On the Habit of Madness: Agamben’s Hölderlin

by Georgios Tsagdis

Preface to the Patient Reader

The untimely patience to pause over Hölderlin’s madness as the present weaves its tapestry with truly maddening threads proves surprisingly rewarding, even perhaps, curative. Agamben’s gesture must thus be applauded for initiating this untimely and decisive—and forever untimely and decisive—engagement. In the solitude imposed on him, as on everyone else, by the pandemic lockdowns, Agamben turns to Hölderlin’s solitude not for solace, but in order to examine the potential for fashioning a form-of-life under liminal conditions. Just like the camp and the monastery, where other works of Agamben are staged, Hölderlin’s tower on the Neckar offers an exemplary locus to outline life’s most salient lineaments by examining its unfolding in extremis.

At its core, Agamben’s thesis is simple: what fashions life, binding it to an abiding form, is habit. What Agamben shows in his examination of Hölderlin is that even madness can, under certain circumstances, be understood as habit. For habit, as will become apparent below, amounts neither to an active construction, nor to a passive endurance of life, but to life’s self-becoming that is the subject. What Hölderlin’s biography affords Agamben is the example of a madness that neither simply befalls, nor is simply chosen by a subject, but is rather ‘accepted’ in a slow side-stepping of established forms of reason and language, fashioning a new subject. Indeed, in that sense, madness is an exemplary habit, in that it shows that the desperate effort of sustaining an untroubled subjectivity while acceding to a habit can only result in maddening failure.

It is thus unsurprising that in exploring madness as the middle-voice of habit, Agamben adopts, as the essay below details, the methodology of a chronicler, who operates in the interstice between divine and secular causality and for whom the co-occurrence and succession of events does not produce linear accounts of becoming, but offers imbricated patterns out of which meaning can be elicited. And yet in its inviting openness, this method also excludes a series of interpretative possibilities. Offering a few words on these possibilities and thus clarifying Agamben’s position and the critical gesture of my own reading constitutes the motivation of this preface, which is added to this essay, first delivered in April 2024 at Erasmus University Rotterdam at the symposium ‘The Use and Abuse of Agamben’ and subsequently published in a special issue of Uil van Minerva.^[1]

One of the key exclusions of the chronicler’s method is that despite placing the subject at the heart of quasi-universal forces, it allows little explanatory value to these forces. This method marginalises thus the role of habitus in the accession of a habit. Agamben would prefer to bracket away Bourdieu’s foregrounding of habitus as that ‘conductorless orchestration’ of groups and classes which leads individuals not only to coordinate their actions, but also fashion their internal desires in accordance with its logic,^[2] or as Romele puts it: “makes us want what society allows us to have.”^[3] Habit for Agamben is the expression of a certain sovereignty even before the subject. Hölderlin—but who is that—accepts the madness that will make him Scardanelli, the most common moniker that he adopts for himself in his late years. And yet, this acceptance and this sliding from an old to a new subjectivity takes place within a sovereign hyper-subjective territory, to which social and historical forces remain external and, as the chronicler would have it, causally nebulous. All the same, as detailed below, Agamben will not refrain from the implausible argument that Hölderlin accepted his madness out of cowardice in the face of the law. Indeed, in Agamben’s reading, Hölderlin chooses what is given to him in a broader sense, given that society at large as well as his closest peers can only consign to madness the poetic and intellectual leap that Hölderlin is attempting. In effect, Agamben accommodates Bourdieu’s habitus, but does so only as a backdrop to the sovereign drama of Hölderlin’s accepting the habit of madness.

This is because in this and many other respects that can only be accounted for in their appropriate place below, Agamben consistently utilises non-dialectic oppositions which privilege unique positions within the spectrum they identify. Agamben thus walls himself up in the tower of human habit, a tower without windows through which to see beyond habit.

I expect that at first Agamben would endorse Lispector’s disdain for the ‘tame madness’ of wishing to ‘invent a form’, when she writes:

Since I’ll inevitably succumb to the need for form that comes from my terror remaining undelimited—then may I at least have the courage to let this shape form by itself like a scab that hardens by itself, like the fiery nebula that cools into earth. And may I have the great courage to resist the temptation to invent a form.^[4]

And yet, on closer inspection, even letting madness take form, like a scab, accepting its arrival, is already an all-too-human madness, which betrays ‘the inhuman’, which “[…] is the best part of us, it’s the thing, the thing-part of us”.^[5] If Agamben can serve as Virgil in guiding us through the Inferno and Purgatory of the present, we may need Lispector as our Beatrice to enter heaven, since God: “wanted my human divinity, and that had to start with an initial stripping-down of the constructed human.”^[6] In order to pass through and beyond Hölderlin’s form-of-life, shaped by the habit of madness, let us make a second start, cross the threshold.

‘Threshold’

For almost a year now I’ve been living with Hölderlin, day in and day out—over recent months in an isolation I never could’ve imagined I’d find myself. As I take my leave of him now, his madness strikes me as rather innocent compared with the madness into which an entire society has fallen without even realizing it. If I try to spell out the political lesson I seem to have gleaned from the dwelling life of the poet in his tower on the Neckar, for the time being I can perhaps ‘only babble and babble’. There are no readers. There are only words with no addressee. The question ‘what does it mean to dwell poetically?’ still awaits an answer. Pallaksh. Pallaksh.^[7]

Thus closes the book Agamben devoted to Hölderlin and the grand, albeit habitual performance of his madness, retro-situating the undertaking and explicating the work’s personal significance while pointing also to its political implications. The study’s inconclusive caesura—a word of importance in Agamben’s analysis of Hölderlin’s poetics—is certainly not insignificant. This work remains incomplete and in its conviction of the absence of readers, notwithstanding the commercial popularity of Agamben’s works, appears destined to remain incomplete. Nonetheless, taking the time to address the gesture of this work without addressees promises a rich philosophical yield.

