Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism

by David Farrell Krell

"Krell writes here with a brilliance of style that few other philosophers can match." ―John Sallis

Although the Romantic Age is usually thought of as idealizing nature as the source of birth, life, and creativity, David Farrell Krell focuses on the preoccupation of three key German Romantic thinkers―Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel―with nature's destructive powers―contagion, disease, and death.

Genres: Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

About the author

David Farrell Krell is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at DePaul University, specializing in Continental Philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. from Duquesne University, where he focused on Heidegger and Nietzsche, two figures central to his scholarly work. Krell has taught at various universities in the United States and Europe, contributing extensively to the study of German Idealism, Romanticism, and deconstruction.
He has authored numerous books, including Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (1992), Infectious Nietzsche (1996), and The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (2005), examining themes of mortality, time, and finitude. His work also explores the intersections of philosophy, literature, and aesthetics, as seen in Lunar Voices (1995) and Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body (1997). Krell has been a key translator of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche and edited Basic Writings (1977), a widely used collection of Heidegger’s essays.
Influenced by Jacques Derrida, Krell has engaged with deconstructive approaches to Nietzsche and Heidegger, shaping contemporary discussions on these thinkers. His later works, such as Ecstasy, Catastrophe (2015) and The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter (2018), continue his inquiries into existential and aesthetic themes, cementing his reputation as a major voice in modern Continental thought.

Reviews

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfortunately (yet understandably) under read, Krell’s Contagion is a fairly dense exploration into the lesser known works of Novalis, Schelling and Hegel regarding the philosophy of nature, highlighting the colossal catastrophe of sexual reproduction, generation and existence more generally. The third section on Hegel’s Realphilosophie is particularly good (when not bogged down by horrendously opaque passages) as it shows Hegelian Spirit perform a real tightrope act, as Krell details how these early lecture notes show Hegel biting off more than his system can chew. In fact with what Krell unearths here a whole new reevaluation of the Phenomenology of Spirit may be necessary, an interpretation centred around infection, autoeroticism and nosology. Minds steeped far deeper in German Idealism than my own would greatly benefit picking up this nifty little volume, as it throws that system of thought (as well as Romanticism) into a whole new light, exposing it to the dire forces of nature. The issue is that many will succumb to Hegel’s own eventual treatment of these problems; as our innate Terror Management Theory kicks in we have no choice but to smooth out the edges of the irreducible facets of the tragedy of our corporealised life.

There’s a great deal of John Brown’s theory of disease in here, concerning the dualism of sensibility and irritability — if you’re anything like me, you will never have heard of this guy before, and I must admit I was at an utter loss. Schelling’s discussions of electromagnetism and a higher physics were also sadly lost on me, but there’s something enthralling amidst all the confusion. As usual, I’m going to leave a treasure trove of quotes from the book below, starting with a hilariously cruel footnote of one of the few times Hegel ever discussed Novalis:

“where Hegel comments on the "hollow characters and situations" of Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (11: 215). Such hollowness Hegel attributes - ironically, cruelly - to Novalis's consumptive spirit, which, itself hollow, brings on his tuberculosis. The compulsion to think conducted "this beautiful soul" only to the level of languor (Sehnsucht) and abstract intellect; such "transcendental languor" is nothing more than a tubercular spirit (die Schwindsucht des Geistes), which penetrated Novalis’s body and thus determined his corporeal fate in a way that was consistent with his spirit.”

Now some quotes about Novalis’ still untranslated Scientific Notebooks, with philosophy being based upon a “first kiss”:

“1. For Novalis, philosophy begins with embodied experience, indeed, with the experience of erotic love - the "first kiss." Further, the experience of the expansive force of love in the first kiss introduces us to other aspects of the system of the mouth - to speech, laughter, eating, digestion, and elimination.

2. The system of the mouth is a mortal system, bound up with the pharmaceutical principle - the principle that medicament and poison are synonymous - and thus with contagion, illness, and death. In a word, the first kiss and the system of the mouth are in essential communication with the baneful aspects of nature.

3. Such communication occurs as a touching that does not achieve contact. It is a touching that works its effects as an actio in distans, precisely through contagion.

4. The pharmaceutical principle extends to the most beloved oppositional pairs in philosophical cosmology, anthropology, and theology, so that meditation on that principle by any "artist of immortality" leads to the most radical results for philosophy in general.”

Some other observations by Novalis:

”Novalis begins to speculate that sheer love of illness can transform a malady into “supreme, positive pleasure," that illness may be a means toward a higher synthesis. Illness may be the secret symphilosopheme and the proper potentiation; it may open a path that will return us to a state of intimacy with nature. To such intimacy the poet gives the name of his dead fiancée, Sofie, the young woman he admitted "loving more almost on account of her illness." There is something uncanny about Novalis's thinking concerning health and illness, something beyond the bizarre.“

“However, it is clear that for Novalis the eminently spiritual ladder is the body of woman, with the eyes of her moralized chest promising the most visible means of nourishment, the folds of her sex embracing the not entirely invisible organs that are closest to the unseen soul of what in baby-talk used to be called man.”

I found the analysis of Schelling particularly obscure, with the inhibition (Hemmung) of infinite activity, the excitability of the organism and the dynamic sequence of stages in the organisation of nature being real tricky stuff. It deals in primarily Freudian territory, why the leap from the (in/an)organic to the organic? What stirred Indifference into production, creating its botched products of vegetation, animals and mankind? Schelling sure as shit doesn’t know, and frankly neither do I. Yet for some strange reason that which externally stirs the organism, that which invites life’s destruction, somehow sustains it — we are continually in lifedeath, a topsy-turvy realm where what destroys us allows us to persevere and what should allow us sustenance (the turn to the inside away from excitability and stimulation, steeling ourselves against it in an ontological numbing) instead builds our own sarcophagus. I’m afraid I’m at a loss for good quotes from this part, so onto Hegel.

Has Hegel ever been more nihilistic? Take a dip in his phosphorescent pool of malformed nature and see for yourself!

“The higher the nature, the greater the misery. Those who clutter the stage are not happy. They are in pain, and they cannot stop craving. Human craving, Begierde, surpasses even the animal's feral urge. Nothing will sate it. The heart of hearts, the labyrinth of the human mind, the untranslatable Gemüt, no longer takes heart in its confrontation with raging seas, howling blizzards, or towering cliffs. Its storms and its heights are within, and from them there is no refuge, no relief. What then does it do with an outside that forever taunts it with reflections of its own finitude? It lights a fire, ignites the extrinsic, and watches the outer nature burn.”

“Nature is the hull or empty husk, the chaff, its ethereal oils and sugar crystals now fuel for the fire of spirit. Nothing that lives is of the measure of spirit, nothing vegetable, nothing animal: all of it taken together and weighed in the balance is unangemessen.”

”Sidereal pox, a leprosy of stars, a rash of celestial proportions - we have heard Hegel on the stars of the night sky. Schiller's and Beethoven's Sternenzelt is actually an Ausschlag, not quite the Aussatz of leprosy, but an irruption of ruddy pustules all the same. We have yet to hear him on krill and plankton, on the phosphorescent slime of the sea, which he compares to the nocturnal sidereal profusion. Although the rash of stars is no more sublime than the rash on a man's face or a swarm of flies (9: 81), the explosion of life in the sea cannot be taken so lightly - precisely because pox, leprosy, rash, and irruption all make sense only on the scene of life, which the snotgreen sea introduces, as though to emphasize at once the abundance and squalor of the living. The sea is everywhere amniotic, nurturing and parturing life, gebärend (9: 364). Sailors tell of the blossoming of the sea in the warm summer months; yet they are not speaking the sentimental language of flowers. In July, August, and September the sea becomes impure, says Hegel, and such murkiness and impurity are turbid, slimy the sure signs of the rampant geometry of life: "The sea is filled with an infinite amount of vegetable points, threads, and planes; there is a tendency to irrupt into plant life [eine Tendenz zum Ausschlagen ins Vegetabilische]" (ibid.). The phosphorescence of these creatures turns of the oceanic mirror is ooze. Hegel seems uncertain whether the sea blossoms with a "a longer life" or a merely "momentary existence". In any case, the shimmering light of the sea, like the flickering gas lanterns on "Unter den Linden" in Berlin, shines with infinitely greater brilliance than all the scintillant stars. “

”And yet the turbid sea, the impure sea, is septic: it is as though life begins with corruption and stench - for the sea does stink, Hegel assures us. Its "army of stars," its battalions of fluorescent squid and octopus, swim in the "indifferent womb" of the sea, the Melvillean sea that rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago; these legion sea creatures eventually swim themselves to death, melting into the fishy element out of which they emerged (9: 364: zerschwimmen schnell wieder in das Element) […] If the phosphorescence of the brine seems to betray an interior light, we must remember that it is also the light of the will-o'-the-wisp, the ghostly light of rotting wood and swamp. If every drop of water contains a universe infused life, as Leibniz was convinced it did, each cosmic drop nevertheless dissolves into universal liquidity (9: 365: in das Allgemeine wieder zerfließen). As Thales and Anaximander must have noticed, god and thorny fish alike struggle to escape the womb that bears them; and as Ferenczi too realized, the sea is the source of catastrophe for animal struggles onto the land - fish gasping on the strand, trying to think of themselves as amphibians - but the land itself emerged from the sea and will one day sink back into the sea, so that the bootless struggle goes on, no matter what the arena. Every force of nature is a dire force. The emergent land, forged by Vulcan and wrested from Neptune, bears the scars of its birth in water and fire. The forces that shape it too are dire forces.”

“Hegel's sexual analysis of illness, strange on its own terms, is also disconcerting for a time such as our own, which prides itself on the discovery of the endocrinological and hormonal spectrum, that is, the graduated scale of masculinity and femininity in any given individual—so that sexual identity is less a univocal genital destiny than a multifaceted and therefore always hazy gender identity. Further, gender identity is inculcated as much by nurture as by nature, inscribed as much by culture as by birth, and, some would aver, even a matter of free choice. The pride of an enlightened and emancipated twentieth-century conception of sexual identity - namely, the spectrum of imbricated identities - is, for Hegel, the very mystery of disproportion and death. Insofar as the individual organism can be stimulated by the outside, it is receptive, conceptive, as it were - female; insofar as the individual organism can move to the outside and alter its environment, achieving effects on the outer world that stimulates it, and thus differentiating that world, it is active—male. Insofar as the individual organism is bisexual, two selves in one, it is destined for death.”

And the big man himself, in his own words:

“The goal of nature is to kill itself and to break through the husk of its immediacy and sensuousness; as Phoenix, to burn itself, in order to emerge rejuvenated as spirit from this exteriority.”

Purification = Pyrification.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why the heck did I read this? Yes, German Idealism has some things to say about genitals...don't we all!