This essay explores the language of retraction. The focus is on two sections of Franz Kafka's Der Proce ss in which a variety of different attempts are made to take back something that has been said and, in some cases, to provide a substitute for it. The antinomy that emerges-all utterances can be rescinded; no utterances can be rescinded-unsettles any simple identity between communication and community. Ultimately, a discourse may prove most stable when its participants can never be entirely confident that they all share a common tongue and are thus disinclined to expect that their own speech acts will be respected or even understood.

Focusing on the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, this essay offers a new perspective on the central claims of Afropessimism by elucidating its implicit theory of language. Putting Wilderson’s “Raw Life and the Ruse of Empathy” into dialogue with the doctrine of linguistic positing elaborated by Paul de Man in his study of the Romantics, we see that Wilderson’s account of anti-Blackness identifies volatile signifying dynamics that many critical theorists have chosen to ignore. In his analyses of Black speech, Wilderson follows de Man in arguing that language is forever pushing—and frequently expanding—the limits of what can be said or done with words. This insight into the self-transgressive nature of linguistic formations proves crucial to the fight against racist logics of subjugation, which rely on a high level of discursive stability.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsJan MieszkowskiJan Mieszkowski is the Reginald F. Arragon Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. His most recent book, Crises of the Sentence, appeared with the University of Chicago Press in 2019. He is currently completing a monograph about the poetics of botany. Email: mieszkow@reed.eduNotes1 Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 100.2 Beckett, Nouvelles et Textes pour rien, 115. Beckett began Textes pour rien in December 1950 but wrote the bulk of it in 1951; he began writing Texts for Nothing in December 1951 and worked on it through much of 1952. See Ackerly and Brown, Samuel Beckett, 9.3 This notion that the ‘original’ was always-already a translation is echoed by Ann Beer, who comments: ‘Beckett, by accident or design, found himself in his maturity writing texts that he knew would have to be self-translated. As a result, a sense of double existence began to be inherent even in the first of the two versions’. Beer, “Beckett’s Bilingualism,” 209. In some instances, Beckett overtly changed languages midstream, as when he began writing a story in English entitled ‘Suite’, then after twenty pages switched to French and renamed the piece ‘La Fin’. He later helped translate the ‘French’ text into English as ‘The End’; on these changes, see Slote, “Bilingual Beckett,” 116.4 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 7.5 Beckett, En attendant Godot, 9.6 Fernández, “Translation for Nothing,” 175.7 Slote, “Bilingual Beckett,” 118.8 See Germoni and Sardin, “Tensions of the In-Between,” 335. Along similar lines, Helen Astbury argues that Beckett ultimately ends up producing a ‘uniquely “Beckettian” tongue’. “How To Do Things with Syntax,” 446.9 Cited in Brater, The Drama in the Text, 9.10 Shenker, “An Interview,” 148. In a letter to the publisher Barney Rossett, Beckett wrote that L’Innommable ‘finished me or expressed my finishedness’. Beckett, The Letters, 497. Whether he was ever finished with this state of being finished is far from clear. When Beckett allowed in a 1956 interview that he had ‘failed’ to emerge from the feeling of being unsure of how to go on, he was industriously generating new work; see Shenker, “An Interview,” 148.11 In the original French version of L’Innommable, the final clauses read: ‘il faut continuer, je vais continuer’. Beckett, L’Innommable (1953), 262. In the English edition that appeared in 1958, an additional clause was inserted: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. Beckett, Three Novels, 414. An additional clause was also added to the 1971 edition of the French: ‘il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer’. Beckett, L’Innommable (1971), 213.12 The remainder of this essay will be preoccupied with the English word ‘suddenly’, as a consequence of which the focus will be on Texts for Nothing rather than Textes pour rien.13 In a similar vein, one might reflect on the disjointed temporal dynamics that organise the title of the 1958 Southern Gothic mystery film Suddenly, Last Summer.14 The ideology of ‘show, don’t tell’ is derived from psychological studies of language processing. In the United States, its influence extends beyond creative writing teaching to K–12 pedagogy, where it is averred that if teachers show rather than tell, they will encourage their students to think actively rather than passively receiving information.15 Ironically, Young’s ‘Just . . . suddenly’ (meaning ‘Merely suddenly’) is what would be left of ‘Just suddenly!’ (‘Absolutely suddenly’) if it were put through the treatment to which the adverb is subject at the start of Texts for Nothing.16 Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 100.17 Beckett, Watt, 232.18 While it is not her primary focus, the word ‘suddenly’ plays a central role in all five passages from Nohow On that Ann Banfield cites as evidence of involuntary ‘image-memories’ that invade the mind but are not created or controlled by the mind. See her “Beckett’s Tattered Syntax,” 18.19 Beckett, How It Is, 13.20 In social media, this has become a meme in which one offers a satirical summary of a doctrine or movement: ‘What’s British psychoanalysis all about?’ ‘Oh, you know, something something object-relations’.21 Collins, “Tension,” 44.22 Ibid.23 Ibid.24 Ibid.