As soon becomes apparent, Agamben’s reading of Hölderlin draws extensively, if often in an implicit or cursory manner, on his whole corpus. In short, this study constitutes a study of what a particular form-of-life, that is, a life indissoluble from its form and impossible to ‘denude’ or ‘bare’,^[8] may be. The viability of such indissolubility has been examined elsewhere.^[9] If however, Agamben considers his reading of Hölderlin as the harvest of the hermeneutic possibilities his earlier works has sown, the difficulties that persist in these possibilities are no less important to explicate. All the more so, since the present portrait of Hölderlin introduces the thread of madness, a thread intricately woven into the fabric of continental philosophy over the last century, into the heart of Agamben’s theory of habit and habitation as well as his theory of poetics. Redoubling Agamben’s gesture which prima facie adheres to the rules of scholarship, while stealthily subverting them, cutting across the “factuality” of historico-philological explication in order to bring forth the truth of a form-of-life, the present circumscribed close reading of this study of Hölderlin not only implicates the totality of Agamben’s philosophical project, but leads us ultimately to the threshold of a non-human poetics.

The Chronicler’s Method: Between Biography and Hagiography

Agamben sums up his method, or rather, as he calls it, ‘non-method,’ (‘a-methodos’) in the opening chapter titled ‘Threshold.’ Agamben casts himself as a chronicler who desists from deciding whether events are determined through divine providence or natural causality. This results in a mingling of the world-historical and the mundane in a temporality which is akin to the succession of seasons. The chronicler operates on a third layer of history, neither in heaven, nor on earth, but from a vantage point that brings both into a close-up view and elides historical standards of verification. It is in the chronicle that “a life’s tenor of truth” emerges, “where multiple events and episodes converge, which are the sole materials that can be discursively shaped into a biography.”^[10] This is the truth of life as figure, a truth that allows the various episodes of a life to fall into place, without allowing in and of themselves the thread of an interpretation. Pursuing the truth of a life as a chronicler, one is led to non-method as a necessity for understanding the phrase that Hölderlin is said to have repeated time and again during his years of madness: “Es geschieht mir nichts,” “nothing happens to me.”^[11]

It might be retorted that such non-method does not lend itself to a biography, since it forms precisely the hagiographic method—the way of portraying the life of saints in a de-individualised, non-personal manner, in order to align it with the traits that they are supposed to exhibit as the specific saints that they are. As such, one may say that the chronicle Agamben composes is shaping the figure of Hölderlin that is not so much a person as a ‘form-of-life’—both in the conceptual generality of a form-of-life, but also anchored in the specific circumstances that compose the person one may call ‘Hölderlin.’

The most telling expression of this hagiographic approach is arguably the periodisation of Hölderlin’s life through a firm division that Agamben asserts as part of his methodology: “As the title of the poem ‘Hälfte des Lebens’ (Mid-life) prophetically seems to suggest, Hölderlin’s life was split neatly in two: his first 36 years, from 1770 to 1806; and the 36 years from 1807 to 1843, which he spent as a madman holed up in the home of Ernst Zimmer, a carpenter.”^[12]

Agamben decides to focus exclusively on the latter period, even though it is clear that there was nothing ‘neat’ in Hölderlin’s descent into madness, which could in any case have only been gradual, as the formation of a habit in Agamben’s terms would require. Indeed, Agamben shows in his prologue that there is a grey zone of perhaps five years, during which early symptoms appear. Moreover, he cites the Tübinger Stift church register which records: “Friedrich Hölderlin, Librarian, Poet, mente absens for about 40 years.”^[13] Showing in the word “about” a fluid development that reaches back to a time before Hölderlin’s lodging with Zimmer. Finally, Agamben also cites Zimmer who explains his decision to take Hölderlin in his care, due to the fact that in Autenrieth’s clinic, where Hölderlin was first interned, his condition was continuously—already— worsening.^[14] But it is not simply that Hölderlin’s life cannot be “split neatly in two,” due to certain empirical chronological inconveniences. It is rather that the irreconcilable non-dialectical opposition that Agamben attempts to set up as the transition from the biography of the early successful poet to the hagiography of the late desolate madman cannot escape the truth that Hölderlin was the madman he was, because something decisive remained in him of the poet he had been. Whatever caesura one wishes to impose on Hölderlin’s life, one must not lose sight of the continuity that subtends and gives meaning to the coalescing habit of madness that would take over that life.

The Demented Comedy

Turning to the ‘Prologue,’ which together with the ‘epilogue’ frames philosophically the Chronology that constitutes the book’s core, one is met with a series of testimonies aimed at destabilising the certitude of Hölderlin’s diagnosis—most eye-witness accounts, including those of illustrious old friends such as Schelling, report an absence or confusion of spirit and intellectual incoherence, while conceding that other intellectual virtues, such as the capacity to translate from the Greek, remain intact.^[15] Indeed, Agamben notes: “Schelling can only confirm that he has ‘assumed the mannerisms’ of a madman—therefore, he is not mad.”^[16] The notion of ‘mannerism’ is certainly loaded, if not over-determined, but even so, it appears here to be pressed too hard. Agamben, for whom the notion of ‘mannerism’ is a technical concept, referring not least to the modalisation of being without ultimate unity, interprets Schelling’s use of the term as an off-the-cuff admission that surface ‘mannerisms’ left Hölderlin’s ‘essence’ intact. At the same time, the abiding intactness of certain traits of Hölderlin is both overlooked and taken for granted, absolutised beyond a matter of mere traits to the essence of Hölderlin’s poetic fate. The explanation that Agamben offers to Schelling’s remarks, side-lining the latter’s express sorrow for the affliction of his erstwhile friend, is one of an intellectual rift:

