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Hölderlin

Friedrich Hölderlin · German poet · 1770–1843

Appears in 152 videos · 295 passages, 140 of them in depth.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani sees Hölderlin as the fellow student of Hegel and Schelling at the Tübingen Stift, with whom he planted a liberty tree, and he notes that his influence on Hegel is now being reassessed1. He returns very often to Mnemosyne: mortals reach the abyss before the gods, and with them the echo changes. Knowledge of death thus becomes a superiority23. He reads Bread and Wine closely: what Hölderlin misses in Greece is not beauty, but that "no one there was alone in bearing life"4. He also reads In Lovely Blue, To Mother Earth, The Ister and Andenken. Against Heidegger's reading, he presents Hölderlin as a poet who favoured the Revolution and who concludes that Sophocles is republican56. Finally, he links his madness to his reflection on poetic genres and to overwhelming beauty ("Apollo has struck me"), and places him with Nerval and Nietzsche among the madmen of modernity.

  1. 1"Je est un autre" ou l'identité contradictoire12 Dec 2023 · 45:27
  2. 2#1.8 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?28 Jan 2016 · 1:46:11
  3. 3#5 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...19 Nov 2020 · 10:14
  4. 4#9 • Retour aux logiques du sujet30 May 2020 · 23:33
  5. 510#1 L’éternelle ironie de la communauté22 Sept 2021 · 55:16
  6. 6#11 • Retour aux logiques du sujet21 Jun 2020 · 1:39:30

Summary produced automatically from 150 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Portrait: HölderlinWho is this?

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (UK:, US: ; German: ; 20 March 1770 – 7 June 1843) was a German poet and philosopher. Described by Norbert von Hellingrath as "the most German of Germans", Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism. Particularly due to his early association with and philosophical influence on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, he was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism. […]

Read the article on Wikipedia

Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0, excerpt · Portrait: Franz Carl Hiemer, Public domain

