The Unpolitical

On the Radical Critique of Political Reason

Massimo Cacciari, Alessandro Carrera, Massimo Verdicchio

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823230051
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

Massimo Cacciari is one of the leading public intellectuals in today's Italy, both as an outstanding philosopher and political thinker and as now three times (and currently) the mayor of Venice. This collection of essays on political topics provides the best introduction in English to his thought to date. The political focus does not, however, prevent these essays from being an introduction to the full range of Cacciari's thought.The present collection includes chapters on Hofmannstahl, Lukács, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Weber, Derrida, Schmitt, Canetti, and Aeschylus. Written between 1978 and 2006, these essays engagingly address the most hidden tradition in European political thought: the Unpolitical. Far from being a refusal of politics, the Unpolitical represents a merciless critique of political reason and a way out of the now impracticable consolations of utopia and harmonious community. Drawing freely from philosophy and literature, The Unpolitical represents a powerful contribution to contemporary political theory.A lucid and engaging Introduction by Alessandro Carrera sets these essays in the context of Cacciari's work generally and in the broadest context of its historical and geographical backdrop.

CHAPTER 1
Impracticable Utopias

Hofmannsthal, Lukács, Benjamin

“Romània” and Calderón

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s work seems to amount to a research project on the languages and forms of “Romània.” But this “Romania” is not at all the stable dwelling that many interpreters have claimed, in the shadow of whose authority Hofmannsthal would overcome the aestheticism of his youthful dramas, of his Loris.1 Loris’s “great art,” as Hermann Bahr would say, “has no feeling.”2 Loris belongs to the Jugendstil that reflects upon the formal elements, the style of composition, rather than evoking feelings and moods. It is, after all, Jugendstil that is perfectly suited to its “problem:” transience.3 How can transience be stated and saved at the same time from the pure line of words? What power do words possess, and, therefore, what are their limitations with respect to transience? But transience is also the past. Its problem is also the problem of saving the past. The limitations of language in “comprehending” transience are its limitations in preserving and reliving the past. Hofmannsthal’s uncanny (Unheimliches), which fascinates and scares, is this “second being,” namely language, where present, every day life relives the past—the transience of words and forms.4 Life itself, here, perceives a substantial continuity, an elective affinity, not beyond but in every contradiction and dissension. Transience returns as present. For the poet “the dead resuscitate, not when he likes, but when they want—and they resuscitate without respite.”5 The poet saves the past, as the idea saves the phenomenon. But the present of poetry is not an abstract unity, a meeting as one of primordial, mythical elements so alike as to be bound to meet beyond any separation—destined to meet. This is the literary and conservative image that we often have of Hofmannsthal. His dead, on the contrary, revive with the multiplicity of their voices and, above all, their forms, their questions, their interrupted paths. If “the invented word” is spiritually and morally impossible, if originality betrays the necessary presence of transience in every voice, it is equally impossible—an equally indecent pretension—to believe in the “word,” which eliminates every difference, dissolves every contradiction, gives peace and unity to traditions and reconciles them with the present. The poet “comprehends” the problems, listens to the questions of those traditions, talks about them, since they necessarily speak his language (the dead revive whenever they want), but he does not have at his disposal synthetic Esperantos. The poet is suspicious of profound, substantive truths, according to which we should “go around naked, as if [we were] wandering abysses and vortices.”6

“Romània” is the place where Hofmannsthal’s problems and contradictions are located. It is the space of his language. But this space does not represent an abstract totality; it already stems from a choice. It cannot be identified at all with the idea or destiny of Europe or with the intellectual cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. Hofmannsthal’s Romanity encompasses the multiplicity of languages that revolve around the great Habsburg Empire. In Hofmannsthal, European history is reshaped around the events of the last universal monarchy instead of the traditional axis: from the Renaissance to the Counterreformation to the French Enlightenment.7 Austria is at the center of this Reich, but not in the sense of supremacy or spiritual synthesis. In Hofmannsthal’s Austria in the Mirror of Its Poetry, only the roots of Austrian culture are discussed. With slight irony, the Magic Flute becomes a child’s fairytale, and Schubert’s Lieder acquire a “somewhat popular superiority.”8 The essay, in subdued tonalities difficult to detect, is a critique of the myths of German culture, a search for “delicate divisions.” To distinguish and separate does not amount to provincialism. On the contrary, it means “letting-through” the different. The idea of Austria at the center of the Habsburg universal monarchy turn for Hofmannsthal into a “letting-through,” acceptance, a way of giving-itself to the multiplicity of forms and traditions that make up the Empire. Austrian universalism consists in making room and words for the different, in accepting its problems, in giving itself to it.

