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As in France and England, German observers of contemporary events around 1800 would also explore the potential of emotional experience as a galvanizing political force. The early German Romantics seize on the experimental possibility of their historical moment, and as part of a sweeping reformulation of the means and ends of revolutionary commitment, they

immediately begin to translate French models, among others, into more speculative (aesthetic, philosophical, scientific, and political) interventions into the specifically German cultural situation. The “Vorerinnerung” or introductory notice of the first issue of the Athenäum journal, and thus the first published statement of the collective program of early Romanticism, draws directly on tropes of fraternité to do so. Beginning the decades-long development of a

revolutionary model of the imagination critically reapplied onto the sociopolitical sphere—what this study understands as a figure of wild politics—the brothers Schlegel evoke a kind of

fraternal community of knowledge, bodies of knowledge and practice melding into each other, and this from the very outset of the Athenäum. In the Vorerinnerung, they write:

In Ansehung der Gegenstände, streben wir nach möglichster Allgemeinheit in dem, was unmittelbar auf Bildung abzielt; im Vortrage nach der freyesten Mittheilung. Um uns jener näher zu bringen, hielten wir eine Verbrüderung der Kenntnisse und Fertigkeiten,

affective return as much as an aesthetic one. “Aesthetics [and here one could just as well substitute affects] and politics,” Kompridis writes, “have been overtly implicated and entangled with each other since the late eighteenth century, when one could already speak of an aesthetic [or affective] turn in political thought, retrospectively, in the writings of European romanticism from Rousseau to Schiller and the Jena romantics, and in the framing of the debates about the meaning of the French Revolution. So what we may be speaking of is a return rather than a turn, or of a turn delayed and resisted until the emergence of more propitious conditions” (Ibid.). As addressed in more detail in the following, Frühromantik reframes the debate about the meaning and use-value of the French Revolution in terms of affect; as such, the contemporary interest in political affect could profit from a return to some of its historical contexts around 1800. The present chapter attempts to do just this. One example of this can be found again in Sloterdijk’s work, who, for his part, has returned all the way back to ancient Greece, attempting to extract a framework of political affect beginning with the Iliad and extending forwards to the contemporary (see Rage and Time).

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um welches sich ein jeder von uns an seinem Theile bewirbt, nicht für unnütz. Bey dieser leitet uns der gemeinschaftliche Grundsatz, was uns für Wahrheit gilt, niemals aus

Rücksichten nur halb zu sagen.95

But it will not only be in terms of form and method through which such centripetal affective force is taken up by the Romantic system of thought, but in content as well. Similar to the French revolutionaries with whom they ambiguously identify, but also critically distance themselves from (Robespierre particularly), the Frühromantiker place an exploration of “protopolitical” figures and effects—e.g. fraternization, but above all love, as we will see—at the center of a major strand of their political theory. In the attempt to articulate the doctrine of total existential transformation, early Romantic thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis focus on

stimulating and enlarging certain moods, feelings, and emotions as essential to the possibility of real sociopolitical change.

But while French revolutionary rhetoric aims to produce realpolitisch emotional

effects—and was able in actual practice to do so, however provisional or contested this proved to be in Robespierre’s own specific case—early Romantic discourse captures the protean,

95 _{August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäum (Berlin: Meyer and Jessen, 1798), iii. My emphasis. In an}

interpretive gesture that is essential to the concerns of this dissertation as a whole, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy draw attention to this notion of a literary-philosophical fraternization (Verbrüderung) as the initial impetus for the later so-called historical avant-garde (“without any exaggeration, [Romanticism] is the first ‘avant-garde’ group in history”) (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 8). In general, I follow their analysis by understanding Romanticism (but here I depart by also considering Spätromantik) as the imaginative production of essentially political moments, or as a series of speculative literary images with direct sociopolitical significance. Referring to the above sense of a fraternization of knowledge and talents at the heart of the Athenäum project—and this first journal constitutes Frühromantik in its totality from the perspective of the authors of The Literary Absolute—they write: “Already we can see the well-known ‘papal’ phenomenon [e.g. André Breton vis-à-vis Surrealism] developing, and before long, the soon-to-be ‘classic’ (so to speak) scenario will be in place, with its annexations, its sensational ruptures, its exclusions and excommunications, its quarrels and spectacular reconciliations, etc.; everything, in sum, that on a small scale constitutes the politics (for it is clearly a politics and very precise one) of this sort of organism.

