Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 111 Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius Gabriel Trop University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Abstract: The origin of the epigram as an inscription on a tombstone or votive object establishes an attractor toward brevity that persists throughout the history of the genre. The seventeenth century, however, witnessed the cultivation of an epigrammatic practice - epigrammatic paradoxicality , as exemplified in the work of Angelus Silesius - invested with a counter-aesthetic potential to the one that would emerge in Lessing’s later Enlightenment aesthetic theory. Angelus Silesius, who compares epigrams and their constitutive elements to points, lines, and circles, uses the epigram to multiply different perspectives, albeit in such a way that these perspectives never fully coalesce into a whole, akin to a textual pointillism held always on the cusp of resolution into an image� Angelus Silesius’ practice of epigrammatic paradoxicality releases a dynamizing, heterodox energy by occupying a point of bifurcation between correct belief (orthodoxy) and divergent belief (heterodoxy)� The epigram thereby sets readers into permanent motion and productivity, refusing to allow them to settle into normative finality; the generative power of the epigram depends upon the irresolution of this constitutive tension� Keywords: Aesthetics, Paradox, Epigram, Baroque, Enlightenment To read a book of epigrams is to wander among gravestones and monuments� The wanderer in a book of epigrams - in a cemetery composed of paper, ink, and imagination - does not seek out a specific person, a singular or intimate departed, but moves from one monument to the next, from one marker of mortality to the next. Letters originally chiseled on stone, later written on other surfaces and gathered in series, provide an intimation of worlds to which the wanderer has limited access: for a brief moment, the wanderer enters into proximity with these worlds, watches words emerge and recede, perhaps pauses to reflect, and 112 Gabriel Trop then moves on to another inscription, another monument, another inflection in the order of beings� The analogy between the book of epigrams and the cemetery can be maintained only if the epigram retains the residue of its ancestral form: the epigramma or the inscription above a tomb or on a votive object� When Lessing examined the form of the epigram in his Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm (1771), he had this image specifically in mind as a primordial scene: “das Epigramm in seinem Ursprunge” (181). In its origin, the epigram cannot be dissociated from its specifically graphic quality ( epi-gramma ); it conjures forth the history of what Sybille Krämer would call the “notational iconicity” ( Schriftbildlichkeit ) of the letter, a form of visualization that in turn produces a “place value” or a “place-within-a-configuration” (525). The visuality of writing, rather than its semantic or referential operations - the fact that one letter can only be differentiated from another by occupying a discrete space, for example - posits space as a relational concept, one in which a place enters into configuration with another place: here, not there. In Lessing’s notion of the “epigram in its origin,” however - as shall become clear - it is not only the act of writing that makes visible such processes of differentiation, but the object on which writing is inscribed. This object (the tombstone, the column that indicates “here lies…”) functions as a limiting condition for epigrammatic form, establishing the generic attractor toward brevity that persists in epigrammatic literature� 1 For Lessing, the brevity of the epigram reveals the extent to which the traces of its original spatial condition continue to shape its generic history� Only in relation to this origin can the aesthetic potential of the epigram be properly grasped� This paper, while inspired by Lessing, will depart from Lessing by turning towards the past rather than towards the future; it stages an encounter with Lessing in order to ultimately take leave of him� The focus of this paper will come to rest on a particular form of epigrammatic practice prevalent in the seventeenth century, one that does not cohere with Lessing’s attempt to “epistemologize” the epigram or to link the aesthetic form of the epigram to processes of sensate knowledge production� This particular epigrammatic practice can be found in its most concentrated form in the epigrams of Angelus Silesius ( Johann Scheffler), in his Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1657)� Rather than reducing epigrammatic form to the genesis of knowledge - one in which the “end” of the epigram would find its fulfilment in a resolution of tension, in the solidity of the norm or the establishment of a singular or stable transcendent point - these epigrams mobilize a dynamizing, heterodox energy. They willfully suspend the discursive operations that would otherwise guarantee the cosmic and divine order that they would seem so ardently to seek� To uncover the implicit counter-aesthetics of this form of writing practice - as epigrammatic paradoxicality - is the Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 113 primary purpose of this paper� This counter-aesthetics arises from a particular geometry of the epigram associated with its brevity; Angelus Silesius, who compares epigrams and their constitutive elements to points, lines, and circles, uses the epigram to multiply different perspectives, albeit in such a way that these perspectives never fully coalesce into a whole, akin to a textual pointillism held on the cusp of resolution into an image� Epigrammatic paradoxicality harnesses this power of divergence in the construction of its textual cosmos� This paradoxical epigrammatic practice also develops out of the conditions latent in the generic history of the epigram� As the epigram underwent a series of transformations, above all in the works of Martial, brevity drifted into wit, albeit a form of wit infused with a deviant force (thus becoming constitutive of the traditional dyad, brevitas and argutia , in discussions of the epigram). 