Two Apothecaries: Novalis and Derrida.

Krell, David Farrell

HERMAN MELVILLE'S THE CONFIDENCE MAN (1857), CHAPTER XVI, "A SICK man, after some Impatience, Is Induced to Become a Patient," finds us aboard the steamboat Fidele, gliding down the mighty Mississippi on our way to New Orleans and the Gulf. It is April 1st, the Feast of All Fools, and the confidence man, disguised as an herb-doctor, is plying his trade. Like a salesperson at Whole Foods, well-informed and bursting with good faith, he is selling his "Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator" to those passengers who will profit most from it--if only they have confidence in its curative powers and confidence in him. The confidence man inveighs against the atheistical science of his day, priding himself on his piety and his complicity with nature. "How different we herb-doctors!" he exclaims, in disdain of the scientists. For the herb-doctors "claim nothing, invent nothing; but staff in hand, in glades, and upon hillsides, go about in nature, humbly seeking her cures." (1) Theirs is the piety, humility, and wisdom of Solomon. Yet also of Medea, whom the herb-doctor also cites: Medea, who serves up wolfs-bane, or aconite, distilled from the foam spewed by the hellhound Cerberus. Hebrew king and Greek witch--that is Melville's figurative lineage for the herb-doctor. When an invalid begs to know precisely which herbs are mixed in the Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator, the confidence man refuses to list them. "A sick philosopher is incurable," he says, if said philosopher lacks confidence. "Because either he spurns his powder, or, if he take it, it proves a blank cartridge, though the same given to a rustic in like extremity, would act like a charm. I am no materialist; but the mind so acts upon the body, that if the one have no confidence, neither has the other" (86). The invalid timidly objects that he has heard of a book entitled Nature in Disease. The herb-doctor professes to be shocked:

 "A title I cannot approve; it is suspiciously scientific. 'Nature
 in Disease'? As if nature, divine nature, were aught but health; as
 if through nature disease is decreed! But did I not before hint of
 the tendency of science, that forbidden tree? Sir, if despondency
 is yours from recalling that title, dismiss it. Trust me, nature is
 health; for health is good, and nature cannot work ill. As little
 can she work error. Get nature, and you get well. Now, I repeat,
 this medicine is nature's own." (86)

"Get nature." One is reminded of Derrida's allusion in Of Spirit to Matthew Arnold, one of whose fictitious personages urges us to "Get Geist." (2) Get nature, and you get well, says the ethereally oily herb-doctor. Get nature and you get the good Geist into the bargain.

Later, in chapter xxi, "A Hard Case," another of the confidence man's victims, a sickly old miser, is chastised by a Missouri frontiersman for having succumbed to the blandishments of the herb-doctor. The following dialogue ensues, about "yarbs" (which is apparently Missourian for "herbs") and the putative beneficence of nature:

"Think it will cure me?" coughed the miser in echo; "why shouldn't it? The medicine is nat'ral yarbs, pure yarbs; yarbs must cure me."

"Because a thing is nat'ral, as you call it, you think it must be good. But who gave you that cough? Was it, or was it not, nature?"

"Sure, you don't think that natur, Dame Natur, will hurt a body, do you?"

"Natur is good Queen Bess; but who's responsible for the cholera?"

"But yarbs, yarbs; yarbs are good?"

"What's deadly-nightshade? Yarb, ain't it?" (113)

The confidence man now enters the fray, sensing that the old miser is not doing so well against the skeptical Show-me Missourian. The confidence man addresses the skeptic:

"Now, can you, who suspect nature, deny, that this same nature not only kindly brought you into being, but has faithfully nursed you to your present vigorous and independent condition? is it not to nature that you are indebted for that robustness of mind which you so unhandsomely use to her scandal? Pray, is it not to nature that you owe the very eyes by which you criticize her?"

The skeptic snaps back:

"No! for the privilege of vision I am indebted to an oculist, who in my tenth year operated upon me in Philadelphia. Nature made me blind and would have kept me so. My oculist counterplotted her."

"And yet, sir, by your complexion, I judge you live an out-of-door life; without knowing it, you are partial to nature; you fly to nature, the universal mother."

"Very motherly! Sir, in the passion-fits of nature, I've known birds fly from nature to me, rough as I look; yes, sir, in a tempest, refuge here," smiting the folds of his bearskin. "Fact, sir, fact. Come, come, Mr. Palaverer, for all your palavering, did you yourself never shut out nature of a cold, wet night? Bar her out? Bolt her out? Lint her out?"

"As to that," said the herb-doctor calmly, "much may be said." (115-16)

Much indeed may be said, and it would all be as entertaining as Thomas Aquinas' uproarious answer to the query as to whether God "could have made a better world than the world that he made." And in the end it would all echo the sentiments of a passage that Goethe copied into his notebook around 1780, about ten years prior to his Metamorphosis of Plants:

 Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her--without being able
 to exit from her or to enter into her more deeply. Unasked and
 unwarned, we are taken up into the circuitry of her dance; she has
 her way with us, until we grow weary and sink from her arms....

 We live in the midst of her and are foreign to her. She speaks to
 us ceaselessly and does not betray her secret to us. We work our
 endless effects on her, yet have no dominion over her.

 She seems to have invested all her hopes in individuality, and she
 cares nothing for the individuals. Always she builds, always she
 destroys, and we have no access to her workshop.

 She lives in a profusion of children, and their mother, where is
 she?--

 She squirts her creatures out of nothingness, and does not tell
 them where they came from and where they are going. Their task is
 to fly; hers is to know the orbit. (3)

We are so accustomed to thinking of the "romantic" view of nature as idyllic and idealistic that we fail to see that our skeptical Missourian is in fact a disciple of the Romantics, for whom nature was as threatening as it was propitious. If we associate Emerson's "Nature" with the Romantic view of nature, we forget that Emerson also penned "Illusions." Melville knew better. In chapter xxxvi, "In Which the Cosmopolitan Is Accosted By a Mystic, Whereupon Ensues Pretty Much Such Talk As Might Be Expected," he has the confidence man--now wearing the mask of the cosmopolitan--engage in a polite exchange with a figure very much like Emerson. Emerson, "the mystic," identifies the smooth-talking cosmopolitan as "a beautiful soul," one in whom beauty, truth, and love prevail. When the confidence man, wreathing his form and cresting his head, slitheringly asserts that even the rattle-snake must be beheld with wonder, the mystic inquires whether the confidence man has ever been tempted to exchange personalities with the snake, "to glide unsuspected in grass, to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death?" (196). At last, someone understands the confidence man!

