Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Trop, Gabriel

Titel

Affirmative Disequilibrium: Hogarth, Schiller, Schelling, and Goethe

Ist Teil von

• The Germanic review, 2017-04, Vol.92 (2), p.169-188

Ort / Verlag

Washington: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article examines the emergence of discourses in the eighteenth century in which disequilibrium appears not as an aberration-a perturbation later attenuated by some future well-ordered state-but as a source of affirmation in and of itself. The article focuses on specific paradigmatic snapshots that ascribe a certain value to disequilibrium: William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, Schiller's Anmuth und Würde, Schelling's early philosophy of nature, and the Homunculus episode of Faust II. These texts frame affirmative disequilibrium in different modes: as a perceptual technology (aesthetic disequilibrium), as a way of being in the world (ethical disequilibrium), or as a basic structure of givenness (ontological disequilibrium). Each instance of affirmative disequilibrium makes possible a form of thought in which disruption, disjunction, or deviance constitutes the condition of possibility of the author's respective investments, whether in an aesthetics of stimulation (Hogarth), an ethics of sovereignty (Schiller), or an ontology of agonistic forces that frames systemic inconsistency as a source of affirmative potentiality (Schelling). An epilogue on the Homunculus episode of Goethe's Faust II shows how the text imaginatively engages with non-teleological, chaotic liquidity as a generative matrix of forms.