| This dissertation focuses on two relations that mark epistemologically the discourse of secular modernity (roughly since the sixteenth century): the one between theory and fiction and the other between 'words' and 'things.' With regard to the former I examine specifically the epistemological preconditions that at once allow for and are produced by cultural artifacts as diverse as: the early modern philosophy of Neo-Stoicism (Lipsius); the German Baroque tragic drama (Gryphius, Lohenstein); the major European early theories of the State, the Law, and religion (Hobbes, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz); the philosophies of German Idealism (Kant, Hegel, Marx); the theory of linguistics (Benveniste, Saussure, Greimas); and the emergence of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century (Freud), including its current development since Lacan and its impact on the contemporary, postmodern discourse (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida). With regard to the relation between 'words' and 'things,' I examine the ways in which these cultural and discursive products ('words') sustain or challenge actual historical power dynamics ('things') that define the relation of the subjects to the Law as well as among subjects themselves--including not least gender relations. Crucial here is the concept of 'non-coercive coercion,' that is, the secular, willed submission to the Law and to power hierarchies despite the absence of an absolute authority (God, and the monarch as divine representative). The interlacing of law and desire and the constitution and function of sexuality and gender in attaining 'non-coercively' social cohesion are traced in major seventeenth century German tragic dramas and in their transfigurations in theory up to today.;Determined by Benjaminian methodology, my approach does not apply a contemporary theory (as an analytic tool) to analyze primary fictional or theoretical texts, but attempts instead to examine how the interaction between negotiations of social power and culture necessitates historically the production of both the texts in analysis and the theory that analyzes them. The function of both is to construct a subjectivity that simultaneously produces and sustains the principle structures of semantic and economic exchange in secular modernity: 'free' interpretation and 'free' circulation of capital.;The major epistemological conclusion is that psychoanalytic structures of subjectivity, rhetorico-linguistic structures, and economic structures coincide. On the one hand, this insight challenges both the bourgeois idealist assumption of the determination of the 'base' by the 'superstructure' and its Marxist inversion. On the other, it reveals the strong--though disavowed--interdependence and continuity between German Baroque and Idealism and contemporary Western, postmodern theories. |
