Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806–1843. By Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Alta L. Price. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2023. 352 pages + 17 halftones. Cloth $25.00.

The last 36 years of Hölderlin’s life, spent in the carpenter Zimmer’s tower in Tübingen in presumably incurable madness and largely isolated from the outside world, have lost little of their fascination for scholarly speculation. If a philosopher of Agamben’s status engages with this enigmatic life, one should not expect any traditional answers. And indeed, this may be one of the more unusual publications on Hölderlin in recent years. It is neither, strictly speaking, a volume of philological scholarship nor a historical-critical biography; it is not even a purely philosophical inquiry, although it contains aspects of all these genres. It is a collage-like assembly, inspired, explicitly, by Walter Benjamin’s distinction between history and chronicle, but also, or so it seems, by his Arcades Project. Like Benjamin, Agamben juxtaposes philosophical reflections with an assemblage of minute, sometimes deceptively marginal but always highly suggestive text fragments, together with historical portraits and other illustrations. Requiring the active reader’s imagination to work out hidden connections among its elements, this unorthodox structure in effect mimics the highly dispersed elusiveness of Hölderlin’s life itself.

Following Benjamin, Agamben argues that the historian depends on verifiable sources, whereas the chronicler “doesn’t invent a thing, nor needs to verify the authenticity of their sources”; rather, their “only document is the spoken word—their own voice, as well as the voices from which they’ve happened to hear the adventure, be it happy or sad, that they then retell” (10). As a chronicle, Agamben’s work does not aim at an objective reconstruction of Hölderlin’s personal life in its historical context. Rather, he seeks to fathom a “life’s tenor of truth,” which “cannot be exclusively defined or exhausted through words—rather, to a certain extent, it must remain hidden” (11). The enigmatic tenor of truth is the secret “vanishing point where multiple events and episodes” of biographical and literary material converge in such a way that “the truth of an existence proves itself irreducible to the vicissitudes and things through which it presents itself to our sight” (12). Thus, Agamben elegantly circumvents the need of traditional scholarship to decipher the elusive self-articulations of the late Hölderlin and the speculative accounts of his contemporaries as objects of verifiable knowledge. Instead, Agamben, alluding to some lines by Giacomo Leopardi, wishes to preserve a life in “its defenseless, yet untasted knowability” (13). Indeed, on Agamben’s pages, Hölderlin’s late life simultaneously emerges and vanishes as a potentiality—as an indeterminate, or perhaps uncannily overdetermined, occasion for philosophical speculation.

A lengthy Prologue recapitulates some important topics such as the distraught Hölderlin’s return from Bordeaux to Germany; his poetological distinction between the national and the foreign; the Sophocles and Pindar translations; his critique of Fichte’s philosophy of the “absolute I”; the Empedocles fragments; and his theory of the tragic. These topics are well-known from previous scholarship and Agamben here revisits a rather reliable body of knowledge. By contrast, the innovative principle of the irreducibly hidden tenor of a life’s truth is more convincingly discernible in the following 218 pages of a “Chronology, 1806–1843.” Here Agamben initially juxtaposes, on the verso side and printed in italics, selected day-to-day historical facts and excerpts from Goethe’s diaries, conversations, and letters, that, in spite of the tumultuous times, document a largely fortunate, self-assured, and artistically productive life. This framework makes ironic sense, given the fact that Hölderlin’s and Goethe’s sparse interactions were notoriously marked by mutual misunderstandings. Rather abruptly, the Goethe compilation ends after 1809; perhaps it would have made more sense to cut it off already on May 3, 1807. For on that day, Hölderlin found himself rescued in Zimmer’s tower: only here, it appears, was the poet effectively isolated from most historical events in which Goethe was still famously involved as a writer and politician. Beginning on the recto pages, Agamben compiles, with brief commentary, extended excerpts from letters, diaries, and reminiscences mostly by Hölderlin’s fellow-poets and occasional visitors, together with poems and letters by the protagonist himself. Topics cover Hölderlin’s daily affairs, his shifting moods, his refuge from the spoken word into obsessively improvisatory piano-playing, as well as his admirers’ complicated plans to publish the writings of the neglected genius. As Agamben freely acknowledges, these excerpts are mostly culled from existing critical editions and documentary sources. Many of these texts are well-known, others shed new light on the poet’s conduct with others, and in sharp contrast to Goethe’s obvious success story, they highlight all the more poignantly the disastrous, if strangely enigmatic and even fascinating ruins of Hölderlin’s last decades. These details are allowed to speak authentically in their own diverse, often contradictory voices; almost sensuously direct and yet bewilderingly evasive, they point to the secret point of converging life lines that Agamben seeks to identify.

