1052 CLAUDIA WEGENER

*A Music of Translation*
❦

Claudia Wegener

In his article “The Caesura of the Speculative,” Lacoue-Labarthe

proposes that it might be the neglect of Hölderlin’s dramaturgical
work, in other words, the exclusive consideration of his work as
poetry, which has helped to circumvent a double-folded question: how
is it that Hölderlin’s writing works both to elaborate and dismantle
speculative thought, or, what Lacoue-Labarthe calls “the speculative-
tragic matrix”; and how is it that “nothing, finally, could offer him the
resources of an ‘other’ thought, or give him the possibility of
instituting any difference in relation to it.”1 In what follows, I propose
a reading of Hölderlin’s “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” the notes
meant to accompany his translation of Sophocles’ tragedy.2 Even
before a response to the question raised by Lacoue-Labarthe, the
following text is intended to show how this question might be
approached. The mechanism of a double suspension works in—and
un-works—my writing. It follows what Hölderlin himself in his
“Notes” calls a “double infidelity.” Suspending at once, art and thought,
(the) work and (the) subject, it is destined to open an “other” space
of response, since the “other” is perhaps precisely other than thought—
or, at least, that thought which has defined itself in terms of the
concept: thought as a place of gathering, thinking as concentration.
My reading of Hölderlin owes a considerable debt to and is to some
extent a reading of Lacoue-Labarthe’s “The Caesura of the Specula-
tive.” Yet, what I propose here tends to diverge from Lacoue-Labarthe’s

*
I wish to thank Mark Ryder, Rainer Nägele, Howard Caygill and Eduardo Cadava for
their comments and corrections to this piece of writing at various stages of its
realisation.

MLN 115 (2000): 1052–1084 © 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
 MLN 1053

interpretation as regards, I would say, its destination, and a sense of

space or closure that comes as an effect of “destiny” (destination as
diverted by desire). Where he states that Hölderlin “was not able to give
rise to any logic that might have been properly his own and that could have
brought about a scission,” 3 there I do not quite agree, or, only to the
point that this must inescapably be the conclusion, if the question’s
origin and destination is philosophical, and even, philosophy itself. It
is not, that such a work as “The Caesura of the Speculative” does not
also exceed the strictly philosophical at times—quite the opposite,
this excess is precisely its challenge and its immense interest for works
of a non-philosophical direction—yet, it returns to itself, it never
forgets its destination, which is, without doubt, philosophical. This
“return to itself” is, what since Aristotle has been called entelechia, a
textual as well as a properly philosophical device of a return, an
identification of destination and origin. It is precisely the return to the
same and the self which Hölderlin severely unsettles in and with his
“Anmerkungen.” He lets “himself” be challenged, puts his writing, his
text, and not only that, at risk. For the challenge of following the
other turn, that is to say, the turn of the tragic, he abandons, or rather,
he will have deserted at some point, the traditional, that is, the
philosophical sublimation of the contradiction which comes with
suffering—and the sublimation of another contradiction, which, per-
haps not altogether different, comes with art.4 In my reading, I tend to
accentuate the scission that is indeed working in Hölderlin’s writing,
that is productive, even if it did not (not yet) produce another
thought, another philosophy, not even, another literature. I pursue
this reading of an accentuation of a certain dissolution—and I will
continue to insist on the productive force of this paradox—along the
lines of scission drawn by a question of form. The diversion of
Hölderlin’s work from the philosophical, or certainly, from philoso-
phy, begins to become severe, that is to say, cutting, with the
consideration of “(re)cognition” (and, perhaps, with what exceeds
it).5 The “question of form” is, for Hölderlin, not simply a question,
neither does it succumb to “formalism.” It is a matter of elaboration,
operation, organisation, realisation—in Blanchot’s words, work and
unworking; it is experimentation and experience. And thus, “(re)-
cognition” becomes here less a matter of identification, of the
distinction of the subjective and the objective, than a matter of form,
of formalising, of recognising form, recognising a structure, type, in
and as formal repetition. Recognition becomes an affirmation of a
formal repetition, a procedure and an operation, which, again and
1054 CLAUDIA WEGENER

again, submits form and figure to time and to listening. And the
affirmation of repetition is necessary. The (sense of) time Hölderlin’s
short piece of prose writing gives to its reader, is rather more like time
spent listening to a piece of music than time spent reading a philosophi-
cal text.
What follows is a close reading of Hölderlin’s “Anmerkungen zum
Ödipus,” the “Notes” which append (that is to say, in its published
form)6 his translation of the Sophoclean tragedy. The “Notes” consist
of three parts. I concentrate on the third and read the text from
there, “backwards.” The language is of an unspeakable, delirious
density [Dichte]. What interests me here is how two of the most urgent
modern issues can be, in this text from the very beginning of the 19th
century, at once, so much at stake and not a matter of questions. One
concerns our questioning of an adequate representation of suffering,
the other the division of what goes under the name “practice and
theory,” or also, “art and work.” That is to say, I am interested in what
Hölderlin does in writing when he concerns himself with tragedy—as
it is, of course, never simply a doing, but always also passion—and
perhaps, this is so even more violently in the very proximity of
translation.
Anticipating, I would already like to note at this point that
Hölderlin comes to write about tragedy in terms of the “tragic
transport.” Transport can be rendered as Über-tragung, that is, also,
trans-lation. For Hölderlin, the tragic is essentially linked to forms of
trans-port, of trans-lation. The translation of “a tragedy,” indeed, is
tragic, it moves in a space of duplication, in which the tragic will have
already become unspeakable and unreadable, a space in which it
comes to figure, comes to stand there as form. It is this experience which
becomes inscription and work in the “Notes,” and, I would even say,
song and triumph.7
Here is a translation of the beginning of the third part of the
“Anmerkungen”:
The (re)presentation of the tragic rests, principally, on the fact that the
monstrous [das Ungeheure]—how the god and man join together and the
power of nature and the innermost being of man boundlessly become as
one in fury—is to be understood through the boundless becoming-one
being purified by boundless separation.8

Die Darstellung des Tragischen. (Re)presentation of the tragic. There is

no before or behind of (re)presentation, nor is there another tragic.
(Re)presentation of the tragic always [vorzüglich, superbly, preferably]
 MLN 1055

rests on something, something monstrous, on the monstrous [das

Ungeheure]. There is always and already (re)presentation, and this is
also, what is so monstrous about it, and particularly, when it concerns
the tragic. There is no doubt, the tragic is real. It really is tragic, and
it is (re)presentation from the start. It is one and it is double. It is
boundless becoming-one and boundless separation, and this (as if) in
one or, at once, as one in fury, in a monstrous collision. This is the very
tendency, the inclination (and I do not say “essence”) of Hölderlin’s
writing: representation is (the) tragic. Representation is the reality, a
tragic one, of, as he puts it, “the god and man.”
Das Ungeheure. The monstrous appears as the mode of a coupling,
the moment of a coincidence, strange (barbarous) and beyond
measure (unfathomed). It is neither simply a thing nor a space,
rather the (enormous and outrageous) appearance of an absence of
some-thing, or some space. Das Ungeheure, wie der Gott und Mensch
sich paart. The German unheimlich marks the alienating appearance of
an absence, like the appearance of a space which is “normally” too
familiar to appear as space. If “Home,” the inhabited, is a “site” where
space most perfectly disappears—and where even this disappearance
disappears, das Ungeheure [unge-huire, the “un-housely”] would be the
irritating moment of a self-showing of a space made to be occupied, a
demonstration at once monumental and unfaithful. The monstrous,
relating to the Latin monere, to show, to warn, shares the same
etymological root with monumentum: something which shows “it-
self”—and too much. “Music” and “madness” (mania) should be seen as
members of the same (etymological) family, and, in the drama of
Hölderlin’s writing, directly related to the monstrous coupling of “the
god and man.”9
Der Gott. Perhaps, what always has to remain without translation,
the absolute, the absolutely other—boundlessly empty, infinitely rich.
A fragment contemporary with the “Anmerkungen” begins: “Was ist
Gott, unbekannt, dennoch / Voll Eigenschaften ist das Angesicht / Des
Himmels von ihm.” [“What is God? Unknown, and yet / Full of
qualities is the face / Of heaven with him”].10
Der Gott und Mensch. “The god,” this god, is not (the) all, or, at least:
it remains unknown. In the case of “god,” the article, be it definite or
indefinite, amounts to a limitation, a distancing, and a matter of
uncertainty, other than in the case of “man.”11 It is only here, in the
first sentence of the third part, and only once, that “man” lacks the
definite article. Der Gott und Mensch. An encounter of an excessive, a
too much and a too little of definition and address is the very trace of
1056 CLAUDIA WEGENER

“man,” of the involvement of an “I.” With a gesture of definition—

directed toward the monstrous, a monstrous unity—my mouth gapes
open, as if it were in pain or pleasure or death. I am at a loss for
speech.12 Der Gott und Mensch. “the god and man” is—and this is also
transported via the use of the singular rather than the plural in the
verb—already one, or rather the one, always and already united before
uniting [Eineswerden], coupled [gepaart] before any text, coupled
in a monstrous dissent.
Boundless [grenzenloses] becoming-one purifying itself in boundless separa-
tion.13 The paradox of limitlessness encountering another limitless-
ness in an infinite collision. “The God and man” summons up the
intimacy and terror of limitlessness with and in “itself” as the other,
the absolute other. It is the intimacy of the monstrous [das Ungeheure];
in other words, a becoming uncanny [unheimlich] of what sounds so
familiar, of what shows itself [monstrare] as the all too familiar. There
is no escape from the monstrous uncertainty of (re)presentation, of
tragic (re)presentation, other than—and this is less an escape, than
another monstrosity—“representation itself”; the very repetition, the
task of repeating again and again, and of miming in some form, what
Hölderlin calls the boundless becoming-one purifying itself in boundless
separation. This is to say, there is escape, be it only a relief, a relief
which might not come without horror, a temporary, a time-bound
lifting of gravity, and this escape is formal. It is precisely and “only” a
formal escape—and only by insisting on, by exhausting, and even
enjoying, the paradox can there be something like (re)cognition.
There is escape from representation, the infinity of representation,
and it is what form, what repetition of form, and what rhythm does in
time and to time, and it is when there is “representation itself,” when
“die Vorstellung selber erscheint,” when “representation itself
appears.”14
The tragic does take place and it takes up time, it inscribes itself as
an event in history, yet its paradoxical and constitutive boundlessness
[Grenzenlosigkeit] of exchange [Wechsel] is bound—that is, inescapably,
by necessity—to interrupt time and history and thought. The tragic is
an infinity of exchange without resolution—boundless becoming-one
and boundless separation —and it is with and in this infinity, which is a
double boundlessness, coupled with and in an excess of definition
(de-finition), that there lies a threat of dissolution that always comes
with the tragic. It is this interruption, a necessary interruption, in its
hyperbolic, its double and doubling force, which Hölderlin describes
in terms of and as the caesura. This, according to Lacoue-Labarthe,
 MLN 1057

