Objetivos Propuestos

The present study argues that the Romantic system of thought relies on a specifically wild sense of the political imagination applied to three major scenes of intervention: affect, nature, and religion.53 The following chapters delve into the specifics of each.

Chapter 1: at the beginning of the Romantic movement’s political coming-into- consciousness, around 1800 Novalis proposes a poetics of love in which a revision of the Schillerian operations of aesthetic play includes the potentialization of affect to politics. To effectively reconstitute the current Prussian state from the perspective of the monarch and the common citizen, Novalis draws on a unique framework of the fairy tale (or Märchenpolitik) to

53 _{For a general overview of the central and often neglected role of the imagination in Kantian, postkantian, and}

Romantic systems of thought, see Gerad Gentry, “Introduction to the Significances of the Imagination in Kant, Idealism, and Romanticism.” In The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2019), 1-23.

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systematize the estranging effects of rethinking postrevolutionary society as a messianic task of proliferating love.

Chapter 2: the anonymous author(s) of Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus (most likely Schelling), Schlegel, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter all share the demand for the so-called new mythology that would revolutionize modernity through the transformation of the human’s relationship to nature: together they articulate a kind of doctrine of Naturpolitik. Located primarily in the politicization of nature, the existential effect of change ascribed to the Romantic physics of organicism and dynamism in new mythological texts draws its source material directly from an imaginative figure of cosmological science.

Chapter 3: Excursus: in a brief departure from these central figures, the much neglected novel Nachtwachen by August Klingemann stages a materialist—and openly nihilistic— confrontation with the idealist core of political Romanticism. Nachtwachen’s protagonist, the nightwatchman Kreuzgang, comes to police Romantic poetics even as he simultaneously subverts the Polizei-function of the state apparatus he is sworn to protect, spreading chaos throughout his community in an effort to invert its dominant hierarchies and normative social structures. Here Romanticism, in danger of losing itself in an Icarian pursuit of the Absolute, is brought back down to earth by the Nachtpolitik of the nightwatchman and reintroduced to the sociopolitical realities of the everyday environment around 1800. Even so—or precisely because of this conceptual-practical descent—the novel offers some of the most transgressive

revolutionary depictions of wild political imagination within the Romantic discourse network. Chapter 4: culminating some two decades after these two initial moments of Romantic wild politics, the late Schlegel begins to intensify his engagement with religious speculation, connecting an apocalyptic theory of politics to contemporary revelations of material spirituality,

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such as in mesmeric medical practices and spiritist phenomena. These occult scientific

phenomena, and the kind of esoteric Christian science Schlegel invents to explore them, reveal the physiological body around 1820 as the combined site of sociohistorical and eschatological crisis. Schlegel’s efforts along these lines constitute the last major scene of intervention for wild political Romanticism in which the affective, natural scientific, and religious drives of a

proposed future community all coalesce into a practice of Religionspolitik.

In each of the chapters, a different structural facet of the imaginative application of politics becomes evident in Romantic texts, and together their case study outlines the formal features of the movement’s wild political approach. These facets, or paradigmatic methods and approaches in the Romantic system of thought, can be summarized in terms of the characteristic field, activity, temporality, and sociopolitical expression for which they are designed: their combination informs the general refunctionalization of affect, nature, and religion in the political imaginary of Romanticism.

1) Field: the theoretical and practical scope of wild politics is metadisciplinary. In a set of variations on a theme, a cohesive body of Romantic texts articulate a kind of super-discourse that recombines, as noted above, the dispersion of modern knowledge practices into a form of

universal identity, the key to recognizing the necessary global alterations to life as such. This amounts to an essentially speculative figure, a meta-analogy that makes clear the basic

correspondence of all micro- and macrological experience, microcosm and macrocosm. Relating environmental process and individuated anthropological becoming, ideal human capacity and its concretization in the sociopolitical environment, Romantic metadisciplinarity reads them

together and ultimately points to the confluence of all attempts to critically analyse, and thereafter practically alter, the nature of contemporary reality principles.

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For example: Novalis’ poetic and scientific fragments in Das allgemeine Brouillon, Freiberger Studien, and Glauben und Liebe elaborate a framework of the Romantic fairy tale in terms of its operations of aesthetic-affective metamorphosis (Liebe), connecting it to the

contemporary mobilization of political emotions around 1800 and using it for a radical critique of postrevolutionary Prussian society. The metadisciplinary constellation of Märchenpolitik thus appears in the specific conceptual imbrication of love, fairy tale, and politics.

In Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie, and Ritter’s Versuch über den Galvanismus, Physik als Kunst, and Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers, speculative natural science— contemporary Naturphilosophie or the Romantic physics of organicism and dynamism—is given a revolutionary, and indeed cosmopolitical agenda. It is to discover and make practicable a transformative relationship between modern humanity and nature itself in the institution of an alternative society, a utopia based in the scientific revelation of the cosmic manifold of force. This constitutes a Naturpolitik at the metadisciplinary conjuncture of new mythology, physics, and politics.

