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Hyperion’s symposium: an erotics of reception

Joshua Billings*

Holderlin’s Hyperion is both a reception of Plato’s Symposium and a reflection on the

process of reception. Fundamental to Holderlin’s reading is Socrates’s description

of Eros: the god exists in a state of constant oscillation between lack and fulfilment.

This dialectical nature makes erotic desire unstable and forces it to turn away from

the pursuit of transient possession to the production of lasting beauty. Hyperion

shows the erotic dialectic in relation both to physical desire and to desire for the ideal

of ancient Athens. The title character turns from his initial romance with Diotima to

the civic goal of reviving the culture of ancient Greece in the modern world. Themes

and verbal echoes of the Symposium structure the first book of Hyperion and suggest

that desire for the presence of the past is conditioned by the Symposium’s dialectic

of poverty and resource. Recognizing this structure leads to an understanding of the

process of classical reception as essentially dialectical, characterized both by

absence and presence; this calls for an increased attention to the ‘erotics

of reception’.

Beauty is momentary in the mind – The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.

(Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier )

Diotima

Diotima of Mantinea is a present absence in Plato’s Symposium. Her words form the

most important of the symposium’s encomia to Eros, but she does not speak them

herself. Socrates, her former pupil, relates her lesson in erotics to the assembly. Sheremains a mysterious figure: her name — ‘honoured by god’ — and her city, cognatewith mantis, place her somewhere between human and divinity.1 Though the mainnarrative of the Symposium is doubly framed — it records the words of Apollodoruswho recounts what he heard from Aristodemus — Diotima is still further removedfrom the literary present. She exists (if she exists at all) as a liminal, ambiguousbeing. But this is appropriate to her subject: Eros, a god characterized by perpetualincompleteness.

*Correspondence to Joshua Billings, Merton College, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 4 JD,

UK. [email protected]

I am grateful for the perceptive comments of Constanze Guthenke and the editors of CRJ.

1 Rowe (1998: 173).

Classical Receptions Journal Vol 2. Iss. 1 (2010) pp. 4 – 24

ß The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For Permissions, please email: [email protected]:10.1093/crj/clq003

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The Diotima of Friedrich Holderlin’s Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece (Hyperion

oder der Eremit in Griechenland), too, seems poised between being and non-being. As

the title character’s beloved, her existence forms the hinge of the entire narrative, yet

the pages in which she appears are relatively few and in them, she is most often

passive and silent. Most formative for Hyperion, indeed, is her seemingly unmoti-

vated death, reported at second-hand. The form of the novel, a series of retrospec-tive letters from Hyperion, serves to heighten her absence just as the Symposium’s

framing places its narrative in a doubly-remembered past. Holderlin’s Diotima, like

Plato’s, exists in eternal mediation, suggesting that Hyperion’s desire cannot be

fulfilled, his ideal never realized.

This is the lesson of Diotima in the Symposium. In contrast to the previous

speakers, Socrates emphasizes not the positive qualities of Eros, but the poverty

that drives the god to seek beauties he does not possess. Socrates reports the speech

of Diotima, who disabused him of the notion advocated by his friends. The Erosdescribed by Diotima is liminal, neither beautiful nor ugly, and neither man nor god.

Heisa daimo n, whose existence is defined by his place between opposing realms. His

power is

. . . interpreting and carrying to gods things from humans, and to humans things from gods:

from humans, the entreaties and sacrifices; from gods, orders and exchanges for sacrifices.

He is in the middle of both and fills the space between, so that all is bound by him. 2

Eros is always relational, a mediation between two elements.3 This is a consequenceof his birth, as the child of Penia and Poros, need and resource. Like his mother, he is

unattractive and perpetually impoverished, yet he has the skills of his father that

allow him occasionally to attain his desire. This makes him a paradox, poor but able

to become rich, immortal but able to die: ‘sometimes he flourishes for a day and lives,

whenever he has resources, and sometimes he dies, but is brought back to life again

through the nature of his father.’4 Eros is not a happy medium of his two parents, but

an unstable oscillation between states of euporia and aporia.5

Eros’ dialectical nature makes him philosophical, and distinguishes him from hisparents. Those who are wise (like Poros) feel no need to philosophize, while those

who are ignorant (like Penia) cannot comprehend their need. Eros’s philosophical

2 Symposium 202e: ‘JE geN o 1 dioeN o eo8 y 1 ’ 2Þx 1

2Þoiy 1 1 e8, 8 e ; 1y de– eiy 1 t 0 y, 8 de ; 1y e’i 0neiy

e 1 2oi1y 8 t i8, e’ Œ N de ; 4 2uo Œ x tgo8 , 7 e 1 R

2 1 3 M tdedŒ i.’ All translations are my own and aim for transparency at the

(considerable) expense of elegance.3 Markus (1971).

4 Symposium 203e: ‘ o e ; e ; 8y 2 8y 3Œ y 0ei e 1 I, 7 e2o– :,

o e ; de ; 2oAei, 0i de ; 2iÞei di1 1 oN 1y u0 i.’

5 Sheffield (2006: 58).

H Y P E R I O N ’ S S Y M P O S I U M

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nature is based on reflection; it results from the recognition of his own ignorance.

Philosophy is a state of intellectual poverty that uses resource to gain insight:

Being a philosopher he is between a wise man and an ignorant. The cause of this is his birth:

for he is from a wise and resourceful [euporos] father, and an unwise and unresourceful

[aporos] mother.6

Socratic philosophy and erotic desire are parallel;7 both begin in a state of reflective

aporia and strive towards euporia. Socrates’s self-conscious ignorance makes him the

exemplary erotic seeker. In this respect, it is particularly important that the figure of

Diotima is absent in the dialogue: erotic and philosophical fulfilments are deferred,

set off in a mysterious past. Furthermore, Socrates (like the speakers who frame the

story) is simply repeating an earlier conversation rather than engaging in his usual

dialectics. What remains for the symposiasts as for the reader of the Symposium is a

mediated presence that relates knowledge without being able to answer for it.The connection of philosophy and desire suggests a productive nature of Eros, a

way it escapes the constant oscillation between want and fleeting fulfilment. As we

have already learned, Eros is unable to possess what it desires permanently. Instead

of possession of the beautiful, Eros seeks to reproduce with the beautiful:

-Eros, Socrates, she said, is not of the beautiful, as you think.

-But what then?

-Of begetting and bringing forth on the beautiful.-Let it be so, I said.

-It is so absolutely, she said. And why is it of begetting? Because begetting is eternal and

undying as far as it is possible for a mortal. From what we have agreed, it is necessary that

with good one desire immortality, if indeed eros is of the good being one’s own always. It is

necessary from this very account that eros be also of immortality.8

The account of Eros’ activity here changes abruptly: Eros finds a way out of lack, to a

creative activity.9 This also necessitates a redefinition of Eros as desire, not for the

6 Symposium 204b: ‘ui0 ouo de ; 5 en1 e9 i ouoN 1 2 oN y. 2 0 de ;2 M 1 o0 x 3 gŒ e iyÁ 1y e ; g1 ouoN e’ i 1 e20ot, g1y de ; o2 ou8y 1 20ot.’

