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Veloziferisch (Velociferian)
Bryan Norton
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
The lexeme veloziferisch (velociferian) was rst coined by Goethe in an unsent letter
from 1825 and entered the public stage four years later with the second edition of the
novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1829; Wilhelm Meister’s
Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants). As a portmanteau, the neologism, which is
composed of the Italian velocità and the German luziferisch, combines two central
elements of the Goethean imaginary: the accelerated velocity of modern life and the
“luciferian” function of negation. Das Veloziferische marks a dangerous speed at which
organic growth is outpaced by the rapid acceleration of technological development. At
velociferian speeds, the otherwise gurative role of negation in Goethe’s philosophy of
nature takes on a dis guring function, highlighted most clearly by the technoaccelerationist allegory Faust. The invention of this term has prompted recent
investigations into the relationship between technological development and social
acceleration in modernity. Furthermore, an appreciation of Goethe’s critique of the
velociferian enables a fuller understanding of his unique position in relation to broader
trends in natural philosophy and the philosophy of biology (Spinoza, Schelling, and
Erwin Schrödinger), in addition to the philosophy of technology (Thomas Carlyle and
Bruno Latour).
1. Introduction
2. Veloziferisch: The Formation of a Term
3. The Speed of Negation: Figuration and Determination in the
Philosophy of Nature
↑
4. Velocity in the Age of Machinery
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5. Restless Modernity
6. Conclusion: On Steuerung
7. Notes
8. Related Entries in the GLPC
9. Works Cited and Further Reading
ntroduction
The lexeme veloziferisch is a surprisingly heterogenous word that Goethe rst coined in
an unsent postscript to a letter addressed to the Prussian lawyer Nicolovius in 1825.1
The term entered the public stage four years later in 1829 with the release of the second
edition of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants.
The neologism, composed of the Italian velocità and the German luziferisch, combines
two elements that play a central role in the Goethean imaginary: the accelerating
velocity of modern life and the gurative work of negation, here hinted at by the
luciferian. The term thus casts a critical glance at the rapidly quickening pace of
activity that Goethe experienced towards the end of his life. The term veloziferisch
marks the transgression of a limit point beyond which the speed of technological and
communication systems proves destructive to natural growth and individuation. Yet it
also hints at an important exibility that Goethe imputes to the pace of guration, a
exibility that possesses not only upper limits but also lower boundaries that deserve to
be explored in Goethe’s oeuvre.
This article is divided into ve main sections, each of which explores a di erent facet of
Goethe’s diagnosis of his age as veloziferisch. In the rst section, the composition of
this portmanteau is discussed in further detail, in addition to the often-overlooked
exibility Goethe a ords to the speed of organic guration, or Bildung. This line of
thinking concerning the pace of growth extends into the second section, in which the
relationship between speed, negation, and guration is analyzed in detail. In the third
section, Goethe’s pronouncements regarding the veloziferisch tendencies of modern life
are placed alongside attempts by other philosophers to come to terms with an
accelerating rate of technological advancement. In the fourth section, the impact of
Goethe’s term on more contemporary theoretical writings regarding the↑speed
ackof
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modernity is discussed, with particular attention paid to the way in which Goethe’s
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Faust character is often viewed as an embodiment of the manic, destructive ideal of an
“erfülltes Leben,” a “full life” that is marked by impatience and restlessness. In the fth
and nal section, the invocation of a broken rudder in Goethe’s play “Torquato Tasso”
is introduced as a vital Denk gur ( gure of thought) for navigating Goethe’s thinking
concerning the speed of modernity and its impact on aesthetic and natural guration.