2 The intensification of the deviant force in brevity becomes one of the defining characteristics of the Baroque epigram. Opitz, who had called the epigram “eine kurtze Satyra,” writes: “die kürtze ist seine eigenschaft / und die spitzfindigkeit gleichsam seine seele und gestallt” (21). The subtlety of the epigram’s brevity, its refinement or spitzfindigkeit , has the sharp or piercing quality of the satire, making the sense ( Sinn ) of the Sinngedicht , which was more or less synonymous with the epigram, into a pointe or a punctum . Logau, in his note to the reader introducing his Sinngedichte , draws attention to the isomorphism between Sinn-Getichte and Stichel-Getichte (“Sinn-Getichte” are “kurtze Stichel-Getichte” and “Stichel-Getichte” are “lange Sinn-Getichte” [3]). The Sinn of the Sinngedicht was thus first and foremost a disruption of sense. The pointe or textual barb of epigrammatic form introduces a counter-force in thought to the pull of habit; if thinking tends through expectation or habituation to travel in a certain direction, the pointe introduces a countervailing tendency, initiating a lateral movement toward the unexpected� The ending of an epigram lands, according to Opitz, “anders als wir verhoffet hetten” (21). The generic tendencies of epigrammatic form in the seventeenth century, thus described, lay the groundwork for Lessing’s account of the epigram as the near simultaneity of anticipation ( Erwartung ) and an unforeseeable resolution ( unvorhergesehener Aufschluß ), condensed in one and the same aesthetic cognitive act. The seventeenth century also witnessed the birth of a novel epigrammatic genre: the “spiritual epigram�” 3 The spiritual epigram, as practiced by Daniel Czepko von Reigersfeld in his Sexcenta Monodisticha Sapientum and Angelus Silesius in his Cherubinischer Wandersmann , functions as a crucible for what Yuk Hui calls “cosmotechnical” thinking, or the unification of “cosmic order and moral order through technical activities” (19)� One of the central technical achievements of the spiritual epigram as an art form (as techné ) consists in the construction of matrices uniting poetic form (signs, genres, topoi), the sensate 114 Gabriel Trop cognitive and affective movements that accompany poetic form (attention, cognition, judgment, retention, desire), and metaphysical, ontological, or as the case may be, “theo-logical” order. The spiritual epigram, its arrangement of letters on a page ( epi-gramma ), explores operations binding together text and mind, poetic form, cognition and ontology. The coordination of these operations were codified later by Baumgarten in the discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, which brought together the formal structure of the work of art, the perfection of sensate cognition stimulated by the work of art, and the ethical production of a certain ideal human type (the felix aestheticus ), each of which were in turn analogical archetypes of the rational structure of the cosmos ( analogon rationis )� The resonance between operations internal to epigrammatic form and those that will later be explicitly theorized in Baumgarten’s aesthetic paradigm - a resonance that Lessing will thematize and make explicit in his thoughts on the epigram - authorize the construction of the epigram as a proto-aesthetic object, or an object whose very form opens onto the production of metaphysical truth. According to Niklaus Largier, the mystical tradition to which Angelus Silesius was indebted paved the way for a “poetics or poiesis of experience” - a poetics that flowed into the birth of aesthetics inasmuch as “in early modern times mystical tropes come to be increasingly projected into a new epistemological space” (39)� Lessing’s turn to this proto-aesthetic genre, or a genre whose own formal potential is inextricably linked with aesthetic operations (understood as the binding of sensate cognition, poetic form, and ethical and cosmological truth), owes perhaps more to the brevity of the object than to its sacrality� He constructs the fable as a similarly proto-aesthetic object; in both the case of the fable and the epigram, Lessing draws attention to the way in which the sudden apperceptive unity of an object is concentrated in a singular, temporally compressed and tightly circumscribed act of cognition� Although Lessing interprets the epigram through the lens of the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, the seventeenth-century spiritual epigram operates according to a logic that cannot be subsumed under the Enlightenment aesthetic tendency towards the streamlining of cognition. In particular, the formal potential of the spiritual epigram (or “Formpotential” as David Wellbery writes in reference to the tragic form of Faust I [8]) must pass through zones that suspend the rules ensuring the smooth functioning of cognition, often differentiating what seems identical and making identical what seems distinct� The formal potential of the epigram, however, should not be limited to an analysis of its generic features or to its innovation within the history of the genre. Rather, the formal potential of the spiritual epigram contains within itself Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 115 an ethical exercise value, ultimately seeking to produce a specific human type. For Angelus Silesius, this human type is the cherubinic wanderer , a designation that could be applied not merely to the author of the epigrams, but also to its readers. More to the point: if the epigram must be inscribed on a surface, an epi-gramma ( Aufschrift ), the human being - its body and its consciousness - becomes that being on whose surface these letters are inscribed� The formal potential of the epigram is realized through the potential of the being who receives it� Silesius’ final epigram articulates this imperative: “So geh und werde selbst die Schrifft und selbst das Wesen” (285). The words following this epigram - ENDE - thus mark a barrier to be overcome rather than an end to the text� The terminus of cherubinic epigrammatic production - the inscribed surface that readers themselves would become, were they to infinitely reproduce epigrams in their own being - makes the human being into a dynamic process, a being constantly dissolving and reforming itself in the light of the attraction of the divine� The cherubinic wanderer, moving from one epigram to another, must pass through a reconfiguration of knowledge, tarrying with a form that repositions its constitutive elements in particular constellations� Epigrammatic form thus both sustains and reconfigures the system of differences underlying what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” (35). It does not, however, break the anthropological machine, but sets it into an eccentric motion: animals become human, humans become angels, and angels God. Angelus Silesius calls this process “over-formation”: Die Überformung Dann wird das Thier ein Mensch / der Mensch ein Englisch wesen Und dieses Gott / wann wir Vollkömmlich seynd genesen� (129) The salvation of the community of epigrammatic readers ( wann wir Vollkömmlich seynd genesen ) becomes co-extensive with a process of transformation and potentiation from the animal to the divine, folding each of these terms into the one that follows. In this process, the human being becomes a fleeting mark on an epigrammatic surface, a vanishing