Melville opens his book with a scene in which the confidence man appeals to the Pauline encouragement to the Corinthians, "Love never faileth," and after our April Fool's Day aboard the Fiddle, where only the confidence man shows charity, whereas his victims show how venal and callous the American heartlanders can be, Melville closes by remarking, "Something further may follow of this Masquerade" (260). Let me set Melville's masquerade aside now, however, in order to take up both Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) and Derrida, whom some regard as confidence men, others as cosmopolitans, still others--myself included--as apothecaries. The aim of the paper is to relate what in Contagion (4) I called Novalis' "pharmaceutical principle" to Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy." (5) First, by way of introduction, a few words about that remarkable early essay of Derrida's, and a reference to Derrida's most extensive treatment of Novalis, namely, his 1990-1991 seminar on the "Rhetorics of Cannibalism." I have treated that course elsewhere, and so will here only repeat a number of theses concerning the course. (6)

Let me begin (again) by reading the opening pages of "Plato's Pharmacy." Derrida opens with Heraclitean caution: texts are tissues hidden from even the most perceptive eye, their deeper harmony forever concealed, their nature loving to hide from every reading. What histology of reading and writing is equal to the tissues of a text? Such tissues weave themselves ever anew, as organisms do. The verge by which textual tissue is inscribed is also the warp and woof of the weave, the very weft of inscription: this is the puzzling imbrication of mast and sail, the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of narrative and rhetoric from Homer through Quintilian (from [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the root of so many Platonic words), a mast, the vertical beam of a loom, the shinbone, anything set upright, but also, by metonymy, the warp, the web itself, or a honeycomb. [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is the original metonymy or synecdoche, if there is an original--the philosopher's lost umbrella, whether closed or open. If for Plato (and these are the first references to Plato in Derrida's text) any given instance of writing always signifies the same thing, repeating its reply to any and every question, such signification is itselfa game, always in play, always at play. The rules of the game, however, do not give themselves up to perception. There can be no phenomenology of reading. Reading does not see what it does. And it surely does not see what it fails to do. "Let us begin again," Derrida begins. Recommencons.

The first specifically Novalisian allusion in "Plato's Pharmacy" (and early in Derrida's career all we will find are allusions, merely possible threads of connection) comes in section one of Part One, on the feminine figure of Pharmacee, that is, Derrida's reference to the myth of Pharmakeia. Yet this first allusion is not to a pharmacy but to a meal, and to that part of a meal that involves the supplement of pure taste, taste for the sake of mere tasting, namely, dessert. Of the myth of Theuth and Thamus, and the entire final portion of Phaedrus, where the status of writing is decided for metaphysics, Derrida writes the following: "In a certain manner, one may think that this morsel [morceau] could have been isolated as an appendix, a superadded supplement. And in spite of all the things that make appeal to it in the preceding stages, it is true that Plato offers it up somewhat as a diversion, an hors-d'oeuvre, or, rather, as a dessert" (82/73). Dessert is the theme of Derrida's seminar on Novalis in 1990-1991 whenever theories of language--and especially metalanguage--are being discussed. Metalanguage is for Derrida not an entree, ultimately not even a starter; as a nonstarter, metalanguage is an item for dessert.

A second Novalisian allusion occurs in section three of Part One, where Derrida speaks of the various "constraints" under which the Platonic myths must operate, constraints that include all the traditional opposites that we associate with Pythagorean and Platonistic thinking; yet Derrida writes of an "eventual contagion of the mythemes" (97/85), and such contagion or contamination reminds us of what we may call Novalis' fundamental pharmaceutical principle. Indeed, one of the leading ideas of Derrida's "pharmacy" is that the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is an anti-substance. That is to say, the relation of remedy to poison is so radically undecidable in its effects that we have to doubt whether the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] has any stable identity. It is almost as though identity becomes a matter of dosage--everything depends on how much you can take. One extended passage from "Plato's Pharmacy":

 Philosophy thus opposes to its other [e.g., to sophistry] this
 transmutation of the drug into a remedy, of the poison into a
 counterpoison. Such an operation would not be possible if the
 pharmako-logos did not already harbor within itself that complicity
 of contrary values, and if the pharmakon in general were not, prior
 to any distinction-making, that which, presenting itself as a
 poison, may turn out to be a cure, may retrospectively reveal
 itself in the truth of its curative power. The "essence" of the
 pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no
 "proper" characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical,
 physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance. The
 pharmakon has no ideal identity; it is aneidetic, firstly because
 it is not monoeidetic (in the sense in which the Phaedo speaks of
 the eidos as something simple, noncomposite: monoeides). This
 "medicine" is not a simple thing. But neither is it a composite, a
 sensible or empirical syntheton partaking of several simple
 essences. It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in
 general is produced, along with the opposition between the eidos
 and its other; this medium is analogous to the one that will,
 subsequent to and according to the decision of philosophy, be
 reserved for the transcendental imagination.... (143-44/125-26)

I will allow the quotation to fade out here. Yet imagine what such a passage would have meant to a twenty-year-old writing in 1790, when the transcendental imagination was "breaking news."