cannot but take place in a theatre, on stage, in other words, it is always

and already also a matter of theory. The caesura also caesura-s the
interruption “itself.” A hyperbolic separation holds and divides, holds
by dividing “itself”; a separation that is the very possibility and end of
theory, of thinking, of history.
Die Darstellung des Tragischen beruht vorzüglich darauf, daß das Ungeheure
[...] sich begreift [...]. The (re)presentation of the tragic does not rest
in or on itself. There is no such thing as, the tragic itself, or the
monstrous per se. The tragic is the entrance and the “work” of the
contradictory [das Wider-sprüchliche]. It cannot be known as/by “itself,”
it cannot be controlled by recourse to the self/same (yet what indeed
could be controlled by it?). That is, it can of course be controlled,
precisely in and through philosophical, i.e. speculative, sublimation,
which is, at once and inescapably also the very sublimation of
representation. By giving way to a speculative control of the tragic,
one has already abandoned the possibility of following, and thus of
(re)cognising, the turn of the tragic, the caesura, the reality of tragic
(re)presentation. This notion of a possibility of ((re)cognition of)
tragic (re)presentation is something like super-speculation, an excess
of speculation. And at this point, and this is what Lacoue-Labarthe
describes as “the caesura of the speculative,” it is the speculative
which turns: “the very excess of the speculative switches into the very
excess of submission to finitude.”15 Yet, in Hölderlin’s writing, this
turn realises itself, and this can be “shown”: it is super-speculation,
which, forced into an encounter with an insistence in form and
time—an insistence realised in and by poetic form—breaks off and
gives way to an unprecedented generalisation of the tragic, an
unprecedented “view” on the “catastrophe” [Umkehr] of thought, of
culture, of aesthetic and historical representation. The tragic has
become a measure of reality.
Caesura: it is here that diversion becomes cutting, and even, it is
here that the cut appears “itself.” Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading, philo-
sophical in origin and destination, leads to the suggestion of a
“generalisation of catharsis,” and even, “a catharsis of the specula-
tive.”16 The reading I am pursuing points toward a generalisation of the
tragic. In a philosophical reading, a re-appropriating fidelity to the
philosophical has led to an inversion, to something like an infidelity;
thus nonetheless, it is a typical philosophical (reduction of) recogni-
tion. It is inescapable—perhaps. It is a problem of identity, a desire to
match (couple) beginnings and ends. It is the demand for “(re)-
cognition” which turns (in)to identification, in a kind of short-circuit,
1058 CLAUDIA WEGENER

typically by-passing (the question of) form and measure. “The very
excess of submission to finitude,” as Lacoue-Labarthe has it, becomes
diverted, reduced, bound in identification, as human finitude. It is at
its most problematic in/as a certain accentuation of “the subject”:
“‘the subject’ of tragedy or of the dramatic utterance.”17 A kind of human-
ism, and even moralism, slips in. Or, in other words, it is with the
“generalisation of catharsis” that a problematic fundamentalisation of
the sacrificial takes hold, such as it manifests itself in what Lacoue-
Labarthe calls, citing Hölderlin, and perhaps all to diligently: “the
‘categorical’ turning about of the divine corresponds to the volte-face
of man toward the earth, his pious infidelity,”18 or “the appropriation
of a divine position [...] and the appropriation of the right to institute
difference by oneself.”19 Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading is not free of “the
madness of the self-consciousness” which it reads in Hölderlin. The
reading I am pursuing is, in turn, not free of a radical detachment,
which it (the reading) has come to listen to in Hölderlin’s words. This
radical appearance of a detachment is all too often, and often, all too
easily, returned and reduced to “its proper” place: art; and, in a tone
of accusation: formalism. In Hölderlin’s writing on the tragic, formalism
(and to provide the means for another return, and provocatively, I
stay with this term for now), is indeed essential—and this shows.
It will be good, in order to secure for today’s poets a bourgeois existence—
taking into account the difference of times and institutions—if we elevate
poetry today to the mhxanÆ of the ancients.20

The generalisation of the tragic—necessarily following from and

presupposing an affirmation of representation as the tragic—puts
issues of time and of form at stake with an unprecedented insistence.
To put time and form at stake, to use means/media, Mittel anwenden,
is what is denoted by the Greek term mhxanÆ. It makes for a
provocative opening of the “Notes,” appearing in the first sentence of
part one of the “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus.”21
In the third part of the “Anmerkungen,” an accumulation of
reflexive verbs is linked within temporal structures of on-going
processes: das Ungeheure begreift sich [the monstrous touches, grasps,
understands itself], der Gott und Mensch paart sich [the god and man
couples “him”self], das grenzenlose Eineswerden reinigt sich [the bound-
less becoming-one purifies itself]. And it continues in such a way, that
all main verbs in this third and last part of Hölderlin’s text are
reflexive; here is the continuation of the list: sich aufheben [to cancel
itself], sich mitteilen [to communicate itself], sich vergessen [to forget
 MLN 1059

itself], sich umkehren [to turn itself], sich vergessen [to forget itself], sich
wenden [to turn itself], sich (nicht) reimen [(not) to rhyme itself].
Circularity as reflexivity [re-flexive—literally: to bend back] seems
implicated here—and in more than one way; a circularity, in whose
centre, as it were, the monstrous [das Ungeheure] lies, a coiled up
fury, untouched and untouchable [unbegreiflich as impossible to
behold and understand], and only grasped (at) by itself [sich be-
greifen]. A monstrous mechanics which betrays itself in grasping (at)
itself [sich be-greifen]. The (re)presentation of the tragic rests calmly on
the horrific scene like a statue leaning, with as much elegance as
indifference, on a plinth.
We should, however, note here immediately the typographic
delimitation of the above visual metaphor: the tragic, for Hölderlin, is
hardly a scene at all. Alles ist Rede gegen Rede. Everything is speech
against speech. The monstrous is the troubling approach of an
intimacy in terms of a becoming-speech, a becoming of speech and
counter-speech—and a becoming all too familiar. It is a becoming of
listening and of language, rather than bound to the visual. The
intimacy of this dialogue threatens to “tear apart the soul of the
listener.”22 From here, one could begin to trace the cut that gapes
between Freud and Hölderlin—that is, also, between Freud and
Freud, and between Hölderlin and Hölderlin—between (re)presen-
tations of a spectatorship of the tragic scene and those of an audience
of the tragedy of speech, of a monstrosity which has to be witnessed by
listening.23
In Hölderlin’s writing, the tragic is a movement of reflexivity, a
turning which however never returns to “itself”—beginning and end
simply do not rhyme [Anfang und Ende sich (in ihr) schlechterdings nicht
reimen läßt].24 It is absolute reflexivity without return. A treacherous
faithfulness. A point of catastrophic detachment from which none-
theless, alienating and alienated in its distant familiarity, and thus
from a position of powerlessness, the net and connections of words
are to be witnessed. The hyperbolic form of the tragic realises itself in
language, in speech, in the word, as a testimony without witness. Yet it
is witnessing nonetheless, a witnessing detached from the “self,” as if
detached from all consciousness: in the “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,”
Hölderlin speaks of a “consciousness which cancels consciousness,” “ein
Bewußtsein welches das Bewußtsein aufhebt.”25 In the “Anmerkungen
zum Ödipus,” he writes, at an analogous position in the text (also at
the beginning of part three), “everything is speech against speech,
one cancelling [itself in] the other,” “alles ist Rede gegen Rede die sich
1060 CLAUDIA WEGENER

gegenseitig aufhebt.”26 When super-speculation realises itself in an

absolute reflexivity without return, that is, radically submitting to the
conditions of form/time/listening, in a finite poetic space, then (and
it is indeed a radical temporalisation which takes hold), the turning
of speculation “itself” appears: speculation without profit, negativity
without sublimation, empty exchange (transport, as Hölderlin says).
However, a super-speculation realised—in a procedure, unfaithfully
faithful—in time and space and word stands there in/as utter strange-
ness, “its own” excessive residue and resemblance, a monumentality
against monumentality cancelling out itself.
According to Hölderlin’s translation, Oedipus’ crime, his nefas, is
that he “himself ” attempts to link, as if this were possible, as if he were
a priest (“in priestly fashion”), the “all too infinite” (he interprets the
words of the oracle “all too infinitely”) and “the particular”: “Who is
this man whose fate the God pronounces?”27 A monstrous coupling of
“the god and man,” and even, of “the god” and “this man,” the violent
encounter of the particular and the “all too infinite” takes place when
language becomes speech.
The tragic is a matter of a fascinated speech, of “a language almost
in the manner of furies,” “eine Sprache beinahe nach Furienart.”28 An
excessive fascination (fas-cination) speaks—almost by definition. The
tragic comes with and as an excessive fascination with language which
(and when it) becomes “mine,” it is a gamble in-between “the word”
and my word, at once lawful and maniac: fas, the natural or the divine
law is related to the Latin fari and the Greek fhm¤, to speak, also to
sing—always at the risk of tempting the ne-fas, of speaking, or singing,
sacrilegiously, as if “in a priestly fashion.” The ne-fas, the crime, would
be the moment when the distance to “the word” collapses, the
distance between language and speech, between speech and “my”
speech, between “the god” and “this man”: fas is the law inscribed in
language, it is what has been spoken, but it is not “me” who speaks.
Excessive fascination speaks, it speaks at the limit of a collapse, at the
risk of life and death: “Das Wort aus begeistertem Munde ist schrecklich,
und tötet ” [“The enthusiastic word is terrible, and kills ” ].29
A dialogue which wants to tear apart the soul of just these listeners [ein
Dialog, der die Seele eben dieser Hörer zerreißen will]. The emphasis of
this phrase, “just these listeners,” seems strange, the referent uncer-
tain. Hölderlin has been speaking here of the “lamenting, the
peaceful, the religious, the pious lie” in the chorus “scenes” of the
Oedipus.30 Perhaps, for Hölderlin, “the listener,” rather than some-
body, a man listening, is the one who is in or on the side of the
 MLN 1061

