Das tragische Absolute bei Schelling und Hölderlin

“Christianity is an epidemic”: on Hölderlin and the plague

“…In The Tragic Absolute David Farrell Krell argues that “the metaphysical or ontotheological absolute,” as that which is independent of change and time, is represented in Hölderlin’s work as being infected with finitude ( 2005 , p. 1). According to Krell, this failure of transcendence does not result in modernity’s death or absence of God but in a disquieting conjunction of the divine with states and affects to which it had been antithetical: “Longing, languishing, languissement , disease, plague—and God?” ( 2011 , p. 203) In Hölderlin’s literary imagination the primal scene of this conjunction is Sophocles’ Thebes.…”