Utopie contra Ideologie – Ingeborg Bachmanns Textstrategien zwischen Sprachethik und literarischer Ethik

Abstract

Focusing on Ingeborg Bachmann's Musil essay Utopia versus Ideology, the article outlines aspects of literary and language ethics. Both Robert Musil's and Ingeborg Bachmann's works are characterized by transdisciplinary, philosophical-literary thought centered on ethical con-cerns. The literary form is appreciated in its critique of ideologies; Bachmann, with Musil, speaks about literature as formulating open ideologies instead of closed ones, and according to both, this means: utopias. Due to the polyphony of literary texts and the linking of ethical statements to character perspectives, these statements appear in their intrinsic connection to experience and to moments of cognition – Musil's anderer Zustand – and therein as a philo-sophically precise representation of a true-to-life ethics that puts situational contexts as well as application- and motivation-problems in the foreground. In the search for the right expression, which is particularly noticeable in Musil and Bachmann, e.g. through the variation of literary modes like essay, poetry and novel as well as through the metaphoricity of speech, a language ethics manifests itself.