The Work of Leisure: The Figure of Empty Time in the Poetics of Holderlin and Mandelshtam

Artemy Magun

1. Surplus-Time
of history was definitively formulated in the Rousseau and Kant restricted the access of when eighteenth century, humans to their own supersensible, substantial nature (essence). Man appeared as a historical being, one whose definition lies in his development (or, in the case of Rousseau, fall), in his negativity. As soon as this vision of human nature was made public, a question arose, which dominated the subsequent tradition of the philosophy of history up to our days. Namely, the question of the access of humans to historicity as such-to pure historicity or pure temporality, apart from this or that particular historical development. Such access would permit humans both knowledge of themselves and spontaneity of action. Even blocked from the transcendent, God-like, absolute freedom, humans may still be free historical actors if they can deliver themselves from the determination of past and future, which forces them into the alienated labor of development, or into the labor of mourning. They would still act and produce, but do so as free subjects, out of nothing. If human essence lies in human history, then why does it move forward, what is the principle of its movement? Such a principle, for human history, may only be human freedom, human spontaneity and The modern notion
MLN118 (2004): 1152-1176 ? 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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negativity, the capacity to abstract oneself from the past and to create the new out of nothing. Thus, Rousseau, in his Letter to d'Alembert on the Spectacles, speaks, paradoxically, of the "laborieuse oisivete,"' the laborious idleness of Spartans who, while not present at the lost origin of history, enjoyed an "exceptional" place within it. Kant considered time and space to be the "pure forms" of intuition. However, he was ambiguous as to the possibility of a direct access to them, without any intuited object. Kant alluded to the possibility of directly perceiving time, this "pure intuition," in two places: first, in the famous section on the schematism in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,2 and second, in the analytic of the sublime of the Critique ofJudgment.3 Both the scheme of the category of substance (the first case) and the failure of imagination to represent and grasp the enormity of time and space (the second case) hint at the possibility of perceiving not what moves in time, but the empty form of time itself. The philosophers of Kantian lineage almost unanimously developed these hints in the direction of searching human freedom and self-knowledge in the contemplation of pure time, in the time of leisure. Thus Schiller, who displaced human liberty into the intermediate space of aesthetical play, a game which would allow one to "cancel (aufheben) time within time."4 Even Hegel, who, in spite and because of his identification of history with the labor of the negative, still speaks of the periods of happiness as the "blank pages" of history.5 Thus, finally, Marx, whose theory of capitalism is built upon the notion of surplus labor, the labor performed by the worker during the "free," "disposable" time, "leisure time."6 For Marx, this leisure activity is "antithetic." It constitutes the only free, authentic human action-but at the same time the cunning exploitation of it by capitalism (paying for your free labor) makes possible the cyclic, infinite, and frenetic increase of capitalist production.7 The more technical progress succeeds in reducing necessary labor, that is, in more vigorously does capitalist economy "conliberating time-the vert" this free time into "surplus labor." Such exploitation of the overabundant, surplus force would, according to Marx, lead capitalism into the crisis of overproduction and allow working masses to "reappropriate" their surplus labor for their free development. In our century, George Bataille further developed this theory, inverting the concept of economy and grounding it in surplus and festive expense, rather than in lack and productivity.8 While this development concentrated on the practical aspect of

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luxury and leisure as the excess, surplus of historical time, the epistemological aspect of free time was most clearly presented by Friedrich Holderlin in his Remarkson Sophocles' tragedies. There, H6lderlin clearly states the possibility of a direct contemplation of the pure Kantian forms of space and time. This possibility is opened by the interruption-caesura-of the narrative form, which creates an unfilled excess of "leisure time" (die miiuigeZeit) in the middle of it. This leisure time is mentioned in the end of the Remarkson Oedipus9 and restated in the Remarkson Antigona, in the full strength of its internal contradiction: But firstof all the tragicrepresentation consistsin the facticityof the word, which, being rather an internal structurethan a pronounced [sound], goes, fatally,from a beginning to an end. [It consists] in the sequence of events, in the groupingof persons againsteach other, and in the form of builds outof the leisure reason, which time, and, as it [the of a tragic frightening in theirwildemergences, reasonform] haspresenteditselfin contradictions, later,in the human time, it counts as a firm opinion born from the divine 10 destiny. When the action suddenly stops, the spectator perceives, in silence, the surplus of this action, something that still moves (in him or herself, through him or herself), when nothing moves. This "something" is time itself, the principle of human freedom and excess. For Holderlin, this moment of free time, the radicalized version of the Kantian sublime, is explicitly both epistemological and practical. Tragedy, as "an imitation of action," presents to the human being his own freedom, freedom as excess, and time that is empty for spontaneous action. Even more explicitly, Holderlin links his notion of free time with political revolution: he speaks of the "categorical" (Remarks on Oedipus) and "infinite" (Remarkson Antigona) "reversal" (Umkehr, Umkehrung-which is, at the time, a widely used word for revolution), and of the republican character of tragedy (Remarkson Antigona). The "leisure"is, however, "frightening" (furchtbar). The motion that presents itself in spite of the apparent pause appears as indeterminate and therefore infinite. The motion "in the void," the motion of time itself, has no immanent limits. Leisure is excessive time and excessive In reality, however, the motion that the motion. This is how it appears. subject perceives during leisure is his or her own motion, which constitutes this leisure: it terminates the inertia of labor and adjourns the desires and plans for the future. This negative activity is, first, potentially infinite (as it has, in turn, to hinder itself) and, second,

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seems to come to the subject as an external necessity. The "excessive time" is not fully free, and therefore it poses an imperative, a driveto exceed. The opening of time, which is excessive, empty, or infinite, depending on the perspective, drives the subject to probehis or her infinity and to exceed him or herself, to leave oneself behind. This is why Holderlin compares tragedy to a sports competition. The game is a leisure activity par excellence, but at the same time it has no internal limits and is competitive, leading thus to an infinite internal struggle. When Holderlin compares Oedipus the Tyrantto a fistfight, he may refer to a monotonous, merciless series of strikes that aim at the same point of the body, in an attempt to knock the adversary out. The leisure opens an abyss of disaster; it tempts one to perish and drives one to escape from peril. The link between free time and revolution is even more direct in Holderlin's poem Die Mufle, an explicit allegory of the French Revolution, written in 1797, during the tension caused by the advance of the French revolutionary troops. Here Holderlin clarifies many things in the development of German idealism, and goes even further than Marx, who knew his work well enough (the epigraph from Holderlin's novel Hyperionstands in the front page of the "FrancoGerman Journal" that Marx and his friend Ruge edited in Paris) but never made an explicit parallel between his theory of revolution and his notion of free time and surplus labor. This fact created an unfortunate ambiguity in the Marxist concept of revolution, allowing its interpretation as a historical necessity and deferring the ethics of leisure activity until the coming of communism. H6lderlin's fragmentary poem is interesting because of its enigmatic moment of ellipsis, where the letter W stands on its own. Until recently, the editors dismissed this peculiarity as negligence and "complemented" the letter with the word "wood" (Wald), as for example, F. BeiBner. The Frankfurt edition of D.E. Sattler restored the manuscript version. I will try to show that the fragmentary capital letter fits the logic of the poem, the poem that is dedicated to the materialization of language, to the destruction and atomization of the material signifier. This letter standing on its own has an obvious pendant in the oeuvre of Holderlin-namely, the famous enigmatic ending of Patmos (a poem written several years later than Die MuJfe):
"<...> der Vater aber liebt/Der iiber alien waltet, / Am meisten, daft gepfleget werde / Der feste Buchstab, und Bestehendes gut / Gedeutetet. Dem folgt deutscher Gesang" (emphasis mine).

