ABSTRACT
Disabusing himself of post-Kantian aspirations of self-authenticating knowledge, the mysterious Romantic author known as Novalis sought a new way of understanding of subjectivity and its constitutive role in experience. To that end, Novalis turns to poetry. For Novalis, poetry’s virtue is its capacity to simultaneously express and occlude the Absolute and transfigure the finitude of transcendental reflection through ecstasy. Thus Novalis identifies presentation of the “unpresentable” as the common gesture of poetry and mysticism, an idea reflected in the frequent use of apophatic themes like unspeakability, renunciation, presence-in-absence, and kenosis throughout his writings. For Novalis, this mystical poesis shapes the touchstones of public life. For this reason, ideological and social critics must learn to construct and use fantasy. While such uses of fantasy risk implicating Novalis’ mystical approach in a proto-fascistic “aestheticisation” of the political, his aestheticising strategy also expresses revolutionary potential by facilitating an interrogation of the temporality of political redemption as such. This mystical temporality of redemption reverberates in Western Marxism through Walter Benjamin’s “messianic materialism.” Reading the historical struggle for emancipation through an “index by which it is referred to redemption,” Benjamin combines the messianic theology of post-exilic Judaism with the redemptive temporality of Novalis’ mystico-political writings.
