Forms of Life

This article explores the relationship between Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and contemporary writings about natural organisms, including Goethe's own botanical studies. The article argues that Goethe's novel should be read as a meditation on the disunity of biological and human form. The defining feature of human as opposed to biological life is the former's dependence on representation, which makes human form both open-ended and malleable. Aesthetic representation achieves in this context a central yet ambiguous role within the economy of human life: While the subject (Wilhelm) is involved in acts of aesthetic self-fashioning, larger social forces (the Tower Society) make use of art to orchestrate their normative interventions. The article ends by situating Goethe's novel in relation to Foucault's lectures on liberalism and biopolitics, arguing that Wilhelm Meister shows what the liberal “art of governing humans” would look like when applied not to populations but to individuals as self-conscious actors engaged in their own constitution

Aesthetics · Biopower · Constitution · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Meditation · Natural (archaeology · Normative · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Representation (politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · Theology · Bioethics and Human Rights Issues · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy