The Work of Leisure

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The Workof Leisure:The Figureof Empty Timein the Poetics ofHolderlin and MandelshtamArtemyMagun

1. Surplus-TimeThe modern notion of history was definitively formulated in theeighteenth century, when Rousseau and Kant restricted the access ofhumans to their own supersensible, substantial nature (essence).Man appeared as a historical being, one whose definition lies in hisdevelopment (or, in the case of Rousseau, fall), in his negativity. Assoon as this vision of human nature was made public, a questionarose, which dominated the subsequent tradition of the philosophyof history up to our days. Namely, the question of the access ofhumans to historicity as such-to pure historicity or pure temporality,apart from this or that particular historical development. Such accesswould permit humans both knowledge of themselves and spontaneityof action. Even blocked from the transcendent, God-like, absolutefreedom, humans may still be free historical actors if they can deliverthemselves from the determination of past and future, which forcesthem into the alienated labor of development, or into the labor ofmourning. They would still act and produce, but do so as freesubjects, out of nothing.If human essence lies in human history, then why does it moveforward, what is the principle of its movement? Such a principle, forhuman history, may only be human freedom, human spontaneity and

MLN118 (2004): 1152-1176 ? 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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negativity, the capacity to abstract oneself from the past and to createthe new out of nothing.Thus, Rousseau, in his Letter to d'Alembert on the Spectacles, speaks,paradoxically, of the "laborieuse oisivete,"' the laborious idleness ofSpartans who, while not present at the lost origin of history, enjoyedan "exceptional" place within it. Kant considered time and space tobe the "pure forms" of intuition. However, he was ambiguous as to thepossibility of a direct access to them, without any intuited object. Kantalluded to the possibility of directly perceiving time, this "pureintuition," in two places: first, in the famous section on the schematismin the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,2 and second, in theanalytic of the sublime of the Critique ofJudgment.3 Both the scheme ofthe category of substance (the first case) and the failure of imagina-tion to represent and grasp the enormity of time and space (thesecond case) hint at the possibility of perceiving not what moves intime, but the empty form of time itself. The philosophers of Kantianlineage almost unanimously developed these hints in the direction ofsearching human freedom and self-knowledge in the contemplationof pure time, in the time of leisure.

Thus Schiller, who displaced human liberty into the intermediatespace of aesthetical play, a game which would allow one to "cancel(aufheben) time within time."4 Even Hegel, who, in spite and becauseof his identification of history with the labor of the negative, stillspeaks of the periods of happiness as the "blank pages" of history.5Thus, finally, Marx, whose theory of capitalism is built upon thenotion of surplus labor, the labor performed by the worker duringthe "free," "disposable" time, "leisure time."6 For Marx, this leisureactivity is "antithetic." It constitutes the only free, authentic humanaction-but at the same time the cunning exploitation of it bycapitalism (paying for your free labor) makes possible the cyclic,infinite, and frenetic increase of capitalist production.7 The moretechnical progress succeeds in reducing necessary labor, that is, inliberating time-the more vigorously does capitalist economy "con-vert" this free time into "surplus labor." Such exploitation of theoverabundant, surplus force would, according to Marx, lead capital-ism into the crisis of overproduction and allow working masses to "re-appropriate" their surplus labor for their free development. In ourcentury, George Bataille further developed this theory, inverting theconcept of economy and grounding it in surplus and festive expense,rather than in lack and productivity.8While this development concentrated on the practical aspect of

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luxury and leisure as the excess, surplus of historical time, theepistemological spect of free time was most clearly presented byFriedrich Holderlin in his Remarkson Sophocles' tragedies. There,H6lderlin clearly states the possibility of a direct contemplation of thepure Kantian forms of space and time. This possibility is opened bythe interruption-caesura-of the narrative form, which creates anunfilled excess of "leisure time" (die miiuigeZeit) in the middle of it.This leisure time is mentioned in the end of the Remarkson Oedipus9and restated in the Remarkson Antigona, in the full strength of itsinternal contradiction:

But firstof all the tragicrepresentation onsists n the facticityof theword,which, being rather an internal structure than a pronounced [sound],goes, fatally, rom a beginning to an end. [It consists]in the sequenceofevents,in the groupingof persons againsteach other,and in the form ofreason,whichbuilds utofthefrighteningeisurefa tragicime, nd,asit [thereason orm]haspresentedtself n contradictions,n theirwildemergences,later, n the humantime,it counts as a firmopinionborn fromthe divinedestiny. 0When the action suddenly stops, the spectator perceives, in silence,the surplus of this action, something that still moves (in him orherself, through him or herself), when nothingmoves. This "some-thing" is time itself, the principle of human freedom and excess. ForHolderlin, this moment of free time, the radicalized version of theKantian sublime, is explicitly both epistemological and practical.Tragedy,as "an imitation of action," presents to the human being hisown freedom, freedom as excess, and time that is empty for spontane-ous action. Even more explicitly, Holderlin links his notion of free

time with political revolution: he speaks of the "categorical" (Remarkson Oedipus)and "infinite" (Remarkson Antigona) "reversal"(Umkehr,Umkehrung-which is, at the time, a widely used word for revolution),and of the republican character of tragedy (Remarkson Antigona).The "leisure" s, however, "frightening" (furchtbar).The motion thatpresents itself in spite of the apparent pause appears as indeterminateand therefore infinite. The motion "in the void," the motion of timeitself, has no immanent limits. Leisure is excessive time and excessivemotion. This is how it appears. n reality,however, the motion that thesubject perceives during leisure is his or her own motion, whichconstitutes this leisure: it terminates the inertia of labor and adjournsthe desires and plans for the future. This negative activity is, first,potentially infinite (as it has, in turn, to hinder itself) and, second,

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seems to come to the subject as an external necessity. The "excessivetime" is not fully free, and therefore it poses an imperative, a drivetoexceed. The opening of time, which is excessive, empty, or infinite,depending on the perspective, drives the subject to probehis or herinfinity and to exceed him or herself, to leave oneself behind. This iswhy Holderlin compares tragedy to a sports competition. The game isa leisure activitypar excellence, ut at the same time it has no internallimits and is competitive, leading thus to an infinite internal struggle.When Holderlin compares Oedipusthe Tyrantto a fistfight, he mayrefer to a monotonous, merciless series of strikes that aim at the samepoint of the body, in an attempt to knock the adversary out. Theleisure opens an abyss of disaster; it tempts one to perish and drivesone to escape from peril.The link between free time and revolution is even more direct inHolderlin's poem Die Mufle, an explicit allegory of the FrenchRevolution, written in 1797, during the tension caused by the advanceof the French revolutionary troops. Here Holderlin clarifies manythings in the development of German idealism, and goes even furtherthan Marx, who knew his work well enough (the epigraph fromHolderlin's novel Hyperion tands in the front page of the "Franco-German Journal" that Marx and his friend Ruge edited in Paris) butnever made an explicit parallel between his theory of revolution andhis notion of free time and surplus labor. This fact created anunfortunate ambiguity in the Marxist concept of revolution, allowingits interpretation as a historical necessity and deferring the ethics ofleisure activity until the coming of communism.H6lderlin's fragmentary poem is interesting because of its enig-matic moment of ellipsis, where the letter W stands on its own. Untilrecently, the editors dismissed this peculiarity as negligence and"complemented" the letter with the word "wood" (Wald), as forexample, F. BeiBner. The Frankfurt edition of D.E. Sattler restoredthe manuscript version. I will try to show that the fragmentary capitalletter fits the logic of the poem, the poem that is dedicated to thematerialization of language, to the destruction and atomization of thematerial signifier. This letter standing on its own has an obviouspendant in the oeuvre of Holderlin-namely, the famous enigmaticending of Patmos(a poem written several years later than Die MuJfe):" der Vater aber liebt/Der iiber alien waltet, / Am meisten, daft gepflegetwerde / Der feste Buchstab, und Bestehendes gut / Gedeutetet. Dem folgtdeutscher Gesang" (emphasis mine).Holderlin's poem works to demystify the concept of"free time" and

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to point at its internal contradiction. The time may not be entirely"free" or "static"-this would mean an absolute nothing, or a spatialpicture. The very idea of leisure consists in the fact that, even in freetime, something continues to move. The "leisure" signifies, strictlyspeaking, not the void, but the excess of time, time as excess. Itdesignates the human condition as that of posthumous superfluityand untimeliness. As such, leisure is both a condition of freedom (or,rather, liberation) and a condition of anxiety, inachievement, andinfinite unrest. Here, as we saw, Holderlin agrees with both Rousseauand Marx: the "free time" is the principle of freedom and labor.Fromone point of view the surplus appears as spontaneity and infinitepower; from another point of view, it appears as a principle ofexcessive, unstoppable inertia of senseless motion, such as the wagelaborer's desire to keep working after the end of the labor day. Thevery attempt to terminate this unnecessary rest of motion makes yetanother motion, that of termination. And thus ad infinitum. Thisdouble character of leisure appears not only in the economic sphere,but also in political revolution and aesthetical, poetic production,which, by definition, constitutes an activity of leisure and is addressedto someone who wants to spend his or her time reading.2. The Law of Leisure"

FriedrichHolderlinDie Mufle12

Sorglos chlummert ieBrust und es ruhn diestrengenGedanken.Auf die Wiesegeh' ich hinaus, wo das Gras aus der WurzelFrisch,wie die Quellemirkeimt,wo die lieblicheLippeder BlumeMir sich 6ffnetund stum mitsiiu3emOthemmich anhaucht.Und an tausendZweigendesHains, wie an brennendenKerzenMir das FldmchendesLebensgldnzt, die rotlicheBliithe,Woim sonnigenQuelldiezufriednenFischesichregen,Wodie Schwalbedas Nestmit thorigenJungenumflattert,Und dieSchmetterlingeich reun, und die Bienen da wandl' ichMitten in ihrerLust; ich steh imfriedlichenFeldeWieein liebenderUlmbaumda, und wieRebenund TraubenSchlingensich rund um mich die siifienSpieledes Lebens.Oder chau ich hinauf zumBerge,dermit GewolkenSich die Scheitelumkrdnztund die diisternLoken m WindeSchiittelt,und wenn er michtrdgtauf seinerkrdftigenSchulter;Wenndie leichtereLuft mir alle Sinne bezaubert

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Und das unendlicheThal, wieeinefarbigeWolkeUntermirliegt, da werd' ch zumAdler,und ledigdes BodensWechseltmein Leben m All derNatur wie Nomadenden WohnortUnd nun fiihrt michderPfad zuriik ins LebenderMenschen,Fernherddmmertdie Stadt,wie eineeherneRiistungGegendie Macht des Gewittergottsnd der MenschengeschmiedetMajestatischherauf,und ringsumruhen dieDorfchen;Und dieDdcherumhiillt,vomAbendlichtegerothetFreundlichderhdiuflicheRauch;es ruhn die sorglichumzduntenGdrten,es schlummert erPflug auf dengesonderten eldern.Aber ns Mondlichtsteigenheraufdie zerbrohenendulenUnd die Tempeltoren,ie einst derFurchtbaretraf, dergeheimeGeistderUnruh, derin der BrustderErd' und der MenschenZiirnetund gdhrt,derUnbezwungne, er alte ErobrerDer die Stadte,wieLdmmer,erreifit, er einst den OlympusStiirmte,derin denBergen ich regt,und Flammenherauswirft.Der die Wdlder ntwurzeltund durchden OzeandurchfdhrtUnd dieSchiffezerschldgt nd dochin derewigenOrdnungNiemalsirre dichmacht,auf derTafeldeinerGesezeKeineSylbeverwischt,derauch deinSohn, o Natur, istMit demGeistederRuh' aus einemSchoosegeboren.Hab' ich zu HaufJedann, wo die Biume das FensterumsduselnUnd dieLuft mit demLichtemirspielt,von menschlichem ebenEin unsterbliches latt zu gutemEndegelesenLeben Lebender Welt du liegstwie ein heiligerWSprechch dann, und es nehmedieAxt, werwill, dich zu ebnen,Glucklich wohn ich in dir.1797

Leisure.The breast carelessly slumbers, and the grave thoughts are at rest.I go out into the meadows, where the fresh grassSprings out of its root, where the lovely lip of the flowerOpens to me and mutely envelops me with its sweet breath.And on the thousand branches of a grove, as though a little flameof lifeWas shining to me from the burning candles, the red flowers bloom,Where in a sunny spring scurry the happy fish,Where a swallow flies about the nest with the mindless youngsters,And the larks, and the bees rejoice,There I wander in the midst of their joy, I stand in the peaceful fieldAs a loving elm-tree, and as vine and bunchesThe sweet plays of life crawl around me.

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Or I look at the mountain, which crowns its summit with clouds,And shakes its curls on the wind,And when it carries me on its powerful shoulders,When the rarefied air enchants all my senses,And the infinite valley, as a colorful cloud,Lies under me, then I become into an eagle, and, liberated fromthe ground,My life, as the nomads, constantly changes its dwelling place in theAll of nature.Now the path leads me back into the life of men,Far awaymajestically dawns the city, as a copper armorThat is forged against the powerOf the Thunder god and of men, and around it rest the villages;And the smoke of houses, reddened by the evening light,Friendly illuminates the roofs; there rest the carefully fencedgardens,There slumbers the plow in the demarcated fields.But, in the moonlight there rise the broken columns,And the temple doors, which once saw the Frightening one,The hidden spirit of unrest, which angers and ripplesIn the breast of Earth and of men, the Irresistible,The old Conqueror, who tears apart the cities, as lambs,Who once stormed the Olympus, who stirs inside the mountainsAnd throws out flames. Who unroots the woods and moves throughthe OceanAnd breaks the ships and who, meanwhile, never makes you err fromthe eternal order,Never erases a syllable from the table of your law,Who is also your son, oh Nature, born from the same womb with the

spirit of rest. -Then, at home, where the trees whisper around the window,And the air plays with the light, I have read the immortal leaf ofhuman lifeUp to a good end.Life Life of the world You lie as a sacred WSay I then, and it would take an axe to even you up,Happily I live in you.13a. The spirit of unrest. While all discursive practices try to constituteand delineate the suspension of all "other" practices, to short-circuit

a split between rest and motion, silence and speech, lyric poetry, in itsrhythmical mode of repetitively interrupted monotony, thematizesthis task of speech in an especially illustrative way. The lyrics arelanguage suspended, neither affirmed nor denied, addressed neither

