Die sinnlichen Enden der Ideologie

Abstract

Abstract This essay inquires into the historical background, the analytical function, and the political implications of Georg Büchner’s materialism. Büchner’s revolutionary drama Danton’s Tod (1835) is situated at an interface between the French sensualist school of the idéologues and a modern concept of ideology in Marx. In Büchner’s drama, the senso-materialist concept of idea and sensation is related to the constitution of political bodies, which reveals an intimate nexus of imagination and sensation, ideology and affect.