Including, moreover, its intrinsic weakness: recantations and an undeniably ‘arriviste’ mentality. It will take only six years to convert to Catholicism; a little more than ten to dine with Metternich [i.e., Friedrich Schlegel]. But in point of fact, things are not this simple” (Ibid., 9). The point of departure of the following chapters is to examine the complex political dimensions of the Romantic movement precisely as it evolves over time into its later forms. In this sense, the insight that “things are not this simple” when referring to political Romanticism can be understood as a kind of leitmotif of the dissertation, an insight, moreover, that is most often lacking in contemporary critical scholarship on political Romanticism.

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ambivalent, or ambiguous aspect of political affect, precisely that which often renders it useless from the perspective of a Realpolitik.96 The Frühromantiker approach emotions as the kind of excessive surplus of meaningful experience noted above, as a reserve of unruly energy with practical (and metaphysical) implications for change. Just for this reason, for them emotions can also be channeled into a kind of Möglichkeitssinn for the revolutionary imagination: a sense of possibility emerging in the transformative potential of affective experience, a new approach to political speculation that thinks emotions as so many modifiable drives, transfiguring them into the constitutive power and social-binder of a utopian community in the future.97 In this sense,

96 _{A clear pragmatic and result-oriented outcome of the political use of affect can surely be attributed to the actors}

and acts of the French Revolution. At play here is, in other words, also a certain Realpolitik of affect that characterizes French revolutionary method and orientation. To recapitulate this point: as we have seen with Robespierre above, bringing positive and negative emotions into rhetorical confluence was supposed to consolidate popular passions into a revolutionary will that could appear sometimes virtuous and terrifying, or other times loving and contemptible. This strategic activation of mass affect was supposed to help identify and ensure clear ideological boundaries between enmity and fraternity within an on-going transformation of the political sphere. Thus what Robespierre called virtue as love of homeland automatically entails the policy of terror directed against the homeland’s enemies, a policy that must be immediately put into practice and maintained. For its part, the policy of contempt shores up the self-confidence and solidarity of the republic confronted with a crucial moment of decision (determining the legal status of Louis’ fate). What the Committee of Public Safety was able to accomplish—not only in sheer violent coercion but also in securing support for the Jacobin cause—testifies to the practical efficacy of emotion as an influential force under those historical circumstances. Such was the political “technology” of the French revolutionaries that strategically modulated and steered affect for world-transformative change. Nevertheless, as we have seen above, there is also an interesting ambiguity to this realpolitical deployment of political affect (as is also evident in Robespierre’s case), even while the use-value of such emotional paradigms as fraternity proved, at least under certain conditions, to be very powerful as a resource for revolutionary agitation. But it is precisely this ambivalence or instability in the deployment of political affect around 1800—its contested or unreliable point of theoretical and practical orientation—that establishes the potential of emotional paradigms in this period to serve as material for the political imaginary.

97 _{It should be noted that Robespierrean terror also shares, to a certain extent, this departure from pragmatic reality-}

principles. Like Romantic figurations of political love, it also arrives at a deeply imaginative and indeed transcendent sense of the significance of political activism (albeit an abyssal or terrifying one in the case of Robespierre). That being said, Novalis’ reception of Robespierre, and specifically of the Terror, differs from that of the rest of the early Romantic circle, perhaps only for the reason that Novalis died before he had the chance to change some of his initial opinions (see William Arctander O’Brien,Novalis. Signs of Revolution [Durham: Duke University, 1995], 123). Novalis, as opposed to Schlegel and many others, never lost his enthusiasm for the

