive principles which lie in it, or Nature suffices for itself (autarchy of Nature).3. They are both contained in the proposition: Nature has unconditioned reality, a proposition which is precisely the principle of a philosophy of nature. (First Outline 17)According to the first proposition, the autonomy of nature, there is no outside to nature, no foreignness; all is immanence. As a consequence, there can be nothing within nature that is unnatural, unless this unnatural tendency is intrinsic to nature itself. According to the second proposition, the autarchy of nature, nature is self-sufficient, characterized by excess but without lack. Both of these propositions follow from nature as something to which no conditions can be attached. Each individual and differentiated entity is a condition; nature presupposes forces that simultaneously condition and uncondition. Translated into a mythological function, the play of forces harnesses this power of unconditioning in order to bring the conditions of knowledge or forms of attribution—the power by which a subject is conjoined to its predicates, for example—back into contact with processes of becoming. The power of unconditioning can thus be mythologically directed against the stabilization of forms of power based on an attributive logic and normative interpellation (as exemplified, for example, by the statement “Gérard de Nerval is insane”).Individuation is one of the central problems of Schelling’s early nature-philosophical texts, above all in the First Outline.4 How is it that nature as pure productivity outside all space and time, natura naturans, steps out of itself and generates differentiated products in space and time? Such is the question of individuation, and already in the World Soul, Schelling saw individuation as the central operation of life: “The universal principle of life individualizes itself in every individual living being (as if in a unique world) according to the different degree of its receptivity” (quoted in translator’s introduction, First Outline xx). In the First Outline, life, because it is dependent on individuation, enters into tension with nature, which seeks to be pure process without any differentiated content. Unlike Spinoza’s conatus, which describes the power by which a being maintains itself in its being and seeks to thrive, nature desires not the maintenance nor the increased power of the individual, but its elimination. Schelling thus describes life as an inhibition of nature’s desire to maintain itself in a state of pure productivity. Individuated matter—and with it, life and consciousness—is nothing but a manifestation of this primordial frustration: “We can think infinitely many points of inhibition—at each such point, the stream of Nature’s activity will be broken, as it were, its productivity annihilated. But at each moment comes a new impulse, as it were, a new wave, which fills this sphere afresh. In short, Nature is originally pure identity—nothing to be distinguished in it. Now, points of inhibition appear, against which, as limitations to its productivity, Nature constantly struggles. While it struggles against them, however, it fills this sphere again with its productivity” (First Outline 18). Such is the agonism of individuation. What would be the implications of this doctrine of individuation for the mythology of Naturphilosophie? First, something like an overturning of values emerges from the drama of individuation. What appears as life-sustaining—the Spinozan conatus of a being that strives to bolster its own existence—actually generates a struggle against nature inasmuch as nature sees diversity as an impediment to its desire to be pure process without product. The doctrine of individuation elaborated here produces a Romantic ironic function by which a subject steps out of its value system and inverts the frame of its being as an individuated being. This form of individuation instantiates a paradox: the individual appears unnatural, not as that which is outside of nature, but as an unnature at the heart of nature. Individuation occurs because nature is itself a deviant, eccentric system, always violating its own structure; the human is simply one being among many others that manifests this violation. In this instance, individuation is predicated upon deviation from a pattern, and it signals that process by which a system is rendered internally inconsistent with itself. Understanding individuation in this way entails embracing an internal inconsistency, an individual as exteriority to norm, rather than valorizing the individual as a norm.However, philosophical attempts to theorize individuation at this time often culminate in a generative problem rather than a definitive doctrine; individuation itself can be unconditioned as a figure of thought. Whereas individuation in the First Outline indexes a self-inconsistency of nature—and all difference is imbued with something equal parts lawful and anomalous—in Schelling’s later identity philosophy, as Daniel Whistler notes, individuation is affirmative: the cosmos saying yes to itself, loving itself, externalizing itself in order to better affirm its own generative power. The doctrines of individuation elaborated philosophically thus call out for distinct forms of mythopoiesis that bring individuation into a horizon of intelligibility: are forms of individuation stabilizing or destabilizing, affirmative or negative, healthy or unhealthy, normative or transgressive, erotic or violent, solid or liquid?If the second operation—that of individuation—harbors a potentiality of deviation, one in which human beings can thereby ironize their projects of life and embrace their status as deviant forms, the third mythological operation, that of indifference, represents yet another potential source of simultaneous normalization and denormalization. In the introduction to the First Outline, Schelling begins with the following axiom: “No identity in Nature is absolute, but all is only indifference” (220). Indifference here designates the suspension