“Dichtermut” and “Blödigkeit”: Two Poems by Hölderlin Interpreted by Walter Benjamin Beatrice Hanssen I The figure of inversion has occupied a prominent place in twentieth-century critical attempts to read the text of modernity as a correction to Idealism and to release the subversive, modernist potential of German Romanticism. In a notable, jointly authored essay, published in 1977, Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz returned to Novalis’s notion of ordo inversus to suggest that inversion was the trope (Gr. trepo\, to reverse) par excellence paradigmatic of modern poetics. 1 They held that inversion, a figure of reflection (Reflexionsfigur), found in the writings of Hölderlin, Kleist, but also Kafka, served as a corrective to the model of transparent self-consciousness that Fichte first put forth in his Wissenschaftslehre (1794). 2 If all thinking was thetic and proceeded through the principle of contradiction (Gegensatz), Fichte argued, self-consciousness itself was a thinking of thinking to the second degree in which the subject of thinking recognized itself to be the ground or instance that posited the real—an instance that Fichte called the absolute I. Inversion, Frank and Kurz countered, offered a profound critique of such hubristic idealism. Reflecting on the very limits of reflection, inversion unmasked this figure’s alleged autonomy, together with the self-positing of the subject, as mere figments of the imagination. Upsetting the balance between thetic I and the object of reflective positing, inversion revealed how reflection, in truth, was dependent on the incontrovertible facticity of the real. 3 [End Page 786] Some years before Frank and Kurz, an eminent member of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, addressed the inherently subversive operations of a figure closely related to inversion, namely, parataxis. Following the ineluctable logic of negative dialectics, Adorno’s essay “Parataxis” (1963) demonstrated how the paratactical constructions typical of Hölderlin’s later poetry radically disrupted the thetic, identificatory logic that ruled German Idealism and culminated in Hegel’s speculative philosophy. 4 Traditionally, parataxis has been considered a grammatical device of coordination, concatenation and serialization that does not make use of subordinating conjunctions. While parataxis, as a rule, does not produce logical disjunction, Adorno applied the term to the frequent non sequiturs as well as the reversals of predicative logic that were common in Hölderlin’s late hymnic work. Drawing on the Hölderlin fragments compiled under the rubric “Reflexion,” Adorno reinterpreted parataxis as “constitutive dissociation” and as an anti-idealistic linguistic strategy that undermined the hierarchical, even synthetic, function of discursive language. 5 More than just being a stylistic “micro” technique, parataxis in reality was to be seen on a grander scale, exemplifying the disintegration of a coercive thetic logic. This much was clear, Adorno suggested, from one of Hölderlin’s theoretical fragments on inversion: One has inversions of words in the period. Yet the inversion of the periods itself, then, must prove greater and more effective. The logical position of periods where the ground (the grounding period) is followed by becoming, becoming by the goal [Zweck], the goal by the purpose, and where the subclauses are always attached at the end of the main clauses to which they refer—is certainly only very seldom of use to the poet. 6 Much as the mechanism of inversion could upset the hierarchical relation between ground and becoming, main clause and subclause, so parataxis, Adorno implied, derailed the Zweck or teleological drift of speculative thought. Only by laying bare the multiple effects that followed from this paratactical structure, Adorno went on to argue, could the critic-interpreter grasp the Gedichtete of Hölderlin’s late poetry. In using the term Gedichtete, Adorno in fact appropriated a concept that his friend Walter Benjamin had introduced in his 1914 Hölderlin essay, “Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin—‘Dichtermut’ und ‘Blödigkeit’” (“Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘The Poet’s Courage’ and ‘Timidity’”). With this term, Adorno not only sought to qualify the [End Page 787] strangeness, otherness, and sublime darkness that distinguished Hölderlin’s late lyric work, but also its truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt), which eluded traditional methods of literary analysis (such as philology or the genetic method), no less than Heidegger’s...