Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. 2 Michel FoucaultFrom Herman Melville's iconic Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and its protagonist's signature formula 'I would prefer not to' to the Disney box office hit Frozen (2013), in which princess Elsa's emphatic 'Let it go' rejects society's conventional demands to be a 'good girl', refusing personalities in literature, visual culture, and history bear an undeniable fascination. Whether they obstinately dig in their heels or practise a more lethargic withdrawal, whether they reject social norms of productivity and industriousness, or of identity and desire, tales about individuals who refuse to accept normative expectations and collective participation elicit a certain form of pleasure: a delightful victory of individual liberation over the constraints of social norms and conventions. This Special Number seeks to explore the critical potential of this pleasure as well as its limitations: with what we have called 'primary rejections', we hope to offer an approach that helps us to think in theoretical terms about those narratives of refusal that are not already embedded in articulated political protest but that nevertheless pose challenges to existing normative power structures. The articles in this volume and also the theoretical considerations in this introduction thus form a 'Suchbewegung' to conceptually grasp 1 The articles in this volume are the result of 'Primary Rejections: A Comparative Workshop on the Refusing Personality in German and International Literature, History and Culture', held on 28 September 2018 at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The event was generously funded by the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies. A follow-up podcast discussion with the radio producer Trevor Dann and some of the participants can still be accessed on the DAAD website: http://www.daad.cam.ac.uk/workshops/primary-rejections-a-comparative-workshop-on-the-refusingpersonality-in-german-and-european-literature-history-and-culture#tabevent-output.
This article examines ‘primary rejection’ on the basis of a concrete historical example. This ‘primary rejection’ was that of a Bavarian soldier who in 1839 refused to go on bended knee when taking part in a Corpus Christi procession. Ludwig I had decreed that Protestant soldiers should, like their Catholic counterparts, kneel during Catholic services. In this order to kneel, political, religious, military and aesthetic imperatives are woven together in complex ways. Having been placed in its historical context, the soldier's refusal is used as a ‘theoretical incident’ to investigate the practice of bending the knee. Drawing on Louis Althusser, Blaise Pascal, Siegfried Kracauer, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, an attempt is made to construct a theory of ‘the bended knee’. The ‘primary rejection’ of refusing to kneel can then be seen not as an intuitive refusal to comply with a single demand, but as physical resistance to an entire cluster of imperatives, some of which even contradict each other. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die Verweigerungshaltung der ‘primary rejection’ von einem konkreten historischen Beispiel ausgehend. Diese ‘primary rejection’ bestand darin, dass ein Soldat sich im Jahr 1839 in Bayern weigerte, bei einer Fronleichnamsprozession auf die Knie zu gehen. Vorher hatte Ludwig I. den Befehl gegeben, dass in katholischen Gottesdiensten auch die protestantischen Soldaten einen Kniefall tun sollten. In diesem ‘Kniebeugeerlass’ sind politische, religiöse, militärische und ästhetische Imperative auf komplexe Weise miteinander verwoben. Nach einer Historisierung wird diese Weigerung als ‘Theorieszene’ für die Untersuchung des Kniefalls verwendet. Mit Louis Althusser, Blaise Pascal, Siegfried Kracauer, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud und Ludwig Wittgenstein wird eine Theoretisierung des ‘in‐die‐Knie‐Gehens’ versucht. Die ‘primary rejection’ der Verweigerung des Kniefalls stellt sich von dort aus als eine intuitive Verweigerung nicht einer einzelnen Aufforderung dar, sondern als körperlich wirksamer Widerstand gegen ein ganzes Bündel an Imperativen, die zum Teil auch widersprüchlich zueinander stehen.
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