chorus—lamenting, peaceful, religious—represented by and in the

chorus. In the “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” Hölderlin speaks of (the
parts, the structure of) the chorus as separate from and opposed to
[im Gegensatze mit] the otherwise “dialogical form,” the more
“violent or irresistible dialogue,” and that the parts of the chorus
function in tragedy as the “suffering organs,” and as “holding and
interpreting.”31 Witnessing by listening as on the side of the chorus is a
space which opens for the listener of tragic speech: “lamenting,
peaceful, religious,” it is more a celebration of speech, a listening-
speaking “in chorus,” more song than speech. A space apart from the
dialogical furies, the speculative twists, of the dramatic events. It is less
something “in itself,” than an interval “of itself.” It is more a dreaming
of space, than space “itself.”
In “The Caesura of the Speculative,” Lacoue-Labarthe discusses,
what he calls, Hölderlin’s “disorganising of tragedy.” Here is a
moment where the movement of a “disorganising of tragedy” can be
traced as it turns. A Hölderlinean dissolution of tragedy takes place,
as Lacoue-Labarthe suggests it, in terms of a “re-turn to Aristotle.”
Aristotle emphasises in his Poetics the more musical character of the
chorus parts. He even warns of a deteriorating effect this music
threatens to have, with “the later poets” (after Sophocles) transfering
(a certain anticipation of the Hölderlinean transport) choral pieces
indiscriminately from one tragedy to another. Music as the song of
the tragic chorus enters “the scene” as the binding and un-binding,
the boundless threat of indiscriminate repetition, an unbinding of
the transfer of language where it tends toward the meaningless,
empty lament, pious lie. It is a boundlessness close to religion. The
Latin religatio [re-ligo] renders a binding [always and already a re-
binding].32
Hölderlin’s inclination toward issues of form in the wake of a
radical generalisation of the tragic already announces itself in the first
sentence of the first part of the “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus.” There, it is
written in the “proper” language of poetry [Poesie], that is, in the
language of his profession which he advocates here, a “mechanics” of
poetry, poetry as mhxanÆ. What I attempt to inscribe here within the
definition of a double genitive—the language of poetry, the language
of his profession—continues to mock definition, it holds onto defini-
tion and keeps it at play—and this is not without irony here. The
“Anmerkungen,” or more precisely, Hölderlin’s dramaturgical works,
particularly as set and held in comparison with the lyric, are seen, as
Lacoue-Labarthe notes, as a merely eccentric supplement, more or
1062 CLAUDIA WEGENER

less “theoretical,” not to say marginal to Hölderlin’s work. It is an

irony which will have already been inherent in language that also
finds its way into Hölderlin’s words and text:33
Amongst man, one has particularly to take into consideration in relation to
every thing, that it is a something, that is to say, that it is something knowable
through the means (moyen) of its manifestation, that its mode of condition-
ing may be determined and learned.34

Here hides and reveals itself, with/in irony, the tragic triumph of
writing, of “the word,” as Hölderlin also says, over mediation
[Vermittlung/ Mittelbarkeit]. Mediation looks like a school-master, since
it is always and already the demand for mediation “itself”: everything
should be some-thing, something knowable—that is, knowable accord-
ing to the school-master. “Amongst man, one has to be watchful that every-
thing is some-thing . . . that everything is ‘its own means’ to understanding
. . . that every-thing can be classified and taught.” Language should be a
message and an information, and thus, a transfer of knowledge, that
is, properly transportable. Just as much as, and I extend here by
analogy, something should show—“through the means of its manifes-
tation” [in dem Mittel seiner Erscheinung]—whether it is to be
understood as tragic or not.
It is a structure of irony, rather than ironic tone, which is at stake.35
This structural irony lies in the coupling of Hölderlin’s explicit
insistence on a “strict mediation” [strenge Mittelbarkeit],36 and his,
at once, extensive use of the ambiguity inherent in language and its
inescapable multiplications of meaning. It lies, in particular—and
this form of particularity is decisive in Hölderlin’s writing—in the
staged coupling, in the very phrase “im Mittel (moyen) seiner Erscheinung ”:
a “(re)cognition” which realises itself “through the means (moyen) of
its manifestation.” The bracketed French moyen forms a particular
means of transport, it transports irony—and again, this shows. It
supports and repeats a certain contamination of the German Mittel
(means) which can also designate a Mittel-punkt, the middle, a
calculable average, a centre, as does moyen. In the middle of a call for
proper mediation, the very effort of explicitness will have already
become ambiguous. Here, “proper” mediation is put on stage to
subvert itself as if from its very “centre,” from inside. The tragedy of the
tragic, a passion in-between an acclaimed vital centrality (moyen),
“murderous factuality” (“the word”) and “strict mediation,” im-
plodes within a word, in a mere word. As if a play of mhxanÆ, of art
and mechanics, foreshadows and causes (a) real tragedy—and it
 MLN 1063

does. The tragic—and this deserves to be affirmed and shown—is, of

course, a play of words and a mere word-play.
Structural irony also lies in Hölderlin’s provocative citation of
mhxanÆ, his calling on poetic mhxanÆ, or “strict mediation.” Hölderlin
submits—ironically, and that is, not without an accentuated “self”-
irony—to the typical counter-argument [Wider-spruch] of the artist.
The irony is pre-emptive. Yet the turn of irony also and already
exceeds irony, as it begins to resemble in advance another move: the
turn of a double infidelity.37 It is known to be not only a “properly”
philosophical, but also a typical strategy of specularisation, to play
down “technique” and insist on “inspiration” as the limit of art. This
being another pre-emptive manoeuvre (not every pre-emptive move,
however, is also ironic), since it is precisely by means of a “correct”
installation of “spirit” at the expense of “technique,” i.e. the exclusion
of art as merely technical, imitation, deceit, lacking truth from a
properly philosophical realm of “spirit” [noËw], that philosophy
establishes “itself” as/within the very return to “(it)self.”38 An ironical
twist, a rather twisted irony, comes to bear, since the provocative
insistence on mhxanÆ coincides with Hölderlin’s excessively philo-
sophical approach to the question of the tragic. The twisting of a
philosophy, whose “end” and destination is, without doubt, other
than “(it)self,” other than philosophical. Or, in other words, and from
the point of view of a future aftermath, after the turn (and this is what
Hölderlin refers to as infidelity): philosophy will have become the
destination of a movement without name and without origin, the very
moment, its unidentifiable identity, of a forgetting, a radical turning
away, as if there would have never been a philosophy before.
“Beginning and end do not rhyme,” or, as it is put toward the end of
the “Anmerkungen,” “in such moments man forgets himself and turns
around like a traitor.”39 Once again, and this time, ironically, an
absolute reflexivity without return marks itself. What follows is a kind
of forgetting, a forgetting of “self” (of the model of the self/same),
which Hölderlin in and with his “Anmerkungen” designates as (the)
tragic.
“However, the tragic presentation principally consists of the factual
word which, being more a relation than something that is stated
explicitly, moves by destiny from the beginning to the end,” Hölderlin
writes in the “Anmerkungen zur Antigone.” The tragic is a word and
it is factual. Something has been done with and in the word, always
and already. It is inescapable. The factual word is “the god” and it is his
figure, it is “the god, present in the figure of death.”40 “The word” of
1064 CLAUDIA WEGENER

the (re)presentation of the tragic is factual; it is death, death and

murder, forms of death, which could be received as/within speaking
and listening, but which may just as well be a perfectly silent,
murderous relation [Zusammenhang].41 With tragic (re)presen-
tation—whether or not it is more or less mediate, more modern,
more ancient—it will have always become inescapable: death is
“merely” a figure, a word even, and nonetheless, this is the presence
of death, a standing there in/as a figure. As Lacoue-Labarthe has put it
elsewhere, there is “nothing to do with death but dramatise it.”42
An accumulation of the grammatical form of the comparative
defines the effective territory of “strict mediation”: (re)cognition is
possible only by means of contrast, in a process involving contradiction
[Wider-spruch, Gegen-rede], which is always a matter of form and
time. “Die strenge Mittelbarkeit aber ist das Gesetz,” Hölderlin writes in
“Das Höchste,” one of the late Pindar fragments. “The strictly
mediate is the law,” the supreme, the king, not because it is the
highest power, but because it provides for the “highest ground of
(re)cognition” [den höchsten Erkenntnisgrund].43 The “strictly me-
diate,” rather than the possibility of (re)cognition, its specularisation,
is its supreme realisation and figuration. It is the inescapable law of
representation, less (re)cognition “itself,” than its foremost, its “high-
est” ground. Supreme (re)cognition, always, by law, takes place on the
grounds of representation. And this, “for the tragic must be compre-
hended herein,” may often end “deadly.”44
The insistence that, supreme “(re)cognition” takes place on the
grounds of representation, is an ambition which carries Hölderlin’s
thought and “tragic project” beyond philosophy: philosophy having
installed itself as that which attempts the return to “(it)self,” a
movement of identification which does not pass without a certain
forcing of the “properly” philosophical, a certain infidelity. Hölderlin’s
approach is excessively philosophical, a fidelity to the philosophical
which leaves philosophy “proper” and turns away.45 It is a tempting of
fidelity, which leaves the demand of speculative structures empty,
without response, and realises some-thing—something other than
“itself”—something which nonetheless also testifies to form, structure,
(re)cognition, though it shows a resistance to the model of the self/
same, or certainly, its specularisation in/as the imprint. Hölderlin
inscribes and stages this other typing, this other “recognition,” as a
double turning away, a double forgetting, a double infidelity. The
“recognition” at stake, is a recognition without recognition, without
“subject” or “object,” merely “its” form, the iteration and the rhythm
 MLN 1065

of “its” form. It is also known as the hyperbolic: the more and less than
one, more and less than two. The accumulation of comparatives in
Hölderlin’s writing traces the “working” of a double infidelity as the
very loosening of speculative structures.46
In the “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” Hölderlin articulates a
sacrilege which could also name the movement, destination and
destiny, of his writing:“Wo einer, in Gottes Sinne, wie gegen Gott sich
verhält, und den Geist des Höchsten gesetzlos erkennt.” [“where someone,
in the sense of god, acts as if against god and recognises the spirit of
the highest as lawless.”]47
Here is indeed the middle and the means of Hölderlin’s work on
“the Oedipus.” Concerning the “narration,” or rather, the course of
dramatic speech, the mechanics foreshadowing and causing the
catastrophe of Oedipus’ life are played out (Oedipus out-plays
“himself”), according to Hölderlin’s reading, in the central part
around the oracle of Teresias. It is a catastrophe which “snatches man
from his sphere of life, at the median point of his inner life, and carries
him off to another world, the eccentric sphere of the dead.”48 The
desire for and the tempting of origins—always also the desire for “my”
origin—does not lead (back) to any beginning, to a (re)cognition of
“(it)self,” to self-knowledge, it always provides the lead for a turning.
The desire for origins always ends in (a turn to) mourning. The
catastrophe is the very turn where excessive mediation coincides with
the tempting of origins. In the “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” in its
second, its middle part, Hölderlin presents the mechanics of the turn
by means of extensive citations from his translation of the Sophoclean
text.49
The two “eccentric” parts, part one and three of the “Anmerkungen”
deliver the analysis again in other languages, the first in the language
of explicit poetic laws and mechanics, the third in yet another
language, more difficult to name. However, it seems to me, that the
third part might begin to realise itself in a language of infidelity which
it also explicitly announces: “to communicate (itself) in the all-
forgetting form of unfaithfulness” [in der allvergessenden Form der
Untreue sich mitteilt]. This realisation, it could be said, transports the last
part, or, the second “eccentric” language, into a central position, a
position of mediation, from where the mechanics of (poetic) text and
(dramatic) “narrative” correspond to each other, in and through the
opening of a space which is yet a gap (again: like an open mouth . . .),
unfaithful to either side, to the laws of poetics and to the laws of
dramatic speech (dramatisation). Both sides speak the laws of the
1066 CLAUDIA WEGENER

