Gifting the other,or why are nineteenth-century German bourgeois men acting like Trobriand Islanders?

Isn’t it ironic

Since Søren Kierkegaard’s 1841 Concept of Irony (1965), Hegel commentators have principally situated the Phenomenology’s engagement with Schlegel at the moment in Spirit’s development toward Absolute Knowledge when Spirit becomes certain of itself in the form of Morality (Ayon Roy, 2009). Hegel is read as alluding to Schlegelian irony when he depicts the bifurcated culmination of the (Fichtean) “I” as the absolute certainty of its conscience: the (Schlegelian ironic) “I” whose natural (embodied) individuality taints the actualization of its universal claim in the world is apposed to and opposed by the no less absolutely self-certain, universal moralist who judges the actions of its counterpart as evil and hypocritical. When the judge recognizes himself in his “absolute opposite,” the evil hypocrite, and utters the “reconciling ‘Yea’ ” by which the “I” knows that it is identical with and certain of both itself and its opposing externalization, “God manifests” itself as such for the first time in Hegel’s narrative (1977: 409). The Phenomenology then dialectically shifts to Spirit’s penultimate stage, Religion, which recapitulates the preceding stages of Spirit’s development from the perspective of the Absolute’s own journey toward self-awareness.

Schlegel’s writings, specifically the publication of Lucinde, however, presented more than ethico-epistemological problems for the good German bourgeois philosopher Hegel to sublate by means of Religion; it was at the crux of a social ontological dilemma. The German bourgeoisie came to define itself (over and against the aristocracy) by asserting the universality of a specific social framework and the virtues it purportedly engendered, rather than by articulating itself in economic terms like the English or in political terms like the French. These claims were often mediated by representations of women (whether in “moral weeklies” or in Gotthold Lessing’s classic tragedies, such as Emilia Galotti and Miss Sara Sampson). Though these bourgeois characterizations were initially more prescriptive than descriptive, German social space came to be increasingly reorganized into a male-coded public sphere of employment that was physically and ideologically separate from (although still politically, economically, and administratively intervening in) the female-coded private domestic sphere of the “nuclear” family. The sexual division of labor, sexual difference, determined the German male bourgeoisie; represented as natural it legitimated their authority. Kinship, which in the form of lineage had conditioned aristocratic authority, identity formation, and social organization, became reterritorialized in the newly constituted family, which now became the locus of individual and collective identity. The family became inscribed as the natural and primal origin of humanity (Karin Hausen 1981; Joan Landes, 1988; Thomas Laqueur, 1987 − extending the work of Jürgen Habermas, 1962 and Michel Foucault, 1978).

Complications arouse, however, with grounding this social ontology. Bourgeois promotion of contract theory put in question the indissolubility of marriage and, by implication, the assumed natural sexual division of labor. Further, the authority of both theological law to legitimate state as well as family and Enlightenment discourse, which sustained that law by articulating its exclusive, totalistic claim to Truth as a consequence of (its notion of) the other, were greatly compromised by two “events” at the outset of the long nineteenth century: Kant's critiques, which instituted as a structure of the human world the radical disjunction of the knowing subject from any other (whether thing, consciousness, or deity); and the French Revolution, which overthrew the divine right of the singular sovereign and the patriarchal homology of monarchical state and family. Those two ground-shattering events led to a shift in conceiving the male subject’s relationship to the absolute other from the locative to the temporal: i.e., from laying out a geometric proof to producing a narrative of the ongoing agonistic encounter of representation with the unrepresentable, the telos of which is their ultimate identity. This reorientation that projected a restored relationship with the absolute other – but under the sign of its (possible) differance (deferral/delay) – coincided with two countervailing developments to the crisis of the German bourgeois male subject’s relation to his female other: the emergence of the law of paternity and the doctrine of sexual stereotypes. With the former, man authorized his products (including himself), ensuring the reproduction of the public sphere by providing legitimate male citizens and maintaining his presence in the private sphere by fathering heirs. The latter development legitimated as it naturalized both the polarization of gender roles and the disassociation of work and family life (Hausen, 1981). Hence stabilizing representations of contact with those non-absolute others, women (i.e., discourses of and about gender and gender relations), were imbricated in the histories of contact with the absolute other and played a crucial (if not the only) role in determination and maintenance of individual and social identity as well as of discursive authority for the emergent German bourgeoisie. What was at issue was not a catalogue of positive or negative images of women, but rather how representation (as produced and exchanged) constructed both the “subject” and the “other” and how representation affected as well as was affected by non-discursive social apparati and power relations (the family, class struggle, etc.).