Revolution, even if he maintains it throughout his works as an object in need of critical interrogation. In Europa, for example, Novalis praises Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being but questions its lasting impact: “Historisch merkwürdig bleibt der Versuch jener großen eisernen Maske, die unter dem Namen Robespierre in der Religion den Mittelpunkt und die Kraft der Republik suchte” (Novalis, 2:744). Novalis appears to have held Robespierre in a kind of dubious awe, and his reflections on the Revolution and particularly Robespierre’s role within it always revolve around utilizing affective (or here mystic-religious forces) for political change. Frederick Beiser, for example, reports that: “According to C. A. Just, the local councilor under whom Novalis served his apprenticeship, Novalis

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one of early Romanticism’s main responses to the revolutionary novelty of their historical moment is to activate emotional resources for the imaginative construction of Utopia, and to apply this image for a critical analysis of modern life. With Rancière, we can say that the general Romantic attempt to articulate “figures of community,” to envision and narrate the “formation and education of a specific type of humanity” to come, is given specific form in the early Romantic discourse of political emotion.

For the Romantics, a particular deployment of love, similar to Robespierre’s invocation of an absolute patriotic love, represents the royal road to knowledge of the ideal political system, the key to a radical alteration of status quo experience. When turned into an instrument of an alternative sociopolitical imaginary, love constitutes a kind of absolute horizon for political Romanticism in its initial phase, the means and end of the early movement’s aspiration to romanticize the world, as Novalis puts it. And it is in Novalis’ political writings that this

problematic is most sustained, for no one in the Athenäum’s immediate symphilosophical circle addressed the possibilities of affect for political thinking in more depth and breadth than Novalis. Within a programmatic vision of a future utopian society—what he and Schlegel both explore under their futurological image of the “golden Age”98—Novalis offers a model of

Möglichkeitsaffekt by politicizing a whole array of “procedures of love.”99

This first chapter concentrates on Novalis’ political system of thought through his

identification of Liebe as the foundation of the ideal future community. By way of examining the

delivered ‘a panegyric on Robespierre's Reign of Terror,’ because he was so impressed by Robespierre's consistency in the service of the ideal. Indeed, Novalis was always fascinated by the figure of Robespierre; as late as 1799 [and thus in the period of the texts considered below], he saw Robespierre's religion of reason as grounds for hope for the revival of spirituality in France” (Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, Romanticism, 265).

98 _{See Hans-Joachim Mähl, Die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1965).} 99 _{Michael Hardt, “The Procedures of Love.” 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, no. 68.}

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various imaginative-aesthetic or, to use Novalis’ own term again, so-called romanticized

functions attributed to the Romantic notion of love, the following sections treat this intersection of politics and affect by way of its central presence in the body of texts beginning with Novalis’ poems Blumen (Schlegel’s and not Novalis’ title) and ending with the unpublished Politische Aphorismen, with the fragment collection Glauben und Liebe oder der König und die Königin at its center (all written together in 1798). Alongside the Glauben und Liebe corpus, I also turn to the concurrent Das allgemeine Brouillon encyclopedia project (1798/1799), in which Novalis’ proposed connections between romanticized love and the ideal utopian polity find their

theoretical adumbration in the paradigm of the fairy tale (Märchen). Throughout the following, I argue that the Brouillon’s articulation of the fairy tale can be understood as the basic framework for the affective political turn of Glauben und Liebe, and thus comes to inform the essential gesture of Novalis’ system of political aesthetics. On this reading, the Novalisian Märchen is a directly political genre, as well as a generic political operation. It should be noted from the outset that such an interpretation does not proceed by interrogating the political imaginary included in the various fairy tales offered in his works (such as in the so-called “Klingsohrs Märchen” or “Atlantis” episode in Heinrich von Ofterdingen), but rather approaches the theory of the fairy tale as a new paradigm of the Romantic political imagination, and one that is then reasserted in full form in Glauben und Liebe. It is through an expansive and highly idiosyncratic theory of the Märchen within his literary-historical context that the systematic conception unifying Novalis’ political reflections is prepared, where the interface between love and the utopian image of the ideal future community is worked out and applied to the present sociopolitical situation around 1800. The fairy tale constitutes one of the major test-sites, so to speak, within the greater experimental attempt of the Brouillon and Glauben und Liebe text cycle to provide a critique of