Veloziferisch: The
ormation of a Term
F
At the end of book two of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, in the excursus titled
“Betrachtungen im Sinne der Wanderer” (Observations in the Mindset of the
Wanderers), Goethe decries his age as one which “nichts reif warden läßt” (lets nothing
ripen). It is a time of accelerated intensity in which “man im nächsten Augenblick den
vorhergehenden verspeist, den Tag im Tage vertut, und so immer aus der Hand in den
Mund lebt, ohne irgend etwas vor sich zu bringen” (one lives from hand to mouth,
each moment consuming the previous moment, wasting day after day without
producing anything lasting). Scathingly, Goethe continues:
Haben wir doch schon Blätter für sämtliche Tageszeiten! ein guter Kopf könnte wohl
noch eins und das andere interkalieren. Dadurch wird alles was ein jeder tut, treibt,
dichtet, ja was er vor hat, in’s ö entliche geschleppt. Niemand darf sich freuen oder
leiden als zum Zeitvertrieb der übrigen; und so springt’s von Haus zu Haus, von Stadt
zu Stadt, von Reich zu Reich, und zuletzt von Weltteil zu Weltteil, alles veloziferisch.
(FA 1.10:563)
Do we not already have enough pages for all the daily papers! A good head can surely
intercalate one and the other. In this way everything that anybody goes about doing,
writing, even what one intends to do in the future, it is all dragged before the public
eye. No one can su er or enjoy themselves for a moment except as a means of mere
entertainment for others; and so it springs from house to house, city to city, from
domain to domain and ultimately from corner to corner of the globe, everything
veloziferisch.
This fragment, a verbatim transcription of Goethe’s earlier unsent letter, has caught
the critical imagination of a number of theorists who have taken inspiration from the
early diagnosis of modernity they nd in Goethe’s oeuvre. The term is seen as an
expression of Goethe’s “discovery of slowness,” which presents a precursor of sorts to
the contemporary interest in “slow thinking” in a number of elds.2 Yet, veloziferisch is
↑ ack
to Top
also a surprisingly plastic and dynamic concept that interfaces with Goethe’s
lifelong
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re ection on organic growth and the work of guration in nature and thought. The
construction of the term even presents an imaginative product of guration itself, as
veloziferisch is a portmanteau of the Italian term velocità, signifying speed, and the
German luziferisch, that which concerns the devil, Lucifer. The term veloziferisch
marks a hurried pace of motion, as we have seen in the fragment from the
Wanderjahre, at which point nothing can ripen or reach its full potential. Even more
ttingly, Goethe’s term suggests a boundary or a limit point for modern growth and
technological acceleration. Veloziferisch describes motion at a speed that has surpassed
that of Bildung—of organic, healthy motion.
The Speed of egation: iguration and
etermination in the Philosophy of ature
N
D
F
N
While Goethe would have been hesitant to de ne or quantify the limit posed on
Bildung by das Veloziferische, it is equally important to re ect on the work performed
by the “luciferian” element, which in the Goethean imaginary is integrally connected
to the dialectical work of negation. In Goethe’s Faust, it is the demonic gure
Mephistopheles who refers to himself as “der Geist, der stets verneint” (FA 1.7:65; the
spirit who constantly negates). While it may be tempting to understand the Faust
tragedy as the work of pure negation alone, let us not forget that Faust’s fate is tied to
his “Ungeduld” (impatience), to his desire to throw himself into the torrents of
modern life and forgo his previous existence of scholarly re ection. The
Mephistophelean pronouncement linking the luciferian to negation may thus serve as a
reminder of the productive, even necessary role of negation in Goethe’s writings when
it is not coupled with breakneck speeds.
This connection between productivity and luciferian negation is playfully pushed to
the allegorical limit in book eight of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Poetry and Truth) where Goethe discusses the creation of the devil Lucifer as a result
of the productive drive’s need for incessant cosmological activity:
Ich möchte mir wohl eine Gottheit vorstellen, die sich von Ewigkeit her selbst
produziert; da sich aber Produktion nicht ohne Mannigfaltigkeit denken läßt, so
mußte sie sich notwendig sogleich als ein Zweites erscheinen, welches wir unter
dem
↑
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Namen des Sohns anerkennen. (FA 1.14:383)
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Let me imagine, if I may, a deity which has produced itself from eternity; because
production itself cannot be thought without diversity, so it must necessarily appear to
itself as a second, which we recognize under the name of the Son.