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to no one nor to a particular person. It is a proliferation of wordsdriven by the oblivion, suppression or inaccessibility of theWord, ofan absolute name of the true language.'4In the spring of 1797 Friedrich Holderlin wrote a poem called"Leisure" (Die Mujfe). Many senses of the poem coincide with theEnglish word "rest:"immobility, leisure, and also remainder. Thepoem starts with a description of the "carelessness" and calm oneexperiences in a pause. The figures of grass stemming from and outof their root(aus derWurzel), ike a springor a source(Quelle), and ofthe openyet mute lips of the flowers, coupled with the reference to the"sweet play of life" (sii3en SpieledesLebens), eave no doubt as to thephilosophical ambitions of the text. In the tradition of Kant's andespecially Schiller's theories of free "play,"Holderlin's "leisure" is aspace of opening and freedom, a sourceof human creative activityandthe manifestation of the original "roots" of humanity (from which it,however, departs) in language.For the rest of the poem the hero turns to wandering-anoscillation between the plain and the mountains, between the settledand circumscribed "rest"of the country-place and the nomadic life ofthe mountaineers. This oscillation is a ceaseless motion in-between,and it seems therefore to give a hope of "settling" within itself, toattain this "Bacchic delight," in which, according to a famous phraseof Hegel, all members would dissolve and form a "transparent andsimple rest."'5 Holderlin's hero becomes an eagle, becomes "freefrom the ground" (ledig desBodens),and his life, "asnomads," keepschanging its place "in the All of Nature" (im All derNatur). Of Nature,or of language, since the letters of the word "Adler' (eagle) alsowander-"All der."

The pause of leisure makes one dream of a pure mediation or apure passage. In his fragment Das Werden m Vergehen,Holderlinspeaks of a paradoxical state "between being and not being," of acontradictory passage (Ubergang),which also has a meaning of ascentand of excess.'6 This passage helps to "clarify and reunite the gap(Liicke)and the contrast, which stand between the new and the past,"and, from the point of view of the new that has already appeared, isnecessary retrospectively. Holderlin further speaks, significantly, ofthe "matter of passage" (Materie des Uberganges). It is the samelandscape that we encounter in the poem Die Mujfe.Leisure lets thepoet reflect upon historical change that has already taken place, tostage a retrospective passage between the past and the new as well asto access the threshold of birth into meaning and being. Hence the

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materialization of language, the return to the point of a yet unbornmeaning. We will encounter the same will to maintain the pause andto stand on the threshold of meaning in the poetics of Mandelshtam.The aspiration of leisure is to stand inside absolute mobility. Thetransitory pause has to leave one as he or she is, for a new start. Butprecisely this task of "keeping" to oneself leads to a catastrophe. Itturns out that leisure also wakes up the spirit of "unrest"(Unruhe)-the spirit of splitting that leaves behind itself ruins (the "brokencolumns" and, significantly, "temple gates" (Tempeltore),which arealso, as it appears, the gates of tmesis, he limits of fragmentation).This spirit operates not just on stone and wood but on the verylinguistic matter of the poem. It "deroots" (entwurzelt)not only treesbut words: "Der die Wdlder entwurzelt," "Der in den Bergen sich regt. "Where does this spirit of unrest come from? It comes from the veryeffort of putting oneself at leisure. The leisure is not yet fully leisure:the fact that it "rests," n the sense of remainder,means that it does notfully "rest," n the sense of vacation.Further, the violent operation ofinterrupting work and putting oneself at rest, itself violates the restand has to be put at rest: hence, the "leisure"threatens with a viciouscircle of self-hindrance, of purification from the remnants of the past.The project and the fiction of accessing the "empty" ime wake up thefury of destruction.The same situation may be described in yet another way.Left aloneto himself, in the free space of leisure, man probes he limits of hisfreedom, he checks whether he is fully and truly free. Hence theviolence and destruction that so often follows human play.The task isto make sure that the time of despotic labor is over, to accomplish thepassage from the past in order to access, "under" the layers ofhistorical residue, the pure essence of being and time, one's ownessence. The probing of freedom therefore coincides with its founda-tion: the goal of the game is to find and to found one's own, toappropriate the world and to make it one's home. Hence the politicaladdress of H6lderlin's poem that I discuss below.The logic of the "spirit of unrest" also works on the level oflanguage, which, in order to be poetic, has to be playfully put insuspense, to be exposed as a "pure medium." Thus, the words, withtheir "settled,"referential meanings, have to be destroyed to denudethe "sheer" materiality of syllables and letters. Words still "work:"syllables and letters "rest:" heir atomistic existence promises a purereading of the essence of language and the capture of the voice ofsilence. This also means the ultimate separation of the ideal meaning

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from the material signs, and vice versa. By fragmentation, one attainsnot only the pure signs but, from another point of view, the pureimmaterial meaning. The "unrest"of reading-the leisure activity parexcellence-splits the words in trying to dismiss them as "void," o throwthem awayas leftovers, like a rocket throws away its steps.H6lderlin seems to find consolation, for a moment, in the fact thatthe spirit of unrest does not precisely destroy any syllable (keineSylbeverwischt) rom the "table of laws"-it simply shatters and scattersthem. "Sylbe" n this poem full of "wood"metaphors also refers to theLatin "silva"-a word for "wood"that is etymologically connected tothe Greek "hyle, matter. A human being, or reader, wants to live "in"the permanence of matter, with its alphabet and with its recombina-tion. But the syllables are themselves divisible into letters, and,logically speaking, any self-identical element will be divisible in itsturn. The search for the void promises to be an infinite movement,with its never fulfilled attempt to stop-and liberate-everything.Therefore it has to be suddenly interrupted.This interruption of apause affirms it by its very failure-because its sudden rupture inmedias resmanifests the potential infinity of leisure. Both the excessand lack, in their indication of this potential infinity, open a space ofleisure (or of a playful festival) within the textual work.

b. The letterof law. Holderlin writes:"Life,life of the world, you lie asa sacred W / Say I then, and it takes an axe to even you up" (Leben,Leben der Welt,du liegst wie ein heiliger W/Sprechich dann, und es nehme einAxt, wer will, dich zu ebnen). A capital letter emerges out of a syllable:thus a "title,"a "name,"an identifying element of language. In the nextline this-or rather the complementary-operation seems to be re-jected. "Evening up" a word means "decapitating"it-taking "ebnen"out of "Leben."However, the letter W stands as a ruin of decapitation:it is left capital and thus negates the possibility of a total "materializa-tion." Except for its status as a ruin, W marks an interruption of a line,a sudden(unexpected) caesura. The frenzy of circulation and arresthalts in a moment of silence and then goes on ("SayI then," Sprechich dann).The very effort of finding a meaningless, void sign fails: the letter Wis not at all meaningless. It is identical in writing with the Greek letteromega-a symbol of end. In H6lderlin's poem, the end is only possibleas an interruption and is therefore self-contradictory. The very factthat the letter still meanssomething, even though it means the end,prevents the poem from being accomplished. Further, the poem ends