world, of life, of art and of history jealously in their “own” tone, always
under the threat of a collapse of difference, of one side becoming the
ob-literation of the other: of dramatic speech obliterating the mhxanÆ
of poetics, and the law obliterating the story. Yet here, with/in the
allforgetting form of infidelity, a third side, a forgetting, a limit has
become a space, and even, begins to allow for speech: perhaps there
could be another language, perhaps another listening.50
Here is the caesura as it speaks “itself” in Hölderlin’s writing, in his
“Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” and three times over, an excessive
coincidence without collapse, each time a becoming of another
language:
Thus, in the rhythmic succession of representations [Vorstellungen] through
which the transport is (re)presented [sich darstellt], what in metrics is called
a caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic interruption, becomes necessary
to counteract, at its acme, the turbulent succession of representations, in
such a way that it is not now the succession of representations that appears
but representation itself.51
He (Teresias) makes his entry under the course of destiny like the seer who
can see into the force of nature [Naturmacht] which, tragically, snatches
man from his sphere of life, at the median point of his inner life, and carries
him off to another world, the eccentric sphere of the dead.52
At such a moment, the man forgets himself and the God, and turns around,
admittedly in a holy way, like a traitor. At the extreme limit of suffering
[Leiden: pathos], nothing indeed remains but the conditions of time or
space.
At this point, the man forgets himself because he is entirely within the
moment; the God forgets himself because he is nothing but time; and both
are unfaithful, Time because at such a moment it undergoes a categoric
change and beginning and end simply no longer rhyme within it; man
because, at this moment, he has to follow the categorical turning away and
that thus, as a consequence, he can simply no longer be as he was in the
beginning.53
At the extreme limit of suffering: in Hölderlin’s words, “in” the extreme
limit, “in der äußersten Grenze.” As if, in suffering, the very limit of
what is sufferable becomes or forms still—or again—something like a
space, certainly an enclosure, the limiting interiority of an ég≈n.54
This interiority at the outer limit—agonia, agony, the struggle unto
death—is also an opening to and an approaching of the other, and
thus, perhaps, an opening to some kind of communion. As Levinas
articulates it: “my solitude is not confirmed by death but broken by it.”55 And
Hölderlin responds (to the limit): “man is entirely in (the) moment
 MLN 1067

[im Moment].” “Man” is nothing but momentary, a moment of

turning about, he is nothing but momentary (spatial and temporal)
conditions—which, at the end, he “is” not. “Man” “is” in the embrace
of utmost exteriority, “himself” a fiight of utter (self)forgetfulness.
“His” solitude, a reflexivity apart from the “I.” This enclosure or this
interiority at the very limit of “itself,” surprising as it may seem, does
not come without an un-binding of responsibility, that is to say,
boundless responsibility. “Self-forgetfulness as a first abnegation,” Levinas
writes.56
Caesura. What remains, and “something” does remain, is more and
less than nothing. It remains: the nothing. The very appearance of
(the) nothing. Conditions of time or space. Empty conditionality is
the limit of what is sufferable. An interruption of time and space takes
place in time and space as a cut and the precarious balance [Gleich-
gewicht] of what has been cut. What remains is (the) nothing as it
cuts, all-forgetting but, nonetheless, still form, the form of a cut, the
caesura: double (self)forgetting, double turning away, double infidel-
ity—yet never simply double, always more and less than double. The
hyperbolic takes place as a becoming of form, a coming to form, and
with Hölderlin, the becoming of another language.57
“The tragical transport is essentially empty, and the most unbounded of
all.”58 The caesura appears as if it were the point of a rupture, an
event. Yet the appearance of a nothingness cuts horizontally through
whatever structures might have been there “before,” it cuts “from the
beginning to the end,” so that beginning and end “no longer rhyme
within it.” The caesura is not a point, it is experienced as/in a
moment, in time, yet it also interrupts time, moment, experience. It
is interruption and event in history, yet its working is that of the
“counter-rhythmic,” a rhythm which comes to form in the figure of
no-figure, an end of figuration as a (re)turn, a turning away. It is the
switch, the gap, which is (a) becoming form. Perhaps it is even the
becoming of form, an empty play, unbinding and boundless; while
rhythm and counter-rhythm nonetheless, and also, come to a kind of
balance [Gleichgewicht], where “something” can appear. “Some-
thing” which is (the) nothing, and also the beginning of every-thing:
a play of representations, representation “itself,” the unsettling
presentation of a boundlessness which is also split. Tragedy is also
play, a playing of and at representation. In German, tragedy can be
translated as “Trauerspiel,” that is to say, a play of grief, of sorrow, of
lament.
A (re)turn of the “pure word,” the “counter-rhythmic intervention”
1068 CLAUDIA WEGENER

cuts through—and binds—the entire third part of the “Anmerkungen.”

Examining the accumulation of reflexive verbs more closely, a
maximum of calculation and recognisable form and rhythm can be
found. Here is the list of verbs once again: sich begreifen [to grasp
itself], sich paaren [to couple “itself”], sich reinigen [to purify itself], sich
aufheben [to cancel itself], sich mitteilen [to communicate itself], sich
vergessen [to forget itself], sich umkehren [to turn itself], sich vergessen
[to forget itself], sich wenden [to turn itself], sich (nicht) reimen [(not)
to rhyme itself]. This list is indeed not a list and is no simple
accumulation, but words necklaced and bound according to recognisable
rules of poetic mhxanÆ. The rhythm can be noted as: a / b - c - d - e /
f - g - f - g / (-)⬙a.⬙ The first and the last verb form a frame, an
embrace, or almost, since a variation—sich paaren/ sich reimen—is
added, as well as an inversion, the last verb reimen appears in the
negative form. The other eight verbs are bound in groups of four,
whereby the first forms a succession: sich begreifen, sich reinigen, sich
aufheben, sich mitteilen; while the following group forms a cross,
alternation [Wechsel], or double turn [Wende]: sich vergessen, sich
umkehren, sich vergessen, sich wenden. Text and rhythm are bound by
and in the (in)fidelity of another, a third side. The text describes what
is inscribed and takes place in the very rhythm of words: the
impossibility of correspondence between beginning and end within a
movement of reflexivity without return (to the self/same). The
rhythm of a “categorical turning away” forms the framework, in/as
which an encounter of succession [Aufeinanderfolge] and alterna-
tion [Wechsel] takes place in a correspondence of double infidelity,
which is, despite everything, a space of balance, of equilibrium
[Gleich-gewicht]. “In Tragedy, the law [...] is more by counterpoise than by
pure succession.” “Das Gesetz [...] ist im Tragischen mehr Gleichgewicht als
reine Aufeinanderfolge,” Hölderlin writes.59 In tragedy, what counts, is
the (in)stability of the more and less than one, more and less than
two. A hyperbolic alternation finds, less a charged sublimation as “its”
profit and specularisation, rather than a discharge of a kind. Impossi-
bility of correspondence—Hölderlin’s speaks of a “categorical (re)turn”
[kategorische Umkehr]—can only appear “itself” as far as it betrays
itself [sich ver-raten], i.e. as far as it shows itself [sich darstellen], and
thus, still and despite “itself” corresponds.60 And thus, Hölderlin
writes: “Der tragische Transport ist nämlich leer und der ungebundenste.”61
Lacoue-Labarthe remarks on the transport as being French in the
original.62 From the original publication from 1804,63 it cannot be
understood with any certainty whether “transport” is meant to be the
 MLN 1069

French transport or the German Transport; it could just as well be the

English transport. The word is spelt with a capital T, while the
parenthetic addition of the French moyen is set in the lower case. Both
words are set out in the first edition (the text is printed in italics
throughout). According to the Duden, “transport ” entered the Ger-
man language via the French.64 However, if this has been a transport of
some kind, it also left a trace of division and departure in the French,
when something was excluded—that is, from the transport—which is
marked fig. for figuré in the dictionary, that is to say, a sense of transport
as rapture or ecstasy (also common in English); since this is what is
absent from the German “Transport.” What is at stake here—and at
the very centre of Hölderlin’s writing—is translation “itself.” And this is
what (the Latin) transport also speaks, Über-tragung, translation.
For Hölderlin, tragic transport does not transport a thing, it transports
no-thing. The tragic is empty transport; it is a transport void of “its”
very possibility, a precarious shifting of “its” experience and figure.
And it is thus also “the most unbound,” der ungebundenste; it does not
bind a thing. It transports without binding the transported to the
transporting or to the transport. Tragic transport is experience and
figure of detachment. However, the tragic transports, it carries over, it is
transition, involving also tradition, yet never far from the excess of
over carrying, of tempting, as Hölderlin says in the “Anmerkungen”
(and it is about a knowledge which wants to know more, and too
much, that he says), “more than it can bear or contain.”65 The tragic
is essentially transport, forms of trans-port, rhythms of trans-lation. The
translation, die Über-tragung of (a) tragedy, indeed, is tragic, it moves
in a space of duplication, never simply double, yet “in fact” tending to
ruin the double, a space, in which the tragic comes to figure, comes
to stand there as figure, a form which comes to pass, rhythm. It is this
experience which becomes inscription and work in the “Notes,” and
I would even say, it comes to pass as song and triumph, which is to say,
the very unfolding of (a) play—play, Spiel, also, in terms of an excess
of space—a getting un-done of work in transfer, of meaning in means,
of words in song and rhythm, “Trauerspiel.”
There is however also another translation of the Latin transport into
German, which is “Ver-kehr ” (traffic). “Kehre” is the German “turn.”
“Ver-kehrt” means up-side-down, in-side-out. Literally ver-kehren is turn-
ing around, turning away, though a connotation of traffic, journey,
encounter or correspondence [i.e., Verkehr] as turning, turn without
return, is little recognised in spoken German. However, the Latin
noun transportation denotes also a journey, an itinerary, a wandering.
1070 CLAUDIA WEGENER

