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The Last Mask: Hamann's Theater of the Grotesque
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) remains one of the most influential and yet least understood figures in the history of German thought and literature. Throughout his life, he had major influence on figures as diverse as Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and a host of others. Hamann is also one of the most difficult-to-read authors in the German language, writing in an ultracondensed, hyperallusive language for which he became infamous—and which his detractors constantly used to dismiss him. Today, Hamann has been picked up by literary theorists as a precursor of the linguistic turn.
The Last Mask focuses on Hamann’s final work, Entkleidung und Verklärung (1786), which was consciously conceived of as an “Abschluss” of his “kleine Autorschaft” and a final defense against his critics. Equally philological and theoretical, it identifies a number of previously unnoticed manuscript alterations that help answer some long-standing questions in Hamann scholarship as well as open new doors for inquiry.
Importantly, the manuscripts show that Hamann is one of the earliest theorists of the virtual in our sense of the word today, using the word “virtualiter” to describe his own theory. He links this theory with the concept of the mask or disguise, and conceives of texts as fabrics or textiles composed of threads and strings. The philological focus is on Hamann’s understanding of intertextuality, and on the basis of his dominant string images his notion of virtuality is brought into conversation with Deleuze’s idea of a plane of immanence through the image of a skein of immanence, a knotted bundle of thread which solidifies into a three-dimensional virtual space—a new perspective in contemporary discussions surrounding the nature of virtuality.
The Last Mask focuses on Hamann’s final work, Entkleidung und Verklärung (1786), which was consciously conceived of as an “Abschluss” of his “kleine Autorschaft” and a final defense against his critics. Equally philological and theoretical, it identifies a number of previously unnoticed manuscript alterations that help answer some long-standing questions in Hamann scholarship as well as open new doors for inquiry.
Importantly, the manuscripts show that Hamann is one of the earliest theorists of the virtual in our sense of the word today, using the word “virtualiter” to describe his own theory. He links this theory with the concept of the mask or disguise, and conceives of texts as fabrics or textiles composed of threads and strings. The philological focus is on Hamann’s understanding of intertextuality, and on the basis of his dominant string images his notion of virtuality is brought into conversation with Deleuze’s idea of a plane of immanence through the image of a skein of immanence, a knotted bundle of thread which solidifies into a three-dimensional virtual space—a new perspective in contemporary discussions surrounding the nature of virtuality.
128 pages, Paperback
Published July 22, 2021
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October 19, 2022
A second, closer reading: one conducted to validate an intuition strongly felt upon completion of the first: this is one of the more compelling academic texts I’ve read. In my usual mode of late, the take-aways are epistemically responsible but all come pre-soaked in the dye of an imperative for personal growth.
Alkire sets out to excavate and activate a more complex and violent Hamann (1730-1788) than the one we’ve inherited from generations of Christian admirers—clowning mocker of Enlightenment universalization, vivacious jester in the staid court of German faith—reanimating instead a genius far more authentically postmodern than any soixante-huitard: “What was Hamann? … a series of veils, masks, personae and disguises stitched together from the words of others…hyperreferential mosaic masks…tessellated to fit particular occasions, usually combative and antagonistic reactions to contemporaries…” Alkire wants to do away with the “reliably univocal” Hamann we know, forcing us to meditate instead on Hamann’s own disownment of that portrait: “The entire fable of my authorship is also a mask.” Hamann is “asserting more than the relatively commonplace assertion claim that philosophy is conditioned by its own linguistic constraints: he is attempting to stage something in the marrow of language itself, to show that ambiguity is not simply some accidental feature of language but rather something lying so near its heart as to maybe be that heart.” His oeuvre is “a kind of self-staging theoretical performance art.”
