Poetry as a way of life: aesthetics and askesis in the German eighteenth century

Abstract

Trop, Gabriel. Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. 388pp. $89.95 (hardcover).Poetry as a Way of Life rereads the works of Holderlin, Novalis, and various rococo poets (e.g., Gleim, Uz, von Hagedorn, Brockes) through a methodological lens that takes each poem as an aesthetic exercise or ensemble of such exercises. Most generally, these exercises stimulate processes of cognition and imagination in the reader as well as retraining her perception of sensuous particulars. An opening discussion of Baumgarten's aesthetic reclamation of the sensuous modalities of knowing allows Trop to isolate various malleable dispositions of mind and body opened up and reconfigured by the aesthetic exercises staged in and as every poem. Such dispositions include inner sensibility, or attentiveness to one's own perceptual processes, the imagination as rendering the absent present, and memory as a cognitive operation involved in the retrospective generation of coherence from seemingly discrete, unrelated past events.This suggestive reconstruction of Baumgarten's aesthetics in terms of a typology of aesthetic exercises forms the starting point for a rich theoretical discussion, in which Trop distinguishes his notion of the aesthetic exercise from other paradigms of performativity, such as Sloterdijk's idea of anthropotechnics, Hadot's spiritual exercise, and Butler's account of performance. Aesthetic exercises for Trop are neither instrumental (directed at a desired end-state or habit, the instilling of a new capacity such as bicycle-riding or arrow-shooting) nor teleological (oriented toward an immanent end, such as eudaimonia or the virtuous life). Unlike pragmatically oriented exercises, aesthetic exercises possess no immanent telos. Unlike the second paradigm of the spiritual exercise as discussed in Pierre Hadot's studies of ancient philosophy, Trop's aesthetic exercises are not characterized by any claim to universal validity, for they do not seek to convert their reader/listener via her guided restaging of an uncontestable epistemic insight or truth-event. A third paradigm consists in socio-discursive practices of subjectformation, such as those described by Butler's notion of performance, Foucault's care of the self, and Bourdieu's habitus, which similarly revoke any claim to universal validity for all subjects, instead accounting for how the dynamics of subject-formation may be hijacked or reinvented by subjects themselves. Trop notes that such accounts of socio-discursive self-fashioning nonetheless remain parasitic on historically given normative codes of conduct. Unlike these practices, aesthetic exercises are not dependent on given normative codes, their normative horizon instead projected (and perturbed) by the poems themselves.When Trop provocatively asks, sort of self does this text call into being, what practices of life does it invoke? (11), he thus introduces a paradigm of poetic performativity that brackets questions of poetic performance's pragmatic orientation or immanent telos, the epistemic validity of its truth content or truth-event, as well as its normative status. The payoff achieved through this bracketing is primarily methodological, allowing Trop to sidestep productively questions of how form relates to content (whether functioning as its mimetic enactment or its performative contradiction), instead interpreting each poem as a dynamic bundle of operations that interlock, reinforce or even undermine one another, and ultimately affect the reader. Indeed, an implicit aesthetics of reception seems to underlie the idea of an aesthetic exercise, one in which the reader's reception of a poem is an essentially active posture of receptivity, a willed openness to be reconfigured in one's sensorium and cognitive apparatus.The heart of the book lies in its richly sophisticated yet clear close readings. In three core chapters on Holderlin, Novalis, and rococo poets such as Gleim, Uz, and Brockes, Trop not only devotes close attention to individual poems and poetic lines, but integrates systematic investigation of philosophical and poetological theories into the minutiae of close reading. …