Symbolic Death and the Eccentric Sphere: “Remarks” on Hölderlin’s Oedipus

Abstract

Insofar as the caesura of tragic temporality and the movement of “tragic transport’” are said to be shaped by a tendency toward the “eccentric sphere of the dead” in Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus”, the privileged position of this sphere within Hölderlin’s “Remarks” solicits further analysis of what this topos signifies within both Hölderlin’s poetological writings and his translation of Oedipus the King. How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” relate to Hölderlin’s formal descriptions of the caesura that lends tragic succession a certain equilibrium, and what is implied in the qualification of this region as an “eccentric sphere”? How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” register in the language of Sophocles’ tragedy? And conversely, what does the language of Oedipus the King indicate concerning the constitution and parameters of the “spheres” of the living and the dead? These are the questions that will be pursued in this essay, beginning with the broader resonance of the terms to which Hölderlin takes recourse in his “Remarks”, and proceeding to the ways in which the limits of life and death are articulated in Sophocles’ drama and Hölderlin’s translation. Those elaborations of the “eccentric sphere of the dead” will, in turn, allow for a reinterpretation of the more formal determinations of “tragic transport” that Hölderlin offers.

The first section of Friedrich Hölderlin’s tripartite “Remarks on Oedipus” (“Anmerkungen zum Ödipus”) ends with a characterization of the seer Tiresias as the one who, in both Oedipus the King and Antigone, “enters into the course of fate, as overseer over the power of nature that tragically transports man from his living sphere, from the middle point of his inner life, into another world and tears him into the eccentric sphere of the dead” (“Er tritt in den Gang des Schiksaals, als Aufseher über die Naturmacht, die tragisch, den Menschen seiner Lebenssphäre, dem Mittelpuncte seines innern Lebens in eine andere Welt entrükt und in die exzentrische Sphäre der Todten reißt”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 251).1 Indicating a shift in focus, if not a rupture, these concluding lines present Tiresias as a persona whose speech instantiates the caesura that Hölderlin had initially described in formal terms as that which structures tragic temporality, rendering its successive unfolding “more equilibrium than pure succession” (“mehr Gleichgewicht, als reine Aufeinanderfolge”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250). The passage thus not only marks the end of Hölderlin’s reflections on tragic temporality but also a transition to Sophocles’ drama that prepares for the discussion of selected sequences from Oedipus the King that Hölderlin will offer in the next section of his “Remarks”. Although the first part of Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” primarily concerns the temporal form of tragedy in general, the emphasis thus falls in the end upon Tiresias’ prophetic vision of the power that draws humans into the “eccentric sphere of the dead”. It is a visionary mode of speech and a specific topos that mark the final word on the caesura in the first division of Hölderlin’s “Remarks”, as well as a turning point in the organization of his text. What began as a matter of time is assigned a particular spatial orientation and verbal character, lending greater precision to Hölderlin’s characterization of the movement that he also designates as “tragic transport” (“tragische[n] Transport”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250).

Insofar as the caesura of tragic temporality and the movement of “tragic transport” are said to be shaped by a tendency toward the “eccentric sphere of the dead”, the privileged position of this sphere within Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” solicits further analysis of what this topos signifies within both Hölderlin’s poetological writings and his translation of Oedipus the King. How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” relate to Hölderlin’s formal descriptions of the caesura that lends tragic succession a certain equilibrium, and what is implied in the qualification of this region as an “eccentric sphere”? How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” register in the language of Sophocles’ tragedy? And conversely, what does the language of Oedipus the King indicate concerning the constitution and parameters of the “spheres” of the living and the dead? These are the questions that will be pursued in the following essay, beginning with the broader resonance of the terms to which Hölderlin takes recourse in his “Remarks”, and proceeding to the ways in which the limits of life and death are articulated in Sophocles’ drama and Hölderlin’s translation. Those elaborations of the “eccentric sphere of the dead” will, in turn, allow for a reinterpretation of the more formal determinations of “tragic transport” that Hölderlin offers.

1. Situating the “Eccentric Sphere”

Among the more conspicuous traits of Hölderlin’s formulation for the “eccentric sphere of the dead” are the ways in which it presents a variation upon terms that he had deployed in his earlier writings on tragedy from around the time that he was working on The Death of Empedocles. As Karin Dahlke has observed in one of the few studies of Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” that includes extensive commentary upon the “eccentric sphere of the dead”,2 his evocation of this sphere recalls his discussions of the “Aorgischen” or the “aorgic” tendency of nature that he had situated in a dynamic opposition to art and organic life in his poetological fragment on the “Basis of Empedocles” (“Grund zum Empedokles”) (Dahlke 2008, p. 457).3 As Violetta Waibel has observed, this term “seems to be a neologism that Hölderlin coined and that he opposed to the organic, but not in the sense of the inorganic”; instead, his usage of the “aorgic” suggests at once associations with the “wild, the coarse, the culturally unshaped”, as well as with the Greek word for “fury” (ὀργή), and it is this dimension of passion that also distinguishes the “aorgic” from suggesting merely disorganization (Waibel 2021, pp. 99–100). Similarly to the way in which Hölderlin speaks in his “Remarks” of “the power of nature” (“Naturmacht”) as that which tears the human from “the middle point of his inner life”, Hölderlin had introduced the “aorgic” in the “Basis of Empedocles” as that which draws the tragic individual to abandon his organized particularity to the same extent that he opposes the force of disorganization, thereby becoming more like what he opposes, and by virtue of this very opposition. This dynamic thus displaces the gravitational center of the individual from (organized) life to (aorgic) death:

In der Mitte liegt der Tod des Einzelnen, nemlich derjenige Moment, wo das organische seine Ichheit, sein besonderes Daseyn, das zum Extreme geworden war, das aorgische seine Allgemeinheit nicht wie zu Anfang in idealer Vermischung, sondern in realem höchstem Kampf ablegt, indem das besondere auf seinem Extrem gegen das Extrem des aorgischen sich thätig immer mehr verallgemeinern, immer von seinem Mittelpuncte sich reißen muß, das aorgische gegen das Extrem des besondern sich immer mehr concentriren und immer mehr einen Mittelpunct gewinnen und zum besondersten werden muß […].

(Hölderlin 1985, p. 871)

At the midpoint lies the death of the individual, namely the moment when the organizational dispenses with its egoity, its particularized existence, which went to the extreme; the aorgic dispenses with its universality, not in the ideal mixture, as it was at the commencement, but in its real supreme struggle; such dispensing occurs when the particular, having gone to its extreme, increasingly universalizes itself and becomes active against the extreme of the aorgic; the particular has to tear itself away from its midpoint more and more, while the aorgic, acting against the extreme of the particular, has to concentrate itself more and more; it achieves for itself with ever greater success a midpoint, thus becoming something superlatively particular […].

(Hölderlin 2008, p. 145; trans. modified)

The parallels between the two passages could thus be construed to suggest that the “power of nature” is simply another name for the aorgic force that brings humans to tear themselves away from a vital “midpoint” (“Mittelpunct”). Hence, Wolfgang Schadewaldt interprets Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” to address the “aorgic striving of the human towards unification, towards pairing with the divine power of nature” (“das […] aorgische Streben des Menschen nach Einswerden, Paarung mit der göttlichen Naturmacht”), which would accordingly seem to drive Oedipus as it had driven Hölderlin’s Empedocles (Schadewaldt 1966, p. 139). If this were the case, then Sophocles’ drama would primarily consist of a dramatic contest between aorgic and organic powers as they express themselves through the tragic individual who, like Empedocles, serves as their medium of presentation.

