Autopsie: Die Physiologie der Liebe und die Anatomie der Politik im Werk Georg Buechners (German text)

This study investigates the intersection of love, politics, and the advancing life sciences---anatomy and physiology---in the work of the German writer, scientist, and radical democrat Georg Buchner (1813--37). Buchner has long been considered one of the most important figures in the history of German literature and yet despite extensive and uninterrupted scholarly attention the degree to which his scientific endeavors infiltrate his oeuvre has yet to be recognized. By exploring the poetics of science in Buchner's writings, this study demonstrates the mechanisms by which scientific knowledge can be transferred across disciplinary boundaries and aesthetically re-coded in the medium of literature. In order to show how the poetics of science permeates Buchner's work, the thesis identifies two crucial themes: what it means to love and what it means to constitute the body politic.; In two of his works, Buchner develops a physiological semantics of love, which strives to unite the spiritual and the sensual sides of intimacy. In this endeavor, Buchner radically undermines idealistic conceptions of love. Specifically, the comedy Leonce and Lena constitutes a large-scale parody of love concepts in German Classicism and Romanticism. His last play, Woyzeck, however, is free from any such form of irony. Rather, it rehabilitates energetically the love and sensuality that idealistic discourse denies the working class.; In regard to politics, Buchner fashions an anatomy of the body politic that observes its mobilization in the wake of the French revolution. In particular, he conceptualizes political representation as anatomica animata, as a non-violent and non invasive gaze under the skin of the collective body. Drawing upon the old European semantics of the state as body, Buchner's work transforms organic metaphors, which structure the economy of symbolic politics, into constituents of a scientific project with democratizing potential. His political autopsy involves a twofold focus: making visible and seeing for oneself. By looking under the skin, the body politic is made transparent to the people. This new mode of a political perception schooled in science captures Buchner's anatomy of politics in a nutshell.