The flipside of this feat of enormous control is that his output is so fucking unhinged: Alkire mocks those who seek “relationality and dialogue” with H.: “What would it mean to take up this call and enter into partnership with a writer who intentionally miscites and disfigures the language of his opponents (after arguing for a real equivalence between text, author, and physical body), who implants impossible-to-solve codes and puzzles into his texts, who is almost pathologically obsessed with alchemy, the occult, and Freemasonry, who makes not-so-subtle allusions to ritual cannibalism in the court of Friedrich the Great…? … What about those weird if intriguing hints that he might quite sincerely conceive of his texts as magical spells or talismans?”
The bulk of The Last Mask consists of an extremely detailed reading of Hamann’s last work, Disrobing and Transfiguration: A Letter to Nobody, the Well-Known. The archival research and textual analysis are extremely impressive. The theoretical implications mostly come in the final chapter, which (of course) compares Hamann to Deleuze. Deleuze “joins Alcibiades, Hamann and Nietzsche in affirming the fundamentally dithyrambic, Dionysian and satyric nature of philosophy.” However, Deleuze’s project is one of relentless philosophical positivity: a generative, unabashedly synthetic metaphysics that Foucault termed “reverse Platonism.” Alkire suggests that Hamann’s anti-Platonism was far more radical: a reversal of Plato not on a conceptual level, but on an enacted one. His combative intertextual games constitute a skein of immanence, selves woven in and out of the writings of others, in contrast to Deleuze’s flat authorial plane of conceptual creation.
Deleuze advocated for a metaphysics of univocity, in which “being—first as a word and then, on its own terms, irresistibly, actually—has a single sense: God is in the same sense that sun, lily, and dragonfly are.” Alkire suggests that Hamann perhaps simply had a more interesting, because ambiguous take, one that he performed rather than philosophized about: that the truest univocity is an unreliable one.
A lot of what I’ve read and thought about in the past couple years (CCRU, Situationism, occult studies) bears on a paradoxical imperative: using mediation to get beyond mediation. Another way into this problem might be found by limning a metaphorics of univocity. Whether or not one is convinced by univocity as metaphysics, it’s got some beautiful seeds of a vision of how to be a person. Perhaps sentimentality and mysticism are two sides of the same coin; and forging a self means embracing the singularity and unrepeatability that univocity finally implies, while also rejecting the complacency allowed by mysticism’s refusal or inability to name. Naming is acting, and acting is also a naming; we are embodied texts, manifesting only in endless univocal exercises of our own agency. “Hamann is indeed attempting to save something: the body and its language.” But here as in so many places, it might be better to be way off the mark than to land somewhere close but less than spot-on: so perhaps there’s a reliable univocity that is the ultimate trap, a spiritual stasis that believes it’s really flux, a mode of self that varies constantly but has ceased being able to truly surprise itself. This is what a lot of “spirituality” feels like to me: dishonestly self-consoling but also overly novelty- and insight-hungry; an internal hamster wheel of reification and internal control; a terminal dialectic of unearned stability and little shivers of good feeling. Maybe Hamann’s unreliable univocity is a useful way to think toward a way out of mediation that goes right through it. Embodied language is sacred and often violent, and it effects real change in its ephemerality. Taking language as seriously as it beckons us to might mean recognizing that its proper use is the closest we get to knowing (or being) God, and what that looks like is play: but a form of play that owns its finitude.
Having lowered himself to the world by offering it a convenient reservoir of concepts ripe for rhetorical exploitation, Deleuze’s legacy of a million tepid academic children is fittingly dilute. Hamann stands singular and obscure, having fully embodied and engamed his textual life in his own time: only very indirectly accessible, if at all, even to his close contemporaries. “For Hamann there is no “outside”—making this adamant Lutheran less of a mystic than the atheist Deleuze.”
Alkire closes: “Words become stranger and more foreign in repetition: say ‘mask’ sixty times. This is the immense solitude I eventually encountered in Hamann: where every word feels strange in my mouth.” Hamann built a beautiful house of cards that fell all to ashes, and we will never know what to make of what he made.