Holderlin's poem works to demystify the concept of"free time" and

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to point at its internal contradiction. The time may not be entirely "free" or "static"-this would mean an absolute nothing, or a spatial picture. The very idea of leisure consists in the fact that, even in free time, something continues to move. The "leisure" signifies, strictly speaking, not the void, but the excess of time, time as excess. It designates the human condition as that of posthumous superfluity and untimeliness. As such, leisure is both a condition of freedom (or, rather, liberation) and a condition of anxiety, inachievement, and infinite unrest. Here, as we saw, Holderlin agrees with both Rousseau and Marx: the "free time" is the principle of freedom and labor. From one point of view the surplus appears as spontaneity and infinite power; from another point of view, it appears as a principle of excessive, unstoppable inertia of senseless motion, such as the wage laborer's desire to keep working after the end of the labor day. The very attempt to terminate this unnecessary rest of motion makes yet another motion, that of termination. And thus ad infinitum. This double character of leisure appears not only in the economic sphere, but also in political revolution and aesthetical, poetic production, which, by definition, constitutes an activity of leisure and is addressed to someone who wants to spend his or her time reading. 2. The Law of Leisure" Friedrich Holderlin Die Mufle12 die Brust und es ruhn die strengenGedanken. Sorglosschlummert die Wiese ich hinaus, wo das Gras aus der Wurzel Auf geh' Frisch,wie die Quellemir keimt,wo die liebliche Lippe derBlume Mir sich 6ffnetund stum mit siiu3em Othemmich anhaucht. Kerzen Und an tausend Zweigendes Hains, wie an brennenden Mir das Fldmchendes Lebensgldnzt, die rotliche Bliithe, Wo im sonnigen Quell die zufriednen Fischesich regen, Wo die Schwalbe das Nest mit thorigenJungenumflattert, Und die Schmetterlinge sichfreun, und die Bienen da wandl' ich Mitten in ihrerLust; ich steh imfriedlichenFelde Wieein liebender Ulmbaumda, und wie Rebenund Trauben Schlingensich rund um mich die siifien Spieledes Lebens. Oderschau ich hinauf zum Berge,der mit Gewolken Sich die Scheitelumkrdnztund die diisternLokenim Winde Schiittelt,und wenn er mich trdgtauf seinerkrdftigen Schulter; Wenndie leichtere Luft mir alle Sinne bezaubert

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Und das unendlicheThal, wie einefarbige Wolke Untermir liegt, da werd'ich zum Adler,und ledig des Bodens mein Lebenim All derNatur wie Nomadenden Wohnort Wechselt Und nun fiihrt mich derPfad zuriik ins LebenderMenschen, die Stadt, wie eine eherneRiistung Fernher ddmmert und derMenschengeschmiedet Gegendie Macht des Gewittergotts und herauf, ringsumruhen die Dorfchen; Majestatisch Und die Ddcherumhiillt, vom Abendlichte gerothet Freundlichder hdiufliche Rauch; es ruhn die sorglichumzdunten Feldern. derPflug auf den gesonderten Gdrten,es schlummert Sdulen Aberins Mondlichtsteigenheraufdie zerbrohenen die einst derFurchtbare Und die Tempeltoren, traf, dergeheime Geistder Unruh, der in derBrust derErd' und der Menschen der alte Erobrer Ziirnetund gdhrt, der Unbezwungne, der einst den Olympus Der die Stadte, wie Ldmmer, zerreifit, Stiirmte,der in den Bergensich regt,und Flammenherauswirft. und durchden Ozeandurchfdhrt entwurzelt Der die Wdlder und doch in der ewigenOrdnung Und die Schiffezerschldgt Niemals irre dich macht, auf der TafeldeinerGeseze KeineSylbeverwischt,der auch dein Sohn, o Natur, ist Mit dem GeistederRuh' aus einemSchoose geboren. Hab' ich zu HaufJedann, wo die Biume das Fensterumsduseln Leben Und die Luft mit demLichtemir spielt, von menschlichem Blatt zu gutemEnde gelesen Ein unsterbliches Leben!Lebender Welt!du liegstwie ein heiligerW Sprechich dann, und es nehmedie Axt, werwill, dich zu ebnen, Glucklich wohn ich in dir. 1797 Leisure. The breast carelessly slumbers, and the grave thoughts are at rest. I go out into the meadows, where the fresh grass Springs out of its root, where the lovely lip of the flower Opens to me and mutely envelops me with its sweet breath. And on the thousand branches of a grove, as though a little flame of life Was shining to me from the burning candles, the red flowers bloom, Where in a sunny spring scurry the happy fish, Where a swallow flies about the nest with the mindless youngsters, And the larks, and the bees rejoice, There I wander in the midst of their joy, I stand in the peaceful field As a loving elm-tree, and as vine and bunches The sweet plays of life crawl around me.

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Or I look at the mountain, which crowns its summit with clouds, And shakes its curls on the wind, And when it carries me on its powerful shoulders, When the rarefied air enchants all my senses, And the infinite valley, as a colorful cloud, Lies under me, then I become into an eagle, and, liberated from the ground, My life, as the nomads, constantly changes its dwelling place in the All of nature. Now the path leads me back into the life of men, Far away majestically dawns the city, as a copper armor That is forged against the power Of the Thunder god and of men, and around it rest the villages; And the smoke of houses, reddened by the evening light, Friendly illuminates the roofs; there rest the carefully fenced gardens, There slumbers the plow in the demarcated fields. But, in the moonlight there rise the broken columns, And the temple doors, which once saw the Frightening one, The hidden spirit of unrest, which angers and ripples In the breast of Earth and of men, the Irresistible, The old Conqueror, who tears apart the cities, as lambs, Who once stormed the Olympus, who stirs inside the mountains And throws out flames. Who unroots the woods and moves through the Ocean And breaks the ships and who, meanwhile, never makes you err from the eternal order, Never erases a syllable from the table of your law, Who is also your son, oh Nature, born from the same womb with the spirit of rest. Then, at home, where the trees whisper around the window, And the air plays with the light, I have read the immortal leaf of human life Up to a good end. Life! Life of the world! You lie as a sacred W Say I then, and it would take an axe to even you up, Happily I live in you.13 a. The spirit of unrest. While all discursive practices try to constitute and delineate the suspension of all "other" practices, to short-circuit a split between rest and motion, silence and speech, lyric poetry, in its rhythmical mode of repetitively interrupted monotony, thematizes this task of speech in an especially illustrative way. The lyrics are language suspended, neither affirmed nor denied, addressed neither

