My Dissertation

Dissertation Abstract

In Act 4, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost – a play translated and addressed by the German “Storm-and-Stress” outsider, Jakob Lenz – the character named Holofernes provides an “extemporal epitaph on the death of [a] deer” that was just shot and killed by the princess:

Replete with puns and alliterations, this passage is not only a prime example of Shakespeare’s playful use and ironic mastery of the English language, but can even be read as a poetological poem on poetry itself, as Holofernes indeed remarks:

The ease with which Holofernes produces hordes of deer and multitudes of other “forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas,” appears to be a function of language and, more precisely, of words composed of letters. It is thanks to these latter individual (and possibly independent) elements that words can turn into each other, resemble each other (be it on an auditory or visual level), and turn out to be, in fact, entirely unstable, unidentifiable, and therefore emphatically playful entities. This scene in Shakespeare can be regarded as the Urszene of my dissertation, which is about “character, caricature and wordplay in Marx, Lenz, and Goethe.” In the following, I will sketch out the constellations implied by that title.

In his Remarks on Theater, a series of lectures which he gave to close friends and appended to his translation of Shakespeare’s play, Lenz notes how, for the latter, his pieces are often based on nothing but a pun. This is one of the few explicit mentions of Shakespeare, and it is not elaborated further. Instead, the more significant portion of Lenz’s Remarks are a commentary on, and a critique of, Aristotle’s Poetics. Lenz’s remarks are motivated by a desire to break free from the poetological constraints found in the Poetics. One dogmatic tenet is the preponderance of “plot” (mythos) over “character” (ethos), which Lenz rejects and inverts, placing “character” at the center of the kind of theater he envisions. As Lenz puts it: “Character. The recognizable shape of a human on the stage.” Plot, on the other hand, is instead composed of the acts of individual, real characters. Those acts find their common root precisely in those characters, which is what gives a plot any “unity” it may have. However, what appears as a stable base is disrupted and rendered questionable by two other movements found in Lenz’s writings. In the same text, the word “character” itself is subjected to wordplay through a parallel with the word “caricature.” Lenz argues that authors such as Voltaire only ever produce caricatures of real characters, i.e. one-sided, abstract figures. However, Lenz also notes that he will always prefer a caricature that exaggerates a real trait over any idealized type. He thus opens up various tensions between the idea of a real, complex character, and its collapse into a one-dimensional figure whose only purpose is to carry along a formulaic plot. In a closely related text on Goethe’s Götz of Berlichingen, Lenz suggests that his contemporaries have not even entered the historical stage as “freely acting beings.” This thought gives rise to the idea that “character,” in the sense that Lenz emphasizes, does not yet quite exist, but would have to be formed and cultivated on the rehearsal stage, namely by “practicing” to “act.” The first chapter of my dissertation teases out the intricacies of these complexities surrounding “character,” in its roles as “figure“ and as “letter,” whole and part.

Whereas Lenz wants to draw real human characters on and off the theatrical stage, one of Marx’s key insights in Capital consists in the “fetish character of the commodity,” which encodes human social relations such that they appear “hieroglyphic.” This is noteworthy in regard to the dramatic and theatrical elements that make up Capital’s presentation. These are centered around Marx’s idea that “capital” is a social formation to be conceived as a “double stage:” the spheres of production and of circulation. Thus, Marx’s “fetish character” becomes an illuminating contrast with Lenz’s “legible character,” because it can now be seen as an “illegible human character” on the stage of history. I relate both Lenz’s and Marx’s interest in the possibility of a readable imprint, that of the “human,” to a term coined by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, namely “ontotypology.” This allows me to expand my reading of the ways in which Marx and Lenz articulate deconstructive strategies for engaging with ontotypological concepts. I trace how both Lenz and Marx employ ancient materialist, Atomistic concepts in their respective engagements with Aristotelian philosophy, which lead to a deconstruction of Aristotle’s definitions of the human as zoon logon echon and as zoon politikon. Lenz and Marx open up that definition to play by introducing what Lucretius refers to as the clinamen, a deviation in trajectory. I explore this through an extensive reading of an early article by Marx on “wood theft,” which deals with the issue of fallen wood, and whether a fallen branch can still belong to property, like the living tree. This complements my reading of the fetish character in Capital, drawing attention to the meaning of the Greek word hyle as both “matter” and “wood.” I build on the observation that both Marx and Lenz employ a rhetoric of theatrical stages even as they place great emphasis on grounding theory in “reality.” Taking my cues from this coincidence, I then explore the notion of history as “tragedy” and “comedy,” as it is presented in Hegel and complicated by Marx and Lenz. I show how their respective characterizations of “comedy” offer different, but concurrent strategies for subverting the idea of linear narratives, and a concept of history as a tragic plot, aiming at a historic telos. My second chapter concludes with an outlook towards alternative possibilities.

In my third chapter, I provide a reading of Goethe’s Novella, which exemplifies another way of breaking up linear schemes of teleological accomplishment. I explore how the Novella treats the relationship between nature, art, and technology, or physis and techne, and focus on the roles which contradictory kinds of “impressions” play in negotiating the role of techne in structuring the relationship between nature and human efforts to dominate it. The exposition of the Novella suggests that mimetic art can capture the essence of a “unique locale,” an old family castle ruin situated within a deep forest. It is described as sitting on a rock where one cannot distinguish “where nature ends and human craft begins.” In its very indiscernibility, however, the castle ruin becomes legible as an emblem of an “eternal, most serious strife” between human attempts to surpass and contain nature through artifacts, and nature’s erosive, but also self-regenerating forces. A sketch artist is said to capture this very “strife” in a “characteristic drawing,” implying that mimesis is a way to escape a struggle in which nature would have the last say. I contrast this aesthetic ideology with a traumatizing “impression” left by unpredictable outbreaks of natural forces that occur later in the Novella. I tease out how the idea of the “unheard-of,” the entirely “novel,” emerges from this contrast. Furthermore, I expand on the physis/techne distinction by discussing the role that “necessity” and “chance” play in that dichotomy. In conclusion, I show how “chances” that Goethe features can be discerned as a focus of both Marx’s and Lenz’s attention to their respective sets of problems.