Novalis' "pharmaceutical principle" seems to me a fascinating anticipation of this central insight of Derrida's. For both Novalis and Derrida, a [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] can never be merely beneficial (112/99). Not only that. The very interlacing of good and bad makes it inevitable that the metaphoricity of the bad (extrinsic writing) be called upon to designate the good (intrinsic writing, inscription in the heart or soul) (172/149). "Interlacing" is perhaps too weak a word. For the ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is a liquid; it mixes good and bad in a solvent as natural as water (175/152). Related to this idea of the pharmakon is a second one, namely, that disease itself is a life-form with its own life-history. Both the life and the history must be respected: natural disease is a living organism (113/100). Third, what both good and bad writing share is essential repeatability or re-marking: neither the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] nor the extrinsic memorandum would be anything without their repetitions in the world of objects and of meanings. With regard to the extrinsic, when we put a written text to the question, it can only repeat what it always says; this vice, when it occurs in the writing of the heart or mind, is called consistency (125-26/l09-11). The play of repetitions can, I believe, at least be related to Novalis' "logarithmic method" (discussed at the end of the paper), which finds the grandest aspects of the universe repeated in the pettiest, the most elevated spirituality repeated in ostensibly base materiality. Hence typology and the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as such are important for both thinkers (183/159). A fourth idea, one that dominates the entire second part of Derrida's diptych, is that science and death are intimately related, the latter as the ultimate threat to and final resource of science (136/119). Finally, a fifth idea: whereas traditional philosophy has viewed the family scene of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as a matter of fathers and sons, with the written text playing the ambiguous role of both orphan and parricide, Derrida and Novalis will pay scrupulous attention to the mother and to all things female and feminine. The mother will no longer be passed over in silence (164/143).

Let us then go in search of the following in Novalis' scientific-philosophical notebooks: (1) the pharmaceutical principle, for which the interpenetration of good and bad, the salubrious and deleterious, boon and bane, appears to be without limit; (2) the notion of disease as a life-form and a life-history; (3) ways in which the healthy and the noxious depend upon an economy of repetitions, thus yielding a shared typology; (4) the relation of science, wisdom, and knowledge to death as both aporia and resource; and (5) the role of the feminine in speech, writing, and thought. In the restricted space of an article it will not be possible to touch on all these ideas; yet they are present in some form in the thousand book-pages of Novalis' notes.

One may with some justice identify Novalis as a grammatological thinker, and even if the emphasis here falls on pharmacology, a word or two about Novalis' theory of the sign seems to be called for. From the outset, Novalis' response to Fichte (in his Fichte-Studien) is dominated by the idea of the "hieroglyphic force" of the ego. This means that philosophy, if it wants to be systematic, must become a "theory of the sign" (2: 12). (7) The "relation of sign to signified" is the principal issue for such a theory--and it is almost as though Novalis has leapt a century ahead in order to undertake a study of Saussure. The most intriguing aspects of his inchoate theory, which will be developed in his later well-known "Monologue" on language (2: 438-39), are (1) that the relation between sign and signified must be "altogether free" (today we would perhaps say "arbitrary"), so that (2) something like "a second signifier" [ein zweyter Bezeichnenden] must grant whatever necessity can be granted to the connection between sign and signified (2: 13). Yet this second signifier, itselfa sign, waits upon either contingency [Zufall] or a miracle [Wunder] to enable it to encompass the signified. Novalis appears to recognize in every system of signs something like a differential process--would it be too much to say that he recognizes the inevitability of differance?--inasmuch as one must take into account "the signifier in general, or the other signifiers" (2: 14). In other words, "The schema stands in reciprocal relation with itself. Every sign, in its place, is what it is only by virtue of the others" (2: 1).

Novalis understands his theory of signification as a decisive critique of the Fichtean "absolute ego" (2: 12, 15). His theory leads to a discussion of feeling [Gefuhl] and drive [Trieb], rather than to Fichtean "positings," as the proper paths to a new sense of "intellectual intuition" (2: 18-26). Yet these themes are too rich and too complex to be dealt with here. (8) Let us then begin again, and this time focus on Novalis's pharmacy--on Novalis as apothecary.

Novalis recognizes that the pharmaceutical art, the art of mixing and administering medicines, is "the art of killing," and that there are at bottom no healthy medicines: "All remedies are such because they are efficacious in general, harmful" (2: 501). Melville mentioned Medea, but we might also think of Helen. Helen's maid, the one who teaches Helen the pharmaceutical art she has brought back with her from Egypt, is named Polydamna, which one might translate as "lots of ways to send someone to hell." It is this multifariously murderous side of pharmaceuticals that reminds Novalis again and again of the soul, which is the very principle of life. If the stimuli that diffuse quite readily are generally characterized by their "narcotic nature" (2: 590), then the immortal soul, which diffuses most readily throughout the body, appears to be the most potent narcotic, the most fatal toxin, the most lethal poison. The soul works as salves, balms, and unguents do [wie Oele], "and also like narcotic poisons--depressing and also exciting" (2: 711). Balms or salves are themselves spiritual entities, inasmuch as they contain highly volatile substances; it is as though only an essence, only a fragrance, only a spirit, could be narcotic. Yet narcosis is not simply to be condemned, not in this complex world.

The pharmaceutical principle unites the themes of soul and poison to the sexual process, a unification that will be particularly important to Derrida. In a tantalizing note, Novalis writes, "Poison and antidote--gradual intensification of the two-sided process--in the process of generation" (2: 502). Novalis grows increasingly occupied with "the pathological explanation of the human condition" (2: 716); yet the art of healing, he says, "like physics and philosophy, is as much a theory of making as of annihilating" (2: 717). Its future course may lead to the most radical measures: "In the general therapy of the future not even inoculation with death will be missing--in the way that many illnesses are counted among the best educational methods, the pedagogues demanding the appropriate remedies for them" (2: 717). Whatever the art of healing may be in the future, it will not be simple trial and error, which has characterized the history of medicine thus far--each advance being made on the basis of "an overfilled cemetery" (2: 566). Novalis is not thinking of injecting death after the manner of Dr. Death. Rather, death is to become a major heuristic principle, a field of discovery, as opposed to the charnel house of ignorance and defeat. Novalis asks himself, "How many kinds of killing are there?" and he replies: "The kinds of killing, like the kinds of noxious infection, would have to shed great light on the kinds of life and animation there are, and on the ways we make beings healthy" (2: 604). Inoculation with death, understood in terms of the pharmaceutical principle, has more to do with the saving grace than with the coup de grace.

