Arts of Unconditioning: On Romantic Science and Poetry

Georgetown University’s German Department hosted a lecture by Dr. Gabriel Trop (Univ. of North Carolina) titled “Arts of Unconditioning: On Romantic Science and Poetry.” This talk explored the contours of the romantic concept of a “new mythology” (Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling) as an attempt to “uncondition” Kantian transcendental operations that sought to secure knowledge, morality, and judgment through discovering their conditions of possibility. The unconditioning power of this new mythology is produced by weaving the scientific, material, and physical operations of an absolute of nature beyond the human into the folds of the destiny of the human; romantic poetry itself, however, reflects critically on the emancipatory potential of such operations, above all in the work of Karoline von Günderrode.

Gabriel Trop is Associate Professor of German at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His research tends to focus on the relationship between literature, philosophy, and science, with a special emphasis on poetics and aesthetics. Most recently, he co-edited the volume Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant with Edgar Landgraf and Leif Weatherby, published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Press.