Evidently something in Hölderlin’s words and appearance eluded his friend, even though the two had shared such a deep love for philosophy that historians sometimes hesitate to ascribe to one over the other some unattributed texts that have come down to us. The only possible explanation is that, by then, Hölderlin’s thinking had grown so far from his own that Schelling preferred to reject it outright.^[17]

Agamben has also little more than derisory scorn for Hölderlin’s mother, who considers the poet’s being incessantly at work, as a sign of insanity. Regardless of all her other failings as a mother—indicatively, until her death decades later, she never visited Hölderlin at the Tübingen tower—it is far from certain when hard, purposeful work becomes a manic obsession. Agamben appears to know better than Hölderlin’s mother, who observed the poet closely; he may, of course, be right. All the same, he pre-empts the issue. He writes:

It is not a matter of ascertaining whether Hölderlin was or was not crazy, nor whether he believed himself to be. What is of decisive importance is that, in fact, he wanted to be so—or, rather, that at a certain point madness struck him as a necessity, something he could not avoid, lest he become a coward, since, ‘like old Tantalus . . . the gods had given him more than he could bear’. It has been said of both Swift and Gogol that they did everything they could to go mad, and in the end they succeeded. Hölderlin did not seek madness, he had to accept it; but, as Bertaux notes, his conception of madness had nothing to do with our notions of mental illness. It was, rather, something that could or should be inhabited. That is why, when he translates Sophocles’ Ajax, he renders the phrase theiai maniai xynaulos, literally ‘dwelling with divine madness’, as sein Haus ist göttliche Wahnsinn, ‘his house is divine madness’.^[18]

Agamben comments then at length on Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles and Pindar that he composed as he approached insanity and that so bemused Schiller and Goethe, as manifesting an “immeasurable gap between what Hölderlin had in mind and the culture of his time. His goal—translation as both calque and correction of the original—was so unheard of that his contemporaries could only view it as a demented idea.”^[19] In what appears as a proto-Heideggerian attempt to translate word-for-word, confounding comprehension, Hölderlin attempted according to Agamben to do justice to the superlative difficulty that formed the crux of his late work, that is, the aspiration of making ‘free use’ of ‘what is proper to us.’

As Agamben explains, Hölderlin’s sets aside appearances to claim that for the Greeks, “heavenly fire and passion is the proper, national element (and thus also their weak point)”; they can thus only achieve excellence through theoretical and artistic clarity.^[20] The Hesperians on the other hand, for whom clarity and sobriety are proper, will have to seek their achievements in works of passion. Hölderlin’s translations adopt thus a peculiar ‘literariness’ in order to ‘restore’ the Greek texts to their native element. This, for the poet, as well as for everyone else, according to Agamben, constitutes the most difficult task of the free use of the proper. What one is truly and what adjectives such as ‘native’ and ‘national’ point at in the case of a human community, is not readily available to oneself. Rather it requires abiding labour to be liberated and put into use. It requires, moreover, a non-dialectical passage or rather exposure to what one is not. One receives what one is from this exposure, garbed in the cloth of what one is not.

Closing this arc on translation, Agamben repeats: “Dementia and madness, however, are not at issue here. Rather, the issue is a dedication to one’s task—a dedication so intense that one doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice formal, artistic excellence for the sake of a poetic manner that is ruinous, unhinged, and, taken to the extreme, incomprehensible.”^[21]

This poetic imperative is intertwined for Agamben with the profound alienation that “from a certain moment onwards, at the threshold of modernity,”^[22] begins to afflict the poet and forces them to inhabit the ancient philosophical condition of addressing as a quasi-stranger an absent community. Socrates embodies for Agamben this quintessential philosophical condition, that as we saw at the outset, Agamben no less co-inhabits. In order to insert, however, Hölderlin into the venerable community of alienated philosophers, Agamben glosses over Socrates’ intellectual and affective proximity to many of the best Athenian citizens, his being forced to the death penalty only under the profound tumult of exceptional historico-political circumstances and ultimately his refusal to turn his back to this community to which he felt beholden even as it put him to death. Agamben thus concludes on Hölderlin:

He realizes that what he lacks, or rather his weak point, is a sense of community with his people—what he referred to as the ‘national’—without which he will never be able to excel poetically. Hence the rupture, the break with earlier poetic forms, the paratactic shattering of the hymn, the stereotypical repetitions of his final quatrains; hence Hölderlin’s unconditional acceptance of the diagnosis—madness—his people ascribed to him. And, nevertheless, he continues writing until the very end, stubbornly seeking out a ‘German song’ in the darkness of night.^[23]

However, it was not simply alienation from his fellow Germans who decreed him mad, that led Hölderlin to accept the verdict. According to Agamben, Hölderlin exploited his “alleged” madness to avoid the fate of his friend Isaac von Sinclair who as advocate of the democratic enthusiasm that swept Germany in the wake of the Napoleonic advance, was taken to imprisonment. Agamben writes:

It is entirely possible that, given the seriously risky situation in which he found himself, Hölderlin decided to exploit the suspicions of madness that hung over him to effectively make an escape. This hypothesis would seem to be confirmed by the tone of his exclamations, which sound calculated to distance himself from the culprits (he insults his friend von Sinclair) and from the revolutionary plot in which he might otherwise have been implicated. […] He therefore had no reason, other than utilitarian self-preservation, to cry vive le roi, nor to sympathize with the prince-elector and Wintzingerode, who were both notoriously anti-democratic.^[24]

