The accessibility of art in Germany underwent a fundamental change over the course of the 18th century. Aristocratic collectors opened their doors to the general public, and new museums were dedicated exclusively to art. This development parallels the concurrent development of aesthetics in philosophy and the conception of the autonomy of art. Its theoretical foundation was provided by Kant in his third critique with such completeness that the standards of beauty he worked out emerge as constitutive elements of the art (...) museum. The Romantic movement reinforced the trend in what proved to be an ambivalent way. The general accessibility of art was well suited to its transgression of boundaries, but it necessitated a new, less contingent mode of demarcation between the work of art and the observer. That became an occasion for »Romanticization« of both the artwork and its audience, demonstrated here by August Wilhelm Schlegel’s conversation on art Die Gemählde. It is further elucidated by Friedrich Schlegel’s Nachricht von den Gemählden in Paris and its echo in two texts published by Kleist: The novella Die Heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik and the essay on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Mönch am Meer that was drafted by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim and radically modified by Kleist. (shrink)

The article undertakes a rereading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy with a focus on its two central achievements – reviving the Dionysus myth and making the origin of tragedy evident – whose mutual interrelatedness has attracted only sparse critical attention to date. Working more as a myth-maker than a theorist, Nietzsche advances a groundbreaking portrayal of the story of Dionysus that allows him to lay bare the origins of tragedy. Simultaneously, his identification of tragedy’s ultimate source suggests a configuration that (...) lends the Dionysus myth new currency. In so doing, Nietzsche conceives the manifest presence of this myth – as well as that of the origins of tragedy – as a specific recombination of the Dionysian and the Apollonian: not as an Apollonian taming or sublimation of the Dionysian, nor yet as dialectical mediation, but rather as the Apollonian’s seizure by the Dionysian, which teeters on the threshold between lurching toward and postponing a new, more comprehensively Dionysian loss of boundaries. In this way, Nietzsche suggests, there is generated a »Schauen und Sehnen über das Schauen hinaus,« a mode of viewing amplified by longing, through which the specific form of the Dionysus myth from the perspective of tragedy and conversely of tragedy from the perspective of myth becomes apparent. The fulfillment of Nietzsche’s vision in dramatic art is here exemplified by Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. (shrink)

In reference to the paradoxical classification of art in Kafka’s Josefine story, religious aspects of the artist’s performances and their effect on the audience are scrutinized. The leading question is to what extent it evokes an allusion to the primal scene of divine revelation, following Stéphane Mosès’ commentary in his readings of the Bible. Josefine’s singing with a “nothing of a voice”, reduced to “the slightest of nullities”, the zero-point of signification, nevertheless affects an experience of presence and community that (...) touches the listeners’ entire being. From the perspective of the artist, her song recitals are manifestations of supreme art of which she claims a soteriological significance in respect of her audience who belongs in Kafka’s portrayal obviously to the Jewish people. Around such a tension between maximal restraint of an utterance (the voice onset of the aleph of the word anokhi/i) and all-encompassing meaning (the name of God and all Commandments whose acceptance is constitutive for the Jewish people) circle the theological exegeses of the Sinai-scene (esp. Ex. 20,1) in the tradition of Rashi and Maimonides, in modernity e.g. of Gershom Scholem in dispute with Walter Benjamin on Kafka. It will be shown that the depicted paradoxes of Josefine’s art performances unfold the mentioned tension as an original literary reflection on revelation and language under the conditions of modernity. (shrink)