A note from Das allgemeine Brouillon of 1798-1799, having to do with "The utility of illness--the poesy of illness," begins skeptically enough (2: 475): "An illness cannot be a life, otherwise the connection with illness would have to elevate our existence. Continue this bizarre thought." The "bizarre thought" occurs to Novalis that the connection between life and illness might be elevating rather than distressing and depressing. No doubt he is thinking of the imbricated structures of excitability, that is, sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, as developed in the physiological and diagnostic system of the Edinburgh physician John Brown. Brown's text, which intends to provide a complete nosology, that is, a classification or typology of diseases, offers in addition a general theory of physiology. Although quite convincing in its general outlines, at least to his German followers (though admittedly less so back in Edinburgh), even Brown's German disciples note that the theory does not sufficiently distinguish between health and illness. Brown appeals to the identical factors and processes when describing both states. Indeed, the main thrust of Brown's theory is to blur the distinction between health and illness. For each of these states Brown introduces an "indirect" state that serves as a transition from one to the other. Novalis, following Brown, writes: "Just as illness is a symptom of health, so must health manifest symptoms of illness.... Repeated indirect illnesses ultimately elide with direct illness, and vice versa--repeated indirect health elides with direct health. Indirect health follows direct illness as surely as indirect illness follows health" (2: 452). An equally bizarre thought now occurs to Novalis. No matter how elevating illness in general might be in and for a romanticizing tendency, as though illness were the logarithm of well-being, the soul itself, the most elevated principle of life, may serve to aggravate the worst illnesses of the body. Indeed, Novalis knows the secret ambivalence of all pharmaka, and he does not shrink from speculating that the soul itself might be the prime instance of the pharmaceutical principle--the principle of life itself may be the most poisonous of entities:

 Among all poisons, the soul is the most potent. It is the most
 penetrating, the most diffuse stimulus.--All the effects of the
 soul are therefore supremely harmful when it is a question of local
 illness and infection.

 A local illness often cannot be cured except
 by means of a general illness, and vice-versa.
 Curing one illness by means of another. (2: 706)

Novalis begins to speculate that the sheer love of illness can transform a malady into "supreme, positive pleasure," that illness may be a means toward a higher synthesis. Malady may be the "symphilosopheme" proper, and may open a path that will return us to a state of intimacy with nature. To such intimacy the poet gives the name of his deceased fiancee, Sofie, the young woman he admitted "loving almost more on account of her illness. (9)

There is something uncanny about Novalis' thinking concerning health and illness, something beyond the bizarre. Its uncanniness is corroborated by the fact that the fairy tale, which Freud in his famous essay on "The Uncanny" cites as the proper genre of uncanniness, is Novalis' most beloved genre: "In the fairy tale lies concealed the genuine anarchy of nature" (2: 679). (10) Novalis's lingua romana, itself radically anarchic, would have to learn a new lexicon with regard to illness, a lexicon for which John Brown had provided the first entries: Novalis' project would have to involve a Poetik des Ubels, a poetics of the baneful and malignant, of which the fairy tale provides the most fecund source. Novalis elaborates on the way in which the action in fairy tales often depends on a double transformation, whereby one impossible occurrence--by some sort of kettle-logic--induces another impossible occurrence. As soon as the princess overcomes her disgust in the face of the frog, as soon as she does the impossible and confesses her love to and for the beast, bestowing on it its first philosophical kiss, the frog is transformed into a prince. Yet the transformation of the ugly into the beautiful comes about if and only if the beautiful (inexplicably, monstrously) comes to love the ugly as such. If the Beauty believes that the ugliness of the Beast is but a facade concealing a beauty equal to her own, and that a prince hides behind the horror, the magic will not work. If the kiss has indeed been given, the Beauty loves the Beast--not the prince. An unexpected outcome for the fairy tale, at least for all thinking that has not yet come to terms with Derrida's thinking of the supplement. Novalis now muses on the uncanny relation of illness to voluptuousness and love:

 Perhaps a similar metamorphosis would occur if human beings could
 come to love what is baneful in the world--the moment a human being
 began to love its illness or pain, the most stimulating
 voluptuosity would lie in its arms--the summit of positive pleasure
 would permeate it. Could not illness be a means to a higher
 synthesis--the more horrific the pain, the higher the pleasure
 concealed within it. (Harmony.) Every illness is perhaps the
 necessary commencement of the more intense conjunction of two
 creatures--the necessary beginning of love. Enthusiasm for
 illnesses and pains. Death--a closer conjunction of lovers.

Poetics of the baneful.

 Does not the best everywhere begin with illness? Half an illness is
 baneful. A whole illness is pleasure--indeed, a higher form of
 pleasure.

 On the attractive force of the dire. (2: 628)

Novalis' poetics of the baneful, celebrating the attractive force of the dire, tends to identify the forces of good health with those of a "whole" illness, and to identify the embrace of lovers, which culminates in their "little death," as the fulfillment of what began with infirmity and, paradoxically, with death itself. In one of the final notes, he elaborates as follows:

 Illnesses are surely a supremely important object for humanity, for
 they are numberless, and each human being has to struggle with them
 so often. It is only that we know so little about the art of using
 them. They are probably the most interesting stimulus to our
 meditation and our activity.... What if I should become the prophet
 of this art? (2: 828)