This mitotic process of reproduction through self-division repeats itself once more
until all three members of the holy trinity have come into appearance. Although this
e ectively closes the circle of the Christian godhead, creation does not stop there. It
must continue further outward on its path of autopoetic expansion: “Da jedoch der
Produktionstrieb immer fortging, so erschufen sie ein Viertes [. . .] Dieses war nun
Lucifer, welchem von nun an die ganze Schöpfungskraft übertragen war” (FA
1.14:383; Because the productive drive must always push onwards, so a fourth was
created [. . .] And this was Lucifer, to whom the entire force of creation was thus
conferred). Even the godhead must submit to the demands of the productive drive,
which becomes bound to the negativity of Lucifer while passing from the in nite into
the nite.
The connection that Goethe draws here between the bifurcations of the productive
drive and Lucifer’s reign over creation serves to put an organic, productive spin on the
idea, initially outlined by Spinoza, that negation, as a cosmic-ontological force,
possesses some form of gurative functionality in the universe: “Since gure is nothing
but determination, and determination is negation, gure can be nothing other than
negation.”3 While Spinoza intended to explain why negation could never actually exist
in a universe that was not nite, but composed of a single in nite all-encompassing
substance, Goethe embraced this suggested view of negativity as a means of
understanding the “productive drive” underlying the complex activity of the organic
world.4 This revisionist take on Spinozist negativity puts Goethe’s thinking squarely in
line with that of the twentieth-century physicist and philosopher of science, Erwin
Schrödinger, while drawing further attention to the thermodynamic context of the
critique of das Veloziferische. Schrödinger, who was not by chance an avid reader of
both Goethe and Spinoza, famously made the case that biological organisms, while not
exactly rooted in principles that are exogenous to the rest of the physical universe,
possess astoundingly intricate ways of negotiating these principles in exchange with
their surroundings.5 The second law of thermodynamics, for example, which states
that entropy increases irreversibly over time, is never broken in the achievement of
organic growth and reproduction. Instead, entropy is simply negotiated and
↑ ack to Top
redistributed in highly di use ways across an organism’s milieu. Disorder and death are
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deferred in complex ways, but never overcome, a characteristic of organic life that
Schrödinger dubs negative entropy.6 This unique type of negativity, which is in a
certain sense the negation of negation itself, of the Mephistophelean tendency towards
death and chaos, serves to remind the reader of what is at stake in Goethe’s diagnosis of
the modern world as veloziferisch. The bifurcations of the productive drive can only
function so quickly, otherwise they become chaotic and destructive, impossible to
subdue in their velocity.
Goethe was keen to articulate an alternative form of negation which, like Schrödinger’s
negative entropy, would play a gurative role, moving at speeds capable of guiding
organic matter along on its path of autopoietic formation. A prominent instance of
this type of gurative negativity can be found in Goethe’s 1803 poem “Weltseele,” or
“World-Soul,” titled after the philosopher F.W.J. Schelling’s 1798 essay of the same
name.7 In this cosmic paean composed of nine rhymed quatrains, Goethe lauds the
dialectical dynamism of Schelling’s vision of the cosmos as a complex organism. The
poem presents the reader with a celebration of natural motion, beginning with an
energetic urge for the “world soul” to expand itself into space and to ll the empty
cosmos with its life force. “Verteilet euch” (disperse), the poet exclaims to the dynamo,
urging it onward and outward. Already in the rst line the organism is referred to in
the plural, and the world soul is encouraged along in its mitotic, expansive bifurcations.
