The Politics of Letters.
Poetics and theology in the alphabetic game
Habilitation project by Stefanie Leuenberger
"No royal palace and no billionaire's cottage has experienced a thousandth of the ornamental love that has been bestowed on letters throughout cultural history. Once for the joy of beauty and to honour them. But also with cunning intent. The letters are, after all, the pillars of a gate over which could be written quite well what Dante read about the gates of hell, and there their rough archetype should not deter the many little ones who have to pass through this gate every year." (Benjamin 1991d, p. 619)
The project focuses on literature that emphasises letters in a playful way and thus brings alphabetical order into the centre of attention. The starting thesis is that in many of these texts the work with the alphabet is not to be understood as a self-referential reflection on language and the production procedures of texts. Rather, it serves as an examination of language as a system of signs corresponding to the order of things and asks about the relationship between language and the world and about the possibilities and limits of man's poetic power. It discusses the "engagement" of literature, the role that the respective literary and artistic avant-gardes take in this regard, the problem of representing the unrepresentable, the relationship between history, memory and politics. Literature that deals with the alphabet in this playful-serious way is to be seen as a transnational, European phenomenon that can be observed from the 17th to the 20th century. It bears witness to the dialectic of secularisation and has a decisive historical, theological and political significance in modern Europe.
European literatures since antiquity feature a large number of game forms that draw the recipient's attention to the letters: for example, texts determined by a "contrainte" such as the lepogram, tautogram, anagram, pangram, acrostic and palindrome, as well as figure poems, sound poems and some forms of concrete poetry. Despite the knowledge of the significance of letters and their combinations in mysticism and magic, these games are often read in research to this day as signs of mannerism and as semantically empty gimmicks.
The planned project would like to counter this view with a fundamentally different reading. It is to be outlined on the basis of the following theses:
1) the serious play with letters serves to address the question of the relationship between linguistic order and world order. The cabbalistic theory of language understood the letters as cosmological basic forms through whose combination creation took place. Thus, the structure of language and writing was seen as the metaphysical structure of things, which included the possibility of a magical-productive function of language. These ideas remained influential in modernity after the collapse of metaphysical systems, to the extent that the combination and permutation, the connection or dispersion of letters in different contexts is played out again and again up to the present. It serves to reflect on the poetic-creative as well as the destructive potential of man.
2) The dissolution of the letter order, which characterises some texts, not only has the function of shaking up the recipients through its moment of irritation, but also shows the attempt to fragment the previous literary language into its smallest components and thus at the same time to disrupt or even abolish the order of an outdated system of socio-political relations.
3) Literary texts often emerge in times of historical crisis. They thematise loss, trauma and collapse insofar as these processes of destruction become visible in their very structure. The questioning, the damage, the shattering of literature is followed, as will be shown, by its reconstruction from "zero point" by playing with its smallest elements, the letters.
4) Language games with the alphabet often produce multilingual, polyphonic texts and are thus always connected with a reflection on the one language and the multiplicity of languages. They are connected to the question of the constitution or restitution of a national (literary) language and to the discussion about language pluralism and language patriotism, about one's own and 'foreign' language and thus about the inclusion and exclusion of groups and individuals. In this way, they make it possible to address the tension between European nationalism and cosmopolitanism as well as the relationship between one's own and 'foreign' language in the context of exile and expulsion, migration and cultural translation processes.
These theses will be examined using a corpus of texts whose study cases are taken from European literatures and American literature, with a focus on the Baroque, the period around 1800, the avant-gardes of modernity and the post-war period - epochs in which literature emerged that combines the play of language with reflections on social reality and the situation of the individual during or after a profound crisis. The project can thus reveal the political and historical function of supposedly solipsistic procedures and discover the significance of this literature.