Hofmannsthal’s “Romània,” completely alien from Stefan George’s “magnificent intolerance,” not only represents a choice, which defines and delimits a linguistic-cultural space, but it is also a concrete, internal multiplicity, where the art of uniting, of Verbinden, is indissolubly linked to the art of distinguishing, of Scheiden.9 The arch of this “Romània” is stretched between Spain and Venice. Venice is Hofmannsthal’s Italian home as Florence was George’s (Essays, 147). And with Venice, Hofmannsthal could conceive the union of East and West. Venice was his Byzantium, the memory of a primordial and disappeared Romanity. And yet Spanish poetry is very different from Venice. Venice is the city of masks, of the self that splits and travels in quest of itself through the adventures of chance, the place of encounters and enchantments without name. In the Adventurer and the Singer or in Christina’s Journey Home, Casanova the master of initiations, “who must always journey,” represents the exterior of the Venetian mask, which Andreas in the end will turn into the tragedy of the impossible bildungsroman.10 Spain, instead, is the poetry of solidity, fidelity, permanence. It is the mystical soul of the Empire where the great problems are assumed sub specie aeternitatis, Theatrum Mundi, expression of a symbolism that illuminates and transfigures the characters of the period as eternal figures of the conflicts of the spirit (Essays, I6I). This symbolic construction dominates from The Smallest World Theatre to The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World, which, as Goldschmit correctly remembered, premiered “six weeks after Rathenau’s murder and while in Munich Falckenberg was completing rehearsal for Drums in the Night.” 11 And yet the idea of Theatrum Mundi would seem opposed to that of masks. The world of chance, adventure, of the discordant multiplicity of characters, is a theater of the transitoriness and vanity of worldly interests, of their eternal return and collapse. It is in this theater that the fundamental conflicts of the era take place. The great ceremony that the theater represents does not crystallize these conflicts, does not arrest their becoming.12 Only their “play” acquires the form of ceremony—is rescued from chance. Here, too, there are masks—ceremony is also mask. In this case it is the mask of cult, of the eternal symbolism that prevails over the individual multiplicity of life. There, it is the mask of the individual and the wanderer that renounces the plasticity of forms. One pole could not exist without the other, which does not mean that one is any less remote and different than the other. This substantial diversity—which once recognized appears to be necessary and insurmountable—is contained in Hofmannsthal’s “Romània,” in the multiplicity of its languages and in its dramatics, since the Spanish ceremony cannot “comprehend” the Venetian travels, nor can the Venetian mask reach the solidity and permanence of ceremony. Hofmannsthal will analyze both of these languages in their inseparable difference until his last days and in his two greatest works: the Spanish Schauspiel in The Tower on one hand, and on the other in Andreas, the novel of Venice.13

