Stefani Engelstein

This essay traces the ways in which Kafka’s drawings position themselves adamantly in the middle of things: temporally both through the foregrounding of their own becoming and through dynamic evocations of motion, as well as interpersonally through networks of performance and observation. The article juxtaposes images with texts such as “Wunsch, Indianer zu werden,” “Der Kübelreiter,” and sections of letters that describe the process of drawing to argue for a generative rather than privative sense of incomplete becoming that functions differently in the two media. It also explores how meanings arise and vary through relation and perspective. The images reflect self-referentially on the visual medium through depicted acts of observation, and also offer a visual commentary on textuality through expressive portraits of Kafka’s own relatives reading. The drawings’ sketchiness—their dynamic refusal of closure enables a theory of humor in Kafka’s work as arising from the way the viewer is “drawn into” the images. The recognition of one’s own implication in this prolific openness of bodies and in the always-undercut drive to find meanings reveals the viewer as a co-inhabiter of an absurd and yet vibrant world in flux.

The word Organismus came into usage in German in the 1790s to hold certain paradoxes in suspension. Referring to the dynamic processes of a living being rather than to the being itself, the concept of the organism attempted to navigate the complexity of identity for an interactive system in flux. This article analyzes four interconnected theories of the organism. Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer conceptualized an open, interactive system of all living beings in development over time. Andreas Röschlaub adapted John Brown's concept of excitability into a theory of the organism as that which integrated internal selfdetermination with responsiveness to an external world for each living being. Friedrich Schelling developed a theory of a world organism as a system of forces and incorporated thinking from both Kielmeyer and Röschlaub to account for differentiated existence as such. Finally, Novalis rendered the very concept of boundaries indistinct through his emphasis on perviousness and communicability.
https://symphilosophie.com/issue-3-2021/

The new mythology for which the German Romantic period called was not envisioned as antithetical to empiricism or experiential/experimental knowledge, but rather as emerging in dialogue with it to form a cultural foundation for such inquiry. Central to the mytho-scientific project were problematic theories of sexual division and generativity that established cultural baselines. This article examines the mythological investments of two influential thinkers of the period-Goethe and Schelling. It then analyzes Goethe's unique merger of mythological approaches to sex and generation with empirical observation in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It next traces Schelling's expansion of Goethe's theories of nature beyond their empirical justifications to develop a metaphysics of sexual differentiation. Finally, the article illuminates Goethe's final reply to the sexual dynamics of Naturphilosophie at the end of his life, through the analysis of a single poem, "Finding Again," in the collection God and World. Ultimately and in spite of its empirical commitments, Goethe's more flexible view of sexual correlations would lose ground to the powerful metaphysical mythology of sexual opposition as both scientific and cultural bedrock.

F riedrich Schlegel stood at the center of the Early Romantic circle in Germany, both theoretically and (together with family members August Wilhelm Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel, and Dorothea Veit) socially. His writings were central to the Romantic project of theorizing the relation between aesthetics, life, and knowledge. In 1800, his "Conversation about Literature" 1 appeared in the major organ of the movement , the Athenaeum, which the Schlegels published from 1798 to 1800. In "Conversation about Literature," Schlegel approaches the question "What is liter-ature?" through another, namely, "What is literary criticism, literary theory, or a scholarship of literature?" The answer he provides is adamantly diverse, representing a pleth-ora of approaches, each performed by a fictional figure in a conversation that prefigures the eclectic modern field of literary studies. Schlegel successfully establishes modern literary scholarship as distinct from previous tendencies centered on rhetorical rules and genre classification. His praxis is indebted to the classical philology that developed in the decades preceding his text and in which he was trained, but he legitimates the study of literature for its own sake and even in its modern form. This attempt to establish literature and the critique of literature as forms of knowledge is equally indebted to Kant's critical and his aesthetic projects, as well as to responses from Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling. Schlegel's "Conversation" merges textual and historical analysis with a theory-minded critical hermeneutics that seeks its ground in itself-a poesy of poesy, or a poetical literary critique. In "Conversation about Literature," Schlegel returns to the social origins of intellec-tualism in Plato's Symposium (which could be translated as "Drinking Party") as he depicts a group of friends discussing the meaning and study of Poesie. 2 Unlike its Platonic model, however, Schlegel features the participation (though unequal) of both men and History of Humanities, Volume 4, Number 2. http://dx.