A translation which recalls a certain line of Antigone: “knowing (and

she speaks of Sophocles’ language here) how to objectify the human
mind as wandering beneath the unthinkable.” A rapture of transport
has inscribed itself in Hölderlin’s words: a transport less bound to
destination and vehicle than to movement and change. The German
“wandeln” bears witness to an “idle” wandering and to transformation
[Wandlung, Verwandlung]. Change, even the most unthinkable, will
have come to bear by walking [wandeln], with steps almost as light as
a dance.66
The tragic transport—Hölderlin writes; and this is, without doubt, a
matter of translation. Leaning toward a “French” or an “English”
rendering could mean recognising a kind of ecstasy in the tragic, an
ecstatic inclination of the tragic. The Greek ¶k-stasiw presents,
despite a somewhat typically overwhelming sense of wild (religious)
frenzy and orgiastic rage, also a stasis, a standstill, a halt, a standing
out(side); §j¤sthmi means to put/stand away, away from a usual
standing, and in the medium voice, to distance “oneself,” sich
entfernen. Hölderlin’s presentation “on” the tragic cannot but stand
there and stand out as a realisation of the tragic, i.e. essentially formal,
according to the inescapable turn, ver-kehrt to begin with, of the tragic
“and” of representation. It is with this turning away to begin with, that
tragic transport also shows an inclination toward a “German” rendering
of transport as ver-kehren, turning away (in the “Anmerkungen zur
Antigone” Hölderlin speaks of “vaterländische Umkehr,” another trans-
lation of what appears in the “Notes” as faithful infidelity). A
presentation of the impossibility of correspondence which, despite
“itself,” corresponds. Thus the tragic transport holds “itself,” in transla-
tion, between turning around (ver-kehren) and ecstasis (transport),67
between standstill, revolution, figure and rage, between dissolution
and immobilisation. The very revolution and rhythm of turning,
coming to stand there—in translation—almost like a figure: the
hyperbolic “and” the muteness of a music, a figure in-between mania
“and” music. Hölderlin’s writing figures “itself” as the very movement
of tragedy. It turns in between a “transport ” holding onto “itself” in
translation and a “music ” which just cannot hold onto “itself.”68
To stand there as . . . this is the inscription of an ecstasis. It is an
inscription which stands there. The tragic comes to pass in “the word”
as the becoming of a coincidence of form/time/listening, realisation
carried “over” and down to “its” limit. Nothing else, and nothing
more, could be said than what stands there in the last sentence of the
“Anmerkungen zum Ödipus.” It is the very subsiding of speech: “So
 MLN 1071

steht Hämon in der Antigone. So Ödipus selbst in der Mitte der Tragödie von
Ödipus.” [“Thus stands Haemon in the Antigone. And thus Oedipus
himself at the centre of the Tragedy of Oedipus.”]69 To bring, that is,
to transport speech, “the word,” to “its” very limit, where it subsides,
this is also what/where the tragic is. The frightful appearance of a
gap, outside speech, a speaking muteness, un-bound from and
infinitely full of meaning: perhaps the becoming of an origin,
perhaps a madness.
The reading and writing of a movement of dissolution comes as a
formalism of a kind, rather than as dissolution, pure dissolution—if
there were such a thing. To recognise the hyperbolic is a matter of
turning and cutting, of form and measure (be it in terms of a
mathematics or geometry, rhetoric or ethics).70 With and in the tragic
as Hölderlin writes it, the hyperbolic becomes the figure of recogni-
tion and its unsettling, the unsettling of the very dialectic of recogni-
tion in/as a figure and its tracing, its realisation, its testimony in a
time of listening. Thus, recognition does not come without a sense of
ecstasis, a kind of hyper-recognition, as an un-binding of recognition
from “itself,” from dialectics, a cutting through its metaphysical
ground, and its appropriation by logic or psychology, a ver-kehren of
its erotic undercurrent to the surface. Recognition, Erkennen, is also
a sexual Ver-kehr: ecstatic recognition.71
The other side of ecstasis, its overwhelming translation in terms of
orgiastic rage is by no means absent from Hölderlin’s writing of the
tragic. There is an inclination of the tragic toward ecstasis, rage,
delirium, which is, again according to the principle and inescapable
turn [kategorische Wende], leaning—and I am also thinking here
again of Hölderlin’s analysis of various rhythms and inclinations of/in
tragedy72—not toward an origin, but toward a future, toward what is
yet to come. This violent inclination toward what is unknown and still
to come, is the necessary “result,” the ecstasis of a turn without return,
ver-kehrt to begin with. When there is an inclination toward the end,
then the caesura comes more toward the end, according to Hölderlin’s
analysis of the rhythm or the calculable law of tragedy, as he names it,
since then, it is the end which is to be protected from the beginning.
The end which is to be protected from the beginning is also what is to
come, the future, a revolution, a turning of destiny which Hölderlin
often also names “patriotic” [vaterländische Umkehr]. While this is
the rhythm of (re)presentation in the “Antigone,” in the “Oedipus,”
the inclination lies toward the beginning, and it is thus the beginning
which is to be protected from the end, as Hölderlin puts it. Yet the
1072 CLAUDIA WEGENER

end which turns toward the beginning in order to protect what is

original, does so, and necessarily, by means of a divine infidelity, a
(self)correspondence [ein sich mitteilen] in the all-forgetting form of
infidelity. Since, as Hölderlin has it, “divine infidelity is best to retain,”
“göttliche Untreue ist am besten zu behalten.”73 The ecstatic inclination of
the tragic also inscribes itself in Hölderlin’s writing. Here is the
succession of its (re)presentations as they appear in the “Anmerkungen
zum Ödipus,” and for now, I will count the list of turns [Wendungen]
as they come and without attending to their rhythm and rhyme:
reißender Wechsel (speeding alternation);
exzentrische Rapidität (eccentric rapidity);
durch die folgenden hingerissen (torn along by the later ones);
in eine andere Welt entrückt (removed to another world);
in die exzentrische Sphäre der Toten reißen (torn off into the eccentric orbit of
the dead);
das furchtbare Wort (the terrible word);
zornige Ahnung (angry intimation);
wunderbare zornige Neugier (amazing angry curiosity);
seine Schranken durchrissen (broken through its limits);
wie trunken (as if intoxicated);
sich selbst reizt (it provokes itself);
zorniges Unmaß (angry immoderation);
zerstörungsfroh (delights in destruction) der reißende Zeit nur folgen (and only
follows the tearing rapacity of time);
das niedertretende fast schamlose Streben (degrading, almost shameless attempt);
das närrischwilde Nachsuchen (foolish wild search);
das geisteskranke Fragen (insane searching);
gewaltsamere Verhältnisse (violent circumstances);
eine Sprache beinahe nach Furienart (language, almost like the furies);
sich paaren (uniting); im Zorn Eins werden (becoming one in rage);
bis zur gänzlichen Erschöpfung (to the point of complete exhaustion);
die Seele zerreißen (tear apart the souls);
zornige Empfindlichkeit (angry sensitivity);
schrecklichfeierliche Formen (fearfully ceremonial forms);
wie ein Ketzergericht (like a trial of heresy);
äußerste Grenze des Leidens (the most extreme edge of suffering)74

What we have just traced as tragic transport and ecstatic inclination of

the tragic, comes here in a typical song. It is a familiar melody, yet
with Hölderlin’s translation of the tragic, its punctuation, its rhythm
and its destination have turned. What is listed above recalls—perhaps
without singing it, yet not without a sense of discharge—tragƒd¤a,
the Bocksgesang, the goats song, the Dithyrambos, a Dionysian “heritage”
 MLN 1073

(and what exceeds it).75 The tragic transport is also and precisely the
turning, the translation, the ecstasis of this heritage. There is an origin
which is to be protected by divine infidelity. The space of this
protection, the space which protects the impossible correspondence
of divine infidelity—rather than an “origin”—is “the musical,”76 or
what has traditionally been known as musical catharsis.77 It is also a
space opened by sacrilege, by an un-binding or boundlessness of
speculative structures. In Hölderlin’s writing, the rhythm punctuating
this tradition, this translation, this transport, is hyperbolic. If one
turns this “heritage” (which is also an ecstasis of heritage) and defines
an origin, tragic transport would be lost in the closure of an identity, in
the name of the original and without means of translation. If it is
translated, what might be secured—that is, suspended—is a kind of
“origin” in a space violently opened by a double infidelity, like the
double foreignness between two languages. Writing about the transla-
tion of classical works “which belong to a language that is not
spoken,” Blanchot notes:
“The responsibility for the future of a language that has no future. Only
translated are these works alive; moreover, in the original language itself
they are always as if retranslated and redirected toward what is most
specific to them: the foreignness of origin.”78
The Nietzschean rewriting of tragedy could be said to follow a
thinking of transfer, a speculative reciprocity, rather than translation
(we could also say, though not without a sense of vertigo, a thinking
of transference).79 The end of chapter 21 of “The Birth of Tragedy”
reads: “Dionysus redet die Sprache des Apollo, Apollo aber schließlich die
Sprache Dionysus.”80 There is resemblance at work, and indeed, “trans-
ference” of a kind; a hyper-resemblance drifting toward identity, an
original unity, “eine Rückkehr zur Ur-heimat.”81
In Hölderlin’s rewriting of the tragic, a generalisation of the tragic
encounters a generalisation of translation as the violent and violating
affirmation of a unifying power which would be the very becoming of
origin. Blanchot writes on Hölderlin’s translations of the Antigone and
the Oedipus:
“The result is almost frightful. It is as if one were discovering between the
two languages an understanding so profound, a harmony so fundamental,
that it substitutes itself for meaning, or succeeds in turning the hiatus that
lies open between the two languages into the origin of a new meaning.”82
Everything begins by (a) turning around. The movement of
generalisation, which follows the “categorical return,” leads to a yet
1074 CLAUDIA WEGENER

unheard–of un-binding of catharsis, a loosening of catharsis’ sacrificial

ties. Catharsis reveals itself as a movement of dissolution and purifica-
tion: a distancing [kaya¤rv: to clean, to liberate from, to distance
from oneself], a taking down, a departure [kayair°v: to take down,
to let down, to take away]. Yet here, in Hölderlin’s writing, it also
becomes music. Hölderlin “composes” a movement of dissolution in/
of/as (the) tragic, he draws out the lines of a tragic decline as it also
takes place in the unravelling of dramatic threads after “the plot,” in
the taking down of speech to the limit where it subsides. In his writing
and translation, he labours to suspend a collapse of difference in a
space of a double infidelity protected by “the musical,” or certainly
rhythm, a form of a listening standing there as—neither simply beat
nor figure. In and with his translation of tragedy, Hölderlin “com-
poses” a movement unfaithful to (a theory of) dissolution and a
religious or medical or musical discharge. Musical catharsis. It is the
boundlessness of dissolution which is frightful, and purification is
almost immediately returned to “itself” and bound back into the
order of expression, gesture, guilt.83 Thus, with Hölderlin’s rewriting
of tragedy, it is more than a purging of “pity and terror” [¶leou kai
fÒbou], of “those emotions” [t«n toioÊtvn payhmãtvn], and more
precisely, it is a purification of affects from their binding in/as expres-
sion, from their expressive charge—a dis-charge—which is at stake.
There is a sense of completion, of writing—in translation (that is,
also, the translation of “Sophocles”)—the completion of “Aristotle,”
or in other words, of taking the writing of a tradition and the tradition
of writing down to “its” limit where it gets undone, loses “itself” and
“ends” (as if in some loose threads).84
The (re)presentation of the tragic rests, principally, on the fact that the
monstrous [das Ungeheure]—how the god and man join together and the
power of nature and the innermost being of man boundlessly become as one
in fury—is to be understood through the boundless becoming-one being purified
by boundless separation.85
Hölderlin’s radical unsettling of speculative structures brings about
the exposure of an old rupture: the interruption of monotheism by
Platonic dialectics. Forcing a certain limit, or rather, by means of a
relentless work of translation, guiding the strictures of sublimation
down to a limit where they subside, Hölderlin returns to the point of
interruption. An in-between space, torn open by the translator’s
necessary double infidelity. The rupture has almost turned indefinite,
imponderable. Western thought realises “itself” in the very balance of
 MLN 1075

“its” difference, in the (im)possible correspondence of monotheism

and dialectics: the specularisation of monotheism. A most profitable
specularisation of an impossible rupture. It is, as if Hölderlin’s work
sets out translating at the very limit where/when a collapse into
indifference is about, or rather, is already about to absent itself. The
generalisation of the tragic as a violent and violating work of
translation, whereby the tragic becomes a measure of reality, is the
affirmation of a unifying power which will have been the very
becoming of origin.
Hölderlin’s work and writing is also and essentially a “thinking” of
and as translation, its radical realisation in and as tragic transport, and
perhaps, even its programme: every-thing begins by translation, and
translation begins by turning away, turning “its” back to any begin-
ning, any “original” or “origin” which seems already given, moving
backwards, steadily. The destination of such a movement or programme
of “translation” (a generalisation of translation) would be a future
becoming of origin and unity. It is the translation of an almost
intolerable passion for the other, unknown, but coming. Moving
backwards, ver-kehrt to begin with, is the dangerous and hazardous
wandering [(ver)wandeln] of a double infidelity, which continuously
and rhythmically needs to be renewed in order to maintain an
impossible correspondence as impossible: “the boundless becoming-one
being purified by boundless separation.” An infinite ecstasis, a boundless
ég≈n. Monotheism, having been stabilised in accordance with the
Question of Being, as absent origin and lost unity, resurfaces in and
through translation, and begins to appear as the frightful announce-
ment of a future (be)coming of “the One.”86
Translation is a celebration of a madness and its suspension; it
invokes the (be)coming of “the One” and it suspends the threat of its
arrival. For the time being, a music of translation works to suspend
“itself,” celebrating the necessity of a rhythm, between paralysis and
triumph, figure and beat.