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with a comma so that the text itself remains (like the leisure) afragment, a ruin, a rest.The real "rest" urns out to be possible only as a fleeting moment ofinterruption. It is a rest from rest, a leisure from leisure, an interrup-tion from interruption. And it is only in and at this moment that onecan truly"dwell"(the poem ends with a reiteration-"Happily I live inyou"-"Gliicklich wohn' ich in dir"). It is also at this moment thatlanguage arrives to naming:the naming of the language and of thereader. W may possibly (although not necessarily) be read as a ruin ofthe word Wort-"word." ts "void"may only be established by filling itin with the syllable"[O]rt,"like a bowl that may be proven void only infilling and pouring.'7 It therefore exposes the reader to the movementof his or her own voice, which goes on speaking when the text stops.A syllable does,after all, disappear-but it returns from another side,that of the inertia of reading. In the empty pause that is guarded bythe "sacred" W-an aforementioned "temple door"-we "hear" avoice that speaks in silence, the voice of silence. This is what, in thevery beginning of the poem, is promised by the openand mutelipsofthe flower.

Word (Wort)-language, poetry-is not an empty place but anemptiness froma place [ Ort].This emptiness may also be read into thepoem itself. One could make yet another hypothesis concerning theword that starts with W:"Wohnort," living place mentioned earlier inthe poem as the "living place of nomads." If decapitated, this wordbecomes its contrary, an "[O]hnort," a "placelessness." The placekept empty by the letter W is thus suspended between place and thelack of place. The poem approaches the absolute transcendence ofthe inaccessible, inhospitable void. The letter W is a "temple door" inthat it delimits and guards the sanctuaryof silence. This placeless voidis the true and inaccessible "leisure" around which the poem ofHolderlin does its work.A "place,"a silence, and a temporal "break"are no more than therecognized failures of the human activitythat is ultimately directed atsuch failures and the momentous capture of capital.The moment offailure is something that sustains the repeated efforts to keepcontinuity and, like any rest, charges with energy. This is also themeaning of ellipsis in Kleist: "Puppets, like elves, need the groundonly so that they can touch it lightly and renew the momentum oftheir limbs through this momentary delay."'8In the letter W, thereader touches on the limit of divisibility as something exterior tohim or herself. The moment of interruption is a moment of

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transcendence and delimitation. The letter stands as a solitarytemporal ate,which is impenetrable but which, in its very impenetra-bility, invites a human being for a singular self-recognition. Such isthe gate of the law in Kafka'sparable Before heLaw, a parable told toa hero whose name does not go further than the letter K.The interruption is sudden; the exact position of a limit isindeterminate. It therefore manifests the law, understood, in theKantian sense, as an indeterminate limit, a principle of finitude andlimitation. The letter remaining from an unspecified word is the"firm letter" (derfeste Buchstab),that Holderlin evokes, several yearslater, in the end of his hymn Patmos.The letter that stands firmly onits own, without a determinate meaning, is the letterof law, the symbolof prohibition imposed on the immediate access to the purity ofbeing. If leisure is a condition of probing the foundation, then, inarriving to the limit of the law, it both fails and succeeds. It fails fortwo reasons: first, because the limit is imposed on it and notappropriated, and, second, because it cannot even access the absolutelimit, as only a sign of this limit is available. The subject of leisuresucceeds, however, in proving the limitation of freedom in his or herown free experience. The law expressed by the "firm letter" is, instrict accordance with Kant's teaching, both autonomous and hetero-nymous. It is a law of autonomy which is imposed rom outside.At the same time the letter guards the empty place where thereshould have been a word. The law is therefore expressed, notjust ina firm letter, but in what Holderlin calls "a sign = 0" in his shortfragment The Meaning of the Tragedies (1799). The context of theformula shows that Holderlin interpreted this "zero" symbol as amaterial but meaningless sign, again, in the direction of the "festeBuchstab."However, the very formulation is more radical in that italludes to the possibility that the symbol is simply absent in its place,and that the finitude is manifested-and staged-in an ellipsis.'9Thesame thought appears in the Remarks o Oedipus: he "caesura" thatinterrupts the tragedy is treatedby Holderlin as an "empty transport,"a metaphor without meaning, or, one could add, a mute language.This moment of interruption opens, according to H6lderlin, amediated, negative access to the "pure word"-a word without aword, the voice of the language itself. The silence becomes produc-tive, "poetic" in that it gives word to the word itself. In the hymn"Friedensfeier,"The festival of peace" (in many ways parallel to DieMufie) Holderlin says: "It is the law of destiny that everyone experi-ences on oneself, that, when the silence turns, it is also the language"

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(Schicksalgesez ist, daJ3Alle sich erfahren / DaJt, wenn die Stille kehrt, aucheine Sprache sei).Thus the letter and the ellipsis of the interrupted word produce adouble effect. On the one hand, the letter blocks access to the word,forbids it to continue. On the other hand, it allows touchingupon theindependence of language and time, hearing its "voice."The inter-ruption and inertia create an effect of a "speaking silence." Holderlinhimself formulates this double function of poetry with precision. Thetask of contemporary poets, he says in the "Remarks to Antigona," is,"den Geist der Zeit festhalten und fihlen"--first, to establish and toimpose the spirit of time-second, to feel it.

c. The revolutionary leisure. Holderlin's poem also carries an obviouspolitical message. It speaks of the French revolution, which had lastedalmost eight years by the time of the poem's composition. Driven bythe almost idyllic dream of peace and freedom20 (eventually, a dreamvery much shared by H6lderlin himself) the revolution had led to aparoxysm of violence and terror.21As was later shown by Hegel in hisPhenomenologyof Spirit, the French revolutionaries aimed not atbecoming tyrants but at remaining inessential and intermediaryservants of the universal itself, of pure negativity (Hegel, ThePhenom-enologyof Mind, VI B III, 605-607). Their task consisted, further, inleading the people, like Moses, from the corrupted state of the AncienRegime, oward a new realm of reason and nature. At the time, theFrench people were still contaminated by the virus of absolutism,from which the Jacobins tried to cure them not only by means ofterror but also by means of systematic public education (LInstructionPublique).They insisted, in their struggle against the Girondists, thatthe revolution-this transitory period-was not yet over and that itwas too early to say that the new, republican regime had been safelyestablished. The problem of the French revolutionaries was thereforethat of the passage. On the one hand, they were haunted by the past;on the other hand, once inside the transitoryperiod, they extended itfurther and further, unable to exit from the potentially infinitemovement of revolution.The project of temporal mediation is akin to the project of politicalstructure since in the suspended, intermediate state there can be nohierarchy. Equality,a crucial member of the revolutionary triad, is notsimply an ideological dogma but an inference from the revolutionarycondition itself, when everything and everyone has to start over froma zero point. In the transitory period, power is suspended and does