Alkire sets out to excavate and activate a more complex and violent Hamann (1730-1788) than the one we’ve inherited from generations of Christian admirers—clowning mocker of Enlightenment universalization, vivacious jester in the staid court of German faith—reanimating instead a genius far more authentically postmodern than any soixante-huitard: “What was Hamann? … a series of veils, masks, personae and disguises stitched together from the words of others…hyperreferential mosaic masks…tessellated to fit particular occasions, usually combative and antagonistic reactions to contemporaries…” Alkire wants to do away with the “reliably univocal” Hamann we know, forcing us to meditate instead on Hamann’s own disownment of that portrait: “The entire fable of my authorship is also a mask.” Hamann is “asserting more than the relatively commonplace assertion claim that philosophy is conditioned by its own linguistic constraints: he is attempting to stage something in the marrow of language itself, to show that ambiguity is not simply some accidental feature of language but rather something lying so near its heart as to maybe be that heart.” His oeuvre is “a kind of self-staging theoretical performance art.”
The flipside of this feat of enormous control is that his output is so fucking unhinged: Alkire mocks those who seek “relationality and dialogue” with H.: “What would it mean to take up this call and enter into partnership with a writer who intentionally miscites and disfigures the language of his opponents (after arguing for a real equivalence between text, author, and physical body), who implants impossible-to-solve codes and puzzles into his texts, who is almost pathologically obsessed with alchemy, the occult, and Freemasonry, who makes not-so-subtle allusions to ritual cannibalism in the court of Friedrich the Great…? … What about those weird if intriguing hints that he might quite sincerely conceive of his texts as magical spells or talismans?”
The bulk of The Last Mask consists of an extremely detailed reading of Hamann’s last work, Disrobing and Transfiguration: A Letter to Nobody, the Well-Known. The archival research and textual analysis are extremely impressive. The theoretical implications mostly come in the final chapter, which (of course) compares Hamann to Deleuze. Deleuze “joins Alcibiades, Hamann and Nietzsche in affirming the fundamentally dithyrambic, Dionysian and satyric nature of philosophy.” However, Deleuze’s project is one of relentless philosophical positivity: a generative, unabashedly synthetic metaphysics that Foucault termed “reverse Platonism.” Alkire suggests that Hamann’s anti-Platonism was far more radical: a reversal of Plato not on a conceptual level, but on an enacted one. His combative intertextual games constitute a skein of immanence, selves woven in and out of the writings of others, in contrast to Deleuze’s flat authorial plane of conceptual creation.
Deleuze advocated for a metaphysics of univocity, in which “being—first as a word and then, on its own terms, irresistibly, actually—has a single sense: God is in the same sense that sun, lily, and dragonfly are.” Alkire suggests that Hamann perhaps simply had a more interesting, because ambiguous take, one that he performed rather than philosophized about: that the truest univocity is an unreliable one.
A lot of what I’ve read and thought about in the past couple years (CCRU, Situationism, occult studies) bears on a paradoxical imperative: using mediation to get beyond mediation. Another way into this problem might be found by limning a metaphorics of univocity. Whether or not one is convinced by univocity as metaphysics, it’s got some beautiful seeds of a vision of how to be a person. Perhaps sentimentality and mysticism are two sides of the same coin; and forging a self means embracing the singularity and unrepeatability that univocity finally implies, while also rejecting the complacency allowed by mysticism’s refusal or inability to name. Naming is acting, and acting is also a naming; we are embodied texts, manifesting only in endless univocal exercises of our own agency. “Hamann is indeed attempting to save something: the body and its language.” But here as in so many places, it might be better to be way off the mark than to land somewhere close but less than spot-on: so perhaps there’s a reliable univocity that is the ultimate trap, a spiritual stasis that believes it’s really flux, a mode of self that varies constantly but has ceased being able to truly surprise itself. This is what a lot of “spirituality” feels like to me: dishonestly self-consoling but also overly novelty- and insight-hungry; an internal hamster wheel of reification and internal control; a terminal dialectic of unearned stability and little shivers of good feeling. Maybe Hamann’s unreliable univocity is a useful way to think toward a way out of mediation that goes right through it. Embodied language is sacred and often violent, and it effects real change in its ephemerality. Taking language as seriously as it beckons us to might mean recognizing that its proper use is the closest we get to knowing (or being) God, and what that looks like is play: but a form of play that owns its finitude.