NOTES

1 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative” (1979), in: Typogra-

phy: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard U.P.,
1989), p. 213. I also consulted his “Hölderlin and the Greeks” published in the
same volume.
2 Hölderlin translated two Sophoclean tragedies, the “Oedipus” and the “Antigone.”
The translations are published together with “Notes.” Hölderlin calls them
1076 CLAUDIA WEGENER

“Anmerkungen.” It is these “Notes,” and in particular the “Notes on the Oedipus”

of which this text attempts a reading.
Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1952), Vol. 5, pp. 195. first
publication of Hölderlin’s translation of the Sophoclean tragedies: (Frankfurt
a. M.: Wilmans, 1804). If not otherwise stated, I use the translations given in
Lacoue-Labarthe’s “The Caesura,” in Heidegger, Art and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell,
1990), pp. 41 (transl. Chris Turner) and add the German text in the footnotes.
The Kohlhammer gives the spelling of the first edition, I have here adapted the
German rendering in the footnotes according to contemporary orthography. For
a complete translation cf. F. Hölderlin. Essays and Letters on Theory, transl. and ed. by
Thomas Pfau (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988). References to
this translation will appear henceforth in the footnotes as Pfau. I also consulted
the translation by Jeremy Adler, “On tragedy: ‘Notes on the Oedipus’ and ‘Notes
on the Antigone,’” in Comparative Criticism 5, ed. E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge, 1983),
pp. 205; thanks to John Lavery for providing me with a copy. Further texts
consulted: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Scene Is Primal,” in The Subject of
Philosophy (1979), ed. Th. Trezise (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota U.P.,
1993); Maurice Blanchot “Hölderlin’s Itinerary” in The Space of Literature (1955),
(Lincoln and London: Nebraska U.P., 1982).
3 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” p. 213.
4 I italicise the term contradiction to ask for time and listening from my reader for
this process and attempt of reading Hölderlin’s “translation of tragedy.” Listening
to contra-diction (Wider-spruch, das Wider-sprüchliche) would mean to hear
connotations of counter-speech, counter-speaking (Gegen-rede). Hölderlin does
not use such a term in the “Anmerkungen,” however, he writes “it,” in fact,
“sublimation of contradiction” would already be a quote from the “Anmerkungen”
where Hölderlin writes of “speech against speech, one cancelling the other.” I
would like to draw your, my reader’s, attention to this procedure, which is, yet
certainly not merely, a choice of words or style. This choice of words works, it
operates a shift, a drawing out of a concept to an already dramatic, already tragic
set of movements and script of a plot. Instead of using the concept and the word
“Wider-spruch,” Hölderlin writes “Rede gegen Rede, die sich gegenseitig aufhebt,” speech
against speech one sublimating the other. I would like to take this occasion to
point out and even “exercise,” as if in advance, the attention of a reading and
writing “with the ear” that is indispensable when approaching Hölderlin’s work;
and I ask your, the reader’s, patience for my, at times, perhaps tiresome obedience
to the winding path “of the ear.” It is tiresome “for good reason,” since it has
abandoned, or at times, labours to abandon, the typical “overview” with which we
have accepted to approach everything. My reading suggests to follow the winding
path of listening, where you might not, at every moment, know where you are,
and where, inevitably, you will find—and lose—yourself going back and forth,
over and over again. (This—all too long—footnote is dedicated to Mark Ryder,
who, certainly, is one of my most patient readers.)
5 I mark the term “(re)cognition” and, in advance, call for caution around its
appearance and working. In my writing on Hölderlin, and not only here, the term
becomes the moment where, what Hölderlin calls “infidelity,” hides itself in a
(formal and philosophical) concept. The term carries, and fails to carry, tints of a
shift, a tension, a fight, even an agony (ég≈n, agonia, names the struggle onto
death) in-between mechanisms of (poetic) formal beholding and mechanisms of
(philosophical) insight.
6 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe’s remarks on the “‘editorial” arrangement (one apparently
chosen by Hölderlin),” whereby “the translation of Oedipus the King precedes that
of Antigone. The most modern tragedy thus comes before the most ancient.” Ibid.
p. 220.
 MLN 1077

7 With an inserted quotation in Greek, apart from its apparent reference to

Aristotle and, by extension, to Sophocles, thus to the classical tradition of poetics,
Hölderlin also gives testimony to his interest in writing “itself.” The Greek
sentence is a citation from Suidas, or rather “Suidas,” a Byzantian encyclopædia
dating from the 10th century and attributed to “Suidas of Athens” (the following
two editions are available at the Warburg Institute London: Suidae Lexicon,
Immanuelin Bekkeri (ed.), Berolini, A. 1854, p. 170/ and, Ada Adler (ed), pars
I, Lipsiae in aedibus B.G. Teubnersi, 1928, p. 358). The cited entry concerns
Aristotle and, in full, can be translated as, “that he (Aristotle) was the writer of
physis (nature), wetting [in German I would say: benetzen] the pen (reed) for/in
the direction of spirit/meaning.” Yet in Hölderlin’s quotation the latter, efiw
noËn, has become eÎnoun “well-meaning.” Is it that Hölderlin hints here at a shift
in the destination (efiw) of writing, at least as far as the tragic is concerned: a shift
from a direction toward “spirit” to a rather banal, somewhat aimless “good-
intention” (eÎ-noun)? And, in this context, what hints can be drawn from a
certain multiplication of natural and even sexual imagery: the writer of physis,
pen/reed, to wet the pen/to water the reed (épobr°xvn means to make
something wet so that it can grow, i.e. to rain)? The widespread translation of
“dipping the quill into meaning” obscures this imagery, apart from being
grammatically incorrect (efiw here stands with the accusative, not with the dative,
thus indicating a direction). I wonder, and I anticipate here a claim I shall
repeat a little later, I wonder whether there is not a delicate sense of irony to be
traced in Hölderlin’s writing here—an irony set into play by means of an
emphasis on an all too common emphasis on language’s meaningful transport—
surfacing at the precise moment, when writing explicitly turns toward “itself,”
writes “itself ”?
8 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, p. 201; “Die Darstellung des Tragischen beruht
vorzüglich darauf, daß das Ungeheure, wie der Gott und Mensch sich paart, und
grenzenlos die Naturmacht und des Menschen Innerstes im Zorn eins wird,
dadurch sich begreift, daß das grenzenlose Eineswerden durch grenzenloses
Scheiden sich reiniget.” (emphasis added)
9 The paragraph is dedicated to Rainer Nägele, who, very rightly, remarked on the
gap between the English monstrous and the German “das Ungeheure.” I should also
note at this occasion that the present article is part of the fourth and last chapter
of my PhD dissertation on the monumental, entitled “The Last Monument”
(London: Goldsmiths College, 1998), where the net of references listed in these
lines traces itself frequently and in various constellations.
10 Hölderlin Poems and Fragments, transl. M. Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry
1994), pp. 540–541.
11 Monotheistic religions speak with a typical certainty of “God” and even often of
“my God.” A use of the article “the God” is likely to denote a distancing, in the
case of a monotheistic perspective, from a “false God.” Collins dictionary (2nd
ed., Stuttgart and Dresden: Klett, 1993) reproduces a generalisation of monothe-
istic belief as grammatical regulation: under b) god without capital G, a
parenthetic “(non-christian)” begins the list of examples—as if Christianity were
the only monotheism. In Hölderlin, it is a radical generalisation of distancing
which takes hold, “the God” is a trace of an unknown: “Was ist Gott, unbekannt, . . .”
(and I wonder whether, in translation, one should not make use of “the god”
without a capital, without head, I am tempted to say). In the fragment just quoted,
the means of distancing has shifted into the interrogative “what,” rather than the
straight personification of a “who,” which would hardly leave any space for/of the
“unknown.” The following “von ihm” (Hamburger translates “with him”), hovers
strangely, lacking relation. It is by no means surprising that, with Hölderlin, the
question of translation arises in the vicinity of the question of monotheism.
1078 CLAUDIA WEGENER

12 In a letter to a friend, Hölderlin writes, after his trip to the south of France, again,
contemporary with the “Anmerkungen”: “We have almost lost our speech in a foreign
land.” Blanchot, “Hölderlin’s Itinerary,” p. 271.
13 Here, one may of course recall Aristotle’s Poetics: the purging of fear and pity,
catharsis, the “proper” tragic effect. Even if I agree (somewhat “with and against”
Lacoue-Labarthe) that it is the effect of a “return” to Aristotle which is working in
Hölderlin’s writing, it is, however, so I suggest, precisely catharsis as “the proper
tragic effect,” which becomes drawn into question, dislocated and even re-defined
with Hölderlin’s work. Cf. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1894), transl. and
ed. by S. H. Butcher (New York: Dover Publications, 1951).
14 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke, p. 196.
15 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” p. 232.
16 Ibid. pp. 232.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid. p. 233.
20 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke, p. 195; Pfau, p. 101. “Es wird gut sein, um den Dichtern,
auch bei uns, eine bürgerliche Existenz zu sichern, wenn man die Poesie, auch
bei uns, den Unterschied der Zeiten und Verfassungen abgerechnet, zur mhxanÆ
der Alten erhebt.”
21 The reader may note here, that in reading Hölderlin, what could be called a
question of t°xnh (such as Heidegger in particular considers it) turns into the
question of a mhxanÆ. The former, being the more generic term, typically
suggesting itself in a space of thought dominated by the model of the imprint and
its speculations. While, with Hölderlin, another transport promises itself, a kind of
transport which, employing other means (mhxanÆ), works to resist the model of
the imprint—or certainly its “specularisation” (to use the term Lacoue-Labarthe
suggests as an inscription of the visual bias of speculation). The Greek term
mhxanÆ also denotes the theatre machine and the siege machine.
22 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke , p. 201; Pfau, p. 107.
23 Lacoue-Labarthe remarks on the elimination of musical catharsis from the
Freudian discourse as Freud’s “philosophical obedience” (i.e. to the Aristotlean
and Platonic elimination). in “The Scene Is Primal” p. 114. The cut however does
not simply run between Freud and Hölderlin. One might only consider the
importance of a witnessing as a listener for the Freudian or psychoanalytic practice,
to grasp that the cut, the gap of an elimination, also runs right through Freud’s
work. And in German, one could even hear the cut in Lacoue-Labarthe’s remark:
philosophical obedience would be, in translation, “philosophisches Ge-horchen,” a
philosophical attention by listening.
24 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke, p. 202; Pfau, p. 108.
25 Ibid. “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” p. 269; Pfau, p. 113.
26 Ibid. “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” p. 201; Pfau, p. 107; parenthesis added in
order to take note of the reflexive structure: sich aufheben/to cancel out itself,
sublimate itself.
27 Ibid. p. 197; Pfau, pp. 102, 103 (emphasis added).
28 Ibid. p. 201; Pfau, p. 107.
29 Ibid. “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” p. 270; Pfau, p. 114. Hölderlin’s emphasis of
the word is missed in Pfau’s translation.
 MLN 1079

