Eine andere Klarheit: Hölderlin, Philology, and the Idea of Rigor in Literary Study

Abstract:Throughout the twentieth century Friedrich Hölderlin's work has served as a lodestar for avant-garde reading practices that brought a scientific meticulousness to revelatory and disruptive intentions. A general appreciation of Hölderlin's peculiar intensity begins with Norbert von Hellingrath and his philological project of textual reconstruction. It is this project that supports the readings that Stefan George and his circle and Walter Benjamin produce after the First World War, as well as Martin Heidegger's during the Second. In its fragmentary character, Hölderlin's archive demands to an unusual extent the procedures of scientific philology, which encounters, for its part, a work, in its intimacy with young Hegel and Schelling, that is uniquely proximate to dialectical speculation. In the postwar years, the methodological conflicts between Friedrich Beissner's Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe and D. E. Sattler's Frankfurter Ausgabe implicate the continuing relevance of philology to newer critical readings by Theodor Adorno, Peter Szondi, and later deconstructive expositions of Hölderlin's writing. In his meteoric trajectory along a philosophical parabola from lyric expressive traditions into what Maurice Blanchot has called "madness par excellence," Hölderlin presents an absolute intensification of the question of reading. His paradoxical incomparability flashes forth at the intersection of anonymous science, universal philosophy, and impersonal pathology, where the literary and the literal touch and repel each other.