Die ‚Furie des Verschwindens‘ – eine Replik auf Nicolas Deterings Beobachtungen zum Stand der Frühneuzeitgermanistik

Does alterity slip away or is it not instead only made invisible in a fatal way? If, as Nicolas Detering observes, all earlier epochs seem equally alien to younger generations, like distant cultures, this would not be seen as an opportunity for an unprejudiced re-encounter even with the literature of the early modern period, but rather as a dramatic loss of cognitive possibilities and aesthetic experiences that arise precisely from the specific differences to earlier epochs on the one hand and the subcutaneous lines of tradition up to the present on the other. Benjamin's concept of the "tiger's leap" into past times had a political intention: to see one's own present anew in the light of surprising historical constellations and at the same time to relativise one's own standpoint. If alterity slips into a diffuse realm of arbitrariness, aesthetic judgment and, generally, the foundations for a critical reflection on contemporary social conditions disappear with it.