“Begeistert reißt euch durch die nächsten Zonen / Ins All und füllt es aus!” (FA
1.2:491; Rip yourselves enraptured through the next zones / into the All and ll it
out!). In the third stanza, the poem encourages racing, powerful (gewaltig) comets
onward in their journey through the heavens (FA 1.2:492). In the fourth, the world
soul shows a keenness to exhibit its capacity for gurative negation, “greift rasch nach
ungeformten Erden” (FA 1.2:492; grasp rapidly towards unformed earth) with the
creative force of youth. In the fth stanza, however, the cosmic force begins to slowly
retreat from its previous expansive, outward-moving impulse. Yet here it nonetheless
maintains its function as determinatively gurative, providing a natural grapheme of
sorts by pre-scribing (vorschreiben) solid, recognizable form to piles of previously
nondescript stone found in cavernous vaults (FA 1.2:492). At the end of the poem,
however, the world-soul does eventually run out of steam. A previously inexhaustible,
boundless striving (unbegrenztes Streben) is dissolved in a blissful exchange of glances
with the cosmos, receiving back the life it had given. Despite this entropic↑ ending,
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however, there is hope that other divisions might later occur in this once open,
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expansive system: “Kein Wesen kann zu Nichts zerfallen” (No being can fully
disintegrate into nothing), Goethe reminds us at the beginning of “Vermächtnis” (FA
1.2:685-86; Legacy), a poem quoted by Schrödinger at the beginning of one of his
lectures; life itself is the law and treasure “[a]us welchen sich das All geschmückt”
(from which the universe adorns itself).8
While Goethe’s “Weltseele” serves to highlight the productive, even vibrant role
assumed by negation in nature and natural guration, the poem also provides one of
numerous examples in Goethe’s oeuvre of the celebration of speed, rather than its
critique. Particularly from Goethe’s early Sturm und Drang years, one nds a number
of texts lauding the excitement of a quickening pace of life. In a 1774 poem titled “An
Schwager Kronos” (To Coachman Chronos) Goethe seeks to recreate the breathtaking
excitement of a late-night carriage ride through uneven, unrhymed verse. “Spude dich
Kronos” (Spurs to, Kronos), the rst stanza begins, “Fort den rasselnden Trott” (FA
1.1:201–2; onward the racing trot!). The opening stanza continues in a hurried pace
rushing downhill and “[r]asch in’s Leben hinein” (FA 1.1:202; swiftly down towards
life). The poet gives an impressionistic account of sticks, stones, and roots ying past
him at the coach’s breakneck speed. In the next stanza, which describes the more
belabored (mühsam) e ort of the coach pulling back uphill after racing downwards,
the poet implores the coachman not to grow sluggish (träge) urging him “strebend und
ho end” (striving and hoping), onward and upward (FA 1.1:202). In another energetic
poem, “Dauer im Wechsel” (Constancy in Change), Goethe references the pace of
organic growth and change marked by the seasons as a means of urging his readers to
hurry and take advantage of nature’s o erings: “willst du nach den Früchten greifen, /
Eilig nimm dein Teil davon! / Diese fangen an zu reifen / und die andern keimen
schon” (FA 1.2:493; so you want to reach for the fruit / Well, take your share of it! /
These are beginning to ripen / and the others are already shooting up).
Velocity in the ge of achinery
A
M
While these passages serve to show that it is not velocity per se that is the object of
critique for Goethe in his diagnosis of modernity as veloziferisch, it is clear that he
believes a turning point has been reached in the pace of life by the time he↑ creates
the
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term in the 1820s. Modernity has by this time accelerated, in Goethe’s view, in a
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manner that is particularly detrimental to re ection and organic growth. Life and
thought, when dominated by ever speedier systems of communication and
transportation, become dis gured. In a letter to his friend, the composer Carl Friedrich
Zelter, Goethe describes his distaste for what he sees as the senseless chase after wealth
(Reichtum) and speed (Schnelligkeit) that is visible all around him, especially in large
cities like Berlin. He cites the railroad, express mail, the steam ship, and quickened
communication networks as symptoms of this veloziferisch tendency.9 With these early
signs of modernity and industry, the negating, teu isch aspect of das Veloziferische
functions to deform. Of course, Goethe was not alone in his critical attitude. In the
same year as the term veloziferisch went into print, the British essayist and historian
Thomas Carlyle famously described this set of developments as a “mechanical age” and
“the Age of Machinery,” describing this new period as an age “which, with its whole
undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to