The long nineteenth century turned to genealogy as an organizing principle for knowledge across fields as diverse as evolutionary theory, linguistics, race theory and comparative religion. In a genealogical system, the sibling – neither quite the same, nor quite other – is a boundary figure that enables, but also undermines, the delineation of neighboring terms, whether within systems of species, languages, races, religions, or subjects. However, the sibling was never gender-neutral. The evolutionary, racial, linguistic and familial genealogical trees of the nineteenth century attest to the desires of Europeans both to control the contours of kinship and to naturalize – and hence legitimate – systems of classification and knowledge. Repeatedly, the sexuality of sisters is implicated in establishing affiliation. The parthenogenetically imagined lineages of language development could turn the sister language into a pure arbiter of identity, in contrast to the category race, which, susceptible to the mingling of kinships, subjected female sexuality to policing. A family affect fostered between siblings in the nursery grounded both gender differentiation and the financial allegiance at the heart of emerging capitalism. However, this education left traces that challenged rather than reinforced both the innateness of gender and the integrity of the subject. Hence, the sibling became the privileged figure for negotiating identity in literature, while sibling incest haunted the cultural imaginary.

A growing majority of Americans now support legalizing same-sex marriage, a position that has recently won significant victories in courts and voting booths, as well as endorsements from politicians, both Democratic and, in smaller numbers, Republican. Opposition remains vigorous and durable, however, and divergent views on same-sex marriage have joined those on abortion rights as indicators of a deep fault line in Amer-ican culture. A closer analysis of both sides of the debate, however, reveals a common legacy that has escaped notice and that continues to constrain both liberal and conservative politics. While proponents of legalizing same-sex marriage rely primarily on the language and precedents of civil rights and constitutionality, conservative opponents of same-sex marriage most frequently draw on the rhetoric of sexual complementarity. Complementarity—the idea that men and women have distinct but reciprocally attuned bodies, attributes, and dispositions, so that they together, as a heterosexual couple, create a single, functional unit—first arose during the Enlightenment in tandem with the modern conception of two biological sexes. Complementarity was originally understood to be manifested both physically, in sexual union, and morally, in the

A recent wave of commentary on Sophocles’s Antigone by critics from Judith Butler to Bracha Ettinger and Simon Goldhill, has begun to emerge from the shadow of two paradigmatic interpretations: Lacan’s reading of the title character in splendid structural isolation and Hegel’s dialectical opposition of familial vs. political spheres.  My article works through the critical elision of Antigone’s siblings (particularly her sister Ismene) and her relationship to them, as emblematic of the problematic omission of the sibling from theoretical discourses in general.  I suggest the neglected sibling as a model that allows us to move beyond both self/other dualisms and the mother-child dyad which form the only grounds for intersubjectivity in contemporary debates.  Sibling logic instead recognizes the subject as embedded in a transsubjective network of partial others, with whom we crucially also share.  The article thereby provides a new approach to poststructuralist debates on subjectivity and the political.

Christina von Braun has traced an intriguing reversal in the meaning of the word Blutschande over the course of the nineteenth century.1 While the ultimate disgrace to the blood originally referred to incest, i.e., to sexual relations between kin deemed too close, it had been transformed by the twentieth century into a shameful exogamy, a betrayal of the race through sexual relations with the "other," and not just any other, but specifically with the Jewish other. Braun suggests that the transformation of the word signals a unidirectional shift in dominant anxieties , from fear of incest to fear of interracial relationships. My claim is, however, that as early as the eighteenth century the nightmare or fantasy of incest already encapsulated within itself the fear of otherness, while the twentieth-century definition of Blutschande had not in fact drifted very far from its incestuous origin. Against the ferment of cultural encounter in the eighteenth century, the prevalence of the overdetermined motif of incest in the cultural imagination can be read in two different ways which sit uneasily with each other, but are nonetheless interdependent. First, incest fantasies constitute a conservative response to anxiety over confrontation with otherness, in the form of a model of ultimate insularity through radical endogamy. According to this model, incest is a way of conserving the purity of a race.2 Second, and simultaneously, incest fantasies constitute an apocalyptic vision of the dissolution of civilization (i.e., of Western or German culture defined as civilized) in a mimicry of "primitive" sexual behavior. Thus, even in the very act which guarantees the biological segregation of a group, the efficacy of biological segregation is called into question. This particular alignment of oriental-ism with sibling incest originated in the mid-eighteenth century and persisted into the twentieth, adapting itself to new cultural constellations as they arose. While the first work that I will address, Karoline von Gtinderode's Udohla (1805), takes place in India and rests upon the assumption that Hindu law permits siblings to marry, the last work under consideration, Thomas Mann's Wiilsungenblut (written 1905, first published 1921), projects the charge of incest onto German Jews. As we will see, the significance of racial and cultural anxiety in the incestuous imagination remained remarkably constant, providing a backdrop against which changing perceptions of race appear in stark contrast.