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the postrevolutionary moment. Through the corrective vision of a political organization based in love, the signature cognitive movements of the Novalisian fairy tale stimulate the collective imagination, helping to generate an image of a novel body politic, self-emancipated through the transformative effects of aestheticized love.100

More specifically, what is at issue for Novalis is the way in which the political investments of Märchen theory—of the fairy tale as the place for the imaginative literary generation of an alternative, future sociopolitical order—coincide with a proposal for modern Prussian society to reground itself through affective bonds, in politicized love as the basis of communal organization and expression. The modern world, so Novalis insists throughout his political fragments, is to be pushed towards the same paradigmatic transformations dramatized in the magical affect-effect of fairy tales: the citizen, polity, and world-community must learn to carry out Märchen operations on itself. It must collectively learn, through a kind of elastic or romanticized Bildung (terms we will return to below) to project binding forms of love through every domain of everyday life, to fashion itself as an ideal society that knows itself to be consciously embedded in the messianic progression of history.

When brought into the more concrete-historical context of Glauben und Liebe (whose ostensible occasion is to reflect on the recent rise of King Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz to the throne of Prussia), what I refer to as Märchenpolitik in the following sketches out a design for love as a tool to build new worlds in the imagination, as a preparatory exercise for the manifestation of a different world in the here and now.

100 _{Novalis returns repeatedly to the immense sense of possibility he finds in the estrangement effects of combining a}

certain sense of the fairy tale, love, and speculative political imagination. And this not just in his own contributions to the Kunstmärchen tradition (perhaps most well-known in the fragment-novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Die Lehrlinge zu Sais), but also when he offers direct programmatic proposals for a radical transformation of modern political life, as in the more theoretical-abstract fragments of Glauben und Liebe and the Brouillon in question here.

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Märchenpolitik, and the figure of romanticized love that informs it, is to empower the imagination to think, but also the individual body and the collective body politic to act out, alternatives to the historical real, to offer direct negations and/or permutations of entrenched, conventional sociopolitical norms and values—whether revolutionary or conservative in nature. Or, as we will see, the politics of the fairy tale simply departs from such frameworks in a radical break, taking up the task of constructing the future utopian society on the basis of an entirely new figure of mass affect.

Such is the notion of the fairy tale as it resurfaces in Glauben und Liebe with a specific political effect: love, as an injection of speculative imagination into everyday social practices, provides the preconditions, the necessary framework of reflection, to overcome what Novalis takes to be the central issue of modern politics: love reconciles the antinomy of monarchism and republicanism, collapsing the bipolar opposition determining the field of postrevolutionary political theory and practice around 1800. It will only be a specifically Romantic idea of Liebe that could serve as the “constitution” of a future state, one that has inherited the best from both republican and monarchical forms, resulting in a kind of Staatsmärchen that “transfigures” (verklärt) as Novalis puts it, the modern German polity into utopian form.101 Again, as he

101 _{To anticipate the movement of the following sections: Märchen theory informs Novalis’ main statement on}

politicized love—and affect more generally—in Glauben und Liebe. Within the fairy tale paradigm, the constitutive moment of all politics, the emotional a priori of politics as such, is defined as love. Locating the conjuncture between, on the one hand, the affective, historical, and cognitive operations associated with the framework of Märchen, and, on the other hand, the dramatization of love in the political fragments, I first treat the Brouillon’s theory of the fairy tale and then turn to its concretization in Glauben und Liebe. I show how the postulate of a new political community sketched in this latter text—a community of the future that first has to be speculative

constructed in the here and now—constitutes what we can call, using Novalis’ terms, a Staatsmärchen. The projected image of the state that emerges from such a Märchenpolitik is reducible neither to an apology of