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to no one nor to a particular person. It is a proliferation of words driven by the oblivion, suppression or inaccessibility of theWord, of an absolute name of the true language.'4 In the spring of 1797 Friedrich Holderlin wrote a poem called "Leisure" (Die Mujfe). Many senses of the poem coincide with the English word "rest:" immobility, leisure, and also remainder. The poem starts with a description of the "carelessness" and calm one experiences in a pause. The figures of grass stemming from and out of their root (aus der Wurzel),like a springor a source(Quelle), and of the openyet mute lips of the flowers, coupled with the reference to the "sweet play of life" (sii3en Spieledes Lebens),leave no doubt as to the philosophical ambitions of the text. In the tradition of Kant's and especially Schiller's theories of free "play,"Holderlin's "leisure" is a space of opening and freedom, a sourceof human creative activity and the manifestation of the original "roots"of humanity (from which it, however, departs) in language. For the rest of the poem the hero turns to wandering-an oscillation between the plain and the mountains, between the settled and circumscribed "rest"of the country-place and the nomadic life of the mountaineers. This oscillation is a ceaseless motion in-between, and it seems therefore to give a hope of "settling" within itself, to attain this "Bacchic delight," in which, according to a famous phrase of Hegel, all members would dissolve and form a "transparent and simple rest."'5 Holderlin's hero becomes an eagle, becomes "free from the ground" (ledig des Bodens), and his life, "as nomads," keeps changing its place "in the All of Nature" (im All derNatur). Of Nature, or of language, since the letters of the word "Adler' (eagle) also wander-"All der." The pause of leisure makes one dream of a pure mediation or a Holderlin pure passage. In his fragment Das Werdenim Vergehen, speaks of a paradoxical state "between being and not being," of a contradictory passage (Ubergang),which also has a meaning of ascent and of excess.'6 This passage helps to "clarify and reunite the gap (Liicke)and the contrast, which stand between the new and the past," and, from the point of view of the new that has already appeared, is necessary retrospectively. Holderlin further speaks, significantly, of
the "matter of passage" (Materie des Uberganges). It is the same

landscape that we encounter in the poem Die Mujfe.Leisure lets the poet reflect upon historical change that has already taken place, to stage a retrospective passage between the past and the new as well as to access the threshold of birth into meaning and being. Hence the

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materialization of language, the return to the point of a yet unborn meaning. We will encounter the same will to maintain the pause and to stand on the threshold of meaning in the poetics of Mandelshtam. The aspiration of leisure is to stand inside absolute mobility. The transitory pause has to leave one as he or she is, for a new start. But precisely this task of "keeping" to oneself leads to a catastrophe. It turns out that leisure also wakes up the spirit of "unrest" (Unruhe)the spirit of splitting that leaves behind itself ruins (the "broken which are columns" and, significantly, "temple gates" (Tempeltore), also, as it appears, the gates of tmesis,the limits of fragmentation). This spirit operates not just on stone and wood but on the very linguistic matter of the poem. It "deroots" (entwurzelt)not only trees
but words: "Der die Wdlder entwurzelt, " "Der in den Bergen sich regt. "

Where does this spirit of unrest come from? It comes from the very effort of putting oneself at leisure. The leisure is not yet fully leisure: means that it does not the fact that it "rests,"in the sense of remainder, fully "rest,"in the sense of vacation.Further, the violent operation of interrupting work and putting oneself at rest, itself violates the rest and has to be put at rest: hence, the "leisure" threatens with a vicious circle of self-hindrance, of purification from the remnants of the past. The project and the fiction of accessing the "empty"time wake up the fury of destruction. The same situation may be described in yet another way. Left alone to himself, in the free space of leisure, man probesthe limits of his freedom, he checks whether he is fully and truly free. Hence the violence and destruction that so often follows human play. The task is to make sure that the time of despotic labor is over, to accomplish the passage from the past in order to access, "under" the layers of historical residue, the pure essence of being and time, one's own essence. The probing of freedom therefore coincides with its foundation: the goal of the game is to find and to found one's own, to appropriate the world and to make it one's home. Hence the political address of H6lderlin's poem that I discuss below. The logic of the "spirit of unrest" also works on the level of language, which, in order to be poetic, has to be playfully put in suspense, to be exposed as a "pure medium." Thus, the words, with their "settled," referential meanings, have to be destroyed to denude the "sheer" materiality of syllables and letters. Words still "work:" syllables and letters "rest:"their atomistic existence promises a pure reading of the essence of language and the capture of the voice of silence. This also means the ultimate separation of the ideal meaning

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from the material signs, and vice versa. By fragmentation, one attains not only the pure signs but, from another point of view, the pure immaterial meaning. The "unrest"of reading-the leisure activitypar excellence-splits the words in trying to dismiss them as "void,"to throw them away as leftovers, like a rocket throws away its steps. H6lderlin seems to find consolation, for a moment, in the fact that the spirit of unrest does not precisely destroy any syllable (keineSylbe verwischt)from the "table of laws"-it simply shatters and scatters them. "Sylbe"in this poem full of "wood"metaphors also refers to the Latin "silva"-a word for "wood" that is etymologically connected to the Greek "hyle, "matter. A human being, or reader, wants to live "in" the permanence of matter, with its alphabet and with its recombination. But the syllables are themselves divisible into letters, and, logically speaking, any self-identical element will be divisible in its turn. The search for the void promises to be an infinite movement, with its never fulfilled attempt to stop-and liberate-everything. Therefore it has to be suddenly interrupted. This interruption of a pause affirms it by its very failure-because its sudden rupture in mediasresmanifests the potential infinity of leisure. Both the excess and lack, in their indication of this potential infinity, open a space of leisure (or of a playful festival) within the textual work. b. The letterof law. Holderlin writes: "Life, life of the world, you lie as a sacred W / Say I then, and it takes an axe to even you up" (Leben,
Leben der Welt, du liegst wie ein heiliger W/Sprech ich dann, und es nehme ein Axt, wer will, dich zu ebnen). A capital letter emerges out of a syllable:

thus a "title,"a "name,"an identifying element of language. In the next line this-or rather the complementary-operation seems to be rejected. "Evening up" a word means "decapitating" it-taking "ebnen" out of "Leben."However, the letter W stands as a ruin of decapitation: it is left capital and thus negates the possibility of a total "materialization." Except for its status as a ruin, W marks an interruption of a line, a sudden (unexpected) caesura. The frenzy of circulation and arrest halts in a moment of silence and then goes on ("Say I then," Sprech
ich dann).