element in the passage towards a divine telos� Over-formation ( Überformung ) designates this dynamic decomposition and recomposition of relations that both fixes the human as an element in a chain and dissolves the boundaries of the human in the process of its transformation toward a final state of perfection. It also names the implicit aesthetic dynamic that subtends epigrammatic paradoxicality� In light of such epigrams, it is not difficult to see why Leibniz assimilates Angelus Silesius’ mystical thought to Spinoza’s notion of “one substance […] of which individual souls are fleeting modifications” ( une seule substance […] dont 116 Gabriel Trop les âmes individuelles ne sont que des modifications passagères [Leibniz 55]). That Angelus Silesius could be read (or misread) as a pantheist is not specifically relevant to the operations of epigrammatic form; the epigram can move in and out of the orbit of pantheism, and it is the attraction to pantheism, a form of “setting into motion” that occurs through the temptation of heretical thought, that is constitutive of paradoxical epigrammatic form� 4 Similarly, it is not the challenge of Angelus Silesius’ poetry to the principle of sufficient reason that concerns Leibniz. Heidegger draws attention to this challenge in his reading of the rose “without why” (“Die Ros’ ist ohn warumb / sie blühet weil sie blühet” [69]); while the rose still refers to a ground, it discloses a being that does not seek its own ground� 5 Thus the rose implies a principle of reason ( Satz vom Grund ) that does not demand to be spoken or articulated in the language of logic. However, the freedom of the rose from seeking a ground is itself an articulation, a modification in a larger textual cosmos. If the rose in one epigram is indifferent to its being-seen (“sie achtt nicht jhrer selbst / fragt nicht ob man sie sihet” [69]), in another epigram, it takes up a different relation to the ground precisely as something to be seen. In “Die Rose,” Angelus Silesius writes: “Die Rose / welche hier dein äußres Auge siht / Die hat von Ewigkeit in GOtt also geblüht” (43), adding “idealiter” in an asterisk. The rose in this instance functions as a copula between the sensible and the ideal; it is no longer a rose “without why�” It is thus inaccurate to write about the rose of Angelus Silesius; there is not one rose in his epigrams. Keeping the hetereogeneity of the rose in mind - the multiple metaphysical operations that it can gather around itself - it is possible to understand Leibniz’ comparison of Angelus Silesius and Spinoza in another way. Every epigram constructs its own particular cosmo-technical relation, as if each were a monad - albeit not windowless, as they are gathered together in a contiguous series - that generates resonances and frictions, each opening up onto a slightly displaced cosmic order constituted by degrees of difference and similarity. While it is primarily the “quietism” of Angelus Silesius that draws Leibniz’ explicit criticism at the level of philosophical content, Leibniz nevertheless generates an insight of a different sort when he sets the epigram in relation to Spinozistic individuation as a series of fleeting modifications ( modifications passagères )� Angelus Silesius’ own poetic persona as a wanderer through cosmic orders ( Cherubinischer Wandersmann ) emphasizes the principle of movement� For Angelus Silesius, reading and writing is wandering: always on the move, never standing still� “Stille stehn ist zurücke gehn” (257) reads one of the titles of the epigrams. Even this statement, however, cannot be axiomatic; in another epigram (“Was die geistliche Ruh ist”), one must be “begihr- und willen-loß / Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 117 gelassen innig” (182)� One epigrammatic point of entry enters into tension with another, setting thought in an opposite direction: always still, always moving; free of desire, full of desire; realizing one’s will, free of will. Although one can find such tendencies in Czepko’s epigrams as well, and indeed, in the corpus of mystical writings, it is Angelus Silesius who articulates and develops epigrammatic paradoxicality as a generative poetic practice� Just as the sense of the Sinngedicht is in fact a disruption of sense (in the barb or pointe ), introducing a counter-tendency to the pull of habituation and harboring a deviant force, so too does the momentum of the spiritual epigram increase through paradoxicality as thinking outside common opinion ( doxa ) . 6 In the “Erinnerungs Vorrede an den Leser,” Angelus Silesius frames the epigram as a potential temptation: the “vil seltzame paradoxa oder widersinnische Reden” could encourage readers to attribute to the epigram “wegen der kurtzen Verfassung leicht einen Verdamlichen Sinn oder böse Meinung” (13)� While one may almost always resolve the paradox of the epigram to ultimately be consistent with dogma, it nevertheless unleashes a disorganizing and disruptive force, one that sets the hermeneutic machine into motion, and like the pointe or punctum of the satirical Sinngedicht, one that, by wounding, cures. In what follows, I will attempt to describe the specific aesthetic operations of Angelus Silesius’ epigrammatic practice� What comes to light is not an aesthetics of reason, but an aesthetics of the paradox. Paradox in this context designates neither merely a rhetorical strategy nor a strictly logical operation (which is how the paradox has tended to be received: belonging to the twin domains of rhetoric and logic). Instead, paradox becomes a specific form of attunement, a state of suspension between “correct belief ” (orthodoxy) and “divergent belief ” (heterodoxy)� Epigrammatic paradoxicality is situated at a point of bifurcation between these two poles. Its efficacy depends upon its capability to be pulled in either direction: toward the norm or away from it� The function of epigrammatic paradoxicality is to enable acts of imaginative wandering: it becomes operative when one is not fully immersed in a stable normative discourse (orthodoxy) nor fully detached from this discourse (heterodoxy)� Such paradoxicality is not limited to what can be found within a single epigram, but also characterizes the movement between epigrams� As I have previously suggested, each epigram produces a “micro-cosmos” saturated with sense and non-sense; epigrams that follow one another may open onto another dimension of the same cosmos or set of terms, or they may linger in another cosmos, another framework of intelligibility altogether. The relation of the various epigrams to one another - epigrams that necessitate stepping inside and outside of imaginative worlds with different forms of sensuous organization 118 Gabriel Trop - designates the movement of the paradox, rather than its localization