7 Osborne (1994: 93 – 101); Sheffield (2006: 59 – 66).

8 Symposium 206e: ‘e ! i g0, P * SÞ ey, e !ug, o2 oN oN 3 e !xy, 3y 1 o4 ei.

+1 0 –;

S 8y ge– exy 1 oN 0ot e’ M M.

E 9 e, 9 d’ e’gÞ.

P 0

t e

; oB

,e

!ug

. 0 d

1oB

8yge

– exy

;7 i

2eige

Œ y e’ i 1

2

0 o

3y

g M 3 gŒ g iy. 2 0 y de ; 2g8 o e’i te8 e 1 2g oN e’ 8

3ooggŒ x, e4 e oN 2g oN e‘t M e9 i 2e1 e !xy e’ 0 . 2g8 o d1e’ o0 ot oN 0got 1 8y 2 0 y 1 e !x e9 i.’

9 Rowe (1998: 184).

J O S H U A B I L L I N G S

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beautiful or the good, but for an eternal existence. In place of possession, Eros turnsto production.10 This is the crux on which Holderlin’s reading of the Symposium will

focus, as nostalgia for a lost ideal is transformed into the realization of future pos-sibility. This dynamic constitutes what might be termed an ‘erotics of reception’.

Desire, according to Socrates, necessarily turns from the transient present

towards an infinite future. In reporting Diotima’s words, Socrates enacts this tem-poral reorientation, making her absence the basis for philosophical production. Heleads his companions, as erotic desire leads the philosopher, on the ascent to higher

forms of beauty, and ultimately, to the idea. This is an increasingly contemplativeact, in which desire for a beautiful body yields to desire for a beautiful soul, and

ultimately, to knowledge of the essence of beauty:

Beginning from these very beauties, for the sake of that highest beauty he ascends eternally,

just as if employing the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful

bodies; from beautiful bodies he proceeds to beautiful pursuits, from pursuits to beautiful

sciences, and from these sciences arrives at that science which is concerned with the beautiful

itself and nothing else, so that finally he comes to know what the beautiful is. 11

The end of Eros is philosophical fulfilment, conceived as a reflection on immortalbeauty. The ascent to the eternal form is parallel to the immortality of giving birth:

both begin with a pregnancy of the soul that seeks a beautiful object. From the aporia

of mortal bodies, philosophy fashions the euporia of wisdom. The figure of Diotima,

an absence that produces knowledge, represents this progress to fulfilment throughloss. In the Symposium, as in Hyperion, Diotima’s very pastness makes her the object

of an erotic dialectic.

Hyperion

Friedrich Holderlin’s Hyperion, published in two parts in 1797 and 1799, continuesthe Symposium’s reflection on erotics. Hyperion, a young Greek of the eighteenthcentury, recounts the story of his life and wanderings in sixty letters. He seeks

fulfilment in love and war, traversing the Mediterranean, and venturing as far

north as Germany before resigning himself to the life of a hermit. The novelbegins with a letter announcing Hyperion’s return to Greece and narrates the

story retrospectively to his German friend Bellarmin. Though Hyperion takes

10 Sheffield (2006: 110).

11 Symposium 211c: ‘2c0eo 21 8de 8 8 e’e0 ot e 2 e oN oN 2e1

e’iŒ

i, 7

e e’o8 yc

Þ

eo, 2

1 e‘1y e’1 d0o 12

1 dto8 e’1

0 1 1 Þ, 1 21 8 8 x0 x e’1 1 1e’i gde0, 1 21 8 e’i gdet0 x e’1 1 1 –, 1 21

8 g0 x e’’ e’e8 o 1 0 g eet 8i, 7 e’ i o2 4ot 4 2 oN

e’e0 ot oN oN 0 g, 1 gM 2 1 eet 8 6 e ! i 0.’


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much from the traditions of the Bildungsroman and epistolary novel, its philosophi-

cal concerns and rhapsodic language make it a unique and enigmatic work. Holderlin

revised the novel repeatedly, and his changes suggest the importance of Plato: he

changes the name of Hyperion’s beloved from Melite to Diotima, and adopts the

framing device of the prose letter after a metrical version and a simple first-person

narration. Both of these decisions bring the work closer to the structural mediationsof the Symposium, and a late version of the prologue ends with an acknowledgement

of Holderlin’s debt: ‘I believe at the end we will all say: holy Plato, forgive! We have

sinned against you mightily.’12

Hyperion emerges from the early ferment of German Idealism, the philosophical

movement conceived with Holderlin’s schoolmates Schelling and Hegel at the end

of the eighteenth century. The importance of Plato to Holderlin and Idealism gen-

erally is well known: Platonic dialogues, particularly the Symposium, Phaedrus, and

Timaeus were a favourite reading material at the Tubingen Stift.13

The trace of Platonic and neo-Platonic ideas is obvious in early formulations of Idealism,

though its extent disputed.14 Plato seemed to offer a way beyond the dualism of

Kantian philosophy, which had rigorously distinguished between unconditioned

knowledge and the mediate, phenomenal knowledge that can be gained from

sense and cognition.15 Idealism sought to show that subject and object were not

divided by an absolute gulf, but that both categories were created by a previous

unity, the absolute. Where Kant argued that human reason could not access the

noumenal realm of the Ding an sich, the ‘aesthetic Platonism’ of early Idealism saw

earthly beauty as a foretaste of absolute knowledge.16 Art appeared as the medium in

which the apparently opposed drives of existence were unified, and a means of

making sense of worldly chaos.17

In Hyperion, Plato’s influence is literary as well as philosophical: the relations and

conflicts of the Symposium serve to structure the novel to an extent that has not

previously been recognized. Attention to Hyperion’s reception of the Symposium

suggests a profound and detailed engagement with Plato’s text, and establishes an

erotic dialectic through which to understand the protagonist’s ‘eccentric path’.18

12 Friedrich Ho lderlin: Sa mtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Jochen Schmidt, 3 vols

(Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992 – 4); cited as SWB. Here: SWB II, 257:

‘Ich glaube, wir werden am Ende alle sagen: heiliger Plato, vergib! man hat schwer an dir

gesundigt.’

13 Franz (1993); Jamme and Volkel (2003: I, 134 – 68); Lampenscherf (1993).

14 Dusing (1981); Henrich (1992: 147 – 54); Port (1996: 61 – 8).

15Harrison (

1975:

57); see also Holderlin’s letter in SWB

III

,157

, which suggests that thePhaedrus may help to revise Kant’s concepts of the sublime and beautiful.

