Repository | Book | Chapter

It is now over twenty years since Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy declared their generation of French critical theorists (not without a trace of thoroughly romantic irony) the inheritors of the avant-garde project of German romanticism: "The Athenaum", they wrote in The Literary Absolute, "is our birthplace" (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 8). Today, the actuality of German romanticism, which, as Isaiah Berlin has recently averred, inaugurated "the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West", appears undiminished (Berlin 6). Peter Murphy and David Roberts concur, while insisting that the resonance of romanticism within the present extends far beyond the aesthetic avant-gardism that preoccupied the French poststructuralists. "German romanticism" in The Literary Absolute is pre-eminently what Germanists term Frühromantik, or as I prefer, Jena Romantik. What Murphy and Roberts term romanticism, by contrast, gets underway earlier, namely with J. G. Herder's "organic historicism", and is considerably more encompassing: here, romanticism signifies the on-going quest for the "renaturalisation" of humanity in the wake of the rationalist disenchantment of the world (Murphy and Roberts 6, 3). In this analysis, romanticism, understood as an enduring cultural impulse rather than as a discrete historical moment, stands alongside enlightenment as a continuing, and problematic, mode of response to the modern world that is itself inherently modernist. Problematic, because, like enlightenment, it generates its own baleful dialectic, which still has us in its grip. While the enlightenment project of human self-determination and self-fashioning prevails in the guise of the modernist (and, I would add, postmodernist) "attraction to futurist technology and progressive techniques", romanticism returns in many a modernist condemnation of modern society (in Adorno and Horkheimer no less than in Heidegger), and, according to Murphy and Roberts, continues to hold sway in postmodernist critiques of logocentric reason (Murphy and Roberts x-xi).

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-8350-9676-9_10

Full citation: