Devouring One´s Own Tail (Ukázka, strana 99)

Autopoiesis and “Pure Culture of Death Instinct”: Creativity as a Suicidal Project Josef Vojvodík

Friend, let this be enough; if you wish more to read Go and become yourself the writ and that which is.

Angelus Silesius It was a song from the abyss and once heard it opened an abyss in every utterance and powerfully enticed whoever heard it to disappear into that abyss.

Maurice Blanchot

Since Greek antiquity, philosophers and poets have known of a certain tension between the creative life and melancholy. In the Problemata physica, a fragmentary collection of short treatises attributed to Aristotle, philosophers and artists are characterized as melancholic heroes who lead a valiant but tragic existence, overshadowed by the eternal darkness of night, by the void: Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile, as is said to have happened to Heracles among the heroes? […] Any many others of the heroes seem to have been similarly afflicted, and among men of recent times Empedocles, Plato, and Socrates, and numerous other well–known men, and also most of the poets. (Aristotle 1984, 226)

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This essay is an attempt to reconstruct the relationship between creative forms of self-realization and the suicidal “Pure Culture of Death Instinct” (Freud [1923] 1960, 54–5). In this sense, tragic autopoiesis figures as a lethal, sometimes fatal, vicious circle of self-construction and self-destruction, the kind of tragic symmetry of fates that unites Péter Szondi and Paul Celan. Péter Szondi (1929–71) was the son of Hungarian physician and psychiatrist Léopold Szondi, whose work in depth psychology led him to develop the theory and method of fate analysis (Schicksalsanalyse). A comparativist and theorist of literary hermeneutics and interpreter of dark poetry, Péter Szondi committed suicide in October 1971 in a manner identical to that of his friend, the poet Paul Celan (1920–70), with whose work Szondi was closely engaged. The links between Szondi and Celan that make up this symmetry of fates are numerous and unsettling: both were of Central European-Jewish descent; both experienced persecution during the war; both worked in a poetics characterized by aesthetic passion; both suffered from crippling depression; both died by drowning – a mirror – identical death.

At the beginning of Hermann Burger’s novel Die künstliche Mutter (The Artificial Mother) from 1982, the protagonist, Wolfram Schöllkopf, learns he will be laid off from his job as associate professor of German literature and glaciology (the science of glaciers and natural phenomena involving ice) at the Institute of Technology in Zurich. He entertains the idea of committing suicide by jumping from the third floor over the university courtyard. In addition to the trauma of losing his job, he is plagued by a chronic illness that he characterizes as a migraine of the genitals, an illness that makes his sex life impossible and his daily existence miserable.

A sudden heart attack turns Schöllkopf’s mind away from suicide, and he decides, through various turns in the story, to subject himself to an (ultimately ineffective) psychotherapy treatment conducted by a secret society at the Artificial Mother clinic located in the abandoned Swiss Army tunnels of the Saint-Gotthard Massif. Schöllkopf’s aim is to revive himself, or more aptly, reinvent himself under the literary pseudonym Armando, but what he discovers there are possibilities of creativity and ingenuity hitherto undreamed of, beyond the boundaries of ordinary linguistic expression. These open up a space for artistic self-determination – and, simultaneously, artificial reality – outside the natural world of social bonds and relations. Schöllkopf, alias Armando, will spend the last two summer months of his life in Lugano in a state of narcissistic-ecstatic intoxication where he alone is the subject, speaker, and audience of his monologues.

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Most of Burger’s works revolve around the question of death, a through line that begins with his very first prose text and continues to Tractatus logico-suicidalis (1988), a collection of aphorisms that was his last published work. It is as if the whole of his literary (self-) creation were simply a confirmation of Walter Benjamin’s assertion in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”: Modernity must stand under the sign of suicide, an act which seals a heroic will that makes no concession to a mentality inimical toward this will. Such a resignation is not resignation but heroic passion. It is the achievement of modernity in the realm of the passions. (Benjamin [1938] 2006, 104)

Just as Benjamin carries on the age-old tradition of heroizing death, identifying it as the “signature of modernity”, so too does Burger carry on the Platonic tradition of philosophical existence as ars philosophandi, and with it the notion of ars moriendi.

While Schöllkopf-Armando never commits suicide by jumping from his university window, Burger himself, on 28 February 1989, would take his own life by overdosing on sleeping tablets. It was the death of a writer who understood his work not only as a form of existence, but as a process of self-creation through words, a process that carried with it both the opportunity and risk of becoming a “man made only of words”. It is in these terms that Burger beckons to the reader in an essay of the same title (“Der Mann der nur aus Wörtern besteht”, 1968): “Come with me!

Come with me to the realm of words! Come with me and become a man who consists only of words!” (Burger 1983, 240).1 In Hermann Burger (1942–89) were combined the sensibilities of a literary scholar, associate professor of German literature, poet and novelist. He was, we can safely say, the very model of autopoietic self-constitution by means of intense self-reflection, and by way of explicitly autobiographical subject matter.

In this, of course, he was not alone, nor is it difficult to find similar examples: a literary scholar, for instance, who also produced literary works, or an art scholar who produced art. In Burger’s semi-autobiographical fictional works, however, the theme of self-constitution is closely intertwined with that of self-destruction, in a manner reminiscent of the works

1

Komm mit! Komm mit ins Reich der Wörter! Komm mit und werde ein Mann, der nur aus Wörtern besteht!

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