Abstract

This dissertation explores the links between visual violence and the loss of selfhood in three German authors around 1800, Karoline von Gunderrode , Friedrich Holderlin and Johann Gottlieb Fichte , who are read as precursors of 20th-century continental philosophers of the gaze such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Baudrillard. ;Arguing against the enlightenment myth of the self-transparent subject, the German Romantics and Idealists Gunderrode, Holderlin, and Fichte negotiate the precarious status of selfhood which subjects itself to conflicting scopic desires. ;Chapter One discusses visual self-alienation and photophobic desire in Gunderrode's poems, dramas, and epistolary writings. Throughout her work, Gunderrode depicts all efforts of the isolated subject to merge with a motherly gaze and to lose itself in imagined icons of oneness as futile attempts to escape alienation. The violent underpinnings of scopic harmony become unavoidable for her characters and lyrical personae. ;Chapter Two analyzes restrained scopic desire in Holderlin's poem Patmos and the ironic desubjectivation of fields of vision in his last poems, in which seemingly idyllic landscapes have become empty of recognizable subjects. ;Chapter Three addresses Fichte's writings and lectures on "Wissenschaftslehre," especially the lectures between 1804 and 1812, in which he claims that self-reflective scopic procedures and pictorial constructions are contignent on the negation of the living self. Fichte criticizes, however, his own speculative and specular order as violent and concedes the impossibility of resolving the tensions between a totalized abstract self-reflexivity on the one hand and a concrete, empirical subject on the other. This subject stubbornly resists its own self-obliteration