16 Dusing (1981: 109).

17 Engel (1993: 339).

18 SWB II, 177: ‘exzentrische Bahn.’


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Most secondary literature on the novel has sought to determine whether this path

is ultimately developmental, and to what extent Hyperion’s experiences are educa-

tive.19 Reading Hyperion’s desire through the Symposium suggests that a kind of

reconciliation does take place, though not necessarily on the level of plot or char-

acter. Rather, just as the dialogue is philosophically productive through interpretive

indeterminacy, so too is Hyperion’s search for meaning realized through the stagingof various, dialectically related, possibilities. Holderlin does not leave the reader

with an answer any more than Plato does, except that the process of reflection —

writing or philosophizing — is itself an end.One can understand the Platonic influence in terms of the contrast between

Aristophanes’s and Socrates’s accounts of eros in the Symposium.20 Aristophanes

explains eros through a story of fall and redemption: originally one body, humans are

divided by the gods for an act of hubris. Eros is the search for one’s other half. Erotic

love appears as the path to earthly fulfilment by a return to the original state of union: ‘[It is eros] that in the present benefits us most by bringing us to our own, and

gives the greatest hopes for the future, that if we offer the gods reverence, he, having

returned us to our ancient nature and healed us, will make us happy and blessed.’21

Though Aristophanes’s account is rendered comic by its descriptions of clumsy

half-bodies seeking one another, Holderlin signally ignores its irony and fixes on

the possibility of redemption. He understands desire as a yearning to return to a

primal state, and holds out an Aristophanic hope for this fulfilment. In the final

letter, Hyperion writes that ‘The dissonances of the world are like the quarrel of lovers. Reconciliation is in the middle of conflict, and all that has been divided finds

itself again.’22 Hyperion and Aristophanes both seek to find a means of returning to

one’s own, and thereby transcending the division and chaos of existence.Holderlin understands Aristophanes’s narrative as holding the promise of a

return to an originary state of union. Yet, as is obvious in the preface to the

19 Ryan (1965), still a seminal study, argues for a kind of learning through suffering, and is

followed broadly by Engel (1993) and the narrative analysis of Stiening (2005).

Aspetsberger (1971) sees little development through the novel, and Bay (2003) explicitly

rejects any reconciliation.

20 When referring to the particular god of Socrates’s account ‘Eros’ is capitalized; when

used abstractly, I leave in lower-case—though slippage is inevitable.

21 Symposium 193d: ‘6y e ! e M 0 i 3Ry e8 20 g i e2 y 1 o2 e8 o 4gx,

1 e2 y 1 e

!ei e’0 dy e

g0 y

Œ cei

, 38

ec

oŒ

x 1y eo1y

e2 Œ ei, –y 3Ry e2 y 1 2c0 u0 i 1 2 0eoy 0 oty

1 e2d0 oy oi8i.’

22 SWB II, 175: ‘Wie der Zwist der Liebenden, sind die Dissonanzen der Welt. Versohnung

ist mitten im Streit und alles Getrennte findet sich wieder.’


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penultimate version of Hyperion, the path to this reunion is elusive:

To end the eternal conflict between our self and the world, to restore the peace of all peace,

which is higher than all reason, to unify us with nature in one infinite whole — that is the goal

of all our striving, we may understand ourselves or not.23

The final clause echoes a crucial point of Aristophanes’s speech: the divided humans

are drawn to one another without understanding why, or being able to articulatetheir desire. It is not sexual satisfaction that they seek, ‘but it is clear that the soul of

each is wishing for something else, which it is unable to say, but rather divines whatit wants and speaks in riddles’.24 The inchoate desire of Aristophanes’s beings also

characterizes Hyperion, who seems unable to satisfy his restlessness. The notion of eros presented in Aristophanes’s speech holds out the possibility of a redemptive

telos, but makes the means of attaining it obscure. Though Hyperion never realizes

it, the novel’s reading of the Symposium implies that both Aristophanic and Socraticaccounts of eros are in some way aporetic.

Hyperion is guided by an Aristophanic ideal of reconciliation, but he repeatedlyfinds himself in the reality of Socrates’s dialectic. He grows up on an island in the

Greece of the eighteenth century, immersing himself in the heroic tales and phi-losophy of antiquity, guided by his teacher Adamas. Hyperion compares their rela-

tionship to that between Plato and his pupil Stella (the name of the beloved in aPlatonic epigram), suggesting an erotic dimension.25 Hyperion, though, soon

becomes restless, and ventures to Smyrna, where he is disgusted with the culturalphilistinism of modern Greeks. There, he is attracted to the revolutionary Alabanda,and their relationship seems to suggest the possibility of reconstituting society after

the ancient model. But this, too, reveals itself as wanting, as they quarrel and part,

and Hyperion retreats to solitude. In both these relationships, the ideal of Greece islinked to erotic fulfilment, which Hyperion strives in vain to attain. The

Aristophanic dream of return to a natural state is undermined by the uncertaintyof how to achieve it.

It is only after two male relationships fail him that Hyperion meets Diotima on the

island of Kalaurea. For the rest of the text, she will represent one side of an eroticdialectic, an idealized retreat from the active life represented by Alabanda.26 Her

naıve, unearthly beauty seems to offer the return to nature Hyperion had sought;

23 SWB II, 256: ‘Jenen ewigen Widerstreit zwischen unserem Selbst und der Welt zu

endigen, den Frieden alles Friedens, der hoher ist, denn alle Vernunft, den wiederzu-

bringen, uns mit der Natur zu vereinigen zu Einem unendlichen Ganzen, das ist das Ziel

all’ unseres Strebens, wir mogen uns daruber verstehen oder nicht.’24 Symposium 192c: ‘2’ 4o i otoŒ g e‘ Œ ot 3 wtc1 d–g e’ 0 , 6 o2

d0i e2 e8 , 21 e0ei 6 o0ei, 1 2 0 ei.’

25 Roche (2002: 91); SWB II, 19.

26 Engel (1993: 340).


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indeed, the modern name of the island is Poros.27 In Hyperion’s succession of infatuations, one can recognize an ascent similar to that described in the

Symposium. Hyperion’s Diotima exists on an entirely different level from his pre-

vious attractions. She represents to Hyperion the essence of beauty, a realization of the unity of self and nature: ‘do you know its name? The name of that which is one

and all? Its name is beauty. [. . .

] Diotima, Diotima, divine being!’28 The descriptionseems inspired by Plato’s notion of anamnesis, the recollection of beauty’s pure form,which Holderlin would have found connected to eros in the Phaedrus.29 Diotima isan ideal that seems only partially embodied in reality.