The very effort of finding a meaningless, void sign fails: the letter W is not at all meaningless. It is identical in writing with the Greek letter omega-a symbol of end. In H6lderlin's poem, the end is only possible as an interruption and is therefore self-contradictory. The very fact that the letter still meanssomething, even though it means the end, prevents the poem from being accomplished. Further, the poem ends

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with a comma so that the text itself remains (like the leisure) a fragment, a ruin, a rest. The real "rest"turns out to be possible only as a fleeting moment of interruption. It is a rest from rest, a leisure from leisure, an interruption from interruption. And it is only in and at this moment that one can truly "dwell"(the poem ends with a reiteration-"Happily I live in
you"-"Gliicklich wohn' ich in dir"). It is also at this moment that

language arrives to naming: the naming of the language and of the reader. W may possibly (although not necessarily) be read as a ruin of the word Wort-"word."Its "void"may only be established by filling it in with the syllable "[O] rt," like a bowl that may be proven void only in filling and pouring.'7 It therefore exposes the reader to the movement of his or her own voice, which goes on speaking when the text stops. A syllable does,after all, disappear-but it returns from another side, that of the inertia of reading. In the empty pause that is guarded by the "sacred" W-an aforementioned "temple door"-we "hear" a voice that speaks in silence, the voice of silence. This is what, in the very beginning of the poem, is promised by the openand mute lips of the flower. Word (Wort)-language, poetry-is not an empty place but an emptiness from a place [ Ort]. This emptiness may also be read into the poem itself. One could make yet another hypothesis concerning the word that starts with W: "Wohnort," a living place mentioned earlier in the poem as the "living place of nomads." If decapitated, this word becomes its contrary, an "[O]hnort," a "placelessness." The place kept empty by the letter W is thus suspended between place and the lack of place. The poem approaches the absolute transcendence of the inaccessible, inhospitable void. The letter W is a "temple door" in that it delimits and guards the sanctuary of silence. This placeless void is the true and inaccessible "leisure" around which the poem of Holderlin does its work. A "place," a silence, and a temporal "break"are no more than the recognized failures of the human activity that is ultimately directed at such failures and the momentous capture of capital.The moment of failure is something that sustains the repeated efforts to keep continuity and, like any rest, charges with energy. This is also the meaning of ellipsis in Kleist: "Puppets, like elves, need the ground only so that they can touch it lightly and renew the momentum of their limbs through this momentary delay."'8 In the letter W, the reader touches on the limit of divisibility as something exterior to him or herself. The moment of interruption is a moment of

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transcendence and delimitation. The letter stands as a solitary temporal gate, which is impenetrable but which, in its very impenetrability, invites a human being for a singular self-recognition. Such is the gate of the law in Kafka'sparable Beforethe Law, a parable told to a hero whose name does not go further than the letter K. The interruption is sudden; the exact position of a limit is indeterminate. It therefore manifests the law, understood, in the Kantian sense, as an indeterminate limit, a principle of finitude and limitation. The letter remaining from an unspecified word is the "firm letter" (derfeste Buchstab),that Holderlin evokes, several years later, in the end of his hymn Patmos.The letter that stands firmly on its own, without a determinate meaning, is the letterof law, the symbol of prohibition imposed on the immediate access to the purity of being. If leisure is a condition of probing the foundation, then, in arriving to the limit of the law, it both fails and succeeds. It fails for two reasons: first, because the limit is imposed on it and not appropriated, and, second, because it cannot even access the absolute limit, as only a sign of this limit is available. The subject of leisure succeeds, however, in proving the limitation of freedom in his or her own free experience. The law expressed by the "firm letter" is, in strict accordance with Kant's teaching, both autonomous and heterofrom outside. nymous. It is a law of autonomy which is imposed At the same time the letter guards the empty place where there should have been a word. The law is therefore expressed, notjust in a firm letter, but in what Holderlin calls "a sign = 0" in his short
fragment The Meaning of the Tragedies (1799). The context of the

formula shows that Holderlin interpreted this "zero" symbol as a material but meaningless sign, again, in the direction of the "feste Buchstab."However, the very formulation is more radical in that it alludes to the possibility that the symbol is simply absent in its place, and that the finitude is manifested-and staged-in an ellipsis.'9The same thought appears in the Remarksto Oedipus:the "caesura" that interrupts the tragedy is treatedby Holderlin as an "empty transport," a metaphor without meaning, or, one could add, a mute language. This moment of interruption opens, according to H6lderlin, a mediated, negative access to the "pure word"-a word without a word, the voice of the language itself. The silence becomes productive, "poetic" in that it gives word to the word itself. In the hymn "The festival of peace" (in many ways parallel to Die "Friedensfeier," Mufie) Holderlin says: "It is the law of destiny that everyone experiences on oneself, that, when the silence turns, it is also the language"

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(Schicksalgesez ist, daJ3Alle sich erfahren / DaJt, wenn die Stille kehrt, auch eine Sprache sei).

Thus the letter and the ellipsis of the interrupted word produce a double effect. On the one hand, the letter blocks access to the word, forbids it to continue. On the other hand, it allows touchingupon the independence of language and time, hearing its "voice." The interruption and inertia create an effect of a "speaking silence." Holderlin himself formulates this double function of poetry with precision. The task of contemporary poets, he says in the "Remarksto Antigona," is,
"den Geist der Zeit <...> festhalten und fihlen"--first, to establish and to

impose the spirit of time-second,

to feel it.

c. The revolutionary leisure. Holderlin's poem also carries an obvious

political message. It speaks of the French revolution, which had lasted almost eight years by the time of the poem's composition. Driven by the almost idyllic dream of peace and freedom20 (eventually, a dream very much shared by H6lderlin himself) the revolution had led to a As was later shown by Hegel in his paroxysm of violence and terror.21 Phenomenologyof Spirit, the French revolutionaries aimed not at becoming tyrants but at remaining inessential and intermediary servants of the universal itself, of pure negativity (Hegel, ThePhenomenologyof Mind, VI B III, 605-607). Their task consisted, further, in leading the people, like Moses, from the corrupted state of the Ancien Regime,toward a new realm of reason and nature. At the time, the French people were still contaminated by the virus of absolutism, from which the Jacobins tried to cure them not only by means of terror but also by means of systematic public education (LInstruction Publique).They insisted, in their struggle against the Girondists, that the revolution-this transitory period-was not yet over and that it was too early to say that the new, republican regime had been safely established. The problem of the French revolutionaries was therefore that of the passage. On the one hand, they were haunted by the past; on the other hand, once inside the transitory period, they extended it further and further, unable to exit from the potentially infinite movement of revolution. The project of temporal mediation is akin to the project of political structure since in the suspended, intermediate state there can be no hierarchy. Equality, a crucial member of the revolutionary triad, is not simply an ideological dogma but an inference from the revolutionary condition itself, when everything and everyone has to start over from a zero point. In the transitory period, power is suspended and does