within a specific epigrammatic object. In order to approach the aesthetics of the paradox as it comes to light in Angelus Silesius’ cherubinic epigrams, a poetic form dedicated to train the mind to go wandering, I will draw upon Lessing’s remarks on the epigram as a guide. This gesture may elicit accusations of anachronism� 7 Lessing’s remarks can nevertheless function as a heuristic lens through which the particularity of Angelus Silesius’ experimentation with poetic form can be drawn out of its latency� I embrace this temporal discontinuity in order to better uncover the specificity of the cherubinic epigram, which ideally will emerge more clearly in contrast to the concept of the epigram operative within the framework of Enlightenment aesthetics� Lessing’s reflections on the epigram dynamize what otherwise might appear as a static poetic form� Lessing’s focus on dynamic operations binding sensate experience and poetic form - rather than his attempt to isolate normative or invariant features of the genre - can be used to understand the epigram as an aesthetic exercise intending to incite cognitive and affective responses. A genre becomes useful in relation to its specific formal potential to activate semiotic, cognitive, ethical, and imaginative tendencies (“What operations can the form of the epigram enable ? ”) rather than in relation to the construction of typologies (“What is the generic form of the epigram and its invariant features? ”)� Lessing explicates the aesthetics of the epigram in three domains that will become relevant for an understanding of epigrammatic paradoxicality. First, the epigram functions as a differential marker of spatial coordinates, tending toward operations that position, reposition, or transgress boundaries; second, the epigram excites contrary imaginative tendencies collapsed into a single and unified cognitive event; third, the mimetic basis of the epigram - its relationship to a singular “thing” or entity - initiates a process of orientation binding spatial and temporal unity and meaning ( Sinn )� First, the most primordial function of the epigram consists in the force of demarcation itself. In the origin story told by Lessing, or “das Epigramm in seinem Ursprunge,” the power of the epigram can be traced back to an indexical function that carves out and apportions space: Wenn Theseus , in der Landenge von Korinth, eine Säule errichten, und auf die eine Seite derselben schreiben ließ: Hier ist nicht Peloponnesus, sondern Attika ; so wie auf die entgegenstehende: Hier ist Peloponnesus, und nicht Attika : so waren diese Worte das Epigramm, die Aufschrift der Säule. (181) Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 119 The mythological origin of the epigram inscribes the history of the genre into cultural techniques of boundary demarcation. The inscription on the column marks out discrete spatial zones and performatively converts the object of its indexical force into a defined field. Open land becomes territory; objects become property; buildings become monuments or commemorations of an event; the words “here lies” make ground hallowed, sacred, a site of memory and visitation� The power of the epigram is thus linked to its ability to performatively mark a boundary, define an object, constitute a determinate spatial field with effective properties� Ritualized practices gather around this demarcated zone; the indexical field associated with the epigram is concomitant with the force of law. Not all epigrams harbor this performative force, but something of this power surfaces in later variants of the epigram, where it becomes akin to an archaic vestigial structure� The introductory epigrams of Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien - alluding to Martial’s 13 th book of epigrams, which are inscribed on gifts given to guests (although they are, in the words of Frieder von Ammon, “ungastliche Gaben” [142]) - take place at a border crossing. The state apparatus appears here in the guise of the aesthete and the aesthete in the guise of the state apparatus, staging a scene of interpellation that coheres with Joseph Vogl’s comments on the simultaneous “Ästhetisierung der Policey” and the “Verpolizeilichung der Ästhetik” (615) in the eighteenth century� In the initial epigrams of the Xenien , a border is being enforced at one moment and transgressed in another; the aesthetic police seeks to establish boundaries, while poetry leaps over them. 8 Der ästhetische Thorschreiber. Halt, Passagiere! Wer seyd ihr? Weß Standes und Characteres? Niemand passiret hier durch, bis er den Paß mir gezeigt. Xenien � Distichen sind wir. Wir geben uns nicht für mehr noch für minder, Sperre du immer, wir ziehn über den Schlagbaum hinweg. (199) Movement and counter-movement make up this prologue to the Xenien : enforce the boundary, transgress the boundary. On the one side, articulate the law, establish differentiation (the “estate” or Stand ), fix character, regulate passage; on the other side, disarticulate the law, efface differentiation, dissolve identity in a self-declared structure of recursivity� The Xenien themselves, as personified epigrams, take control of their own identity (and here one is tempted to read metonymically the Xenien for the work itself, although there is a difference between these personified Xenien and the Xenien as a whole): we are distichs and do not present ourselves as more or less than that; we do not have an estate or a fixed character. The indexical force of these Xenien , taking charge of their own lyric identity, becomes self-referential in the declaration of autonomy from 120 Gabriel Trop state authority. At the same time, the Xenien - the text as a whole, rather than the personified epigram - incorporate a moment of resistance to this autonomy (via the police) into the lyric corpus. The dynamic of the form of the epigram, as presented here, is essentially agonistic: the epigram is not pure transgression, but characterized simultaneously by enforcement and transgression� If the first operation of the epigram is to articulate space, or to transform space into place, the second operation applies to the landscape of the mind. For Lessing, the central characteristic of the epigram consists in the simultaneity of a cognitive movement and a counter-movement: it excites an anticipation ( Erwartung ) and offers a resolution ( Aufschluß ) in one unified mental event. The aesthetic formula is described as follows: the epigram “muß über irgend einen einzeln ungewöhnlichen Gegenstand, den es zu einer so viel als möglich sinnlichen Klarheit zu erheben sucht, in Erwartung setzen, und durch einen unvorhergesehenen Aufschluß diese Erwartung mit eins befriedigen” (188)� The successful epigram must simultaneously stimulate desire (via a seeming disruption of the norm, something extra-ordinary that stimulates anticipation) and bring about satisfaction (via an unexpected restoration of the norm, an Aufschluß )� Although Lessing may seem here like an “aesthetic gatekeeper” himself, the very articulation of the norm becomes a condition for the refined play with genre as it manifests itself in Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien . “Der ästhetische Thorschreiber” (emphasis on Thor , also a fool) ironically does not conform to Lessing’s definition of an epigram, as there is neither anticipation nor resolution, but the mere form of a distich; the very representative of the law, der ästhetische Thorschreiber , is, according to Lessing’s classical definition of the genre, a poor manifestation of the generic law. The third operation characteristic of the epigram is to reproduce a particular form of mimesis� The epigram does not imitate the form of the object on which it is written, but imitates the phenomenology of the encounter with this object� Lessing describes this scene as follows (to which I alluded at the beginning of this paper), which I cite at length: Wenn uns unvermutet ein beträchtliches Denkmal aufstößt, so vermenget sich mit der angenehmen Überraschung, in welche wir durch die Größe oder Schönheit des Denkmals geraten, sogleich eine Art von Verlegenheit über die noch unbewußte Bestimmung desselben, welche so lange anhält, bis wir uns dem Denkmale genugsam genähert haben, und durch seine Aufschrift aus unserer Ungewißheit gesetzt worden; worauf das Vergnügen der befriedigten Wißbegierde sich mit dem schmeichelhaften Eindrucke des schönen sinnlichen Gegenstandes verbindet, und beide zusammen in ein drittes angenehmes Gefühl zusammenschmelzen. - Diese Reihe von Empfindungen, sage ich, ist das Sinngedichte bestimmt nachzuahmen; und nur dieser Nachah- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 121 mung wegen hat es, in der Sprache seiner Erfinder, den Namen seines Urbildes, des eigentlichen Epigramms behalten. (187—88) The epigram imitates not the object, but the perception of the object� The epigram thus provokes a second-order perception, the perception of a perception that makes explicit the phenomenology of attention: an embodied anticipation, dis-organization, and resolution that takes place at the site of the epigram. From a certain point of view, the epigram recapitulates the genesis of thought itself. Merleau-Ponty describes attention as a “knowledge-bringing event”: “This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this recasting at every moment of its own history in the unity of a new meaning, is thought itself ” (35—36). The epigram reawakens a primordial attentiveness to objects that is the sensate condition from which knowledge emerges� Perceptually, the epigram is thus situated at a liminal state between the known and the unknown; it represents a compressed medium of what Eric Downing, in another context, calls Schwellenkunst � 9 Following Lessing’s description, the epigram lays bare a phenomenologically nested structure of thresholds, since the epigram fuses three sensations that are themselves threshold sensations: 1) the pleasure of surprise ( angenehme Überraschung ) fused with the embarrassment ( Verlegenheit ) of unconscious determination ( unbewußte Bestimmung ); 2) the fusion of the satisfaction of knowledge ( befriedigte Wißbegierde ) and delight of the sensate object ( der schmeichelhafte Eindruck des schönen sinnlichen Gegenstandes ); and 3) the fusion of these two sensations held together at once� This latter fusion is emphatically not a second-order operation, since each sensation must be co-present on a plane of sensuous immanence, belonging to a series of sensations, eine Reihe von Empfindungen � The pleasure of the epigram, as derived from this primordial scene, stages a simultaneous differentiation and dedifferentiation in liminal forms of spatiality, temporality, and sense: it captures a transition from distance to proximity, while retaining the perceptual character of both; it operates both according to the temporality of succession ( eine Reihe von Empfindungen ) and simultaneity (the fusion of two successive moments in ein drittes Gefühl ); and it describes the emergence of sense from uncertainty� The epigram imitates this act of perceptual orientation, both suspending and bringing to an end the state of hesitation between the known and the unknown, lingering within the potentiality of ambiguity - foregrounding what Frauke Berndt and Klaus Sachs-Hombach call “constitutive” ambiguity - even after disambiguation has supposedly taken place� 10 These three operations can function as a heuristic through which the aesthetic particularity of Angelus Silesius - that of epigrammatic paradoxicality - can be brought into relief: the epigram as the drawing of distinctions, or the 122 Gabriel Trop performative marking of spatial and conceptual boundaries; the epigram as the sudden and unexpected resolution of desire into norm while simultaneously preserving a moment of irresolution; and the epigram as the recapitulation of processes of perceptual orientation that simultaneously preserve and efface spatial, temporal, and epistemological oppositions (between distance and proximity, succession and simultaneity, the unknown and the known). In Angelus Silesius’ preface to Cherubinischer Wandersmann , paradox, or “widersinnische Reden” (non-sensical speech), raises the threat of a heterodox sense that must ultimately be held at bay� The function of the preface is to prevent readers from automatically associating the non-sense of paradoxa with damnation or heterodoxy, “einen Verdamlichen Sinn” or “böse Meinung” (13). At the same time, the preface understands such paradoxicality as a constitutive feature of the attractive pull of the epigram; in order to move into orthodoxy, or correct opinion, one must pass through the disorganizing field of the paradox. Epigrammatic paradoxicality unfolds according to operations that cohere with and diverge from those that Lessing discovered as intrinsic to the epigram� In addition to drawing distinctions and constituting a distinct field of differences - Hier ist nicht Peloponnesus, sondern Attika ; Hier ist Peloponnesus, und nicht Attika - Angelus Silesius’ epigrammatic paradoxicality explores equally prevalent zones of indistinction : Die Gleichheit. Jch weiß nicht was ich sol! Es ist mir alles Ein / Orth / Unorth / Ewigkeit / Zeit / Nacht / Tag / Freud / und Pein. ( Wandersmann 55) While the zone of indistinction, above all between God and creature, plays a central role in mystical thought - and, as Angelus Silesius notes in the preface, can be found in the works of Tauler, Ruysbroek, Lois de Blois - epigrammatic paradoxicality compresses such zones of indistinction into proximity with one another and