30 Ibid. “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus” p. 201; Pfau, p. 107. The problematic of the
visual with regard to Hölderlin’s understanding of the tragic surfaces again in/as
translation: Thomas Pfau translates “in den Chören des Ödipus” as “in the chorus
scenes,” a translation necessitated by the absence of a plural form of “chorus” in
English. In German, it is possible to denote the part, the role, the character, of the
chorus as a structural whole in the tragic drama by means of the plural
construction “in den Chören des Ödipus.”
31 Ibid.
32 Cf. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, pp. 68, 69 (XVIII 1456a 25–30).
33 An ironical twist may also, at least in part, lie in a certain “self”-irony, to the extent
that Hölderlin could perhaps not help but agree with his critics about the
“eccentric” character of the “Anmerkungen.” As Lacoue-Labarthe has indicated
in “The Caesura of the Speculative” as well as in his other writings, the mirroring
effects of mimetic rivalry cannot be excluded from the work “itself.”
34 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke op. p. 195. “Man hat, unter Menschen, bei jedem Dinge,
vor allem darauf zu sehen, daß es Etwas ist, d.h. daß es in dem Mittel (moyen) seiner
Erscheinung erkennbar ist, daß die Art wie es bedingt ist, bestimmt und gelehrt werden
kann” (emphasis added).
35 I frequently experienced something of an outcry when mentioning “Hölderlin”
and “irony” in one sentence. Such a limitation of a poetic work—a limitation in
advance of everything, as it seems, asks to be challenged. One reason for the over-
reaction experienced being the reduction of irony to ironic tone ; another, the
reduction of “Hölderlin’s work” to “Hölderlin’s lyric.”
36 Cf. also below, reference to Hölderlin’s Pindar translations: “Die strenge
Mittelbarkeit aber ist das Gestz.” (“The strictly mediate is the law.”) Hölderlin Poems
and Fragments, pp. 638, 639.
37 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke p. 202. “Double infidelity” announces itself in part three of
the “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus.” See quotation below.
38 Here is “the other side” of the argument. In the second speech of the “Phaedrus,”
Socrates says: “But if man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of
the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane
composition never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances
of the inspired madman.” The insistence on touch, a touch of/by madness, which is
identified with a certain attachment to the Muses, to (a personified) memory,
comes as the anticipating rebuttal of a de-tachment, which, rather like, but not
identical with the detachment which comes with suffering, nonetheless, strikes
the one, who is somewhat touched by detachment, as if with madness, a madness, that
is by no means always or simply productive, rather often (also) paralysing: the
detachment which necessarily comes with the activity of the work and “its”
unworking. And is not Plato’s “touch of the Muses” also otherwise known as the self-
detachment of “ecstasis” or “enthusiasm?” De-tachment bears witness to a threat of
the inhuman, or even, the inanimate, as something which cannot possibly be
excluded from the “properly” human. It is the very appearance of the failure of
exclusion (the failure of an economy) which threatens, and, as in above citation,
provokes prophylactic manoeuvre. Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, p. 245,
transl. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1973). (emphasis added)
39 Ibid. p. 202, see also quotations below.
40 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke, “Anmerkungen zur Antigone,” p. 270; (Pfau, p. 114).
“Vorzüglich aber bestehet die tragische Darstellung in dem faktischen Worte, das,
mehr Zusammenhang, als ausgesprochen, schicksalsweise, vom Anfang bis zum Ende
1080 CLAUDIA WEGENER

gehet” and: p. 269 (Pfau p. 113) “. . . und der Gott in der Gestalt des Todes
gegenwärtig ist” (emphasis added).
41 Hölderlin differentiates between a more Greek, deadly factual [tödlichfaktisches],
more mediate [mittelbarer], and a more Hesperian (Lacoue-Labarthe translates
as “more modern”), murderously factual [tötend-faktisches], more immediate
word. I would like to refer the reader to Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis of a chiasm
between the ancient and the modern (and, of course, issues of mimesis involved)
in Hölderlin’s writings on tragedy which he develops in “The Caesura of the
Speculative,” pp. 221, 222.
42 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Scene is Primal,” p. 112.
43 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke p. 285; (cf. Hölderlin Poems and Fragments, pp. 638, 639).
44 Ibid. “Anmerkungen zur Antigone” p. 270; (Pfau p. 114).
45 A reading of Hölderlin’s and Nietzsche’s reworking of the tragic could begin from
here: Nietzsche’s writing, approaching the tragic in terms of an aesthetic
(“together with tragedy the aesthetic spectator has been reborn”), leans toward
philosophy. The problematic dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is
more a philosophical than an artistic question. Thus, Nietzsche in his “The Birth of
Tragedy,” calls for a return “through the tragic mythos [...] back to the realities”
and comes to recite and affirm the famous Goethe question as to whether “the
highest pathos was but a form of aesthetic play.” While Hölderlin’s excessively
philosophical approach escapes and betrays (as always, in more than one sense)
philosophy “proper,” leading to a movement of radical generalisation, the
beginning of a boundless generalisation of the tragic and the aesthetic, Nietzsche
sets out to trace an origin of tragedy which, having perhaps never yet been
present, now (with Wagner’s music), expresses its advent. Hölderlin writes a
return to the tragic, which is a return to the foreignness of “its” origin as “its”
future. Nothing has arrived yet, perhaps nothing will arrive, yet for the time being a
return has left a figure, the experience of a figuration. (cf. Die Geburt der Tragödie
(1872), in: Nietzsche Werke, quotations from chapter 22, pp. 136–140; The Birth of
Tragedy, transl. F. Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 131–136.
46 Perhaps, from here, Hölderlin’s “disorganisation of tragedy” can be seen (and
“heard”) as a re-definition—a re(dis)organisation—of tragedy in terms of a
purification which will have inscribed itself in terms of an un-doing, un-working,
a becoming loose. According to the Gemoll (Griechisch-Deutsches Schul- und
Handwörterbuch [München, Wien: G. Freytag Verlag, 1954]) kayarÒw can be
rendered as unvermischt, sauber, unmixed, pure and related to the “old-indian
cittrirá-s locker, lose, loose.”
47 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke “Anmerkungen zur Antigone” p. 268. Pfau p. 112.
48 Ibid. “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus” p. 197, “die tragisch den Menschen seiner
Lebenssphäre, dem Mittelpunkt seines inneren Lebens in eine andere Welt
entrückt und in die exzentrische Sphäre der Toten reißt.”
49 The “story of Oedipus” might be understood as always and already an ob-
literation of “itself”—a necessary obliteration, perhaps, since figure and narrative
bear both, always both, recognition and forgetting—and Hölderlin’s translation
as an attempt to correct the traditional obliteration. As J. Adler mentions in his
notes on Hölderlin’s “Notes,” Hölderlin “wrote to Wilmans [the publisher of the
“Notes”] on 28 September 1803, saying he hoped to correct the ‘errors’ which, he
believed, the Greek poet had been forced to make by virtue of his time and place
in history” (cf. J. Adler, p. 207). Freud’s “Ödipus” might then be read as another
modern rewriting of these ob-literations. A typical movement by which the
modern will have always defined itself as looking backwards, and thus missing the
 MLN 1081

most ancient—since the most ancient is perhaps precisely what has never been
realised by/as “the ancient,” yet always figured as its profound, unrealised, and
perhaps unrealisable, destination.
50 Nietzsche’s “necessary forgetting,” which he demands in his Unzeitgemäße
Betrachtungen as an antidote of too-much-history and the very possibility of history
might receive another reading. One, where we might come to encounter the
double–faced monster of, according to Nietzsche, the paralysis of memory and
forgetting bound in relentless reciprocity, and, according to Hölderlin, the
boundless dissolution of memory and forgetting in the absolute exigency of the
re-turn. It is also a reading which would provide for the strange encounter with a
Hölderlin, more Nietzschean than Nietzsche, or at least, the Nietzsche of the
Untimely Meditations.
51 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke, p. 196. “Dadurch wird in der rhythmischen Aufein-
anderfolge der Vorstellungen, worin der Transport sich darstellt, das, was man im
Silbenmaße Zäsur heißt, das reine Wort, die gegenrhythmische Unterbrechung notwendig,
um nämlich dem reißenden Wechsel der Vorstellungen, auf seinem Summum, so
zu begegenen, daß alsdann nicht mehr der Wechsel der Vorstellungen, sondern
die Vorstellung selber erscheint” (emphasis added).
52 Ibid. p. 167. “Er tritt ein in den Gang des Schicksals, als Aufseher über die
Naturmacht, die tragisch, den Menschen seiner Lebenssphäre, dem Mittelpunkt
seines innern Lebens in eine andere Welt entrückt und in die exzentrische Sphäre
der Toten reißt” (emphasis added).
53 Ibid. p. 202. “In solchem Momente vergißt der Mensch sich und den Gott, und
kehret, freilich heiliger Weise, wie ein Verräter sich um.—In der äußersten Grenze
des Leidens bestehet nämlich nichts mehr, als die Bedingungen der Zeit oder des
Raums. In solchem Momente vergißt sich der Mensch, weil er ganz im Moment ist;
der Gott weil er nichts als Zeit ist; und beides ist untreu, die Zeit, weil sie in
solchem Momente sich kategorisch wendet, und Anfang und Ende sich in ihr
schlechterdings nicht reimen läßt; der Mensch, weil er in diesem Momente der
kategorischen Umkehr folgen muß, hiermit im folgenden schlechterdings nicht
dem Anfänglichen gleichen kann” (emphasis added).
54 Hölderlin’s formulation “in der äußersten Grenze” brings the various forms of
ég≈n into play: Versammlung, assembly and the place of its gathering and the
activity in a gathering, fight, contest, war, court.
55 E. Levinas, “Time and the Other,” in: The Levinas Reader, ed. by S. Hand (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989), p. 43.
56 Ibid. p. 39. (Levinas writes here of “an absorption” which is enjoyment.) I wish to
take brief note of a shift in the quality of an “absorption”—an absorption that is
bound to sight—which has occurred between Hölderlin’s text and the English
translation here: in the former, Teresias actively over-sees (Auf-seher, watch-man)
a force of nature, an in-sight gives him a certain power and control over nature,
while in the latter, as a seer (Seher), he suffers a seeing, he has insight into the
force of nature (Pfau translates “Aufseher” as “custodian,” Adler “guardian”).
Thanks to Rainer Nägele, who pointed this out to me.
57 Rather than the “hyperbologic,” as Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, I insist on the
“hyperbolic.” What I wish to indicate here is less a “logic” than its transgression,
excess or suspension: in/as “the word,” as poetic form, representation, in its
traditional rhetorical as well as in its moral and its mathematical sense. (The
Greek ÍperbolÆ can be rendered by the Latin terms transgression and excess, in the
medium, the middle voice (Íperbãllomai), it also designates a delay or sus-
pense.)
1082 CLAUDIA WEGENER

58 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke (Anmerkungen zum Ödipus) p. 196, (transl. Adler p.

