Peter Gilgen

Reading Time: Oswald Egger's Die ganze Zeit

Over the past two decades, Oswald Egger has laid out in several volumes a complex intertextual poetics. A monumental work that intertwines theory, poetry, narrative prose, and graphic art, his most recent book, Die ganze Zeit (2010), offers a performative reflection on reading and readability as conditioned by time. By means of pervasive quotation and self-quotation, Egger creates a “yarn of recollection” that intertwines different textual strands but not without indicating their contingent relation. The book opens with an adaptation from Augustines reflections on memory. It ends with Eggers minimal, but momentous, rewriting of a passage from Boethiuss reflections on time. A handful of judicious cuts and substitutions unlocks hidden potentials and leaves an indelible trace that turns Boethiuss theory upside down. In the process, Eggers adaptations draw attention to the contingency and connectivity of future readings.

Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus: Tübingen—Jena 1790 –1794 (review)

magical meaning of the numbers and geometric rendering of the mathematical aspects of Faust may lead us rather far into the speculative, McCarthy seems right on with his assessment that both parts I and II of the play are “fractal rather than fragmented” (229). The fi nal two chapters on Nietzsche and Grass continue to reveal how the texts (unknowingly or not) refl ect the science of chaos, whether in terms of Grass’s “boundaries” and mathematically worn skirts, or Nietzsche’s undoing of philosophical traditions in order to return to “the earth.” McCarthy builds on Nietzsche’s idea that much of our existing knowledge “is really based on prejudice and false judgments. Liberating consciousness from the mechanistic paradigm of the past three hundred years and allowing it to revert to a primordial state were, for Nietzsche, the most urgent of tasks” (160). McCarthy’s Oskar, fi nally, unites myth and reality in a metaphysical geometry arising from such shapes as the triangular father(s)-mother-son dynamic, the interaction of the four elements, and the 46 chapters of the book oddly echoing the number of chromosomes in the nucleus of a cell. In all three literary texts, McCarthy fi nds astonishing patterns that reinforce his thesis of creative genius enfolding and enacting the motions and structures of the world in whose dynamics we are integrated and which we integrate. McCarthy’s book is an ingenious tour de force for anyone interested in science and literature, Goethe, Nietzsche, Grass, or contemporary theories of text and mind.