But there are also critical differences that disrupt this alignment. Death holds only a temporary place within the dynamic that Hölderlin traces in the “Basis of Empedocles”. If the “death of the individual” centers Empedocles’ drama, it is not implied that this center holds since the accent in Hölderlin’s “Basis of Empedocles” falls upon the opposition of organic and disorganizing forces, which not only produces death but also exceeds death’ occurrence. By contrast, Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” suggest that the “sphere of the dead” is among the constant topological coordinates that determine human destiny and inhuman nature.4 Even when, in his “Remarks on Antigone”, Hölderlin more closely approximates his rhetoric from the “Basis of Empedocles”, writing that nature “in her virtuosity tends towards the all-too-organic to the very degree that man approaches the aorgic” (“in ihrer Virtuosität in eben dem Grade ins Allzuorganische gehet, wie der Mensch sich dem Aorgischen nähert” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 415), he returns shortly thereafter to speaking of the “wild world of the dead” (“wilden Welt der Todten”), again conferring it a consistency that it does not seem to have in the “Basis for Empedocles” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 418).5 Yet if the assignation of the dead to a sphere or a world distinguishes death in Hölderlin’s “Remarks” from a transitory function of opposing forces, its persistent association with the aorgic also provokes the question as to how the dead could constitute a sphere or a world, especially if the “aorgic” should signify “the inconceivable, the insensible, the unbounded” (“d[as] Unbegreiflich[e], d[as] Unfühlbar[e], d[as] Unbegrenzt[e]”) or “the inconceivable, the unconscious, the involuntary” (“d[as] Unbegreiflich[e], d[as] Unbewußt[e], d[as] Unwillkürlich[e]”), as Hölderlin had insisted in the “Basis of Empedocles” (Hölderlin 2008, pp. 145, 151; trans. modified; Hölderlin 1985, pp. 871, 877). For “world” implies nothing if not organization, as Hölderlin underscores in the fragmentary essay titled by editors “The Fatherland in Decline” (“Das untergehende Vaterland”), where “world” designates a “particular reciprocal relation” (“besondere Wechselwirkung”) between “nature and humans” that has “become ideal”, forging a particular “nexus of things” (“Verbindung der Dinge”) that suppresses every other possible “kind of relation and matter” (“Beziehungsart u. Stoffart”). As a consequence, he continues, “in it, as in language, little or nothing subsisting as living” appears “on the one side”, while “all seems to lie on the other” (“so daß in ihm, so wie in der Sprache, von einer Seite weniger oder nichts lebendig Bestehendes von der anderen Seite alles zu liegen scheint”) (Hölderlin 2008, p. 153; trans. modified; Hölderlin 1979, p. 136). Here, “world” names the relational nexus of all that, “as in language”, conveys manifest and comprehensible significance, creating the semblance that there is nothing “living” or “subsisting” besides what is already known and spoken. “The inconceivable, the insensible” and “the unbounded” would be that which each world suppresses or forecloses.

Just as “world” suggests ordered relations, “sphere” evokes not only the ideal geometrical form defined as “compris[ing] an infinite number of points equidistant from the center” (Cole 2017, p. 59) but also the compass of efficacy within a context of “reciprocal relation” (“Wechselwirkung”) that both Hölderlin and his contemporaries repeatedly describe as a sphere in order to circumscribe the finite range of various powers and actions.6 In his earlier draft of an essay “On Religion”, which was also published under the title “Fragment of Philosophical Letters” (“Fragment philosophischer Briefe”), “sphere” (“Sphäre”) is the word with which Hölderlin designates the particular religious nexus of relations that would be operative each time that humans relate to their respective worlds as something “more than a machinated course” (“mehr als Maschinengang”) (Hölderlin 1979, p. 45).7 There, he locates the central power of each sphere in the “spirit” (“Geist”) that “rules” (“herrscht”) in it, whose laws so intimately bind “activity” (“Thätigkeit”) with “its element” (“ihr[em] Element”) that no law can so much as be “thought” apart from a “particular case” (“besondern Fall”) (Hölderlin 1979, pp. 48, 47). As Waibel has shown, these reflections upon the constitution of a religious sphere build, in turn, upon the “sphere” of natural right as it had recently been presented by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his book on the Foundations of Natural Right (Waibel 1996/1997, pp. 169–72).8 Early in his exposition, Fichte had deduced natural right from the conditions of possibility for subjective freedom as such, which include the intersubjective establishment of a limited “sphere” (“Sphäre”) for each subject involved, “within which no one may disturb him and beyond which he, for his part, may not go” in exercising his freedom to act efficaciously (Fichte 1845, SW III, p. 15; 2000, p. 15).9 The geometrical register that Fichte evokes to describe the limited “sphere” of individual activity is, moreover, not a metaphor but rather a reminder of the “original schema for activity in general”, which Fichte aligns with the (geometrical) operation of “drawing […] a line”. In so doing, Fichte echoes Kant’s claim that we “cannot represent time without, in drawing a straight line [….], attending merely to the action of the synthesis of the manifold through which we successively determine the inner sense”, which not only “first produces the concept of succession” but also, as Fichte underscores, yields an intuition of “the I” (Fichte 2000, p. 55; cf. Fichte 1845, SW III, p. 58; Kant 1998a, p. 258; cf. Kant 1998b, p. 195). Fichte’s formulations for mutually exclusive individual spheres of activity extend the linear intuition of subjective activity, as such, to a three-dimensional, intersubjective space.

These notions of a world and a sphere are at odds with Hölderlin’s association of death with the cancellation of “egoity” (“Ichheit”), as well as his characterization of the aorgic as a “disorganizing” force that opposes the “formative drives” of thought and life (Hölderlin 2008, pp. 145–46; trans. modified; Hölderlin 1985, pp. 871–72). Or, to put it in terms of the Kantian vocabulary that resonates throughout the first section of Hölderlin’s “Remarks”, the ordered relations that are suggested by the spherical determination of the “eccentric sphere of the dead” could not obtain in this field, if only because death will have struck those subjects of conscious experience who could give coherence to a sphere or form the regulative idea of a world.10 Shared among an indefinite plethora of “the dead” in an indefinite manner and to an indefinite extent, the “eccentric sphere of the dead” would thus seem to be “eccentric” (“exzentrisch”) not only with respect to the “middle point” of man’s “inner life” but also thanks to its remove (“ex-”) from every conceivable organizing center (“-zentrisch”) and, therefore, too, from every viable sphere.11 Thus, as the human is said to be torn from his “living sphere” into the “eccentric sphere of the dead”, the “sphere” that seems to carry over in Hölderlin’s articulation of this “transport” does not suture the tear that is evoked but rather renders it more conspicuous.12 As the designation of a topos that resists the concept, shape, and limits that are assigned to it, the syntagma “eccentric sphere of the dead” marks an instance of catachresis or “hard jointure” (“harte Fügung”), which is the term that Norbert von Hellingrath adopts for the style of poetic construction that, like the caesura of tragedy, disrupts “the frictionless sequence of logical connection” (“die widerstandlose folge des logischen zusammenhangs”) (von Hellingrath 1910, p. 5).

2. Oedipus’ Place

“Hard jointure” is the style that Hellingrath shows to be characteristic of Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and Sophocles, as well as his late poems. But the logic of place—the topology—that is articulated in Hölderlin’s translation of Oedipus also disrupts the “frictionless sequence of logical connection”, especially when it comes to the demarcation of the living and the dead, rendering the catachrestic syntagma “eccentric sphere of the dead” the verbal correlate to the spatial relations that structure the drama. In Hölderlin’s translation, indices of death and aorgic wilderness are repeatedly superimposed upon the “sphere” of the living in a manner that allows them to figure within the compass of the latter while, at the same time, troubling its bounds. The passages in which this superposition takes place offer, in turn, a further elucidation of what is at stake in Hölderlin’s remarks on Tiresias’ role “as overseer over the power of nature that tragically transports man from his living sphere, from the middle point of his inner life, into another world and tears him into the eccentric sphere of the dead” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 251).

One of the most pronounced moments in which the “sphere of the dead” encroaches upon the “living” scene of discourse can, in fact, be located in the lines where Tiresias reiterates his announcement that “the murder” of Laios “falls upon Oedipus” himself (“Des Manns Mord, den du suchst, ich sag’, auf dich da fällt er”), before adding that Oedipus fails to know “where” he is “in misfortune”, along with those who are “most dear” to him (“Ganz schändlich, sag ich, lebst du mit den Liebsten/Geheim, weist nicht, woran du bist im Unglük”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 117, l. 366, 370–71). Reprising and expanding upon the latter formulation, Tiresias declares the following:

Gesehen hast auch du, siehst nicht, woran du bist,

Im Übel, wo du wohnst, womit du haußest.

Weist du, woher du bist? du bist geheim

Verhaßt den Deinen, die hier unten sind,

Und oben auf der Erd’, und ringsum treffend

Vertreibet von der Mutter und vom Vater

Dich aus dem Land der Fluch gewaltig wandelnd,

Jezt sehend wohl, hernach in Finsterniß;

Und deines Geschreies, welcher Hafen wird

Nicht voll seyn, welcher Kithäron nicht mitrufen bald?

(Hölderlin 1988, p. 123, l. 418–27; my emphasis)

You, too, have seen, see not, where you are in evil, where you dwell, with what you house. Do you know from where you are? You are secretly hated by yours who are here below and above upon earth, and, striking the mark all-around, the curse drives you out of the land, the one of the mother and the father, mightily wandering, now seeing, later in darkness; and of your cry, what harbor will not be full, what Cithaeron will not soon call along?

The corresponding passage in Sophocles’ Greek reads as follows:

σὺ καὶ δέδορκας κοὐ βλέπεις ἵν᾽ εἶ κακοῦ,

οὐδ᾽ ἔνθα ναίεις, οὐδ᾽ ὅτων οἰκεῖς μέτα.

ἆρ᾽ οἶσθ᾽ ἀφ᾽ ὧν εἶ; καὶ λέληθας ἐχθρὸς ὢν

τοῖς σοῖσιν αὐτοῦ νέρθε κἀπὶ γῆς ἄνω;

καί σ᾽ἀμφιπλὴξ μητρός τε καὶ τοῦ σοῦ πατρὸς

ἐλᾷ ποτ᾽ἐκ γῆς τῆσδε δεινόπους ἀρὰ,

βλέποντα νῦν μὲν ὄρθ᾽. ἔπειτα δὲ σκότον.

βοῆς δὲ τῆς σῆς, ποῖος οὐκ ἔσται λιμὴν;

ποῖος Κιθαιρὼν οὐχὶ σύμφωνος τάχα.

(Hölderlin 1988, p. 122, l. 418–21)

You, even though you have seen clearly, also do not glimpse where you are in evil, nor where you dwell, nor with whom you house. But do you know from whom you come? And has it escaped you, how you are hated by those of yours down below as well as upon the earth above? And striking on both sides, from the mother and your father, the terrible-footed curse shall drive you from this earth, you who see rightly now; but later, darkness. Of your cry, what shall not be a harbor; what Cithaeron shall not swiftly resound with it?

In Hölderlin’s version, the repetition of “you are” (“du bist”) in the sequence that proceeds from the question “Do you know from where you are”? (“Weist du, woher du bist”?) to the statement “You are secretly hated by yours” (“du bist geheim/Verhaßt den Deinen”) could seem at first to imply that Tiresias is about to answer the question that he had posed, e.g., “Do you know from where you are? You are from X”. But rather than revealing a trajectory that would lead back to Oedipus’ provenance, Tiresias abruptly shifts registers to speak of a “secret” hate for Oedipus that is harbored by those relatives “who are here below and above upon earth”. The presentation of Oedipus as a subject of ignorance thus gives way to one in which he appears as an object of hatred; the question of his provenance provokes word of his affective significance here and now; and, most significantly, the dialogue between Oedipus and Tiresias comes to be situated in the underworld with the phrase “here below” (“hier unten”), either in distinction from or in addition to “above upon earth” (“oben auf der Erde”), depending upon whether the “and” is construed to be additive or explicative. The adverbial νέρθε, which signifies “below” or “from below” in ancient Greek, is substituted in Hölderlin’s translation with a deictic index that renders “below” a determination of the place where Oedipus and Tiresias speak, marking a displacement of the “live” scene of dialogue to the topos, if not the sphere, of the dead.13 At the same time, the ambivalence of the “and”, which may or may not link “here below” to the terrain “above”, renders directionality, and with it, any center of orientation is impossible to establish. Oedipus thus does not simply fail to know “where” he is, as Tiresias says, but also could not know it on such terms.14

Hölderlin’s substitution of “hier unten” for νέρθε has significant implications for the action, character, space, and time of Sophocles’ drama, as well as the caesura of succession and movement of transport that he associates with the speech of Tiresias in his “Remarks”. This substitution may, to be sure, belong among the deviations from Sophocles’ Greek that commentators such as Schadewaldt have noted, underscoring how “Hölderlin” often “confuses” (“verwechselt”) grammatical “forms” that have “external similarity with one another” (Schadewaldt 1966, p. 122). Yet, whether it is the result of “confusion” or intention, the formulation “Verhaßt den Deinen, die hier unten sind” also marks a deviation from Sophocles’ Greek “behind” which “something true stands” (“hinter denen ein […] Wahres steht”), like the apparent “errors” in translation that Schadewaldt and Karl Reinhardt find to disclose, among others, the religious dimension of Sophoclean tragedy (Schadewaldt 1966, pp. 122, 125–26; cf. Reinhardt 1960, p. 382).15 For it shows that just as Oedipus can simultaneously occupy the positions of kinship and enmity with respect to “his” own, the underworld of those “below” does not exist at a stable distance from the world of the living but as a site within a relational nexus whose terms remain distinct even as they are subject to superpositions that disrupt their individual integrity and oppositional complementarity. These ruptures in “logical connection” are multiplied as Tiresias goes on to assert the materially impossible coincidence of two figures in the same place, declaring that the widow of Laios occupies “One bed with the father and his murderer” (“in Einem Bette mit/Dem Vater und sein Mörder”) (von Hellingrath 1910, p. 5; Hölderlin 1988, p. 127).16 Nor are such formulations merely indicative of a profound disturbance in the relations that are more usually understood to organize the world, for whether it is a matter of the place that is said to be held by both the father and his murderer or the site of dialogic exchange that is situated above and below, such determinations attest to the turn that Hölderlin describes in his “Remarks” from “the striving from this world into the other” (“das Streben aus dieser Welt in die andre”) into “a striving from another world into this one” (“einem Streben aus einer andern Welt in diese”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 415).

If these utterances of Tiresias should exemplify what Hölderlin calls “tragic transport” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250), then this “transport” does not refer to local motion or φορά in the Aristotelian sense, where a body changes its place, and where place is understood as the “innermost motionless boundary of what contains” a corporeal thing (Aristotle 1984, Physis 211a 20). It also does not merely evoke associations with ecstatic passion, whose relevance to Hölderlin’s “Remarks” Charles Lewis has demonstrated, tracing the phrase “tragic transport” back to Nicolas Boileau’s rendition of ekstasis with “transport” in his translation of pseudo-Longinus’ treatise on the sublime (Lewis 2011, p. 119; Lewis 2019, pp. 83–100; cf. Balfour 2015, p. 76). Instead, it signifies a topological rearticulation of Oedipus’ position that locates him, among others, within what could be called the “eccentric sphere of the dead”, and whose catachrestic designation as a “sphere” corresponds with the way in which terms for spatial orientation such as “above” and “below” undergo abuse, marking coincidences that resist synthesis and order.17

The passages from Tiresias’ speech that have been discussed thus far give some indication, then, as to what it could mean to say that the seer “enters into the course of fate, as overseer over the power of nature that tragically transports man from his living sphere, from the middle point of his inner life, into another world and tears him into the eccentric sphere of the dead” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 251). But the placement of Oedipus among the dead frequently repeats in Hölderlin’s translation, and with manifold variations whose analysis further elucidates the implications of the “eccentric sphere” that Hölderlin emphasizes in his “Remarks”. As he explains his self-blinding, for instance, Oedipus claims ἐγὼ γὰρ οὐκ᾽οἶδ᾽ὄμμασιν ποίοις βλέπων,/πατέρα πότ᾽ἂν προσεῖδον εἰς ᾃδου μολών/οὐδ᾽αὖ τάλαιναν μητέρ᾽ (“For I do not know with what sort of eyes, looking, I ever could have looked upon my father if I came to Hades, nor, in turn, my wretched mother”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 230, l. 1368–70), which Hölderlin renders in a manner that suggests Oedipus has already made his journey to the underworld: “Ich wußte nemlich nicht, mit welchen Augen ich/Den Vater angesehn, zum Hades wandelnd,/Und auch die arme Mutter” (“I did not know with which eyes I [would have] seen the father, wandering to Hades, and the poor mother as well”) (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 230–31, l. 1396–98). In this formulation, the use of the preterit “wußte” rather than the present “weiß” (“know”), together with the use of the past participle “angesehn” rather than the infinitive “ansehen”, implies that the elided auxiliary verb would have been “hätte”, as if Oedipus did not know “with which eyes” he would have seen his parents in the underworld had he been endowed with vision when he arrived there (‘Ich wußte nemlich nicht, mit welchen Augen ich den Vater angesehn hätte, zum Hades wandelnd’). In this way, the verses “say” that Oedipus’ arrival in the underworld has already taken place. The prospect of glimpsing his progenitors in the realm of the dead is not, in other words, presented as one that is yet to come but as a past potential that Oedipus’ self-mutilation effectively allowed him to evade.

Similar implications are conveyed with a different accent when the chorus retells Oedipus’ history towards the end of the play in the sequence that reads as follows:

Getroffen hattest du es über die Maas,

Und gewonnen durchaus glüklichen Reichthum,

O Zevs, und verderbet sie mit krummem Nagel,

Die wahrsagende Jungfrau,

Aufstehend in den Todten meines Landes ein Thurm,

Woher du auch mir König genannt bist.

Und geehert am höchsten,

Im großen Thebe regierend.

Wo höret man aber jezt, von einem, der

Mühseeliger wär’ im Wechsel des Lebens

In Arbeit wohnend, in Quaalen wild?

(Hölderlin 1988, p. 213, l. 1222–32)

You had met the mark beyond measure and won thoroughly fortunate wealth, o Zeus, and [you] made her perish, the one with crooked talons, the soothsaying virgin, standing up as a tower amidst the dead of my land, whence you are also named king to me. And honored most highly, ruling in great Thebes. But where does one now hear of anyone who was more toilsome in the vicissitudes of life, dwelling in labor; in torments, wild?