Having lowered himself to the world by offering it a convenient reservoir of concepts ripe for rhetorical exploitation, Deleuze’s legacy of a million tepid academic children is fittingly dilute. Hamann stands singular and obscure, having fully embodied and engamed his textual life in his own time: only very indirectly accessible, if at all, even to his close contemporaries. “For Hamann there is no “outside”—making this adamant Lutheran less of a mystic than the atheist Deleuze.”
Alkire closes: “Words become stranger and more foreign in repetition: say ‘mask’ sixty times. This is the immense solitude I eventually encountered in Hamann: where every word feels strange in my mouth.” Hamann built a beautiful house of cards that fell all to ashes, and we will never know what to make of what he made.
December 12, 2023
Alkire's book is a model for how Hamann studies should be done. For the reader, it is a most inviting study, written with clarity, pleasure, and even a great deal of refreshing honesty; at times Alkire asks questions of the reader and admits his own limits. For me this approach from beneath (or within) Hamann's own riddles opened up the Magus, or rather, it opened up the way to approach the Magus, for his writing is an event, a performance - not something to be taken in easily and immediately. The Magus wears masks, and his masks have masks.
Alkire also manages to be quite focused without being myopic and accessible without being popular. That being said, the greatest strength of this particular study is how focused it is; Alkire does not simply approach a particular text, the "Fliegender Brief" ("Flying Letter," Hamann's last publication), but he asks questions of it, puts it into conversation with other things. He puts himself under its spell.
In my opinion, Alkire's way is the best way to read the Magus: to accept the full volley of quotations, allusions, and jokes - to let all this 'hit' you as the reader. Or, to use Alkire's metaphor at the end, inspired by Gilles Deleuze, to consider the many 'folds' of Hamann's work, then to 'unwrap' it. It is full of knots and various strands. It is not straightforward. It will not yield itself to those unwilling to do the hard work of disentangling, stretching, connecting. In Hamann, the text is like a performance and conversation partner. It goes out from Hamann and then takes on its own 'personality,' sometimes becoming unknown to the writer himself! It is interwoven with Hamann's letters (particularly to Jacobi at the end of his life) and with his life. It is all colored with the Bible, through and through. In a very unusual way, Hamann then incorporates into his published texts reviews and reactions to other texts, and in the case of the Fliegender Brief, his writing intriguingly takes into account the physical position of a particular review of his Golgotha und Scheblimini from a Berlin journal. In Hamann's Autorschaft, everything is playing with everything else: life, letters, drafts, title pages, footnotes, publications, reviews, and his pseudonymous reviews of his own books (and reviewers!). His texts are "polyhedral" and "plastic" (70). They have a "right" to "actively intervene and confuse or entangle other texts - including the Bible" (80).
One of the few places where I differ from Alkire is in his notion of how Hamann "transferred" language in his work. In Hamann's very interesting letters to Jacobi, he writes, "Idealism and realism are nothing more than entia rations, waxen noses - Christianity and Lutheranism are res facti, living organs and tools... Being, faith, reason are all simply relations that cannot be treated of absolutely, are not things but simple scholastic terms, signs to understand not to admire, aids in stimulating our attention, not shackling it... Your theory is truly a botched patchwork of philosophical and human authorities - do you not feel that, dear Jonathan?" (106).
Alkire then writes: "Hamann is indeed attempting to save something: the body and its language. That, perhaps, is his greatest sacrilege: instrumentalizing the divine. Faced with the dying or dead vocabulary of Christianity, Hamann was correct in his self-estimate in these letters: while Jacobi was attempting to erect a sanctuary around his inherited faith, Hamann was burning down the temple by transferring the language of the divine into the language of the body and the body of language. Did Hamann realize he was the first authentic atheist?" (106).