The relationship does not bring with it the passion of Hyperion’s earlier attrac-tions; indeed, at first they do little but sit in silence. A direct echo of Aristophanes’s

speech occurs in Hyperion’s description of his early times with Diotima, when the

earth appeared as ‘originally perhaps more intimately unified with [the sky], then

however cut off from it through an all-ruling fate, so that [the earth] seeks, comesclose, distances itself and with desire and mourning, ripens to full beauty’.30 The

passage suggests a bridge between Aristophanes’s and Socrates’s speeches: it imag-ines the telos of reunion as unattainable, but at the same time sees a kind of redemp-tion in the unending dialectic of distance and nearness to the ideal. The fall from

innocence establishes the possibility of a new, mature form of fulfilment that would

synthesize nature and culture.31

Through the figure of Diotima, Hyperion imagines an ascent from human to ideal

beauty, and from sensory to intellectual apprehension. The Platonic echoes of the

shift from homosexual to hetero-, though essentially asexual, desire are undeniable,though have not been noted before.32 The passionate eros of Hyperion’s earlier,male relationships is subordinated to the contemplation of metaphysical beauty,

guided and embodied by Diotima.33 Holderlin’s description of the process is sur-prisingly equivocal. Hyperion, in forgetting his own mortality, experiences a kind of

death: ‘she was my Lethe, this soul, my holy Lethe, from which I drank forgetful-

ness of existence, so that I stood before her like an immortal.’34 Loss — as deathor forgetfulness — becomes a necessary moment in experiencing the beautiful.

27 Guthenke (2008: 82).

28 SWB II, 62: ‘wißt ihr seinen Namen? den Namen deß, das Eins ist und Alles? Sein Name

ist Schonheit.[. . .] O Diotima, Diotima, himmlisches Wesen!’

29 Dusing (1981: 109).

30 Stiening (2005: 323); SWB II, 63: ‘ursprunglich vielleicht inniger mit ihm vereint, dann

aber durch ein allwaltend Schicksal geschieden von ihm, damit sie ihn suche, sich nahere,

sich entferne und unter Lust und Trauer zur hochsten Schonheit reife.’

31Lacoue-Labarthe (

1989:

243).32 On the Platonic ascent, see Vlastos (1981: 38 – 42).

33 Bassermann-Jordan (2004: 36).

34 SWB II, 68: ‘Sie war mein Lethe, diese Seele, mein heiliger Lethe, woraus ich die

Vergessenheit des Daseins trank, daß ich vor ihr stand, wie ein Unsterblicher.’


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Yet Hyperion is at first unaware of how his desire is conditioned by lack. He dares

to hope, in explicit refutation of Socrates in the Symposium, that he will ‘not see

the poverty of love’.35 Having found what he believes he was seeking, Hyperion

feels himself in the state of union promised by Aristophanes, and unaffected by the

poverty of Socratic eros.

Eros, as Hyperion learns, cannot exist without Thanatos. This is emphasized bythe novel’s retrospective narration, which allows Hyperion to tell the story of his love

while simultaneously reflecting on his loss. From this perspective, euporia and aporia

are inextricable:

Wherever I flee with my thoughts, into the heaven above and into the void, at the beginning

and the end of times, even when I throw myself into its arms, that which was my last refuge,

which otherwise consumed every care, which otherwise burned up all desire and all the

pains of life with the flame of fire in which it showed itself — the glorious, secret soul of the

world — when I dive into its depth as down into the bottomless ocean, even there, even there

the sweet terrors find me out, the sweet, confusing, killing terrors, that Diotima’s grave

is near me.36

In looking back, Hyperion cannot but recognize the dialectical nature of eros and the

elusiveness of Aristophanic reunion. Even in the moment of erotic fulfilment, there

seems to be something missing — though only Diotima recognizes this lack at first.

Early on, she prophesies that love cannot provide the principle whereby Hyperion

reconciles himself to the world: ‘Do you know [. . .

] what you are mourning in allyour mourning? [. . .] It is a better time you seek, a more beautiful world.’37 Eros, as

Aristophanes’s speech predicted, cannot provide the ultimate orientation. It drives

Hyperion on, but without knowing his goal. Diotima urges Hyperion’s desire

beyond her own beauty, to the ‘better time’ of ancient Athens, a utopian ideal

that Hyperion will seek to realize through the rest of the novel.38

Diotima’s role as catalyst for Hyperion’s search echoes that of the Symposium’s

mantic teacher. Despite a recent interest in Holderlin’s Diotima, the Platonic roots

35 SWB II, 75: ‘die Armut der Liebe nicht sehn.’

36 SWB II, 69: ‘Wohin ich auch entfliehe mit meinen Gedanken, in die Himmel hinauf und

in den Abgrund, zum Anfang und an’s Ende der Zeiten, selbst wenn ich ihm, der meine

letzte Zuflucht war, der sonst noch jede Sorge in mir verzehrte, der alle Lust und allen

Schmerz des Lebens sonst mit der Feuerflamme, worin er sich offenbarte, in mir ver-

sengte, selbst wenn ich ihm mich in die Arme werfe, dem herrlichen geheimen Geiste der

Welt, in seine Tiefe mich tauche, wie in den bodenlosen Ozean hinab, auch da, auch da

finden die sußen Schrecken mich aus, die sußen verwirrenden totenden Schrecken, daßDiotima’s Grab mir nah ist.’

37 SWB II, 76: ‘Weißt du denn [. . .] um was du trauertest in aller deiner Trauer? [. . .] Es ist

eine bessere Zeit, die suchst du, eine schonere Welt.’

38 Bay (2003: 146).


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of her character have not been fully explored.39 Like Socrates’s Diotima, Hyperion’soften seems more an absence than a presence in the text. She can seem a bloodless

ideal, her character undefined.40 She appears in the text only briefly, and her death,

though the trauma of the second half of the novel, is reported to Hyperion only inletters. Yet there is an important difference in the two absences. Where the

Symposium presents Diotima as mediate because factually absent, Hyperion’sDiotima is rather an image of pure immediacy (with nature, with the form of

beauty) that in the course of the telling becomes more and more remote.Diotima’s absence in Hyperion is not the result of spatial difference but of an abso-lute temporal alterity. Even when present in the narrated time of the work, she

belongs more to the ideal world of antiquity than to modern reality. In this, she is

analogous to the Greece that Hyperion longs for. Both are divided from the narrative

present by a temporal gap that cannot be bridged, except partially through the

medium of language.41

Hyperion’s recollections of Diotima and ancient Athensare conditioned by the same impossibility. His desire is thus even more fundamen-

tally predicated on absence that Socrates’s eros. Hyperion stages the confrontationbetween Aristophanes’s teleological desire for return to one’s own, and Socrates’s

unending dialectic of aporia and euporia. For Hyperion, eros reveals itself as a pro-cess of mourning.

Athens

Hyperion’s desire is directed towards the ancient past. The famous ‘Athens letter’

recounts Hyperion’s journey with a group of friends, including Diotima, to the city.