Is it really possible that Hölderlin lived the rest of his life in seclusion out of an atavistic fear of arrest? Sinclair himself, was acquitted of all charges and returned to Homburg after merely five months of imprisonment. By that point, if not much earlier, there could have hardly been any danger for Hölderlin as a remote sympathiser of Sinclair’s cause. For Agamben, however, “from this moment on, whatever his mental state, the poet is somehow obliged to honour the diagnosis that saved him from being arrested.”^[25] This is particularly puzzling, as we heard only shortly before that from “a certain point madness struck him as a necessity, something he could not avoid, lest he become a coward.”^[26] In this interpretation, Hölderlin could not afford being a coward in the face of madness, because he was a coward in the face of the law. Or again—something that Agamben does not even hint at—because he proved a coward in the face of his friend’s and the revolution’s fate, which he betrayed in a single stroke. If there is something comic in this, it is for Agamben not accidental. He writes:

Hölderlin’s apparent silence regarding comedy is still more difficult to explain. It is as if, despite having understood that tragedy had become impossible, he simply could not see any way beyond tragedy except through madness—but then madness had to assume the character and manner of a comedy, of ‘sublime mockery’. (60)

In this conception, comedy aims to make the ‘common, ordinary, habitual’ (Gemeine und Gewöhnliche), ‘infinitely significant’ (unendlich bedeutend).^[27] For Agamben this is what Hölderlin, not merely through his poetry but through his very life, endeavoured to do for thirty-six years. What remains unclear is how Hölderlin’s comic psychological fear and cowardice in the face of the law tallies with the sublime, heroic comedy that he elected to inhabit in the face of the epochal closure gleaned in the exhaustion of tragedy’s potential to offer the sense of the world.

Hölderlin’s Portrait

Before continuing with Agamben’s exposition in the ‘Epilogue,’ a few scenes from the ‘Chronology’ will help animate Hölderlin’s portrait. The first, Agamben draws from Wilhelm Waiblinger’s biography:

Hölderlin’s days are extremely simple. In the mornings, especially in summertime, when he is agitated and tormented inside, he gets up before dawn or right as the sun rises and ventures out immediately, wandering around outside the house and in the courtyard. This walk usually lasts four or five hours, until he grows tired. He enjoys knocking his handkerchief against the fence posts and tearing up bits of grass. Whatever he finds, even the smallest piece of iron or leather, he puts in his pocket and keeps . . . Then he returns to the house and roams from room to room. He has a hearty appetite, and eats his meals in his room; he also enjoys wine, and would drink more if it were offered. After each meal he cannot bear for any dishes to remain inside his room, even for a moment, so he sets them on the floor outside his door. The only objects he tolerates in his room are his own belongings, everything else is set outside, in front of the door.^[28]

Agamben admits that this description comes from Hölderlin’s later years, but claims that it should be relevant also to the early period. This is indicative of Agamben’s method which seeks to identify a form-of-life which is determined from the outset and remains throughout unaltered. In this regard, he is contradicted by the carpenter Zimmer who on 22 December 1835 writes:

He has been in my house for 30 years now. I no longer have any difficulty with him, although in the past he often grew infuriated; blood would rush to his head, he’d become red as a brick, and took offence at everything. But as soon as his fit of rage passed, he was the first to extend his hand in a gesture of reconciliation. Hölderlin has a noble heart, is capable of deep emotion, and has a very healthy body. For as long as he has been in my home, he has never fallen ill.

He is handsome and cuts a fine figure—never have I seen such beautiful eyes in the face of a mere mortal.^[29]

This passage indicates, among other things, that Hölderlin’s habit of madness would not have been possible without the counterpart form-of-life that Zimmer adopted—a life of unwavering, interminable care. Without this receptive clay, the seal of Hölderlin’s madness would have found no support, no substratum on which impart its form. It is highly plausible that in an asylum Hölderlin’s demise would have been precipitous, the hagiography of his madness ruined from the start. The fact that Agamben hardly spends a word on the formation of Zimmer’s form-of-life is not without significance. It is also not coincidental that Agamben, who welcomes the chronicler’s commerce with the super-natural, is wary of the judgment Zimmer passes earlier in the same letter: “poor Hölderlin was doomed from the very start. […]”^[30] For Agamben, Hölderlin’s madness is part opportunistic cowardice, part sublime heroism necessitated by poetic stricture and thus as little divine affliction, in the sense of a transcendent personal punishment or an economy of redemption, as it is pure chance.

Despite, however, such principle disagreements with the well-nigh illiterate carpenter, Agamben concedes Zimmer’s insight in his interpretation of Hölderlin’s use of titles such as ‘Your Excellence,’ ‘Your Holiness’, ‘Your Majesty’ and so on, as well as other modes of exaggerated formality to keep anyone unwelcome at arm’s length. Among the people kept at a distance is Hölderlin’s mother. Two letters will suffice to impress the overpowering sense of irony which pervades his disposition:

1 July 1824:

My esteemed Mother,

As you know, I will always gladly write to you, since you are aware of what I have become, and I habitually feel that my way of making myself comprehensible is as it must be. Please always write me letters which require that I reply with all due courtesy. I remain

your devoted son,

Hölderlin^[31]

20 March 1827:

My esteemed Mother,

I am free, thanks to the permission of the good Herr Zimmer, to profess my devotion to you and remain,

your most devoted son,

Hölderlin^[32]