Schlegel thrust his way into the contestation over bourgeois social ontology in 1799 by publishing his unfinished novel Lucinde. It celebrated sexual union, in which even gender roles (active male and passive female) might be reversed, as the emblem of the union of mortal and immortal, body and mind, world and experience, other and self, female and male. In the “true marriage” (Schlegel, 1971: 165) between his chief protagonists, Julius and Lucinde, Schlegel proposed both an allegory of and a paradigm for proper relationships within the projected moral public realm and the cosmos. Schlegel envisioned the proper society as a great family, consisting of the circle of male artist friends, each in a sensual−spiritual love relationship with a female priestess/mother.

Despite its egalitarian and/or anarchic/erotic pretensions of a new public sphere, the novel’s mobile male protagonists, authoring themselves through their creations, and their stay-at-home female counterparts, finding their meaning within the (great) family, ultimately reproduced the roles of bifurcated bourgeois society. Nevertheless, readers denounced Lucinde as immoral; their responses not only echoed bourgeois values but also led to the articulation and assertion of bifurcated bourgeois society, of the male-coded public and female-coded private spheres. Yet, when Hegel arrived at the University of Jena in November 1800, ironically, even as its reception helped differentiate the public from the private, the novel’s representation of the private – less the intimate relationship of its protagonists than the woman’s eponym the novel bore – materially remained in the public as a synecdochal surd disrupting the self-articulation of bourgeois society.

The social ontological implications of Lucinde’s ongoing public transgression could not simply be allusively trivialized and dismissed as an “arbitrary combination of an imagination” that has been “brought to market” (Hegel, 1977: 42). Rather, gender and gender relations are the primary loci upon which Hegel's social-ontological concerns, the problem of the other, ⁶ and the apparent threat presented by Lucinde converge. Hegel took her on when Spirit is first made manifestly visible in the Phenomenology‘s discussion of the Ethical Order (Sittlichkeit); recalling the Greek polis, it is a world determined by gendered oppositions – the male-coded human law and polis over and against, respectively, the female-coded divine law and family – and inhabited by a single and singular eponymous ethical agent, the embodiment of the divine law and the family, Antigone. Hegel's representation of the pathos of Antigone and her desire-free relationship with her brother responds to and substitutes for the pudeur represented by Schlegel's Lucinde. ⁷ After the death of Antigone, however, the ethical order collapses through the mediation of the term most associated with Schlegel, “irony,” ⁸ when “womankind – the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community – changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament of the family” (Hegel, 1977: 288). Whereas Hegel had idealized the Greek polis as a model for the reconciliation of opposites in his early writings, the Phenomenology culminates with Absolute Knowledge assuming that role. Although the Ethical Order is in itself inadequate, Hegel’s depiction of it in the Phenomenology still portended the ideal state in which man finds his full self-expression and woman is to be found in the privacy of the nuclear family.

