‘A mysterious malady of the times’

Abstract

Eric Santner has described a peculiar agitation that increasingly haunted people in the wake of the shift in political theology after the French Revolution. The ‘substance’ that previously gave the sovereign his or her splendour was turned into an immanent pressure: an irritation of the flesh. Early in his life, Robert Musil visited a psychiatric hospital in Rome. He was struck by the physical agitation of the patients and sensed a similarity between their spasms and the general state of society. He repeatedly compared his times to a madhouse. This agitation was increased by the prevailing moral rigidity. Moreover, both Ulrich, the protagonist of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Musil himself display a remarkable incapacity to adopt a social position in society. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is a novel that takes up the task to find a way to cope with the agitation of the flesh, as Santner described it. Musil called the problems of his time ‘symptoms’ and with his novel he wanted to find a way to work through these symptoms. Musil's work is thus a rich exploration of the phenomena Santner has described.