A Reconsideration of the Romantic Fragment

Abstract

This article argues that Schlegel's fragment-practice allows not only a diagnosis of various scientific and epistemological contexts but also an alteration of their rules. What Hans Blumenberg calls the “Copernican comparative” leads Schlegel to entertain and reject the notion of a classification of literary forms. In its place, the notion of writing as a kind of general science of communication that includes its own materiality arises. Exploiting the properties of such a communication—which is fragmentary in general structure, and shot through with the capacity for irony—allows the practice of the fragment to do more than critique the categories of sciences like the geology Novalis learned in Freiberg. The fragment's “unworking” action as conceived by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy produces concrete second-order traces in the structure of communication itself, producing and potentially changing the interface between signification and being.