Karl Gutzkow, the author of the third member in this series, Wally, the Skeptic, had been among Hegel's last and finest students in Berlin (Walter Dietze, 1957: 139). Just prior to the publication of Wally, Gutzkow had reissued Schleiermacher's Confidential Letters Concerning Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde”; this edition included an appended foreword with Gutzkow's critical remarks on Lucinde. The novel recounts the travails of the bourgeois coquette Wally, who, prodded by the dilettante Cäsar, the object of her never-to-be-consummated desire, begins to question the truth of religion and eventually commits suicide. Gutzkow’s principal motivation for producing the overarching narrative was to ensure that its centerpiece, Cäsar’s “Confessions Concerning Religion and Christianity,” a polemical hybrid of Reimarus-like biblical criticism and Hegel Lite historicism, could avoid the prepublication governmental review required of any work fewer than 20 folio pages in length. Neither reconciling Schlegel’s Lucinde with Hegel’s Phenomenology’s Antigone nor siding with either, Wally impotently laments the wrongness of existing religion-legitimated gender (and political) relations rather than offering an alternative social ontological vision. And Wally, its copies confiscated very soon after publication and its author briefly imprisoned, would not, unlike either Lucinde or the Phenomenology’s Antigone, stay in public circulation. The scholarly literature frequently discusses the commonality of both Schlegel's and Gutzkow's alleged emancipatory intent, as well as the success or failure of its actualization in their respective novels (M Kay Flavell, 1975; Geller, 1985; Sigrid Weigel, 1983), and the influence of Hegel's philosophic project upon “The Confessions Concerning Religion and Christianity” has long been noted (Dietze, 1957: 139). Yet this study is concerned with neither intertextuality nor the anxiety of influence, but with events in the public sphere that are mediated by female eponyms: the publications of Lucinde, of the Antigone section within the public cloak of the Phenomenology, and of Wally.

The interpellation of Gutzkow into the “rivalry” between Schlegel and Hegel redirects our attention from a pas de deux to the circulation of representations of women. It leads to the recognition of the exchange character of all three public performances: Lucinde, the Phenomenology’s Antigone, and Wally. Despite the everyday tendency to conceive of exchange in restricted, rational, and reciprocal terms, following a model of economic or commodity exchange, analysts since Marx have uncovered beneath the appearance of individuals willfully endeavoring to satisfy their respective needs (e.g., “I buy your idea”; “I'll give you a break”) a network of social relationships that is both presupposed and furthered by this local exchange and that serves other functions than those necessarily recognized by the participants. As Harry Liebersohn (2011: 3) observed: “From the end of the Napoleonic period to the end of the Great War, [gift exchange] almost disappears from the writings of Europeans [sic] thinkers; one looks in vain through the sociological theories of the nineteenth century for anything like a systematic or extended discussion of the gift.” The contemporary paucity of theory did not, however, reflect some purported foreclosure (charity aside: Liebersohn, 2011: 29−30, 58−59) of gift exchange from the modern public sphere in which Hegel, Schlegel and Gutzkow located themselves.

A theory of exchange

Marcel Mauss's classic The Gift (1990) and Marshall Sahlins’ masterful rereading of it, “The spirit of the gift” (1972), offer insight into this specific exchange of representations of women among Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow and open up the possibility of a general structure in which gift exchange is recognized as a multidimensional working-through contact with otherness, absolute as well as finite, and the gift exchanged as its overdetermined mediation. In The Gift, Mauss analyzed the ethnography of gift exchange among non-Western and non-modern peoples and noted how every contact with difference – other families, tribes, orders of being – becomes caught up in the matrix of ongoing exchange. Although the relationships within exchange are agonistic (1990: 6−7), the threats of both subjection and war are deterred through the mediation of exchange (1990: 65−83). As opposed to the West's familiar exchange of goods to secure material needs and to acquire material wealth, the practices described by Mauss included celebrations, in which status was rewarded to those who expended or destroyed the most of their possessions, and societies, whose most prized possessions served only to be given away in a ritual cycle of exchanges. Beneath the catalogue of seemingly irrational and unrelated customs Mauss uncovered a network of continuous gift exchange. In contrast to barter or economic exchange, he considered gift exchange as a “ ‘total’ social phenomenon” (1990: 3, 38). In addition to embracing religious and political as well as economic domains, giving assumes the guise of a moral gesture because, based on several criteria, it is perceived as selfless or unmotivated by private interest: first, giving does not originate with the particular participants, but presupposes that they are in the midst of an ongoing network of exchange (1990: 21−22); second, it is an obligation (1990: 13−14, 39−42); third, the gift usually lacks practical value; that is, it does not satisfy material needs (1990: 5−7, 71−75); fourth, there is no immediate return (1990: 35−36). Preventing this process from succumbing to entropy is what Mauss called the obligation to be repaid (1990: 3, 41−42) and that he tied to the hau or “spirit” that each gift bears. This obligation is not a tacit rule but, Mauss suggested, is an effect of the gift itself (1990: 11−13). The gift is more than an object; indeed, it is almost like a member of the family (1990: 43−44), and its hau desires to return to its origin (1990: 10−13), although not in the form of the original gift (1990: 42). In sum, the mediation of this third member, the hau-laden gift, allows both giver and receiver to retain the purity of their motives as well as their individuality in the midst of relationship (1990: 22−23). This third member makes any exchange relationship meaningful.