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not legitimately belong to anyone. The Jacobins fiercely attacked the aristocratic elements, but they were even more suspicious of the popularity of their own members: as intermediaries and representatives of the people, the revolutionaries had no right to personal power. The power could not have a proper name. "Itwould take an axe to even you up," Holderlin says in addressing the "life of the world." The axe and the decapitalized "even" lifeLeben-point at the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 in the struggle for the pure passage and countable equality (evenness).H6lderlin shows that the search for pure mediation, for "leisure" from history, is a process of self-perpetuating fragmentation and "de-capitation." The mediating continuity is haunted by its starting point. As Saint-Justsays in his speech concerning the trial of the king (1792): "One will say that the revolution is over, that there is no more reason to be afraid of the tyrant,<...> but, Citizens, tyranny is like a reed that the wind bends and that rises again.<...> Revolution starts when the tyrant ends." And above: "His <of Louis XVI> politics is constantly to stay motionless, or to march with all the parties."22 The same problem of the impossibility to escape the beginning goes for words as "mediators"of meaning. A mediating word has its own prior (capital letter) and posterior and therefore does not really mediate. The same is true for the text that has to begin and end, as a beginning belongs not only to the text but first of all to the context that precedes it. According to Holderlin the project of the pure evenness of matter, and of complete political equality and suspension, is doomed to failure, even if one takes an axe to split the wood or to cut heads as cabbages. Due to the potential infinity and vicious circularity of this project, it has to be suddenly interrupted in the middle. The letter W stands as a limit of fragmentation and as a remainder of unevenness. This capital letter testifies to the failure of the project of erasing the uniqueness of the proper name and of the referential (nominative) aspect of language in general. The letter W, moreover, is an icon of a crown.As such, it emblematizes the monarchical element that stands on its own after the separation of the king's head from his body. The beheading of the king could not help but affirm and fix the absolutism in its distilled form. The Jacobins killed the king but immortalized the royal place of power by his public execution. The execution of the king left the French Revolution in history as a virus and trace of the royal,absolutist institution of power as the triumphant failure of voiding the signifier. Michelet, and more recently Lefort, saw the essence of the French

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revolution in the void that it left after itself as a political heritage.23 According to Lefort, the "empty place of power" inaugurated by the Revolution consists in the disjunction between symbolical and material power. A post-revolutionary ruler always improperly occupies his position. This coincides with what Marx, in the "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," observed about the comic, parodic character of revolutions. Similarly, in Holderlin's poem, the letter of law guards the void of the proper name of language and being; the void which is not even an empty place (one cannot occupy it), but an absence and promise of place [ Ort]. We can now see that this poem of Holderlin, indeed his entire corpus,hold an important place in the development of the modern philosophy of history. Building on Kant and Schiller, Holderlin anticipates the notion of labor as it will appear in Hegel and especially in Marx. Holderlin notices that "free time" is, paradoxically, a source or a spring (Quelle)of poetic labor. Marx will later build on the same intuition and show that the exploitation of labor by capital builds on the engagement of "surplus-labor," performed during what seems to the worker as his or her "free time." Meanwhile, according to Marx, free, "disposable" time is the positive ideal of human development and the chance of freedom. This poem of Holderlin, written in explicit reference to the French revolution, illuminates, in my view, the implicit links between Marx's political and economic doctrines. The paradigm of the free, non-alienated labor is the revolution, where people suddenly enter the surplus-time of history, where they have to find and found themselves. As capital progresses through surplus-labor, so history progresses with revolutions. To abolish necessary labor and leave only the surplus is, of course, just as impossible as it is to abolish history in favor of a between the necessary and perpetual revolution. However, the border supplementary is indeterminate and fluid. In this way labor and leisure are one, and the task of the critique consists in exposing the free nature of labor and the destructive, infinite labor inherent in the moments of leisure and festivity.

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3. Holding a Pause
0. MatAenbummam Mbl Hanpa1 c oeHHooMontnaHbs He 6bHOCUM, -

naKcoHe4! Hecoeepumencm6o ayu o6uaHo,

H 6 3aMetuamenbcm6eyic o6bs6unca ,meu,,

H paaocmuoezo npusemcm6o6anu: "HIpocuM!"

A maK u 3Han, Kmo 3aecb npucymcmos6an He3puMo! teno6eK tiumaem"YnuuloM." KouiMapHbliu 3HuaeHbe- cyema, u cno60 - monbKo ulyM,

Kozea aioHemuKa- cnycamauKa cepatfuMa. nena O aoMe 3uwepo6 3azapa apcfa.

Be3yMHblui 6oUy nun, oHnyncr u yMOmK.

A uten no ynu4e. C6ucmenoceHHuu uienK...

H zopno epeem wuenK umeKoiyuMeXo tuapaja...24

We do not stand the tension of silence, The imperfection of souls is unfortunate. But, in the confusion, there appears a reciter, And one greeted him joyfully: "Welcome." I knew who had been invisibly present here! The nightmarish man recites "Ulalume." The meaning is vain, and the word is only a noise When the poetics is a maid of a seraph. The harp of Edgar sang the house of Usher. A madman was drinking water, then regained consciousness and hushed up. I was walking down the street. The silk of the Fall was whistling, And the silk of a tickling scarf is warming my throat.25 In 1913, between two Russian revolutions, Osip Mandelshtam wrote a poem that starts with the line: "We do not bear the tension of silence" (My napriazhennogo molchania ne vynosim). The poem tells how, in the "confusion" (v zameshatel'stve) brought by silence, someone gets up and recites Edgar Allan Poe's "Ulalume"-the poem performing and thematizing the "empty" mumble of alliteration as emptied by loss, exalting the language as a "tomb" of meaning. Mandelshtam's poem ironically repeats the widespread argument defending the euphonic "empty" language ("meaning is vanity, and a word is only a noise when phonetics is the servant of a seraphym"). After the evening is over the poet comes out into the street and refers to himself in a concluding line performing the alliterative music ad absurdum (I gorlo greet shelk stchekochustchego sharfa). The poem is

