Art criticism in the early German Romanticism and the production of subjectivity

Abstract

In this text I argue that a certain concept of criticism fostered by Friedrich Schlegel and the early German romantics is worth recovering for a consideration of the problem of subjectivity. I start by outlining the concept of criticism by Schlegel as it is presented by Walter Benjamin in his The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism (1920). Here I stress three aspects of the abovementioned concept: the immanent dimension of the art work’s judgement criteria; the preparation of the prosaic nucleus of the art work; and the critical gesture as positive, creative, and as a restitution of the individual work to the infinitude of art. I conclude by articulating this notion of criticism with the idea of “sympoetry” proposed by Schlegel and other early romantics, sustaining that these notions can contribute to a resistance vocabulary and discourse in the context of contemporary subjectivity mass production.