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not legitimately belong to anyone. The Jacobins fiercely attacked thearistocratic elements, but they were even more suspicious of thepopularity of their own members: as intermediaries and representa-tives of the people, the revolutionaries had no right to personalpower. The power could not have a proper name."Itwould take an axe to even you up," Holderlin saysin addressingthe "life of the world." The axe and the decapitalized "even"life-Leben-point at the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 in the struggle forthe pure passage and countable equality(evenness).H6lderlin showsthat the search for pure mediation, for "leisure" from history, is aprocess of self-perpetuating fragmentation and "de-capitation." Themediating continuity is haunted by its starting point. As Saint-Justsaysin his speech concerning the trial of the king (1792): "One will saythat the revolution is over, that there is no more reason to be afraid ofthe tyrant,but, Citizens, tyrannyis like a reed that the wind bendsand that rises again. Revolution starts when the tyrantends." Andabove: "His politics is constantly to staymotionless, orto march with all the parties."22The same problem of the impossibil-ity to escape the beginning goes for words as "mediators" of meaning.A mediating word has its own prior (capital letter) and posterior andtherefore does not really mediate. The same is true for the text thathas to begin and end, as a beginning belongs not only to the text butfirst of all to the context that precedes it.According to Holderlin the project of the pure evenness of matter,and of complete political equality and suspension, is doomed tofailure, even if one takes an axe to split the wood or to cut heads ascabbages. Due to the potential infinity and vicious circularity of thisproject, it has to be suddenly interrupted in the middle. The letter Wstands as a limitof fragmentation and as a remainder f unevenness.This capitalletter testifies to the failure of the project of erasing theuniqueness of the proper name and of the referential (nominative)aspect of language in general. The letter W, moreover, is an icon of acrown.As such, it emblematizes the monarchical element that standson its own after the separation of the king's head from his body. Thebeheading of the king could not help but affirm and fix theabsolutism in its distilled form. The Jacobins killed the king butimmortalized the royal place of power by his public execution. Theexecution of the king left the French Revolution in history as a virusand trace of the royal,absolutistnstitution of power as the triumphantfailure of voiding the signifier.Michelet, and more recently Lefort, saw the essence of the French

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revolution in the void that it left after itself as a political heritage.23According to Lefort, the "empty place of power" inaugurated by theRevolution consists in the disjunction between symbolical and mate-rial power. A post-revolutionary ruler always improperly occupies hisposition. This coincides with what Marx, in the "18th Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte," observed about the comic, parodic character ofrevolutions. Similarly, in Holderlin's poem, the letter of law guardsthe void of the proper name of language and being; the void which isnot even an empty place (one cannot occupy it), but an absence andpromise of place [Ort].

We can now see that this poem of Holderlin, indeed his entirecorpus,hold an important place in the development of the modernphilosophy of history. Building on Kant and Schiller, Holderlinanticipates the notion of labor as it will appear in Hegel andespecially in Marx. Holderlin notices that "free time" is, paradoxi-cally,a source or a spring (Quelle)of poetic labor. Marxwill later buildon the same intuition and show that the exploitation of labor bycapital builds on the engagement of "surplus-labor," performedduring what seems to the worker as his or her "free time." Meanwhile,according to Marx, free, "disposable" time is the positive ideal ofhuman development and the chance of freedom. This poem ofHolderlin, written in explicit reference to the French revolution,illuminates, in my view, the implicit links between Marx'spolitical andeconomic doctrines. The paradigm of the free, non-alienated labor isthe revolution, where people suddenly enter the surplus-time ofhistory, where they have to find and found themselves. As capitalprogresses through surplus-labor, so history progresses with revolu-tions. To abolish necessary labor and leave only the surplus is, ofcourse, just as impossible as it is to abolish history in favor of aperpetual revolution. However, the border etween the necessary andsupplementary is indeterminate and fluid. In this way labor andleisure are one, and the task of the critique consists in exposing thefree nature of labor and the destructive, infinite labor inherent in themoments of leisure and festivity.

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3. Holding a Pause0. MatAenbummamMbl Hanpa1 oeHHooMontnaHbsHe6bHOCUM,Hecoeepumencm6oyu o6uaHo,naKcoHe4H 6 3aMetuamenbcm6eyic o6bs6unca ,meu,,H paaocmuoezonpusemcm6o6anu:HIpocuM "A maK u 3Han,Kmo3aecb npucymcmos6an He3puMoKouiMapHbliueno6eK iumaem"YnuuloM."3HuaeHbe cyema, u cno60 - monbKo ulyM,KozeaioHemuKa cnycamauKaepatfuMa.O aoMe uwepo6 azapa nenaapcfa.Be3yMHbluioUy nun, oHnyncr u yMOmK.A utennoynu4e. C6ucmenoceHHuuienK...H zopno epeem wuenK meKoiyuMeXouapaja...24We do not stand the tension of silence,The imperfection of souls is unfortunate.But, in the confusion, there appears a reciter,And one greeted him joyfully: "Welcome."I knew who had been invisibly present hereThe nightmarish man recites "Ulalume."The meaning is vain, and the word is only a noiseWhen the poetics is a maid of a seraph.The harp of Edgar sang the house of Usher.A madman was drinking water, then regained consciousness andhushed up.I was walking down the street. The silk of the Fall was whistling,And the silk of a tickling scarf is warming my throat.25In 1913, between two Russian revolutions, Osip Mandelshtamwrote a poem that starts with the line: "We do not bear the tension ofsilence" (My napriazhennogo molchania ne vynosim). The poem tellshow, in the "confusion" (v zameshatel'stve) brought by silence, some-one gets up and recites Edgar Allan Poe's "Ulalume"-the poem

performing and thematizing the "empty" mumble of alliteration asemptied by loss, exalting the language as a "tomb" of meaning.Mandelshtam's poem ironically repeats the widespread argumentdefending the euphonic "empty" language ("meaning is vanity, and aword is only a noise when phonetics is the servant of a seraphym").After the evening is over the poet comes out into the street and refersto himself in a concluding line performing the alliterative music adabsurdum (I gorlo greet shelk stchekochustchego sharfa). The poem is