Novalis uses the term Ubel, the baneful, in both a nosological and moral sense. It is not as though illness were a metaphor for evil, or evil a metaphor for ill, or that the two stand in analogical relation; rather, Novalis takes the two to be in some very deep sense one. Deep if only because both the malignant and the malevolent are, for a philosopher of unification, principles of separation, Trennung. Ironically, to try to separate off good from evil, the healthy from the morbid, or even moral evil from physical malaise, is to be both evil and sick. (Yet had not all the institutions of Christendom tried to effect such a separation? Was not such a separation the point of all moral education and sacramental administration?) Only an enhanced synthesis, achieved through "symphilosophizing," only integration, concatenation, ramification, alternation, and reciprocity, would avail. In contrast, isolation is wickedness and decrepitude. Not that for Novalis there is no radical evil; rather, radical evil is the fanatical struggle to separate off good from evil. That would explain the reluctance that Jesus (or perhaps Brian) tried to inculcate, to wit, the reluctance to toss the first packet of gravel. In short, for Novalis' critical physics and thaumaturgic idealism, matters of medicine and illness, along with questions of vice and law, are not remote from either politics, religion, or art. Precisely how such "conceptual developments" are to be joined systematically or encyclopedically is a question that spurs Novalis throughout the philosophical-scientific notes. In the sixth group of notes in the Fichte Studies we also find the following two observations on philosophy and systematicity: "The properly philosophical system must be freedom and infinity--or, to express it in a poignant fashion, systemlessness--brought together in a system. Only that kind of system can avoid the mistakes of the system, in such a way that neither injustice nor anarchy can be held against it" (2: 200). And: "The universal system of philosophy must, like time, be one thread along which one can run through infinite determinations--It must be a system of the most manifold unity, of infinite expansion, with the compass of freedom--neither a formal nor a material system--We must search out the dichotomy everywhere" (2: 201).

Tempering Novalis' enthusiasm for what he calls the "art of immortality" is the recurrent sense of the "infinite difficulty" of the problem with which he is engaged. That problem can be resolved only "successively," step by step, along an "infinite gradation of solutions" (2: 564) At the end of a long note on infinite difficulty, the parenthetical remark appears, "(Now we clearly see the imperfection and the ideal of our corporeal and human system)" (2: 564). It is as though Novalis is tracing the world back to the era of Chaos, searching for the point at which the human body and all other living organisms, during the reign of Kronos and Zeus, took their departure from anorganic matter (2: 565). Early on in The Universal Sketchbook he writes: "In the world to come, everything will be as it was in the former world--and yet it will be altogether different. The world to come is rational Chaos--the Chaos that has permeated itself--that is in itself and outside itself--[Chaos.sup.2] or [infinity]" (2: 514). Among his last notes we find the following: "Stones and matter are the highest--the human being is the genuine Chaos" (2: 795). Novalis therefore also fears Chaos, fears its primordial, dire forces, the forces that fracture stones, the forces that disquiet matter. Even though he embraces magical idealism, there are moments when it too seems to him sick, and these are precisely the moments when it wants the world to be complete and perfect. The very desire for perfection is a piece of pathology:

 An absolute drive to perfection and completion is illness as soon
 as it betrays its destructive attitude, its disinclination with
 respect to the imperfect, the incomplete.

 If one wants to act in such a way as to achieve something in
 particular, one must stake out boundaries that are determinate even
 if provisional. Whoever cannot bring himself to do this is the
 perfectionist, the one who refuses to swim until he knows precisely
 how to.

 He is a magical idealist, just as there are magical realists. The
 former seek a miraculous motion, a miraculous subject; the latter
 seek a miraculous object, a miraculous configuration. Both are
 caught up in logical illnesses, forms of delusion, in which, to be
 sure, the ideal reveals or mirrors itself in a twofold way--[both
 are] holy--[both are] isolated creatures--that refract the higher
 light miraculously--true prophets.... (2: 623; cf. 481-82, 499,
 624)

Note the ambivalence: the magical idealist is a perfectionist and a prophet--one who suffers from logical illnesses and delusions. Putting the matter somewhat paradoxically, one may say that logical illness is fantastic health, and fantastic health is contagious. (11) Delusion and prophecy are perhaps inseparable, or, if separable, are in constant contact, or, if not in contact, are continuously in the contiguity that brings about contagion. The only thing that prevents Novalis' thaumaturgic idealism from degenerating into a facile optimism and subsequent baneful delusion is, to repeat, his sense of the complexity of his subject. However universal illness may be, it is everywhere intricate:

 Similarities of diseases.--Every organ can have just about all the
 illnesses of the others.

 All diseases are composed of other diseases. The entire body
 becomes ill when individual organs become ill. Relations of
 diseases of particular organs to one another--their mixtures--and
 complications.

 All diseases originate from diremptions [Entzweyungen] of organs.
 (Illness belongs among the positive traits of the human being, as
 does death.) (2: 686)

In spite of the similarities of diseases, the sheer variety of palliatives and cures is what fascinates Novalis. He compares this variety to the sundry ways a composer can resolve a dissonant chord (2: 818). For all that, illness is fundamentally one, and its origin is coeval with sentient, nervous nature, equiprimordial with spirit and with life itself. Though the balms and elixirs and omni-balsamic reinvigorators are numberless, they all line up on the same shelf in the same pharmacy:

 From of old there has been only one illness and likewise only one
 universal pharmacy. With sensibility and its organs, the nerves,
 illness enters on the scene of nature. With that, freedom and the
 arbitrary are brought into nature, and thereby sin, infraction
 against the will of nature, the cause of all that is baneful. There
 are diseases of the musculature that arise solely from the
 despotism of nerves. The ethical human being must also have a free
 nature--a counterstriving, educable, peculiar nature. If animal
 life is a phlogistical process, all diseases are antiphlogistical
 processes--disturbances of combustion. Their manifold character
 testifies precisely to their personal origin. Illness is the
 conflict of organs. The universal must almost always become local,
 as the local necessarily passes over into the universal.

 Transiency, vulnerability [Verganglichkeit, Gebrechlichkeit] is
 the character of a nature bound up with spirit. It testifies to the
 activity, the universality, and the sublime personality of spirit.
 (2: 818-19)

If Romanticism and German Idealism are the movements of poetry, art, and thought in which spirit comes to hold sway, and to hold sway absolutely, it is important to observe that for Novalis the sublimity of absolute spirit expresses itself first and foremost in the transiency and vulnerability of nature. If absolute spirit is nervous tissue, spirit's nerves are absolutely frayed from the outset. If spirit is flame--and both Derrida and Novalis know that it is--then it is absolute hunger, absolutely consumed with consumption.