The German QuarterlyVolume 95, Issue 3 p. 331-333 Book Review Feldman, Karen S. Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality Jan Mieszkowski, Jan Mieszkowski Reed CollegeSearch for more papers by this author Jan Mieszkowski, Jan Mieszkowski Reed CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 31 July 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12286Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume95, Issue3Summer 2022Pages 331-333 RelatedInformation

The German QuarterlyVolume 92, Issue 4 p. 431-503 Forum Does German Cultural Studies need the Nation-State Model? Yael Almog, Yael Almog Durham UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorKirsten Belgum, Kirsten Belgum The University of Texas at AustinSearch for more papers by this authorBenjamin Biebuyck, Benjamin Biebuyck Ghent UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorStephen Brockmann, Stephen Brockmann Carnegie Mellon UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorVance Byrd, Vance Byrd Grinnell CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorNecia Chronister, Necia Chronister Kansas State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorNicole Coleman, Nicole Coleman Wayne State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorLisabeth Hock, Lisabeth Hock Wayne State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorCarol Anne Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming University of North TexasSearch for more papers by this authorGisela Holfter, Gisela Holfter University of Limerick, IrelandSearch for more papers by this authorJennifer Ruth Hosek, Jennifer Ruth Hosek Queen's UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorKathrin Maurer, Kathrin Maurer University of Southern DenmarkSearch for more papers by this authorMoritz Schramm, Moritz Schramm University of Southern DenmarkSearch for more papers by this authorPatrizia C. McBride, Patrizia C. McBride Cornell UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorJan Mieszkowski, Jan Mieszkowski Reed CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorJohn K. Noyes, John K. Noyes University of Toronto / Stellenbosch UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorBenjamin Robinson, Benjamin Robinson Indiana University, BloomingtonSearch for more papers by this authorCarrie Smith, Carrie Smith University of AlbertaSearch for more papers by this authorScott Spector, Scott Spector University of MichiganSearch for more papers by this authorBrangwen Stone, Brangwen Stone The University of Sydney, and Australian National University, CanberraSearch for more papers by this authorKatie Sutton, Katie Sutton The University of Sydney, and Australian National University, CanberraSearch for more papers by this authorHeather Sullivan, Heather Sullivan Trinity UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorPer Urlaub, Per Urlaub Middlebury CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorKirk Wetters, Kirk Wetters Yale UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Yael Almog, Yael Almog Durham UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorKirsten Belgum, Kirsten Belgum The University of Texas at AustinSearch for more papers by this authorBenjamin Biebuyck, Benjamin Biebuyck Ghent UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorStephen Brockmann, Stephen Brockmann Carnegie Mellon UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorVance Byrd, Vance Byrd Grinnell CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorNecia Chronister, Necia Chronister Kansas State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorNicole Coleman, Nicole Coleman Wayne State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorLisabeth Hock, Lisabeth Hock Wayne State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorCarol Anne Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming University of North TexasSearch for more papers by this authorGisela Holfter, Gisela Holfter University of Limerick, IrelandSearch for more papers by this authorJennifer Ruth Hosek, Jennifer Ruth Hosek Queen's UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorKathrin Maurer, Kathrin Maurer University of Southern DenmarkSearch for more papers by this authorMoritz Schramm, Moritz Schramm University of Southern DenmarkSearch for more papers by this authorPatrizia C. McBride, Patrizia C. McBride Cornell UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorJan Mieszkowski, Jan Mieszkowski Reed CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorJohn K. Noyes, John K. Noyes University of Toronto / Stellenbosch UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorBenjamin Robinson, Benjamin Robinson Indiana University, BloomingtonSearch for more papers by this authorCarrie Smith, Carrie Smith University of AlbertaSearch for more papers by this authorScott Spector, Scott Spector University of MichiganSearch for more papers by this authorBrangwen Stone, Brangwen Stone The University of Sydney, and Australian National University, CanberraSearch for more papers by this authorKatie Sutton, Katie Sutton The University of Sydney, and Australian National University, CanberraSearch for more papers by this authorHeather Sullivan, Heather Sullivan Trinity UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorPer Urlaub, Per Urlaub Middlebury CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorKirk Wetters, Kirk Wetters Yale UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 November 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12117Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume92, Issue4Fall 2019Pages 431-503 RelatedInformation

