Abstract

Through a study of the poetic and poetological projects that arise in the wake of Kant's doctrine of freedom, this dissertation works towards a reconceptualization of the ethical and historical dimensions of literary language. The analyses of linguistic autonomy and spontaneity provide a new perspective on the status of self-legislation within Idealist paradigms of reference and signification, facilitating a better understanding of literary criticism's contribution to a progressive politics. ;Chapter 1 explores Friedrich Schlegel's notion of the interesting in the context of eighteenth-century debates about the relationship between poetry, imagination, and history. In its idiosyncratic account of what it means to be interested in or to learn something from a literary text, Schlegel's interpretation of Kant's theory of judgment presents a major challenge to any direct synthesis of ethical and aesthetic arguments. ;Looking at Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Chapter 2 discusses the concept of law as a crucial juncture between language and political praxis. The problems that arise in the play's search for a mode of address through which the eponymous character can affirm his own spontaneity and his power to act rationally suggest that dramatic language's status as the performance of an act is incompatible with its pretensions to be free. ;Chapter 3 turns to Hoderlin's late hymns, focusing on the ways in which their conception of linguistic memory comes into conflict with the understanding of poetry's ability to give form to either subjective agency or objective acts. Linguistic history proves to be nothing less than poetry's sacrifice of its power to speak in the name of freedom, an event which confounds poetry's endeavor to constitute itself as a creative, productive force. ;Chapter 4 examines Walter Benjamin's determination of evil as allegory in light of Hegel's theory of poetic self-legislation. As a mode of knowledge whose object is neither sensible nor supersensible, evil heralds the appearance of an a-practical reason, a discourse free of freedom itself. Allegory thus becomes both the ruins of thought and the mark of the impossibility of conceiving of language as ruin.