Season 11 · 18 Mar 2023A SPRINGTIME OF THE PEOPLES?
  1. 40:01The listener evokes a body detaching into infinity, commented on during a live reading.
  2. 1:09:45To the MadonnaIn this hymn, melancholy has devoured the song of his childhood; the Madonna gathers up the fragmented body.
  3. 1:31:11In Lovely BlueComing down from the bell tower reveals man's stature and protects against what is fearsome in poetic illumination.
  4. 1:31:51To the MadonnaSolitary happiness makes him unreasonable regarding property.
  5. 1:33:53In the ForestMan wraps himself in the garment of his shame and receives speech, the most perilous of goods.
Season 11 · 17 Feb 2023Roots or migration? From analytical reverie to current events, from Hölderlin to the war
  1. 13:33In Lovely BlueA poem from the tower period, attributed by Waiblinger to a mad poet; its clarity discourages any elucidation.
  2. 21:28In Lovely BlueFrom infinite blue without contour, the descent beneath the bell brings out the figure of man.
  3. 33:01In Lovely BlueMan dwells poetically; God delights in rupture; the soul must remain pure; restraint calls for Greek measure.
  4. 57:35In Lovely BlueThe last lines make Oedipus a poor foreigner in Greece: to live is a death, death is also a life.
Talks · 19 Mar 2022Dominique Pagani - Hölderlin, poetry and politics
  1. 6:11Remarks on Oedipus and on AntigoneFinal essay before madness, which concludes that Sophocles is republican.
  2. 19:13The Bread and the WineClose reading of the elegy, where night is a time of waiting between the Greek day and the return of the collective.
  3. 1:20:26MnemosyneMortals reach the abyss before the gods: finitude becomes a plus.
  4. 1:28:46GermaniaGermania becomes priestess and unarmed counselor of the peoples, contrary to the Heideggerian reading.
  5. 1:35:55Distich in which he says he hates the rabble of lords and priests.
Season 10 · 24 Nov 202110#5 The figure of Antigone, such as into herself at last...
  1. 14:47Remarks on Oedipus and AntigoneLast prose essay, written just before his madness.
  2. 1:16:51Remarks on Oedipus and AntigoneHe concludes that the rational form of tragedy is political and more precisely republican.
  3. 1:26:31Remarks on Oedipus and AntigoneThe most perilous moment is when spirit and the sensible object stand face to face; it is there that man takes on his outline.
  4. 1:36:56Remarks on Oedipus and AntigoneHe comments on the Hesperian, the sun as moral center, and Antigone's sublime presumption, then Niobe.
  5. 2:03:29The RhineThe hymn describes the dialectic of river and banks, from the excess of its youth to the founding of cities.
Season 9.1 · 13 Nov 2020#4 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
  1. 34:41MnemosyneReading and commentary of the first Mnemosyne: fruits ripened that return to the earth, the prophetic serpent of Delphi.
  2. 43:38MnemosyneMuch is to be retained like a burden of logs, against the ancient laws of the earth that go awry.
  3. 1:03:39MnemosyneThe first poem concludes with an intermediate solution: letting oneself be rocked as on an unsteady boat.
  4. 1:05:04MnemosyneCommentary on the second Mnemosyne: sign without meaning, mortals who have won the abyss, dead heroes, Mnemosyne's hubris.
  5. 1:09:35Written in 1802, of a modernity that makes surrealist poetry look academic by comparison.
Season 8 · 9 Jul 2020#13 • Return to the logics of the subject
  1. 1:10:19German SongThe texts of the late Hölderlin, full of gaps, are among the most difficult; full reading of the poem.
  2. 1:15:04German SongThe poem opposes intoxication and sobriety, light and shadow; the lone poet seeks a measure he does not attain.
  3. 1:27:21To the PoetsThe poet receives the divine lightning bareheaded and transmits it to men veiled in song.
  4. 1:31:24German SongThe nameless "you" is the spirit of the homeland, named by the song, far from any chauvinist sense.
Season 8 · 11 Jun 2020#10 • Return to the logics of the subject
  1. 26:35BonapartePoets are sacred vessels in which the soul of heroes rests, but the hero acts in the world.
  2. 41:31To Mother EarthFirst of the great hymns, which synthesizes the collective poet and the poet of interiority; names of the three characters.
  3. 45:02To Mother EarthWithout the song of the community, the sacred would not be manifest among the living.
  4. 1:02:02To Mother EarthThe one who sings alone, the abandoned temples, the nameless god, the shepherd contemplating the peaks.
Season 7 · 18 Apr 2020#5 • Harnessed to confinitude
  1. 3:48His formula: fear before truth arising from pleasure at its contact, which announces psychoanalysis.
  2. 38:19The Bread and the WineThe poem floats between Christ and Dionysus, night and day; the nocturnal is exceptional in his poetry, which is otherwise too luminous.
  3. 50:38The Bread and the WineCommentary on the stanzas: the night of non-knowledge, sacred intoxication and the mad, but the day remains dearer, where thought reigns.
  4. 1:08:38Poem he prefers to call Evocation: it is not good to have in the soul no perishable thought.
  5. 1:18:06The Bread and the WineWe come too late: truth is fearsome from excess of happiness, and what moderns lack is the Greece where no one was alone.
Season 5.2 · 26 Mar 2019#5.5 Nature or Landscape?
  1. 30:47The WalkThe setting is annihilated down to "the beauty that wells up at the sources of the very first image."
  2. 35:18In Lovely BlueFrom the blue where there is nothing to see, one comes back down toward the measure of man, who dwells poetically on the earth.
  3. 43:55The EagleMigration from the Indus raises the question "where shall we want to remain?"
  4. 53:32German SongThe native turn: the modern poet, in the shade, finds in speech and the collective what takes over from the religious.