I want to point out that in this letter Hamann does not state that the "Divine" is an organ or tool, but "Christianity" and "Lutheranism," that is, particular religious groups or movements gathered around specific doctrines and with textual and liturgical practices. I am also not sure that Hamann was faced with "the dying or dead vocabulary of Christianity." Hamann probably thought this was the only real, living language. Herder points this out, too, that the prophetic language of the Scriptures is living and active (Heb. 4:12), and the speech of mankind is increasingly impoverished. I think what Hamann is objecting to in Jacobi is the latter's effort to "play by the world's rules" and not by the Church's. Maybe it would have been better for Alkire to have said that Jacobi was attempting to erect a "wall" or a "support" around his inherited faith. I also object to Alkire's notion of "the language of the divine." Hamann would not speak in this abstract way; if anything, Hamann would call God's language simply "God's Word" and would argue that the human propensity is to institutionalize and soften (or geld) this Word, rather than bring it to bear in one's existence. Hamann is only an atheist when it comes to the "god of this world," for he does not put his faith, love, and trust in anything but Christ. This fact, I expect, would be one hard for Alkire or non-believing interpreters of Hamann to accept. Jesus is still the biggest stumbling stone and rock of offense. He is not "transferring" language from the "divine" (whatever that is) to the body, but from the discourse of his day into the body of Christ. The body of Word can disrobe and transfigure our words. Much of this theological reflection is missing from Alkire's book, but it should be said that Alkire does not pretend to understand these theological intricacies in Hamann.
I'll end this review by interacting with Alkire a bit; I have my own questions and ideas.
It seems to me that Hamann's reading of the Apostolic Fathers, Athenagoras, Justin, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Lactantius have not been adequately examined; these early apologists are bold, combative, and intertextual themselves. The Scriptures form the backbone of their texts, and their concern is often to mock and dismantle their opponents (gnostic heretics and Greek philosophers). These attacks come in the form of massive broadsides. A Christian writer will often parody his opponents and include long lists of ridiculous teachings, glaring omissions, obvious contradictions, and embarrassing errors. Then the apologist will set out to smash them over and over again. It strikes me after reading Justin in particular how similar Hamann truly is, and he had read all of these writers in various compilations and editions.
I also want to draw more from Hamann's experience in the Münster Circle as an aid to reading the Fliegender Brief. We have Princess Gallitzin's diary entries about Hamann and letters she wrote to him or to Hemsterhuis about him. It seems to me that these anecdotes about Hamann's words and behavior during these final weeks and days would help us to see behind his mask better. Hemsterhuis even called the princess his "Diotima," and, as I've read elsewhere, both Goethe and Diderot claimed to be "madly" in love with her! The princess was apparently an unusual combination of interior and exterior beauty, of quiet genius and brilliant piety. It is this woman and her mostly Catholic circle Hamann chooses to visit and to "take under his wing" at the end of his life. That is important to Hamann's overall 'performance.'
Finally, Alkire's ending is fascinating: "Words become stranger and more foreign in repetition: say mask sixty times. That is the immense solitude I eventually encountered in Hamann: where every word feels strange in my mouth" (117). Here Alkire has just written on the end of Hamann's Fliegender Brief, and is trying to untangle some final skeins of the Magus's conclusion to his entire Autorschaft. But what Alkire overlooks is the centrality of Psalm 137 here. Hamann takes the psalmist's language, improvises with it, and incorporates several poetic Latin quotations in it. I think that this final touch (with all its puzzling obscurity and ambiguity - as Alkire points out) is essentially the Lord's words in Matthew 13 directed at all Hamann's opponents in the Aufklärung. Hamann's message is strange because the Christian message is strange; attempts at curtailing it (Reimarus), secularizing it (Starck), and domesticating it (Lessing) have led Europe back to the pagan, anti-Christian centuries after Christ's ascension. Hamann now finds himself in the position of an Athenagoras or Justin, with many pagan and Jewish friends who are laughing off Christianity. But Hamann will laugh at them (Psalm 59:8) and point out the wickedness of the age, then continue to "say his dark sayings" and "play his harp" (Psalm 49:4), before "hanging it on the tree" (the cross: Deut. 21:23) at the end of his life, as he waits for the Jerusalem from above (Psalm 137:2; Gal. 4:26; Rev. 21:2).