In the corresponding passage from Sophocles’ version of the text, the formulations read as follows: κατὰ μὲν φθίσας τὰν γαμψώνυχα/παρθένον χρησμῳδόν,/θανάτων δ᾽ ἐμᾷ χώρᾳ πύργος ἀνέστας/ἐξ οὗ καὶ βασιλεὺς καλεῖ ἐμὸς (“and, having made to perish utterly the crooked-taloned virgin who sang oracles, you arose, a tower in my land against deaths, whence you are called my king”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 212, l. 1206–09).18 There, the Greek construction θανάτων…πύργος lends itself to the interpretation that various commentators have proposed, namely “tower against death” or “tower against deaths”, where the genitive is interpreted as a genitive of separation, and πύργος is taken to signify not simply “tower” but, more specifically, “tower of defense”, as it is used in other contexts as well (Bollack 2010, 3:787–88; Finglass 2018, pp. 530–31; Kamerbeek 1967, p. 224). Hölderlin, by contrast, renders the genitive with a prepositional phrase that situates the “tower” within or in the midst of “the dead”, suggesting that Oedipus’ initial rise to rule was an ascendence over a dead polis. Thebes is characterized as an underworld, which accords, in turn, with the rhetoric that the priest of Zeus had deployed to exalt Oedipus in the prologue, where Hölderlin translates the lines σωτῆρα κλῄζει τῆς πάρος προθυμίας./ἀρχῆς δὲ τῆς σῆς μηδαμῶς μεμνώμεθα,/στάντες τ᾽ἐς ὀρθὸν, καὶ πεσόντες ὕστερον (“one calls you a savior from out of your earlier towardness of heart, yet let us not remember the reign that was yours, such that, having stood upright, we fell again at a later time”) as follows: “Es nennt das Land/Den Retter dich vom alten wilden Sinne;/Zu wenig denkt man aber deiner Herrschaft,/Sind wir zurecht gestellt und fallen wieder” (“The land names you the savior from the old wild sense; but too little shall one think of your rule if we are set right and fall again”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 84, l. 48–50, p. 85, l. 47–50). There, the signifier for Oedipus’ former “willingness of heart” or “goodwill” (προθυμία) towards Thebes is rendered in a manner that ascribes a “wild sense” (“wilden Sinn”) to the polis, drawing out the associations of θυμός (“temper”, “seat of the passions”) with “rage” (ὀργή), and associating this wilder, “aorgic” sense at the root of προθυμία with the Thebans’ senses during the epoch of the Sphinx.19 Insofar as these associations do not correspond with the sense that προθυμία generally conveys in Greek, Schadewaldt cites this passage as an example of the way in which Hölderlin often seems not to “connect the word with the right sense” or to find “the nuance of sense” that is “demanded” in the particular “passage” (Schadewaldt 1966, p. 120). Yet in ascribing a “wild” disposition to the Thebans in his construal of σωτῆρα τῆς πάρος προθυμίας, Hölderlin indicates that the devastation wrought by the Sphinx was not, or not merely, an external misfortune from which the Thebans needed to be saved but a state of wild passion and a preponderance of the “aorgic” tendency, which had rendered the city akin to the “wild world of the dead” (“wilden Welt der Todten”) so long as it was not set right (ἐς ὀρθὸν) through Oedipus’ intervention (Hölderlin 1988, p. 418).20 In this way, the “wild sense” that the priest attributes to Thebes anticipates the chorus’s claim that Oedipus rose as a “tower amidst the dead of [its] land” in its recapitulation of Oedipus’ trajectory. Between these two passages from, respectively, the beginning and the end of the play, the Thebans are presented as dwelling in a state of death when Oedipus first arrived, which is also the state to which Thebes has returned in the present reign of corporeal disease and disturbed senses, forming, as Hölderlin writes in his “Remarks”, “a world” of “plague and sense-confusion and universally enflamed soothsaying spirit” (“Pest und Sinnesverwirrung und allgemein entzündetem Wahrsagergeist”) (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 257–58).

Tiresias’ placement of himself and Oedipus among the dead “here below” thus finds resonance in the public discourse of the priest and the chorus, where death is interpreted as a possible mode of existence, and Oedipus is viewed as a “tower amidst the dead of my land” (“in den Todten meines Landes ein Thurm”). But whereas the priest of Zeus had emphasized Oedipus’ resurrection of the polis from the wilderness and death that had prevailed under the influence of the Sphinx, the chorus’s later formulation implies that the population remained dead even as Oedipus rose. In this way, the chorus also places Oedipus on a par with the Sphinx and, thus, with an agent of death, which the syntactic ambiguity of Hölderlin’s verses further underscores, insofar as the participial phrase “Aufstehend in den Todten meines Landes” may be construed not only as a further determination of Oedipus’ rise but also as an appositional determination of the “wahrsagende[n] Jungfrau”.21 The fact that the Sphinx and Oedipus are equally plausible subjects of the participle “aufstehend” corresponds with the fundamental ambiguity of Oedipus; for if the plague that is besetting the city at the outset of Oedipus the King is the effect of the pollution caused by Oedipus’ crimes, then his arrival, like the arrival of the Sphinx, is one that plays a privileged role in catalyzing a deadly epidemic of “wild sense” where disease, anxieties, and deaths proliferate (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 83, 95, 97). As Jacques Lacan astutely observes in his seminar on The Logic of the Phantasm: “The full jouissance of the king of Thebes and the Savior of the people, of the one who raises the scepter that had fallen […] this jouissance, what does it cover? The rotting decay [pourriture] that finally explodes with the plague” (Lacan 2023, p. 307). By the time the chorus recapitulates Oedipus’ history in the end, Oedipus not only figures among the dead but also as a Sphinxlike savior who revived the city in the past only in order to give new impetus to the spread of death and devastation.

Whether it is an issue of the narrower circle that Tiresias and Oedipus foreground, naming, respectively, the hatred of Oedipus’ relatives “here below” and the unbearable prospect of a parental encounter in the underworld, or whether it is a matter of the dead population that the chorus evokes in recalling Oedipus’ defeat of the Sphinx, Oedipus’ drama is one that has, from his arrival in Thebes onward, played out within the “eccentric sphere of the dead”. This sphere is nowhere in particular, and it knows no definite bounds; rather, it is the spacetime that takes shape wherever absent instances of power and wilderness prevail over the present. Although it is emphatically associated with Oedipus, then, the incursion of the dead upon the living as well as the concomitant spread of “wild sense” depend first and foremost upon the symbolic nexus in which a “curse” (“Fluch”) can outlast its sources in order to expel the accursed “from the land” (“aus dem Land”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 123, l. 424); the hatred of a murdered father can turn the here-and-now of the guilty son into a “here” that is “below” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 123, l. 421); and the seemingly living members of a plague-ridden city can already find themselves submerged in an “abyss” that turns their world into an underworld (“heben kann das Haupt/Vom Abrund sie nicht mehr”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 83, l. 23–24).

It would exceed the scope of this essay to offer detailed commentaries upon all of the passages where the independence of this symbolic nexus from embodied, “living” presence is made pronounced.22 Yet, the consequences of the symbolic determination of sense and space, life and death, are perhaps most drastically exposed in the speech of the messenger whose report of Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’ self-blinding culminates in the announcement that Oedipus continues to beget ills with his wife even after she has ended her life:

Und so frohlokend stieß er öfters, einmal nicht,

Die Wimpern haltend, und die blutigen

Augäpfel färbten ihm den Bart, und Tropfen nicht,

Als wie von Mord vergossen, rieselten, sondern schwarz

Vergossen ward das Blut, ein Hagelreegen.

Aus einem Paare kam’s, kein einzeln Übel,

Ein Übel zusammen erzeugt von Mann und Weib.

(Hölderlin 1988, p. 221, l. 1305–11)

And so, rejoicing, he thrust often, not once, holding the lashes, and the bloody apples of the eye colored his beard, and drops trickled down, not, as if shed from murder, but blackly the blood was shed, a rain of hail. From a single pair it came, no single evil, an evil engendered together by man and wife.

