Novalis and the Absolute of Attraction

Abstract

In the opening fragment of Bluthenstaub, Novalis writes, “Wir suchen uberall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge” (2: 413). The absolute, or that which is without condition and without limit, is first and foremost a point of attraction: a non-thing that organizes the relationship of the human being to things, to other human beings, indeed to the manifold world of differences. Any critical project that still considers it worthwhile to inquire into the status of the absolute must therefore approach this idea not according to what it is, or what it is not, but according to what it does and to the particular movements it generates in the order of thought and discourse. The fascination with the absolute generates a paradoxical effect: as a pure plenitude of being that is semiotically equivalent to a void in the order of representations – as an identity incommensurable with differentiation and therefore excluded from all differential systems – the absolute resists all forms of codification, and yet, in its very withdrawal from representation, it never ceases to generate representations, acts of speech, multiple forms of reflection. It is generally assumed that some conception of the absolute as pure, undifferentiated identity conditions Romantic poetics and the specific subject that this discourse presupposes and calls into being. Manfred Frank – who has undertaken perhaps the most extensive, well-documented, and persuasive account of early Romantic philosophy – notes that such a conception of the absolute cannot be represented in reflective acts of consciousness: “Die Erfahrung, die das Bewustsein mit seinem eigenen Unvermogen macht, geschieht ganz immanent; und das transzendente Sein erwirbt den Charakter einer regulativen Idee: also eines Gedankens, auf den ich nicht verzichten kann, will ich die Einsichtigkeit einer Grundtatsache des Bewustseins nicht gefahrden” (Einfuhrung 261). According to Frank, the absolute, strictly speaking, as an undifferentiated absolute of identity that precedes both subject and object and yet makes their appearance possible, is unavailable to consciousness; consciousness is thus always striving for – but never cognizing – the ground of its own experience. A cursory glance at Novalis’s writings after the Fichte-Studien (1795–96) suggests that the concept of the absolute becomes less central to his later intellectual and poetic projects. This impression would be mistaken; the gestures produced by Novalis’s attempts to grapple with the absolute are taken up and absorbed as internal organizing and disorganizing patterns at work in many of Novalis’s texts, whether in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, or the Geistliche Lieder, to name a few examples. Nor does the absolute, as it