Schlegel’s late manifesto Signatur des Zeitalters and the associated notebooks entitled Zur Geschichte und Politik, recast the early Romantic physiological hermeneutic (as exemplified in Wilhelm Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden

Klosterbruders) within the developing discourse of mesmerism and religious spiritualism. Schlegel interprets the pathological crisis of the revolutionary epoch around 1820, expressive at the site of the spiritist body and body politic, as part of a more comprehensive exegesis of the apocalyptic signature of world history accelerating towards its final end. His Religionspolitik at the end of the movement consists in a metadisciplinary doctrine that binds together

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As a general schema in the Romantic system of thought, the metadisciplinary figures of Märchenpolitik, Naturpolitik, and Religionspolitik all represent couplets (or thrupples) in mutual reciprocation, each made more effective through erasing the mimetic barriers, theoretical and practical, that historically divide them. They all draw attention to a performed synthesis of disparate realms of being and thinking, an activity that resolves them into their possibilities for collective social transformation, in the present and future.

2) Activity: the general operation foregrounded in the above texts constitutes a kind of elastic activity proper to Romantic metadisciplinarity. The characteristic nature of the subjects and collectives who arise out of the Romantic wild political imaginary is to be always occupied with a transitional process of inner and outer becoming, suspending themselves, or residing in the productive tension, between everyday realities and the imaginative impulse towards a utopian alternative. This is a shared plan for a kind of existential Bildung or Erziehung that succeeds only when the manifold of experience, including all its constitutive oppositions in thought and

practice—in the individual’s subjectivity, interpersonal relations, and in the public sphere—is understood as a malleable object, the object of humanity’s unfolding capacity to transcend its current fallen status and realize the ideal future state in current activity.

Thus Novalis will describe the essentially Romantic activity of romanticization (romantisieren) as an ordo inversus of phenomenal experience that simultaneously raises the mundane to the level of the sacred, and reduces the transcendent into earthly imperfection. The activity of romanticization is identified as a restorative procedure of Romantic love and ascribed to an elastic model of the subject-collective. The resulting formulation of the so-called

transmundane agent (Transmundaner) who moves between different worlds, potentializing the present and constructing new ones in turn, functions to historically estrange and politically

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reconstruct the possible horizons of postrevolutionary society, and this through faith and love alone. In the Novalisian political fairy tale, the occupation of the monarch, as well as the average citizen—both reconceived as transmundane agents—is to stimulate the (currently weak) affective bonds that connect them in the only true political relations: emotions. The monarch is to become lovable to the citizen, and citizens begin to love their own sovereign nature, long since obscured under modern conditions. Both of them, all segments of modern political society, must be rendered constitutively flexible.

In the complex literary corpus of new mythology, Schelling, Schlegel, and Ritter together envision a figure of the Romantic physicist whose activity transgresses the boundaries of

empirical science, bending the experimental approach towards the full extent of its metaphysical consequences. Where Schiller imagines a Kunst des Ideals, the new mythologists will speak of a Kunst des Lebens (Ritter) that rethinks scientific practice as a task of messianic reunification with nature. They call for a speculative science of the cosmos—a new mythology (Neue

Mythologie)—that is elastic insofar as it constantly strives to become practical, utilizable for the demands of a totalizing existential transformation. Here a certain Romantic metadisciplinarity is evident as the occupation of the new scientific generation, its signal activity: the coming

naturephilosophical physicists will not only reveal the discovery of organic, and then dynamic (electromagnetic) nature, they will also contribute to the attempt to reconstruct modern society in accord with the surrounding cosmos of force, mobilizing the insights of Romantic science for a utopian system of sociopolitical relationships.

The late Schlegel turns to an idiosyncratic notion of (Catholic) religiosity that constantly rebounds between pious resignation and the desire to actualize apocalyptic change in the here and now. True religious activity in Schlegel’s late thought is understood as an elastic process of

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religare, a binding in thought and practice of different elements and energies, or, as he puts it, an unbounded or wild realism (grenzenloser Realismus). For him, the activity of the spiritist healer- analyst toggles between clinical and world historical prognosis, charting, through painstaking observation and speculation, the evolution of eschatological change at the basis of the organic body-in-crisis. When the tranced mesmeric body expresses apocalyptic prophecies, Schlegel applies this new communicative vessel as part of a program of contemporary metapolitical rejuvenation.

3) Temporality: wild politics, characteristic as a kind of metadiscipline and elastic

activity of the Romantic literary imagination, interprets history and human evolution over time as essentially provisional. Messianic narratives of teleological progress abound in Romantic texts, and insofar as they index a certain futural capacity denied to modern humanity—at least for the moment—they function as utopianist critiques that relativize the status quo of postrevolutionary social organization. In light of such an absolute historical idealization—whether located in pre- historical Edenic origins, somewhere obscurely embedded in the post-lapsarian modern present, or in the promised golden age of the future—contemporary experience, all of previous history, can only appear as under erasure, an incomplete symbol or fragment waiting for the ultimate crisis-event to render it finally legible.