His letters rarely exceed this length and through the years Hölderlin appears to stretch the breach that was there from the outset into a gaping abyss. Ultimately, as Christoph Theodor Schwab’s early biography reports, her death “seems to have made little impression on Hölderlin. His mind was no longer subject to the laws which, at least momentarily, naturally and necessarily govern even the most brutal men.”^[33] Indeed, instead of configuring this as a sign of utter disaffection with regard to a shattered relation and an exemplary token of the sovereign performance of madness that Agamben believes Hölderlin capable of, the possibility that Hölderlin was no longer in a position to make sense of the death of his mother cannot be discounted. Among the various passages cited by Agamben himself that support this interpretation, let one suffice. It comes also from C. T. Schwab who on 26 January 1841 wrote in his diary:

I asked him about Matthison, and whether he loved him, and he nodded; I had known Matthison when I was a child, and so I asked about him again, but he only gave highly convoluted answers, and I soon realized that he was in fact talking about me. He called me Pater today, and at one point said, ‘You are a very pleasant person…’^[34]

Finally, there is perhaps no more telling episode that encapsulates the mundane comedy of Hölderlin’s life in the tower than the one attested by Zimmer in a letter written in July 1838 to Hölderlin’s legal guardian, Burk:

Your ward is doing very well, and now has new windows and Venetian blinds in his room, which he scrupulously steered clear of at first. When something pops into his mind at night, he has long had a habit of getting out of bed, opening the window, and articulating his thoughts to the open air. But now, with these new windows, when he tries to open them, he finds them less comfortable, so is not as quick to open them as he used to be.^[35]

Clearly, Hölderlin is not master of the grand performance of his madness. His habits—even such a principally mad habit as talking to the winds—evolve and often hinge on trifling contingencies such as the inconvenient resistance a window presents him with.

Madness as the Auto-affection of Habit

It might be the view from this window—indeed, his room in the tower had a splendid view of the river Neckar—that gave the title of what is believed to be his final poem, written in June 1843, and which merits quoting in the original as well as in translation:

Die Aussicht

Wenn in die Ferne geht der Menschen wohnend Leben,

Wo in die Ferne sich erglänzt die Zeit der Reben

Ist auch dabei des Sommers leer Gefilde,

Der Wald erscheint mit seinem dunklen Bilde;

Dass die Natur ergänzt das Bild der Zeiten,

Dass die verweilt, sie schnell vorübergleiten,

Ist aus volkommenheit, des Himmels Höhe glänzet

Dem Menschen dann, wie Bäume Blüht’ umkränzet.

d. 24 Mai 1748

Mit Unterthänigkeit

Scardanelli

The View

When one’s life of dwelling goes off into the distance,

Where, faraway, the vineyard’s season glistens,

There, too, summer’s empty fields draw near,

The woods and their dark countenances appear.

That Nature completes the image of the ages,

That it lingers as they glide by, swiftly turning pages

Is sheer perfection, and the high heavens shine

For people, too, like trees crowned in flowers so fine.

24 May 1748

Your humble and obedient servant,

Scardanelli”^[36]

Agamben’s study of Hölderlin is an effort to make sense on this notion of ‘dwelling life’ [vita abitante]. The most summary and most explicit expression he gives to this sense and to his assessment of Hölderlin’s madness, reads:

Hölderlin’s life of dwelling or inhabitant life is ‘habitive’ because it is not just a series of voluntary, attributable actions but rather is a form of life, a being that is affected, at every single moment, by its own habits. This is why Hölderlin, at a certain point, willingly accepts the diagnosis of his madness […]. And he not only keeps it up for the rest of his life, he even seems intentionally to play it up in front of visitors.^[37]

Although the effort to explicate Hölderlin’s dwelling life permeates and structures the whole book and opens it to the entirety of Agamben’s corpus, it is the book’s ‘Epilogue’ that takes on the task thematically. At the outset of the epilogue, Agamben traces the etymology of the German verb wohnen to delusion (Wahn) and madness (Wahnsinn) on the one hand, but also delight (Wonne) and pleasure which from the same Indo-European root *wen- leads to the Latin Venus. Importantly, of course, dwelling (wohnen) is how a habit (Gewohnheit) is formed.^[38]

Before proceeding with his linguistic exposition, Agamben reminds us that wohnen designates human habitation on earth and that when the term refers to other beings, including stars, eagles and God, the intention is to bring these beings closer to humans. Agamben also invokes the famous phrase from Hölderlin’s poem ‘In lieblicher Bläue’ that so fascinated Heidegger: “dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde” (“poetically, dwells the human on this earth”). Agamben speculates that “this dictum intentionally echoes a passage of the Lutheran Bible (John 1:14), ‘das Wort ward Fleisch und wohnte unter uns,’ ‘the word became flesh, and dwelt among us.’ By becoming flesh, God dwells as a human among humans, partaking in the basic, binding fact of dwelling.”^[39] Configuring, however, dwelling as a specifically anthropic prerogative which other entities—stars, eagles and God—experience only by proxy invites not only charges of human exceptionalism, but is also incompatible with Félix Ravaisson’s analysis of habit from which Agamben draws later in the epilogue. Attention to this analysis by Hölderlin’s rough contemporary, would be integral to the situating labour alluded to in the introduction, and would open Hölderlin’s habitation into posthumanist readings, but exceeds the space and scope of the present essay. What is certain, is that for Ravaisson habit permeates all life and indeed runs down into the inorganic, bringing life in communion with the non-living, something that Agamben is quick to gloss over.