ends.”10 Whereas a number of thinkers such as the French philosopher Henri de SaintSimon and his followers, or Bertrand Russel in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,”
held relatively optimistic views of the bene ts a orded to humankind by industry,
Goethe, like Carlyle and others, was much more skeptical of the bene ts a orded by
this “Age of Machinery.”11
The mechanical nature of modernity emphasized in Carlyle’s essay, in fact, may prove
useful for achieving an understanding of veloziferisch as a limit point of sorts for
modernity. Das Veloziferische, as has been noted, suggests a transgression. It marks the
limit beyond which machinic motion simply outpaces that of Bildung and of the
organic. Das Veloziferische serves to uncover, for Goethe, a dangerous separation that
has taken place between the mechanical and the organic, a traumatic rupture lying at
the very heart of modernity’s self-image.12 The term enacts the rapid speed at which
the technicity of guration—encompassing, poetry, thought, and life—loses control,
passing over into the totalizing, hegemonic technologos of a modernity careening,
threating to y o the rails.13 With this in mind, it is no surprise that Goethe’s Faust is
commonly read as a tragedy allegorizing the rapid pace of modernity. In fact, the pact
signed by Faust even requires a uniquely symbolic sacri ce of the organic for the sake of
veloziferisch mechanicity—Faust must sign in blood, “ein ganz besonderer Saft” (FA
1.7:77; a very special sap) of organic life.14
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Restless odernity
M
With this velocital feature of the Faustian bargain in mind, it is easy to see how
Goethe’s term has caught the critical imaginations of sociologists, historians, and
critical theorists who are interested in studying the accelerated pace of modernity and
its e ect on institutions, individuals, and the natural world. The writings of Hartmut
Rosa, a political theorist and sociologist who has spent much of his life studying the
political, social, and existential implications of these phenomena of acceleration, are
lled with references to das Veloziferische, in addition to re ections on numerous
writings by Goethe. In his 2005 Habilitationsschrift, Rosa suggests that Goethe’s
invention of the term veloziferisch presents an early indication of the appearance of a
new modern ideal for life itself—that of “the full life” (das erfüllte Leben).15 The full
life is one in which a person must tirelessly take advantage of every opportunity
available, without a moment’s pause. Any respite would mean falling behind, missing
out on an important opportunity. Goethe’s critical stance taken towards this
veloziferisch way of life is so integral to Rosa’s critical theory of speed that his English
translator, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, begins his introduction with a passage from the
posthumously published Maxims and Re ections in which Goethe decries the “lack of
th[e] indispensable requirement of symmetry” in modern life, explaining that “this is a
mischief which will often occur in modern times. For who will be able to come up to
the claims of an age so full and intense as this,” he continues, “and one too that moves
so rapidly?”16 This lack of symmetry and the overhasty pace of life, for Rosa, nds its
clearest, fullest, and earliest expression in Goethe’s Faust, whose title character’s
“patience-cursing restlessness” reveals some of the most destructive consequences of
the manic attempt at living an “erfülltes Leben,” a full life.17
It is patience, Geduld, that Faust curses above all in his study with Mephistopheles (FA
1.7:73), and his lines accompanying the blood-pact that seals his fate suggest an
impatient, manic desire for this new existential ideal: “Stürzen wir uns in das Rauschen
der Zeit / Ins Rollen der Begebenheit [. . .] / Nur rastlos betätigt sich der Mann” (FA
1.7:78; Let us plunge into time’s whirl that dazes my sense / Into the torrent of events
[. . .] / For restless activity proves a man).18 The reply he receives from Mephisto,
“[e]uch ist kein Maß und Ziel gesetzt” (FA 1.7:78; you truly know neither measure nor
end), seems not just directed at Faust. With these blunt words, it would appear
↑ ackthat
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Goethe wishes to implicate all of modernity in Faust’s fate. And of course, it is not just
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in Faust that one nds such warnings against impatient thinking and hasty action. In
his 1793 essay on scienti c method, “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und
Subject” (The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject), Goethe implores
the natural observer “[s]ich vor jeder Übereilung [zu] hüten” (FA 1.25:27; [to] protect
herself against all rushing), also warning against the temptation to hastily decide in
favor of a certain scienti c theory or in support of a predetermined idea while
examining the results of a particular scienti c study (FA 1.25:30).