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usually read26as a restatement of the "acmeist"approach to words asfull of meaning and a rejection of the symbolist tendency toward theempty, euphonic language. This interpretation is verisimilar but itleaves doubts: if Mandelshtam simply wanted to express this banal,conservative position, there was no need whatsoever to write a poem.What does it mean that silence is "unbearable"?The very attemptto "bear,"to carry silence-across a silent pause-is contradictory.How can one carry or keep the void if it is by definition somethingnon-existent? The faithful extension of the void is already not voidbut becomes full with the void. Silence betrays itself in becoming the"speaking" silence. It acquires meaning. The silence is thereforepossible only as an "imperceptible" fleeting moment.While the "unbearability"of silence seems to be an effect of time, itis in fact a result of the attempt o bear, to stop and to hold on to theinterruption. Meanwhile, the motion goes on in the very act ofstoppage. One promptly perceives that the silence, instead of beingsilent, eloquently exposes the attempt to maintain silence, or, mostprobably, not to say something that is on everyone's mind. Themeaning of silence is the resistance to speech. A word that is omittedor suppressed starts to mean more than it normally does. The ellipsis,as we saw in Holderlin, is a figure to address the unspeakable itself,the very substance of language. The "silence" is a symptom of thecrisis and blockage of a suspended transition (Mandelshtam writes hispoem between two Russian revolutions, at the eve of the first WorldWar,so tension was in the air).Silence need not be literally mute: the very language can be "silent"or meaningless. We saw with Holderlin that the emancipation oflanguage from meaning is akin to the very essence of poetic languageas leisure. Similarly, the "euphonic" language of Russian symbolistsand of Edgar Allan Poe attempts, notjust to fill in the awkwardpause,but to incorporate and express the silence and the void, to hear theessence of language in a pure chatter. The poetry is understood as aluxury of leisure, as a way to hinder the void of a break or a rest.What does the reciting of Poe's "Ulalume" stand for? Of course,Poe is famously a master of euphony. But "Ulalume" is, above all, aballad about a name. "Ulalume" is a pure name, a name of a name(thus not without theological connotations), and this name is a tombof what it names. The purely phonetic, melocentric language is amourning of lost meaning, a means of holding to the loss and ofsupporting it. But can this work of mourning possiblybe accomplished?Mandelshtam writes hasty ines that invite us to read them as long,

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monotonous, accentless periods, interrupted finally by a stress andexhalation: "Iv Izalmel'shaltel'lstvel uzh oblial'villsial 'chtets." Thereare six 4- and 5-syllable words in the poem (written, formally, withiambic meter-of which hardly anything has remained). Language isliterally "fussy" n trying to maintain itself vain (in Russian "fuss"and"vanity" re designated by the same word (sueta),which Mandelshtamuses) and to cross the potential infinity of the void, the abyss ofsilence. In this fuss, each verse stops, fails, and presents its break asproof of its own futility, superfluity and playfulness. Then, out of thisnew pause, another verse starts and breaks. However, as we will see,the meaning comes back as the meaning of this very self-dismissal oflanguage. Even the words "znachenie-sueta" ("meaning is vanity(fuss)") are ambiguous: is meaning vain, or is the vanity (fuss)precisely themeaning?Fuss and acceleration are a way to trick time, to jump over thedangerous intermediate pause as quickly as possible. The phonetic,"empty" anguage extends the "silence" in a hope to carry it over tosomething new and unpredictable. The subject chatters, suspends thelanguage, in expectinghe encounter with what is exterior to him. Theencounter is, as we will see, the encounter with one's own limit: thefailure of holding the silence.The key to Mandelshtam's position in the poem lies in twomonstrously long words: "confusion" (zameshatelstvo) nd "tickling"(stchekochustchego).he word "zameshatelstvo"s a substantive derivedfrom the verb "zameshatsia." he active form of this verb means "tomix, to knead a dough." The meaning grows, swells, is inflatedwithand out of emptiness: it forms nothingness (cf. the late Mandelshtam'spoem "I won't be able to hide from the great nonsense" (Net, nespriatatsiamnieot velikoymury),where the metaphor of yeast dough ismade explicit in the discussion of, virtually, the same theme ofmeaningful nothingness). There is a famous fable where a frog thatfalls into ajar of cream tries in vain to get out and in the end mixes(zameshivaet)he cream into butter.This is precisely what Mandelshtammeans to do with his poem, where a name is born out of the fuss ofsilence.

Silence does not stop the poetic labor but constitutes its dynamicprinciple. The "unbearable"silence opens the possibility and neces-sity of the potentially infinite activity that tries to hold the pause andto cross it at the same time. In this sense, silence, as the surplus andsupplement of language, is a point of emergence and growth of apoem, in the same way as, for Marx, leisure time is the secret source

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of labor. This principle is developed consistently in Mandelshtam'spoetics. The silence is understood both as a loss (oblivion) of theword (in his poem "Iforgot the word that I wanted to say . .") and thestate before the word's "birth" (in the poem Silentium). It is anintermediate, ambiguous state where the word is both speech andsilence, "both music and word" (Silentium). The poetic language ofMandelshtam oscillates between these directions: from word to musicand back from music to word, thus balancing on the threshold ofspeech. The poetic labor emerges out of silence. Hence the seemingparadoxes which abound in Mandelshtam's poetry and which showhis proximity to H6lderlin: "the incessant (literally, "never silent")tune of silence" (nemolchnyi apev tishiny) n the very first poem of thebook "Kamen"OM, 23) and the comparison of silence to a spinning-wheel of Helena and Penelope as the symbol of the poetic labor (thepoem Zolotistogomeda struia iz butylki tekla, OM, 71). The silence spins,kneads the language into poetry. Its work starts when everything hasalready been said and when there rests,on the one hand, somethingunspeakable and, on the other hand, idle words without a clearmeaning.

In the process of dismissing and running away from itself, theempty language produces (kneads), in spite of itself, a meaning.Theicon of this process is the penultimate word of the poem, "tickling"(stchekochustchego).his word has five syllables, only one of which isstressed, but even this stress tends to be "swallowed:""stchel(')kolchulstchelgo (_)'sharlfa." The meaning of the word is embodied in itsphonetic orm: the haste and fuss of crossing self-dismissal inevitablycomes to a stop: the stress of the following word-"sha"-interruptssomething that would otherwise go on and on. Significantly, thissyllable under stress, "sha," s a Russian interjection ordering "shutup," or "hush" (it is also the syllable under stress in the other"semantic"word zaIme 'sha telstvo,confusion/kneading). In questionis, therefore, "the tickling "sha,"he tickle of the "shut up." The verysuspension and unbearability of language, the rise and fall of span,strain and stress, all have their name in this "tickle." The meaning ofa word, as an infinitely quick electric impulse, is perceived as runningthrough the accumulated maintenance of inessentiality, from thepoint of its stop backwards,as a compensation for the hinderedmovement, for the hindered breath. With this meaning, the verydismissal, the very "sha"hat language already is, is itself dismissed. It

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is by the order to stop, by the order not to read, by the order to keepsilent, that language itself is constituted."Sha" is a hidden name of the poem which could stand as its titleinstead of the three asterisks. It is also a name of language itself as itdesignates the self-negating, self-refuting nature of any name, whichalways names "something else" and fails to express what it names.A word means "against its own will," so to speak; it is a loss, but aloss of itself. The word "tickle" omits and "produces" the operationthat the reader performs in order to read it. It thus leads the readertoward a strange deictic self-recognition. Recognition of the word isconstituted as the recognition of myself reading this word. When I say"it tickles," this already implies the (delayed) order to stop the tickle:the syllable "sha" is not simply an accidental interruption, rather, itembodies and coincides with the movement of resistance that wasgrowing in me in the course of the long hindering of breath. Therecognition of this uncanny mirror-effect is the "birth of meaningfrom the spirit of music." Meaning may only "belong" to a fragmentof a word because the latter is nothing but the crowning of its ownself-dismissal, which necessarily remains incomplete.

