Colloquium: New Philologies

Front Matter

Editorial Team — 2024-04-02

Bachmann und die Philosophie

Marion Heinz — 2024-04-02

Der vorliegende Band versammelt die überarbeiteten Vorträge der gleichnamigen Tagung, die nach einer Idee von Marion Heinz gemeinsam mit Alice Pechriggl und dem Institut für Philosophie, in Kooperation mit dem Musil-Institut für Literaturforschung der Universität Klagenfurt, organisiert wurde und von 19. bis 20. Mai 2022 im Musil-Haus stattfand. Der Titel Ingeborg Bachmann und die Philosophie zeigt an, dass entgegen den üblichen Schwerpunktsetzungen hier ihre philosophischen Arbeiten, deren Erträge und Kontexte ins Zentrum der Untersuchung gestellt werden sollten. Die philosophischen Leistungen und Auffassungen der Dichterin zu explizieren und zu würdigen, verspricht einen klareren Blick auf den Niederschlag dieser Gedanken im literarischen Werk, aber auch ein besseres Verständnis für die Eigenart poetischer Transformationen philosophischer Gehalte. So schärfen derartige Analysen auch den Blick für die der dichterischen Arbeit erst entspringenden philosophischen Anliegen und für die philosophischen Gehalte der literarischen Texte.

Philosophie und die Wahrheit der Kunst

Marion Heinz — 2024-04-02

This article deals with Ingeborg Bachmann’s doctoral dissertation on the critical reception of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the exceptional position of Bachman’s dissertation in academia after the Second World War, which celebrated Heidegger as a master-thinker even though he was deeply engaged in the Third Reich. On the basis of Rudolf Carnap’s thinking Bachmann draws a sharp line between philosophy and Heidegger’s “Seinsmystik”. This leads her to a short, but profound, reflection on the essence of fine art.

Ingeborg Bachmanns Schrift – Auf der Suche nach Wahrheit, Wissen und Begehren

Eva Laquièze-Waniek — 2024-04-02

Bachmann’s claims “We have to find true sentences” or “The truth is reasonable for man” demonstrate her interest in the question of a true access to the real by language and writing, which I discuss here. I firstly turn to her doctoral thesis (1949): There Bachmann used Carnap’s logical empirical method of verification to criticise Heidegger's existential philosophy as metaphysical and senseless, referring to Wittgenstein's Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” as an interdiction to express existential feelings in language. But in the end Bachmann thwarted this restriction with Baudelaire’s poem The Abyss (1862), which expressed Pascal´s experience of fear and being split, leading to the insight that there is no full knowledge: our access to the world remains partial and strange.

This may have impacted Bachmann’s further writing, for she then tackled the topic of truth in a literary way like in her novels A Wildermuth and Undine Goes/Leaves. This leads me to the further question if poetry and art have their own claim to truth. With Austin, Jakobson, Peirce, and the later Wittgenstein – who offer different understandings of telling the truth and a performative and plurifunctional usage of language –, I then show that Bachmann’s notion of poetry aims at breaking silence and pushing back darkness, which connects it finally to the Lacanian and Freudian concept of desire as the subject’s own and unconscious truth that can become conscious through free association in speech.

Bachmann und Wittgenstein

Volker Munz — 2024-04-02

The following contribution focuses on Ingeborg Bachmann’s reception of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy, particularly the central theses of his famous Tractatus logico-philosophicus, published in 1922. Her two radio essays from 1953, Sagbares und Unsagbares – Die Philosophie Ludwig Wittgensteins, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Zu einem Kapitel der jüngsten Philosophiegeschichte show Bachmann’s deep understanding of essential aspects in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. Bachmann was also responsible for the German publication of Wittgenstein’s Werkausgabe Band I, including the Tractatus and his second masterpiece Philosophical Investigations in 1960. On several occasions Bachmann mentions the influence Wittgenstein had on her. The text will focus on selected topics of his philosophy that also had a strong impact on Bachmann, such as his famous concept of the unsayable, the limits of language, or his understanding of the Western civilization and culture at his times.

