Chapter 21 examines Goethe’s relationship to German Idealism. Although the speculative nature of the Idealist method appears alien to Goethe’s own thought, and he himself expressed reservations about it, his poetic and scientific works display a significant degree of sympathy with the concerns that motivated his contemporaries. The chapter highlights the importance of Spinoza in the alignment between Goethe and Idealist thought, before considering in detail the significance of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and above all Schelling, whose philosophy of nature and art is particularly resonant with Goethe’s own.

Katrin Becker's Zwischen Norm und Chaos is an ambitious work that draws on the concepts of Pierre Legendre's dogmatic anthropology in order to rethink the relationship between law and literature. Since Legendre's work may be relatively unknown to those working in intellectual disciplines outside law and literature studies, a large section of the book gives a clear and engaging introduction to the concepts, operations, and investments of Legendre's theory before mining its aesthetic potential, above all for works of literature. Indeed, the very notion of dogma that Legendre seeks to rehabilitate—which links normative commitments and beliefs (doxa) to a manner of appearance, making visible, and even potential deception (dokein)—makes the aesthetic into an anthropological constant: the “decor” in which the norm is presented comes to define the human just as much as the rationality of the norm itself.

Becker's engagement with Legendre does not so much seek to impose a theoretical model on literary works—in this instance, Kafka's Der Process and Hoffmann's Der Sandmann—as much as to let these works shine through a conceptual prism and thereby uncover latent features of literary art that would otherwise remain invisible and unthematized. In so doing, Becker brings to the fore a chaotic potential in these works—a disruptive literary agency—that undermines attempts to read literature primarily as a discursive resource aimed at the stabilization of preexistent normative commitments.

Cleaving too close to a theoretical scaffolding is not without its risks: does the work of art become submerged behind a conceptual edifice? Is the capacity of the work of art to stimulate thought and novelty tamed inasmuch as it is regarded as an allegory, an illustrative example operating in the service of a theory, or a feedback mechanism whose ultimate purpose is to problematize, expand or modify a theory (the work serving the theory rather than the theory serving the work)? If one regards theory not as the production of truth, but rather, as a manner of seeing the phenomenon in a different conceptual landscape and making it speak with a different voice—literature as the “voice” of law, to draw on Becker's phrase—then these potential risks can be navigated inasmuch as the theory itself becomes a source of profound alienation: throw the work of art into a sea of concepts and observe what comes up from the depths.

A cursory glance at some of the more recent philosophical lexica and dictionaries will, in all likelihood, accord little attention to the seemingly fleeting and capricious concept that lies at the heart of Christiane Frey's study on Laune. Mood, or Laune—as distinguished from the more philosophically resonant and exalted concept of mood as attunement, or Stimmung—does not have its own entry in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe (2000–2005) or in the more recent Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014).

And yet, it is a significant term in the history of aesthetics and itself an untranslatable term, one whose contours Frey approaches with great erudition, flair, and mercurial agility. It flits around Stimmung, it circles the French humeur and the English humour, it brushes up against Genie, is tempted by caprice, and moves among various and often contradictory modes of appearance—both conscious and unconscious, purposive and arbitrary—on the margins of dominant aesthetic and anthropological discourses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Perhaps it is all for the best that mood, as Laune, is no longer to be found in the compendia of dominant philosophical and aesthetic concepts, since, as Frey shows us, its potential and its power derive precisely from its peripheral status, its “parasitic” position vis-à-vis dominant discourses. By occupying a liminal position between activity and passivity, freedom and unfreedom, knowledge and the lack of knowledge, masculinity and femininity, mood harbors a power of deviation from the generality of the norm. As a figure that often resists universalization, mood becomes a discursive repository of anthropological and aesthetic operations that are unpredictable and idiosyncratic.

In Frey's study, mood as Laune is thus closely aligned with the aesthetics of the comic, above all with the particularizing tendencies within the comic that cannot be integrated into higher orders of transcendence. In a coda to her study, Frey draws attention to Jean Paul's concept of mood, which he denigrates in favor of humor: unlike humor, which brings the finite individual into a contrastive relationship with the infinite idea, mood as Laune contrasts the finite particularity only with that which is finite. Although resistant to its pull—or perhaps precisely because of this resistance—Jean Paul uncovers the potentiality of Laune, namely, as the means through which the particularity of the particular, rather than the particular in relation to a generality, is accorded a space of appearance.

IN A PUBLISHED LETTER sent to the “party leadership of the German Social Democrats in Austria” on January 21, 1919, four Viennese Jewish socialist organizations pledged their support for the Social Democrats in the upcoming election for the Constituent National Assembly of German Austria. But the pledge came with a condition: The groups united in the Jewish Social Democratic Party “Poale Zion” in Austria (a group that advocated both Marxism and Zionism) were unified in their demand that the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) overcome the “opportunism of the day” and “renounce their position on the Jewish question.” The general position of the Social Democrats was that Jews should assimilate and thereby renounce or downplay their religious commitments. Were the Social Democrats to give up the demand for assimilation, the party could still embrace “social justice […] the basis for the brotherly union of the proletariat of all nations.” While Jewish socialists aimed their ire at the Social Democrats, the party was also under intense fire from bourgeois and nationalist forces who derided the party as verjudet, contaminated by Jewish thought and dominated by Jewish leadership. Indeed, many of the driving personalities involved with the Austrian Social Democratic movement were from Jewish families, including its founder, Victor Adler, and later such party luminaries as Otto Bauer, Julius Tandler, Hugo Breitner, Robert Danneberg, Käthe Leichter, and Julius Deutsch. The complexity of Viennese Jewish identity can be seen in the offer of the Jewish socialists in their letter to the leaders of the supposedly verjudete SDAP: If the party would revise its approach to the Jewish question, the Jewish socialist associations vowed to join them in the “fight to the death against the dehumanizing and Volk-defiling force of Jewish capital.” These Jewish groups thus weaponized anti-Semitic tropes against other Jewish groups, showing the toxic ubiquity of anti-Semitism.