  5. 1:30:36God himself wears a garment; Semele, struck by lightning, gives birth to Bacchus.
Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.4 From Ulysses to Daedalus
  1. 22:32Poems of MadnessSecluded in his tower, he writes: "Only now do I understand man, since I live far from him."
  2. 37:35Greece"Mine is the discourse of the fatherland"; the Greeks neglected the "national"; "who then governs now? A race of serpents."
  3. 48:19RousseauA great post-Rousseauian, he sees great poets appear at the beginning and end of the great historical eras.
  4. 50:49Commentators heir to Heidegger never quote his "patriotic discourse."
  5. 1:05:13The Bread and the Wine"Why poets in this time of miserable shadow?": the quotation that closes the talk.
Season 9.1 · 19 Nov 2020#5 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
  1. 10:14MnemosyneMortals reach the abyss before the gods, thus with them the echo changes: he explains the three versions and why he keeps the word echo.
  2. 40:28MnemosyneThe fragment poses a problem that Proust's texts do not yet resolve.
  3. 50:37MnemosyneRecalls the end of the first version: "forward, backward, we do not want to see."
  4. 1:26:10MnemosyneWe now understand why the echo changes: a back-and-forth between the effort of anamnesis and the effort not to know.
Season 8 · 21 Jun 2020#11 • Return to the logics of the subject
  1. 19:08Fellow student of Hegel and Schelling at the Tübingen Stift.
  2. 25:06For him, Greek culture is the inverse of ours.
  3. 1:11:19Letter to BöhlendorffOn returning from Bordeaux, he says that Apollo struck him and describes how the Greeks preserved themselves from the violence of the element.
  4. 1:39:30In Lovely BluePoet favorable to the Revolution, to be wrested from Heidegger; his Oedipus Rex has an eye too many.
  5. 1:42:34German SongPoem announced for the next session.
Season 7 · 4 Apr 2020#3 • Harnessed to confinitude
  1. 42:46"King Oedipus has one eye too many, perhaps": modern man knows too much.
  2. 52:51One can fall upward as well as downward.
  3. 1:09:58His stay in Bordeaux shows that globalization is not a thing of today.
  4. 1:39:22He calls for a Greece extended to the whole of society; fragment: the Greeks wanted to found an empire of art, and Greece foundered.
Season 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.8 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
  1. 1:28:00In his translations of Pindar: fear of truth because of the pleasure found in contact with it.
  2. 1:28:19At the Source of the DanubeHis last hymns bear the names of rivers; the Danube, the only great river that flows eastward.
  3. 1:31:13At the Source of the DanubeLike Marx, he begins with Asia; the word from the East passes through Greece and Rome down to us.
  4. 1:37:21The RhineHeavy to bear is misfortune, but happiness even more so.
Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.1 From Ulysses to Daedalus
  1. 3:40AndenkenHis trip to Bordeaux makes him encounter Greece as the South; he replies to an aristocrat: "On the contrary, I am German."
  2. 39:27MnemosyneThe gods cannot do everything, mortals reach the abyss: with men the echo changes, there is no longer mere repetition.
Series · 1 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 1/5
  1. 7:29At the Source of the DanubeHis poetry rises to the philosophical and rediscovers the Hegelian conception of history: Orient, Greece, the West.
  2. 1:41:15Planted a tree of liberty in Tübingen with Hegel and Schelling.
  3. 1:46:27At the Source of the DanubeThe stupor that darkens the eyes of the best explains the hecatomb of his generation.
Series · 3 Dec 2020Musicosophy 1. Schubert and the master singers
  1. 16:22The RhineThe gushing of the Rhine that tears at its banks, the opposite of the Schubertian river.
  2. 21:57During his madness, he might say: nothing happens to me.
  3. 26:50Bread and WineA nocturne of very rare serenity for him, where the marketplace rests and the fountains murmur.
  4. 40:48PatmosThe conclusion of Patmos is compared to the final harangue of Die Meistersinger.
Season 7 · 11 Apr 2020#4 • Harnessed to confinitude
  1. 49:53"King Oedipus has one eye too many": modern man sees and knows too much.
  2. 55:06Born in 1770 like Hegel and Beethoven, the generation of the storming of the Bastille.
  3. 1:16:17The Bread and the WineHis great elegy will conclude the sequence of the three madmen; he recommends Gustave Roud's translation.
Series · 9 Jan 2015Z for Zero
  1. 6:35MnemosyneThe gods cannot do everything; mortals reach the abyss before them: man is superior to the gods, who know neither death nor, therefore, feeling.
Series · 8 Jan 2015Y for Yonville
  1. 5:23A poet who acclaims the Revolution and passes for nostalgic for Greece. His hymn begins with "while waiting," which defines the function of the imaginary.
Series · 15 Dec 2014A for Antigone
  1. 4:45The greatest poet of the age, Hegel's roommate at the Stift.
  2. 5:16Remarks on Oedipus and Remarks on AntigoneHegel spoke of Antigone with him above all; his remarks on his translations are a last text wrested from madness.
Season 8 · 2 Jul 2020#12 • Return to the logics of the subject
  1. 6:35German SongA poem announced for the end of the session, taken from the sketched hymns, then postponed to another session.
  2. 15:03The divinity is present among mortals only if the community knows how to sing it with one heart.
  3. 16:35In Lovely BlueQuoted on the night and its stars, no purer than man.
  4. 1:20:26"It is not good to have in the soul no perishable thought," quoted with respect to sleep.

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