Connected to Jocasta only by the “golden needles” (χρυσηλάτους περόνας, “die goldnen Nadeln”) that he takes from her robe, this minimal metonymic link between her needles and her body would seem to be all that it takes for the self-mutilation of Oedipus to be eroticized, which Hölderlin underscores in rendering the participle that, in Greek, suggests the utterance of a refrain (ἐφυμνῶν) with “frohlokend” (“rejoicing”) (Finglass 2018, p. 557). Through the metal accessories that symbolically pin him to her, Jocasta remains instrumental as Oedipus performs a simultaneously punitive and copulative act of penetration while ejaculating cries of joy. And just as their intimacy comes to hinge upon metallic matters, so, too, does the bodily fluid that Oedipus sheds over Jocasta’s corpse assume the appearance of an aorgic meteorological phenomenon rather than that of blood flow: “drops trickled down, not, as if shed from murder, but blackly the blood was shed, a rain of hail [ὄμβρος χαλάζης, ein Hagelreegen]”.23 What is engendered in this wild pairing of destructive drives and piercing metal is dead matter, petrified hail. Nearly every element of eroticism becomes emphatically marked as dead, from Oedipus’ partner to their offspring. Ultimately, however, this distinction holds true for himself as well insofar as the organs that he attacks bear a privileged association with his proper name, the first part of which spells “knowing’”(οἶδα, “I know”) from εἶδον (“I saw”), in addition to “swelling” (οἰδέω, “I swell”).24 In piercing his eyes, Oedipus joins the dead Jocasta not merely in spawning inorganic hail but also in begetting the symbolic annihilation of “Oedipus” as the one who “sees” and “knows”. This scene of suicide, sex, and generation, among partially inanimate matters, is possible only on the basis of the symbolic nature of life and death.25

Yet, it is also upon this basis that Oedipus’ violent performance of symbolic annihilation legibly functions as a repetition. If to be “dead” is to be discursively situated in a particular way, located in the symbolic arena of “wild sense”, then Oedipus’ life will have unfolded within this topos from the outset, long before his reenactment of murder and incest over Jocasta’s dead body. The precedence of death over life in Oedipus’ case is made explicit, at the latest, when a Corinthian messenger and a former servant of Laios deliver speeches that convince Oedipus to identify with the infant whom Laios and Jocasta intended to expose on Cithaeron so as to circumvent the prophecy that “it would kill the parents” (“Es tödte die Eltern, war das Wort”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 211). It is upon hearing this latter “word” of his intended death that Oedipus cries the following:

Iu! Iu! das Ganze kommt genau heraus!

O Licht! Zum leztenmal seh’ ich dich nun!

Man sagt, ich sei gezeugt, wovon ich nicht

Gesollt, und wohne bei, wo ich nicht soll’, und da,

Wo ich es nicht gedurft, hab’ ich getödtet.

(Hölderlin 1988, p. 211, l. 1207–11)

Io! Io! the whole comes out exactly! O light! For the last time I see you now! One says that I was begotten by those of whom I should not have been and dwell where I should not, and there, where I was not permitted, I have killed.

Although, as Frederick Ahl has meticulously argued, no conclusive evidence is provided by either of the messengers who provoke these conclusions, their words produce the effect of truth, and that truth entails that Oedipus’ entire life, from conception onwards, “should not” have been (Ahl 1991, p. 207).26 Such is the discordance at the core of Oedipus’ existence within the symbolic order, which Hölderlin exaggerates further in this passage through the “hard jointure” of Oedipus’ outcries (“Iu! Iu!”) with a confession that takes the form of reported speech rather than first-person narrative (“Man sagt, ich sei”).27 In this way, Oedipus repeats through the modulation of his enunciations the reduction that he has undergone, first, in learning that his life has been, before all else, an effect of others’ discourse and, second, in learning that this discourse has defined him both as one who was meant by his parents not to live and as one who was destined to violate those who gave him life. All that remains of Oedipus in the wake of these deaths—both the death that he escaped and the deaths that he caused—is an instance of speech who cannot but cancel himself in addressing the untenable place among the living and the dead that he has been assigned. This place is untenable because it is constituted by the mutually incompatible parental and oracular injunctions that have determined his life to be a course of annihilation that should have been annihilated in advance.

It is also in accordance with this extreme discordance that Oedipus will reprise his history once again under the auspices of negation, beginning with a curse that gives way to an impossible wish:

Zu Grunde gehe, wer es war,

Der von der wilden

Bewanderten Haide die Füße

Erlöst’ und von dem Mord

Errettet und erhielt, zu Dank

Nichts that er. Denn damals gestorben

Wär’ ich den Lieben nicht, nicht mir ein solcher Kummer.

[…] Wohl wäre ich nicht der Vaters Mörder

Gekommen noch der Bräutigam genannt,

Von denen ich erzeugt ward,

Mühselig bin ich nun.

(Hölderlin 1988, p. 229, l. 1377–88)

May he perish whoever it was who released the feet from the wild, traversed woodland and saved from death and preserved [them], he did nothing to be thanked. For dead at that time, I would not have been such a grief for my loved ones, nor for myself. […] I would very well not have come, the murderer of the father, or been named the groom of those from whom I was begotten, now I am troubled.

Left in the end with nothing more to realize concerning the failed curses of his parents and the fulfilled prophecies of the oracle, Oedipus curses the man who spared his life and utters the unfulfillable wish for death that would have made his life impossible. These utterances are the sequel to the gestural repetition of his history that Oedipus had performed with Jocasta’s needles, just as his self-negating confession in the form of reported speech was the prelude to the latter.

Different as these iterations of Oedipus’ symbolic annihilation may be, however, they all reaffirm the position among the dead that Tiresias first assigned to Oedipus, and they demonstrate the “wild sense” that prevails in the speech of a tragic subject who is situated exactly in the zone that, in his analyses of Sophocles’ Antigone, Lacan calls “the-between-two-deaths” (“l’entre-deux-morts”) (Lacan 1986, p. 369; 1992, p. 320), where corporeal death has not yet occurred, but symbolic death in the context of social relations already “encroaches upon life”, radically isolating the subject by reducing the subject to “the cut [coupure] that the very presence of language installs in the life of man” (Lacan 1992, pp. 285, 279; trans. modified; Lacan 1986, pp. 331, 325). Symbolic death is the a priori for Oedipus that renders the physically impossible scenario of speaking and acting when dead not only possible but also necessary. If it is thanks to the presence of language that curses and oracles will have “already named [Oedipus’] destiny even before he was born” and even killed him (Lacan 1988, p. 239),28 it is also thanks to the presence of language that he can continue to speak in the wake of that “destiny” (Lacan 1986, p. 325; 1992, p. 279). “Outside of language”, as Lacan further explicates, “it is inconceivable” that “the being of him who has lived” could “be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself” (Lacan 1992, p. 279). But within language, the subject can wish for the impossible and curse all that will have been, approaching the limit of the speakable that Lacan aligns with the “cut” that splits the subject of the signifier (Lacan 1986, p. 325). The curse that Oedipus utters upon the man who spared him thus anticipates the “maledictions” that he will utter in Oedipus at Colonus, which constitute his ultimate refusal of the “Eros” governing intersubjective life (Lacan 1988, p. 230; 2006, p. 263).

In Oedipus the King, however, Oedipus is not yet at the point of cutting all familial and political ties to Thebes as he will later do at Colonus. The curse upon his anonymous childhood savior instead attests to Oedipus’ more immediate desire to realize the curses of his parents retroactively, which becomes still more pronounced when Oedipus pleads with Creon not only to banish him, in accordance with the punishment that the Delphic oracle is reported to have decreed for the murderer of Laios (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 235–37, l. 1464–65; cf. Hölderlin 1988, p. 89, l. 99–100), but also to permit him to dwell upon the mountains “where my Cithaeron is here famed, which, still living, mother and father elected as gravestone for me” (“wo berühmt ist/Hier mein Kithäron, den, noch lebend,/Mutter und Vater mir zum Grabmal auserkoren”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 237, l. 1480–82). The phrase “my Cithaeron” is Oedipus’ equivalent to Antigone’s appeal to “my Zeus” (“Mein Zevs”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 309, l. 467): a singularizing gesture of appropriation and an exorbitant claim that affirms a relation beyond all communally recognized relations, and in “beyond” that is not so much transcendent as it coincides the mortal limit marked by death and burial.29 It is only in dwelling upon his “elected” grave, Oedipus adds, “that I may die through those who destroyed me” (“d]aß ich durch jene sterbe, welche mich verderbt”), which is desirable not because it would fulfill the will of his dead parents nor because it would avenge their deaths but because it is solely in being exposed on Cithaeron that Oedipus “could have” died, as he will explain in a formulation where, once again, verbal form marks his death as a past event despite his being spared: “This I know very well, neither illness nor anything else could have destroyed me; not from death have I been saved but for this great evil” (“Wiewohl ich dieses weiß, mich konnte Krankheit nicht,/Nichts sonst zerstören; nicht bin ich vom Tod’/Errettet, denn zu diesem großen Übel”) (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 237–39, l. 1483–84).30 In this way, Hölderlin’s version draws out the “wild sense” of Oedipus’ wish: by reformulating this thought in a counter-factual utterance that excludes all alternative manners of death besides death on Cithaeron, Hölderlin’s Oedipus does not merely isolate Cithaeron as the site where his life was meant to end but also verbally realizes his wish to be killed there in an oblique affirmation of the very death that remains to be desired. What Hölderlin says of the language of the drama as a whole could also be said of this single speech: “Alles ist Rede gegen Rede, die sich gegenseitig aufhebt” (“All is speech against speech that mutually cancels itself”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 257).