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usually read26as a restatement of the "acmeist"approach to words as full of meaning and a rejection of the symbolist tendency toward the empty, euphonic language. This interpretation is verisimilar but it leaves doubts: if Mandelshtam simply wanted to express this banal, conservative position, there was no need whatsoever to write a poem. What does it mean that silence is "unbearable"?The very attempt to "bear," to carry silence-across a silent pause-is contradictory. How can one carry or keep the void if it is by definition something non-existent? The faithful extension of the void is already not void but becomes full with the void. Silence betrays itself in becoming the "speaking" silence. It acquires meaning. The silence is therefore possible only as an "imperceptible" fleeting moment. While the "unbearability"of silence seems to be an effect of time, it is in fact a result of the attemptto bear, to stop and to hold on to the interruption. Meanwhile, the motion goes on in the very act of stoppage. One promptly perceives that the silence, instead of being silent, eloquently exposes the attempt to maintain silence, or, most probably, not to say something that is on everyone's mind. The meaning of silence is the resistance to speech. A word that is omitted or suppressed starts to mean more than it normally does. The ellipsis, as we saw in Holderlin, is a figure to address the unspeakable itself, the very substance of language. The "silence" is a symptom of the crisis and blockage of a suspended transition (Mandelshtam writes his poem between two Russian revolutions, at the eve of the first World War, so tension was in the air). Silence need not be literally mute: the very language can be "silent" or meaningless. We saw with Holderlin that the emancipation of language from meaning is akin to the very essence of poetic language as leisure. Similarly, the "euphonic" language of Russian symbolists and of Edgar Allan Poe attempts, notjust to fill in the awkwardpause, but to incorporate and express the silence and the void, to hear the essence of language in a pure chatter. The poetry is understood as a luxury of leisure, as a way to hinder the void of a break or a rest. What does the reciting of Poe's "Ulalume" stand for? Of course, Poe is famously a master of euphony. But "Ulalume" is, above all, a ballad about a name. "Ulalume" is a pure name, a name of a name (thus not without theological connotations), and this name is a tomb of what it names. The purely phonetic, melocentric language is a mourning of lost meaning, a means of holding to the loss and of supporting it. But can this work of mourning possibly be accomplished? Mandelshtam writes hastylines that invite us to read them as long,

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monotonous, accentless periods, interrupted finally by a stress and exhalation: "I v I zalmel'shaltel'lstvel uzh oblial'villsial 'chtets." There are six 4- and 5-syllable words in the poem (written, formally, with iambic meter-of which hardly anything has remained). Language is literally "fussy"in trying to maintain itself vain (in Russian "fuss"and are designated by the same word (sueta), which Mandelshtam "vanity" uses) and to cross the potential infinity of the void, the abyss of silence. In this fuss, each verse stops, fails, and presents its break as proof of its own futility, superfluity and playfulness. Then, out of this new pause, another verse starts and breaks. However, as we will see, the meaning comes back as the meaning of this very self-dismissal of language. Even the words "znachenie-sueta" ("meaning is vanity (fuss)") are ambiguous: is meaning vain, or is the vanity (fuss) precisely the meaning? Fuss and acceleration are a way to trick time, to jump over the dangerous intermediate pause as quickly as possible. The phonetic, "empty"language extends the "silence" in a hope to carry it over to something new and unpredictable. The subject chatters, suspends the the encounter with what is exterior to him. The language, in expecting encounter is, as we will see, the encounter with one's own limit: the failure of holding the silence. The key to Mandelshtam's position in the poem lies in two and "tickling" monstrously long words: "confusion" (zameshatelstvo) is a substantive derived The word "zameshatelstvo" (stchekochustchego). The active form of this verb means "to from the verb "zameshatsia." mix, to knead a dough." The meaning grows, swells, is inflated with and out of emptiness: it forms nothingness (cf. the late Mandelshtam's poem "I won't be able to hide from the great nonsense" (Net, ne spriatatsiamnie ot velikoymury),where the metaphor of yeast dough is made explicit in the discussion of, virtually, the same theme of meaningful nothingness). There is a famous fable where a frog that falls into ajar of cream tries in vain to get out and in the end mixes the cream into butter. This is precisely what Mandelshtam (zameshivaet) means to do with his poem, where a name is born out of the fuss of silence. Silence does not stop the poetic labor but constitutes its dynamic principle. The "unbearable" silence opens the possibility and necessity of the potentially infinite activity that tries to hold the pause and to cross it at the same time. In this sense, silence, as the surplus and supplement of language, is a point of emergence and growth of a poem, in the same way as, for Marx, leisure time is the secret source

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of labor. This principle is developed consistently in Mandelshtam's poetics. The silence is understood both as a loss (oblivion) of the
word (in his poem "Iforgot the word that I wanted to say . .") and the

state before the word's "birth" (in the poem Silentium). It is an intermediate, ambiguous state where the word is both speech and silence, "both music and word" (Silentium). The poetic language of Mandelshtam oscillates between these directions: from word to music and back from music to word, thus balancing on the threshold of speech. The poetic labor emerges out of silence. Hence the seeming paradoxes which abound in Mandelshtam's poetry and which show his proximity to H6lderlin: "the incessant (literally, "never silent") tune of silence" (nemolchnyi napev tishiny)in the very first poem of the book "Kamen" (OM, 23) and the comparison of silence to a spinningwheel of Helena and Penelope as the symbol of the poetic labor (the kneads the language into poetry. Its work starts when everything has already been said and when there rests,on the one hand, something unspeakable and, on the other hand, idle words without a clear meaning. In the process of dismissing and running away from itself, the empty language produces (kneads), in spite of itself, a meaning.The icon of this process is the penultimate word of the poem, "tickling" This word has five syllables, only one of which is (stchekochustchego). stressed, but even this stress tends to be "swallowed:""stchel(')kolchul
stchelgo (_)'sharlfa." The meaning of the word is embodied in its poem Zolotistogo meda struia iz butylki tekla, OM, 71). The silence spins,

phoneticform: the haste and fuss of crossing self-dismissal inevitably comes to a stop: the stress of the following word-"sha"-interrupts something that would otherwise go on and on. Significantly, this syllable under stress, "sha,"is a Russian interjection ordering "shut up," or "hush" (it is also the syllable under stress in the other "semantic"word za Ime 'shaItelstvo,confusion/kneading). In question the tickle of the "shut up." The very is, therefore, "the tickling "sha," suspension and unbearability of language, the rise and fall of span, strain and stress, all have their name in this "tickle."The meaning of a word, as an infinitely quick electric impulse, is perceived as running through the accumulated maintenance of inessentiality, from the point of its stop backwards,as a compensation for the hindered movement, for the hindered breath. With this meaning, the very that language already is, is itself dismissed. It dismissal, the very "sha"

