“Living Calm”—Hölderlin’s Anthropocene Theater, Benjamin Lewis Robinson (NYU)

Hölderlin’s abandoned Empedocles project (1797–1800) can be read today as a contribution to political theater in the Anthropocene. It stages the trouble with action in a climate emergency. The Anthropocene drives home a truth about action on which Hannah Arendt always insisted: “In acting we can really never know what we are doing.” While something must be done, this is because of what has already been, and is still being, done. How to respond to the tragic drama of the Anthropocene without rehearsing it? Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, on the threshold, by some estimates, of the Anthropocene epoch, Hölderlin addressed this conundrum of climate activism as one of political mood. The young poet and political radical experienced his time as an “exigent time” (dürftige Zeit), which, like ours, urgently demanded action. But rather than writing a politically engaged play inciting revolutionary action, he produced a series of theatrical reflections on the mood of action. Declining the imperative to act but without submitting to quietism, Hölderlin sought through theater to communicate “living calm” as the condition for sober radicalism in exigent times.

Benjamin Lewis Robinson is Assistant Professor of German at NYU. His research focuses on the intersections of political theory and literature with an emphasis on biopolitical and ecological concerns. Need / Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times (forthcoming with Stanford University Press) explores the biopolitical transformation of modern life refracted in the theater of Hölderlin, Kleist, Büchner, Brecht, and Jelinek. He is the author of Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization (De Gruyter 2019), which treats the literary engagement with the bureaucratic transformation of political life in the long nineteenth century. Robinson co-edited the special issue of The Germanic Review, “Schuld (guilt/debt) in the Anthropocene,” and the volume The Work of World Literature (ICI Berlin 2021). He is also preparing a book on J. M. Coetzee and the cares of fiction.