Lukas Lehner

Supervisor: Marit Grøtta (UiO) Co-supervisor: Cornelia Zumbusch (Universität Hamburg) (Pre-print) This thesis reads Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) as an experimental arrangement in which sociohistorical, epistemological and media-technological developments around 1800 are staged, finding its nexus in the “borderline-case” of the novel’s main theme of love: The conception of love around 1800 is marked by the emergence of an “imaginary” sociability, as well as “romantic data-processing” – in the way it reacts to the aporias inherent to the representational, aesthetic qua media technological status quo of its time. In theoretical dialogue with Niklas Luhmann’s system-theoretical perspectives and Friedrich Kittler’s psychoanalytically infused media-theory, this thesis takes on a post-hermeneutic approach, focusing on the historically situated material, medial and institutional structures that partake in the constitution of the novel’s characters as enamored subjects around 1800. In analyzing key scenes of the novel in which the tension between the imagination and the empirical real are staged with regard to a plethora of media-technological dispositifs, as well as to the discussion of artistic representational strategies, I argue, that these extra-romantic scenes in the novel equally find their intersection in the theme of love: Love, around 1800, the novel shows, is radically transformed by changing institutional and media-technological structures and techniques. In reading the novel as an experimental arrangement on not only a thematic and motivic, but also formal level, I show, how the novel itself attempts to “think” and stage both the historical vectors that inform its theme of romantic love and epistemic positions, as well as the representational aporias of the medium of literature. I aim to show how the novel’s formal descriptive modes and its formal characterizations of its characters pertain to central parameters and media-technological aporias of around 1800, and how they find their intersection in the constitution of love. In my view, Die Wahlverwandtschaften makes up a “laboratory of modernity”, staging the aporetic tensions and negotiations that infuse the constitution of modern, loving subjects. Overarchingly, I aim to show, how the emergence of the nuclear family and a remodeled institution of marriage in the transition to functional society marks a new pedagogical and anthropological site for the inscription of novel pathways in which desire circulates: Following the Enlightenment’s (reform-pedagogy’s) implicit goal of ridding the human of natural, animal carnal desires, love is being spiritualized and disembodied. It is this development of love becoming tied to the imagination and the tension between an “ideal of the beloved” and the empirical bodily individual of the loved, that I argue infuse the plethora of media-technological, epistemological and representational questions and aporias the novel thematizes, and which this thesis aims to explore as structurally relevant to a radically new functioning of love around 1800.

(Draft of Conference Paper held at the BARS-Conference “Romantic (Un)Consciousness”, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, UK in September 2025). Around 1800, a plethora of epistemological and physiological theories and discoveries contest and differentiate the primacy of “conscious” conceptual synthesis postulated by Kantian transcendental philosophy: Rather than taking the spontaneity of the self-identical subject of the transcendental apperception posited by Kant, as its epistemological point of departure, the aforementioned theories, I argue, implicitly highlight the existence of an unconscious perceptive field, occupying a strangely liminal position between objectivity and subjectivity, between conscious and unconscious processes. This paper will take Salomon Maimon’s critique of Kantian transcendental philosophy in his treatise “Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie” (1790) as a point of departure: Maimon, I argue following Gilles Deleuze, is the first to radicalize the consequences of an unconscious, psychic automatism of perception as the constitutive ground of conscious conceptual synthesis. Goethe’s “Theory of Color” (“Zur Farbenlehre”, 1810), especially its first chapter concerning the physiology of color (“Physiologische Farben”), provides, I argue, a physiologically situated theory of vision that further differentiates Maimon’s claim. Goethe’s inquiry into entoptic phenomena discovers a sphere of “pure perceptual events”, i.e., unconscious and physiologically grounded differential mechanisms that precede the synthesis of recognition of clearly delineated figures and objects. Physician Johann Christian Reil, a key-figure in “romantic psychology”, proposes a physiological grounded, proto-“neuronal” theory of mental illnesses and their cure in Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (1803): For Reil, the possibility of mental disorder lies in the very physiological, i.e., neuronal constitution of consciousness. This papers overarching goal is thus to highlight and explicate the philosophical and natural scientific vectors infusing a “differential”, perceptual unconscious, foreshadowing both the psychophysical conception of a “perceptive threshold”, as well as of subsequent psychoanalytical theories of a “Reizschutz”.

This article investigates how the self is thematized in August Strindberg’s naturalist works from the 1880s and 1890s, as well as in A Dream Play after the turn of the century. Focusing on the play The Father and the short stories “Samvetskval” and “Silverträsket”, and in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s machinistic conception of the self, this article explores how Strindberg depicts a “mechanics of the self” marked by the interplay of external social regulations and internal psychological pressures which constitute the bourgeois subject. Further, this article shows how Strindberg’s measurements of the unclear coordinates of the “I” and mapping of the fluctuating movements of the “self” between containment and expansion are transposed to A Dream Play. Thus, this article proposes that A Dream Play does not exclusively thematize a longing for transcendence, as a certain current in Strindberg scholarship claims, but rather a longing for immanent changes of the self and possible expansions and spheres of movement of the “I”, closely tied to socio-economic questions.