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is by the order to stop, by the order not to read, by the order to keep silent, that language itself is constituted. "Sha" is a hidden name of the poem which could stand as its title instead of the three asterisks. It is also a name of language itself as it designates the self-negating, self-refuting nature of any name, which always names "something else" and fails to express what it names. A word means "against its own will," so to speak; it is a loss, but a loss of itself. The word "tickle" omits and "produces" the operation that the reader performs in order to read it. It thus leads the reader toward a strange deictic self-recognition. Recognition of the word is constituted as the recognition of myself reading this word. When I say "it tickles," this already implies the (delayed) order to stop the tickle: the syllable "sha" is not simply an accidental interruption, rather, it embodies and coincides with the movement of resistance that was growing in me in the course of the long hindering of breath. The recognition of this uncanny mirror-effect is the "birth of meaning from the spirit of music." Meaning may only "belong" to a fragment of a word because the latter is nothing but the crowning of its own self-dismissal, which necessarily remains incomplete. The meaning penetrates into the real as the slow imperceptible drift of the world that the "inessential" word has been trying to stop appears through the interruption of the word itself as a hidden, suppressed desire of a reader. A sudden shift occurs, which is again imperceptible, now because of its quickness, not its slowness. This sudden "epiphany" is nothing but a simple change of aspect, a Gestalt switch. What was a hidden effort of the subject now appears to him as the voice of the language itself as the force of unbearable time. In this sense poetry is the same thing as labor (Arbeit)-the negative human activity, in which, according to Hegel and Marx, a human being obtains an access to the independence of matter, in experiencing the resistance of the thing to his or her work.27 Through this experience, the person further comes to the recognition of him or herself, and to the independent self-consciousness of one's own. That this Hegelian view is not alien to Mandelshtam, may be seen from his article "The morning of the acmeism" (1912-1913): "Acmeism is for those who, possessed with the spirit of construction, does not faint-heartedly refuse from one's weight butjoyfully accepts it, in order to wake up and use the forces that are hidden in it. <...> Which madman would agree to build if he does not believe in the reality of the material

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whose resistance he has to overcome? <...> Tiutchev's stone that "hasfallen from a mountain in the valley, fallen by itself or thrown down by a thinking hand," is the word. The voice of matter sounds in this unexpected fall as an articulate speech." (OM, 473, Translation mine-A.M.)

One could only add that faith in the reality of the material is not just the necessary condition of the poetic labor but also a hypothesis that is being checked in its course. It is the building formation of matter by the subject that wakes its resistance and makes it "speak"for itself. Poetic labor is a proof of the reality in which it first only believes. "To prove, to prove incessantly," writes Mandelshtam in the same article," to accept anything for granted is below the dignity of an artist" (OM, 475). Language, qua aggregate of letters or sounds, does not have any meaning of its own. It even lacks the meaning of meaninglessness. In the practice of speech and writing, the meaning of language becomes the resistance to language that is appropriated by the language itself. Neither "empty" nor "full" language is possible on its own. The speech is full with its own emptiness only in the dynamics of infinite labor. This, I think, is the sobriety of Mandelshtam:28 something entirely different from the "sobriety" of those commentators for whom the meaningfulness of language is a matter of course, as well as the possibility of a "meaningless" language. The poetic effect produced by the formation of sense by the adjacent parts of two successive words was called, by Mandelshtam's a shift or displacement. As contemporary A. Kruchionykh, "sdvig":29 Mandelshtam later wrote in one of his most famous poems, Theslate ode (1923): "Here writes the fear, here writes the shift, with a milky lead stick," (Zdes' pishet strakh, zdes' pishet sdvig svinzovoypalochkoy (OM, 103). The meaning is produced by language, but it is molochnoy) unlocateable in it, it swaysin-between the words. It is then clear how the and of words, seen retrospectively, contribute density multiplication to (or knead) the formation of meaning as a net and a knot of their crossing over each other. Words enter a liaison,an illegitimate affair.It is also clear that meaning may only exist in a fuss of unstable equilibrium, a quasi-geological "rift."The superposition, rupture and crossing over of fragments, as one we also witnessed in Holderlin's poem, is a condition of the production of meaning. As Hegel says in the Preface to ThePhenomenology of Mind:
[The] conflict between the general form of a proposition and the unity of the Notion which destroys it is similar to the conflict that occurs in rhythm

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between meter and accent. Rhythm results from the floating middle
(schwebenden Mitte) and the unification of the two. <...> The form of the

proposition is the appearance of the determinate, or the accent that distinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance, and that the Subject itself falls into the universal, this is the unity in
which the accent dies away. (Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 38)

4. Conclusion
I have tried to show that the poetics of both Holderlin and Mandelshtam bear some significant common features. Both poets reflect on the "leisurely," superfluous character of poetry-the work of an idle subject with idle language. For both, this leisure takes the character of passage, of an interval to cross and to maintain. Poetry aspires to stay in the intermediary space where the music, or letter, has not yet fully become the word, and the word has not yet fully become a sheer sound, or letter. This passage is, at the same time, a state of excess and overflow, when something continues to move during rest, and continues to speak during silence. The pause is therefore, on the one hand, insupportable in its purity, but, on the other hand, implies a potentially infinite work of circulation. In both poets, the task of holding and crossing the pause brings into play the materialization of language, the emancipation of the poetic matter from the structures of meaning. Once again, the goal is not to abolish language altogether but to return to the pre-formal murmur from which it is born. The matter boils and expects the meaning to come. Strangely, however, in both poems, meaning in the high sense of proper naming comes not from outside, as an external forming of matter, but as a negative result of the work of leisure, in an interruption of the potentially infinite fuss of matter. The name that emerges out of the tension of silence names nothing but this tension itself. Hence, in both poems, the logic of poetic thinking is akin to the philosophy of German idealism, with its concept of the fulfilling negation (Aufhebung) and of the "labor of the negative." The poems stage and reconstruct, step by step, the logic of history and the temporality of poetry itself.
at Saint-Petersburg EuropeanUniversity

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NOTES 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Oeuvres P.: Biblioteque de la Pleiade, Gallimard, Completes. 5,122. English translation:Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politicsand theArts: Letterto M. Trans. A. Bloom. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, D'Alembert on the Theatre. 1968. 2 Immanuel Kant. Critique of PureReason.Trans. P.Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 3 Immanuel Kant. Critiqueof Judgment. Trans. W. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. 4 Friedrich Schiller. On the AestheticEducation of Man. Trans. E. Wilkinson, L. sur l'education Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. For the original, see Lettres esthitiquede l'homme(a bilingual edition). P.: Aubier, 1992, Letter 14, 206. 5 Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel. Lectureson the Philosophyof History.Trans.J. Sibree. NY: Dover, 1956, 26. 6 Karl Marx. "Economic manuscript of 1861-1863." K.Marx, and F.Engels. Collected Works (NY:International Publishers, 1975-), 30, 190-192; 32, 390-39. Karl Marx. "Grundrisse." Marx, and Engels. Collected Works, 29, 94-99. In these pages of the Marx speaks explicitly of "leisure time," "Mussezeit." "Grundrisse," 7 Karl Marx, "The Capital," vol. 1, Part III, chapter X. Marx, and Engels. Collected vol. 35, pp.239-306. Works, Share.Trans. R. Hurley. NY: Zone Books, 1988. 8 George Bataille. TheAccursed 9 Friedrich Holderlin. "Anmerkungen zum Oedipus." Werke,Briefe, Dokumente. Miunchen: Winkler, 1990, 618-624, cit. 624. 10 Friedrich Holderlin. "Anmerkungen zur Antigonae." ibid., 670-676, cit. 672. Translation and emphasis mine. 11 This analysis of the poem "Die MufJe" grew out of the seminar that professor Thomas Schestag dedicated to it in November, 1997, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I'm also indebted to Manuela Achilles, Ulrich Plass and Shai Ginsburg for their contributions to the discussion. "FrankfurterAusgabe." D.E.Sattler, ed. Fr. 12 Friedrich Holderlin. SdmtlicheWerke. am M.: Roter Stern, 1977-, 3, 83-95. Sattler dates the poem, hypothetically, with the summer of 1796. F.BeiBner, an earlier editor, dates it with 1797, and inserts GroBe Stuttgarter wood, instead of the fragmentary W. (SdmtlicheWerke. "Wald," Ausgabe. W.Kohlhammer: 1954, 1, 236. While the version of the poem given by Sattler is clearly more authentic than BeiBner's (he presents the photocopy of the Ausgabe. A.Beck, the manuscript), I would prefer the dating of the Stuttgarter editor of Holderlin's letters in the StuttgarterAusgabe, justly notes the proximity of the poem "DieMufle'with a letter that Holderlin wrote to his sister in the end of April, 1797 (VI, 2, 836). There Holderlin speaks, first, of his visit of the mountain Taunus and of the panorama (including "Frankfurtwith lovely villages and forests lying around it") and, second, of his impressions from S.Gontard's summer house in Adlersflicht,near Frankfurt, mentioning chestnutsgrowing around the house. The candle-like reddish flowers named in the poem are unmistakably chestnuts, which precisely blossom in April-May,not in Summer, as Sattler suggests to date it. Finally, this letter to the sister speaks of a "special situation," where the French revolutionary troops standing at the door of the city did not immediately fulfill the conditions of a peacetreaty, so that the "celebration of peace" by the people of Frankfurt was for a while mixed with anxiety. This latter anxiety of peace may be one of the connotations of H6lderlin's poem.

