‘The Sole Reign of Relation’: On Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Hölderlin

Walter Benjamin’s wide-ranging engagement with the lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin is of particular interest because it connects diverse strands of his prismatic thinking: from his early philosophical concerns with the concept of experience to his budding theory of literary criticism; and from his singular view of translation to his critique of German nationalism, militarism, and—ultimately—fascism. While Benjamin’s seminal 1914–1915 essay “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” is clearly of central importance in this regard, the characteristic density of this work and its increasingly distant cultural-historical context invite a synthetic reading that considers it alongside Benjamin’s interest in Immanuel Kant and Stefan George, to name only two important coordinates. In particular, the present piece attempts to tease out the manner in which Benjamin recasts a central concept, which has been relatively neglected in the extensive scholarship on his early Hölderlin essay, namely, the concept of “relation” (Beziehung). In discussing the relation between Hölderlin’s odes “The Poet’s Courage” and “Timidity,” I argue that Benjamin’s essay aims at nothing less than recasting the parameters of relationality as such with far-reaching political implications.