Continuing on the plane of language, Agamben turns to the Latin form of wohnen, i.e. habito, a frequentative form of habeo, ‘to have’. Frequentatives, formed with the suffix –ito, “express a repeated and intensified action,” inflecting the stem which is ‘supine,’ indifferent to tense and mode.^[40] Interestingly, the middle voice in general is also at times called by grammarians supine, or habitual.^[41] It appears, accordingly, that ‘habit,’ the frequentative of ‘having’ is suited in an exemplary manner to denote verbal supination as such. Agamben concludes: “In this sense, every dwelling—as both noun and verb—is a secum habitare, a notion of being affected by oneself in and through the act of inhabiting a certain place in a certain way. People cannot be or have themselves, they can only inhabit themselves.”^[42]

Agamben elaborates this analysis by explicating the semantic-noematic limits of Aristotelian hexis through Émile Benveniste’s bifurcation of noun formation, distinguishing between the performance and the possibility of an action. Hexis expresses semantically the latter, while attempting to think noematically the space opened between the poles of the distinction. Thus, Aristotle was for Agamben compelled to think of potentiality as a plane preceding action, rather than as our only way of having what we do—what hexis might have been able to express if it weren’t for the linguistic constrictions ruling over it.^[43]

Accordingly, habit is where being and having converge in the middle voice of indistinction. This is a touch of madness, the auto-affection of being by the hand of having. This is where the whole Derridean analysis of auto-affection should be interposed, temporalising the diaphaneity of the voice or in this instance of life. This analysis, effected in different ways at different moments of Derrida’s work, draws significantly on Heidegger’s reading of Kant.^[44] In a nutshell, in Heidegger’s reading, the pure form of time is the principle affect that constitutes Dasein. Time is not held in the hand of a subject already at hand. It rather arrives, just like madness arrived to Hölderlin, in Agamben’s account, to a subject yet unformed, still and always in-formation (an abidingly “larval” subject). For it is, ultimately, the pure auto-affection of time that forms the subject. This auto-affective movement of time takes time, making up Dasein’s temporality. Derrida’s critique shows that this movement is never “pure,” that it always breaks open into a space that others time. This creates an errant auto-hetero-affectivity that is better poised to account for the comic contingency and the contingent comedy of Hölderlin’s life.

Agamben does not pause over Derrida’s decisive intervention in the philosophical history of auto-affection. Instead he turns to Berthold Delbrück, “the linguist who coined the term Affiziertheit,” (affectivity) and who “includes mainomai, ‘to go mad’, in his illustrative middle voice examples (alongside ‘to rejoice’ and ‘to be ashamed’). To go mad (like to be born, Greek gignomai, Latin nascor) is a ‘habitive’ verb par excellence, and it is this third type of action that defines habit and its special continuity.”^[45] One is only by inhabiting oneself. In this line of explication there is ultimately no (human) being without habit and hardly any habit without the auto-affection of madness—madness belonging to auto-affection as much as auto-affection belongs to madness. In effect, madness becomes in Agamben’s reading what time was for Heidegger: a universal condition for the emergence of subjectivity. The question becomes thus inescapable: why Hölderlin? Is what was earlier called Hölderlin’s ‘hagiography’ only a pretext to engage with the philosophical problem of madness, a problem that has fascinated philosophy from its earliest days?

Answers—at least direct answers—are unforthcoming. However, as Agamben puts the final philosophical touches on Hölderlin’s form-of-life he also observes that following Schiller, Hölderlin conceives ‘habitive’ life as extreme suffering, that is, as affect in the sense of receiving, a life reduced to the ‘mere determinability’ of the pure conditions of space and time. (Space has crept here alongside the purity of time, sidestepping the aforementioned quagmire of the conditions of this “purity.”) In the way of explication, Agamben introduces Maine de Biran’s ‘state of pure affectivity’ (état purement affectif), defined “as ‘a unique relationship of passivity’ which, above and beyond all conscious perception, ‘can constitute… an impersonal mode of existence’.”^[46] Nonetheless, this impersonal mode of affectability is also a complete mode of existence. This is the paradox that makes Agamben’s position at once difficult and fascinating. At the face of it, it is difficult to see how a life of pure suffering, reduced to the mere (and thus, allegedly ‘pure’) determinations of space and time, is not a ‘bare life,’ how it possesses rather the fullness of a form-of-life. Agamben writes:

Habitive life is, then, a state of affect or ‘affectibility’ that remains such even when it receives affections; instead of transforming them into conscious perceptions, it allows them to pass into a superior coherence without ascribing them to an identifiable subject. Hence, for Hölderlin, the self (i.e. the I or ego) cannot take the form of an absolute subject that posits itself—as in the work of Fichte and early Schelling—but must instead assume the more fleeting and unappropriable form of a habit or habitual action.^[47]

The form-of-life that emerges from a life of habit possesses a ‘superior coherence,’ that a ‘bare life’ must be assumed to lack. But what kind of coherence is this and where is its locus of superiority? The answer in the case of Hölderlin is undoubtedly ‘poetry,’ yet this answer appears to offer less of a resolution than the deferral of the question by recasting the perfect affectivity of pure space and time into a perfect poetic articulation of the pure event of language. The logic of the superior coherence of Hölderlin’s form-of-life must be pressed.

Hölderlin’s Plane of Consistency

Agamben refers to a set of marks in Hölerdlin’s late poetry that show that a new way of expressive connection was being sought and established, a style that Norbert von Hellingrath termed ‘harte Fügung,’ hard jointure. Here, as Jakobson and Adorno observed, the classical trope of parataxis is foregrounded, while hypotaxis is eliminated; moreover, as Hamacher noted, parenthetic phrasing is amplified, making extensive use of pausing and layered embedding.^[48] These are not the signs of a deranged loss of coherence (Zusammenhangslosigkeit), with which Hölderlin’s late writing was commonly charged, but rather as Agamben writes: “a higher form of cohesiveness, which he calls ‘infinite connection’ (unendlicher Zusammenhang) and ‘infinite unity’ (unendliche Einheit).”^[49]

