An Ironic Approach to the Absolute

Abstract

An Ironic Approach to the Absolute: Schlegel’s Poetic Mysticism brings Friedrich Schlegel’s ironic fragments in dialogue with the Dao De Jing and John Ashbery’s Flow Chart to argue that poetic texts offer an intuition of the whole because they resist the reader’s desire to comprehend them fully. Karolin Mirzakhan argues that although Schlegel’s ironic fragments proclaim their incompleteness in both their form and their content, they are the primary means for facilitating an intuition of the Absolute. Focusing on the techniques by which texts remain open, empty, or ungraspable, Mirzakhan’s analysis uncovers the methods that authors use to cultivate the agility of mind necessary for their readers to intuit the Absolute. Mirzakhan develops the term “poetic mysticism” to describe the experience of the Absolute made possible by particular textual moments,examining the Dao De Jing and Flow Chart to provide an original account of the striving to know the Absolute that is non-linear, non-totalizing, and attuned to non-presence. This conversation with ancient and contemporary poetic texts enacts the romantic imperative to join philosophy with poetry and advances a clearer communication of the notion of the Absolute that emerges from Schlegel’s romantic philosophy.