On the way, they discuss the ‘excellence of the ancient Athenian people, from where itcomes, in what it consists’.42 Though many interpretations of the novel see this as thecrux of the whole work, it has not been noticed that the form is borrowed from the

Symposium. Members of the group offer competing eulogies of Athens, though the

discussion serves mainly as prelude to Hyperion’s speech, which, like Socrates’s,

seeks to correct the mistakes of his friends:

One said, the climate did it; another, art and philosophy; a third, religion and form of government.

Athenian art and religion, and philosophy and form of government, I said, are blossoms and

fruits of the tree, not ground and roots. You take the effects for the cause. 43

39 Bassermann-Jordan (2004); Jeorgakopulos (2003).

40 Jeorgakopulos (2003: 17 – 23).

41 Schmidt (2001: 132).

42 SWB II, 88: ‘Trefflichkeit des alten Athenervolks, woher sie komme, worin sie bestehe.’

43SWB

II

,88

: ‘Einer sagte, das Klima hat es gemacht; der andere: die Kunst undPhilosophie; der dritte: Religion und Staatsform.

Athenische Kunst und Religion, und Philosophie und Staatsform, sagt’ ich, sind

Bluten und Fruchte des Baums, nicht Boden und Wurzel. Ihr nehmt die Wirkungen

fur die Ursache.’


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In place of such simplistic answers, Hyperion proposes a genealogy of the city, an

account of its development into the ideal. His speech blends individual and collec-

tive growth, emphasizing the freedom of early Athenians from foreign influences or

powers. They seem to exist in a Rousseauist state of nature, before the differenti-

ation of subject from object.44 This pre-societal existence is similar to that experi-

enced by Hyperion and Diotima earlier, and the descriptions of Athens’s earlyhistory echo those of Kalaurea. Hyperion’s imagination of Athens is essentially

linked to his ideal of erotic fulfilment: both are utopian states of original nature.The Athenians initially exist in perfect harmony with their surroundings, una-

ware of their own humanity. From a childish mind without self-consciousness, they

advance to a mature understanding of difference. This differentiation, we learn,

comes from man’s natural creative tendency, which leads him to artistic creation:

The first child of human, of divine beauty, is art. In it, divine man makes himself young andreproduces himself. He wants to feel himself; therefore he sets his beauty in opposition. So

man gave himself his gods. Because in the beginning man and his gods were one, when,

unknown to himself, he was eternal beauty.45

Works of art initiate the process of reflection through which the ancient Greeks

began to distinguish themselves from the world around them. Consciousness of the

gods results from man’s drive to posit something outside of himself. By creating a

beautiful object in opposition, man becomes aware of his own humanity and, simul-

taneously, the beauty of the human form.Differentiation for Hyperion is a necessary moment in beauty — as expressed in

Heraclitus’s motto, e diuŒ o e‘t M (‘one, differentiated in itself’). Later in the

speech, Hyperion describes this as the ‘ideal of beauty’.46 Holderlin would have

found the phrase quoted, although uncomprehendingly, in the Symposium as a

description of music.47 The metaphor of harmony — which Holderlin borrows

throughout Hyperion — is essential to his concept of beauty.48 Harmony is seen

as the coincidence of opposites, the formation of a whole from disparate elements.

This can be understood as a reformulation of Aristophanes’s eulogy that accepts thebasic pattern of thought, but denies the necessity of a fall from grace. It is the

apprehension of difference within unity that creates beauty. Where Aristophanes

44 Stiening (2005: 340).

45 SWB II, 90: ‘Das erste Kind der menschlichen, der gottlichen Schonheit ist die Kunst. In

ihr verjungt und wiederholt der gottliche Mensch sich selbst. Er will sich selber

fuhlen, darum stellt er seine Schonheit gegenuber sich. So gab der Mensch sich seine

Gotter. Denn im Anfang war der Mensch und seine Gotter Eins, da, sich selber unbe-kannt, die ewige Schonheit war.’

46 SWB II, 94: ‘Ideal der Schonheit.’

47 Symposium 187a.

48 Schmidt (1992 – 4: II, 1038).


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had posited division only as something to be overcome, Hyperion finds a way to

positively value difference.Hyperion ascribes this knowledge to Diotima: ‘I have it from you.’49 Erotic and

philosophical knowledge are inextricably interwoven in the eulogy of Athens.

Hyperion goes on to elaborate a neo-Platonic conception of philosophy:

From simple reason comes no philosophy, since philosophy is more than the blind demand

for never-ending progress in uniting and dividing a certain material.

But if the godly e diueo et N shines forth, the ideal of beauty for striving reason, then

reason does not demand blindly and knows why and to what end it demands.50

The beginning of philosophy, then, is an aesthetic experience, not a process of

reasoned deduction. This implies a rejection of Kantian critique in favour of

Idealism’s attempt to found knowledge on a pre-rational basis.51 Like Plato’s

Diotima, Hyperion understands beauty as orienting the quest for philosophicaltruth. It is at this point that the group arrives in Attica. In recognizing, through

Diotima, the centrality of beauty to intellectual contemplation (a conviction that

Holderlin certainly shared), Hyperion reaches the height of philosophical and erotic

euporia.The dialectical nature of eros, though, immediately reasserts itself. As the

group approaches the city, Hyperion imagines ancient Athens as a dead friend,

returned to life:

It is beautiful that it is so difficult for man to believe in the death of what he loves, and there is

probably no one who has yet gone to his friend’s grave without the quiet hope of actually

meeting the friend. The beautiful phantom of ancient Athens grabbed me, like the face of

a mother who returns from the dead.

O Parthenon! I yelled, pride of the world!52

Though Hyperion recognizes that his ideal image of the ancient city is no longer

valid, he cannot help but be caught up in it. His desire is so strong that it brings

49 SWB II, 90: ‘Ich hab’ es von dir.’

50 SWB II, 94: ‘Aus bloßer Vernunft kommt keine Philosophie, denn Philosophie ist mehr,

denn blinde Forderung eines nie zu endigenden Fortschritts in Vereinigung und

Unterscheidung eines moglichen Stoffs.

Leuchtet aber das gottliche e diueo et x [sic], das Ideal der Schonheit der

strebenden Vernunft, so fodert sie nicht blind, und weiß, warum, wozu sie fodert.’

51 Ryan (1965: 141).

52 SWB II, 95: ‘Es ist schon, daß es dem Menschen so schwer wird, sich vom Tode dessen,

was er liebt, zu uberzeugen, und es ist wohl keiner noch zu seines Freundes Grabegegangen, ohne die leise Hoffnung, da dem Freunde wirklich zu begegnen. Mich ergriff

das schone Phantom des alten Athens, wie einer Mutter Gestalt, die aus dem Totenreiche

zuruckkehrt.

O Parthenon! rief ich, Stolz der Welt!’