Ingeborg Bachmann und der Wiener Kreis

Gerhard Donhauser — 2024-04-02

When Ingeborg Bachmann began studying philosophy, the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism had long since ceased to exist. What Bachmann may have found in this regard at the University of Vienna were traces, and traces of the Vienna Circle can also be found in her dissertation. This article attempts to pursue both. Its path leads from a sketch of institutional philosophy at the University of Vienna in the years after 1945 via a concise overview of the Vienna Circle to the references to it in Bachmann's doctoral thesis.

Bachmanns Reflexion über Sprache und Gewalt im Erzählungsband Das dreißigste Jahr

Barbara Agnese — 2024-04-02

The focus of this article is Ingeborg Bachmann’s critical and poetic thinking on the relationship between language and violence. The starting point is a commentary of a central passage from the first Frankfurt lecture Fragen und Scheinfragen (Questions and Pseudo-Questions, 1959), in which Bachmann describes the writer's attitude to language. Dissatisfaction with and suspicion of language are part of a writer's crisis and at the same time his/her greatest motivation. Next, Bachmann's collection of stories Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year, 1961) is presented as a critical analysis of human coexistence and of the social use of language. Bachmann observes and describes the emergence and development of violence from which one cannot escape: language and violence appear to be intertwined. The characters in two of the stories (The Thirtieth Year and Everything), who want to escape this violence and language, are analysed through concepts developed by René Girard. According to Girard, the cause of interpersonal conflicts is the “mimetic desire” of people who live in close proximity with one another. Coexistence fosters rivalry, envy, and jealousy. This behaviour is contagious and shared by all members of the group, who repeat it by imitating each other, which leads to rapid escalations of violence.

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

Marion Schmaus — 2024-04-02

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.

Das Schöne in der kritisch-philosophischen Poetik Ingeborg Bachmanns

Maja Soboleva — 2024-04-02

The paper aims to reconstruct Bachmann’s most important poetological principles on the basis of her critical writings and the Frankfurt lectures. In doing so, the concept of beauty, which is constitutive for her understanding of literature and language, comes into focus. An interpretation of this concept from the perspective of existential philosophy makes it possible to combine questions of literary theory related to contemporary poetics on the one hand, and philosophical questions related to personal authenticity (and hence identity) and to the justification of the author’s existence on the other, and thus to advance to Bachmann’s poetological credo.

Agamben liest Bachmann oder die Sprache als Strafe und Hoffnung

Martin G. Weiß — 2024-04-02

In his longest text on Ingeborg Bachmann, The Silence of Words, Giorgio Agamben attempts to trace Bachmann’s journey from philosophy to poetry. While Agamben distinguishes between a speaking language and a silent language, the present essay seeks to demonstrate, by referring to Bachmann’s and Martin Heidegger’s engagement with the saying of Anaximander, that in Bachmann there is no differentiation between good and bad language. Rather, language for Bachmann is always simultaneously a punishment for the past and a message of hope for the future.

Sprach-Exil und „Haus des Seins“

Markus May — 2024-04-02

Heidegger’s concept of language as “the house of being”, alongside the notion that poets are destined to be the “keepers” of this “house”, appealed pre-eminently to German-speaking post-war poets such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Such poets dealt critically with this idea because of Heidegger’s refusal to confront his own highly controversial stance after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. According to Celan and Bachmann, the philosophical problem involved was not so much a hazy understanding of “Seinsvergessenheit” (forgetfulness of being), but that of a wilful repression of one’s individual and collective past, which is to say the deliberate refusal to acknowledge personal guilt. The dialogically related poems Exil (Exile) and In die Ferne (Into the Distance), both written in 1957, provided alternative poetic versions of the idea of “dwelling in language”, which can be regarded as answers to Heidegger on behalf of those who were silenced in the Shoah, those who Heidegger had deliberately forgotten.