Sahlins found a different locus of the meaning-producing third in the native account (1990: 10−11) that served as paradigm for Mauss. Calling attention to Mauss’s dependence on Elsdon Best’s own English translation of the account that Best had collected from the Maori sage Tamati Ranapiri of the Ngati-Raukawa tribe, Sahlins commissioned an interlinear translation by the Maori scholar Bruce Biggs. According to the retranslated text (Sahlins, 1972: 150−153), which is told from the perspective of the receiver, the hau of the gift does not appear until the narrator becomes a giver to a third person and then receives in return the hau-laden gift. The narrator feels obligated to return the now hau-laden gift to the original giver. Without this third person there is no “disinterested” exchange.

Where Mauss's interpretation failed to recognize the relationship between the third person in the series of exchanges ⁹ and the appearance of the hau and, as a result, “mystified” ¹⁰ both the hau and the gift, Sahlins correlated the inclusion of the third person in the network of exchange with the presence of the hau. Further, drawing on philological studies of Maori, he noted that hau is extraordinarily rich in definitions and that “yield”, “excess”, or “interest” may be more appropriate in this context than “spirit”. Yet, even as Sahlins demystified the hau, his retranslation nevertheless recalled Mauss’s recognition of the supersensuous remainder borne by the sensuous gift (cf. Marx, 1976: 163−164, on the commodity). As a consequence of these two moves, he shifted the responsibility for the primary effects of gift exchange – the appearance of disinterested beneficence on the part of the initial giver, the institution and maintenance of positions and relationships, and the distribution of excess – from the hau to the necessary presence of the third person. The other person allows the gift to retain its moral force without endangering the relationship – that undergird and is undergirded by the guise of disinterest – between the previous participants in the exchange.

Effects similar to those generated by gift exchange can be observed in the polemics of Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow: claims for the by-definition disinterested “truth” of their utterances, assertions of authoritative position, and the agon which accompanies such performative moves, that is, their proffered representations of their persistently proximate others, women. Sahlins’s attention to the necessary role of the third participant as differant (deferred/delayed) from the original two helps situate Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow's polemical exchange and these effects into a historically specific general structure. The third participant generating these effects for each of their exchanges, however, was the public sphere; it was to the public sphere that Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow gave what each had in turn received – albeit, like Mauss’s examples (1990: 42), not in its original form – from predecessors (eighteenth century bourgeois discourse for Schlegel/Lucinde, Schlegel/Lucinde for Hegel/Antigone [Phenomenology], Schlegel/Lucinde bzw. Hegel/Antigone [Phenomenology] for Gutzkow/Wally). By receiving each gift, the public sphere, in return, recognized − that is, authorized − its giver while, structurally, both returning the gift to the earlier exchange participant and keeping it in circulation for a later recipient.

While recognizing that a third, as such, sheds light on certain effects generated by gift exchange, (re)locating it leads to a theory of exchange that addresses the supersensuous supplement of the material gift, noted by both Mauss and Sahlins, as well as gives insight into the critical conditions for the emergence of exchange, including that among Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow, as well as the stakes at play. What follows delineates the interconnections among boundary, contact, otherness, and representation that generate the network of exchange and the gifts exchanged. As I have elsewhere (Geller, 1985) extensively analyzed, the characteristics that the representations of women in Lucinde, the Phenomenology, and Wally share with the gift, this article concludes by discussing the relationship of the elaborated theory and the representations of the persistent proximate other that are Lucinde, the Phenomenology’s Antigone, and Wally.