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ancient Greece back from the dead. To his companions’s surprise at his vision-

ary transformation, he cries ‘Do not remind me of the time!’53 The fragility of

Hyperion’s ideal becomes clear: his account of ancient Greece is entirely

ahistorical.54

Hyperion’s reverie continues until they reach the ruins of the Acropolis, where he

comes face to face with historical reality. Ancient Athens, reborn in his imagination,dies again in his vision:

I looked, and could have passed away from the all-powerful sight.

Like an immeasurable shipwreck, when the hurriances are quiet and the mariners fled, and

the corpse of the shattered fleet lies unrecognizable on a sandbank, so Athens lay before us,

and the decayed columns stood before us, like the naked roots of a forest which still had been

green at evening and in the night went up in flames.55

Ancient Athens is figured as a shipwreck and a corpse, the dead friend Hyperion hadexpected to meet. What he finds, though, is not pure absence, but the presence of

absence, a vision of living death. The shock at the city’s ruins is particularly stark

because it had so recently seemed alive to him in imagination. In the ruins of Athens,

Hyperion comes face to face with the aporia of erotic fulfilment: the beautiful always

exists historically, and the ideal can only be experienced in passing.56 As in the

Symposium, it is Diotima who shows the way beyond such ephemeral possession:

‘Whoever has a certain spirit, said Diotima consolingly, to him Athens still stands

like a blooming fruit-tree. The artist easily completes the torso.’57

Though herwords hold an obvious echo of Winckelmann, Diotima suggests a more active role

for modernity than imitation: it must complete and thereby regenerate the ideal.

The progress of desire is the same as that described by Plato’s Diotima: from trying

to possess a transient ideal, Hyperion will turn to the production of immortal beauty.The rest of the Athens letter dramatizes the difficulty of this turn for Hyperion.

He seems, like Socrates, to be a rather slow pupil, clinging to the transient fulfilment

of bodily eros. At first, he sees his love for Diotima as a possible escape from the

53 SWB II, 95: ‘Mahne mich nicht an die Zeit!’

54 Aspetsberger (1971: 65).

55 SWB II, 96: ‘Ich sah, und hatte vergehen mogen vor dem allmachtigen Anblick.

Wie ein unermeßlicher Schiffbruch, wenn die Orkane verstummt sind und die

Schiffer entflohn, und der Leichnam der zerschmetterten Flotte unkenntlich auf der

Sandbank liegt, so lag vor uns Athen, und die verwaisten Saulen standen vor uns, wie die

nackten Stamme eines Walds, der am Abend noch grunte, und des Nachts darauf imFeuer aufging.’

56 Nancy (1993: 76).

57 SWB II, 96: ‘Wer jenen Geist hat, sagte Diotima trostend, dem stehet Athen noch, wie ein

bluhender Fruchtbaum. Der Kunstler erganzt den Torso sich leicht.’


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degraded world in which he lives: ‘What do I care for the shipwreck of the world, I

know nothing but my holy island.’58 Kalaurea had seemed an existence outside of

time, and it represents the possibility of living forever in a natural state. Yet Diotima

tells him that this too is impossible: ‘There is a time of love, said Diotima with

friendly earnestness, just as there is a time to live in the happy cradle. But life itself

drives us out.’59 Historical change, contra Aristophanes, cannot be redeemed.Caught between an impossible antiquity and an unbearable modernity, lost nature

and degraded culture, Hyperion must seek a third path of synthesis. Diotima guides

him away from mourning and on to his new role:

You must go from here, like the ray of light, like the all-refreshing rain, you must go below

into the land of mortality, you must illuminate, like Apollo, shake, enliven, like Jupiter,

otherwise you are not worthy of your heaven. I beg you, go to Athens again, one more time.60

Hyperion’s return to Athens is an entrance into the historical life of modern Greece.

Diotima suggests that the ancient ideal can be realized through practical action. In

the moment of lack, Hyperion discovers his own resource.Instead of passive possession, Hyperion will strive for active production. This is

an important revision of the Platonic narrative. Whereas for Socrates ascending the

erotic ladder leads to increasing philosophical knowledge, Hyperion’s goal is not

mere contemplation. His desire is reconstituted, turned from asocial pleasure to

civic enlightenment: ‘From the roots of mankind the new world will sprout! A new

godhead will reign over them, a new future show itself in front of them.’61 Thoughearlier he had hoped to regress to childhood, he now accepts the necessity of living in

his own age. This leads him to a still-undefined mission as a creator: ‘I am an artist,

but I am not ready. I imagine in my spirit, but I do not yet know how to lead my

hand.’62 Hyperion’s path will go beyond intellectual images to create sensory expres-

sions of his ideal.Hyperion’s goal is a fusion of Socratic and Aristophanic narratives: a begetting

anew that is also a recreation of past unity. The physical space of ancient Greece

58 SWB II, 98: ‘Was kummert mich der Schiffbruch der Welt, ich weiß von nichts, als

meiner seligen Insel.’

59 SWB II, 98: ‘Es gibt eine Zeit der Liebe, sagte Diotima mit freundlichem Ernste, wie es

eine Zeit gibt, in der glucklichen Wiege zu leben. Aber das Leben selber treibt uns

heraus.’

60 SWB II, 99: ‘Du mußt, wie der Lichtstrahl, herab, wie der allerfrischende Regen, mußt

du nieder in’s Land der Sterblichkeit, du mußt erleuchten, wie Apoll, erschuttern,

beleben, wie Jupiter, sonst bist du deines Himmels nicht wert. Ich bitte dich, geh

nach Athen hinein, noch Einmal.’61 SWB II, 100: ‘Aus der Wurzel der Menschheit sprosse die neue Welt! Eine neue Gottheit

walte uber ihnen, eine neue Zukunft klare vor ihnen sich auf.’

62 SWB II, 100: ‘Ich bin ein Kunstler, aber ich bin nicht geschickt. Ich bilde im Geiste, aber

ich weiß noch die Hand nicht zu fuhren.’


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provides the link between past ideal and present possibility.63 Hyperion envisions

the ruins of Athens as the basis for a revival of ancient fruitfulness:

I stood over the wreckage of Athens like a farmer over a fallow field. Just lie quietly, I

thought, as we went back to the ship. Just lie quietly, sleeping land. Soon young life will

grow from you, and increase towards the benedictions of heaven. Soon the clouds will notrain in vain, soon the sun will find its ancient pupils again.64

The natural cycle suggests that barrenness is only a prelude to growth, but Hyperion

now understands that this rebirth must be qualitatively different from the previous

flowering. The first volume ends with the vision of a reunification of what history

has divided: ‘there will only be one beauty, and man and nature will come together

into one all-encompassing divinity.’65 Hyperion’s desire has turned from the past to

the future: action, he hopes, will realize the ideal anew.

