Cosmoerotics and Cosmoagonistics from Herder to Hölderlin

Abstract: In key texts of eighteenth-century philosophy and poetry, distinct fields of symbolization imbue planetary-cosmological ways of knowing with affective charges, facilitating the ramification of cosmologies into practices, arts of living, and forms of habituation. Two dominant conceptual dynamics drive this transformation: cosmoerotics and cosmoagonistics. Cosmoerotics postulates erotic desire—in fusional semantics, attractions, linkages—as a material and ontological dynamic that becomes the basis for rethinking individual and collective logics. Cosmoagonistics naturalizes forms of conflict and violence that establish, maintain, or efface distinctions in ways that also facilitate the reimagination of individual and collective forms. The occupation of positions within a cosmoerotic-cosmoagonistic matrix can be regarded as a prominent discursive feature of speculative and aesthetic systems and a strategic interface in attempts to change or stabilize cultural forms: in Hemsterhuis' moral organ attuned to the "moral face" of the universe; in Herder's conception of conflict as a condition of emergence and individuation; in Schelling's ecology of struggle in his 1799 nature-philosophy; in Goethe's Faustian cosmoerotics and his nature-philosophical poetry; in Günderrode's idea of the earth; and in Hölderlin's oeuvre, which intensifies contradictions within the cosmoerotic-cosmoagonistic matrix.