Novalis' final notes, which his editors designate as "Fragments and Studies of 1799-1800," evince the poet-philosopher's growing conviction that illness is not a mere anomaly, that the dire forces of nature are not mere exceptions to the rule. "All the forces of nature are but one force" (2: 820). If that force be identified with oxidation, the nature of oxidation is nevertheless far from clear. If phlogiston can still be retained as a name for combustible substance (Novalis knows of Lavoisier and oxygen, yet he persists in naming the principle of inflammability phlogiston), that substance appears under contradictory guises: "All dead matter is phlogiston," and, in the next fiery breath, "Phlogiston = spirit," thus drawing perilously close to the conclusion that spirit is dead matter. In any case, "Rest is peculiar to spirit"; and "mass [Das Schwere] stems from spirit" (2: 820). However shocking it may seem to the airy tradition constituted by the unbearable lightness of being, Novalis asserts the following propositions, each one set off as a paragraph unto itself:

 God is of infinitely compact metal--the most corporeal and the
 heaviest of aH beings.

 Oxidation comes from the devil.

 Life is a sickness of spirit, an activity born to undergo passio
 [literally, "a passionate deed"].

 Annihilation of air establishes the Kingdom of God. (2: 820). (12)

In a world where opposites meet at the closure of the circle, such closure may be called contagion, or contamination. At the closure of contagion, ease and disease are discomfitingly close, and illness is a myopic word for the good health of a spiriting and spirited life. Morbidity comes to be equated with sensibility as such, that is, with the very principle of organic life: "With sensibility, diseases win the upper hand" (2: 820). In one of his last notes, Novalis affirms that "human beings are born to suffer," namely, to suffer the Leid of Leidenschaft (2: 828). Life, albeit one force, ultimately and invariably turns against itself. Novalis' earlier criticism of John Brown, which was that Brown's schema had "served for both life and illness" (2: 695), now goes up in smoke, and Brown is tacitly vindicated. The only cure for life seems to be an eternal mud bath, which feels very much like interment, along with subsequent decomposition and liquefaction (2: 821). In the end, human beings return to the muddy ferment of Chaos whence they rose. "In the end, human beings are but the final Gaic formation" (2: 822).

"Every illness can be called an illness of the soul," reiterates Novalis (2: 824). The immortal soul is, of course, an essential tenet of Christian belief. What would the soul-as-poison imply concerning the relation of Christianity to illness? Novalis' reply seems to anticipate that of Nietzsche in The Antichrist and On the Genealogy of Morals. "Universal presentation of Christianity. Love is through-and-through illness--hence the wonderful significance of Christianity" (2: 829). All of which, to be sure, alters the sense of both piety and sanity as purely positive notions. "The ideal of perfect health is interesting merely from a scientific point of view. Illness belongs to individualization" (2: 835). The final jottings of Novalis' scientific-philosophical notebooks, notes that for lack of space I cannot reproduce here, exhibit something of the program--the program for life--that is gradually forming at the end of Novalis' own life, at the terminus of his own brief individualization. He dreams of heavy metal, but must make peace with his lungs.

What about the contiguity of contagion, however, in Novalis' own life-and-death? The Latin contagium suggests a mutual touching that is detrimental to at least one of the living substances involved. It is in the pages of the Universal Sketchbook (the third group of notes, from November to early December 1798, the period of Novalis' engagement to Julie von Charpentier, and a year before the acute stage of his own illness begins) that Novalis invokes the possibility of his own illness. If all accident is wonderful ["Aller Zufall ist wunderbar"], inasmuch as it is "the touch of a higher essence" (2: 682), and if all past philosophers have dwelt in that ethereal place where the invisible world touches us ["die Beruhrungsstelle mit der unsichtbaren Welt"] (2: 711), Novalis still must wonder about the unseen contingencies of illness and death, of contagion and infection, that have by now touched him. He is interested in contact, whether it be "Contact with the spirit of history" (2: 504), or the "touching at a distance [Beruhrung in distans]" that occurs when we perceive an object or feel a need for it (2: 509), or the actio in distans by which remote mountains, remote events, or remote people touch the Romantic poet (2: 537). In his last notes Novalis is himself touched more and more by the strangeness of his most bizarre, beloved thoughts, his most uncanny and untimely meditations. "It is certain that the highest, the universal, the most obscure is always in play, and that every investigation must therefore quickly collide against obscure thoughts" (2: 792). At the same time, a kind of Nietzschean nervousness in the face of hubris is also there: "A human being cannot climb any higher than insight into the kinds of knowing that are suitable for the stage he or she occupies.... One should not promote in a pathological way the drive to know--rather, one should bring it into harmony with the rest of one's forces and conditions" (2: 793). In spite of the worry about pathology, the tendency of Novalis' final thoughts is to locate illness ever more centrally and irremovably in the terrain of life. "Illness in the genuine sense is a wondrous product of life," he writes; and Novalis well-nigh thinks the reverse as well, namely, that life may be a wondrous product of contagion (2: 794). In any case, excitability [Erregbarkeit] is "wondrous and mysterious"; this is what he learns by stroking in experimental ways the limbs of Julie: "Should not one be able, through thoughts, beliefs, etc., to put the body in the position of wondrous efficacy--vis-a-vis another?" (2: 795). In these last notes, Novalis becomes increasingly convinced that the realms of birth and death, health and illness, generation and corruption, pharmacy and nosology, are coterminous. "All the forces of nature are but one force" (2: 820), as we have already heard, and that force is "the attractive force of the dire." Hence it is often difficult to identify the tendency of Novalis' notes on illness, notes such as the following: "Earmark of illness--the instinct of self-destruction.--So it is with everything incomplete--so it is with life itself--or, better, with organic matter.... Cancellation of the distinction between life and death. Annihilation of death" (2: 417). The parataxis and apparent apposition of the phrases "cancellation of the distinction between life and death" and "annihilation of death" is troubling: annihilation of death sounds like the Pauline project ("Death, thou too shall die!"), and there would be little reason to remember Novalis if he were merely another freerider on the salvationist train. Perhaps the genitive is subjective, however, with death performing its inalienable nihilative task? Annihilation by death, or at the very least, cancellation of every facile distinction between life and death, introduces into Novalis' magical idealism something like lifedeath, the coinage of Derrida's "Specular--sur Freud." (13) Lifedeath would presumably mark out the domain of the physician, though not merely the physician who tinkers with symptoms. It would designate the domain of the apothecary who knows whereof he prescribes. Novalis can accept only the physician who has learned from the prophet of the art of illness. Such a physician-apothecary would himself or herself become an artist of a new kind, an artist of immortality, whereby both artist and immortality would have to be pronounced in an as yet unheard-of way.