251).
59 Ibid.
60 In the third part of the “Anmerkungen zur Antigone” another, yet comparable
rhythm of reflexive verbs can be traced. It is not as clear as in the “Ödipus”: there
is, for example, an additional reflexive gerund “sich scheidend ” (separating itself)
which interferes. The list of verbs is (they are again ten verbs): sich fassen [to grasp
itself], sich verändern [to transform itself], sich fassen [to grasp itself], sich (nicht)
mitteilen [(not) to communicate itself]/ sich bilden [to form itself], sich darstellen [to
represent itself], sich wehren [to defend itself], sich wehren, sich formalisieren [to formalise
itself], sich bilden. The rhythm can be noted as: a - b - a - (-)c / d - e - f - f - ⬙e⬙ - d.
A comparative study of the two Sophoclean tragedies as they are translated by
Hölderlin, a study organised by the two rhythmic schemata as sketched in the
“Anmerkungen” suggests itself: one could for instance begin by questioning the
position of the up-side-down or inverted relation of the “cross” form in both
schemata: at the beginning (in “Antigone”) and, at the end (in “Ödipus”). Or the
position of the “embracing” form: doubled and closed in itself (in “Antigone”)
and, all-embracing with added variation and negation (in “Ödipus”). The analysis
could be related to Hölderlin’s own comparative analysis of the rhythmic balance
[Gleichgewicht] in the two tragedies he translated, as he formulates it in the first
part of the “Antigone”: “the calculable law of “Antigone” compares to that of “Oedipus”
like / to \ . . . . etc.”
61 Transl. J. Adler, p. 251: “The tragical transport is essentially empty, and the most
unbounded of all.”
62 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 41: “the tragic transport [in
French in the original].”
63 A copy of the first edition is available in the British Library London.
64 Blanchot notes, “France represented for Hölderlin the approach to the fire, the
opening onto ancient Greek,” in “Hölderlin’s Itinerary” p. 271.
65 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke (Anmerkungen zum Ödipus) p. 198 (Pfau p. 104).
“[W]eil das Wissen, wenn es seine Schranke durchrissen hat, wie trunken in
seiner herrlich harmonischen Form, die doch bleiben kann, vorerst, sich selbst
reizt, mehr zu wissen, als es tragen oder fassen kann.”
66 Ibid. (Anmerkungen zur Antigone) p. 266. “[D]es Menschen Verstand, als unter
Undenkbarem wandelnd, zu objektivieren wissen.” (translation altered, Pfau translates,
“how to depict man’s understanding as wandering below the unthinkable,” p.
110)
67 I prefer to use the Greek ecstasis, rather than the English ecstasy, as a kind of
terminus technicus remarking the doubling and the split, (im)mobilisation and
paralysis of ecstasy.
68 The insistence in and the proliferation of the conjunctive clause and/“and ”/(and)
highlights the track of a dissolution. The dissolution I attempt to trace in
Hölderlin’s writing and translating of tragedy also and inescapably enters my
writing. The reading and writing of dissolution comes as a formalism of a kind,
rather than as dissolution.
69 Ibid. p. 202; (transl. Adler p. 236).
70 In German, there is no nominal differentiation between the geometrical and the
rhetorical, both are rendered as “Hyperbel.” The English differentiates hyperbola
(geometry) from hyperbole (rhetoric). Here is the beginning of its geometrical
definition according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Vol. 6, 15th ed. 1985):
 MLN 1083

“two-branched open curve, a conic section, produced by the intersection of a

circular cone and a plane that cut both nappes of the cone.” It may be added that
turning is involved in order to produce a cone (“turning of a line around one of
its points”), or, by revolving a hyperbola, to produce a hyperboloid.
71 The Greek trãgow means, according to the Gemoll’ : (from tr≈gv, trage›n
“Nascher,” nibbler, sweat-eater) 1) goat, 2) Zeugungsdrang, drive to procreate, 3)
wild Fig-tree.
72 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke : in both “Anmerkungen”; more elaborately: p. 265, 266
in the “Antigone,” and p. 196 in the “Ödipus”; see quotations above.
73 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke (Anmerkungen zum Ödipus) p. 202. “Behalten” may
denote various forms of appropriation, a holding on to with strong connotations
of re-membering, the appropriating gesture of memory.
74 This list of quotations is from the entire “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus” pp. 195,
translation according to Adler pp. 251; I would like to take note here of a
suggestion which Yahya Elsaghe (Univ. of QLD Australia) made to me in
conversation: the German “Zorn, zornig,” which appears five times in the “Notes,”
and which has become a little antiquated in contemporary spoken German (and
one might wonder why), could, so Elsaghe, be thought in translation as the Greek
ÙrgÆ, as it becomes most plausible with the phrase “im Zorn Eins werden,”
becoming one in fury.
Cf. also Plato, The Republic, transl. D. Lee (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin
Classics, 1987), p. 437 (Republic 10, 606d) where he speaks of representations of
“sex and anger, and the other desires and feelings of pleasure and pain which
accompany all our actions.”
75 Perhaps one could only speak of a “heritage” to the extent that heritage could be
understood according to the law of “divine infidelity” and forgetting which
Hölderlin cites. Here is a taste of the Dionysian from Erwin Rohde’s book Psyche.
Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (1893), where he describes proce-
dures of a celebratory and musical discharge (Tübingen: Verlag von J.C.B.Mohr,
1925), Bd. II, p. 9: “Die Feier ging auf Berghöhen vor sich in dunkler Nacht, beim
unsteten Schein der Fackelbrände. Lärmende Musik erscholl, der schmetternde
Schall eherner Becken, der dumpfe Donner großer Handpauken und dazwischen
hinein ‘der zum Wahnsinn lockende Einklang’ der tieftönenden Flöten [...] In
wütendem, wirbelnden Rundtanz eilt die Schar der Begeisterten über die
Berghalden dahin. Meist waren es Weiber die bis zur Erschöpfung in diesen
Wirbeltänzen sich umschwangen; seltsam verkleidet [...].”
76 For now, I shall continue to use this odd term, “the musical.” In its very
strangeness, it may form a reminder that, rather than the particularlity of a music,
it is “music ” which is at stake. It is a certain musical destination whose interference
I attempt to trace in my writing; Benjamin’s “das Musikalische ” still waiting in the
wings.
77 According to Rohde’s translation, rather than “the Dionysian,” it is forms of
musical catharsis which were transported into tragedy [auf die Tragödie übertragen].
His description of musical catharsis: “vorübergehender Wahnsinn [...] religiös
gefärbte Wahnsinnsform [...] in der ohne äußeren Anlaß der Leidende Gestalten
seltsamer Art sah, Flötentöne hörte, in heftigste Aufregung geriet und von
ungeheurer Tanzwut ergriffen wurde. Solchem enthusiastischen Drange zur
Entladung und damit zur Heilung und Reinigung dienten die mit Tanz und
Musik [...] begangenen Weihefeste [...]. Das Ekstatische soll in diesem Verfahren
nicht unterdrückt und ausgerottet werden; es wird nur in eine priesterlich-
ärztliche Zucht genommen und wird als ein belebender Trieb dem Gottesdienste
beigefügt.” And in the footnotes he adds: “Und aus diesem priesterlich
1084 CLAUDIA WEGENER

musikalischen, nicht aus den eigentlich medizinischen Erfahrungen und Praktiken

hat Aristotle, der Anregung des Plato, Rep. 10, 606 folgend, die Vorstellung von
der durch vehemente Entladung—und nicht wie neuerdings wieder erklärt wird,
vermittels Beruhigung der Affekte durch einen ‘versöhnenden Schluß’—bewirkten
kãyarsiw t«n payhmãtvn auf die Tragödie übertragen.” E. Rohde, Bd. II, p. 47–
49. Lacoue-Labarthe quotes the latter (the footnote) in his “The Echo of the
Subject” in Typography p. 189: “Aristotle, following Plato (Republic X 606), and
basing his work on his clerico-musical experiments and practices, and not on
properly medical experiments and practices, applied to tragedy the idea of a
katharsis ton pathematon produced by a vehement discharge—not, as recently
claimed, by the calming of the passions through a ‘reconciling ending.’”
78 Maurice Blanchot, “Translating,” in Friendship (1971), transl. E. Rottenberg
(Stanford California: Stanford U.P., 1997), p. 59.
79 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Scene is Primal.”
80 Nietzsche Werke, p. 136.
81 Ibid. p. 138.
82 Maurice Blanchot, “Translating,” p. 61.
83 One of the most challenging sentences of the “Moses” is when Freud speaks about
guilt as “suffocating doubt,” “Schuld um den Zweifel zu ersticken.” The binding of
catharsis into sacrificial structures is such a suffocation of doubt, of boundless
uncertainty as it comes with the contradiction of (re)presentation, the exposure
of a split at that limit which represents suffering. Cf. Sigmund Freud, Der Mann
Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1939) (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1992), pp. 25.
84 Cf. Aristotle, Poetics vi 2, p. 23; cf. also pp. 240 in the same volume.
85 Hölderlin Sämtliche Werke, p. 201 (emphasis added).
86 Hölderlin passes here very close to a certain mystic translation of monotheism,
known as the Kabbala. According to the Kabbala, the beginning is a withdrawal of
“the One,” so that there be “something” separated from “the All.” The destination
of “a being” is therefore thought in terms of giving up being “something.”
Gershom Scholem considers this mystic withdrawal as a kind of exiling, an exiling
of (one)self, Selbstverbannung, and sets it in relation to the catastrophe of the
expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Cf. Gershom Scholem, Zur Kabbala und ihrer
Symbolik (Darmstadt, 1965), p. 148.