Introduction

The introduction situates the book within the context of contemporary debates about life, spells out the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later thought to the argument, and explains how literature provides access to the political interiority of human life unavailable to contemporary theories of biopolitics. It also motivates the geographical and temporal specificity of the book, arguing that German culture from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century developed an expanded conception of life as the dynamic drive toward form. It suggests that this dynamic process of formation was seen by many in the German tradition as fundamental not merely to metabolic and bodily life, but equally to the vital processes of aesthetic, psychic, and socio-political phenomena.

The Life of Cognition and the Cognition of Life (Kant)

This chapter examines the conceptualization of life as formative form around 1800. Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is the first book in the German tradition to articulate the new dynamic notion of life as a convergence of mind and nature. For Kant, aesthetic experience is important because it involves an intensification of the life of the mind (including the social dimension of mind as sensus communis) and enables us to develop a regulative notion of organic life. Kant's claim is that to understand the peculiar organization of natural beings, we must view them as products of an intrinsic formative activity, and hence as in some way analogous to the mind's power of cognitive and perceptual synthesis, which we experience most vividly in our encounter with beauty. Aesthetic experience allows us to grasp the nature of human, or symbolic, life and its place within the natural world.

Life as Will (Nietzsche)

This chapter discusses Friedrich Nietzsche and how he views like as will. In contrast to the Idealist notion of the human imposition of value upon life, Nietzsche makes life not only the highest value but understands it as a process of valuation. Moreover, since valuation is conceived as the assertion of self against the assertion of countless other selves, Nietzsche's vitalism is intrinsically antagonistic and heterogeneous. For Nietzsche, life is a struggle down to the smallest cell, and formation (Bildung) is also deformation and overcoming, including the overcoming of previous forms of self. Under the rubric of the will-to-power, Nietzsche thus thinks of life as a force that both produces and exceeds all conceptual distinctions and oppositions; life becomes a problem and task that is at once biological and political, aesthetic and ethical, theoretical and practical.

Metamorphoses of Form (Goethe)

This chapter discusses Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the metamorphoses of form. Goethe's biological and literary writings of the 1790s radicalize Kant's insights. On the one hand, he emphasizes the “metamorphic” fluidity of both natural forms and human cognition; on the other, he stresses the erotic and social dimension of subjectivity. For Goethe, human life is singularly precarious because it is subject to libidinal investments and the unruliness of the imagination. To develop properly, human life must therefore be regularized by social forms that (re)direct its innate vitality — it must assume a second-order, socialized naturalness. Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship associates the creation of this second nature with liberal forms of governing, depicting liberalism's normative force as a necessary, if at times violent, supplement to human life. With Goethe, vitalism opens itself to biopower.

Brains (Benn)

This chapter explores modernist figurations of life in Gottfried Benn who developed his poetics through an engagement with and rejection of earlier models of vitalism. Benn's avant-garde Ronne novellas, written during World War I, deconstruct the Kantian belief in the mind's capacity to unify sensory data, replacing the latter's emphasis on formal unity with an emphasis on linguistic and bodily disarticulation. Himself a medical doctor, Benn writes literature in part as a pathology report, finding in the focus on disintegrating bodies and subjectivities an opening toward a new prose and therefore a new way of conceptualizing the human bios.

Epilogue

The final chapter, the epilogue, articulates in compressed and axiomatic form the book's major theoretical positions and claims, which are: (1) German vitalism conceives of life as a process of self-constitution; (2) the notion of life replaces the earlier model of nature-culture; (3) life's immanent normativity is built around a dialect of force and form; (4) speaking is a form of life; (5) a mutual absorption of the natural and the social; (6) forms exert a distinct kind of force; (7) human life is open to the threat of unintelligibility; (8) vital and social norms; (9) a short critique of recent ontologies; (10) the place of politics in human life; (11) from politics to biopolitics; and finally (12) beyond biopolitics.

Enter the Hybrid (Kleist)

This chapter examines the radicalization of this violent dimension in Kleist. While Kant and Goethe model life as a self-organizing form, Heinrich von Kleist highlights its divided and conflictual nature, depicting it as driving beyond form into the territory of deformation and disarticulation. In Kleist, this anti-organicism manifests in a poetic practice that emphasizes both the self-interrupting power of language and the prosthetic character of human life. Whereas Kant's and Goethe's autopoetic models seek to reconcile art and life, Kleist's heteropoietics frames art as an artificially intensified mode of life: art exceeds ordinary life, not by providing it with a beautiful form, but by extracting and magnifying its capacity to exceed itself, to break its own form, to become hybrid.

The Infinite Specificity of Life (Musil)

This chapter discusses Musil. Robert Musil's unfinished magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities, analyzes the petrification of the classical model of Bildung under conditions of a heightened biopolitical modernity. Where Goethe presented social forms as stabilizing human life, Musil depicts a world in which calculative reason has absorbed all singularity into statistical patterns of norm and deviation, splitting language and culture into impersonal scientific knowledge on the one hand and vacuous, dilettante chatter on the other. Musil's unfinished novel examines the violent fallout of the resulting inexpressibility of life (nationalism, madness, hypermasculinity) and explores, in its second part, new forms of speaking, thinking, and desiring capable of restoring life to experience and existence.