The second volume radically undermines Hyperion’s dream of renaissance. Itannounces its turn to tragedy in an epigraph adapted from Oedipus at Colonus: ‘Not

to be born surpasses all account. But once one has seen the light, the second best by

far is to return as quickly as possible whence one has come.’66 The bitter rejoinder to

Aristophanes’s teleology sees the only return to nature in death. In the two years that

separate the volumes of Hyperion, Holderlin was working simultaneously on his

own, never-completed tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, and on translations of

Sophocles, and the themes and outlook of those works permeate the second

volume of Hyperion. It descends further into disaster, as Hyperion reunites withAlabanda to fight against the Turks, only to be deserted by his comrade-in-arms.

The loss brings to bear another echo of the Symposium: Alcibiades’s late entrance to

the gathering, which takes place shortly before he will lead the disastrous Sicilian

expedition. Alcibiades and Alabanda represent similar erotic objects, martial and

homosexual alternatives to the philosophical, heterosexual Diotima. Furthermore,

they both endanger the protagonist — Alcibiades by casting suspicion on Socrates

and Alabanda by leading Hyperion into a hopeless battle. Alcibiades’s disgrace, like

Socrates’s execution, is not mentioned in the Symposium, but suggests that bothnarratives are filtered through catastrophe suffered after the fact.

63 Guthenke (2008: 75).

64 SWB II, 101: ‘Ich stand nun uber den Trummern von Athen, wie der Ackersmann auf

dem Brachfeld. Liege nur ruhig, dacht’ ich, da wir wieder zu Schiffe gingen, liege nur

ruhig, schlummerndes Land! Bald grunt das junge Leben aus dir, und wachst den

Segnungen des Himmels entgegen. Bald regnen die Wolken nimmer umsonst, bald

findet die Sonne die alten Zoglinge wieder.’65 SWB II, 101: ‘Es wird nur Eine Schonheit sein; und Menschheit und Natur wird sich

vereinen in Eine allumfassende Gottheit.’

66 SWB II, 104: ‘g uti, o iG ogo. o d1eei u: / gi ei e, o e

e gei, ot det eo xy ci’ [sic] cf. OC 1225 – 7.


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The greatest blow is reported to Hyperion in letters from Kalaurea, which he

encloses with his own: Diotima dies from an illness that wastes her away to nothing.

Her last letter cautions Hyperion against trying to understand her death: ‘Whoever

thinks to fathom such a fate ends by cursing himself and everything.’67 Hyperion’s

philosophical nature now seems a danger, as too much questioning would lead him

into despondency. Seeking to avoid this abyss, Hyperion leaves Greece and journeysto Germany, where he finds himself miserable among ‘barbarians from ages back,

who have become through diligence and study and even through religion more

barbaric’.68 Hyperion’s tirade against contemporary Germans suggests that his ide-

alism has not been extinguished by catastrophe, though it has become deeply embit-

tered. The dialectic of desire does not vanish completely in the second volume, but its

euporetic side is present only in fleeting moments of hopefulness. While the first

volume is saturated with Platonic echoes, classical allusions in the second draw more

on tragedy. The only consolation seems to be the process of reflection thatHyperion’s epistolary recollections allow. The novel closes with the enigmatic

words ‘So I thought. More soon.’69 Like the Symposium, Hyperion ends without recon-

ciliation or synthesis, but with an image of the philosopher continuing on his path.Socrates’s eulogy of eros establishes the philosophical basis for the dialectic of

hope and despair portrayed in Hyperion. The novel can be understood both as a

product and as a depiction of Diotima’s narrative, which turns from seeking to

possess a fleeting ideal to the production of a lasting work of reflection. Hyperion

emerges from the dialectic of desire, passing through the experiences of poverty and

resource before arriving at the task of representation. This does not restore, inAristophanic fashion, a fractured wholeness, but it does show a way beyond the

unhappy instability of the erotic subject. Holderlin’s representation, to be sure, does

not synthesize the dialectic any more than Plato’s does, but it nevertheless turns the

experience of aporia into a kind of euporia. In Hyperion, the loss of an idealized

antiquity becomes productive; the novel itself is a means of ‘begetting and bringing

forth on the beautiful’.

Towards an erotics of reception

Holderlin’s reading of the Symposium contains within it a reflection on the process of

reception. Hyperion continually poses the question of the presence of antiquity in the

modern world. The novel is the result of a quest to make ancient soil fruitful again.

This is as true for Hyperion as for Holderlin, whose poetic and philosophical project

was centred on ancient Greece from its beginning. Hyperion represents his first

sustained attempt to conceptualize the interplay of antiquity and modernity.

67SWB

II

,160

: ‘Wer solch ein Schicksal zu ergrunden denkt, der flucht am Ende sich undallem.’

68 SWB II, 168: ‘Barbaren von Alters her, durch Fleiß und Wissenschaft und selbst durch

Religion barbarischer geworden.’

69 SWB II, 175: ‘So dacht’ ich. Nachstens mehr.’


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The Symposium’s discussion of eros leads Holderlin to figure the dynamics of a

relationship to ancient Greece as a dialectic of lack and resource. Hyperion’s reflec-

tions on the presence of the past thus articulate an erotics of reception.One can trace an erotic dialectic through Holderlin’s writing on ancient Greece,

as a tension between elegy and appropriation.70 In Hyperion, ancient Greece seems

overwhelmingly an object of mourning, as in the famous words of the poem ‘Brodund Wein’:

Aber Freund! Wir kommen zu spa t. Zwar leben die Go tter,

Aber u ber dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt .

Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten,

Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns. (SWB I, 289).

(But, friend! We come too late. The gods still live, but over our heads above in another world.

They act there infinitely and appear to care little whether or not we live, so much do theheavenly ones spare us.)

The gods of antiquity seem to have left the modern world a cold, empty place. Yet

there is nearly always a sense of possibility attending such lament, an attempt, as in

Hyperion, to renew the ancient ideal. Though Hyperion’s project ultimately leads todesolation after the failure of his societal transformation and the death of Diotima,

he maintains an Aristophanic hope throughout the work. Similarly, ‘Brod und

Wein’, conflating Greek and Christian divinity, sees the earthly presence of the

eucharist as a foretaste of a return of the gods:

Darum denken wir auch dabei der Himmlischen, die sonst

Da gewesen und die kehren in richtiger Zeit,

Darum singen sie auch mit Ernst die Sa nger den Weingott

Und nicht eitel erdacht to net dem Alten das Lob. (SWB I, 290)

(Therefore we think of the heavenly ones, who once were here and who will return at the

right time. Therefore the singers sing with earnestness to the wine-god, and the praise does

not sound empty to the ancient one.)