The notes we have been examining from the outset appear principally in the context of Novalis' projected Enzyklopadistik (1: 477), an ambitious at tempt to synthesize--or, as he and Friedrich Schlegel are fond of writing, "symphilosophize"--the findings of all the sciences, whether natural or historical, with a philosophy of the transcendental imagination and a universal poesy. It may be useful, as we draw toward a close, to take a brief look at these remarkable notes on encyclopedia. Nova]is' dream is to translate all lore, from the fairy tale to the findings of chemistry and physics, into a common code, which he calls the lingua romana. Another favorite linguistic reference of Novalis and other Romantic writers is to the "hieroglyphics" of nature, the sacred ideograms that are inscribed in rock, leaf, fish, and pond. In the "Preliminary Studies" of 1798 Novalis writes of the lingua romana and of his own logarithmic method as follows:

 The world must be romanticized. In this way one will find its
 original meaning once again. Romanticizing is nothing other than a
 qualitative raising to the powers [Potenzirung]. The lower self is
 identified with a better self in this operation. Thus we ourselves
 are a kind of qualitative sequence of powers. This operation is
 still altogether unknown. Whenever I give the common a higher
 meaning, the usual a mysterious aspect, the familiar the dignity of
 the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance, in this way I
 romanticize it--Opposed to that is the operation for the higher,
 unknown, mystical, infinite--by connecting these matters we find
 their logarithms--They receive a customary expression. Romantic
 philosophy. Lingua romana. Alternate elevation and degradation. (2:
 334)

The fragmentary syntax and the "altogether unknown" symphilosophical content of the note may give us pause. Nova]is seems content to scatter seed in all directions, trusting in our powers to glean (the German lesen, "to read, to gather") his drift. He seems content to be as wasteful as dehiscent nature herself. One is tempted to agree with Anni Carlsson when she says that fragmentary writing is fragmentary knowledge, and when she wonders whether Novalis is Jean Paul's Quintus Fixlein--an irrepressible romantic dabbler who is an ancestor of the Flaubertian Bouvard et Pecuchet and the Sartrean autodidact--all of them reveling in "literary Saturnalia" instead of preparing sober festivals of crystalline analytical understanding. (14) If Novalis' lingua romana at first seems arcane and impenetrable, and if we are nostalgic for the lingua franca of analytical thought, it may help if we remember some of the more recent lessons we are supposed to have learned. At least if we are to believe Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, an erotics that is more devoted to the discontinuity of being than to any dream of uninterrupted continuity may be conjoined to an infinite interview of interruption, multiple truth, plurality, and perspectivism--the earmarks of what Blanchot calls "fragmentary writing," for which Novalis seems to be the perfect preparation. (15)

To be sure, Novalis' poetics of the baneful takes him to the utterly destructive aspects of illness. For contagion will have begun prior to the essentially undecidable moment of the "first" contact, the "first" touching, the "first" kiss. In The Apprentices at Sais he writes that nature--the lactating mother of the Romantics, the figure in Heinrich von Ofterdingen he calls Ginnistan--herself sometimes seems "a terrifying death-mill," "a frightful, rapacious power," vast, turbulent, and merciless, "a realm of voracity and the wildest excess, an immensity pregnant with misery." (16) Indeed, the Derridian thought of holocaust and ashes, der Aschenhaufen, is never absent from Novalis' text. (17) By now we have heard much about the forces of nature as dire forces, particularly the forces of illness and death, accompanying those of eros and sexuality. To speak or write of the dire forces of nature is to say the unsayable of our own mortality. It is to struggle with nature's baneful aspect and dire forces--a struggle that is obscurely but ineluctably tied up with love and sexuality--that perhaps best exposes the Romantic thinkers, and Novalis above all, to our gaze.

Let me by way of conclusion summarize in a brutally brief fashion Novalis' scientific and theoretical observations during the years 1798-1800, in order that we may see what must have drawn Derrida's attention:

(1.) For Novalis, philosophy begins with embodied experience, indeed, with the experience of erotic love--the "first kiss." Further, the experience of the expansive force of love is also bound up with other aspects of the system of the mouth--with speech, laughter, eating, digestion, and elimination.

(2.) The system of the mouth is a mortal system, bound up with the pharmaceutical principle--to repeat, the principle that medicament and poison are synonymous--and thus with contagion, illness, and death. In a word, the first kiss and the system of the mouth are in essential communication with the baneful aspects of nature.

3. The pharmaceutical principle extends to the most beloved oppositional pairs in philosophical cosmology, anthropology, and theology, so that meditation on that principle by any "artist of immortality" leads to the most radical results for philosophy in general.

It is too late for us here and now to gain a fuller sense of the first kiss and of the system of the mouth--the very first point listed above. That kiss clearly comes from Sophie, or perhaps from her playmate Pharmakeia. With a mere gesture toward those broader discussions cited in endnotes 2, 6, and 16, discussions in which Novalis' theory of voluptuosity is developed more fully, this final note on the community of Derrida and Novalis, our two apothecaries.