As self-contradictory as it may be for Oedipus to imply that exposure on Cithaeron has caused the very death from which he admits to being saved—which is exactly what he does in claiming not that nothing else could still kill him, but that nothing else “could have” done so (besides, presumably, what did)—his claim is also perfectly logical according to the symbolic determination of Oedipus as one who is situated among the dead from birth onward.31 It is along similar lines, moreover, that Hölderlin renders Oedipus’ final reiteration of his crimes to Antigone and Ismene: “Euren Vater/Ermordete der Vater, die Gebährerin/Hat er gepflügt, von der er selbst gesäet ward” (“the father murdered your father, he ploughed the child-bearer from whom he himself was sown”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 241, l. 1526–28). For in so doing, Hölderlin inverts the grammatical subject and object of Sophocles’ clause, τὸν πατέρα πατὴρ/ὑμῶν ἔπεφνε (“the father of you slew the father”), so that it is Oedipus who is said to have been murdered (Hölderlin 1988, p. 240, l. 1493–94). Both this deviation from Sophocles’ version of the passage, as well as the one that emerges through the counter-factual construction cited above, could, to be sure, be considered further errors on Hölderlin’s part when measured by the standard of syntactic and semantic equivalence. But these errors also expose the truth of the fact that, within the recent history of Theban royalty, the child of Laios and Jocasta had been pronounced dead long before the supposed stranger named Oedipus arrived in Thebes, defeated the Sphinx, and took the widowed Jocasta as his wife. Oedipus’ life initially rests upon the local fiction of his death, which therefore determines his identity even though it failed to arrive.32 Nor is this “hard jointure” without a basis in Sophocles’ Greek. Oedipus’ exposition as the exposed child of Jocasta and Laios retroactively brings about the coincidence of birth and death that Tiresias had predicted when he responded to Oedipus’ question, “[W]ho among mortals engendered me?” (τίς δέ μ᾽ἐκφύει βροτῶν, “wer zeugt mich unter Menschen?”), with the words: ἥδ᾽ἡμέρα φύσει σε καὶ διαφθερεῖ (“this day will engender and destroy you”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 124, l. 443); or, as Hölderlin more ambivalently puts it: “Der Tag, der! wird dich zeugen und verderben” (“The day, that one! will engender and ruin you”) (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 124–25, l. 443–44).33 This engendering (φύειν) and destruction (διαφθερεῖν) take place at once, and they can do so because birth and death are as much symbolic functions as the guilt that Oedipus incurs by virtue of his place within the symbolic orders of law and lineage.

It is the engendering and annihilation of a linguistic subject that are at stake in the day that arrives in Oedipus the King, which depends not upon the calculable diurnal course of heavenly spheres but upon the eccentric course of spoken encounters that Sophocles presents, lending truth not only to many of Hölderlin’s apparent errors but also to the coincidence of birth and death that is latent in Sophocles’ text and that Hölderlin’s translation draws out. Such is, moreover, the truth of the error that appears in Wilhelm Böhm’s edition of Hölderlin’s “Remarks”, where the sentence concerning Tiresias’ role is printed as follows: “Er tritt ein in den Gang des Schicksals als Aufseher über die Naturmacht, die tragisch den Menschen seiner Lebenssphäre, dem Mittelpunkte seines innern Lebens in eine andere Welt entrückt und in die exzentrische Sphäre der Toten zeigt” (“He enters into the course of fate, as overseer over the power of nature that tragically transports man from his living sphere, from the middle point of his inner life into another world and shows him into the eccentric sphere of the dead”) (Hölderlin 1905, 3:280).34 For besides showing the power of nature to be one that “tears” (“reißt”) humans into the “eccentric sphere of the dead”, Hölderlin’ translation also lets the power of nature be seen as one that “shows” (“zeigt”) humans into that wild “sphere”, which thereby shows itself to be not an area of material extension but a matter of determinations that are both established and unsettled by language, from the words of the seer to the speeches of Oedipus in the wake of his demise.

3. Signs of “Transport”

Against this background, it is possible to return to the opening of Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” and to reinterpret “tragic transport” as a movement affecting subjects of symbolically constituted life and death. Hölderlin’s formulations are, to be sure, more resonant with the vocabulary of Kant than with the speeches of Sophocles’ drama that have been discussed thus far. When Hölderlin first evokes “tragic transport” in his “Remarks on Oedipus”, the phrase appears in an isolated line that seems to sum up his immediately preceding elaboration upon the specificity of tragic succession:

Das Gesez, der Kalkul, die Art, wie, ein Empfindungssystem, der ganze Mensch, als unter dem Einflusse des Elements sich entwikelt, und Vorstellung und Empfindung und Räsonnement, in verschiedenen Successionen, aber immer nach einer sichern Regel nacheinander hervorgehn, ist im Tragischen mehr Gleichgewicht, als reine Aufeinanderfolge.

Der tragische Transport ist nemlich eigentlich leer, und der ungebundenste.

(Hölderlin 1988, p. 250)

The law, the calculus, the fashion in which, a system of sense-reception, the entire human, as under the influence of the element, develops, and representation and sense-reception and reasoning emerge one after another, in different successions [Successionen], but always according to a secure rule, [this] is, in the tragic, more equilibrium than pure succession [Aufeinanderfolge].

The tragic transport is, namely, actually empty and the most unbound.

In the next paragraph, Hölderlin unfolds the way in which this “equilibrium” presents itself (“sich darstellt”) through recourse to the register of metrics:

Dadurch wird in der rhythmischen Aufeinanderfolge der Vorstellungen, worinn der Transport sich darstellt, das, was man im Sylbenmaaße Cäsur heißt, das reine Wort, die gegenrhythmische Unterbrechung nothwendig, um nemlich dem reißenden Wechsel der Vorstellungen, auf seinem Summum, so zu begegnen, daß alsdann nicht mehr der Wechsel der Vorstellung, sondern die Vorstellung selber erscheint. (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250)

Through this, what becomes necessary in the rhythmic succession [Aufeinanderfolge] of representations in which the transport presents itself is that which one calls in metrics [Sylbenmaaße] the caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic interruption, in order, namely, to encounter the tearing alternation of representations at its peak, such that it is no longer the alternation of representation, then, but the representation itself which appears.

Suspending all questions of meaning or plot, prophecy, and history, Hölderlin thus turns to the quantitative measures of poetics to exemplify and clarify the formal relations that render “tragic transport”, before all else, a matter of time. As Rodolphe Gasché has extensively demonstrated, what is at stake is the dimension of experience that Kant associates with “inner sense” or the a priori form of intuition comprising the “determinations of the mind” (“Bestimmungen des Gemüts”) (Kant 1998a, p. 163; 1998b, p. 109). Since this form is temporal, the determinations in question would, to be sure, include the objective order of succession that the subject grasps through the application of the category of causality to the sensible manifold of experience, which obtains even in cases where cause and effect appear to coincide, as when a ball is understood to make an impression upon a “stuffed pillow” (“aufgestopften Küssen”) (Kant 1998a, p. 312; 1998b, p. 300). But the “determinations of mind” would also, and more initially, include all notions that come to mind or, as Hölderlin puts it in his “Remarks”, all “representation and sense-reception and reasoning” (“Vorstellung und Empfindung und Räsonnement”). The latter occurrences, insofar as they affect the inner sense, would be instances of “sense-reception” (“Empfindung”) whether they proceed from outer affection or spontaneous thought.35 It is consistent with this consequence of Kantian thought, moreover, that “representation and sense-reception and reasoning” can, in Hölderlin’s remarks, all appear under the auspices of the “system of sense-reception” (Empfindungssystem) that is said to make up “the entire human” (“de[n] ganz[en] Mensch[en]”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250).36 This would have to be the case once it is recognized that even reasoning is experienced each time only insofar as it fills a moment of time and thereby registers in the mind’s inner sense.