The origin of exchange as an exchange without origin

At the most general level gift exchange is a way of relating to otherness without annihilating or superseding the participants. Otherness, again at the most general level, is what is contacted at the boundary – be it territorial, temporal, epidermal, lineal, etc. – even as the contact constitutes the boundary as both limit and transgressible between (Mary Douglas, 1966; Victor Turner, 1969). For example, historically contact is where two seemingly incommensurable cultural orders meet (Long, 1986; Smith 1982b). ¹¹ Further, as Mauss's essay and Sahlins's work have shown, any particular contact is embedded in an already ongoing social practice of exchange. These characteristics of exchange have several implications. First, if exchange is the practical means of dealing with contact yet is always already going on, it is then best understood as coeval with contact. Second, the participants in an exchange cannot be distinguished as ego/alter or self/other – that is, as the unitary, action-initiating entities which are presupposed by such disciplines as anthropology and social psychology that traditionally employ these distinctions. Rather, and this is key, the slash of demarcation in the opposition self/other separates those who are presumed to be able to exchange from those who either are not able to exchange or are themselves exchanged. Whereas contact signifies that the participants are structurally and existentially other, exchange signifies that pragmatically they are not. Only purported agental egos participate in exchange; that is, they are recognized as subjects asymmetrically related within the social order produced and maintained by the exchange.

The interconnection of contact and boundary, indicated both by definition and by the act of exclusion, also has a number of implications. Because contact constitutes the boundary even as it transgresses it, then by means of gift exchange the occasion of boundary formation is also the occasion of its effacement. The boundary implicitly acknowledges the limitations of each exchange participant, whether conceived as individual or community. Moreover, the extrinsic boundary that is coeval with contact is not the only one at work; the intrinsic heterogeneity, together with its constitutive internal boundaries, of the contacted parties is effaced in the exchange. There is also something else: the something else of social identity − that supplement determined by the exchange of something else, the gift. For example, in the Kwakiutl potlatches reported by Boas ¹² and considered by Mauss as the degree zero of exchange, rank and prestige were determined through the destruction of property acquired by Western contact.

Above all, contact is caught up in the consequences of boundary formation: the reproduction and/or transformation (and annihilation is a form of transformation) of social relations. Every contact with otherness is critical. Each is an occasion to reproduce the network of relationships in which the excess is distributed and to articulate the positions and identities of the recognized participants. Yet, each contact also indicates that the network is not closed; contact thereby reveals both the structure of relationships and its contingency. ¹³ These consequences are themselves effects of the cognitive and practical mediations of the boundary's dual status: it is both disjunctive and conjunctive. On the one hand, the border constructs clear-cut differences, value-charged and agonistically opposed categories, embodied on either side of the border. Thus Europeans and Hawaiians pre-existed contact, but only after contact are they also constructed as other, that is, as, respectively, non-Hawaiians and non-Europeans. This cognition of disjunctive boundary formation poses a threat: because to form this border is to transgress it, the other is represented as threatening annihilation of the self. Sacerdotal categories and practices − the separation of the pure and the impure − endeavor to restore the border. On the other hand, the disjunction marked by the boundary is also mediated by it. Because the border contacts both sides, it appears to be determined by both, yet it is unlike either. The boundary is outside the categories. The ambiguity of the boundary threatens the structures − the network of differentiations that undergird the identification of the participants.