Derrida loved the figure of zigzag, which seemed to describe the itinerary of every act of deconstruction. And he loved thinkers who wept-Rousseau and Nietzsche above all, and Augustine on the rare occasions when he did not forbid himself the pleasure. I suspect that Derrida would have admired very much Novalis' moments of self-doubt, when his own hovering zigzag motion, as unavoidable as it was painful for him, made him nostalgic for more rigorous and well-centered methods. Novalis dreamed of the kind of nobility that comes when one learns how to live (finally) in terms of years rather than moments, overcoming "restless haste" and "petty preoccupations of the spirit," discovering "splendid patience" (2: 841). Yet he surrendered the dream. At one point he scribbled into his notebook the following lamentation, punctuated by an endless number of hiatuses, as though by now he could not even punctuate: "I am too much on the superficies--not the tranquil inner life--not the kernel--working its effects from the inside out, from a midpoint--but rather on the surface--by way of zigzag--horizontally--without steadiness of character--play-accident--not lawful effect--the trace of autonomy--the externalizing of one essence" (2: 167). And then the despairing self-indictment, "Why must I always pursue things with painful insistence--nothing calm--leisurely--with releasement" (2: 169).

At its best, Novalis' hovering zigzag promises a kind of harmony and integration of extremes; at its worst, it seems to Novalis himself a form of self-deceptive vacillation suffered by a hyperactive imagination (2: 177). Yet "hovering" [Schweben] and "zigzag" are assuredly the best ways to describe the thinking that produces the "genuine philosophical system," whose primary characteristic is "systemlessness." Recall Novalis' directive to all who seek a monistic system: "We must seek out the dichotomy everywhere" (2: 200-20l). We must abandon all hope for ultimate or absolute grounds, or even for "determinate negation." The pharmacy is not so stable as all that. All future apothecaries, therefore, will have to abjure confidence, as they look out into a nature that requires of them a narcosis and a death--which always seems to arrive too early, always out of season. And the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] that would rout this death, as Derrida and Novalis both realized, could only be lethal.

DePaul University

(1.) Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1954 rpt.; New York: New American Library, 1964) 85; henceforth cited by page number in the text.

SiR, 46 (Summer/Fall 2007)

(2.) See Jacques Derrida, De l'esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987) 114-15, n. I; trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989) 125-27, no. 8.

(3.) Johann Wolfgang yon Goethe, Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, 5 vols., ed. Rudolf Steiner (Dornach, Switzerland: R. Steiner Verlag, 1982) 2: 5-7.

(4.) D. F. Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998).

(5.) Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy" in Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 61-171; La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 69-197. Henceforth cited by page number in the French edition/English edition in the text.

(6.) See D. F. Krell, "All You Can't Eat: Derrida's Course, Rhetorique du cannibalisme (1990-1991)," in the forthcoming Derrida Memorial issue of Research in Phenomenology (Autumn 2006). Some of the main themes of the course are as follows: (1) the paradoxical identity of God and filth, of the exalted and the base, discussed in the opening lecture with reference to Angelus Silesius and Novalis; (2) eating the other, with special reference to the shared sacrificial meal, discussed in the second lecture with a view to Novalis and to an early seventeenth-century treatise on the Renaissance banquet; (3) the philosophical fragment as a genre--Novalis' and Friedrich Schlegel's preferred genre--as a device for achieving nonsystematic systematicity, discussed in the third lecture; (4) flame, an important theme for Derrida's then recently completed work, Of Spirit, discussed in the third lecture as well; (5) the fable and the first kiss as origins of philosophy in Novalis, discussed in lecture four; and, to end the list, which could go on, (6) the double night of madness and the folly of sacrifice, discussed in lecture five. See "All You Can't Eat" for a detailed treatment.

(7.) In what follows I will cite Novalis' notes by volume and page of the Hanser edition. See Novalis, Werke, Tagebucher und Briefe, ed. Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel, 3 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1987). Particular reference is made to vol. 2, Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk.

(8.) For more early material on the sign, see 2: 69, 76, 96, 108, 136, 192, and elsewhere. Among the most intriguing notes is one that affirms the "naturalness" of the Oriental manner of writing from right-to-left: see 2: 62.

(9.) Quoted by Gerhard Schulz, Novalis (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969) 59.

(10.) Of the uncanny, Novalis writes: "It is strange that in a well-wrought tale there is always something secret--something incomprehensible. The story seems to touch still unopened eyes in us--and we find ourselves in an altogether different world when we return from its realm" (2: 760). It is almost as though Novalis had moved ahead in time in order to read E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann, which undoubtedly "seems to touch still unopened eyes," often with a touch that is far from gentle.

(11.) "Fantastic" in the following sense: among the requirements of thaumaturgic idealism, none is more important than the faculty of free association, and the exercise of that faculty--what Novalis calls Fantastik, a word that he takes to be homologous with Logik: "If only we had a fantastic as well as a logic, the art of invention would have been--invented. To the fantastic belongs also an aesthethics (sic) [die Aestethik], so to speak, in the way that the doctrine of reason belongs to logic" (2: 697). No doubt, Novalis' Fantastik, along with its odd hybrid of ethics and aesthetics, will be put to work n the most recalcitrant of philosophical problems, that of a poetics of the baneful.

(12.) For a detailed treatment of this extraordinary note, see chapter 2 of D. F. Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005).

(13.) The issue of lifedeath is discussed in detail in "Specular--sur 'Freud,'" in Derrida, La Carte postale de Socrate a Freud et au-dela (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980) 275-437; trans. Alan Bass as The Post Card from Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) 257-386. See also chapter 7 of D. F. Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992).

(14.) See Anni Carlsson, Die Fragmente des Novalis (Basel: Verlag Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1939) passim.

(15.) See the "Introduction" to Georges Bataille, L'Erotisme (1957 rpt.; Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1972, esp. 17, 22 and 27; and Maurice Blanchot, L'Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), esp. 1-11, 228, 230 and 235.

(16.) See 1: 211; cf. Klingsohr's account of Chaos in Heinrich von Qfterdingen 1: 348. I have referred to much of this material, especially involving the first kiss and the system of the mouth, in chapter 9 of my Infectious Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995) and once again in the opening chapters of Contagion.

(17.) On the theme of ashes in Derrida's thought, see Feu la cendre (Paris: Des Femmes, 1987); trans. Ned Lukacher as Cinders (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991).