generates an oscillation� The epigram above thus brings two different operations into the same textual and imaginative space: the indistinction of identity ( Es ist mir alles Ein ) and difference ( Ort / Unorth , etc.); and the distinction of identity and difference. These two operations take place in turn both sonically and graphically, albeit with each domain (sonic and graphic) inverting the operations of the other. Sonically, there is a marked difference between the first line, in which poetic rhythm coheres with grammatical syntax - Jch weiß nicht was ich sol! / Es ist mir alles Ein - and the second line, in which oppositional terms are compressed and collide with one another: OrthUnorthEwigKeit / ZeitNachtTagFreudundPein� The rhythm of the alexandrine blends and dis- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 123 torts the syntactical order of differences in this second line, swiveling around the caesura between eternity ( Ewigkeit ) and time ( Zeit )� The graphic signs of the poem, however - the slashes inserted between oppositions ( Orth / Unorth , Ewigkeit / Zeit ) - react against this blending in the second line by emphasizing each term as marked and oppositional to its other� The graphical slash is not, however, a mere mark of opposition or differentiation. At the end of the first line ( Est ist mir alles Ein / ), the slash exhibits a different function. Unlike the slashes in the second line, which signal oppositionality, this slash simultaneously marks difference and indistinction: a separation between the first line and the second as well as their identity, the alles Ein as the overarching set under which the oppositions that follow are subsumed� Syntactical markers here become vehicles for operations of epigrammatic paradoxicality, simultaneously establishing and dissolving the distinctions that otherwise would stabilize a textual, ontological, and theological order. Epigrammatic paradoxicality also distorts the second main operation of the epigram as elaborated by Lessing, namely the transition from anticipation ( Erwartung ) into resolution ( Aufschluß )� Lessing’s understanding of the epigram is modeled on an explicitly epistemological form of aisthesis : the emergence of sensate knowledge from the confusion of perceptual experience� The pointe of epigrammatic paradoxicality does not always coincide with the transition from obscurity to clarity, but often suspends such transitions, unfolding in a contradiction whose resolution lies outside the confines of textual space: Das Vermögende Unvermögen. Wer nichts begehrt / nichts hat / nichts weiß / nichts liebt / nichts wil; Der hat / der weiß / begehrt / und liebt noch jmmer vil� ( Wandersmann 34) Epigrammatic paradoxicality does not refer to the knowledge encoded in the epigram, but rather, to the effect of its aesthetic form. The paradox of the epigram as a form of knowledge, after all, can be grasped by the semantics of the mystical tradition to which it owes its intelligibility� 11 To love nothing is to love many things : emptying the will of differentiated images becomes the condition for the receptivity of divine plenitude. The very incapacity of the epigram itself, its “Unvermögen,” becomes a source of potentiality (to think with and against Agamben, there can be no “pure” potentiality or impotentiality that could not become differentially generative, re-distinguished after entering into a zone of indistinction). In this manner, the “senseless” proposition - to desire nothing is to desire much - produces sense� It is thus always possible to recuperate the paradox for knowledge, or at the very least, for a form of knowledge constituted discursively through the production of further differentiating, communicative acts. Peter-André Alt, 124 Gabriel Trop following Luhmann, writes: “Paradoxien sind nicht nützlich, vermögen aber ‘Anschlusskommunikation’ herzustellen” (183). Paradoxes are generative inasmuch as they can be explicated or unfolded ( Paradoxienentfaltung ). However, if the paradox is to be brought in relation to knowledge, it gestures at a form of knowledge that is unconditioned , knowledge to which conditions are attached only in the process of unfolding: according to Luhmann, “Paradoxien sind […] die einzige Form, in der Wissen unbedingt gegeben ist” (132)� There is thus a discontinuity between the “unconditionedness” of the knowledge generated by the paradox and the “conditions” that facilitate its explication� This understanding of the paradoxicality of the literary text as a medium of knowledge, however, only becomes possible by occupying the position of a second-order observer� Epigrammatic paradoxicality is supposed to block precisely this position. “Erfahrung ist besser als wissenschafft,” writes Angelus Silesius (204)� Moving to a second-order observational standpoint transforms communicative acts into knowledge through their capacity for connectivity; from such a perspective, Erfahrung becomes yet another differential term that produces knowledge, namely via the opposition Erfahrung / Wissenschaft. However, once the movement to the second-order observational stance has taken place, one is no longer within the attractive orbit of the epigram’s particular paradoxical power. This power extends beyond the mere logical form of the paradox (i.e., the bare “contradiction”), seeping into the way in which words and letters themselves are arranged. In “Das Vermögende Unvermögen,” the paradox becomes a pretext for chiasmatic imbrications, a tapestry of asymmetrical lines of force. The first verb in the first line, begehrt , becomes the third verb in the second line, which generates the following pattern - 1-3; 2-1; 3-2; 4-4 - all the while producing oppositional lines of force in the tension between the repeated “nichts” and the singular “vil�” A diagram of these lines of force could be constructed as follows: Wer nichts begehrt / nichts hat / nichts weiß / nichts liebt / nichts wil; Der hat / der weiß / begehrt / und liebt noch jmmer vil. (Wandersmann 34) The only verb from the first line that is not repeated in the second is the verb “wollen”; the extinction of the will in the first line occurs to such an extent that it no longer registers as a difference in the second. The epigram does not merely show how one may “will nothing,” but rather, makes willing itself into a nothing, annihilates its specific difference-generating capacity. Epigrammatic paradoxicality thus draws upon an unconditioning power to reshape the field of differentiation, making inoperative what was previously operative. This un- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 125 conditioning power dissipates in second-order observation, which is why the epigram invests its paradoxical force in first-order experience ( Erfahrung ): an attraction to the vibrating