The meaning penetrates into the real as the slow imperceptibledrift of the world that the "inessential" word has been trying to stopappears through the interruption of the word itself as a hidden,suppressed desire of a reader. A sudden shift occurs, which is againimperceptible, now because of its quickness, not its slowness. Thissudden "epiphany" is nothing but a simple change of aspect, a Gestaltswitch. What was a hidden effort of the subject now appears to him asthe voice of the language itself as the force of unbearable time. In thissense poetry is the same thing as labor (Arbeit)-the negative humanactivity, in which, according to Hegel and Marx, a human beingobtains an access to the independence of matter,in experiencing theresistance of the thing to his or her work.27 Through this experience,the person further comes to the recognition of him or herself, and tothe independent self-consciousness of one's own. That this Hegelianview is not alien to Mandelshtam, may be seen from his article "Themorning of the acmeism" (1912-1913):

"Acmeism is for those who, possessed with the spirit of construction, doesnot faint-heartedly refuse from one's weight butjoyfully accepts it, in orderto wake up and use the forces that are hidden in it. Which madmanwould agree to build if he does not believe in the reality of the material

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whose resistance he has to overcome? Tiutchev's stone that "hasfallenfrom a mountain in the valley,fallen by itself or thrown down by a thinkinghand," is the word. The voice of matter sounds in this unexpected fall as anarticulate speech." (OM, 473, Translation mine-A.M.)One could only add that faith in the reality of the material is notjust the necessary condition of the poetic labor but also a hypothesisthat is being checked in its course. It is the building formation ofmatter by the subject that wakes its resistance and makes it "speak" oritself. Poetic labor is a proof of the reality in which it first onlybelieves. "Toprove, to prove incessantly,"writes Mandelshtam in the

same article," to accept anything for granted is below the dignity of anartist" (OM, 475).Language, qua aggregate of letters or sounds, does not have any

meaning of its own. It even lacks the meaning of meaninglessness. Inthe practice of speech and writing, the meaning of language becomesthe resistance to language that is appropriated by the language itself.Neither "empty" nor "full" language is possible on its own. Thespeech is full with its own emptiness only in the dynamics of infinitelabor. This, I think, is the sobriety of Mandelshtam:28somethingentirely different from the "sobriety" of those commentators forwhom the meaningfulness of language is a matter of course, as well asthe possibility of a "meaningless" language.The poetic effect produced by the formation of sense by theadjacent parts of two successive words was called, by Mandelshtam'scontemporary A. Kruchionykh, "sdvig":29 shift or displacement. AsMandelshtam later wrote in one of his most famous poems, The slateode (1923): "Here writes the fear, here writes the shift, with a milkylead stick," (Zdes' pishet strakh, zdes' pishet sdvig svinzovoypalochkoymolochnoy)OM, 103). The meaning is produced by language, but it isunlocateable in it, it swaysin-betweenhe words. It is then clear how themultiplication and density of words, seen retrospectively, contributeto (or knead) the formation of meaning as a net and a knot of theircrossing over each other. Words enter a liaison,an illegitimate affair. Itis also clear that meaning may only exist in a fuss of unstableequilibrium, a quasi-geological "rift."The superposition, rupture andcrossing over of fragments, as one we also witnessed in Holderlin'spoem, is a condition of the production of meaning. As Hegel says inthe Preface to ThePhenomenologyf Mind:

[The] conflict between the general form of a proposition and the unity ofthe Notion which destroys it is similar to the conflict that occurs in rhythm

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between meter and accent. Rhythm results from the floating middle(schwebenden Mitte) and the unification of the two. The form of theproposition is the appearance of the determinate, or the accent thatdistinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Sub-stance, and that the Subject itself falls into the universal, this is the unity inwhich the accent dies away. (Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 38)

4. ConclusionI have tried to show that the poetics of both Holderlin andMandelshtam bear some significant common features. Both poetsreflect on the "leisurely," superfluous character of poetry-the workof an idle subject with idle language. For both, this leisure takes thecharacter of passage, of an interval to cross and to maintain. Poetryaspires to stay in the intermediary space where the music, or letter,has not yet fully become the word, and the word has not yet fullybecome a sheer sound, or letter. This passage is, at the same time, astate of excess and overflow, when something continues to moveduring rest, and continues to speak during silence. The pause istherefore, on the one hand, insupportable in its purity, but, on theother hand, implies a potentially infinite work of circulation.In both poets, the task of holding and crossing the pause bringsinto play the materialization of language, the emancipation of thepoetic matter from the structures of meaning. Once again, the goal isnot to abolish language altogether but to return to the pre-formalmurmur from which it is born. The matter boils and expects themeaning to come. Strangely, however, in both poems, meaning in thehigh sense of proper naming comes not from outside, as an externalforming of matter, but as a negative result of the work of leisure, in aninterruption of the potentially infinite fuss of matter. The name thatemerges out of the tension of silence names nothing but this tensionitself. Hence, in both poems, the logic of poetic thinking is akin to thephilosophy of German idealism, with its concept of the fulfillingnegation (Aufhebung) and of the "labor of the negative." The poemsstage and reconstruct, step by step, the logic of history and thetemporality of poetry itself.EuropeanUniversity t Saint-Petersburg

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NOTES1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. OeuvresCompletes..:Biblioteque de la Pleiade, Gallimard,5,122. English translation:Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politics and theArts: Letter o M.D'Alembert n the Theatre.Trans. A. Bloom. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press,1968.2 Immanuel Kant. Critique fPureReason.Trans. P.Guyerand A. Wood. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997.3 Immanuel Kant. Critiqueof Judgment.Trans. W. Pluhar. Indianapolis: HackettPublishing Company, 1987.4 Friedrich Schiller. On the AestheticEducation of Man. Trans. E. Wilkinson, L.Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. For the original, see Lettres ur l'education

esthitiquede l'homme a bilingual edition). P.:Aubier, 1992, Letter 14, 206.5 Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel. Lectureson thePhilosophy f History.Trans.J. Sibree.NY:Dover, 1956, 26.6 Karl Marx. "Economic manuscript of 1861-1863." K.Marx,and F.Engels. CollectedWorksNY:International Publishers, 1975-), 30, 190-192; 32, 390-39. Karl Marx."Grundrisse."Marx, and Engels. CollectedWorks, 9, 94-99. In these pages of the"Grundrisse,"Marx speaks explicitly of "leisure time," "Mussezeit."7 Karl Marx, "The Capital,"vol. 1, Part III, chapter X. Marx, and Engels. CollectedWorks, ol. 35, pp.239-306.8 George Bataille. TheAccursedShare.Trans. R. Hurley. NY:Zone Books, 1988.9 Friedrich Holderlin. "Anmerkungen zum Oedipus." Werke,Briefe,Dokumente.Miunchen:Winkler, 1990, 618-624, cit. 624.10 Friedrich Holderlin. "Anmerkungen zur Antigonae." ibid., 670-676, cit. 672.Translation and emphasis mine.

