Senses of Smell: The Differentiation of Air in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Ponge

Rosenbrück, Jonas

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-5trx-aj94

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Senses of Smell: The Differentiation of Air in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Ponge

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This dissertation studies the sense most neglected in literary studies, philosophy, and the history of the senses: olfaction. It argues that modernity has been marked by a tendency towards deodorization that attempts to establish a monosensorial and odorless civilization shaped by ocularcentrism. Against this tendency, the authors studied here (Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Francis Ponge) show that we have, in fact, never been deodorized and that the unique logic of olfactory sense-making harbors significant philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural potential. Responding to recent ecocritical discourses that propose the term “being-in-the-air” as key to understanding our existence in the atmosphere, the two main sections of this dissertation are centered on terms that show that the air of this “being-in-the-air” is not a unified term but rather is always stratified and differentiated—and that the olfactory modulation of air is a key mode of just such stratification and differentiation, which, to a degree, is opposed to deodorization as an erasure of difference. The first section titled “Smell and the Dis-Articulation of Unity” argues that Friedrich Hölderlin discovers in his poetry that “Luft” (air) and “Duft” (fragrance) present themselves as terms that are, comparatively speaking, better suited to articulate the unity of everything living, thus potentially replacing the ocularcentric intellectual "Anschauung" (intuition) of his philosophical peers. However, as Hölderlin’s poetry progresses into “lateness,” this unifying tendency becomes dis-articulated: the inevitable stratification, the falling apart of the unity of air, asserts itself in his “geopoetics of smell,” and it is this very dis-articulation that serves as a defining feature of what lateness means in Hölderlin. From this dis-articulation of unity found in the ever increasing differentiating and opening character of smells, Hölderlin’s “latest” poetry moves towards deodorization, slowly erasing olfactory tropes and thus producing a negative version of the unity of air via the absence of explicit olfactory differentiation. The second section, titled “Smell and the Problem of Distance,” shows that for Friedrich Nietzsche smell similarly poses an urgent question of differentiation: his “olfactory genius” (itself inscribed into the agon of vision, hearing, and olfaction that makes up Nietzsche’s sensory constitution) is supposed to set him apart from those surrounding him in his (aerial) element—but a close analysis of smell’s relationship to distance, perspective, and chaos shows that smell is compromising; it undoes the stratification of a pathos of distance and instead tends towards chaos. In smell, according to the argument developed in this section, the world’s constant tendency towards chaos becomes perceptible. Nietzsche’s “new smells,” then, proposed most insistently in Also sprach Zarathustra as the “smell of the earth” and the “smell of eternity,” seek to reconfigure olfaction’s relationship to differentiation. The dissertation concludes with an epilogue on Francis Ponge’s book Soap: shifting the emphasis away from the questions of unity and distance, the everyday, vulgar smell of soap reconceptualizes what deodorization means in and for modernity, and leads to a different understanding of cleanliness, purity, and literature.

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