Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften by Sigrid Weigel

Abstract

550 Reviews his engagement with thewider world; a lengthypiece on non-European motifs in the literature of the nineteenth century, from Stifter to Fontane, proves how rewarding further treatment of all of the authors covered would be; and German accounts of encounters with 'natives' on thePacific island of Palau reveal how attitudes changed between the 'philosophical' travellers of the lateeighteenth century and thevisitors of the i86os whose clear design itwas topave theway forGerman colonial penetration. Most of the other chapters show less obvious connections to the overall theme as formulated in the titleof the collection. There are, however, discernible clusters of concern: two articles trace the influence of early Shakespeare criticism on Goethe's Gotz and his Shakespeare speech and the connections between Shakespeare and Schiller's aesthetics of cruelty; threearticles deal with the theme of death (inGleim's and C. E Meyer's writings, and in epitaphs for pets); two articles highlight prob lems of translation and redaction (the examples are some ofWalter Scott's Goethe translations and differentversions of B. Traven's stories). And then there are a few contributions which do not seem tobelong to any of the thematic groupings sketched above. Methodologically, most articles combine timely concerns with traditional ap proaches of philological meticulousness; all articles present rich insights and display stupendous knowledge; some intervene in general debates, some will be of interest only to a highly specialized readership. NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH FLORIAN KROBB Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwis senschaften. By SIGRID WEIGEL. Munich: Fink. 2oo6. 288 pp. ?29.90. ISBN 978-3-7705-4I73-7. Generation is one of themost widely used concepts in contemporary German dis course. On the one hand it is a convenient label fornewly self-styled social cohorts (such as 'generation.com' or 'Generation Golf'), on the other the concept seems to lend itself to a 'natural' way of categorizing and delimiting historical experience. It is precisely the concept's highly intuitive but undertheorized appeal that Sigrid Weigel analyses from a cultural-historical perspective. As Weigel's careful analysis of the complex semantic history of the term shows, the idea of generation is rooted in biological meaning, but at the same time it is used to regulate legal, social, and cul tural issues of affiliation.Mapping out the separation of the discourse of the natural sciences from thatof thehumanities, Weigel makes a case fornew formsof interdis ciplinary co-operation which would set epistemic differences between the disciplines in dialogue with one another. In thisway the book also offers amethodological per spective which attempts to bridge the ever widening gap between science discourse and thecultural disciplines. Cross-stitching thecultural and natural-science perspec tives in ten chapters, thebook offers a fascinating account of the career of the idea of generation since antiquity. Chapter i takes thecontemporary dream of immortality through geneticmanipula tion as a springboard for thehistorical analysis of the episteme 'genealogy'. It argues that our contemporary understanding of 'Erbschaft' in the two senses of heritage and inheritance is theproduct of the transferof the idea of genealogy from religious and biblical discourse tobiological discourse in the eighteenth century: while in the older paradigm genealogy regulated important issues of family inheritance, lineage, and heritage, the pre-molecular biology of the eighteenth century already incorpo rated the idea inside theorganism. The paradigm shift from the idea of preformation to that of epigenesis produced a new ambiguity: while all people are now equipped with the triumphal knowledge that theywill pass on a biological inheritance, this MLR, 102.2, 2007 551 triumph isundermined by the insight thateach of us is theproduct of a biological in heritance.Weigel takes thebiological discourse from theeighteenth century through nineteenth-century evolution theory and, finally,to contemporary debates on gene tics and information theory.Analysing themetaphors that are used to textualize the genetic code, she shows how the semantic ambiguity of the idea of generation has resurfaced in the language of information theory,where the term 'information' os cillates between a pure mathematical function and a semantically connoted meaning. The switching of perspective from the emergence of the nineteenth-century theory of evolution to the evolution of systems allows her todemonstrate thatcontemporary biological discourse...