This essay explores the conceptualization of warfare in Romanticism. The focus is on two plays by Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea and Prince Friedrich von Homburg. I begin by discussing Carl von Clausewitz's influential understanding of conflict and the problems that arise when he attempts to explain the interdependence of warring parties. I go on to argue that in Kleist's dramas war is a competition between different languages of authority. When no coherent paradigm of agency emerges from this contest, the right to wage war is revealed to be anything but a guarantee that one knows how to do so.

This essay argues that the Marxist discourse on slogans was shaped by Hegelian and Romantic critiques of the rationalist proposition. The first half juxtaposes Friedrich Schlegel’s account of a statement that cannot be reversed with Hegel’s doctrine of the speculative sentence. The second half focuses on Marx’s understanding of a revolutionary speech act, a salto mortale, that wins its power from the boldness with which it threatens to put our most basic model of praxis in jeopardy.

Late eighteenth-century thought was profoundly influenced by the mathematics of infinity and infinitesimals in Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Leonhard Euler. Immanuel Kant’s pronouncement in the Critique of Pure Reason that the spatio-temporal world is neither finite nor infinite, along with his doctrine of the mathematical sublime in the Critique of Judgment, set the stage for the accounts of singularity, totality, and the absolute that emerge in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. One of the most familiar Romantic motifs presents the conceptualization of the unconditioned as a perpetual striving after an unattainable goal. Characterized as the asymptotic approach to a limit, this dynamic is often illustrated with a diagram from analytic geometry showing the distance between a curve and a line nearing zero as the two tend to infinity. This “endlose Annaherung,” as Friedrich Schlegel terms it, is first and foremost an emblem of tension or contradiction (Studien des klassischen Altertums 255). As boundlessly precise imprecision, such a process is constitutively imperfect and open-ended, its telos uncertain, yet it remains unsurpassed in the exactitude of its execution. The privilege accorded infinite approximation by Romantic authors highlights their investment in irreducibly provisional programs whose coherence and integrity are permanently under threat. But it is also a reminder of the substantial advances that had taken place in infinitesimal calculus, which by Schlegel’s time was generating algorithms of considerable accuracy, distinguishing itself as a discourse of continuity as much as discontinuity. The Romantic concern with the interplay of verbal and mathematical dynamics raises the question of whether sentences or words may relate asymptotically. On a larger scale, could one speak of the infinite approach of one poem to another? In this article, I will explore the concept of proximity in Romantic poetry and poetics by focusing on a small constellation of terms: nah, beinahe, and annahern. As the invocation of an asymptotic function implies, what is at issue is less a static set of fixed elements than a dynamic of forces of uncertain provenance. Even the exposition of the word near proves a challenging task. As much as it describes the arrangement of objects in space or metaphorically characterizes relations between abstract terms, nearness also seems to pre-exist and even enable relationships, thereby proving central to the Romantic account of