Now we should examine the Spanish side of the antithesis (without, however, forgetting that it remains incomprehensible without its opposite). The great figures of this side of “Romània” are a decisive part of this same Austrian tradition. Grillparzer had translated Life Is a Dream in 1816 and had remained under the sign of Lope de Vega and Calderón throughout his entire work. Lenau tackled another decisive symbol of Spanish poetry in Don Juan (the link between Spain and Venice? between metaphysical ceremony and mask?). The encounter with this tradition on the part of Hofmannsthal is immediate. The fairytale The Emperor and the Sorceress (Der Kaiser und die Hexe, 1897) derives from Lope and Grillparzer. The idea of The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World is entirely in the spirit of Calderón. The world is a stage where man lives the part that God assigned to him. From 1905 on, Hofmannsthal works on Calderón’s La hija del aire and the idea reemerges in 1907–1908 in the correspondence with Strauss, this time as the project for an opera, Semiramis.14 In 1918 Hofmannsthal confides to Hermann Bahr the intention of preparing every year an adaptation of Calderón for the Burgtheater.15 From this idea originates the translation of Dame Goblin (La dama duende)(Hofmannsthal,Chapter 3). But the link with Calderón is centered on the symbol of Sigismund in Life Is a Dream. From this symbol Hofmannsthal will not be able to detach himself. Between 1901 and 1902 he works at a trochaic version, but as the Notes and Diaries (Aufzeichnungen und Entwurfe) of spring 1902, revised in August 1904, show, he is already thinking at a complete adaptation of the play.16 In a letter to his father, he remarks on the incompleteness of Calderón’s work and the need for a bold transformation. And, shortly after, in another letter to Theodor Comperz, he writes that he is working on “an adaptation of Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, a play profound at times, but at times unsuccessful—a completely free adaptation . . . that relates to the original not like Kleist’s Amphitryon to Molière’s but, comparison not intended—as a Shakespeare play to the Italian novella.”17 In 1904 he writes to Hermann Bahr, “It is a question of descending in the heart of the matter of Life Is a Dream, which now fascinates me more than ever, into the most remote depths of the ambiguous, deep realm of the self, and of finding the no-longer-I, or the world” (Briefe 1900–1909, 73, 155). But the adaptation runs into a major difficulty, not of a technical but of a spiritual nature as Hofmannsthal himself remarks in his preliminary remarks (Vorbemerkung) to the incomplete edition of 1910—a difficulty that makes the conclusion of the play impossible. After the war, Hofmannsthal’s work starts from this point. From October 23, 1920, on, he labors every day on the “major work.”18 In October 1921, having reached Act V, of which he sketches the basic structure, he interrupts it for The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World. In 1923 he writes to Burckhardt, “By now this work has become almost mysterious to me and this last act is like a castle built over an abyss.”19 He interrupts the work once again and writes The Egyptian Helen. Finally, the first version is completed, and Schnitzler, who gets a copy at the beginning of 1925, stresses its novelty with respect to Calderón not only as far as the characters go, but also for “the problem.”20 This version appeared in two issues of the Neue Deutsche Beiträge that Hofmannsthal published with the Bremer Press from 1922 to 1927. The Bremer Press published a second version, but as a separate volume, that was essentially identical to the first with the exception of numerous abbreviations and the scene with the Gypsy woman in Act V (the Gypsy woman appears in only one part).

But Life Is a Dream is not finished yet. In his reply to Leopold von Adrian, who admired the unity of the work, Hofmannsthal speaks of his decision to change the final two acts.21 The motive of dramatic surrender conceals a deeper, substantial change in the conception of the entire work. The new version appeared in 1927. The harsh disenchantment of the last scene must have haunted Hofmannsthal. Burckhardt rightly sees how “the glassy look of this tragedy” weighs also on Andreas (Ricordi, 47). How is it possible, through suffering and with recourse to the spiritual energy one gains from it not to reach the “flash of reconciliation,” the presence of a “superior morality”? Precisely this ending seemed impossible to Hofmannsthal after the first version. The subject matter had changed to the point of negating such an ending. But this negation escapes Hofmannsthal as a foreign power. The irruption of the Trauerspiel through The Tower “in these destitute times” was destined to remain a crucial presence of the contemporary uncanny.22

This brief account already shows how the relationship between Hofmannsthal and Life Is a Dream is not at all sympathetic. It is neither a model nor an answer to Hofmannsthal’s questions, but a continuous questioning of the reasons of his entire work and its forms. Hofmannsthal’s work is a tireless reworking and transformation of the incomplete Life Is a Dream—the essential incompleteness of its symbolism. With the 1925 and 1927 versions, this reworking and transformation gets to the core of the drama’s sense without providing any cure for it. This sense relates to Hofmannsthal’s overall idea of “Romània.” Life Is a Dream—incomplete, and whose analysis appears endless 23—is an open wound in this idea—the contradictory being of this idea—its specific uncanny. Removed with effort from the first version, the wound reappears uncontrollably in the second.

