Modernist Image-Consciousness and Lyric Form: Rilke's Encounter with Cézanne

Date: 

Thursday, October 29, 2020, 3:00pm to 5:00pm

Location: 

Zoom Meeting

abstract painting

GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVES

SPEAKER: THOMAS PFAU, DUKE UNIVERSITY

Thomas Pfau is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English at Duke University and holds secondary appointments in Germanic Languages & Literature and the Divinity School. He is the author of some fifty essays and of Wordsworth’s Profession (Stanford 1997), Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790-1840 (Johns Hopkins 2005), and Minding the Modern: Intellectual Traditions, Human Agency, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame 2013). He is currently finishing a new monograph ranging from Plato to Rilke —a complement to Minding the Modern and provisionally titled “Incomprehensible Certainty: Image Consciousness in Philosophy, Theology, and Aesthetics.”

This lecture will consider a striking parallel in the genesis of early modernism. Between 1902 and 1907, Husserl moves beyond his early, robust critique of “psychologism” in Logische Untersuchungen to outline his project of a transcendental phenomenology (in Die Idee der Phänomenologie and Ding und Raum). A key transitional text of this shift, which I will briefly consider, are his lectures on Bildbewußtsein(1905). For it is here that Husserl first works out how consciousness apprehends the world at a pre-discursive level. In shifting the focus of inquiry from subjective “expression” (Ausdruck) to a pre-discursive, mainly visual “apprehension” (Auffassung), Husserl’s phenomenology performs a turn strikingly analogous to Rilke’s poetic development during those very same years. The main part of my lecture will sketch how, in his short monograph on Rodin, his letters on Cézanne, and finally in volume I of Neue Gedichte (1907), Rilke develops a phenomenology of image experience consistent with Husserl’s aims but infinitely more supple in its articulation. Having at last broken with symbolist and late Romantic “expressivism,” Rilke after 1902 refashions lyric form as the optimal medium in which to trace the absolute givenness of the visible qua image. In their mute yet insistent Dinghaftigkeit, Rodin’s sculptures and Cézanne’s canvases had taught him that, prior to all lexical decoding or referential speech, consciousness already constitutes itself in its encounter with the sheer Dinghaftigkeit of the visible world. Rilke sees the beholder of Rodin’s sculptures becoming the unsuspecting witness and virtual collaborator in the thing’s primordial creation: “[Rodin] hatte ihn gemacht, wie Gott den ersten Menschen gemacht hat [. . .] namenloses Leben. [. . .] Da übersetzt sich [. . .] während der Arbeit das Stoffliche immer mehr in Sachliches und Namenloses.” Integral to early modernism’s shift of focus from expressivity to mediality is a qualified revival of mystic motifs that, long before, had been unfolded by Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa. Recalling the late-medieval visio intellectuals, Rilke’s Dinggedichte seek to trace the event (or advent) of consciousness wholly absorbed and, indeed, positively constituted by the sheer givenness of visible things as yet unspoiled by discursive or propositional utterance: “Es entsteht eine Stille; die Stille, die um Dinge ist. Der zu nichts gedrängten Dinge.” Anticipating Husserl’s idea of a “transcendental reduction” (epoché), Rilke finds in Cézanne’s paintings prima facie evidence of what he calls “die Dingwerdung, die durch sein eigenes Erlebnis an dem Gegenstand bis ins Unzerstörbare hinein gesteigerte Wirklichkeit.”

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