This essay argues that a demand to be written on is intrinsic to architectural constructs. Beginning with the debates that surrounded the renovation of the Berlin Reichstag and the decision to preserve the graffiti left on it by conquering Soviet soldiers in 1945, wall writing is shown to be a profoundly unstable medium that fractures the historicity of its host surfaces even as it highlights their authority as systems of protection or exclusion. In Brassaï's photographs of the streets of modernist Paris, graffiti is understood as a uniquely auto-exhibitive discourse, a script that constantly exposes the limits of writing. In Walter Benjamin's study of Bertolt Brecht's poetry, this lapidary style is characterized as a kind of ex-scription that counters the formative, singularizing force of inscription with a trace logic that disarticulates the very schemas of surface and display that appear to ground it. Benjamin continues this discussion in his Arcades Project, revealing architecture and poetry to be two dimensions of a broader dynamic in which any sentence is a gesture toward the wall it will mark, if not render ephemeral, while any wall is a gesture toward the sentence that it will put on display and thereby potentially evacuate of its expressive or performative power.

The goal of this essay is to describe an emotional dynamic that is intrinsic to language rather than simply represented by or expressed in it. Beyond the familiar models of linguistic praxis?positing and performance; reference and signification; formation and deforma? tion?I will attempt to articulate a notion of linguistic affectivity, or more specifically, linguistic auto-affection. The initial focus will be on the traditional but vexing figure of anacoluthon, a breakdown of grammar or syntax that is often mistakenly treated as though its manifestation reveals nothing about language. I will then turn to a reading of Gottfried Benn's "Requiem," a text in which the relations between disruptions of syntactic norms and discursive affectivity are explored in detail. From the Greek for "lack of sequence," anacoluthon is typically defined as an abrupt change in the syntax or grammar of a statement, as when a sentence begins in the first person but suddenly switches to the third person or a transitive verb appears but fails to be followed by a direct object. Anacoluthon is often associated with aposiopesis, in which a sentence breaks off, never to continue, and anapodoton, in which a sentence begins with a subordinate clause that is not fol? lowed by a main clause. In these cases, rhetoricians speak of the initial syntax or grammar creating an expectation for the completion of a pattern that is then thwarted when another grammar rears its head. Anacoluthon is regularly linked with feelings, but not in the terms I propose to delineate. Figures of interruption are celebrated for what they convey about the volatile emotional state of their speaker, since

CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARS AGREE THAT THE WARFARE that ravaged Europe between 1792 and 1815 as formative for the culture of the period as the French and Industrial Revolutions. Napoleonic Age has been described as the moment at which sustained international conflict became an all-engrossing spectacle1 that structured communal existence such that a militarized society became the norm, an everyday affair under whose reign we may still be living today.2 Such claims are supported by the work of military historians, generally view the Napoleonic Era as the first time that entire nations *were mobilized in the support of well-defined military goals, the inauguration of an epoch of total that would reach its apotheosis in the titanic world of the twentieth century3 Guided by these observations, one can identify numerous literary and philosophical texts from around 1800 that ask whether the fighting of the day was a genuinely new phenomenon or a logical outgrowth of longstanding trends. Questions about the form - and the inevitability - of future wars were also a prominent concern. In exploring the conceptualization of war in this period, it is important to recognize that its disruptive potential constituted a challenge both to existing power structures and to the way in which the representation of historical experience was understood. If military scholars today tend to stress the scale and destructiveness of the combat at Waterloo orAusterlitz, authors at the turn of the nineteenth century also dwelled on the complex epistemologica! problems presented by these epic clashes. In this essay, I argue that the conviction that military events engender as many philosophical exigencies as material ones is central to the plays of Friedrich Schiller. theme of warfare in Schiller's dramas has been much discussed, and in fact, it has frequently been argued that his depictions of historical figures are allegorical meditations on the rise of Napoleon and the changing nature of political authority. There has nonetheless been a tendency to underestimate the theoretical sophistication of Schiller's contributions.4 In his Wallenstein trilogy and Die Jungfrau von Orleans, he shows that armies develop their own representational systems designed to elucidate the significance of battles as they occur. In these terms, war unfolds as an auto-interpretive enterprise whereby opposing parties set forth not simply an account of their aims and accomplishments, but standards for judging the meaningfulness of the events they seek to bring about.5 Far from merely selling their operations as necessary evils, present themselves as prototypes of individual and collective action. Schiller's ultimate claim is thus that war is not simply a struggle to subdue a foe, but an attempt to govern the paradigms of historical praxis as such. Written between 1799 and 1801, Wallenstein and Die Jungfrau are alike in a number of respects.6 Both focus on revered leaders who won fame in that were seemingly interminable; and in both instances, the longstanding conflict outlived the hero by decades. protagonists ,Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, and Johanna, The Maid, embody exaggerated traits of military prowess, although each endures a period of inactivity in which what is not done is more significant than what is. Both dramas also present military ventures as efforts to control rhetorical forces. In Wallenstein, the focus is on the tension between individual agency and the allegorical dynamics that impose themselves each time one of the characters tries to fashion a language which to articulate the tactics and goals of the forces he commands. In Die Jungfrau, it is the representational praxis of battlefield operations that is at issue as the heroine struggles with emblems and icons rather than swords and arrows. In both cases, the claim to discursive supremacy is a key feature of martial authority, but paradoxically, it turns out that fighting over the symbols of warfare makes it more difficult to confirm one's prowess as a warrior. …