The complexity of the political, social, and religious identity of Vienna's Jewish citizens is inexorably tied to the unstable and increasingly dangerous conditions that surrounded them. While the Red Vienna era was tumultuous for all Viennese citizens, Vienna's Jewish inhabitants experienced the years of the First Republic in a state of perpetual crisis.

IN ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC EPISODES of one of the most important works of modern Austrian literature, Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Traumnovelle (Dream Story), the protagonist is driven through the streets of Vienna toward a house in the suburbs near Gallitzinberg hill in order to participate in the ritualistic orgy of a secret society. The participants are at first dressed in the habits of monks and nuns. Later, the men exchange their monastic robes for the costumes of noblemen and the women remove all of their clothing. The scene overwhelms the protagonist with desire, although as an outsider, he never gains full access to this mysterious, dangerous world of eroticism.

The journey from the center of the city to the periphery has often been likened to a journey from bourgeois order toward the transgressive libidinal energies associated with the unconscious. In this instance, unconscious desire and sexual transgression manifest themselves in the profanation of symbols of power (the clothing of monks, nuns, and noblemen) that were formerly held sacred in Austrian culture and political life—metonymically standing in for the Church and the nobility—while at the same time positing these very same symbols as fetish objects and thus as endowed with a peculiar imaginative and even erotic fascination. This episode can be regarded as a window onto the complex dynamics that pervade questions of religion and secularization in Red Vienna: while Viennese culture, at least according to the dominant Social Democratic vision, seems to shift toward increasing secularization, religion and the question of the sacred never disappear from the intellectual landscape. Indeed, religion and the sacred are constantly reappearing or being rethought in different forms, almost—as Schnitzler's text suggests—as a return of the repressed.

The topography of Schnitzler's text may be productively mapped onto a political dynamic: the further one traveled outside of Vienna across the other Austrian regions, the further one moved from the seemingly secular political culture of the Social Democrats to the Catholic conservatism of the Christian Social Party. Historiographies of Austria have thus tended to see in the period after World War I a cultural clash between opposing ideals with their corresponding geographical locations on the map of Austria: the progressive, secularist Marxism of Vienna against the conservative, corporatist Catholicism of the Austrian rural regions.

These words, written by Novalis, declare that philosophy begins in an act of self-destruction, or more precisely formulated: all properly philosophical acts aim to destroy the self. This demand is not as mysterious as it might seem. A self, by definition, is differentiated and limited, and thus represents one of the most palpable impediments to that which romantic philosophy seeks, namely, the absolute, das Unbedingte, that which is without condition and without limit. A truly philosophical act must efface the horizon of limitations and differences that constitutes selfhood: Selbsttödtung, self-annihilation. The proper name for this act is not suicide, but transcendence.

And yet: what is suicide other than the most extreme and literal form of self-extinction? E. T. A. Hoffmann would have been able to read the fragment cited above in Schlegel and Tieck's edition of Novalis's collected works. In light of this fragment, it is worth considering whether or not Hoffmann's most celebrated Nachtstück (Night Piece), Der Sandmann—which culminates in a spectacular act of self-destruction, Selbsttödtung—is much more than a story about childhood trauma, abuse, irony, or the tragic frustrations of a mediocre poet. Rather, Der Sandmann, as an aesthetic document, indexes a distinctly philosophical problem, namely, the phenomenal movements and operations associated with a conception of the absolute that exists beyond all instances of differential signification attached to a limited self. Seen from this perspective, the central problem of Der Sandmann is less psychological than ontological: it concerns not the pathological psyche of a problematic individual, but the order of beings as a whole.

In this rich and groundbreaking study, which ought to be considered one of the most important and formidable recent contributions to scholarship on early German Romanticism, Dalia Nassar sets out to rethink the category of the absolute in texts by Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling. Nassar's historically informed and textually sensitive account of these thinkers reframes their various attempts to grasp or conceptualize the absolute as an inherently relational, differential, and dynamic engagement with reality.

The notion of a relational absolute seems, at first glance, counterintuitive or contradictory. The absolute, as that which is without limit and thus irreducible to things or conditions, has traditionally been understood to exclude differentiation and thus to be incompatible with relationality. And yet, Nassar shows with considerable conviction, clarity, and attention to detail that Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling—albeit each in different ways and with different emphases— gravitated toward the absolute as a figure of thought that helped them think relationally and thus reconcile oppositions between the one and the many, the infinite and the finite, or the differentiation of knowledge and the unity of being.

As Nassar points out in her introduction, scholars of early German Romanticism have dramatically different ways of approaching the concept of the absolute. Some, such as Frederick Beiser, understand the Romantics to be Idealists, or philosophers who endow the absolute with some form of metaphysical and ontological reality. The other dominant interpretive paradigm for understanding the philosophical discourse of early German Romanticism has been articulated by Manfred Frank, who portrays the Romantics as skeptical thinkers. According to Frank, the Romantics view the absolute as a Kantian regulative idea: something that must be presupposed as that which makes experience possible but can never be conceptually grasped or exhaustively articulated.

Nassar aligns herself more with Beiser's account, although she differentiates herself from his tendency to see the Romantics as prioritizing Spinoza's metaphysics over Fichtean self-positing. For Nassar, the Romantics remain invested in the “active and constructive nature of the self” (11) and are committed to the agency of Romantic creativity. In general, however, she steers a middle course between Beiser and Frank, or between scholars who conceptualize the absolute as a metaphysical ontology and those who see the absolute as a mere regulative idea.