| This thesis studies the relation of politics and poetics in Hoelderlin's work. Reading the novel Hyperion in light of both Hoelderlin's development as poet and his engagement with contemporary discourses, I argue that his understanding of poetry as a political act arises from an appropriation and transformation of two currents of eighteenth century thought, both largely neglected in the critical literature: the theories of dancing developed in the writings of Smith, Koerner, and (later) Adam Mueller, and the emerging disciplines of physiocracy and political economy. The first part of this dissertation, which focuses on the novel's epistolary character and its appropriation of the motifs of Platonic eros, ruins, gardens, and ferment, demonstrates that, despite his early engagement with Kant, Schiller, and Fichte and his own contributions to the absolute idealism of Schelling and Hegel, Hoelderlin, influenced in part by Soemmerring's physiological writings, comes to reject a teleological view of nature, history, and human agency, conceiving of both natural and historical life as an endless circulation and interchange between growth and decay, in which art is not opposed to, but an outgrowth of nature. The second part argues that Hyperion, anticipating the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, develops a "metatheory" of political action that classifies different forms of political life not according to the ultimate goal that they seek, but according to how they comport themselves towards the nonteleological gesture of life. The third and final part shows how in Hyperion dance emerges as the decisive paradigm for political action, with poetry itself conceived as a choreographic writing, which, itself absolutely groundless, traces out the possibility of a mode of being which has only been glimpsed and not intuitively grasped with absolute certainty. The aim of the poet is to choreograph a political body which, rather than being opposed to nature, belongs to nature as part of its circulation and interchange of forces. Thus Hoelderlin's choreo-politics and poetics is a physiocracy: it institutes the dancing virtuosity of a body politic which is ruled by nature, not as a force foreign to itself, but by incorporating and instituting within itself nature's rule and measure. |