"Nichts kan natiirlicher als die allgemein herrschende Neigung seyn, lieber zu sterben, als das Abschneiden groBer Glieder geme und willig ausstehen zu wollen," Johann Ulrich Bilguer, a surgeon general in the Prussian army, wrote in his 1761 Abhandlung von dem sehr seltenen Gebrauch, oder, der beynahe gdnzlichen Vermeidung des Ablosens der menschlichen Glieder.1 The abhorrence of this operation, according to his description, extended beyond the individual patient throughout society, affecting, or even infecting, anyone who "solche wahmimmt, die sich nur mehr aufihre Stelzen lehnen, als damit fortschreiten können" (19). By 1812, however, Karl Ferdinand Graefe, a professor of surgery at the University of Berlin and instructor at the Royal Medical-Surgical Academy for the Military, insisted that both the visual and functional impact of amputation had been eliminated with the replacement of the rickety and conspicuous peg-leg by a prosthesis so advanced that "das verlohrene Glied durch ihn vollkommen zu ersetzen ist. Alle, denen ich den Unterschenkel abnahm, gebrauchen den kiinstlichen so, dafB man in den Bewegungen zwischen dem natiirlichen undjenem, keinen Unterschied auffinden kann."2 Therefore "Den gut gefertigten kiinstlichen Unterschenkel gebrauchen die Amputirten so, daB sie den Verlust des Gliedes gar nicht vermissen" (18). Hidden within the startling alteration in medical opinion which thejuxtaposition of these two comments, issued a mere fifty years apart, reveals, lie implications which reach far beyond this particular operation and beyond the medical field as a whole. The prosthesis is a symptom of and a catalyst for the shifting perceptions and evaluations of the "natural" in general and the human body specifically. Simultaneously it occupies a unique mediating position both between the medical and military communities, and between these institutions and the culture at large. The most visible and lasting remnant of battle, the amputee is also a testament to both the prowess and the limitations of medical technology. Fluctuating between

The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous - yet unacknowledged - conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century.  Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings - often incestuously inclined - negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical systems the sibling term, not-quite-same and not-quite-other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification.

In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counter-reactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories,  conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

Reviews of Sibling Action

"As inviting, invigorating, and stimulating an academic book as I have encountered. An astonishing read from the first page to the last."-Adrian Daub, Stanford University

"This ambitious, powerful, and highly original study examines the figure of the sibling as a major anchoring device of the epistemological and political systems of modernity-a figure that not only relays the great shift from a vertical model of sovereignty to a horizontal one of fraternité, but also causes trouble for the various systems it underwrites by transforming dichotomies into more open relational structures. At the same time, Engelstein interrogates the gender politics of this master trope by way of the figure of the sister, whose role in the new citizenship model that emerged from the French Revolution was to provide a locus of stable affective bonding, while being excluded from the public sphere. Through incisive readings of texts by Sophocles, Schiller, Rousseau, Lessing, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, and George Eliot, among others, Engelstein open up archives in a new way, and adds her eloquent voice to the ongoing discussion of cosmopolitanism and participatory democracy."-Marc Redfield, author of Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America

"In an utterly original way, Engelstein reveals how the figure of the sibling-not quite self, and not quite other-has shaped Western understandings of biology, language, and politics. Through deft analysis, she uncovers an epistemological move that since the late eighteenth century has been destabilizing quests for origins and descriptions of unique, historically grounded individuals: a lateral rather than a vertical comparison that blurs boundaries by claiming both affinity and difference."-Laura Otis, author of Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists

"The scope, complexity, and importance of Sibling Action is extraordinary: working fluently and fluidly across German, French, and British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures and sciences, as well as ancient Greek tragedy and its modern interpretations, Engelstein establishes convincingly that the sibling is a key 'boundary object' by means of which many of our modern disciplines, as well as the very notion of disciplinarity, have established themselves. Sibling Action is an enormous contribution not only to German and British literary studies, but also to science studies and contemporary feminist theory, and is certain to be a key reference in all of those fields for a long time to come."-Robert Mitchell, author of Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature

Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (2008, SUNY Press) explores debates at the turn of the 19th century surrounding the human form – its reproduction, its maiming through injury and amputation, and its supplementation with prosthetics.  These concerns not only dominated natural history, but informed a variety of interrelated discourses such as surgery, art, aesthetics, and literature.  Anxious Anatomy traces the transformation of the concept of teleology from a principle in natural history necessary for understanding reproduction, into a rationalization for using the biological sciences to ground ideologies in the body – from theories of subjectivity, race, and gender, to support for republican revolution and social hierarchies.  The book provides a cultural history of the palpable body as well as new interpretations of works by Goethe, Blake, Kleist, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and Austen.

