Laokoon beyond the Crossroads

Wiggins, Ellwood H.; Wiggins, Ellwood H.

Lessing's seminal treatise on aesthetics, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und der Poesie (Laocoon: or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 1766), has often and profitably been read as a meeting place. In the introduction to their 2017 volume Rethinking Lessing’s Laokoon, for instance, Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire describe the essay as “a liminal text that has helped define ‘modernity’ against an ‘ancient’ alter ego.” But at the same time that the treatise is a place of threshold, the text is also on the move. Not only do the visual arts and the linguistic arts come together to find their respective "boundaries" in this text, but artworks from a wide array of times, cultures, and traditions encounter each other and take off again, sometimes in very unexpected directions. Lessing himself foregrounds this meandering method and stages himself at critical junctures as a walker on a path: “Ich lenke mich vielmehr wieder in meinen Weg, wenn ein Spaziergänger anders einen Weg hat” (XX). This is a text in which intertexts collide and careen off along new trajectories. The tension between place and time, location and motion, furthermore, is central to the treatise’s theoretical claims. Lessing’s Laokoon, despite its statuary emblem, never stands still. For this panel, we invite papers that host, foster, and interrogate these intertextual journeys, and the phenomena of aesthetic motion.

We were impressed with the number and quality of abstracts we received, and we were unable to accommodate all of them. Four panelists will present papers that deal with motion within Laokoon and its moving reception in the last two centuries. Each presenter will speak for no more than 15 minutes, so that we have at least 15 minutes of discussion in the end. We are excited to gather these interventions on the kinetic legacies of Laokoon, as it is a topic understudied in scholarship.

With "'Winged Words' and Poetic Trespass," Nicholas Rennie will start us of with an exploration of figures of motion within Laokoon. In this text, walking serves as a figure that mediates between the marking out of boundaries and laws – including the laws of convention – and the need to transgress these boundaries, break away from a dogmatic adherence to philosophical systems, and embrace an element of spontaneity and chance in the development of ideas. As this paper argues, the Laokoon frame the semiotics of forward-motion that Lessing finds exemplified in Homeric epic. The “winged words” of Homer, in their very conventionality, represent those forms of thought that are least earth-bound, least plodding, least pedestrian, least grounded in the fixed spatial categories of ownership and traditional propriety that Lessing connects with Malerei.

In "The Politicization of an Aesthetic Rule: Lukács’s Appropriation of Lessing’s Critique of Description," Martin Wagner moves to the reception of Lessing's kinetics in the twentieth century. In his critique of description in literary works in “Erzählen oder Beschreiben,” Georg Lukács, like Lessing, demands that literature focuses on narration rather than description. But Lukács is using the term 'description' fundamentally differently from Lessing. What is actually dynamic becomes static through description. The temporal aspect of description (its lack of temporal development), in other words, is for Lukács not simply the content of description (as for Lessing), but an effect of description’s distanced and reified view of the world.

Andre Fischer pushes forward this strain of reception studies with "Theatrical Resistance to Signification in Heiner Müller’s Bildbeschreibung." By staging the theatricality of visual perception, Bildbeschreibung undermines Lessing’s distinctions. However, Müller confirms the premises of the latter when describing his text as “an action that is passed” and is merely visible in “an extinct dramatic structure.” This paper argues that beyond Müller’s engagement with Lessing (Leben Gundlings) and Laokoon (Philoktet), the temporal-spatial paradox at the basis of Lessing’s media-theoretical distinction generated the post-dramatic form of Müller’s late theatrical tableaux.

Finally, with "The Sound of the Wounded Body: The Afterlife of Lessing’s Laokoon in Contemporary Theatre." Teresa Kovacs drives the investigation of motion home to the present. Based on a reading of Lessing with and through Malabou, she turns to contemporary theatrical works to ask about the afterlife of Lessing’s interconnection of the sonic and the wound. Here, she focuses on Elfriede Jelinek’s play Kein Licht, in which the ear as a queer embodiment replaces the eye as the central sense for theatrical representation. As a play that produces an overwhelming soundscape full of expressions of pain and sorrow, she re-evaluates the importance for pleasure and sympathy in contemporary works.

183 Laokoon beyond the Crossroads: Calls for Papers