Much of Holderlin’s poetry performs this expectation, fulfilling the task of ‘Dichter

indurftiger Zeit’ (SWB I, 290: ‘poets in a destitute time’). Writing becomes the locus

of antiquity’s presence in the modern world, and the guarantee of its future return.71

There is also in Holderlin’s work, and particularly in his later writings, a more

active engagement with ancient Greece, which sees a productive tension in the

relation of antiquity and modernity. This is only incipient in Hyperion, and repre-

sents the second stage of Socratic eros, in which desire for the ancient ideal leads to

new creation. Holderlin comes to see the engagement with the foreignness of

70 Lacoue-Labarthe (1989).

71 Heidegger (2002).


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antiquity as constitutive of modernity’s self-consciousness. As he writes in a letter of

1801: ‘The proper must be learned as well as the alien. Therefore the Greeks are

indispensable to us.’72 For the later Holderlin, the experience of non-identity is

essential to finding ‘the proper’ ( 1 o2 e8 o, das Eigene). The path to self-knowledge

is not the reconstitution of a previous unity, but the creation of a reflective dialectic

of similarity and difference.For Holderlin, modernity comes to know itself only through antiquity. Ancient

Greece represents neither an origin nor an endpoint for modern artists, but a

defining alterity.73 This relation to antiquity is also clear in the last work

Holderlin published, the notes to his translation of Oedipus the King and Antigone,

which declares that ‘the national forms of our poets, where such exist, are to be

preferred [to those of the Greeks] because they do not simply exist in order to learn

to understand the spirit of the times, but to hold it fast and to feel it, once it is

grasped and learned’.74

Holderlin describes Greek art not as an end in itself, but as ameans of understanding the historical condition of modernity. This concept of

reception no longer seeks to possess or recreate antiquity, but views it as one element

of the dialectic through which modernity (re)produces itself.Both aspects of Socratic eros, lack and resource, are simultaneously present in

Hyperion as throughout Holderlin’s works. Indeed, their dialectic forms one of the

essential features of German philhellenism’s relation to antiquity and, more impor-

tantly, of the formative notions of modernity that emerge from this engagement.75

One could trace a similar erotics of reception in the earlier eighteenth century,76

throughout Schiller’s works,77 or in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.78 The ancient

world seems at once an unrecoverable ideal and a source of timeless wisdom. The

passage of time that divides modernity from antiquity is lamented as well as cele-

brated; out of this dialectic emerges the literature of classical reception. Loss and

restitution are essential moments in modern self-definition through antiquity,

elements of a powerful and ambiguous desire.The example of Holderlin’s Hyperion suggests that, parallel to a hermeneutics, we

need an erotics of reception. Such a perspective would be sensitive not only to the

ways the classical world is present in modernity, but also to the ways it is experiencedas absent. It would understand engagement with the untimeliness of antiquity — not

72 SWB III, 460: ‘Das eigene muß so gut gelernt sein, wie das Fremde. Deswegen sind uns

die Griechen unentbehrlich.’

73 Szondi (1978: 358).

74 SWB II, 921: ‘Die vaterlandischen Formen unserer Dichter, wo solche sind, sind aber

dennoch vorzuziehen, weil solche nicht bloß da sind, um den Geist der Zeit verstehen zu

lernen, sondern ihn festzuhalten und zu fuhlen, wenn er einmal begriffen und gelernt ist.’75 Guthenke (2008: 40).

76 Parker (2008).

77 Alt (2006).

78 Ferris (2000: 52 – 84).


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its timelessness or universality — as the genuinely productive force in classical recep-

tion. The reflection on alterity establishes a dialectic of lack and resource that leads to

a productive relation to antiquity. One can figure the negative element of this erotics

in many ways: misremembering and erasure,79 historical incompleteness,80 the

impossibility of translation,81 traumatic loss and repression,82 or, as Holderlin

does, mourning. What unifies these approaches is a close attention to the complexways ancient works are appropriated , experienced as alien and made into one’s own.

The process, these studies show, is always conditioned by a desire that makes

the relation to the ancient past simultaneously an imperative and an impossibility.Classical receptions begin in a desire for what is absent. This is not merely because

erotics is one of many possible modes of relation to the ancient world. Though this is

obviously the case, one could go further, and argue that erotics is a condition of

classical reception. That is to say, an essential difference between the receptions of

ancient Greece and Rome and the receptions of Hamlet or Hollywood film, is thedialectic of absence and presence that antiquity cannot but evoke. This is not, it is

important to realize, a hermeneutic point: from the reader’s point of view, there is no

fundamental difference between classical texts, texts that ‘receive’ the classics in one

way or another, and texts with no discernible classical engagement. They are all

encountered in the same way, their meaning ‘realized at the point of reception’.83

Though ‘iterability’ may be the defining quality of a classic, it is as applicable to

Shakespeare as to Sophocles.84 If the term ‘classical reception’ has any particular

meaning (and if its study belongs in departments of the Classics), it is because thereis something of interest in the specific way that ancient texts are reiterated.85

The erotic dialectic helps to formulate the specificity of classical receptions, as

conditioned by a play of distance and proximity, or in Platonic terms, of lack and

resource. This relation is infinitely flexible but it is always self-conscious.86

Antiquity is, as Uvo Holscher writes, ‘the closest other’ (‘das nachste Fremde’) of

modernity, and this consciousness cuts across national literatures and the hetero-

geneity of receptions.87 The dialectic of absence and presence forms the basis for an

understanding of classical receptions as a comparative field, in which different tra-

ditions converge around a central experience.88 What marks classical receptions istheir engagement with the antiquity of the ancient and the modernity of the modern.

79 Burrow (2004).

80 Prettejohn (2006).

81 Lianeri (2006).

82 Leonard (2008).

83 Martindale (1993: 3).

84Martindale (

1993:

28).85 Porter (2008: 474).

86 Budelmann and Haubold (2008).

87 Holscher (1994: 278).

88 Revermann (2008).


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The Greeks (and one could say the same for the Romans) are ‘indispensable to us’

because they initiate a dialectic of desire. Holderlin teaches that modern reflection

emerges from the alterity of antiquity: ‘the proper must be learned as well as the

alien’. It is the interplay of difference and similarity in the formation of modernity

that makes the field of classical reception a potential meeting-place for different

disciplines, periods, and traditions. Attention to the erotics of reception can help usto probe the encounters through which modernity comes to know its own ‘proper’.

Yet it is only by recognizing the absence at the heart of classical reception that we can

fully understand antiquity’s presence.

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F. Aspetsberger, Welteinheit und epische Gestaltung: Studien zur Ichform von Ho lderlins Roman Hyperion(Munich: Fink, 1971).

G. von Bassermann-Jordan, ’Scho nes Leben! Du lebst, wie die zarten Blu then im Winter . . . .’: Die Figur der Diotima in Ho lderlins Lyrik und im Hyperion-Projekt. Theorie und dichterische Praxis (Wurzburg:Konigshausen & Neumann, 2004).

H. Bay, Ohne Ru ckkehr: Utopische Intention und poetischer Prozeß in Ho lderlins Hyperion (Munich:Fink, 2003).

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C. Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and humanistic culture’, in C. Martindale and A.B. Taylor (eds), Shakespeareand the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 9 – 27.

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