Agamben shows Hölderlin grappling—before his madness—with the possibility of a non-dialectic resolution of the conflicting demand of unity and difference that is ultimately bound to split the poetic spirit asunder. The most interesting of Agamben’s interpretations of this struggle, is not however that Hölderlin anticipates Benjamin’s critique of Hegel by insisting on the dialectic standstill; it is rather that Hölderlin’s opposition of an infinity alive through the perfect connection of its elements, and another dead and empty in their haphazard dissociation anticipates Cantor’s theorem which distinguishes between infinite and transfinite sets and which states: “‘the cardinality of the continuum, which is the same as that of the power set of the integers, is strictly larger than the cardinality of the integers.’”^[50]

Both interpretations are offered in nuce; they are not developed either separately or in their relation. Among the host of questions they invoke, it would not be unwarranted to ask: why should the life of a mad poet be more continuous and thus ‘more infinite’ than a life lived in accordance with a rational habit, the life for example of an athlete or a soldier, indeed, perhaps a monk? Agamben writes:

There is no coordination between life’s various moments, nor between the poet’s disconnected thoughts and verses, because they are ‘more infinitely connected’—not according to any ‘logical arrangement’, but rather in their being cohesively juxtaposed in a state of arrest. The ‘but’ (aber) that often marks this standstill in the poems isn’t adversative, it doesn’t indicate an opposition, which would just be yet another form of coordination: it merely marks an impasse between lines and thoughts, which follow one another without allowing any possibility of inserting logical coordination between one and the next.^[51]

Agamben takes the caesura, ‘the pure word’ and ‘counter-rhythmic rupture’ to be the culmination of this higher unity expressed through parataxis and parenthesis. As such, the caesura appears to interrupt the ‘lower’ unity of discourse in order to manifest the ‘higher’ unity of language itself. What the caesura does effectively is to cut off blocks of marble from the quarry of language and offer them as poems. Agamben writes:

Precisely because, in a certain sense, the late poems are stalled blocks of language, they come to us in not just one but several versions. These multiples […] are not various approaches to some ultimate form or meaning that just happens to have missed the mark. Rather, they are a poem’s ‘di-versions’ from itself—a poem that can only exist in potentially infinite movement, diverging from itself and, at the same time, turning to itself. If the ‘verse’ of poetry is—etymologically speaking, from the Latin versare, ‘to turn’—language that ‘turns’, and returns to itself by diverging from itself, then Hölderlin’s late work pushes the ‘versive’ nature of poetic language to its extreme.^[52]

However, it is unclear why one would need to return or even where one would return to, unless, each poem, or in the case of late Hölderlin, each cluster of poems, manifested a certain uniqueness. For without uniqueness, there is no return, just as there is no return if the unique cannot be iterated and as such become quasi-universal. This is the case both at the level of the poem and at the level of the poet. For even if Hölderlin’s mad poems utter not a discourse but the pure event of language, so does all true poetry for Agamben—so does Leopardi and so does Celan. Yet each poet is unique. Indeed, in Agamben’s terms, one should have to admit Hölderlin’s early poetry no less as a pure event of language. The question then must be raised about the unity and the difference that singularise and distinguish early and late Hölderlin as two articulations of the ‘pure’ word, of the pure event of language.

In his ‘Remarks on Oedipus’, Hölderlin writes: “‘Modern poetry…lacks especially training and craftsmanship, namely, that its mode of operation can be calculated and taught and, once it has been learned, is always capable of being repeated reliably in practice.’”^[53] There seems to be something about the craftsmanship that Hölderlin gained over his early years of poetic apprenticeship that stamps his whole poetic work, notwithstanding the cesura of madness. It is this training that accounts for his early style as it finds its most complete expression in works such as Hyperion. But it also persists as his style changes, not least because craftsmanship is a habit. Hölderlin does not lose this habit as he descends into madness, just as he does not lose the habit of playing the piano. He continues to train, showing that his life is not only split but also connected. So that even when the disruptive tropes of anacolouthon (non sequitur or ‘what does not follow,’) and of parekbasis (‘side-exit,’ ‘digression’ or ‘di-version’) come to dominate the ‘hard jointure’ of his poetics, the ‘infinite unity’ of his style is preserved, while being transformed.

Hölderlin’s poems are perfectly recognisable; his style is imitable, because it is unmistakeable. Thus when shown his poems, Hölderlin does not—in a commonly schizophrenic manner—disown them; it is easy for him to recognise them as his own. Nonetheless he demands that they be assigned to a different name, that his is a different name, often ‘Scardanelli,’ but at times other Italian variations. According to Agamben, this is not an attempt to assume a new identity, but to play the game of authorial signatures in adherence to the comedic attitude that informs Hölderlin’s late work. As Aristotle observes (Poetics, 1451b), while in tragedy names have a historic uniqueness that binds indissolubly a hero’s character and actions, in comedy they transform and vary, in a random dissociation from meaning. However, “just as Hölderlin’s late poems exist in multiple versions, without that fact casting any doubt upon their ‘more infinite cohesion’ or ‘infinite unity’, so too does his name.”^[54]

But here the question of the plane on which this unity must be sought returns. For, it is even more difficult to piece together the infinite unity of a mere name, than the unity of a poem or a poetic corpus. It seems particularly difficult to imagine such unity without the stylistic convergence, even alliterative assonances, that Hölderlin chooses for all his aliases, their Italian origin and the dating that accompanies them that sets them within a specific historic-noematic context. Such a convergence is however immanent to its conditions—for where could a higher or superior unity be sought?