11 This analysis of the poem "DieMufJe" rew out of the seminar that professorThomas Schestag dedicated to it in November, 1997, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I'malso indebted to Manuela Achilles, Ulrich Plass and Shai Ginsburg for theircontributions to the discussion.12 Friedrich Holderlin. SdmtlicheWerke. FrankfurterAusgabe." D.E.Sattler, ed. Fr.am M.: Roter Stern, 1977-, 3, 83-95. Sattler dates the poem, hypothetically, withthe summer of 1796. F.BeiBner,an earlier editor, dates it with 1797, and inserts"Wald,"wood, instead of the fragmentary W. (SdmtlicheWerke.GroBe StuttgarterAusgabe. W.Kohlhammer: 1954, 1, 236. While the version of the poem given bySattler is clearly more authentic than BeiBner's (he presents the photocopy of themanuscript), I would prefer the dating of the StuttgarterAusgabe.A.Beck, theeditor of Holderlin's letters in the StuttgarterAusgabe,ustly notes the proximity ofthe poem "DieMufle'with a letter that Holderlin wrote to his sister in the end ofApril, 1797 (VI, 2, 836). There Holderlin speaks, first, of his visit of the mountainTaunus and of the panorama (including "Frankfurtwith lovely villages and forestslying around it") and, second, of his impressions from S.Gontard's summer housein Adlersflicht,near Frankfurt, mentioning chestnutsgrowing around the house.The candle-like reddish flowers named in the poem are unmistakably chestnuts,which precisely blossom in April-May,not in Summer, as Sattler suggests to date it.Finally, this letter to the sister speaks of a "special situation," where the Frenchrevolutionary troops standing at the door of the city did not immediately fulfillthe conditions of a peace reaty,so that the "celebration of peace" by the people ofFrankfurt was for a while mixed with anxiety. This latter anxiety of peace may beone of the connotations of H6lderlin's poem.

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13 Translation mine.14 Cf. Walter Benjamin. "The Task of the Translator."Illuminations. NY: Harcourt,Brace and World, 1968.15 Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel. Phanomenologiees GeistesFr. am M.:Suhrkamp, 1992.Vorrede, 6. English translation: The Phenomenology f Mind. Trans. A.V. Miller.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.16 MartinHeidegger, in his reading of Holderlin's poem "Andenken,"Gesamtausgabe.Fr. am M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982, vol. 52) justly notes the importance of themotive of festivity in Holderlin's poetry. He also notes that the time of festivityisassociated with a state of transition-Ubergang. This remark is even morepertinent, since Ubergangmeans both a passage in between and a passage oversomething, a surpassing and excess. Thus, in our poem the leisure time is both anintermediary pause and an after-time or an over-time-a posthumous, superflu-ous state. The attempt to hold an intermediary pause implies an excess andtherefore leads to a state of interminable and self-reinforcing tension. This linkbetween Ubergang nd Uberflufiwas noted already by Schiller in his Letterson theaesthetic ducation(Letter 27).I cannot, however, agree with the whole of Heidegger's reading, whichdownplays the negativeaspects of the leisure time and takes for granted theimmediate existence of the unique and unusual that manifests itself in the festivedays. I insist, on the other hand, on the essentially negativenature of festival as acessation or interruption of work. It is not by chance that Heidegger, inenumerating the instances where Holderlin mentions the festival, never mentionsthe prosaic and negative but the most explicit "leisure" of the 1797 poem.17 That the German word "Wort"ontains the "Ort,"place, is an old observation,which was already made by Angelus Silesius in his "CherubWanderer."18 Heinrich von Kleist. "Uber das Marionettentheater" (1811). Simtliche Werke.Berlin: Ullstein, 1997, 945-950.19 Compare also the translation by Holderlin of Oedipus hetyrant:"wofindetman/ diezeichenloseSpurder alten Schuld:" where does one find the signless trace of the oldguilt?," Werke.Briefe.Dokumente, 71.20 For the idyllic tendencies in the revolutionary ideology, see Mona Ozouf. Lafeterevolutionnaire.P.: Gallimard, 1976. It is not by chance that the festival becameone of the main form of the symbolic manifestation of the French revolution.21 For the attitude of Holderlin to the French revolution and his pro-Jacobin

political activism, see Pierre Bertaux, Holderlin und dieFranziisischeRevolution.Fr.am M.: Suhrkamp, 1969.22 Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. "SecondDiscours concernant le jugement de Louis XVI'(Second discourse concerning the judgment of Louis XVI). 27. 12 1792. Saint-Just, Oeuvres choisies (P.: Gallimard, 1968), 100, 94. Translation into Englishmine-A.M.23 Michelet famously says:"The Champs de Mars This is the only monument thatthe Revolution has left. And the Revolution has for her monument ... emptyspace.... Her monument is this sandy plain, flat as Arabia. A tumulus on eitherhand. Jules Michelet. Histoire de la RevolutionFrancaise.P: Gallimard, 1952.Prefacede1847, 1. Translation mine. Cf. Claude Lefort: ". .. of all regimes of which

we know, it is the only one to have represented power in such a wayas to show thatpower is an emptyplace and to have thereby maintained a gap between thesymbolic and the real." Claude Lefort. Democracy nd political theory.Polity Press,1988, 225.

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24 Ossip Mandelshtam. Stikhotvorenia. roza.Yu.Freidin, ed. M.: Ripol Klassik,2001(Further cited as OM), 43. The poem is written in 1913 and published in the firstbook of the poet, "Kamen," n the same year.The last line of the poem was added in a much later revision of the text byMandelshtam, in 1937. Until then, the last line of the poem read: ?Chtobgorlopoviazat' ya ne imeiusharfa?,"I do not have a scarf to tie around my throat." Theword "sharfa,""scarf,"which will play an important role in my reading, is presentin both versions.25 Translations of Mandelshtam here and below are mine.26 See the commentary of A. Metz in: Ossip Mandelstam. Polnoiesobranietikhotvoreniy.Akademicheskiy proekt: Spb, 1997, 532-533.27 See in particular, Hegel. ThePhenomenology f Mind. B IV a ("The independenceand dependence of self-consciousness;" "Domination and servitude").28 Like Holderlin, Mandelshtam saw "sobriety"as his poetic program. Thus, in oneof his poems, he says:"Stars,a sober conversation, Western wind from Neva/ Arebetter than the delirium of an inflamed head." While Mandelshtam's poeticsclearly differs from that of Holderlin, the affinities are also strong and may be dueto a convergence as well as to direct influence. We know from NadezhdaMandelshtam that Osip Mandestam knew Holderlin from his youth and becameparticularly interested in him and in other German poets of the early 19thcentury in his late period, in the thirties. See Nadezhda Mandelshtam. Vospominania.M.: Soglasie, 1999.29 See Alexei Kruchionykh. "Sdvigologia russkogo stikha." Kukishproshliakam.Gileia:M.-Tallinn, 1992[1921], 33-79. Kruchionykh distinguishes the complementary

effects of the "sdvig' (shift) and "slom" break, fragmentation). He calls "sdvig,"significantly, the "secret creative labor" of poetry ("tainaia tvorcheskaiaabota," .67).

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The Work of Leisure