“Sense-reception”, however, is itself not successive since succession is already a synthetic notion, as Kant illustrates in the passage from the Critique of Pure Reason that was cited in the first part of this essay to contextualize Fichte’s geometrical figures for intuited subjective activity: “We cannot even represent time”, Kant writes, “without, in drawing a straight line (which is to be the external figurative representation of time), attending merely to the action of the synthesis of the manifold through which we successively determine the inner sense, and thereby attending to the succession of this determination in inner sense” (Kant 1998a, p. 258; cf. Kant 1998b, p. 195).37 It is only if we “attend solely to the action in accordance with which we determine the form of inner sense”, he continues, that “the concept of succession” can emerge “at all. The understanding therefore does not find some sort of combination of the manifold already in inner sense” but “first produces it, by affecting inner sense” (Kant 1998a, p. 258; cf. Kant 1998b, p. 195). Yet, besides the activity of synthesis, each construal of successive moments also presupposes the punctual and fleeting “instant” (“Augenblick”) of “sense-reception” (“Empfindung”) that is anticipated and mediated through the category of “reality” or “the quantity of something insofar as it fills time” (“Quanität von Etwas, so fern es die Zeit erfüllt”), which varies in degree of intensity rather than in magnitude of extent (Kant 1998a, p. 275; 1998b, p. 244). As Gasché concisely elucidates: “The temporal modus of a single sense-reception [einer einzelnen Empfindung] of something in space and time is that of the instant [Augenblick]”; hence, “before every objective determination, apprehension as the sense-reception of something real [Empfindung von etwas Realem] is an apprehension of the unity of a manifold of the real […] as sheer intensive magnitude” (Gasché 2004, p. 437).38 The priority of “sense-reception” in its instantaneous and intensive character over the derivative, synthetic form of succession is, in turn, the presupposition that would allow one to claim as Hölderlin does that the elements of temporal experience may enter into another arrangement than that of “pure succession”.

The other presupposition underlying Hölderlin’s initial remarks on tragic temporality, however, is that the category of reality, as well as the temporal form of its reception, are linguistic functions.39 Hence, the Kantian question of the a priori conditions and limitations of cognition is reformulated at the outset of Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” in terms of the poetic “principles and limitations” (“Prinzipien und Schranken”) by which something might show “that it is something, i.e., that it is cognizable in the means (moyen) of its appearance” (“daß es Etwas ist, d.h. daß es in dem Mittel (moyen) seiner Erscheinung erkennbar ist”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 249). Similarly, Kant’s claim regarding the way in which the “matter” (“Materie”) of a given “sense-reception” (“Empfindung”) “cannot be anticipated” is transferred in Hölderlin’s “Remarks” to the “living sense” (“lebendige[n] Sinn”) of poetic composition, which, like the material content of sensation, “cannot be calculated” in advance (Kant 1998a, p. 291; 1998b, p. 266; Hölderlin 1988, p. 250). Elsewhere, in another famous text on tragedy, Hölderlin explicitly characterizes “the tragic” as a signifying structure of intensive magnitude in which “the sign is, in itself, unmeaningful, without effect, but the original is straight out. Properly speaking”, he continues, “the original can appear only in its weakness, yet insofar as the sign is posited in itself as unmeaningful = 0, the original, the concealed ground of every nature can present itself” (“Im Tragischen nun ist das Zeichen an sich selbst unbedeutend, wirkungslos, aber das Ursprüngliche ist gerade heraus. Eigentlich nemlich kann das Ursprüngliche nur in seiner Schwäche erscheinen, insofern aber das Zeichen an sich selbst als unbedeutend = 0 gesezt wird, kann auch das Ursprüngliche, der verborgene Grund jeder Natur sich darstellen” (Hölderlin 1979, p. 383).40 At issue in these formulations concerning degrees of meaning and force is not the conscious subject of Kantian “sense-reception” but rather the sense of the tragic sign that presents “the concealed ground of every nature” to the degree that its meaning is “posited” as null. In this way, as Gasché points out, Hölderlin adopts “Kantian” terms for the intensive continuum of “sense-reception” to describe the dynamic structure of the linguistic sign (Gasché 2004, p. 437).41

This connection establishes a continuum between the Kantian formulations that Hölderlin deploys at the outset of his “Remarks” and the language of the tragedy by Sophocles that he translates. The “Remarks on Oedipus” formally indicate that reality, meaning, effect, intensity, and time would all be at stake in the spoken signs of Sophocles’ drama. Thus, when Hölderlin writes in his “Remarks on Oedipus” that “tragic transport is, namely, actually empty”, this transport may be read as an alternative articulation for the evacuation of sense that he associates elsewhere with the tragic sign, whose emptiness of meaning allows it to serve as a vehicle for the presentation of what Hölderlin calls “the concealed ground of every nature”. Insofar as it is “concealed”, moreover, this ground lends itself to alignment with death and the dead, especially if, as Hölderlin writes in “The Fatherland in Decline”, there are always two sides to the texture of linguistically structured experience, “so that […] little or nothing subsisting as living” appears on the one side and “all seems to lie on the other”, foreclosing access to whatever dead possibilities may remain latent (“so daß in ihm, so wie in der Sprache, von einer Seite weniger oder nichts lebendig Bestehendes von der anderen Seite alles zu liegen scheint”) (Hölderlin 2008, p. 153; trans. modified; Hölderlin 1979, p. 136). Yet, whether or not it is the other side of the meaningful and efficacious sign—the dead side that appears to be nothing and that therefore escapes all but formal indications—the “concealed ground of every nature” would still be a dimension of language to the extent that it can be mediated by signs. Similarly, the empty “sense-reception” that distinguishes the tragic sign would still be related to the subject of experience that concerns Kant insofar as Hölderlin defines “the entire human” in his “Remarks” as “a system of sense-reception” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250). But the latter system would have to be understood not as an organization of the mind but as an organization of signs to which the human is subjected.

Remote as the opening passages of Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus” may at first seem to be from Sophocles’ drama, then, the structure of linguistic experience that he elaborates there may be read to correspond with the many passages that register the vicissitudes of “sense-reception” that linguistic signs undergo as they lose or accrue effect, and as the personae of the drama come to be affected by these affections of the sign. As Ian Balfour has briefly but incisively observed in his commentary on Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus”, Tiresias’ “speeches” constitute a “discourse with a not-yet-real referent” and thus expose “the character of representation” by suspending “its function of representing the represented” (Balfour 2015, p. 77). Although they span the past, present, and future of both Oedipus and Thebes, filling the “gap” (“Lüke”) in the “course of the world” (“Weltlauf”) that had been created with the unsolved murder of Laios (Hölderlin 1988, p. 258), Tiresias’ pronunciations at the same time present an empty moment of discourse, a discourse without recognizable meaning not only for Oedipus but also for the chorus of Theban elders. Hence, in the stasimon that immediately follows Tiresias’ departure, the chorus takes his prophecies to be void by refusing to acknowledge the “conflict” that Tiresias has just evoked between Oedipus and Laios:

Denn was ein Streit ist zwischen

Den Labdakiden und Polybus’ Sohn

Nicht vormals hab’ ichs

Gewußt, noch weiß ich jezt auch […].

(Hölderlin 1988, pp. 129–31, l. 496–99)

For whatever a conflict there is between the Labdacidae and Polybus’ son, I did not know it before, nor do I know it even now.

Although Tiresias has revealed the conflict in question, the chorus professes to know nothing about it “even now” and thus “says” that he has not uttered signs whose meaning and effect would found a claim to knowledge on their part. Without saying so directly, in other words, they “say” that the signs he utters are “unmeaningful = 0” (Hölderlin 1979, p. 383).

For his part, Oedipus takes a violent, ad hominum approach to doing the same, in accordance with the way in which Tiresias’ words concern not only his knowledge, as is the case for the chorus, but also his very civic identity, casting him both as the murderer of Laios and as one who lives “entirely shamefully” (“[g]anz schändlich”) “with those most beloved” to him (“mit den Liebsten”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 117, l. 370–71). The decisive provocation, however, arrives precisely when Tiresias appeals to the “force of truth” (τῆς ἀληθείας σθένος) or the “power of truth” (“der Wahrheit Macht”) that sustains his speech, evoking the intensity and force that Hölderlin foregrounds in his theoretical remarks on the tragic sign. Acknowledging this force while denying it to Tiresias, Oedipus replies: “It holds valid, [but] not with you, to you this does not belong; blind in ear you are, in mind and eyes” (“Sie gilt, bei dir nicht, dir gehört diß nicht,/Blind bist an Ohren du, an Muth und Augen”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 119, l. 373–75). With this response, Oedipus ascribes the qualities of force and sensibility to speech in order to qualify Tiresias as a speaker who is deprived thereof: without sense, without power, and without truth. In this way, Oedipus, like the chorus, posits the signs of the seer “as unmeaningful = 0”, but he does so in placing the accent upon their “weakness” (“Schwäche”) and with reference to the very signs through which the “concealed ground” of his nature has been brought “straight out” unbeknownst to himself (Hölderlin 1979, p. 383). This nature is nothing if not the position that Oedipus holds within symbolic orders that situate him among the dead “here below” (“hier unten”), rendering his “concealed […] nature” the side of the sign upon which “little or nothing” appears “subsisting as living” (“lebendig Bestehendes”), and in more than one sense (Hölderlin 1988, p. 123, l. 421; 2008, p. 153; trans. modified; Hölderlin 1979, p. 136).42