The impasse may be best summarised in Deleuzian terms. For despite appearances, Agamben’s mobilisation of the notion of ‘coherence’ and of the virtual potentialisation of Hölderlin’s names, construe not a plane of consistency, but a plane of organisation, that is, a plane “that renders perceptible without itself being perceived, without being capable of being perceived.”^[55] The higher unity of Hölderlin’s names and of Hölderlin’s lives and indeed, of the former with the latter, is ultimately a transcendent unity. This transcendent unity regulates all levels in the hierarchy of dissociations that Hölderlin effects. It salvages the anacolouthon that structures each poem, it brings together a series of poems into a ‘cycle’ of meaning and it organises these cycles into a poetics that preserves its singularity across a series of signatures. For Agamben, as we saw, this is the ‘higher’ unity of language itself, which comes forth to take the place of the ‘lower’ unity of discourse which madness has shed. However, if anywhere within the space of this reading, habitation should be allowed to unfold across the ontological difference that separates discourse and language, in a middle voice which composes a ‘style’ between the two. Only such a unity can form a plane of consistency in which the uniqueness of Hölderlin’s early and late styles can be located, along with the evolution of the habit of craftsmanship that links their becoming.

Coda: the Significance of Madness

In sum, Agamben can be seen to construe Hölderlin as the higher unity of three domains fractured in modernity: biography, politics and language. In the domain of biography, ‘Hölderlin’ amounts to the perfect fold of the fullness of a form of life with the empty conditions of space and time into which a life of pure suffering or affectability dissolves. As this perfect fold, Hölderlin is also able to unite the tragedy and comedy of life, merging the spheres of heroic action and irresponsible passivity into “a simple, everyday, trite act of dwelling, an anonymous and impersonal form of life […].”^[56]

It is however in the domain of politics that Agamben locates Hölderlin’s most abiding legacy. In his interminable, excessive solitude, Hölderlin adopts the title of ‘Herr Librarian’ and addresses all his visitors with ironically inflated official titles, fusing the spheres of the private and the public through his habitive practice. For Agamben, this brings Hölderlin to the present, “as we, too, no longer distinguish between the two spheres. His life prophesied something that no one in his era could conceive of without verging on madness.”^[57]

And yet, vertiginous as this mutual transgression of the private and the public may be today, the most significant dimension of Hölderlin’s madness lies arguably elsewhere. It is not merely that the limited historico-philological question of whether Hölderlin was mad is overtaken by the potential of the cipher ‘Hölderlin’ enabling a new thematization of madness and the discovery of dimensions that evade the clinical-pathological Gestell of the modern institutionalisation of the errancy of reason. It is rather that in pursuing the authorial subject that is Hölderlin one arrives today at the parekbasis of all style, its interminable fragmentation and recomposition on a plane of infinite algorithimic unity without subject or consciousness, without habitation as well as without transcendence, which goes by the name of artificial intelligence. If the figure of Goethe promised a modernity illuminated by the triumph of the human genius, the counterpart failure of Hölderlin, his fall into, or rather total, unprotected exposure to madness, anticipated the arrival of this modernity to the threshold of the dominion of an intelligence without habit.

1. Georgios Tsagdis, ‘Over de gewoonte van de waanzin: Agambens Hölderlin’, Uil van Minerva 37:4 (2025), 365-83. The Dutch translation was made by Bart Buseyne to whom I am immensely thankful. Let it be noted that I have taken the opportunity to make a few minor emendations for the present publication. ↑
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), 80-1. ↑
3. Alberto Romele, Digital Hermeneutics: Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies (London, Routledge, 2020), 150. ↑
4. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H, translated by Idra Novey (London, Penguin, 1964), 7. ↑
5. Lispector, The Passion, 65. ↑
6. Lispector, The Passion, 131. ↑
7. Giorgio Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843, translated by Alta L. Price (London, Seagull Books, 2023), 329. ↑
8. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Form-of-life’ in Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-4; Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life, translated by Adam Kotsko (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013), xi; Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, translated by Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 207. ↑
9. Georgios Tsagdis, ‘A Perfect Fold: Agamben’s Form-of-life as Archaeology and Messianism’, Inscriptions 6:2 (2023), 57-67. ↑
10. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 11-12. ↑
11. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 11. ↑
12. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 10. ↑
13. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 291. ↑
14. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 105. ↑
15. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 23-26. ↑
16. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 27; emphasis added. ↑
17. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 28. ↑
18. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 30-31. ↑
19. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 32-34. ↑
20. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 37-38. ↑
21. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 39. ↑
22. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 41. ↑
23. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 40-41. ↑
24. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 65. ↑
25. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 67. ↑
26. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 30-31. ↑
27. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 73-74. ↑
28. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 111. ↑
29. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 222-23. ↑
30. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 221 ↑
31. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 190. ↑
32. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 197. ↑
33. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 199. ↑
34. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 256. ↑
35. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 237. ↑
36. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 288-89. ↑
37. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 325. ↑
38. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 295. ↑
39. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 296. ↑
40. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 296. ↑
41. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 297-98. ↑
42. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 299. ↑
43. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 318-21. ↑
44. Cf. Cathrine Bjørnholt-Michaelsen, ‘Auto-affection and the Curvature of Spacetime: Derrida Reading Heidegger Reading Kant’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28:3 (2020), 411-32. ↑
45. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 299. ↑
46. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 302. ↑
47. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 301-2. The passage in the English translation opens with the word ‘Habitative’. However, even though Hörlderlin’s habitation was integral to the habit he fashions, the latter is foregrounded in this passage, as attested by the original Italian ‘abitiva’. The translation has thus been modified accordingly, aligning with other instances of the term in this essay. ↑
48. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 303-4. ↑
49. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 305. ↑
50. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 309. ↑
51. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 309-10. ↑
52. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 311. ↑
53. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 312. ↑
54. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 314-15. ↑
55. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 281. ↑
56. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 327. ↑
57. Agamben, Hölderlin’s Madness, 326. ↑