Yes, I think that Hamann's entire Autorshaft, from Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten to Fliegender Brief is consciously utilizing the theology behind Matthew 13:11-15, which reads, "Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says:
‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
And seeing you will see and not perceive;
For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
Their ears are hard of hearing,
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I should heal them.’"
Alkire also manages to be quite focused without being myopic and accessible without being popular. That being said, the greatest strength of this particular study is how focused it is; Alkire does not simply approach a particular text, the "Fliegender Brief" ("Flying Letter," Hamann's last publication), but he asks questions of it, puts it into conversation with other things. He puts himself under its spell.
In my opinion, Alkire's way is the best way to read the Magus: to accept the full volley of quotations, allusions, and jokes - to let all this 'hit' you as the reader. Or, to use Alkire's metaphor at the end, inspired by Gilles Deleuze, to consider the many 'folds' of Hamann's work, then to 'unwrap' it. It is full of knots and various strands. It is not straightforward. It will not yield itself to those unwilling to do the hard work of disentangling, stretching, connecting. In Hamann, the text is like a performance and conversation partner. It goes out from Hamann and then takes on its own 'personality,' sometimes becoming unknown to the writer himself! It is interwoven with Hamann's letters (particularly to Jacobi at the end of his life) and with his life. It is all colored with the Bible, through and through. In a very unusual way, Hamann then incorporates into his published texts reviews and reactions to other texts, and in the case of the Fliegender Brief, his writing intriguingly takes into account the physical position of a particular review of his Golgotha und Scheblimini from a Berlin journal. In Hamann's Autorschaft, everything is playing with everything else: life, letters, drafts, title pages, footnotes, publications, reviews, and his pseudonymous reviews of his own books (and reviewers!). His texts are "polyhedral" and "plastic" (70). They have a "right" to "actively intervene and confuse or entangle other texts - including the Bible" (80).
One of the few places where I differ from Alkire is in his notion of how Hamann "transferred" language in his work. In Hamann's very interesting letters to Jacobi, he writes, "Idealism and realism are nothing more than entia rations, waxen noses - Christianity and Lutheranism are res facti, living organs and tools... Being, faith, reason are all simply relations that cannot be treated of absolutely, are not things but simple scholastic terms, signs to understand not to admire, aids in stimulating our attention, not shackling it... Your theory is truly a botched patchwork of philosophical and human authorities - do you not feel that, dear Jonathan?" (106).
Alkire then writes: "Hamann is indeed attempting to save something: the body and its language. That, perhaps, is his greatest sacrilege: instrumentalizing the divine. Faced with the dying or dead vocabulary of Christianity, Hamann was correct in his self-estimate in these letters: while Jacobi was attempting to erect a sanctuary around his inherited faith, Hamann was burning down the temple by transferring the language of the divine into the language of the body and the body of language. Did Hamann realize he was the first authentic atheist?" (106).
