Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe by Joseph D. O'Neil

Abstract

Reviewed by: Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe by Joseph D. O'Neil Christine Lehleiter Joseph D. O'Neil. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 312 pp. As many of us would concede and regret, we live in a moment of crisis of the political and in times of incredibly divisive politics. Joseph O'Neil's Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe may be motivated by this crisis, but it also shows us, beyond the current moment, that the antagonistic and contingent is at the very heart of the political. Our wish for a "pacified globe" (Carl Schmitt, as quoted by O'Neil, 25) might never be fulfilled, but that could be a good thing. At the core of this project is the question of how political action is possible without relying on essentialism. We do not need to be reminded of current discussions to understand that this is a timely project. O'Neil offers a sophisticated account of the concepts behind these debates which delivers to the reader both a panoramic display of political theory and a careful consideration of literary texts. [End Page 314] Drawing on twentieth-century heavyweights on both sides of the political divide, most notably Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, O'Neil sets out to explore and reconceptualize the political in the age of Goethe. The author does not understand his contribution as a genealogy of political concepts from Lessing to Arendt and beyond. His interest is more structural than historical. O'Neil argues that the conceptualization of the political in literary texts around 1800 is characterized by features of contingency and rupture that are captured in metaphors of birth and are best understood using Arendt's concept of natality. The book's premise is that "birth qua natality is the main marker of a discourse of the political in the decades around 1800" (25). Natality, as second birth, overlaps with birth where it promises something absolutely new and it diverges from birth where the latter is bound to causation and determinism. Natality promises both novelty and contingency and is, for Arendt, the precondition for entering the political sphere as an acting being. To put it in Schmittian terms, natality marks the state of exception in which the sovereign acts and "the power of real life breaks through the crust of mechanism that has become torpid by repetition" (Schmitt, as quoted by O'Neil, 21). The monograph is organized in five chapters focusing on literary texts by Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist, which are framed by a detailed introduction to the monograph's conceptual framework and a concluding chapter. In the first chapter, O'Neil reads Goethe's early lyric ("Prometheus" and "Explanation of an Old Woodcut") in the context of the American Revolution as literature that "reflects and anticipates political forms" with the aim to demonstrate an "understanding of revolution beyond the dynamics of [autopoietic] production" (52). In the second chapter, the author problematizes a reading of Lessing's Nathan that proclaims a pacified community in the name of the all embracing kinship group. Reading Nathan, O'Neil is interested in how "natal semiotics can create political community through alternate versions of generation and genre" (48). The third chapter discusses the autopoeitic model of Romantic critique and economics. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann, O'Neil highlights the totalizing tendencies inherent in these models and their inability to provide for second-order observers. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the focus of the fourth chapter. Here, O'Neil argues that the often assumed organicism of the work—as proclaimed by Friedrich Schlegel's Meister essay—needs to be questioned in light of the contingent ending of Wilhelm's Bildung by means of the acceptance of a child whose origin is in question. In the fifth chapter, Kleist's mothers (Marquise von O. . ., Amphitryon, Penthesilea) are interpreted in the context of Julia Kristeva's readings of Arendtian natality. At the core, the question here is "how to create lasting institutions without stable foundations" (51). The study brings a number of discourses into relation (biology, selfhood, economics etc.), arguing that they...