Discourses of globalization depend on a 'global imaginary,' a set of tropes and narratives that enable human beings to conceive of the world as a totality. One of the most important of these tropes is the globe itself. Closer inspection reveals that this figure in Enlightenment and Modern anthropology is far from unequivocal. In discourses of the global, it can be employed both to produce and to subvert totality and closure.

Stefani Engelstein. Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 360 pp. ISBN 9780231180405 S tefani Engelstein's book documenting how sibling relationships were constitutive of many disciplines that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-including anthropology, economics, linguistics, comparative literature, and evolutionary biology-reveals the author's own deep reflections on and detailed study of a number of seemingly disparate fields of knowledge. This fascinating volume demonstrates how a common method of genealogical organization, with increased emphasis on sibling as opposed to parent-child relationships, structured scientific, social scientific, and humanistic discourses during this period. Genealogical trees showing the descent of biological species, of languages, and of human beings from a common ancestor or set of ancestors often highlighted what Engelstein calls "horizontal" relationships, those among multiple descendants of an ancestor or set of ancestors. For example, diagrams made by nineteenth-century linguists show modern language groups like Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic as "siblings" descended from a common Indo-European "ancestral" language. To be sure, the genea-logical model is an oversimplification that does not allow for later influences of "sibling" languages, species, races, or religions upon each other after they have separated from the common ancestor, and Engelstein does address the explanatory weaknesses as well as the strengths of the genealogical paradigm. Her argument about the prevalence of this model across various disciplines is convincing and well supported by evidence from a variety of fields. A point of departure for Engelstein is Sophocles's Antigone, and its reception from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Antigone is certainly a play that prioritizes sibling relationships, but also one that complicates the distinction between sib-ling and parent, since Oedipus is both father and brother to the heroine while Creon, her antagonist and uncle, is also a quasi-sibling or brother-in-law, as the brother of Jocasta, Antigone's mother and Oedipus's mother/wife. The play provides a heightened example of Engelstein's theory that the relationship with a sibling, as not-quite-self but not-quite-other, is crucial to the notion of subjectivity that emerged in the late eighteenth century. The challenges that the play presents to the definition of the sibling fit with Engelstein's idea that sibling relationships are dynamic and multiple, expanding the possibilities for personal and political alliances. Although the book's title alludes to "siblings," a generic term, Engelstein does differentiate among brother-sister, brother-brother, and sister-sister relationships. The second section of the book, on "Fraternity and Revolution" illustrates the cost of political "fraternit e" from which the sister is excluded. In fact, Engelstein offers a nuanced argument that the sister, while not recognized within the emerging political paradigm, nonetheless serves a key function as "catalyst," in that love between brother and sister provides an ideal model for the egalitarian relationships among (male) citizens that emerge from the French Revolution. At the same time, the sister reveals unspoken problems in the new political structure, including the problem of political and sexual consent, when she functions as the (often unacknowledged) erotic object underpinning men's commitment to politics, a realm that invokes passion yet demands the exclusion of the explicitly erotic. Engelstein traces the ways in which eroticism both provides the foundation and is in theory excluded 258 THE GERMANIC REVIEW ♦ VOLUME 94, NUMBER 3 / 2019

Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity, by Stefani Engelstein; pp. xiii + 360. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017, $65.00. Stefani Engelstein's Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity is an impressively researched study that aims for nothing less than rethinking the intellectual history of modernity. Engelstein is interested in the fact that so many fields used the formal organization of a family tree to lay out their ideas, including anthropology, linguistics, psychology, religious studies, literature, and political science. They used the sibling to mark the component that was clearly relevant yet did not quite fit the taxonomy. Sister languages, fraternity in political systems, wife/sister exchange, Romantic incest tales: the figure of the sibling is crucial in the intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The sibling functions like the Derridean supplement, the extra that is necessary to constitute the whole, and Sibling Action is very much a deconstructive study, powered by the paradox of structure that exceeds its own limits in order to stand: "the sibling serv[es] as splinter in the system, simultaneously constitutive of terms and yet always promiscuously intermingling, undermining the very possibility of term-integrity and the establishment of natural kinds" (225).