Analogy, Terminable and Interminable Jan Mieszkowski (bio) Few twentieth-century discourses have shaped the humanities and social sciences like psychoanalysis. The work of Sigmund Freud and his inheritors has been a driving force behind countless efforts to rethink the most fundamental questions of subjectivity, history, and politics. This enduring influence is readily evident in contemporary gender studies, film theory, and media studies--to list only the most obvious examples. Perhaps even more uniquely, the authority of psychoanalysis has crossed all methodological and ideological lines, impacting Anglo-American analytic as much as Continental philosophy, empirical anthropological research as well as semiotics and formalist hermeneutics. Freud himself sets the stage for these developments. Throughout his oeuvre, he routinely moves between observations about the dynamics organizing a singular psyche and broader reflections on cultural experience, considering art, literature, and religion as well as the nature of charismatic leaders, mass movements, and the possibilities for world peace. At the same time, it is in the midst of his strongest assertions of parallels between individual and sociopolitical systems that Freud betrays the most profound doubts about the explanatory reach of his work. Paradoxically, the status of psychoanalysis as a "master discourse," its seeming ability to model everything under the sun, may be the product of the profound skepticism it directs toward its own mastery. Near the close of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud asks whether his account of "the integration of a separate individual into a human group" provides a basis for understanding the "creation of a unified group out of many individuals" (21: 140).[1] Given the "similarity between the means employed and the resultant phenomena," he writes, one can in this instance speak of "the same process applied to different kinds of objects" (140). In explaining the analogous development of the singular human psyche and civilization in general, Freud describes a cultural superego that resembles the individual superego in origin and function. Both formations establish ideal demands that lead to the creation of a conscience, and at times, they appear almost completely interdependent, as if one could not exist without the other. If the two differ, Freud suggests, it is only in that the injunctions of the cultural superego tend to be more legible than those of individual ones, whose commands largely remain unconscious and can thus be difficult to discern. In other words, even if one's primary goal is to study the singular psyche rather than its social counterpart, focusing on the latter may still be the best means of understanding the former. On the basis of these remarks, it would be a gross understatement to say that the development of the singular psyche is "mirrored by" or "reflected in" a larger communal field. Taking their cue from Freud's characterization of these substantive parallels between individual psychological processes and social ones, several generations of cultural critics have felt licensed, if not required, to pass judgment on the mental welfare of entire societies. As Freud canonically formulates it: If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization--possibly the whole of mankind--have become "neurotic"? (21: 144) The elaboration of "a pathology of cultural communities," as Freud also terms it, has become a sine qua non of much contemporary research, even in disciplines in which the word "psychoanalysis" is rarely uttered. From anthropologists to art historians, from poetry critics to urban economists, scholars routinely pursue a host of different diagnoses of the psycho-logics of mass formations, implicitly and explicitly analogizing individual dynamics with groups ranging from reading or consuming publics to the populations of nations or continents. Given the authority that Freud's views on this topic have acquired, it is important to consider whether his claim that "the development of civilization" is "comparable to the normal maturation of the individual" is entirely compatible with his other views about social experience (21: 97-98). As is well known, a central concept in his later work--and a topic of considerable controversy for...