Provisionality is necessary in the Romantic philosophy of history because the nascent revolutionary energetics, unleashed in contemporary philosophy and statecraft alike—as Schiller points out—demands it: in order to attack and then reformulate the modern distribution of the sensible on a novel basis, political Romanticism introduces a metahistorical bracketing of the current moment, replacing it with a poetic construction that no longer separates the here and now from an ideal—and thus productively transformative—image of the past and future. Novalis is

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explicit in this futurological intention, untethered from historical determination, as is the text of Das älteste Systemprogramm, the early Schelling, Schlegel, and Ritter, each in their own ways. 4) Sociopolitical expression: the typical field, activity, and temporality of the Romantic political imaginary eventually expresses itself in the form of a dynamic system, or a framework of thought that emphasizes both the productive stimulus of oppositional relations (theoretical- metaphorical, but also physical), and the need to stabilize sociopolitical forces in a natural state of transcending equilibrium. Mereological schemas between part and whole, mechanistic versus organicist doctrines of social organization, practical solutions to balance individual freedoms against the needs of the greater body politic, problems of constitutionality and lasting peaceful, non-alienating and mutually affirmative relationships at the interpersonal, domestic,

international, and cosmopolitical level: these issues are all translated in Romantic texts into a vocabulary of existential becoming, appearing again and again as functionally expanded technologies for the coming utopian reorganization of modern life. They are constantly reformulated as questions of increasing human power with the resources of its own

contemporary epoch—whether imaginatively (as Einbildungskraft) or in physiological capacity (as Ritter puts it: when modern society becomes electromagnetic). In the fairy tale, new

mythology, and late religious turn of political Romanticism, a discourse of dynamism

everywhere seeks and activates material and immaterial forces in the basic drive to collective existential transformation.

Novalis will work out a kind of proto-anarchism based on voiding the conventional nature of monarchy as political structure and representative body—as well as any other social order that openly dominates its populace. But this will be an elastic, and more exactly chiastic, activity that just as much elevates the concept of monarchy itself, making it into an ideal of all

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modern political subjects, a new centerpoint for the coming community. He wants the dynamic energy released in this imaginative “regicide”—and simultaneous becoming-popular of the King—to accrue to all citizens. The people are to recognize that only an egalitarian republic, filled with individual citizen-monarchs, could found the so-called new Prussian state through a magical-affective (rather than rationalistic-contractual) constitution.

The early naturephilosophical Schelling, Schlegel, and Ritter offer the clearest variant of wild political Romanticism as a “dynamisch Denken” (Schlegel). In their reflections on the mysteries of natural dynamic forces, they include a dedicated political physics that recognizes no boundaries between, on the one hand, the scientific revelation of the organism and the

environmental force-field of electromagnetism (beginning in nuce in their own period) and, on the other, the postrevolutionary demand to reimagine modern society without alienation and mechanistic exploitation. Throughout new mythological discourse, a radical anti-state program is called for in the name of an alternative political subject and community based in the speculative science of the dynamic cosmos.

Finally, Schlegel, drawing on and departing from his earlier work on new mythology and the dynamics of Romantic Poesie, understands world history in his last phase of work as the progressive attempt to identify but also suppress the energies of eschatological change. Throughout the 1820s, he develops a hermeneutic framework—a reading practice focused on metaphysical, historical, and physiological “signatures”—as a hybrid between the language of the physical body in extreme, ecstatic states and the breakthrough of apocalyptic revolution into the contemporary epoch. In his late Religionspolitik, Schlegel thus foregrounds the provisionality of the present moment by looking to a variety of philosophical and physical indices of the post- apocalyptic utopian community. He relies on an expressly metapolitical dynamics that

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reconfigures contemporary political activity in light of its ultimate transformation, sometime after the divine revolution (Gottes-revolution). He will call for the palingenesis, “durch die Fantasie bestimmt,”54 of an estranged version of the Catholic church that will serve as the transcendental signifier for a global political System des Gleichgewichts or Gegengewichts, the dynamic mediator of all spheres of material and spiritual energy in the rebirth of the coming religious epoch.

Metadisciplinary field, elastic activity, provisional temporality, and dynamic sociopolitical expression are used in the following only as organizing terms with which to approach the diverse register of wild political Romanticism. They are themselves all provisional within the scope of this study insofar as the texts of Märchenpolitik, Naturpolitik, and

Religionspolitik offer such a wide range of alternative designations, as we will see. The political valence of their different conceptual operations and modes of being, their whole profusive grammar of Romantic self-definition, remains to be explored in detail.