This vanishing point is especially intimated and yet partly hidden by the question of Hölderlin’s madness. The poet’s seemingly uncontrollable rage, delusions, and obsessive, mostly incoherent and disjointed floods of speech, coupled with the exaggerated ceremoniousness he displayed when addressing his visitors, strangely contrasts with the absolutely coherent, if overly formal structure of his tower poetry. Among scholars, this issue has initiated an endless debate as to whether Hölderlin was indeed clinically deranged (at least by the standard definitions of his time), or whether he deliberately staged his symptoms for the sake of self-protection from an intrusive outside world after the horrendous traumas he suffered previously. Agamben is wise to consider the question ultimately unanswerable but still tends to come down on the side of the latter explanation. Thus, the “exaggerated formality” of a letter by Hölderlin to his mother is evidence for the fact that the entire correspondence “is a conscious, almost parodic way of distancing himself from his interlocutors” (138). Moreover, “many elements of Hölderlin’s behaviour previously attributed to madness can be read as the result of a subtle, calculated irony” (141). This emphasis on the seemingly obvious performativity of Hölderlin’s persona is a fittingly modern or even postmodern alternative to the arch-romantic impressions of contemporaries like Wilhelm Waiblinger, who adored the poet as displaying “such a subtle, lofty, and pure spirit—in a madman”; written by “one of the most intoxicated, divinely possessed men,” Hölderlin’s Hyperion inspired the younger writer to pen his own passionate novel about a protagonist “who goes insane due to divine intoxication” (180–81).

It is only in the Epilogue that Agamben uncovers what may indeed be the “vanishing point” coordinating the events of Hölderlin’s seclusion: the notion of a “dwelling life.” Agamben suggests that dwelling is a deliberate but necessary way of “repeatedly and intensely” living “according to customs and habits,” in order to forge a “particular mode of continuity within a life that we need to grasp” (297). Reflective of the parataxis of the “harte Fügung” (Norbert von Hellingrath) of Hölderlin’s later poetry, whose seemingly disjointed fragments only hint at a hidden, deeper coherence, the poet’s dwelling life itself is marked by a grounding continuity behind its dispersions and dissolutions, which are “being cohesively juxtaposed in a state of arrest” (309–10). By maintaining this “habitive” way of dwelling, Agamben proposes, Hölderlin came to accept the public’s verdict that he was stricken with insanity, performing it before his visitors in ways that neutralized the opposition between public and private, as well as between the tragic and the comic (325–27). Not least of all, Agamben suggests, rather grandly, this “dwelling” marks Hölderlin’s “apparent defeat” as being powerfully subversive, because it “entirely deposes Goethe’s success, stripping it of all legitimacy” (328).

On the last page, Agamben reveals the very personal reasons for his almost year-long “living with Hölderlin”: his own dwelling in isolation as a result of the (unnamed) Covid pandemic. Even though today the poet’s madness seems “rather innocent compared with the madness into which an entire society has fallen without even realizing it,” Agamben, “for the time being,” is at a loss for words when trying to extract a political lesson from the poet’s secluded life: “There are no readers,” he muses, “There are only words with no addressee.” It is unclear whether this refers to the poet’s utterances or Agamben’s own. In any case, Hölderlin’s question what it may “mean to dwell poetically,” it seems, “still awaits an answer” (329). Like the secret “vanishing point” of truth, such answers cannot be fully fathomed in the present, even by the most erudite scholarship and experimental mode of representation, but may suddenly and surprisingly spring forth from the future.