These traits of Oedipus and Tiresias’ exchange would thus invite the alignment between Tiresias’ speech and the caesura that Hölderlin arrives upon towards the end of the first division of his “Remarks on Oedipus”, as well as the alignment between prophecy and the zero-degree tragic sign that scholars such as Balfour have proposed. But the nullification of sense and force that plays out in the dialogue between Oedipus and Tiresias is also, upon closer examination, irreducible to Oedipus’ and the chorus’s refusal to acknowledge the truth of Tiresias’ words. Just as Oedipus denies force and sight to the person, and thus to the speech, of the seer, Tiresias also emphatically denies Oedipus all “feeling” or αἴσθησις for the truth that he has conveyed, which ranges from Oedipus’ culpability in the murder of Laios to the indefinite plethora of evils in which he and his incestuously begotten children are embroiled: “Do you not feel”; Tiresias says, “the marriage, how you have landed in good sailing upon the shoreless? The crowd of other evils you also do not feel”, he continues, “the ones that at once strike you and your children” (“Fühlst [καταίσθῃ] du die Hochzeit, wie du landetest/Auf guter Schiffahrt an der Uferlosen?/Der andern Übel Menge fühlst [ἐπαισθάνῃ] du auch nicht,/Die dich zugleich und deine Kinder treffen”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 123, l. 428–31; my emphasis). A symmetry thus emerges between these verses and Oedipus’ attack upon Tiresias that is not without significance for the “tragic transport” that Hölderlin locates in the temporary interruption of succession and meaning through prophetic intervention (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250). For Oedipus, Tiresias’ words have no true power, and for Tiresias, Oedipus’ responses have no sense, creating a deadlock that is also an equilibrium. It is this tense balance between Tiresias’ and Oedipus’ respective affirmations and denials that arguably brings the successive movement of the drama to a breaking point and temporarily deprives the linguistic sign of meaning and effect. Not only the truth but also the status of those who claim to pursue or convey it has become undecidable: is the highest instance of political authority in Thebes a criminal, or does the seer with supposed access to the divine lack sight? At the same time, what is thereby rendered questionable far exceeds the two nominal personae who are in conflict. Nothing less than the very foundation of symbolic authority comes to be at stake as public discourse supports the claims of Oedipus, whereas Tiresias locates the “power of truth” with the gods and the dead, i.e., with those instances of speech who are not present, but who function as “pure word” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250).43 As the dialogic opposition between them unfolds, different institutions of significance and truth are alternately invoked and called into question, suspending the very possibility of meaningful and efficacious discourse.

Unlike in Hölderlin’s remarks on the caesura or in his poetological fragment on the tragic sign, however, this suspension is made pronounced in Sophocles’ episode through the rage—the “wild sense”—that supplements the absence of sense and the vacuum of authority that temporarily opens. The chorus will respond to Oedipus’ attack upon Tiresias by ascribing rage to both of them: “They seem to us to be said in rage at once, the words of that one and yours, Oedipus” (“Es scheinen uns zugleich von dem die Worte/Im Zorn [ὀργῇ] gesagt und deine, Oedipus”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 121, l. 409–10). In so doing, the chorus places both speakers under the aegis of the “wild sense” (“wilden Sinn”) that the priest of Zeus had associated with the influence of the Sphinx and that Hölderlin will associate with the “wild world of the dead” (“wilden Welt der Todten”) in his “Remarks on Antigone” (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 85, 418).44 It will be to this rage that Hölderlin recurs again in his “Remarks” when he underscores how the “peaceful” (“[f]riedliche”) speech of the chorus, precisely because it is peaceful, is also not conciliatory but rather conflicted with the dialogue, which, in turn, aims to “tear the soul” of the chorus in what Hölderlin calls “its”—the dialogue’s—“enraged sensibility” (“in seiner zornigen Empfindlichkeit”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 257).45 This “enraged sensibility” of the dialogue is the wild and deadly correlate to a situation in which the symbolic basis of speech is rent, voiding the sense or “sense-reception” (“Empfindung”) of the sign as such.46 It is therefore not only through the breach in symbolic foundations that arrives with the deadlock between Tiresias and Oedipus but also through the wild and deadly rage that arises in this gap that “tragic transport” can be seen to occur as humans are torn “from the middle point of [their] inner life […] into the eccentric sphere of the dead” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 251).

This moment of nullified signs and intense rage does not, however, merely mark the pause that precedes the increasingly rapid movement toward catastrophe where, as Hölderlin puts it in his remarks, “raging unmeasure [zornige[e] Unmaas], […], in destructive jouissance [zerstörungsfroh], merely follows the riptide of time [der reißenden Zeit]” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 253). It is also already a turning point. For if the presumed validity of public discourse prevails up to Tiresias’ entrance “into the course of fate” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 251), Tiresias’ initially void declarations will accrue force and meaning over the remainder of the drama.47 The supposedly empty signs of the seer already begin to gain sense for Oedipus when Jocasta reveals the details of Laios’ fatal journey, describing the route that Laios took, as well as his physical likeness to Oedipus (Hölderlin 1988, p. 161). Having heard her account, Oedipus responds: “Poor me. I may well have, as I violently broke out just now in curses, known nothing! […] Violently I fear whether the seer may not be seeing” (“Ich armer. Wohl hab’ ich, da ich in Flüche/Gewaltig ausbrach eben, nichts gewußt! […] Gewaltig fürcht’ ich, daß nicht sehend sei der Seher”) (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 161, l. 764–67).48 When Jocasta adds the further detail that Laios was in the company of four men with only one wagon, Oedipus cries out again: “Woe, woe, now it is revealed” (“Weh! Weh! nun ist es offenbar”) (Hölderlin 1988, pp. 161, l. 774). Initially declared null, Tiresias’ utterances thus turn out to be the third party of this dialogue; they are what provoke outcries of pain, and they are what new tidings are interpreted to contest or to confirm.

But it is when a former servant of Laios reports the prophetic motives for Laios’ and Jocasta’s decision to kill their child that Oedipus’ outcries suggest that he has finally received, sensed, and felt the full reality of Tiresias’ prophecies. “Io, io, that all of these things should come out clearly” (ἰού, ίού, τὰ πάντ᾽ἂν ἐξικοι σαφῆ), Oedipus begins, which Hölderlin renders: “Iu! Iu! das Ganze kommt genau heraus” (“Io! Io! The whole comes out exactly”), echoing his formulation for the tragic sign: “Now, in the tragic, the sign is, in itself, unmeaningful, without effect, but the original is straight out” (“Im Tragischen nun ist das Zeichen an sich selbst unbedeutend, wirkungslos, aber das Ursprüngliche ist gerade heraus”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 211, l. 1207; 1979, p. 383; my emphasis). What ensues is Oedipus’ violent reenactment discussed above of the “entirely shameful” comportment that Tiresias had ascribed to him, as Oedipus penetrates his eyes with the needles that he takes from Jocasta’s robes, coupling self-punishment and copulation to yield “an evil engendered together by man and wife” (“Ein Übel zusammen erzeugt von Mann und Weib”) (Hölderlin 1988, p. 221, l. 1311). And when Oedipus returns to the stage blinded, his speech will henceforth consist of virtually nothing but a series of further variations upon his criminal history in which he figures not only as the agent of murder and incest but also as one who has already been long pronounced dead.49

The empty signifiers of Tiresias’ prophecy thus become fulfilled, and those of Oedipus become annulled, reducing the rupture that had opened with the discrepancy between the signs of the seer and the “representation and sense-reception and reasoning” of public discourse (Hölderlin 1988, p. 250). In his translation of Oedipus the King, Hölderlin draws out these qualitative alterations of the linguistic sign, from the crisis in authority that suspends significance to the “wild sense” that prevails in the absence of an internally consistent symbolic order, allowing life and death to coincide to the very degree that the “power” of prophetic “truth” approaches a maximum. In the first division of his “Remarks on Oedipus”, Hölderlin offers a formal description of this dynamic that accentuates its implications for the temporality of experience, whose transcendental forms and categories Hölderlin reconceives, in a departure from Kant, as determinations of language. Inner sense, sense-reception, quality, and reality become articulated there and elsewhere in Hölderlin’s poetological writings as affections of the sign rather than affections of the mind. But as the initial nullification and incremental realization of Tiresias’ prophecies indicate, the formal structure of linguistic experience that Hölderlin elaborates also entails that each subject of language and each worldly nexus are structurally exposed to vicissitudes that may interrupt the course of succession, reconfigure the historical past, expose the latent side of the discursive world, and draw human life into the “eccentric sphere of the dead” (Hölderlin 1988, p. 251).

Tragedy emerges as a function of both transcendental linguistic structures and contingencies that bring the symbolic order to a breaking point. Since these structures and contingencies are also those that shape the meaning of reality and the order of succession, tragedy emerges as a historical structure as well, exposing both poetry and experience to be a question “of knowing where there may ever yet […] reside something that would be of the order of prophecy”—and where we may stand with the dead (Lacan 2024, p. 299).