C
onclusion: n Steuerung
O
As critical as Goethe may be of impatience, Ungeduld, and of Übereilung, the restless
haste of modern life signi ed by das Veloziferische, we must nevertheless be careful not
to group his attitude together with those of thinkers who are unconditionally, often
uncritically, in favor of the slow. Unlike Francis Bacon, who in his Novum Organum
rather comically suggests out tting the human intellect with lead weights rather than
with wings in order to slow it down, Goethe’s understanding of a healthy speed for
thought is integrally tied to the plastic pace of guration in organic growth.19 The
veloziferisch does serve as a warning for Goethe’s readers that an upper speed limit has
been reached, a point beyond which the mechanical outpaces the organic and destroys
it. However, this does not mean that there are no lower limits for motion, below which
such restrictions on speed may be equally sti ing and destructive for the work of
Bildung. For example, in his closing monologue, the court poet Torquato Tasso in
Goethe’s 1790 play of the same name decries the inertial lifelessness of courtly life,
contrasting it with the mighty power of a storm that is brewing along the coast. The
work of guration Tasso sought in poetry, and indeed in love, is sti ed by the slowness
and xity of life at court. His only recourse is to evoke the dynamic, threatening force
of a natural storm, whose motions will ultimately prove more powerful than any social
or political guration (FA 1.5:833).
While drawing a vividly slow-moving counterpoint to the techno-accelerationist
allegory one nds in the Faust myth, Tasso’s closing monologue also introduces an
important gure of thought that may prove useful for understanding how Goethe
understood both the upper and lower limits of the speed of guration. In↑ resignation,
ack to Top
Tasso cries, “Zerbrochen ist das Steuer und es kracht / Das Schi an allen Seiten.
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Berstend reißt / Der Boden unter meinen Füßen auf!” (FA 1.5:834; The rudder is
broken / And the ship is creaking on all sides. / The oor beneath my feet is being torn
apart!). In the absence of steering, the ship is headed for sure destruction. Yet with the
restoration of Steuerung, political and cultural steering mechanisms for the
maintenance of control, the veloziferisch tendency of modernity may yet be reined in.
A controlled, pleasurable pace may be restored, while, perhaps more importantly,
avoiding the catastrophic alternative—an impoverished, destructive life in which
history is experienced as the incessant, accelerated “hurling of debris upon debris”
before one’s feet.20
1. Manfred Osten, “Alles veloziferisch” oder Goethes Entdeckung der Langsamkeit (Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 2013). ↩
2. See Daniel Kahnemann’s best-selling book on “slow-thinking” for an example of this.
Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011). ↩
3. See Spinoza, Spinoza Opera IV: Epistolae, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters,
1925), 240. “Quia ergo gura non aliud, quam determinatio, et determinatio negatio est; non
poterit, ut dictum, aliud quid, quam negatio, esse.” Translation by Edwin Curley. See Yitzhak Y.
Melamed, “Omnis Determinatio Est Negatio:’ Determination, Negation, and Self-Negation in
Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel,” in Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. Eckart Förster and Yhitzhak Y.
Malamed (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 176. ↩
4. See Melamed, “‘Omnis Determinatio Est Negatio’,” 175-96. ↩
5. See “Chapter 1: The Classical Physicist’s Approach to the Subject” in Erwin Schrödinger,
What Is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 3-18. ↩
6. See Schrödinger, What is Life?, 70. ↩
7. See Schelling, Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der höhern Physik zur Erklärung des
allgemeinen Organismus, ed. Jörg Jantzen et al. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000). ↩
8. See Schrödinger, What is Life?, 19. ↩
9. See Osten, “Alles veloziferisch,” 10. ↩
10. See Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” in A Carlyle Reader. Selections from the
Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), 24.