Only what Bourdieu (1977) calls practice ¹⁴ delimits the extent of the boundary with its mixture of orders and allows the boundary to perform its proper functions: as disjunction, to totalize self-identity and efface internal difference; and as liminal conjunction, to determine agonistically status among the participants of the contact. That practice is gift exchange. Gift exchange regulates the economy of the border. It determines the what: the excess and the lack. It determines the how: the access and the remedy. And it determines the who: the included and the excluded. On the one hand, as noted above, gift exchange both transgresses and effaces the “external” border by inclusion; on the other hand, exchange maintains “internal” boundaries even as it disavows their existence by exclusion. Correlating contact with boundary construction – with drawing lines – highlights the political or juridical character of gift exchange: exchange is a relationship of power (Peter Blau, 1964). This correlation also marks the ritual character of exchange. Ritual makes distinctions, for example, by separating sacred and profane, and effaces them by instituting relationship where disjunction, for example, between human and divine exists – ritual covers gaps (see Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1966; Smith, 1982a).

Gift as external or sacerdotal other

The cognitive and practical as well as the sacerdotal and the juridical mediations (Smith, 1987) of contact converge on the gift exchanged. As noted, the boundary constructs the other qua other; however, the “otherness” of any contacted potential exchange participant is in the pragmatic of exchange displaced onto the gift. ¹⁵ Yet the gift is already other. Because the gift is other than the two recognized participants – or the third person pointed out by Sahlins – in the exchange, then it must be drawn from the category of what is either left out or excluded from participation. The gift draws from the dominant culture's persistent, proximate others: the subordinate member in the hierarchical oppositions animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman (and nondivine; i.e., human/animal), male/female, Christian/Jew, white/black, etc. These others, unlike the others encountered in contact, are characterized always already by a necessary subordination and by their persistence.

The gift is apotropaic; that is, it is a representation of otherness that substitutes for the otherness encountered in contact. As such, it is like a gargoyle, a constructed representation of evil to fend off evil. The gift has the sacerdotal function of preserving borders. Yet, the apotropaic gift both asserts and denies that otherness. As such it can be compared to a mausoleum, a monument that both asserts and denies the loss of a loved one. Although intended to mitigate the effects of contact, the gift, on a number of levels, retains a certain ambivalence. As mediator in exchange it draws upon the ambivalence of that other mediation, the boundary. More significantly, the gift's mediatory function is overdetermined; it mediates, as object exchanged, the other encountered in contact and, as representation, the persistent proximate other. By maintaining a referential relationship, if always already deferred, with the other, by bearing a trace of the other, the repulsive representation may repulse both its intended object and its bearer. Yet as borne, as one's own construct, the gift is domesticated, rendered somehow familiar and nonthreatening. Although the gift is drawn from the dominant culture's proximate others, as a representation produced by the exchange participants, it no longer refers to itself as other (than the known); it is a substitute for itself. It manifests ambivalence by being both other and not other. Another ambivalent consequence of the representational character of the gift is that it seems to absent itself, to become a screen that allows it to perform dual functions in exchange: to screen out the otherness of the other and to display the projections of the participants' desires and fears (Shoshana Felman, 1981). Further, its signifying relationships to its absent source and intended goal are as manifestly natural and as covertly contingent as the exchange relationships it conditions. Thus these representations of the other often bear a dual modality: as tremendum and as fascinans, as repulsive and as attractive, as demonic and as soteriological. ¹⁶

Gift as internal or juridical other

The gift as a sacerdotal representation functions juridically. It seeks to screen the heterogeneity of or otherness within the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. The gift’s transparency, its just-so-ness, veils the opacity of the others, their specific and multitudinous differences. The gift’s exchange obscures the dependency of the exchange participants on the other, in particular their persistent, proximate others, necessary to secure identity, to determine positions, and to maintain (status) relationships among themselves. As Nancy Munn (1983: 283) writes about the effects of Massim exchange, “Although men appear to be agents in defining shell value, in fact, without shells, men cannot define their own value; in this respect, shells and men are reciprocally agents of each other's value definition.” In other words, not only does the apotropaic representation seek to subsume all that exists beyond the individual or the community's boundaries into a totalized “other,” but it also effaces the differences within that group. It naturalizes hierarchical relationships both among the participants in exchange and between those participants and the nonparticipants. Through gift exchange both the subjected others and the subject selves are constructed. And the construction is itself repressed – as is the crisis presented by the continuous contact with the proximate other. For dominant cultures, especially those, such as that of the German bourgeoisie, in which universality is given paramount value, the most threatening aspect of this presence is its persistence. It denies the extant order's claim for present universality as well as interminably delays any redemptive return of lost wholeness. The dominant culture neither allows the others to articulate themselves nor as such to participate in the exchange network. The crisis generated by persistent contact with the proximate other, however, is not completely resolved by exchange; instead, a repressive silence prevails, complemented by the exchange of a continuous series of symptomatic, apotropaic representations that assume both soteriological and demonic guises. These others are represented in terms of their denial of the dominant culture's once and future universality. ¹⁷ Yet these persisting others are just as necessary in their very otherness to the eventuality of redemption. The exchange of representations of these persistent proximate others is always going on. ¹⁸