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13 Translation mine. 14 Cf. Walter Benjamin. "The Task of the Translator."Illuminations. NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. 15 Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel. Phanomenologie des Geistes Fr. am M.: Suhrkamp, 1992. 46. English translation: The Phenomenology Vorrede, of Mind. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 16 Martin Heidegger, in his reading of Holderlin's poem "Andenken," (Gesamtausgabe. Fr. am M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982, vol. 52) justly notes the importance of the motive of festivity in Holderlin's poetry. He also notes that the time of festivity is associated with a state of transition-Ubergang. This remark is even more pertinent, since Ubergangmeans both a passage in between and a passage over something, a surpassing and excess. Thus, in our poem the leisure time is both an intermediary pause and an after-time or an over-time-a posthumous, superfluous state. The attempt to hold an intermediary pause implies an excess and therefore leads to a state of interminable and self-reinforcing tension. This link between Ubergang and Uberflufi was noted already by Schiller in his Letterson the education(Letter 27). aesthetic I cannot, however, agree with the whole of Heidegger's reading, which downplays the negative aspects of the leisure time and takes for granted the immediate existence of the unique and unusual that manifests itself in the festive days. I insist, on the other hand, on the essentially negativenature of festival as a cessation or interruption of work. It is not by chance that Heidegger, in enumerating the instances where Holderlin mentions the festival, never mentions the prosaic and negative but the most explicit "leisure" of the 1797 poem. 17 That the German word "Wort" contains the "Ort,"place, is an old observation, Wanderer." which was already made by Angelus Silesius in his "Cherub 18 Heinrich von Kleist. "Uber das Marionettentheater" (1811). Simtliche Werke. Berlin: Ullstein, 1997, 945-950. 19 Compare also the translation by Holderlin of Oedipusthetyrant:"wofindetman / die zeichenlose "where does one find the signless trace of the old Spur deralten Schuld:" 571. Briefe.Dokumente, guilt?," Werke. 20 For the idyllic tendencies in the revolutionary ideology, see Mona Ozouf. La fete revolutionnaire. P.: Gallimard, 1976. It is not by chance that the festival became one of the main form of the symbolic manifestation of the French revolution. 21 For the attitude of Holderlin to the French revolution and his pro-Jacobin Revolution.Fr. political activism, see Pierre Bertaux, Holderlinund die Franziisische am M.: Suhrkamp, 1969. 22 Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. "SecondDiscours concernant le jugement de Louis XVI' (Second discourse concerning the judgment of Louis XVI). 27. 12 1792. SaintJust, Oeuvres choisies (P.: Gallimard, 1968), 100, 94. Translation into English mine-A.M. 23 Michelet famously says: "The Champs de Mars! This is the only monument that the Revolution has left.<...> And the Revolution has for her monument ... empty space.... Her monument is this sandy plain, flat as Arabia. A tumulus on either hand<...>. Jules Michelet. Histoirede la RevolutionFrancaise.P: Gallimard, 1952. de 1847, 1. Translation mine. Cf. Claude Lefort: ". .. of all regimes of which Preface we know, it is the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an emptyplace and to have thereby maintained a gap between the and political theory.Polity Press, symbolic and the real." Claude Lefort. Democracy 1988, 225.

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Proza.Yu.Freidin, ed. M.: Ripol Klassik, 2001 24 Ossip Mandelshtam. Stikhotvorenia. (Further cited as OM), 43. The poem is written in 1913 and published in the first book of the poet, "Kamen,"in the same year. The last line of the poem was added in a much later revision of the text by Mandelshtam, in 1937. Until then, the last line of the poem read: ?Chtobgorlo poviazat' ya ne imeiu sharfa?, "I do not have a scarf to tie around my throat." The word "sharfa," "scarf,"which will play an important role in my reading, is present in both versions. 25 Translations of Mandelshtam here and below are mine. 26 See the commentary of A. Metz in: Ossip Mandelstam. Polnoiesobranie stikhotvoreniy. Akademicheskiy proekt: Spb, 1997, 532-533. 27 See in particular, Hegel. ThePhenomenology of Mind. B IV a ("The independence and dependence of self-consciousness;" "Domination and servitude"). 28 Like Holderlin, Mandelshtam saw "sobriety"as his poetic program. Thus, in one of his poems, he says: "Stars,a sober conversation, Western wind from Neva/ Are better than the delirium of an inflamed head." While Mandelshtam's poetics clearly differs from that of Holderlin, the affinities are also strong and may be due to a convergence as well as to direct influence. We know from Nadezhda Mandelshtam that Osip Mandestam knew Holderlin from his youth and became particularly interested in him and in other German poets of the early 19th century in his late period, in the thirties. See Nadezhda Mandelshtam. Vospominania. M.: Soglasie, 1999. Gileia: 29 See Alexei Kruchionykh. "Sdvigologia russkogo stikha." Kukishproshliakam. M.-Tallinn, 1992[1921], 33-79. Kruchionykh distinguishes the complementary effects of the "sdvig' (shift) and "slom"(break, fragmentation). He calls "sdvig," rabota," significantly, the "secret creative labor" of poetry ("tainaia tvorcheskaia p. 67).