of a difference that still remains operative. Indifference can only ever appear locally, in spaces or at moments when a polarity becomes inoperative so as to keep the system in a state of dynamic flux. Schelling writes: “Only relative points of indifference … are always attained, never absolute ones, and every successively originated difference leaves behind a new and still unremoved antithesis, and this again passes into indifference, which, in its turn, partially removes the primary antithesis” (First Outline 220). Schelling describes indifference here as the removal of an antithesis: an opposition that was previously operative is made inoperative.Mythologically, the operation of indifference becomes of paramount importance when it manifests itself as the removal of an antithesis. An antithesis runs the risk of crystallizing into a stable pattern or structure: if an antithesis were to remain fixed in place, there would be no movement, no dynamic instability, an opposition at a standstill. Indifference destabilizes the antithesis, fluidifies it, so that a new antithesis can emerge only to be suspended once again. Reduced to its basic ontological operation, indifference produces a state of exception to an antithetical structure. The function of indifference can thus be mobilized against the stabilization of demarcations: here is the law, here is violation; here is the organic, here is the inorganic; this is man, this is woman. Zones of indifference can be invoked to perturb any oppositional structure that threatens to raise itself to the level of an inviolable law.Schelling’s Naturphilosophie harbors a latent dynamic grammar for mythological projects that bring individuation and normalization in contact with potentially denormalizing forces of unconditioning through operations of indifference. Gérard de Nerval’s works can be regarded as precisely such a project. Nerval draws on multiple, incommensurable, and often occult or arcane traditions in order to produce his own idiosyncratic patchwork of mythologies; Rodolphe Gasché claims that Nerval’s writings are chemical in the way they mix various traditions (88). The mythology of the occult associated with Nerval has, in the meantime, yielded to a different sort of mythologization, namely to his canonization as a poet of madness: the author who was interned in Dr. Emile Blanche’s asylum, who intimates a language other than that of reason (Foucault 363) and who ultimately succumbs to his illness when he hangs himself on January 26, 1855.Mythology as a practice of Romantic signification, however, must be strictly distinguished from ideologically stabilizing mythologies—or, in the Hegelian sense of the term, “substantial” mythologies—in which the key to Nerval’s writings might ultimately be sought or found in submerged occult meanings, in an essential link between madness and creativity, or even in his madness as a form of unreason that appears outside the normalizing discourses of scientific rationality. In Aurélia, the narrator—whom I call Nerval simply for the sake of convenience (and not because he should be identified with the biographical person Gérard Labrunie)—is constantly seeking out thresholds: passing between worlds, among forms, between life and death, consciousness and dream, reason and madness. That he appropriates both languages (the language of reason and the language of madness) reveals the extent to which one cannot merely relegate Nerval to the voice of unreason; the cosmos of the text is precisely not irrational—nor purely rational—as it erects a zone of indifference between the two codes among which the narrator may then wander.The narrator’s first mythological gesture in the opening sentences of Aurélia consists precisely in the traversal of a psychophysical boundary that troubles identity and difference. At the instant of falling asleep, the conscious self appears simultaneously continuous and discontinuous with its unconscious self: “I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world without a sense of dread. The first few instants of sleep are the image of death” (Aurélia 265). Nerval does not fall asleep: he crosses a threshold. Moreover, in the passage through gates of ivory (according to the antecedents in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, distorted or illusory visions) or horn (true visions), the narrator elides the contemporary and the ancient, truth and illusion, sleep, death and rebirth (as every sleep produces a second life, hence a death and rebirth). One threshold leads to another, generating a secondary oscillation between multiple thresholds: horn or ivory, truth or illusion, life or death. The dynamic mythopoiesis of this passage lies not in the allusion to the katabasis of the Odyssey or the Aeneid, but rather, manifests itself in its oscillating and indifferentiating textual movement.One of Nerval’s most significant mythological strategies—as a mythology not of a determinate content but as a textual wandering in the light of the unconditioned—is to turn Neoplatonism and its movement toward the One into an expansive ontology of the multiple. Nerval will not write about love that ends in plenitude, but about loves that have passed or are lost; indeed, Past Loves (Les Amours passées) was one of the original titles for his collection of stories Les filles du feu (Daughters of Fire; Brix 136), stories that themselves orbit around individual women and produce a constellation of particular erotic relations rather than an overwhelming desire for unity. To be sure, in Sylvie, the narrator will draw attention to the operation of idealization that must operate on the real: “Seen close, any real woman seemed too gross to our starry-eyed sensibilities. She had to appear a queen or goddess: above all, she had to lie beyond reach” (Sylvie 146). The idealization of the woman is an all-too-familiar topos, and one might be tempted to situate this idealization generically through the lens of Dante or Neoplatonic philosophy (Nerv
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