Abstract

In this dissertation I examine the structure of the subject in Friedrich Holderlin. The dissertation begins with a theoretical/historical introduction. Several scholars contend that Holderlin had developed his views on language under the influence of the linguistic philosophies of Hamann, Herder and Fichte. In the first chapter I point to several concepts that these thinkers share with Holderlin, but argue that one concept has particular relevance: the rejection of Kant's assertion that the self can be known only by means of an "inner sense." For all these thinkers, including Holderlin, knowledge ensues from the perception of objects, and all objects can be perceived and understood only by means of linguistic signs. The same holds for the self. For them, the self is knowable only as an object constituted in language. ;In the second chapter I examine Holderlin's theory of tragedy. For Holderlin, a theory of tragedy must also be a theory of language and consciousness. A tragedy is comprised of the play of linguistic signifiers against one another. These signifiers are cancelled out, or aufgehoben, in the tension inherent in formal elements of the genre. Further, tragic characters are constituted by linguistic signifiers. What makes this genre tragic is the negation of this self as a linguistic entity. In this respect, Holderlin is quite close not only to Hamann, Herder and Fichte, but to Hegel and Lacan and their notions of language, self-consciousness, and death. ;The third chapter begins by marking a transition to the final two. In his late fragments and essays, Holderlin conflates tragic and lyric poetry, and holds that lyric represents the completion of tragedy. I thus examine "Germanien" and "Der Rhein" in the context of the first two chapters, with emphasis on the structure of the lyrical/tragic self. In these hymns, Holderlin adheres to a notion of the self as constituted by object relationships expressed in language. While tragedy represents the ultimate and irrevocable death of the self, lyric reveals the possibility of its reconstitution in relation to an object and the linguistic signifiers that define that object and that self