HOELDERLIN'S 'HYPERION': THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTIONARY IDEALISM

This dissertation argues that the content and form of Holderlin's novel Hyperion are concretely determined by the French Revolution. I show how Holderlin's sympathy for the Revolution affects the novel's formal treatment of nature, history, and subjectivity. With these concepts, the novel interrogates the unified and closed logic of Idealism, and discovers capacities to resist hierarchical politics and ideologies.;Schiller's philosophy of history provides an intellectual context for Holderlin, but Holderlin develops a concept of history organized by human subjectivity, not a transcendental other. Where Schiller links aesthetics and politics through figures of harmony, Holderlin connects them as forms of struggle.;Human subjectivity is the most polemical of the novel's concepts, as the ground of the novel's critique of contemporary conditions and the source of its hope. Social life perverts the affective and reflective capacities of subjects, which are also sources of resistance to oppression and instrumentalization. A comparison with Freud's later work shows how features of Holderlin's subject were historically submerged due to the failure of Holderlin's revolution to occur.;I finally reground the discussion in German culture during the Revolution. Hegel's historical success and Holderlin's historical failure are understood through their respective assessments of the Revolution. Hegel's work pivots on what the Revolution succeeded in doing; Holderlin's on its failures. Lived historical content shapes their writing, in accord with how each appraises the Revolution.;An analysis of the novel's presentation of nature demonstrates the operation of an open-ended dialectic of identity and difference, which reduces images of unity and closure to moments in an endless process of affirmation and negation. Refusing a categorical separation between immanence and transcendence, the novel affirms the sanctity of nature. Nature is both the totality for each subject and the subject's other.;My purpose is thus to demonstrate how Holderlin uses literary form to argue political, social, and philosophical questions; fictional form contends with the rigor of theoretical discourse, and exploits the affective power of the poetic. To read the novel is to grasp the historicity of Holderlin's broaching of revolutionary possibilities for human subjectivity. Aesthetic activity becomes a projection of political goals.