Goethe’s concept of “world literature” was also developed during this time in his correspondence
with Carlyle. See the lexicon entry on Weltliteratur for more on this. ↩
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11. See Bertrand Russel, “In Praise of Idleness,” in In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays,
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 1-15. ↩
12. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012). ↩
13. For more on this important historical and philosophical distinction between technique
and technology, a term which, although coined by Harvard Botanist Jacob Bigelow in 1828, did
not take on its more current usage until decades letter, see Leo Marx, “Technology: The
Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (2010): 561-77. ↩
14. For more on this, see Helmut Müller-Sievers, “The Curse of Technics: A Gloss on the
World-Curse in Goethe’s Faust,” MLN 131, no. 3 (2016): 656-61. ↩
15. See Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017). ↩
16. See Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, “Translator’s Introduction: Modernity and Time,” in
Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys
(New York: Columbia UP, 2013), xi. ↩
17. For more on Faust’s “patience-cursing restlessness,” see Rosa, Beschleunigung, 72. ↩
18. I have made use of Walter Kaufmann’s translation here. See Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor, 1961), 186-87. ↩
19. See Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson
(New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 98. ↩
20. This image has been lifted from Walter Benjamin’s description of the angel of history. See
Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begri der Geschichte,” in Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften I
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 255. ↩
Related ntries in the GLPC
E
BEGRIFF Concept • BESTIMMUNG Determination • BILDUNG Formation • EILE Hurry •
FIGUR Figure • GESTALT/GESTALTEN Shape(s) • LUZIFERISCH Luciferian • NEGATION Negation • PRODUKTIVITÄT Productivity • SPINOZA Spinoza •
STEUERUNG Steering • TEUFEL/TEUFLISCH Devil/Devilish • ÜBEREILE Overhaste •
WELTLITERATUR World Literature • WELT World
Works ited and urther Reading
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Bacon, Francis. The New Organon and Related Writings. Edited by Fulton H.
Anderson. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser. 14 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991.
Carlyle, Thomas. “Signs of the Times.” In A Carlyle Reader. Selections from the
Writings of Thomas Carlyle, edited by G. B. Tennyson, 31–54. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1969.
Geulen, Eva. Aus dem Leben der Form: Goethes Morphologie und die Nager. Berlin:
August Verlag, 2016.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe’s Faust. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New
York: Anchor, 1961.
———. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Edited by Hendrik Birus,
Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Eibl, et. al. 40 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1987–2013.
Kahnemann, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2011.
Klausmeyer, Bryan. “Abschlussbewegungen: Goethe, Freud, and Spectral Forms of
Life.” Goethe Yearbook 26, no. 1 (2019): 163–78.
https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2019.0025 (https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2019.0025).
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012.
Marx, Leo. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Technology and
Culture 51, no. 3 (2010): 561–77. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2010.0009
(https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2010.0009).
Melamed, Yitzhak Y. “‘Omnis Determinatio Est Negatio’: Determination, Negation,
and Self-Negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel.” In Spinoza and German
Idealism, edited by Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, 175–96. Camrbdige:
Cambridge UP, 2012.
Müller-Sievers, Helmut. “The Curse of Technics: A Gloss on the World-Curse in
Goethe’s Faust.” MLN 131, no. 3 (2016): 656–61.
https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2016.0043
↑ ack to Top
(https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2016.0043).
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Osten, Manfred. “Alles veloziferisch” oder Goethes Entdeckung der Langsamkeit.
Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013.
Rosa, Hartmut. Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne.
Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017.
Russel, Bertrand. “In Praise of Idleness.” In In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays, 115. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Historisch-kritisch Ausgabe. Ed. Jörg Jantzen
et al. 36 vols. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1976 – present.
Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical
Sketches. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.
Spinoza, Benedictus de. Spinoza Opera IV: Epistolae. Edited by Carl Gebhardt.
Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925.
Trejo-Mathys, Jonathan. “Translator’s Introduction: Modernity and Time.” In
Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Translated by
Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, xi-xxxi. New York: Columbia UP, 2013.
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