Hölderlin's Insistence, or the Insistence of the Literary in the Theologico-Political

摘要

Considering the program and the specific topics of the conference, this paper cannot avoid addressing the question of whether literature (or the literary) can possibly be a legitimate and relevant interlocutor in the debate between theology (or the theological) and political philosophy and theory (or the political). In what way can the literary contribute to reflections on the ambivalent relations of insistence and resistance that exist between religion and politics, and to questions of heteronomy and autonomy that are at the heart of the history of modernity and the story of secularization? If there is an insistence of the theologico-political in contemporary philosophy, can we then also speak of a specific insistence of the literary in the persistence of the theologico-political? The title of this paper may suggest that these vast theoretical questions will be dealt with through the development of a privileged literary example, an approach whose promise of illumination often ends up obscuring and suspending the urgency of the theoretical question that inspires it. The singularity of the name Hölderlin, the name that (surprisingly or not) insists more or less explicitly in the works of many of the names that are routinely linked to the resurgence of the theologico-political (Benjamin, Schmitt, Agamben, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe,…), does not only stand for a resistance to this evasive logic of exemplarity; it also stands for a radicalization of the theoretical questions, at least if one is prepared to attend to the literary and critical performativity of Hölderlin’s writing. Hölderlin’s writing simultaneously reflects on and enacts the fortunes of a literary-theologico-political speech act that is constitutively in search of a locus beyond both excessively heteronomous and excessively autonomous speech, in order to address - “in times of distress” - a future community. Even while crossing the abyss of failure and absolute disenchantment, it still insists on this address; for in this space far beyond the possibility of community (and communication), the space of an infinite abandonment and betrayal (of man by god, of god by man, and of man by man) beyond melancholy and hope, a language emerges that, stripped of its imaginary, political and theological ambitions, witnesses its own incapacity and prepares for a gathering that comes before every contemporary or future theologico-political discourse.