I want to point out that in this letter Hamann does not state that the "Divine" is an organ or tool, but "Christianity" and "Lutheranism," that is, particular religious groups or movements gathered around specific doctrines and with textual and liturgical practices. I am also not sure that Hamann was faced with "the dying or dead vocabulary of Christianity." Hamann probably thought this was the only real, living language. Herder points this out, too, that the prophetic language of the Scriptures is living and active (Heb. 4:12), and the speech of mankind is increasingly impoverished. I think what Hamann is objecting to in Jacobi is the latter's effort to "play by the world's rules" and not by the Church's. Maybe it would have been better for Alkire to have said that Jacobi was attempting to erect a "wall" or a "support" around his inherited faith. I also object to Alkire's notion of "the language of the divine." Hamann would not speak in this abstract way; if anything, Hamann would call God's language simply "God's Word" and would argue that the human propensity is to institutionalize and soften (or geld) this Word, rather than bring it to bear in one's existence. Hamann is only an atheist when it comes to the "god of this world," for he does not put his faith, love, and trust in anything but Christ. This fact, I expect, would be one hard for Alkire or non-believing interpreters of Hamann to accept. Jesus is still the biggest stumbling stone and rock of offense. He is not "transferring" language from the "divine" (whatever that is) to the body, but from the discourse of his day into the body of Christ. The body of Word can disrobe and transfigure our words. Much of this theological reflection is missing from Alkire's book, but it should be said that Alkire does not pretend to understand these theological intricacies in Hamann.
I'll end this review by interacting with Alkire a bit; I have my own questions and ideas.
It seems to me that Hamann's reading of the Apostolic Fathers, Athenagoras, Justin, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Lactantius have not been adequately examined; these early apologists are bold, combative, and intertextual themselves. The Scriptures form the backbone of their texts, and their concern is often to mock and dismantle their opponents (gnostic heretics and Greek philosophers). These attacks come in the form of massive broadsides. A Christian writer will often parody his opponents and include long lists of ridiculous teachings, glaring omissions, obvious contradictions, and embarrassing errors. Then the apologist will set out to smash them over and over again. It strikes me after reading Justin in particular how similar Hamann truly is, and he had read all of these writers in various compilations and editions.
I also want to draw more from Hamann's experience in the Münster Circle as an aid to reading the Fliegender Brief. We have Princess Gallitzin's diary entries about Hamann and letters she wrote to him or to Hemsterhuis about him. It seems to me that these anecdotes about Hamann's words and behavior during these final weeks and days would help us to see behind his mask better. Hemsterhuis even called the princess his "Diotima," and, as I've read elsewhere, both Goethe and Diderot claimed to be "madly" in love with her! The princess was apparently an unusual combination of interior and exterior beauty, of quiet genius and brilliant piety. It is this woman and her mostly Catholic circle Hamann chooses to visit and to "take under his wing" at the end of his life. That is important to Hamann's overall 'performance.'
Finally, Alkire's ending is fascinating: "Words become stranger and more foreign in repetition: say mask sixty times. That is the immense solitude I eventually encountered in Hamann: where every word feels strange in my mouth" (117). Here Alkire has just written on the end of Hamann's Fliegender Brief, and is trying to untangle some final skeins of the Magus's conclusion to his entire Autorschaft. But what Alkire overlooks is the centrality of Psalm 137 here. Hamann takes the psalmist's language, improvises with it, and incorporates several poetic Latin quotations in it. I think that this final touch (with all its puzzling obscurity and ambiguity - as Alkire points out) is essentially the Lord's words in Matthew 13 directed at all Hamann's opponents in the Aufklärung. Hamann's message is strange because the Christian message is strange; attempts at curtailing it (Reimarus), secularizing it (Starck), and domesticating it (Lessing) have led Europe back to the pagan, anti-Christian centuries after Christ's ascension. Hamann now finds himself in the position of an Athenagoras or Justin, with many pagan and Jewish friends who are laughing off Christianity. But Hamann will laugh at them (Psalm 59:8) and point out the wickedness of the age, then continue to "say his dark sayings" and "play his harp" (Psalm 49:4), before "hanging it on the tree" (the cross: Deut. 21:23) at the end of his life, as he waits for the Jerusalem from above (Psalm 137:2; Gal. 4:26; Rev. 21:2).
Yes, I think that Hamann's entire Autorshaft, from Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten to Fliegender Brief is consciously utilizing the theology behind Matthew 13:11-15, which reads, "Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says:
‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
And seeing you will see and not perceive;
For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
Their ears are hard of hearing,
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I should heal them.’"
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