In sum, gift exchange substitutes for a contact never acknowledged − the contact with persistent proximate others. Gift exchange endeavors to ameliorate the fears of catastrophic consequences to identities and relations that every contact portends. It attempts to avert apocalypse; it seeks to resolve a crisis of contact. Gift exchange endeavors to rectify (see Smith, 1982b) a dual crisis: the contingent encounter with a potential subject rival and the structural relationship with the subjected other – the third – whose necessity gives the dominant culture meaning.

Crises rectification

The particular character of Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow's polemical exchange is a consequence of the double crisis of contact in late eighteenth-century Germany. First, the social−structural conditions, briefly described above, out of which the German bourgeoisie emerged precipitated a crisis of contact with persistent proximate others: women. Woman, defined by reproductive relations, is the stumbling block to Man's autonomous production of himself. The male could only articulate himself as autonomous by differentiating himself from the female; however, to acknowledge this relationship would be to deny that very autonomy. Male identity for the German bourgeoisie depended on the maintenance of clear-cut male−female relationships and different spheres of activity: the objective, public sphere of male productive labor, and the subjective, private sphere of family intimacy. In order to efface this dependence, production of an other, a substituting representation, was necessary. Because the representation appears in the public realm, it is objective, and this objectivity reflects back upon the producer. Although the producer is dependent on his product, as producer of the representation he has produced himself. For example, Lucinde, the text, substitutes for Lucinde, the character within the novel itself. ¹⁹

Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow were also responding to an irruptive crisis of contact with absolute otherness generated, as noted earlier, by Kant's critiques and the French Revolution. Schlegel and Hegel endeavored to mediate the crisis of contact in part by representing women and their relationships. Their representations intend particular social orders – the family of humanity for Schlegel and the state for Hegel – upon which they sought to ground the male subject, to devalue, if not to efface, the necessity of the represented other, and to maintain the bifurcations of bourgeois society. Schlegel’s Lucinde and its immediate outraged reception should be seen both as the culmination of these crisis-generating developments and as the precipitate that led to the recognition of the crisis, whereas in the depiction of women in their relationships with men in the Ethical Order section of his Phenomenology Hegel awards Antigone exemplary status within this depiction of duty, desire, and the absence of self-consciousness over and against his famous designation of woman as “the everlasting irony (in the life) of the community.” ²⁰ Finally, Wally can be read as a negative image of both. Gutzkow's representations function as a repudiation of his predecessors. The ambivalence of Gutzkow's representations is highlighted, as is their failure to offer an alternative relationship with otherness. As with any such crisis, the attempt to rectify it drew upon the preexistent exchange network whose circulating gifts were representations of women. In other words, even as Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow openly engaged the problematics of the other, their public proclamations of the new agenda both articulated the nature of the old and unwittingly revealed its persistence. All three texts situate their representations of these persistent proximate others, women, as media for the immanent presence (Schlegel and Hegel) or absence (Gutzkow) of the absolute other. Within their network of public polemical exchange, Schlegel, Hegel, and Gutzkow were working through German bourgeois society’s problematic contact(s) with the other, both the absolute and the persistent proximate; and Lucinde, the Phenomenology’s Antigone, and Wally were their gifts.