But this outcome develops ever since the first trochaic version in 1901–1902 and from the Notes of 1902–1904.24 The stylistic differences are decisive. Calderón’s universe of metrical forms, rhythms, arrangements, symbols, and similes is replaced by a functional language, attentive to the collocation and role of the characters (Hofmannsthal, 24). The long monologues disappear, and the dialogues are interrupted whenever the functional tension of the discourse seems to fall. Plays on words, maxims, and witticisms (the figure of Clarín) no longer adorn the verses (Hofmannsthal, 109). This reduction of Calderón’s language conforms to the nucleus of the work’s idea. Far from having a mere decorative function, the polyvalence of the linguistic character in Calderón is symbolic of the harmony of “the great theater of the world.” The language stands as symbol for the system of relations, weights and counterweights, thrusts and counterthrusts, which rule in the order of the universe (Hofmannsthal, 100, 105). The wealth and breadth of the empire of language is symbolic of the “great theater” as kosmos, order willed and kept inscrutably by God. There is no silence in this empire. The word is never missing. The empty spaces, the pauses that populate the subject of The Tower could not be found in Calderón—for important reasons, which conform to the age and spirit of the two authors, their questioning, not their style. The word in Calderón develops its power to the point of covering the most sublime ideas, while this same power is precisely Hofmannsthal’s problem when approaching Life Is a Dream. Hofmannsthal’s The Letter of Lord Chandos is published in 1902, and The Tower’s Sigismund is the brother (sharing even the memories, as we shall see) of the despairing Lord.25

A Divine World-Play

In Hofmannsthal’s reworking and transformation the linguistic concentration reduces the events to the essential—to the new essential. The role of many characters in Calderón is compressed to the minimum, and some secondary relationships are suppressed, namely, that of Astolfo and Estrella. This new essential is Sigismund, the destiny of the imprisoned prince whose “moving star threatens endless tragedy and grief” (Calde-rón, Act II, Scene I), whom we meet in chains and covered with rags (“man’s worst crime is to be born”) and to whom “history” teaches to repress his wild nature by showing precisely that “to live is already to dream”: “My master in this was a dream, and I still tremble at the thought that I may waken and find myself again locked in a cell. Even if this should happen, it would be enough to dream it, since that’s the way I’ve come to know that all of human happiness must like a dream come to an end” (Act III, scene XIV).26 “Essential” is only what rotates around this figure, the forces that correspond to his problem and his secrets. Thus minor figures acquire an importance that is completely absent in Calderón. Soldiers get to speak, while the rebellion acquires characters and faces, as it was the case in The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World. But above all the figure of Basilius the King changes aspect. Hofmannsthal believed that the king in Calderón appeared deeply contradictory. He is the prisoner of destiny for having banished the prince to the Tower “in the crags and rocks of those mountains” (Act I, scene I), and he wants him back. For this reason the king wants to “try the Heavens,” “because man prevails over the stars.” But Sigismund is not mature for the trial, he fails because he ignores that life is a dream. To exile him again seems still his fate, “How little does fate lie when he foresees misfortune!” The king defends order and stability “in the theater of the world” by defending himself against Sigismund’s wild nature, and yet this necessity is also his guilt. Calderón already voices this essential contradiction through Basilius, which undermines the very idea of kingdom: “Wishing to restrain another from tyranny and cruelty, I become one myself; or . . . by preventing his committing crimes, I may commit those cr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Impracticable Utopias
• 2. Nietzsche and the Unpolitical
• 3. Weber and the Critique of Socialist Reason
• 4. Project
• 5. Catastrophes
• 6. The Language of Power in Canetti: A Scrutiny
• 7. Law and Justice
• 8. The Geophilosophy of Europe
• 9. Weber and the Politician as Tragic Hero
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names