Monday, March 20, 2006
(9:56 AM) | David Sneek:
Being and Event Reading Group: Meditation 25
"Mathematicians are a kind of Frenchmen," Goethe said. "When you talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and then it is at once something quite different." This phenomenon can be observed in the short Meditation 25 of Being and Event, Badiou's interesting though perhaps flawed reading of the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. Badiou does not try to hide the fact that he is a French mathematician: he points out in a footnote that he has modified the translations he uses, and he rarely gives sources for his quotations.With google it's not so difficult to find them anyway; Am Quell der Donau, Der Rhein, Heimkunft, Die Wanderung, Der Wanderer, Germanien, Brot und Wein and Stimme des Volks all date from around 1801 and often describe similar journeys. The source is an "enigma", a "golden fountain" - an Event. It brings forth a river that is "bound for the Caucasus", driven "towards Asia", or does not really know where it is going. But it also remains faithful to its beginning, and in that double movement, "a paradoxical flight from the site to itself", Badiou finds the relation between the ancient Greeks and Germany.
In Hölderlin this connection can still be seen as a kind of translatio artium, the traditional idea of culture being passed on from one civilization to another; the thought that the origin of Roman civilization could be found in Greece, the foundation of Greek culture in Egypt. And already in ancient Rome the idea was linked to the image of a river. Cicero wrote in De re publica that "it was not some scanty little brook that flew from Greece to this city, but an over-abundant stream of sciences and arts."
Similarly, the idea that the trajectory of a hero or genius could be compared to a river gathering force, existed in antiquity and was passed on as a rhetorical figure that remained popular until the eighteenth century. In the Encyclopédie, in the entry on enthousiasm, genius was compared to "those great streams, that appear at their source to be but weak brooks: they run, curve, stretch out; and mountain torrents, the rivers of the plains mingle with their course, make the waters grow, become one with them: it is no longer a light murmur, but an imposing noise which they excite; their floods majestically roll into the ocean, after having enriched the fortunate grounds which were doused by them."
Immediately afterwards the author, Cahusac, referred his readers to the article on Eclecticism, as a reminder maybe that it was not the weak brook at the source that made the majestic floods; the mountain torrents and rivers of the plains were at least of equal importance. When the metaphor was taken up in the 1770s by the Sturm und Drang movement, the emphasis shifted. Now the origin, the purity of the source is dominant, and this is what Badiou finds again in Hölderlin.
"Just as great rivers have, as their being, the impetuous breaking apart of any obstacle to their flight towards the plain, and just as the site of their source is thus the void - from which we are separated solely by the excess-of-one by their élan ('Enigma, born from a pure jetting forth!') - so the homeland is first what one leaves, not because one separates oneself from it, but, on the contrary, through that superior fidelity which lies in understanding that the very being of the homeland is that of escaping."
The identification of site of the source of the river with the void, and therefore with being is essential - here Badiou's interpretation of Hölderlin follows that of Heidegger who did not want to see the rivers as metaphors or symbols, but instead found an approach to pure being in their flow. A propos of Der Ister: "The streams in Holderlin's poetry are in no way just gradually more difficult to interpret symbols. If that was so, they would essentially remain 'symbols'. And this is exactly what they are not. The 'streams' cannot be ranked as emblems of higher things, and 'more profound', 'religious' contents."
Badiou acknowledges Heidegger's influence on his interpretation, and that makes him vulnerable to the same critique. Paul de Man rubbed in how Heidegger's desire to find "being" instead of rhetorical figures in Hölderlin's poetry made it difficult for him to see the alternation of tones that placed heroic passages against more contemplative ideas in a carefully designed dialectic; at some points Badiou seems to fall into the same trap.
Take Der Rhein, the poem Meditation 25 cites most often. Hölderlin sketched out his plan for the hymn in a short text. "The rule of this hymn is that the first two parts are, through progress and regress, juxtaposed as to their form, but similar in content, the next two parts however are similar in form but juxtaposed in content, after which the final parts even everything out with an ongoing metaphor."
Badiou focuses on three moments in the poem. The "Enigma, born from a pure jetting forth!", the origin of the river; the flight from the site, "but I am bound for the Caucasus"; the later fidelity, "the slow voyage across German lands". But in Hölderlin's design for Der Rhein these passages all belong to the naive first movement. They are later answered by the meditative passages of the second movement and the idealism the third, starting with "the wedding meal of men and gods" - it would not be so easy, I think, to find a place for those passages in Badiou's ontology.
