From the Spirit of Slip Boxes

This article examines the medial interferences between Jean Paul’s citation of different technologies for managing information and his own way of writing and reading, namely in excerpts. Focusing on his second major idyll, Leben des Quintus Fixlein, aus fünfzehn Zettelkästen gezogen; nebst einem Mustheil und einigen Jus de tablette (1796/1801), this article contends that Jean Paul’s fictional references to the 18th-century librarian and jurist Johann Jacob Moser’s “slip box” [Zettelkasten] system serve as a poetological code for his own witty-combinatorial way of writing. Hence, far from simply reflecting contemporaneous discursive-historical writing practices, Jean Paul’s incorporation of the pervasive slip box motif into the strictures of his biographical novel can be understood as part of a poetic strategy for exposing the material and media-technological preconditions that make possible the inscription of “life” as an object of representation—a dependency of the “spiritual” on the “material” which contemporaries like G. W. F. Hegel, another avid slip box user, sought to veil

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Citation · Epistemology · Hegelianism · Idyll · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Motif (music · Poetry · German Literature and Culture Studies · Law · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Social Critique

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