After Words

In tracking the middle, these leaps across the discontinuous terrain of periods and languages are needed. It is vital, however, that we not let them blind us to the gaps and intervals that are thereby traversed. The labor of middling is, like that of translation, necessary but impossible, never fully completed but always in the midst of taking place. The attention given to both German and British romantic writing, alongside modern French and American commentaries as well as classical sources, is motivated by my commitment to comparative literary studies. Yet the gestures of comparison and translation that characterize the field often take too much for granted about transparency, immediacy, and communicability. In the course of rethinking the middle, we have begun to reexamine the assumptions behind such critical acts. The point is not to undermine the legitimacy of these reading practices, but indeed to offer an opportunity to renew our understanding of their foundational principles.

Love Language

Chapter 4 engages with Plato’s Symposium, P. B. Shelley’s “On Love,” and Friedrich Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry. These texts share an ancient trope of love as the metaxu, an agent of the in-between that enables exchange between mortals and gods, self and other. The figure of middling love is crucial to Shelley’s and Schlegel’s reception of Plato. In Shelley’s fragment, middling logic operates at the level of address and voice to complicate claims about self and other, type and anti-type, reducing desire to the pure motion of language and emptying out the self. Schlegel’s Dialogue draws on the circling movement that repeatedly drives the self out of itself toward the other and back again. Unlike Hegel, he radically undercuts any possibility of ascension or resolution, instead underscoring the tendency to divide and divide again. The chapter considers this restless middle, continually subject to division, as the crux of romantic philology.

Parenthyrsos

The chapter re-examines the eighteenth-century sublime, which we tend to think of in superlatives: the greatest, the most high, the absolute limit. It challenges conventional wisdom that the sublime represents a disenchantment with rules, restraints, and decorum, and therefore breaks with the classical middle. The readings construct a counter-narrative by concentrating on descriptions of its production rather than its effects, and considering some fastidious, anxious accounts by Longinus, G. E. Lessing, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant about how to successfully achieve the sublime while avoiding the many pitfalls that surround it. The strategic calculation that goes into the rhetorical management of the sublime suggests that it is something other than absolutely individual, unmediated expression, and that it is closely aligned with the shaded complexities of the middle, rather than the stark simplicity of extremes. Moderation emerges, therefore, as a function of rhetorical rather than normative or aesthetic calculation.

The Medium Eats the Message

The chapter examines the complications of “mediatization” around 1800 in two separate senses. The first involves the growth in the variety, reach, and influence of media of communication. The second is a reorganization of political power in the wake of Napoleon, whereby territories that were formerly answerable only to the Emperor and therefore stood in “immediate” relation to imperial power became “mediatized.” Both developments and their profound consequences are represented in Kleist’s novella, “Michael Kohlhaas.” The text frames Kohlhaas’s spiral into madness and immoderation with a chain of virulent circulating signifiers (horses, letters, missives, prophecies, and so on) and an almost obsessive attention to borders, boundaries, and lines of difference that can only be crossed at great cost. Reading Kleist’s text alongside twentieth-century commentaries reveals how its urgent insights into language, force, and justice are intertwined with deep misgivings about mediality and its proliferating logic.

Lyric Meditude

John Ashbery’s self-declared preference for the middle and the debt to Hölderlin form the context for reading select poems from Where Shall I Wander (2005). The source of their anxiety is not the expanse on the other side of death, but the endless gaps opened up in the middle of things—not fini-tude, therefore, but medi-tude. Moving between Ashbery’s “The New Higher” and Hölderlin’s translation of Pindar’s “The Highest,” the reading explores what both have to say about relation, voice, and subjectivity. The poetic self is, they propose, constituted by addressing and turning to the other, but such acts seem to never arrive at their destination. We dwell instead in the spaces of the in-between: the caesura, the comma, the stutter or the sudden division of a line. Symptoms of perpetual delay and deferral, they also represent the life of poetic address as the infinite, restless movement of desire.

This is (not) a Joint

The readings of Hölderlin’s poetry by Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger place emphasis on the principle of articulation or joining, with particular attention to the question of how this principle of middling itself makes its appearance in literary representation. The figure of palintropic, invisible harmonia—borrowed from Heraclitus by Heidegger—is a vivid example of a joint that holds together and also apart, but must itself withdraw from appearance. This doubling-back of appearance has important parallels in Heidegger and Benjamin’s texts, which share a concern about preserving a sphere of “un-mediatizability” (Unmittelbarkeit). Their interest in representation at the very limits of what can be represented is considered alongside their use and thematization of punctuation, which is evoked at crucial junctures as a paradigmatic figure that brings word and image together in an ekphrastic comparison that also undercuts its own mimetic claims.

Radically Neutral

Revisiting Susan Buck-Morss’s work on Hegel and Haiti, the chapter considers the political and epistemological implications of romantic middling. Buck-Morss imagines a universal history that comprises lateral, virtual connections in the place of static differences and identities. Universal history challenges the coercive thinking represented by Hegelian dialectics and celebrates instead free circulation and connection around a middle ground of radical neutrality. Central to this promise is the trope of “syncretism”—harmonious mixture and exchange of properties across porous borders. A counter-image can be found in Kleist’s “Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” whose tale of betrayal exposes the violence that remains repressed but legible in the term “syncretism,” first introduced into the modern European languages to describe closing-off rather than an opening-up of borders. The chapter considers Kleist’s critique of medial thinking alongside some passages from The Phenomenology of Spirit to show how the medial is already, even for Hegel, fraught with contradiction.

Introduction

Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.