textual surface, the site of inscription. The surface of the poem, first and foremost, initiates a heterodox movement, a momentum towards an “other” sense than that of common sense and everyday appearance, the doxa � The paratextual apparatus - footnotes that allude to the writings of the mystics, for example -continually draw the epigram back into the orbit of normative thought when it threatens to spin off into heresy: GOtt lebt nicht ohne mich. Ich weiß daß ohne mich GOtt nicht ein Nun kann leben / Werd’ ich zu nicht Er muß von Noth den Geist aufgeben. ( Wandersmann 28) Just as it is possible to recuperate the paradox for operations of knowledge, so too is it possible to draw the heterodox thrust of the epigram back into the sphere of orthodoxy, or right belief. The surface of the poem travels toward its disruptive pointe: the unconditioned (God) as attached to a condition (the creature); the constraint by necessity of that which cannot be constrained (without me, God must necessarily “give up the ghost”); and the provocation of the death of God that would accompany the death of the particular individual (if I dissolve into nothing, God dies with me). However, it is precisely this heretical surface that the epigram holds at bay� It activates an entire apparatus of theological and depth-hermeneutic reading technologies to steer the poem away from the implications of the surface; paratextual queues attached to this epigram (“Schawe in der Vorrede”) assure readers that the heterodox velocity of the poem is directed towards the stability of the norm, the fixing of the creature and the divine in their proper places after they seem to have been dislodged from their dogmatic positions� The interpreter thus folds the poem back into the received wisdom and normative comfort of Catholic orthodoxy. After a moment of brief anxiety, order is restored. However, the restoration of order depends upon an extratextual event. It is thus that the epigram “epigrammatizes” its readers, turns them into textual surfaces onto which its particular truth is then inscribed as a potential to be explicated in turn� The epigrammatic paradox thus lies precisely in the vibrating surface of the poem, not in the depth of the knowledge that it encodes: its function is to contravene orthodoxy so that depth-hermeneutic reading technologies can be stimulated to repair the seeming wound inflicted on divine order. The epigram must be held in a state of suspension between heterodox velocity and orthodox stability, as it is only by being thus suspended that the imagination can move actively into the norm� 126 Gabriel Trop Thus far, the aesthetics of the paradox has been limited to a dynamic within individual epigrams. However, more significant is the heterodoxy of form that emerges from the epigrammatic cosmos of the Cherubinischer Wandersmann as a whole� Heterodoxy of form designates the way in which the formal organization of the text itself - the way each epigram relates to every other, for example, in a serial structure or in a kaleidoscopic shifting - uncouples readers from the tendency to lead textual appearances back to some form of “correct opinion,” a dividing up of space and time that would culminate in a final transcendent point, a dogma. In the heterodoxy of form that governs its textual cosmos, the Cherubinischer Wandersmann may be regarded as a semiotic counter-paradigm to that which one finds in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises � According to Roland Barthes, Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises respond to the divine essence not with ineffability or with a via negativa , but with assemblages, instances of articulation, fields of exclusion, the establishment of topics, rules for what counts as an element, arborescent models of signification whose growths and outgrowths allow the codification of experience such that the encounter with the divine becomes structured like a language: “the theophany [Ignatius] is methodically seeking is in fact a semiophany, what he is striving to obtain is more the sign of God than knowledge of him or His Presence” (53)� Underlying the epigrams of the Cherubinischer Wandersmann one may discern a different principle of organization. Like the Spiritual Exercises , the epigrams are concerned not merely to approach an ineffable transcendent middle point (that is, not a via negativa ), although they can be, as Derrida argues, “contaminated” by operations of negative theology (69). Instead, the epigrams experiment with geometrical figures (points, lines, circles), modalities (possibilities, actualities, impossibilities), spatialities (operations demarcating and blurring inside and outside), differentiation and dedifferentiation, jumping from one point of entry into a cosmic totality to another� The “middle point” thus does not describe an ineffable center, but a vantage point, a horizon that makes visible the periphery - and thus a via positiva : Jm Mittelpunct sicht man alles. Wer jhm den Mittelpunct zum wohnhauß hat erkiest / Der siht mit einem Blik was in dem Umbschweif ist� ( Wandersmann 75) What sort of a grammar emerges from the cherubinic wanderer that attends to the circle from the point of view of the midpoint? Instead of arborescent models of signification and fields of exclusion or distinction - Lessing’s form of the epigram that initiates a process of spatio-temporal orientation, or the emergence of thought from confusion - the cherubinic epigram simultaneously Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 127 organizes and dis-organizes space; the “resolution” of the epigram ( Aufschluß ) is only a resolution inasmuch as it becomes a hermeneutic problem (the gears of orthodoxy slam into action); the epigram is no longer a self-contained unit or a single monument, but a cosmos of dynamic thought� In the relation between epigrams, the transcendent point of one epigram becomes a mobile element of another� This strategic reconfiguration of spatial terms depends upon language as something that can be dis-articulated� Prepositions are detached from their grammatical function and become conceptual operators, placing the cherubinic wanderer in a state of pre-positionality: “Zwey wörtlein lieb ich sehr; sie heissen Auß und Ein / Auß Babel / und auß mir / in GOtt und JEsum ein” (102)� This same mobility of individual elements or points takes place in a play with geometrical figures. When Nicolas of Cusa, in De docta ignorantia , makes the line and the circle coincide in an intuition of the infinite - God as a coincidentia oppositorum - he provides the impulse for an aesthetics of geometry as a source of paradoxicality� 12 Angelus Silesius extends this paradoxical aesthetics of geometry to forms of desire that could readily be designated as queer. In one epigram, God is “Der Kreiß im Puncte,” the womb as a point that enfolds a circle within it (“Als GOtt verborgen lag in eines Mägdleins Schoß / Da war es / da der Punct den Kreiß in sich beschloß” [115]). In another epigram, this very geometry is internalized, relativized, and eroticized when the human being invaginates the phallic divine midpoint (“wenn ich Ihn in mich schlisse”), only to invert these sexual positions when the speaker becomes phallic, flowing out into a divine principle that has now become yonic, womb-like: GOtt is mein Punct und Kreiß. GOtt ist mein mittelpunct wenn ich Jhn in mich schlisse: Mein Umbkreiß dann / wenn ich auß Lieb’ in ihn zerflisse. ( Wandersmann 134) Desire disrupts geometric order, and geometric disorder queers desire. Every word, every epigram, every series of epigrams, can at any moment become centralized or de-centralized, ordered and re-ordered; points, lines and surfaces become simultaneously distinguishable and indistinguishable; one attractive point is displaced by another (love is a magnet that draws the creature to God, or God into death, or the human heart is iron and magnet that pulls God down into its depths 13 ); the utmost impossible is possible (“das Überunmöglichste ist möglich” [270]). Paradox exercises the sense of possibility, a modality whose power it expands and intensifies. Possibility becomes here commensurate with a form of impossibility that transcends even the grammar of the superlative ( das Überunmöglichste )� Angelus Silesius’ epigrammatic practice thereby erects zones of indistinction and asymmetrical relations through which exchanges 128 Gabriel Trop take place: between God and creature; possibility and super-impossibility; point, line, circle, and surface. In so doing, it assures the kaleidoscopic shimmering of the word� Epigrammatic paradoxicality is less the property of a text than an emergent property extending out from a text, drawing the reader into its attractive pull and aesthetically transforming the reader into yet another paradoxical surface, infinitely generative. One may speak of an “aesthetics” of epigrammatic paradoxicality when ontology, sensuous cognition, and textual order are fused within an open horizon suspended between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The final epigram in the Cherubinischer Wandersmann points precisely to this dynamic: Beschluß� Freund, es ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr wilt lesen / So geh und werde selbst die Schrifft und selbst das Wesen. ( Wandersmann 285) This final epigram is not an end, but simultaneously beginning, middle, and end of a potentially infinite series of acts of reading and writing. It fuses three domains: ontological order, generic form, and the subject itself. The logos ( Schrifft and Wesen , ontological order) produces of a form of textuality (textual form as Schrifft ) and a subject (the implied thou ) who simultaneously writes and reads the text that the subject has become� An ambiguity emerges in the last line that perfectly embodies the ideal of epigrammatic paradoxicality: go and become yourself the text and yourself the essence� 14 Does the reader become the holy writ that precedes the subject, embodying the divine logos as an originary donation outside the subject, or does the reader become the source for an entirely new textual practice, a life lived as text? The logos ( Schrifft and Wesen ) in this instance can be self-producing, self-receiving, no longer “canonized” or capable of “canonization” (hence heterodox), but at the same time, it can be an ethical imperative grounded in a pre-existent textual body and essence (therefore capable of being led back to orthodoxy, back to the “canon” of the holy writ): go and become yourself the text and yourself the essence� What is the written text that one becomes? If every reader becomes the text and the essence, then there are as many texts and essences as there are individual bodies and minds. To be sure, some of these bodies and minds will act in concert, and the texts that they live out will come to resemble one another closely� Epigrammatic paradoxicality lays bare the way in which a reader can always willfully re-embrace orthodoxies or sink into them almost reflexively and automatically after the crisis of their disruption has taken place. Equally possible, however, is the becoming of texts that refract themselves through the prism of singular beings, expanding outward uncontrollably, painting the cosmos with infinite nuance. Such is, perhaps, the final manifestation of epi- Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius 129 grammatic paradoxicality: the genesis of a textual form that, even when it calls for orthodoxy after orthodoxy, nevertheless leaves open the possibility for a text and an essence that is irreducibly multiple, as if the fate of all right opinion were to become heterodoxical in spite of itself� 15 Notes 1 Peter Hess links the brevity of the epigram to its object-relational character, its Objektbezug ; see Hess 11� 2 See Hess 9� 3 For a recent account of this genre, see Wierzbicka 23—30. 4 See above all Hillenbrand 609—10. 5 See Heidegger 55—60. 6 Wilfried Barner, for this reason, still sees the structure of the pointe or argutia as central to the spiritual epigram; see Barner 350—71. 7 Although the Baroque attraction to paradox and Enlightenment rationalism seem to be at odds with one another, according to Peter Hess, “Erst Herders Theorie bricht eindeutig mit der barocken Epigrammkonzeption” (51)� 8 According to Frieder von Ammon, these epigrams represent a cycle within the logic of the work; they begin with a “Grenzüberschreitung” which is at the same time “eine poetische Transgression, ein Verstoß gegen literarische Normen und Regeln” (96). 9 See Downing 69—86. 10 See Berndt und Sachs-Hombach� 11 The paradox thus plays a role in the “cultures of knowledge” ( Wissenskulturen ) of this time; see Alt 182� 12 Nicolas of Cusa was a critical figure linking aesthetics and mathematics, which has an afterlife in Early German Romanticism; see Smith 67—69. 13 “Die Lieb ist ein Magnet / sie ziehet mich in GOtt: / Unnd was noch grösser ist / sie reisset GOtt inn Tod” (72); “Mein Hertze weil es stäts in GOtt gezogen steht / Und jhn herwieder zeucht / ist Eisen und Magnet” (132)� 14 As Niklaus Largier writes, “This very act (“become yourself the writ”) now stands outside the medieval hermeneutical framework and its claims� It takes shape as an application of mystical tropes that produces ever new forms of experience on the basis of rhetorical experiments” (50)� 15 I am indebted to Aleksandra Prica and Eric Downing for their generous comments on an earlier draft of this paper� 130 Gabriel Trop Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 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